Imagine you’re an astronaut exploring the surface of Mars, when suddenly you fall ill or injure yourself. As your team struggles to get you safely back to base, you become seriously dehydrated. With their trusty — and ingenious — kit, the medical officer hooks into the drinking water supply, using … Continue reading
The physiological, emotional and psychological stress associated with spaceflight can result in decreased immunity that reactivates the virus that causes shingles, a disease punctuated by painful skin lesions. NASA has developed a technology that can detect immune changes early enough to begin treatment before painful lesions appear in astronauts and … Continue reading
Each spring as Earth passes through the debris trail from Halley’s Comet (1P/Halley), the cosmic bits burn up in our atmosphere and result in the annual Eta Aquarid meteor shower. This year the peak will occur on the night of May 5 and into the morning of May 6, with … Continue reading
Humanity is on the constant search for improvements in cancer treatments, and the International Space Station has provided a microgravity platform that has enabled advancements in the cancer treatment process. The oncology community has a recent history of using different microencapsulation techniques as an approach to cancer treatment. Microencapsulation is … Continue reading
Last month, when the sun unleashed the most intense radiation storm since 2003, peppering satellites with charged particles and igniting strong auroras around both poles, a group of high school students in Bishop, Calif., knew just what to do. They launched a rubber chicken. The students inflated a helium balloon … Continue reading
Imagine this: you are a young and inquisitive middle-school student, investigating and examining the vastness of Earth’s majestic mountain ranges, coastlines, oceans and other geographic imprints. Now, envision the thrill of doing so from the vantage point of an astronaut! Earth Knowledge Acquired by Middle School Students, or EarthKAM, allows … Continue reading
The words “hazard field” certainly never were associated with the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. To the contrary, the goal was to keep the runway area free of any hazards that might endanger the shuttle and crew during landing. But that is about to change … Continue reading
When people talk about a meteorologist cooking up a weather forecast, they may be more right than they realize, said one of the forecasters NASA counts on to predict conditions ahead of a launch. “I compare forecasting a lot to cooking, to be honest,” said Joel Tumbiolo, a meteorologist with … Continue reading
Why does NASA sometimes schedule a rocket launch for the middle of the night, or aim for a liftoff time when weather is notoriously unlikely to cooperate? The simplicity of the question belies the complexity of the answer. The best time to start a mission is based on a blend … Continue reading
A set of recent papers, many of which draw on data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, reveal new details in the emerging picture of how Saturn’s moon Titan shifts with the seasons and even throughout the day. The papers, published in the journal Planetary and Space Science in a special issue … Continue reading