NASA Goddard
Your friendly neighborhood space flight center. 👩🔬🚀
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study Earth, the Sun, our solar system and the universe.
Named for American rocketry pioneer Dr. Robert H. Goddard, the center was established in 1959 as NASA's first space flight complex. Goddard and its several facilities are critical in carrying out NASA's missions of space exploration and scientific discovery.
Watch for the latest in NASA's research into planetary science, astrophysics, Earth observing, and solar science.
NASA Goddard
We're one month away from launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope!
Hear from our experts LIVE about the engineering and scientific marvel.
1 week ago | [YT] | 38
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NASA Goddard
Meet the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope!
In this video with included audio descriptions, learn about NASA's newest space telescope, gearing up to launch next month.
We have more videos with audio descriptions, all collected in a playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?list...
2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1
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NASA Goddard
Earth in living color! 🌏
Celebrate Earth Day by exploring our home planet through the eyes of our PACE satellite, which monitors clouds, the atmosphere, and life in the ocean.
3 months ago | [YT] | 45
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NASA Goddard
Watch this space 🌌
Today our Artemis II astronauts fly around the Moon! Tune in NOW as they view parts of the Moon never seen by human eyes.
4 months ago | [YT] | 147
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NASA Goddard
Meet the man who knows the far side of the Moon like the back of his hand.
Ernie Wright uses spacecraft data to map the Moon, which comes in handy when training NASA Artemis astronauts to see parts of the lunar surface humans have never directly laid eyes on before. Hear how his expertise helped prepare the Artemis II crew for the lunar flyby and beyond.
4 months ago | [YT] | 97
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NASA Goddard
This week, NOAA's SWFO-L1 is launching with NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) and Carruthers Geocorona Observatory. These probes and telescopes will help researchers monitor and study the Sun, the near-Earth environment, and the heliosphere.
SWFO-L1 will keep a watchful eye on the Sun and near-Earth environment for space weather activity, using a suite of instruments to make real time measurements of the solar wind.
10 months ago | [YT] | 61
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NASA Goddard
A baby picture for the ages 🛰️
NASA’s retired COBE satellite gave us the first baby picture of the universe by capturing light released just 380,000 years after the big bang. COBE’s Differential Microwave Radiometer offers a unique and colorful look at the sky, including the oldest light in the universe.
COBE has discovered clues as to how the universe’s first structures were formed, reflected in tiny differences in temperature across the cosmos seen here.
11 months ago | [YT] | 55
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NASA Goddard
Celebrate the anniversary of @NASAWebbTelescope's first science images by watching the behind-the-scenes story of how this telescope grew from an idea to a scientific marvel.
1 year ago | [YT] | 83
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NASA Goddard
Rain, rain, go away 🌧️
NASA's Webb telescope peered through the thick atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan to see the cycle of weather occurring there. On Titan, methane goes through similar condensation, precipitation, and evaporation as water on Earth.
1 year ago | [YT] | 79
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NASA Goddard
In 2023, we brought a sample of an asteroid called Bennu to Earth, part of a plan to study remnants of our early solar system. These grains of rock have shown that the building blocks of life and the conditions for making them existed on Bennu's parent body 4.5 billion years ago.
The Bennu samples contain amino acids -- the building blocks of proteins -- including 14 of the 20 that life uses to create proteins here on Earth. In addition, the samples contain all five of the nucleobases that encode genetic information in DNA and RNA.
The samples also contain minerals called evaporites, or salts, which exist on Earth, too. Evaporites are evidence that the larger body Bennu was once part of had a wet, salty environment. On Earth, scientists believe conditions like this played a role in life developing.
Although there is no evidence that life ever existed on Bennu or its parent body, the asteroid samples suggest that ingredients for life were widespread across the early solar system, and some may have made their way to Earth when asteroids bombarded our planet during its youth.
The samples contain other surprises as well. Some of those amino acids exist almost exclusively in one of two possible orientations on Earth. We expected to see some of this imbalance on Bennu, too. But the samples revealed an even mix of both molecule orientations, suggesting that something else in early life may have caused the imbalance.
Much of this science wouldn't have been possible to conduct in space, and traveling through Earth's atmosphere and landing on the ground changes fragments of asteroids, making meteorites an imperfect record of the solar system’s history. This means that sample return missions like OSIRIS-REx are a unique way to peek into our early solar system from the era of the origins of life.
1 year ago | [YT] | 195
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