NASA News

Tides flowing in a subsurface ocean of molten rock, or magma, could explain why Jupiter’s moon Io appears to have its volcanoes in the “wrong” place. New NASA research implies that oceans beneath the crusts of tidally stressed moons may be more common and last longer than expected. The phenomenon applies to oceans made from …

Building a space telescope to see the light from the earliest stars of our universe is a pretty complex task. Although much of the attention goes to instruments and the giant mirrors on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, there are other components that have big jobs to do and that required imagination, engineering, and innovation …

Fred Fades in Far Atlantic Before Tropical Storm Fred fizzled in the Eastern Atlantic, NASA’s Global Hawk flew overhead on September 5 and the Global Hawk’s imagery was used to create a movie of the flyover as part of NOAA’s SHOUT mission. On Sunday, Sept. 6. at 5 a.m. EDT (0900 UTC) the center of Tropical Depression …

A critical part of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope successfully completed acoustic testing during the week of Aug. 3. The Integrated Science Instrument Module, or ISIM, passed all of the “severe sound” tests that engineers put it through. The Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) is one of three major elements that comprise the Webb Observatory …

Update – Sept. 4, 2015: The Chromospheric Lyman-Alpha Spectro-Polarimeter, or CLASP, payload developed by joint team from United States, Japan, Spain and France and led by the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, was successfully flown on a NASA Black Brant IX suborbital sounding rocket at 1:01 p.m. EDT (11:01 a.m. MDT), September 3, from the …

On the most recent nautical chart of the Beaufort Sea where the long narrow Tapkaluk Islands of Alaska’s North Slope separate the sea from the shallow Elson Lagoon (Nautical Chart 16081), a massive shoal is immediately noticeable just west of the entrance to the lagoon. On the chart, it looks like a massive blue thumb …

On Greenland’s ice sheet, a vast icy landscape crisscrossed by turquoise rivers and dotted with melt water lakes, a small cluster of orange camping tents popped up in late July. The camp, home for a week to a team of researchers, sat by a large, fast-flowing river. Just a kilometer downstream, the river dropped into …

Sea level rise is a natural consequence of the warming of our planet. We know this from basic physics. When water heats up, it expands. So when the ocean warms, sea level rises. When ice is exposed to heat, it melts. And when ice on land melts and water runs into the ocean, sea level …

One of the most crucial pieces of the James Webb Space Telescope, the flight backplane, arrived on Aug. 25, on schedule for Webb’s 2018 launch date at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for mirror assembly. The backplane is the “spine” of the telescope, responsible for holding its 18 hexagonal mirrors and instruments …