Tag Archives: NASAs

In a high-resolution satellite image taken by NASA’s Landsat 8 on May 3, 2016, a series of dark, swirling shapes appeared in the clouds above Heard Island, a remote volcanic island in the Southern Ocean. Located roughly 1,000 kilometers north of Antarctica, this uninhabited landmass became the center of attention after the release of the image revealed what looked like …

On Sept. 11, 2022, engineers at a flight control center in Turin, Italy, sent a radio signal into deep space. Its destination was NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) spacecraft flying toward an asteroid more than 5 million miles away. The message prompted the spacecraft to execute a series of pre-programmed commands that caused a small, shoebox-sized satellite contributed by the …

Scientists on the imaging team, led by Arizona State University, captured multiple long-exposure (up to 10-second) pictures of the two bodies, which appear as dots sparkling with reflected sunlight amid a starfield in the constellation Aries. The observations help the team determine how the cameras respond to solar system objects that shine by reflected sunlight, just like the Psyche asteroid. …

NASA’s Curiosity rover, after years of navigating the rugged terrain of Mars, has recently reached a rare and highly stable location in Gale Crater. This new position is considered one of the most secure and advantageous spots since the rover’s landing, allowing mission scientists to plan operations with exceptional precision and minimal risk to the vehicle. The discovery was detailed …

More About Psyche The Psyche mission is led by ASU. Lindy Elkins-Tanton of the University of California, Berkeley is the principal investigator. A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL is responsible for the mission’s overall management, system engineering, integration and test, and mission operations. Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto, California, provided the high-power solar electric propulsion spacecraft chassis. ASU leads …

Headed for a metal-rich asteroid of the same name, the Psyche spacecraft successfully calibrated its cameras by looking homeward. On schedule for its 2029 arrival at the asteroid Psyche, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft recently looked back toward home and captured images of Earth and our Moon from about 180 million miles (290 million kilometers) away. The images were obtained during one …

NEW YORK — The Webb Space Telescope has spotted a new tiny moon orbiting Uranus. The new member of the lunar gang, announced Tuesday by NASA, appears to be just six miles (10 kilometers) wide. It was spotted by the telescope’s near-infrared camera during observations in February. Scientists think it hid for so long — even eluding the Voyager 2 …

NASA’s Curiosity rover continues its trek through the Martian terrain with a new stop that has captured both scientific and visual intrigue. In a blog update from NASA’s Science Mission Directorate on August 15, 2025, the rover team described its latest observations in an area known as The Boxworks, where oddly shaped rocks—some resembling clusters of fossilized eggs or even …

Sean Duffy, the acting administrator of NASA for a little more than a month, has vowed to make the United States great in space. With a background as a US Congressman, reality TV star, and television commentator, Duffy did not come to the position with a deep well of knowledge about spaceflight. He also already had a lot on his …

Editor’s Note: The headline of this article was updated on August 14 to to clarify the nature of the moonquake research. As NASA prepares to send astronauts to the surface of the Moon’s south polar region for the first time ever during the Artemis III mission, scientists are working on methods to determine the frequency of moonquakes along active faults …