Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, has mysterious dark spots on the surface amid one of the many giant ridges that scar the moon's surface.

Produced by Emmanuel Ocbazghi. Original reporting by Jessica Orwig.

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Water behaves in some pretty bizarre ways 250 miles above Earth in microgravity.

On Jan. 21, astronaut Scott Kelly celebrated his 300th day aboard the International Space Station by demonstrating one of the many strange things water can do in space: it can double as a ping pong ball. 

First Kelly carefully squeezed out a water droplet from the packets of water that astronauts use for drinking, cleaning, and bathing. Water molecules love to stick to each other, and without gravity acting on them, they clump into the shape with the least amount of surface area — a sphere. 

Then he used two paddles with a water-repellent Teflon coating to gently tap the droplet back and forth.

Big drops are easy to accidentally burst — a problem when those droplets can float off into unsuspecting machinery lining the space station's walls — but small drops like this one can survive harder hits.

Of course, this kind of slow-motion ping pong game would not be very exciting to watch. Each player would have plenty of time to line up their shot.

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Astronaut Chris Hadfield is launching a crowd-funded animated comedy science series called "It's Not Rocket Science."

Hadfield became famous during his time on the International Space Station for a series of videos where he did everything from explaining how to brush your teeth in space, to performing an impressive cover of David Bowie's song "Space Oddity."

Hadfield is now retired, but it seems he's still interested in the video-making business.

Hadfield and his son have announced a new team effort to provide an entertaining series of science videos to the masses. 

In this new animated series, Hadfield will be the narrator and main character, his son Evan Hadfield will write and produce the series, while two artists and developers will work on the animation.

The team plans to release 10 videos (one every month) starting this winter.

They're using the crowd-funding website Patreon to get the show started, and at the time this story was written they've raised more than $2,800 of a $5,000 per video goal.

It's a comedy show, but according to the Patreon page, it sounds like the team wants to use it as a platform for science education, too:

We're creating what we believe will be the best science comedy animated series of all time. Our goal isn't just to deliver facts, but to explain the stories that make progress interesting. If we want to make a better future, we need better explanations of our present. We need people to understand where the ship is sailing if they're ever going to tend the sails.

You can watch a teaser for the series below:

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NASA's Scott Kelly turned a ball of water and two hydrophobic paddles into an out of this world game of ping pong on the International Space Station.

Story by Tony Manfred and editing by Ben Nigh

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An epic war is coming between our home galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy, which is currently racing toward us at a speed of 250,000 mph.

Astronomers estimate that 3.75 billion years from now, Earth will be caught up amid the largest galactic event in our planet's history, when these two giant galaxies collide.

Luckily, experts think that Earth will survive, but it won't be entirely unaffected. The collision will unfold right in front of us, changing the night sky to look like nothing any human has seen before.

Join us on a journey into the future to see what it will be like:

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Far from city lights, on a clear night, this is what the sky on Earth looks like today. During certain times of the year, you can see the Andromeda Galaxy, circled below, next to the bright band of our own Milky Way.

Right now, Andromeda is about 2.5 million light-years away. When it collides with our galaxy in less than 4 billion years, it will enter into a cataclysmic dance lasting billions of years that will rip it and the Milky Way apart to form a new galaxy.

Just before Andromeda collides, Earthlings will have a gorgeous view. On the left you can see Andromeda as it approaches the Milky Way through mutual gravitational attraction.

The planets and galaxies created for sci-fi films such as "Star Wars,""Star Trek," and "Alien" are pretty realistic.

That is, according to Robert Hurt, a visualization specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In a video for Wired, Hurt analyzes certain fictional planets and compares them to real-life counterparts.

Hoth, the icy planet from "Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back," is similar to a moon in our own solar system, Saturn's Enceladus.

"[It's] this pristine, white, icy ball that has these fantastic geysers of ice that spray out into space," Hurt explains of the moon. It's "less hospitable" than Hoth, but still comparable. 

"Star Trek's" Romulus and Remus are a double-planet system, which means the two planets orbit each other. In our own system once again, Hurt explains that Pluto and its moon Charon "orbit around a mutual point in space. That would actually categorize it as a dual-planet system." 

As for "Alien's" LV-426, the planet's "hostile environment" is similar to that of exoplanets.

Watch the video below: 

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On Jan. 22 Bue Origin — the spaceflight company owned and founded by billionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos — landed its reusable rocket, named New Shepard, for the second time. And here's the footage the company released to prove it:

There's only one way to land a rocket: upright. So, as expected, this second landing looks a lot like the first one Blue Origin achieved last November.

But there are a couple differences this time around, Bezos explained in a news release on Blue Origin's site:

• New Shepard reached an altitude of 63.2 miles compared to the 62.4 miles it reached on Nov. 24, 2015.
• Software improvements now enable the rocket to target its landing point from farther away, similar to how pilots line up with the runway before landing. "This new strategy increases margins, improving the vehicle’s ability to reject disturbances created by low-altitude winds," Bezos wrote.

This is the second vertical-landing-vertical-takeoff rocket in history that has launched to space and returned for a successful landing.

Blue Origin's rival spaceflight company, SpaceX, is also making history with its reusable rockets. So far, SpaceX has achieved one rocket landing, last December — making Blue Origin's landing on Jan. 22 the third ever rocket landing in history.

To be fair, SpaceX rocket landings are more complicated to perform because the reusable first stage is traveling at faster speeds when it reaches space, therefore, requiring a number of complex maneuvers — including a somersault in space and multiple engine burns upon descent — to return to Earth.

New Shepard, on the other hand, launches to space and then falls back to Earth, firing its rockets seconds before touch down for a soft, safe landing. No somersaults needed, as shown in the diagram below:

Right now, Blue Origin's impressive rocket landings are test runs as opposed to SpaceX, who attempts its landings after shuttling cargo to space, which it has been paid to do by the company who owns the cargo.

Both Blue Origin and SpaceX have achieved what was thought impossible ten years ago: sending a rocket to space and then bringing it back. This type of rocket reusability is expected to drastically cut the cost of spaceflight, enabling more people to take a trip to space than at any other point in history.

Not only that, reusable rocket technology is critical for realizing Bezos dream of "millions of people living and working in space" and Musk's dream of building a permanent civilization on Mars.

Looking forward, Bezos discussed Blue Origin's progress on building an orbital rocket — a rocket that launches faster and achieves higher altitudes than New Shepard so it can achieve orbit around Earth. SpaceX's Falcon 9 reusable rockets are orbital.

Another development we can expect to see from Blue Origin in the near future is the full-engine testing of its monster BE-4 rocket engines, which the United Launch Alliance hopes will fly its most powerful rocket yet.

Watch the full footage of the launch and landing test on YouTube or below:

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Every job comes with its own unique perks, but NASA astronauts seem to have the best perk of all: the opportunity to visit space.

That's not the only bonus, however, according to NASA astronaut Andrew J. Feustel.

"The other wonderful thing about this job is the opportunity to go and talk to people about what we do — especially kids," Feustel told Business Insider during a press event at NASA's Johnson Spaceflight Center in December.

Feustel first signed on to be a NASA astronaut in July 2000 and is now one of the 47 active astronauts at NASA today. He's spent over 40 hours in the unprotected confines of outer space, performing space walks that included upgrades to prolong the life of the famous Hubble Space Telescope.

"I hope that over the 15 years that I've been an astronaut and in the years to follow, I will continue to be able to inspire children," he said at the event which was to promote the Digital HD and Blu-ray/DVD release of the sci-fi film "The Martian." Both are now available.

For Feustel, there was no question growing up that space was going to be a part of his future. He was born in 1965, right in the middle of the great space race between the US and USSR, and it was this feverish thirst for space exploration that inspired Feustel, along with an entire generation, to reach for the stars.

But it's not the drive to become an astronaut that Feustel tries to inspire in the generations to come. He envisions something grander.

"I hope that every time I go to talk to a school, youth organization, or university that there's somebody there that heard what I said and was inspired personally to go off and pursue whatever goal they had. It doesn't have to be space exploration," he said.

He continued: "It doesn't have to be to become an astronaut, but that they were inspired to follow the dream that they had and pursue that and be successful."

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Three months ago, news broke that a giant "alien megastructure" could exist around a bizarre-looking star 1,500 light-years away.

While the prospect of aliens was first launched by Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, almost everyone in the astronomy community agreed that the chances that this was the case were "very low."

Now, the latest investigations into this strange star by Louisiana State University astronomer Bradley Schaefer have reignited the alien theory, New Scientist reported.

What makes this star, KIC8462852, so bizarre is the drastic changes in light we see from it over time. Many stars experience temporary fluctuations in brightness, increasing and decreasing in luminosity over time, but KIC8462852's changes are severe by comparison.

Between 2009 and 2013, astronomers using the Kepler space telescope discovered that it would sometimes lose up to 20% of its brightness. What's more, the changes didn't follow any obvious pattern.

That would suggest something gigantic must be blocking the light at random times, meaning that it couldn't be a planet or other regular orbiting object because that would generate a distinct pattern of dimming light. It must be something that changes shape over time, thereby blocking different levels of light at random intervals.

Surprise: It's probably not comets

An alien megastructure, called a Dyson swarm, was suggested as one explanation for what scientists have observed, but the most likely reason astronomers came up with was comets — a giant family of them.

But Shaefer says not so fast.

"The comet-family idea was reasonably put forth as the best of the proposals, even while acknowledging that they all were a poor lot," Schaefer told New Scientist. "But now we have a refutation of the idea, and indeed, of all published ideas."

To make his discovery, Schaefer had to dig deep down into the astronomy archives at Harvard. It turns out, astronomers have data on KIC8462852 dating back as far as 1890.

By analyzing over 1,200 measurements of this star's brightness taken from 1890 through 1989, Schaefer found that the irregular dimming of KIC8462852 has been going on for over 100 years. Schaefer published his findings in the online preprint server arXiv.org.

What's more, he explains in his paper that this "century-long dimming trend requires an estimated 648,000 giant comets (each with 200 km diameter) all orchestrated to pass in front of the star within the last century," which he said is "completely implausible."

So what is it?

By killing the comet theory, Schaefer has brought us one step closer to finding out what is really happening around KIC8462852.

At the same time, he's also reignited the possibility that the source could be an alien megastructure that an advanced alien civilization has been slowly building over time. One thing's certain for Schaefer: The bizarre dimmings are probably caused by a single, physical mechanism that's undergoing some type of ongoing change.

"The century-long dimming and the day-long dips are both just extreme ends of a spectrum of timescales for unique dimming events, so by Ockham's Razor, all this is produced by one physical mechanism," Shaefer said in his paper. "This one mechanism does not appear as any isolated catastrophic event in the last century, but rather must be some ongoing process with continuous effects."

Schaefer isn't the only one interested in learning more about KIC8462852. Late last year, astronomer Doug Vakoch and his team at the new organization called SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International— not to be confused with the SETI Institute — went hunting for aliens around KIC8462852.

They searched for signals that an alien civilization might be beaming toward Earth either in radio or visible wavelengths, but ultimately they came up empty handed. So, if it is aliens, then they're being awfully quiet.

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Astronauts on board the International Space Station get most of their nutrition from pre-cooked meals that NASA's Science Food Lab at Johnson Space Center prepares from fresh ingredients.

However, there are some classic pre-packaged snacks — available in just about any grocery store in America — that NASA sends up to remind astronauts of home.

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics compiled a list of some of these house-hold favorites, 9 of which we pulled for this post to show how you can eat like an astronaut.

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Whoppers are relatively light weight, making them an ideal space food. Astronauts also say they're great for target practice. (SpaceX offers one of the cheapest cargo rides to space, but it still costs on average $2,500 per pound, so the lighter the better.)

Source: Smithsonian Air & Space and AIAA

Plain and peanut M&Ms are another favorite because the hard candy shell makes them unlikely to crumble and leave a floating mess. Astronauts also enjoy using them for educational demonstration videos.

Source: Smithsonian

There are no refrigerators on the ISS, but astronauts still occasionally get fresh produce like oranges, tomatoes, and bananas, which NASA sends on board cargo missions.

Source: Spaceflight.nasa.org

A deeply disturbing and controversial line of thinking has emerged within the physics community.

It's the idea that we are reaching the absolute limit of what we can understand about the world around us through science. 

"The next few years may tell us whether we'll be able to continue to increase our understanding of nature or whether maybe, for the first time in the history of science, we could be facing questions that we cannot answer," Harry Cliff, a particle physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research — better known as CERN — said during a recent TED talk in Geneva, Switzerland.

Equally frightening is the reason for this approaching limit, which Cliff says is because "the laws of physics forbid it."

At the core of Cliff's argument are what he calls the two most dangerous numbers in the universe. These numbers are responsible for all the matter, structure, and life that we witness across the cosmos.

And if these two numbers were even slightly different, says Cliff, the universe would be an empty, lifeless place.

Dangerous No. 1: The strength of the Higgs field

The first dangerous number on Cliff's list is a value that represents the strength of what physicists call the Higgs field, an invisible energy field not entirely unlike other magnetic fields that permeates the cosmos.

As particles swim through the Higgs field, they gain mass to eventually become the protons, neutrons, and electrons comprising all of the atoms that make up you, me, and everything we see around us.

Without it, we wouldn't be here.

We know with near certainty that the Higgs field exists because of a groundbreaking discovery in 2012, when CERN physicists detected a new elementary particle called the Higgs boson. According to theory, you can't have a Higgs boson without a Higgs field.

But there's something mysterious about the Higgs field that continues to perturb physicists like Cliff.

According to Einstein's theory of general relativity and the theory of quantum mechanics — the two theories in physics that drive our understanding of the cosmos on incredibly large and extremely small scales — the Higgs field should be performing one of two tasks, says Cliff.

Either it should be turned off, meaning it would have a strength value of zero and wouldn't be working to give particles mass, or it should be turned on, and, as the theory goes, this "on value" is "absolutely enormous," Cliff says. But neither of those two scenarios are what physicists observe.

"In reality, the Higgs field is just slightly on," says Cliff. "It's not zero, but it's ten-thousand-trillion times weaker than it's fully on value — a bit like a light switch that got stuck just before the 'off' position. And this value is crucial. If it were a tiny bit different, then there would be no physical structure in the universe."

Why the strength of the Higgs field is so ridiculously weak defies understanding. Physicists hope to find an answer to this question by detecting brand-new particles at the newly upgraded particle accelerator at CERN. So far, though, they're still hunting.

Dangerous No. 2: The strength of dark energy

Cliff's second dangerous number doubles as what physicists have called "the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics."

This perilous number deals in the depths of deep space and a mind-meltingly complex phenomenon called dark energy.

Dark energy, a repulsive force that's responsible for the accelerating expansion of our universe, was first measured in 1998.

Still, "we don't know what dark energy is," Cliff admits. "But the best idea is that it's the energy of empty space itself — the energy of the vacuum."

If this is true, you should be able to sum up all the energy of empty space to get a value representing the strength of dark energy. And although theoretical physicists have done so, there's one gigantic problem with their answer:

"Dark energy should be 10¹²⁰ times stronger than the value we observe from astronomy," Cliff said. "This is a number so mind-bogglingly huge that it's impossible to get your head around ... this number is bigger than any number in astronomy — it's a thousand-trillion-trillion-trillion times bigger than the number of atoms in the universe. That's a pretty bad prediction."

On the bright side, we're lucky that dark energy is smaller than theorists predict. If it followed our theoretical models, then the repulsive force of dark energy would be so huge that it would literally rip our universe apart. The fundamental forces that bind atoms together would be powerless against it and nothing could ever form — galaxies, stars, planets, and life as we know it would not exist.

On the other hand, it's extremely frustrating that we can't use our current theories of the universe to develop a better measurement of dark energy that agrees with existing observations. Even better than improving our theories would be to find a way that we can understand why the strength of dark energy and the Higgs field is what it is.

Getting answers could be impossible

Cliff said there is one possible way to get some answers, but we might never have the ability to prove it.

If we could somehow confirm that our universe is just one in a vast multiverse of billions of other universes, then "suddenly we can understand the weirdly fine-tuned values of these two dangerous numbers [because] in most of the multiverse dark energy is so strong that the universe gets torn apart, or the Higgs field is so weak that no atoms can form," Cliff said.

To prove this, physicists need to discover new particles that would uphold radical theories like string theory, which predicts the existence of a multiverse. Right now, there's only one place in the world that could possibly produce these particles, if they exist, and that's the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

And physicists only have two to three years before CERN shuts the LHC down for upgrades. If we haven't found anything by then, Cliff said, it could signal the beginning of the end.

"We may be entering a new era in physics. An era where there are weird features in the universe that we cannot explain. An era where we have hints that we live in a multiverse that lies frustratingly beyond our reach. An era where we will never be able to answer the question why is there something rather than nothing."

Check out the TED talk below:

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In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi raised a very important question about the Universe and the existence of extra-terrestrial life.

Given the size and age of the Universe, he stated, and the statistical probability of life emerging in other solar systems, why is it that humanity has not seen any indications of intelligent life in the cosmos?

This query, known as the Fermi Paradox, continues to haunt us to this day.

If, indeed, there are billions of star systems in our galaxy, and the conditions needed for life are not so rare, then where are all the aliens?

According to a recent paper by researchers at Australian National University's Research School of Earth Sciences, the answer may be simple: They're all dead. In what the research teams calls the "Gaian Bottleneck," the solution to this paradox may be that life is so fragile that most of it simply doesn't make it.

To put this in perspective, let's first consider some of the numbers. As of the penning of this article, scientists have discovered a total of 2,049 planets in 1,297 planetary systems, including 507 multiple planetary systems. In addition, a report issued in 2013 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA indicated that, based on Kepler mission data, there could be as many as 40 billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of Sun-like stars and red dwarfs within the Milky Way, and that 11 billion of these may be orbiting Sun-like stars.

So really, there should be no shortage of alien civilizations out there. And given that some scientists estimate that our galaxy is over 13 billion years old, there's been no shortage of time for some of that life to evolve and crate all the necessary technology to reach out and find us. But according to Dr. Aditya Chopra, the lead author on the ANU paper, one needs take into account that the evolutionary process is filled with its share of hurdles.

"Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive," he says. "Most early planetary environments are unstable. To produce a habitable planet, life forms need to regulate greenhouse gases such as water and carbon dioxide to keep surface temperatures stable."

Consider our Solar System. We all know that planet Earth has all the right elements to give rise to life as we know it. It sits within the Sun's so-called Goldilocks Zone (aka habitable zone), it has liquid water on its surface, an atmosphere, and a magnetosphere to protect this atmosphere and ensure that life on the surface isn't exposed to too much radiation. As such, Earth is the only place in our Solar System where life is known to thrive.

But what about Venus and Mars? Both of these planets sit within the Sun's Goldilocks Zone and might have had microbial life on them at one time. But roughly 3 billion years ago, when life on Earth was beginning to convert the Earth's primordial atmosphere by producing oxygen, Venus and Mars both underwent cataclysmic change.

Whereas Venus experienced a runaway Greenhouse Effect and became the hot, hostile world it is today, Mars lost its atmosphere and surface water and became the cold, desiccated place it is today. So whereas Earth's microbial life played a key role in stabilizing our environment, any lifeforms on Venus and Mars would have been wiped out by the sudden temperature extremes.

In other words, when considering the likelihood of life in the cosmos, we need to look beyond the mere statistics and consider whether or not it may come down to an "emergence bottleneck." Essentially, those planets where lifeforms fail to emerge quickly enough, thus stabilizing the planet and paving the way for more life, will be doomed to remain uninhabited.

In their report, "The Case for a Gaian Bottleneck: The Biology of Habitability"— which appears in the first issue of Astrobiology for 2016 — Dr. Chopra and his associates summarize their argument as follows:

If life emerges on a planet, it only rarely evolves quickly enough to regulate greenhouse gases and albedo, thereby maintaining surface temperatures compatible with liquid water and habitability. Such a Gaian bottleneck suggests that (i) extinction is the cosmic default for most life that has ever emerged on the surfaces of wet rocky planets in the Universe and (ii) rocky planets need to be inhabited to remain habitable.

While potentially depressing, this theory does offer a resolution to the Fermi Paradox. Given the sheer number of warm, wet terrestrial planets in the Milky Way Galaxy, there ought to be at least a few thousand civilizations kicking around. And of those, surely there are a few who have climbed their way up the Kardashev Scale and built something like a Dyson Sphere, or at least some flying saucers!

And yet, not only have we not detected any signs of life in other solar systems, but the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) hasn't detecting any radio waves from other star systems since its inception. The only possible explanations for this are that either life is far more rare than we think, or that we aren't looking in the right places. In the former case, an emergence bottleneck may be the reason why life has been so hard to find.

But if the latter possibility should be the case, it means our methodology needs to change. So far, all of our searches have been for the "low-hanging fruit" of alien life — looking for signs of it on warm, watery planets like our own. Perhaps life does exist out there, but in more complex and exotic forms that we have yet to consider. Or, as is often suggested, it is possible that extra-terrestrial life is taking great pains to avoid us.

Regardless, Fermi's Paradox has endured for over 50 years, and will continue to endure until such time that we make contact with an extra-terrestrial civilization. In the meantime, all we can do is speculate. To quote Arthur C. Clarke, "Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."

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The Russian space agency just announced that it's working on a very unusual project: a nuclear reactor-powered rocket engine capable of propelling spacecraft out into the cosmos.

A nuclear engine might sound alarming and even dangerous, but when nuclear power is safely harnessed, it can be a quick and efficient way to travel around the solar system on much less fuel than a traditional rocket.

Rosatom State Nuclear Energy Corporation is already developing one of these engines, a spokesperson for the company, Andrei Ivanov, told the Russian newspaper Izvestia.

A nuclear reactor engine is designed to heat some kind of liquid (usually hydrogen) to extremely high temperatures inside a reactor where it turns into a gas. Then as it expands, it streams out of a nozzle to generate thrust.

Rosatom has already successfully tested the design for a reactor casing and created a special fuel element that allows the engine to operate in a wide range of temperatures. It hopes to have an engine ready for a test flight in 2025.

NASA is also working on a reactor-powered engine of its own: The Nuclear Thermal Rocket Element Environmental Simulator (NTREES) program.

NTREES is working on a rocket that would use a regular chemical rocket to launch a payload, then once it was safely into orbit, the payload would continue on into space powered by a nuclear reactor engine.

NASA thinks this kind of engine could get humans to Mars faster and on less fuel than a traditional rocket engine. Less fuel on board would free up the rocket to carry more astronauts or more supplies per trip.

While these rockets seem like they'd be ideal for destinations pretty close to home (like Mars), news reports that suggest a nuclear reactor engine could be used for deep-space missions to the far reaches of the galaxy are overblown, Bill Emrich, a NASA engineer, told Tech Insider in an email. It's not yet clear what kind of mission Russia plans to use the engine for.

And, unsurprisingly, nuclear-powered spaceflight is not without risks.

Back in 1978, the Soviet Union launched a satellite called Kosmos-954 carrying a nuclear reactor onboard, but a malfunction prevented the satellite from separating from the nuclear reactor. The satellite crashed back into Earth's atmosphere and scattered radioactive pieces over a region in northwest Canada. The Soviet Union had to pay Canada over $10 million for the damage.

But spaceflight has come a long way since the 70s, so hopefully that kind of problem won't happen again if space agencies start testing these engines.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Astronauts found something troubling in these shots from space

If you're going into space, you might as well look good, right? 

That's the idea behind the new "spacewear" partnership between Virgin Galactic and Y-3, Adidas's futuristic fashion label.

Here's a look.

Virgin Galactic head of design Adam Wells (left) and Y-3 senior design director Lawrence Midwood debuted three prototype suits at Spaceport America, Virgin Galactic's New Mexico launching station.

The three suits — including the one pictured here in front of Spaceport America — are mostly made of Nomex, a super-tough, flame-resistant fabric similar to Kevlar body armor.

Rather than the bright reds that are usually found on Virgin branded gear, the spacewear is made up of different black textures.

What's it like to not walk on solid ground for a year?

That's one of the questions NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and companion Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko have set out to answer during their year-long mission on board the International Space Station (ISS).

If the men succeed in their mission to discover how a long-term, low-gravity environment affects the human body, they'll be the first humans to ever spend a full year in zero gravity, which is twice as long as typical US missions. Their journey of more than 143 million miles is critical in preparing astronauts for future expeditions to Mars.

So far, Kelly and Kornienko have spent more than 300 continuous days aboard ISS, and Kelly shared some interesting observations so far during a Reddit AMA this weekend.

Here are some of the most interesting things the astronaut revealed about life aboard the International Space Station:

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Space isn't as scary as you might think.

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"I don't feel alone or afraid. I was up here for six weeks as the only American on the US side of the space station and I was fine. I have been afraid when the ground has called and privatized the audio generally meaning something bad has happened. So I have been a little afraid."

This is a response to the question, Do you ever feel alone/afraid? If so, how do you combat those feelings?

The Bahamas are just as beautiful from space.

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"My favorite spot on Earth to see from space is probably the Bahamas. The brilliant and varied colors of the blue water and contrast from here is pretty spectacular."

This is a response to the question, What is your favorite part of Earth to see from space?

Kelly's first meal upon returning to earth won't be fast food.

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"The first thing I will eat will probably be a piece of fruit (or a cucumber) the Russian nurse hands me as soon as I am pulled out of the space capsule and begin initial health checks."

This is a response to the question, What will be the first thing you eat once you're back on Earth?

Two separate teams of physicists have been examining the flow of time in the Universe, and they’ve proposed that some 14 billion years ago, the Big Bang could have given rise to a second, inverse mirror universe where time moves in the opposite direction: it moves backwards, not forwards.

Basically, if we were looking at the mirror universe, we would see time moving from the future to the past, but from the perspective of that universe, it would look like our time was moving backwards, not forwards, the researchers suggest.

"Time is not something that pre-exists," one of the physicists, Julian Barbour from the University of Oxford in the UK, told Olivia Goldhill at Quartz."The direction and flow of time we have to deduce from what’s happening in the Universe. When we look at it that way, it’s natural to say that time begins at that central point and flows away in opposite directions."

Physicists have been struggling for decades over the fact that none of the fundamental laws of physics that govern the Universe state that time has to necessarily move forwards. "Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our Universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward,"Lee Billings writes for Scientific American.

Back in 1927, a British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington proposed that there exists an 'arrow of time', which acts as a fundamental property of a branch of physics called thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics states that in any isolated system - such as a universe - entropy (or disorder) has to increase, so regardless of whether the arrow of time is moving backwards or forwards, things must always march towards a higher state of entropy. 

Our version of the Universe and its thermodynamic arrow of time it is that when the Big Bang occurred, our Universe began like a new, whole egg, with high order and low entropy. Soon enough, that 'egg' was broken and scrambled almost beyond recognition, and everything fell into a chaotic, high entropy state.  

The problem with this assumption is that is doesn’t allow for the backwards movement of time that the fundamental laws of physics allow for. You can’t progress from a shattered egg back to a highly ordered, perfectly whole egg, so what gives?

Joshua Sokol explains at New Scientist:

"Zooming out to the entire Universe, we ... define the future as that direction of time in which entropy increases. By studying the motion of faraway galaxies, we can predict how the cosmos will evolve. Or we can rewind time back to the Big Bang, when the Universe must have had much less entropy.

Try to rewind further and we meet a cosmological conundrum. We can’t proceed if the Big Bang was indeed the beginning of time, but in that case, why did it have such low entropy? And if it wasn’t the beginning of time ... we’d still want to know how an eternal Universe could have reached such a low-entropy state that would allow for the arrow of time to form."

Julian Barbour and his colleagues in the UK published a paper back in 2014 arguing that this arrow of time is being governed by gravity, rather than thermodynamics. Publishing in Physical Review Letters, they describe how they ran a computer simulation of 1,000 particles that were all governed by Newtonian gravity - the most simplistic simulation of the Universe you could imagine. 

They found that, thanks to gravity, the particles ended up with the smallest amount of distance between each other - which they called the Janus point. The particles would then expand back outwards in different directions, signifying how time could move forwards and backwards in an actual multiverse.

"When the particles then expand outwards, they do so in two different temporal directions,"Goldhill writes for Quartz. "Barbour and his colleagues created a simplified 1,000 particle point model of the Universe showing this dual expansion, with gravity creating structure in both directions."

"It’s the simplest thing,"Barbour says of his research. "You start at that central Janus point where the motion is chaotic - that’s like the Greek notion of primordial chaos - but then in both directions you get this structure forming. If the theory is right, then there’s another universe on the other side of the Big Bang in which the direction of experience of time is opposite to ours."

Now two other physicists, Sean Carroll from the California Institute of Technology and Alan Guth from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), have come up with similar results using a different particle model. 

As described by Sokol at New Scientist, in this model, they created a finite cloud of particles, and dropped it into an infinite universe. Soon enough, two different arrows of time emerge spontaneously - half of them move towards increasing entropy, while the other half congregate in the center, decreasing entropy, before passing through and moving back outwards into chaos. 

"Eventually the whole cloud is expanding, and entropy is rising in tandem,"says Sokol.

Perhaps this middle region of low entropy describes the Big Bang, but also solves the problem of there being no "beginning of time" - just the lowest state of chaos.

Carroll and Guth have yet to publish the results of their model, and admit that there are lots of limitations that still need to be ironed out, but together with Barbour's team's work, it's safe to say that there's something else going on other than the "One Universe was created from the beginning of time" assumption. 

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Caltech scientists Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin caused an uproar last week when they published a paper suggesting the existence of an undiscovered "Planet X" or "Planet 9" on the edge of our solar system.

Their research didn't prove the planet exists, but their analysis of the unusual orbital paths of a clump of dwarf planets in the outer solar system strongly suggests that a big, Neptune-sized planet is lurking out there, tugging on the tiny planets.

This isn't definite proof that the planet exists. We need an actual image of the planet by spotting it through a telescope.

But the problem is that this planet is far away (10 or 20 times the distance of Pluto), and we don't know where in the sky to search for it. We also don't know how much sunlight is reflecting off it, so it might appear very faint even if we can pin down its location.

Brown and Batygin are hopeful though, that with some careful planning and calculation, they'll be able to get visual proof of the distant planet nine. They explained in the Reddit AMA how it might be possible to directly observe the mysterious planet and prove it exists.

First, they have to figure out what part of the sky it's in.

Brown explained that they think they know the planet's orbital path, but not where on the path it's located right now. And since the planet is so far away, it likely takes thousands of years for it to travel around the sun — that's a lot of ground to cover in a search.

Sadly, Brown and Batygin don't think the planet is currently in the part of its orbit that would bring it close enough for amateur astronomers to spot it with their home telescopes, so they're turning to giant, ground-based telescopes that are capable of seeing farther out into space.

"The planet is faint, but not hopelessly so, we think," Brown wrote. "Based on where we think it likely is in its orbit, we are going to need a couple of the biggest telescopes in the world (the Subaru telescope, is my favorite), but with these we definitely have a chance."

Brown and Batygin think it could take anywhere between five and 15 years to track down the planet, and they've invited other scientists to join the search.

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During a Reddit AMA from the International Space Station on Jan. 23 Astronaut Scott Kelly called out the US government for its lack of financial support for NASA.

When a Reddit user asked Kelly what he'd like to see the next president of the United States do, Kelly had an interesting answer:

"I would like the next president to support a budget that allows us to accomplish the mission that we are asked to perform, whatever that mission may be," Kelly wrote.

While NASA's budget for 2016 is $19.3 billion, the amount of money the organization gets fluctuates from year to year, depending on the amount the president requests for NASA and the amount that Congress actually approves.

When you don't know what kind of budget to expect from year to year, it makes long-term planning difficult. And when you're tasked with building and launching spacecraft millions or even billions of miles from Earth, on missions that take several years, long-term planning is pretty critical.

For NASA's work to be worth it, the funding needs to be there for the duration of each mission — or all the time, money, and research that goes into a given space exploration mission can end up being all for nothing.

To Kelly's point, even though the Obama administration directed NASA to start working on a manned mission to Mars, many have criticized the administration and Congress for not adequately funding NASA, causing critical Mars projects to fall behind schedule.

And in 2010, lack of funding and new government priorities forced NASA to shut down its Constellation program which was working on a rocket designed to take us back to the moon and beyond.

In fact, NASA has wasted over $20 billion on canceled projects between the early 90s and 2012.

Kelly is not the first astronaut to point out problems with NASA's budget. Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham, NASA administrator and former astronaut Charles Bolden, and others, have repeatedly said NASA's budget is too low to accomplish all that the government expects.

NASA's budget peaked during the Apollo era at about 4.4% of the federal budget. But by the end of the 70s, it had dropped to well below 1%. And since 2010, it has hovered around or just below 0.5% of the federal budget.

NASA's 2016 budget was actually higher than expected, which is great news for the agency. But next year the budget could drop again, which could trigger a mad scramble to reshuffle priorities. More programs could end up stalled in the water or canceled all together.

Further, when a new president is inaugurated next year, he or she might direct NASA toward an entirely different mission. That means all of NASA's work on a manned mission to Mars could get shelved until a new president comes along who agrees that we should go there.

Some have proposed that NASA's funding should be set in 5-year or 10-year budgets instead of yearly budgets to ensure the organization can see projects through from start to finish. But since NASA's funding is part of the yearly federal budget, it would be extremely difficult to make that happen.

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NASA has already warned that the large amount of space junk around our planet is growing beyond our control, but now a team of Russian scientists has cited another potentially unforeseen consequence of that debris: War.

Scientists estimate that anywhere from 500,000 to 600,000 pieces of human-made space debris between 0.4 and 4 inches in size are currently orbiting the Earth and traveling at speeds over 17,000 miles per hour.

If one of those pieces smashed into a military satellite it "may provoke political or even armed conflict between space-faring nations," Vitaly Adushkin, a researcher for the Institute of Geosphere Dynamics at the Russian Academy of Sciences, reported in a paper set to be published in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Astronautica, which is sponsored by the International Academy of Astronautics.

Say, for example, that a satellite was destroyed or significantly damaged in orbit — something that a 4-inch hunk of space junk could easily do traveling at speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, Adushkin reported. (Even smaller pieces no bigger than size of a pea could cause enough damage to the satellite that it would no longer operate correctly, he notes.)

It would be difficult for anyone to determine whether the event was accidental or deliberate.

This lack of immediate proof could lead to false accusations, heated arguments and, eventually, war, according to Adushkin and his colleagues.

A politically dangerous dilemma

In the report, the Adushkin said that there have already been repeated "sudden failures" of military spacecraft in the last two decades that cannot be explained.

"So, there are two possible explanations," he wrote. The first is "unregistered collisions with space objects." The second is "machinations" [deliberate action] of the space adversary.

"This is a politically dangerous dilemma," he added.

But these mysterious failures in the past aren't what concerns Adushkin most.

It's a future threat of what experts call the cascade effect that has Adushkin and other scientists around the world extremely concerned.

The Kessler Syndrome

In 1978, American astrophysicist Donald Kessler predicted that the amount of space debris around Earth would begin to grow exponentially after the turn of the millennium.

Kessler 's predictions rely on the fact that over time, space junk accumulates. We leave most of our defunct satellites in space, and when meteors and other man-made space debris slam into them, you get a cascade of debris.

The cascade effect — also known as the Kessler Syndrome — refers to a critical point wherein the density of space junk grows so large that a single collision could set off a domino effect of increasingly more collisions.

For Kessler, this is a problem because it would "create small debris faster than it can be removed,"Kessler said last year. And this cloud of junk could eventually make missions to space too dangerous.

For Adushkin, this would exacerbate the issue of identifying what, or who, could be behind broken satellites.

The future

So far, the US and Russian Space Surveillance Systems have catalogued 170,000 pieces of large space debris (between 4 and 8 inches wide) and are currently tracking them to prevent anymore dilemmas like the ones Adushkin and his colleagues cite in their paper.

But it's not just the large objects that concern Adushkin, who reported that even small objects (less than 1/3 of an inch) could damage satellites to the point they can't function properly.

Using mathematical models, Adushkin and his colleagues calculated what the situtation will be like in 200 years if we continue to leave satellites in space and make no effort to clean up the mess. They estimate we'll have:

• 1.5 times more fragments greater than 8 inches across
• 3.2 times more fragments between 4 and 8 inches across
• 13-20 times more smaller-sized fragments less than 4 inches across

"The number of small-size, non-catalogued objects will grow exponentially in mutual collisions," the researchers reported.

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We all know what it feels like to fall.

If you've got a daredevil's bent, it's a thrill — that leap off a cliff into the blue water below.

For many, there's fear, a nightmare of a never-ending fall that recurs night after night.

But if you reside on the International Space Station, like astronaut Scott Kelly has been doing for more than 300 days already as part of a year in space, that never-ending fall is a feeling you may have to grow comfortable with.

As Kelly explained in a Reddit AMA question-and-answer session on January 24, it feels rather strange — physically — to live on a satellite orbiting our planet.

Redditor emshedoesit asked Kelly "What does zero G feel like on your body when you are just hanging out?"

Kelly replied:

It feels like there is no pressure at all on your body. Sometimes it feels like you are just hanging but you are not hanging by anything, just hanging there.

But what he said next was particularly fascinating:

If I close my eyes, I can give myself the sensation that I am falling. Which I am, I am falling around the Earth.

The Space Station falls constantly around the Earth, at a speed of more than 17,500 miles per hour. Earth's gravity keeps it in orbit, but that orbit is just a constant speedy fall around the globe.

So while most of the time it may feel like just hanging, not being drawn to the ground as we earthbound are; that feeling is caused by the weightlessness of a constant fall that doesn't end as long as you are up in space, a fall that goes around and around the planet.

Sounds pretty fun.

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