标签：#nas

"It's called the US Space Academy. That's a big deal."

The LINK probe was supposed to use robotic arms to capture Swift and lift it into a safe orbit. Problems with its control system forced NASA to call off the attempt.

"We probably need another site that's capable of heavy and super heavy launch capability."

Without a rescue, NASA's Swift Observatory is expected to reenter the atmosphere later this year.

The summer is officially over. I am staring at a remarkably clean Git branch, my laptop didn't literally take off into orbit (though the CPU fans certainly tried a few times during local CI builds), and I somehow know what git rebase -i does without having to Google it in a cold sweat. If you'd asked me back in May what I was going to be doing, I would have confidently told you I was going to "write tests for Astropy's C extensions." It sounded so neat. So contained. But open source doesn't really work like that. I came in thinking I was just going to write tests, and somewhere along the way, I ended up learning how the actual machinery underneath the Python abstraction works, how maintainers think about architecture, and how to safely catch C-level memory panics without taking down the entire interpreter. So, here is the real story of what I did for the last few months, what broke, how we fixed it, and where the project stands now. So, what was I actually supposed to do? Astropy is a beast of a library. The Python-facing API is incredibly robust and beautifully documented. But underneath all those pretty Python classes is a complex, mixed-language architecture. The library relies heavily on compiled C, and Cython extensions to handle the performance-critical hot-paths. The problem? That compiled layer was a massive testing blind spot. Before this summer, these performance-critical extensions were almost entirely tested indirectly, meaning they were only validated by calling the high-level Python wrappers. That is a risky abstraction. If a regression happens deep inside the C code, the Python layer sitting above it can accidentally mask it. You wouldn't know something was fundamentally broken until a downstream package started acting weird. My project goal was to build a dedicated, de novo test suite that bypassed the public API completely and exercised each compiled extension module directly. This wasn't just for code coverage. It was an absolute prerequisite for t

The photograph, taken in visible light, made it possible to observe for the first time the tiny plasma vortices that had been predicted for more than a century.

Although no one captured a direct image of the impact, scientists have detected signals confirming the rocket hit the lunar surface. Orbiters could provide the first images of the crash site in the coming days.

"We believe that a capture of Swift, an attempted capture of Swift, is very much in the cards."

The latest discovery from NASA's Curiosity Mars rover is a field of honeycomb-shaped polygons covering a Martian valley called Valle Grande. As Gizmodo reports, Curiosity has snapped pictures of the unusual terrain texture before, called polygonal fractures, each about 1.5 to 3 inches wide, but NASA says it's previously only found them in small patches, […]

"We're feeling pretty good about that," Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg said.

We like to think of our home as a nice, smooth sphere. But mapping the Earth’s gravitational field provides a different view of the planet.

"Preliminary investigation shows that two of Link's three reaction wheels currently are not operable."

According to NASA, two of the three reaction wheels that control the spacecraft's alignment have failed, and there are problems with one of the spacecraft's thruster systems.

Flames burned through the Deep Space Communications Complex near Madrid, but NASA has been unable to assess the damage as a wildfire emergency grips the region.

"Any potential damage will be assessed when it is safe to do so."

"I pretty much, at that point in time, gave up on being an astronaut."

Experts explain how they work, what they can do, and what's still unsettled.

"Industry finally knows what NASA is asking of them."

Something on Pluto and one of Saturn’s moons, Titan, absorbs light in a way unexplained by anything in spectroscopic databases.

Explore decades of incredible images and videos of stars, planets, moons, and galaxies—most of which are free to use and share.