In about five years’ time, a potentially hazardous asteroid will swing by Earth at an eerily close distance of less than 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers). During this rare encounter, Apophis will be ten times closer to Earth than the Moon and scientists want to take full advantage of its visit.
A long overdue mission to Venus is finally back on track after being put on hold due to budgeting and staffing issues at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
NASA outfitted its aging communications network with a hybrid antenna that allowed it to receive both radio frequency and laser signals for the first time, helping the space agency keep up with its increasing number of missions traveling through deep space.
Asteroid 99942 Apophis is fast approaching our home planet for an uncomfortably close encounter in 2029. In order to prepare for the rare event, NASA is calling for ideas for low cost missions to rendezvous with Apophis, but the space agency already has a pair of asteroid probes ready to take on the task.
NASA just combined all of my favorite things: space, lasers, and cats. In a first-of-its-kind demonstration of deep space optical communication, the space agency streamed a high-definition video from 19 million miles away from Earth. And as it turns out, NASA is just as obsessed as we are when it comes to sharing cat…
It departed our planet just over two months ago, but NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is already 16 million miles from Earth, well on its way to its main destination: the asteroid Psyche.
A gold-capped laser transceiver attached to the asteroid probe Psyche saw its first light on Tuesday, sending and receiving data through laser beams from far beyond the Moon for the first time.
A pair of spacecraft is undergoing final testing before a roughly 230 million mile journey to explore the Red Planet.
Update: October, 13, 11:17 a.m. ET: Psyche is finally in space. The Falcon Heavy lifted off on time, sending the probe on its 2.2 billion-mile journey to a highly metallic asteroid.
Wedged between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the main asteroid belt contains over 1 million rocky objects, but perhaps few of them are as intriguing as Psyche. The metal-rich asteroid might have once been an ancient planetary building block that was stripped of its outer rocky shell as our solar system came to be.…
