NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research.
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A member of the winning team of NASA’s 2023’s BIG Idea Challenge working on their Lunar Forge project, Production of Steel from Lunar Regolith through Carbonyl Iron Refining (CIR).University of Utah Through Artemis, NASA plans to conduct long-duration human and robotic missions on the lunar surface in preparation for future crewed exploration of Mars. Expanding exploration capabilities requires a robust lunar infrastructure, including practical and cost-effective ways to construct a lunar base. One method is employing in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) – or the ability to use naturally occurring resources – to produce consumables and build structures in the future, whi…
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7 Min Read Deformable Mirrors in Space: Key Technology toDirectly Image Earth Twins PROJECT: Deformable Mirror Technology development SNAPSHOT Deformable mirrors enable direct imaging of exoplanets by correcting imperfections or shape changes in a space telescope down to subatomic scales. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video d Finding and studying Earth-like planets orbiting nearby stars is critical to understand whether we are alone in the universe. To study such planets and assess if they can sustain life, it is nece…
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2 min read NASA One Step Closer to Fueling Space Missions with Plutonium-238 Close-up of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover as it looks back at its wheel tracks on March 17, 2022, the 381st Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credit: NASA The recent shipment of heat source plutonium-238 from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory to its Los Alamos National Laboratory is a critical step toward fueling planned NASA missions with radioisotope power systems. This shipment of 0.5 kilograms (a little over 1 pound) of new heat source plutonium oxide is the largest since the domestic restart of plutonium-238 production over a deca…
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Teams with Astrobotic install the NASA meatball decal on Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander on Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023, at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.NASA/Isaac Watson NASA will host a What’s on Board media teleconference at 2 p.m. EST Wednesday, Nov. 29, to discuss the science payloads flying aboard the first commercial robotic flight to the lunar surface as part of the agency’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative under the Artemis program. Carrying NASA and commercial payloads to the Moon, Astrobotic Technologies will launch its Peregrine lander on ULA’s (United Launch Alliance) Vulcan …
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A team of engineers participate in simulation training for the Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 (PRIME-1) on Thursday, Nov. 2, 2023, inside the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The purpose of the training is to get the integrated PRIME-1 team – engineers with PRIME-1’s MSOLO (Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations) and Honeybee Robotics’ TRIDENT (The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain) drill – prepared to operate the instrument on the lunar surface. The team commanded the PRIME-1 hardware, located at Intuitive Machines in Houston, to operate MSOLO and TRIDENT. “While the MSOLO and TRI…
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The NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) instrument on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s reveals a portion of the Milky Way’s dense core in a new light. An estimated 500,000 stars shine in this image of the Sagittarius C (Sgr C) region, along with some as-yet unidentified features. A large region of ionized hydrogen, shown in cyan, contains intriguing needle-like structures that lack any uniform orientation.NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and S. Crowe (University of Virginia) A star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is seen in exceptional detail in this image from Nov. 20, 2023, thanks to the Near-Infrared Camera instrument on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. An estimate…
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A Journey of Support and Community Impact Small Business Saturday is an annual holiday that encourages shoppers to support local businesses. Taking place on the Saturday following Thanksgiving, it stands as a dedicated day to celebrate and rally support for the contributions small businesses make to their communities. This year, amid the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic, the emphasis on supporting small businesses is more crucial than ever as they navigate and adapt to evolving circumstances. The History and Evolution: As of 2013, communities actively embraced the holiday, expressing solidarity by pledging support for their local businesses and o…
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3 min read NASA to Highlight Inclusion During Bayou Classic Event NASA Logo.NASA NASA is bringing a clear message to the 50th Annual Bayou Classic Friday, Nov. 24 and Saturday, Nov. 25 – while exploring the universe for the benefit of all, it is equally invested in ensuring the participation of all in the agency and its discovery work. The commitment will be on full display during NASA’s outreach and engagement activities at the Bayou Classic weekend in New Orleans. “Our message is simple – there’s space for everybody at NASA,” said Pamela Covington, Office of Communications director at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, whic…
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4 Min Read NASA’s Webb Reveals New Features in Heart of Milky Way Sagitarius C (NIRCam) Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and S. Crowe (University of Virginia). The latest image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense center of our galaxy in unprecedented detail, including never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain. The star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is about 300 light-years from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*. Image: Sagita…
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Science and Supplies Delivered to the Space Station on This Week @NASA – November 17, 2023
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4 min read Minority Serving Institution Partners Coppin State University Coppin State University (CSU) is a public, historically black university located in Baltimore, Maryland. It is part of the University System of Maryland. CSU is a model urban, residential liberal arts university located in the northwest section of the City of Baltimore that provides academic programs in the arts and sciences, teacher education, nursing, graduate studies, and continuing education. As an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), Coppin has a culturally rich history as an institution providing quality educational programs and community outreach servic…
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35 min read SaSa Class of 2022 Annalyse Belton What is your current major and university? My name is Annalyse Belton and I am a 2nd-year Biology major at Coppin State University. What made you decide to apply to SaSa? I applied to SaSa to gain more experience in the scientific field and build on my foundational knowledge. What would you like to accomplish over the summer? Over this summer I would like to gain hands-on experience in innovative research. I also want to collaborate with peers, graduates, and other staff to develop skills in teamwork and communication. What are your three favorite things about yourself? My three favorite t…
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3 min read 2022 SaSa Graduate Student Mentors Emily Faber Emily is an Atmospheric Physics Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is finishing her 3rd year and works in the Laboratory for Atmospheric Studies and Particle Light Interaction under the guidance of Dr. Adriana Rocha Lima. She is interested in improving the physical parameterization of climate models through a better understanding of physical processes that drive the climate. Her thesis work sits in the space between physical measurements and climate modeling and seeks to improve the physical parameterization of surface wind speed and aerosolized dust, which i…
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Astronaut Alan B. Shepard Jr., attired in his Mercury pressure suit, poses for a photo on May 5, 1961, prior to his launch in a Mercury-Redstone 3 spacecraft from Cape Canaveral on a suborbital mission – the first U.S. manned spaceflight.NASA Born barely 20 years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, Alan Shepard grew up to fly combat missions in World War II, test multiple new aircraft, become the first American in space, and ultimately hit the first golf shot on the Moon. Born on Nov. 18, 1923, Shepard lifted off in the Freedom 7 spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on May 5, 1961, beginning 62 years of Americans’ journeys into space. During the 15-minute subor…
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NASA / Michael DeMocker Artemis II NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Christina Koch of NASA, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen view the core stage for the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket at the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans on Nov. 16. The three astronauts, along with NASA’s Victor Glover, will launch atop the rocket stage to venture around the Moon on Artemis II, the first crewed flight for Artemis. The SLS core stage, towering at 212 feet, is the backbone of the Moon rocket and includes two massive propellant tanks that collectively hold 733,000 gallons of propellant to help power the stage’s four RS-25 engines. NASA, Boei…
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5 min read NASA Mission Excels at Spotting Greenhouse Gas Emission Sources Flaring, in which excess natural gas is intentionally burned into the air, is one way methane is released from oil and gas facilities. NASA’s EMIT mission, in more than a year in operation, has shown a proficiency at spotting emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases from space.Adobe Stock/Ilya Glovatskiy Since launching 16 months ago, the EMIT imaging spectrometer aboard the International Space Station has shown an ability to detect more than just surface minerals. More than a year after first detecting methane plumes from its perch aboard the International Space Station,…
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Earth science researcher Dr. Antonia Gambacorta earned the 2023 Goddard IRAD Technology Leadership award for pioneering new ways to measure lower layers of Earth’s atmosphere from space. The award from the chief technologist of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, recognizes Gambacorta’s work demonstrating how hyperspectral microwave sounding, the measurement of hundreds of thousands of wavelengths of microwave light, could dissect Earth’s atmospheric planetary boundary layer (PBL). She also conceptualized a microwave photonics radiometer instrument to reveal these measurements. NASA / Christopher Gunn The part of Earth’s atmosphere people l…
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NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility supported the launch of two suborbital sounding rockets on Nov. 15, 2023, for Navy Strategic Systems Programs (SSP), and the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), in coordination with Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane) and the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH TB). This subscale test was executed by Sandia National Laboratories. Data collected from this test will be used to inform the development of the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS), MDA’s hypersonic defensive capability, and to mature other hypersonic tech…
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5 Min Read The Heat is On! NASA’s “Flawless” Heat Shield Demo Passes the Test The Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator, or LOFTID, spacecraft is pictured after its atmospheric re-entry test in November 2022. Credits: NASA / Greg Swanson A little more than a year ago, a NASA flight test article came screaming back from space at more than 18,000 mph, reaching temperatures of nearly 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit before gently splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. At that moment, it became the largest blunt bod…
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2 min read Hubble Images Galaxy with an Explosive Past A NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the spiral galaxy NGC 941. ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Kilpatrick This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 941, which lies about 55 million light-years from Earth. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) collected the data that created this image. Beautiful NGC 941 is undoubtedly the main attraction in this view; however, the hazy-looking galaxy was not the motivation for collecting the data. That distinction belongs to an astronomical event that took place in the galaxy years before: the supernova SN 2005ad. The location of this fa…
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6 min read NASA’s Deep Space Optical Comm Demo Sends, Receives First Data NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is shown in a clean room at the Astrotech Space Operations facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Dec. 8, 2022. DSOC’s gold-capped flight laser transceiver can be seen, near center, attached to the spacecraft.NASA/Ben Smegelsky DSOC, an experiment that could transform how spacecraft communicate, has achieved ‘first light,’ sending data via laser to and from far beyond the Moon for the first time. NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment has beamed a near-infrared laser encoded with test data fromnearly 10 million m…
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November 1968 proved pivotal to achieving the goal of landing a man on the Moon before the end of the decade. The highly successful Apollo 7 mission that returned American astronauts to space provided the confidence for NASA to decide to send the next flight, Apollo 8, on a trip to orbit the Moon in December. At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, the Saturn V rocket and the Apollo spacecraft for that mission sat on Launch Pad 39A undergoing tests for its upcoming launch. In the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), the three stages of the Saturn V for the Apollo 9 mission sat stacked awaiting the addition of its spacecraft undergoing final testing. Also in th…
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The third and final crewed mission to the Skylab space station, Skylab 4, got underway on Nov. 16, 1973, with a thunderous launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Docking eight hours later, astronauts Gerald P. Carr, Edward G. Gibson, and William R. Pogue began a planned 56-day mission that program managers extended to a record-breaking 84 days. During their first month, as they adjusted to weightlessness and their new surroundings, they completed the first of four spacewalks. They began an extensive science program, investigating the effects of long-duration spaceflight on human physiology, examining the Sun, conducting observations of the Earth, as wel…
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NASA Explorers Season 6, Episode 2: Bennu’s Surprises
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NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and Gateway Program will hold a Utilization Town Hall for the international science community at 3 p.m., Jan. 31, 2024. Members of the global science community, academia, and public are invited to participate in this virtual Webex event by registering below. The purpose of this event is to provide all interested international science communities with an opportunity to learn about anticipated Gateway capabilities and opportunities during the Artemis era. Participants will be invited to attend informal presentations from participating agencies, panel discussions and breakout sessions. Registration to the Webex is free but required for even…
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