Blog

Tiny NASA Spacecraft Delivers Exoplanet Mission’s First Images

With the first images from the spacecraft now in hand, the team behind NASA’s Star-Planet Activity Research CubeSat, or SPARCS, is ready to begin charting the energetic lives of the galaxy’s most common stars to help answer one of humanity’s most profound questions: Which distant worlds beyond our solar system might be habitable? Initial, or […]

Posted March 12, 2026

Webb Spots Details in Nearby Spiral Galaxy

Stars peek through the dusty, winding arms of NGC 5134, a spiral galaxy located 65 million light-years away, in this Feb. 20, 2026, image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument collects the mid-infrared light emitted by the warm dust speckled through the galaxy’s clouds, tracing the clumps and strands of dusty gas.

Posted March 12, 2026

Help Galaxy Zoo: Tidal Tales Open Cosmic Storybook

Galaxies carry the imprints of past encounters. When they pass near one another or collide, gravity pulls their stars into long tails, thin streams, and faint shells – features that preserve the history of these dramatic events.

Posted March 12, 2026

General

NASA Engineering and Safety Center

Efficient Large Displacement/Large Rotation Dynamic Simulations Using Nonlinear Dynamic Substructures

Download PDF: Efficient Large Displacement/Large Rotation Dynamic Simulations Using Nonlinear Dynamic Substructures Utilizing reduced-order dynamic math models (DMM) in linear system-level dynamic analyses is a well-known practice that enables extreme computational efficiencies. But what about nonlinear system dynamics?

Posted March 12, 2026

Dust Outbreak Reaches Europe

Clouds of dust lofted from the Sahara Desert brought hazy skies and muddy rain to Western Europe.

Posted March 12, 2026

Earth

Landsat

2026 William T. Pecora Award Nominations Now Being Accepted

The William T. Pecora Award is presented annually to individuals or teams using satellite or aerial remote sensing that make outstanding contributions toward understanding the Earth (land, oceans, and air), educating the next generation of scientists, informing decision-makers, or supporting natural or human-induced disaster response.

Posted March 11, 2026

University Innovation

About University Innovation Project (UI)

NASA’s University Innovation (UI) project funds university-led innovation to address the agency’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate’s system-level challenges via independent, NASA-alternate-path, multi-disciplinary awards.

Posted March 11, 2026

Hubble Space Telescope

Planetary Nebulae

Telescopes Team Up for New View of Cat’s Eye Nebula

This March 3, 2026, image combines views from ESA’s (European Space Agency) Euclid and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to feature one of the most visually intricate remnants of a dying star: the Cat’s Eye Nebula, also known as NGC 6543.

Posted March 11, 2026

Blogs

Curiosity Blog, Sols 4825-4831: Exploring the Borderlands

Written by William Farrand, Senior Research Scientist, Space Science Institute Earth planning date: Friday, March 6, 2026 Curiosity is in the last stage of its exploration of the spiderweb-like boxwork unit. This stage consists of exploring the eastern and southern borders of this terrain. There were two multi-sol plans assembled this week.

Posted March 11, 2026

Astrobiology

Earth Observatory

Ice & Glaciers

Landsat 9

Planetary Analogs

Surface Water

Water on Earth

A Most Unusual Lake

Lake Unter-See in Antarctica, sealed beneath thick ice, contains unusually high levels of dissolved oxygen and cone-shaped microbial reefs resembling some of Earth’s oldest fossils.

Posted March 11, 2026