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Nancy Grace Roman Celebrates Her Birthday
05.16.13 -
Long before there was a program called Women@NASA, Dr. Nancy Grace Roman was paving the path for women at NASA. She was the first Chief of Astronomy in the Office of Space Science. In her role, she successfully managed numerous astronomy-based projects including the Hubble Space Telescope. At the age of 88, Dr. Roman speaks eloquently and intelligently with a passion to encourage young women to pursue careers in science and engineering. -
Faith 7: Gordon Cooper
05.13.13 -
50 years ago this week, astronaut Gordon Cooper made the final flight of the Mercury program, spending more than a day in orbit in his Faith 7 capsule.
"Gordo" spent more time in orbit than all of the previous Mercury astronauts combined, and became the first American astronaut to sleep in space. -
Activity Continues on the Sun
05.15.13 -
Solar activity continued on May 14, 2013, as the sun emitted a fourth X-class flare from its upper left limb, peaking at 9:48 p.m. EDT. This flare is classified as an X1.2 flare and it is the 18th X-class flare of the current solar cycle.
The flare caused a radio blackout – categorized as an R3, or strong, on NOAA’s space weather scales from R1 to R5 -- which has since subsided. -
Astronaut Mom Karen Nyberg Preps for Mission
05.11.13 - Astronaut Karen Nyberg is just a few weeks from launching for her long-duration mission to the International Space Station. And, as the mother of a young son, Karen says she will be savoring this Mother’s Day weekend before departing for Kazakhstan, and ultimately space.
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NASA Celebrates Skylab at 40, Looks to the Future
05.14.13 -
Launched aboard the last of the Apollo-era Saturn V rockets on May 14, 1973, the uncrewed Skylab became America's first space station. The station almost immediately developed technical problems due to vibrations during liftoff when a critical meteoroid shield ripped off, taking one of the craft's two primary solar panels with it. Engineers in mission control maneuvered Skylab's secondary solar panels to face the sun to provide as much electricity as possible. -
Robots Practice New Satellite-Servicing Tasks
05.10.13 -
Early on May 10, NASA's Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM) completed a new round of satellite-servicing tasks. During five days of operations aboard the International Space Station, the Canadian-built Dextre robot with RRM tools retrieved and stowed tiny caps and sliced through satellite blanket tape.
NASA developed RRM to demonstrate how remotely-operated robot mechanics could extend the lives of the hundreds of satellites residing in geosynchronous-Earth orbit. -
New Public Application of Landsat Images Released
05.09.13 -
Google released more than a quarter-century of images of Earth taken from space Thursday compiled into an interactive time-lapse experience. Working with data from the Landsat Program managed by the U.S. Geological Survey, the images display an historical perspective on changes to Earth's surface over time. -
Sifting Through the Atmospheres of Distant Planets
05.09.13 -
Currently, there are more than 800 confirmed exoplanets -- planets that orbit stars beyond our sun -- and more than 2,700 other candidates. Researchers are using infrared pictures, taken by ground-based telescopes equipped with spectrographs, to probe these planets' makeup.
Project 1640, partly funded by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently found precise composition information about four exoplanets using the Palomar Observatory near San Diego. -
Annular Eclipse on May 10
05.09.13 -
On May 10, 2013, the sun will experience what’s called an annular eclipse – when the moon moves directly in front of the sun, but doesn’t obscure it completely. This leaves a thin, fiery ring, the annulus, visible around the outside.
This eclipse will only be visible from the South Pacific, along an approximately 100-mile-wide track that traverses Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and the Gilbert Islands. -
Dead Stars Found 'Polluted' with Planet Debris
05.09.13 -
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks for Earth-sized planets in an unlikely place-- the atmospheres of a pair of burned-out stars called white dwarfs.
These dead stars are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster, Hyades, in the constellation Taurus. The star cluster is only 625 million years old. The white dwarfs are being polluted by asteroid-like debris falling onto them.