NASA’s Lunar Flashlight mission successfully launched on Dec. 11, 2022, to begin its four-month journey to the Moon, where the small satellite, or SmallSat, will test several new technologies with a goal of looking for hidden surface ice at the lunar South Pole. While the SmallSat is largely healthy and communicating with NASA’s Deep Space Network, the mission operations team has discovered…
Creeping, rising, falling, slipping – some parts of Earth are in perpetual motion. The movements are usually too tiny for human senses to notice, but they offer clues about more significant changes happening inside volcanoes, along fault lines, and where tectonic plates…
NASA Wants You to Help Study Planets Around Other Stars
January 11, 2023
More than 5,000 planets have been confirmed to exist outside our solar system, featuring a wide array of characteristics like clouds made of glass and twin suns. Scientists estimate there could be millions more exoplanets in our home galaxy alone, which means professional…
NASA’s TESS Discovers Planetary System’s Second Earth-Size World
January 11, 2023
Using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scientists have identified an Earth-size world, called TOI 700 e, orbiting within the habitable zone of its star – the range of distances where liquid water could occur on a planet’s surface. The world is 95% Earth’s size and likely rocky.
Astronomers previously discovered three planets in this system, called TOI 700 b, c, and…
NASA Space Missions Pinpoint Sources of CO2 Emissions on Earth
January 10, 2023
A duo of Earth-observing missions has enabled researchers to detect and track carbon dioxide (CO2) emission changes from a single facility, using the world’s fifth-largest coal-fired power plant as a test case.
In the recent study, researchers used space-based measurements…
Watch the Latest Water Satellite Unfold Itself in Space
December 29, 2022
The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite launched into Earth orbit on Friday, Dec. 16, from Vandenberg Space Force Base in central California, and engineers are working to prepare the mission to begin measuring the height of water on over 90% of Earth’s…
NASA Explores a Winter Wonderland on Mars
December 23, 2022
When winter comes to Mars, the surface is transformed into a truly otherworldly holiday scene. Snow, ice, and frost accompany the season’s sub-zero temperatures. Some of the coldest of these occur at the planet’s poles, where it gets as low as minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 123 degrees Celsius).
Cold as it is, don’t expect snow drifts worthy of the Rocky Mountains. No region of Mars…
Juno Spacecraft Recovering Memory After 47th Flyby of Jupiter
December 23, 2022
NASA’s Juno spacecraft completed its 47th close pass of Jupiter on Dec. 14. Afterward, as the solar-powered orbiter was sending its science data to mission controllers from its onboard computer, the downlink was disrupted.
The issue – an inability to directly access the…
Moon Water Imager Integrated With NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer
December 23, 2022
Lunar Trailblazer, NASA’s mission to understand lunar water and the Moon’s water cycle led by Caltech in Pasadena, California, is one step closer to launching next year. Earlier this month, the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California delivered a key…
Construction Begins on NASA’s Next-Generation Asteroid Hunter
December 22, 2022
A space telescope designed to search for the hardest-to-find asteroids and comets that stray into Earth’s orbital neighborhood, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NEO Surveyor) recently passed a rigorous technical and programmatic review. Now the mission is transitioning into the final design-and-fabrication phase and establishing its technical, cost, and schedule baseline.
The mission…
