By Abby Graf Imagine the feeling of flying on an airplane. Smooth sailing, clear skies, not a cloud in sight. It's a relaxing ride that many take for work or recreational travel. Now imagine flying through clouds, with the turbulence of different intensities. While some sink and hold onto their seats, others view it like …
by Sofie Bates Andrew Janiszeski and Troy Zaremba blow up a weather balloon in a dark hotel lobby. The weather was calm last night when they drove into Plymouth, Massachusetts, but this morning a blizzard is raging outside. Snow is piling up in the hotel parking lot, wind gusts are near 70mph, and the power …
NASA's Global Lyman-alpha Imager of the Dynamic Exosphere, or GLIDE mission, passed a mission review on January 13, 2021, moving the mission into its next phase with a target launch readiness date of 2025.
By Katrina Wesencraft As project manager for NASA's Scientifically Calibrated In-flight Imagery (SCIFLI) group, Dr. Jennifer Inman is used to managing complicated logistics and solving problems ahead of her team's deployments. Someone needs a new laptop? No problem. A research plane needs new window panels? OK! The SCIFLI team – which specializes in in-flight imaging …
Landsat 9, a joint mission of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), passed its post-launch assessment review and is now in its operational phase. Continuing the Landsat program's nearly 50-year record of imaging Earth from orbit, USGS plans to start releasing Landsat 9 data to the public in mid-February and will announce data availability …
NASA's HERMES mission – a four-instrument suite to be mounted outside NASA's Moon-orbiting Gateway – passed a critical mission review on Jan. 27, 2022. The review, Key Decision Point C, evaluated the mission's preliminary design and program plan to achieve launch by its target launch readiness date no earlier than November 2024. With the …
The Lucy spacecraft, launched on Oct. 16, 2021, is now over 30 million miles, or 48 million kilometers, from Earth and continues to operate safely in "outbound cruise" mode. Besides a solar array that didn't latch after deployment — an issue the mission team is working to resolve— all spacecraft systems are normal. The arrays …
At the Sun Greetings from the Sun! Today is the final stop of our #SolarTour and we've got some big news from Parker Solar Probe. Hot off the press! We've touched the Sun! Parker Solar Probe is officially the first spacecraft to fly through the Sun's upper atmosphere – the corona – sample particles and …
Near the Sun We're nearing the end of our solar tour, which means we're getting closer to the star of the show! We sent Parker Solar Probe to the Sun to investigate some of our star's biggest mysteries. The closer we get, the more discoveries we make. The Sun's hottest mystery One of the big …
The Solar Cycle Everything we've seen so far on the solar tour has been shaped by the Sun's activity, which ebbs and flows over an 11-year cycle. To understand the Sun's effects on space, we need to get to the bottom of the solar cycle. How one scientist predicts the solar cycle Solar scientist Lisa …
