The explosion was caused by a meteorite, 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide, weighing in at about 40 kilograms. When it hit the moon, it was travelling at 56,000 miles per hour. According to NASA, it exploded with the force of 5 tons of TNT.

“On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”

The impact was so bright, in fact, that anyone looking would have seen it without the help of a telescope.

“It jumped right out at me, it was so bright,” says Marshall Space Flight Center analyst Ron Suggs, who was the first to see the impact.

This type of lunar strike is common, but NASA has yet to see one this large in the nearly 8 years its been monitoring the moon for such impacts. Here’s why:

Unlike Earth, which has an atmosphere to protect it, the Moon is airless and exposed. “Lunar meteors” crash into the ground with fair frequency. Since the monitoring program began in 2005, NASA’s lunar impact team has detected more than 300 strikes, most orders of magnitude fainter than the March 17th event. Statistically speaking, more than half of all lunar meteors come from known meteoroid streams such as the Perseids and Leonids. The rest are sporadic meteors–random bits of comet and asteroid debris of unknown parentage.

Oh, by the way, the “explosion” is special thanks to the lack of oxygen in the Moon’s atmosphere.

“The Moon has no oxygen atmosphere, so how can something explode? Lunar meteors don’t require oxygen or combustion to make themselves visible. They hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that even a pebble can make a crater several feet wide. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site,” says NASA.

[NASA via Wired]

According to the LA Times, the network made their announcement on Monday at their upfront presentation. The series will start with 13 episodes, set to air sometime in 2014. Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane is attached as a producer.

Sagan’s original Cosmos series is one of the most beloved and popular documentary series in the history of television. Broadcast on PBS in 1980, Cosmos was the most watched series in the public television history until Ken Burns’ The Civil War series overtook that title.

We’ve known that something like this was in the works, as reports of a Cosmos reboot starring Tyson was reported back in 2011. No additional details emerged at that time, and nearly a year later Tyson confirmed on Twitter that we could expect the new Cosmos series to launch in Spring of 2014.

The new show’s host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, is easily the most renowned astrophysicist around. He currently directs the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and has hosted a PBS show before – NOVA ScienceNow from 2006 to 2011. Tyson is also host to the popular StarTalk Radio Show. He’s also a frequent contributor to the alternative nightly show circuit, including The Daily Show, and Real Time with Bill Maher. Oh, and he’s quite popular on the internet.

Earlier this week we learned that Fox is also bringing back the popular action series 24 – but at this point it’s a one-time thing and it will only run 12 more episodes.

[Image via]

Well, here’s his goodbye. It’s a slightly tweaked version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” Yep, “Space Oddity” performed in space. It just feels right, doesn’t it?

[via reddit]

Lansdorp told Business Insider that his organization had expected “a slow start,” that would eventually build toward their 500,000 applicant goal by the August 31st deadline. Instead they got nearly a sixth of their goal in a fraction of the expected time. According to Lansdorp, many applicants say that they have been following the project since before the application process began.

According to information released by Mars One on Tuesday, applicants come from more than 120 countries, and have a variety of backgrounds. The countries contributing the most applicants are, as you might expect, the United States with 17,324, China with 10,241, and the United Kingdom with 3,581.

The application deadline is August 31st. Once applications are closed, Mars One will begin the process of selecting the best candidates. While you might think that scientists and engineers would be the most desirable, Lansdorp says that the program isn’t that picky about applicants’ backgrounds. According to Dr. Norbert Kraft, the program’s chief medical officer, the key qualities they look for in applicants are commitment, creativity, and resiliency.

The selection process will consist of four rounds and will seek to identify the 28-40 most qualified candidates. Those candidates will then undergo seven years of training before the final team will be chosen to go to Mars.

The initial Mars One expedition will be a four-person mission designed to establish a foothold on Mars. This team will begin laying the groundwork for a full permanent settlement on Mars.

Many of the Mars One applicants have submitted videos discussing their qualifications and their motivations for applying. You can check out some of the videos and even apply yourself (if leaving the planet forever is your thing) at applicants.mars-one.com.

Literally. Well, not its orbit (apologies). Anyway, Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Chris Hadfield, Commander of the International Space Station, was part of the big reveal. For those of you who lost track, yes, Canada did just unveil a new style of currency in space.

“Canadians can be very proud of their new polymer bank notes,” said Finance Minister Flaherty. “With today’s unveiling of the final two notes in the series, one can see not only the unique story that each of the five denominations tells, but the unifying theme that underlies them all – the profound courage, determination, and ingenuity of our nation and its people.”

Here’s the Bank of Canada’s rationale for the switch to polymer:

Almost half a billion of these new notes are now in circulation. Safer, cheaper, greener, the polymer notes have already proven their worth. Safer, because all the notes have the same state-of-the-art security features, using holography, transparency and other elements that make them difficult to counterfeit but easy for everyone, especially those behind the counter, to verify.

Cheaper, because the durable polymer material lasts at least 2.5 times longer than paper-based notes. This means that fewer notes will need to be printed, making the series more economical. Greener because, over the life of the series, fewer notes produced also means fewer notes transported. And when they do need to be replaced, the notes will be recycled in Canada.

The new $5 bill features images of Canadarm2 and Dextre – robots used to build and keep the ISS. It also features a portrait of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister of Canada from 1896 to 1911.

You can watch the currency reveal from space below:

Canada already has $20, $50, and $100 polymer notes in circulation, and the Bank of Canada says that they are the most secure bank note that they’ve ever issued.

“I try to inspire young Canadians to aim high. This new $5 bill should do the same,” Commander Hadfield said. “By giving prominence to Canadian achievements in space, this bank note reminds us that not even the sky is the limit.”

Now, NASA is letting everyone in on the agonizing wait with a new feature incorporated into its Eyes on the Solar System software. Eyes on the Solar System is an interactive, 3-D web app that uses up-to-date NASA mission data to depict the Solar System.

The new module allows users to watch the Voyager 1 probe as it hurtles toward interstellar space. Astronomers believe that Voyager 1 entered a “magnetic highway” at the edge of the Solar System late last year. The ‘Highway” is a region where charged particles can pass both in and out of the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles that surrounds the sun.

The app will speed up Voyager 1′s journey to one day per second. Navigation data from the project is used to show the probe roll and maneuver through the Solar System.

NASA researchers are tracking the particles coming from inside the heliosphere and outside of it. They believe that a sustained increase in detected outside charged particles indicates the “magnetic highway” Voyager 1 currently occupies. Scientists are waiting for a magnetic field shift before confirming the probe has left the Solar System.

(Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

As you may have expected, the clever minds on reddit first spotted this image. It was subsequently noticed by the likes of Gizmodo and The Huffington Post. Fierce debate ensued. Is it real? If so, did they mean to do it?

We probably know the answer to the first question. You can find the image on NASA’s website, so it’s not likely photoshopped or anything.

But just because it’s real, that doesn’t make it intentional.

I’d like to hope that whoever was controlling the rover had a few too many beers and decided to substitute the forehead of their passed-out buddy for Mars’ vast, blank canvas.

Though the launch was successful, a problem with three of the capsule’s four thruster pods delayed the opening of its solar arrays. SpaceX engineers had to wait until the capsule was over its Australia-based ground station to “command inhibit override” and reactivate enough of the thruster pods to deploy the arrays. While only one of the thruster pods was reactivated, it was enough to successfully deploy the arrays.

SpaceX spent hours trying to reactivate the two thruster pods that were still malfunctioning. At around 3 pm EST Space X founder Elon Musk tweeted that the thruster pods were back online and that the capsule is no longer drifting:

Follow @elonmusk

Elon Musk
@elonmusk

Pods 1 and 4 now online and thrusters engaged. Dragon transitioned from free drift to active control. Yes!!

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11 minutes ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

The problems caused the capsule to miss one of its scheduled burns that would take it toward its scheduled docking with the ISS. As a result, the docking could be delayed.

SpaceX and NASA have scheduled a teleconference for 3 pm EST. More details about the Dragon capsule and its docking schedule should be revealed during the call.

The Dragon capsule is carrying 1,200 pounds of cargo and science equipment that will be delivered to the ISS’s crew of six international astronauts. The capsule is scheduled to return with refuse and used equipment on March 25. SpaceX successfully completed its first resupply mission to the ISS back in October 2012 when it delivered 882 pounds of supplies to the satellite.

The launch of the capsule can be seen in the video below, which NASA released earlier today:

The newly discovered belt of radiation was observed for four weeks before a shockwave from the sun blew it apart. The new belt could improve researchers’ understanding of how the belts react to space weather, and in particular solar winds. The research was published this week in the journal Science.

“Even 55 years after their discovery, the Earth’s radiation belts still are capable of surprising us and still have mysteries to discover and explain,” said Nicky Fox, Van Allen Probes deputy project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “We thought we knew the radiation belts, but we don’t. The advances in technology and detection made by NASA in this mission already have had an almost immediate impact on basic science.”

The new belt was detected by the Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope (REPT) on-board the Van Allen Probes. The probes discovered that a region thought to be one belt had actually become two distinct belts with space in between.

“This is the first time we have had such high-resolution instruments look at time, space and energy together in the outer belt,” said Daniel Baker, lead author of the study and REPT instrument lead at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado. “Previous observations of the outer radiation belt only resolved it as a single blurry element. When we turned REPT on just two days after launch, a powerful electron acceleration event was already in progress, and we clearly saw the new belt and new slot between it and the outer belt.”

The Van Allen Probes were launched back in August with the mission of studying the Van Allen belts and how space weather can affect them. By December of last year data from the probes was already revealing to scientists just how much influence the sun has over the Earth’s magnetosphere.

“The fantastic new capabilities and advances in technology in the Van Allen Probes have allowed scientists to see in unprecedented detail how the radiation belts are populated with charged particles and will provide insight on what causes them to change, and how these processes affect the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science.

When you’re done with this, make sure you catch his recent reddit AMA. It’s out of this world! (I’ll show myself out).