Stone’s remarkable tenure on NASA’s longest-operating mission spans decades of historic discoveries and firsts. Edward Stone has retired as the project scientist for NASA’s Voyager mission a half-century after taking on the role. Stone accepted scientific leadership of the historic mission in 1972, five years before the launch of its two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Under his guidance, the Voyagers explored the four ...

Astronomers around the world are captivated by an unusually bright and long-lasting pulse of high-energy radiation that swept over Earth Sunday, Oct. 9. The emission came from a gamma-ray burst (GRB) – the most powerful class of explosions in the universe – that ranks among the most luminous events known. On Sunday morning Eastern time, a wave of X-rays and ...

On Oct. 16, at 7:04 a.m. EDT, NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, the first mission to the Jupiter Trojan asteroids, will skim the Earth’s atmosphere, passing a mere 220 miles (350 kilometers) above the surface. By sling-shotting past Earth on the first anniversary of its launch, Lucy will gain some of the orbital energy it needs to travel to this never-before-visited population ...

JPL’s Venus Aerial Robotic Balloon Prototype Aces Test Flights A scaled-down version of the aerobot that could one day take to the Venusian skies successfully completed two Nevada test flights, marking a milestone for the project. The intense pressure, heat, and corrosive gases of Venus’ surface are enough to disable even the most robust spacecraft in a matter of hours. ...

Two of NASA’s Great Observatories, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope, have captured views of a unique NASA experiment designed to intentionally smash a spacecraft into a small asteroid in the world’s first-ever in-space test for planetary defense. These observations of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) impact mark the first time that Webb and Hubble ...

A pair of microwave radiometers collected data on the storm as they passed over the Caribbean Sea aboard the International Space Station. Two recently launched instruments that were designed and built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to provide forecasters data on weather over the open ocean captured images of Hurricane Ian on Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2022, as ...

An unexpected ‘heat wave’ of 700 degrees Celsius, extending 130,000 kilometres (10 Earth diameters) in Jupiter’s atmosphere, has been discovered. James O’Donoghue, of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), has presented the results this week at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2022 in Granada. Jupiter’s atmosphere, famous for its characteristic multicoloured vortices, is also unexpectedly hot: in fact, it is ...

NASA will provide live coverage of key events as a NASA astronaut and two cosmonauts launch and dock to the International Space Station on Wednesday, Sept. 21. NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin will launch aboard the Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 9:54 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Sept. 21 (6:54 ...

Vice President Kamala Harris highlighted the importance of climate, human spaceflight, and STEM education during the Biden-Harris Administration’s second National Space Council meeting Friday, held at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. “For generations, with our allies and partners around the globe, America has led our world in the exploration and use of space,” said Harris. “Our leadership has been ...

The U.S. Postal Service will issue a stamp celebrating NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, the largest, most powerful, and most complex science telescope ever put in space. The stamp, which features an illustration of the observatory, will be dedicated in a ceremony Thursday, Sept. 8, at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington. “When anyone who uses these stamps ...

Key takeaways: Roving the Red Planet. Perseverance landed on Mars in February 2021 and has been gathering data on the planet’s geology and climate and searching for signs of ancient life.​​​​​​ What lies beneath. The rover’s subsurface radar experiment, co-led by UCLA’s David Paige, has returned images showing unexpected variations in rock layers beneath the Jezero crater. Probing the past. The variations could indicate ...

The agency’s newly upgraded “Eyes on the Solar System” visualization tool includes Artemis I’s trajectory along with a host of other new features. NASA has revamped its “Eyes on the Solar System” 3D visualization tool, making interplanetary travel easier and more interactive than ever. More than two years in the making, the update delivers better controls, improved navigation, and a ...

Digital content creators are invited to register to attend the launch of the fifth SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket that will carry astronauts to the International Space Station for a science expedition mission. This mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The earliest targeted launch date for the agency’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission is Oct. 3, from Kennedy’s ...

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has captured the first clear evidence for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside the solar system. This observation of a gas giant planet orbiting a Sun-like star 700 light-years away provides important insights into the composition and formation of the planet. The finding, accepted for publication in Nature, offers evidence that in ...

NASA will target Saturday, Sept. 3 at 2:17 p.m. EDT, the beginning of a two-hour window, for the launch of Artemis I, the first integrated test of NASA’s Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and the ground systems at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Mission managers met Tuesday to discuss data and develop a forward plan to address ...

Finding water on the Moon could be easier with a Goddard technology that uses an effect called quantum tunneling to generate a high-powered terahertz laser, filling a gap in existing laser technology. Locating water and other resources is a NASA priority crucial to exploring Earth’s natural satellite and other objects in the solar system and beyond. Previous experiments inferred, then ...

By harnessing the capabilities of the 8.1-meter Gemini South telescope in Chile, which is part of the International Gemini Observatory operated by NSF’s NOIRLab, astronomers have obtained the sharpest image ever of the star R136a1, the most massive known star in the Universe. Their research, led by NOIRLab astronomer Venu M. Kalari, challenges our understanding of the most massive stars ...

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has captured some strange formations on the surface of the Red Planet with its Context Camera giving clues about the measurements of one impact crater with a central peak and another collapse depression with concentric troughs. Gullies on Martian sand dunes found on Matara Crater, have been very active, with many flows seen in the last ten ...