Odyssey is NASA’s longest-lived Mars mission. Its heat-vision camera, the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS), can detect changes in surface temperature as Phobos circles Mars every seven hours. Different textures and minerals determine how much heat THEMIS detects. “This new image is a kind of temperature bullseye — warmest in the middle and gradually cooler moving out,” said Jeffrey Plaut, Odyssey project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which leads the mission....

For decades, scholars have believed that the quantum statistical properties of bosons are preserved in plasmonic systems, and therefore will not create different form of light. This rapidly growing field of research focuses on quantum properties of light and its interaction with matter at the nanoscale level. Stimulated by experimental work in the possibility of preserving nonclassical correlations in light-matter interactions mediated by scattering of photons and plasmons, it has been assumed that similar dynamics underlie the conservation of the quantum fluctuations that define the nature of light sources....

Mercury, our smallest planetary neighbor, has very little to call an atmosphere, but it does have a strange weather pattern: morning micro-meteor showers. Recent modeling along with previously published results from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft — short for Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging, a mission that observed Mercury from 2011 to 2015 — has shed new light on how certain types of comets influence the lopsided bombardment of Mercury’s surface by tiny dust particles called micrometeoroids....

But what if the final assembly was the only assembly, with the whole plane built out of a large array of tiny identical pieces, all put together by an army of tiny robots? That’s the vision that graduate student Benjamin Jenett, working with Professor Neil Gershenfeld in MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), has been pursuing as his doctoral thesis work. It’s now reached the point that prototype versions of such robots can assemble small structures and even work together as a team to build up larger assemblies....

Although we may think of each of these routines as a single task, they are usually made up of many smaller actions, such as picking up our toothbrush, squeezing toothpaste onto it, and then lifting the brush to our mouth. This process of grouping behaviors together into a single routine is known as “chunking,” but little is known about how the brain groups these behaviors together. MIT neuroscientists have now found that certain neurons in the brain are responsible for marking the beginning and end of these chunked units of behavior....

To demonstrate the effect of radiant cooling, Forrest Meggers, assistant professor of architecture and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and a team of researchers built a “Cold Tube,” in Singapore last year. It was an outdoor pavilion lined with novel insulated radiant panels that held cold water pipes inside. Because your body is constantly exchanging radiation with objects around you, and radiation flows from hot to cool surfaces, the participants who walked through the exhibit shed their radiation toward the panels, similar to what would happen if you stood near a freezer....

“So far, the general trend has been to use traditional silicon cells, which we show are far from ideal once you go to a significant depth since silicon absorbs a large amount of red and infrared light, which is also absorbed by water — especially at large depths,” says Jason A. Röhr, a postdoctoral research associate in Prof. André D. Taylor’s Transformative Materials and Devices Laboratory at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University and an author on the study....

Researchers published their analysis on November 6, 2019 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a journal of the American Astronomical Society. “If we point a telescope to the sky and take a deep image, we can see so many galaxies out there,” said Masayuki Tanaka, paper author and associate professor of astronomical science in the Graduate University for Advanced Studies and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. “But our understanding of how these galaxies form and grow is still quite limited — especially when it comes to massive galaxies....

A survey in Germany found over 8% of patients with Parkinson’s disease are using cannabis products and more than half experienced beneficial clinical effects, reports the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease. With medicinal cannabis now legalized in many parts of the world, there is growing interest in its use to alleviate symptoms of many illnesses including Parkinson’s disease (PD). According to results of a survey of PD patients in Germany in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, over 8% of patients with PD reported using cannabis products and more than half of those users (54%) reported a beneficial clinical effect....

Working at the level of atoms, scientists in New Zealand and Australia created something unexpected: tiny metallic snowflakes. Why’s that significant? Because coaxing individual atoms to cooperate is leading to a revolution in engineering and technology via nanomaterials. (And creating snowflakes is cool.) Nanoscale structures (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter or about 50,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair) can aid electronic manufacturing, make materials stronger yet lighter, or aid environmental clean-ups by binding to toxins....

Each year across the globe, people celebrate Pi Day. On March 14 (3/14 in the month/day date format, since 3, 1, and 4, or 3.14, are the first three significant digits of π, we sing the praises of this mathematical constant. Here at NASA, whether it’s sending spacecraft to other planets, driving rovers on Mars, finding out what planets are made of, or how deep alien oceans are, pi takes us far....

Snowflake research is one of many ways that NASA studies the frozen regions of Earth, collectively known as the cryosphere. This visualization is based on the first three-dimensional numerical model of melting snowflakes in the atmosphere, developed by scientist Jussi Leinonen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. A better understanding of how snow melts can help scientists recognize the signature in radar signals of heavier, wetter snow — the kind that breaks power lines and tree limbs — and could be a step toward improving predictions of this hazard....

On August 7, 1972, in the heart of the Apollo era, an enormous solar flare exploded from the sun’s atmosphere. Along with a gigantic burst of light in nearly all wavelengths, this event accelerated a wave of energetic particles. Mostly protons, with a few electrons and heavier elements mixed in, this wash of quick-moving particles would have been dangerous to anyone outside Earth’s protective magnetic bubble. Luckily, the Apollo 16 crew had returned to Earth just five months earlier, narrowly escaping this powerful event....

NASA is seeking new work to mature designs and conduct technology and engineering risk-reduction tasks for the human landing system (HLS), which will ferry Artemis astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back. Prior to opening the call for commercial space lunar transportation on a recurring basis, NASA is asking U.S. companies to hone HLS concepts and safety measures. Companies awarded work under this research and development procurement, known as NextSTEP-2 Appendix N, will help NASA polish requirements for the future recurring services solicitation, which will secure regular crewed trips from Gateway in lunar orbit to the lunar surface and back....

On August 17, 2017, Fermi detected the first light ever seen from a source of gravitational waves — ripples in space-time produced, in this event, by the merger of two superdense neutron stars. Just five weeks later, a single high-energy particle discovered by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) IceCube Neutrino Observatory was traced to a distant galaxy powered by a supermassive black hole thanks to a gamma-ray flare observed by Fermi....

During a portion of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter’s 33rd flight, a small piece of foreign object debris (FOD) was seen in footage (see video below) from the Mars helicopter’s navigation camera (Navcam). Flight 33 Preview – By the Numbers

Checkouts for the Lucy instruments were successfully completed on November 8, and all instruments are working normally. Following checkout completion, the instruments were powered off, and the remaining spacecraft subsystem commissioning activities are continuing as scheduled. Lucy’s Solar Array Anomaly Response Team has made progress searching for the cause of the solar array’s incomplete deployment. The team has used an engineering model of the solar array motor and lanyard to replicate what was observed during the initial solar array deployment....

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter passed a mission milestone of 40,000 orbits on February 7, 2015, in its ninth year of returning information about the atmosphere, surface and subsurface of Mars, from equatorial to polar latitudes. The mission’s potent science instruments and extended lifespan have revealed that Mars is a world more dynamic and diverse than was previously realized. Now in its fourth mission extension after a two-year prime mission, the orbiter is investigating seasonal and longer-term changes, including some warm-season flows that are the strongest evidence so far for liquid water on Mars today....

The technology, called the Next-Generation Microshutter Array (NGMSA), will fly for the first time on the Far-ultraviolet Off Rowland-circle Telescope for Imaging and Spectroscopy, or FORTIS, mission on October 27, 2019. The array includes 8,125 tiny shutters, each about the width of a human hair, that open and close as needed to focus on specific celestial objects. Led by Johns Hopkins University Professor Stephan McCandliss, FORTIS will launch aboard a Black Brant IX sounding rocket from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico to study the star-forming galaxy, Messier 33, or M33....

NASA’s Perseverance rover will celebrated its second anniversary on the surface of Mars on Saturday, February 18. Since arriving at Jezero Crater in 2021, the six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover has been examining geologic features and collecting samples of the Red Planet that are central to the first step of the NASA-ESA (European Space Agency) Mars Sample Return campaign. Scientists want to study Martian samples with powerful lab equipment on Earth to search for signs of ancient microbial life and to better understand the processes that have shaped the surface of Mars....