NASA Goddard Shorts HD

College students in Boston are getting the chance to help NASA explore an asteroid. These student scientists have built an instrument called REXIS, which will fly on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft that launches in September 2016. This video puts a spotlight on a group of these students and their experience on the REXIS project.

Video profiles of researchers and scientists in the field during the OLYMPEX field campaign (2015-2016). From November 10 through December 21, NASA and university scientists are taking to the field to study wet winter weather near Seattle, Washington. With weather radars, weather balloons, specialized ground instruments, and NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory, the science team will be verifying rain and snowfall observations made by the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite mission on a NASA-led field campaign, The Olympic Mountain Experiment, or OLYMPEX.

Less than a year after its launch on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), NASA's onboard camera is taking images of the entire sunlit side of Earth every two hours. From its vantage point balanced between the sun and Earth, the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) provides a new view on our home planet - able to see the daily cycle of clouds and ozone, and the swirls of thick aerosols like dust as they move across oceans and continents. Because the DSCOVR satellite is always between the sun and Earth, EPIC also provides a new view for studying vegetation by naturally separating shadowed and sunlit leaves, which undergo photosynthesis differently.

Laser Focus: The Transmitter Opto-Mechanical Engineer Tyler Evans illustrates how the laser is transmitted from the ATLAS instrument on the ICESat-2 spacecraft.

Video profiles of researchers and scientists in the field during the OLYMPEX field campaign (2015-2016). From November 10 through December 21, NASA and university scientists are taking to the field to study wet winter weather near Seattle, Washington. With weather radars, weather balloons, specialized ground instruments, and NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory, the science team will be verifying rain and snowfall observations made by the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite mission on a NASA-led field campaign, The Olympic Mountain Experiment, or OLYMPEX.

Laser Focus: The Receiver Opto-Mechanical Engineer Tyler Evans explains how the photons that bounce back from Earth are received and filtered by the ATLAS telescope.

February 11, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides incredibly detailed images of the whole sun 24 hours a day. Capturing an image more than once per second, SDO has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its launch on Feb. 11, 2010. The imagery is also captivating, allowing one to watch the constant ballet of solar material through the sun's atmosphere, the corona. In honor of SDO's fifth anniversary, NASA has released a video showcasing highlights from the last five years of sun watching. Watch the movie to see giant clouds of solar material hurled out into space, the dance of giant loops hovering in the corona, and huge sunspots growing and shrinking on the sun's surface. The imagery is an example of the kind of data that SDO provides to scientists. By watching the sun in different wavelengths - and therefore different temperatures - scientists can watch how material courses through the corona, which holds clues to what causes eruptions on the sun, what heats the sun's atmosphere up to 1,000 times hotter than its surface, and why the sun's magnetic fields are constantly on the move. Five years into its mission, SDO continues to send back tantalizing imagery to incite scientists' curiosity. For example, in late 2014, SDO captured imagery of the largest sun spots seen since 1995 as well as a torrent of intense solar flares. Solar flares are bursts of light, energy and X-rays. They can occur by themselves or can be accompanied by what's called a coronal mass ejection, or CME, in which a giant cloud of solar material erupts off the sun, achieves escape velocity and heads off into space. In this case, the sun produced only flares and no CMEs, which, while not unheard of, is somewhat unusual for flares of that size. Scientists are looking at that data now to see if they can determine what circumstances might have led to flares eruptions alone. Goddard built, operates and manages the SDO spacecraft for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. SDO is the first mission of NASA's Living with a Star Program. The program's goal is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to address those aspects of the sun-Earth system that directly affect our lives and society.

A number of people who've seen the annual lunar phase and libration videos have asked what the other side of the Moon looks like, the side that can't be seen from the Earth. This video answers that question. Just like the near side, the far side goes through a complete cycle of phases. But the terrain of the far side is quite different. It lacks the large dark spots, called maria, that make up the familiar Man in the Moon on the near side. Instead, craters of all sizes crowd together over the entire far side. The far side is also home to one of the largest and oldest impact features in the solar system, the South Pole-Aitken basin, visible here as a slightly darker bruise covering the bottom third of the disk. The far side was first seen in a handful of grainy images returned by the Soviet Luna 3 probe, which swung around the Moon in October, 1959. Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched fifty years later, and since then it has returned hundreds of terabytes of data, allowing LRO scientists to create extremely detailed and accurate maps of the far side. Those maps were used to create the imagery seen here.

The microwave radiometer on NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite was designed and built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Along with the microwave radar, data from the radiometer will be used to calculate the water content of Earth's soil. All types of soil emit microwave radiation, but the amount of water changes how much of this energy is emitted. The drier the soil, the more microwave energy; the wetter the soil, the less energy. But radio frequency interference is a problem, even though the instrument is passively listening in a region of the microwave spectrum where transmission is prohibited. Some of the signals from the surrounding regions leak into the protected "listen-only" band. Goddard engineers developed new hardware and software to search for and cut out the erroneous measurements.

For nearly a century, scientists have been studying the form and flow of the Greenland Ice Sheet. They have measured the change in the elevation of the surface over time using satellites. They have drilled ice cores in the field to reveal a record of what the past climate was like. They have flown aircraft over the surface of the ice sheet laden with instruments to gleen information about the interior of the ice sheet and the bedrock below. Now a new analysis of this data has revealed a three dimensional map of the age of the ice sheet. This animation shows this new 3D age map of the Greenland Ice Sheet, explains how it was created and describes the three distinct periods of climate that are evident within the ice sheet.

Explore Eta Carinae from the inside out with the help of supercomputer simulations and data from NASA satellites and ground-based observatories.

Volunteers using DiskDetective, a NASA-sponsored citizen science website to find potential planetary nurseries, have made 1 million classifications in less than a year. Goddard astrophysicist Marc Kuchner, the project's principal investigator, explains how it works.

Using data from NASA/USGS satellite Landsat 8, scientists have measured how vegetation in the Colorado River Delta has responded to the pulse of water released in March 2014 as part of the Minute 319 bi-national agreement.

Say you need a new weather satellite. Is it as simple as selecting options and clicking to order? Not quite. Building a vital national asset like the GOES-R spacecraft takes teams of meteorologists and engineers working together to figure out new ways for getting the best weather forecast possible. After all, reliable weather forecasts affect all aspects of life, from recreation to commerce to defense. In order to generate those forecasts experts need superb data, and in order to get it they took the best technologies available and improved on them.

It's official -- our holiday lights are so bright we can see them from space. Thanks to the VIIRS instrument on the Suomi NPP satellite, a joint mission between NASA and NOAA, scientists are presenting a new way of studying satellite data that can illustrate patterns in holiday lights, both during Christmas and the Holy Month of Ramadan. These new tools can provide new insights into how energy consumption behaviors vary across different cultural settings.

The sun emitted a significant solar flare, peaking at 7:24 p.m. EST on Dec. 19, 2014. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which watches the sun constantly, captured an image of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. To see how this event may affect Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings. This flare is classified as an X1.8-class flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc.

NASA scientist Danny Glavin discusses the most recent findings by the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument suite (SAM). This includes variations in methane levels in the atmosphere and the first definitive detection of organic molecules on the Red Planet.

New research merging Fermi data with information from ground-based radar and lightning networks shows that terrestrial gamma-ray flashes arise from an unexpected diversity of storms and may be more common than currently thought.

The phase and libration of the Moon for 2015, at hourly intervals. Includes supplemental graphics that display the Moon's orbit, subsolar and sub-Earth points, and the Moon's distance from Earth at true scale. Craters near the terminator are labeled.

The Women@NASA project is the perfect opportunity to celebrate women from across the agency who contribute to NASA's mission in many ways.Giving you a glimpse of the talent is here at NASA today. These stories of dedicated women, who play a vital role at the agency, will inspire you. You'll hear stories of women overcoming almost every obstacle imaginable to pursue their dreams and make a difference in the world. Cynthia Simmons - Instrument Project Manager in the Flight Projects Directorate at Goddard Space Flight Center