Space

After a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, the Invention Challenge made a lively return to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Friday. Now in its 23rd year, the long-running tradition brings together students and professional engineers to compete side by side with their homemade machines. For this year’s Invention Challenge, dubbed the “Sticky Wicket Contest,”…

While Alaska straddles the Arctic Circle and is covered by vast expanses of frozen land, the state also has a lot of liquid water. In fact, Alaska holds about 40% of U.S. surface water resources. This includes more than 12,000 rivers, thousands more streams and creeks, and hundreds of thousands of lakes. So when the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite launches this month from…

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…

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…