In a small, square room walled by four feet of concrete, the air smells as if a lightning storm just passed through—crisp and acrid, like cleaning supplies. Outside, that’s the smell of lightning ripping apart oxygen in the air, which readily reshuffles into ozone. But belowground in one of the rooms at NASA’s Radiation Effects…

Tropical Depression Rumbia, the twenty-first tropical cyclone of the Northwestern Pacific Ocean season formed on Aug. 15, as NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite flew overhead. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite captured a visible image of Rumbia that showed a large storm over Japan’s southern islands. The storm was…

The launch of Parker Solar Probe, the mission that will get closer to the Sun than any human-made object has ever gone, is quickly approaching, and on June 27, 2018, Parker Solar Probe’s heat shield—called the Thermal Protection System, or TPS—was installed on the spacecraft. A mission 60 years in the making, Parker Solar Probe…

An ultra-dark coating comprised of nearly invisible shag rug-like strands made of pure carbon is proving to be highly versatile for all types of spaceflight applications. In the most recent application of the carbon-nanotube coating, optical engineer John Hagopian, a contractor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Goddard scientist Lucy Lim…

After an amateur astronomer recorded observations of a satellite in high Earth orbit on Jan. 20, 2018, his initial research suggested it was the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE)—a NASA mission launched into orbit around Earth on March 25, 2000. Seeking to ascertain whether the signal indeed came from IMAGE, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight…

NOAA’s GOES East satellite provided an image of Post-Tropical Cyclone Selma as it dissipated near the border of El Salvador and Honduras. The National Hurricane Center final advisory on Selma was issued on Oct. 28 at 4 p.m. CDT (2100 UTC). At that time the National Hurricane Center said the center of Post-Tropical Cyclone Selma…

At NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland the James Webb Space Telescope team completed the acoustic and vibration portions of environmental testing on the telescope. These tests are merely two of the many that spacecraft and instruments endure to ensure they are fit for spaceflight. For the acoustic test, the telescope was wrapped in a…

On May 16, 2016, the bread loaf-sized Miniature X-Ray Solar Spectrometer, or MinXSS, CubeSat deployed from an airlock on the International Space Station to begin its journey into space. The NASA-funded MinXSS studies emissions from the sun that can affect our communications systems. MinXSS will operate for up to 12 months. The CubeSat observes soft…

On Sept. 14, waves of energy traveling for more than a billion years gently rattled space-time in the vicinity of Earth. The disturbance, produced by a pair of merging black holes, was captured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. This event marked the first-ever detection of gravitational…

NASA’s first wide-field soft X-ray camera, which incorporated a never-before-flown focusing technology when it debuted in late 2012, is a gift that keeps giving. NASA recently selected a miniaturized version of the original X-ray camera to fly as a CubeSat mission to study Earth’s magnetic cusps – regions in the magnetic cocoon around our planet…

Spending nearly a year in space, 249 miles from Earth, could be a lonely prospect, but an office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, made sure astronaut Scott Kelly could reach home for the entire 340-day duration of his mission. Not only could Kelly communicate with mission control in Houston, but Goddard’s…

Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., accomplished another first. Using a large overhead crane, they mated two Magnetospheric Multiscale, or MMS, observatories — also called mini-stacks — at a time, to construct a full four-stack of observatories. Next, the MMS four-stack will be carefully transported from their Goddard cleanroom to a…

The fully integrated spacecraft and science instrument for NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) mission is seen in a clean room at the Lockheed Martin Space Systems Sunnyvale, Calif. facility. The solar arrays are deployed in the configuration they will assume when in orbit. Credit: Credit: Lockheed Martin Read: NASA’s IRIS Spacecraft is Fully Integrated

NASA’s next Small Explorer (SMEX) mission to study the little-understood lower levels of the sun’s atmosphere has been fully integrated and final testing is underway. Scheduled to launch in April 2013, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) will make use of high-resolution images, data and advanced computer models to unravel how matter, light, and energy…