🦞🌯 Lobster Roll

NASA’s LRO overcame a critical sensor failure through the innovative FastMan algorithm, enabling the spacecraft to continue capturing valuable lunar data and supporting future Artemis missions. NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft has far exceeded its planned mission duration, reveal...

Perseverance’s descent caught by HiRISE in a stunning Martian snapshot. The descent stage holding NASA’s Perseverance rover can be seen falling through the Martian atmosphere, its parachute trailing behind, in this image taken on February 18, 2021, by the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (Hi...

A Step in the Search for Life Elsewhere in the Galaxy The huge forces generated by the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories are being used to replicate the gravitational pressures on so-called “super-Earths” to determine which might maintain atmospheres that could support life. Astronomers beli...

At the lunar poles, the Sun circles the horizon endlessly, casting extreme shadows and creating frigid craters that trap water ice. At the Moon’s North and South Poles, the Sun is never more than 1.5° above or below the horizon. The resulting pattern of daylight and shadows is unlike anywhere ...

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a striking image of Saturn and its rings from 90 kilometers above the Moon’s surface. From a viewpoint about 90 kilometers (56 miles) above Lacus Veris, “Lake of Spring,” the camera aboard NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft i...

Even undisturbed sand piles creep like glass, with grains constantly in motion. Experiments reveal soil behavior can be tuned by disturbances, offering new clues for landslide prediction. A recent study published in Nature Communications finds that piles of sand grains, even when undisturbed, are in...

Caltech researchers used the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to determine that surface water left salt minerals behind as recently as 2 billion years ago. Mars once rippled with rivers and ponds billions of years ago, providing a potential habitat for microbial life. As the planet’s atmosphere thinned o...

Hardware and software improvements shorten ‘run time’ from year to a day. A Sandia National Laboratories supercomputer simulation model called SNAP that rapidly predicts the behavior of billions of interacting atoms has captured the melting of diamond when compressed by extreme pressures and tempera...

The accidental experiment will shed light on the physics of impacts in space. On March 4, 2022, a lonely, spent rocket booster will smack into the surface of the Moon at nearly 6,000 mph. Once the dust has settled, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will move into position to get an up-close view o...

China’s Tianwen-1 lander and Zhurong rover touched down on the Martian plain Utopia Planitia on May 14, 2021 after spending about three months orbiting the Red Planet. While the Chinese Space Agency has shared images of the rover and lander (including a cute family portrait taken by a wireless remot...

Astronomers discovered a rocket body heading toward a lunar collision late last year. Impact occurred on March 4, 2022, with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) later spotting the resulting crater. Surprisingly the crater is actually two craters, an eastern crater (18-meter diameter, abo...

The rainbow-colored map, to be released in batches over six months, covers the vast majority of the planet Mars, revealing dozens of minerals found on its surface. Scientists are about to get a new look at the Red Planet, thanks to a multicolored 5.6-gigapixel map. Covering 86% of the surface of Mar...

Unusual Circular Sand Dunes With Asymmetrical Slip Faces Were Imaged on Mars Sand dunes of many shapes and sizes are common on Mars. In this example, the dunes are almost perfectly circular, which is unusual. They are still slightly asymmetrical, with steep slip faces on the south ends. This indicat...

One of six instruments aboard the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, CRISM produced global maps of minerals on the Red Planet’s surface. After 17 years of service, NASA has decommissioned CRISM, the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, which was aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orb...

Researchers have discovered a new state of matter, which they call a “bosonic correlated insulator,” a crystalline assembly of bosonic particles, specifically excitons. Take a lattice — a flat section of a grid of uniform cells, like a window screen or a honeycomb — and lay another, simi...

For the 2024 Artemis II mission, astronauts are trained using extensive data from NASA’s 14-year-old Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, ensuring well-informed lunar explorations. When astronauts set off for a trip around the Moon in 2024 with NASA’s Artemis II mission, they will go primed with knowledge ...

NASA’s LRO – the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter – spacecraft imaged the Chandrayaan-3 landing site on the Moon’s surface. The ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) Chandrayaan-3 touched down on the Moon on August 23, 2023. The Chandrayaan-3 landing site is located about 600 kilometers (370 miles) ...

JAXA’s SLIM lunar landing on January 19, 2024, captured by NASA’s LRO, establishes Japan as the fifth nation to achieve a soft landing on the Moon. On January 19, 2024, at 10:20 a.m. EST, the JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) landed on t...

Odysseus’ landing on the Moon represents a landmark achievement for NASA’s lunar exploration, capturing the first soft landing in over 50 years and highlighting the capabilities of modern space technology. On February 22, Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander, called Odysseus, completed a se...

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a striking image of the Earth during the April 8 solar eclipse from its position 223,000 miles away, showcasing the advanced imaging capabilities of its camera suite. As the Moon blotted out the Sun to viewers across the United States during the April 8 s...

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed China’s Chang’e 6 on the Moon, revealing its location on a crater within the geologically rich Apollo basin, characterized by ancient basaltic flows. On June 7, NASA’s LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) imaged China’s Chang’e 6 sampl...

Stanford researchers have created SandAI, an AI tool that reveals the ancient history of quartz sand grains, identifying how wind, rivers, waves, or glaciers shaped them. By using machine learning, SandAI enhances the accuracy and objectivity of microtextural analysis, making it valuable for geologi...

Watching for changes in the Mars’ orbit over time could be a new way to detect passing dark matter. Dark matter, potentially in the form of primordial black holes, could be revealing its presence through subtle influences on Mars’ orbit. These black holes, theorized remnants from the early uni...