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The earth, solar system, entire Milky Way, and the few thousand galaxies closest to us move in a vast “bubble” that is 250 million light-years in diameter, where the average density of matter is half as large as for the rest of the universe. This is the hypothesis put forward by a theoretical physicist from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) to solve a conundrum that has been splitting the scientific community for a decade: at what speed is the universe expanding?...

A consortium of scientists from across the country has found that breathing ultrafine particles from a large family of materials that increasingly are found in a host of household and commercial products, from sunscreens to the ink in copy machines to super-strong but lightweight sporting equipment, can cause lung inflammation and damage. The research on two of the most common types of engineered nanomaterials is published online today in Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)....

Washington State University researchers are working with NASA to determine how a submarine might work on Titan, the largest of Saturn’s many moons and the second largest in the solar system. The space agency plans to launch a real submarine into Titan seas in the next 20 years. The researchers re-created a Titan ocean in a laboratory. They have published a paper on their work in the journal, Fluid Phase Equilibria....

Pasadena, California – A distant world gleaming in sunlight, Earth’s twin planet, Venus, shines like a bright beacon in images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. One special image of Venus and Saturn was taken last November when Cassini was placed in the shadow of Saturn. This allowed Cassini to look in the direction of the sun and Venus, and take a backlit image of Saturn and its rings in a particular viewing geometry called “high solar phase....

There’s a hill with a V-shaped collapse structure (the nose), two craters (the eyes), and a circular fracture pattern (the head). The circular fracture pattern might be due to the settling of a deposit over a buried impact crater. Maybe the nose is a volcanic or mud vent and the deposit could be lava or mud flows? Maybe just grin and bear it. The image was captured by the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HIRISE), a big and powerful camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO)....

“So far, the engineering telemetry we have received and analyzed tell us that the flight met expectations and our prior computer modeling has been accurate,” said Bob Balaram, chief engineer for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “We have two flights of Mars under our belts, which means that there is still a lot to learn during this month of Ingenuity.” For this second flight test at “Wright Brothers Field,” Ingenuity took off again at 5:33 a....

Michela Negro, a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, could not have been in a better place. She was attending the 10th Fermi Symposium, a gathering of gamma-ray astronomers, in Johannesburg, South Africa. She grabbed two colleagues and started doing the math to see if it might be possible to catch polarized X-rays with the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE)....

The IXPE observatory features three identical telescopes, each with a mirror assembly and a polarization-sensitive detector. To focus X-rays, IXPE’s mirrors need to be about 13 feet (4 meters) away from the detectors. That’s too large to fit inside some rocket fairings. So IXPE’s boom had to fold up, like origami, into a 12-inch (0.3-meter) cannister and stretch out again in orbit. With the boom now deployed, mission specialists are ready to focus on commissioning the telescopes, preparing them for the spacecraft’s first science....

Roughly the size of a small car, the spacecraft lifted off at 3:31 a.m. EDT on a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket from Space Launch Complex-37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. At 5:33 a.m., the mission operations manager reported that the spacecraft was healthy and operating normally. The mission’s findings will help researchers improve their forecasts of space weather events, which have the potential to damage satellites and harm astronauts on orbit, disrupt radio communications and, at their most severe, overwhelm power grids....

During a brief swing by Venus, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe detected a natural radio signal that revealed the spacecraft had flown through the planet’s upper atmosphere. This was the first direct measurement of the Venusian atmosphere in nearly 30 years — and it looks quite different from Venus past. A study published today confirms that Venus’ upper atmosphere undergoes puzzling changes over a solar cycle, the Sun’s 11-year activity cycle....

Inside that part of the solar atmosphere, a region known as the corona, Parker Solar Probe will provide unprecedented observations of what drives the wide range of particles, energy and heat that course through the region — flinging particles outward into the solar system and far past Neptune. Inside the corona, it’s also, of course, unimaginably hot. The spacecraft will travel through material with temperatures greater than a million degrees Fahrenheit while being bombarded with intense sunlight....

Crew-6 joins the Expedition 68 crew of NASA astronauts Frank Rubio, Nicole Mann, and Josh Cassada, as well as Koichi Wakata of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev, Dmitri Petelin, and Anna Kikina. NASA SpaceX Crew-6 astronauts launched aboard the Crew Dragon Endeavour on a SpaceX Falcon 9 at 12:34 a.m. EST on Thursday from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Their SpaceX Dragon, named Endeavour, docked to the ISS at 1:40 a....

The four Crew-6 crewmates – Commander Stephen Bowen, Pilot Warren “Woody” Hoburg, Mission Specialist UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and Mission Specialist Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev – will dock the Dragon spacecraft, named Endeavour, to the forward port on the space station’s Harmony module about 23 hours after liftoff. Crew-6’s science mission includes cutting-edge research aimed at keeping astronauts and spacecraft safe during deep space exploration, and studies that could lead to improved medical treatments for humans back on Earth....

“One of the biggest questions in exoplanet exploration is: If an astronomer finds a planet in a star’s habitable zone, will it be interesting from a biologist’s point of view?” said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in Cambridge, which is leading the mission. “We expect TESS will discover a number of planets whose atmospheric compositions, which hold potential clues to the presence of life, could be precisely measured by future observers....

Thanks to the efforts of several NASA teams, the public can now interactively browse all global imagery from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument quickly and easily from the comfort of a home computer. All global MODIS imagery dating back to the operational start of MODIS in 2000 is available through NASA’s Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) for viewing using NASA’s Worldview application. And there’s a lot to see....

They’re packing extreme cold-weather gear and scientific instruments onto sleds pulled by two tank-like snow machines called PistenBullys, and on December 21 they will begin their two- to three-week traverse in an arc around the South Pole. The 470-mile (760-kilometer) expedition in one of the most barren landscapes on Earth will ultimately provide the best assessment of the accuracy of data collected from space by the Ice Cloud and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2), set to launch in 2018....

The selected concepts include three from JPL. The projects are still in the early stages of development and are not considered official NASA missions. An astronaut steps into a body scanner and, hours later, walks on Mars in a custom-made spacesuit, breathing oxygen that was extracted from Mars’ carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere. On Venus, an inflatable bird-like drone swoops through the sky, studying the planet’s atmosphere and weather patterns. Ideas like these are currently science fiction, but they could one day become reality, thanks to a new round of grants awarded by NASA....

SLS will be the most powerful rocket ever built and, with the agency’s Orion spacecraft, will launch America into a new era of exploration to destinations beyond Earth’s orbit. The CDR provided a final look at the design and development of the integrated launch vehicle before full-scale fabrication begins. “We’ve nailed down the design of SLS, we’ve successfully completed the first round of testing of the rocket’s engines and boosters, and all the major components for the first flight are now in production,” said Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Division....

On August 17, 2011, the sun emitted a solar flare and treated scientists to the most comprehensive view of the complex configuration of moving magnetic fields – a process called magnetic reconnection – which powered it. Credit: NASA Goddard Two NASA spacecraft have provided the most comprehensive movie ever of a mysterious process at the heart of all explosions on the sun: magnetic reconnection. Magnetic reconnection happens when magnetic field lines come together, break apart and then exchange partners, snapping into new positions and releasing a jolt of magnetic energy....

[October 26, 2020] Update: The announcement is that NASA has confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. Learn all the details, why this matters, and watch the accompanying video here. NASA will announce an exciting new discovery about the Moon from the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) at a media teleconference at 12 p.m. EDT Monday, October 26. Audio of the teleconference will stream live on the agency’s website....