NASA and Imaging Innovation: Exploring the Final Frontier from Home

Exploration is different in the 21st Century. Images are at the forefront. Cameras are what explore the last frontier.

NASA science discoveries are made primarily by space-based satellites, probes, rovers, and helicopters carrying telescopes and instruments that record images at various wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum. Scientists gain new insights about our home planet, the solar system and the cosmos at large by correlating data from diverse sources.

Some notable results include climate models for Earth and Mars, weather predictions, following the water on Mars to detect possibility of past life, surveying for landing sites for human exploration on the moon and Mars, studying atmospheres of other planets (including those around other star systems), researching the age of the universe, and detecting dark matter--to name just a few examples.

In this special Friday-night event, Jaya Bajpayee—deputy director of Exploration Technology Directorate at NASA’s Ames Research Center—will detail how a number of recent key discoveries were made by diverse imaging techniques. She will also discuss imaging techniques under consideration to enable NASA’s future plans to explore planets in the solar system, to detect habitable worlds around other star systems and even to monitor our home planet.