Tag: NASA
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NASA to Chase August 12 Eclipse Shadow With High-Altitude Jet and 86 Balloons
The eclipse offers researchers a rare vantage point. “From our unique perspective on Earth during a total solar eclipse, scientists can study the Sun’s corona in a way we can’t from anywhere else in the solar system,” said Kelly Korreck, eclipse program manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The Sun impacts our daily life, satellites,…
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ISS Gets 3 Spacewalks in August for Solar Array Prep
Are NASA’s August Spacewalks About Keeping the ISS Alive or Shutting It Down? Three back-to-back extravehicular activities scheduled for August reveal the ISS in a paradoxical operational moment: NASA is simultaneously installing hardware to expand power capacity and running cable work explicitly tied to the station’s future controlled deorbit. The first of the three EVAs…
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Soyuz MS-28 Returns NASA Astronaut Chris Williams After 241-Day Space Station Mission
The three crew members launched to the space station on November 27, 2025. The mission was the first spaceflight for both Williams and Mikaev, and the second for Kud-Sverchkov. Together they orbited the Earth 3,856 times and traveled more than 102 million miles before departing the station. The Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft undocked at 2:03 a.m.…
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Could nuclear heaters keep astronauts warm on the moon? NASA is funding research to find out
This collage highlights some of the projects selected for funding through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program, including a study looking at radioisotope heating systems for moonwalking astronauts, depicted at center left. (NASA Graphic) NASA says it’s funding a new batch of far-out research projects, including a study evaluating how radioactive heaters can keep astronauts…
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NASA Runs Google’s Gemma AI in Orbit, Letting a Satellite Analyze Its Own Images
The experiment, called NAVI-Orbital, was conducted aboard Loft Orbital’s YAM-9 satellite and achieved its first successful in-orbit demonstration on April 16, 2026. According to the researchers, it represents the first reported demonstration of a vision-language model performing autonomous multimodal inference entirely aboard an orbiting spacecraft. Rather than simply capturing images and transmitting them to Earth…
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SpaceX eyes tower catch for next Starship after auspicious end to 13th flight
SpaceX was more than lucky Friday, sending its 13th full-scale Starship test flight halfway around the world from South Texas to an on-target, intact splashdown in a remote section of the Indian Ocean. Starship has made precise splashdowns before. This time, however, the ship gently tipped over and came to rest floating in a remote…
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Soyuz MS-28 Returns Expedition 74 After 241 Days
Did Expedition 74 Complete Its 8-Month ISS Mission Successfully? Soyuz MS-28 touched down southeast of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan at 5:27 a.m. CDT on July 26, 2026, closing out a 241-day Expedition 74 mission that sent NASA astronaut Chris Williams and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev around Earth 3,856 times. The crew departed the International…
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Wildfire forces evacuation of NASA’s Deep Space Network complex in Spain
A fast-moving wildfire, one of many raging across Spain, bore down on the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex on Friday, forcing an evacuation and temporarily suspending operations at one of NASA’s most important tracking stations. The tracking station is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network, operating in concert with similar facilities in California and Australia…
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NASA Awards CAPSTONE 02 to Advanced Space for Cislunar Navigation Demonstration
The mission builds on the original CAPSTONE, short for Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, which became the first U.S. commercial mission to the Moon and the first spacecraft to operate in a near-rectilinear halo orbit, a nearly stable orbit maintained by the gravitational pull of both the Earth and the Moon.…
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Rocket Report: Lightning strikes in China; Starship launch on deck
Welcome to Edition 9.04 of the Rocket Report! We’ve had to wait an extra week for SpaceX to get its 13th Starship test flight off the ground. A last-second abort on July 16 led engineers to roll the booster back to its hangar in South Texas to swap out engines. Starship is now back on…