NASA Space Administration

NASA Science Live Ep. 3: Our Weird Home The third episode of NASA Science Live highlights our weird home: Earth. Liquid water, a protective atmosphere and an active core that gives our planet a defensive shield. These features, plus more, make our home one of the most unique places in the solar system. Watch as we explore these features that make our planet special in celebration of Earth Day.

Somewhere Out There, New Planets are Forming NASA needs your help! Yes you. Somewhere out there, new planets are forming. Professional astronomers need your help to hunt for the disks where they form. Disk Detectives help find where planets are forming by searching for stars surrounded by giant disks of gas and dust. Join the Disk Detective citizen science project and help us solve the mystery!

NASA ScienceCasts: A Growing Market at Gravity’s Edge The commercialization of low-Earth orbit is enabling a new market in space, while aiding NASA in its mission of exploration and discovery.

NASA ScienceCasts: The Small Satellite That’s Paying Big Dividends The International Space Station is well known as an orbiting laboratory, but during the past decade the station has also served a very different role - that of being a business incubator. One of its star products is the CubeSat.

Seasons - NASASpaceAdministration Seeing Equinoxes and Solstices from Space NASASpaceAdministration

4000 Exoplanets Data: NASA Exoplanet Archive NASASpaceAdministration

NASA ScienceCasts: Observing Lightning from the International Space Station Colorful bursts of energy above thunderstorms called transient luminous events can be observed from the International Space Station. Instruments on the station are helping scientists study these particle outbursts, which may prove useful to better understand our climate, weather, and the behaviors of storms.

Earth Day Poster 2021 NASA Science Art Director Jenny Mottar explains the inspiration behind the 2021 NASA Earth Day poster.

NASA's Climate Advisor Discusses Climate Change NASA studies Earth’s climate so closely and with so many missions that the agency has a climate advisor to the presidential administration. NASA provides real data for decision-makers about our climate. Watch to hear from NASA’s Climate Advisor Gavin Schmidt.

Planetary Defense By the Numbers: May 2021 How many near-Earth objects have been found thus far? How big are they? Are there any left to discover? Find out the answers to these questions and more in this month's Planetary Defense: By the Numbers video. Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are asteroids and comets that orbit the Sun and come within 30 million miles of Earth’s orbit. While many NEOs have been found and closely studied, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office was established to manage the agency’s ongoing efforts to find, track, study, and if necessary, lead efforts to mitigate a potentially hazardous NEO that could pose a potential impact threat to Earth.

Team Members from NASA's Two New Venus Missions Share Excitement On Wednesday, June 2, 2021, NASA announced selection of two new missions to Venus, Earth’s nearest planetary neighbor. Part of NASA’s Discovery Program, the missions aim to understand how Venus became an inferno-like world when it has so many other characteristics similar to ours – and may have been the first habitable world in the solar system, complete with an ocean and Earth-like climate. Hear from mission team members about why they are excited to explore Venus.

Science in Seconds: NASA Earth System Observatory The Earth System Observatory is really our future in @NASAEarth Science. It's a collection of missions that will view the Earth in three dimensions and allow us to answer questions we've never been able to answer before about how the Earth system works. Learn more from NASA Earth Science Division Director Dr. Karen St. Germain and NASA Science Associate Administrator Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen in #ScienceInSeconds.

Science in Seconds: New Results from NASA's Juno Mission at Jupiter New results from NASA's Juno mission at Jupiter suggest our solar system's largest planet is home to what's called "shallow lightning." An unexpected form of electrical discharge, shallow lightning originates from clouds containing an ammonia-water solution, whereas lightning on Earth originates from water clouds. Other new findings suggest the violent thunderstorms for which the gas giant is known may form slushy ammonia-rich hailstones Juno's science team calls "mushballs"; they theorize that mushballs essentially kidnap ammonia and water in the upper atmosphere and carry them into the depths of Jupiter's atmosphere.

Visualizing the Impact of COVID-19 Through the Lens of NASA Science Earth is an interconnected system of systems, with everything intermingling and affecting each other, so what happens when populations worldwide come to a near-simultaneous halt? Join Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen, as he looks through the lens of climate pollutants, nitrogen dioxide and carbon dioxide, to see how NASA Science and its partners have responded to the impacts of the novel coronavirus.

Draining Earth's oceans, revealing the two-thirds of Earth's surface we don't get to see Three fifths of the Earth's surface is under the ocean, and the ocean floor is as rich in detail as the land surface with which we are familiar. This animation simulates a drop in sea level that gradually reveals this detail. As the sea level drops, the continental shelves appear immediately. They are mostly visible by a depth of 140 meters, except for the Arctic and Antarctic regions, where the shelves are deeper. The mid-ocean ridges start to appear at a depth of 2000 to 3000 meters. By 6000 meters, most of the ocean is drained except for the deep ocean trenches, the deepest of which is the Marianas Trench at a depth of 10,911 meters.

Rocket Dispatch as Seen from the Space Station

ScienceCasts: Amazing Sunset Sky Show Venus and Jupiter are converging for a must-see close encounter at the end of June. It could be the best backyard sky show of 2015.

Rocket Engine Testing the NASA Way ! Stennis Space Center has long been known as the agency’s largest rocket testing facility and they have been extremely busy with the testing of the upgraded RS-25 engines. In fact all RS-25 Engine testing happens exclusively at Stennis Space Center! If these look familiar to you, it may be due to the fact that they were used as the space shuttle main engine for the last 30 years. Compared to the 3 RS-25 engines that the space shuttle had the SLS will utilize 4 of them to produce 2 Million pounds of thrust. The thorough testing of the RS-25 plays an essential role in upholding NASA’s high standards of efficient and reliable engines.

A "Flight" Over Jupiter This video uses images from NASA’s Juno mission to recreate what it might have looked like to ride along with the Juno spacecraft as it performed its 27th close flyby of Jupiter on June 2, 2020. During the closest approach of this pass, the Juno spacecraft came within approximately 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers) of Jupiter’s cloud tops. At that point, Jupiter’s powerful gravity accelerated the spacecraft to tremendous speed – about 130,000 mph (209,000 kilometers per hour) relative to the planet. Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill created the video using data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam instrument. The sequence combines 41 JunoCam still images digitally projected onto a sphere, with a virtual “camera” providing views of Jupiter from different angles as the spacecraft speeds by. The original JunoCam images were taken on June 2, 2020, between 2:47 a.m. PDT (5:47 a.m. EDT) and 4:25 a.m. PDT (7:25 a.m. EDT).

Why Did NASA Release Water into Space ? There were a LOT of unknowns about spaceflight in the early 1960s, including what would happen if a rocket exploded en route to orbit. Enter Project Highwater.

ScienceCasts : Solar Minimum is Coming Intense solar activity such as sunspots and solar flares subsides during solar minimum, but that doesn’t mean the sun becomes dull. Solar activity simply changes form.

ScienceCasts: 2016 Ends with Three Supermoons Nothing beats a bright and beautiful "supermoon." Except maybe, three supermoons! 2016 ends with a trio of full moons at their closest points to Earth.

ScienceCasts: Summer Blue Moon The second full Moon of July is just around the corner. According to modern folklore, it is a "Blue Moon."

Shallow Lightning on Jupiter This animation takes the viewer on a simulated journey into Jupiter’s exotic high-altitude electrical storms. Get an up-close view of Mission Juno’s newly discovered “shallow lighting” flashes and dive into the violent atmospheric jet of the Nautilus cloud. The smallest white “pop-up” clouds on top of the Nautilus are about 100 km across. The ride navigates through Jupiter’s towering thunderstorms, dodging the spray of ammonia-water rain, and shallow lighting flashes. At these altitudes -- too cold for pure liquid water to exit – ammonia gas acts like an antifreeze that melts the water ice crystals flung up to these heights by Jupiter’s powerful storms – giving Jupiter an unexpected ammonia-water cloud that can electrify the sky. The animation was created by combining an image of high-altitude clouds from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft with a computer-generated animation.

ScienceCasts: The 2016 Transit of Mercury