A detailed analysis of Heatflow and Physical Properties Package Radiometer on the Mars InSight lander, including changing instrument sensitivity and calibration coefficients.
spacecraft
Posted inNews
A Month of Milestones for Mars Missions
Mars launch season has arrived, and it brings the first space exploration mission from the Arab world, China’s first Mars landing, and the first powered flight on another planet.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
“Electron Wings” Can Interfere with Spacecraft Measurements
Spacecraft sometimes produce a form of electrical self-interference as they zip through plasmas in space—a previously unreported effect that may be lurking in old data sets.
Posted inNews
The Ice Giant Spacecraft of Our Dreams
Scientists imagined some innovative technologies that could enhance a future mission to Uranus or Neptune.
Posted inNews
Location, Location, Location: The How-to’s of Asteroid Sampling
Finding the right spot to grab a sample of Bennu was more of a challenge than the OSIRIS-REx team had originally planned.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Explaining the Missing Energy in Mars’s Electrons
Electrons energized and trapped at Mars were thought to lose energy inside the planet’s magnetosheath, but new research suggests a different explanation of spacecraft data.
Posted inNews
What Inflates the Solar Bubble? Voyagers Count What’s Missing
The first in situ measurement of the pressure at the edge of the solar system reveals that there’s still a lot we don’t know about what sets the size of the heliosphere.
Posted inFeatures
The Coming Surge of Rocket Emissions
With the space industry’s rapid growth, rocket exhaust will increasingly accumulate in the atmosphere. How this accumulation might affect the planet is unknown—because we’re not taking it seriously.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Sampling the Space Between the Stars
Data from the Cassini and Voyager spacecraft reveal new information about the Sun’s magnetic bubble.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Curiosity Monitors Rare Global Dust Storm From Mars’s Surface
Since the 1970s, no surface platform had made meteorological measurements of a global dust storm on Mars, but last summer NASA’s Curiosity rover witnessed one of these rare events.