NASA Administrator Charles Bolden told an audience at the agency’s Washingon headquarters Wednesday that the next phase of contracting for transporting astronauts to the International Space Station will start next week. Rockets and spacecraft made by either SpaceX or Orbital Sciences will support all current and planned U.S. experiments on the station under the CommercialRead… Read more »
NASA received more than 400 ideas in response to a June request for information that sought methods on how to identify, capture and re-locate asteroids near Earth for studies. Industry, universities, international organizations and individual citizens responded to the RFI that also asked for ideas on how to leverage partnerships, crowdsourcing and citizen science forRead… Read more »
Amazon Web Services and NASA have embarked on a project to provide the public access to the space agency’s satellite information on climate and the Earth sciences. The collection of NASA research data will be made available for researchers and educational organizations through the AWS cloud platform, NASA said Tuesday. AWS and the space agencyRead… Read more »
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory will lead a study into the surfaces of asteroids and the moon for NASA as the agency aims to explore those areas with humans and robots. The five-year initiative aims to build on APL’s previous Lunar Science Institute project for NASA that sought to learn more about the geologyRead… Read more »
Nine teams of researchers have been selected by NASA to join a collaborative organization that will work on a virtual setting to support the agency’s human space exploration programs. The Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute will bring together U.S. scientists and international partners to help NASA study the moon, near-Earth asteroids and space environments,Read… Read more »
An experimental communication system on board a NASA lunar probe has used laser pulses to send data back to Earth at speeds of up to 622 megabits per second. The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration system also works to transmit data at 20 Mbps between a ground station located in New Mexico and the spacecraft inRead… Read more »
NASA recently picked 770 proposals for space exploration hardware and applications from 9,147 participants in an April competition, GCN reported Wednesday. The space agency conducted the event across 48 countries for two days and developers built software, hardware, visualization, mobile applications and web tools, which the agency says will help further its existing programs, accordingRead… Read more »
NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer has started to orbit around the moon this week and has been protected from effects of the government shutdown, Space.com reports. Miriam Kramer writes LADEE made three elliptical orbits around the Earth, then moved into a higher orbit after each lap around the planet. The moon’s gravity tookRead… Read more »
NASA has granted an emergency exemption for a University of Colorado program to examine Mars’ atmosphere to avoid delaying the project until 2016, according to a report by the Daily Camera. The $485 million Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft will launch between Nov. 18 and Dec. 7 because the Earth and Mars are inRead… Read more »
Fairfax, Va.-based Zimmerman Associates has won a subcontract to help manage the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s information library. Cadence Group Associates is the prime contractor for the program, ZAI said. “This win allows us to continue with the specialized library support we have been providing to NASA GSFC since 2001,” said ZAI Chief InformationRead… Read more »