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Artist’s rendering of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft.

NASA Selects Students for Europa Clipper Intern Program

4 min read

NASA has selected 40 undergraduate students for the first year of its Europa ICONS (Inspiring Clipper: Opportunities for Next-generation Scientists) internship program, supporting the agency’s Europa Clipper mission. Europa ICONS matches students with mentors from the mission’s science team for a…

Article4 days ago
Orange sun with colorful planets trailing out to one side.

Orbits and Kepler’s Laws

9 min read

Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion The story of how we understand planetary motion could not be told if it were not for the work of a German mathematician named Johannes Kepler.  Kepler’s three laws describe how planets orbit the Sun.…

Article4 days ago

NASA Selects Commercial Service Studies to Enable Mars Robotic Science

4 min read

Nine companies have been selected to conduct early-stage studies of concepts for commercial services to support lower-cost, higher-frequency missions to the Red Planet. NASA has identified nine U.S. companies to perform a total of 12 concept studies of how commercial…

Article5 days ago
The bright, glowing Milky way fills the middle of this desert landscape.

What’s Up: May 2024 Skywatching Tips from NASA

5 min read

What to look for: Morning Meteors and May Planets See Mars, Saturn, and Mercury in the May morning sky. Antares slips behind the Moon for East Coast U.S. skywatchers. And the eta Aquariid meteors peak May 6th. Transcript What’s Up…

Article5 days ago
A map of constellations at night for mid-May 2024 in the Northern Hemisphere

May’s Night Sky Notes: Stargazing for Beginners

3 min read

Were you inspired by the solar eclipse to become an amateur astronomer? If so, here are some high-level tips on how to get started, from Night Sky Notes!

Article5 days ago

NASA Scientists Gear Up for Solar Storms at Mars

6 min read

The Sun will be at peak activity this year, providing a rare opportunity to study how solar storms and radiation could affect future astronauts on the Red Planet. In the months ahead, two of NASA’s Mars spacecraft will have an…

Article7 days ago
Water-ice (blue) and dust (red) in the atmosphere of Mars above the cratered Martian surface as viewed from orbit by the THEMIS camera (false-color composite image).

Major Martian Milestones

1 min read

There’s good news from NASA’s Cloudspotting on Mars project! That’s the project that invites you to help identify exotic clouds high in the Martian atmosphere. Congratulations to the Cloudspotting on Mars team and all the volunteers who have helped spot Martian clouds!

Article7 days ago
A landscape scene looks out on a mostly flat surface with pools of liquid. in the middle A mountain range in the distance runs across the top of the image, punctuated by a daylight blue sky.

Why is Methane Seeping on Mars? NASA Scientists Have New Ideas

5 min read

The most surprising revelation from NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover — that methane is seeping from the surface of Gale Crater — has scientists scratching their heads. Living creatures produce most of the methane on Earth. But scientists haven’t found convincing…

Article2 weeks ago

NASA’s Juno Gives Aerial Views of Mountain, Lava Lake on Io

6 min read

Imagery from the solar-powered spacecraft provides close-ups of intriguing features on the hellish Jovian moon. Scientists on NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter have transformed data collected during two recent flybys of Io into animations that highlight two of the Jovian…

Article3 weeks ago
This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of the barred spiral galaxy UGC 12158. The majestic galaxy has a pinwheel shape made up of bright blue stars wound around a yellow-white hub of central stars. The hub has a slash of stars across it, called a bar. The galaxy is tilted face-on to our view from Earth. A slightly s-shaped white line across the top is a Hubble image is of an asteroid streaking across Hubble's view. It looks dashed because the image is a combination of several exposures of the asteroid flying by like a race car.

Hubble Goes Hunting for Small Main Belt Asteroids

5 min read

Like boulders, rocks, and pebbles scattered across a landscape, asteroids come in a wide range of sizes. Cataloging asteroids in space is tricky because they are faint and they don’t stop to be photographed as they zip along their orbits…

Article3 weeks ago