A team of NASA scientists wants to draw a more complete picture of where water exists on the Moon and whether it migrates across the lunar surface, including in the permanently shadowed regions that haven’t seen sunlight in perhaps a billion years or more. The first hint of potential water at both lunar poles came in 1994, with the…

NASA scientists, who always are on the hunt for new platforms from which to carry out their research, now may avail themselves of two agency-developed unmanned aerial systems, or UASs, that some say represent the future for drone aircraft. Unlike most commercially available unmanned aircraft systems, Vanilla Aircraft’s VA001 and Black Swift Technologies’ S2 small Unmanned…

NASA researchers say they have passed a major milestone in their quest to mature more powerful tools for directly detecting and analyzing the atmospheres of giant planets outside the solar system—one of the observational goals of NASA’s proposed Wide-Field Infrared Space Telescope, also known as WFIRST. In tests conducted at the High-Contrast Imaging Testbed at…

Virtual and augmented reality are transforming the multi-billion-dollar gaming industry. A team of NASA technologists now is investigating how this immersive technology could profit agency engineers and scientists, particularly in the design and construction of spacecraft and the interpretation of scientific data. Thomas Grubb, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland,…

A novel mission concept involving two CubeSats connected by a thin, miles-long tether could help scientists understand how the moon got its mysterious “tattoos” — swirling patterns of light and dark found at more than 100 locations across the lunar surface. NASA’s Planetary Science Deep Space SmallSat Studies, or PSDS3, program recently selected a team at the…

A century-old technology that scientists use to probe the ionosphere—the important atmospheric layer that can interfere with the transmission of radio waves—is getting smaller. A team of NASA scientists and engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is upgrading and miniaturizing the electronics on a prototype instrument, called the Concentration vs. Height…

Along for the ride on Dellingr’s maiden journey is a suite of miniaturized NASA-developed technologies—one no larger than a fingernail—that in many cases already have proven their mettle in suborbital or space demonstrations, boosting confidence that they will perform as designed once in orbit. Scientists and engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,…

NASA scientists and engineers named their new CubeSat after the mythological Norse god of the dawn. Now, just days from launch, they are confident Dellingr will live up to its name and inaugurate a new era for scientists wanting to use small, highly reliable satellites to carry out important, and in some cases, never-before-tried science.…