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Neela Rajendra said deadlines are an obstacle to ‘inclusion.’. NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory has parted ways with its top diversity officer, Neela Rajendra, after the Washington Free Beacon reported that the lab had changed her title in an effort to keep her. "Neela Rajendra is no longer working at [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory]," lab director Laurie Leshin said in an all-staff email on Thursday. "We are incredibly grateful for the lasting impact she made to our organization. We wish her the very best." ... Leshin added that the newly formed Office of Team Excellence and Employee Success—intended to replace the...

Scientists from Princeton University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have invented a device that seemingly generates electricity from the Earth’s rotation. Although generally accepted theories show that generating electricity from a uniform field like Earth’s magnetic field is impossible, the team believes they have found a “loophole” that allows their device to generate tiny but measurable amounts of electricity. If independent reviews can confirm the team’s work, they say the next steps to building a practical energy-generating device would involve miniaturization and scaling efforts, as proposed in a new paper detailing their current efforts. Device That Generates Electricity from...

An artist’s concept depicts one of NASA’s Voyager probes. The twin spacecraft launched in 1977. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Mission engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California turned off the cosmic ray subsystem experiment aboard Voyager 1 on Feb. 25 and will shut off Voyager 2's low-energy charged particle instrument on March 24. Three science instruments will continue to operate on each spacecraft. The moves are part of an ongoing effort to manage the gradually diminishing power supply of the twin probes. Launched in 1977, Voyagers 1 and 2 rely on a radioisotope power system that generates electricity from the...

CBS' Dave Malkoff explains how firefighters were able to save NASA's JPL from the Eaton Fire. However, many people who work there lost their homes during the disaster.

Ben Rich from 1975 to 1991, was the Director of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, the division responsible for development of several advanced technological aircraft including the U-2, the SR-17 Blackbird, the F-117 Nighthawk stealth bomber, and the F-22 Raptor. In a presentation about the infamous Skunk Works program, Rich made several unusual comments that had many in the audience scratching their heads. During the presentation, Rich hinted on more than one occasion that more, undisclosed, top-secret advanced technologies have been developed since the F-117 was introduced. Of course, Rich could not go into specifics. Jan Harzan, director of Mutual UFO Network...

An artist’s concept shows the Voyager spacecraft traveling through space against a field of stars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA’s Voyager 1 team tackled complex challenges by successfully switching to backup thrusters after the primary ones became clogged with silicon dioxide. The spacecraft uses its thrusters to stay pointed at Earth, but after 47 years in space some of the fuel tubes have become clogged. This adaptation was complicated as the spacecraft, now in interstellar space, continues its journey on dwindling power. Resolving Thruster Issues on Voyager 1 Engineers working on NASA’s Voyager 1 probe have successfully mitigated an issue with the...

NASA’s history-making Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has ended its mission at the Red Planet after surpassing expectations and making dozens more flights than planned. While the helicopter remains upright and in communication with ground controllers, imagery of its Jan. 18 flight sent to Earth this week indicates one or more of its rotor blades sustained damage during landing and it is no longer capable of flight.

STATUS UPDATES | January 22, 2024 Ingenuity Reestablishes Communications Written by NASA/JPL On Saturday, Jan. 20, communications were reestablished between Ingenuity and NASA’s Perseverance rover. The Ingenuity team has determined the helicopter is power-positive and is sitting vertically on the surface. Next steps include running further diagnostic checks, commanding Ingenuity to take photos of its location on the surface, and performing a spin test.

Jack Parsons via Wikimedia Commons John “Jack” Whiteside Parsons’s life seems too improbable to be believed. But it’s all there in the biographies, Sex and Rockets and Strange Angel (the basis of a TV series of the same name), among other places, including a streaming series based on Strange Angel. Born in 1914, Parsons died in 1952 while working on an explosive special effect for a movie in his home laboratory. The explosion has been called an accident, a suicide, or an assassination, depending on the source. An obituary in the Pasadena Independent described Parsons as “a down-to-earth explosives...

It could be the end of the red dusty line for NASA's InSight lander, which has fallen silent after four years on Mars. The lander's power levels have been dwindling for months because of all the dust coating its solar panels. Ground controllers at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory knew the end was near, but NASA reported that InSight unexpectedly didn't respond to communications from Earth on Sunday. "It's assumed InSight may have reached the end of its operations," NASA said late Monday, adding that its last communication was Thursday. "It's unknown what prompted the change in its energy." Just last...

In the early hours of Saturday, Nov. 19, the skies over southern Ontario, Canada, lit up as a tiny asteroid harmlessly streaked across the sky high in Earth's atmosphere, broke up, and likely scattered small meteorites over the southern coastline of Lake Ontario. The fireball wasn't a surprise. Roughly 1 meter (3 feet) wide, the asteroid was detected 3 ½ hours before impact, making this event the sixth time in history a small asteroid has been tracked in space before impacting Earth's atmosphere. NASA is tasked with the detection and tracking of much larger near-Earth objects that could survive passage...

NASA’s InSight Mars lander has detected the largest quake ever observed on another planet: an estimated magnitude 5 temblor that occurred on May 4, 2022, the 1,222nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. This adds to the catalog of more than 1,313 quakes InSight has detected since landing on Mars in November 2018. The largest previously recorded quake was an estimated magnitude 4.2 detected Aug. 25, 2021. InSight was sent to Mars with a highly sensitive seismometer, provided by France’s Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), to study the deep interior of the planet. As seismic waves pass through or...

Nazi Mind Control Amidst the subtle cerebral circumvention of the gullible populace, through a multitude of manipulated mediums, lies one of the most diabolical atrocities perpetrated upon a segment of the human race; a form of systematic mind control which has permeated every aspect of society for almost fifty years.To objectively ascertain the following, one may need to re-examine preconceived ideologies relating to the dualistic nature of mankind. . . . . .This exposition is substantiated by declassified U.S. government documents, individuals formerly connected to the U.S. intelligence communities, historical writings, researchers knowledgeable in mind control, publications from mental health...

Venus is an enigma. It’s the planet next door and yet reveals little about itself. An opaque blanket of clouds smothers a harsh landscape pelted by acid rain and baked at temperatures that can liquify lead. Now, new observations from the safety of Earth are lifting the veil on some of Venus’ most basic properties. By repeatedly bouncing radar off the planet’s surface over the last 15 years, a UCLA-led team has pinned down the precise length of a day on Venus, the tilt of its axis and the size of its core. The findings are published today in the...

Lesbians in SpaceIs NASA Courting the Wrong Stuff?Does it matter that Sally Ride, NASA’s first woman in Space was a lesbian? It wasn’t like the diminutive five-foot-five female astronaut was advocating or promoting same-sex lifestyles, or openly grooming young girls to become future female partners. No one outside a very small circle even knew about her sexual proclivities until after her death from pancreatic cancer.Does it matter that NASA astronaut Lisa Novak was charged with the attempted kidnapping and murder of fellow astronaut William Oefelein’s girlfriend, or that “outed” astronaut Anne McClain was accused of identity theft and “wrongfully attempting...

It's summer in Mars' southern hemisphere, and strange structures are crawling out of the ice. It's summer at the south pole of Mars, and the angels and devils are coming out to play. You can see them both in a stunning new image of the recently thawed pole, taken by the European Space Agency (ESA). The devils, it should be said, are made of dust. Just like on Earth, Martian dust devils form when a pocket of warm air suddenly rises through a column of cool air, creating a spinning updraft. (Unlike on Earth, these dusty cyclones can tower 6...

A team of scientists from NASA used the old Voyager 2 data and found some interesting information about Uranus. Uranus had blasted a gas bubble of enormous size, it was nearly 22,000 times bigger than Earth. A detailed research report was published on NASA website recently. It was also published in the geophysical research Letters on 9th August 2019. Giba DiBraccio and Daniel Gershman, the two scientists who made this discovery on Uranus. found the data from the age-old data archive of NASA....Scientists have not explored Uranus with any probes till now. Therefore, DiBraccio and Gershman used the archived data...

Election Day may have us tied up in anxious knots today. But we can also take solace in the fact that nearly 12 billion miles away, one of humanity's greatest achievements is twinkling back at us, and our understanding of the mysteries of the universe continues to unfold.... ...After a seven-month hiatus without being able to command Voyager 2, NASA is now able to communicate new directions and procedures to the craft, the agency announced. The Voyager 2 space probe, launched in August 1977, has been traveling outward for more than 43 years visiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune....

(NASA/JPL-Caltech) ================================================================================= Life isn't always easy for astrophysicists: just when they've figured out another aspect of the patterns of movement in our Solar System, along come two of the moons of Neptune to mess everything up. The two moons in question are Naiad and Thalassa, both around 100 kilometres or 62 miles wide, which race around their planet in what NASA researchers are calling a "dance of avoidance". Their strange orbit was first detected by NASA researchers in November 2019. Compared with Thalassa, Naiad's orbit is tilted by about five degrees – it spends half of its time above Thalassa...

NASA's Perseverance Mars rover has been attached to the top of the rocket that will send it toward the Red Planet this summer. Encased in the nose cone that will protect it during launch, the rover and the rest of the Mars 2020 spacecraft – the aeroshell, cruise stage, and descent stage – were affixed to a United Launch Alliance Atlas V booster on Tuesday, July 7, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Central Florida. The process began when a 60-ton hoist on the roof of the Vertical Integration Facility at Space Launch Complex 41 lifted the nose cone,...