NASA is inviting members of the public to submit their names and a personal message online for a DVD to be carried aboard a spacecraft that will study the Martian upper atmosphere. Scheduled for launch in November, the DVD will be in NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft. The DVD is part of […]
NASA
NASA Wins Prestigious Aerospace Industry Awards
Two prominent aerospace industry organizations are recognizing the contributions of NASA, especially the achievements of the team that landed NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars in August, with coveted awards. The National Aeronautic Association (NAA) will present its Robert J. Collier Trophy to the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Team of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in […]
Curiosity’s Second Drill Target Identified By NASA’s Rover Team
The team operating NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover on Mars has selected a second target rock for drilling and sampling. The rover will set course to the drilling location in coming days. This second drilling target, called “Cumberland,” lies about nine feet (2.75 meters) west of the rock where Curiosity’s drill first touched Martian stone in […]
NASA Awards Contract To Modify Mobile Launcher
NASA has awarded a contract to J.P. Donovan Construction Inc. of Rockledge, Fla., to modify the mobile launcher that will enable the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) heavy-lift rocket to send humans to an asteroid, Mars and other new destinations in the solar system. The work under this firm fixed-price $20.7 million contract will begin […]
Antares Roars In Successful Debut Launch
Rising up from a blast of fire and steam, Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Antares rocket roared off its Virignia launch pad this evening to begin successful inaugural mission. Liftoff occurred on Sunday, April 21 at 5:00 p.m. EDT from the new Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad-0A at the NASA’s’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It marked the […]
SpaceX Dragon Capsule Returns To Earth After Successful Mission
SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft successfully completed the second contracted resupply flight to the International Space Station on Tuesday, March 26, with a 12:36 p.m. EDT splashdown in the Pacific Ocean a few hundred miles west of Baja California, Mexico. “The scientific research delivered and being returned by Dragon enables advances in every aspect of NASA’s diverse […]
NASA’s Voyager-1 Spacecraft Has NOT Left The Solar System, Yet
Reports from various news agencies today have been stating NASA’s Voyager-1 spacecraft as having left the solar system. Although some in the astronomy community feel that Voyager 1 is in fact now traversing interstellar space, NASA and officials at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the same folks who built the spacecraft and continue […]
NASA’s Exploration Design Challenge Offers Students Unique Opportunity
NASA unveiled an Exploration Design Challenge on Monday to give students from kindergarten through 12th grade the opportunity to play a unique role in the future of human spaceflight. The innovative educational opportunity was announced in a special event at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The challenge asks students in the U.S. and abroad […]
NASA’s NuSTAR Helps Solve Riddle of Black Hole Spin
Two X-ray space observatories, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun. The supermassive black hole lies at the dust- and gas-filled heart of […]
Comet PANSTARRS To Be Visible From The Northern Hemisphere
Comets visible to the naked eye are a rare delicacy in the celestial smorgasbord of objects in the nighttime sky. Scientists estimate that the opportunity to see one of these icy dirtballs advertising their cosmic presence so brilliantly they can be seen without the aid of a telescope or binoculars happens only once every five […]