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NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is back to science operations as of Thursday (Feb. 17), following a glitch more than a month ago. The nearly 18-year-old telescope suffered a failure with one of its reaction wheels on Jan. 18, forcing a temporary pivot to safe mode. Swift uses a total of six reaction wheels to … Read more
The Perseverance rover’s second year on Mars should be even more action-packed than the first. The car-sized Perseverance rover landed inside the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, tasked with searching for signs of ancient Mars life and collecting dozens of samples for future return to Earth. The 28-mile-wide (45 kilometers) Jezero is … Read more
NASA’s InSight Mars lander has shaken off the effects of a recent dust storm, likely allowing the spacecraft to collect science data for a few more months. InSight went into a protective safe mode on Jan. 7, temporarily shutting down its instruments after a huge dust storm prevented the solar-powered lander from soaking up enough … Read more
A prolific NASA space telescope has closed its camera eye for now due to a power issue that has stalled the observatory’s science work. The Chandra X-ray Observatory, which has studied the X-ray universe since 1999, suffered a power supply problem with its High Resolution Camera instrument on Feb. 9, leading the mission team to … Read more
IXPE’s first science image shows the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. (Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/IXPE) NASA’s newly-launched X-ray hunting probe has snapped its first science image and — wow — it’s spectacular. The Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) probe launched Dec. 9, 2021, on a mission to observe objects like black holes and neutron stars in X-ray … Read more
You can give your valentine a card that’s out of this world, thanks to NASA. The space agency has put together some freely available e-cards that feature iconic space photos with special Valentine’s Day messages attached. For example, one card depicts the Perseverance Mars rover and Ingenuity helicopter together on the Red Planet, with “We … Read more
We love it when a rocket comes together. In October 2021, NASA finished stacking the huge Space Launch System (SLS) rocket for its Artemis 1 moon mission inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. That was a big milestone for the agency and its moon-exploration plans, and a newly … Read more
The wait is finally over. The team behind NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released some of the first images from the much-anticipated observatory on Friday (Feb. 11). The main photo, which doesn’t even hint at the power Webb will bring to the universe once it’s fully operational, shows a star called HD 84406 and is … Read more
In between its main mission, the Parker Solar Probe just made a novel contribution to Venusian science. New images from the sun-focused mission, captured during a close flyby of Venus, show the planet in visible light for the first time. With time and analysis, the new images will provide valuable information about the planet’s geology … Read more
It’s been a whirlwind 38 days in space for the James Webb Space Telescope, but its chief scientist says the mission is well on track to uncover the universe soon. “The telescope is cold … the instruments are cooling,” John Mather, a Nobel laureate and astrophysicist who also works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in … Read more