Yesterday morning, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft slammed into the day side of Saturn, the brief flash of its vaporization marking the end of a 13-year mission. But it took people to turn this hunk of aluminum and silicon into an extension of our curiosity.
Oh Florence, we really needed you this month. There’s a petulant species of brainy monkeys apes that just can’t seem to get along that probably deserves to be completely wiped out in a fiery collision. But there you go, flying right on by.
Back in June, after installing a new lithium-ion battery into its ape-inspired RoboSimian and plugging it into charge, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory had their lunches cut short when the battery suddenly exploded in a spectacular fireball that completely torched the bot.
The Dawn spacecraft has been hard at work orbiting Ceres, and over the last week, it’s sent back some stunning images of our closest dwarf planet.
It’s not often you see the United States Geological Survey and Jet Propulsion Laboratories get into a smackdown over science, but that’s just what happened thanks to a new set of earthquake predictions for southern California.
We’ve reached the point of no return.
Right now, here’s how close we are to the events of Andy Weir’s novel The Martian actually happening: Not very. NASA believes we’re probably about 20 years away from putting an astronaut on Mars, but as the movie about a astronaut being stranded on Mars hits theaters, 20 years feels longer than it sounds.
In 2004, NASA landed its Opportunity rover on Mars. Initially intended to run for 90 days, it’s now spent 11 years trundling around the planet—in that time covering a distance of over 26 miles. Here, you can watch its multi-year marathon in just 8 minutes.
Taking a spacecraft to the surface of an alien planet is hard enough, but it can be even more difficult to reach the exact landing spot. Now, new NASA technologies could enable landers to adapt in real-time to what they see before them.
During Microsoft's demo of its fascinating holographic headset HoloLens today, the company barely mentioned the coolest way it's already using it: to develop software with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that will let scientists explore and work on the Red Planet remotely.
The Cassini Orbiter captures a different view of Saturn, in which the planet and its rings seem to vanish into darkness.
11 trillion. 11,000,000,000,000. However, you wrap your brain around it, that number is hard to fathom. But that's how many gallons of water California's three-year drought has sucked from the Earth, according to NASA.
Europa, Jupiter's sixth-closest moon, has long been a source of fascination and wonder for astronomers. Not only is it unique amongst its Jovian peers for having a smooth, ice-covered surface, but it is believed that warm, ocean waters exist beneath that crust – which also makes it a strong candidate for …
Put a man on the Moon? Sure. Establish a continuously orbiting zero-gravity laboratory? Easy. Parachute a rover onto Mars? Ain't no thang. Okay, fine NASA, but can you carve a pumpkin?
With Rosetta hanging out so closely with an asteroid, we're getting better views than ever before of what the surface of an asteroid looks like. But compared to one another, how do the surfaces we've visited in our Solar System stack up?
NASA's Opportunity rover is still trundling across the surface of Mars, more than 11 years after its 90 day mission began. But its software is getting bogged down, so NASA's doing a full system backup, memory wipe, and reboot. It's just like your routine computer cleanup, just from the next planet over.
Brian Trease, a mechanical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is working with researchers at Brigham Young University to construct a solar array that uses origami principles for deployment.
On this dry July day, news about the drought that’s engulfed most of the western United States continues to get worse. But how do we know how extensive the current megadrought is? We actually can measure from the sky, but not in the way you think.
As we move further out into space, these robots — including a sticky-sided grasping robot and a hedgehog-inspired hopping cubebot — could be the ones exploring that terrain for us.
The landing was a bit rough, but NASA is calling the test flight of its flying saucer shaped, low-density supersonic decelerator a success. Mika McKinnon has the details on the primary mission – which began at 120,000 feet and ended with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean – after the jump.
