NASA
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NASA
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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NASA
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
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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NASA
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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NASA
Listen to This Month’s ‘Planetary Parade’ With NASA’s Chandra
In late February, people in the Northern Hemisphere can look up for a special sight: six planets will all be visible from clear and dark night skies. New sonifications from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory released Feb. 25 will help commemorate this latest “planetary parade.” Because the planets in our solar system travel around the Sun in the same plane (known as…
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NASA
NASA Study to Analyze Fermented Food Samples from Space
Certain nutrients critical for human health lack the shelf life needed to span multi-year missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. NASA’s BioNutrients-3 is part of an experiment series testing ways to use microorganisms to produce these nutrients in space and on demand. The on-demand nature of this experiment is similar to making nutrient-dense fermented foods on Earth, such as how…
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NASA
NASA’s Webb Examines Cranium Nebula
Two heads are better than one in the latest images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which reveal new detail in a mysterious, little-studied nebula surrounding a dying star. Nebula PMR 1 is a cloud of gas and dust that bears an uncanny resemblance to a brain in a transparent skull, inspiring its nickname, the “Exposed Cranium” nebula. Webb captured…
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NASA
Landslide and Avalanche Debris Litter Hubbard Glacier
On December 6, 2025, a powerful magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the remote St. Elias Mountains, a highly glaciated range that spans the Yukon-Alaska border. The quake shook the landscape beneath Hubbard Glacier, sending ice and rock careening down the range’s steep slopes. The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite offered some of the earliest views of the changed landscape. Geophysicist Eric Fielding and colleagues…
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NASA
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4812-4819: Back Into the Hollows
Written by Diana Hayes, Graduate student at York University, Toronto Earth planning date: Friday, Feb. 20, 2026 This has been a pretty routine week for Curiosity. As was mentioned last week, we’re now in the final phase of the boxwork exploration campaign. We’re currently making our way toward the eastern contact of the boxwork formation with the surrounding geology, which we…
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NASA
New Volunteer Data from 143 Observatories Unveils the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse
On April 8, 2024, volunteers participating in NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project all around the United States hurried to photograph the solar eclipse with the latest, greatest equipment, capturing groundbreaking images of the Sun’s corona. Now, the Eclipse Megamovie team has released the remarkable new dataset that resulted from this effort — the first-ever, white-light eclipse dataset with calibration frames, spanning…
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