By Paul Hertz NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) provides opportunities for scientists outside the agency to determine what science NASA should pursue in future missions. Several different programs, such as Discovery and Explorer, publish announcements of opportunity so ideas can be proposed, vetted, selected, and flown in the pursuit of groundbreaking scientific discovery.
By Dava Newman For the past dozen years, I have been working with colleagues and students here at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and with collaborators in various disciplines from around the world to develop a new kind of spacesuit.
By Bob Chesson Most European Space Agency (ESA) projects are contracted to European industry on a firm fixed-price (FFP) basis. These FFP contracts and their statements of work transfer most of the project risks to the prime contractor, who then transfers as much risk as he can to subcontractors and equipment suppliers.
On August 1, 2010, almost the entire Earth-facing side of the sun erupted in activity from a C3-class solar flare, a solar tsunami, large-scale shaking of the solar corona, radio bursts, a coronal mass ejection, and more. This extreme ultraviolet snapshot from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows the sun’s northern hemisphere in mid-eruption. Different […]
NASA in the News NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed its first discovery of a planet in the “habitable zone,” the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface.
By Laurence Prusak Every once in a while, some U.S. or other government agency or a nongovernmental organization issues a report that is actually very useful and—dare I say it—even startling in its implications.
By Andrew Cheng NEAR was the Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, the first launch in NASA’s Discovery Program—and the first dedicated asteroid mission. The plan was to insert the vehicle into orbit around Eros, one of the larger near-Earth asteroids. Not everything went according to plan.
By Vania Neves We make many decisions every day. Should we wait patiently for the green light to cross the street or risk an accident? Should we buy something we want or save money for the future?
Whats Next for NASA? The end of the Space Shuttle program marks the end of an era for NASA, but not the end of NASA’s ambitious goals for space exploration, aeronautics, science, and technology.
