Latest Discovery program Stories

WASHINGTON, May 15, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will host a news teleconference at 4 p.m. EDT, today, May 15, to discuss the status of the agency's Kepler Space Telescope. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone, which is the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water. Launched...

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory On a new list of the 100 most influential people on Earth, three work at the same California address, where they've led projects to study things that are not on Earth. The list announced today by TIME Magazine includes Don Yeomans, Pete Theisinger and Richard Cook, all at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Yeomans manages NASA's Near-Earth Objects Program Office at JPL, which coordinates the search for and tracking of asteroids and...

NASA will host a news briefing at 11 a.m. PDT (2 p.m. EDT), Thursday, April 18, to announce new discoveries from the agency's Kepler mission. The briefing will be held at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and will be broadcast live on NASA Television and on the agency's website. The briefing will also be streamed live at: http://www.ustream.tv/NASAJPL2, with a moderated Web chat featuring Kepler Deputy Project Scientist Nick Gautier of NASA's Jet Propulsion...

NASA Within NASA’s new FY2014 budget proposal lies a project known as the Asteroid Retrieval and Utilization Mission. This project would be the first to capture a small near-Earth asteroid and safely redirect it to a lunar orbit so that astronauts can visit and explore it. Such a mission would expand scientific knowledge of the origins of both humanity and the universe. The goal of asteroid retrieval is not a new endeavor for NASA. In fact, the idea dates to the earliest days of the...

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Like many of his colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., Shyam Bhaskaran is working a lot with asteroids these days. And also like many of his colleagues, the deep space navigator devotes a great deal of time to crafting, and contemplating, computer-generated 3-D models of these intriguing nomads of the solar system. But while many of his coworkers are calculating asteroids' past, present and future locations in the cosmos,...

WATCH VIDEO: [LAMP Observes GRAIL Impact] Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online After spending nearly a year in lunar orbit studying the moon’s interior, two NASA spacecraft, known as GRAIL A (Ebb) and GRAIL B (Flow), were ordered to embark on a final mission that would hopefully give scientists one last bit of data about the moon’s composition. The twin spacecraft, which were launched in September 2011 and arrived in lunar orbit in late December 2011 and early...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Several new, high-resolution images of Mercury were among the data obtained by NASA’s Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) satellite and released by the US space agency on Friday. The images, which show the crater-filled surface of our solar system’s innermost planet in “unprecedented detail,” were obtained by MESSENGER during its 13th through 18th month in orbit around Mercury. They...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The combination of new technology, a growing interest in astronomy, and more media hype has led to an even bigger fear of "what if" scenarios for potentially hazardous asteroids. However, Iowa State engineers say they are coming up with a few ideas to help save our planet from a repeat of the asteroid-impact that led to the dinosaur annihilation. Bong Wie and colleagues from Iowa State will be presenting a paper as part of NASA's...

[ Watch the Video: NASA Captures Planet Mercury In Color HD ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online NASA scientists have used thousands of images acquired by the Messenger probe during its first year in orbit around Mercury in order to create a colorful, high-resolution map of the planet, various media outlets reported on Friday. According to the Daily Mail, the images of Mercury, which appears to be brownish-gray in color when viewed from here on Earth, were taken...

PASADENA, Calif., Feb. 13, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA Television will provide commentary starting at 2 p.m. EST (11 a.m. PST) on Friday, Feb. 15, during the close, but safe, flyby of a small near-Earth asteroid named 2012 DA14. NASA places a high priority on tracking asteroids and protecting our home planet from them. This flyby will provide a unique opportunity for researchers to study a near-Earth object up close. (Logo:...