NASA
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NICER Status Updates
June 24, 2025 NASA’s NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer), an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station, has paused observations due to a problem with one of the motors that drives its ability to track cosmic objects. The NICER team paused operations June 17 when performance degradation in the motor began affecting science observations. Engineers are investigating the cause…
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Live or Fly a Plane in California? Help NASA Measure Ozone Pollution!
Ozone high in the stratosphere protects us from the Sun’s ultraviolet light. But ozone near the ground is a pollutant that harms people and plants. The San Joaquin Valley has some of the most polluted air in the country, and NASA scientists with the new Ozone Where We Live (OWWL) project are working to measure ozone and other pollutants there. They need…
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NASA’s SLS Solid Rocket Boosters: What is DM-1?
Demonstration Motor-1 (DM-1) is the first full-scale ground test of the evolved five-segment solid rocket motor of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket. The event will take place in Promontory, Utah, and will be used as an opportunity to test several upgrades made from the current solid rocket boosters. Each booster burns six tons of solid propellant every second and…
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Mission Accomplished! Artemis ROADS III National Challenge Competitors Celebrate their Achievements
The NASA Science Activation program’s Northwest Earth and Space Sciences Pathways (NESSP) team has successfully concluded the 2024–2025 Artemis ROADS III National Challenge, an educational competition that brought real NASA mission objectives to student teams (and reached more than 1,500 learners) across the country. From December 2024 through May 2025, over 300 teams of upper elementary, middle, and high school students…
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Clay Minerals From Mars’ Most Ancient Past?
Recent detections of clay-bearing bedrock on Jezero’s crater rim have the Perseverance Science Team excited and eager to sample. NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image of the Laknes abrasion, acquired in the clay-bearing bedrock of the Krokodillen plateau, on the outer slopes of the Jezero crater rim. Perseverance captured the image using its Right Mastcam-Z camera on June 8,…
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Starts Unpacking Boxwork Formations
The rover recently drilled a sample from a new region with features that could reveal whether Mars’ subsurface once provided an environment suitable for life. New images from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover show the first close-up views of a region scientists had previously observed only from orbit. The images and data being collected are already raising new questions about how…
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A Martian Volcano in the Mist
Arsia Mons, one of the Red Planet’s largest volcanoes, peeks through a blanket of water ice clouds in this image captured by NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter on May 2, 2025. Odyssey used a camera called the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) to capture this view while studying the Martian atmosphere, which appears here as a greenish haze above the…
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NASA Intern Took Career from Car Engines to Cockpits
Some career changes involve small shifts. But for one NASA engineering intern, the leap was much bigger –moving from under the hood of a car to helping air taxis take to the skies. Saré Culbertson spent more than a decade in the auto industry and had been working as a service manager in busy auto repair shops. Today, she supports…
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NASA Fosters Innovative, Far-Out Tech for the Future of Aerospace
Through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, NASA nurtures visionary yet credible concepts that could one day “change the possible” in aerospace, while engaging America’s innovators and entrepreneurs as partners in the journey. These concepts span various disciplines and aim to advance capabilities such as finding resources on distant planets, making space travel safer and more efficient, and even…
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NASA Tests New RS-25 Engine
NASA tested RS-25 engine No. 20001 on June 20, at the Fred Haise Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. Test teams fired the engine for almost eight-and-a-half minutes (500 seconds), the same amount of time RS-25 engines fire during a launch of an SLS (Space Launch System) rocket on Artemis missions to the Moon. The Artemis campaign will explore the…
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