Research lab
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, is a major NASA lab building spacecraft and instruments for Earth and space science missions.
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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Curiosity's team planned four chemistry readings on blocks covered in disc-shaped lumps, a texture Earth rocks can show where evaporating fluid left minerals. Settling whether that happened on Mars will likely take the rover's next drill sample and its CheMin instrument.
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XRISM spectra show wind plasma from the hypergiant Wray 977 falling onto the pulsar GX 301-2 during an X-ray flare, a first for any compact object. The spectra back a cause astronomers had long inferred from orbital timing, though so far they cover a single observing window.
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A Science Advances paper says five ordinary human-associated microbes could stay alive in shadowed south-pole terrain. The expensive consequence is the baseline contamination survey it implies.
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Simulations strand Earth outside the heliosphere three times in 14 million years, and dust in sediment cores agrees. The cadence, roughly one encounter every 4.5 million years, limits what it explains.
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A Science Advances paper says hitchhiking Earth microbes can persist in shadowed niches sometimes no bigger than a footprint, which moves contamination control from hardware treatment to traverse planning.
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NASA's SpEED Demon rocket ejected four dropsondes to sample one sporadic E layer in five places at the same instant. The plasma came back uneven and doubly peaked, shaped by turbulence in the surrounding air.
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NASA says the Wide Field Instrument and the coronagraph are both working in space. The two published accounts of the milestone disagree about when science observations start and how long the mission runs.
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NASA pointed the telescope at galaxy cluster MACS J0417 on September 19 to catch a second appearance of supernova Athena, predicted before early March 2027, and the timing would constrain both the cluster's mass and the expansion rate.
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A PNAS reconstruction of 23 years of satellite gravity data finds regional freshwater storage trends 33 percent stronger than earlier estimates on average, and 45 percent stronger where farms pump aquifers.
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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 Wide Field Instrument passed its first in-flight tests of detectors, calibration source, filter wheel and focus, and NASA says first science images are still expected by early 2027 with months of commissioning left.
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A 16-hour look at the binary caught iron absorption lines sitting below their laboratory energies, and the team takes that shift as gas already on its way onto the neutron star. Rahin says nothing comparable is in the literature.
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Researchers at NASA Goddard and the University of Maryland mapped polar sunlight down to five metres per pixel and found small shadows where five skin-borne bacteria and fungi could sit dormant for days.
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NASA now says the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has propellant for at least 22 years against a 10-year design life, with the extra time coming from three savings of about four years each. Two of the three are already banked.
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NASA Earth Observatory's map of September 15 pairs satellite data with the GEOS model to show air approaching 40 degrees Celsius across the south-central states. The 41 million figure beside it counts residents of National Weather Service alert areas.
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NASA says the Roman Space Telescope now has propellant for at least 22 years of science against a planned decade, a margin built from a spacecraft that launched light and course-correction burns that came in under their allocations.
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Puerto Rico held no drought at all three months before August 25, when the U.S. Drought Monitor put 44 percent of the territory in extreme drought and rationing was already running in several municipalities.
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A NASA-funded team simulated the solar system's passage through cold galactic clouds and put dates on when Earth sat outside the Sun's shield. Dust in seabed cores gives that reconstruction a check; the temperature effect has none yet.
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The experimental instrument riding alongside Roman's survey camera carries the first deformable mirrors NASA has flown, and its science teams have pre-committed to a test that tells them whether the fault is theirs.
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