Space, Astronomy, Astronaut, NASA News from Kepea

ContributorNetwork - Eric Anderson, the chairman of Space Adventures, offered a YouTube video update on his company's plan to send two paying customers on a Russian Soyuz on a flight around the moon. Anderson said that he hopes the flight to depart by February 2017.

SPACE.com - As most weather-minded people know, today (Feb. 2) is Groundhog Day.

SPACE.com - The spectacularly fast-whirling dead stars known as millisecond pulsars put the brakes on their spinning in large part by blasting pieces of themselves into space, a new model suggests.

LiveScience.com - A recent, prolonged lull in the sun's activity did not prevent the Earth from absorbing more solar energy than it let escape back into space, a NASA analysis of the Earth's recent energy budget indicates.  

SPACE.com - A potentially habitable alien planet — one that scientists say is the best candidate yet to harbor water, and possibly even life, on its surface — has been found around a nearby star.

SPACE.com - Trace elements in stars may influence the evolution of habitable zones around them where life as we know it might dwell, scientists now find.

LiveScience.com - A massive crack in a huge sheet of Antarctic ice discovered in mid-October last year is steadily growing, as seen in recently released satellite images.

SPACE.com - In 1991, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) issued a stamp depicting the now on-again, off-again planet Pluto with the inscription "Not Yet Explored." Now, the team behind NASA's first mission to the last planet wants to correct that record with a stamp of their own.

Reuters - Germany's OHB AG confirmed it won a 250 million euro ($330 million) contract to build eight satellites for the European Union's Galileo navigation system.

SPACE.com - NASA astronaut Mike Massimino, who gained Internet fame as the first spaceflyer to send Twitter updates from space, is about to get another taste of stardom, this time on the CBS sitcom "The Big Bang Theory."