Earth
Cassini images Earth beneath Saturn’s rings
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured color images of Earth and the moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away on July 19. Meanwhile, MESSENGER, the first probe to orbit Mercury, took a black-and-white image from a distance of 61 million miles (98 million kilometers) as part of a …
Antares delivers Cygnus to ISS
The new ‘Commercial Space Era’ received a resounding boost today when a privately developed Antares rocket lofting the first ever Cygnus commercial cargo resupply craft thundered to space from America’s newest launch pad at NASA Wallops along the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The history making launch marks the first time that a spacecraft launched from …
Masten’s Xombie rocket tests new precision landing software
A year after NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity’s landed on Mars, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., are testing a sophisticated flight-control algorithm that could allow for even more precise, pinpoint landings of future Martian spacecraft. Flight testing of the new Fuel Optimal Large Divert Guidance (G-FOLD) algorithm for planetary pinpoint landing is being …
Importance of exercise while in orbit
Human space flight is a physically demanding experience. It poses numerous risks, many of them are very evident, but some are hidden to the naked eye. The most important hidden health challenge is the bone density changes that are brought on by prolonged weightlessness. These bone density changes in the hip and back are very …
Soot likely played a role in 1800s glacier retreat
A NASA-led team of scientists has uncovered strong evidence that soot from a rapidly industrializing Europe caused the abrupt retreat of mountain glaciers in the European Alps that began in the 1860s, a period often thought of as the end of the Little Ice Age. The research last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy …
La Nada climate pattern lingers
New remote sensing data from NASA’s Jason-2 satellite show near-normal sea-surface height conditions across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. This neutral, or “La Nada” event, has stubbornly persisted for 16 months, since spring 2012. Models suggest this pattern will continue through the spring of 2014, according to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. “Without an …