Tagged: nasa

With less than a year to launch, NASA’s Lucy mission’s third and final scientific instrument has been integrated onto the spacecraft. The spacecraft, which will be the first to explore the Trojan asteroids—a population of small bodies that share an orbit with Jupiter—-is in the...

A tightly choreographed dance between NASA’s Deep Space Network and Mars orbiters will keep the agency’s Perseverance in touch with Earth during landing and beyond. When NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover touches down with the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on the Red Planet on Feb. 18,...

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will create enormous cosmic panoramas, helping us answer questions about the evolution of our universe. Astronomers also expect the mission to find thousands of planets using two different techniques as it surveys a wide range of stars in the...

NASA has selected three potential landing sites for the upcoming Mars 2020 rover: an ancient lake, a past volcanic hotbed and an early hot-spring site. Scientists chose the final three candidates at a workshop Feb. 8-10 in Monrovia, California, from eight sites chosen in 2015...

NASA’s Juno spacecraft will continue studying Jupiter for another three years. The $1.1 billion Juno mission has been extended through at least July 2021, NASA officials announced yesterday (June 6). The agency will fund Juno into 2022, to cover the cost of data analysis and...

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which has yielded the first close-up views of Pluto, was poised to ring in the new year by flying past the ancient icy object “Ultima Thule” some billions of miles away from Earth. New Horizons’ encounter with Ultima Thule was to...

Existing medical techniques are laying the foundations for an ambitious research project to send astronauts into a deep sleep on a six-month journey to Mars, according to the engineer leading the study. “There’s technology being used in the medical community that could support this –...

A stunning new NASA video provides an astronaut’s view of the moon’s far side, when the crew aboard Apollo 13 was out of communication with Earth. The video, courtesy of the space agency’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), is optimized to zoom in on on the...

It’s an “identified flying object.” On Monday morning, 220 or so miles about the Earth, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy looked out the window to see a mysterious object drifting by. Cassidy reached out to Mission Control about the strange item, which was drifting lazily in...

Bill Cooke, NASA scientist, is regularly shooting marbles into carefully arranged piles of soil. Each marble explodes on impact with a spectacular blast of light and leaves a nice-looking crater in the soil. Why is NASA paying this man to do something most of us...