NASA’s Katherine Johnson Independent Verification and Validation Facility (IV&V) held a swearing-in ceremony for civil servants on Monday, Aug. 10, 2026, at the facility in Fairmont, West Virginia. In total, 51 new employees were hired at IV&V as part of NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman’s directive to strengthen NASA’s technical core competencies. Growing up in Grafton, [...]
APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 13 – Total… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Total [...]
Photo of the Day It looks like a view from the Little Prince's planet. The featured image is a throwback to the 2024 Perseid meteor shower, surrounded in this projection by the Bieszczady Mountains in Poland. Visible in the sky is the arch of the Milky Way, along with several nebulas in red and [...]
3 min readPreparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA has been taking pictures of the Moon for decades, collecting a wealth of data. This false-color picture is a composite of 15 images of the Moon taken through three color filters on NASA’s Galileo solid-state imaging system.Credit: NASA The barren lunar landscape has some [...]
NASA/Bill Ingalls A total solar eclipse is seen from San Millán de los Caballeros, Spain, Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2026. A total solar eclipse – the Moon passing between the Sun and Earth, completely blocking the face of the Sun – swept across parts of Greenland, Iceland, northern Russia, the Atlantic Ocean, Spain, and a small [...]
2 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) The Vertical Motion Simulator at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley is capable of vertical and horizontal motion to simulate a range of flight experiences, such as lunar landers, helicopters, and commercial aircraft.NASA/Jesse Carpenter Imagine stepping into a machine that can make [...]
NASA astronaut Mike Fincke is pictured inside the International Space Station’s Quest airlock prior to the start of the third spacewalk for the STS-134 mission. Credit: NASA NASA astronaut Mike Fincke is departing the agency on Wednesday after 30 years of service. Throughout his career, he flew four missions, spent 549 days in space, and [...]
Lindsey Waitt, engineer with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program, participates in a terminal countdown simulation for Artemis III on Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026, inside Firing Room 1 of the Rocco A. Petrone Launch Control Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA/Clayton Rougelot As a young girl raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, Lindsey Waitt dreamed [...]
APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 12 –… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. Perseids over [...]
A new quality assessment report from NASA’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) program evaluates data from the Polar Geospatial Center’s (PGC) EarthDEM product. The results of the evaluation help inform NASA program management and the user community about the quality of commercial Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) for use in NASA science. At left, the cover [...]
