Join observers from around the world on Saturday, Oct. 4, for NASA’s International Observe the Moon Night. This annual event offers an opportunity for earthlings to celebrate the inspiring bond between Earth and the Moon, and, this year, to share in the excitement of NASA’s preparations for Artemis II. Launching in early 2026, the mission … Read more
A new NASA mission will capture images of Earth’s invisible “halo,” the faint light given off by our planet’s outermost atmospheric layer, the exosphere, as it morphs and changes in response to the Sun. Understanding the physics of the exosphere is a key step toward forecasting dangerous conditions in near-Earth space, a requirement for protecting … Read more
Summary NASA’s new Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, or IMAP, will launch no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 23 to study the heliosphere, a giant shield created by the Sun. The mission will chart the heliosphere’s boundaries to help us better understand the protection it offers life on Earth and how it changes with the Sun’s … Read more
The IAU (International Astronomical Union), an international non-governmental research organization and global naming authority for celestial objects, has approved official names for features on Donaldjohanson, an asteroid NASA’s Lucy spacecraft visited on April 20. In a nod to the fossilized inspiration for the names of the asteroid and spacecraft, the IAU’s selections recognize significant sites … Read more
As NASA prepares to send astronauts to the surface of the Moon’s south polar region for the first time ever during the Artemis III mission, scientists are working on methods to determine the frequency of moonquakes along active faults there. Faults are cracks in the Moon’s crust that indicate that the Moon is slowly shrinking … Read more
KEY POINTS NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has taken the closest ever images to the Sun, captured just 3.8 million miles from the solar surface. The new close-up images show features in the solar wind, the constant stream of electrically charged subatomic particles released by the Sun that rage across the solar system at speeds exceeding … Read more
NASA is launching rockets from a remote Pacific island to study mysterious, high-altitude cloud-like structures that can disrupt critical communication systems. The mission, called Sporadic-E ElectroDynamics, or SEED, opens its three-week launch window from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands on Friday, June 13. The atmospheric features SEED is studying are known as Sporadic-E layers, … Read more
When it descends through the thick golden haze on Saturn’s moon Titan, NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft will find eerily familiar terrain. Dunes wrap around Titan’s equator. Clouds drift across its skies. Rain drizzles. Rivers flow, forming canyons, lakes and seas. But not everything is as familiar as it seems. At minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit, the dune … Read more
One year on, NASA scientists are still making huge discoveries about the largest geomagnetic storm to hit Earth in two decades, the Gannon storm. The findings are helping us better understand and prepare for the ways in which the Sun’s activity can affect us. On May 10, 2024, the first G5 or “severe” geomagnetic storm … Read more
A NASA-developed technology that recently proved its capabilities in the harsh environment of space will soon head back to the Moon to search for gases trapped under the lunar surface thanks to a new Cooperative Research and Development Agreement between NASA and commercial company Magna Petra Corp. The Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSOLO) successfully … Read more