Hoisted about 30ft. in the air, a mockup of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft awaits its encounter with a pad full of dirt. “Three, two, one” projects over the loud speaker just before the spacecraft is released and makes a loud thud when meeting the dirt. Six attached airbags absorb much of the landing impact and stabilise the spacecraft.

At NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, a group of students successfully flew a prototype of an aircraft that could one day fly in the Martian atmosphere and send its findings back to Earth. Called the Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Land on Mars, or Prandtl-M, the small, remotely piloted glider aircraft flew 11th August at Armstrong.

  At NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, the sounding rocket team conducted a mission that launched on 16th September 2015. Including the firing of 44 rocket engines, this mission set a world record for the most rocket engines fired on a single flight.

In partnership with Space Center Houston, the Official Visitor Center of NASA Johnson Space Center, and NineSigma, a global innovation consultant organisation, has opened registration for a new competition. The Space Robotics Challenge seeks to develop the capabilities of humanoid robots to help astronauts on the journey to Mars.

NASA is preparing to launch its first mission to return a sample of an asteroid to Earth. The mission will help scientists investigate how planets formed and how life began, as well as improve our understanding of asteroids that could impact Earth. The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft will travel to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu and bring a sample back to Earth for inten...

The BARREL team is at Esrange Space Center near Kiruna, Sweden, launching a series of six scientific payloads on miniature scientific balloons. The BARREL team launched the first balloon of this campaign – the fourth for BARREL – on Aug. 13, 2016. The NASA-funded BARREL – which stands for Balloon Array for Radiation-belt Relativistic Electron Losses – primarily measures X-rays in Earth’s atmosphere near the North and...

Following a key programme review, NASA approved the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) to proceed to the next phase of design and development for the mission's robotic segment. ARM is a two-part mission that will integrate robotic and crewed spacecraft operations in the proving ground of deep space to demonstrate key capabilities needed for NASA's journey to Mars.

  NASA has selected six U.S. companies to help advance the Journey to Mars by developing ground prototypes and concepts for deep space habitats under the second Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) Broad Agency Announcement, or NextSTEP-2

NASA has selected five green technology concepts that have the potential to transform the aviation industry in the next decade by reducing aircraft fuel use and emissions. The concepts were selected under NASA’s Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program for a two-year study.

When entering a burning building, firefighters have only their wits and senses to rely on. New research, developed jointly by the Jet Propulsion Lab and the Department of Homeland Security, may change that with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that could collect data on temperatures, gases and other danger signals and guide a team of first responders safely through the flames.

The JunoCam camera aboard NASA's Juno mission is operational and sending down data after the spacecraft's July 4 arrival at Jupiter. Juno's visible-light camera was turned on six days after Juno fired its main engine and placed itself into orbit around the largest planetary inhabitant of our solar system. The first high-resolution images of the gas giant Jupiter are still a few weeks away.

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are using NASA's most powerful supercomputer, Pleiades, to create unique star-formation simulations. Like something from a video game, the simulations zoom through the entire evolution of young star clusters. A giant cloud of interstellar gas and dust collapses under the forces of gravity. Inside the cloud, turbulent clumps of gas form and then collap...

Launched nearly five years ago on 5th August, 2011, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, NASA’s solar-powered spacecraft, ‘Juno’, has crossed the four largest Galilean moons of Jupiter (eponymously named after Galileo Galilei who discovered them in 1609) and has reached its destination; Jupiter. Follow Juno's mission from launch to orbit below. 

NASA's Balloon Program Office successfully completed the second test flight of its Super Pressure Balloon (SPB) at 3:54 p.m. EDT, Saturday, July 2, setting a new flight duration record for a mid-latitude flight of a large scientific research balloon. The mission, which began at 7:35 p.m. EDT, May 16 (11:35 a.m., May 17, in New Zealand time), launched from Wanaka, New Zealand, and ran a total of 46 days, 20 hours, and 19 minutes.

NASA has taken a major step toward creating a Solar System internet by establishing operational Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) service on the ISS. The DTN service will help automate and improve data availability for space station experimenters and will result in more efficient bandwidth utilisation and more data return.

Getting spacecraft ready for launch may have more to do with medical research than you think. For a study on microbes that may be associated with a history of breast cancer, researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, employed the same sequencing and analysis methods used for examining bacteria in spacecraft assembly rooms. Those techniques were designed for planetary protection—ensuring that NASA spacecraft do no...

  With 14 electric motors turning propellers integrated into a uniquely-designed wing, NASA will test new propulsion technology using an experimental aeroplane. This plane, the agency’s first X-plane designation in a decade, has been designated the X-57 and nicknamed “Maxwell”.

Sailors working on vessels spread across the Earth’s oceans and seas must be better connected than astronauts, who’s working environment is hundreds of kilometres into space, right? Well, recent research from the 2015 Crew Connectivity Survey and sources such as NASA and The Atlantic has taken a closer look at the communication services that are provided to sailors, as well as the limiting factors that impact accessibility, making a d...

A partnership between NASA and Hitachi is testing a system known as Aircraft Access to System Wide Information Management (SWIM), to wirelessly send aviation information. The test was recently conducted on an FAA Bombardier Global 5000 test aircraft taxiing 60 to 70 miles per hour on the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport runway.

Scientists are getting closer to finding worlds that resemble our own 'blue marble' of a planet. NASA's Kepler mission alone has confirmed more than 1,000 planets outside our solar system -- a handful of which are a bit bigger than Earth and orbit in the habitable zones of their stars, where liquid water might exist. Some astronomers think the discovery of Earth's true analogs may be around the corner. What are the next steps to search for life o...