HERMES Mission Passes Key Milestone, Moves Toward Launch
NASA’s HERMES mission – a four-instrument suite to be mounted outside NASA’s Moon-orbiting Gateway – has passed a critical mission review on Jan. 27, 2022. The review, Key Decision Point C, evaluated the mission’s preliminary design and program plan to achieve launch by its target launch readiness date no earlier than November 2024. With the […]
Strong Winds Power Electric Fields in the Upper Atmosphere, NASA’s ICON Finds
The ICON mission’s observations of the wind-driven dynamo in space have been published in the latest (29 Nov) issue of Nature Geoscience along with an accompanying article from NASA http://go.nasa.gov/3o9UWeA.
NASA craft ‘touches’ sun for 1st time, dives into atmosphere
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A NASA spacecraft has officially “touched” the sun, plunging through the unexplored solar atmosphere known as the corona. Scientists announced the news Tuesday during a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The Parker Solar Probe actually flew through the corona in April during the spacecraft’s eighth close approach to the sun. […]
The Sun in X-rays from NuSTAR
Why are the regions above sunspots so hot? Sunspots themselves are a bit cooler than the surrounding solar surface because the magnetic fields that create them reduce convective heating. It is therefore unusual that regions overhead — even much higher up in the Sun’s corona–can be hundreds of times hotter. To help find the cause, NASA directed the Earth-orbiting Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope […]
Berkeley News: UC Berkeley scientists to lead NASA’s newest space telescope
[by Bob Sanders, UCB Media Relations] In an announcement last week, NASA selected the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) mission, which is led by UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL), to advance toward a scheduled launch in 2025. The mission budget is estimated at $145 million, not including launch costs. The telescope will map low […]
NASA Selects Gamma-ray Telescope to Chart Milky Way Evolution
NASA has selected a new space telescope proposal that will study the recent history of star birth, star death, and the formation chemical elements in the Milky Way. The gamma-ray telescope, called the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), is expected to launch in 2025 as NASA’s latest small astrophysics mission. NASA’s Astrophysics Explorers Program received 18 telescope proposals […]
Mars on the cheap: Scientists working to revolutionize access to the Red Planet
While officials at NASA and the European Space Agency, as well as planners in China, plot out ultra-expensive and complicated missions to return samples from Mars, there are an increasing number of researchers blueprinting low-cost and novel ways to further explore the Red Planet. Be it via souped-up helicopters or inexpensive landers and orbiters, they say it’s […]
2021 ASSURE students cap their summer internship with real-life SSL poster session
In mid-August 2021, the Advancing Space Sciences through Undergraduate Research Experience (ASSURE) hosted an outdoor (in person!) poster session at the Space Sciences Lab (SSL) to wrap up an exciting summer internship program. Along with several additional SSL undergraduates, the ten participants of the ASSURE program presented their research projects and results to the general […]
Parker Solar Probe Team Sheds New Light on Structure, Behavior of Inner Solar System Dust
Scientists using data from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe have assembled a comprehensive picture of the structure and behavior of the large cloud of space dust that swirls through the innermost solar system – and the new insight offers clues to similar clouds around stars across the universe. Research teams led by Jamey Szalay of Princeton […]
Berkeley News features ESCAPADE in cover story
The UC Berkeley home page is featuring a Berkeley news story on ESCAPADE: ‘Blue’ and ‘Gold’ satellites headed to Mars in 2024. Read the full Berkeley News story. Read SSL profile of PI Rob Lillis.
