NASA - TechEBlog

Six Seconds of Controlled Blast, NASA Starts Firing Into Fake Moon Dirt for Artemis IV

By Jackson Chung August 26, 2026

Inside a 60-foot steel sphere at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, a team has begun a new series of tests that look simple on paper and get complicated fast. They fire scaled rocket exhaust into a shallow bin of jagged gray powder that stands in for lunar soil. Each run lasts about six seconds. Cameras and sensors record crater shape, how high and wide the flying sheet of dirt rises, where the particles land, and how fast they travel. That data will help keep future landers, astronauts, and nearby hardware from getting sandblasted when real engines light on the Moon.

LandSpace Brings Zhuque-3 Home on Its Second Flight, Successfully Achieves Soft Landing in the Gobi

By Jackson Chung August 19, 2026

Soft white plume marked the sky over Minqin County just after dawn on August 19 as LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 first stage settled onto its concrete pad. Four landing legs unfolded in the final seconds. Engines cut. The booster stood upright, roughly 390 kilometers from where it had left the ground six minutes earlier. China’s private rocket company had just completed its first successful recovery of an orbital-class booster on land.

NASA’s LRO Spots the Crater a SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Carved into the Moon

By Jackson Chung August 19, 2026

Between August 11 and 12 NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter locked onto a quiet patch of lunar ground and returned the clearest views yet of a brand-new scar. The crater formed six days earlier when a spent Falcon 9 upper stage struck the surface at roughly 5,400 miles per hour.

Laser Fire From Perseverance Lights Up Ruby Mineral in Jezero Crater Rocks

By Jackson Chung August 13, 2026

NASA’s Perseverance aimed its SuperCam laser at ordinary looking pale rocks scattered along the rim of Jezero Crater and the returning light carried a clear signature of something never confirmed on Mars before. Chromium bearing corundum showed up in the data, the same crystalline aluminum oxide that forms rubies and sapphires on Earth.

Thirteen Years of Night Sky Photos Became a 5.6-Trillion-Pixel Atlas of Nearly Four Billion Cosmic Objects

By Jackson Chung August 11, 2026

Astronomers released the largest two-dimensional map of the universe ever assembled this week. The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys catalog spans roughly three-quarters of the sky and holds nearly four billion stars, galaxies, black holes, asteroids and other objects captured across visible and near-infrared light. Its total resolution reaches 5.6 trillion pixels.

Kreios Space’s Satellite Will Scoop Thin Air to Fight the Drag That Kills Low Orbits

By Jackson Chung August 11, 2026

Spanish startup Kreios Space just named Kongsberg NanoAvionics as the builder of the platform that will carry its experimental thruster into space. The goal is straightforward and ambitious: prove that a satellite can collect residual atmospheric gases at extremely low altitudes and turn them into continuous thrust, staying aloft where conventional craft fall quickly.

A White Dwarf Sculpts the Lion’s Face in Webb’s New Infrared View

By Jackson Chung August 10, 2026

Astronomers have long known NGC 2392 by several names, yet the latest images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope make the Lion Nebula nickname feel newly earned. Released today, the views combine near-infrared light from NIRCam and mid-infrared light from MIRI to show a planetary nebula roughly 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. What appears is a glowing, roughly circular structure about 2.6 light-years across, its center dominated by a bright point that looks for all the world like a button nose.

Webb’s Latest Capture Showcases a Glowing Chest of Newborn Stars in the Carina Nebula

By Jackson Chung August 8, 2026

Dense clouds of gas and dust gather into the clear outline of an open chest at the center of this new James Webb Space Telescope view. Light shines from inside the structure while long pillars of thick material trail from its base. Dark orange globules and pale hazes fill the background, and a few bright stars sit in the foreground, one of the largest positioned right in front of the chest’s lid.

NSF’s Inoyue Solar Telescope Captures Tiny Swirls Covering the Sun That May Explain Its Superheated Atmosphere

By Jackson Chung August 7, 2026

Scientists pointed the world’s largest solar telescope at our star and came back with the sharpest photographs ever made of its surface. Those frames, captured at a wavelength of 416 nanometers by the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on Maui, resolve features only tens of kilometers across. What they show is a restless landscape of bright granules ringed by darker, corrugated edges that twist and fold into miniature vortices.

NASA SkyFall’s Featherweight Radar Antenna Survives 200 Mars Landings

By Jackson Chung August 6, 2026

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory just finished a punishing test campaign on a piece of hardware smaller and lighter than most people would expect for a Mars mission. In July, engineers put a flexible, fabric-based radar antenna through the equivalent of more than two full prime missions of hard landings on the Red Planet. The antenna came through with its signal strength intact.