Tag: NASA
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NASA Finishes First Astronaut-Deployed Lunar Instrument Since Apollo
LEMS builds on a legacy of lunar seismic tracking that began with Apollo. Astronauts deployed a network of seismometers on the Moon’s nearside equatorial region between 1969 and 1972, and those instruments operated until 1977, recording about 13,000 moonquakes and other ground vibrations that helped scientists begin to understand the composition of the Moon’s interior.…
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NASA Invites India to Join Lunar Moon Base Programme
The meeting was attended by US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor and ISRO Chairman V Narayanan, who discussed existing and future avenues of collaboration in the space sector. The US Embassy shared a press release on the meeting on Wednesday. The discussions referenced the TRUST Initiative, launched jointly by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US…
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NASA Selects Gravitics for SBIR Award to Develop Orbital Sample Return System
Gravitics, Inc., an orbital infrastructure company, has announced that it was selected by NASA for a 2026 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award. The award supports development of the Multiple-Downmass Hangar, a system for affordable and frequent commercial sample return from low Earth orbit. The Multiple-Downmass Hangar is designed to hold multiple return…
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NASA Extends Voyager 2 Science by a Year With “Big Bang” Power Maneuver
Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, draw electricity from radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which convert heat from decaying plutonium into power. As that plutonium supply diminishes, each spacecraft loses about 4 watts of available power every year. After nearly half a century in space, the Voyagers have very little power to spare, forcing mission controllers…
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Katalyst Slows Tumbling Link Spacecraft as Clock Ticks on NASA’s Swift Rescue
Link launched July 3 on a Pegasus rocket. Weeks later, during post-launch commissioning, the spacecraft lost attitude control and entered what Katalyst on July 28 described as a multi-axis spin. Two of the spacecraft’s three reaction wheels were not functioning after the incident, and its reaction control system thrusters were only partially working. The company…
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NASA Tests Power Fix on Voyager 1 as Twin Probes Diverge After 49 Years
Voyager 1 needs the fix more urgently than its twin did. It has less power in reserve, has already lost more of its original instruments, and in February this year came close to tripping its own emergency shutdown during a routine roll manoeuvre. That event prompted NASA in April to switch off the Low-energy Charged…
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NASA Administrator Tours Idaho Lab Building Reactor for 2028 Mars Mission
Isaacman and a group of NASA executives toured INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex, meeting the scientists and engineers developing nuclear power for space. The visit followed a period of accelerated activity at the laboratory tied to a May 2025 executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which called for at least three nuclear power criticalities…
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NASA, Northrop Grumman repurpose Gateway elements for Moon Base demo missions
Northrop Grumman’s Lunar Infrastructure Demos (LID-1, LID-2 and LID-3) reuse HALO derived technologies to rapidly mature lunar surface power, thermal, autonomy, communications and hosted payload services that can survive the lunar night and scale into persistent infrastructure near the Moon’s South Pole. Graphic: Northrop Grumman NASA’s decision to pivot away from the orbiting Gateway lunar…
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NASA Redirects Gateway Hardware Toward Lunar Surface Demonstration Missions
Gateway was a cornerstone of the Artemis architecture and represented years of international partnership commitments. Redirecting its hardware to surface demonstrations signals that NASA is moving toward establishing a permanent lunar presence on the ground rather than in orbit. The repurposing effort is being carried out in partnership with Northrop Grumman. The hardware in question…
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NASA’s PUNCH Nails Solar Storm Arrival to Within 30 Minutes in Proof-of-Concept Test
Solar storms are caused by coronal mass ejections, huge explosions of material off the Sun. Forecasting when these ejections reach Earth is central to mitigating their impacts on power grids, satellites, and astronauts. Until recently, coronal mass ejections could not be tracked continuously for much of their journey, and could only be observed as they…