Tag archives: Nasa
The public is invited to join Westmont’s astrophysics students to learn more about the moon on NASA’s International Observe the Moon Night on Saturday, Sept. 14, from 7:30-9:30 pm at the Westmont Observatory. “The moon is something we’re so used to seeing, and it’s an important part of our life here on Earth,” says Jen […]
Tim Lister PhD, Senior Scientist at the Las Cumbres Observatory, Goleta, has been awarded a grant from NASA to join the European Space Agency’s Hera Mission, as one of 12 U.S. participating scientists. On September 26, 2022, the world’s first planetary defense test mission was carried out by NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). In […]
At the 14th Asteroids, Comets, Meteors Conferenceon June 18-23 held in Flagstaff, Arizona, astrophysics scientist Tim Lister PhD, who works at the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) in Goleta, was awarded for his life’s work in the field with the naming of an asteroid, also known as a minor planet, after him. The meeting, of which […]
Now that it’s spring and we’re starting to travel again, our local deserts have become popular nearby attractions. Joshua Tree, Death Valley, and the Mojave Desert are at their best this time of year and you might even catch some wildflowers if they got enough rain. At NASA, in addition to enjoying seasonal wildflowers, we […]
Climate change has been in the news a lot, what with extreme weather, wildfires, and the recent international negotiations in Scotland. What I thought I could do here is go into the science behind what’s happening to the climate system and to leave the policy implications to my fellow citizens and their representatives; kind of […]
When you want to know where you are or how to get there from here, you just check your smart phone and there you are — but did you ever think about how that gets done? The Global Positioning System of satellites was put in place by the U.S. Air Force (now Space Force) and […]
Late the other night my friend Joan called from the Cachuma Lake campground and asked excitedly what the string of lights was that had just tracked across their sky. Was it a UFO? Luckily, I had heard about Elon Musk’s latest launch of about 60 small satellites as part of Starlink, a satellite-based internet. I […]
“We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.”— TS Eliot After surveying our solar system, as well as thousands of others beyond our own, we can now look back at our home planet with a new perspective, that […]
Twenty years ago, there would have been nothing to write about under this topic. There were no known planets circling stars beyond our own. But in 2009 a revolution happened with NASA’s launch of the Kepler telescope. Within a few years, Kepler had found so many planets that scientists realized that there were more planets […]
We all learned in school that there are eight planets (well, nine if you’re as old as I am), but our solar system is messier than that. There are millions of leftover rocks called asteroids; bits of ice and rock that come and go called comets; and objects out there beyond Neptune called, in dry […]
30 June 2004, 7:30 pm. The VIP room at JPL is quiet as we all watch a thin line trace horizontally across the big screen at the front of the room. It’s the radio signal from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft as it speeds toward Saturn Orbit Insertion (SOI) after seven years in transit. JPL invites some […]
On July 20, 1976, seven years to the day after humans first walked on the moon, a bunch of us new employees of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory trooped over to Caltech’s Beckman auditorium (the one that looks like a circus tent) to see the first landing of a spacecraft on another planet. Viking 1 was […]
The Montecito foothills are more than a thousand miles from both the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and NASA’s headquarters in Houston – not to mention 234,000 miles from the moon – but the rolling greenery amounts to much more than a footnote for part-time Montecito resident Steven C. Barber spearheading a project to fashion […]
I was already in the Science Team room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory when the second cycle of radar images of the surface of Venus were beamed down in May of 1991. I waited impatiently for the five-inch print roll to start spooling out. The first cycle had gone well and most of Venus’s surface […]
The crew capsule aboard the Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket that NASA successfully blasted into space last weekend achieved an amazing milestone. This incredible event was the remarkable result of the public-private sector partnership between NASA and SpaceX that sent astronauts directly from the U.S. to the International Space Station for the first time in nine […]
My longtime friend and confidante, balloonist, scientist, physicist, thinker, inventor, conversationalist, and bon vivant, Julian Nott, passed away peacefully on March 26 after suffering multiple injuries from an extraordinary and unforeseeable accident following a successful balloon flight and landing in Warner Springs, California. Every second or third Saturday morning, depending upon his schedule, we would […]
