On June 28 NASA successfully tested its low-density supersonic decelerator (LDSD) off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii.

 

 

The rim surrounding Endeavour Crater on Mars recedes southward, then sweeps around to the east in a vista (above) obtained by NASA's Mars exploration rover Opportunity. This view is from high on the south end of the Murray Ridge portion of the crater's western rim.

A new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, finds a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in the area from melting into the sea.

Researchers who study the interaction of plants, carbon and climate are eagerly awaiting data on chlorophyll fluorescence from NASA's OCO-2 satellite mission, scheduled to launch in July.

Planets rich in carbon, including so-called diamond planets, may lack oceans, according to NASA-funded theoretical research.

NASA has released a natural-color image of Saturn from space, the first in which Saturn, its moons and rings, and Earth, Venus and Mars, all are visible. The new panoramic mosaic of the Saturn system taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which shows the view as it would be seen by human eyes, was unveiled at the Newseum in Washington on November 12.

An atlas of the giant asteroid Vesta, created from images taken as NASA's Dawn mission flew around the object, is now accessible for the public to explore online. The set of maps was created from mosaics of 10,000 images taken by Dawn's framing cameras at a low altitude of about 210 kilometers.

Mars has lost much of its original atmosphere, but what's left remains quite active, recent findings from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity indicate. Rover team members reported diverse findings April 8 at the European Geosciences Union 2013 General Assembly, in Vienna, NASA said in a news release the same day.

Seven months after the rover Curiosity landed on Mars, scientists announced March 12 that they've found what they were looking for: an environment that could have supported microbial life.

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) are working together to build a spacecraft that will take a human crew farther into space than ever before. The two agencies finalized an agreement for ESA to provide Orion, NASA's spacecraft for human exploration, with a module performing critical functions such as propulsion, power generation and storage of crew supplies.