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Mar 12 | News
At 1.3 million cubic feet, the Goddard Space Flight Center’s High Bay Clean Room, where the components of the James Webb Space Telescope are now being assembled, circulates a staggering one million cubic feet of air per minutes, ensuring no more than 10,000 particles larger than 0.5 microns. Progress on the telescope can now be viewed by webcam.
Mar 9 | News
What if space held the key to producing alternative energy crops on Earth? That's what researchers are hoping to find in a new experiment on the International Space Station. The experiment, National Lab Pathfinder-Cells 3, is aimed at learning whether microgravity can help jatropha curcas plant cells grow faster to produce biofuel, or renewable fuel derived from biological matter.
Mar 5 | RDBlog
I typically attend the annual Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy each year in pursuit of specific coverage. This year, I sought out candidates for coverage in a vacuum technology article, and pulled together some instruments for a spectroscopy guide. But as busy as that kept me, it wasn’t all mass spectrometers and vacuum pumps on the show floor.
Mar 2 | News
Astronomers from the United States and Europe have used a gravitational lens—a distant, light-bending clump of dark matter—to make a new estimate of the Hubble constant, which determines the size and age of the universe.
Feb 22 | News
Over the next three years, Southwest Research Institute scientists will develop and fly microgravity and space astronomy experiments on multiple suborbital space flights. The project marks a new approach to low-orbit astronomy experiments, conducted “in the field”.
Feb 19 | News
In the short time that the image of Fomalhaut—a star with a Jupiter-sized planet imaged by Hubble Space Telescope—was published by UC Berkeley’s Paul Kalas, it has become an icon. Why? The 2008 image was the first visible-light picture of an extrasolar planet.
Feb 16 | Featured Articles
Physics software simulates parameters for extracting water from the Moon. Preliminary data from NASA’s Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009, impacts into the Moon’s south pole.
Feb 3 | News
Workers at NASA and Northrop Grumman had to invent the techniques, materials, and mechanisms needed to build the James Webb Space Telescope’s complex sunshield system. The tennis court-sized solar deflector relies on five layers of Kapton, each as thin as a human hair.
Feb 2 | RDBlog
Monday was probably a bittersweet day for NASA. Told that it would no longer be following President Bush’s lunar comeback effort or even launching its own astronauts into space, the agency must now look to contractors for their escape velocity needs.
Feb 1 | News
Someday soon, the national space agency might no longer be responsible for putting astronauts into space. This idea of private space has been debated for years, but now the Obama administration is expected to push billions of dollars toward this goal in a budget to be proposed today.