NewsSpace

5 Things to Know About How SWOT Will Look at the World’s Water

November 16, 2022
On Dec. 12, NASA will launch the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite into Earth orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is a collaborative effort between NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) – with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the UK Space Agency – that will…
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JPL’s Venus Aerial Robotic Balloon Prototype Aces Test Flights

November 16, 2022
The intense pressure, heat, and corrosive gases of Venus’ surface are enough to disable even the most robust spacecraft in a matter of hours. But a few dozen miles overhead, the thick atmosphere is far more hospitable to robotic exploration. One concept envisions pairing a…
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NASA’s InSight Gets a Few Extra Weeks of Mars Science

November 16, 2022
As the power available to NASA’s InSight Mars lander diminishes by the day, the spacecraft’s team has revised the mission’s timeline in order to maximize the science they can conduct. The lander was projected to automatically shut down the seismometer – InSight’s…
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New Images Using Data From Retired Telescopes Reveal Hidden Features

November 16, 2022
New images using data from ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA missions showcase the dust that fills the space between stars in four of the galaxies closest to our own Milky Way. More than striking, the snapshots are also a scientific trove, lending insight into how dramatically the density of dust clouds can vary within a galaxy. With a consistency similar to smoke, dust is created by dying…
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NASA’s Psyche Starts Processing at Kennedy

November 16, 2022
Since its arrival on April 29, the Psyche spacecraft has moved into the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where technicians removed it from its protective shipping container, rotated it to vertical, and have begun the final steps to prepare the spacecraft for launch. In the coming months, crews will perform a range of work including reinstalling…
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How NASA’s Psyche Mission Will Explore an Unexplored World

November 16, 2022
The target of NASA’s Psyche mission – a metal-rich asteroid, also called Psyche, in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter – is an uncharted world in outer space. From Earth- and space-based telescopes, the asteroid appears as a fuzzy blur. What scientists do know…
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NASA’s Next-Generation Asteroid Impact Monitoring System Goes Online

November 16, 2022
To date, nearly 28,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) have been found by survey telescopes that continually scan the night sky, adding new discoveries at a rate of about 3,000 per year. But as larger and more advanced survey telescopes turbocharge the search over the next few years, a rapid uptick in discoveries is expected. In anticipation of this increase, NASA astronomers have developed a…
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