NASASpaceQuest

NASA's Mars Mission Shields Up for Tests Set far away from residents and surrounded by dunes, the Remote Hypervelocity Test Laboratory at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico, has supported every human spaceflight program from the Space Shuttle to Artemis. A team designing shields to protect NASA's Mars Earth Entry System from micrometeorites and space debris traveled to this facility to safely recreate dangerous impacts, and to test the team’s shields and computer models.

The Webb Space Telescope’s New Look at the Cosmos on This Week @NASA – The Webb Space Telescope’s new look at the cosmos, technology used to fine tune Webb improves the vision of millions on Earth, and a new climate study heads to the space station … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!

NASA’s Artemis I Mission Begins Departure from Lunar Orbit NASA will begin coverage of the Orion spacecraft performing the first of two maneuvers to exit lunar orbit, called the distant retrograde orbit departure burn, on Dec. 1 at 4:30 p.m. EST (21:30 UTC). The burn is scheduled to occur at 4:53 p.m. EST (21:53 UTC). Orion launched aboard the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket at 1:47 a.m. EST (06:47 UTC) on Nov. 16 from historic Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Orion entered a distant retrograde orbit on at 4:52 p.m. EST (21:52 UTC) on Nov. 25, where the spacecraft has been testing systems in a deep space environment. The Artemis I mission is the first integrated test of NASA’s deep space exploration systems: the Orion spacecraft, the SLS rocket, and Kennedy Space Center ground systems.

NASA's Psyche Mission to an Asteroid: Official NASA Trailer #MissionToPsyche Join the journey as NASA’s Psyche mission team prepares for a targeted Oct. 5, 2023, launch to explore a unique metallic asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid, likely made largely of nickel-iron metal mixed with rock, could contain metal from the core of a planetesimal (the building block of an early rocky planet) and may offer a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created the terrestrial planets like Earth. Arizona State University leads the Psyche mission. JPL, which is managed by Caltech for NASA, is responsible for the mission’s overall management, system engineering, integration and test, and mission operations. Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto, California, provided the high-power solar electric propulsion spacecraft chassis.