The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research. Since February 2006, NASA's mission statement has been to "pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research." On September 14, 2011, NASA announced that it had selected the design of a new Space Launch System that it said would take the agency's astronauts farther into space than ever before and provide the cornerstone for future human space exploration efforts by the U.S. NASA was established by the National Aeronautics and Space Act on July 29, 1958, replacing its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The agency became operational on October 1, 1958. U.S. space exploration efforts have since been led by NASA, including the Apollo moon-landing missions, the Skylab space station, and later the Space Shuttle. Currently, NASA is supporting the International Space Station and is overseeing the development of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and Commercial Crew vehicles.
A scar that the Woolsey Fire left behind
Fire destroys and decimates. It takes out almost everything in its path. In the wake of a fire, a burn scar appears which takes a long time to heal. The mountains of San Bernardino County in Southern California were in a ...
Nov 16, 2018
in
Image: Finding an elusive star behind a supernova
Located 65 million light-years away is a blue supergiant star that once existed inside a cluster of young stars in the spiral galaxy NGC 3938, as shown in this artist's concept. It exploded as a supernova in 2017 and Hubble ...
Toward urban air mobility: Air taxis with side-by-side rotors
In this high-resolution visualization of NASA's side-by-side, intermeshing rotor air taxi concept, researchers are working to understand complex rotor air flow interactions, simulated using high-fidelity computational fluid ...
NASA Learns More About Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua
In November 2017, scientists pointed NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope toward the object known as 'Oumuamua—the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system. The infrared Spitzer was one of many telescopes pointed ...
Image: Hubble spots a lonely blue dwarf
This captivating image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 shows a lonely dwarf galaxy 100 million light-years away from Earth. This image depicts the blue compact dwarf galaxy ESO 338-4, which ...
How Earth volcanoes offer a window into the evolution of life and the solar system
Violent and destructive, active volcanoes ought to be feared and avoided. Yet, these geological cauldrons expose the pulse of many planets and moons, offering clues to how these bodies evolved from chemical soups to the complex ...
NASA's ARIA maps California wildfires from space
California continues to be plagued by wildfires—including the Woolsey Fire near Los Angeles and the Camp Fire in Northern California, now one of the deadliest in the state's history. NASA satellites are observing these ...
Image: Flooding along the Nueces River
On Nov. 1, 2018, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured a false-color view of flooding along the Nueces River in a series of storms that have delivered historic amounts of rain to central Texas.
Aboard the first spacecraft to the trojan asteroids—NASA Ralph's next adventure
Ralph, one of NASA's most well-traveled space explorers, has voyaged far and accomplished much: on the New Horizons mission, Ralph obtained stunning flyby images of Jupiter and its moons; this was followed by a visit to Pluto ...
Image: The frozen wild Dnieper River
Curling snow drifts are magnified by the terrain around the 1,400 mile Dnieper River, flowing from Russia to the Black Sea.
