Mars helicopter Ingenuity gearing up for 19th Red Planet flight on Friday | Satellite images show epic snowstorm that shut down part of Interstate 95 | China livestreams New Year's view from new space station
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NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity is poised to make its first flight of 2022. The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity's next Red Planet sortie — its 19th overall — will take place as early as Friday (Jan. 7).
A band of snow blankets the United States northeast in a new satellite photo showing the huge storm stranding motorists on Interstate 95 in Virginia. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite captured the storm, which dumped more than 14 inches (36 centimeters) of snow on parts of southern Virginia and southern Maryland.
China welcomed the New Year with a live stream from cameras outside the new Tianhe space station module. In a new video from the China National Space Administration, livestreamed on New Year's Day (Jan. 1), you can now see the beauty of the Earth below from the Tianhe module on China's Tiangong space station.
An alliance of experts in space, sports and the entertainment industry are designing and developing original games exclusively for low or microgravity playing fields. The group, known as the Space Games Federation, has already identified a number of prospective game concepts, from guiding a magnetic ball through hoops in space to space dodgeball, as well as racing the clock to tie an increasingly complicated series of knots while tethered to a teammate.
The James Webb Space Telescope achieved another major milestone today, successfully extending its secondary mirror as it continues to sail seamlessly through its never-before-conducted deployment sequence on the way to its destination.
The Flame Nebula rings in the New Year from the constellation Orion in a blazing new photo from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). In the new telescope view, the nebula, nicknamed "Orion's fireplace," looks like an inferno, but it's actually a colorful cloud of interstellar dust and gas and a nursery for new star formation.
Amazon's Alexa has a new feature: it can fly you to the moon. The virtual assistant, which is more commonly used (on Earth) to control devices around your home, is set to launch on a journey around the moon aboard NASA's Artemis 1 mission later this year. Together with Cisco's Webex video conferencing platform, Alexa is part of "Callisto," a new far-field voice technology, AI and tablet-based video demonstration created with Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for NASA's Orion spacecraft.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) want to engineer a new kind of hovering spacecraft that can operate without air. Instead of relying on air like birds and planes, it will levitate using the electric charge available from interplanetary surfaces.
Comet Leonard is falling out of view, but not without putting on one last show. Discovered just a year ago, the comet, formally known as Comet C/2021 A1, made its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 12, marking the climax of a month full of prime observing opportunities. As the comet has continued on its journey through the inner solar system, however, something has changed: its tail has taken on the appearance of twisted streamers, even as the core of the comet became brighter.
A meteor hurtling through Earth's atmosphere exploded over Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on New Year's Day (Jan. 1). Just before 11:30 a.m. EST (1630 GMT) on Jan. 1, people in Pittsburgh heard what sounded like a loud "boom" outside.
