A long time ago in a galaxy half the universe away, a flood of high-energy gamma rays began its journey to Earth. When they arrived in April, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope caught the outburst, which helped two...

NASA Goddard is preparing to demonstrate for the fist time in space, a 3-wavelength, laser remote sensing instrument. The Cloud-Aerosol Transport System or CATS will measure clouds and aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere. This...

Mars's thick early atmosphere was likely lost to space, and the Sun is a potential culprit. When high-energy solar photons strike the upper Martian atmosphere they can ionize gas molecules, causing the atmosphere to erode over time....

Snow is vital for Earth’s ecosystems and humans, from its temperature-regulating reflection of sunlight and insulating properties, to its life-sustaining water as it melts in the springtime. Snow provides freshwater for...

ICESat-2's instrument, ATLAS, is designed to measure heights on Earth. ATLAS has three main tasks: transmitting a pattern of six laser beams, collecting the laser photons that return to the satellite after reflecting off Earth, and...

Major improvements to methods used to process observations from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have yielded an expanded, higher-quality set of data that allows astronomers to produce the most detailed census of the sky yet...

To see how the Transmitter works, go here

Opto-Mechanical Engineer Tyler Evans explains how the photons that bounce back from Earth are received and filtered by the ATLAS telescope. ATLAS is the primary instrument on board the...

Deputy Systems Engineer Phil Luers explains how ICESat-2’s ATLAS instrument transmitter and receiver subsystems come together to calculate the timing of photons, which, in turn, measure the elevation of...

Follow an entire orbit of the ICESat-2 mission as it measures the elevation of oceans, sea ice, mountains, and islands around the Earth. This video shows the same orbit (ground reference track 1352) on...

How unusual non-linear crystals can entangle particles of light, or photons. Thanks to non-profit edX.org for sponsoring this video. Quantum entanglement involves a special process of splitting photons into two. But it involves a process...

ICESat-2 is an incredibly precise space laser that features the latest in NASA technology To measure ice heights, engineers have to take ICESat-2's instrument ATLAS to the extreme - sometimes going big, sometimes...

The Higgs boson is a wave, ripple or disturbance in an invisible, all-permeating field called the Higgs field. In the year 1964, Peter Higgs, François Englert and four other scientists proposed a rather unique idea to explain why certain...

In this episode, I talk about receptive field of ganglion cells, showing how rods and cones are connected to bipolar cells that are then connected to Ganglion cells. The more bipolar cells you have connected to Ganglion cells, the larger...

ICESat-2 is an incredibly precise space laser that features the latest in NASA technology To measure ice heights, engineers have to take ICESat-2's instrument ATLAS to the extreme - sometimes going big, sometimes...

In this episode, I give an introduction to how eyes work. Why do you see what you see? What is the mechanism involved in that process? Watch the video and see :)

Students from the Alexander Dawson School in Boulder, Colorado explain the workings of a "dark detector" coated with the one of the world's darkest materials, a forest of carbon nanotubes that reflect almost no light across the visible...

In our study of physics, we have become aware of four forces, and the fields that mediate them. Once we got deep into quantum theory, we started to realize that these forces are not mediated by fields at all, but rather by quanta. That's...

So Max Planck kicked things off, but how does the story of modern physics continue? With none other than your favorite scientist and mine, Albert Einstein! He did more than just stick his tongue out and have crazy hair. He elucidated the...

Scientists have known that the Moon has a tail, like a comet, since the late 1990s, but now they know where it comes from — and why it’s brighter sometimes than others. <br/>

Lasers are known to burn things, fix eyes, and dance on powerpoint presentations. But they can also be used to cool objects to some of the coldest temperatures in the universe.

How did the field of quantum mechanics come about in the first place? The Rayleigh-Jeans catastrophe, also known as the ultraviolet catastrophe was a prediction by the Rayleigh-Jeans law that a blackbody would radiate infinite amounts of...

NASA scientist Philip Lubin is working on perfecting laser technology that could propel a light spacecraft to Mars in as little as three days. In order for spacecraft to achieve faster speeds, Lubin proposes using an electromagnetic...

As you go faster, what happens to time and space? What would happen if you could manage to go the speed of light? Astrum Answers!

This video provides a simple and concise explanation of how mirrors work. It covers the history of mirrors, from primitive stones to modern glass coated with a thin layer of metal. The video explains the concept of reflection and how...