This diagram illustrates the positions of Mars, Earth and the sun during a period that occurs approximately every 26 months, when Mars passes almost directly behind the sun from Earth’s perspective. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Mars Missions Status Report Th... More »
World Water Day is held annually on March 22 as a means of focusing attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources. NASA scientists and missions study Earth’s water and provide data used by decis... More »
The bulk of the Planck computations were performed on the Cray XE6 supercomputer, named for computer scientist Grace Hopper, at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkel... More »
This view of Curiosity’s left-front and left-center wheels and of marks made by wheels on the ground in the “Yellowknife Bay” area comes from one of six cameras used on Mars for the first time more than six months after the rover landed. The left Navigation Ca... More »
Scientists have now discovered that studying meteorites from the giant asteroid Vesta helps them understand the event known as the “lunar cataclysm,” when a repositioning of the gas giant planets destabilized a portion of the asteroid belt and triggered a sola... More »
The Cassini spacecraft observes three of Saturn’s moons set against the darkened night side of the planet. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute A new analysis of data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft suggests that Saturn’s moons and rings are gently wo... More »
Winners of the 2013 Los Angeles regional FIRST Robotics Competition, Dos Pueblos High School Engineering Academy, Atascadero High School and Milken Community High School (pictured left to right) will go on to compete in the FIRST Championship to be held April ... More »
NASA researchers modified three repurposed Aerovironment RQ-14 Dragon Eye unmanned aerial vehicles acquired from the United States Marine Corps to study the sulfur dioxide plume of Costa Rica’s Turrialba volcano. The project is designed to improve the remote s... More »
W3 is an enormous stellar nursery about 6,200 light-years away in the Perseus Arm, one of the Milky Way galaxy’s main spiral arms, which hosts both low- and high-mass star formation. In this image from the Herschel space observatory, the low-mass forming stars... More »
JPL says an analysis of a rock sample collected by its Curiosity rover shows ancient Mars could have supported living microbes. Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon — some of the key chemical ingredients for life — in... More »
If you could lick the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, you would actually be sampling a bit of the ocean beneath. A new paper by Mike Brown, an astronomer at Caltech, and Kevin Hand, from JPL, details the strongest evidence yet that salty water from the v... More »
The Herschel infrared observatory has an unprecedented view on the cold universe, bridging the gap between what can be observed from the ground and earlier infrared space missions, and bringing to light previously unseen star-forming regions and galaxies enshr... More »
