NASA confirmed an impressive feat today. The agency has confirmed that a man-made object has reached the space between the stars for the second time in history. NASA’s Voyager 2 probe has entered interstellar space after existing the heliosphere, the plasma bubble created by the sun which covers most of our solar system.
InSight, NASA’s robotic lander, has successfully touched down on Mars. It has spent seven months traveling through space to reach the Red Planet. It notified the agency of its successful landing with a “beep” signal shortly after touching down to confirm that everything was as it should be. A photo of the Martian surface where it landed was sent back to Earth as well.
Supersonic commercial air travel may become a possibility at some point in the future. NASA has been working to make that happen. The first part of the X-59 Quiet Supersonic Technology aircraft is now being built by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works team as part of NASA’s Low-Boom Flight Demonstration program.
NASA will be sending another rover to Mars in 2020 and the space agency has now confirmed where it’s going to land the machine. The Jezero Crater has been chosen as the landing site for the Mars 2020 rover. It has been selected as the landing spot after a five year search during which every detail of more than 60 possible locations was scrutinized and debated by the mission team […]
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NASA has announced that it has delayed the James Webb Space Telescope launch after an independent review board unanimously recommended that the development work on the new telescope should continue. In light of the recommendation, NASA has decided to delay the launch of its next major telescope to 2021. For those who are unaware, the James Webb Space Telescope is the successor to NASA’s famous Hubble Telescope.
For a while we’ve known about Apple’s interest in self-driving cars and the technology behind it. We’re not sure what the company plans to do about it, but whatever the company is planning for the technology is certainly progressing thanks to a recent hire in the form of Jaime Waydo, a senior engineer who previously worked with Waymo and was also at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
As part of its 2020 mission to put a more advanced rover on the Red Planet, NASA has announced that it’s going to send a small helicopter to Mars. This would make it the first time that an aircraft like the helicopter will be used outside our planet. The Mars Helicopter that NASA has developed is going to travel to the neighboring planet with the agency’s Mars 2020 rover. It’s […]
There’s some bad news for those who have been following NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope project. It’s the successor to the Hubble telescope that has been at the center of many a discovery up in space. It’s going to be 100x more powerful than the Hubble. NASA was previously planning to launch the telescope between March and June 2019 but it has confirmed today that the James Webb Space Telescope […]
Update – Turns out the original report by Business Insider was not completely accurate. According to a statement released by NASA Johnson Space Center News Chief Kelly O. Humphries, “Mark and Scott Kelly are still identical twins. Scott’s DNA did not fundamentally change. What researchers did observe are changes in gene expression, which is how your body reacts to your environment. This likely is within the range for humans under stress, such as […]
It was reported last year that the International Space Station could be decommissioned by 2024 but if a new report is to be believed, that might not happen. That’s because the Trump administration is now believed to be thinking about privatizing the massive international experiment that orbits the planet. The administration is now mulling the idea of handing over the International Space Station to the private industry.
For those unfamiliar, muscle atrophy is when we do not regularly use or exercise our muscles, leading to them weakening and deterioating. This is especially prevalent in astronauts as maintaining muscle mass while in space has proven to be an issue, where astronauts typically require physiotherapy when they get back to Earth after their missions in space.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been trying to perfect a clock for 20 years because accurate timekeeping is very important to navigation in space. The Deep Space Atomic Clock or DSAC is being built for deep space exploration. The space agency has said that it’s going to test this atomic clock later this year.
Lego confirmed earlier this year that it was building a “Women of NASA” set. The idea was actually submitted to the company by Maia Weinstock, the MIT deputy news editor, in its Lego Ideas competition. The set is ready now and will soon be available for purchase. Lego has confirmed that the Women of NASA set will be sold starting next month.
Many of us have never sat inside a supersonic plane. We might have had a chance if the Concorde was still around but that supersonic plane was grounded a long time back. However, it seems that we might be able to travel faster than the speed of sound on a commercial flight in a couple of decades. NASA has designed a new supersonic plane that will not only drastically reduce […]