NASA
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NASA
Louisiana Students Loft Payloads from NASA Balloon Facility in Texas
Every spring in Palestine, Texas, the wide-open fields around NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility fill with students and faculty from across Louisiana. They arrive carrying sensors, laptops, and carefully engineered payloads they have spent months preparing. The goal is to send their experiments to the edge of space and return with meaningful data, while reflecting NASA’s long-standing commitment to develop future scientists…
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NASA
Guinea-Bissau Tidal Waters
Twice each day, tides ebb and flow through a maze of sandy channels, mudflats, and mangrove forests that flank the 88 islands and islets of Guinea-Bissau’s Bijagós Archipelago (Arquipélago dos Bijagós in Portuguese). Seen from above in this image from Nov. 28, 2025, the process leads to stark changes to the landscape: around low tide, intertidal mudflats and sandflats emerge from the sea, causing…
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NASA
Ike Theriot Helps Prepare Astronauts to Work on the Moon
From serving in the U.S. Army to helping prepare astronauts to explore the lunar surface, Ike Theriot built a path to NASA through discipline and determination. Theriot serves as the Flight Operations Surface Testing lead in the Exploration Extravehicular Activity Operations Branch within the EVA, Robotics, and Crew Operations Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. He integrates flight operations testing needs across the Artemis program, ensuring teams have the…
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NASA
NASA Brings Space Exploration to the FIFA World Cup
From June 11 through July 19, NASA’s free interactive exhibit at FIFA Fan Festival™ brought space exploration to soccer fans in East Downtown Houston. More than 500,000 visitors explored the exhibit during the tournament, learning how the agency’s missions, research, and technology benefit life on Earth. FIFA Fan Festival visitors explore NASA’s exhibit. NASA/Luna Posadas Nava The exhibit introduced a global audience to the Artemis program, Moon…
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NASA
NASA Delivers Navigation System for Commercial Lunar Relay
NASA delivered the NavCube3-mini payload on July 13 to Intuitive Machines for integration into Altus-1, the company’s first lunar relay satellite, marking an important milestone in the development of future lunar communications and navigation services. The lunar relays are designed to enable communications and navigation for astronauts and rovers operating at the agency’s future Moon Base. About half the size of a shoebox and weighing just 3.5 pounds, NavCube3-mini is a compact but powerful navigation receiver designed to use signals from Earth-based GPS…
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NASA
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Vaporizing Meteor Photobombs the Lacerta Nebula Explanation: What’s happening to this meteor? This bright meteor streak appeared and disappeared quickly during a long exposure of the Great Lacerta Nebula, seen faintly in red toward the center of the image. The meteoroid, likely a small pebble, creates its glow partly by heating and exciting surrounding air in Earth’s atmosphere, but itself vaporizes and leaves wind-blown gas and dust with colors that…
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NASA
Astronomy Picture of the Day
A Fire Rainbow over West Virginia Explanation: What’s happening to this cloud? Ice crystals in a distant cirrus cloud are acting like little floating prisms. Known informally as a fire rainbow for its flame-like appearance, a circumhorizon arc appears parallel to the horizon. For a circumhorizontal arc to be visible, the Sun must be at least 58 degrees high in a sky where cirrus clouds present below — in this…
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NASA
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Buck Moon and Belt of Venus Explanation: The Buck Moon is a traditional name for the full moon of July. In this colorful Adriatic sea and skyscape captured on July 28 from Krk Island along the coast of Croatia, a full Buck Moon is just rising over distant mountains. Since a full moon rises as the Sun sets, Earth’s shadow also rises in the…
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NASA
What’s Up: August 2026 Skywatching Tips from NASA
A solar eclipse, the Perseids, bright Venus after sunset, and a deep partial lunar eclipse highlight August’s skywatching. Skywatching Highlights Aug. 5: Last Quarter Moon Aug. 12: Total solar eclipse across northern Russia, Greenland, Iceland, northern Spain, and part of Portugal; partial eclipse in parts of the U.S.; New Moon Aug. 12-13: Perseid meteor shower peak under dark skies Aug. 14-16: Venus reaches greatest…
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NASA
NASA to Host Florida Event Celebrating American Air, Space Leadership
NASA will hold a news conference at 2:30 p.m. EDT, Friday, Aug. 14, live from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and media and digital creators are invited to attend in person. The announcement, held in the XLV Hangar at the Shuttle Landing Facility, will preview a new event at NASA Kennedy later this year tied to America’s 250th…
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