In this new picture from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, a spiral galaxy glittering with star clusters is the center of attention. NGC 3137 is located 53 million light-years away in the constellation Antlia (the Air Pump). As a nearby spiral galaxy, this target offers astronomers an excellent opportunity to study the cycle of stellar birth and death,…
Listen to this audio excerpt from Peter Rossoni, Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System flight manager: Your browser does not support the audio element. As a child, Peter Rossoni watched the Apollo missions launch with his family. In April 2026, he became a part of NASA’s Artemis II mission, helping enable communications as astronauts journeyed…
Beyond the border of Washington, D.C., numerous suburbs spread across Virginia and Maryland. Many are accessible from the Capital Beltway (I-495), the highway that encircles Washington. An astronaut on the International Space Station captured this photo of the beltway’s northeast side where it passes through the historic city of Greenbelt, Maryland. The photo was taken…
A luminous swirl set against the deep black of space, the barred spiral galaxy IC 486 glows with a soft, ethereal light in this new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. IC 486 lies right on the edge of the constellation Gemini (the Twins), around 380 million light-years from Earth. Classified as a barred spiral galaxy,…
At the top of the planet, the cap of sea ice across Arctic waters grows and shrinks with the seasons, usually reaching its annual maximum extent in March. In 2026, this peak occurred on March 15, when the extent reached 14.29 million square kilometers, matching the lowest maximum observed since satellite monitoring began in 1979….
Listen to this audio excerpt from Erik Richards, Near Space Network Mission Manager: Your browser does not support the audio element. For Erik Richards, supporting NASA’s first crewed Artemis mission to the Moon and back is the culmination of a career spent helping spacecraft communicate with Earth. Like many kids who grew up at the height of the Space Shuttle Program, Richards…
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found evidence that the spinning of a small comet slowed and then reversed its direction of rotation, offering a dramatic example of how volatile activity can affect the spin and physical evolution of small bodies in the solar system. This is the first time researchers have observed evidence…
As NASA seeks to understand the mysteries of the universe, the agency is advancing technologies to locate and explore Earth-like planets far beyond our solar system. A key element of this research involves observing reflected light from exoplanets, which can reveal indicators of Earth-like features such as water and oxygen. However, detecting this faint reflected…
