NewsSpace

Meet the People Behind the SWOT Water-Tracking Satellite

As the international Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission finishes final preparations for its December launch, a new video series focuses on some of the engineers and scientists behind the satellite, which will be the first to observe nearly all water on Earth’s surface. Led by NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), SWOT will measure the…
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JPL’s Venus Aerial Robotic Balloon Prototype Aces Test Flights

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 balloon with a Venus orbiter, the two working in tandem to study Earth’s sister planet. While the orbiter would remain far…
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NASA’s InSight Gets a Few Extra Weeks of Mars Science

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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NASA’s NuSTAR Mission Celebrates 10 Years Studying the X-Ray Universe

NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is turning 10. Launched on June 13, 2012, this space telescope detects high-energy X-ray light and studies some of the most energetic objects and processes in the universe, from black holes devouring hot gas to the radioactive remains of exploded stars. Here are some of the ways NuSTAR has opened our eyes to the X-ray universe over the last…
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NASA’s Psyche Starts Processing at Kennedy

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…
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Shake and Bake: NASA’s Psyche Is Tested in Spacelike Conditions

The conditions that a NASA spacecraft endures are extreme: the violent shaking and cacophony of a rocket launch, the jolt of separating from the launch vehicle, the extreme temperature fluctuations in and out of the Sun’s rays, the unforgiving vacuum of space. Before launch, engineers do their best to replicate these harsh conditions in a rigorous series of tests to ensure the spacecraft can…
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