Nasa | featured news

The most high-tech rover NASA has ever designed landed safely on Mars early Monday, after a 352-million-mile journey and a harrowing plunge through the planet's atmosphere dubbed “7 Minutes of Terror.” Beforehand, with Curiosity on autopilot, engineers became spectators, anxiously waiting to see if Curiosity executed the routine as planned. "I'm not the nervous type, but I haven't been sleeping all that well the last week or so even though I'm still very confident," said engineer Steven Lee.

After an 8 1/2-month voyage through space, NASA's souped-up Mars spacecraft zoomed toward the red planet for what the agency hopes will be an epic touchdown. The fiery punch through the tenuous Martian atmosphere at 13,000 mph Sunday night marks the beginning of "seven minutes of terror" as the Curiosity rover aims for a bull's-eye landing inside a massive crater near the equator.

Greenland’s surface ice cover experienced a broader thaw during a three-day period this month than in nearly four decades of satellite record-keeping, according to three independent satellite measurements analyzed by NASA and university scientists.

Through a labyrinth of hallways deep inside a 1960s-era building that has housed research that dates back to the early years of U.S. space travel, a group of scientists in white coats is stirring, mixing, measuring, brushing and, most important, tasting the end result of their cooking.

On Aug. 5, as nervous JPL engineers watch, the fate of the rover — capable of pulverizing rocks and ingesting soil — will rest on a landing sequence so far-fetched that some scientists were skeptical it could work.

A new university-led study with NASA participation finds ancient Antarctica was much warmer and wetter than previously suspected. The climate was suitable to support substantial vegetation -- including stunted trees -- along the edges of the frozen continent.

NASA is poised to launch its latest X-ray space telescope on a two-year hunt for hard-to-see objects lurking in the heart of the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Less than a year after NASA ended its shuttle program, players in America's space business are casting around for new direction.

Space shuttle Discovery, NASA's fleet leader and the world's most flown spacecraft, lifted off for the last time on Tuesday (April 17) to be delivered to the Smithsonian for its permanent display.