Advancements in NASA’s airborne technology have made it possible to gather localized wind data and assess its impacts on smoke and fire behavior. This information could improve wildland fire decision making and enable operational agencies to better allocate firefighters and resources. A small team from NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, is demonstrating … Read more
What are the dangers of going to space? For human spaceflight, the first thing I think about is the astronauts actually strapping themselves to a rocket. And if that isn’t dangerous enough, once they launch and they’re out into space in deep exploration, we have to worry about radiation. Radiation is coming at them from … Read more
How can I see the northern lights? To see the northern lights, you need to be in the right place at the right time. Auroras are the result of charged particles and magnetism from the Sun called space weather dancing with the Earth’s magnetic field. And they happen far above the clouds. So you need … Read more
Researchers analyzing pulverized rock onboard NASA’s Curiosity rover have found the largest organic compounds on the Red Planet to date. The finding, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests prebiotic chemistry may have advanced further on Mars than previously observed. Scientists probed an existing rock sample inside Curiosity’s Sample Analysis … Read more
Three NASA-funded rockets are set to launch from Poker Flat Research Range in Fairbanks, Alaska, in an experiment that seeks to reveal how auroral substorms affect the behavior and composition of Earth’s far upper atmosphere. The experiment’s outcome could upend a long-held theory about the aurora’s interaction with the thermosphere. It may also improve space … Read more
NASA’s newest astrophysics observatory, SPHEREx, is on its way to study the origins of our universe and the history of galaxies, and to search for the ingredients of life in our galaxy. Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, SPHEREx lifted off at 8:10 p.m. PDT on … Read more
Shortly after touching down inside a crater on the Moon, carrying NASA technology and science on its IM-2 mission, Intuitive Machines collected some data for the agency before calling an early end of mission at 12:15 a.m. CST Friday. As part of the company’s second Moon delivery for NASA under the agency’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar … Read more
NASA has selected Firefly Aerospace Inc. of Cedar Park, Texas, to provide the launch service for the agency’s Investigation of Convective Updrafts (INCUS) mission, which aims to understand why, when, and where tropical convective storms form, and why some storms produce extreme weather. The mission will launch on the company’s Alpha rocket from NASA’s Wallops … Read more
Carrying NASA technology demonstrations and science investigations, Intuitive Machines is targeting their Moon landing no earlier than 12:32 p.m. EST on Thursday, March 6. The company’s Nova-C lunar lander is slated to land in Mons Mouton, a lunar plateau near the Moon’s South Pole, as part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative and … Read more
Carrying a suite of NASA science and technology, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 successfully landed at 3:34 a.m. EST on Sunday near a volcanic feature called Mons Latreille within Mare Crisium, a more than 300-mile-wide basin located in the northeast quadrant of the Moon’s near side. The Blue Ghost lander is in an upright … Read more