NASA

James Webb Space Telescope Reaches Its Destination in Huge Mission Milestone

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The James Webb Space Telescope has fired its thrusters and reached its orbital destination around a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from our planet, NASA said Monday, a key milestone on its mission to study cosmic history.   At around 2:00 pm Eastern Time (1900 GMT), the observatory fired its thrusters for 5 minutes … Read more

NASA upgrades its asteroid hazard software to use sunlight

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NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) just upgraded the software it uses to assess potentially hazardous asteroids to account for sunlight’s affect on orbits, among other changes. While there are no immediate known space rock hazards to Earth despite decades of careful searching, astronomers continue to scan the skies, just in case. The new impact monitoring … Read more

NASA space station officials weigh in on remaining in orbit until 2030

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NASA’s International Space Station team is eager to stick with the orbiting laboratory until 2030. NASA officials speaking at a virtual meeting held on Tuesday (Jan. 18) spoke about plans to take advantage of an extension to the International Space Station program that NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced on Dec. 31. The meeting was held … Read more

NASA wants your ideas to reuse trash and waste on a Mars mission

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NASA just opened a challenge seeking ways to go to Mars and back with a minimum of wasted materials. The agency’s tournament lab, along with crowdsourcing platform HeroX, have launched a “Waste to Base” challenge looking for ideas to recycle trash, waste, carbon dioxide and foam packaging materials during a two- to three-year crewed Red … Read more

The Mars rover Perseverance has pebbles stuck in its drill. NASA has a plan to fix it.

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NASA’s Perseverance rover will dump its latest Mars sample to unclog pebbles from its drill.  Perseverance mission managers made the unexpected announcement that they had to dump out Percy’s latest sample via a blog post on Friday (Jan. 14). The team even shared in the post that they never thought they would have to do … Read more

NASA leasing bill morphs into ‘freedom to vote’ legislation

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A recent bill meant to facilitate NASA raising money by leasing out underused facilities went in a most unexpected direction: expanding the right to vote. The NASA property bill was transformed into the “Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act” under the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives, seeking to undercut Republican opposition to … Read more

Perseverance Has Run Into a Problem on Mars: Pebbles

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A small pile of pebbles is clogging up the Perseverance Mars rover’s operations.   The rover, which is collecting rock samples for eventual return to Earth, began to struggle on Dec. 29, after extracting a core from a rock the mission team nicknamed “Issole.”   According to a NASA blog, the problem occurred in the device that transfers … Read more

2021 saw record temperatures and deaths from natural disasters, NASA, NOAA reveal

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2021 was another record-setting year, ranking as the sixth hottest year on record. Following a trend, these past eight years have also been the eight hottest years on record, experts revealed Thursday (Jan. 13). In an annual call to discuss climate change and the year’s climate data, experts from NASA and NOAA (the National Oceanic … Read more

NASA getting SLS megarockets ready for crewed moon missions

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The giant rockets that will carry NASA astronauts to the moon a few years from now are really starting to come together.  In a brief status update posted on Tuesday (Jan. 11), NASA officials wrote that the agency and its manufacturing partners have made “great progress” on putting together the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket … Read more