NASA Names New Manager of International Space Station Program

NASA’s springboard for discovery, innovation and deep space exploration has a new chief. The agency has named Kirk Shireman as the new manager of its International Space Station (ISS) Program, based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where Shireman has served as deputy center director since 2013.

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New Online Exploring Tools Bring NASA Journey's to Mars to New Generation

On the three-year anniversary of the Mars landing of NASA's Curiosity rover, NASA is unveiling two new online tools, inviting the public to help with its journey to Mars.

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New Online Tools Bring NASA’s Journey to Mars to New Generation of Explorers

On the three-year anniversary of the Mars landing of NASA’s Curiosity rover, NASA is unveiling two new online tools that open the mysterious terrain of the Red Planet to a new generation of explorers, inviting the public to help with its journey to Mars.

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NASA Notifies Congress About Space Station Contract Modification with Russia

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden sent a letter to Congress Wednesday informing members that, due to continued reductions in the president’s funding requests for the agency’s Commercial Crew Program over the past several years, NASA was forced to extend its existing contract with the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) to transport American as

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Researchers Use 'Seafloor Gardens' to Switch on Light Bulb

How did the very first life forms on Earth get an electrical boost? New laboratory experiments offer clues.

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NASA Awards U.S Global Change Research Program Support Services Contract

NASA has awarded a contract for technical and programmatic support services for the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) National Coordination Office in Washington to ICF Incorporated, LLC of Fairfax, Virginia.

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NASA Deputy Administrator to Tour Composites Technology Center at Marshall

NASA Deputy Administrator to Tour Composites Technology Center at Marshall

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NASA Invites Media to Orion Spacecraft Parachute Test in Arizona

NASA is inviting media to attend a test of the Orion spacecraft’s parachutes on Wednesday, Aug. 26 at the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. An engineering model of the spacecraft will drop from an airplane 35,000 feet up to evaluate how it fares when the parachute system does not perform as expected.

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CometWatch 30 July

Today’s spectacular CometWatch entry was taken by Rosetta’s NAVCAM on 30 July 2015 from a distance of 178 km from Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The image scale is 15.2 m/pixel and the image measures 15.6 km across. Although the activity is visible even in the original image (below), the contrast has been increased in the enhanced image above to better show off these details. It is clear from the prominent jets of dust and gas streaming from the nucleus and out to the edge of the camera’s field of view that activity is becoming more intense – the comet is now just over a week from perihelion on 13 August, its closest approach to the Sun along its orbit. But, while the increasing activity provides dramatic views, it can also lead to difficulties in navigation. Indeed, Rosetta’s star trackers have struggled to identify stars among the large amount of debris being ejected from the nucleus during the last week and is therefore currently moving to safer distances – it will be at about 300 km by Saturday. For more information about perihelion, see our background article and FAQ. Full details of our perihelion Google+ Hangout on 13 August are also coming very soon. The original 1024 x 1024 pixel image for today’s CometWatch entry is provided below:

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Tracking A Mysterious Group of Asteroid Outcasts

Astronomers may have found the source of a particularly hard-to-spot group of near-Earth asteroids, thanks to a once-dormant NASA space telescope.

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First release of Rosetta comet phase data from four orbiter instruments

ESA’s Rosetta downlink and archive teams are very happy to announce the release today of the first wave of Rosetta instrument data from the “comet pre-landing phase” via the Planetary Science Archive. Data from four instruments are included in this release: COSIMA, OSIRIS, ROSINA, and RPC-MAG. After Rosetta woke up from 31 months hibernation in January 2014, its scientific instruments were turned back on and checked out before being used to study Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko during the approach, rendezvous, and escort phases. As agreed between ESA and the funding bodies responsible for Rosetta’s instruments, their data are initially made available to the corresponding scientific teams for first analysis, with a significant number of Rosetta papers published based on these data, as described in previous blog posts. After a nominal period of 6 months, the scientific data themselves are to be delivered to ESA to be placed in the public domain via the Planetary Science Archive (PSA) for use by all scientists and the wider public. In practice, it was agreed to deliver data to ESA for release in blocks, and the first of those blocks was defined as the ‘pre-landing phase’, i.e. covering the period from January 2014 to just after Philae’s landing on the comet in mid-November 2014. This led to a date of 19 May for the instrument teams to deliver the data from that phase to ESA, following which, a very significant effort had to be made by the ESA team to process the datasets of the many instruments involved and prepare them for release. What did this processing entail? Firstly, the data and the associated metadata had to be checked for completeness and for compliance with standard formats to ensure that they can be downloaded and analysed by other scientists in a transparent manner. This involved interactions […]

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