New findings expand Apollo observations of lunar atmosphere

In December 1972 the astronauts of Apollo 17-the last manned mission to the moon-deployed the Lunar Atmospheric Composition Experiment (LACE), a spectrometer designed to measure and characterize the thin lunar atmosphere. ...

'Giant erector set' supports Webb Telescope test component

(Phys.org)—A new photograph taken inside the giant clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., shows what looks like a giant Erector Set supporting a test component of the James Webb Space Telescope.

NASA image: NIRSpec's clean room move

Engineers hoisted NASA's Webb telescope's Near Infrared Spectrograph or NIRSpec from its shipping container to a dolly in the clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. 

ESA to set tiny hair-like Webb Telescope microshutters

Tiny little shutters as small as the width of a human hair are a key component in the James Webb Space Telescope's ability to see huge distances in the cosmos, and they have now arrived at the European Space Agency. Those ...

NASA's IRIS mission to launch in June

Lying just above the sun's surface is an enigmatic region of the solar atmosphere called the interface region. A relatively thin region, just 3,000 to 6,000 miles thick, it pulses with movement: Zones of different temperature ...

DY Centauri: Stellar evolution while you watch

In 1930, Dorrit Hoffleit reported that star number #4749 in the Harvard List of variables had faded four times between 1897 and 1929, and identified it as an R Coronae Borealis (RCB) variable. RCB stars are luminous low-mass ...

NASA's IRIS mission readies for a new challenge

(Phys.org) —The time draws near. NASA is getting ready to launch a new mission, a mission to observe a largely unexplored region of the solar atmosphere that powers its dynamic million-degree outer atmosphere and drives ...

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