Day: February 26, 2025

These dwarf galaxies in the Hydra cluster are baffling scientists: ‘We found something we didn’t expect’

NeRD

Astronomers have discovered something surprising about the universe’s smallest and faintest class of galaxies: Ultra-Diffuse Galaxies (UDGs). A research team studying these galaxies found that around half of the ones they investigated showed signs of motion that defy previous theories about the formation and evolution of such realms. In particular, the team found an unexpected rotational motion of stars within many of these dwarf galaxies. The scientists reached these findings while studying stellar motion in 30 UDGs in the Hydra galaxy cluster located over 160 million light-years away from us.…

Read More

NASA Remembers Long-Time Civil Servant John Boyd

NeRD

Portrait of John Boyd, whose contributions to NASA spanned more than 70 years. Credit: NASA John Boyd, known to many as Jack and whose career spanned more than seven decades in a multitude of roles across NASA as well as its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), died Feb. 20. He was 99. Born in 1925, and raised in Danville, Virginia, he was a long-time resident of Saratoga, California. Boyd is being remembered by many across the agency, including Dr. Eugene Tu, director, NASA’s Ames Research Center in…

Read More

Fourth Launch of NASA Instruments Planned for Near Moon’s South Pole

NeRD

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stands vertical on Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2025, at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center ahead of Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative and Artemis campaign. SpaceX Sending instruments to the Moon supports a growing lunar economy on and off Earth, and the next flight of NASA science and technology is only days away. NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative is a lunar delivery service that sends NASA science and technology instruments to various geographic…

Read More

Milky Way on the Horizon

NeRD

The Milky Way appears beyond Earth’s horizon in this celestial photograph captured on Jan. 29, 2025, by NASA astronaut Don Pettit using a camera with low light and long duration settings pointed out a window on the SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft. The International Space Station was orbiting 265 miles above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile just before sunrise.

Read More

NASA leadership shakeup continues as agency settles into Trump’s 2nd term

NeRD

NASA continues to reshape its leadership tier. The agency announced a number of personnel moves on Monday (Feb. 24), including the selection of Vanessa Wyche as acting associate administrator. “Vanessa will bring exceptional leadership to NASA’s senior ranks, helping guide our workforce toward the opportunities that lie ahead,” NASA Acting Administrator Janet Petro said in a statement on Monday. The associate administrator serves as NASA’s chief operating officer, overseeing its 18,000 employees and nearly $25 billion budget, agency officials wrote in the statement. Wyche succeeds Jim Free, who retired a…

Read More

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 to Discuss Space Station Mission, Upcoming Return

NeRD

The four crew members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission, including NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, pose for a photo aboard the International Space Station NASA Media are invited to hear from NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts during a news conference beginning at 11:55 a.m. EST, Tuesday, March 4, from the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore will discuss their return to Earth on NASA+. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms,…

Read More