By Rei Ueyama, NASA Ames Research Center /SALINA, KANSAS/ It's 3 a.m. in Salina, Kansas. The moon is out. Crickets are chirping on this balmy summer night. The light above the door to the hangar softly illuminates the sign that reads "DCOTSS." Most teammates are just waking up. I unlock the door and walk in …
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are now targeting Jan. 8, 2022, for the launch of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite T (GOES-T) mission. The launch was previously planned for Dec. 7, 2021. NASA, NOAA, and United Launch Alliance (ULA) coordinated the new target date to optimize launch schedules for missions flying …
NASA's PUNCH mission – short for Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere – passed a mission review on July 23, 2021, moving the mission into its next phase with a new target launch readiness date of October 2023.
NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe – IMAP – has completed a key milestone in mission development. After rigorous review, IMAP has passed what is known as Key Decision Point C, or KDP-C, which marks the mission's progression from formulation to implementation.
By Mara Johnson-Groh NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Plasma – a fourth state of matter after solid, liquid, and gas where particles have split into charged ions and electrons – is the most common form of matter in the universe. It's somewhat rare on Earth, but it makes up 99% of the matter in the …
The Sun emitted a significant solar flare peaking at 10:29 a.m. EDT on July 3, 2021. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the Sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however …
By Shawnee Traylor, PhD student in the joint Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution program in Chemical Oceanography / NORTHERN ATLANTIC OCEAN / Satellites have undoubtedly opened up new ways for scientists to study the ocean, giving us global coverage of the surface of the ocean without ever having to step foot …
By Laetitia Drago, PhD student at Sorbonne Université / NORTHERN ATLANTIC OCEAN / As a child, I used to spend my summers on the rocks near the water in Villefranche-sur-mer, France, my hands busy with a bucket and a small net. I was fascinated by the organisms surrounding me both on the rocks and in …
By Mikayla Cote, Master's student at the University of Rhode Island / UNITED KINGDOM / After flying to the United Kingdom, the EXPORTS scientists were in quarantine for two weeks prior to embarking on a month-long research cruise. While there was still some last-minute work to be done before departure, for most of us this …
By Diana Fontaine, Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography / NORTHERN ATLANTIC OCEAN / We have about one more week of full science fun left in the North Atlantic NASA EXPORTS campaign. It has certainly been a wild ride at sea given that we've experienced about four storms to …
