When NASA returns to the Moon with Artemis, the agency and its partners will reach unexplored regions of the lunar surface around the South Pole, where it can get much colder at night than even on frigid Mars. Such surface conditions would be challenge for current spacecraft, which rely on energy-consuming heaters to stay warm.
A technology demonstration being developed at NASA’s Jet…
A merging galaxy pair cavort in this image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, an international mission led by NASA with its partners ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency). This new Webb image of a pair of galaxies, known to astronomers as II ZW…
Baby Star ‘Burps’ Tell Tales of Frantic Feeding, NASA Data Shows
November 30, 2022
Newborn stars “feed” at a furious rate and grow through surprisingly frequent feeding frenzies, a recent analysis of data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope shows.
Outbursts from stellar babies at the earliest stage of development – when they’re about…
NASA’s Lunar Flashlight SmallSat Readies for Launch
November 29, 2022
When NASA’s Lunar Flashlight launches no earlier than Nov. 30, the tiny satellite will begin a three-month journey, with mission navigators guiding the spacecraft far past the Moon. It will then be slowly pulled back by gravity from Earth and the Sun before settling into a wide science-gathering orbit to hunt for surface water ice inside dark regions on the Moon that haven’t seen sunlight in…
NASA’s Europa Clipper Gets Its Wheels for Traveling in Deep Space
November 24, 2022
Just as NASA’s Mars rovers rely on robust wheels to roam the Red Planet and conduct science, some orbiters rely on wheels, too – in this case, reaction wheels – to stay pointed in the right direction. Engineers and technicians at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in…
Meet the People Behind the SWOT Water-Tracking Satellite
November 23, 2022
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…
NASA Program Predicted Impact of Small Asteroid Over Ontario, Canada
November 23, 2022
In the early hours of Saturday, Nov. 19, the skies over southern Ontario, Canada, lit up as a tiny asteroid harmlessly streaked across the sky high in Earth’s atmosphere, broke up, and likely scattered small meteorites over the southern coastline of Lake Ontario. The fireball wasn’t a surprise. Roughly 1 meter (3 feet) wide, the asteroid was detected 3 ½ hours before impact, making this event…
5 Things to Know About How SWOT Will Look at the World’s Water
November 16, 2022
On Dec. 12, NASA will launch the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite into Earth orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California atop a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission is a collaborative effort between NASA and the French space agency Centre National…
JPL’s Venus Aerial Robotic Balloon Prototype Aces Test Flights
November 16, 2022
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…
NASA’s InSight Gets a Few Extra Weeks of Mars Science
November 16, 2022
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 last operational science instrument – by the end of June in order to conserve energy, surviving on what power its dust-laden…
