Research lab
A NASA research center managed by Caltech that builds robotic spacecraft and instruments for planetary exploration, Earth science, and deep-space missions.
NASA is replacing "AI" with "super intelligence" on a four-phase schedule running into December, Space reports from an internal document. Software that connects to NASA systems is exposed to at least one update the document itself calls a breaking change.
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NASA is accelerating SkyFall, three Mars helicopters that will ride the SR-1 Freedom spacecraft when it launches in 2028. Project scientist Matthew Golombek says each is designed to last six months, and the landing site has yet to be chosen.
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Voyager 1 will become the first spacecraft to reach one light-day from Earth on November 18, at 25.9 billion km. Launched almost 50 years ago, the probe still sends back data that tell scientists something new each day, according to Science News.
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NASA's Perseverance reached 28.10 miles on Mars on October 11, passing Opportunity's 28.06-mile off-world driving record. NASA says its AutoNav software has guided more than 90% of the rover's total distance.
Perspective Coverage
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Raghvendra Sahai's team used ALMA to find a ring of radius about 16,950 Earth-sun distances around the preplanetary nebula IRAS 06530. The team says it records the star's last flare-up, but the spectra show no gas faster than 16.5 km/s, below the fast outflows a binary-jet origin should produce.
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SPHEREx spectra of 37 brown dwarfs in The Astrophysical Journal trace water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane across the full temperature range. Lead author Zafar Rustamkulov says models struggle to match objects whose clouds are thinning.
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NASA's Roman Space Telescope held its pointing steady to better than 1/100,000 of a degree in September tests, for up to eight hours in coronagraph mode. Its coronagraph has also imaged stars, but its starlight suppression is still untested.
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The mission's project scientist describes three hours to triage telemetry and agree on targets, then four more to compile commands that must fit the rover's available time and energy before sunrise on Mars.
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NISAR scientists turned 17 radar frames of Kamchatka's Krasheninnikov volcano into a time-lapse of lava filling and overflowing its crater. Two looks every 12 days are enough to follow a lava field that grows over months, though the satellite began imaging about five months into the eruption.
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Ten current and former staff told Scientific American that NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center no longer has the people or the equipment to build a telescope like Roman. NASA says flagship missions remain a core Goddard capability.
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The rover's first polygon field gives Gale Crater a calibration point for wet-dry cycling. Orbital polygons are at least 190 times wider, and no rover has stood next to one.
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From 31 August, Ralf Busch's group will remotely melt levitated droplets of nickel-niobium alloys aboard the ISS, chasing thermophysical numbers that anchor years of alloy design.
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A fabric Vivaldi antenna sheathed in Vectran has cleared testing at JPL, letting SkyFall drag a 500-2,500 MHz radar about 15 cm above the regolith and still survive dozens of landings.
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