Latest Jet Propulsion Laboratory Stories

NASA will host a 3-day NASA Social for 25 of its social media followers Aug. 3-5 at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. The NASA Social is scheduled to culminate in the landing of the Mars Science Laboratory's Curiosity rover at Mars' Gale crater. The landing is anticipated at approximately 1:31 a.m. EDT Aug. 6. The event will offer people who engage with NASA through Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks the opportunity to tour JPL, speak with...

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, is being prepared for the final journey to its launch pad on Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean. The mission will study everything from massive black holes to our own sun. It is scheduled to launch no earlier than June 13. "We will see the hottest, densest and most energetic objects with a fundamentally new, high-energy X-ray telescope that can obtain much deeper and crisper images than before," said Fiona Harrison, the...

Final pre-launch preparations are underway for NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. The mission, which will use X-ray vision to hunt for hidden black holes, is scheduled to launch no earlier than June 13 from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The observatory will launch from the belly of Orbital Sciences Corporation's L-1011 "Stargazer" aircraft aboard the company's Pegasus rocket. Technicians at Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California are busy installing...

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., invites the public to its annual Open House on Saturday, June 9, and Sunday, June 10, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The event, themed "Great Journeys," will take visitors on a "ride" through the wonders of space. Highlights include a life-size model of Mars Science Laboratory, the NASA/JPL spacecraft currently bound for Mars; demonstrations from numerous space missions; JPL's machine shop, where robotic spacecraft parts are built; and the...

Its construction now complete, the science instrument that is the heart of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) spacecraft - NASA's first mission dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide - has left its nest at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and has arrived at its integration and test site in Gilbert, Ariz. A truck carrying the OCO-2 instrument left JPL before dawn on Tuesday, May 9, to begin the trek to Orbital Science Corporation's Satellite...

With its daily supply of solar energy increasing, NASA's durable Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has driven off the sunward-tilted outcrop, called Greeley Haven, where it worked during its fifth Martian winter. Opportunity's first drive since Dec. 26, 2011, took the rover about 12 feet (3.67 meters) northwest and downhill on Tuesday, May 8. The rover operations team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., received confirmation of the completed drive late Tuesday, relayed...

For 10 years, it has silently swooped through space in its orbital perch 438 miles (705 kilometers) above Earth, its nearly 2,400 spectral "eyes" peering into Earth's atmosphere, watching. But there's nothing alien about NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, or AIRS, instrument, a "monster" of weather and climate research that celebrates its 10th birthday in orbit May 4. AIRS, built by BAE Systems, Boston, under the direction of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., is one of...

The NASA Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) and the Curiosity rover are now less than 100 days away from landing on the surface of the Red Planet, officials at the US space agency announced on Friday. The one-ton Curiosity and the craft ferrying it to Mars reached the T-minus 100 day mark at 10:31pm PDT on Friday, officials at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California said over the weekend. At that time, it was approximately 119 million miles from its destination, travelling...

Images from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) reveal an old star in the throes of a fiery outburst, spraying the cosmos with dust. The findings offer a rare, real-time look at the process by which stars like our sun seed the universe with building blocks for other stars, planets and even life. The star, catalogued as WISE J180956.27-330500.2, was discovered in images taken during the WISE survey in 2010, the most detailed infrared survey to date of the entire celestial sky....

A bright ball of light traveling east to west was seen over the skies of central/northern California Sunday morning, April 22. The former space rock-turned-flaming-meteor entered Earth's atmosphere around 8 a.m. PDT. Reports of the fireball have come in from as far north as Sacramento, Calif. and as far east as North Las Vegas, Nev. Bill Cooke of the Meteoroid Environments Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., estimates the object was about the size of a...