NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured images of last year’s storm on Saturn, the largest storm seen up-close at the planet, with bluish spots in the middle of swirling clouds. Those bluish spots indicate flashes of lightning and mark the first time scientists have detected lightning in visible wavelengths on the side of Saturn illuminated by the sun.
Scientists know that the intensity of the lightning flash is comparable to the strongest flashes on Earth.
The unexpected slowing of NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft – the so-called “Pioneer Anomaly” – turns out to be due to the slight, but detectable effect of heat pushing back on the spacecraft, according to a recent paper.
The results were published on June 12 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
NASA researchers are in Hawaii this week analyzing effective ways to incorporate space resources into their spacecraft designs. The research helps improve spacecraft efficiency and guarantee the survival of hardware and people in space.
This practice of harnessing resources at the exploration site is called in-situ-resource utilization (ISRU).
NASA astronaut Suni Williams, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Aki Hoshide and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko joined their Expedition 32 crewmates at the International Space Station early Tuesday.
The docking occurs 37 years to the day after the first ever docking of American and Russian spacecraft during the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission.
A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope discovered another moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto.
The moon is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6-15 miles across. It is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular orbit around Pluto that is assumed to be co-planar with the other satellites in the system.
NASA partner Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) has completed an important design review of the crewed version of its Dragon spacecraft.
The concept baseline review presented NASA with the primary and secondary design elements of its Dragon capsule designed to carry astronauts into low Earth orbit, including the International Space Station.
Available for free on the iPhone and iPad, Spacecraft 3D brings some of the agency's robotic spacecraft to life, using augmented reality to "put high definition, three-dimensional models literally into the hands of kids of all ages."
The app currently features the twin GRAIL spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, currently orbiting the moon, and the Curiosity rover that will touch down on Mars on Aug. 5 at 10:31 p.m. PDT (Aug. 6 at 1:31 a.m. EDT).
Two of the most destructive fires in the history of Colorado and New Mexico have both now been contained.
Together, the High Park Fire in Colorado and the Little Bear Fire in New Mexico have burned well over one hundred thousand acres and destroyed hundreds of homes and other buildings, displacing thousands of people and taking one life.
Officials believe the blazes were caused by lightning strikes combined with dry hot summer conditions.
NASA partner Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has completed a successful test of the nose landing gear for its full-scale Dream Chaser engineering flight test vehicle.
The completed test and an upcoming flight test are part of SNC's Commercial Crew Development Round 2 (CCDev2) agreement with NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
On July 12, 1962, the Telstar satellite relayed the world's first transatlantic television signal.
Although operational for only a few months and relaying television signals of a brief duration, Telstar immediately captured the imagination of the world. The first images, those of President John F. Kennedy and of singer Yves Montand from France, along with clips of sporting events, images of the American flag waving in the breeze and a still image of Mount Rushmore.
Astronomers have puzzled over why some puny, extremely faint dwarf galaxies spotted in our Milky Way galaxy's back yard contain so few stars.
Hubble views of three of the small-fry galaxies reveal that their stars share the same birth date. The galaxies all started forming stars more than 13 billion years ago – and then abruptly stopped – all in the first billion years after the universe was born in the big bang.
A year after space shuttle Atlantis touched down to end the shuttle program, NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is preparing for future missions.
Facilities are being remodeled to host a variety of spacecraft, rockets and companies to continue humanity's great adventure into space.
A new approach to an established fuel will be the focus of research, development and maybe production with the help of NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Cella Energy's American subsidiary has signed on with Kennedy to make its micro-bead technology practical enough to be used as a fuel in most kinds of machinery and even cars.
Visit NASA's hurricane page.
Imagine if the rings of Saturn suddenly disappeared. Astronomers have witnessed the equivalent around a young sun-like star. Enormous amounts of dust known to circle the star are unexpectedly nowhere to be found.