The same historic facilities that some 50 years ago prepared NASA’s twin Voyager probes for their ongoing interstellar odyssey are helping to ready a towering commercial spacecraft for a journey to the Moon. Launches involve brutal shaking and astonishingly loud noises, and testing in these facilities mimics those conditions to help ensure mission hardware can […]
Category: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
One of NASA’s Key Cameras Orbiting Mars Takes 100,000th Image
Mesas and dunes stand out in the view snapped by HiRISE, one of the imagers aboard the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. After nearly 20 years at the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has snapped its 100,000th image of the surface with its HiRISE camera. Short for High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, HiRISE is […]
NASA, Partners Share First Data From New US-European Sea Satellite
Launched in November, Sentinel-6B will track ocean height with ultraprecision to advance marine forecasting, national security, and more. Sentinel-6B, a joint mission by NASA and its U.S. and European partners to survey 90% of the world’s oceans for the benefit of communities and commerce, has started sending back its first measurements since launching in November. […]
NASA’s Webb, Curiosity Named in TIME’s Best Inventions Hall of Fame
Two icons of discovery, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and NASA’s Curiosity rover, have earned places in TIME’s “Best Inventions Hall of Fame,” which recognizes the 25 groundbreaking inventions of the past quarter century that have had the most global impact, since TIME began its annual Best Inventions list in 2000. The inventions are celebrated […]
NASA, SpaceX Launch US-European Satellite to Monitor Earth’s Oceans
About the size of a full-size pickup truck, a newly launched satellite by NASA and its partners will provide ocean and atmospheric information to improve hurricane forecasts, help protect infrastructure, and benefit commercial activities, such as shipping. The Sentinel-6B satellite lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg […]
NASA Sets Launch Coverage for International Ocean Tracking Mission
NASA will provide live coverage of prelaunch and launch activities for Sentinel-6B, an international mission delivering critical sea level and ocean data to protect coastal infrastructure, improve weather forecasting, and support commercial activities at sea. Launch is targeted at 12:21 a.m. EST, Monday, Nov. 17 (9:21 p.m. PST, Sunday, Nov. 16) aboard a SpaceX Falcon […]
NASA Sets Launch Coverage for International Ocean Tracking Mission
NASA will provide live coverage of prelaunch and launch activities for Sentinel-6B, an international mission delivering critical sea level and ocean data to protect coastal infrastructure, improve weather forecasting, and support commercial activities at sea. Launch is targeted at 12:21 a.m. EST, Monday, Nov. 17 (9:21 p.m. PST, Sunday, Nov. 16) aboard a SpaceX Falcon […]
NASA-ISRO Satellite Sends First Radar Images of Earth’s Surface
The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) Earth-observing radar satellite’s first images of our planet’s surface are in, and they offer a glimpse of things to come as the joint mission between NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) approaches full science operations later this year. “Launched under President Trump in conjunction with India, NISAR’s first […]
NASA’s Deep Space Communications Demo Exceeds Project Expectations
The project has exceeded all of its technical goals after two years, setting up the foundations of high-speed communications for NASA’s future human missions to Mars. NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications technology successfully showed that data encoded in lasers could be reliably transmitted, received, and decoded after traveling millions of miles from Earth at distances […]
NASA’s Tally of Planets Outside Our Solar System Reaches 6,000
The milestone highlights the accelerating rate of discoveries, just over three decades since the first exoplanets were found. The official number of exoplanets — planets outside our solar system — tracked by NASA has reached 6,000. Confirmed planets are added to the count on a rolling basis by scientists from around the world, so no […]