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“We expected to find the Milky Way’s books balanced, with an equilibrium of gas inflow and outflow, but 10 years of Hubble ultraviolet data has shown there is more coming in than going out,” said astronomer Andrew Fox of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, lead author of the study to be published in The Astrophysical Journal. Fox said that, for now, the source of the excess inflowing gas remains a mystery....

Video Transcript: Making progress on our Artemis Moon rocket. Images from a close encounter with a Jovian moon. And a ring of fire for our Moon. A few of the stories to tell you about This Week at NASA! Stacking and assembly activities for the agency’s uncrewed Artemis I mission continue at our Kennedy Space Center. These activities involve lifting the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s 188,000-pound core stage onto the mobile launcher, in between the two solid rocket boosters....

Continuing the planet’s long-term warming trend, globally averaged temperatures in 2017 were 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.90 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. That is second only to global temperatures in 2016. In a separate, independent analysis, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that 2017 was the third-warmest year in their record....

Former astronaut Walter Cunningham, who flew into space on Apollo 7, the first flight with crew in NASA’s Apollo Program, died early Tuesday morning (January 3, 2022) in Houston. He was 90 years old. “Walt Cunningham was a fighter pilot, physicist, and an entrepreneur – but, above all, he was an explorer. On Apollo 7, the first launch of a crewed Apollo mission, Walt and his crewmates made history, paving the way for the Artemis Generation we see today,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson....

After receiving more than 100 applications, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California has selected eight U.S. manufacturers to make a new ventilator tailored for coronavirus (COVID-19) patients. The prototype, which was created by JPL engineers in just 37 days, received an Emergency Use Authorization from the Food and Drug Administration on April 30. Called VITAL (Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally), the high-pressure ventilator was designed to use one-seventh the parts of a traditional ventilator, relying on parts already available in supply chains....

Flight 16 will be a shorter, 109-second flight. Ingenuity will climb up to 33 feet (10 meters), glide over the “Raised Ridges” at 3 mph (1.5 meters per second), then land near the edge of “South Séítah,” covering a distance of 380 feet (116 meters). We plan to capture a series of nine color Return-to-Earth (RTE) camera images evenly spaced throughout the flight, oriented to the southwest and opposite the flight path....

NASA’s next giant leap may be aided by tiny lunar robots. These miniature robots would help scout the lunar surface, collecting key information about the Moon, its resources, and the environment. Such data would be helpful for the agency’s future lunar endeavors and NASA’s Artemis program. In April, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California ran a public prize competition for miniature payload designs for future Moon missions. The “Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload” challenge garnered the interest of hundreds of innovators....

NASA — along with ESA (European Space Agency), the European Commission (EC), the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — made the announcement during a special event at the agency’s headquarters. “This honor demonstrates the global reach of Mike’s legacy,” said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. “We are grateful for ESA and the European partners’ generosity in recognizing Mike’s lifelong dedication to understanding our planet and improving life for everyone on it....

Back on February 18, IBEX experienced a flight computer reset during a planned contact and the spacecraft went into contingency mode. While fight computer resets have happened before, this time the team lost the ability to command the spacecraft during the subsequent reset recovery. The team also was unsuccessful in regaining command capability by resetting ground systems hardware and software. Flight software still was running, and the spacecraft systems appeared to be functional....

What are some skywatching highlights in January 2021? Mark Earth’s closest approach to the Sun for the year, called perihelion, at the start of the month, then spot a couple of elusive planets: Uranus on January 20th and Mercury throughout the second half of the month. Video Transcript: What’s Up for January? Getting close to the Sun, some easy outer-planet spotting, and a chance to catch quick-moving Mercury. The new year begins with planet Earth at the closest point in its orbit around the Sun, called perihelion, on January 2nd....

This month NASA is sending a team of scientists, a host of ground instruments, and two research aircraft to study the inner workings of snowstorms. The Investigation of Microphysics Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms, or IMPACTS, has its first deployment in a multi-year field campaign from January 17, 2020 through March 1, 2020. It will be the first comprehensive study of East Coast snowstorms in 30 years. This winter, NASA is sending a team of scientists, a host of ground instruments, and two research aircraft to study the inner workings of snow storms....

The SPHEREx mission will have some similarities with the James Webb Space Telescope. But the two observatories will take dramatically different approaches to studying the sky. NASA’s upcoming SPHEREx mission will be able to scan the entire sky every six months and create a map of the cosmos unlike any before. Scheduled to launch no later than April 2025, it will probe what happened within the first second after the big bang, how galaxies form and evolve, and the prevalence of molecules critical to the formation of life, like water, locked away as ice in our galaxy....

With the combined power of NASA’s Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, as well as a cosmic magnification effect, astronomers have spotted what could be the most distant galaxy ever seen. Light from the young galaxy captured by the orbiting observatories first shone when our 13.7-billion-year-old universe was just 500 million years old. The far-off galaxy existed within an important era when the universe began to transit from the so-called cosmic dark ages....

To stay in the proper orbit, many satellites have thrusters—small rocket engines—that fire to change altitude or orientation in space. On Earth where gravity dominates, 5 pounds of thrust, equivalent to 22 Newtons of force, may seem small, but in space, it doesn’t take much thrust to move a large spacecraft. Currently, most satellite thrusters are powered by hydrazine, a toxic and corrosive fuel that is dangerous to handle and store....

USC researchers have isolated chills at a cellular level, identifying the sensory network of neurons in the skin that relays the sensation of cold. David McKemy, associate professor of neurobiology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and his team managed to selectively shut off the ability to sense cold in mice while still leaving them able to sense heat and touch. In prior work, McKemy discovered a link between the experience of cold and a protein known as TRPM8 (pronounced trip-em-ate), which is a sensor of cold temperatures in neurons in the skin, as well as a receptor for menthol, the cooling component of mint....

As the world’s most popular shoe, flip-flops account for a troubling percentage of plastic waste that ends up in landfills, on seashores and in our oceans. Scientists at the University of California San Diego have spent years working to resolve this problem, and now they have taken a step further toward accomplishing this mission. Sticking with their chemistry, the team of researchers formulated polyurethane foams, made from algae oil, to meet commercial specifications for midsole shoes and the foot-bed of flip-flops....

In most developing organisms, scientists assumed that most of the energy was expended on the replication of DNA or the division of cells. Yale researchers decided to test this idea and developed a method to probe the energy utilized by living systems. What they found surprised them. Researchers Jonathan Rodenfels, Karla Neugebauer, and Joe Howard measured the heat flows associated with rapidly dividing cells by placing a developing zebrafish embryo into a calorimeter, a heat-sensing device popular for studying chemical reactions....

A new artificial enzyme has demonstrated it can chew through lignin, the tough polymer that helps woody plants maintain their structure. Lignin also stores tremendous potential for renewable energy and materials. Reporting today (May 31, 2022) in the journal Nature Communications, a team of researchers from Washington State University and the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) demonstrated that their artificial enzyme succeeded in digesting lignin, which has stubbornly resisted previous attempts to develop it into an economically useful energy source....

Researchers at King’s College London, Massachusetts General Hospital and health science company ZOE have developed an artificial intelligence diagnostic that can predict whether someone is likely to have COVID-19 based on their symptoms. Their findings were published on May 11, 2020, in Nature Medicine. The AI model uses data from the COVID Symptom Study app to predict COVID-19 infection, by comparing people’s symptoms and the results of traditional COVID tests....

Some of the dark sandstone in an area being explored by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows texture and inclined bedding structures characteristic of deposits that formed as sand dunes, then were cemented into rock. This sandstone outcrop — part of a geological layer that Curiosity’s science team calls the Stimson unit — has a structure called crossbedding on a large scale that the team has interpreted as deposits of sand dunes formed by wind....