The National Space Grant Foundation (NSGF) (www.SpaceGrant.org) is pleased to announce the Grand Opening of  our Space Grant Store at www.SpaceGrantStore.com, which has been carefully created to share and sell fun and educational STEM and Space Related merchandise.  Visitors supporting  www.SpaceGrantStore.com help fund our programming needs to reach more students to become involved in STEM and space related education and careers.  NSGF intends for the SpaceGrantStore.com to be the Ultimate STEM and Space related merchandise Super Store for STEM and space enthusiasts around the world in the months and years ahead.

More products are arriving weekly at www.SpaceGrantStore.com so check back often, especially during holiday gift giving time and birthdays! Your generous donation at www.SpaceGrantStore.com helps NSGF fund our ability and programming to reach more students, with our goal to impact a million more STEM and Space Explorers by 2025, so please consider a donation to support our cause today!

Standing only a foot tall, the cubed shaped, shiny satellite could be the future to understanding temperature and climate on earth.

All of it is made possible by a group of inspiring Arizona State University students.

“To finally see everyone’s work over three years just represented as one system,” said student researcher Sarah Rodgers. “It’s more than I can describe.”

The device is called the “Phoenix,” a perfect name given the machine’s purpose.

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Engineers took NASA’s Mars 2020 for a spin on Aug. 29, 2019. The 2,300-pound (1,040-kilogram) Martian vehicle was rotated clockwise and counterclockwise at about 1 revolution per minute on what is called a spin table in the clean room of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. (The rotation was speeded up in the video above.) The engineers were looking for the rover’s center of gravity, or the point at which weight is evenly dispersed on all sides.

Establishing the rover’s center of gravity is a key part of the assembly process and helps ensure that the spacecraft travels smoothly from launch to entry, descent and landing on Mars as calculated. Engineers can add weights in order to help balance out the vehicle. In the end, they affixed nine tungsten weights totaling 44 pounds (20 kilograms) to the rover chassis at predetermined attachment points to get the center of gravity just right.

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Amateur astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere may be able to currently see Saturn, but NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken a series of images of the ringed planet that give new details about its rings, as well as its ever-changing weather.

In a blog post, NASA said the images snapped by the telescope “are more than just beauty shots,” adding that they shed new light on a planet that has “a turbulent, dynamic atmosphere.”

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Olivia Pierce spent part of her summer vacation at NASA and she wants to help other students get the same kinds of unique opportunities.

The Oliver Ames High School senior attended a NASA STEM Enhancement in Earth Science (SEES) internship at the University of Texas in Austin for two weeks this past July.

The internship, offered by the Texas Space Grant Consortium and University of Texas at Austin Center for Space Research provides selected students with exposure to Earth and space research. All expenses were covered in the internship. Pierce only paid for her flight, but some travel grants are available.

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Astronomers have discovered the most massive example yet of the dead stars known as neutron stars, one almost too massive to exist, a new study finds.

Neutron stars, like black holes, are corpses of stars that died in catastrophic explosions known as supernovas. When a star goes supernova, the core of its remains collapses under the strength of its own gravitational pull. If this remnant is massive enough, it may form a black hole, which has gravity so powerful that not even light can escape. A less massive core will form a neutron star, so named because its gravity is strong enough to crush protons together with electrons to form neutrons.

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A rocket launched Crosby’s scientific package in January. Three plastic tanks containing different amounts of water were outside of earth’s atmosphere for about four minutes. Space crafts have to tow extra fuel, and that can cost millions of dollars.

“So there was this famous moment on the moon landing,” Crosby said of the July 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing. “When the alarms were going off and they had 30 seconds before they were going to run out of fuel — turns out they weren’t going to run out fuel, but it was a very tense and traumatic moment because we don’t have a good way of knowing how much fuel is in the tank.”

In 2010, Crosby and his students applied to design and develop an experiment to test an idea by Kennedy Space Center engineer Rudy Werlink. Werlink hypothesized a spacecraft’s natural vibrations could be used to determine the amount of fuel left in the gas tank.

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An atomic clock that could pave the way for autonomous deep space travel was successfully activated last week and is ready to begin its year-long tech demo, the mission team confirmed on Friday, Aug. 23, 2019. Launched in June, NASA’s Deep Space Atomic Clock is a critical step toward enabling spacecraft to safely navigate themselves in deep space rather than rely on the time-consuming process of receiving directions from Earth.

Developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the clock is the first timekeeper stable enough to map a spacecraft’s trajectory in deep space while being small enough to fly onboard the spacecraft. A more stable clock can operate farther from Earth, where it needs to work well for longer periods than satellites closer to home.

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