KENNETH CHANG | The Seattle Times

May 4, 2018 at 12:41 pm

With Mars InSight, NASA journeys into the Red Planet’s deepest mysteries

The $814 million mission hinges on detecting something that has never been definitively detected before: Marsquakes.

April 20, 2018 at 3:57 pm

Scanners find secrets from Picasso’s ‘Blue Period’

Using techniques and tools originally developed for medicine and geology, researchers have found a “jazz” facet to Picasso, in how he painted over an older...

January 23, 2018 at 6:46 pm

Elon Musk has big agenda for SpaceX’s big rocket

At a launchpad in Florida, technicians for Elon Musk’s upstart rocket company are preparing for the maiden flight of the Falcon Heavy, whose 27 engines...

Business

September 9, 2017 at 12:00 am

Hints of trigonometry found on 3,700-Year-Old Babylonian tablet

Two Australian mathematicians assert that an ancient clay tablet was a tool for working out trigonometry problems, possibly adding to the many techniques that Babylonian...

August 15, 2017 at 11:37 pm

Cathleen Morawetz, mathematician with real-world impact, dies at 94

Cathleen S. Morawetz, a mathematician whose theorems often found use in solving real-world engineering problems, has died at her home in New York City. She...

January 2, 2017 at 1:31 pm

SpaceX says it’s ready to launch rockets again

Four months after a Falcon 9 rocket exploded on a Florida launchpad, SpaceX said Monday that the cause was a failed composite overwrapped pressure vessel...

Nation & World

An undated handout image of an artist’s concept of NASA’s X-57 Maxwell aircraft showing the plane’s specially designed wing and 14 electric motors. The new experimental airplane could help push electric-powered aviation from a technical curiosity and pipe dream into something that might become commercially viable for small aircraft.(NASA Langley/Advanced Concepts Lab, AMA, Inc. via The New York Times) — NO SALES; FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY WITH NASA ELECTRIC PLANE BY KENNETH CHANG FOR JUNE 18, 2016. ALL OTHER USE PROHIBITED. —

June 18, 2016 at 5:03 pm

‘Moonshot for aviation’: NASA plans test plane that flies on electricity

The X-57 will look like a Cessna, and its cruising speed might hit 175 mph. Its wings will be unique: far skinnier than usual and...

Nation & World

ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter at Mars. TGO will be launched in 2016 with Schiaparelli, the entry, descent and landing demonstrator module. It will search for evidence of methane and other atmospheric gases that could be signatures of active biological or geological processes on Mars. TGO will also serve as a communications relay for the rover and surface science platform that will be launched in 2018.

March 12, 2016 at 6:08 pm

European-Russian mission to study Mars gases, storms

The unmanned spacecraft, consisting of an orbiter to measure methane and other gases in the Martian atmosphere and a lander to study dust storms, will...

Nation & World

Interesting items, like possible cutting tools, recovered from the Blick Mead dig site, Amesbury, England, Oct. 17, 2015. Archaeological excavation at a site known as Blick Mead is revealing a wealth of items and information about the area’s hunter-gatherers who eventually became farmers and, more than a millennia later, built Stonehenge and and other prehistoric monuments that dot the English countryside. (Andrew Testa/The New York Times)

November 9, 2015 at 6:21 pm

Ancient house may help fill in blanks about Stonehenge VIEW

The house is part of the story of Stonehenge, even though the occupants of the Blick Mead home never saw that assemblage of massive stones....

In this photo provided by NASA, New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colo., left, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) Director Ralph Semmel, center, and New Horizons Co-Investigator Will Grundy of the Lowell Observatory hold a print of a U.S. stamp with their suggested update since the New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto, at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md. on Tuesday, July 14, 2015. (Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP)

July 18, 2015 at 2:16 pm

Remarkable mission to Pluto nearly didn’t happen

The story of New Horizons, the little spacecraft that could, and did, visit a small planet that is now considered too small to be a...

Nation & World