NASA, SpaceX, and Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) launch managers met today, Dec. 9, to conduct a Flight Readiness Review (FRR) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. During the FRR, teams provided an update on the mission status, closed out actions from previous readiness reviews, and certified the readiness to initiate final launch …
Leerlo en español aquí. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission is now encapsulated in its payload fairing in preparation for launch. Technicians at the SpaceX processing facility at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California completed the operation and will soon mate the fairing to the top of a Falcon 9 rocket. The fairing …
One year ago, NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) lit up the early morning sky as it started its journey into space. The satellite was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Dec. 9, 2021. IXPE is the first satellite dedicated to measuring the polarization of X-rays from …
Editor's Note: This post highlights data from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process. An international team of astronomers has used data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to report the discovery of the earliest galaxies confirmed to date. The light from these galaxies has taken more than 13.4 …
The CubeSat to Study Solar Particles (CuSP) launched as an Artemis I payload on 1:47 AM EST on Nov. 16, 2022. CuSP was deployed from its canister about eight hours after launch. Approximately two hours after deployment, CuSP transmissions were received by an Open Loop Receiver (OLR) operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Radio Science …
On Nov. 25, 2022, NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) team lost contact with the spacecraft. The ICON spacecraft is equipped with a built-in onboard command loss timer that will power cycle or reset the spacecraft after contact is lost for eight days. On Dec. 5, after the power cycle was complete, the team was still …
On Nov. 28, NASA's LunaH-Map spacecraft acquired its first star tracker image, showing the constellation Auriga and its two brightest stars, Menkalinan and Mahasim. The LunaH-Map navigation team used these images to test a new type of autonomous optical navigation software that can be run on the spacecraft's flight computer. On Dec. 2, LunaH-Map also …
Illustration of NEO Surveyor, which is a mission designed to discover and characterize most of the potentially hazardous asteroids that are near the Earth. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech Agency officials have completed a rigorous technical and programmatic review, known as Key Decision Point C (KDP-C), and confirmed NASA's Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO Surveyor) – the …
As of Nov. 29, 2022, InSight is generating an average between 290 watt-hours of energy per Martian day, or sol. The tau, or level of dust cover in the atmosphere, was estimated at .95 (typical tau levels outside of dust season range from 0.6-0.7).
NASA has renamed its Global Lyman-alpha Imager of the Dynamic Exosphere, or GLIDE, mission in honor of Dr. George R. Carruthers.
