NASA - TechEBlog

Gemini North Reveals Pa 30 as the Firework a Medieval Sky Once Held

By Jackson Chung October 7, 2026

Photo credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Rodriguez
Eight separate records from Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic observers place a new star in Cassiopeia between August 4-6, 1181. It stayed visible for 185 days, long enough for court astronomers to log it during the Genpei War in Japan and the reign of Henry II in England. One of only five Milky Way supernovae people recorded before telescopes existed, that guest star faded and left no obvious wreck for modern catalogs to claim.

Curiosity Marks Five Thousand Martian Days With a Postcard From Chocolatal

By Jackson Chung October 6, 2026

NASA’s Curiosity has spent so long inside Gale Crater that a round number now feels less like a party than a quiet check of the odometer. On August 30, 2026, at 9:56 a.m. local Mars time, the rover reached its 5,000th sol, a Martian day that runs about 39 minutes longer than one on Earth. Parked on a sandy ridge the team calls Chocolatal, in the lower foothills of Mount Sharp, it turned its black-and-white navigation cameras on the slope below and took the first half of what NASA later released as a postcard.

Old Hubble Spectra Solve a Cold Case With a Second Generation Planet Candidate

By Jackson Chung October 5, 2026

Astronomers filed a strange spectrum of the white dwarf HS 0209+0832 in 1999 and left it there. Hubble had recorded roughly 100 chemical features that no catalog of the time could name. The star itself is the bare core of a low-mass sun that burned through its fuel, shed its outer layers, and settled into a compact remnant. At about 35,800 degrees, with a cooling age near five million years, it is still young as white dwarfs go, and still hot enough to strip gas from anything orbiting close in.

James Webb Finds Two Rare Gravitational Mirrors in Cluster MACS J0454.1-0300

By Jackson Chung September 30, 2026

Golden elliptical galaxies fill the middle of the newest James Webb Picture of the Month, released this morning. They belong to the cluster MACS J0454.1-0300. Orange galaxies crowd one side of the frame and stretch into a broad arc around the brightest central members, while smaller reddish objects bend into short arcs even near the edges. A handful of bluish-white galaxies and a pair of sharp foreground stars sit in front of all of it.

SpaceX’s Starship Flight 14 Reaches Orbit and Releases Twenty Six New Starlinks

By Jackson Chung September 28, 2026

Monday morning at Starbase on the Texas coast, a 407-foot stack of stainless steel left the pad at 7:48 local time with 33 Raptor engines burning methane underneath. Flight 14 carried a clearer assignment than the thirteen tests before it. Earlier flights stayed on suborbital arcs. This one was meant to stay up, place real satellites in orbit, and come back down on a controlled path.

Scott Manley Flies Kerbal Spaceships to the Mun With a DJ Mixer

By Jackson Chung September 26, 2026

Scott Manley Launching Kerbal Spaceship Rocket DJ Mixer
Scott Manley teaches orbital mechanics through Kerbal Space Program, and he also DJs. For his latest project, he wired those two lives together on a whim, writing a small Python program that reads MIDI events from a portable mixer and turns them into spacecraft commands. The question he set out to answer was simple enough to print in all caps: can you fly a spaceship using a DJ mixer? After one messy airplane test and one surprisingly clean lunar landing, the answer was yes.

Project Suncatcher Flies Google AI Chips Into Orbit to Learn If Compute Can Live on Sunlight

By Jackson Chung September 24, 2026

Google will send its first AI chips into space next week as the opening flight of Project Suncatcher, a long-term research effort to find out whether machine learning hardware can run in low Earth orbit on solar power. A refrigerator-sized prototype named MVP, built with Planet Labs and carrying four Tensor Processing Units, is booked on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 Falcon 9 rideshare from Vandenberg, with a target date of October 1. The satellite is not a working orbital data center. It exists to measure what launch vibration, radiation, and vacuum heat do to Google’s chips once they leave the ground.

Last Cheater Standing Turns CrunchLabs Into Mark Rober’s Casino Where Engineers Build Devices to Beat the House

By Bill Smith September 21, 2026

Former NASA engineer Mark Rober filled his CrunchLabs warehouse with blackjack, poker, craps, and a roulette wheel, then invited a room of makers and YouTube builders to play for $10,000 destined for charity. Cheating was allowed. Getting caught was not. If a device showed up on camera or in a pit boss’s hand, it left the floor and the owner had to play straight. Whoever held the most chips at the end of the night took the cash. He called the event Last Cheater Standing, and he staffed it like a real floor: Science Bob as pit boss, a security lead named Bam, and 62 cameras running computer vision over every table.

Hubble Captures NGC 4698, an Out of Sync Galaxy Spinning Two Ways at Once

By Jackson Chung September 19, 2026

Hubble’s new frame of NGC 4698 arrives from 55 million light years out in Virgo, a spiral tucked into the nearest big cluster of more than a thousand galaxies bound by gravity. Brown dust lanes cut through the outer disk and young blue stars light the same curves, yet those arms refuse to spiral into the middle. They hang in a ring around the perimeter and leave the bright core standing on its own, with reddish pockets of fresh star birth mixed among the dust.

Curiosity’s One-Centimeter Footprints on Mount Sharp

By Jackson Chung September 16, 2026

Fourteen years after touching down in Gale Crater, Curiosity is still finding surface details that stop its science team mid-plan. In mid-August 2026, during sols 4988 through 4994, the rover paused among layered rocks on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp and photographed a scatter of broad, shallow pits cut into bedrock. One of them, captured by the Mars Hand Lens Imager on the end of the robotic arm on sol 4989, measures about a centimeter across and, from certain angles, looks uncomfortably like a small footprint.