Portions of rock powder collected by the hammering drill on NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover from a slab of Martian sandstone will be delivered to the rover’s internal instruments. Rover team members at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., received confirmation early today (Tuesday) of Curiosity’s third successful acquisition of a drilled rock sample, following the […]
Engineering’s 4 lines of business focus on problem-solving
Engineering is about making dreams a reality. At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the team in the Engineering and Technology Directorate not only puts those visions on paper, but sees the designs all the way through from development to reality. This key organization recently aligned its structure around four new lines of business. This […]
Photos of the Day: Introducing supersonic passenger planes
The level of concern over sonic boom annoyance became so significant that the Federal Aviation Administration prohibited domestic civil supersonic flight over land in 1973. This prohibition helped quiet the skies and reduce potential impacts on the environment. However, it also dashed hopes of introducing supersonic overland passenger service within U.S. airspace during the Concorde […]
Photos of the Day: NASA Tech Sees Birth of the Universe
The BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole used a specialized array of superconducting detectors to capture polarized light from billions of years ago. Read: Capturing Polarized Light from Billions of Years Ago The detector array is shown here, under a microscope. Techniques called micro-lithography and micro-machining are used to fabricate the devices. View: Stanford Professor […]
Capturing Polarized Light from Billions of Years Ago
Astronomers are announcing that they have acquired the first direct evidence that gravitational waves rippled through our infant universe during an explosive period of growth called inflation. This is the strongest confirmation yet of cosmic inflation theories, which say the universe expanded by 100 trillion trillion times, in less than the blink of an eye. […]
NASA Helps Growers During Drought
Water – it shapes our world in many ways. It has the power to cut through rock and turn stone into sand. We rely on it to trade goods, power our homes, grow our crops, quench our thirst. For these and many other reasons, water is precious to life on Earth and essential to sustaining […]
Photos of the Day: Hennessey Venom GT Meets NASA Playground
The Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center is one of only about half-a-dozen places in the world that provides the kind of room and infrastructure to make test runs safe for high-end sports cars. An engineer readies a Hennessey Venom GT for test runs on the 3.5-mile long runway at the Shuttle […]
GPM spreads its wings in solar array deployment test
“Cross your fingers. Cross your toes,” said Art Azarbarzin, GPM project manager, as he watched engineers take their places around the GPM Core satellite, set up on its end in the middle of the clean room. A loud hiss filled the room as engineers turned on air hoses. The hoses pumped air through tubes attached […]
NASA Builds Sophisticated Earth-Observing Microwave Radiometer
A NASA team has delivered a sophisticated microwave radiometer specifically designed to overcome the pitfalls that have plagued similar Earth-observing instruments in the past. View: Photos of the Day: Earth-Observing Microwave Radiometer Literally years in the making, the new radiometer, which is designed to measure the intensity of electromagnetic radiation, specifically microwaves, is equipped with […]
Photos of the Day: Earth-Observing Microwave Radiometer
Building the new radiometer took years to accomplish and involved the development of advanced algorithms and an onboard computing system capable of crunching a deluge of data estimated at 192 million samples per second. Read: NASA Builds Sophisticated Earth-Observing Microwave Radiometer This photograph shows the SMAP propellant tank after installation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory […]