The following photos were taken by a longtime Rockwell (now Boeing) Downey employee last week. They are tearing down much of Building 1. It wil be replaced by a shopping center. For those of us who worked in this historic facility, this is very sad.
Looking for planets hundreds of light-years away is tricky. The stars are very big and bright, the planets very small and faint. Locating them requires staring at stars for a long time in hopes of everything aligning just right so we can witness a planet's transit--that is, its passage in front of its star, which obscures a tiny fraction of the star's light. Measuring that dip in light is how the Kepler mission determines a planet's size.
This full-resolution image from NASA's Curiosity shows the turret of tools at the end of the rover's extended robotic arm on Aug. 20, 2012. The Navigation Camera captured this view.
The Research and Technology Studies (RATS) test, a 10-day asteroid exploration simulation in Johnson's Space Vehicle Mockup Facility, kicked off this week. As NASA makes plans to send humans to asteroids by 2025, RATS and other mission simulations provide the agency with a way to test new operations, concepts and exploration techniques to influence the future of exploration.
Voyager 2 became the longest-operating spacecraft on Aug. 13, 2012, surpassing Pioneer 6, which launched on Dec. 16, 1965, and sent its last signal back to NASA's Deep Space Network on Dec. 8, 2000. (It operated for 12,758 days.)
A UK Space Agency-funded instrument, designed to investigate the interior structure and processes of Mars, has been selected to travel to the Red Planet on NASA's newly announced InSight mission.
