Jet Propulsion Laboratory – Page 7

NASA invites public to vote on name for Mars 2020 rover

January 22, 2020 Stephen Clark

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’s next Mars rover will soon ship to Cape Canaveral launch site

January 2, 2020 Stephen Clark

Fresh off its first terrestrial test drive, NASA’s Mars 2020 rover was displayed to media last week at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California before it’s packed up and flown across the country to Cape Canaveral in February to begin final launch preparations for liftoff in July.

Ground teams studying setback with InSight’s subsurface heat probe

October 29, 2019 Stephen Clark

The self-hammering mole on NASA’s InSight lander partially backed out of the ground over the weekend, the latest setback for a German-built science instrument designed to measure heat flowing from the interior of Mars.

NASA to proceed with asteroid surveillance mission

October 2, 2019 Stephen Clark

After years of studies, NASA plans to move forward with a space-based telescope that could launch as soon as 2025 to scan the solar system for asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft sees moon’s otherworldly shadow on Jupiter

September 18, 2019 Stephen Clark

Fresh images from NASA’s Juno spacecraft show an ethereal shadow cast by Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io on the planet’s swirling cloud tops.

Mini-helicopter installed on NASA’s next Mars-bound rover

September 4, 2019 Stephen Clark

Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California have attached a flying helicopter drone to the belly of the Mars 2020 rover set for launch next July.

NASA’s first interplanetary smallsats may struggle to stay under cost caps

August 5, 2019 Stephen Clark

The first set of proposals for a new class of small robotic probes NASA wants to dispatch across the solar system came in with higher cost estimates than agency officials expected, a NASA manager said Sunday.

Mars 2020 rover on track for launch next July

July 31, 2019 Stephen Clark

The launch of NASA’s Mars 2020 rover is less than a year away, and the steady pace of work inside the craft’s pristine assembly hall in California is keeping the mission on schedule for liftoff from Cape Canaveral next July, despite growing costs, according to mission managers.

Mars lander’s ground team begins inspection of stuck instrument

July 2, 2019 Stephen Clark

In a bit of interplanetary troubleshooting, the robot arm on NASA’s InSight Mars lander has lifted a support structure to reveal an underground thermal probe that got stuck soon after it started hammering into the Red Planet’s surface earlier this year.

NASA technology experiments hitching a ride on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket

June 24, 2019 Stephen Clark

NASA is sending into orbit Monday night a spacecraft to test a safer type of rocket fuel, an ultra-precise atomic clock that could change the way missions navigate in deep space, and an experiment to examine the resiliency of electronics to radiation.