Fifty years ago, 5 unmanned lunar orbiters circled the moon, taking extremely high resolution photos of the surface. They were trying to find the perfect landing site for the Apollo missions. They would be good enough to blow up to 40 x 54ft images that the astronauts would walk across looking for the great spot. After their use, the images were locked away from the public, as at the time they would have revealed the superior technology of the USA’s spy satellite cameras, which the orbiters cameras were designed from. Instead the images from that time were grainy and low resolution, made to be so by NASA.

World of Indie

Throughout the 20th century, NASA made extensive use of wind tunnels to test and refine designs for airplanes, spacecraft, and many other vehicles and structures.

Nasa's Opportunity rover may be dead on Mars, engineers fear. The little robot has been travelling over the planet for the last 15 years, but has lost contact with its team on Earth. They fear that the rover might never wake back up, and its mission could come to an end. Opportunity ran into problems in recent days when a Martian storm that is covering a quarter of the planet swept over the rover. That blotted out the Sun's light, leaving it unable to charge its batteries.

NASA’s Opportunity rover on Mars has lost touch with its handlers back on Earth, probably due to a low-power condition brought on by a chokingly thick dust storm. The storm is covering an area of 14 million square miles, or a quarter of the Red Planet, NASA said today in a mission update. The solar-powered rover has been in operation for nearly 15 years — but if its batteries dip below 24 volts of electrical charge, it’s programmed to put nearly all its systems into sleep mode and wait until the batteries are sufficiently charged up.

NASA's Juno spacecraft finds lightning on Jupiter is same as in Earth in some ways, opposite in others.

Two new solar systems, filled with their own worlds, have been found relatively close to our own. One of them is just 160 light years from Earth and includes three planets that are remarkably similar in size to our own. One of the three is exactly the same size as our own world, and the others are only ever so slightly bigger.

Sixty years after the founding of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), most Americans believe the United States should be at the forefront of global leadership in space exploration. Majorities say the International Space Station has been a good investment for the country and that, on balance, NASA is still vital to the future of U.S. space exploration even as private space companies emerge as increasingly important players.

For the past two years, the spacecraft has been taking photos of Jupiter. Here are the best shots. By Brian Resnick.

Science operations for NASA's Opportunity rover have been temporarily suspended as it waits out a growing dust storm on Mars. NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter first detected the storm on Friday, June 1. As soon as the orbiter team saw how close the storm was to Opportunity, they notified the rover's team to begin preparing contingency plans.

It may have been one giant leap for man, but those steps may have consequences for mankind. The presence of astronauts on the moon caused an unexpected warming of its subsurface temperatures for a period of time in the 1970s, a new study has found after delving into "lost" tapes from the Apollo missions. In 1971 and 1972, NASA deployed sensors on the moon during the Apollo 15 and 17 missions in an effort to measure the moon's surface and subsurface temperatures — a project dubbed the heat flow experiment.

Three members of the International Space Station Expedition 55 crew, including NASA astronaut Scott Tingle, returned to Earth Sunday after 168 days of living and working in low-Earth orbit. Tingle, astronaut Norishige Kanai of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos landed at 8:39 a.m. EDT (6:39 p.m. in Kazakhstan) southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan.

The Trump Administration’s plan to hand the International Space Station off to the private sector by 2025 probably won’t work, says a government auditor. It’s unlikely that any commercial companies will be able to take on the enormous costs of operating the ISS within the next six years, the auditor said.

If you've ever wondered what it's like to stand on an alien planet, NASA has you covered.

NASA's Curiosity rover has found organic molecules, the building blocks of life, in ancient rocks on Mars, and discovered that methane on the Red Planet follows a seasonal cycle. Read our full story here! NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has apparently found something intriguing on Mars, and the space agency will unveil the discovery today (June 7).

It's no secret that the Trump administration has filled cabinet positions and other senior staff jobs with people who reject or ignore established climate science. On Monday, for example, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington that he’s “not going to get into the climate debate.” He also said he could not endorse climate research by one of his own agencies, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose satellites...

You probably thought it was infinitely cool when Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo first emerged from their cryosleep chambers in Alien, but now that slice of sci-fi could become a reality in our lifetime. By Elizabeth Rayne;

Sperm is objectively pretty strange here on Earth, so imagine how it looks and acts in microgravity. A NASA scientist tells Inverse that’s exactly what astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) will be doing over the next few months.

No, no, no...That is not a massive NASA cloud generating machine in that viral video. Here is the actual science.

See what scientists saw this week at a meeting in Vienna. It’s a 3-D fly-around of Jupiter’s north pole, showing its central cyclone and the 8 smaller cyclones encircling it.

NASA is set to launch its next Mars lander, InSight, early Saturday morning. But something’s different about this launch. It’s taking place on the West Coast, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

NASA has spent about $100 billion on the International Space Station, but the Trump administration wants to end the program in 2024 — about four years early. NASA's lead auditor told Congress the plan may jeopardize NASA research into protecting astronauts on future moon or Mars missions.

Scientists say they have found evidence of dunes of frozen methane on Pluto. The research, which is published in the journal Science, suggests that the distant world is more dynamic than previously thought. Pluto's atmosphere was believed to be too thin to create the features familiar in deserts on Earth.

Breaking Voyager 1’s record

The new SpaceX rocket seriously undercuts its competitors.

Former American astronaut Scott Kelly says he was a poor student until he found inspiration in Tom Wolfe’s famous book “The Right Stuff” that he read at the age of 18 while pursuing bachelor’s degree in science from the State University of New York Maritime College in the Bronx. According to Scott, this book, which was about America’s early space programs, inspired him to work hard in his studies and to also excel in his career as a NASA astronaut.

Seven percent of Scott Kelly's genes did not return to normal when he got home.

You don’t have to know a whole lot about science to know that black holes normally suck things in, not spew things out. But NASA detected something mighty bizarre at the supermassive black hole Markarian 335. Two of NASA’s space telescopes, including the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), amazingly observed a black hole’s corona “launched” away from the supermassive black hole.

NASA is pressing forward on plans to build a Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, an outpost for astronauts positioned in the space near Earth's moon. According to NASA, the Gateway will not only be a place to live, learn and work around the moon but will also support an array of missions to the lunar surface. And scientists foresee a host of uses for the station.

Scores of stories reporting that Kelly’s DNA is substantially different now are missing some basic facts about how biology works.

A new photo shows a swirling maelstrom on Jupiter through rose-colored glasses.

Clean rooms are the final line of defense in extraterrestrial exploration: Spacecraft departing for other worlds are stripped of any biological contaminants there, and samples returning from space, such as the Apollo moon rocks, are stored in pristine conditions to be studied later. But a new study suggests that a clean room storing meteorite samples at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, may not be quite so clean, after all.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope currently is undergoing final integration and test phases that will require more time to ensure a successful mission. After an independent assessment of remaining tasks for the highly complex space observatory, Webb’s previously revised 2019 launch window now is targeted for approximately May 2020.

NASA has just green-lighted a research project to investigate how swarms of robotic bees might spread out over the surface of Mars, equipping our exploration efforts with a much wider net.