On May 7, 2024, NASA announced the selection of four proposals for concept studies of missions to benefit humanity through the study of Earth science. Most of what we know about Earth has been gathered through NASA’s 60 years of observations from space, such as this image of our home planet as shown as a [...]

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran This April 1, 2018, enhanced-color image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft. The image is a combination of three separate images taken as Juno performed its 12th close flyby of the planet. The Great Red Spot, a swirling oval of clouds twice as wide as Earth, has [...]

6 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) Flooding on the Souris River inundated this community in North Dakota in 2011. The U.S.-French SWOT satellite is giving scientists and water managers a new tool to look at floods in 3D, information that can improve predictions of where and how often flooding will [...]

When the Orion spacecraft carries the first Artemis crews to the Moon and back, it will rely on the European Service Module contributed by ESA (European Space Agency) to make the journey. The service module provides electrical power generation, propulsion, temperature control, and consumable storage for Orion, up to the moment it separates from the [...]

Today, Ken Carpenter is a scientist for NASA’s Hubble and Roman space telescopes, but in 1967 he was just a teenager at his local library out to fact-check a “Star Trek” episode. Name: Kenneth G. Carpenter Title: Operations Project Scientist for Hubble Space Telescope; Ground System Scientist for Roman Space Telescope; and a NASA Innovative [...]

6 Min Read Breaking the Scaling Limits: New Ultralow-noise Superconducting Camera for Exoplanet Searches When imaging faint objects such as distant stars or exoplanets, capturing every last bit of light is crucial to get the most out of a scientific mission. These cameras must be extremely low-noise, and be able to detect the smallest [...]

Astronomers have discovered black holes ranging from a few times the Sun’s mass to tens of billions. Now a group of scientists has predicted that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could find a class of “featherweight” black holes that has so far eluded detection. Today, black holes form either when a massive star collapses [...]

NASA/Frank Micheaux NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test astronaut Suni Williams gives a thumbs up during a mission dress rehearsal on Friday, April 26, 2024, at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Williams was selected as an astronaut by NASA in 1998 and has been aboard the International Space Station twice. She is set to [...]

5 min read New NASA Black Hole Visualization Takes Viewers Beyond the Brink Ever wonder what happens when you fall into a black hole? Now, thanks to a new, immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer, viewers can plunge into the event horizon, a black hole’s point of no return. In this visualization of [...]

Artist James Dean prepares sketches of the space shuttle Columbia as it sits on Pad 39 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on April 9, 1981, waiting for its first historic flight (STS-1).NASA In March 1962, NASA Administrator James Webb addressed a two-paragraph memorandum to NASA Public Affairs Director Hiden T. Cox about the possibility of [...]