Goddard Space Flight Center

SpaceX rocket readied for space station resupply run

August 13, 2017 Stephen Clark

Ground teams at the Kennedy Space Center were packing last-minute cargo into a commercial Dragon supply ship Sunday, a day before the automated freighter is set for liftoff on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on a two-day trek to the International Space Station.

Experiment devoted to neutron star research installed on space station

June 19, 2017 Stephen Clark

A NASA instrument built to help astronomers learn about the structure and behavior of neutron stars, super-dense stellar skeletons left behind by massive explosions, has been mounted to an observation post outside the International Space Station after delivery aboard a SpaceX supply ship earlier this month.

Budget proposal puts NASA satellite servicing mission in doubt

May 23, 2017 Stephen Clark

NASA plans to shelve a robotic demonstration mission to refuel an aging Landsat Earth-imaging observatory and join forces with the private sector and a U.S. military research and development agency in a public-private partnership to commercialize satellite servicing technologies, according to language in the White House’s budget request released Tuesday.

James Webb Space Telescope shipped to Texas for its biggest test yet

May 9, 2017 Stephen Clark

The centerpiece of the James Webb Space Telescope has arrived at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for a three-month test to ensure the observatory’s sensors and gold-coated mirrors work in the frigid temperatures of deep space.

Pioneering Earth observation satellite retired by NASA

April 1, 2017 Stephen Clark

NASA has decommissioned a long-lived satellite launched in 2000 that demonstrated remote sensing and surveying instruments and techniques common in today’s orbiting Earth observatories.

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx probe moonlights as asteroid sleuth

February 1, 2017 Stephen Clark

On course to collect specimens from asteroid Bennu after its launch last year, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will search this month for objects locked in orbits near Earth, a bonus science opportunity to locate possible fragments of the primordial building blocks that formed our home planet.

NASA resumes JWST vibration testing

January 25, 2017 Stephen Clark

Vibration testing on the James Webb Space Telescope, the multibillion-dollar successor to Hubble, has resumed after engineers traced a problem that cropped up last month to a restraint holding part of the observatory’s giant segmented mirror in place for launch.