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KEY POINTS For millennia, astronomers thought Uranus was no more than a distant star. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that Uranus was universally accepted as a planet. To this day, the ringed, blue world subverts scientists’ expectations, but new NASA research helps puzzle out some of the world’s mystique.  Uranus is unlike any […]

KEY POINTS Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune each emit more energy than they receive from the Sun, meaning they have comparatively warm interiors. NASA’s Uranus flyby with Voyager 2 in 1986 found the planet colder than expected, which challenged ideas of how planets formed and evolved. However, with advanced computer modeling and a new look at old data, scientists think the planet may actually be warmer than previously expected. For millennia, astronomers thought Uranus was no more than a distant star. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that Uranus was universally accepted as a planet. To this day, the ringed, blue world subverts scientists’ expectations, but new NASA research helps puzzle out some of the world’s mystique. This zoomed-in image of Uranus, captured by the Near-Infrared Camera on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope on Feb. 6, 2023, reveals stunning views of Uranus’ rings. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Uranus is unlike any other planet in our solar system. It spins on its side, which means each pole directly faces the Sun for a continuous 42-year “summer.” Uranus also rotates in the opposite direction of all planets except Venus. Data from NASA’s Voyager 2 Uranus flyby in 1986 also suggested the planet is unusually cold inside, challenging scientists to reconsider fundamental theories of how planets formed and evolved throughout our solar system. “Since Voyager 2’s flyby, everybody has said Uranus has no internal heat,” said Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “But it’s been really hard to explain why that is, especially when compared with the other giant planets.” These Uranus projections came from only one up-close measurement of the planet’s emitted heat made by Voyager 2: “Everything hinges on that one data point,” said Simon. “That is part of the problem.” Now, using an advanced computer modeling technique and revisiting decades of data, Simon and a team of scientists have found that Uranus does in fact generate some heat, as they reported on May 16 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal. A planet’s internal heat can be calculated by comparing the amount of energy it receives from the Sun to the amount it of energy it releases into space in the form of reflected light and emitted heat. The solar system’s other giant planets — Saturn, Jupiter, and Neptune — emit more heat than they receive, which means the extra heat is coming from inside, much of it left over from the high-energy processes that formed the planets 4.5 billion years ago. The amount of heat a planet exudes could be an indication of its age: the less heat released relative to the heat absorbed from the Sun, the older the planet is. Uranus stood out from the other planets because it appeared to give off as much heat as it received, implying it had none of its own. This puzzled scientists. Some hypothesized that perhaps the planet is much older than all the others and has cooled off completely. Others proposed that a giant collision — the same one that may have knocked the planet on its side — blasted out all of Uranus’ heat. But none of these hypotheses satisfied scientists, motivating them to solve Uranus’ cold case. “We thought, ‘Could it really be that there is no internal heat at Uranus?’” said Patrick Irwin, the paper’s lead author and professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford in England. “We did many calculations to see how much sunshine is reflected by Uranus and we realized that it is actually more reflective than people had estimated.” The researchers set out to determine Uranus’ full energy budget: how much energy it receives from the Sun compared to how much it reflects as sunlight and how much it emits as heat. To do this, they needed to estimate the total amount of light reflected from the planet at all angles. “You need to see the light that’s scattered off to the sides, not just coming straight back at you,” Simon said. To get the most accurate estimate of Uranus’ energy budget yet, Oxford researchers developed a computer model that brought together everything known about Uranus’ atmosphere from decades of observations from ground- and space-based telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii. The model included information about the planet’s hazes, clouds, and seasonal changes, all of which affect how sunlight is reflected and how heat escapes. These side-by-side images of Uranus, taken eight years apart by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, show seasonal changes in the planet’s reflectivity. The left image shows the planet seven years after its northern spring equinox when the Sun was shining just above its equator. The second photo, taken six years before the planet’s summer solstice, portrays a bright and large northern polar cap. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, A. Simon (NASA-GSFC), M. H. Wong (UC Berkeley), J. DePasquale (STScI) The researchers found that Uranus releases about 15% more energy than it receives from the Sun, a figure that is similar to another recent estimate from a separate study funded in part by NASA that was published July 14 in Geophysical Research Letters. These studies suggest Uranus it has its own heat, though still far less than its neighbor Neptune, which emits more than twice the energy it receives. “Now we have to understand what that remnant amount of heat at Uranus means, as well as get better measurements of it,” Simon said. Unraveling Uranus’ past is useful not only for mapping the timeline of when solar system planets formed and migrated to their current orbits, but it also helps scientists better understand many of the planets discovered outside the solar system, called exoplanets, a majority of which are the same size as Uranus. By Emma Friedman NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Explore More 3 min read Hubble Helps Determine Uranus’ Rotation Rate with Unprecedented Precision Article 3 months ago 5 min read Hubble Monitors Changing Weather and Seasons at Jupiter and Uranus Article 2 years ago 8 min read Why Uranus and Neptune Are Different Colors Neptune and Uranus have much in common yet their appearances are notably different. Astronomers now… Article 3 years ago Share Details Last Updated Jul 17, 2025 Editor Lonnie Shekhtman Contact Lonnie Shekhtman lonnie.shekhtman@nasa.gov Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms Planetary Science Planets The Solar System Uranus

NASA/Jacob Shaw NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft has officially begun taxi tests, marking the first time this one-of-a-kind experimental aircraft has moved under its own power. NASA test pilot Nils Larson and the X-59 team, made up of NASA and contractor Lockheed Martin personnel, completed the aircraft’s first low-speed taxi test at U.S. Air […]

2 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA/Jacob Shaw NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft has officially begun taxi tests, marking the first time this one-of-a-kind experimental aircraft has moved under its own power. NASA test pilot Nils Larson and the X-59 team, made up of NASA and contractor Lockheed Martin personnel, completed the aircraft’s first low-speed taxi test at U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, on July 10, 2025. The taxiing represents the X-59’s last series of ground tests before first flight. Over the coming weeks, the aircraft will gradually increase its speed, leading up to a high-speed taxi test that will take the aircraft just short of the point where it would take off. During the low-speed tests, engineers and flight crews monitored how the X-59 handled as it moved across the runway, working to validate critical systems like steering and braking. These checks help ensure the aircraft’s stability and control across a range of conditions, giving pilots and engineers confidence that all systems are functioning as expected. The X-59 is the centerpiece of NASA’s Quesst mission, which aims to demonstrate quiet supersonic flight by reducing the loud sonic boom to a quieter “thump.” Data gathered from the X-59 will be shared with U.S. and international regulators to inform the establishment of new, data-driven acceptable noise thresholds related to supersonic commercial flight over land. NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft taxis across the runway during a low-speed taxi test at U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, on July 10, 2025. The test marks the start of taxi tests and the last series of ground tests before first flight. NASA/Carla Thomas NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft moves under its own power for the first time at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California, on July 10, 2025. Guided by the aircraft’s crew chief, the event marks the beginning of taxi tests – a key milestone and the final series of ground tests before first flight. NASA/Carla Thomas Share Details Last Updated Jul 17, 2025 Related Terms Aeronautics Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate Ames Research Center Armstrong Flight Research Center Commercial Supersonic Technology Glenn Research Center Integrated Aviation Systems Program Langley Research Center Low Boom Flight Demonstrator Quesst (X-59) Supersonic Flight Explore More 3 min read NASA Glenn Announces 2025 Drop Tower Challenge Winners Article 1 day ago 5 min read NASA’s SpaceX Crew-11 Mission Gears Up for Space Station Research Article 2 days ago 2 min read X-59 Model Tested in Japanese Supersonic Wind Tunnel Article 6 days ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center Aeronautics Quesst Quesst is NASA's mission to demonstrate how the X-59 can fly supersonic without generating loud sonic booms and then survey… Integrated Aviation Systems Program

July will see the launch of the groundbreaking Solar EruptioN Integral Field Spectrograph mission, or SNIFS. Delivered to space via a Black Brant IX sounding rocket, SNIFS will explore the energy and dynamics of the chromosphere, one of the most complex regions of the Sun’s atmosphere. The SNIFS mission’s launch window at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico opens on Friday, July 18. 

4 min read NASA to Launch SNIFS, Sun’s Next Trailblazing Spectator July will see the launch of the groundbreaking Solar EruptioN Integral Field Spectrograph mission, or SNIFS. Delivered to space via a Black Brant IX sounding rocket, SNIFS will explore the energy and dynamics of the chromosphere, one of the most complex regions of the Sun’s atmosphere. The SNIFS mission’s launch window at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico opens on Friday, July 18. The chromosphere is located between the Sun’s visible surface, or photosphere, and its outer layer, the corona. The different layers of the Sun’s atmosphere have been researched at length, but many questions persist about the chromosphere. “There’s still a lot of unknowns,” said Phillip Chamberlin, a research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder and principal investigator for the SNIFS mission. The reddish chromosphere is visible on the Sun’s right edge in this view of the Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse from Madras, Oregon. Credit: NASA/Nat Gopalswamy The chromosphere lies just below the corona, where powerful solar flares and massive coronal mass ejections are observed. These solar eruptions are the main drivers of space weather, the hazardous conditions in near-Earth space that threaten satellites and endanger astronauts. The SNIFS mission aims to learn more about how energy is converted and moves through the chromosphere, where it can ultimately power these massive explosions. “To make sure the Earth is safe from space weather, we really would like to be able to model things,” said Vicki Herde, a doctoral graduate of CU Boulder who worked with Chamberlin to develop SNIFS. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video This footage from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the Sun in the 304-angstrom band of extreme ultraviolet light, which primarily reveals light from the chromosphere. This video, captured on Feb. 22, 2024, shows a solar flare — as seen in the bright flash on the upper left. Credit: NASA/SDO The SNIFS mission is the first ever solar ultraviolet integral field spectrograph, an advanced technology combining an imager and a spectrograph. Imagers capture photos and videos, which are good for seeing the combined light from a large field of view all at once. Spectrographs dissect light into its various wavelengths, revealing which elements are present in the light source, their temperature, and how they’re moving — but only from a single location at a time. The SNIFS mission combines these two technologies into one instrument. “It’s the best of both worlds,” said Chamberlin. “You’re pushing the limit of what technology allows us to do.” By focusing on specific wavelengths, known as spectral lines, the SNIFS mission will help scientists to learn about the chromosphere. These wavelengths include a spectral line of hydrogen that is the brightest line in the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV) spectrum, and two spectral lines from the elements silicon and oxygen. Together, data from these spectral lines will help reveal how the chromosphere connects with upper atmosphere by tracing how solar material and energy move through it. The SNIFS mission will be carried into space by a sounding rocket. These rockets are effective tools for launching and carrying space experiments and offer a valuable opportunity for hands-on experience, particularly for students and early-career researchers. (From left to right) Vicki Herde, Joseph Wallace, and Gabi Gonzalez, who worked on the SNIFS mission, stand with the sounding rocket containing the rocket payload at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Credit: courtesy of Phillip Chamberlin “You can really try some wild things,” Herde said. “It gives the opportunity to allow students to touch the hardware.” Chamberlin emphasized how beneficial these types of missions can be for science and engineering students like Herde, or the next generation of space scientists, who “come with a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of new ideas, new techniques,” he said. The entirety of the SNIFS mission will likely last up to 15 minutes. After launch, the sounding rocket is expected to take 90 seconds to make it to space and point toward the Sun, seven to eight minutes to perform the experiment on the chromosphere, and three to five minutes to return to Earth’s surface. A previous sounding rocket launch from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. This mission carried a copy of the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE). Credit: NASA/University of Colorado Boulder, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics/James Mason The rocket will drift around 70 to 80 miles (112 to 128 kilometers) from the launchpad before its return, so mission contributors must ensure it will have a safe place to land. White Sands, a largely empty desert, is ideal. Herde, who spent four years working on the rocket, expressed her immense excitement for the launch. “This has been my baby.” By Harper Lawson NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Share Details Last Updated Jul 17, 2025 Related Terms Heliophysics Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Division Science & Research Sounding Rockets Sounding Rockets Program Wallops Flight Facility Explore More 5 min read NASA, Oxford Discover Warmer Uranus Than Once Thought Article 43 minutes ago 6 min read NASA’s TRACERS Studies Explosive Process in Earth’s Magnetic Shield Article 1 day ago 3 min read NASA Citizen Science and Your Career: Stories of Exoplanet Watch Volunteers Doing NASA Science brings many rewards. But can taking part in NASA citizen science help… Article 1 day ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Missions Humans in Space Climate Change Solar System

In this June 13, 2025, photo, NASA astronaut Anne McClain shows off a hamburger-shaped cake to celebrate 200 cumulative days in space for JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi since his first spaceflight as an Expedition 48-49 Flight Engineer in 2016. Onishi and McClain launched to the International Space Station along with NASA […]

NASA/Jonny Kim In this June 13, 2025, photo, NASA astronaut Anne McClain shows off a hamburger-shaped cake to celebrate 200 cumulative days in space for JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi since his first spaceflight as an Expedition 48-49 Flight Engineer in 2016. Onishi and McClain launched to the International Space Station along with NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov on March 14, 2025, as part of the Crew-10 mission. Aboard the orbital laboratory, the Crew-10 members conduct scientific research to prepare for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit and benefit humanity on Earth. McClain and Ayers also performed a spacewalk on May 1, 2025 – McClain’s third and Ayers’ first. Check out the International Space Station blog to follow the crew’s research and other activities. Image credit: NASA/Jonny Kim

Lee esta historia en español aquí NASA invites innovators of all ages to register for the NASA Space Apps Challenge, held on Oct. 4-5. The 2025 theme is Learn, Launch, Lead, and participants will work alongside a vibrant community of scientists, technologists, and storytellers at more than 450 events worldwide. Participants can expect to learn […]

3 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) A team works together on their project during the 2024 NASA Space Apps Challenge event in in Arequipa, Peru. Teams have two days to respond to the challenges and submit their project for the chance to win one of 10 global awards. Lee esta historia en español aquí NASA invites innovators of all ages to register for the NASA Space Apps Challenge, held on Oct. 4-5. The 2025 theme is Learn, Launch, Lead, and participants will work alongside a vibrant community of scientists, technologists, and storytellers at more than 450 events worldwide. Participants can expect to learn skills to succeed in STEM fields, launch ideas that transform NASA’s open data into actionable tools, and lead their communities in driving technological innovation. During the NASA Space Apps Challenge, participants in the U.S. and around the world gather at hundreds of in-person and virtual events to address challenges authored by subject matter experts across NASA divisions. These challenges range in complexity and topic, tasking participants with everything from creating machine learning models and leveraging artificial intelligence, to improving access to NASA research, to designing sustainable recycling systems for Mars, and to developing tools to evaluate local air quality here on Earth. Dr. Yoseline Angel Lopez, a former space apps challenge winner and now an assistant research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, can attest that the opportunity to Learn, Launch, Lead goes far beyond the hackathon. “The NASA Space Apps Challenge gave me and my team a meaningful opportunity to apply science to real-world problems and gain validation from NASA scientists and industry experts,” said Angel. In 2021, her team’s winning web-app prototype was adopted by Colombia’s Ministry of Agriculture, connecting smallholder farmers with local buyers. The platform also supported agricultural land-use monitoring using satellite imagery. After the hackathon, project submissions are judged by NASA and space agency experts. Winners are selected for one of 10 global awards. “Participating in the hackathon is exciting on its own. But when your project can lead to greater opportunities and make a difference in your community, that’s a dream come true,” said Angel. She will return to the 2025 hackathon as a NASA subject matter expert and challenge author, giving a Golden Age of innovators the opportunity to make a difference in their communities through the use of data from NASA and 14 space agency partners. This year’s partners include: Bahrain Space Agency; Brazilian Space Agency; CSA (Canadian Space Agency); ESA (European Space Agency); ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation); Italian Space Agency; JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency); Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre of the United Arab Emirates; National Space Activities Commission of Argentina; Paraguayan Space Agency; South African National Space Agency; Spanish Space Agency; Turkish Space Agency; and the UK Space Agency. NASA Space Apps is funded by NASA’s Earth Science Division through a contract with Booz Allen Hamilton, Mindgrub, and SecondMuse. We invite you to register for the 2025 NASA Space Apps Challenge and choose a virtual or in-person event near you at: https://www.spaceappschallenge.org Find videos about Space Apps at: youtube.com/c/NASASpaceAppsChallenge Social Media Stay up to date with #SpaceApps by following these accounts: Facebook logo @spaceappschallenge @SpaceApps Instagram logo @nasa_spaceapps Share Details Last Updated Jul 17, 2025 Related Terms Earth Earth Science Division General Get Involved Learning Resources Opportunities to Contribute to NASA Missions & Get Involved Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing Program Explore More 6 min read NASA Program Builds Bridge From Military to Civilian Careers for Johnson Team Members Article 12 hours ago 3 min read NASA Citizen Science and Your Career: Stories of Exoplanet Watch Volunteers Doing NASA Science brings many rewards. But can taking part in NASA citizen science help… Article 1 day ago 2 min read Ejection Mechanism Design for the SPEED Test Architecture Challenge Article 1 day ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics Missions Humans in Space Climate Change Solar System

Of all the possible entry points to NASA, the agency’s SkillBridge Program has been instrumental in helping servicemembers transition from the military and into civilian careers. Offered in partnership with the Department of Defense (DoD), the program enables individuals to spend their final months of military service working with a NASA office or organization. SkillBridge […]

Of all the possible entry points to NASA, the agency’s SkillBridge Program has been instrumental in helping servicemembers transition from the military and into civilian careers. Offered in partnership with the Department of Defense (DoD), the program enables individuals to spend their final months of military service working with a NASA office or organization. SkillBridge fellows work anywhere from 90 to 180 days, contributing their unique skillsets to the agency while building their network and knowledge. The Johnson Space Center in Houston hosted NASA’s first SkillBridge fellow in 2019, paving the way for dozens of others to follow. SkillBridge participants are not guaranteed a job offer at the end of their fellowship, but many have gone on to accept full-time positions with NASA. About 25 of those former fellows currently work at Johnson, filling roles as varied as their military experiences. Miguel Shears during his military service (left) and his SkillBridge fellowship at Johnson Space Center. Images courtesy of Miguel Shears Miguel Shears retired from the Marine Corps in November 2023. He ended his 30 years of service as the administration, academics, and operations chief for the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia, where he was also an adjunct professor. Shears completed a SkillBridge fellowship with FOD in the summer and fall of 2023, supporting the instructional systems design team. He was hired as a full-time employee upon his military retirement and currently serves as an instructional systems designer for the Instructor Training Module, Mentorship Module, and Spaceflight Academy. He conducts training needs analysis for FOD, as well. Ever Zavala as a flight test engineer in the U.S. Air Force (left) and as a capsule communicator in the Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center. Images courtesy of Ever Zavala Ever Zavala was very familiar with Johnson before becoming a SkillBridge fellow. He spent the last three of his nearly 24-year Air Force career serving as the deputy director of the DoD Human Spaceflight Payloads Office at Johnson. His team oversaw the development, integration, launch, and operation of payloads hosting DoD experiments on small satellites and the International Space Station. He also became a certified capsule communicator, or capcom, in December 2022, and was the lead capcom for SpaceX’s 28th commercial resupply services mission to the orbiting laboratory. Zavala’s SkillBridge fellowship was in Johnson’s Astronaut Office, where he worked as a capcom, capcom instructor, and an integration engineer supporting the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program. He was involved in developing a training needs analysis and agency simulators for the human landing system, among other projects. He officially joined the center team as a full-time contractor in August 2024. He is currently a flight operations safety officer within the Flight Operations Directorate (FOD) and continues to serve as a part-time capcom. Carl Johnson with his wife during his first visit to Johnson Space Center (left) and completing some electrical work as part of his SkillBridge fellowship. Images courtesy of Carl Johnson Carl Johnson thanks his wife for helping him find a path to NASA. While she was a Pathways intern — and his girlfriend at the time — she gave him a tour of the center that inspired him to join the agency when he was ready to leave the Army. She helped connect him to one of the center’s SkillBridge coordinators and the rest is history. Johnson was selected for a SkillBridge fellowship in the Dynamic System Test Branch. From February to June 2023, he supported development of the lunar terrain vehicle ground test unit and contributed to the Active Response Gravity Offload System (ARGOS), which simulates reduced gravity for astronaut training. Johnson officially joined the center team as an electrical engineer in the Engineering Directorate’s Software, Robotics, and Simulation Division in September 2023. He is currently developing a new ARGOS spacewalk simulator and training as an operator and test director for another ARGOS system. Johnson holds an electrical engineering degree from the United States Military Academy. He was on active duty in the Army for 10 years and concluded his military career as an instructor and small group leader for the Engineer Captains Career Course. In that role, he was responsible for instructing, mentoring, and preparing the next generation of engineer captains. Kevin Quinn during his Navy service. Image courtesy of Kevin Quinn Kevin Quinn served in the Navy for 22 years. His last role was maintenance senior chief with Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 31, known as “the Dust Devils.” Quinn managed the operations and maintenance of 33 aircraft, ensuring their readiness for complex missions and contributing to developmental flight tests and search and rescue missions. He applied that experience to his SkillBridge fellowship in quality assurance at Ellington Field in 2024. Quinn worked to enhance flight safety and astronaut training across various aircraft, including the T-38, WB-57, and the Super Guppy. He has continued contributing to those projects since being hired as a full-time quality assurance employee in 2025. Andrew Ulat during his Air Force career. Image courtesy of Andrew Ulat Andrew Ulat retired from the Air Force after serving for 21 years as an intercontinental ballistic missile launch control officer and strategic operations advisor. His last role in the military was as a director of staff at the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. There he served as a graduate-level instructor teaching international security concepts to mid-level officers and civilian counterparts from all branches of the military and various federal agencies. Ulat started his SkillBridge fellowship as an integration engineer in Johnson’s X-Lab, supporting avionics, power, and software integration for the Gateway lunar space station. Ulat transitioned directly from his fellowship into a similar full-time position at Johnson in May 2024. Ariel Vargas receives a commendation during his Army service (left) and in his official NASA portrait. Ariel Vargas transitioned to NASA after serving for five years in the Army. His last role in the military was as a signal officer, which involved leading teams managing secure communications and network operations in dynamic and mission-critical environments in the Middle East and the United States. Vargas completed his SkillBridge fellowship in November 2023, supporting Johnson’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO). During his fellowship, he led a center-wide wireless augmentation project that modernized Johnson’s connectivity. He became a full-time civil servant in May 2024 and currently serves as the business operations and partnerships lead within OCIO, supporting a digital transformation initiative. In this role, he leads efforts to streamline internal business operations, manage strategic partnerships, and drive cross-functional collaboration. “My time in the military taught me the value of service, leadership, and adaptability—qualities that I now apply daily in support of NASA’s mission,” Vargas said. “I’m proud to be part of the Johnson team and hope my story can inspire other service members considering the SkillBridge pathway.” Explore More 3 min read Registration Opens for 2025 NASA International Space Apps Challenge Article 5 hours ago 3 min read Melissa Harris: Shaping NASA’s Vision for a Future in Low Earth Orbit Article 3 days ago 5 min read Protected: Glenn Extreme Environments Rig (GEER) Article 3 days ago

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center will host astronauts for a media opportunity as the center celebrates its 65th anniversary during a free, community event on Saturday, July 19, from noon to 5 p.m. CDT at The Orion Amphitheater in Huntsville, Alabama. Marshall, along with its partners and collaborators, will fill the amphitheater with space exhibits, […]

2 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center will host astronauts for a media opportunity as the center celebrates its 65th anniversary during a free, community event on Saturday, July 19, from noon to 5 p.m. CDT at The Orion Amphitheater in Huntsville, Alabama. Marshall, along with its partners and collaborators, will fill the amphitheater with space exhibits, music, food vendors, and hands-on activities for all ages. The summer celebration will mark 65 years of innovation and exploration, not only for Marshall, but for Huntsville and other North Alabama communities. The event will kick off with a program at 12:30 p.m. led by Joseph Pelfrey, director of NASA Marshall, and will include a presentation from some of the Expedition 72 crew members who recently returned from their mission after dedicating more than 1,000 combined hours to scientific research and technology demonstrations aboard the International Space Station. The crew will share their experiences in space with the community. The official portrait of the International Space Station’s Expedition 72 crew. At the top (from left) are Roscosmos cosmonaut and Flight Engineer Alexey Ovchinin, NASA astronaut and space station Commander Suni Williams, and NASA astronaut and Flight Engineer Butch Wilmore. In the middle row are Roscosmos cosmonaut and Flight Engineer Ivan Vagner and NASA astronaut and Flight Engineer Don Pettit. In the bottom row are Roscosmos cosmonaut and Flight Engineer Aleksandr Gorbunov and NASA astronaut and Flight Engineer Nick Hague. NASA/Bill Stafford and Robert Markowitz Media are invited to attend the event and participate in a news conference with the astronauts after the presentation but must confirm their attendance by 4:30 p.m., Thursday, July 17, to Lance D. Davis – lance.d.davis@nasa.gov – in Marshall’s Office of Communications. Media should arrive at the front entrance of The Orion Amphitheater by 11:45 a.m., Saturday, July 19, to be escorted by the Office of Communications. Founded July 1, 1960, in Huntsville, Marshall has shaped or supported nearly every facet of the nation’s ongoing mission of space exploration and discovery, solving the most complex, technical flight challenges, and contributing to science to improve life and protect resources around the world. Learn more about Marshall’s 65th anniversary celebration at: https://www.nasa.gov/marshall65/ Lance D. Davis Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. 256-640-9065 lance.d.davis@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Jul 16, 2025 Editor Beth Ridgeway Location Marshall Space Flight Center Related Terms Marshall Space Flight Center

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and look up during July evenings, you’ll see the brilliant star Vega shining overhead. Did you know that Vega is one of the most studied stars in our skies? As one of the brightest summer stars, Vega has fascinated astronomers for thousands of years.Vega is the brightest star in the […]

3 min read Summer Triangle Corner: Vega If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and look up during July evenings, you’ll see the brilliant star Vega shining overhead. Did you know that Vega is one of the most studied stars in our skies? As one of the brightest summer stars, Vega has fascinated astronomers for thousands of years. Vega is the brightest star in the small Greek constellation of Lyra, the harp. It’s also one of the three points of the large “Summer Triangle” asterism, making Vega one of the easiest stars to find for novice stargazers. Ancient humans from 14,000 years ago likely knew Vega for another reason: it was the Earth’s northern pole star! Compare Vega’s current position with that of the current north star, Polaris, and you can see how much the direction of Earth’s axis changes over thousands of years. This slow movement of axial rotation is called precession, and in 12,000 years, Vega will return to the northern pole star position. A map of the asterism known as the Summer Triangle. This asterism is made up of three stars: Vega in the Lyra constellation, Altair in the Aquila constellation, and Deneb in the Cygnus constellation. Stellarium Web Bright Vega has been observed closely since the beginning of modern astronomy and even helped to set the standard for the current magnitude scale used to categorize the brightness of stars. Polaris and Vega have something else in common, besides being once and future pole stars: their brightness varies over time, making them variable stars. Variable stars’ light can change for many different reasons. Dust, smaller stars, or even planets may block the light we see from the star. Or the star itself might be unstable with active sunspots, expansions, or eruptions changing its brightness. Most stars are so far away that we only record the change in light, and can’t see their surface. Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a large asteroid belt around the bright star Vega, as illustrated here at left in brown. The ring of warm, rocky debris was detected using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory, in which NASA plays an important role. NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA’s TESS satellite has ultra-sensitive light sensors primed to look for the tiny dimming of starlight caused by transits of extrasolar planets. Their sensitivity also allowed TESS to observe much smaller pulsations in a certain type of variable star’s light than previously observed. These observations of Delta Scuti variable stars will help astronomers model their complex interiors and make sense of their distinct, seemingly chaotic pulsations. This is a major contribution towards the field of astroseismology: the study of stellar interiors via observations of how sound waves “sing” as they travel through stars. The findings may help settle the debate over what kind of variable star Vega is. Find more details on this research, including a sonification demo that lets you “hear” the heartbeat of one of these stars, at: bit.ly/DeltaScutiTESS In 2024, the James Webb Space Telescope revisited the Vega system to reveal a 100-billion-mile-wide disk of dust around this star. While the debris disk is confirmed, there is no evidence of planets as of today. Originally posted by Dave Prosper: June 2020 Last Updated by Kat Troche: July 2025

NASA will host a news conference at 12 p.m. EDT Monday, July 21, to discuss the upcoming NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission. The Earth-observing satellite, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), carries an advanced radar system that will help protect communities by providing a dynamic, three-dimensional view of Earth […]

A collaboration between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation, NISAR will use synthetic aperture radar to monitor nearly all the planet’s land- and ice-covered surfaces twice every 12 days. Credit: NASA NASA will host a news conference at 12 p.m. EDT Monday, July 21, to discuss the upcoming NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission. The Earth-observing satellite, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), carries an advanced radar system that will help protect communities by providing a dynamic, three-dimensional view of Earth in unprecedented detail and detecting the movement of land and ice surfaces down to the centimeter. The NISAR mission will lift off from ISRO’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, on India’s southeastern coast. Launch is targeted for no earlier than late July. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California will stream the briefing live on its X, Facebook, and YouTube channels. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media. Participants in the news conference include: Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters Karen St. Germain, director, Earth Science Division, NASA Headquarters Wendy Edelstein, deputy project manager, NISAR, NASA JPL Paul Rosen, project scientist, NISAR, NASA JPL To ask questions by phone, members of the media must RSVP no later than two hours before the start of the event to: rexana.v.vizza@jpl.nasa.gov. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online. Questions can be asked on social media during the briefing using #AskNISAR. With its two radar instruments — an S-band system provided by ISRO and an L-band system provided by NASA — NISAR will use a technique known as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to scan nearly all the planet’s land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days. Each system’s signal is sensitive to different sizes of features on Earth’s surface, and each specializes in measuring different attributes, such as moisture content, surface roughness, and motion. These capabilities will help scientists better understand processes involved in natural hazards and catastrophic events, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, land subsidence, and landslides. Additionally, NISAR’s cloud penetrating ability will aid urgent responses to communities during weather disasters such as hurricanes, storm surge, and flooding. The detailed maps the mission creates also will provide information on both gradual and sudden changes occurring on Earth’s land and ice surfaces. Managed by Caltech for NASA, JPL leads the U.S. component of the NISAR project and provided the L-band SAR. NASA JPL also provided the radar reflector antenna, the deployable boom, a high-rate communication subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid-state recorder, and payload data subsystem. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the Near Space Network, which will receive NISAR’s L-band data. Multiple ISRO centers have contributed to NISAR. The Space Applications Centre is providing the mission’s S-band SAR. The U R Rao Satellite Centre provided the spacecraft bus. The rocket is from Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, launch services are through Satish Dhawan Space Centre, and satellite mission operations are by the ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network. The National Remote Sensing Centre is responsible for S-band data reception, operational products generation, and dissemination. To learn more about NISAR, visit: https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov -end- Karen Fox / Elizabeth Vlock Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1600 karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / elizabeth.a.vlock@nasa.gov Andrew Wang / Scott Hulme Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-379-6874 / 818-653-9131 andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov / scott.d.hulme@jpl.nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Jul 16, 2025 Editor Jessica Taveau Location NASA Headquarters Related Terms NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) Earth Science Division Goddard Space Flight Center Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near Space Network Science Mission Directorate

A baby planet is shrinking from the size of Jupiter with a thick atmosphere to a small, barren world, according to a new study from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This transformation is happening as the host star unleashes a barrage of X-rays that is tearing the young planet’s atmosphere away at an enormous rate. The […]

X-ray: NASA/CXC/RIT/A. Varga et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk A baby planet is shrinking from the size of Jupiter with a thick atmosphere to a small, barren world, according to a new study from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This transformation is happening as the host star unleashes a barrage of X-rays that is tearing the young planet’s atmosphere away at an enormous rate. The planet, named TOI 1227 b, is in an orbit around a red dwarf star about 330 light-years from Earth. TOI 1227 b orbits very close to its star — less than a fifth the distance that Mercury orbits the Sun. The new study shows this planet outside our solar system, or exoplanet, is a “baby” at a mere 8 million years old. By comparison, the Earth is about 5 billion years old, or nearly a thousand times older. That makes it the second youngest planet ever to be observed passing in front of its host star (also called a transit). Previously the planet had been estimated by others to be about 11 million years old. A research team found that X-rays from its star are blasting TOI 1227 b and tearing away its atmosphere at such a rate that the planet will entirely lose it in about a billion years. At that point the planet will have lost a total mass equal to about two Earth masses, down from about 17 times the mass of Earth now. “It’s almost unfathomable to imagine what is happening to this planet,” said Attila Varga, a Ph.D. student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York, who led the study. “The planet’s atmosphere simply cannot withstand the high X-ray dose it’s receiving from its star.” It is probably impossible for life to exist on TOI 1227 b, either now or in the future. The planet is too close to its star to fit into any definition of a ‘habitable zone,’ a term astronomers use to determine if planets around other stars could sustain liquid water on their surface. The star that hosts TOI 1227 b, which is called TOI 1227, is only about a tenth the mass of the Sun and is much cooler and fainter in optical light. In X-rays, however, TOI 1227 is brighter than the Sun and is subjecting this planet, in its very close orbit, to a withering assault. The mass of TOI 1227 b, while not well understood, is likely similar to that of Neptune, but its diameter is three times larger than Neptune’s (making it similar in size to Jupiter). “A crucial part of understanding planets outside our solar system is to account for high-energy radiation like X-rays that they’re receiving,” said co-author Joel Kastner, also of RIT. “We think this planet is puffed up, or inflated, in large part as a result of the ongoing assault of X-rays from the star.” The team used new Chandra data to measure the amount of X-rays from the star that are striking the planet. Using computer models of the effects of these X-rays, they concluded the X-rays will have a transformative effect, rapidly stripping away the planet’s atmosphere. They estimate that the planet is losing a mass equivalent to a full Earth’s atmosphere about every 200 years. “The future for this baby planet doesn’t look great,” said co-author Alexander Binks of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany. “From here, TOI 1227 b may shrink to about a tenth of its current size and will lose more than 10 percent of its weight.” The researchers used different sets of data to estimate the age of TOI 1227 b. One method exploits measurements of how TOI 1227 b’s host star moves through space compared to nearby populations of stars with known ages. A second method compared the brightness and surface temperature of the star with theoretical models of evolving stars. Of all the exoplanets astronomers have found with ages less than 50 million years, TOI 1227 b stands out for having the longest year and the host planet with the lowest mass. A paper describing these results has been accepted publication in The Astrophysical Journal, and a preprint is available here. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts. Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here: https://www.nasa.gov/chandra https://chandra.si.edu Visual Description This release features an artist’s illustration of a Jupiter-sized planet closely orbiting a faint red star. An inset image, showing the star in X-ray light from Chandra, is superimposed on top of the illustration at our upper left corner. At our upper right, the red star is illustrated as a ball made of intense fire. The planet, slightly smaller than the star, is shown at our lower left. Powerful X-rays from the star are tearing away the atmosphere of the planet, causing wisps of material to flow away from the planet’s surface in the opposite direction from the star. This gives the planet a slight resemblance to a comet, complete with a tail. X-ray data from Chandra, presented in the inset image, shows the star as a small purple orb on a black background. Astronomers used the Chandra data to measure the amount of X-rays striking the planet from the star. They estimate that the planet is losing a mass equivalent to a full Earth’s atmosphere about every 200 years, causing it to ultimately shrink from the size of Jupiter down to a small, barren world. News Media Contact Megan Watzke Chandra X-ray Center Cambridge, Mass. 617-496-7998 mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu Corinne Beckinger Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama 256-544-0034 corinne.m.beckinger@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Jul 17, 2025 Editor Lee Mohon Contact Corinne M. Beckinger corinne.m.beckinger@nasa.gov Related Terms Astrophysics Chandra X-Ray Observatory Exoplanet Science Exoplanets Marshall Astrophysics Marshall Space Flight Center Science & Research Studying Exoplanets The Universe Explore More 5 min read NASA, Oxford Discover Warmer Uranus Than Once Thought KEY POINTS For millennia, astronomers thought Uranus was no more than a distant star. It… Article 3 hours ago 4 min read NASA to Launch SNIFS, Sun’s Next Trailblazing Spectator July will see the launch of the groundbreaking Solar EruptioN Integral Field Spectrograph mission, or… Article 4 hours ago 3 min read NASA Citizen Science and Your Career: Stories of Exoplanet Watch Volunteers Doing NASA Science brings many rewards. But can taking part in NASA citizen science help… Article 1 day ago

The latest NASA "Image of the Day" image.

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NASA astronaut Bob Hines took this picture of the waning crescent moon on May 8, 2022, as the International Space Station flew into an orbital sunrise 260 miles above the Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of the United States.

NASA astronaut Zena Cardman inspects her spacesuit’s wrist mirror at the NASA Johnson Space Center photo studio on March 22, 2024.

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Scientists have discovered a star behaving like no other seen before, giving fresh clues about the origin of a new class of mysterious objects.

President Donald Trump steps onstage to speak following the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft on NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley aboard, Saturday, May 30, 2020, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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The waning gibbous moon sets behind a flag at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans just after sunrise on Wednesday, March 19, 2025.

A flower is seen in the foreground with a Soyuz rocket on the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on April 7, 2025. Expedition 73 crewmembers including NASA astronaut Jonny Kim launched aboard their Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft on April 8.

NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft is seen during its “aluminum bird” systems testing at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California. The test verified how the aircraft’s hardware and software work together, responding to pilot inputs and handling injected system failures.

On May 19th, 2005, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This panoramic camera mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover's 489th Martian day, or sol.

Webb has found crystalline water ice in a debris disk around a young, Sun-like star called HD 181327. Based on its presence in our own solar system, scientists have expected to see it in other star systems — but haven't had sensitive enough instruments to provide definitive proof until now.

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Students from the University of Massachusetts Amherst team carry their high-powered rocket toward the launch pad at NASA’s 2025 Student Launch launch day competition in Toney, Alabama, on April 4, 2025.

NASA astronaut and Expedition 72 flight engineer Anne McClain is pictured near one of the International Space Station's main solar arrays during a spacewalk to upgrade the orbital outpost's power generation system and relocate a communications antenna.

The NASA "meatball" logo mounted on the south side of the Flight Research Building at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, as seen through foliage.

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The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft is pictured backing away from the International Space Station shortly after undocking from the Rassvet module on April 19, 2025. The Soyuz crew ship would parachute to a landing in Kazakhstan about three hours later returning NASA astronaut Don Pettit and Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner back to Earth after a 220-day space research mission.

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The asteroid Donaldjohanson as seen by the Lucy Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (L’LORRI). This is one of the most detailed images returned by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft during its flyby. This image was taken at 1:51 p.m. EDT (17:51 UTC), April 20, 2025, near closest approach, from a range of approximately 660 miles (1,100 km). The spacecraft’s closest approach distance was 600 miles (960 km), but the image shown was taken approximately 40 seconds beforehand. The image has been sharpened and processed to enhance contrast.

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This towering structure of billowing gas and dark, obscuring dust might only be a small portion of the Eagle Nebula, but it is no less majestic in appearance for it. 9.5 light-years tall and 7000 light-years distant from Earth, this dusty sculpture is refreshed with the use of new processing techniques.

Official National Aeronautics and Space Administration Website

KEY POINTS For millennia, astronomers thought Uranus was no more than a distant star. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that Uranus was universally accepted as a planet. To this day, the ringed, blue world subverts scientists’ expectations, but new NASA research helps puzzle out some of the world’s mystique.  Uranus is unlike any […]

KEY POINTS Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune each emit more energy than they receive from the Sun, meaning they have comparatively warm interiors. NASA’s Uranus flyby with Voyager 2 in 1986 found the planet colder than expected, which challenged ideas of how planets formed and evolved. However, with advanced computer modeling and a new look at old data, scientists think the planet may actually be warmer than previously expected. For millennia, astronomers thought Uranus was no more than a distant star. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that Uranus was universally accepted as a planet. To this day, the ringed, blue world subverts scientists’ expectations, but new NASA research helps puzzle out some of the world’s mystique. This zoomed-in image of Uranus, captured by the Near-Infrared Camera on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope on Feb. 6, 2023, reveals stunning views of Uranus’ rings. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Uranus is unlike any other planet in our solar system. It spins on its side, which means each pole directly faces the Sun for a continuous 42-year “summer.” Uranus also rotates in the opposite direction of all planets except Venus. Data from NASA’s Voyager 2 Uranus flyby in 1986 also suggested the planet is unusually cold inside, challenging scientists to reconsider fundamental theories of how planets formed and evolved throughout our solar system. “Since Voyager 2’s flyby, everybody has said Uranus has no internal heat,” said Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “But it’s been really hard to explain why that is, especially when compared with the other giant planets.” These Uranus projections came from only one up-close measurement of the planet’s emitted heat made by Voyager 2: “Everything hinges on that one data point,” said Simon. “That is part of the problem.” Now, using an advanced computer modeling technique and revisiting decades of data, Simon and a team of scientists have found that Uranus does in fact generate some heat, as they reported on May 16 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal. A planet’s internal heat can be calculated by comparing the amount of energy it receives from the Sun to the amount it of energy it releases into space in the form of reflected light and emitted heat. The solar system’s other giant planets — Saturn, Jupiter, and Neptune — emit more heat than they receive, which means the extra heat is coming from inside, much of it left over from the high-energy processes that formed the planets 4.5 billion years ago. The amount of heat a planet exudes could be an indication of its age: the less heat released relative to the heat absorbed from the Sun, the older the planet is. Uranus stood out from the other planets because it appeared to give off as much heat as it received, implying it had none of its own. This puzzled scientists. Some hypothesized that perhaps the planet is much older than all the others and has cooled off completely. Others proposed that a giant collision — the same one that may have knocked the planet on its side — blasted out all of Uranus’ heat. But none of these hypotheses satisfied scientists, motivating them to solve Uranus’ cold case. “We thought, ‘Could it really be that there is no internal heat at Uranus?’” said Patrick Irwin, the paper’s lead author and professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford in England. “We did many calculations to see how much sunshine is reflected by Uranus and we realized that it is actually more reflective than people had estimated.” The researchers set out to determine Uranus’ full energy budget: how much energy it receives from the Sun compared to how much it reflects as sunlight and how much it emits as heat. To do this, they needed to estimate the total amount of light reflected from the planet at all angles. “You need to see the light that’s scattered off to the sides, not just coming straight back at you,” Simon said. To get the most accurate estimate of Uranus’ energy budget yet, Oxford researchers developed a computer model that brought together everything known about Uranus’ atmosphere from decades of observations from ground- and space-based telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii. The model included information about the planet’s hazes, clouds, and seasonal changes, all of which affect how sunlight is reflected and how heat escapes. These side-by-side images of Uranus, taken eight years apart by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, show seasonal changes in the planet’s reflectivity. The left image shows the planet seven years after its northern spring equinox when the Sun was shining just above its equator. The second photo, taken six years before the planet’s summer solstice, portrays a bright and large northern polar cap. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, A. Simon (NASA-GSFC), M. H. Wong (UC Berkeley), J. DePasquale (STScI) The researchers found that Uranus releases about 15% more energy than it receives from the Sun, a figure that is similar to another recent estimate from a separate study funded in part by NASA that was published July 14 in Geophysical Research Letters. These studies suggest Uranus it has its own heat, though still far less than its neighbor Neptune, which emits more than twice the energy it receives. “Now we have to understand what that remnant amount of heat at Uranus means, as well as get better measurements of it,” Simon said. Unraveling Uranus’ past is useful not only for mapping the timeline of when solar system planets formed and migrated to their current orbits, but it also helps scientists better understand many of the planets discovered outside the solar system, called exoplanets, a majority of which are the same size as Uranus. By Emma Friedman NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Explore More 3 min read Hubble Helps Determine Uranus’ Rotation Rate with Unprecedented Precision Article 3 months ago 5 min read Hubble Monitors Changing Weather and Seasons at Jupiter and Uranus Article 2 years ago 8 min read Why Uranus and Neptune Are Different Colors Neptune and Uranus have much in common yet their appearances are notably different. Astronomers now… Article 3 years ago Share Details Last Updated Jul 17, 2025 Editor Lonnie Shekhtman Contact Lonnie Shekhtman lonnie.shekhtman@nasa.gov Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms Planetary Science Planets The Solar System Uranus

NASA/Jacob Shaw NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft has officially begun taxi tests, marking the first time this one-of-a-kind experimental aircraft has moved under its own power. NASA test pilot Nils Larson and the X-59 team, made up of NASA and contractor Lockheed Martin personnel, completed the aircraft’s first low-speed taxi test at U.S. Air […]

2 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA/Jacob Shaw NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft has officially begun taxi tests, marking the first time this one-of-a-kind experimental aircraft has moved under its own power. NASA test pilot Nils Larson and the X-59 team, made up of NASA and contractor Lockheed Martin personnel, completed the aircraft’s first low-speed taxi test at U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, on July 10, 2025. The taxiing represents the X-59’s last series of ground tests before first flight. Over the coming weeks, the aircraft will gradually increase its speed, leading up to a high-speed taxi test that will take the aircraft just short of the point where it would take off. During the low-speed tests, engineers and flight crews monitored how the X-59 handled as it moved across the runway, working to validate critical systems like steering and braking. These checks help ensure the aircraft’s stability and control across a range of conditions, giving pilots and engineers confidence that all systems are functioning as expected. The X-59 is the centerpiece of NASA’s Quesst mission, which aims to demonstrate quiet supersonic flight by reducing the loud sonic boom to a quieter “thump.” Data gathered from the X-59 will be shared with U.S. and international regulators to inform the establishment of new, data-driven acceptable noise thresholds related to supersonic commercial flight over land. NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft taxis across the runway during a low-speed taxi test at U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, on July 10, 2025. The test marks the start of taxi tests and the last series of ground tests before first flight. NASA/Carla Thomas NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft moves under its own power for the first time at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, California, on July 10, 2025. Guided by the aircraft’s crew chief, the event marks the beginning of taxi tests – a key milestone and the final series of ground tests before first flight. NASA/Carla Thomas Share Details Last Updated Jul 17, 2025 Related Terms Aeronautics Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate Ames Research Center Armstrong Flight Research Center Commercial Supersonic Technology Glenn Research Center Integrated Aviation Systems Program Langley Research Center Low Boom Flight Demonstrator Quesst (X-59) Supersonic Flight Explore More 3 min read NASA Glenn Announces 2025 Drop Tower Challenge Winners Article 1 day ago 5 min read NASA’s SpaceX Crew-11 Mission Gears Up for Space Station Research Article 2 days ago 2 min read X-59 Model Tested in Japanese Supersonic Wind Tunnel Article 6 days ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center Aeronautics Quesst Quesst is NASA's mission to demonstrate how the X-59 can fly supersonic without generating loud sonic booms and then survey… Integrated Aviation Systems Program

July will see the launch of the groundbreaking Solar EruptioN Integral Field Spectrograph mission, or SNIFS. Delivered to space via a Black Brant IX sounding rocket, SNIFS will explore the energy and dynamics of the chromosphere, one of the most complex regions of the Sun’s atmosphere. The SNIFS mission’s launch window at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico opens on Friday, July 18. 

4 min read NASA to Launch SNIFS, Sun’s Next Trailblazing Spectator July will see the launch of the groundbreaking Solar EruptioN Integral Field Spectrograph mission, or SNIFS. Delivered to space via a Black Brant IX sounding rocket, SNIFS will explore the energy and dynamics of the chromosphere, one of the most complex regions of the Sun’s atmosphere. The SNIFS mission’s launch window at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico opens on Friday, July 18. The chromosphere is located between the Sun’s visible surface, or photosphere, and its outer layer, the corona. The different layers of the Sun’s atmosphere have been researched at length, but many questions persist about the chromosphere. “There’s still a lot of unknowns,” said Phillip Chamberlin, a research scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder and principal investigator for the SNIFS mission. The reddish chromosphere is visible on the Sun’s right edge in this view of the Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse from Madras, Oregon. Credit: NASA/Nat Gopalswamy The chromosphere lies just below the corona, where powerful solar flares and massive coronal mass ejections are observed. These solar eruptions are the main drivers of space weather, the hazardous conditions in near-Earth space that threaten satellites and endanger astronauts. The SNIFS mission aims to learn more about how energy is converted and moves through the chromosphere, where it can ultimately power these massive explosions. “To make sure the Earth is safe from space weather, we really would like to be able to model things,” said Vicki Herde, a doctoral graduate of CU Boulder who worked with Chamberlin to develop SNIFS. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video This footage from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the Sun in the 304-angstrom band of extreme ultraviolet light, which primarily reveals light from the chromosphere. This video, captured on Feb. 22, 2024, shows a solar flare — as seen in the bright flash on the upper left. Credit: NASA/SDO The SNIFS mission is the first ever solar ultraviolet integral field spectrograph, an advanced technology combining an imager and a spectrograph. Imagers capture photos and videos, which are good for seeing the combined light from a large field of view all at once. Spectrographs dissect light into its various wavelengths, revealing which elements are present in the light source, their temperature, and how they’re moving — but only from a single location at a time. The SNIFS mission combines these two technologies into one instrument. “It’s the best of both worlds,” said Chamberlin. “You’re pushing the limit of what technology allows us to do.” By focusing on specific wavelengths, known as spectral lines, the SNIFS mission will help scientists to learn about the chromosphere. These wavelengths include a spectral line of hydrogen that is the brightest line in the Sun’s ultraviolet (UV) spectrum, and two spectral lines from the elements silicon and oxygen. Together, data from these spectral lines will help reveal how the chromosphere connects with upper atmosphere by tracing how solar material and energy move through it. The SNIFS mission will be carried into space by a sounding rocket. These rockets are effective tools for launching and carrying space experiments and offer a valuable opportunity for hands-on experience, particularly for students and early-career researchers. (From left to right) Vicki Herde, Joseph Wallace, and Gabi Gonzalez, who worked on the SNIFS mission, stand with the sounding rocket containing the rocket payload at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Credit: courtesy of Phillip Chamberlin “You can really try some wild things,” Herde said. “It gives the opportunity to allow students to touch the hardware.” Chamberlin emphasized how beneficial these types of missions can be for science and engineering students like Herde, or the next generation of space scientists, who “come with a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of new ideas, new techniques,” he said. The entirety of the SNIFS mission will likely last up to 15 minutes. After launch, the sounding rocket is expected to take 90 seconds to make it to space and point toward the Sun, seven to eight minutes to perform the experiment on the chromosphere, and three to five minutes to return to Earth’s surface. A previous sounding rocket launch from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. This mission carried a copy of the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE). Credit: NASA/University of Colorado Boulder, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics/James Mason The rocket will drift around 70 to 80 miles (112 to 128 kilometers) from the launchpad before its return, so mission contributors must ensure it will have a safe place to land. White Sands, a largely empty desert, is ideal. Herde, who spent four years working on the rocket, expressed her immense excitement for the launch. “This has been my baby.” By Harper Lawson NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Share Details Last Updated Jul 17, 2025 Related Terms Heliophysics Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Division Science & Research Sounding Rockets Sounding Rockets Program Wallops Flight Facility Explore More 5 min read NASA, Oxford Discover Warmer Uranus Than Once Thought Article 43 minutes ago 6 min read NASA’s TRACERS Studies Explosive Process in Earth’s Magnetic Shield Article 1 day ago 3 min read NASA Citizen Science and Your Career: Stories of Exoplanet Watch Volunteers Doing NASA Science brings many rewards. But can taking part in NASA citizen science help… Article 1 day ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Missions Humans in Space Climate Change Solar System

In this June 13, 2025, photo, NASA astronaut Anne McClain shows off a hamburger-shaped cake to celebrate 200 cumulative days in space for JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi since his first spaceflight as an Expedition 48-49 Flight Engineer in 2016. Onishi and McClain launched to the International Space Station along with NASA […]

NASA/Jonny Kim In this June 13, 2025, photo, NASA astronaut Anne McClain shows off a hamburger-shaped cake to celebrate 200 cumulative days in space for JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi since his first spaceflight as an Expedition 48-49 Flight Engineer in 2016. Onishi and McClain launched to the International Space Station along with NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov on March 14, 2025, as part of the Crew-10 mission. Aboard the orbital laboratory, the Crew-10 members conduct scientific research to prepare for human exploration beyond low Earth orbit and benefit humanity on Earth. McClain and Ayers also performed a spacewalk on May 1, 2025 – McClain’s third and Ayers’ first. Check out the International Space Station blog to follow the crew’s research and other activities. Image credit: NASA/Jonny Kim

Lee esta historia en español aquí NASA invites innovators of all ages to register for the NASA Space Apps Challenge, held on Oct. 4-5. The 2025 theme is Learn, Launch, Lead, and participants will work alongside a vibrant community of scientists, technologists, and storytellers at more than 450 events worldwide. Participants can expect to learn […]

3 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) A team works together on their project during the 2024 NASA Space Apps Challenge event in in Arequipa, Peru. Teams have two days to respond to the challenges and submit their project for the chance to win one of 10 global awards. Lee esta historia en español aquí NASA invites innovators of all ages to register for the NASA Space Apps Challenge, held on Oct. 4-5. The 2025 theme is Learn, Launch, Lead, and participants will work alongside a vibrant community of scientists, technologists, and storytellers at more than 450 events worldwide. Participants can expect to learn skills to succeed in STEM fields, launch ideas that transform NASA’s open data into actionable tools, and lead their communities in driving technological innovation. During the NASA Space Apps Challenge, participants in the U.S. and around the world gather at hundreds of in-person and virtual events to address challenges authored by subject matter experts across NASA divisions. These challenges range in complexity and topic, tasking participants with everything from creating machine learning models and leveraging artificial intelligence, to improving access to NASA research, to designing sustainable recycling systems for Mars, and to developing tools to evaluate local air quality here on Earth. Dr. Yoseline Angel Lopez, a former space apps challenge winner and now an assistant research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, can attest that the opportunity to Learn, Launch, Lead goes far beyond the hackathon. “The NASA Space Apps Challenge gave me and my team a meaningful opportunity to apply science to real-world problems and gain validation from NASA scientists and industry experts,” said Angel. In 2021, her team’s winning web-app prototype was adopted by Colombia’s Ministry of Agriculture, connecting smallholder farmers with local buyers. The platform also supported agricultural land-use monitoring using satellite imagery. After the hackathon, project submissions are judged by NASA and space agency experts. Winners are selected for one of 10 global awards. “Participating in the hackathon is exciting on its own. But when your project can lead to greater opportunities and make a difference in your community, that’s a dream come true,” said Angel. She will return to the 2025 hackathon as a NASA subject matter expert and challenge author, giving a Golden Age of innovators the opportunity to make a difference in their communities through the use of data from NASA and 14 space agency partners. This year’s partners include: Bahrain Space Agency; Brazilian Space Agency; CSA (Canadian Space Agency); ESA (European Space Agency); ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation); Italian Space Agency; JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency); Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre of the United Arab Emirates; National Space Activities Commission of Argentina; Paraguayan Space Agency; South African National Space Agency; Spanish Space Agency; Turkish Space Agency; and the UK Space Agency. NASA Space Apps is funded by NASA’s Earth Science Division through a contract with Booz Allen Hamilton, Mindgrub, and SecondMuse. We invite you to register for the 2025 NASA Space Apps Challenge and choose a virtual or in-person event near you at: https://www.spaceappschallenge.org Find videos about Space Apps at: youtube.com/c/NASASpaceAppsChallenge Social Media Stay up to date with #SpaceApps by following these accounts: Facebook logo @spaceappschallenge @SpaceApps Instagram logo @nasa_spaceapps Share Details Last Updated Jul 17, 2025 Related Terms Earth Earth Science Division General Get Involved Learning Resources Opportunities to Contribute to NASA Missions & Get Involved Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing Program Explore More 6 min read NASA Program Builds Bridge From Military to Civilian Careers for Johnson Team Members Article 12 hours ago 3 min read NASA Citizen Science and Your Career: Stories of Exoplanet Watch Volunteers Doing NASA Science brings many rewards. But can taking part in NASA citizen science help… Article 1 day ago 2 min read Ejection Mechanism Design for the SPEED Test Architecture Challenge Article 1 day ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics Missions Humans in Space Climate Change Solar System

Of all the possible entry points to NASA, the agency’s SkillBridge Program has been instrumental in helping servicemembers transition from the military and into civilian careers. Offered in partnership with the Department of Defense (DoD), the program enables individuals to spend their final months of military service working with a NASA office or organization. SkillBridge […]

Of all the possible entry points to NASA, the agency’s SkillBridge Program has been instrumental in helping servicemembers transition from the military and into civilian careers. Offered in partnership with the Department of Defense (DoD), the program enables individuals to spend their final months of military service working with a NASA office or organization. SkillBridge fellows work anywhere from 90 to 180 days, contributing their unique skillsets to the agency while building their network and knowledge. The Johnson Space Center in Houston hosted NASA’s first SkillBridge fellow in 2019, paving the way for dozens of others to follow. SkillBridge participants are not guaranteed a job offer at the end of their fellowship, but many have gone on to accept full-time positions with NASA. About 25 of those former fellows currently work at Johnson, filling roles as varied as their military experiences. Miguel Shears during his military service (left) and his SkillBridge fellowship at Johnson Space Center. Images courtesy of Miguel Shears Miguel Shears retired from the Marine Corps in November 2023. He ended his 30 years of service as the administration, academics, and operations chief for the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia, where he was also an adjunct professor. Shears completed a SkillBridge fellowship with FOD in the summer and fall of 2023, supporting the instructional systems design team. He was hired as a full-time employee upon his military retirement and currently serves as an instructional systems designer for the Instructor Training Module, Mentorship Module, and Spaceflight Academy. He conducts training needs analysis for FOD, as well. Ever Zavala as a flight test engineer in the U.S. Air Force (left) and as a capsule communicator in the Mission Control Center at Johnson Space Center. Images courtesy of Ever Zavala Ever Zavala was very familiar with Johnson before becoming a SkillBridge fellow. He spent the last three of his nearly 24-year Air Force career serving as the deputy director of the DoD Human Spaceflight Payloads Office at Johnson. His team oversaw the development, integration, launch, and operation of payloads hosting DoD experiments on small satellites and the International Space Station. He also became a certified capsule communicator, or capcom, in December 2022, and was the lead capcom for SpaceX’s 28th commercial resupply services mission to the orbiting laboratory. Zavala’s SkillBridge fellowship was in Johnson’s Astronaut Office, where he worked as a capcom, capcom instructor, and an integration engineer supporting the Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program. He was involved in developing a training needs analysis and agency simulators for the human landing system, among other projects. He officially joined the center team as a full-time contractor in August 2024. He is currently a flight operations safety officer within the Flight Operations Directorate (FOD) and continues to serve as a part-time capcom. Carl Johnson with his wife during his first visit to Johnson Space Center (left) and completing some electrical work as part of his SkillBridge fellowship. Images courtesy of Carl Johnson Carl Johnson thanks his wife for helping him find a path to NASA. While she was a Pathways intern — and his girlfriend at the time — she gave him a tour of the center that inspired him to join the agency when he was ready to leave the Army. She helped connect him to one of the center’s SkillBridge coordinators and the rest is history. Johnson was selected for a SkillBridge fellowship in the Dynamic System Test Branch. From February to June 2023, he supported development of the lunar terrain vehicle ground test unit and contributed to the Active Response Gravity Offload System (ARGOS), which simulates reduced gravity for astronaut training. Johnson officially joined the center team as an electrical engineer in the Engineering Directorate’s Software, Robotics, and Simulation Division in September 2023. He is currently developing a new ARGOS spacewalk simulator and training as an operator and test director for another ARGOS system. Johnson holds an electrical engineering degree from the United States Military Academy. He was on active duty in the Army for 10 years and concluded his military career as an instructor and small group leader for the Engineer Captains Career Course. In that role, he was responsible for instructing, mentoring, and preparing the next generation of engineer captains. Kevin Quinn during his Navy service. Image courtesy of Kevin Quinn Kevin Quinn served in the Navy for 22 years. His last role was maintenance senior chief with Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 31, known as “the Dust Devils.” Quinn managed the operations and maintenance of 33 aircraft, ensuring their readiness for complex missions and contributing to developmental flight tests and search and rescue missions. He applied that experience to his SkillBridge fellowship in quality assurance at Ellington Field in 2024. Quinn worked to enhance flight safety and astronaut training across various aircraft, including the T-38, WB-57, and the Super Guppy. He has continued contributing to those projects since being hired as a full-time quality assurance employee in 2025. Andrew Ulat during his Air Force career. Image courtesy of Andrew Ulat Andrew Ulat retired from the Air Force after serving for 21 years as an intercontinental ballistic missile launch control officer and strategic operations advisor. His last role in the military was as a director of staff at the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. There he served as a graduate-level instructor teaching international security concepts to mid-level officers and civilian counterparts from all branches of the military and various federal agencies. Ulat started his SkillBridge fellowship as an integration engineer in Johnson’s X-Lab, supporting avionics, power, and software integration for the Gateway lunar space station. Ulat transitioned directly from his fellowship into a similar full-time position at Johnson in May 2024. Ariel Vargas receives a commendation during his Army service (left) and in his official NASA portrait. Ariel Vargas transitioned to NASA after serving for five years in the Army. His last role in the military was as a signal officer, which involved leading teams managing secure communications and network operations in dynamic and mission-critical environments in the Middle East and the United States. Vargas completed his SkillBridge fellowship in November 2023, supporting Johnson’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO). During his fellowship, he led a center-wide wireless augmentation project that modernized Johnson’s connectivity. He became a full-time civil servant in May 2024 and currently serves as the business operations and partnerships lead within OCIO, supporting a digital transformation initiative. In this role, he leads efforts to streamline internal business operations, manage strategic partnerships, and drive cross-functional collaboration. “My time in the military taught me the value of service, leadership, and adaptability—qualities that I now apply daily in support of NASA’s mission,” Vargas said. “I’m proud to be part of the Johnson team and hope my story can inspire other service members considering the SkillBridge pathway.” Explore More 3 min read Registration Opens for 2025 NASA International Space Apps Challenge Article 5 hours ago 3 min read Melissa Harris: Shaping NASA’s Vision for a Future in Low Earth Orbit Article 2 days ago 5 min read Protected: Glenn Extreme Environments Rig (GEER) Article 3 days ago

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center will host astronauts for a media opportunity as the center celebrates its 65th anniversary during a free, community event on Saturday, July 19, from noon to 5 p.m. CDT at The Orion Amphitheater in Huntsville, Alabama. Marshall, along with its partners and collaborators, will fill the amphitheater with space exhibits, […]

2 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center will host astronauts for a media opportunity as the center celebrates its 65th anniversary during a free, community event on Saturday, July 19, from noon to 5 p.m. CDT at The Orion Amphitheater in Huntsville, Alabama. Marshall, along with its partners and collaborators, will fill the amphitheater with space exhibits, music, food vendors, and hands-on activities for all ages. The summer celebration will mark 65 years of innovation and exploration, not only for Marshall, but for Huntsville and other North Alabama communities. The event will kick off with a program at 12:30 p.m. led by Joseph Pelfrey, director of NASA Marshall, and will include a presentation from some of the Expedition 72 crew members who recently returned from their mission after dedicating more than 1,000 combined hours to scientific research and technology demonstrations aboard the International Space Station. The crew will share their experiences in space with the community. The official portrait of the International Space Station’s Expedition 72 crew. At the top (from left) are Roscosmos cosmonaut and Flight Engineer Alexey Ovchinin, NASA astronaut and space station Commander Suni Williams, and NASA astronaut and Flight Engineer Butch Wilmore. In the middle row are Roscosmos cosmonaut and Flight Engineer Ivan Vagner and NASA astronaut and Flight Engineer Don Pettit. In the bottom row are Roscosmos cosmonaut and Flight Engineer Aleksandr Gorbunov and NASA astronaut and Flight Engineer Nick Hague. NASA/Bill Stafford and Robert Markowitz Media are invited to attend the event and participate in a news conference with the astronauts after the presentation but must confirm their attendance by 4:30 p.m., Thursday, July 17, to Lance D. Davis – lance.d.davis@nasa.gov – in Marshall’s Office of Communications. Media should arrive at the front entrance of The Orion Amphitheater by 11:45 a.m., Saturday, July 19, to be escorted by the Office of Communications. Founded July 1, 1960, in Huntsville, Marshall has shaped or supported nearly every facet of the nation’s ongoing mission of space exploration and discovery, solving the most complex, technical flight challenges, and contributing to science to improve life and protect resources around the world. Learn more about Marshall’s 65th anniversary celebration at: https://www.nasa.gov/marshall65/ Lance D. Davis Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. 256-640-9065 lance.d.davis@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Jul 16, 2025 Editor Beth Ridgeway Location Marshall Space Flight Center Related Terms Marshall Space Flight Center

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and look up during July evenings, you’ll see the brilliant star Vega shining overhead. Did you know that Vega is one of the most studied stars in our skies? As one of the brightest summer stars, Vega has fascinated astronomers for thousands of years.Vega is the brightest star in the […]

3 min read Summer Triangle Corner: Vega If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and look up during July evenings, you’ll see the brilliant star Vega shining overhead. Did you know that Vega is one of the most studied stars in our skies? As one of the brightest summer stars, Vega has fascinated astronomers for thousands of years. Vega is the brightest star in the small Greek constellation of Lyra, the harp. It’s also one of the three points of the large “Summer Triangle” asterism, making Vega one of the easiest stars to find for novice stargazers. Ancient humans from 14,000 years ago likely knew Vega for another reason: it was the Earth’s northern pole star! Compare Vega’s current position with that of the current north star, Polaris, and you can see how much the direction of Earth’s axis changes over thousands of years. This slow movement of axial rotation is called precession, and in 12,000 years, Vega will return to the northern pole star position. A map of the asterism known as the Summer Triangle. This asterism is made up of three stars: Vega in the Lyra constellation, Altair in the Aquila constellation, and Deneb in the Cygnus constellation. Stellarium Web Bright Vega has been observed closely since the beginning of modern astronomy and even helped to set the standard for the current magnitude scale used to categorize the brightness of stars. Polaris and Vega have something else in common, besides being once and future pole stars: their brightness varies over time, making them variable stars. Variable stars’ light can change for many different reasons. Dust, smaller stars, or even planets may block the light we see from the star. Or the star itself might be unstable with active sunspots, expansions, or eruptions changing its brightness. Most stars are so far away that we only record the change in light, and can’t see their surface. Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a large asteroid belt around the bright star Vega, as illustrated here at left in brown. The ring of warm, rocky debris was detected using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory, in which NASA plays an important role. NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA’s TESS satellite has ultra-sensitive light sensors primed to look for the tiny dimming of starlight caused by transits of extrasolar planets. Their sensitivity also allowed TESS to observe much smaller pulsations in a certain type of variable star’s light than previously observed. These observations of Delta Scuti variable stars will help astronomers model their complex interiors and make sense of their distinct, seemingly chaotic pulsations. This is a major contribution towards the field of astroseismology: the study of stellar interiors via observations of how sound waves “sing” as they travel through stars. The findings may help settle the debate over what kind of variable star Vega is. Find more details on this research, including a sonification demo that lets you “hear” the heartbeat of one of these stars, at: bit.ly/DeltaScutiTESS In 2024, the James Webb Space Telescope revisited the Vega system to reveal a 100-billion-mile-wide disk of dust around this star. While the debris disk is confirmed, there is no evidence of planets as of today. Originally posted by Dave Prosper: June 2020 Last Updated by Kat Troche: July 2025

NASA will host a news conference at 12 p.m. EDT Monday, July 21, to discuss the upcoming NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission. The Earth-observing satellite, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), carries an advanced radar system that will help protect communities by providing a dynamic, three-dimensional view of Earth […]

A collaboration between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation, NISAR will use synthetic aperture radar to monitor nearly all the planet’s land- and ice-covered surfaces twice every 12 days. Credit: NASA NASA will host a news conference at 12 p.m. EDT Monday, July 21, to discuss the upcoming NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission. The Earth-observing satellite, a first-of-its-kind collaboration between NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), carries an advanced radar system that will help protect communities by providing a dynamic, three-dimensional view of Earth in unprecedented detail and detecting the movement of land and ice surfaces down to the centimeter. The NISAR mission will lift off from ISRO’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, on India’s southeastern coast. Launch is targeted for no earlier than late July. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California will stream the briefing live on its X, Facebook, and YouTube channels. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media. Participants in the news conference include: Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters Karen St. Germain, director, Earth Science Division, NASA Headquarters Wendy Edelstein, deputy project manager, NISAR, NASA JPL Paul Rosen, project scientist, NISAR, NASA JPL To ask questions by phone, members of the media must RSVP no later than two hours before the start of the event to: rexana.v.vizza@jpl.nasa.gov. NASA’s media accreditation policy is available online. Questions can be asked on social media during the briefing using #AskNISAR. With its two radar instruments — an S-band system provided by ISRO and an L-band system provided by NASA — NISAR will use a technique known as synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to scan nearly all the planet’s land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days. Each system’s signal is sensitive to different sizes of features on Earth’s surface, and each specializes in measuring different attributes, such as moisture content, surface roughness, and motion. These capabilities will help scientists better understand processes involved in natural hazards and catastrophic events, such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, land subsidence, and landslides. Additionally, NISAR’s cloud penetrating ability will aid urgent responses to communities during weather disasters such as hurricanes, storm surge, and flooding. The detailed maps the mission creates also will provide information on both gradual and sudden changes occurring on Earth’s land and ice surfaces. Managed by Caltech for NASA, JPL leads the U.S. component of the NISAR project and provided the L-band SAR. NASA JPL also provided the radar reflector antenna, the deployable boom, a high-rate communication subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid-state recorder, and payload data subsystem. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the Near Space Network, which will receive NISAR’s L-band data. Multiple ISRO centers have contributed to NISAR. The Space Applications Centre is providing the mission’s S-band SAR. The U R Rao Satellite Centre provided the spacecraft bus. The rocket is from Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, launch services are through Satish Dhawan Space Centre, and satellite mission operations are by the ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network. The National Remote Sensing Centre is responsible for S-band data reception, operational products generation, and dissemination. To learn more about NISAR, visit: https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov -end- Karen Fox / Elizabeth Vlock Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1600 karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / elizabeth.a.vlock@nasa.gov Andrew Wang / Scott Hulme Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-379-6874 / 818-653-9131 andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov / scott.d.hulme@jpl.nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Jul 16, 2025 Editor Jessica Taveau Location NASA Headquarters Related Terms NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) Earth Science Division Goddard Space Flight Center Jet Propulsion Laboratory Near Space Network Science Mission Directorate

A baby planet is shrinking from the size of Jupiter with a thick atmosphere to a small, barren world, according to a new study from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This transformation is happening as the host star unleashes a barrage of X-rays that is tearing the young planet’s atmosphere away at an enormous rate. The […]

X-ray: NASA/CXC/RIT/A. Varga et al.; Illustration: NASA/CXC/SAO/M. Weiss; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk A baby planet is shrinking from the size of Jupiter with a thick atmosphere to a small, barren world, according to a new study from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This transformation is happening as the host star unleashes a barrage of X-rays that is tearing the young planet’s atmosphere away at an enormous rate. The planet, named TOI 1227 b, is in an orbit around a red dwarf star about 330 light-years from Earth. TOI 1227 b orbits very close to its star — less than a fifth the distance that Mercury orbits the Sun. The new study shows this planet outside our solar system, or exoplanet, is a “baby” at a mere 8 million years old. By comparison, the Earth is about 5 billion years old, or nearly a thousand times older. That makes it the second youngest planet ever to be observed passing in front of its host star (also called a transit). Previously the planet had been estimated by others to be about 11 million years old. A research team found that X-rays from its star are blasting TOI 1227 b and tearing away its atmosphere at such a rate that the planet will entirely lose it in about a billion years. At that point the planet will have lost a total mass equal to about two Earth masses, down from about 17 times the mass of Earth now. “It’s almost unfathomable to imagine what is happening to this planet,” said Attila Varga, a Ph.D. student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York, who led the study. “The planet’s atmosphere simply cannot withstand the high X-ray dose it’s receiving from its star.” It is probably impossible for life to exist on TOI 1227 b, either now or in the future. The planet is too close to its star to fit into any definition of a ‘habitable zone,’ a term astronomers use to determine if planets around other stars could sustain liquid water on their surface. The star that hosts TOI 1227 b, which is called TOI 1227, is only about a tenth the mass of the Sun and is much cooler and fainter in optical light. In X-rays, however, TOI 1227 is brighter than the Sun and is subjecting this planet, in its very close orbit, to a withering assault. The mass of TOI 1227 b, while not well understood, is likely similar to that of Neptune, but its diameter is three times larger than Neptune’s (making it similar in size to Jupiter). “A crucial part of understanding planets outside our solar system is to account for high-energy radiation like X-rays that they’re receiving,” said co-author Joel Kastner, also of RIT. “We think this planet is puffed up, or inflated, in large part as a result of the ongoing assault of X-rays from the star.” The team used new Chandra data to measure the amount of X-rays from the star that are striking the planet. Using computer models of the effects of these X-rays, they concluded the X-rays will have a transformative effect, rapidly stripping away the planet’s atmosphere. They estimate that the planet is losing a mass equivalent to a full Earth’s atmosphere about every 200 years. “The future for this baby planet doesn’t look great,” said co-author Alexander Binks of the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany. “From here, TOI 1227 b may shrink to about a tenth of its current size and will lose more than 10 percent of its weight.” The researchers used different sets of data to estimate the age of TOI 1227 b. One method exploits measurements of how TOI 1227 b’s host star moves through space compared to nearby populations of stars with known ages. A second method compared the brightness and surface temperature of the star with theoretical models of evolving stars. Of all the exoplanets astronomers have found with ages less than 50 million years, TOI 1227 b stands out for having the longest year and the host planet with the lowest mass. A paper describing these results has been accepted publication in The Astrophysical Journal, and a preprint is available here. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts. Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here: https://www.nasa.gov/chandra https://chandra.si.edu Visual Description This release features an artist’s illustration of a Jupiter-sized planet closely orbiting a faint red star. An inset image, showing the star in X-ray light from Chandra, is superimposed on top of the illustration at our upper left corner. At our upper right, the red star is illustrated as a ball made of intense fire. The planet, slightly smaller than the star, is shown at our lower left. Powerful X-rays from the star are tearing away the atmosphere of the planet, causing wisps of material to flow away from the planet’s surface in the opposite direction from the star. This gives the planet a slight resemblance to a comet, complete with a tail. X-ray data from Chandra, presented in the inset image, shows the star as a small purple orb on a black background. Astronomers used the Chandra data to measure the amount of X-rays striking the planet from the star. They estimate that the planet is losing a mass equivalent to a full Earth’s atmosphere about every 200 years, causing it to ultimately shrink from the size of Jupiter down to a small, barren world. News Media Contact Megan Watzke Chandra X-ray Center Cambridge, Mass. 617-496-7998 mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu Corinne Beckinger Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama 256-544-0034 corinne.m.beckinger@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Jul 17, 2025 Editor Lee Mohon Contact Corinne M. Beckinger corinne.m.beckinger@nasa.gov Related Terms Astrophysics Chandra X-Ray Observatory Exoplanet Science Exoplanets Marshall Astrophysics Marshall Space Flight Center Science & Research Studying Exoplanets The Universe Explore More 5 min read NASA, Oxford Discover Warmer Uranus Than Once Thought KEY POINTS For millennia, astronomers thought Uranus was no more than a distant star. It… Article 2 hours ago 4 min read NASA to Launch SNIFS, Sun’s Next Trailblazing Spectator July will see the launch of the groundbreaking Solar EruptioN Integral Field Spectrograph mission, or… Article 3 hours ago 3 min read NASA Citizen Science and Your Career: Stories of Exoplanet Watch Volunteers Doing NASA Science brings many rewards. But can taking part in NASA citizen science help… Article 1 day ago

New Scientist - Space

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Please sort comments by 'new' to find questions that would otherwise be buried. In this thread you can ask any space related question that you may have. Two examples of potential questions could be; "How do rockets work?", or "How do the phases of the Moon work?" If you see a space related question posted in another subreddit or in this subreddit, then please politely link them to this thread. Ask away! submitted by /u/AutoModerator [link] [comments]

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TLDR I worked on this side hatch 15 years ago. The "design" of that system and others on Orion was totally fraudulent and everyone knew it. That system is still causing problems today. Lockheed and NASA knew about it and chose to squash dissent rather than address the issues. In 2008, I was hired as an engineer to work on the Orion vehicle. Specifically, I was hired as a subcontractor to work on the CIAS - Crew Impact Attenuation System. My subcontractor was GHG. Immediately, I saw problems. The Orion had just gone through PDR - Preliminary Design Review. Yet, no one could produce a single piece of mathematics to explain how they got from nothing to the existing CAD model. There was an FEA analysis presented as part of the PDR, but no one (besides me) had any knowledge of FEA. No one could tell me where that analysis came from. Within a few weeks, I was approached by another engineer and told that he and I were swapping jobs. It was explained to me by him and my manager - Kurt Miller - that he could not do his job and that he had asked for my position as he and that group lead were friends. This was presented as if I could refuse, but I would not ... because of the implications. My new system was the ASDS - Abort System to Docking System. It was a one man team and the two previous engineers had both refused to do any work citing a lack of training, knowledge, and mentorship. It had measurements and analysis that were presented in PDR but none had any mathematical support whatsoever. They seemed to be made up completely - again. I spent the next year doing a full mathematical design. I received no mentorship, no help, no guidance, and not a single question I asked about the process was answered. I was always told that we were all learning as we went on. I worked 60+ hours a week and when I finished, I was told to move into testing. Again, I asked for guidance and was told none existed. I was also told to relax for a while (years) while the remaining systems caught up. I asked to be transferred back to my original role or to another position. At this time, my yearly review came up. I filled out my forms and submitted them to GHG. The process should have been that my manager at LM talked with me about the review and then we would agree on the results. Instead, GHG called me over and showed me the "review". I got 5/5 marks for pretty much everything - including behavior. However, there were 3 sentences at the bottom comments section claiming I had a bad attitude. My subcontractor - GHG - told me that my manager claimed to have spoken with me. I assured them this was not the case and they immediately refused to speak with me any more. Kurt Miller denied making the comments or submitting the review. GHG then claimed that he had reasserted both those things. Eventually, I asked that everyone get in the same room. When the day of the meeting came, GHG no showed. Kurt Miller was sitting behind his desk and another manager - Kim Kuykendall - was present. She managed the Hatched and Latches - including the side hatch that is still causing problems. She explained to me that the negative comments were not in the review and that I was being transferred to her group to work on a test fixture for this side hatch. She refused to speak about anything else. Kurt refused to say anything and instead placed his head on his hands and then rolled back from his desk and placed his head under his desk. GHG refused to speak with me and I refused to sign the "review". This is the United States space program and these are two "non technical" engineers with decades of experience. Upon getting to my new group, I was brought to a room in the basement where a door from a previous program sat - I believe it was Gemini. I was told that the engineers had copied this design and enlarged it to fit Orion specs. Here was the problem - Orion was much larger and the seal had to be a lot denser because it would be in space longer and could not leak air like Gemini. These two things meant that the mechanism to open and close the door would not work properly. Again, this was a known issue that I was able to deduce within hours. When I raised this issue and asked how I could design a test fixture when the design of the actual door was going to change, I was told that if I needed the design of the hatch / latch to be complete to do the test fixture, then this was my job to complete it. Basically, I was told to do their work ... again. I politely stated that I would not without being given the role and credit for doing it. At this point, everyone stopped working with me. I was eventually tasked with writing test software with Labview. My thesis work was in Labview and I was very proficient in it. A trial license was put on a computer in a locked training room in the basement and I was told to work on the software when the room was available - after hours. Again, this is the US Space Program. Not long after, the Hatches group was brought to a room where our managers - Kin Kuykendall and Paige Carr - told us that the design was now considered a failure and we were going to have to start over. They made it clear that heads would roll. They stated that if you felt that you were responsible and wanted to make a case for remaining, you should come talk to them. So ... walk in and admit that you deserve to be fired and beg to remain. I didn't actually work on the design, so I wasn't concerned. Again, this is the US space program. A few days later, I was terminated. Lockheed and NASA maintain several unwritten policies that apply only to "unprotected" classes of people. One of those is that employees that "do not produce" for six months can be terminated. That means that you can get a review where you are a 5/5 top performing engineer and then 6 months and 1 day later be terminated with no discussion. You won't even know what allegations are made against you, much less be given a chance to defend yourself. You are just escorted from the building. Since this takes place in Texas and the people have no protection status, they have no grounds to sue. I was terminated 6 months and 1 day after moving to the hatches group - six months and 1 day after getting the 5/5 review. I filed a NASA OIG complaint denoting that the three systems I saw - including the side hatch - all had zero mathematical basis for their "design" and everything else listed above. To my surprise, I was told that nothing I alleged was denied. Apparently, there was no legal issue with what was done as long as Lockheed and NASA didn't lie to the OIG. I was never given a reason for my termination. I filed a Lockheed Ethics complaint and was literally laughed at and told that the filing of the complaint established a record of having a bad attitude. I was told through the grapevine that I was blamed for the failure the side hatch design. Basically, Lockheed tells NASA that the design failed and they fired the guy responsible. That destroyed any chance I had at a career anywhere else. The problem is that the remaining people could not do the design initially and they didn't suddenly become competent when I was terminated. Thus, these failures 15 years ago bleed into today because incompetent engineers remain in place. NASA was 100% aware of this because they acknowledged it in my OIG complaint. These issues were known and Lockheed and NASA made the conscious decision to terminate an employee with a history of doing things other engineers could not and retain ones that failed repeatedly. There were reasons for this based on contractor vs subcontractor and protected vs unprotected classes. I left a lot out for brevity - although I failed at that. I have no solutions and i've spent an unfortunate amount of time trying to get NASA and Lockheed to do something about these designs. They've spent $30 billion and 20 years on this. submitted by /u/jfoxworth [link] [comments]

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I saw this today and I thought it was pretty cool! I don’t think it classifies as a planet since it’s way smaller than Pluto, but still neat nevertheless. submitted by /u/Consistent-Deal-8713 [link] [comments]

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High resolution star trail from the SpaceX Crew 9 Dragon, marked by a fleet of flashing Starlink satellites, glowing atmosphere, soon to rise sun, and arcing stars. Starlink satellites are a common phenomena to see from the ISS at orbital dusk and dawn, when their solar panels catch the sunlight and momentarily flash. In exposures like mine, they can create distinct streaks across the time history. Captured over the Pacific Ocean with Nikon Z9, Sigma 14mm f1.4 lens, effective 24 minute exposure compiled from individual 30 second frames, f1.4, ISO 1600. More star trails from space can be found on my twitter and instagram, astro_pettit submitted by /u/astro_pettit [link] [comments]

I was curious to see what the night sky might have looked like to Dante Alighieri, as he describes it in the Purgatorio cantica. The text provides fairly clear space-time coordinates, so I thought I’d plug them into StarWalk2. Enjoy! submitted by /u/bad3xposure [link] [comments]

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Hello, I took interested in space news and US politic recently but as a newbie and foreigner, it hard for me to tell the reconciliation bill's impact (The $10 billion reconciliation bill that the Senate approve for NASA on July 1 to be precise) on the scientific society and the future of NASA as a whole (or if it does at all), due to my unfamiliarity on the topic and lack of discussion I found around social flatforms. The number of questions I have as follow (please excuse my ignorance and the lack of vocabulary, or dumb question I might post): - If the reconciliation bill is for allocate for certain programs, does it count as a direct funding to NASA? - In the very best case scenario where we have the appropriation bill finalized as flat or increase from last fiscal year. Does the appropriation bill and reconciliation bill add up and make a massive surplus in NASA's funding? - In the same case that the appropriation bill finalized as flat or increase from last fiscal year. How will the two bill interact with each other? Will it free up some fund space for NASA to invest in other fields or will the reconciliation bill will act as some kind of insurance, ensure the funding for that kind of specific missions but will compromise with the remaining fund, in other word, sacrifice other scientific fields? -How this bills will affect the scientific society? In the case where the bills compromise each other, will it decrease the workforce on the science department but increase the workforce for exploration field instead? -How impactful is the bill in general? Is it a safe indication that it not so impactful by the lack articles and attention it had? submitted by /u/Nem_Cha [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/dem676 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/New_Scientist_Mag [link] [comments]

Hi everyone, i've been wondering about the idea of building fuel stations in space kind of like gas stations for spacecrafts. I’m talking about orbital refueling depots that spacecraft could dock with to refuel with liquid fuel (Hydrogen, Methane etc..), especially for missions going beyond low Earth orbit. A few questions I have: Is it technically feasible with today’s or near-future technology, specially for zero boil-off technology? Would it actually be useful compared to just launching with more fuel from Earth? Just trying to wrap my head around the pros and cons. Curious to hear your thoughts! submitted by /u/Achh12 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Science_News [link] [comments]

I've linked to the press release in the above post. For those interested, here's the study: Refractory solid condensation detected in an embedded protoplanetary disk (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09163-z) submitted by /u/umichnews [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/bad3xposure [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/dem676 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/The_Rise_Daily [link] [comments]

All the latest content from the Space.com team

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Views from the Dragon spacecraft during Fram2, the first polar-orbit human spaceflight mission to explore Earth with the @framonauts. Watch the extended, ~4-hour cut with additional views @SpaceX on X → https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1919172303709184350

The first Starship flight test of 2025 flew with ambitious goals: seeking to repeat our previous success of launching and catching the world’s most powerful launch vehicle while putting a redesigned and upgraded Starship through a rigorous set of flight demonstrations. It served as a reminder that development testing, by definition, can be unpredictable. On its seventh flight test, Starship successfully lifted off from Starbase in Texas at 4:37 p.m. CT on Thursday, January 16. For the second time ever, the Super Heavy booster returned to the launch site and was caught by the tower. But before Starship could reach space, a fire developed in the aft section leading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly. As always, success comes from what we learned, and this flight test will help us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary.

The sixth flight test of Starship launched from Starbase on November 19, 2024, seeking to expand the envelope on ship and booster capabilities and get closer to bringing reuse of the entire system online. The Super Heavy booster successfully lifted off at the start of the launch window, with all 33 Raptor engines powering it and Starship off the pad from Starbase. Following a nominal ascent and stage separation, the booster successfully transitioned to its boostback burn to begin the return to launch site. During this phase, automated health checks of critical hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered an abort of the catch attempt. The booster then executed a pre-planned divert maneuver, performing a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. Starship completed another successful ascent, placing it on the expected trajectory. The ship successfully reignited a single Raptor engine while in space, demonstrating the capabilities required to conduct a ship deorbit burn before starting fully orbital missions. With live views and telemetry being relayed by Starlink, the ship successfully made it through reentry and executed a flip, landing burn, and soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean. Data gathered from the multiple thermal protection experiments, as well as the successful flight through subsonic speeds at a more aggressive angle of attack, provides invaluable feedback on flight hardware performing in a flight environment as we aim for eventual ship return and catch. With data and flight learnings as our primary payload, Starship’s sixth flight test once again delivered. Lessons learned will directly make the entire Starship system more reliable as we close in on full and rapid reusability.

SpaceX was founded to increase access to space and help make life multiplanetary. In just this year, we’ve launched 114 successful Falcon missions and counting for our commercial and government customers, deployed ~1,700 @Starlink satellites to provide high-speed internet for millions of people all around the world, and made extraordinary strides developing Starship’s capability to return humanity to the Moon and ultimately send people to Mars. If you want to join the team and help build a more exciting future, check out the latest job openings across the company → https://www.spacex.com/careers

Starship’s fifth flight test lifted off on October 13, 2024, with our most ambitious test objectives yet as we work to demonstrate techniques fundamental to Starship and Super Heavy’s fully and rapidly reusable design. And on our first try, Mechazilla caught the booster. Following a successful liftoff, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and coast, the Super Heavy booster performed its landing burn and was caught by the chopstick arms of the launch and catch tower at Starbase. Thousands of distinct vehicle and pad criteria had to be met prior to the catch attempt, and thanks to the tireless work of SpaceX engineers, we succeeded with catch on our first attempt. Prior to catch, Starship executed another successful hot-staging separation, igniting its six Raptor engines and completing ascent into outer space. It coasted along its planned trajectory to the other side of the planet before executing a controlled reentry, passing through the phases of peak heating and maximum aerodynamic pressure, before executing a flip, landing burn, and splashdown at its target area in the Indian Ocean. The flight test concluded at splashdown 1 hour, 5 minutes and 40 seconds after launch.

On Tuesday, September 10, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launched the Polaris Dawn mission to orbit from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Polaris Dawn became the first crew to perform the first-ever spacewalk from Dragon, travel the farthest (1,408 km) within Earth’s orbit since the completion of the Apollo program in 1972, and test Starlink laser-based communications aboard Dragon. Additionally, the crew conducted approximately 36 experiments designed to better life on Earth and on future long-duration spaceflights, shared special moments with mission partners including reading Kisses from Space to patients at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital®, and inspired the world with a global music moment before safely returning to Earth on Sunday, September 15.

During its five day mission, Dragon and the Polaris Dawn crew completed 75 orbits around Earth.

A live webcast of the Polaris Dawn EVA will begin about one hour prior to the beginning of the spacewalk on Thursday, September 12, which you can watch on X @SpaceX. You can also watch the webcast on the new X TV app. The four-hour window opens at 3:23 a.m. ET. If needed, a backup opportunity is available on Friday, September 13 at the same time.

A live webcast of the Polaris Dawn EVA will begin about one hour prior to the beginning of the spacewalk on Thursday, September 12, which you can watch on X @SpaceX. You can also watch the webcast on the new X TV app. The four-hour window opens at 3:23 a.m. ET. If needed, a backup opportunity is available on Friday, September 13 at the same time.

Starship’s fourth flight test launched with ambitious goals, attempting to go farther than any previous test before and begin demonstrating capabilities central to return and reuse of Starship and Super Heavy. The payload for this test was the data. Starship delivered. On June 6, 2024, Starship successfully lifted off at 7:50 a.m. CT from Starbase in Texas and went on to deliver maximum excitement. The fourth flight of Starship made major strides to bring us closer to a rapidly reusable future. Its accomplishments will provide data to drive improvements as we continue rapidly developing Starship into a fully reusable transportation system designed to carry crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars and beyond.

At ~700 km above Earth, the EVA suit will support the Polaris Dawn crew in the vacuum of space during the first-ever commercial astronaut spacewalk. Evolved from the Intravehicular Activity (IVA) suit, the EVA suit provides greater mobility, a state-of-the-art helmet Heads-Up Display (HUD) and camera, new thermal management textiles, and materials borrowed from Falcon’s interstage and Dragon’s trunk. Building a base on the Moon and a city on Mars will require millions of spacesuits. The development of this suit and the execution of the spacewalk will be important steps toward a scalable design for spacesuits on future long-duration missions as life becomes multiplanetary.

The goal of SpaceX is to build the technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary. This is the first time in the 4-billion-year history of Earth that it’s possible to realize that goal and protect the light of consciousness. At Starbase on Thursday, April 4, SpaceX Chief Engineer Elon Musk provided an update on the company’s plans to send humanity to Mars, the best destination to begin making life multiplanetary. Go to (https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1776669097490776563) for the full talk, which also includes the mechanics and challenges of traveling to Mars, along with what we’re building today to enable sending around a million people and several million tonnes to the Martian surface in the years to come.

On March 14, 2024, Starship successfully lifted off at 8:25 a.m. CT from Starbase in Texas and went on to accomplish several major milestones and firsts. Starship's six second stage Raptor engines all started successfully and powered the vehicle to its expected orbit, becoming the first Starship to complete its full-duration ascent burn. Starship went on to experience its first ever entry from space, providing valuable data on heating and vehicle control during hypersonic reentry. Live views of entry were made possible by Starlink terminals operating on Starship. This rapid iterative development approach has been the basis for all of SpaceX’s major innovative advancements, including Falcon, Dragon, and Starlink. Recursive improvement is essential as we work to build a fully reusable transportation system capable of carrying both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, help humanity return to the Moon, and ultimately travel to Mars and beyond.

The world's most powerful launch vehicle is ready for flight. The third flight test aims to build on what we’ve learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives. Recursive improvement is essential as we work to build a fully reusable transportation system capable of carrying both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, help humanity return to the Moon, and ultimately travel to Mars and beyond. Follow us on X.com/SpaceX for updates on the upcoming flight test.

On November 18, 2023, Starship successfully lifted off at 7:02 a.m. CT from Starbase on its second integrated flight test. While it didn’t happen in a lab or on a test stand, it was absolutely a test. What we did with this second flight will provide invaluable data to continue rapidly developing Starship. The test achieved a number of major milestones, helping us improve Starship’s reliability as SpaceX seeks to make life multiplanetary. The team at Starbase is already working final preparations on the vehicles slated for use in Starship’s third flight test. Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting second flight test of Starship! Follow us on X.com/SpaceX for continued updates on Starship's progress