NASA

Julie McEnery is NASA's Project Scientist for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. When she checked her email on March 29, 2012, she was startled to find an automatically generated message stating that in six days, her half-billion-plus dollar satellite was going to cross paths with Cosmos 1805, a Soviet-era spy satellite. The predicted encounter had the two satellites occupying the same coordinates only 30 milliseconds apart. Not only that, but Cosmos was in an orbit moving nearly perpendicular to Fermi such that their collision would be equivalent to tons of high explosives. Essentially total destruction.  Read More

It was Puerto Rico's day at the 20th NASA Great Moonbuggy Race. Teams from that country won first place in both the high school and college division races. More than 90 teams competed in the race, in which lightweight human-powered buggies race over a simulated lunar surface built at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The winning times for this grueling three-quarter mile course were 3:24 for the high school division and 3:32 for the college division.  Read More

Three years ago the very first images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) were beamed back to earth. Since then, NASA’s SDO has effectively had continuous coverage of the Sun’s rise towards solar maximum, the period of the most intense solar activity in the 11 year solar cycle. NASA has now provided a fascinating snapshot of this ongoing research in the form of a time-lapse video that squeezes three years of solar activity into three minutes of footage.  Read More

Since the early days of space travel, a consistent complaint has been bad coffee. Now a group of freshman engineering students at Rice University has developed a simple approach to alleviating this problem.  Read More

Take the little floating ball that gave Luke Skywalker so much trouble during lightsaber practice, slap a pair of huge welder’s goggles on it and you start to get a picture of NASA’s latest foray into flying robots. Currently being tested aboard the International Space Station (ISS), MIT Space Systems Laboratory’s SPHERES-VERTIGO system is a free-flying robot with stereoscopic vision that is part of a program to develop ways for small satellites to autonomously create 3D maps of objects such as asteroids or disabled satellites.  Read More

The history of spaceflight is filled with great images, such as Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon or Viking 1’s first images from Mars, but some of the most dramatic events haven’t any images to accompany them. As NASA's two Voyager spacecraft leave the Solar System, there won’t be any historic pictures sent back. Instead, that invisible boundary between our system and interstellar space will be marked by readings taken by the instruments of the spacecraft. NASA has placed a readout on the Voyager mission home page that shows two of three key factors that will let the public know when this momentous milestone has been reached.  Read More

When Orbital Science Corporation's Antares rocket lofted a simulated spacecraft mass into orbit on its maiden flight from NASA's Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia on Sunday, it also carried a piggyback cargo of three NASA nanosatellites. These “PhoneSats,” which were built using smartphone and off-the-shelf consumer components in a standard cubesat frame, may be the cheapest satellites ever launched.  Read More

New near-infrared and far-infrared views captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel space telescope have provided a spectacular new look at the famous Horsehead Nebula.  Read More

Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Antares rocket lifted off Sunday at 5:00 PM EDT (21:00 GMT) from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad-0A at NASA”s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The launch was the first from the pad at Wallops and also the first flight of Antares, which carried a "mass simulated payload" equivalent to the mass of a spacecraft into Earth orbit.  Read More