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NASA’s Lunar Flashlight to Fly by Earth

May 17, 2023
NASA’s Lunar Flashlight mission to the Moon has ended, but the briefcase-size spacecraft will soon fly past Earth before heading into deep space. On Tuesday, May 16, at 9:44 p.m. PDT (Wednesday, May 17, at 12:44 a.m. EDT), the CubeSat will pass about 40,000 miles (65,000 kilometers) from our planet’s surface. NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System 3D visualization tool will track the tiny…
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JPL’s Snake-Like EELS Slithers Into New Robotics Terrain

May 9, 2023
How do you create a robot that can go places no one has ever seen before – on its own, without real-time human input? A team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that’s creating a snake-like robot for traversing extreme terrain is taking on the challenge with the…
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Webb Looks for Fomalhaut’s Asteroid Belt and Finds Much More

May 8, 2023
Astronomers used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, in order to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of our solar system in infrared light. But to their surprise, the dusty structures are much more complex than the asteroid and Kuiper dust belts of our solar system. Overall, there are three nested belts extending out to 14…
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New Study of Uranus’ Large Moons Shows 4 May Hold Water

May 5, 2023
Re-analysis of data from NASA’s Voyager spacecraft, along with new computer modeling, has led NASA scientists to conclude that four of Uranus’ largest moons likely contain an ocean layer between their cores and icy crusts. Their study is the first to detail the evolution…
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NASA InSight Study Provides Clearest Look Ever at Martian Core

April 25, 2023
While NASA retired its InSight Mars lander in December, the trove of data from its seismometer will be pored over for decades to come. By looking at seismic waves the instrument detected from a pair of temblors in 2021, scientists have been able to deduce that Mars’ liquid iron core is smaller and denser than previously thought. The findings, which mark the first direct observations ever made of…
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Icy Moonquakes: Surface Shaking Could Trigger Landslides

April 14, 2023
Many of the ice-encrusted moons orbiting the giant planets in the far reaches of our solar system are known to be geologically active. Jupiter and Saturn have such strong gravity that they stretch and pull the bodies orbiting them, causing moonquakes that can crack the moons’ crusts and surfaces. New research shows for the first time how these quakes may trigger landslides that lead to…
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