Day: June 9, 2025

12-mile-tall volcano on Mars punches through clouds | Space photo of the day for June 10, 2025

NeRD

A bit after sunrise on June 6, 2025, NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter saw one of Mars’ biggest volcanoes, Arsia Mons, as it broke through the clouds. The volcano is the cloudiest of the Tharsis volcanoes, a trio that is tightly aligned on Mars’ surface. What is it? Standing at over 12 miles (20 kilometers) with a diameter of 270 miles (450km), Arsia Mons is nearly twice as high as Mauna Loa, Earth’s largest volcano, which sits at 6 miles (9 kilometers) from the seafloor. Due to its height, Arsia…

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Paul Morris: Filming the Final Frontier

NeRD

Video Producer – Goddard Space Flight Center What sparked your interest in video production, and what drew you to NASA?  Ever since I saw “Star Wars” at nine years old, I knew I wanted to make movies. I would make little stop action videos with my action figures. How did you land this role at NASA, and what do your duties entail? I was working with a company in New York for about eight years, producing a daily live interactive show on Facebook. I’ve always been obsessed with NASA, so…

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Golden Dome: An aerospace engineer explains the proposed US-wide missile defense system

NeRD

This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Iain Boyd is a professor of aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. President Donald Trump announced a plan to build a missile defense system, called the Golden Dome, on May 20, 2025. The system is intended to protect the United States from ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles, and missiles launched from space. Trump is calling for the current budget to allocate US$25 billion to launch the initiative,…

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There’s an infinite amount of energy locked in the vacuum of space-time. Could we ever use it?

NeRD

There may be an infinite amount of energy locked in the vacuum of space-time. So could we ever harness this energy for anything useful? The idea of vacuum energy comes from quantum field theory, which is a marriage of quantum mechanics with Einstein’s theory of special relativity. In quantum field theory, particles are not really what we think they are. Instead, they are better represented as fields, which are quantum entities that span all of space and time. When a localized patch of the field gets sufficient energy and starts…

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