lab
A NASA research center managed by Caltech that builds robotic spacecraft and instruments for planetary exploration, Earth science, and deep-space missions.
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NASA's Roman Space Telescope held its pointing steady to better than 1/100,000 of a degree in September tests, for up to eight hours in coronagraph mode. Its coronagraph has also imaged stars, but its starlight suppression is still untested.
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The mission's project scientist describes three hours to triage telemetry and agree on targets, then four more to compile commands that must fit the rover's available time and energy before sunrise on Mars.
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NISAR scientists turned 17 radar frames of Kamchatka's Krasheninnikov volcano into a time-lapse of lava filling and overflowing its crater. Two looks every 12 days are enough to follow a lava field that grows over months, though the satellite began imaging about five months into the eruption.
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Ten current and former staff told Scientific American that NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center no longer has the people or the equipment to build a telescope like Roman. NASA says flagship missions remain a core Goddard capability.
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The rover's first polygon field gives Gale Crater a calibration point for wet-dry cycling. Orbital polygons are at least 190 times wider, and no rover has stood next to one.
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From 31 August, Ralf Busch's group will remotely melt levitated droplets of nickel-niobium alloys aboard the ISS, chasing thermophysical numbers that anchor years of alloy design.
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A fabric Vivaldi antenna sheathed in Vectran has cleared testing at JPL, letting SkyFall drag a 500-2,500 MHz radar about 15 cm above the regolith and still survive dozens of landings.
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