PASADENA, CA. – A billion-pixel view from the surface of Mars, from NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity, offers armchair explorers a way to examine one part of the Red Planet in great detail. The first NASA-produced view from the surface of Mars larger than one billion pixels stitches together nearly 900 exposures taken by cameras onboard […]
Spaceflight
NASA Commercial Crew Partner Boeing Completes New Spacecraft, Rocket Milestones
HOUSTON, TX – The Boeing Company of Houston, a NASA Commercial Crew Program (CCP) partner, recently performed wind tunnel testing of its CST-100 spacecraft and integrated launch vehicle, the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket. The testing is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) initiative, intended to make commercial human spaceflight services […]
Data From NASA Rover’s Voyage to Mars Aids Planning
PASADENA, CA – Measurements taken by NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission as it delivered the Curiosity rover to Mars in 2012 are providing NASA the information it needs to design systems to protect human explorers from radiation exposure on deep-space expeditions in the future. Curiosity’s Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) is the first instrument to measure […]
NASA’s GRAIL Mission Solves Mystery of Moon’s Surface Gravity
PASADENA, CA – NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission has uncovered the origin of massive invisible regions that make the moon’s gravity uneven, a phenomenon that affects the operations of lunar-orbiting spacecraft. Because of GRAIL’s findings, spacecraft on missions to other celestial bodies can navigate with greater precision in the future. GRAIL’s twin […]
Pebbly Rocks Testify to Old Streambed on Mars
PASADENA, CA – Detailed analysis and review have borne out researchers’ initial interpretation of pebble-containing slabs that NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity investigated last year: They are part of an ancient streambed. The rocks are the first ever found on Mars that contain streambed gravels. The sizes and shapes of the gravels embedded in these conglomerate […]
NASA Radar Reveals Asteroid Has Its Own Moon
PASADENA, CA – A sequence of radar images of asteroid 1998 QE2 was obtained on the evening of May 29, 2013, by NASA scientists using the 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., when the asteroid was about 3.75 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Earth, which is 15.6 lunar distances. The radar […]
Cassini Finds Hints of Activity at Saturn Moon Dione
PASADENA, CA – From a distance, most of the Saturnian moon Dione resembles a bland cueball. Thanks to close-up images of a 500-mile-long (800-kilometer-long) mountain on the moon from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, scientists have found more evidence for the idea that Dione was likely active in the past. It could still be active now. “A […]
NASA’s WISE Mission Finds Lost Asteroid Family Members
WASHINGTON, DC – Data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to a new and improved family tree for asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. Astronomers used millions of infrared snapshots from the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE all-sky survey, called NEOWISE, to identify 28 new asteroid families. The snapshots […]
ISS Expedition 36 Grows To Six Following Same-day Soyuz Launch And Docking
NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg, Russian cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin and ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano successfully blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:31 p.m. EDT, Tuesday, May 28, riding the Soyuz TM-09M spacecraft. Just six hours later, they joined their Expedition 36 crewmates when the hatches between their capsule and the International Space Station […]
Delta IV Returns To Flight With Successful Launch Of WGS-5 Spacecraft
CAPE CANAVERAL, FL – The Delta IV EELV returned to flight today after experiencing upper state problems on its last mission. The rocket successfully launched the fifth Air Force Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS-5) from Space Launch Complex-37, with liftoff occurring at 8:27 p.m. EDT and separation of WGS-5 40 minutes later. Notably, the launch took […]