Science Missions - NASA Science (2024)

FAQs

What are NASA's current missions? ›

Apollo 11. On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong placed the first human footstep on the Moon.

NASA Science seeks to discover the secrets of the universe, search for life elsewhere, and protect and improve life on Earth and in space.

3 in November of 1967, the near-loss of Apollo XIII in April of 1970, the destruction of Challenger in January of 1986, and the disintegration of Columbia in February of 2003. Biographies of the lost astronauts are listed at Astronaut Biographies.

Apollo 1 Tragedy

The mission was to be the first crewed flight of Apollo, and was scheduled to launch Feb. 21, 1967. Astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee lost their lives when a fire swept through the command module, or CM.

First woman in space: Valentina Tereshkova

Tereshkova, a Soviet cosmonaut, was selected from more than 400 applicants to launch on the Vostok 6 mission on June 16, 1963. She was 26 at the time.

Space Shuttle Challenger breaks up during its 1986 launch resulting in the death of all seven crew members. As of 2024, there have been 19 astronaut fatalities during spaceflight that either crossed, or was intended to cross, the boundary of space as defined by the United States (50 miles above sea level).

NASA consists of its headquarters in Washington, D.C., and 10 field centers. Each center's Speakers Bureau has been assigned a geographic region of responsibility.

The recently discovered super-Earth, TOI-715 b, might be making its appearance at just the right time. Its parent star is a red dwarf, smaller and cooler than our Sun; a number of such stars are known to host small, rocky worlds. At the moment, they're the best bet for finding habitable planets.

NASA's IV&V Program is currently performing IV&V for the projects listed below. With the Artemis program, NASA will land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.

What are the new NASA missions called? ›

With NASA's Artemis campaign, we are exploring the Moon for scientific discovery, technology advancement, and to learn how to live and work on another world as we prepare for human missions to Mars.

What is the average NASA astronaut's salary? According to NASA, civilian astronaut salaries are determined by the US Government's pay scales – or more specifically grades GS-13 to GS-14. As of 2022, the GS-13 pay scale ranges from $81,216 to $105,579 per annum. This is up to $8,798.25 per month or $50.59 an hour.

NASA was founded on July 29, 1958. NASA's motto is: "For the Benefit of All". Since April of 2021, Bill Nelson, former Senator from Florida, has served as NASA Administrator.

The NASA SciX portal links researchers to scientific literature, data, and software in the fields of astronomy, Earth science, heliophysics, physics, and planetary science. The comprehensive library hosts over 20 million records, including refereed publications and preprints from sources like arXiv and EarthArXiv.

Artemis 2 is an eight day mission that will send three NASA astronauts and one Canadian Space Agency astronaut around the moon on a free-return trajectory. It is the last test flight before the Artemis 3 crewed moon landing mission in 2025.

NASA is taking a steppingstone approach to human exploration in space. Building on NASA's 60 years of exploration experience and more than 20 years of continuous human presence on the International Space Station in low Earth orbit, we will extend humanity farther into space than ever before.

The final space shuttle mission, STS-135, ended July 21, 2011 when Atlantis rolled to a stop at its home port, NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Space shuttle Discovery (STS-31) comes in for a landing on April 29, 1990.