News Archive
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217 articles
DSCOVR resumes operations after eight-month outage
The Deep Space Climate Observatory has resumed regular observations after NOAA and NASA engineers uplinked a software patch to the spacecraft a million miles from Earth, restoring data on space weather and a daily series views of the sunlit side of our home planet.
NASA taps SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket to launch mission to metal asteroid
NASA has selected SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket to launch a robotic mission in July 2022 to explore Psyche, a metal-rich asteroid located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The Psyche probe is NASA's first mission assigned to fly on SpaceX's heavy-lift launcher.
NASA’s InSight mission shows Mars is a seismically active world
While one of its two science instruments remains sidelined, NASA's InSight probe has proven Mars is seismically active through the detection of hundreds of quakes, some of which can be traced to a volcanic region nearly 1,000 miles away.
Phobos sample return mission enters development for 2024 launch
Japan's space agency has approved a robotic mission to retrieve a sample from the Martian moon Phobos for return to Earth to begin full development for a planned launch in 2024, officials said Thursday.
NASA to assess proposals for probes to Venus, moons of Jupiter and Neptune
NASA announced Thursday it will fund four concept studies for potential robotic missions to Venus, Jupiter's moon Io and Neptune's moon Triton ahead of a decision next year to approve up to two of the projects for launch in the mid-to-late 2020s.
NASA invites public to vote on name for Mars 2020 rover
NASA has announced the nine finalists for the name of the space agency's next Mars rover -- scheduled for launch in July -- and invited the public to vote on the candidates before making a final selection in the coming months.
NASA selects site for OSIRIS-REx to collect asteroid samples
Using precise autonomous navigation algorithms, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will descend to the surface of an asteroid next year, aiming to retrieve rock specimens for return to Earth from a gravelly pit flanked by hazardous boulders, scientists said Thursday.
Amateur sleuth helps locate crash site of India’s Vikram moon lander
An Indian software developer and mechanical engineer combing through high-resolution imagery captured by a NASA spacecraft has located debris scattered on the lunar surface in September by the crash of the Vikram lander, India's first probe to attempt a soft touchdown on the moon, NASA said Monday.
SpaceX offering Starship to NASA for lunar landing missions
SpaceX is eligible to propose using its next-generation Starship vehicle to carry NASA robotic science payloads to the lunar surface, the U.S. space agency announced Monday, on missions that could precede future Starship flights with people on-board. SpaceX is one of five companies NASA selected Monday to join a roster of commercial transportation providers to deliver scientific instruments and technology demonstration packages to the moon as soon as 2022.
NASA’s VIPER rover in development for scouting mission to moon’s south pole
Building on a mission canceled last year, NASA is developing a mobile robot named VIPER for launch in 2022 to scout for water ice at the moon's south pole, the same region where the agency aims to land astronauts by 2024.