Lunar Trailblazer, NASA’s mission led by Caltech in Pasadena, California to understand lunar water and the moon’s water cycle, is one step closer to launching next year. Earlier this month, the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California delivered a key science instrument to Lockheed Martin Space in Colorado, and the teams integrated it with the small satellite, or SmallSat.

The instrument, called the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3), is one of two on Lunar Trailblazer...

We see the world around us because light is being absorbed by specialized cells in our retina. But can vision happen without any absorption at all—without even a single particle of light? Surprisingly, the answer is yes.

Imagine that you have a camera cartridge that might contain a roll of photographic film. The roll is so sensitive that coming into contact with even a single photon would destroy it. With our everyday classical means there is no way there’s no way to know whether there’s film in the cartridge, but in the quantum world it can be done. Anton Zeilinger, one of the winners of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, was the first to experimentally implement the idea of an interaction-free experiment using optics.

Now, in a study exploring the connection between the quantu...

With a trio of smaller satellites that can each detect 26 wavelengths of light and thermal energy, the Landsat Next mission is expected to look very different from its predecessors that have been observing Earth for 50 years. This new plan for Landsat Next, a joint mission of NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is designed to provide more frequent, and finer resolution, data of the changing surface of Earth.

“I think this is going to be a phenomenally capable instrument, with the biggest leap in Landsat capability since Landsat 4,” said Bruce Cook, NASA Landsat Next Project Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This is basically the first chance we’ve had to completely re-conceive the Landsat mission.”

The Landsat series of satellites h...

Wi-Fi routers continuously broadcast radio frequencies that your phones, tablets and computers pick up and use to get you online. As the invisible frequencies travel, they bounce off or pass through everything around them—the walls, the furniture and even you. Your movements, even breathing, slightly alter the signal’s path from the router to your device.

Those interactions don’t interrupt your internet connection, but they could signal when someone is in trouble...