NASA’s twin E-TBEx CubeSats — short for Enhanced Tandem Beacon Experiment — are scheduled to launch in June 2019 aboard the Department of Defense’s Space Test Program-2 launch. The launch includes a total of 24 satellites from government and research institutions. They will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space…
NASA’s SET Mission to Study Satellite Protection Is Ready for Launch
Ready, SET, go — NASA’s Space Environment Testbeds, or SET, will launch in June 2019 on its mission to study how to better protect satellites in space. SET will get a ride to space on a U.S. Air Force Research Lab spacecraft aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. SET studies…
NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Finds a Clay Cache
NASA’s Curiosity rover has confirmed that the region on Mars it’s exploring, called the “clay-bearing unit,” is well deserving of its name. Two samples the rover recently drilled at rock targets called “Aberlady” and “Kilmarie” have revealed the highest amounts of clay minerals ever found during the mission. Both drill targets appear in a new…
First ICESat-2 Global Data Released: Ice, Forests and More
More than a trillion new measurements of Earth’s height – blanketing everything from glaciers in Greenland, to mangrove forests in Florida, to sea ice surrounding Antarctica – are now available to the public. With millions more observations added each day, data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 is providing a precise global portrait…
City Life Awaits Drones in Final Year of NASA Research
City life has its challenges. The crowds, the traffic, pedestrians at the mercy of the weather … and drones – also known as unmanned aircraft systems, or UAS, which will face some of the same challenges in our cities in the near future. By 2020, there could be as many as 400,000 commercial small UAS registered in the…
How Atmospheric Sounding Transformed Weather Prediction
In the late 1950s, a scientist named Lewis Kaplan divined a new and groundbreaking way to calculate temperature in the atmosphere for weather forecasting: by measuring the vibration of molecules at different altitudes. The hope was to do this using a brand-new technology, an Earth-observing satellite. At the time, the only way to get a…
Illuminating Gases in The Sky: NASA Technology Pinpoints Potent Greenhouse Gases
Whether they’re idyllic floating cotton balls on an otherwise blue sky or ominous grey swirls that block the sun, clouds all begin as an invisible dot of water vapor. This elusive gas has been tricky to measure and track – until now. Research scientists at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, have created a…
NASA Demos CubeSat Laser Communications Capability
Two NASA CubeSats teamed up on an impromptu optical, or laser, communications pointing experiment. The laser beam is seen as a brief flash of light close to the center of the focal plane, to the left of Earth’s horizon. The light originated from the laser communications system onboard one of two Optical Communications and Sensor Demonstration (OCSD) spacecraft. The…
Record-Breaking Satellite Advances NASA’s Exploration of High-Altitude GPS
The four Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft recently broke the world record for navigating with GPS signals farther from Earth than ever before. MMS’ success indicates that NASA spacecraft may soon be able to navigate via GPS as far away as the Moon, which will prove important to the Gateway, a planned space station in lunar orbit. After navigation…
A Decade of Exploring Alaska’s Mountain Glaciers
In Alaska, 5 percent of the land is covered by glaciers that are losing a lot of ice and contributing to sea level rise. To monitor these changes, a small team of NASA-funded researchers has been flying scientific instruments on a bright red, single-engine plane since spring 2009. Flying low over some of the most…