Jewish & World News

The Curiosity rover, currently on Mars after recently landing in a tricky operation controlled by National Space and Aeronautics Administration (NASA) technicians, includes a refrigerator manufactured in Israel. The refrigerator was developed in the northern Israeli kibbutz Ein Harod (Ihud), Yedioth Ahronoth reported.

Sipping a cold glass of freshly filtered water? Give NASA a high-five. Kicking back and tuning in to 500 channels of satellite television? Send a thank-you fruit basket to NASA.

As the new rover that just landed on Mars looks for signs of life there, the NASA program that runs it is supporting life here on Earth -- with jobs. NASA spokesman Guy Webster said the rover, named Curiosity, is currently supporting about 700 people, but has supported 7,000 jobs at various times over the last eight years. The Curiosity project and its $2.5 billion budget has generated jobs not just at NASA but at companies ranging from Lockheed Martin to a bicycle manufacturer in Chattanooga, Tenn.

Chinese hackers gained control over NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in November, which could have allowed them delete sensitive files, add user accounts to mission-critical systems, upload hacking tools, and more -- all at a central repository of U.S. space technology, according to a report released Wednesday afternoon by the Office of the Inspector General. That report revealed scant details of an ongoing investigation into the incident against the Pasadena, Calif., lab, noting only that cyberattacks against the JPL involved Chinese-based Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Paul K. Martin, NASA's inspector general, put his conclusions bluntly.

NASA is playing with fire on the International Space Station — literally. Since March 2009, the space agency's Flame Extinguishment Experiment, or FLEX, has conducted more than 200 tests to better understand how fire behaves in microgravity, which is still not well understood. The research could lead to improved fire suppression systems aboard future spaceships, and it could also have practical benefits here on Earth, scientists said.

Washington - National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) suspected that al-Qaeda might try to attack space shuttle Columbia on its launch pad in Florida's Cape Canaveral because one of its crew members was the first Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, according to a book published by former CIA operations officer Richard Irwin.

Most of us will never make it into space -- but NASA on Monday offered to send photos of inter-galactic dreamers into orbit for free. People can upload a photo of their face, or provide their name, at faceinspace.nasa.gov .

NASA has come up with a new way for the Earth to be destroyed – solar storms. "The sun is waking up from a deep slumber, and in the next few years we expect to see much higher levels of solar activity," said NASA scientist Richard Fisher in a release . "At the same time, our technological society has developed an unprecedented sensitivity to solar storms. The intersection of these two issues is what we're getting together to discuss."

Washington -  The nation's space agency paid the out-of-this-world price of $66 a person a day for bagels, cookies and juice at a conference, a new report found. The subject of the NASA conference? It was a training session for its procurement officials — the people who do the buying with taxpayer funds.

A cushioning device originally intended for space vehicles is now being tested by NASA on helicopters that have to make crash landings. Researchers believe this so-called deployable energy absorber (DEA) could save lives and helicopters in the near future. To gauge the DEA's effectiveness, NASA intentionally crashed an MD-500 helicopter twice at its Landing and Impact Research Facility in Hampton, Virginia — ironically the same facility where Apollo astronauts learned to land safely on the moon.  To set up both crashes, engineers raised the chopper on cables and then dropped it from a height of 35 feet (11 meters). The helicopter hit the ground at about 33 miles (55 kilometers) per hour, simulating a relatively severe—yet survivable—wreck, according to NASA, especially if the impact were dampened somehow.  Cameras recorded footage of the crash, and more than a hundred sensors inside the helicopter collected data for later analysis.  Both abbreviated chopper flights ...

On the eve of the fullest moon of the year, NASA scientists were told they won't be able to visit any longer. In his new budget, President Obama plans to eliminate the space program's manned moon missions. When the president releases his budget on Monday, a White House official confirmed on Thursday, there will be a big hole where funding for NASA's Constellation program used to be. Constellation is the umbrella program that includes the Ares rocket -- the replacement for the aging space shuttles. NASA will receive an additional $5.9 billion over five years, some of which will be used to extend the life of the International Space Station to 2020. The official said it also will be used to entice companies to build private spacecraft to ferry astronauts to the space station after the space shuttle retires. The story was first reported in the Orlando Sentinel, which detailed that the forthcoming budget will include no funding for lunar landers, no moon bases, and no Cons...