Over 50 years ago, NASA captured the world's imagination and inspired generations with the Apollo 11 moon landing. NASA's then-young Deep Space Network (DSN) was crucial to tracking and communicating with that mission, as it will also be essential to NASA's next push to the moon: Artemis.

In certain regions of Brazil, don't be surprised if your GPS device behaves erratically. For years, researchers have been scratching their heads, looking for a solution to the unreliable GPS signals in regions near the Amazon. The cause? Plasma bubbles in space.

Next week, NASA will launch a joint U.S.-Brazil satellite that will be deployed from the International Space Station, with scientific instruments developed by Utah State University (USU) and collaborators. The goal of the mission is to investigate plasma bubbles that form high in the ionosphere over the equator.

Charles Swenson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at USU, has worked with Brazil's Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica for years, developing the satellite and researching answers to why this area of the globe is so highly affected by the space weather phenomenon.

NASA is kicking off its new moon program with a test flight of a brand-new rocket and capsule.

Liftoff was slated for early Wednesday morning from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The test flight aims to send an empty crew capsule into a far-flung lunar orbit, 50 years after NASA's famed Apollo moonshots.

The project is years late and billions over budget. The price tag for the test flight: more than $4 billion.

A rundown of the new rocket and capsule, part of NASA's Artemis program, named after Apollo's mythological twin sister:

On September 26, 2022, NASA's Double-Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) made history when it rendezvoused with the asteroid Didymos and impacted with its moonlet, Dimorphos. The purpose was to test the kinetic impact method, a means of defense against potentially-hazardous asteroids (PHAs) where a spacecraft collides with them to alter their trajectory. Based on follow-up observations, the test succeeded since DART managed to shorten Dimorphos' orbit by 22 minutes. The impact also caused the moonlet to grow a visible tail.

However, as Hollywood loves to remind us, there are scenarios where a planet-killing asteroid gets very close to Earth before we could do anything to stop it.