House and Senate appropriators have released NASA’s final spending bill for the fiscal year 2024, focusing on the Artemis program’s goal of returning astronauts to the Moon. However, there’s still considerable uncertainty surrounding the agency’s plans for bringing back rocky samples from Mars. China’s Plan to Land Astronauts on the Moon NASA was allocated $24.875 … Read more
After eight years of experimenting with flames in space, NASA lit a fire inside a cargo spacecraft for the last time and sent its Saffire experiment toward a burning reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Former NASA Astronaut Leland Melvin on the “Overview Effect” NASA’s Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiments, also known as Saffire, came to a fitting … Read more
NASA is looking for volunteers willing to be trapped inside a simulated Martian environment that’s roughly the size of a two-bedroom apartment for a full year. The space agency is now accepting applications for its second edition of CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog), which is scheduled to take place in spring 2025. The deadline … Read more
NASA outfitted its aging communications network with a hybrid antenna that allowed it to receive both radio frequency and laser signals for the first time, helping the space agency keep up with its increasing number of missions traveling through deep space. Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra: 3 Things We Love and Hate Deep Space Station 13, … Read more
When a NASA contractor launches to the moon, a popular American clothing company will do its part to help the robotic lander bundle up for space and the frigid lunar south pole. Houston-based Intuitive Machines will blast off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, no earlier than Valentine’s Day, with a … Read more
Way up in the sky and sprinkled across the seas, two of the littlest yet most influential things in the world have stubbornly guarded their secrets: aerosols and phytoplankton. Today, NASA launched its Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem mission, or PACE, to unravel their mysteries. The mission’s findings could be a key to understanding how … Read more
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Who knew you could see plankton from space? NASA, of course. The space agency successfully launched a new mission today called PACE — short for the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem satellite — that will study its namesake. It’ll examine microscopic plants and particles — things so small they’re invisible to the naked eye — from … Read more
Hundreds of employees at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will be affected by budget constraints looming over the space agency for the current year, with Congress still behind on issuing the final budget for 2024 and its final decision regarding Mars Sample Return (MSR). ‘More People Need to Know About This History’: A Black Astronaut … Read more
Humanity’s most distant spacecraft is glitching out—again—and engineers are having quite a difficult time solving the problem. Voyager 1, what are we going to do with you? Trump Went Through Twitter Withdrawal The issue is with the 46-year-old Voyager 1’s flight data system (FDS), one of its three onboard computers. The FDS collects data from … Read more
After months of frustration, NASA finally got the Bennu asteroid sample container open in January, revealing the large amounts of asteroid scooped up by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Now, a top member of the mission says the distant hunk of space rock may be a planetesimal—a planet’s building block—that once belonged to an ocean world. ‘More … Read more