Some 10,500 years ago, hunters gathered each year near the Beaver River in what is now western Oklahoma. There, they funneled bison into narrow, dead-end arroyos — steep gullies cut into the hillside by the river — where they killed them en masse, sliced off the choicest meat and left behind piles of skeletons. Walk…
A Box of ‘Black Magic’ to Study Earth from Space
Black magic. That’s what radiofrequency engineers call the mysterious forces guiding communications over the air. These forces involve complex physics and are difficult enough to master on Earth. They only get more baffling when you’re beaming signals into space. Until now, the shape of choice for casting this “magic” has been the parabolic dish. The…
Photo of the Day: At Hangar, Raptors Find Shelter from the Storm
As Tropical Storm Hermine charged up the East Coast Sept. 2, 2016, Langley Air Force Base reached out to the Research Services Directorate and NASA Langley Research Center hangar manager Dale Bowser to see if NASA Langley could store a few F-22 Raptors. Even though the hangar in Hampton, Virginia, already had a large visitor…
Two Month UAS Flight Test Series Concludes
As the wheels of NASA’s Ikhana Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) touched down on Thursday, June 30, a two-month flight test series came to a close, concluding an essential stage in the agency’s research into technologies that support safe integration of UAS into the National Airspace System (NAS). Flight Test Series 4 (FT4), which took place…
LISA Pathfinder Mission Paves Way for Space-based Detection of Gravitational Waves
LISA Pathfinder, a mission led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with contributions from NASA, has successfully tested a key technology needed to build a space-based observatory for detecting gravitational waves. These tiny ripples in the fabric of space, predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago, were first seen last year by the ground-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave…
NASA’s SDO Captures Images of a Mid-Level Solar Flare
The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 8:29 pm EDT on April 17, 2016. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground,…
Europe’s New Mars Mission Bringing NASA Radios Along
Two NASA radios aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars mission that launched today are engineered to provide communication relay service for rovers and landers on Mars. ESA’s ExoMars 2016 mission, combining the Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) with the Schiaparelli landing demonstrator, began a seven-month journey to Mars with today’s launch from Kazakhstan. The twin Electra…
NASA Station Leads Way for Improved Measurements of Earth Orientation, Shape
NASA has demonstrated the success of advanced technology for making precise measurements of Earth’s orientation and rotation – information that helps provide a foundation for navigation of all space missions and for geophysical studies of our planet. The technology includes a new class of radio antenna and electronics that provide broadband capabilities for Very Long…
NASA Demonstrates Airborne Water Quality Sensor
Monitoring the quality of freshwater supplies is a global concern, especially in thirsty California, where the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary and its watershed serve as a major freshwater source. Now scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and the U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park and Sacramento, California, have successfully demonstrated how a NASA-developed airborne…
Radar Images of a Christmas-Eve Asteroid: An Early Gift for Astronomers
Asteroid 2003 SD220 will safely fly past Earth on Dec. 24 at a distance of 6.8 million miles (11 million kilometers). Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have generated the highest-resolution images to date of this asteroid using the Deep Space Network’s 230-foot (70-meter) antenna at Goldstone, California. The radar images were…