Space

Buzz Aldrin is one of just a handful of people on earth with good reason to be unimpressed with the idea of a "moon shot." After all, he's among the privileged few who can say "Meh. Been there, done that."

Aldrin is far more interested in a Mars shot these days.

The second man to step on the moon in 1969 -- right behind the late Neil Armstrong -- is now 83 years old and out with a new book "Mission to Mars," in which he outlines his vision for taking humans to Mars by 2035.… Read more

Several miscellaneous bits and pieces of the first moon mission have orbited back into our field of view lately.

In March, it was pieces of the rocket that propelled Apollo 11 spaceward, kindly dragged from their watery grave by Amazon CEO and space enthusiast Jeff Bezos.

And more recently, the auction block played host to Buzz Aldrin's space jammies, as well as Neil Armstrong's jumpin' heartbeat as he first set foot on the lunar surface.

Now, thanks to Karen Nelson, a tidy archivist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, about 20 forgotten vials of moon dust collected by Armstrong and Aldrin have been rescued from a grave of their own: a warehouse at the Berkeley lab, where they'd sat quietly gathering, um, Earth dust for the last 40 years or so.… Read more

If you thought $200,000 was a lot to pay for a Virgin Galactic flight to the edge of space, try $1.5 million. Do note, however, that the steep ticket price includes Leo DiCaprio as your travel buddy.

A bidder at a Cannes charity auction agreed to fork out that much for a seat in space beside the star who played flight-mad Howard Hughes in "The Aviator." The money will benefit amfARa Cinema Against AIDS, hosted by amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research.

The winning bid was made by 37-year-old Vasily Klyukin, a Russian living in Monaco, according to Reuters.

"I want to be a bit daring," Klyukin was quoted as saying. "I will have to give up smoking now for sure!" … Read more

Hubble has been doing some interesting work with nebulae recently, it seems. About a month ago, we saw new images of the Horsehead Nebula in the infrared spectrum, revealing new details of the famous gas formation.

The newest nebula to get the fine-detail treatment is the equally famous Ring Nebula. Combining visible-light images from Hubble with infrared data from the ground-based Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona has revealed that the structure of the nebula is more complex than was previously believed. … Read more

Triple planetary conjunctions are relatively rare in the night sky, but astronomers are about to be in for a real treat.

The three brightest planets in our solar system as seen from Earth -- Jupiter, Mercury, and Venus -- will be coming together in the sky, "dancing" around each other over the course of several nights, starting Friday, May 24.

If we're lucky, we see a triple conjunction once every two years or so. The most recent was in May 2011; the next won't be until October 2015.

Because the planets in this conjunction are so bright, the dance will be visible to the naked eye, even in densely populated areas. But if you have access to a telescope or binoculars, so much the better. … Read more

The sunsets would be impossibly beautiful. The evening sky would glitter with a thousand silver arcs. If Earth had rings like Saturn, you'd only have to look up to get a spectacular show.

Veteran astronomy artist Ron Miller has created some stunning views of what our skies would look like if Earth were a ringed planet, and they make me want to launch a Kickstarter campaign to make it happen.

In a recent article for sci-fi blog io9, Miller presented his wild visions of a ringed Earth and what the sky would look like from various places on our … Read more

"Star Trek" food replicators will always be the holy grail of space-snack technology, but we could be edging a step closer to the dream thanks to the work of mechanical engineer Anjan Contractor with Systems and Materials Research in Austin, Texas.

Systems and Materials Research recently received a $125,000 grant from NASA to make a pizza. OK, it's a little more complicated than that. Contractor already created a proof-of-concept printer that can print chocolate onto a cookie. His next goal is to print out dough and cook it while printing out sauce and toppings.… Read more

It's a good thing you weren't standing on the moon's Mare Imbrium crater on March 17. You might have been ground into space dust. A meteoroid "the size of a small boulder" crashed into the lunar surface and exploded with a flash so bright, it was visible to the naked eye from Earth.

NASA has been keeping an eye on the moon for eight years, looking for explosions caused by meteoroids. The space agency has seen hundreds of detectable impacts, but none quite so spectacular as this one. "For about one second, the impact site was glowing like a fourth magnitude star," NASA says.… Read more

NASA announced this week that a key piece of gear on its Kepler space telescope has run into trouble. And though the space agency hasn't given up on a jump-start, the mission may well be at risk.

It's already gone well beyond its planned duration, however, and presented us with many fascinating discoveries.

In this gallery, we take a look back at that mission -- at Kepler's intriguing quest to find Earth-like, life-friendly planets among the Milky Way's many stars.