Mapping the Closest Frontier, Our Oceans Whenever you look through a substance, whether it’s the water in a pool or a pane of old, rippled glass, the objects you see look distorted. For centuries, astronomers have been mapping the sky through the distortions caused by our atmosphere, however, in recent years, they’ve developed techniques to counter…
On its 5th Anniversary, GPM Still Right as Rain
Five years ago, on Feb. 27, 2014, the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory, a joint satellite project by NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), lifted off aboard a Japanese H-IIA rocket. Since then, the cutting-edge instruments on GPM have provided advanced measurements about the rain and snow particles within clouds, Earth’s precipitation…
NASA Selects Mission to Study Space Weather from Space Station
NASA has selected a new mission that will help scientists understand and, ultimately, forecast the vast space weather system around our planet. Space weather is important because it can have profound impacts – affecting technology and astronauts in space, disrupting radio communications and, at its most severe, overwhelming power grids. The new experiment will, for…
Holiday Asteroid Imaged With NASA Radar
The December 2018 close approach by the large, near-Earth asteroid 2003 SD220 has provided astronomers an outstanding opportunity to obtain detailed radar images of the surface and shape of the object and to improve the understanding of its orbit. The asteroid will fly safely past Earth on Saturday, Dec. 22, at a distance of about…
10 CubeSats Ready for NASA’s First Venture Class Launch
NASA will enable the launch of 10 small research satellites, or CubeSats, selected through the CubeSat Launch Initiative (CSLI) for launch on Rocket Lab’s first mission for NASA. The CubeSats were built by three NASA centers, seven universities, and a middle school as part of the Educational Launch of Nanosatellite XIX (ELaNa-19) mission. More than…
A Deep Space Communications Hub In The Desert
When NASA engineers were looking for a place to build a network of large radio antennas in the 1950s, they knew they needed somewhere quiet. They were going to build a series of antennas with huge parabolic dishes and receivers that could detect extremely faint radio signals. They settled on a remote stretch of the…
Arecibo Radar Returns With Asteroid Phaethon Images
After several months of downtime after Hurricane Maria blew through, the Arecibo Observatory Planetary Radar has returned to normal operation, providing the highest-resolution images to date of near-Earth asteroid 3200 Phaethon during its Dec. 16 flyby of Earth. The radar images, which are subtle at the available resolution, reveal the asteroid is spheroidal in shape…
NASA Laser Communications To Provide Orion Faster Connections
NASA is working to forever change the way astronauts communicate to and from space using an advanced laser communications system called LEMNOS, which will enable exponentially faster connections than ever before. Imagine being able to watch 4K ultra-high-definition (UHD) video as humans take their first steps on another planet. Or imagine astronauts picking up a…
Photo of the Day: Hubble Gazes at a Cosmic Megamaser
This galaxy has a far more exciting and futuristic classification than most — it hosts a megamaser. Megamasers are intensely bright, around 100 million times brighter than the masers found in galaxies like the Milky Way. The entire galaxy essentially acts as an astronomical laser that beams out microwave emission rather than visible light (hence…
NASA Radio on Europe’s New Mars Orbiter Aces Relay Test
Data from each of the two rovers active on Mars reached Earth last week in the successful first relay test of a NASA radio aboard Europe’s new Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO). The transmissions from NASA rovers Opportunity and Curiosity, received by one of the twin Electra radios on the orbiter on Nov. 22, mark a…