NASA research center in Silicon Valley conducting aeronautics, space science, and supercomputing research, including Moon and Mars exploration technology.
NASA sent 12 student-built heat-shield test capsules down with a trash-filled Cygnus XL cargo ship that breaks apart on its planned reentry. The capsules eject during the breakup, so Moon and Mars materials still in development get flight data without a launch of their own.
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Florida Tech's John Kiss and colleagues found surface tension slowed water at one-sixth of Earth's gravity, simulated on a suborbital flight. Kiss says lunar plant watering may need its own design, a view that so far rests on one brief test of liquids in containers.
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NASA selected three PRISM science payloads to fly on commercial CLPS landers and survey lunar ice, a possible lava tube and surface hazards for Moon Base. Their findings are meant to shape where and how crews live at an outpost NASA is already planning.
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Field tests at NASA Ames put the taxi clearance into data the aircraft can follow by itself, with a sensor suite watching for vehicles in its path. NASA says the workload fell for pilots and controllers alike.
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Six of the selections target off-planet food production and six target astronaut physiology, with more than $7 million committed across fiscal years 2026 to 2030 and nine awards going to investigators new to the program.
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In three days the FALCON payload refined orbits for more than 200 objects with no help from the ground, working against a 20,000-object catalog. The harder question is where the landmarks come from past Earth orbit.
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Before the telescope's Aug. 30 launch, ground software named ROSALIA already helps decide which targets get scheduled and what the darkest pixels are allowed to mean.
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Analysis of 75 videographed meteorite falls puts melting and fragmentation in charge of mass loss. Breakup starts at a fifth of measured meteorite strength, which is where hazard models bend.
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A SETI Institute team has NASA funding to test whether Raman spectroscopy works from 30 to 50 km away, roughly 250 times farther than its own best demonstration.
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NASA's FALCON experiment fixed a spacecraft's position by matching star-tracker images against an onboard catalog of 20,000 objects, and corrected 200 of their orbits in three days.
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NASA advertises lead times of up to 12 hours. The published test average is 9.24, and the team says the model is not ready for operational forecasting.
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