Nasa

DSCOVR Ready to Spread its Wings Workers conduct a light test on the solar arrays on NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory spacecraft, or DSCOVR, in the Building 1 high bay at the Astrotech payload processing facility in Titusville, Florida, near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. DSCOVR is a partnership between NOAA, NASA and the U.S. Air Force. DSCOVR will maintain the nation's real-time solar wind monitoring capabilities which are critical to the accuracy and lead time of NOAA's space weather alerts and forecasts. Launch is targeted for early 2015 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 v 1.1 launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.

NASA is investing in the future by advancing its capabilities and developing transformative technologies required to reach the challenging destinations that await exploration. The Space Technology Mission Directorate is building, testing and flying these cutting-edge technologies today.

First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope The dawn of a new era in astronomy has begun as the world gets its first look at the full capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a partnership with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency). The telescope’s first full-color images and spectroscopic data were released during a televised broadcast at 10:30 a.m. EDT (14:30 UTC) on Tuesday, July 12, 2022, from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. These listed targets below represent the first wave of follicular scientific images and spectra the observatory has gathered, and the official beginning of Webb’s general science operations. They were selected by an international committee of representatives from NASA, ESA, CSA, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Water is critical for human existence, whether on our planet or distant destinations. In support of future space exploration, researchers from NASA’s Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field, California, are searching for water closer to home -- in the desert near the Mojave National Preserve in Southern California. The Mojave Volatiles Prospector (MVP) project team will remotely operate a planetary rover, named K-REX, developed and managed at Ames, to determine how moisture varies across surface and subsurface soil types. Collectively, the rover and a suite of tools housed on the rover, are being integrated to mature technology concepts into better designed and built systems for prospecting materials in permanently shadowed regions on the moon. “Because the Mojave is extremely dry like the moon, the test makes it a great analog to future lunar polar rover missions. We'll be studying water distributions in the Mojave with a rover in order to learn how to study water distributions on the moon with a rover,” said Jennifer Heldmann, principal investigator for MVP at NASA Ames.