NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research.
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This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the powerful gravity of a galaxy embedded in a massive cluster of galaxies producing multiple images of a single distant supernova far behind it. The image shows the galaxy’s location within a large cluster of galaxies called MACS J1149.6+2223, located more than 5 billion light-years away. In the enlarged inset view of the galaxy, the arrows point to the multiple copies of an exploding star, named Supernova Refsdal, located 9.3 billion light-years from Earth.Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Rodney (JHU) and the FrontierSN team; T. Treu (UCLA), P. Kelly (UC Berkeley), and the GLASS team; J. Lotz (STScI) and the Frontier Fields team; M. Post…
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2 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) A group of spectators view a solar eclipse at Great Lakes Science Center in 2017.Credit: NASA/Andrew Dolph Media are invited to attend an open house from 10 a.m. to noon on Tuesday, Feb. 13, at Great Lakes Science Center, home of the NASA Glenn Visitor Center. During the open house, news outlets will get a preview of the Science Center’s Total Eclipse Fest, which is scheduled to take place April 6-8, and learn everything they need to know to cover the total solar eclipse on April 8. Representatives from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Great Lakes Science Center, and The …
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NASA/Don Richey Daniel Andrews, project manager for NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) (left), stands next to a full-scale model of the rover alongside visitors from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA): Dr. Hitoshi Kuninaka, Vice President of JAXA and Director General of JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS); Nobuhiro Takahashi of the ISAS Management and Integration Department; and Shintaro Chofuku, a JAXA engineer on detail to NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley (right), during a visit to Ames on Feb. 1, 2024. Following briefings about both agencies’ space science and spaceflight mis…
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NASA/JPL-Caltech Workforce statement and memo to employees. JPL statement issued on Feb. 6, 2024: After exhausting all other measures to adjust to a lower budget from NASA, and in the absence of an FY24 appropriation from Congress, we have had to make the difficult decision to reduce the JPL workforce through layoffs. JPL staff has been advised that the workforce reduction will affect approximately 530 of our colleagues, an impact of about 8%, plus approximately 40 additional members of our contractor workforce. The impacts will occur across both technical and support areas of the Lab. These are painful but necessary adjustments that will enable us to adhere to …
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On Feb. 3, 1984, space shuttle Challenger took off on its fourth flight, STS-41B. Its five-person crew of Commander Vance D. Brand, Pilot Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson, and Mission Specialists Ronald E. McNair, Robert L. Stewart, and Bruce McCandless flew an eight-day mission ending with the first return to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Many of the flight activities practiced tasks required for the upcoming Solar Maximum Mission satellite retrieval and repair mission. Among these, successful test flights of the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) astronaut propulsion device during two untethered spacewalks proved the most critical, and visually spectacular. The two co…
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NASA astronaut and Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman exits the side of a mockup of the Orion spacecraft during a training exercise in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston Jan. 23, 2024. As part of training for their mission around the Moon next year the crew of four astronauts practiced the recovery procedures they will use when the splash down in the Pacific Ocean. Artemis II is the first crewed mission on NASA’s path to establishing a long-term presence at the Moon for scientific discovery and exploration through the Artemis campaign. The approximately 10-day flight will test NASA’s foundational human deep space exploration capabilities, th…
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7 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) Procurement manager Sislyn “Pauline” Barrett takes great joy in helping people go beyond what they think they can. Name: Sislyn “Pauline” Barrett Title: Procurement Manager Formal Job Classification: Supervisory Contract Specialist (1102) Organization: Engineering Procurement Office, Procurement Division (Code 175) Pauline Barrett is a procurement manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.Courtesy of Pauline Barrett What do you do and what is most interesting about your role here at Goddard? I manage a wide array of procurement actions for …
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7 min read Gamma-ray Bursts: Harvesting Knowledge From the Universe’s Most Powerful Explosions The most powerful events in the known universe – gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) – are short-lived outbursts of the highest-energy light. They can erupt with a quintillion (a 10 followed by 18 zeros) times the luminosity of our Sun. Now thought to announce the births of new black holes, they were discovered by accident. Two neutron stars begin to merge in this artist’s concept, blasting jets of high-speed particles. Collision events like this one create short gamma-ray bursts. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/ A. Simonnet, Sonoma State University The backstory tak…
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3 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) The Intuitive Machines Nova-C lander for the company’s first Commercial Lunar Payload Services delivery is positioned before being encapsulated inside its launch fairing. The Nova-C lander will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than mid-February.Credit: Intuitive Machines It’s easy to measure fuel in tanks on Earth, where gravity pulls the liquid to the bottom. But in space, the game changes. Quantifying fuel that’s floating around inside a spacecraft’s tank isn’t so simple. “Because of the very small amount of gravity, fluid doesn’t sett…
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11 min read The Universe is Expanding Faster These Days and Dark Energy is Responsible. So What is Dark Energy? Some 13.8 billion years ago, the universe began with a rapid expansion we call the big bang. After this initial expansion, which lasted a fraction of a second, gravity started to slow the universe down. But the cosmos wouldn’t stay this way. Nine billion years after the universe began, its expansion started to speed up, driven by an unknown force that scientists have named dark energy. But what exactly is dark energy? The short answer is: We don’t know. But we do know that it exists, it’s making the universe expand at an accelerating rate, and approximatel…
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3 min read What’s Made in a Thunderstorm and Faster Than Lightning? Gamma Rays! A flash of lightning. A roll of thunder. These are normal stormy sights and sounds. But sometimes, up above the clouds, stranger things happen. Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted bursts of gamma rays – some of the highest-energy forms of light in the universe – coming from thunderstorms. Gamma rays are usually found coming from objects with crazy extreme physics like neutron stars and black holes. So why is Fermi seeing them come from thunderstorms? About a thousand times a day, thunderstorms fire off fleeting bursts of some of the highest-energy light naturally found on …
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4 min read When Dead Stars Collide! Gravity has been making waves — literally. In October 2017, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the first direct detection of gravitational waves two years earlier. Also in that month, astronomers announced a huge advance in the field of gravitational waves: For the first time, they had observed light and gravitational waves from the same source. Let’s look at what happened. Two neutron stars are on the verge of colliding in this illustration. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center There was a pair of orbiting neutron stars in a galaxy (called NGC 4993). Neutron stars are the crushed leftover cores of massive stars (star…
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Official portrait of Joseph Pelfrey, director, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.NASA NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Monday named Joseph Pelfrey director of the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, effective immediately. Pelfrey has served as acting center director since July 2023. “Joseph is a respected leader who shares the passion for innovation and exploration at NASA Marshall. As center director, he will lead the entire Marshall workforce, which includes a world-renowned team of scientists, engineers, and technologists who have a hand in nearly every NASA mission,” said Nelson. “I am confident that under Jose…
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The 2024 National Science Bowl regional competition hosted by JPL included 21 schools, with this team from Irvine’s University High School taking first place. From left, coach David Knight, Feodor Yevtushenko, Yufei Chen, Nathan Ouyang, Wendy Cao, and Julianne Wu.NASA/JPL-Caltech After months of preparation, more than 100 students competed at the fast-paced annual academic competition hosted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For the second year in a row, a team from Irvine’s University High School claimed victory at a regional competition of the National Science Bowl, hosted Saturday, Feb. 3, by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. More th…
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5 Min Read NASA’s Laser Navigation Tech Enables Commercial Lunar Exploration Navigation Doppler Lidar is a guidance system that uses laser pulses to precisely measure velocity and distance. NASA will demonstrate NDL’s capabilities in the lunar environment during the IM-1 mission. Credits: NASA / David C. Bowman Later this month, NASA’s commercial lunar delivery services provider Intuitive Machines will launch its Nova-C lunar lander carrying several NASA science and technology payloads, including the Navigation Doppler …
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Prelaunch News Conference for NASA Mission Studying Earth's Atmosphere and Oceans (Feb. 5, 2024)
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Science Briefing on NASA Mission Studying Earth's Atmosphere and Oceans (Feb. 4, 2024)
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A Commercial Resupply Mission to the Space Station on This Week @NASA – February 2, 2024
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4 Min Read The Iconic Photos from STS-41B: Documenting the First Untethered Spacewalk Astronaut Bruce McCandless II, STS-41B mission specialist, reaches his maximum distance from space shuttle Challenger before returning to the spacecraft using the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU). Credits: NASA As astronaut Bruce McCandless II flew the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) out of the space shuttle Challenger’s payload bay for the first time on February 7, 1984, many in the agency were fearful about the use of a self-propelled and …
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Launch of Mission to Study Earth's Atmosphere and Oceans (Official NASA Broadcast)
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3 min read Meet the Creators, Part 3: NASA’s 2024 Total Solar Eclipse Posters A total solar eclipse is a captivating experience – evoking feelings of awe and wonder that are sometimes best expressed through art. Inspired by the upcoming total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024, artists Tyler Nordgren and Kristen Perrin have designed two posters for NASA that present the magic of the eclipse in unique ways. Tyler Nordgren Download the poster here. NASA/Tyler Nordgren In “The Sun and Moon Align with You” poster for NASA, Nordgren – who is a professional astronomer as well as an artist – said that his goal was to capture the experience that can be had by millions of…
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NASA astronauts and Expedition 70 Flight Engineers Jasmin Moghbeli, left, and Loral O’Hara in the Destiny laboratory celebrate the successful docking of a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station. NASA Students from California and Massachusetts will have separate opportunities next week to hear from NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The two Earth-to-space calls will air live Monday, Feb. 5, and Friday, Feb. 9, on NASA+ and agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media. At 12:15 p.m. EST Feb. 5, NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara and Jasmin Moghbeli will answer prerecor…
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The SpaceX Dragon Freedom spacecraft carrying the four-member Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) crew is pictured approaching the International Space Station 260 miles above China north of the Himalayas. NASA will provide live coverage of the undocking and departure of the Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) private astronaut flight from the International Space Station before the crew returns to Earth. The four-member astronaut crew is scheduled to undock no earlier than 6:05 a.m. EST Saturday, Feb. 3, from the space-facing port of the station’s Harmony module in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to begin the journey home and splashdown off the coast of Florida. NASA will provide live covera…
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NASA and SpaceX technicians safely encapsulate NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) spacecraft in SpaceX’s Falcon 9 payload fairings on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024, at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Photo Credit: NASA Goddard/Denny Henry NASA is hosting virtual activities ahead of the launch of the PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) mission and invites you to share in the fun. The PACE mission will help us better understand how the ocean and atmosphere exchange carbon dioxide, measure key atmospheric variables associated with air quality and Earth’s climate, and monitor ocean health, …
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2 min read UNITE All-Nighter Delights Amateur Astronomers Fadi Saibi and his daughter Sophie, age 14, pose for a photograph with their Unistellar telescope in their backyard in Sunnyvale, Calif., on Thursday, Jan. 11, 2024. Credit: Bay Area News Group/Nhat V. Meye Maybe you read about them in the papers–amateur astronomers in Japan, Russia, France, Finland, and the United States have been pulling all-nighters to spot extraordinary exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. NASA’s UNITE project holds these planetary stakeouts several times every month, and you can join in! This October, the UNITE team undertook a 20-hour marathon as part of tracki…
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