A new map of Mars' gravity made with three NASA spacecraft is the most detailed to date, providing a revealing glimpse into the hidden interior of the Red Planet. Satellites always orbit a planet’s center of mass, but can be pulled slightly off course by the gravity of massive features like Olympus Mons, the solar system’s tallest mountain. Now, scientists at Goddard Space Flight Center have used these slight orbital fluctuations to map the gravity field of Mars, providing fresh insights into its crustal thickness, deep interior, and seasonal variations of dry ice at the poles. The new gravity map will also help to put future spacecraft into orbit more precisely, ensuring that the Mars fleet continues to return a massive trove of data.
In this rare timelapse video, see inside the world's largest clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland as the James Webb Space Telescope team lifts and turns the teles...
The 18-segment primary mirror of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope was raised into vertical alignment in the largest clean room at the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, o...
Former astronaut and climate scientist Dr. Piers Sellers visits Thule, Greenland, one of the home bases for Operation IceBridge’s spring Arctic campaign. IceBridge is a 10-year airborne science mis...
The OSIRIS-REx mission, launching in September 2016, plans to return a sample of asteroid Bennu to Earth in 2023 so that scientists can study pristine material left over from the early solar system...
Nearly 10 billion years ago, the black hole at the center of a distant galaxy produced a powerful outburst, and light from this blast began arriving at Earth in 2012. Astronomers using data from NA...
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a moon orbiting dwarf planet Makemake -- the third largest known object past the orbit of Neptune, about two thirds the size of Pluto. Furthe...
From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study publishe...
On April 17, 2016, an active region on the sun’s right side released a mid-level solar flare, captured here by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. This solar flare caused moderate radio blackouts, a...
In July 1994, the Hubble Space Telescope was poised to use its newly fixed optics to observe one of the most impressive astronomical events of the century - the 21 fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy...
Scientists have long suspected the solar wind of stripping the Martian atmosphere into space, a process that may have turned Mars from a blue world early in its history into the red planet that we ...
El Niño years can have a big impact on the littlest plants in the ocean, and NASA scientists are studying the relationship between the two. Ocean color maps, based on a month's worth of satellite d...