author, research scientist
China achieved a historic feat by bringing back the first-ever sample from the lunar far side in June 2024. It’s moon lander, Chang’e 6, used a robotic scoop and drill to collect approximately 5 pounds (2 kilograms) of rocks and soil. These samples came back to Earth on June 25, 2024. Chang’e 6 built off…
“Every quarter-second, the ASC takes an image of the stars,” said Juno scientist John Leif Jørgensen of the Technical University of Denmark. “Very energetic electrons that penetrate its shielding leave a telltale signature in our images that looks like the trail of a firefly. The instrument is programmed to count the number of these fireflies,…
Twelve years ago, NASA landed its six-wheeled science lab using a daring new technology that lowers the rover using a robotic jetpack. NASA’s Curiosity rover mission is celebrating a dozen years on the Red Planet, where the six-wheeled scientist continues to make big discoveries as it inches up the foothills of a Martian mountain. Just…
The Deep Space Network’s Goldstone planetary radar had a busy few days observing asteroids 2024 MK and 2011 UL21 as they safely passed Earth. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California recently tracked two asteroids as they flew by our planet. One turned out to have a little moon orbiting it, while the…
Our solar system began to form about 4.6 billion years ago. Astronomers think small rocky and icy grains within the solar nebula began sticking together, growing into even larger objects. Although the process remains poorly understood, solid objects miles or more across eventually populated the disk. Astronomers call these bodies planetesimals. Within a million years…
NASA has released two white papers associated with the agency’s Moon to Mars architecture efforts. The papers, one on lunar mobility drivers and needs, and one on lunar surface cargo, detail NASA’s latest thinking on specific areas of its lunar exploration strategy. While NASA has established a yearly cadence of releasing new documents associated with…
During its flyby, Voyager 2 discovered 10 new moons (given such names as Puck, Portia, Juliet, Cressida, Rosalind, Belinda, Desdemona, Cordelia, Ophelia, and Bianca – obvious allusions to Shakespeare, continuing a naming tradition begun in 1787), two new rings in addition to the “older” nine rings, and a magnetic field tilted at 55 degrees off-axis…
It’s also thought that the extremely close quarters allowed the universe’s very first particles to mix, mingle, and settle into roughly the same temperature. Then, in an unimaginably small fraction of a second, all that matter and energy expanded outward more or less evenly, with tiny variations provided by fluctuations on the quantum scale. That…
