The U.S. Air Force and Lockheed Martin have completed on-orbit testing of the second Advanced Extremely High Frequency military communications satellite. Following successful spacecraft testing, Satellite Control Authority was turned over to the 14th Air Force at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., for operations. The AEHF system provides vastly improved global, survivable, highly secure, protected…

NASA Television will provide live coverage as three of the crew members on the International Space Station come back to Earth Nov. 18. Expedition 33 Commander Sunita Williams of NASA, Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Russian Soyuz Commander Yuri Malenchenko will undock their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft from the station,…

NASA has renamed a recently launched mission that studies Earth’s radiation belts as the Van Allen Probes in honor of the late James Van Allen. Van Allen was the head of the physics department at the University of Iowa who discovered the radiation belts encircling Earth in 1958. The new name of the mission, previously…

NASA has selected a proposal from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., to build the first space-based instrument to monitor major air pollutants across the North American continent hourly during daytime. The instrument, to be completed in 2017 at a cost of not more than $90 million, will share a ride on a commercial…

REDONDO BEACH, Calif. – Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center will demonstrate ways to make future protected military satellite communications capabilities more affordable with three awards received Sept. 28 under the Protected Military Satellite Communication Design for Affordability Risk Reduction initiative. Under the 10-month, firm fixed-price contracts, the company…

NASA and the European Space Agency successfully have used an experimental version of interplanetary Internet to control an educational rover from the International Space Station. The experiment used NASA’s Disruption Tolerant Networking protocol to transmit messages and demonstrate technology that one day may enable Internet-like communications with space vehicles and support habitats or infrastructure on…

NASA’s car-sized rover, Curiosity, has taken significant steps toward understanding how Mars may have lost much of its original atmosphere. Learning what happened to the Martian atmosphere will help scientists assess whether the planet ever was habitable. The present atmosphere of Mars is 100 times thinner than Earth’s. A set of instruments aboard the rover…

NASA is exploring options for larger payload fairings to enhance the cargo carrying capabilities of its Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket, now in development, to carry cargo, crewed spacecraft and science payloads. In a Request for Information published Nov. 1, the agency is seeking information about payload adapters and fairings already available within commercial industry….

Space Exploration Technologies has completed its first three performance milestones for NASA’s Commercial Crew Integrated Capability initiative, which is intended to lead to the availability of commercial human spaceflight services for government and commercial customers. During the company’s first milestone, a technical baseline review, NASA and SpaceX reviewed the Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket…