NASA has contributed two Earth science instruments for NOAA’s space weather observing satellite called the Deep Space Climate Observatory or DSCOVR, set to launch in January 2015. One of the instruments called EPIC or Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera will image the Earth in one picture, something that hasn’t been done before from a satellite. EPIC…
New NASA Laser Technology Reveals How Ice Measures Up
New results from NASA’s MABEL campaign demonstrated that a photon-counting technique will allow researchers to track the melt or growth of Earth’s frozen regions. View: Photos of the Day: New NASA Laser Technology Reveals How Ice Measures Up When a high-altitude aircraft flew over the icy Arctic Ocean and the snow-covered terrain of Greenland in…
Tropical Depression Humberto fizzling, 2 areas developing
Imagery from NOAA’s GOES-East satellite on Sept. 19 showed Tropical Depression Humberto had lost its organization, while one tropical low struggled near Bermuda, and another one was taking shape in the southwestern Gulf of Mexico. NASA’s HS3 hurricane mission is sending an unmanned Global Hawk aircraft to investigate the developing system in the Gulf. NOAA’s…
NASA’s Webb Telescope Gets Its Wings
A massive backplane that will hold the primary mirror of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope nearly motionless while it peers into space is another step closer to completion with the recent assembly of the support structure’s wings. The wings enable the mirror, made of 18 pieces of beryllium, to fold up and fit inside a…
NASA’S Webb Telescope Team Completes Optical Milestone
Engineers working on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope met another milestone recently with they completed performance testing on the observatory’s aft-optics subsystem at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp’s facilities in Boulder, Colo. Ball is the principal subcontractor to Northrop Grumman for the optical technology and lightweight mirror system. “Completing Aft Optics System performance testing is…
NASA Pursues Atom Optics to Detect the Imperceptible
A pioneering technology capable of atomic-level precision is now being developed to detect what so far has remained imperceptible: gravitational waves or ripples in space-time caused by cataclysmic events including even the Big Bang itself. A team of researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Stanford University in California, and AOSense, Inc.,…
Photo of the Day: A Giant Erector Set
A new photograph taken inside the giant clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., shows what looks like a giant Erector Set supporting a test component of the James Webb Space Telescope. The “giant Erector Set” is actually ground support equipment that includes the Webb telescope’s Optical Telescope Simulator (OSIM). OSIM…
Bonus Photo of the Day: NASA’s Unmanned Global Hawks
This is a photo of the new purple CPL with the Global Hawk. Credit NASA HS3 will use NASA’s unmanned Global Hawks, which are capable of flying at altitudes greater than 60,000 feet with flight durations of up to 28 hours — capabilities that increase the amount of data scientists can collect. Read: Cutting-Edge Technology…