NASA

Space Center Houston joins the space exploration community in mourning the loss and celebrating the extraordinary life of former astronaut Captain Jim Lovell, who passed away at age 97.  Lovell’s contributions to the U.S. space program are monumental. Selected by NASA as an astronaut in 1962, he served on four pivotal space missions and played a key role in shaping the future of human spaceflight. He was a backup pilot for Gemini 4, a backup commander for Gemini 9, and a backup commander to Neil Armstrong for the historic Apollo 11 lunar landing.  On December 4, 1965, Lovell and Frank Borman launched aboard Gemini 7, completing a 330-hour mission that included the first successful rendezvous of two manned, maneuverable spacecraft in orbit, a milestone that helped make future Moo...

Explore This Section Perseverance Home Mission Overview Rover Components Mars Rock Samples Where is Perseverance? Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Mission Updates Science Overview Objectives Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Perseverance Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions Mars Home 2 min read Linking Local Lithologies to a Larger Landscape This image from NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover, taken by the Mastcam-Z instrument’s right eye, shows a collection of ridge-forming boulders. The rover acquired this image looking south along the ridge while exploring the “Westport” regio...

TAMPA, Fla. — Skyrora has become the first British company to secure a launch license from the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), though a lack of available launch pads could push its first suborbital flight from SaxaVord Spaceport into 2026. The CAA license, announced Aug. 4, allows for up to 16 launches from SaxaVord using Skylark L, an 11-meter suborbital rocket with a 50-kilogram payload capacity. Skylark L flew for the first time in 2022 from Iceland using the company’s mobile launch facility. It reached 300 meters, well short of the 100-kilometer Kármán line, because of a software issue. The rocket is designed to de-risk technologies that will be used in Skyrora XL, a vehicle twice as tall and capable of placing up to 315 kilograms into low Earth orbit. While t...

Colorado Springs, CO — July 29, 2025 — Frontgrade Technologies, a leading provider of high-reliability electronic solutions for space and national security missions, has launched its operationally resilient SpaceStor™ Mass Memory Unit (MMU), a high capacity, solid state storage solution designed for mission-critical space applications. As the newest addition to Frontgrade’s MAMBA (Modular Applications for Mission processing with a Bifurcated Architecture) offering, the radiation-tolerant SpaceStor delivers up to 3.97 TB of reliable, NAND flash memory in a 3U SpaceVPX form factor, ideal for SWaP-C constrained and data-intensive missions. Delivering transaction throughput of up to 4Gb per second, SpaceStor’s significant capacity enables real-time, in-flight computing and pr...