Raul Polit Casillas grew up around fabrics. His mother is a fashion designer in Spain, and, at a young age, he was intrigued by how materials are used for design. Now, as a systems engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, he is still very much in the world of textiles. He and his colleagues are designing advanced woven metal fabrics for use in space.

Want to go ice fishing on Jupiter's moon Europa? There's no promising you'll catch anything, but a new set of robotic prototypes could help. Since 2015, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has been developing technologies for use on future missions to ocean worlds. That includes a subsurface probe that could burrow through miles of ice, taking samples along the way; robotic arms that unfold to reach faraway objects; and...

The Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot (PUFFER) in development at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, was inspired by origami. Its lightweight design is capable of flattening itself, tucking in its wheels and crawling into places rovers can't fit. Over the past year and a half, PUFFER has been tested in a range of rugged terrains, from the Mojave Desert in California to the snowy hills of Antarctica.

Finding derelict spacecraft and space debris in Earth's orbit can be a technological challenge. Detecting these objects in orbit around Earth's moon is even more difficult. Optical telescopes are unable to search for small objects hidden in the bright glare of the moon. However, a new technological application of interplanetary radar pioneered by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has successfully located spac...

Astronomers announced that the ultra-cool dwarf star, TRAPPIST-1, hosts a total of seven Earth-size planets that are likely rocky, a discovery made by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in combination with ground-based telescopes. NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope also has been observing this star since December 2016. Today these additional data about TRAPPIST-1 from Kepler are available to the scientific community.

This summer, an ice chest-sized box will fly to the International Space Station, where it will create the coolest spot in the universe. Inside that box, lasers, a vacuum chamber and an electromagnetic "knife" will be used to cancel out the energy of gas particles, slowing them until they're almost motionless. This suite of instruments is called the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), and was developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,...

NASA and a Palo Alto-based satellite manufacturer are working to get a spacecraft to an asteroid before one gets to us. Asteroid exploration has become one of NASA's top goals, and Space Systems Loral will play a key role in an upcoming mission that will allow scientists to get research equipment to a unique asteroid to study its composition. It's the company's first major foray into the world of deep-space exploration.

Our sun sometimes erupts with bursts of light, solar material, or ultra-fast energised particles—collectively, these events contribute to space weather. In a study published in Space Weather, scientists from NASA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, in Boulder, Colorado, have shown that the warning signs of one type of space weather event can be detected tens of minutes earlier than with current forecasting techni...

Once upon a time there lived, Snow White and the seven dwarfs. But now, NASA may have discovered the real-life version - TRAPPIST-1 and the seven planets. It turns out that life may have been discovered 39 light years away, as this week NASA has made the announcement that seven new earth size planets have been discovered. Previously scientists have only found a tiny number of ‘exoplanets’ which are believed to have the qualities ...

NASA are using X-ray emitters for a super-fast communications system. Electronic Specifier writer Rachel Oliver explains.

A team of researchers from around the world is getting ready to create what might be the first image of a black hole. The project is the result of collaboration between teams manning radio receivers around the world and a team at MIT that will assemble the data from the other teams and hopefully create an image. The project has been ongoing for approximately 20 years as project members have sought to piece together what has now become known ...

Thought your Internet speeds were slow? Try being a space scientist for a day. The vast distances involved will throttle data rates to a trickle. You're lucky if a spacecraft can send more than a few Mbps—a pittance even by dial-up standards. But we might be on the cusp of a change. Just as going from dial-up to broadband revolutionised the Internet and made high-resolution photos and streaming video a given, NASA may be ready to ...

A NASA technologist has teamed with the inventor of a nanotechnology that could transform the way space scientists build spectrometers, the all-important device used by virtually all scientific disciplines to measure the properties of light emanating from astronomical objects, including Earth itself.

A simple chemistry method could vastly enhance how scientists search for signs of life on other planets. The test uses a liquid-based technique known as capillary electrophoresis to separate a mixture of organic molecules into its components. It was designed specifically to analyse for amino acids, the structural building blocks of all life on Earth.

As with most scientific advancements, a stroke of brilliant genius usually revolutionises status quo and opens doors for new discoveries. Something similar happened to Keith Gendreau, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland. NASA was thinking of using X-rays on its proposed Black Hole Imager. 

Spacewalking astronauts hooked up batteries Friday on the International Space Station's sprawling power grid. NASA reported that all three lithium-ion batteries were up and running, a successful start to the space agency's long-term effort to upgrade the aging solar power system. Before venturing out, Commander Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson got a hand from a robot that took care of most of the grunt work—Dextre, a hulking mach...

A NASA supercomputer project builds on the agency's satellite measurements of carbon dioxide and combines them with a sophisticated Earth system model to provide one of the most realistic views yet of how this critical greenhouse gas moves through the atmosphere. Scientists have tracked the rising concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide for decades using ground-based sensors in a few places.

At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, technologist Douglas Hofmann and his collaborators are building a better gear. Hofmann is the lead author of two recent papers on gears made from bulk metallic glass (BMG), a specially crafted alloy with properties that make it ideal for robotics. "Although BMGs have been explored for a long time, understanding how to design and implement them into structural hardware has proven el...

A NASA Social was one of several media events at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center focused on GOES-R - the first spacecraft in a series of NASA-built advanced geostationary weather satellites that will provide images of weather patterns and severe storms as regularly as every five minutes or as frequently as every 30 seconds.

Two proven technologies have been combined to create a promising new technology that could meet future navigational challenges in deep space. It also may help demonstrate -- for the first time -- X-ray communications in space, a capability that would allow the transmission of gigabits per second throughout the solar system. The new technology, called NavCube, combines NASA's SpaceCube, a reconfigurable and fast flight computing platform, wit...