Laurie Leshin stepping down as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab

Laurie Leshin stepping down as director of NASA's JPL | Venus lander's fall to Earth will be no ordinary crash | Hours before a solar eclipse, spruce trees 'talk' Created for ceo.studentlike.spuniv@blogger.com | Web Version May 8, 2025 CONNECT WITH SPACE.COM       Something amazing every day. SIGN UP ⋅   WEBSITE   The Launchpad (NASA/Bill Ingalls) Laurie Leshin stepping down as director of NASA's JPL NASA's main center for planetary exploration will soon come under new leadership. Laurie Leshin announced today (May 7) that she'll step down from her role as director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California in June, after more than three years in charge. She'll be replaced by David Gallagher, JPL's current associate director for strategic integration. Read More (NASA) Venus lander's fall to Earth will be no ordinary crash This will be no ordinary space junk fall. The Soviet Union's failed Kosmos 482 spacecraft will crash to Earth in the coming days after more than 50 years in orbit. Its homecoming may not spark the sorts of artificial meteor showers we're used to seeing from falling rocket bodies and other pieces of debris, however, because Kosmos 482 was built different: It's a Venus lander. Read More Skywatching (Monica Gagliano/Southern Cross University) Hours before a solar eclipse, spruce trees 'talk' Spruce trees retain ancient memories of their environment and communicate with one other in the hours preceding a solar eclipse, a new international study suggests. "We now see the forest not as a mere collection of individuals, but as an orchestra of phase correlated plants," Alessandro Chiolerio, Italian Institute of Technology and University of the West of England, and the study co-leader, said in a statement. Read More Spaceflight (ISRO) India delays 1st Gaganyaan astronaut launch to 2027 India now plans to launch astronauts to space no sooner than 2027, shifting the goal post for the country's first human spaceflight yet again. Indian space minister Jitendra Singh announced the latest delay during a press conference Tuesday (May 6), running through the progress of India's crewed spaceflight program and providing an updated timeline for its first Gaganyaan crewed missions. Read More Science & Astronomy (NASA, ESA, CSA, Dani Player (STScI) JWST finds water in air of exotic 'sub-Neptune' exoplanet NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found water swirling in the air of a distant alien planet, a new study reports. That exotic world is TOI-421 b, a boiling-hot "sub-Neptune" orbiting a star about 244 light-years from Earth whose atmosphere JWST recently probed in detail. Read More SpaceX (SpaceX) 'Eventually, all life on Earth will be destroyed by the sun' Elon Musk is taking the long view. The billionaire SpaceX founder has long said that humanity needs to expand its footprint out into the solar system -- specifically to Mars, which is the most suitable and reachable target -- so that we won't go extinct if something bad should happen to Earth. That "if" only applies in the short term, however; over the very long haul, something bad will definitely happen. The sun is getting brighter and hotter as it ages, and a few hundred million years from now, this increased energy influx will strip off Earth's atmosphere and boil our oceans away. That will probably be the end for life as we know it. The coup de grace will come some five billion years from now, when our expanding red giant sun engulfs and incinerates poor little Earth. Read More Technology (NASA) China makes 1st daytime laser measurement to the moon China has achieved a milestone feat, making the first-ever laser ranging measurement from Earth to the moon during the daytime. Researchers at Yunnan Observatories under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) used an infrared lunar laser ranging system of a recently upgraded 1.2-meter (3.9 feet) telescope to ping a small laser retroreflector on the Tiandu 1 satellite orbiting the moon. Read More   Sign Up  |    Update Profile  |    Unsubscribe Privacy Policy  |    Cookies Policy  |    Terms and Conditions CONTACT US: FEEDBACK  |    ADVERTISE Future US LLC © Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY, 10036