Preppers, it’s almost the big day you’ve been waiting for — the apocalypse and armageddon all rolled into one. Almost, but not quite. According to NASA, “an asteroid about half the size of a football field will fly past Earth only 17,200 miles above our planet’s surface.

The same super-fast laser technology that sent clear images of Mars back to Earth just cleared another hurdle closer to home by sending an image of the Mona Lisa to the surface of the moon and back again.

Reality television has been around since at least the late ’40s. First we had Candid Camera, where hapless, but real, people became the unwitting butt of Allen Funt’s jokes. But it wasn’t until fifty years later that the genre exploded, bringing us Big Brother and, of course, Survivor.

Maybe you have wondered about it. Maybe you haven’t. But either way, astronaut Chris Hadfield answers the big question — how one goes to the bathroom in space.
Hadfield is currently aboard the International Space Station, where he’s actively tweeting about life in orbit. You can follow him on Twitter here (and find us here).

In 1996, science writer John Horgan published a book called The End of Science in which he claimed that we had learned all we could know about the natural world. And in 2008, Wired magazine devoted an issue to, you guessed it, “The End of Science.

Taken at the International Space Station by astronaut Aki Hoshide (Japan), this awe-inspiring self portrait brings into one frame “the Sun, the Earth, two portions of a robotic arm, an astronaut’s spacesuit, the deep darkness of space, and the unusual camera taking the picture.

On December 7, 1972, the Apollo 17 crew took a photograph of earth that became known as “The Blue Marble” because of the whorling clouds above the continents. Not the first image of the earth from space, it remains one of the most arresting.

The Curiosity mission on Mars will soon bring us some big news. We don’t know what it is. We just know, according to one NASA scientist, the discovery “is going to be one for the history books.

Stargazers of all ages will enjoy the latest Google experiment designed for Chrome. One Hundred Thousand Stars (access it here) is an interactive map of space including the locations of—you guessed it—more than 100,000 stars. (Note: Before you experience the map, you will need to download the Chrome browser.

Enduring conspiracy theories aside, the 1969 moon landing (above) was a rousing success for the government space program known as NASA. After a decade-long space race, during which it seemed to all observers that the Soviets had the edge, the U.S.