NASA GSFC Office of Education at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Hubble Spies Faint Irregular Galaxy - NASA This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the faint glow of the dwarf irregular galaxy ESO 490-017.

NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft is picking up speed.

For the first time, the X-59 completed two test flights in a single day as teams accelerate flight operations and gather more data over shorter periods of time. During the flights, the aircraft reached altitudes up to 43,000 feet and speeds approaching the speed of sound.

The increased testing tempo marks an important step forward as NASA works toward the mission’s goal of demonstrating quieter supersonic flight over land.

More than 3,000 “hidden worlds” called brown dwarfs have been discovered, and the people who found them weren’t astronomers, but volunteers.

Brown dwarfs are cosmic in‑betweens: too big to be planets, too small to shine like stars. Their faint glow makes them incredibly hard to spot… until thousands of everyday people joined NASA’s Backyard Worlds project.

By scanning NASA mission data frame‑by‑frame, more than 200,000 volunteers helped uncover over 3,000 of these Jupiter‑sized objects hiding in our own cosmic neighborhood, doubling the number we knew about. Their discoveries are revealing new kinds of objects and helping scientists map our galaxy in ways never before possible.

Every dot a world 🌌

Explore the sky as seen by our exoplanet hunter TESS. Between April 2018, when TESS began its work, and September 2025, the spacecraft identified 679 confirmed (blue) and 5,165 candidate (orange) planets beyond our solar system.

TESS works by scanning a wide swath of the sky, called a sector, for about a month at a time using its four cameras. These long stares allow the spacecraft to track the brightness changes of tens of thousands of stars, looking for variations in their light that might come from orbiting planets.

Researchers assembled an all-sky mosaic made of 96 sectors observed by TESS. The glowing band across the map is the Milky Way, which appears as a smiley shape from the way the map projection is flattened for 2D viewing.

https://go.nasa.gov/4uKQKBs

Today, on his birthday, we remember Challenger Mission Commander Dick Scobee.

Gas stations in space? We’re working on it! ⛽

NASA is teaming up with Rocket Lab and Eta Space for LOXSAT, a low Earth orbit technology demo to address the challenges of using super-cold fuel in space. During a nine-month mission, LOXSAT will demonstrate 11 cryogenic fluid management technologies.

Launching aboard an Electron rocket, this demonstration could help shape the future of in-space propellant depots to refuel missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond: https://go.nasa.gov/4wzzq4h

Join us for an interactive virtual event exploring how technical trades professionals at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center are essential to advancing cutting-edge research & supporting groundbreaking missions.👩‍🏭👷‍♂️👩‍🔧

Registration Deadline: May 26
Event Date: June 2 at 1 pm ET

Find more info & the link to register in comments below. ⬇️

Harmful algal blooms can affect human health and cost communities tens of millions of dollars every year.

A new NASA-developed AI tool could help track these blooms from space, using data from multiple satellites to fill in the gaps. By bringing together diverse datasets, the new AI tool could serve as a force multiplier to help communities determine where to focus their efforts.

Initial results show the AI tool can map harmful algal blooms in western Florida and Southern California, even in complex coastal waters swirling with sediment, plants, and runoff.

Advancing Earth Observation at NASA Since Release of Earthrise Photo - NASA Science From cameras pressed against spacecraft windows to the most powerful radar ever flown, imaging technology has taken giant leaps since 1968, but the drive to understand our home in the cosmos has remained.