The Perseids are back! One of the year’s brightest and most popular meteor showers has been ramping up since early July and will sparkle in the skies through the end of August. The shower reaches its peak on the night of Aug. 12 into the early morning of Aug. 13, and its visibility should be […]
NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Anil Menon have been given the go by mission managers for Thursday’s spacewalk to prepare the International Space Station for future upgrades to its power system. The spacewalkers will spend about seven hours in the vacuum of space building a modification kit on the station’s Starboard 6 truss segment where a roll out solar array is slated to be installed later this year.
NASA is advancing toward Artemis III’s crewed demonstration mission with accelerated, measurable progress across all fronts, outpacing Artemis II integration timelines as teams ready the Orion spacecraft and SLS (Space Launch System) rocket for next year’s mission in low Earth orbit. The Orion crew and service modules were joined together on July 30 inside the […]
A new analysis of imagery collected during NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft’s 2015 encounter with Pluto provides evidence that liquid nitrogen is rising to Pluto’s surface through cracks in the northern edge of the Sputnik Planitia, part of the massive heart-shaped glacier on the dwarf planet’s surface. This is the first evidence of recently flowing liquid […]
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have successfully freed up power on Voyager 2, extending how long the spacecraft can continue to do science. Nicknamed the “Big Bang,” the effort involved simultaneously turning off certain powered devices and substituting them with lower-power alternatives while ensuring the spacecraft remains warm enough to operate. The Voyagers get their power from radioisotope thermoelectric generators, devices that convert […]
The Eyes team has many significant upgrades underway, but in the month of July we only updated our augmented reality mobile app Spacecraft AR and released it to the Google Play and Apple App stores. This update included mostly internal bug fixes and upgrades. If you are unfamiliar with the app, you can download and […]
The Expedition 75 crew continued preparing for a spacewalk scheduled for Thursday to augment the International Space Station’s power system. The orbital residents also installed advanced Earth observation hardware, continued space exercise research, and kept up lab maintenance.
One of the most recognizable features of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is its large, segmented, gold-coated mirror, which delivers images twice as sharp as pre-launch estimates. Aperture masking interferometry is an observational technique that allows for high-angular resolution imaging of celestial objects. The basic principle involves placing a specially designed mask with several small […]
Spacewalk preparations and health research awaited the Expedition 75 crew aboard the International Space Station at the beginning of August. The next crew to visit the orbital outpost, SpaceX Crew-13, introduced themselves today during a news conference from Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
