NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Discovers Field of Honeycomb Textures

As NASA’s Curiosity rover recently began climbing up a Martian valley nicknamed “Valle Grande,” it sent back images that were a familiar sight to mission scientists: honeycomb-like textures called polygonal fractures, each one about 1.5 to 3 inches (4 to 8 centimeters) across. The mission has spotted small patches of these geometric shapes several times […]

NASA’s Juno Takes Temperature of Jupiter’s Fiery Moon Io

 NASA’s Juno mission has provided the first measurements of the temperature below the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io, revealing significant heating within the shallow subsurface of the most volcanically active world in the solar system. Collected during two close flybys, the data also shows that most of Io’s surface is remarkably smooth and composed of […]

NASA to Host Media Briefing on Roman Telescope, Launching Next Month

Media are invited to join NASA for a virtual news conference at 2 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, July 29, to preview the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, scheduled to launch from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, Aug. 30. NASA will stream this event live through a variety of platforms. Learn where […]

NASA to Host Media Briefing on Roman Telescope, Launching Next Month

Media are invited to join NASA for a virtual news conference at 2 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, July 29, to preview the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, scheduled to launch from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, Aug. 30. NASA will stream this event live through a variety of platforms. Learn where […]

NASA to Host Media Briefing on Roman Telescope, Launching Next Month

Media are invited to join NASA for a virtual news conference at 2 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, July 29, to preview the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, scheduled to launch from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, Aug. 30. NASA will stream this event live through a variety of platforms. Learn where […]

NASA to Host Media Briefing on Roman Telescope, Launching Next Month

Media are invited to join NASA for a virtual news conference at 2 p.m. EDT, Wednesday, July 29, to preview the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, scheduled to launch from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sunday, Aug. 30. NASA will stream this event live through a variety of platforms. Learn where […]

US-India Satellite Delivers Data, Reveals ‘Hummingbird’ in Antarctica

As of July 20, the public can access data from the two powerful radar instruments aboard the NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite. Teams in the United States and India will release files processed from the satellite’s L-band and S-band radars on an ongoing basis, helping researchers and other users track the movement of Earth’s […]

NASA Study Finds Near-Earth Asteroid Is Actually Comet

New research led by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California has revealed the identity of a puzzling near-Earth object by precisely tracking its motion through space and using powerful observatories that image faint celestial objects. This object has a dual personality: Past images hadn’t revealed obvious cometlike activity, suggesting it might be […]

Caltech Welcomes Astrophysicist Ray Jayawardhana as New President

Ray Jayawardhana begins his tenure today as the 10th president of the California Institute of Technology. His selection as Caltech’s president, and as the Sonja and William Davidow Presidential Chair and professor of astronomy, was announced Jan. 6. Jayawardhana succeeds Thomas Rosenbaum, who had served as Caltech’s president since 2014. Founded in 1891, Caltech manages […]