In the Origins and Habitability Lab at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, you can find a world in a test tube – specifically, a simplified simulation of early Earth. By re-creating the conditions that would have been found on our planet roughly 4 billion years ago, scientists can narrow down the possible chemical reactions that could have taken place then – including those that may have been…
Earth and Venus are rocky planets of about the same size and rock chemistry, so they should be losing their internal heat to space at about the same rate. How Earth loses its heat is well known, but Venus’ heat flow mechanism has been a mystery. A study that uses…
NASA recently built two weather instruments to test the potential of small, low-cost sensors to do some of the work of bulkier, pricier satellites. Both instruments have exceeded expectations as trial runs, and they are already delivering useful forecast information for the…
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Set to Begin Third Year at Jezero Crater
February 18, 2023
NASA’s Perseverance rover will celebrate its second anniversary on the surface of Mars Saturday, Feb. 18. Since arriving at Jezero Crater in 2021, the six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover has been examining geologic features and collecting samples of the Red Planet that are central to the first step of the NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Sample Return campaign. Scientists want to study…
NASA’s Planetary Radar Captures Detailed View of Oblong Asteroid
February 18, 2023
On Feb. 3, an asteroid more than three times as long as it is wide safely flew past Earth at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers, or a little under five times the distance between the Moon and Earth). While there was no risk of the asteroid…
Researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are getting their first look at star formation, gas, and dust in nearby galaxies with unprecedented resolution at infrared wavelengths. The data has enabled an initial collection of 21 research papers which provide new…
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Shows Off Collection of Mars Samples
February 15, 2023
Even space robots know what “pics or it didn’t happen” means: NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover provided a panorama of its recently completed sample depot – a big milestone for the mission and humanity’s first collection of samples on another planet. The panorama, stitched together from 368 images that were sent to Earth, captures more than a month of careful placement and mapping of 10…
NASA’s NuSTAR Telescope Reveals Hidden Light Shows on the Sun
February 10, 2023
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Wavelengths of light from three space observatories are overlapped to provide a unique view of the Sun in the image at left. The high-energy X-ray light detected by one of those observatories, NASA’s NuSTAR, is seen isolated at right; a…
NASA’s Curiosity Finds Surprise Clues to Mars’ Watery Past
February 9, 2023
When NASA’s Curiosity rover arrived at the “sulfate-bearing unit” last fall, scientists thought they’d seen the last evidence that lakes once covered this region of Mars. That’s because the rock layers here formed in drier settings than regions explored earlier in…
University High Reclaims Victory at JPL-Hosted Science Bowl
February 7, 2023
A team from Irvine, California’s University High School prevailed over teams from 19 other schools Saturday, Feb. 4, at the regional competition of the National Science Bowl, hosted for the 31st year by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The victory marked a return to form for the school, which won four years straight until its streak was disrupted in a narrow loss at…
