At NASA's White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, Boeing recently completed live-fire tests of the complex array of thrusters that will be used to guide the seven-passenger spacecraft in orbit and provide propulsion for the emergency abort system.
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Technology that will guide NASA's Mars 2020 mission to a landing on the surface of Mars began testing recently in the skies over Death Valley in California. The tests are to demonstrate the device's ability to collect and analyze images of the mountainous landscape for landing navigation purposes.
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Studies have shown that billions of years ago Venus might have been just as habitable as Earth. So what happened? New research has found that if ancient Venus was home to vast oceans, tidal drags may have slowed down the rotation of the planet and let it bake into the lifeless world we know today.
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Members of the public can now sign up to have their name accompany NASA’s much anticipated Mars 2020 rover as it unravels the secrets of the Red Planet. The names will not be stored digitally within a chip, but instead etched upon one by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
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If there is a subsurface sea on Pluto, why hasn't it frozen solid? According to computer simulations devised by researchers from Japan’s Hokkaido University and elsewhere, it may be that the hypothetical Plutonian sea may remain liquid thanks to an insulating gas layer keeping in the heat.
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Fifty years ago and a quarter of a million miles away, three astronauts carried out the dress rehearsal for one of the greatest events in human history. On May 18, 1969, Apollo 10 lifted off. Its mission: to return to the Moon and pave the way for the Apollo 11 lunar landing two months later.
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NASA is funding a project to develop an aircraft that runs on a cryogenic hydrogen fuel cell system. Under a US$6 million contract, the CHEETA program will investigate the technology needed to produce a practical all-electric design to replace conventional fossil fuel propulsion systems.
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A photographic search by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has discovered the crash site of the Israeli Beresheet moon lander. By making a series of comparison images, the hunt confirmed the area where the privately operated unmanned spacecraft impacted the lunar surface on April 11, 2019.
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NASA has filled in some of the blanks concerning its return to the Moon, today giving the mission a name and declaring plans to put the first woman on the lunar surface by 2024.
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Earth’s closest natural satellite could be producing powerful moonquakes as it cools and shrinks, according to a newly-published study. The scientists behind the research analyzed data from instruments placed by Apollo-era astronauts and more recent data collected by a NASA spacecraft.
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