NASA

NASA and other federal agencies launched a new website last week that shows past, present, and future sea level rise along America’s coastlines. It combines data from satellites with readings from sensors on the ground to create an interactive map.

At 9:10AM ET, the agency will kick off a livestream of the start of the Crew-9 mission meant to bring stranded NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunni Williams back to Earth next year.

Out of the loop? Check our storystream on the Boeing Starliner issues that left them stuck on ISS. Liftoff is scheduled for 1:17PM ET today.

After separating from the ISS a few hours ago, Starliner is making its uncrewed landing, which is scheduled to touch down in New Mexico just after midnight ET.

If you're up, you can watch it live on NASA's YouTube channel.

The troubled spacecraft successfully undocked from the ISS without issue just after 6PM ET, and now it is scheduled to land at 12:01AM ET on Saturday at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico.

Boeing’s first crewed Starliner launch got Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore to the International Space Station in June, but with issues including helium leaks, will the same vehicle still bring them home?

We expect to find out during NASA’s press conference that was scheduled to start at 1PM ET following an Agency Test Flight Readiness Review.

Will astronauts  Barry ”Butch” Wilmore and Sunita Williams come home from the ISS on the Starliner, or will they wait to hitch a ride home from SpaceX next year without protective space suits?

We may find out on Saturday:

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and leadership will hold an internal Agency Test Flight Readiness Review on Saturday, Aug. 24, for NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test. About an hour later, NASA will host a live news conference at 1 p.m. EDT from Johnson Space Center in Houston.

In the meantime, NASA officials said on a media call that they will weigh the risks of bringing Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams home on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.

The spacesuits they brought wouldn’t work, so they’d have to return without the protection of wearing one. Staying in space longer, however, could expose the astronauts to extra radiation.

It shows carbon dioxide pollution moving through Earth’s atmosphere. We can’t usually see the pollution causing climate change, but NASA was able to illustrate it using a a high-resolution weather model and supercomputers. It incorporates data from billions of ground and satellite observations.

Scientists realized they’d found a field of pure sulfur stones after the Curiosity rover accidentally crushed one of them, exposing the crystals, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote this week.

The rover then collected samples to try to explain them, as elemental sulfur “shouldn’t be there,” according to one of the project’s scientists.

After people in NYC reported a large boom at around 11:17AM that some attributed to military weapons tests, NASA Meteor Watch reports it was actually a meteor. With more reports collected from eyewitnesses, its latest update says the space rock's path took it west over New Jersey at 38,000 miles per hour.

Their simulated mission to Mars tested “how future astronauts may react to isolation and confinement during deep-space journeys,” according to NASA. The crew of four went through 18 health studies during their stint at a 650-square-foot habitat at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Outside of each other’s company, the crew kept four pet triops shrimp: Buzz, Alvin, Simon, and Theodore. 

The contract granted by NASA — worth up to $843 million — will see SpaceX develop a vehicle to safely deorbit the space station “in a controlled manner after the end of its operational life in 2030.”

NASA says the station will remain in use until then, and expects both the station and deorbit vehicle to break apart upon re-entry to avoid risk to populated areas.

The GOES-U satellite launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday.

It’s one of four National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites equipped with powerful new tools to monitor weather in space and on Earth. They’ll provide advanced imagery to inform forecasts, map lightning activity in real time, and detect solar flares.

Closing a loop that began with this 2016 launch, NASA is about to send the fourth and final satellite in the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) – R Series into space as part of a system for much better real-time weather forecasting.

NASA has pushed back the capsule’s return to Earth from the ISS to examine helium leaks and a valve issue. The Starliner ran into multiple delays before finally launching earlier this month.

The agency is targeting a return “no earlier than” June 22nd, and plans to hold a teleconference at 12PM ET on June 18th to talk over details of the delayed departure.

NASA astronaut Matthew Dominick, who’s been on the International Space Station since March, seems to enjoy sharing his camera settings. For the picture of the Boeing Starliner below, he followed up:

For the photography nerds: 1 second exposure, f 1.4, ISO 2000, 24 mm lens.

It includes images of cloud vortices (white), an aurora (pink), a solar flare (light blue), Jupiter’s North Temperate Belt (brown), Jupiter’s moon Io (yellow), Mars (orange), the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (black), a red sprite cluster (red), an algal bloom (green), Neptune (blue), and crab nebula (purple).

Happy Pride!

NASA, Boeing, and the United Launch Alliance had hoped for a shorter delay, but NASA says the ULA is taking more time to troubleshoot an issue with ground launch systems that halted the mission less than four minutes from liftoff.

The next launch window begins on June 5th.

With just 3 minutes and 50 seconds to go, one of three redundant ground computers involved in the launch was slow to respond, triggering a hold and the call to abort liftoff, United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno said during a press conference today.

The next target for launch is 12:03PM ET tomorrow.