Announcements

Astronomers discover an unusually short gamma-ray burst from the death of a massive star

Project News • July 26th, 2021

ZTF and a host of other astronomical observatories have teamed up to identify a rather unusual gamma-ray burst (GRB) - the most powerful event in the universe. Caused by the death of a massive star, this GRB lasted much shorted than expected defying a clear classification of these extraordinary...

From the Sun to the stars

Project News • July 20th, 2021

A journey of exoplanet discovery begins as Penn State’s NEID spectrometer starts its scientific mission.

A White Dwarf Living on the Edge

Project News • July 1st, 2021

Astronomers have identified a white dwarf so massive that it might collapse

Public Data Release 6

Project News • June 30th, 2021

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and IPAC at the California Institute of Technology announce the sixth ZTF Public Data Release. ZTF is an optical time-domain survey covering the northern sky visible from Palomar Observatory.

Asteroid-Hunting Space Telescope Gets Two-Year Mission Extension

Project News • June 30th, 2021

For two more years, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) will continue its hunt for asteroids and comets – including objects that could pose a hazard to Earth.

Are We Missing Other Earths?

Project News • June 29th, 2021

Some exoplanet searches could be missing nearly half of the Earth-sized planets around other stars. New findings from a team that includes Elise Furlan and David Ciardi at Caltech/IPAC - NExScI suggest that Earth-sized worlds could be lurking undiscovered in binary star systems, hidden in the...

Public Release of Reduced Solar Data Products from the NEID Spectrograph

Project News • June 25th, 2021

The NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research (NN-EXPLORE) program announces the public release of reduced solar data products from the NEID spectrograph built by the Pennsylvania State University.

NASA Approves Asteroid Hunting Space Telescope to Continue Development

Project News • June 14th, 2021

NASA has approved the Near-Earth Object Surveyor space telescope (NEO Surveyor) to move to the next phase of mission development after a successful mission review, authorizing the mission to move forward into Preliminary Design (known as Key Decision Point- B).

NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Selects 24 Flight-Quality Heat-Vision ‘Eyes’

Project News • June 9th, 2021

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope team recently flight-certified all 24 of the detectors the mission needs. When Roman launches in the mid-2020s, these devices will convert starlight into electrical signals, which will then be decoded into 300-megapixel images of large patches of the sky.

First official release of Data Reduction Pipeline for the Keck Cosmic Web Imager

Project News • June 8th, 2021

The W. M. Keck Observatory and the KCWI team at Caltech are proud to announce the first official release of the Data Reduction Pipeline (DRP) for the Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI).