Back in January 2019 the team operated the flight model in a simulated Martian environment. Then the helicopter was moved to Lockheed Martin Space in Denver for compatibility testing with the Mars Helicopter Delivery System, which will hold the 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) spacecraft against the belly of the Mars 2020 rover during launch and interplanetary cruise before…
NASA’s Mars 2020 Gets HD Eyes
One of the first operations the Mars 2020 rover will perform after touching down on the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, will be to raise its remote sensing mast (RSM), which carries important optics and instrumentation. In this picture – taken on May 23, 2019, in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility’s High Bay…
NASA’s MRO Completes 60,000 Trips Around Mars
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter hit a dizzying milestone this morning: It completed 60,000 loops around the Red Planet at 10:39 a.m. PDT (1:39 p.m. EDT). On average, MRO takes 112 minutes to circle Mars, whipping around at about 2 miles per second (3.4 kilometers per second). Since entering orbit on March 10, 2006, the spacecraft…
InSight Mars Lander Takes Its First Selfie
NASA’s InSight lander isn’t camera-shy. The spacecraft used a camera on its robotic arm to take its first selfie—a mosaic made up of 11 images. This is the same imaging process used by NASA’s Curiosity rover mission, in which many overlapping pictures are taken and later stitched together. Visible in the selfie are the lander’s…
Planetary Defense: The Bennu Experiment
On Dec. 3, after traveling billions of kilometers from Earth, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reached its target, Bennu, and kicked off a nearly two-year, up-close investigation of the asteroid. It will inspect nearly every square inch of this ancient clump of rubble left over from the formation of our solar system. Ultimately, the spacecraft will pick…
Mars 2020 Parachute a Go
In the early hours of Sept. 7, NASA broke a world record. Less than 2 minutes after the launch of a 58-foot-tall (17.7-meter) Black Brant IX sounding rocket, a payload separated and began its dive back through Earth’s atmosphere. When onboard sensors determined the payload had reached the appropriate height and Mach number (38 kilometers…
Small Packages To Test Big Space Technology Advances
This weekend, when the next cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station lifts off from NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, it will be carrying among its supplies and experiments three cereal box-sized satellites that will be used to test and demonstrate the next generation of Earth-observing technology. NASA has been increasing its use…
Results Of Heat Shield Testing
NASA Mars 2020 Mission Status Report A post-test inspection of the composite structure for a heat shield to be used on the Mars 2020 mission revealed that a fracture occurred during structural testing. The mission team is working to build a replacement heat shield structure. The situation will not affect the mission’s launch readiness date…
Next NASA Mars Rover Reaches Key Manufacturing Milestone
NASA’s Mars 2020 mission has begun the assembly, test and launch operations (ATLO) phase of its development, on track for a July 2020 launch to Mars. The first planned ATLO activities will involve electrical integration of flight hardware into the mission’s descent stage. The Mars 2020 rover, as well as its cruise stage, aeroshell and…
CloudSat Exits The ‘A-Train’
Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, this week lowered the orbit of the nearly 12-year-old CloudSat satellite following the loss of one of its reaction wheels, which control its orientation in orbit. While CloudSat’s science mission will continue, it will no longer fly as part of the Afternoon Constellation, or A-Train…
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Preparing For Years Ahead
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has begun extra stargazing to help the space agency accomplish advances in Mars exploration over the next decade. The spacecraft already has worked more than double its planned mission life since launch in 2005. NASA plans to keep using it past the mid-2020s. Increased reliance on a star tracker, and…
NASA Tests Atomic Clock For Deep Space Navigation
In deep space, accurate timekeeping is vital to navigation, but many spacecraft lack precise timepieces on board. For 20 years, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has been perfecting a clock. It’s not a wristwatch; not something you could buy at a store. It’s the Deep Space Atomic Clock (DSAC), an instrument perfect for deep space…
JPL Deploys A CubeSat For Astronomy
Tiny satellites called CubeSats have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Besides allowing researchers to test new technologies, their relative simplicity also offers hands-on training to early-career engineers. A CubeSat recently deployed from the International Space Station is a key example of their potential, experimenting with CubeSats applied to astronomy. For the next…
Martian Ridge Brings Out Rover’s Color Talents
Color-discerning capabilities that NASA’s Curiosity rover has been using on Mars since 2012 are proving particularly helpful on a mountainside ridge the rover is now climbing. These capabilities go beyond the thousands of full-color images Curiosity takes every year: The rover can look at Mars with special filters helpful for identifying some minerals, and also…
Photo Of The Day: Saturn-Facing Hemisphere Of Enceladus
The brightly lit limb of a crescent Enceladus looks ethereal against the blackness of space. The rest of the moon, lit by light reflected from Saturn, presents a ghostly appearance. Enceladus (313 miles or 504 kilometers across) is back-lit in this image, as is apparent by the thin crescent. However, the Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft (or phase) angle,…
NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Climbing Toward Ridge Top
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has begun the steep ascent of an iron-oxide-bearing ridge that’s grabbed scientists’ attention since before the car-sized rover’s 2012 landing. “We’re on the climb now, driving up a route where we can access the layers we’ve studied from below,” said Abigail Fraeman, a Curiosity science-team member at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory…
NASA-Led Mission Studies Storm Intensification
A group of NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists, including scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, are teaming up this month for an airborne mission focused on studying severe storm processes and intensification. The Hands-On Project Experience (HOPE) Eastern Pacific Origins and Characteristics of Hurricanes (EPOCH) field campaign will use NASA’s Global Hawk autonomous…
Holograms Might Help Search For Alien Life
If a space probe detected microbial life on another planet, would scientists know it when they saw it? Identifying bacteria by sight is challenging enough on Earth, even for experts. To the naked eye, bacteria look like featureless blobs — not unlike the mineral grains that might surround them in a sample. A form of…
Veteran Ocean Satellite To Assume Added Role
A venerable U.S./European oceanography satellite mission with NASA participation that has expanded our knowledge of global sea level change, ocean currents and climate phenomena like El Niño and La Niña will take on an additional role next month: improving maps of Earth’s sea floor. The Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 satellite, a partnership among NASA,…
Laser-Targeting A.I. Yields More Mars Science
Artificial intelligence is changing how we study Mars. A.I. software on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has helped it zap dozens of laser targets on the Red Planet this past year, becoming a frequent science tool when the ground team was out of contact with the spacecraft. This same software has proven useful enough that it’s…
NASA Invests In 22 Visionary Exploration Concepts
A mechanical rover inspired by a Dutch artist. A weather balloon that recharges its batteries in the clouds of Venus. These are just two of the five ideas that originated at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and are advancing for a new round of research funded by the agency. In total, the space…
NASA’s Cassini Mission Prepares for ‘Grand Finale’ at Saturn
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn since 2004, is about to begin the final chapter of its remarkable story. On Wednesday, April 26, the spacecraft will make the first in a series of dives through the 1,500-mile-wide (2,400-kilometer) gap between Saturn and its rings as part of the mission’s grand finale. “No spacecraft has…
NASA Tests Robotic Ice Tools
Want to go ice fishing on Jupiter’s moon Europa? There’s no promising you’ll catch anything, but a new set of robotic prototypes could help. Since 2015, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has been developing new technologies for use on future missions to ocean worlds. That includes a subsurface probe that could burrow through…
COBALT Flight Demonstrations Fuse Technologies to Gain Precision Landing Results
Many regions in the solar system beckon for exploration, but they are considered unreachable due to technology gaps in current landing systems. The CoOperative Blending of Autonomous Landing Technologies (COBALT) project, conducted by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) and Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, could change that. Through a flight campaign this month…
NASA Mars Orbiter Tracks Back-to-Back Regional Storms
A regional dust storm currently swelling on Mars follows unusually closely on one that blossomed less than two weeks earlier and is now dissipating, as seen in daily global weather monitoring by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Images from the orbiter’s wide-angle Mars Color Imager (MARCI) show each storm growing in the Acidalia area of northern…