How NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter Talks to Us From Mars
The Ingenuity helicopter made history on April 19, 2021, with the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. How do engineers talk…
JPL
With First Martian Samples Packed, NASA Perseverance Rover Initiates Ambitious Sample Return Mission
NASA, along with the European Space Agency, is developing a campaign to return the Martian samples to Earth. On September 1, NASA’s Perseverance rover unfurled…
The Sun Is a Mass of Incandescent Gas: Mars Perseverance Rover’s First Solar Conjunction
As the Sun spews hot, energized gas from its outer atmosphere (corona) far across space, and Mars and Earth align on opposite sides, this causes…
NASA Perseverance Mars Rover Images Confirm Jezero Crater Is an Ancient Martian Lake
The findings include signs of flash flooding that carried huge boulders downstream into the lakebed. The first scientific analysis of images taken by NASA’s Perseverance…
NASA’s Mars Perseverance “Kodiak” Moment – Jezero Crater’s Lake Is More Complicated and Intriguing Than Thought
Pictures from NASA’s latest six-wheeler on the Red Planet suggest the area’s history experienced significant flooding events. A new paper from the science team of…
Working Overtime: NASA’s Deep Space Atomic Clock Successfully Completes Mission
Geared toward improving spacecraft navigation, the technology demonstration operated far longer than planned and broke the stability record for atomic clocks in space. For more…
New NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return Campaign Artist’s Concept
This illustration shows a concept for a set of future robots working together to ferry back samples from the surface of Mars collected by NASA’s Mars…
October 2021 Skywatching Highlights From NASA – Two Brilliant Stars Vying for “Pole” Position
What’s Up for October? What to look for this month at sunrise and sunset, and two brilliant stars vying for the “pole” position. On October…
NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft To Explore Unique Asteroid for Clues to Early Solar System
Set to launch next year, NASA’s Psyche mission marks the first time the agency has set out to explore an asteroid richer in metal than…
Next Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Flight Delayed Until After Conjunction – Here’s What Went Wrong
2,800 RPM Spin a Success, but Flight 14 Delayed to Post Conjunction It’s been an eventful several Martian days, or sols, since our last blog…
Solar Conjunction: NASA’s Mars Fleet Lies Low With Sun Between Earth and Red Planet
The missions will continue collecting data about the Red Planet, though engineers back on Earth will stop sending commands to them until mid-October. NASA will…
Mars Solar Conjunction: What Happens When the Sun Blocks our Signal?
Every day for over two decades, the U.S. has had a presence at Mars, using spacecraft to understand this extreme world and its potential as…
Going Hyperspectral for CHIME – The Copernicus Hyperspectral Imaging Mission for the Environment
With Covid restrictions a little more relaxed, scientists from Europe and the USA were finally able to team up for a long-awaited field experiment to…
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Cameras Capture Mars Like Never Before – “A Huge Piece of Everything”
Scientists tap into an array of imagers aboard the six-wheeled explorer to get a big picture of the Red Planet. NASA’s Perseverance rover has been…
NASA’s InSight Mars Lander Detects Three Big Marsquakes
The lander cleared enough dust from one solar panel to keep its seismometer on through the summer, allowing scientists to study the three biggest quakes…
NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts: Visionary Technology Could Pioneer the Future in Space
Dozens of concepts are being presented at this year’s NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Symposium, including eight led by technologists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. NASA…
NASA Robots Compete in DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge Final
Led by NASA JPL, Team CoSTAR will participate in the SubT final this week to demonstrate multi-robot autonomy in a series of tests in extreme…
NASA’s Delta-X Mission Helps With Disaster Response in Wake of Hurricane Ida
Researchers flying a radar instrument over coastal wetlands in Louisiana helped with monitoring oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico. Charged with studying the Mississippi…