NASA’s Artemis program is preparing to return astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the Apollo missions more than fifty years ago. The new lunar missions aim to explore previously unvisited regions of the Moon, particularly the south pole, where water ice may exist, while testing technologies needed for long-duration human exploration. By learning how to live and work on the Moon, NASA hopes to build the foundation for future missions deeper into space, including the first human journeys to Mars.
We are proud to add a 0.05 gram specimen of the Orgueil meteorite to our permanent scientific collection. First recovered in southern France in 1864, this rare CI1 carbonaceous chondrite formed about 4.56 billion years ago and preserves some of the most primitive material from the early Solar System. Its composition closely matches the Sun's elemental makeup (excluding hydrogen and helium), making it an important reference in planetary science and a remarkable fragment of ancient cosmic history.
Meteorites are among the rarest natural objects people can encounter on Earth. In a nutshell, a meteorite is a piece of material from space that survives its journey through Earth’s atmosphere and reaches the ground. Meteorites offer a rare opportunity to study material that formed at the very beginning of the solar system, long before Earth looked anything like it does today. Scientists study meteorites because they preserve information that is no longer available in Earth’s rocks. For everyone else, they are tangible fragments of the wider cosmos.
In the upcoming next stage of the Artemis Program, SpaceX is gearing up for a launch slated for 12:57 a.m. EST on Wednesday, February 14th, to send Intuitive Machines’ first lunar lander to the Moon's surface using a Falcon 9 rocket. The action will kick off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The Mariner program was carried out between 1962 and late 1973 by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in which ten interplanetary probes were designed and built to explore the inner Solar System.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the largest optical telescope in space, primarily designed to conduct infrared astronomy. Its high infrared sensitivity and resolution allow it to view objects otherwise unable to be observed.
NASA's Space Shuttle program was its fourth human spaceflight program, which accomplished routine transportation for Earth-to-orbit crew and cargo from 1981 to 2011. It flew 135 missions that carried 355 astronauts from 16 countries.
Ax-1 launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on April 8, 2022, beginning a 10-day journey that includes eight days aboard the ISS, as the first-ever fully private crewed mission to launch to International Space Station.
Perseverance is a car-sized rover on Mars that is designed to explore the Jezero crater as part of NASA's Mars 2020 mission, and carried Ingenuity, the mini-helicopter, to Mars as an experimental aircraft.
