
Copernical Team
US Space Command chief in Seoul as two sides deepen space cooperation

Enabling human control of autonomous partners

NASA Marshall team soars to success in microgravity

Oceanographic research satellite launched

NASA tests system for aircraft positioning in supersonic flight

AIAA and Space ISAC team up to defend space from cyber attack

Live now: Lunch with the Moon

Live now: Lunch with the Moon
Live now: Lunch with the Moon
Pacific sees a 'Blood Moon' rising

Stargazers across the Pacific Rim will cast their eyes skyward on Wednesday night to witness a rare "Super Blood Moon", as the heavens align to bring an extra-spectacular lunar eclipse.
The first total lunar eclipse in two years will happen at the same time as the Moon is closest to Earth, in what astronomers say will be a once-in-a-decade show.
If the skies are clear, anyone living in the Pacific between Australia and the central United States will be able to see an enormous, bright, orangey-red Moon.
The main event will be between 1111-1125 GMT—late evening in Sydney and pre-dawn in Los Angeles—when the Moon will be entirely in the Earth's shadow.
The Moon will darken and turn red—a result of sunlight refracting off the Earth's rim onto the lunar surface—basking our satellite in a sunrise- or sunset-tinged glow.
PUNCH mission passes important milestone

On May 20, 2021, the Polarimeter to UNify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission achieved an important milestone, passing NASA's Preliminary Design Review (PDR) of its spacecraft and payload experiments.
Why the sun's atmosphere is hundreds of times hotter than its surface

The visible surface of the sun, or the photosphere, is around 6,000°C. But a few thousand kilometers above it—a small distance when we consider the size of the sun—the solar atmosphere, also called the corona, is hundreds of times hotter, reaching a million degrees celsius or higher.
This spike in temperature, despite the increased distance from the sun's main energy source, has been observed in most stars, and represents a fundamental puzzle that astrophysicists have mulled over for decades.
In 1942, the Swedish scientist Hannes Alfvén proposed an explanation. He theorized that magnetized waves of plasma could carry huge amounts of energy along the sun's magnetic field from its interior to the corona, bypassing the photosphere before exploding with heat in the sun's upper atmosphere.
The theory had been tentatively accepted—but we still needed proof, in the form of empirical observation, that these waves existed. Our recent study has finally achieved this, validating Alfvén's 80 year-old theory and taking us a step closer to harnessing this high-energy phenomenon here on Earth.