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…
Tag: science
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…
NOAA’s Newest Satellite Sends Its First Pictures of Earth…and the Moon!
America’s newest next-generation Earth observing weather satellite, NOAA’s GOES-16, has returned its first high-definition images of Earth—one of which even includes the Moon!
First Flight of the Lunar Module, 49 Years Ago Today
49 years ago today, at 5:48 p.m. on Jan. 22, 1968, a stocky Saturn IB roared into the sky from Pad 37B at Kennedy Space Center taking the Lunar Module on its first flight into space. The uncrewed Apollo 5 mission would put LM-1 through a series of tests in low-Earth orbit, making sure that…
Behold the Most Distant Crescent Moon
At first glance this pixelated picture may not look all that spectacular, but it gains a whole new meaning when you realize what it’s actually showing: a look at the most distant crescent moon ever seen! But this isn’t Earth’s moon; it’s Charon, Pluto’s largest companion, lit by the light from a Sun 3.2 billion miles away—some…
Galactic Collisions Meet Supermassive Black Holes in This Deep Space Image
Observations from some of the world’s most powerful telescopes—NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India, the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico, and Japan’s Subaru Telescope in Hawai’i have been combined to create an image of two incredibly powerful cosmic forces colliding, two billion light-years away. Hot gas…
SOFIA Observations of Ceres Show You Can’t Judge an Asteroid by Its Cover(ing)
The dwarf planet Ceres, at 587 miles wide the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has a different surface composition than previously thought—and it took NASA and DLR’s Boeing 747-based SOFIA observatory to make the distinction. By observing Ceres in mid-infrared, only possible from high altitudes above infrared-absorbing water vapor, SOFIA found that…
Cassini Has Just Taken the Best Picture of Daphnis Yet!
Hello, Daphnis! On January 16, 2017, the Cassini spacecraft captured the best photo yet of Daphnis, a 5-mile-wide shepherd moon that orbits Saturn inside the Keeler Gap at the outermost edge of the A ring (and also just so happens to be my personal favorite moon of Saturn!) The raw image arrived on Earth today, and…
ESO Turns its ALMA Eyes on the Sun
The European Southern Observatory has begun imaging the Sun for the first time, using its Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)—a suite of large dish-type telescopes located on a plateau 16,000 feet above sea level in the arid Chilean Andes. ALMA’s capabilities to observe in millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths allow imaging of the Sun’s dynamic chromosphere and…
This Star in Our Galaxy is Almost as Old as the Entire Universe
Like anything else, stars have life spans. They are born (from collapsing clouds of interstellar dust), they go through a long main phase where they fuse various elements in their cores, and eventually they die when they run out of fuel. The finer details of these steps are based on what the star is made of, how…
Apollo 14 Samples Reveal the True Age of Our Moon
Turns out the Moon is even older than we thought—if just by a few dozen million years. Using samples of lunar material collected by Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Ed Mitchell in February 1971, a team of researchers from UCLA, the University of Chicago, and Princeton have determined that the Moon must have formed within the first…
“Alien Megastructure” May Actually Be Scraps of an Ingested Planet
For the past couple of years the astronomy world has been abuzz with news of the strange and randomly-occurring dimming of the star KIC 8462852—aka Tabby’s Star—located 1,276 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus and recently observed by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. Hypotheses about the cause range from conservative (a transiting cloud of comets) to quite speculative (an “alien megastructure” constructed around the…
Lights in the Dark 