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NASA Mission Update: Voyager 2 Communications Pause

July 28, 2023
A series of planned commands sent to NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft July 21 inadvertently caused the antenna to point 2 degrees away from Earth. As a result, Voyager 2 is currently unable to receive commands or transmit data back to Earth. Voyager 2 is located more than 12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from Earth, and this change has interrupted communication between Voyager 2 and the…
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NASA’s Juno Is Getting Ever Closer to Jupiter’s Moon Io

July 26, 2023
When NASA’s Juno mission flies by Jupiter’s fiery moon Io on Sunday, July 30, the spacecraft will be making its closest approach yet, coming within 13,700 miles (22,000 kilometers) of it. Data collected by the Italian-built JIRAM (Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper) and…
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NASA’s Perseverance Rover Sees Mars in a New Light

July 21, 2023
In its first 400 days on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover may have found a diverse collection of organics – carbon-based molecules considered the building blocks of life – thanks to SHERLOC, an innovative instrument on the rover’s robotic arm. Scientists with the mission, which is searching for evidence that the planet supported microbial life billions of years ago, aren’t sure whether…
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NASA’s Psyche Mission Enters Home Stretch Before Launch

July 19, 2023
With less than 100 days to go before its Oct. 5 launch, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is undergoing final preparations at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Teams of engineers and technicians are working almost around the clock to ensure the orbiter is ready to journey 2.5 billion miles (4 billion kilometers) to a metal-rich asteroid that may tell us more about planetary cores and how planets form. The mission…
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ESA’s Euclid Mission Launches to Explore ‘Dark Universe’

July 2, 2023
The ESA (European Space Agency) Euclid spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 11:12 a.m. EDT on Saturday, July 1, beginning its mission to study why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Astronomers use the term “dark…
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NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Phones Home

July 1, 2023
The 52nd flight of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is now in the official mission logbook as a success. The flight took place back on April 26, but mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California lost contact with the helicopter as it descended toward the surface for landing. The Ingenuity team expected the communications dropout because a hill stood between the…
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