Space

Some 250 students hauled homemade machines they’d spent weeks honing to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Friday, Dec. 8, for the 24th annual JPL Invention Challenge. The rules for the creative engineering competition change every year, but the overall goal is the same: Build a device capable of accomplishing a specified task within 60 seconds. This year, teams needed…

For the first time in history, two planets have been home to testing future aircraft designs. On this world, a new rotor that could be used with next-generation Mars helicopters was recently tested at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, spinning at near-supersonic speeds (0.95 Mach). Meanwhile, the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has achieved new altitude and airspeed…

For the first time in space, scientists have produced a quantum gas containing two types of atoms. Accomplished with NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory aboard the International Space Station, the achievement marks another step toward bringing quantum technologies currently available only on Earth into space. Quantum tools are already used in everything from cellphones to GPS to medical devices. In the…

It’s not every day that members of the public have the chance to send their names into deep space beyond Mars, all the way to Jupiter and its moon Europa. But with NASA’s Europa Clipper, you have that opportunity: Names will ride aboard the spacecraft as it journeys 1.8 billion miles (2.6 billion kilometers) to this icy moon, where an ocean hides beneath a frozen outer shell. The deadline to…