NASA is scaling back on its ambitious Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, fearing federal budget cuts to the space agency’s plan to bring back rock and dust from the Red Planet, which has come under heavy scrutiny for having unrealistic costs and timelines.
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…
A diligent surveyor of the night skies, NEOWISE is sadly approaching its fiery demise as the Sun’s erratic outbursts are causing the infrared telescope to gradually fall out of its orbit before it eventually burns up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Six California lawmakers wrote to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson last week to oppose the agency’s recent cuts to the Mars Sample Return mission, which aims to bring samples collected by the Perseverance rover on Mars to Earth.
NASA’s Perseverance rover, equipped with an advanced computer pilot known as AutoNav, has been making significant strides on the Martian surface, setting new speed records since its landing in February 2021.
In order to contact its interplanetary spacecraft, NASA relies on an array of giant radio antennas spread across different parts of the world. The trusty communications network has been transferring data back and forth for more than 60 years but its antennas are currently operating at capacity, with an anticipated…
NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has had a rough few months, first losing communication with its home planet and later suffering a glitch that interrupted its flight. But you can’t keep a good chopper down. Ingenuity soared above the Martian terrain once again as its team on Earth tries to figure out what went wrong with…
NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, currently 12.4 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers) from Earth, has phoned home, essentially telling mission controllers that the recent rumors of its impending death have been greatly exaggerated. The ongoing communications problem, however, remains unresolved.
