Category Astronomy/Space

In the lead-up to a total solar eclipse, most of the attention is on the sun, but Earth’s moon also has a starring role. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space flight Center/SVS

In the lead-up to a total solar eclipse, most of the attention is on the sun, but Earth’s moon also has a starring role. “A total eclipse is a dance with three partners: the moon, the sun and Earth,” said Richard Vondrak, a lunar scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It can only happen when there is an exquisite alignment of the moon and the sun in our sky.”

During this type of eclipse, the moon completely hides the face of the sun for a few minutes, offering a rare opportunity to glimpse the pearly white halo of the solar corona, or faint outer atmosphere...

Plumes water ice and vapor spray from many locations near the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, as documented by the Cassini-Huygens mission. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Engineers explore ways to sample and identify living microbes in the outer solar system. Digital holographic microscopy, which uses lasers to record 3D images, may be our best bet for spotting extraterrestrial microbes. No probe since NASA’s Viking program in the late 1970s has explicitly searched for extraterrestrial life – that is, for actual living organisms. Rather, the focus has been on finding water. Enceladus has a lot of water – an ocean’s worth, hidden beneath an icy shell that coats the entire surface...

DSCOVR’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) will capture images similar to this one from the Lagrange 1 point, about a million miles away from Earth. Credit: NASA/Katy Mersmann

It was midafternoon, but it was dark in an area in Boulder, Colorado on Aug. 3, 1998. A thick cloud appeared overhead and dimmed the land below for more than 30 minutes. Well-calibrated radiometers showed that there were very low levels of light reaching the ground, sufficiently low that researchers decided to simulate this interesting event with computer models. Now in 2017, inspired by the event in Boulder, NASA scientists will explore the moon’s eclipse of the sun to learn more about Earth’s energy system.

On Aug...