Space

After nearly two and a half decades of planning and work, NASA is finally set to launch its next-generation space observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, this morning. The spacecraft will ride to space on top of a European Ariane 5 rocket, taking off out of Europe’s primary launch site in French Guiana, South America. The launch is expected to last just 26 minutes to get JWST to…

. James Smith created the JPL University Crowdsourcing Initiative (JUCI) to pair JPLers with a volunteer workforce hungry for challenges. It was 2016 and Alex Austin couldn’t believe his luck. A college senior studying aerospace and mechanical engineering at New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he had been working hard with his classmates on a challenge…

. NASA-JPL’s ‘On a Mission’ Podcast New Season Rolls Out With Mars Rovers With the first episode available now, Season Four shares the personal stories of the people who’ve helped put NASA’s six-wheeled explorers on the Red Planet. For 25 years, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been sending rovers to Mars. From the first tentative tracks…

. NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover Makes Surprising Discoveries The findings by rover scientists highlight the diversity of samples geologists and future scientists associated with the agency’s Mars Sample Return program will have to study. Scientists with NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover mission have discovered that the bedrock their six-wheeled…