Precise brightness measurements over a broad spectrum of mid-infrared light, combined with 3D climate models and previous observations from other telescopes, suggest the presence of thick, high clouds covering the nightside, clear skies on the dayside, and equ... More »
Eduardo Martinez, a master’s student in civil engineering at California State University, Los Angeles, initially saw no connection between wastewater management and the search for life on Mars. However, after his professor, Arezoo Khodayari, pointed him toward... More »
NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) technology demonstration, led by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, has achieved significant milestones in its mission to revolutionize space communications. Riding aboard the Psyche spacecraft, ... More »
No crystal ball is needed to envision a future that engineers have in mind, one in which air taxis and other flying vehicles ferry passengers between urban locations, avoiding the growing gridlock on the ground below. Companies are already prototyping and test... More »
William M. (Bil) Clemons, Jr., the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Biochemistry, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary society founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, and others. Clemons has been on the... More »
After 17 years of pioneering observations, NASA’s CloudSat mission, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena has come to an end. Launched in 2006, CloudSat’s Cloud Profiling Radar instrument was developed by JPL with important hardware contributio... More »
Each year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) selects students to receive Graduate Research Fellowships that fund three years of graduate study in master’s or doctoral programs including research in science or engineering. This year, 23 current Caltech stud... More »
For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voy... More »
Lynne Hillenbrand, professor of astronomy at Caltech, and Anneila Sargent (PhD ’78), the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, have been named 2023 AAAS Fellows. In addition, Joseph Giaime, the head of the LIGO Livingston laboratory, which is managed ... More »
Engineers working on NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter assembled for one last time in a control room at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Tuesday, April 16, to monitor a transmission from the history-making helicopter. While the m... More »
Many of us would love the superpower to fly, and for good reason: Flight offers a crucial evolutionary advantage. Flying enables an animal to travel large distances quickly, in search of food and new habitats, while expending far less energy than walking. Thro... More »
Hoping to breathe new life into a long-planned but financially struggling effort to retrieve soil and rock samples from Mars and return them to Earth, NASA leaders are reaching out to the space-exploration community Tuesday for proposals that will lower the $1... More »
