Kids News

Fifty years ago, on March 18th, 1965, Soviet Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov took the first spacewalk. It lasted just twelve minutes and almost ended in a disaster. That's because the vacuum of space caused his pressurized suit to inflate and become rigid, making it impossible for Leonov to re-enter the Voskhod 2 space capsule airlock. The quick thinking astronaut let out some of the precious air from his suit and despite severe decompression sickness, manage to stumble back in and live to tell his harrowing tale....

On March 28th, US astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will launch aboard the Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft on a historic mission - a year long visit to the International Space Station. The trip, the first of many that will be undertaken before a manned mission to Mars, is a test to gather information about the psychological and physical effects of extended space travel on the human body....

After a day's delay caused by a wayward boat, bad weather, and some technical problems, NASA's next generation spacecraft Orion, blasted off to space from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 7.05 EST on Friday, December 5th. Perched atop a Delta 4 heavy rocket, it soared through the Earth's atmosphere and disappeared into space....

In a report published in the March 16th edition of Nature Geoscience, scientists revealed that the tiniest member of our Solar System, Mercury, is shrinking even further. According to lead researcher Paul Byrne from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the small planet has contracted about seven kilometers (four miles), significantly more than revealed by previous findings....

Usually when NASA scientists report on new planets, they talk about one or two. However, on February 26th, the US Space Agency stunned space lovers when they announced the discovery of 715 new worlds, almost doubling the size the galaxy, which had previously been thought to have comprised of 961 planets....

At first sight it looks like a mundane desk, the kind most kids spend hours completing their homework on. But flip open the top white cover and you will discover a mission control center that even NASA scientists would be proud to own. What's even more amazing is that this intricate creation is the work of a dad who understands that kids need something to look forward to, after grinding through hours of math, science and whatever else their teachers decide to assign....

If astronauts have any plans of staying on the moon for extended periods of time, they will have to be self-sustaining. One of the most important steps toward achieving that will be growing their own food. That is the reason NASA scientists recently announced plans to test, growing a vegetable garden on the lunar surface....

We have heard of the occasional fish, tadpole and even spider raining down from the skies, but diamonds? That is definitely a first! Unfortunately, this miracle is not happening anywhere on earth but over 830 million miles (1.2 billion km) away, on Saturn and Jupiter....

If you are an Ironman fan you are all familiar with that awesomely cool three-dimensional interface that his alias Tony Stark is constantly manipulating to create the another gadget or improve his suit. Now billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk seems to have managed to emulate that interface except in his case it is to design a real-life rocket engine!...