NASA/Frank Micheaux NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test astronaut Suni Williams gives a thumbs up during a mission dress rehearsal on Friday, April 26, 2024, at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Williams was selected as an astronaut by NASA in 1998 and has been aboard the International Space Station twice. She is set to [...]
5 min read New NASA Black Hole Visualization Takes Viewers Beyond the Brink Ever wonder what happens when you fall into a black hole? Now, thanks to a new, immersive visualization produced on a NASA supercomputer, viewers can plunge into the event horizon, a black hole’s point of no return. In this visualization of [...]
Artist James Dean prepares sketches of the space shuttle Columbia as it sits on Pad 39 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on April 9, 1981, waiting for its first historic flight (STS-1).NASA In March 1962, NASA Administrator James Webb addressed a two-paragraph memorandum to NASA Public Affairs Director Hiden T. Cox about the possibility of [...]
2 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) This Hall-effect thruster, shown being tested at Glenn Research Center, turns electricity and inert gas into force that could propel a spacecraft. Orbion Space Technology was founded to bring the high efficiency of these thrusters to small commercial satellites, and the company sought the [...]
3 min read Sols 4175-4177: Don’t Blink We’re Taking a Picture This image shows our previous workspace block and rover wheel tracks from Sol 4171 taken by the Left Navigation Camera onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity. NASA/JPL-Caltech Earth planning date: Friday, May 3, 2024 Curiosity loves to drive so it’s pretty rare we stay at [...]
2 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, Louisiana, is one of the world’s largest manufacturing plants, with 43 acres under one roof and a port with deep-water access, permitting transportation of large space systems and hardware NASA NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, [...]
Photo of the Day This is how the Sun disappeared from the daytime sky last month. The featured time-lapse video was created from stills taken from Mountain View, Arkansas, USA on 2024 April 8. First, a small sliver of a normally spotted Sun went strangely dark. Within a few minutes, much of the background [...]
2 min read Hubble Views a Galaxy with a Voracious Black Hole This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the spiral galaxy NGC 4951, located roughly 50 million light-years away from Earth. Bright, starry spiral arms surround an active galactic center in this new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy NGC 4951. [...]
From left to right, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams pose for a picture after a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft aboard rolled out of the Vertical Integration Facility to the launch pad at Space Launch Complex-41 ahead of the NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test, Saturday, May 4, 2024 [...]
Photo of the Day What happens to a star that goes near a black hole? If the star directly impacts a massive black hole, then the star falls in completely -- and everything vanishes. More likely, though, the star goes close enough to have the black hole's gravity pull away its outer layers, or [...]
