NASA News

Summer in Antarctica is marked by days in which the Sun never sets, balmy temperatures that hover as high as freezing, and electric-blue clouds of ice. NASA’s Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere mission — AIM for short — spotted the summer’s first noctilucent, or night-shining, clouds on Dec. 8, 2020. In the days that …

The Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) for future flights of NASA’s <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/sls/index.html" target="_BLANK美" title="//nasa.gov/slsSpace Launch System rocket has passed its Critical Design Review, or CDR. A panel of experts evaluated the EUS in the latest review to determine that the stage’s design meets requirements for future missions. This most recent assessment certifies the EUS meets critical design requirements to withstand deep …

Researchers may have found the long-sought “nanoflares” thought to heat the solar corona to its incredible temperatures. A new study published in Nature Astronomy marks the first time researchers have captured the full lifecycle of a putative nanoflare – from bright origins to blistering demise. Mini flares for a major puzzle Nanoflares are tiny eruptions …

As Chile and Argentina witnessed the total solar eclipse on Dec. 14, 2020, unbeknownst to skywatchers, a little tiny speck was flying past the Sun — a recently discovered comet. This comet was first spotted in satellite data by Thai amateur astronomer Worachate Boonplod on the NASA-funded Sungrazer Project — a citizen science project that …

Lengthened to the size of a tennis court, the five-layer sunshield of NASA’s fully assembled James Webb Space Telescope successfully completed a final series of large-scale deployment and tensioning tests. This milestone puts the observatory one step closer to its launch in 2021. “This is one of Webb’s biggest accomplishments in 2020,” said Alphonso Stewart, …

As glaciers flow outward from the Greenland Ice Sheet, what lies beneath them offers clues to their role in future ice thinning and sea-level rise contribution. Outlet glaciers are rivers of ice flowing within the cracks of the bedrock and draining into the surrounding sea. They retreat and start to thin as climate warms, and this thinning works its way toward the center of the ice sheet. Now, by looking at the bed topography beneath the ice, scientists …

More plants and longer growing seasons in the northern latitudes have converted parts of Alaska, Canada and Siberia to deeper shades of green. Some studies translate this Arctic greening to a greater global carbon uptake. But new research shows that as Earth’s climate is changing, increased carbon absorption by plants in the Arctic is being …

Land ecosystems currently play a key role in mitigating climate change. The more carbon dioxide (CO2) plants and trees absorb during photosynthesis, the process they use to make food, the less CO2 remains trapped in the atmosphere where it can cause temperatures to rise. But scientists have identified an unsettling trend – as levels of …

Scientists from Japan and NASA have confirmed the presence in meteorites of a key organic molecule which may have been used to build other organic molecules, including some used by life. The discovery validates theories of the formation of organic compounds in extraterrestrial environments. The chemistry of life runs on organic compounds, molecules containing carbon …