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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is better known as NASA. It pays for tons of research, and all that research is free for the public to see. You can search their online database, called PubSpace, for information on Mars, asteroids, Voyager missions, or alien life, or just look up amazing photos. PubSpace is fun to explore!
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NASA is planning the next mission to Mars, and they’ll be sending along a tiny helicopter! The 4-pound drone will need to be able to work autonomously, meaning it can make some decisions on its own. It will also have to spin its blades 10 times faster since Mars has almost no atmosphere. Awesome!
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3 girls from Washington D C are finalists in a NASA competition. 17 year-olds Mikayla Sharrieff, Bria Snell, and India Skinner had to apply space technologies to earthly challenges. They invented a water purifier out of copper shards, filter floss, and drinking straws. It purifies water in school drinking fountains that might contain led!
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SpaceX made its eighth rocket launch this year, and successfully landed the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket. It carried NASA’s newest satellite, TESS: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. TESS will be looking for planets outside our solar system, hunting especially for Earth-like planets. Then the James Webb Space Telescope will take a closer look!
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NASA and Lockheed Martin are developing an experimental plane called the Low-Boom Flight Demonstration. When the X-plane breaks the sound barrier it won’t produce the sonic boom that would annoy people living below its flight path. As it passes Mach 1, the speed of sound at around 785 miles per hour, you’ll just hear a gentle thump!
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NASA’s Juno mission is uncovering some of Jupiter’s secrets. Its cyclones at its poles have polygonal shapes. A storm near the south pole is pentagon-shaped! Juno has also showed us Jupiter’s aurora, lights caused by electrical currents in the magnetosphere. It also revealed that Jupiter had deep zones and belts of clouds.
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NASA is working on a new spacesuit design that has a built-in toilet! The next spacecraft to carry humans, Orion, will have a toilet, but NASA wants astronauts to be able to survive in the suit for up to six days in case of emergency. For shorter missions, astronauts just wear diapers.
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NASA’s New Horizons probe is hurtling through space at 700,000 miles a day into the Kuiper Belt, where Pluto and many icy objects orbit the sun. The probe sent the most distant photographs ever of the Wishing Well, a group of stars 1,300 light years away. The probe is 3.79 billion miles from Earth. Far out!
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NASA has always wanted to get a close look at the sun. That will finally happen this summer when the Parker Solar Probe is launched. The probe will orbit within 4 million miles of the sun’s surface, flying inside the sun’s corona. It’ll have to withstand temperatures up to 2600 degrees Fahrenheit! Don’t forget the sunblock!
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How would you like to find a new planet? A group of citizen scientists has discovered a planetary system called K2-138 through a project called Exoplanet Explorers! Volunteers can learn what signals from exoplanets look like by logging onto Zooniverse, then look through data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope. Anyone can help, including you!
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