Month: November 2024

NASA Awards Launch Services Contract for Dragonfly Mission

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Caption: Artist’s concept of Dragonfly soaring over the dunes of Saturn’s moon Titan. NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben NASA has selected SpaceX to provide launch services for the Dragonfly mission, a rotorcraft lander mission under NASA’s New Frontiers Program, designed to explore Saturn’s moon Titan. The mission will sample materials and determine surface composition in different geologic settings, advancing our search for the building blocks of life. The firm-fixed-price contract has a value of approximately $256.6 million, which includes launch services and other mission related costs. The Dragonfly mission currently has…

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Mini NASA Robot Takes a SWIM

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This robot prototype was built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to demonstrate the feasibility of a mission concept called SWIM, short for Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers. SWIM envisions a swarm of dozens of self-propelled, cellphone-size robots exploring the waters of icy moons like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus.

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Strange ‘zebra’ patterns are coming from the Crab Nebula — this physicist finally figured out why

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Historical records from around the world describe a bright star appearing in the sky in the year 1054. Today, astronomers are confident that what our ancestors were seeing was, in truth, a star that had gone supernova. But this wasn’t just any supernova. It was a supernova that would eventually lead to the formation of the Crab Nebula — a collage of interstellar gas and dust illuminated by the energy expelled during the death throes of a rapidly contracting nuclear furnace.The star in question would eventually become a pulsar —…

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NASA satellites reveal Earth’s continents are getting drier

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The amount of freshwater found on our planet has dropped significantly in the last decade, NASA satellites have found. An international team of scientists reviewed observations taken by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites operated by NASA, the German Aerospace Center and the German Research Center for Geosciences. The data collected by GRACE revealed that beginning in May 2014, there was a plunge in Earth’s freshwater supply, and the planet has still not recovered. The researchers suggest that this evidence could also mean Earth is undergoing a drier…

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The moon eclipses bright blue star Spica this week. Here’s how to see it

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Earlier this month, the planet Saturn was eclipsed by the moon as seen from Central America, northwest portions of South America, as well as central and southern Florida. This event, known as an occultation (derived from the Latin word occultāre, which means “to conceal”, can be a startling spectacle, especially if it involves a bright star. But unlike a planet which can take up to a minute or two to be completely covered by the moon, a star, in contrast, appears to creep up to the moon’s limb, hangs on…

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Best Predator games of all time

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The Predator movie franchise is now enjoying a resurgence thanks to the big hit that was Prey (2022). With a sequel in the works and another standalone Predator movie coming in the near future, we thought we’d hunt down the best Predator games of all time. Shockingly, the Predator IP hasn’t been nearly as explored as the Alien franchise in video games, at least not on its own; most of the best Predator games ever are actually Alien vs. Predator titles. That doesn’t mean there aren’t ‘solo’ Predator games worth…

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NASA tests cellphone-sized underwater robots for future ocean world missions (video)

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A swarm of tiny robots destined to search for life on a faraway moon recently began its journey in a swimming pool here on Earth. The SWIM robots — short for Sensing With Independent Microswimmers — demonstrated impressive maneuverability during recent tests in the swimming pool at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Pushed along by propellers, the miniature, wedge-shaped robots steered themselves to stay on course, executed a back-and-forth “lawnmower” pattern, and even spelled out “J-P-L,” according to a NASA statement.   Designed to one day search for evidence…

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How a mini-team of NASA archivists is restoring astronomical history

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Precious data from space missions, going back decades, is being carefully restored and archived by scientists at NASA’s Space Science Date Coordinated Archive, allowing researchers today to make new discoveries by delving into the history books. “What’s surprising is how much of this information is either lost or at least not in a condition that anybody can use it in,” planetary scientist David Williams of the National Space Science Data Center Archive (NSSDCA) told Space.com. “We’ve got tons of photography, reels of film from various missions, a lot of microfilm…

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‘Forbidden Planet’ is one of the most influential sci-fi films of all time, and it’s getting a remake

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In the realm of retro science fiction cinema, “Forbidden Planet” is unanimously considered a Hollywood classic and ranks at the top of almost any serious list of seminal outer space films. This 1956 retelling of William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” proudly stands amid the company of other vintage works like “The Thing From Another World,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” “The War of the Worlds,” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still” as prime examples of that long-past Golden Age. Of that celebrated group of 1950s sci-fi movies, “Forbidden Planet” also…

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NASA awards $11.5 million to help design the aircraft of tomorrow

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NASA is looking to develop a new generation of low-emission commercial aircraft that will offer a more efficient and sustainable mode of travel. The space agency has commissioned five new design studies as part of its Advanced Aircraft Concepts for Environmental Sustainability (AACES) 2050 initiative. The organizations contributing to new airliner design concepts include Boeing’s Aurora Flight Sciences, the aerospace company Electra, the Georgia Institute of Technology, the aviation startup JetZero and Pratt & Whitney, according to a statement from NASA. “Through initiatives like AACES, NASA is positioned to harness…

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