From a vantage point of nearly one million miles away NASA’s EPIC camera aboard NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite captures an image of the entire Earth every 1-2 hours as it rotates. For the last year and a half or so these pictures have been uploaded on the EPIC website for public viewing and use as they originally look to…
Author: Jason Major
Jason is a Rhode Island-based graphic designer, photographer, nature lover, and space exploration fanatic.
New Horizons Fine-Tunes Its Course for MU69
A little goes a long way—especially when you’re traveling 51,000 mph! On Feb. 1, 2017 NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft performed a 44-second thruster burn that adjusted its course by just under 1 mph toward its next target, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69. “One mile per hour may not sound like much,” said mission Principal…
Yes, Obi-Wan, That’s a Moon
Saturn’s 250-mile-wide icy moon Mimas shines in direct sunlight and reflected light from Saturn in this image, a composite of raw images acquired by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on Jan. 30, 2017 and received on Earth today, Feb. 1. This is a bit of a “Frankenstein” job I made, assembled from five separate narrow-angle camera images taken in…
Here’s What It Would Look Like to Land on Pluto’s Heart
What would it look like to approach Pluto for a landing? Perhaps some day in the future a robotic mission will do exactly that and we’ll know for sure, but for now we have to use our imaginations…luckily we do have some incredible images of Pluto to help with the details, thanks to NASA’s New…
Intricate Details of Saturn’s Rings Are Revealed in Latest Cassini Images
Like those fractal designs that were so popular in the ’90s Saturn’s rings reveal finer and finer structures the nearer Cassini gets, now in the final year of its mission. Recent images from the spacecraft, captured in December 2016, show groove-like density waves and skyscraper-sized clumps within the planet’s icy rings—and it’s just a hint at what…
NASA Develops a Test to ID Extraterrestrial Life
NASA researchers have modified a decades-old chemistry technique called capillary electrophoresis to identify the amino acids necessary for life, and have tested its success in California’s Mono Lake. The lake’s exceptionally high alkaline content makes it a challenging habitat for life—and an excellent substitute for the salty subsurface water believed to be on Mars and the icy moons Enceladus and Europa. “Using…
NASA’s Launching Rockets in Alaska to Study Ozone-Killing Compounds
A Black Brant IX sounding rocket was launched 175 miles high early Friday morning, Jan. 27, 2017, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Poker Flat Research Range to study levels of nitric oxide in the atmosphere as part of the Polar Night Nitric Oxide Experiment (PolarNOx). “The aurora creates nitric oxide, but in the polar night there is no significant…
50 Years Later: What Happened to Apollo 1?
Today marks the 50th anniversary of one of the worst tragedies to befall NASA: the fire that ignited inside the Apollo 1 (Apollo 204) command module during a test at Kennedy Space Center, claiming the lives of primary crew astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. The event is solemnly remembered every January 27. “We didn’t…
Spaceflight Affects Everything: First Findings In from NASA’s Twins Study
The first preliminary findings have been announced from NASA’s Twins Study, which used the rare opportunity of having identical twin astronauts—Mark and Scott Kelly—agree to (actually it was their idea!) make “human guinea pigs” of themselves during Scott’s One-Year Mission aboard the Space Station in 2015–2016. The results comparing Mark on Earth to Scott in space show variations in nearly…
Opportunity Enters Its “Teenage” Years on Mars
Today marks the start of the “teen years” on Mars for NASA’s Opportunity rover — it’s been busy exploring, studying, and traveling across the planet’s surface for 13 years now and still going strong! Launched July 7, 2003, the rover is currently in its 4,624th sol of operations — pretty impressive for a mission that was initially only planned to…
Find Out How NASA Technology Improves YOUR Life
When someone mentions NASA you may first think about the Apollo Moon missions, space shuttles, rovers on Mars, and breathtaking pictures of the planets and distant stars and galaxies. And while NASA was and is very much responsible for all of these things, some of the most important achievements of NASA aren’t what’s accomplished out in space but how its technological…
It’s Been 31 Years Since We Last Visited Uranus
Voyager 2 may have been the second of NASA’s famous twin exploration spacecraft but it launched first, on August 20, 1977. Eight and a half years later it became the first (and last) spacecraft to visit Uranus, at 31,500 miles across the third largest planet in the Solar System. Voyager 2 made its closest pass by Uranus…
Lights in the Dark 