A NASA project that allows students to use a camera on a spacecraft orbiting Mars for research has received a new education prize from the journal Science. NASA’s Mars Student Imaging Project, a component of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate education and outreach activities, enables students from fifth grade through college to take an image of…

A unique window of opportunity for humankind will open in January 2018, and the Inspiration Mars Foundation intends to seize it, announcing plans Feb. 27 to pursue a challenging manned mission to Mars and back. This historic 501-day journey around the Red Planet is made possible by a rare planetary alignment that occurs five years…

Two X-ray space observatories, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun. The supermassive black hole lies at the dust and gas-filled heart of…

Space exploration has challenged, inspired, and improved us for more than half a century. Today, the Coalition for Space Exploration, in partnership with the recently-formed NASA Visitor Centers Consortium announced an expansion of the Coalition’s “Why Space Matters to the Future” video contest that encourages U.S. residents to visualize what life will be like in…

NASA has selected key contributions to a 2022 European Space Agency mission that will study Jupiter and three of its largest moons in unprecedented detail. The moons are thought to harbor vast water oceans beneath their icy surfaces. NASA’s contribution will consist of one U.S.-led science instrument and hardware for two European instruments to fly…

NASA creates Space Technology Mission Directorate As part of the Obama Administration’s recognition of the critical role that space technology and innovation will play in enabling both future space missions and bettering life here on Earth, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has announced the creation of the Space Technology Mission Directorate. The directorate will be a…

Aerojet, a GenCorp company, announced that its dual AJ26 main engine system successfully powered today’s Antares(TM) Stage 1 Hot Fire test conducted by Orbital Sciences Corporation at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport located at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the eastern shore of Virginia. The 29-second test enabled engineers to validate flight configuration checkout of the…

NASA’s Launch Services Program at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida has selected United Launch Services, LLC of Englewood, Colo., to provide Delta II launch services for the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite-2 mission, currently scheduled for July 2016. A firm fixed-price launch service task order has been awarded under the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity…

ATK successfully delivered a launch abort motor to Kennedy Space Center, Fla., for Exploration Flight Test (EFT-1) of NASA’s Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, scheduled to fly next year. The test flight abort motor is configured with inert propellant, since the EFT-1 mission will have no crew on board, but otherwise replicates the launch abort system…

NASA has released a summary report on findings from a panel that investigated the unsuccessful 2011 launch of the agency’s Glory spacecraft. The satellite, designed to improve our understanding of Earth’s climate, was lost March 4, 2011, when it failed to reach orbit after launch aboard an Orbital Sciences Corp. Taurus XL rocket from Vandenberg…