Discover

How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy

This article was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project. One morning in April 2025, employees of a small office in the US State Department got the email many of them had been dreading.  For months, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Effic...

NASA’s Lunar Development and Test Facility Prepares Artemis Hardware for Moon 

Before astronauts return to the Moon’s surface through NASA’s Artemis program, the hardware they depend on must first prove it can survive the unforgiving lunar environment. At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, engineers at the Lunar Development and Test Facility are t...

APOD: 2026 August 7 – Rubin’s Cosmos Field

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 7 –… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation writte...

Sensing the Poles’ Hidden Heat

New animations from NASA’s PREFIRE mission reveal two years of seasonal temperature swings at the Arctic and Antarctic.

Educators & Teens Get Hands-On With TEMPO Data to Help Investigate Local Air Quality

The NASA Science Activation Program’s Cosmic Storytelling with NASA Data (CosmicDS) project, led by Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, works to bring authentic NASA data into the hands of educators and learners. From July 27–29, 2026, the CosmicDS team partnered with the Smithsonian Ins...

NASA’s SkyFall Helicopters at Work (Artist’s Concept)

Description This artist’s concept depicts NASA’s three SkyFall Mars helicopters collecting data while flying over the surface of the Red Planet.  The green frequency waves emanating from the helicopters’ large antennas depict collection of subsurface radar data. The red beams depict collect near-inf...

Antenna Testing for NASA’s SkyFall Mission

Description SkyFall ground-penetrating radar engineer Maya Román connects a coaxial cable to a test antenna in the Environmental Test Lab’s electromagnetic interference testing chamber at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.  The antenna was pointed up during test to minimize ref...

I Am Artemis Tom Percy

As NASA sets its sights on long-term exploration of the Moon and Mars, the agency is increasing the cadence of its Artemis missions. Helping bring these plans to fruition is Tom Percy, manager of systems engineering and integration for NASA’s Human Landing System Program. Percy serves as a focal poi...

Taking Flight to Prepare for Space

NASA astronaut Adam Fuhrmann (right, in yellow) prepares for a training flight aboard NASA’s WB-57 aircraft in this July 16, 2026, photo. These high-altitude flights train the crew to work in a tight environment and operate aircraft systems while in a pressure suit, preparing them for future mission...

JOB OPPORTUNITIES: NASA OFFICE OF THE GENERAL COUNSEL

The Download: Google’s AI shake-up and Meta’s rogue model

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Google’s AI empire is being reshaped. Here’s what’s changed. After a wave of painful losses in the tech talent wars, delays to its next flagship model...

APOD: 2026 August 6 – New Sharpest Image of the Sun Uncovers Instability

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 6 – New… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation wr...

How the Tide Turns at the Mouth of the Elbe

The ocean’s ebbs and flows reveal dynamic tidal flats and a well-traveled shipping route along the coast of Germany.

NASA’s IXPE May Have Proven 90-Year-Old Theory

A first of its kind measurement of a magnetar may have captured empty space behaving in a way physicists have predicted for 90 years, but never directly observed. The results published Wednesday in Nature. Fast facts Scientists using NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) conducted more th...

Artemis III Orion Crew and Service Models Joined

Technicians joined the Orion crew and service modules together on July 30, 2026, inside the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew module will carry and sustain NASA astronauts Randy Bresnik, Andre Douglas, and Frank Rubio, and ESA (...

NASA’s Perseverance Captures Phobos and Earth

Description This composite of seven images from the Mastcam-Z instrument aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover shows Earth, visible as a small bright dot moving from upper left to lower right, passing behind the Martian moon Phobos on July 2, 2026, 1,907th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The bl...

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Watches Earth Vanish Behind Martian Moon

Earth and the Martian moon Phobos dance together in a series of images recently acquired by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. Earth appears as a point of light in the Martian sky, disappearing behind the crescent of Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons. This is the first time humanity has captured fr...

Puzzle Corner

Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the September/October 2026 Puzzle Corner, brought to you by Michael S. Branicky, ScD ’95, of the Puzzle Corner Puzzle Crew (aka PC2), which also includes Edward Faulkner ’03, MEng ’04, and Abe Kunin ’03. This column includes solutions to the May/June...

Advanced Mini-laboratories Automate Space Station Research

The International Space Station hosts hundreds of science experiments at a time. Some experiments can take hours to perform, and researchers need to account for astronauts’ limited time. Fully automated devices, like Redwire’s  ADvanced Space Experiment Processors (ADSEPs), have been designed t...

The Download: NASA’s new telescope and Chinese tech import curbs

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. NASA’s new dark energy space telescope can also detect killer asteroids   At the end of August, NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Tele...

NASA’s new dark energy space telescope can also detect killer asteroids

At the end of August, NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its quest is to help us better understand how the universe works, from the glue-like dark matter that keeps galaxies together to the elusive dark energy that drives the expansion o...

APOD: 2026 August 5 – Spokes on Saturn’s B Ring

APOD Science APOD APOD: 2026 August 5 – Spokes… Today’s APOD Archive Submissions Index Search Calendar RSS Education About Discuss   APOD Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation...

The Paradox of Lençóis Maranhenses National Park

The coastal dune field in Brazil looks like a desert but fills with freshwater lagoons every year.

NASA Will Attempt to Observe Rocket Part’s Lunar Impact

Using ground-based telescopes and space-based assets, NASA and SpaceX are tracking a used Falcon 9 upper stage from a commercial mission expected to impact the Moon on Wednesday, Aug. 5, near the Einstein and Bell craters. The impact poses no danger to Earth and NASA scientists are planning to colle...