Martian Crater May Have Held Groundwater-Fed Lake
A NASA spacecraft, MRO, is providing new evidence of a wet underground environment on Mars that adds to an increasingly complex picture of the Red Planet's early evolution.
The McLaughlin Crater is 57 miles (92 kilometers) in diameter and 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers) deep. McLaughlin's depth apparently once allowed underground water, which otherwise would have stayed hidden, to flow into the crater's interior.
NASA in Inaugural Parade on Monday
During Monday's Inaugural Parade, astronauts and members of the Curiosity team will walk beside full-sized models of two spacecraft: the Orion capsule and the Curiosity rover, seen above headed to the parade staging area on Sunday.
Two Steps Forward for Human Space Flight
In the first of two milestones, the European Space Agency is providing a service module for the Orion spacecraft's Exploration Mission-1 in 2017, the first fully integrated test of the crew capsule and the Space Launch System.
NASA also announced on Wednesday that Bigelow Aerospace will send an inflatable module to the International Space Station in 2015.
IRIS Spacecraft Is Fully Integrated
NASA's next Small Explorer (SMEX) mission to study the little-understood lower levels of the sun's atmosphere has been fully integrated and final testing is underway.
Scheduled to launch in April 2013, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) will make use of high-resolution images, data and advanced computer models to unravel how matter, light, and energy move from the sun’s surface.
Airborne Mission Climbs to Stratospheric Heights
NASA is deploying the first experimental flight of a multi-year airborne science campaign to investigate unexplored regions of the upper atmosphere.
The Airborne Tropical TRopopause EXperiment (ATTREX) mission will collect data from the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere, allowing scientists to understand and predict how its chemistry is changing Earth in a warming climate.