NASA
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NASA’s Home for Experimental Flight Advances Aeronautics Mission
Nestled in the Mojave Desert, NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, pushes the boundaries of flight to advance the agency’s aeronautics mission. This is where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier and engineers are now pioneering the future of high-speed, autonomous, and electrified aircraft. Armstrong contributes to NASA’s broader mission of innovation and collaboration, leveraging its uniquely capable…
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NASA Adds Mission to Artemis Lunar Program, Updates Architecture
As part of a Golden Age of exploration and discovery, NASA announced Friday the agency is increasing its cadence of missions under the Artemis program to achieve the national objective of returning American astronauts to the Moon and establishing an enduring presence. This includes standardizing vehicle configuration, adding an additional mission in 2027, and undertaking at least one surface landing every year thereafter. As…
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Chesapeake Bay Locked in Ice
Residents of the U.S. Mid-Atlantic endured a formidable winter in 2025-2026, marked by several high-impact storms and prolonged stretches of cold temperatures that left parts of the Chesapeake Bay frozen over. Longtime residents may recall a winter nearly 50 years ago when the region saw even more widespread ice cover. The MSS (Multispectral Scanner System) on Landsat 1 captured this image during the exceptionally…
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JPL 3D-Printed Part Springs Forward
Description With a simple motion, a jack-in-the-box-like spring designed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory showed the potential of additive manufacturing, also known as 3D printing, to cut costs and complexity for futuristic space antennas. Called JPL Additive Compliant Canister (JACC), the spring deployed on the small commercial spacecraft Proteus Space’s Mercury One on Feb. 3, 2026. An onboard camera captured this…
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Inside Project Hail Mary
NASA astronaut and deputy director of the Flight Operations Directorate Kjell Lindgren takes a selfie with panelists and the audience at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Feb. 25, 2026. Actors Ryan Gosling and Sandra Huller, screenwriter Drew Goddard, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and producer and writer of the “Project Hail Mary” novel Andy Weir stopped by NASA…
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NASA’s ESCAPADE Ready to Study Space Weather from Earth to Mars
Mars is not what it used to be. Once warm, watery, and blanketed by a thick atmosphere, today the Red Planet is cold, dry, and draped by a thin atmospheric veil. The main culprit is a relentless stream of particles from the Sun, known as the solar wind. Over billions of years, the solar wind has stripped away much of the Martian atmosphere, causing…
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NASA Names Acting Leaders for Two Key Human Spaceflight Roles
Editor’s note: This release was updated Thursday, Feb. 26 to reflect the effective date of the leadership changes. On Thursday, NASA announced Joel Montalbano will serve as the acting associate administrator for the Space Operations Mission Directorate (SOMD) at NASA Headquarters in Washington, and Dana Hutcherson will serve as the acting program manager of the Commercial Crew Program, effective immediately. SOMD’s programs and activities…
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Dry-Season Floods Drench Northern Colombia
February is one of the driest months of the year in northern Colombia’s Córdoba department, a major farming and cattle region. It’s the time of year when farmers normally prepare fields for planting and ranchers move livestock to graze in drying floodplains. In 2026, however, unusually heavy rains in early February upended seasonal rhythms and submerged much of the department…
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NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel Releases 2025 Annual Report
The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), which advises NASA and Congress on safety, has released its 2025 annual report on NASA’s performance and challenges. While the panel acknowledged NASA’s safety achievements, it warned that the agency’s biggest challenges stem from interconnected factors – workforce, acquisition, technical authority, budgets, and the growing complexity of human spaceflight – requiring sustained attention as missions become more ambitious. “Independent assessments like this will make…
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Making an Entrance
NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway smiles up at the camera as he enters the International Space Station Feb. 14, 2026, after docking to the orbiting laboratory aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. Since Hathaway and fellow Crew-12 members Jessica Meir of NASA, Sophie Adenot of ESA (European Space Agency), and Andrey Fedyaev of Roscosmos began their mission on the space station, they…
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