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NASA’s Curiosity Views First ‘Sun Rays’ on Mars

March 7, 2023
Martian sunsets are uniquely moody, but NASA’s Curiosity rover captured one last month that stands out. As the Sun descended over the horizon on Feb. 2, rays of light illuminated a bank of clouds. These “sun rays” are also known as crepuscular rays, from the Latin word for “twilight.” It was the first time sun rays have been so clearly viewed on Mars. Curiosity captured the scene during…
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NASA’s Quantum Detector Achieves World-Leading Milestone

March 3, 2023
Quantum computers hold the promise of operating millions of times faster than conventional computers. But to communicate over long distances, quantum computers will need a dedicated quantum communications network. To help form such a network, a device has been developed by…
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Study Finds Venus’ ‘Squishy’ Outer Shell May Be Resurfacing the Planet

February 24, 2023
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 three-decade-old data from NASA’s Magellan mission has taken a new look at how Venus cools and found that thin regions of the…
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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 – called 2011 AG5 – impacting our planet, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California closely tracked…
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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…
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NASA’s NuSTAR Telescope Reveals Hidden Light Shows on the Sun

February 10, 2023
Loading Image Comparison… 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 grid was added to indicate the Sun’s surface. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JAXA Even on a sunny day, human eyes can’t see…
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