Ice-blue clouds are drifting high above the Arctic, which means the Northern Hemisphere’s noctilucent cloud season is here. NASA’s AIM spacecraft first spotted wisps of these noctilucent, or night-shining, clouds over the Arctic on May 17.
Across NASA’s many missions, thousands of scientists, engineers, and other experts and professionals all over the country are doing what they do best, but now from home offices and via video conferencing. With most personnel supporting missions remotely to keep onsite staff at a minimal level in response to COVID-19, the Agency is moving ahead strongly with everything from space exploration to using our technology and innovation to help inform policy makers.
Goddard has canceled all non-mission-essential visits to its facilities. Goddard also is closing its Visitor Centers at Greenbelt and at Wallops Flight Facility, Virginia.
NASA researchers will present new findings on a wide range of Earth and space science topics at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), Dec. 9-13 in San Francisco.
After successfully launching Thursday night, NASA’s Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) spacecraft is in orbit for a first-of-its-kind mission to study a region of space where changes can disrupt communications and satellite orbits, and even increase radiation risks to astronauts.
On July 19 mission operators turned off one of the two Van Allen Probes spacecraft. Originally slated for a two-year mission, the Van Allen Probes launched in 2012 and gathered unprecedented data on Earth's radiation belts. As expected, the spacecraft is now out of fuel. It will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up safely in about 15 years.
In 1972, Apollo 16 astronauts stood on the Moon and took a picture of Earth like none before: the first view of our planet in far ultraviolet light. Nearly 50 years later, compare views of Earth’s shining ionosphere from the Apollo era to NASA’s present-day GOLD mission.
On May 1, 1959, the Beltsville Space Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, was renamed NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in honor of Robert H. Goddard, widely considered the father of modern rocketry. Thus began a 60-year boom in science and technological innovation.
On Jan. 4, 2019, the CAPER-2 rocket flew through active aurora borealis, or northern lights, to study the waves that accelerate electrons into our atmosphere.
Two NASA sounding rockets were successfully launched Dec. 7 from Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, in Norway providing scientist a look at the process of Earth’s atmosphere escaping into space.
What does Jupiter sound like? If you had to take a guess, would you imagine the sharp staccato of popcorn popping? The slow static of waves reaching the shore? The universe is full of radio emissions, and all you need to hear them for yourself is a box the size of a DVD player.
Earth's atmosphere is leaking-but how does oxygen get the energy to escape to space? NASA's VISIONS-2 rocket will soon launch into the unique magnetic environment near the North Pole in pursuit of an answer.
NASA's Magnetospheric Multiscale mission has been observing a type of space explosion called magnetic reconnection for three years. MMS just witnessed such an explosion in a unique location: the part of Earth’s magnetic environment trailing behind the planet, away from the Sun — with enough resolution to reveal its true nature more clearly.
From designing rocket launch pad components and safer rotorcraft to improving flood and drought forecasts to modeling the formation of planetary disks, NASA will highlight supercomputing advances at SC18, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, Nov. 12 to 15 in Dallas.
NASA’s continued quest to explore our solar system and beyond received a boost of new information this week with three key missions proving not only that they are up and running, but that their science potential is exceptional.