PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Cassini spacecraft, now exploring Saturn, will take a picture of our home planet from a distance of hundreds of millions of miles on July 19. NASA is inviting the public to help acknowledge the historic interplanetary portrait as it is being taken. Earth will appear as a small, pale blue dot between the rings of Saturn in the image, which will be part of a mosaic, or multi-image portrait, of the Saturn system Cassini is composing. "While Earth will b...

WASHINGTON -  NASA announced Tuesday a Grand Challenge focused on finding all asteroid threats to human populations and knowing what to do about them. The challenge, which was announced at an asteroid initiative industry and partner day at NASA Headquarters in Washington, is a large-scale effort that will use multi-disciplinary collaborations and a variety of partnerships with other government agencies, international partners, industry, academia, and citizen scientists. It complements NASA's recent...

Le Bourget -  Today in Le Bourget Arianespace has announced a launch contract with Telespazio to launch the Göktürk-1 satellite for the Turkish government. Stéphane Israël, Chairman and CEO of Arianespace, and Luigi Pasquali, Chief Executive Officer of Telespazio, announced that they have signed today, at the 50th International Paris Air Show, the launch contract for the Göktürk-1 satellite. This is the ninth contract signed since the beginning of the year by Arianespace...

ESA’s mission to Mars in 2016 has entered the final stage of construction with the signature of a contract today with Thales Alenia Space at the Paris Air & Space Show. ExoMars will fly two missions, in 2016 and 2018, in a partnership between ESA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. Its main goal is to answer one of the outstanding scientific questions of our time: has life ever existed on Mars? In addition, ExoMars will develop new European technical capabilities in lan...

PALO ALTO, Calif. -  The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) spacecraft is on track for a launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on June 26. IRIS will fill a crucial gap in the ability of scientists to advance Sun-Earth connection studies by tracing the flow of energy and plasma through a dynamic interface region – the chromosphere and transition region – between the solar surface and the solar corona. “The entire IRIS team is enormously pleased that we’ve reached...