Editor's blog

A large NASA research balloon carrying gamma-ray instruments has crashed during a launch attempt in Australia. Strong winds ripped the balloon from its moorings prior to launch and drifted into an onlooker's car. Initial reports suggest that the payload has been badly damaged.

This footage shows the payload breaking free from a crane and smashing into the vehicle as it gets dragged some metres across the ground at a reasonable speed.

The next generation European ground based telescope the ELT took a major step forward today when a site in the Atacama desert was chosen as the location.

It seems to me that the Twitterverse is going to stick around for a while, despite reports of its demise, and that being so it raises many questions on how to exploit it in science.

Last night, for the first time ever for an election, the UK had a television debate between the three potential Chancellors of the Exchequer (i.e. those in charge of the money). For a brief moment the phrase #askthechancellors was in the top 2 on Twitter in the UK, and top 4 worldwide.

On Saturday 27 March somewhere in New Zealand a rolling wave of global darkness will commence as the citizens of the world are encouraged to turn the lights off for one hour at 20:30 local time.

This synthesized stereo pair of images gives a remarkable view of the Mojave Crater in the Xanthe Terra region of Mars. The view, which is exaggerated by a factor of three in the vertical, shows an almost Himalayan landscape with a material stopped up behind the surrounding rock walls. The images are a composite from a pair of images taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.