On March 3, 1915, the United States Congress created the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). Although the NACA’s founding took place just over 11 years after the Wright Brothers’ first powered flightfirst powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Congress took the action in response to America lagging behind other world powers’ advances in […]
Author: Brian Evans
35 Years Ago: STS-36 Flies a Dedicated Department of Defense Mission
On Feb. 28, 1990, space shuttle Atlantis took off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on STS-36, the sixth shuttle mission dedicated to the Department of Defense. As such, many of the details of the flight remain classified. The mission marked the 34th flight of the space shuttle, the sixth for Atlantis, and the […]
NASA Names Norman Knight as Acting Deputy Director of Johnson Space Center
NASA has selected Norman Knight as acting deputy director of Johnson Space Center. Knight currently serves as Director of Johnson’s Flight Operations Directorate (FOD), responsible for astronaut training and for overall planning, directing, managing, and implementing overall mission operations for NASA human spaceflight programs. This also includes management for all Johnson aircraft operations and aircrew […]
NASA’s Webb Exposes Complex Atmosphere of Starless Super-Jupiter
An international team of researchers has discovered that previously observed variations in brightness of a free-floating planetary-mass object known as SIMP 0136 must be the result of a complex combination of atmospheric factors, and cannot be explained by clouds alone. Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to monitor a broad spectrum of infrared light emitted […]
NASA Marks 110 Years Since Founding of Predecessor Organization
To celebrate the 110th anniversary of the organization that ultimately became NASA, the agency released a new collection of videos to highlight the history of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and the ways it transformed flight over four decades. Not long after the beginning of World War I, the United States Congress, concerned […]
Touchdown! Carrying NASA Science, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Lands on Moon
Carrying a suite of NASA science and technology, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 successfully landed at 3:34 a.m. EST on Sunday near a volcanic feature called Mons Latreille within Mare Crisium, a more than 300-mile-wide basin located in the northeast quadrant of the Moon’s near side. The Blue Ghost lander is in an upright […]
Smooshing for Science: A Flat-Out Success
Written by Henry Manelski, Ph.D. student at Purdue University The Perseverance team is always looking for creative ways to use the tools we have on Mars to maximize the science we do. On the arm of the rover sits the SHERLOC instrument, which specializes in detecting organic compounds and is crucial in our search for […]
NASA Uses New Technology to Understand California Wildfires
The January wildfires in California devastated local habitats and communities. In an effort to better understand wildfire behavior, NASA scientists and engineers tried to learn from the events by testing new technology. The new instrument, the Compact Fire Infrared Radiance Spectral Tracker (c-FIRST), was tested when NASA’s B200 King Air aircraft flew over the wildfires […]