NASA News

Abundant rainfall in February and March 2026 transformed the desert landscape of Central Australia.

Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, APXS Strategic Planner and Payload Uplink/Downlink Lead, University of New Brunswick, Canada Earth planning date: Friday, March 13, 2026 We are in our final phase of the boxwork campaign, investigating the contacts between the boxwork unit and the layered sulfate unit. As my colleague Bill reported here, last week we crossed […]

The OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8 acquired this rare, relatively clear image of  Mayon, the most active volcano in the Philippines, on Feb. 26, 2026. The natural-color scene is overlaid with infrared observations to highlight the lava’s heat signature. On that day, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (PHIVOLCS) reported volcanic earthquakes, rockfalls, and hot clouds of ash […]

For Corey Elmore, the path to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center did not begin in engineering. It began in service. Today he serves as a NASA Pathways engineering intern in the Technical Processes and Tools Branch (KSC-NE-TA) at Kennedy Space Center. Through the Pathways program, he is gaining hands-on experience supporting the engineering environments, technical tools […]

In a happy twist of fate, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope just witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings published Wednesday in the journal Icarus. The comet K1, whose full name is C/2025 K1 (ATLAS)—not to be confused with interstellar comet […]

An advancing cold front kicked up a sharp line of sand and other small particles that swept over the high plains.

NASA’s X-59 experimental aircraft is preparing for its second flight, a step that will set the pace for more flight testing in 2026.  Over the coming months, NASA will take the quiet supersonic jet faster and higher, while validating safety and performance, a process known as envelope expansion.  NASA test pilot Jim “Clue” Less will be at the X-59’s […]

Cancer the Crab is a dim constellation, yet it contains one of the most beautiful and easy-to-spot star clusters in our sky: the Beehive Cluster. Cancer also possesses one of the most studied exoplanets: the superhot super-Earth, 55 Cancri e. Find Cancer’s dim stars by looking in between the brighter neighboring constellations of Gemini and […]

These X-ray computed tomography (XCT) scans released on March 17, 2026, give us a glimpse inside asteroid Bennu. They show the most common types of crack networks observed in Bennu samples; these networks solved a mystery that baffled NASA for years. When NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft first approached asteroid Bennu in 2018, scientists expected to see smooth, sandy beach-like surfaces. Instead, they […]

In one of the biggest surprises of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission, its target asteroid, Bennu, turned out to be a jagged, rugged world covered in large boulders, with few of the smooth patches of sandy or pebbly material scientists had expected based on observations with Earth-based instruments. Bennu’s looks were quite deceiving, and until now, scientists struggled to figure out why.

The bigger the hailstone, the more damage it can cause. But scientists find that predicting hailstone size can be challenging. How quickly does hail melt as it falls?

Ireland is best known for its many greens, but the striking grays of the island’s Burren region also stand out in satellite images.

NASA will hold a media teleconference at 5:30 p.m. EDT on Thursday, March 19 to highlight plans for its X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft’s upcoming flight tests. The teleconference is set to take place after the X-59 is scheduled to complete its second flight, in California. For the media call, NASA leadership will join representatives from […]

Description This pair of images shows stars observed by the SPARCS (Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat) space telescope simultaneously in the near-ultraviolet, left, and far-ultraviolet, right. These observations were recorded on Feb. 6, 2026, three weeks after the cube satellite, or CubeSat, launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 on Jan. 11. The fact that one star […]

As four astronauts travel around the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission, they will venture beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field. The crew’s spacecraft, Orion, will carry and protect them as they journey into deep space and serves as the main protection against the Sun’s intense power.  During their 10-day flight, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will monitor the […]

From the voyages of spacecraft to the Moon and beyond, to the launches of satellites that help us navigate, communicate, and understand our planet and the universe, the use of liquid-fueled rockets has been key to humanity’s use and exploration of space. Today marks 100 years since the first successful test of this technology. On […]

Download PDF: A Combination of Techniques Leads to Improved Friction Stir Welding The NESC developed several innovative tools and techniques during an assessment to find the root cause of poor tensile strength and low topography anomalies (LTA) in welds formed using a solid-state welding process called self-reacting friction stir welding (SRFSW).    Using a combination of […]

Download PDF: NESC Develops Method for Estimating Risk When Reducing NDE  Performing nondestructive evaluation (NDE) can have both cost and schedule impacts, leading some to question whether descoping (i.e., reducing or eliminating) NDE inspections on certain spaceflight hardware could be possible. However, this approach would be counter to NASA’s Technical Standard NASA-STD-5019A, which outlines the spaceflight […]

During the 2022 summer melt season, sediment plumes and fractured sea ice traced swirling eddies in a branch of the Nansen Sound fjord system in the Canadian Arctic.

Patches of the Sun’s surface often show strong magnetic fields. These fields can emerge within a matter of hours, and can decay slowly or quickly, sometimes over days, weeks, or even months. Thanks to a new study about these long-lived active regions, we now know much more about the patches where these strong magnetic fields […]