Dr. Robert H. Goddard and a liquid oxygen-gasoline rocket in the frame from which it was fired on March 16, 1926, at Auburn, Mass.Esther Goddard, from the Clark University archive From the voyages of spacecraft to the Moon and beyond, to the launches of satellites that help us navigate, communicate, and understand our planet and [...]
Download PDF: A Combination of Techniques Leads to Improved Friction Stir Welding The NESC developed several innovative tools and techniques during an assessment to find the root cause of poor tensile strength and low topography anomalies (LTA) in welds formed using a solid-state welding process called self-reacting friction stir welding (SRFSW). Using a combination of [...]
March 16, 2026: International Space Station Configuration. Three spaceships are parked at the space station including the SpaceX Crew-12 Dragon, the Soyuz MS-28 crew ship, and the Progress 93 resupply ship.NASA The unpiloted Roscosmos Progress 92 spacecraft undocked from the International Space Station at 9:24 a.m. EDT Monday, backing away for a deorbit maneuver and a [...]
Download PDF: NESC Develops Method for Estimating Risk When Reducing NDE Performing nondestructive evaluation (NDE) can have both cost and schedule impacts, leading some to question whether descoping (i.e., reducing or eliminating) NDE inspections on certain spaceflight hardware could be possible. However, this approach would be counter to NASA’s Technical Standard NASA-STD-5019A, which outlines the spaceflight [...]
Photo of the Day To see the feathered serpent descend the Mayan pyramid requires exquisite timing. You must visit El Castillo -- in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula -- near an equinox. Then, during the late afternoon if the sky is clear, the pyramid's own shadows create triangles that merge into the famous illusion of a [...]
Photo of the Day Want to visit a planet that has 3.14 days in a year? Then plan a trip to K2-315b, an earth-sized planet orbiting around a cool, red, M dwarf star about once every 3.14 days. The exoplanet's discovery, based on publicly available data from the planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope's extended K2 [...]
2 min read Volunteers Find Oddly High Solar Flare Rates Patches of the Sun’s surface often show strong magnetic fields. These fields can emerge within a matter of hours, and can decay slowly or quickly, sometimes over days, weeks, or even months. Thanks to a new study about these long-lived active regions, we now [...]
2 min read Extra Extra! Extra Data Stream Added to the Daily Minor Planet! The Daily Minor Planet citizen science project is expanding! In addition to data received nightly from the Catalina Sky Survey’s Mt. Lemmon telescope in Arizona, the project’s science team is now processing images from the Bok 2.3-meter telescope at Kitt [...]
Image Credit: National Institute of Aerospace NASA has selected eight student teams as finalists in the 2026 Gateways to Blue Skies Competition, giving them the resources to help address a critical challenge for U.S. aviation: maintenance. Challenges facing the commercial aviation industry include a shortage of qualified maintenance workers and increasing demands to keep complicated aircraft running for longer. With Gateways to Blue Skies, NASA taps into student innovation [...]
NASA astronauts Chris Williams and Jessica Meir inspect and configure a spacesuit jetpack inside the International Space Station’s Destiny laboratory module. The jetpacks attach to the rear of spacesuits and serve as a safety mechanism that allows a spacewalker to maneuver back to the station in the unlikely event they become untethered from their worksite.NASA/Chris [...]
