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NASA’s InSight Lander Detects its First Marsquake
Since the recent Mojave Desert and Ridgecrest earthquakes, tremors in the ground have been on people’s minds. And the approaching 30th anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake reminds the Bay Area...
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NASA’s Europa Clipper Is A Go
NASA has taken a big step closer to testing the waters of the ocean hiding under the icy crust of Europa, Jupiter’s most enigmatic moon. The Europa Clipper mission, in development at the Jet Propulsion...
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Your Kid Could Name the Mars 2020 Rover
NASA plans soon to send another robotic rover to Mars. The only problem is, the agency needs a good name for it. That’s where young minds come in. If you’re in kindergarten to 12th grade, you may be...
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NASA Wants to Send Shapeshifting Robots to Saturn Moon
As they conceive a new generation of robotic “rovers,” NASA engineers are challenging themselves to think outside the box. The contraptions they envision bear little resemblance to the car-like,...
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Curiosity Rover Finds Clues to a Watery Past on Mars
In its quest to find signs of water in the sediments of Mount Sharp, NASA’s rover Curiosity has turned up some tantalizing clues to when and how the young, watery Mars began to dry up. Images of...
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NASA Hopes to Find Direct Evidence of Past Life on Mars With 2021 Landing
For the first time in over 40 years, NASA plans to search for Martians — not living ones but the very long dead remains of life forms that may have thrived on a watery planet 3.5 billion years ago....
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NASA’s New Space Observatory Discovers Its First Earth-like Exoplanet
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite, or TESS, made its first-ever discovery of an extrasolar planet of Earth’s size that is also located within its star’s habitable zone. Exoplanet hunters...
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Vote Here for the Name of New Mars Rover. Polls Close Monday Night
What would you name NASA’s next Mars rover? Last year, the space agency posed this question to students in Kindergarten through 12th grade, along with a homework assignment: Write an essay to convince...
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NASA Plans to Send a Woman to the Moon … and Really Soon
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy told his country, “We choose to go to the moon!” It took another seven years before the first two men of the Apollo program set foot there. But now, have you heard?...
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Top 10 All-Time Favorite Space Pics From an Astronomer in Isolation
Looking for another entertaining, educational thing to do during your stay-at-home confinement? Here’s a list of favorite space images, collected by an astronomer — me — passing the time in isolation,...
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NASA Scientists Now Have to Explore Mars From Their Own Homes
On Mars, nothing has changed for the rover Curiosity because of the coronavirus pandemic. It continues its exploration up the slopes of Mount Sharp. Curiosity drives where it’s told, stopping to take a...
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NASA Mission to Look for Past Life on Mars Still on Track, Despite Coronavirus
While most of us have been in shelter-at-home mode, Perseverance, NASA’s next-generation Mars rover, has been getting ready for a major trip. In February, it packed its bags, so to speak, and moved...
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A New SpaceX Spacecraft Will Launch Wednesday, With NASA Astronauts on Board
Almost 40 years have passed since the last time NASA astronauts blasted off into space on a brand new spaceship. Now, as NASA looks forward to Wednesday’s planned test flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon...
View ArticleSpaceX Launch Carrying NASA Astronauts Postponed Due to Weather
The launch of a SpaceX rocket ship with two NASA astronauts on a history-making flight into orbit was called off with 16 minutes to go in the countdown Wednesday because of thunderclouds and the danger...
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NASA Plans to Use ‘Lunar Flashlight’ in Search for Moon Water
NASA’s goal of returning humans, including a female astronaut, to the moon with the 2024 Artemis mission is approaching, and engineers are getting ready. They’ll land on the lunar surface from an...
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Kepler Gem: Scientists Find a Tantalizing, and Overlooked Exoplanet
Scientists have made an exciting discovery in deep space — but not with an existing telescope or space probe. Combing through a backlog of data collected several years ago by NASA’s now defunct Kepler...
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Weather Report from Jupiter: Mushballs, With a Chance of Shallow Lightning
Four years after arriving at the planet Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft is still making fresh discoveries and sending us breathtaking pictures of the gas giant and its entourage of at least 79 moons....
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How Often Do Space Objects Hit Earth? A Primer
The year 2020 is clearly out to make its mark in a big way: a global pandemic, massive wildfires across the Western United States, huge demonstrations for social justice around the globe. Here’s...
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Is There Life in the Clouds Above Venus?
In an era of deep space exploration, a tantalizing and surprising discovery has raised the possibility of life on Earth’s nearest, scorching-hot planetary neighbor Venus. Scientists observing with the...
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Did Earth Receive a Radio Transmission From Proxima Centauri?
A team of astronomers is hard at work analyzing an unusual radio signal detected early in 2019 by the Parkes telescope, a 64-meter radio dish in eastern Australia. The signal appears to have come from...
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After Breathtaking Images and Stupendous Discoveries, Spacecraft Juno Gets 4...
Like an artist whose pleased patron commissions more masterpieces, NASA’s Juno spacecraft just earned an extension after four extraordinary years of discovery. And if you’ve seen any of Juno’s images...
View ArticleWatch Live Coverage of Mars Rover Perseverance Landing
After years of complicated preparations, NASA is expected to attempt its ninth Mars landing on Thursday at 12:55 p.m. PT. The live landing commentary will begin at 11:15 a.m. If it lands successfully,...
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Was There Life on Mars? The Mission to Find Out Begins, as Perseverance...
Touchdown! No, it’s not football — unless you imagine a playing field 300 million miles long and a fiery 25,000 mph end-zone plunge. The ball in play is NASA’s Perseverance rover, which successfully...
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NASA Is Considering 5 Space Tech Concepts That Sound Like Sci-Fi
Farming space with soil from asteroids “digested” by fungus? Levitating across the lunar landscape? How about powering a moon base with sunlight? Or scaffolding enormous spinning space habitats?...
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Meet the Interstellar Five, Robotic Explorers Venturing Far, Far From Earth
More than four decades after launch, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is over 14 billion miles from Earth, cruising an eternal course through the stars of the Milky Way galaxy. And Voyager 1 is not the only...
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A Helicopter Takes Flight on Mars
More than a century ago the first propeller-driven aircraft took off on Earth. On Monday, another one took flight for the first time on a different planet. NASA’s experimental Mars Helicopter,...
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Earth Day 2021: 11 Bay Area Events to Get You Inspired
The first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, kicked off the modern environmental movement with more than 20 million Americans — 10% of the U.S. population — hitting the streets to demand action against...
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By Flying Helicopter, Making Oxygen on Mars, NASA Lays Groundwork for Human...
The only helicopter on Mars has done it again. Ingenuity took off on its fourth flight Friday, reaching an altitude of 16 feet and traveling a distance of almost three football fields — 872 feet —...
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NASA Prepares to Return to Venus for the First Time in Decades
Venus is back on the menu for space exploration! NASA announced the selection of not one, but two new missions to Earth’s closest planetary neighbor. The first mission — Deep Atmosphere Venus...
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Are There Lakes Hiding on Mars? Echoes From the Deep Raise This Tantalizing...
In 2018, a highly sophisticated instrument probing the surface of Mars called MARSIS (Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding) detected radar echoes from an area deep beneath the...
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