NASA Chooses American Companies to Transport U.S. Astronauts to International Space Station

U.S. astronauts once again will travel to and from the International Space Station from the United States on American spacecraft under groundbreaking contracts NASA announced Tuesday. The agency unveiled its selection of Boeing and SpaceX to transport U.S. crews to and from the space station using...

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Five Things About NASA's ISS-RapidScat

NASA's ISS-RapidScat mission will observe ocean wind speed and direction over most of the globe, bringing a new eye on tropical storms, hurricanes and typhoons. Here are five fast facts about the mission. 1. The space station looks homeward. ISS-RapidScat is the first scientific Earth-observing...

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NASA Mars Spacecraft Ready for Sept. 21 Orbit Insertion

NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft is nearing its scheduled Sept. 21 insertion into Martian orbit after completing a 10-month interplanetary journey of 442 million miles. Flight Controllers at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton, Colorado, will be responsible...

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NASA Airborne Campaigns Focus on Climate Impacts in the Arctic

This red plane is a DHC-3 Otter, the plane flown in NASA's Operation IceBridge-Alaska surveys of mountain glaciers in Alaska. Over the past few decades, average global temperatures have been on the rise, and this warming is happening two to three times faster in the Arctic. As the region’s summer...

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Cleaner NASA Rover Sees Its Shadow in Martian Spring

Late afternoon lighting produced a dramatic shadow of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity photographed by the rover's rear hazard-avoidance camera on March 20, 2014. The shadow falls across a slope called the McClure-Beverlin Escarpment on the western rim of Endeavour Crater, where Opportunity...

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Research Clarifies Health Costs of Air Pollution from Agriculture

Ammonia pollution from agricultural sources poses larger health costs than previously estimated, according to NASA-funded research. Harvard University researchers Fabien Paulot and Daniel Jacob used computer models including a NASA model of chemical reactions in the atmosphere to better represent...

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NASA's Last F-104 Makes its Final Flight 20 Years Ago

NASA research pilot Tom McMurtry advanced the throttle of the sleek F-104 as it streaked across Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base, barely a few hundred feet above the lakebed. With hundreds of employees gathered atop the main administration building and the ramp area, McMurtry piloted...

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Looking Back to the Cradle of Our Universe

NASA's Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes have spotted what might be one of the most distant galaxies known, harkening back to a time when our universe was only about 650 million years old (our universe is 13.8 billion years old). The galaxy, known as Abell2744 Y1, is about 30 times smaller than...

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Radar Study of Icelandic Glacier Winter Movement - by NASA

The cold of an Icelandic winter did not stop one NASA science aircraft from completing a mission to map glaciers on the island during the past week. NASA's C-20A, based at the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif., flew four radar missions from Keflavik International Airport...

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Looking Back at How NASA Looked Ahead during 2013

Focusing on the future was the dominant theme of a busy year for NASA's aeronautical innovators during 2013. A new strategic vision that will guide the agency's aviation research efforts now and into the future was adopted even as world class research continued at NASA centers across the nation...

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NASA Picks Space Station Science Research Proposals

NASA's Physical Science Research Program will fund seven proposals, including one from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., to conduct physics research using the agency's new microgravity laboratory, which is scheduled to launch to the International Space Station in 2016. NASA's...

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NASA Mars Rover's View of Possible Westward Route

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover reached the edge of a dune on Jan. 30 and photographed the valley on the other side, to aid assessment of whether to cross the dune. Curiosity is on a southwestward traverse of many months from an area where it found evidence of ancient conditions favorable...

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Nasa Space news - Rosetta: To Chase a Comet

Comets are among the most beautiful and least understood nomads of the night sky. To date, half a dozen of these most heavenly of heavenly bodies have been visited by spacecraft in an attempt to unlock their secrets. All these missions have had one thing in common: the high-speed flyby. Like two...

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Magnetic Arcs

An M5 flare (medium-size) associated with a coronal mass ejection generated a fairly robust radiation storm (May 22-23, 2013). The outburst originated from active region right near the right edge of the Sun. After the eruption, cascades of magnetic loops spun up above the area as the magnetic...

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Swirls along an Ice Highway - Nasa Images

Sea water off the east coast of Greenland looked a bit like marbled paper in October 2012. The shifting swirls of white were sea ice, as observed by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite on October 17, 2012. In fact, this ice moved discernibly between October...

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NASA Released January Solar Flare Images

The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 5:13 a.m. EST on Jan. 7, 2014. Images of the flare were captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and showed that it came from an active region on the sun that currently sports one of the largest sunspots seen in the last 10 years. Sunspots...

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Swilling Stormy Stars present on cool celestial orbs

Swirling, stormy clouds may be ever-present on cool celestial orbs called brown dwarfs. New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that most brown dwarfs are roiling with one or more planet-size storms akin to Jupiter's "Great Red Spot." "As the brown dwarfs spin on their axis,...

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Orbital Launch Rescheduled for Jan. 8 - Nasa Space news

The International Space Station Program and Orbital Sciences Corporation have decided to postpone the launch of the Antares rocket and its Cygnus cargo craft on the first Orbital commercial resupply mission to the space station to no earlier than Wednesday, Jan. 8 due to the forecast of cold temperatures for Tuesday, Jan. 7 at the launch site at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. ...

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Two Solar Flares Welcomes 2014 - Nasa Space News

The sun ushered out 2013 and welcomed 2014 with two mid-level flares on Dec. 31, 2013 and Jan. 1, 2014. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough...

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