NASA

3 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) The Intuitive Machines Nova-C lander for the company’s first Commercial Lunar Payload Services delivery is positioned before being encapsulated inside its launch fairing. The Nova-C lander will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than mid-February.Credit: Intuitive Machines It’s easy to measure fuel in tanks on Earth, where gravity pulls the liquid to the bottom. But in space, the game changes. Quantifying fuel that’s floating around inside a spacecraft’s tank isn’t so simple. “Because of the very small amount of gravity, fluid doesn’t settle to the bottom of propellant tanks but rather clings to the walls and could be anywhere inside,” said Lauren Ameen, deputy manager for the Cryogenic Fluid Management Portfolio Project Office at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “That makes it really challenging to understand how much propellant you have within your tank, which is really important to maximize your mission duration and plan how much you need to launch with.” A space-age fuel gauge technology meant to solve this problem will be demonstrated on an upcoming journey to the Moon. Developed at NASA Glenn under the agency’s Technology Demonstration Missions program, the Radio Frequency Mass Gauge (RFMG) payload is set to launch as a part of the Intuitive Machines IM-1 delivery to the lunar surface through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. With CLPS, NASA is working with American companies to deliver scientific, exploration, and technology payloads to the Moon’s surface and orbit. Dr. Greg Zimmerli, principal investigator for the Radio Frequency Mass Gauge (RFMG) project at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, explains how RFMG technology will help pave the way for future space missions. Credit: NASA/Denise Eletich RFMG technology uses radio waves and antennae in a tank to measure exactly how much propellant is available. While smaller-scale experiments have been conducted on the International Space Station and during parabolic flights, this will be the first long-duration RFMG testing on a standalone spacecraft, the Nova-C lunar lander. The data engineers receive throughout its journey could validate simulations done on the ground and mark the next step in developing this technology. “It’s definitely a critical point,” Ameen said. “This is the first time we’re getting this type of data for RFMG.” RFMG could be crucial during future long-duration missions that will rely on spacecraft fueled by cryogenic propellants, like liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, or liquid methane. These propellants are highly efficient but are tricky to store as they can evaporate quickly, even at low temperatures. Being able to accurately measure spacecraft fuel levels will help scientists maximize resources as NASA moves toward its goal of returning humans to the Moon through Artemis. Explore More 5 min read NASA’s Laser Navigation Tech Enables Commercial Lunar Exploration Article 23 hours ago 4 min read Tiny NASA Cameras to Picture Interaction Between Lander, Moon’s Surface Article 4 days ago 5 min read NASA to Study Effects of Radio Noise on Lunar Science Article 5 days ago View the full article

11 min read The Universe is Expanding Faster These Days and Dark Energy is Responsible. So What is Dark Energy? Some 13.8 billion years ago, the universe began with a rapid expansion we call the big bang. After this initial expansion, which lasted a fraction of a second, gravity started to slow the universe down. But the cosmos wouldn’t stay this way. Nine billion years after the universe began, its expansion started to speed up, driven by an unknown force that scientists have named dark energy. But what exactly is dark energy? The short answer is: We don’t know. But we do know that it exists, it’s making the universe expand at an accelerating rate, and approximately 68.3 to 70% of the universe is dark energy. The history of the universe is outlined in this infographic. NASA A Brief History It All Started With Cepheids Dark energy wasn’t discovered until the late 1990s. But its origin in scientific study stretches all the way back to 1912 when American astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt made an important discovery using Cepheid variables, a class of stars whose brightness fluctuates with a regularity that depends on the star’s brightness. All Cepheid stars with a certain period (a Cepheid’s period is the time it takes to go from bright, to dim, and bright again) have the same absolute magnitude, or luminosity – the amount of light they put out. Leavitt measured these stars and proved that there is a relationship between their regular period of brightness and luminosity. Leavitt’s findings made it possible for astronomers to use a star’s period and luminosity to measure the distances between us and Cepheid stars in far-off galaxies (and our own Milky Way). Around this same time in history, astronomer Vesto Slipher observed spiral galaxies using his telescope’s spectrograph, a device that splits light into the colors that make it up, much like the way a prism splits light into a rainbow. He used the spectrograph, a relatively recent invention at the time, to see the different wavelengths of light coming from the galaxies in different spectral lines. With his observations, Silpher was the first astronomer to observe how quickly the galaxy was moving away from us, called redshift, in distant galaxies. These observations would prove to be critical for many future scientific breakthroughs, including the discovery of dark energy. Redshift is a term used when astronomical objects are moving away from us and the light coming from those objects stretches out. Light behaves like a wave, and red light has the longest wavelength. So, the light coming from objects moving away from us has a longer wavelength, stretching to the “red end” of the electromagnetic. Discovering an Expanding Universe The discovery of galactic redshift, the period-luminosity relation of Cepheid variables, and a newfound ability to gauge a star or galaxy’s distance eventually played a role in astronomers observing that galaxies were getting farther away from us over time, which showed how the universe was expanding. In the years that followed, different scientists around the world started to put the pieces of an expanding universe together. In 1922, Russian scientist and mathematician Alexander Friedmann published a paper detailing multiple possibilities for the history of the universe. The paper, which was based on Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity published in 1917, included the possibility that the universe is expanding. In 1927, Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître, who is said to have been unaware of Friedmann’s work, published a paper also factoring in Einstein’s theory of general relativity. And, while Einstein stated in his theory that the universe was static, Lemaître showed how the equations in Einstein’s theory actually support the idea that the universe is not static but, in fact, is actually expanding. Astronomer Edwin Hubble confirmed that the universe was expanding in 1929 using observations made by his associate, astronomer Milton Humason. Humason measured the redshift of spiral galaxies. Hubble and Humason then studied Cepheid stars in those galaxies, using the stars to determine the distance of their galaxies (or nebulae, as they called them). They compared the distances of these galaxies to their redshift and tracked how the farther away an object is, the bigger its redshift and the faster it is moving away from us. The pair found that objects like galaxies are moving away from Earth faster the farther away they are, at upwards of hundreds of thousands of miles per second – an observation now known as Hubble’s Law, or the Hubble- Lemaître law. The universe, they confirmed, is really expanding. This composite image features one of the most complicated and dramatic collisions between galaxy clusters ever seen. Known officially as Abell 2744, this system has been dubbed Pandora’s Cluster because of the wide variety of different structures found. Data from Chandra (red) show gas with temperatures of millions of degrees. In blue is a map showing the total mass concentration (mostly dark matter) based on data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and the Subaru telescope. Optical data from HST and VLT also show the constituent galaxies of the clusters. Astronomers think at least four galaxy clusters coming from a variety of directions are involved with this collision. Expansion is Speeding Up, Supernovae Show Scientists previously thought that the universe’s expansion would likely be slowed down by gravity over time, an expectation backed by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. But in 1998, everything changed when two different teams of astronomers observing far-off supernovae noticed that (at a certain redshift) the stellar explosions were dimmer than expected. These groups were led by astronomers Adam Riess, Saul Perlmutter, and Brian Schmidt. This trio won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work. While dim supernovae might not seem like a major find, these astronomers were looking at Type 1a supernovae, which are known to have a certain level of luminosity. So they knew that there must be another factor making these objects appear dimmer. Scientists can determine distance (and speed) using an objects’ brightness, and dimmer objects are typically farther away (though surrounding dust and other factors can cause an object to dim). This led the scientists to conclude that these supernovae were just much farther away than they expected by looking at their redshifts. Using the objects’ brightness, the researchers determined the distance of these supernovae. And using the spectrum, they were able to figure out the objects’ redshift and, therefore, how fast they were moving away from us. They found that the supernovae were not as close as expected, meaning they had traveled farther away from us faster than ancitipated. These observations led scientists to ultimately conclude that the universe itself must be expanding faster over time. While other possible explanations for these observations have been explored, astronomers studying even more distant supernovae or other cosmic phenomena in more recent years continued to gather evidence and build support for the idea that the universe is expanding faster over time, a phenomenon now called cosmic acceleration. But, as scientists built up a case for cosmic acceleration, they also asked: Why? What could be driving the universe to stretch out faster over time? Enter dark energy. What Exactly is Dark Energy? Right now, dark energy is just the name that astronomers gave to the mysterious “something” that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerated rate. Dark energy has been described by some as having the effect of a negative pressure that is pushing space outward. However, we don’t know if dark energy has the effect of any type of force at all. There are many ideas floating around about what dark energy could possibly be. Here are four leading explanations for dark energy. Keep in mind that it’s possible it’s something else entirely. Vacuum Energy: Some scientists think that dark energy is a fundamental, ever-present background energy in space known as vacuum energy, which could be equal to the cosmological constant, a mathematical term in the equations of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Originally, the constant existed to counterbalance gravity, resulting in a static universe. But when Hubble confirmed that the universe was actually expanding, Einstein removed the constant, calling it “my biggest blunder,” according to physicist George Gamow. But when it was later discovered that the universe’s expansion was actually accelerating, some scientists suggested that there might actually be a non-zero value to the previously-discredited cosmological constant. They suggested that this additional force would be necessary to accelerate the expansion of the universe. This theorized that this mystery component could be attributed to something called “vacuum energy,” which is a theoretical background energy permeating all of space. Space is never exactly empty. According to quantum field theory, there are virtual particles, or pairs of particles and antiparticles. It’s thought that these virtual particles cancel each other out almost as soon as they crop up in the universe, and that this act of popping in and out of existence could be made possible by “vacuum energy” that fills the cosmos and pushes space outward. While this theory has been a popular topic of discussion, scientists investigating this option have calculated how much vacuum energy there should theoretically be in space. They showed that there should either be so much vacuum energy that, at the very beginning, the universe would have expanded outwards so quickly and with so much force that no stars or galaxies could have formed, or… there should be absolutely none. This means that the amount of vacuum energy in the cosmos must be much smaller than it is in these predictions. However, this discrepancy has yet to be solved and has even earned the moniker “the cosmological constant problem.” Quintessence: Some scientists think that dark energy could be a type of energy fluid or field that fills space, behaves in an opposite way to normal matter, and can vary in its amount and distribution throughout both time and space. This hypothesized version of dark energy has been nicknamed quintessence after the theoretical fifth element discussed by ancient Greek philosophers. It’s even been suggested by some scientists that quintessence could be some combination of dark energy and dark matter, though the two are currently considered completely separate from one another. While the two are both major mysteries to scientists, dark matter is thought to make up about 85% of all matter in the universe. Space Wrinkles: Some scientists think that dark energy could be a sort of defect in the fabric of the universe itself; defects like cosmic strings, which are hypothetical one-dimensional “wrinkles” thought to have formed in the early universe. A Flaw in General Relativity: Some scientists think that dark energy isn’t something physical that we can discover. Rather, they think there could be an issue with general relativity and Einstein’s theory of gravity and how it works on the scale of the observable universe. Within this explanation, scientists think that it’s possible to modify our understanding of gravity in a way that explains observations of the universe made without the need for dark energy. Einstein actually proposed such an idea in 1919 called unimodular gravity, a modified version of general relativity that scientists today think wouldn’t require dark energy to make sense of the universe. The Future Dark energy is one of the great mysteries of the universe. For decades, scientists have theorized about our expanding universe. Now, for the first time ever, we have tools powerful enough to put these theories to the test and really investigate the big question: “what is dark energy?” NASA plays a critical role in the ESA (European Space Agency) mission Euclid (launched in 2023), which will make a 3D map of the universe to see how matter has been pulled apart by dark energy over time. This map will include observations of billions of galaxies found up to 10 billion light-years from Earth. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch by May 2027, is designed to investigate dark energy, among many other science topics, and will also create a 3D dark matter map. Roman’s resolution will be as sharp as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope’s, but with a field of view 100 times larger, allowing it to capture more expansive images of the universe. This will allow scientists to map how matter is structured and spread across the universe and explore how dark energy behaves and has changed over time. Roman will also conduct an additional survey to detect Type Ia supernovae In addition to NASA’s missions and efforts, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, supported by a large collaboration that includes the U.S. National Science Foundation, which is currently under construction in Chile, is also poised to support our growing understanding of dark energy. The ground-based observatory is expected to be operational in 2025. The combined efforts of Euclid, Roman, and Rubin will usher in a new “golden age” of cosmology, in which scientists will collect more detailed information than ever about the great mysteries of dark energy. Additionally, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (launched in 2021), the world’s most powerful and largest space telescope, aims to make contributions to several areas of research, and will contribute to studies of dark energy. NASA’s SPHEREx (the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) mission, scheduled to launch no later than April 2025, aims to investigate the origins of the universe. Scientists expect that the data collected with SPHEREx, which will survey the entire sky in near-infrared light, including over 450 million galaxies, could help to further our understanding of dark energy. NASA also supports a citizen science project called Dark Energy Explorers, which enables anyone in the world, even those who have no scientific training, to help in the search for dark energy answers. *A brief note* Lastly, to clarify, dark energy is not the same as dark matter. Their main similarity is that we don’t yet know what they are! By Chelsea Gohd NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Share Details Last Updated Feb 05, 2024 Related Terms Dark Energy Dark Matter Euclid Galaxies James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe and Ices Explorer) Stellar Evolution The Big Bang The Universe Explore More 2 min read Hubble Views a Dim but Distinct Galaxy Article 3 days ago 2 min read Hubble Sees a Merged Galaxy Article 3 days ago 2 min read Hubble Captures a Suspected Galaxy Encounter Article 4 days ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Missions Humans in Space Climate Change Solar System View the full article

3 min read What’s Made in a Thunderstorm and Faster Than Lightning? Gamma Rays! A flash of lightning. A roll of thunder. These are normal stormy sights and sounds. But sometimes, up above the clouds, stranger things happen. Our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted bursts of gamma rays – some of the highest-energy forms of light in the universe – coming from thunderstorms. Gamma rays are usually found coming from objects with crazy extreme physics like neutron stars and black holes. So why is Fermi seeing them come from thunderstorms? About a thousand times a day, thunderstorms fire off fleeting bursts of some of the highest-energy light naturally found on Earth. These events, called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, last less than a millisecond and produce gamma rays with tens of millions of times the energy of visible light. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Thunderstorms form when warm, damp air near the ground starts to rise and encounters colder air. As the warm air rises, moisture condenses into water droplets. The upward-moving water droplets bump into downward-moving ice crystals, stripping off electrons and creating a static charge in the cloud. Updrafts and downdrafts within thunderstorms force rain, snow and ice to collide and acquire an electrical charge, which can cause lightning. Under just the right conditions, the fast-moving electrons can create a terrestrial gamma-ray flash. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center The top of the storm becomes positively charged, and the bottom becomes negatively charged, like two ends of a battery. Eventually the opposite charges build enough to overcome the insulating properties of the surrounding air – and zap! You get lightning. This illustration shows electrons accelerating upwards from a thunderhead. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientists suspect that lightning reconfigures the cloud’s electrical field. In some cases, this allows electrons to rush toward the upper part of the storm at nearly the speed of light. That makes thunderstorms the most powerful natural particle accelerators on Earth! Interactions with matter can produce gamma rays and vice versa, as shown here in this illustration. High-energy electrons traveling close to the speed of light can be deflected by passing near an atom or molecule, producing a gamma ray. And a gamma ray passing through the electron shell of an atom transforms into two particles: an electron and a positron. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center When those electrons run into air molecules, they emit a terrestrial gamma-ray flash, which means that thunderstorms are creating some of the highest energy forms of light in the universe. But that’s not all – thunderstorms can also produce antimatter! Yep, you read that correctly! Sometimes, a gamma ray will run into an atom and produce an electron and a positron, which is an electron’s antimatter opposite! NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, illustrated here, scans the entire sky every three hours as it orbits Earth. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab Fermi can spot terrestrial gamma-ray flashes within 500 miles (800 kilometers) of the location directly below the spacecraft. It does this using an instrument called the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor which is primarily used to watch for spectacular flashes of gamma rays coming from the universe. Visualization of ten years of Fermi observations of terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center There are an estimated 1,800 thunderstorms occurring on Earth at any given moment. Over its first 10 years in space, Fermi spotted about 5,000 terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. But scientists estimate that there are 1,000 of these flashes every day – we’re just seeing the ones that are within 500 miles of Fermi’s regular orbits, which don’t cover the U.S. or Europe. The map above shows all the flashes Fermi saw between 2008 and 2018. (Notice there’s a blob missing over the lower part of South America. That’s the South Atlantic Anomaly, a portion of the sky where radiation affects spacecraft and causes data glitches.) Storm clouds produce some of the highest-energy light naturally made on Earth: terrestrial gamma-ray flashes. The tropical disturbance that would later become Hurricane Julio in 2014 produced four flashes within 100 minutes, with a fifth the next day. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Fermi has also spotted terrestrial gamma-ray flashes coming from individual tropical weather systems. In 2014 Tropical Storm Julio produced four flashes in just 100 minutes! Share Details Last Updated Feb 05, 2024 Related Terms Black Holes Earth Extreme Weather Events Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope Gamma Rays Gamma-Ray Bursts Neutron Stars The Universe Weather and Atmospheric Dynamics Explore More 4 min read When Dead Stars Collide! In October 2017, for the first time, astronomers observed light and gravitational waves from the… Article 1 hour ago 2 min read Hubble Views a Dim but Distinct Galaxy Article 3 days ago 2 min read Hubble Sees a Merged Galaxy Article 3 days ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Dark Matter & Dark Energy The Big Bang Galaxies Stars View the full article

4 min read When Dead Stars Collide! Gravity has been making waves — literally. In October 2017, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the first direct detection of gravitational waves two years earlier. Also in that month, astronomers announced a huge advance in the field of gravitational waves: For the first time, they had observed light and gravitational waves from the same source. Let’s look at what happened. Two neutron stars are on the verge of colliding in this illustration. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center There was a pair of orbiting neutron stars in a galaxy (called NGC 4993). Neutron stars are the crushed leftover cores of massive stars (stars more than 8 times the mass of our sun) that long ago exploded as supernovae. There are many such pairs of binaries in this galaxy, and in all the galaxies we can see, but something special was about to happen to this particular pair. An animation of gravitational wave propagation. R. Hurt/Caltech/JPL Each time these neutron stars orbited, they would lose a teeny bit of gravitational energy to gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are disturbances in space-time — the very fabric of the universe — that travel at the speed of light. The waves are emitted by any mass that is changing speed or direction, like this pair of orbiting neutron stars. However, the gravitational waves are very faint unless the neutron stars are very close and orbiting around each other very fast. Doomed neutron stars whirl toward their demise in this illustration. Gravitational waves (pale arcs) bleed away orbital energy, causing the stars to move closer together and merge. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab The teeny energy loss caused the two neutron stars to get a teeny bit closer to each other and orbit a teeny bit faster. After hundreds of millions of years, all those teeny bits added up, and the neutron stars were very close. So close that … BOOM! … they collided. And we witnessed it on Earth on August 17, 2017. Illustration of two merging neutron stars. The rippling space-time grid represents gravitational waves that travel out from the collision. Narrow beams show the burst of gamma rays that are shot out just seconds after the gravitational waves. The swirling clouds of material are ejected from the merging stars. National Science Foundation/LIGO/A. Simonnet (Sonoma State Univ.) A couple of very cool things happened in that collision, and we expect they happen in all such neutron-star collisions. Just before the neutron stars collided, the gravitational waves were strong enough and at just the right frequency that the National Science Foundation’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and European Gravitational Observatory’s Virgo could detect them. Just after the collision, those waves quickly faded out because there are no longer two things orbiting around each other! LIGO and Virgo are ground-based detectors waiting for gravitational waves to pass through their facilities on Earth. When it is active, it can detect them from almost anywhere in space. This illustration shows a snapshot of a gamma-ray burst caused by the merger of two neutron stars. Powerful jets (orange) emerge and plow into their surroundings, causing shock waves (pink). Just emerging at the center is the kilonova, the neutron-rich debris of the explosion (blue) powered by the decay of newly forged radioactive elements. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab The other thing that happened was what we call a gamma-ray burst. When they get very close, the neutron stars break apart and create a spectacular, but short, explosion. For a couple of seconds, our Fermi satellite saw gamma rays from that explosion. Fermi’s Gamma-ray Burst Monitor is one of our eyes on the sky, looking out for such bursts of gamma rays that scientists want to catch as soon as they’re happening. And those gamma rays came just 1.7 seconds after the gravitational wave signal. The galaxy this occurred in is 130 million light-years away, so the light and gravitational waves were traveling for 130 million years before we detected them. NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory imaged the kilonova produced by merging neutron stars in the galaxy NGC 4993 (box) on Aug. 18, 2017, about 15 hours after gravitational waves and the gamma-ray burst were detected. Inset: Magnified views of the galaxy. NASA/Swift After that initial burst of gamma rays, the debris from the explosion continued to glow, fading as it expanded outward. Our Swift, Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer telescopes, along with a number of ground-based observatories, were poised to look at this afterglow from the explosion in ultraviolet, optical, X-ray, and infrared light. Such coordination between satellites is something that we’ve been doing with our international partners for decades, so we catch events like this one as quickly as possible and in as many wavelengths as possible. The kilonova associated with GW170817 (box) was observed by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. Hubble detected optical and infrared light from the hot expanding debris. Nine days later, Chandra detected the X-ray afterglow emitted by the jet directed toward Earth after it had spread into our line of sight. NASA/CXC/E. Troja Astronomers have thought that neutron star mergers were the cause of one type of gamma-ray burst — a short gamma-ray burst, like the one they observed on August 17. It wasn’t until we could combine the data from our satellites with the information from LIGO/Virgo that we could confirm this directly. This animation captures phenomena observed over the course of nine days following the neutron star merger known as GW170817, detected on Aug. 17, 2017. They include gravitational waves (pale arcs), a near-light-speed jet that produced gamma rays (magenta), expanding debris from a kilonova that produced ultraviolet (violet), optical and infrared (blue-white to red) emission, and, once the jet directed toward us expanded into our view from Earth, X-rays (blue). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab That event began a new chapter in astronomy. For centuries, light was the only way we could learn about our universe. Now, we’ve opened up a whole new window into the study of neutron stars and black holes. This means we can see things we could not detect before. On Aug. 17, gravitational waves from merging neutron stars reached Earth. Just 1.7 seconds after that, NASA’s Fermi saw a gamma-ray burst from the same event. Now that astronomers can combined what we can “see” (light) and what we can “hear” (gravitational waves) from the same event, our ability to understand these extreme cosmic phenomena is greatly enhanced. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center The first LIGO detection was of a pair of merging black holes. Mergers like that may be happening as often as once a month across the universe, but they do not produce much light because there’s little to nothing left around the black hole to emit light. In that case, gravitational waves were the only way to detect the merger. The neutron star merger, though, has plenty of material to emit light. By combining different kinds of light with gravitational waves, we are learning how matter behaves in the most extreme environments. We are learning more about how the gravitational wave information fits with what we already know from light — and in the process we’re solving some long-standing mysteries! Share Details Last Updated Feb 05, 2024 Related Terms Astrophysics Black Holes Chandra X-Ray Observatory Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Gravitational Waves Hubble Space Telescope Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory Neutron Stars Spitzer Space Telescope Stars Supernovae The Universe Virgo Gravitational Wave Interferometer (Virgo) Explore More 3 min read What’s Made in a Thunderstorm and Faster Than Lightning? Gamma Rays! Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has spotted gamma rays coming from thunderstorms. Article 53 mins ago 2 min read UNITE All-Nighter Delights Amateur Astronomers Article 3 days ago 2 min read Hubble Views a Dim but Distinct Galaxy Article 3 days ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Dark Matter & Dark Energy The Big Bang Galaxies Stars View the full article

Official portrait of Joseph Pelfrey, director, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.NASA NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Monday named Joseph Pelfrey director of the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, effective immediately. Pelfrey has served as acting center director since July 2023. “Joseph is a respected leader who shares the passion for innovation and exploration at NASA Marshall. As center director, he will lead the entire Marshall workforce, which includes a world-renowned team of scientists, engineers, and technologists who have a hand in nearly every NASA mission,” said Nelson. “I am confident that under Joseph’s leadership, Marshall will continue to make critical advancements supporting Artemis and Moon to Mars that will benefit all humanity.” NASA Marshall is one of the agency’s largest field centers, and manages NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where some of the largest elements of the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft for the Artemis campaign are manufactured. The center also is responsible for the oversight and execution of an approximately $5 billion portfolio comprised of human spaceflight, science, and technology development efforts. Its workforce consists of nearly 7,000 employees, both civil servants and contractors. “Marshall is renowned for its expertise in exploration and scientific discovery, and I am honored and humbled to be chosen to lead the center into the future,” said Pelfrey. “We will continue to shape the future of human space exploration by leading SLS and human landing system development for Artemis and leveraging our capabilities to make critical advancements in human landing and cargo systems, habitation and transportation systems, advanced manufacturing, mission operations, and cutting-edge science and technology missions.” Prior to joining NASA, Pelfrey worked in industry, supporting development of space station payload hardware. He began his NASA career as an aerospace engineer in the Science and Mission Systems Office, going on to serve in various leadership roles within the International Space Station Program, the Marshall Engineering Directorate and the SLS Spacecraft/Payload Integration and Evolution Office. He also served as manager for the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Project at Marshall and the Exploration and Space Transportation Development Office in the Flight Programs and Partnerships Office. Appointed to the Senior Executive Service in 2016, Pelfrey served as the associate director for operations in Engineering, later becoming deputy manager and subsequently manager for Marshall’s Human Exploration Development and Operations Office. He was appointed as Marshall’s deputy center director in April 2022. Pelfrey received a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Auburn University in 2000. Learn more about Pelfrey in his biography online at: https://www.nasa.gov/people/joseph-pelfrey/ -end- Faith McKie / Cheryl Warner Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1600 faith.d.mckie@nasa.gov / cheryl.m.warner@nasa.gov Lance Davis Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. 256-640-9065 lance.d.davis@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Feb 05, 2024 LocationNASA Headquarters Related TermsMarshall Space Flight CenterPeople of NASA View the full article

The 2024 National Science Bowl regional competition hosted by JPL included 21 schools, with this team from Irvine’s University High School taking first place. From left, coach David Knight, Feodor Yevtushenko, Yufei Chen, Nathan Ouyang, Wendy Cao, and Julianne Wu.NASA/JPL-Caltech After months of preparation, more than 100 students competed at the fast-paced annual academic competition hosted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. For the second year in a row, a team from Irvine’s University High School claimed victory at a regional competition of the National Science Bowl, hosted Saturday, Feb. 3, by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. More than 100 students from 21 schools in Los Angeles and Orange counties competed in the academic challenge, which marked JPL’s 32nd year as host. Fullerton’s Troy High won second place, and Arcadia High placed third. Teams from University High have triumphed at the event several times in recent years. The school also won this year’s regional Ocean Sciences Bowl, hosted last month by JPL. In National Science Bowl competitions, students have mere seconds to answer multiple-choice questions on topics including biology, chemistry, Earth science, physics, energy, and math. Four students and one alternate compose each team, with a teacher serving as coach. Student teams spend months preparing, both studying and practicing their technique with the bowl’s “Jeopardy!”-style buzzers. Dozens of volunteers from JPL help make sure the contest runs smoothly. It all comes down to a surprisingly intense event. “There’s so much energy, it’s a thrill to watch,” said JPL Public Services Office manager Kim Lievense, who’s been coordinating the competition for the lab since 1993. “I just love seeing the students’ concentration and commitment, and knowing how rewarding it is for volunteers as well.” University High is now eligible to compete against winners from dozens of other regional competitions across the country at the national finals tournament, held in Washington April 25-29. Run by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the National Science Bowl is one of the nation’s largest academic science competitions. More than 344,000 students have participated since the competition began in 1991. News Media Contacts Melissa Pamer Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-314-4928 melissa.pamer@jpl.nasa.gov 2024-011 Share Details Last Updated Feb 05, 2024 Related TermsSTEM Engagement at NASAJet Propulsion Laboratory Explore More 6 min read NASA Puts Next-Gen Exoplanet-Imaging Technology to the Test Article 5 days ago 6 min read Poised for Science: NASA’s Europa Clipper Instruments Are All Aboard Article 6 days ago 5 min read NASA Collaborating on European-led Gravitational Wave Observatory in Space The first space-based observatory designed to detect gravitational waves has passed a major review and… Article 2 weeks ago View the full article

5 Min Read NASA’s Laser Navigation Tech Enables Commercial Lunar Exploration Navigation Doppler Lidar is a guidance system that uses laser pulses to precisely measure velocity and distance. NASA will demonstrate NDL’s capabilities in the lunar environment during the IM-1 mission. Credits: NASA / David C. Bowman Later this month, NASA’s commercial lunar delivery services provider Intuitive Machines will launch its Nova-C lunar lander carrying several NASA science and technology payloads, including the Navigation Doppler Lidar (NDL). This innovative guidance system, developed by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, under the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), can potentially revolutionize landing spacecraft on extraterrestrial worlds. The NDL technology is a NASA payload for this Intuitive Machines Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) delivery, meaning NASA will demonstrate NDL’s capabilities in the lunar environment during the mission but the data is not considered mission-critical for the successful landing of Nova-C, as Intuitive Machines has its own navigation and landing systems. The Artemis mission will take humans back to the Moon and Navigation Doppler Lidar will ensure a safe landing for everyone onboard. NDL Chief Engineer Glenn Hines explains how lasers will relieve astronauts of some of the burdens of making safe, precise landings on the Moon. The NDL story started almost 20 years ago when Dr. Farzin Amzajerdian, NDL project manager at NASA Langley, made a breakthrough and successfully found a precise way to land rovers on Mars. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, several attempts at landing rovers on the surface of Mars were met with several significant challenges. Radar was inherently imprecise for this application. Radio waves cover a large area on the ground, meaning smaller craters and boulders that are commonly found on the Martian surface could ‘hide’ from detection and cause unexpected hazards for landers. “The landers needed the radar sensor to tell them how far they were off the ground and how fast they were moving so they could time their parachute deployment,” said Amzajerdian. “Too early or too late, the lander would miss its target or crash into the surface.” Radio waves also couldn’t measure velocity and range independently of one another, which is important, according to Aram Gragossian, electro-optics lead for NDL at NASA Langley, who joined the team about six years ago. “If you go over a steep slope, the range changes very quickly, but that doesn’t mean your velocity has changed,” he said. “So if you just feed that information back to your system, it may cause catastrophic reactions.” Amzajerdian knew about this problem, and he knew how to fix it. “Why not use a lidar instead of a radar?” he asked. LiDAR, which stands for light detection and ranging, is a technology that uses visible or infrared light the same way radar uses radio waves. Lidar sends laser pulses to a target, which reflects some of that light back onto a detector. As the instrument moves in relation to its target, the change in frequency of the returning signal – also known as the Doppler effect – allows the lidar to measure velocity directly and precisely. Distance is measured based on the travel time of the light to the target and back. Lidar offered several advantages over radar, notably the fact that a laser transmits a pencil beam of light that can give a more precise and accurate measurement. In 2004, Amzajerdian proposed NDL as a concept to the Mars Science Laboratory team. In 2005, he and his team received funding from Langley to put together a proof of concept. Then, in 2007, they received funding for building and testing a prototype of a helicopter. This is when Langley’s Dr. Glenn Hines joined NDL — first as electronic lead and now as chief engineer. Since then, Amzajerdian, Hines, and numerous other team members have worked tirelessly to ensure NDL’s success. Hines credits the various NASA personnel who have continued to advocate for NDL. “In almost everything in life, you’ve got to have a champion,” Hines said, “somebody in your corner saying, ‘Look, what you’re doing is good. This has credibility.’ ” The Intuitive Machines delivery is just the beginning of the NDL story; a next-generation system is already in the works. The team has developed a companion sensor to NDL, a multi-functional Flash Lidar camera. Flash Lidar is a 3D camera technology that surveys the surrounding terrain — even in complete darkness. When combined with NDL, Flash Lidar will allow you to go “anywhere, anytime.” Other future versions of NDL could have uses outside the tricky business of landing on extraterrestrial surfaces. In fact, they may have uses in a very terrestrial setting, like helping self-driving cars navigate local streets and highways. Looking at the history and trajectory of NDL, one thing is certain: The initial journey to the Moon will be the culmination of decades of hard work, perseverance, determination, and a steadfast belief in the project across the team, but held most fervently by NDL’s champions, Amzajerdian and Hines. NDL was NASA’s Invention of the Year in 2022. Four programs within STMD contributed to NDL’s development: Flight Opportunities, Technology Transfer, Small Business Innovation Research & Small Business Technology Transfer, and Game Changing Development. NASA is working with multiple CLPS vendors to establish a regular cadence of payload deliveries to the Moon to perform experiments, test technologies, and demonstrate capabilities to help NASA explore the lunar surface. Payloads delivered through CLPS will help NASA advance capabilities for science, technology, and exploration on the Moon. Simone Williams NASA Langley Research Center Explore More 4 min read Tiny NASA Cameras to Picture Interaction Between Lander, Moon’s Surface Article 3 days ago 5 min read NASA to Study Effects of Radio Noise on Lunar Science Article 4 days ago 1 min read Intuitive Machines IM-1 Mission Article 5 days ago Share Details Last Updated Feb 05, 2024 Related TermsGeneralCommercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS)Langley Research Center View the full article

Prelaunch News Conference for NASA Mission Studying Earth's Atmosphere and Oceans (Feb. 5, 2024)

Science Briefing on NASA Mission Studying Earth's Atmosphere and Oceans (Feb. 4, 2024)

A Commercial Resupply Mission to the Space Station on This Week @NASA – February 2, 2024

4 Min Read The Iconic Photos from STS-41B: Documenting the First Untethered Spacewalk Astronaut Bruce McCandless II, STS-41B mission specialist, reaches his maximum distance from space shuttle Challenger before returning to the spacecraft using the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU). Credits: NASA As astronaut Bruce McCandless II flew the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) out of the space shuttle Challenger’s payload bay for the first time on February 7, 1984, many in the agency were fearful about the use of a self-propelled and untethered backpack in space. (Previous spacewalkers remained connected to the vehicle with tethers. This jet-pack allowed crews to move outside of the cargo bay and perform activities away from the safety of the spacecraft.) He remembered trying to ease the tension for his wife and the flight controllers in Mission Control, saying something similar to Neil Armstrong’s declaration as he first stepped on the Moon in 1969. “It may have been one small step for Neil,” he proclaimed, “but it’s a heck of a big leap for me.” It may have been one small step for Neil, but it’s a heck of a big leap for me. Bruce McCandless II NASA Astronaut The crew of STS-41B take an informal portrait on the mid-deck of the Earth-orbiting Challenger. Counter clockwise from the top right are astronauts Vance D. Brand commander; Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson, pilot; and Dr. Ronald E. McNair, Bruce McCandless II, and Robert L. Stewart, all mission specialists.NASA The MMU was the highlight of the STS-41B mission as demonstrated by the stunning mission photographs that graced the cover of Aviation Week & Space Technology, not once, not twice, but three times. “Hoot” Gibson, the flight’s pilot, shot the photograph featured on the February 20, 1984, issue of the magazine from the crew cabin. Gibson remembered he was the only one on the crew that “had absolutely nothing to do” as McCandless made his way out into space, so he picked up a Hasselblad camera and began documenting the events. When he first looked through the camera’s viewfinder, he could not believe what an incredible sight it was to see McCandless untethered, floating above the Earth. Gibson wanted to capture what he was seeing and remembered how meticulous he was. For each photograph he took three light meter readings and checked the focus four times. In the crew’s photography training he learned that an off-kilter horizon looked wrong and was not pleasing to the eye. That presented a slight problem because Challenger was at a 28.5-degree inclination, so he “tilted the camera to put the horizon level in the pictures.” Astronaut Bruce McCandless II is a few meters away from the cabin of the Earth-orbiting space shuttle Challenger in this iconic photo taken by Hoot Gibson, which was featured on the February 20, 1984 issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology.NASA The result was one of NASA’s most iconic and requested images. McCandless called the photograph “beautiful, partly because the sun is shining directly on me.” His son, Bruce McCandless III, said his father “appears to be glowing.” Because the sun was in his eyes, he closed the helmet visor, which made it difficult to identify who exactly was inside the spacesuit. “My anonymity means people can imagine themselves doing the same thing,” he said. And, he added, “at visitor centres [sic], they often have life-sized cardboard versions with the visor cut out, so people can peep through.” Perhaps more importantly, as expressed by United States Senator John McCain, the photo “inspired generations of Americans to believe that there is no limit to the human potential.” A second, but less recognized image, appeared on the cover of Aviation Week & Space Technology the following week: February 27, 1984. Also taken by Gibson, the image featured McCandless on the Manipulator Foot Restraint or “cherry picker” device at end of the Remote Manipulator System (RMS). The restraint was a platform where spacewalkers could work outside the vehicle but remain anchored at the end of the RMS to repair a satellite or other activities. STS-41B marked the first test of the new apparatus. Gibson explained how he chose to capture McCandless on the device. “What I did was I shifted the camera so that he wasn’t right in the center of the picture. I put him on the edge and the orbiter’s rudder on the other edge of the picture. That made a really cool photo.” The feet of Bruce McCandless II are anchored in the Mobile Foot Restraint (MFR) and moved around by the Remote Manipulator System (RMS). The aft portion of the Challenger, to which the RMS is connected, is seen in lower left corner.NASA A third image from the mission appeared on the March 12, 1984, cover of the magazine. The photograph, taken by a fixed camera on McCandless’s helmet, captured Challenger in its entirety, which included the payload bay with the Shuttle Pallet Satellite and a glimpse of astronaut Robert Stewart standing just beneath the spacecraft’s RMS. This photo of Challenger was the third from the STS-41B mission to be featured on the cover of Aviation Week & Space Technology.NASA These photographs from STS-41B, from the tenth flight of the space shuttle, illustrate just how engaging and exciting shuttle missions were. While flying in space became more routine in the 1980s, no one, not even the crew, “appreciated how spectacular” the first MMU flight “was going to be.” The STS-41B photos demonstrated that human spaceflight remained just as captivating, breathtaking, and inspiring as it had always been. See more photos from the STS-41B mission Learn about the MMU Read Hoot Gibson's oral history interviews About the AuthorJennifer Ross-NazzalNASA Human Spaceflight HistorianJennifer Ross-Nazzal is the NASA Human Spaceflight Historian. She is the author of Winning the West for Women: The Life of Suffragist Emma Smith DeVoe and Making Space for Women: Stories from Trailblazing Women of NASA's Johnson Space Center. Share Details Last Updated Feb 02, 2024 Related TermsNASA HistoryBruce McCandlessHumans in SpaceRobert L. GibsonSTS-41B Explore More 10 min read Astronaut Still Photography During Apollo Article 17 years ago 1 min read Astronaut Bruce McCandless Tests New Technology on Historic Spacewalk Article 11 months ago 9 min read Spacelab 1: A Model for International Cooperation Article 2 months ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Humans In Space NASA History Space Shuttle Collier Trophy Awards to the NACA and NASA View the full article

Launch of Mission to Study Earth's Atmosphere and Oceans (Official NASA Broadcast)

3 min read Meet the Creators, Part 3: NASA’s 2024 Total Solar Eclipse Posters A total solar eclipse is a captivating experience – evoking feelings of awe and wonder that are sometimes best expressed through art. Inspired by the upcoming total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024, artists Tyler Nordgren and Kristen Perrin have designed two posters for NASA that present the magic of the eclipse in unique ways. Tyler Nordgren Download the poster here. NASA/Tyler Nordgren In “The Sun and Moon Align with You” poster for NASA, Nordgren – who is a professional astronomer as well as an artist – said that his goal was to capture the experience that can be had by millions of people in cities across the United States in April, while reflecting on the last total solar eclipse that crossed the country in August 2017. “For 2017, the total solar eclipse passed over so many national parks and natural landscapes with very few cities in the path. So I created a poster modeled after the 1930s ‘See America’ national parks posters produced by the Works Progress Administration to educate Americans about the parks. I figured I was doing the same thing. Now, seven years later in 2024, this time the total solar eclipse is passing over major metropolitan areas. Over 30 million people will be living directly in the path of totality – that’s almost three times the total in 2017. So I wanted to make a poster that emphasized what it would be like to see it in one of these cities. “The poster shows a figure standing before a representative skyline where I used elements of different cities (like certain buildings and bridges) all across the path of totality. Along the underpass that sweeps overhead of our central figure are the names of major cities from every state along totality. It truly is stunning how many people in so many cities will get to see this. “Think about being in a sports or concert stadium when the crowd erupts in joy all at once. Now imagine, not just a stadium, but every single person in an entire city all at once at the instant the Sun goes black. This will be a day people will remember and talk about with awe for the rest of their lives. I hope I captured some small part of that.” Kristen Perrin Download the poster here. NASA/Kristen Perrin For her “Through the Eyes of NASA” poster, Perrin – who is an African American woman, mother of four, and the Senior Multimedia and Graphic Specialist on the NASA Heliophysics communications team – said she wanted to show that the eclipse is an experience for everyone. “Designing the poster to commemorate the total solar eclipse happening on April 8 was an honor. I wanted to highlight the event using people that represented all demographics. This was done so that the eclipse could be recognized as an event for ALL. Using the spherical elements to represent the Moon and some of the planets within our solar system encouraged the overall visual to help the audience see where the eclipse takes place and understand, by the coloring, what would happen. The look of the skyline from the audience point of view was also designed to resemble an eye. This visual honed in on the tagline ‘Through the eyes of NASA’.” To learn more about these artists and other eclipse posters they’ve created, read Meet the Creators of NASA’s Newest Eclipse Art. by Vanessa Thomas NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Share Details Last Updated Feb 02, 2024 Related Terms 2024 Solar Eclipse Eclipses Skywatching Solar Eclipses Explore More 2 min read February’s Night Sky Notes: Constant Companions: Circumpolar Constellations, Part I Some constellations can be as familiar as old friends. Learn about three of them in… Article 1 day ago 5 min read How the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse Is Different than the 2017 Eclipse Article 3 days ago 3 min read Landing On Mars: A Tricky Feat! Why is landing on Mars so difficult? Learn more about the challenges with a special… Article 1 week ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics Helio Big Year 2024 Total Eclipse Shadow Notes Eclipses View the full article

NASA astronauts and Expedition 70 Flight Engineers Jasmin Moghbeli, left, and Loral O’Hara in the Destiny laboratory celebrate the successful docking of a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station. NASA Students from California and Massachusetts will have separate opportunities next week to hear from NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The two Earth-to-space calls will air live Monday, Feb. 5, and Friday, Feb. 9, on NASA+ and agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media. At 12:15 p.m. EST Feb. 5, NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara and Jasmin Moghbeli will answer prerecorded questions from students at Emblem Academy in Santa Clarita, California, a public transitional kindergarten through sixth-grade school. In preparation for the event, students and their families will participate in an engineering family night where they will participate in STEM design challenges related to the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics conducted on the space station. Coverage on NASA+ will be live at: https://go.nasa.gov/4bj0k5Q Media interested in covering the event must RSVP no later than 5 p.m. Friday, Feb. 2, to Katie Demsher at kdemsher@saugususd.org or 661-294-5315. At 10:40 a.m. Feb. 9, O’Hara and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen will answer prerecorded questions from students at Central Tree Middle, part of the Wachusett Regional School District in Massachusetts. The day of the event, 13 schools from five cities will watch live from their classrooms. Coverage on NASA+ will be live at: https://go.nasa.gov/42uPAxm Media interested in covering the event must RSVP no later than 5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 8, to Dave Cornacchioli at david_cornacchioli@wrsd.net or 508-886-0073. For more than 23 years, astronauts have continuously lived and worked aboard the space station, testing technologies, performing science, and developing the skills needed to explore farther from Earth. Astronauts living in space aboard the orbiting laboratory communicate with NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston 24 hours a day through the Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Near Space Network. Important research and technology investigations taking place aboard the International Space Station benefits people on Earth and lays the groundwork for future exploration. As part of Artemis, NASA will send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future human exploration of Mars. Inspiring the next generation of explorers – the Artemis Generation – ensures America will continue to lead in space exploration and discovery. See videos and lesson plans highlighting research on the space station at: https://www.nasa.gov/stemonstation -end- Katherine Brown Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1288 katherine.m.brown@nasa.gov Sandra Jones Johnson Space Center, Houston 281-483-5111 sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Feb 02, 2024 LocationNASA Headquarters Related TermsHumans in SpaceAstronautsInternational Space Station (ISS)ISS ResearchJasmin MoghbeliJohnson Space CenterLoral O'HaraNASA Headquarters View the full article

The SpaceX Dragon Freedom spacecraft carrying the four-member Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) crew is pictured approaching the International Space Station 260 miles above China north of the Himalayas. NASA will provide live coverage of the undocking and departure of the Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) private astronaut flight from the International Space Station before the crew returns to Earth. The four-member astronaut crew is scheduled to undock no earlier than 6:05 a.m. EST Saturday, Feb. 3, from the space-facing port of the station’s Harmony module in a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to begin the journey home and splashdown off the coast of Florida. NASA will provide live coverage of space station joint operations with Axiom Space and SpaceX. Coverage of hatch-closure preparations will begin at 4 a.m. NASA coverage of undocking will resume at 5:45 a.m. Coverage will be available on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, YouTube, and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media. The four private astronauts, Michael López-Alegría, Walter Villadei, Marcus Wandt, and Alper Gezeravci, will complete about two weeks in space at the conclusion of their mission. The Axiom crew, along with Expedition 70, highlighted their stay aboard the space station during farewell remarks on Friday in advance of their undocking. Their SpaceX Dragon will return to Earth with more than 550 pounds of cargo, including NASA hardware and data from more than 30 different experiments the crew conducted during their mission. Splashdown is expected about 7 p.m. Ax-3, the third all-private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, successfully lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida Jan. 18. NASA’s undocking and departure coverage for Ax-3 is as follows (all times Eastern and subject to change based on operations): Saturday, Feb. 3 4 a.m. – NASA coverage begins for 4:15 a.m. hatch closure 5:45 a.m. – NASA coverage continues for 6:05 a.m. undocking NASA’s coverage ends approximately 30 minutes after undocking when space station joint operations with Axiom Space and SpaceX mission teams conclude. Axiom Space will resume coverage of Dragon’s re-entry and splashdown on the company’s website. The Ax-3 mission is part of NASA’s effort to foster a commercial market in low Earth orbit and continue a new era of space exploration that enables more people and organizations to fly multiple mission objectives. This partnership expands the arc of human spaceflight and opens access to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station to more people, science, and commercial opportunities. Learn more about how NASA is supporting a space economy in low Earth orbit: https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/commercial-space/ -end- Julian Coltre Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1100 julian.n.coltre@nasa.gov Rebecca Turkington Johnson Space Center, Houston 281-483-5111 rebecca.turkington@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Feb 02, 2024 LocationNASA Headquarters Related TermsInternational Space Station (ISS)Commercial CrewCommercial SpaceHumans in SpaceISS ResearchLow-Earth Orbit Economy View the full article

NASA and SpaceX technicians safely encapsulate NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) spacecraft in SpaceX’s Falcon 9 payload fairings on Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2024, at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Photo Credit: NASA Goddard/Denny Henry NASA is hosting virtual activities ahead of the launch of the PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) mission and invites you to share in the fun. The PACE mission will help us better understand how the ocean and atmosphere exchange carbon dioxide, measure key atmospheric variables associated with air quality and Earth’s climate, and monitor ocean health, in part by studying phytoplankton, tiny plants and algae that sustain the marine food web. PACE will extend and expand NASA’s long-term observations of our living planet. By doing so, it will take Earth’s pulse in new ways for decades to come. NASA’s PACE is scheduled to launch no earlier than 1:33 a.m. EST, Tuesday, Feb. 6, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Members of the public can register to attend the launch virtually. As a virtual guest, you have access to curated resources, schedule changes, and mission-specific information delivered straight to your inbox. Following each activity, virtual guests will receive a commemorative stamp for their virtual guest passport. Live launch coverage will begin at 12:45 a.m., Feb. 6, on NASA+, NASA Television, and the agency’s website. For more information about the PACE mission, visit: https://pace.oceansciences.org/. View the full article

2 min read UNITE All-Nighter Delights Amateur Astronomers Fadi Saibi and his daughter Sophie, age 14, pose for a photograph with their Unistellar telescope in their backyard in Sunnyvale, Calif., on Thursday, Jan. 11, 2024. Credit: Bay Area News Group/Nhat V. Meye Maybe you read about them in the papers–amateur astronomers in Japan, Russia, France, Finland, and the United States have been pulling all-nighters to spot extraordinary exoplanets, planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. NASA’s UNITE project holds these planetary stakeouts several times every month, and you can join in! This October, the UNITE team undertook a 20-hour marathon as part of tracking a Saturn-sized planet called TOI-4600 c. They watched and waited, trying to see the planet’s star dim by about 1% as the planet passed in front of it. Success would tell us that the planet takes a little more than one Earth year to orbit its star. It would place this planet on a short list of gas-giant planets known outside our own solar system that have sizes and temperatures similar to those of Saturn and Jupiter. Such planets are key laboratories for studying how our solar system was formed, so each new example is precious. In mid-January, the UNITE team coordinated observations across Europe to catch the third-ever star-crossing event for a different planet. (The third one seen by humans, that is!) Once the team does catch it, they’ll know if it takes three Earth years to orbits its star, which would make it fairly cold planet, or something closer to 100 Earth days, telling us that the planet is relatively warm. The final results of these observations remain closely-guarded secrets, but they will soon be released in an astronomy journal articles. The Unistellar Network Investigating TESS Exoplanets (UNITE) project is a global team of volunteer telescope observers tracking down rare worlds in distant solar systems. Visit science.unistellaroptics.com and you can be part of the next UNITE discovery! Share Details Last Updated Feb 02, 2024 Related Terms Astrophysics Citizen Science Uncategorized View the full article

On Feb. 3, 1994, space shuttle Discovery took off on its 18th flight, STS-60. Its six-person crew of Commander Charles F. Bolden, Pilot Kenneth S. Reightler, and Mission Specialists N. Jan Davis, Ronald M. Sega, Franklin R. Chang-Díaz, who served as payload commander, and Sergei K. Krikalev of the Russian Space Agency, now Roscosmos, flew the first mission of the Shuttle-Mir Program. Other objectives of the mission included the first flight of the Wake Shield Facility, a free-flying satellite using the ultra-vacuum of space to generate semi-conductor films for advanced electronics and the second flight of a Spacehab commercially developed pressurized module to enable multidisciplinary research and technology demonstrations. The eight-day mission marked an important step forward in international cooperation and the commercial development of space. Left: The STS-60 crew patch. Middle: The STS-60 crew of (clockwise from bottom left) Pilot Kenneth S. Reightler, Mission Specialists Franklin R. Chang-Díaz, Ronald M. Sega, Sergei K. Krikalev representing the Russian Space Agency, now Roscosmos, and N. Jan Davis, and Commander Charles F. Bolden. Right: The patch for the Phase 1 Shuttle-Mir program. In Oct. 1992, NASA announced Bolden, Reightler, Davis, Sega, and Chang-Díaz as the STS-60 crew. For Bolden and Chang-Díaz, STS-60 represented their fourth trips into space; for Bolden the second as commander. Reightler and Davis each had completed one previous spaceflight, with Sega as the sole rookie on the crew. The announcement noted that one of two RSA cosmonauts already in training at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston would join the crew at a later date. In early April 1993, NASA designated Krikalev, a veteran of two long-duration missions aboard the Mir space station, as the prime international crew member, with Vladimir G. Titov named as his backup. The now six-person crew trained extensively for the next nine months for the history-making flight. Left: Space shuttle Discovery departs the Vehicle Assembly Building on its way to Launch Pad 39A. Middle: The STS-60 crew departs crew quarters for Launch Pad 39A. Right: Liftoff of space shuttle Discovery to begin the STS-60 mission. Discovery landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida after its previous mission, STS-51, on Sept. 22, 1993, where workers towed it to the Orbiter Processing Facility to refurbish it for STS-60. They towed it to the Vehicle Assembly Building on Jan. 4, 1994, for mating with its external tank and twin solid rocket boosters, and rolled the completed stack to Launch Pad 39A six days later. The astronauts participated in the Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test, a rehearsal for the actual countdown, on Jan. 14. Senior managers held the Flight Readiness Review on Jan. 22 to confirm the Feb. 3 launch date. Engineers began the countdown for launch on Jan. 31. Liftoff occurred on schedule at 7:10 a.m. EST on Feb. 3, and Discovery and its six-person crew flew up the U.S. East Coast to achieve a 57-degree inclination orbit. Left: Discovery’s payload bay, showing the Spacehab module including the externally mounted Sample Return Experiment, and the Canadian-built Remote Manipulator System. Middle: Astronauts N. Jan Davis, left, and Franklin R. Chang-Díaz open the hatch to the Spacehab module. Right: Ronald M. Sega monitors Sergei K. Krikalev as he performs a neurosensory investigation. Once in orbit, the astronauts opened Discovery’s payload bay doors to begin their activities. Chang-Díaz and Davis opened the hatches to the Spacehab, accessed from the middeck through the airlock and a connecting tunnel, and activated the module’s systems. They began activating some of the 12 experiments in the Spacehab, primarily focused on biotechnology and materials processing. In the middeck, Reightler, Davis, Sega, and Krikalev performed the first session of the joint neurovestibular experiment, which they repeated five more times during the mission. The astronauts also began activating some of the experiments in the shuttle’s middeck. Left: Charles F. Bolden prepares to take a blood sample from Franklin R. Chang-Díaz for the metabolic experiment. Middle: Kenneth S. Reightler processes blood samples in the centrifuge. Right: Reightler places the processed blood samples in the GN2 freezer. The astronauts began the joint metabolic experiment to investigate biochemical responses to weightlessness on flight day 2. With Bolden and Chang-Díaz serving as phlebotomists, they and Reightler participated as subjects for this study that involved drawing blood samples, spinning them in a centrifuge, and placing them in gaseous nitrogen freezers for return to Earth for analysis. Left: The Wake Shield Facility (WSF) deployed at the end of the Canadian-built Remote Manipulator System, with the aurora in the background. Middle: The WSF at the end of the RMS. Right: The robotic arm about to stow the Wake Shield Facility. Operations with the wake shield began in flight day three. Davis grappled the WSF (Wake Shield Facility) with the shuttle’s Canadian-built remote manipulator system, or robotic arm, lifting it out of the payload bay, placing it in the “ram clearing” attitude to have atomic oxygen present in low Earth orbit cleanse it of contaminants that could hamper the purity of any produced samples. Plans called for Davis to then release the facility for its two days of free flight. During this process, the astronauts and Mission Control could not properly assess the satellite’s configuration, and troubleshooting efforts led to loss of communications with it. Mission Control instructed the astronauts to berth the facility overnight as ground teams assessed the problem. Engineers traced the problem to a radio frequency interference issue missed due to inadequate preflight testing. The next morning, Davis once again picked up the facility with the robotic arm. The communications issue recurred, but a reboot of the facility’s computer appeared to fix that problem. However, problems cropped up with the satellite’s navigation system, precluding its deployment. All operations and manufacturing occurred with the WSF remaining attached to the robotic arm. Despite this, the facility demonstrated its capabilities by producing five semiconductor films of good quality before Davis berthed it back in the payload bay on flight day seven. Left: N. Jan Davis takes a peripheral venous pressure measurement on Charles F. Bolden. Middle: Davis operates a fluid processing apparatus, one of the experiments in the Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus. Right: Bolden operates the Organic Separation experiment. Meanwhile, the astronauts continued with experiments in the middeck and the Spacehab. Another joint investigation called for the measurement of peripheral venous blood pressure. The Spacehab module contained 12 experiments in the fields of biotechnology, materials processing, and microacceleration environment measurement. A thirteenth experiment mounted on the module’s exterior collected cosmic dust particles on aerogel capture cells. Left: Ronald M. Sega operates the liquid phase sintering experiment. Middle left: Franklin R. Chang-Díaz operates the Space Experiment Furnace. Middle right: The Stirling Orbiter Refrigerator/Freezer technology demonstration. Right: The STS-60 crew enjoys ice cream stored in the freezer. A technology demonstration on STS-60 involved the test flight of a Stirling Orbiter Refrigerator/Freezer. Planned for use on future missions to store biological samples, on STS-60 the astronauts tested the unit’s ability to chill water containers and provided the crew with a rare treat in space: real ice cream. Left: In the Mission Control Center, President William J. “Bill” Clinton chats with the STS-60 crew during his visit to NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Right: The Mir crew and the STS-60 crew talk with each other through the communications link established during the ABC program Good Morning America. On the astronauts’ fifth day in orbit, President William J. “Bill” Clinton visited Johnson and stopped in the Mission Control Center to talk with them. NASA Administrator Daniel S. Golden and Johnson Director Carolyn L. Huntoon accompanied the President on his tour. President Clinton praised the crew, saying, “I think this is the first step in what will become the norm in global cooperation. And when we get this space station finished…it’s going to be a force for peace and progress that will be truly historic, and you will have played a major role in that.” The following day, the ABC program Good Morning America set up a communications link between Bolden, Davis, and Krikalev aboard Discovery and the three cosmonauts aboard the Mir space station. The two crews chatted with each other and answered reporters’ questions. A selection of STS-60 Earth observation photographs of North American cities. Left: Los Angeles. Middle left: Chicago. Middle right: Montréal. Right: New York City. Every space mission includes astronaut Earth photography, and the 57-degree inclination of STS-60 enabled this crew to image areas on the planet not usually visible to astronauts. Many of the images included spectacular views of snow-covered landscapes in the northern hemisphere winter. Left: Deployment of one of the six spheres of the Orbital Debris Radar Calibration Spheres experiment. Middle: The six spheres fly away from the shuttle. Right: Deployment of the University of Bremen satellite. Once the astronauts had stowed the WSF on flight day seven, they could proceed to the deployment of two payloads. The first called Orbital Debris Radar Calibration Spheres consisted of deploying six metal spheres of three different sizes from Discovery’s payload bay. Ground-based radars and optical telescopes observed and tracked the metal spheres to calibrate their instruments. The University of Bremen in Germany provided the second deployable payload. It measured various parameters of its in-orbit environment as well as its internal pressure and temperature as it burned up when it reentered Earth’s atmosphere. Left: The STS-60 crew members pose near the end of their successful mission. Right: Franklin R. Chang-Díaz, left, and N. Jan Davis close the hatch to the Spacehab module at the end of the mission. With most of the experiments completed by flight day eight, the astronauts busied themselves with tidying up the middeck and the Spacehab. Bolden and Reightler tested Discovery’s reaction control system thrusters and flight control surfaces in preparation for the deorbit, entry, and landing the following day. Left: Charles F. Bolden prepares to bring Discovery home. Right: Bolden makes a perfect touchdown at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to conclude STS-60. On the morning of Feb. 11, the mission’s final day in space, Chang-Díaz and Davis deactivated the Spacehab and closed the hatches to the module. The astronauts donned their launch and entry suits, but NASA delayed their deorbit burn by one orbit due to inclement weather at John F. Kennedy Space Center. Ninety minutes later, they fired the two Orbital Maneuvering System engines to bring them out of orbit and Bolden guided Discovery to a smooth landing at Kennedy, ending the STS-60 mission after 8 days, 7 hours, and 9 minutes, having circled the Earth 130 times. Enjoy the crew narrate a video about the STS-60 mission. Read Bolden’s and Sega‘s recollections of the STS-60 mission in their oral histories with Johnson’s History Office. Explore More 25 min read Honoring Black Astronauts During Black History Month 2024 Article 1 day ago 7 min read 40 Years Ago: President Reagan Directs NASA to Build a Space Station Article 1 week ago 3 min read NASA Glenn Established in Cleveland in 1941 Article 1 week ago View the full article

This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows ESO 185-IG013, a luminous blue compact galaxy (BCG). BCGs are nearby galaxies that show an intense burst of star formation. They are unusually blue in visible light, which sets them apart from other high-starburst galaxies that emit more infrared light. Astrophysicists study BCGs because they provide a relatively close-by equivalent for galaxies from the early universe. This means that BCGs can help scientists learn about galaxy formation and evolution that may have been happening billions of years ago. Hubble imaged ESO 185-IG013 in ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths to reveal details about its past. Hundreds of young star clusters, many of which are younger than 100 million years, populate the galaxy. A large number of star clusters are only 3.5 million years old – relative infants compared to the timescale of our universe. Scientists predict that many of these youngest clusters will not last, since young clusters can often perish after expelling too much of their gas. The large number of young star clusters indicates that this galaxy was part of a recent galaxy collision and merger. The perturbed structure of the galaxy, which likely occurred from the violent interactions of gas and dust during the collision, is another sign. The merger supplied the system with lots of fuel for star formation, which continues to take place today. ESO 185-IG013 also contains a tidal shell, the diffuse glow surrounding its bright center, which is a common signal of galaxy mergers. Scientists believe that in a galaxy merger, the smaller of the two interacting galaxies gets disrupted by the larger galaxy, losing most of its material. This releases the material, which then gets pulled in again by the gravity of the larger galaxy. The dense area where the material gets repositioned is called the shell, and it contains many star clusters. In addition to the shell, ESO 185-IG013 boasts a tail of gas in the northeast. All of the stars in the system have a combined mass more than 7 billion times that of our Sun. The system is located about 260 million light-years away. LEARN MORE: Hubble’s Cosmic Collisions Hubble Science: Galaxy Details and Mergers Hubble Science: Tracing the Growth of Galaxies Download this image Media Contact: Claire Andreoli NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD claire.andreoli@nasa.gov View the full article

4 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) Say cheese, Moon. We’re coming in for a close-up. As Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lander descends toward the Moon, four tiny NASA cameras will be trained on the lunar surface, collecting imagery of how the surface changes from interactions with the spacecraft’s engine plume. The Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies will help us to land larger payloads as we explore space. Olivia Tyrrell from the SCALPPS photogrammetry team explains how a small array of cameras will capture invaluable imagery during lunar descent and landing, and how that imagery can inform our future missions to the Moon and beyond. Developed at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS) is an array of cameras placed around the base of a lunar lander to collect imagery during and after descent. Using a technique called stereo photogrammetry, researchers at Langley will use the overlapping images from the version of SCALPSS on Nova-C — SCALPSS 1.0 — to produce a 3D view of the surface. These images of the Moon’s surface won’t just be a “gee-whiz” novelty. As trips to the Moon increase and the number of payloads touching down in proximity to one another grows, scientists and engineers need to be able to accurately predict the effects of landings. How much will the surface change? As a lander comes down, what happens to the lunar soil, or regolith, it ejects? With limited data collected during descent and landing to date, SCALPSS will be the first dedicated instrument to measure plume-surface interaction on the Moon in real time and help to answer these questions. “If we’re placing things – landers, habitats, etc. – near each other, we could be sand blasting what’s next to us, so that’s going to drive requirements on protecting those other assets on the surface, which could add mass, and that mass ripples through the architecture,” said Michelle Munk, principal investigator for SCALPSS and acting chief architect for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “It’s all part of an integrated engineering problem.” Under Artemis, NASA intends to collaborate with commercial and international partners to establish the first long-term presence on the Moon. On this Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative delivery, SCALPSS 1.0 is purely focused on how the lander alters the surface of the Moon during landing. It will begin capturing imagery from before the time the lander’s plume begins interacting with the surface until after the landing is complete. The final images will be gathered on a small onboard data storage unit before being sent to the lander for downlink back to Earth. The team will likely need at least a couple of months to process the images, verify the data, and generate the 3D digital elevation maps of the surface. The expected depression they reveal probably won’t be very deep — not this time, anyway. “Even if you look at the old Apollo images — and the Apollo crewed landers were larger than these new robotic landers — you have to look really closely to see where the erosion took place,” said Rob Maddock, SCALPSS project manager at Langley. “We’re anticipating something on the order of centimeters deep — maybe an inch. It really depends on the landing site and how deep the regolith is and where the bedrock is.” But this is a chance for researchers to see how well SCALPSS will work as the U.S. advances into a future where Human-Landing-Systems-class spacecraft will start making trips to the Moon. “Those are going to be much larger than even Apollo. Those are pretty large engines, and they could conceivably dig some good holes,” said Maddock. “So that’s what we’re doing. We’re collecting data we can use to validate the models that are predicting what will happen.” SCALPSS 1.1, which will feature two additional cameras, is scheduled to fly on another CLPS delivery — Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost — later this year. The extra cameras are optimized to take images at a higher altitude, prior to the expected onset of plume-surface interaction, and provide a more accurate before-and-after comparison. SCALPSS 1.0 was funded by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate through the NASA-Provided Lunar Payloads Program. The SCALPSS 1.1 project is funded by the Space Technology Mission Directorate’s Game Changing Development Program. NASA is working with several American companies to deliver science and technology to the lunar surface through the CLPS initiative. These companies, ranging in size, bid on delivering payloads for NASA. This includes everything from payload integration and operations, to launching from Earth and landing on the surface of the Moon. Joe Atkinson NASA Langley Research Center Explore More 5 min read NASA to Study Effects of Radio Noise on Lunar Science Article 1 day ago 1 min read Intuitive Machines IM-1 Mission Article 2 days ago 4 min read NASA Autonomous Flight Software Successfully Used in Air Taxi Stand-Ins Article 1 week ago Share Details Last Updated Feb 02, 2024 Related TermsCommercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS)Langley Research Center View the full article

2 min read Hubble Views a Dim but Distinct Galaxy Both visible and ultraviolet wavelengths of light comprise this Hubble Space Telescope image of the spiral galaxy UGC 11105. ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. J. Foley (UC Santa Cruz) This image of the softly luminous spiral galaxy UGC 11105 is from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It lies about 110 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Hercules. Astronomers have different ways of quantifying how bright celestial objects are. Apparent magnitude is one of those methods. It describes how bright an object appears to an observer on Earth, which is not the same thing as measuring how bright an object actually is; or its intrinsic brightness. Apparent magnitude depends heavily on an object’s proximity to Earth. To better understand how apparent magnitude works, consider streetlights; each lamppost is putting out the same amount of light, but the light that is closer to you is much brighter than one several blocks away. Although their intrinsic brightness is the same, their apparent brightness is different. UGC 11105 has an apparent magnitude, or brightness, of around 13.6 in the light our eyes are sensitive to, called visible or optical light. However, this image also holds ultraviolet data, allowing us to see wavelengths beyond those that the human eye can see. Because of its proximity and our perspective here on Earth, the Sun appears to be about 14 thousand trillion times brighter than UGC 11105, even though UGC 11105 is an entire galaxy. Hubble’s sensitivity and location above Earth’s light-distorting atmosphere allows the observatory to see extraordinarily dim objects in visible light, ultraviolet light, and a small portion of infrared light. Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA) Download this image Media Contact: Claire Andreoli NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD claire.andreoli@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Feb 02, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms Astrophysics Astrophysics Division Galaxies Goddard Space Flight Center Hubble Space Telescope Missions Spiral Galaxies The Universe Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Hubble Space Telescope Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe. Galaxies Stories Stars Stories James Webb Space Telescope Webb is the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It studies every phase in the… View the full article

2 min read Hubble Sees a Merged Galaxy This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the luminous blue compact galaxy called ESO 185-IG013. NASA, ESA, and R. Chandar (University of Toledo); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows ESO 185-IG013, a luminous blue compact galaxy (BCG). BCGs are nearby galaxies that show an intense burst of star formation. They are unusually blue in visible light, which sets them apart from other high-starburst galaxies that emit more infrared light. Astrophysicists study BCGs because they provide a relatively close-by equivalent for galaxies from the early universe. This means that BCGs can help scientists learn about galaxy formation and evolution that may have been happening billions of years ago. Hubble imaged ESO 185-IG013 in ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths to reveal details about its past. Hundreds of young star clusters, many of which are younger than 100 million years, populate the galaxy. A large number of star clusters are only 3.5 million years old – relative infants compared to the timescale of our universe. Scientists predict that many of these youngest clusters will not last, since young clusters can often perish after expelling too much of their gas. The large number of young star clusters indicates that this galaxy was part of a recent galaxy collision and merger. The perturbed structure of the galaxy, which likely occurred from the violent interactions of gas and dust during the collision, is another sign. The merger supplied the system with lots of fuel for star formation, which continues to take place today. ESO 185-IG013 also contains a tidal shell, the diffuse glow surrounding its bright center, which is a common signal of galaxy mergers. Scientists believe that in a galaxy merger, the smaller of the two interacting galaxies gets disrupted by the larger galaxy, losing most of its material. This releases the material, which then gets pulled in again by the gravity of the larger galaxy. The dense area where the material gets repositioned is called the shell, and it contains many star clusters. In addition to the shell, ESO 185-IG013 boasts a tail of gas in the northeast. All of the stars in the system have a combined mass more than 7 billion times that of our Sun. The system is located about 260 million light-years away. LEARN MORE: Hubble’s Cosmic Collisions Hubble Science: Galaxy Details and Mergers Hubble Science: Tracing the Growth of Galaxies Download this image Media Contact: Claire Andreoli NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD claire.andreoli@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Feb 01, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms Astrophysics Division Galaxies Goddard Space Flight Center Hubble Space Telescope Missions The Universe Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Hubble Space Telescope Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe. Galaxies Stories Stars Stories James Webb Space Telescope Webb is the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It studies every phase in the… View the full article

NASA/Danny Nowlin Clouds of white vapor pile up at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi during a full-duration, 500-second hot fire of an RS-25 certification engine Jan. 17, 2024. This test series is critical for future flights of NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket in support of the Artemis campaign. During the Jan. 17 test, operators followed a “test like you fly” approach, firing the engine for the same amount of time – almost eight-and-a-half minutes (500 seconds) – needed to launch SLS and at power levels ranging between 80% to 113%. Image Credit: NASA/Danny Nowlin View the full article

5 min read OpenET Moisture Measurement Tool is Proving Highly Accurate This is a false-color image, acquired December 26, 2018, with the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8, and shows flooded rice fields along the Sacramento and Feather Rivers. Inundated fields appear dark blue; vegetation is bright green. NASA Earth Observatory / Lauren Dauphin As the world looks for sustainable solutions, a system tapping into NASA satellite data for water management has passed a critical test. Called OpenET, the system uses an ensemble of six satellite-driven models that harness publicly available data from the Landsat program to calculate evapotranspiration (ET)—the movement of water vapor from soil and plant leaves into the atmosphere. OpenET does this on a field-level scale that is greatly improving the way farmers, ranchers, and water resource managers steward one of Earth’s most precious resources. Researchers have now conducted a large-scale analysis of how well OpenET is tracking evapotranspiration over crops and natural landscapes. The team compared OpenET data with measurements from 152 sites with ground-based instruments across the United States. In agricultural areas, OpenET calculated evapotranspiration with high accuracy, especially for annual crops such as wheat, corn, soy, and rice. The researchers reported their findings on January 15 in Nature Water. “I was pleasantly surprised by the results,” said John Volk, lead author of the study and assistant research scientist and software engineer at Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev. “The accuracy in croplands was quite strong, particularly in western arid regions, which are important areas for agriculture and have water sustainability challenges.” That’s welcome news for regions where OpenET data is already being put to work. In Northern California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, water resource managers are using OpenET to help farmers comply with state rules requiring them to report aspects of their water use. The new study “gives us more confidence that these numbers are accurate, and that OpenET is continually improving over time,” said Lindsay Kammeier, a senior engineer with the California State Water Board in Sacramento, who was not involved in the new research. “ET is notoriously difficult to calculate,” she added. “Having a really accurate number helps us to make decisions to manage the environment, manage for agricultural uses, and manage for urban uses better and from a common understanding.” Tracking the Invisible Movement of Water While many people are familiar with what one inch of rainfall means, few stop to think about one inch of evapotranspiration returning to the atmosphere, said Forrest Melton, the OpenET project scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. “OpenET is working to make the unseen process of evapotranspiration as easy to track as checking the amount of rainfall in the daily weather forecast.” Evapotranspiration is the natural process in which water moves to the atmosphere from the surface. The term combines evaporation—water changing from liquid to gas (vapor) and rising from soil, lakes, and oceans—and transpiration, the “exhaling” by plants as they release moisture back into the air. After precipitation, evapotranspiration is one of the most important factors for estimating how much water is available for crops or other plants. In California, state officials and farmers are using satellite data through OpenET to track evapotranspiration to better manage water resources. The process is a window into the water consumed by plants and crops, such as those grown in the Central Valley. NASA Earth Observatory using openetdata.org For farmers and water managers, accurate data provides a measure of the amount of water required through irrigation to replace the water that has been consumed by evapotranspiration. Knowing precisely how much water is available helps people give plants the moisture they need to flourish, without needing to apply too much. And that, in turn, can help save money for water and for the electricity used to pump water for irrigation. But all that rising water vapor is invisible, making it difficult and expensive to track on the ground. Farmers, scientists, and others previously relied on estimates of “potential evaporation” based on temperature, humidity, and other weather data. Or they turned to ground-based stations such as flux towers, equipped with sensors that monitor carbon dioxide, water vapor, and the exchange of heat between Earth’s surface and the atmosphere—a process crucial to calculating evapotranspiration. But while they tend to be highly accurate, flux towers are expensive to set up and maintain, so there are a limited number, and their data is local and cannot represent wider regions. That’s where calculating evapotranspiration from space comes in. Satellites pass over the same areas regularly, offering consistent monitoring. OpenET’s primary observations come from the Landsat 8 and 9 satellites, a partnership between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. The satellites combine data on land surface temperatures and the greenness of plants, among other things. Cooler land surface temperatures over areas with healthier, denser vegetation, for example, usually indicate higher levels of transpiration. That data is then fed into models to calculate evapotranspiration at high resolution—about a quarter of an acre for each image pixel. The new results show that for agricultural lands, OpenET data for monthly, growing season, and annual timescales had an average error rate of about 10-20%. The OpenET consortium includes NASA, USGS, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture working with Desert Research Institute and nearly a dozen other universities, Environmental Defense Fund, and Google Earth Engine. For more information, go to: https://openetdata.org/ By: Emily DeMarco, NASA Earth Science Division About the Author Emily DeMarco Share Details Last Updated Feb 01, 2024 Related Terms Earth Earth Science Water & Energy Cycle Explore More 5 min read 2023 NASA International Space Apps Challenge Announces 10 Global Winners Ten teams from around the world have been named the Global Winners of the 2023… Article 6 days ago 6 min read NASA’s PACE To Investigate Oceans, Atmosphere in Changing Climate Article 3 weeks ago 2 min read Going the Extra 500 miles for Alaskan River Ice Article 1 month ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Missions Humans in Space Climate Change Solar System View the full article

4 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) Alabama A&M University Agribition Center will host the final Break the Ice Lunar Challenge featuring a large dirt-based indoor arena on 40 acres of land, offering plenty of green space to build Break the Ice’s complex testing infrastructure.Photo Courtesy: Alabama A&M University Extension By Savannah Bullard NASA has selected Alabama A&M University’s Agribition Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to host the final level of the agency’s Break the Ice Lunar Challenge, using indoor and outdoor space to ground test the finalists’ solutions. The challenge opened in 2020 to find novel solutions for excavating icy lunar regolith and delivering acquired resources in extreme environmental conditions. In alignment with NASA’s Moon to Mars objectives, the challenge aims to develop technologies that could support a sustained human presence on the Moon. Throughout the challenge, competitors have designed, built, and independently tested robots that could theoretically withstand the harsh environments inside permanently shadowed regions of the lunar South Pole. The six finalists who succeeded in Phase 2: Level 2 of the challenge were announced in December 2023. “We were looking for a unique set of criteria to house the Break the Ice Lunar competition, so we partnered with Jacobs Space Exploration Group in finding a facility,” said Denise Morris, NASA Centennial Challenges program manager at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “Alabama A&M is a good fit for this challenge because of the on-site capabilities they have and being close to NASA facilities makes logistics much easier.” Located a few miles east of the Alabama A&M University (AAMU) campus, the Agribition (agriculture + exhibition) Center is managed by the Alabama Cooperative Extension System with support from AAMU and its College of Agricultural, Life, and Natural Sciences. Its indoor arena features a large dirt space, typically equipped to support rodeos and other agricultural expos. Outside, the center sits on roughly 40 acres of land, offering plenty of green space to build the competition’s complex infrastructure. The final Phase 2: Level 3 testing will occur June 10-12, 2024. There are two components that each team will focus on mastering: excavation and transportation. Six identically sized concrete slabs will be set up inside the arena for the finalists’ robots to dig. The slabs, measuring 300 cubic feet, will have qualities similar to a permanently shadowed crater located at the Moon’s South Pole. A gravity-offloading crane and pulley system will lift the excavators while working, simulating the one-sixth gravity experienced on the Moon. Each team will have one hour to dig as much material as possible or until they reach the payload capacity of their excavation robot. Up to three top-performing teams will earn an opportunity to test their solution inside one of the thermal vacuum chambers located at Marshall, which can simulate the temperature and vacuum conditions at the lunar South Pole. Outside the Agribition Center, challenge teams will take turns on a custom-built track outfitted with slopes, boulders, pebbles, rocks, and gravel to simulate the lunar surface. This volatile surface will stretch approximately 300 meters and include several twists and turns for more intermediate handling. Each team will get one hour on the track to deliver a payload and return to the starting point. Times, distances, and pitfalls will be recorded independently. “These two testing methods address the excavation and transportation of large quantities of icy regolith, which are some of NASA’s current top technology gaps,” said Naveen Vetcha, NASA challenge manager at Jacobs Space Exploration Group. “This competition has enabled teams to develop lightweight, energy efficient, reliable and durable hardware, all while performing well in Moon-like conditions like reduced gravity and complex terrain.” The total prize purse is $1.5 million, with the first-place winner taking home $1 million and the second-place winner receiving $500,000. The Break the Ice Lunar Challenge is a NASA Centennial Challenge led by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center, with support from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Centennial Challenges are part of the Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing program under NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. Ensemble Consultancy supports challenge competitors. Learn more about Break the Ice Jonathan Deal NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center 256-544-0034 jonathan.e.deal@nasa.gov Facebook logo @NASAPrize @NASAPrize Instagram logo @NASAPrize Share Details Last Updated Feb 01, 2024 LocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related TermsCentennial ChallengesMarshall Space Flight Center Explore More 3 min read Break the Ice Lunar Challenge Phase 2 Article 2 years ago 4 min read NASA Awards $500,000 in Break the Ice Lunar Challenge Article 2 years ago 3 min read Top Teams Advance in NASA’s Break the Ice Lunar Challenge NASA has named 15 teams moving on to compete in the semifinal level of its… Article 1 year ago 4 min read Six Finalists Named in NASA’s $3.5 Million Break the Ice Challenge Article 2 months ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics Missions Humans in Space Climate Change Solar System View the full article