NASA

2 Min Read First Look: Spaceplane Stacked and Shaken at NASA Test Facility Nose-up and bathed in soft blue lights, Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane and its Shooting Star cargo module cast dramatic shadows onto the walls of NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, as members of the media got their first glimpse of the towering 55-foot-tall stack on Feb. 1. The spaceplane and its cargo module are undergoing testing at the facility to prepare for the extreme environment of space. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Luke Staab, senior project manager at NASA's Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, shares more about recent testing of Sierra Space's Dream Chaser spaceplane. Credit: NASA/Steven Logan “The Armstrong Test Facility is one of NASA Glenn Research Center’s most critical assets,” said Dr. Jimmy Kenyon, center director of NASA Glenn in Cleveland, during a media event where Tom Vice, chief executive officer of Sierra Space; Phil Dempsey, transportation integration manager for the International Space Station Program; and Dr. Tom Marshburn, former NASA astronaut and chief medical officer for Sierra Space, were also on hand for interviews. “Here, we have some of the world’s largest and most capable simulation and test facilities to test the harsh conditions that spacecraft will experience during launch and in flight." Dr. Jimmy Kenyon Center Director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland “Here, we have some of the world’s largest and most capable simulation and test facilities to test the harsh conditions that spacecraft will experience during launch and in flight,” Kenyon said. Using the world’s most powerful spacecraft shaker system, NASA exposed Dream Chaser and Shooting Star to vibrations like those it will experience during launch and re-entry into the atmosphere. Next up, Dream Chaser will move to a huge, in-ground vacuum chamber that will continue to simulate the space environment Dream Chaser will encounter on its mission. The spaceplane will be put through its paces, experiencing low ambient pressures, low-background temperatures, and dynamic solar heating. This testing marks progress toward Dream Chaser’s first uncrewed demonstration flight to the International Space Station later this year as part of NASA’s Commercial Resupply Program. On its first flight, Dream Chaser is scheduled to deliver over 7,800 pounds of cargo. NASA’s work with commercial industry is leading to more people, science, and commercial opportunities in space for the benefit of humanity. Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane and its Shooting Star Cargo module seen inside the Mechanical Vibration Facility at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, on Feb. 1.Credit: NASA/Jef Janis Phil Dempsey, transportation integration manager for the International Space Station Program, speaks to members of the media during an event at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, on Feb. 1.Credit: NASA/Jef Janis Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane and its Shooting Star Cargo module stacked inside the Mechanical Vibration Facility at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio. Members of the media got their first glimpse of Dream Chaser during an event on Feb. 1.Credit: NASA/Jef Janis From left: Dr. Tom Marshburn, former NASA astronaut and chief medical officer for Sierra Space; Dr. Jimmy Kenyon, center director of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland; Tom Vice, chief executive officer of Sierra Space; and Phil Dempsey, transportation integration manager for the International Space Station Program, speak to members of the media during an event at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, on Feb. 1. Credit: NASA/Jef Janis Tom Vice, chief executive officer of Sierra Space, offers remarks about the company’s Dream Chaser spaceplane during a media event at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio, on Feb. 1. Credit: NASA/Jef Janis “We collectively, NASA and Sierra Space, go to space to benefit life on Earth." Tom vice Chief Executive Officer of Sierra Space “We collectively, NASA and Sierra Space, go to space to benefit life on Earth,” Vice said. “The most significant industrial revolution in history is underway in space. You have to kind of step back and inhale everything you’re witnessing, the magnitude of what you’re witnessing; the signs are all around us that we are now living in the orbital age.” Top Image Credit: Sierra Space/Shay Saldana Explore More 3 min read NASA Tests New Spacecraft Propellant Gauge on Lunar Lander Article 1 day ago 5 min read Station Science 101: Studying DNA in Space Article 6 days ago 4 min read NASA’s Fission Surface Power Project Energizes Lunar Exploration Article 1 week ago View the full article

NASA has selected 8(a) vendor Seventh Sense Consulting LLC of Woodbridge, Virginia, to provide acquisition support services for non-inherently governmental functions across the agency. The contractor will provide services agencywide, including document development support, procurement administrative services, acquisition policy support, procurement operations support, procurement source selection support, cost/pricing support, and contract closeout support. The latter will be performed at all NASA centers, and the acquisition support may be performed at any NASA center, either on-site, off-site, or hybrid. This award will result in a single-award blanket purchase agreement to an 8(a) small business. The maximum contract value is about $77.5 million. A one-year base period begins on Friday, March 1. The contract includes up to four one-year options with the potential to extend services through Aug. 31, 2029. For information about NASA and agency programs, visit: https://www.nasa.gov -end- Abbey Donaldson Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1600 abbey.a.donaldson@nasa.gov View the full article

17 Min Read The Marshall Star for February 7, 2024 NASA Administrator Announces New Marshall Space Flight Center Director NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Feb. 5 named Joseph Pelfrey director of the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center, 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.” Marshall Space Flight Center Director Joseph Pelfrey.NASA NASA Marshall is one of the agency’s largest field centers, and manages NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility, 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.” Pelfrey talks during a 2023 all-hands meeting at Marshall.NASA/Charles Beason 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. › Back to Top NASA to Demonstrate Autonomous Navigation System on Moon By Rick Smith When the second CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) delivery is launched to the Moon in mid-February, its NASA payloads will include an experiment that could change how human explorers, rovers, and spacecraft independently track their precise location on the Moon and in cis-lunar space. Demonstrating autonomous navigation, the Lunar Node-1 experiment, or LN-1, is a radio beacon designed to support precise geolocation and navigation observations for landers, surface infrastructure, and astronauts, digitally confirming their positions on the Moon relative to other craft, ground stations, or rovers on the move. These radio beacons also can be used in space to help with orbital maneuvers and with guiding landers to a successful touchdown on the lunar surface. Lunar Node-1, or LN-1, an autonomous navigation payload that will change how human explorers safely traverse the Moon’s surface and live and work in lunar orbit, awaits liftoff as part of Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission, its first under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. LN-1 was developed, built, and tested at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.NASA/Intuitive Machines “Imagine getting verification from a lighthouse on the shore you’re approaching, rather than waiting on word from the home port you left days earlier,” said Evan Anzalone, principal investigator of LN-1 and a navigation systems engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. “What we seek to deliver is a lunar network of lighthouses, offering sustainable, localized navigation assets that enable lunar craft and ground crews to quickly and accurately confirm their position instead of relying on Earth.” The system is designed to operate as part of a broader navigation infrastructure, anchored by a series of satellites in lunar orbit as being procured under NASA’s Lunar Communications Relay and Navigation Systems project. Together, future versions of LN-1 would utilize LunaNet-defined standards to provide interoperable navigation reference signals from surface beacons as well as orbital assets. Currently, navigation beyond Earth is heavily reliant on point-to-point services provided by NASA’s Deep Space Network, an international array of giant radio antennas which transmit positioning data to interplanetary spacecraft to keep them on course. These measurements typically are relayed back to Earth and processed on the ground to deliver information back to the traveling vehicle. But when seconds count during orbital maneuvers, or among explorers traversing uncharted areas of the lunar surface, LN-1 offers a timely improvement, Anzalone said. IM-1, the first NASA Commercial Launch Program Services launch for Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander, will carry multiple payloads to the Moon, including Lunar Node-1, demonstrating autonomous navigation via radio beacon to support precise geolocation and navigation among lunar orbiters, landers, and surface personnel. NASA’s CLPS initiative oversees industry development of small robotic landers and rovers to support NASA’s Artemis campaign.NASA/Intuitive Machines The CubeSat-sized experiment is one of six payloads included in the NASA delivery manifest for Intuitive Machines of Houston, which will be launched via a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Designated IM-1, the launch is the company’s first for NASA’s CLPS initiative, which oversees industry development, testing, and launch of small robotic landers and rovers supporting NASA’s Artemis campaign. The Nova-C lander is scheduled to touch down near Malapert A, a lunar impact crater in the Moon’s South Pole region. LN-1 relies on networked computer navigation software known as MAPS (Multi-spacecraft Autonomous Positioning System). Developed by Anzalone and researchers at Marshall, MAPS was successfully tested on the International Space Station in 2018 using NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation testbed. Engineers at Marshall conducted all structural design, thermal and electronic systems development, and integration and environmental testing of LN-1 as part of the NASA-Provided Lunar Payloads project funded by the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. Anzalone and his team delivered the payload in 2021, having performed the payload build during the COVID pandemic. Since then, they refined the operating procedures, conducted thorough testing of the integrated flight system, and in October 2023, oversaw installation of LN-1 on Intuitive Machines’ lander. Demonstrating autonomous navigation, the Lunar Node-1 experiment, or LN-1, is a radio beacon designed to support precise geolocation and navigation observations to orbiters, landers, and surface personnel, digitally confirming their positions on the Moon relative to other craft, ground stations, or rovers on the move. The system is designed to operate as part of a broader navigation infrastructure, anchored by a series of satellites in lunar orbit as being procured under NASA’s Lunar Communications Relay and Navigation Systems project. (NASA) The payload will transmit information briefly each day during the journey to the Moon. Upon lunar touchdown, the LN-1 team will conduct a full systems checkout and begin continuous operations within 24 hours of landing. NASA’s Deep Space Network will receive its transmissions, capturing telemetry, Doppler tracking, and other data and relaying it back to Earth. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and at Morehead State University in Kentucky also will monitor LN-1’s transmissions throughout the mission, which is scheduled to last approximately 10 days. Eventually, as the technology is proven and its infrastructure expanded, Anzalone expects LN-1 to evolve from a single lighthouse on the lunar shore into a key piece of a much broader infrastructure, helping NASA evolve its navigation system into something more akin to a bustling metropolitan subway network, wherein every train is tracked in real time as it travels its complex route. “Spacecraft, surface vehicles, base camps and exploratory digs, even individual astronauts on the lunar surface,” Anzalone said. “LN-1 could connect them all and help them navigate more accurately, creating a reliable, more autonomous lunar network.” Marshall’s LN-1 team is already discussing future Moon to Mars applications for LN-1 with NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) program – which oversees more than 100 NASA and partner missions. They’re also consulting with the European Space Agency and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, aiding the push to unite spacefaring nations via an interconnected, interoperable global architecture. “Eventually, these same technologies and applications we’re proving at the Moon will be vital on Mars, making those next generations of human explorers safer and more self-sufficient as they lead us out into the solar system,” Anzalone said. NASA’s CLPS initiative enables NASA to buy a complete commercial robotic lunar delivery service from leading aerospace contractors. The provider is responsible for launch services, owns its lander design, and leads landing operations. Learn more here. Smith, an Aeyon/MTS employee, supports the Marshall Office of Communications. › Back to Top Marshall Wraps Up Mentoring Month with Mega Meal, Mentoring Panel By Jessica Barnett There was no shortage of opportunities in January to learn about the benefits of mentoring from those who have experienced them firsthand. In fact, there was so much to share, team members at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center kept the celebration going through the first week of February. “It was so great to see so many from our workforce out and excited about mentorship,” said Selina Salgado, who serves as the Mentoring Program coordinator at Marshall. “At every event throughout the month and when reading through the highlights, I was encouraged by the engagement and commitment that the Marshall team showed for development.” Marshall Space Flight Center Chief Financial Officer Rhega Gordon, center, who participates in the center’s Mentorship Program, discusses the benefits of mentoring and her advice for getting the most out of a mentoring relationship during a panel event held Feb. 6 in Activities Building 4316 as part of Marshall’s celebration of National Mentoring Month. Joining her on stage are two of her mentees, program specialist Kim Henry and Marshall Sustainability Coordinator Malene McElroy. NASA/Danielle Burleson This year’s events included Meals with Mentors, in which team members could have lunch and chat with mentors from a variety of backgrounds and departments, and an in-person mentoring panel Feb. 6 featuring Marshall Chief Financial Officer Rhega Gordon and two of her mentees, Marshall Sustainability Coordinator Malene McElroy and program specialist Kim Henry. Marshall also participated in the launch for AMPED (Agencywide Mentoring Pilot for Engagement & Development), which pairs mentors and mentees together using the MentorcliQ platform. Civil servants can sign up for AMPED now through Feb. 19. Marshall team members can also participate in MERGE, a NASA-built mentoring application that allows users to create and view profiles to identify potential mentors or mentees. MERGE is recommended for casual, informal, or short-term mentoring relationships, as well as shadowing opportunities. Civil servants and contractors can sign up at any time. Marshall Associate Center Director, Technical, Larry Leopard engages with center team members during a Meals with Mentors event Feb. 6 in Activities Building 4316. Team members were encouraged to chat with center leaders and potential mentors at the event as part of Marshall’s celebration of National Mentoring Month. NASA/Danielle Burleson In addition to in-person events and showcasing new options for finding a mentor or mentee, there were weekly tips to help team members get the most out of their mentorship journey and interviews with mentors and mentees, who shared their experiences, advice, and more. “Our hope was that employees would reengage with mentorship, find value in their current relationships, or provide resources and guidance to help those who were new to the world of mentoring,” Salgado said. Marshall team members can start or continue their mentorship journey by visiting the Marshall Mentorship Program page on Inside Marshall. Barnett, a Media Fusion employee, supports the Marshall Office of Communications. › Back to Top Mission Success is in Our Hands: Ashley Marlar By Wayne Smith Mission Success is in Our Hands is a safety initiative collaboration between NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Jacobs. As part of the initiative, eight Marshall team members are featured in new testimonial banners placed around the center. This is the fourth in a Marshall Star series profiling team members featured in the testimonial banners. The next Mission Success is in Our Hands Shared Experience Forum will be Feb. 22 and will feature Robert Conway, deputy director of NASA’s Safety Center. The 11:30 a.m. event will be in Activities Building 4316 for Marshall team members. Ashley Marlar is the Jacobs Space Exploration Group team lead of Operations Engineering Support at Marshall, responsible for managing a team of four Jacobs Transportation engineers supporting the center’s Transportation and Logistics Engineering Office. Marlar and her team develop and execute detailed plans, procedures, and engineered lift analyses to transport NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) flight hardware and test articles, as well as hardware for various other programs and projects at Marshall. Ashley Marlar is the Jacobs Space Exploration Group Team Lead of Operations Engineering Support at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, supporting the Transportation and Logistics Engineering Office.NASA/Charles Beason She has worked at Marshall for eight years, including six years with Jacobs, starting her career as a transportation and logistics engineer. A native of Hazel Green, Alabama, Marlar is a graduate of the University of Alabama in Huntsville where she earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering. Question: How does your work support the safety and success of NASA and Marshall missions? Marlar: The thorough coordination and detailed planning of each hardware movement is absolutely critical to the safety of the hardware and the personnel handling it, and the success of the mission. We must anticipate risks and consider contingency plans. Whether it’s offloading a welded component from the delivery truck, installing a test article into a structural test stand, or shipping the SLS core stage on the barge Pegasus from NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility to the agency’s Kennedy Space Center, we meticulously plan every step of the operation to ensure the hardware is delivered without mishaps or delays. Question: What does the Mission Success is in Our Hands initiative mean to you? Marlar: To me it means every individual plays a vital role in making our missions safe and successful. We all contribute to NASA’s success by bringing our unique skills and perspectives to the table. And we are all responsible for the safety of ourselves and each other by having the courage to speak up and ask questions. Question: Do you have a story or personal experience you can share that might help others understand the significance of mission assurance or flight safety? Marlar: One of the things we do to help ensure mission safety is perform dry runs, like dress rehearsals, for many of our major moves. For example, we utilized the core stage Pathfinder vehicle to practice our transportation methods and iron out all the little details of our procedures without risking the actual core stage flight unit. We repeatedly practiced installing the Pathfinder onto ground support equipment, lifting and rotating it from horizontal to vertical orientation, and installing it into the B2 test stand at Stennis Space Center. Then we did everything in reverse. We did this multiple times to identify any challenges, safety issues, or workflow inefficiencies we might face when it came time to perform these tasks with the real thing, and then made many procedural changes and some hardware changes to mitigate those risks and resolve numerous issues. All of this paid off in a big way when we transported, lifted, and tested the flight core stage flawlessly. Question: How can we work together better to achieve mission success? Marlar: Mission success is a team effort and a shared responsibility. I think it’s vital to encourage and empower everyone to speak up and share their ideas and concerns as well as hold each other accountable. We should continue to reinforce the importance of communication and engagement, particularly as we emerge from a pandemic. Question: Do you have anything else you’d like to share? Marlar: My primary goal is to make sure my team gets home safe and sound at the end of the day. As important and grand as our mission is, our biggest asset is our people. We are a collective of many pieces in a large puzzle, but every piece is equally important to the whole. Smith, a Media Fusion employee and the Marshall Star editor, supports the Marshall Office of Communications. › Back to Top NASA Taps Alabama A&M University to Host Break the Ice Lunar Challenge By Savannah Bullard NASA has selected Alabama A&M University’s Agribition Center in Huntsville 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. Alabama A&M University’s 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 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. “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 campus, the Agribition (agriculture + exhibition) Center is managed by the Alabama Cooperative Extension System with support from the university 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 Marshall, with support from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Centennial Challenges are part of the Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing program under NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. Ensemble Consultancy supports challenge competitors. Bullard, a Manufacturing Technical Solutions Inc. employee, supports the Marshall Office of Communications. › Back to Top Mars, Venus Appear Very Close to Each Other this Month By Lauren Perkins February is a great month for the early rising skygazers. Venus has been bright in the morning sky all year, rising just before the Moon. This graphic shows Venus, Earth and its Moon, and Mars.NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA In the minutes before dawn this week, Venus will rise to the upper left of the waning crescent Moon and will be joined by Mars. Over the coming weeks, Venus will shift towards Mars until they appear to merge into one another, just a half a degree apart, on Feb. 22. To view this planetary illusion, you’ll need to find a place with a clear view of the western horizon – few to no tall trees or buildings. For more skygazing opportunities, including observing spiral galaxy M81, check out the video from Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s monthly “What’s Up” video series. Perkins, a Media Fusion employee, supports the Marshall Office of Communications. › Back to Top View the full article

NASA Astronaut Bruce McCandless II approaches his maximum distance from the Earth-orbiting Space Shuttle Challenger in this 70mm photo from Feb. 7, 1984. While testing out the nitrogen-propelled, hand-controlled back-pack device called the manned maneuvering unit (MMU) for the first time, McCandless’s fellow crewmembers aboard the reusable vehicle photographed him. The MMU allowed crews to move outside of the cargo bay and perform activities away from the safety of the spacecraft. “It may have been one small step for Neil,” he proclaimed, “but it’s a heck of a big leap for me.” Learn how this and other iconic photos from the STS-41B mission came to be. Image Credit: NASA View the full article

The longest spaceflight up to that time ended on Feb. 8, 1974, when Skylab 4 astronauts Gerald P. Carr, Edward G. Gibson, and William R. Pogue splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after their 84-day mission aboard Skylab, America’s first space station. During their stay, they carried out a challenging research program, including biomedical investigations on the effects of long-duration space flight on the human body, Earth observations using the Earth Resources Experiment Package, and solar observations with instruments mounted in the Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM). To study newly discovered Comet Kohoutek, scientists added cometary observations to the crew’s already busy schedule, including adding a far ultraviolet camera to Skylab’s instrument suite. The astronauts conducted four spacewalks, a then-record for a single Earth orbital mission. Left: View from the Skylab 4 Command and Service Module (CSM) shortly after undocking from Skylab. Middle: Skylab during the final fly around, with the CSM’s shadow visible on the solar array. Right: Distant view of Skylab as the crew departed. Carr, Gibson, and Pogue spent the first week of February 1974 finishing up their experiments, preparing the station for uncrewed operations, and packing their Command Module (CM) with science samples and other items for return to Earth. On Feb. 8, they closed all the hatches to Skylab and undocked their CM. Carr flew a complete loop around Skylab, the crew inspecting the station, noting the discoloration caused by solar irradiation. The sunshade installed by the Skylab 3 crew appeared to be in good condition. Finally, Carr fired the spacecraft’s thrusters to separate from the station. Three and a half hours after undocking, they received the go for the deorbit burn and fired the Service Module’s (SM) main engine. After 84 days in weightlessness, the burn felt like “a kick in the pants” to the astronauts. They separated the CM from the SM, but when Carr tried to reorient it with its heat shield forward for reentry, nothing happened! Carr switched to a backup system and corrected the problem, caused by an inadvertent flipping of the wrong circuit breakers. Reentry took place without incident, the two drogue parachutes opened at 24,000 feet to slow and stabilize the spacecraft, followed by the three main parachutes at 10,000 feet to slow the descent until splashdown. Left: Splashdown of Skylab 4, ending the longest crewed mission to that time. Right: The Skylab 4 Command Module in the apex down or Stable II position. Splashdown of Skylab 4 took place 176 miles from San Diego and three miles from the prime recovery ship the helicopter carrier U.S.S. New Orleans (LPH-11). The mission of 84 days 1 hour 16 minutes set a human spaceflight duration record for that time. Carr, Gibson, and Pogue had orbited the Earth 1,214 times and traveled 70.5 million miles. The CM first assumed a Stable II or apex down orientation in the water. Balloons at the top of the spacecraft inflated within minutes to right it to the Stable I or apex up position. In Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, flight controllers met the splashdown with mixed feelings – elation at the conclusion of the longest and highly successful mission and sadness at the end of the Skylab program with an upcoming prolonged hiatus in human spaceflights until the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975. The three major television networks chose not to carry the splashdown live, the first American splashdown not covered live since the capability began with the Gemini VI mission in 1965. The networks deemed the event not newsworthy. Mission Control at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston shortly after the Skylab 4 splashdown. Left: Recovery helicopter from the U.S.S. New Orleans about to drop swimmers into the water. Middle: Swimmers attach an inflatable collar around the Skylab 4 Command Module (CM). Right: Sailors lift the CM onto an elevator deck on the New Orleans. Within 40 minutes of splashdown, recovery teams had placed an inflatable collar around the spacecraft and lifted it aboard the New Orleans. Seven minutes later, they had the hatch open and flight surgeons quickly examined the three astronauts, declaring them to be healthy. Left: Aboard the U.S.S. New Orleans, Edward G. Gibson emerges first from the Skylab 4 Command Module (CM). Middle: William R. Pogue stands after emerging from the CM. Right: Skylab 4 crew members Gibson, left, Pogue, and Gerald P. Carr seated on a forklift platform after emerging from the CM and on their way to the medical facility. Gibson, riding in the spacecraft’s center seat, emerged first, followed by Pogue. Carr exited last, befitting his role as commander. They walked the few steps to a platform where they could sit and wave to the cheering sailors. A forklift picked up the entire platform with the astronauts, and transported them to the Skylab mobile medical facilities aboard the carrier. Extensive medical examinations of the astronauts continued throughout landing day while the carrier sailed toward San Diego. Left: Skylab 4 Commander Gerald P. Carr enjoys a cup of coffee during medical testing aboard the U.S.S. New Orleans. Right: During a break from medial testing, the Skylab 4 astronauts mingle with some of the crew aboard the New Orleans. Medical exams revealed Carr, Gibson, and Pogue to have withstood the rigors of weightlessness better than the previous two Skylab crews despite having spent more time in space. They attributed this to their increased exercise regimen, including the use of the Thornton treadmill, and better nutrition, an assertion backed up by flight surgeons and scientists. While on board ship, they had limited contact with the staff, all of whom wore protective masks when in close proximity to the crew to maintain the strict postflight medical quarantine. Left: From aboard the U.S.S. New Orleans, Skylab 4 astronauts Gerald P. Carr, left, Edward G. Gibson, and William R. Pogue wave to the crowd assembled dockside at North Island Naval Air Station (NAS) in San Diego. Middle: Carr, top, Gibson, and Pogue board a U.S. Air Force transport jet at North Island NAS that flew them to Houston. Right: Carr, Gibson, and Pogue aboard the transport jet on their way to Houston. Carr, Gibson, and Pogue remained aboard the New Orleans until completion of the landing plus 2-day medical exams. The ship had arrived at North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego the morning of Feb. 9, and the astronauts participated in a dockside welcoming ceremony while remaining on the carrier. The next day, the trio left the carrier and boarded a U.S. Air Force transport jet that flew them to Ellington Air Force Base in Houston. Left: At Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, Skylab 4 astronauts Gerald P. Carr, bottom, Edward G. Gibson, and William R. Pogue descend the steps from the U.S. Air Force jet that had flown them from San Diego. Middle: Pogue, left, Gibson, and Carr hug their wives for the first time in more than three months. Right: On the podium at Ellington, Carr, left, Gibson, and Pogue address the welcoming crowd. Upon deplaning at Ellington, Carr, Gibson, and Pogue reunited with their wives, JoAnn, Julia, and Helen, respectively, whom they had not seen in three months. Director of JSC Christopher C. Kraft introduced them to the several hundred well-wishers who turned out to welcome the astronauts back to Houston. Left: Gerald P. Carr, left, Edward G. Gibson, and William R. Pogue address reporters at their postflight press conference on Feb. 22. Middle: President Richard M. Nixon speaks to the assembled crowd at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston during the ceremony where he presented the Skylab 4 astronauts, sitting on the podium with their wives, with the Distinguished Service Medal on March 20, 1974. Right: In April 1974, the Skylab 4 astronauts address the assembled employees in the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The astronauts soon returned to work at JSC for a series of debriefings about their mission. During a press conference on Feb. 22, they showed a film of their experiences aboard Skylab and answered reporters’ questions. During a visit to Texas, on March 20, President Richard M. Nixon stopped at JSC to award Carr, Gibson, and Pogue the Distinguished Service Medal in a ceremony attended by thousands of employees and visitors. Left: The Skylab 4 Command Module on display at the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City. Image credit: courtesy Oklahoma History Center. Right: The Crew-1 astronauts aboard the space station talk with Skylab-4 astronaut Edward G. Gibson. Following splashdown, the U.S.S. New Orleans delivered the CM to San Diego, from where workers trucked it to its manufacturer, the Rockwell International facility in Downey, California, for postflight inspection. NASA transferred the Skylab 4 CM to the National Air and Space Museum in 1975, where it went on display the following year when the Smithsonian Institution inaugurated its new building. After more than 40 years (1976 to 2018) on display there, in 2020, the NASM loaned the spacecraft to the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City. The Skylab 4 CM held the record for the longest single flight for an American spacecraft for 47 years until Feb. 7, 2021, when the Crew Dragon Resilience flying the SpaceX Crew-1 mission to the International Space Station broke it. To commemorate the event, the four-person crew of Crew-1 held a video conference with Gibson from the space station. Left: The Skylab 4 rescue vehicle returns to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on Feb. 14, 1974. Middle: Workers in the VAB destack the Skylab rescue spacecraft Command and Service Module-119 (CSM-119) from the SA-209 Saturn IB rocket. Right: The Skylab 4 CSM-119 rescue spacecraft on display in the KSC Apollo/Saturn V Center. The Skylab 4 SA-209 Saturn IB rocket on display at the Visitor Center’s Rocket Garden at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket is topped with the Facility Verification Vehicle Apollo Command and Service Module. The Skylab Rescue Vehicle’s rocket (SA-209) and spacecraft (CSM-119), on Launch Pad 39B since Dec. 3, 1973, returned to the Vehicle Assembly Building on Feb. 14, 1974. Workers destacked the vehicle, keeping the components in storage at KSC. Managers designated SA-209 and CSM-119 as the backup vehicle for the July 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. Engineers used the spacecraft to conduct lightning sensitivity testing in KSC’s Manned Spacecraft Operations Building’s high bay in September 1974. Following ASTP, NASA retired both the rocket and spacecraft, eventually putting them on display. Visitors can view the SA-209 Saturn IB in the Rocket Garden of KSC’s Visitor Center and the CSM-119 in the Apollo/Saturn V Center at KSC. Left: Illustration of a possible Skylab reboost mission by a space shuttle. Middle: Track of Skylab’s reentry over Australia. Right: Managers, flight directors, and astronauts monitor Skylab’s reentry from Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Two days before leaving Skylab, the Skylab 4 crew boosted the station into a higher 269-by-283-mile orbit, assuming it would remain in space until 1983. By then, NASA hoped that space shuttle astronauts could attach a rocket to the station to either boost it to a higher orbit or safely deorbit it over the Pacific Ocean. But delays in the shuttle program and higher than expected solar activity resulting in increased atmospheric drag on the station ultimately thwarted those plans. It became apparent that Skylab would reenter in mid-1979, forcing NASA to devise plans to control its entry point as much as possible by adjusting the station’s attitude to influence atmospheric drag. On July 11, 1979, during its 34,981st orbit around the Earth, engineers in JSC’s Mission Control sent the final command to Skylab to turn off its control moment gyros, sending it into a slow tumble in an effort to ensure that Skylab would not reenter over a populated area. Skylab’s breakup resulted in most of the debris that survived reentry falling into the Indian Ocean, with some pieces falling over sparsely populated areas of southern Western Australia. Left: The Skylab postage stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service. Image credit: courtesy Smithsonian National Postal Museum. Right: Skylab 2 Commander Charles “Pete” Conrad, center, accepts the Collier Trophy from Vice President Gerald R. Ford, right, as Skylab 4 Commander Gerald P. Carr, left, and Skylab 3 Commander Alan L. Bean look on. The scientific results returned during the 171 days of human occupancy aboard Skylab remain some of the most significant in the history of spaceflight. The medical studies on the astronauts represent the first comprehensive look at the human body’s response to long-duration spaceflight. The ATM solar telescopes took more than 170,000 images for astronomers, while Earth scientists received 46,000 photographs. The Skylab program received many accolades. The U.S. Postal Service honored it by releasing a stamp in the program’s honor on May 14, 1974, the 1-year anniversary of Skylab’s launch. The National Aviation Association awarded its prestigious Robert J. Collier Trophy to the nine Skylab astronauts and to Skylab Program Director William C. Schneider for “proving beyond question the value of man in future explorations of space and the production of data of benefit to all the people on Earth.” Vice President Gerald R. Ford presented the award on June 4, 1974. Left: The Skylab backup flight unit on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Image credit: courtesy NASM. Right: The Skylab trainer on display at Space Center Houston. Possible plans for launching the Skylab backup flight unit never materialized due to budget constraints. That unit is on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The training units of the various Skylab modules are on display at Space Center Houston, JSC’s official visitors center. Left: Soviet cosmonauts Georgi M. Grechko, left, and Yuri V. Romanenko during their record-breaking 96-day mission aboard Salyut 6. Right: NASA astronaut Norman E. Thagard during his American record-breaking 115-day flight aboard Mir. As for the record for longest spaceflight, Skylab 4’s 84-day mark held for four years, when Soviet cosmonauts Yuri V. Romanenko and Georgi M. Grechko surpassed it, spending 96 days aboard the Salyut 6 space station from December 1977 to March 1978. As an American record it held up longer, broken by NASA astronaut Norman E. Thagard during his 115-day flight aboard the Russian space station Mir between March and July 1995. Operational lessons learned from Skylab proved invaluable for the Shuttle-Mir and International Space Station programs. For more insight into the Skylab 4 mission, read Carr’s, Gibson’s, and Pogue’s oral histories with the JSC History Office. With special thanks to Ed Hengeveld for his expert contributions on Skylab imagery. Explore More 14 min read 40 Years Ago: STS-41B, the First Flight of the Manned Maneuvering Unit Article 22 hours ago 4 min read The Iconic Photos from STS-41B: Documenting the First Untethered Spacewalk Article 5 days ago 9 min read 30 Years Ago: STS-60, the First Shuttle-Mir Mission Article 5 days ago View the full article

La promoción de candidatos a astronautas de la NASA, fotografiada durante un acto cerca del Centro Espacial Johnson de la NASA en Houston el 7 de diciembre de 2021. Créditos: NASA/James Blair Read this release in English here. La NASA rendirá homenaje a la nueva generación de candidatos a astronautas para el programa Artemis durante su acto de graduación, a las 10:30 a.m. hora del este del miércoles 5 de marzo en el Centro Espacial Johnson de la agencia en Houston. Después de completar más de dos años de capacitación básica, estos candidatos recibirán sus “alas” y serán elegibles para vuelos espaciales, incluyendo asignaciones a la Estación Espacial Internacional, futuros destinos comerciales y misiones a la Luna y, más adelante, misiones a Marte. La promoción de estudiantes que comenzaron sus estudios en 2021 incluye a 10 candidatos de la NASA, así como a dos candidatos de los Emiratos Árabes Unidos (EAU) del Centro Espacial Mohammed Bin Rashid, quienes han estado entrenando junto a los candidatos de la NASA. Después de la ceremonia, a las 11:45 a.m. hora del este, la NASA tendrá una sesión de preguntas y respuestas con los estudiantes y los medios de comunicación presentes. Quienes sigan la sesión en las redes sociales pueden hacer preguntas usando la etiqueta #AskNASA. Los recién graduados también estarán disponibles para entrevistas con los medios de comunicación en persona y de manera remota. Tanto la ceremonia como la sesión de preguntas y respuestas serán transmitidas en vivo por NASA+, NASA Television y el sitio web de la agencia. Aprende en este enlace (en inglés) cómo puedes ver la transmisión de NASA TV a través de diferentes plataformas, incluidas las redes sociales. Los periodistas no estadounidenses que quieran participar de forma presencial deberán solicitar sus credenciales antes de las 5 p.m. hora de la zona central (CT) del miércoles 21 de febrero a la sala de redacción del Centro Espacial Johnson, llamando al teléfono +1 281-483-5111 o enviando un correo electrónico a jsccommu@mail.nasa.gov. Los periodistas estadounidenses que deseen participar en persona deben solicitar sus credenciales comunicándose con la sala de redacción del centro Johnson antes de las 5 p.m. CT del jueves 29 de febrero. Todos los medios interesados en obtener una entrevista en persona o en forma remota con los astronautas deberán solicitar sus credenciales antes de las 5 p.m. CT del 29 de febrero, comunicándose con la sala de redacción del centro Johnson. Los candidatos a astronauta de la NASA son: Nichole Ayers, mayor de la Fuerza Aérea de Estados Unidos, es nativa de Colorado y se graduó en el año 2011 de la Academia de la Fuerza Aérea de Estados Unidos en Colorado Springs, Colorado, con una licenciatura en matemáticas y una especialización en ruso. Más tarde obtuvo una maestría en matemáticas computacionales y aplicadas de la Universidad Rice en Houston. Ayers tiene más de 200 horas de combate y más de 1.400 horas de tiempo total de vuelo en el T-38 y en el avión de combate F-22 Raptor. Ayers, una de las pocas mujeres que ha pilotado el F-22, lideró en 2019 la primera formación de este avión compuesta exclusivamente por mujeres en combate. Marcos Berríos, mayor de la Fuerza Aérea de Estados Unidos, creció en Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. Berríos trabajó como ingeniero aeroespacial para la Dirección de Desarrollo de la Aviación del Ejército de Estados Unidos en el aeródromo federal de Moffett en California y como piloto de helicópteros de búsqueda y rescate de combate para la Guardia Nacional Aérea de California. Es piloto de pruebas y tiene una licenciatura en ingeniería mecánica del Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts en Cambridge, Massachusetts, y una maestría en ingeniería mecánica, así como un doctorado en aeronáutica y astronáutica de la Universidad de Stanford en Palo Alto, California. Berríos ha acumulado más de 110 misiones de combate y 1.400 horas de vuelo en más de 21 aeronaves diferentes. Chris (Christina) Birch creció en Gilbert, Arizona, y se graduó de la Universidad de Arizona en Tucson, con títulos en matemáticas y bioquímica y biofísica molecular. Después de obtener un doctorado en ingeniería biológica del Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts, dio clases de bioingeniería en la Universidad de California en Riverside, y de escritura y comunicación científicas en el Instituto de Tecnología de California en Pasadena. Posteriormente, dejó la academia para convertirse en ciclista de pista en el equipo de la selección nacional de Estados Unidos. Deniz Burnham considera a Wasilla, Alaska, su hogar. Expasante en el Centro de Investigación Ames de la NASA en Silicon Valley, California, obtuvo una licenciatura en ingeniería química de la Universidad de California en San Diego y una maestría en ingeniería mecánica de la Universidad del Sur de California en Los Ángeles. Burnham es una líder con experiencia en la industria de la energía, y ha gestionado proyectos de perforación en plataformas petroleras durante más de una década, incluyendo el Ártico en Alaska, el norte de Alberta en Canadá y Texas. Burnham sirvió en la Reserva de la Marina de Estados Unidos como oficial del servicio de ingeniería. Es piloto privada licenciada con las siguientes calificaciones: avión monomotor de tierra y mar, avión de instrumentos y helicóptero-rotor. Luke Delaney, mayor retirado del Cuerpo de Marines de Estados Unidos, creció en Debary, Florida. Tiene una licenciatura en ingeniería mecánica de la Universidad del Norte de Florida en Jacksonville, y una maestría en ingeniería aeroespacial de la Escuela Naval de Postgrado en Monterey, California. Delaney es un aviador naval que ha participado en ejercicios en toda la región del Pacífico asiático y realizó misiones de combate en apoyo de la Operación Libertad Duradera. Como piloto de pruebas, efectuó vuelos de evaluación de integración de sistemas de armas y se desempeñó como instructor. Delaney trabajó recientemente como piloto de investigación en el Centro de Investigación Langley de la NASA en Hampton, Virginia, donde apoyó misiones científicas aéreas. Incluyendo su carrera en la NASA, Delaney ha registrado más de 3.900 horas de vuelo en 48 modelos de aviones a reacción, de hélice y de ala giratoria. Andre Douglas es nativo de Virginia. Obtuvo una licenciatura en ingeniería mecánica de la Academia de la Guardia Costera de Estados Unidos, una maestría en ingeniería mecánica y en arquitectura naval e ingeniería marina de la Universidad de Michigan en Ann Arbor, una maestría en ingeniería eléctrica e informática de la Universidad Johns Hopkins en Baltimore y un doctorado en ingeniería de sistemas de la Universidad George Washington en Washington. Douglas sirvió en la Guardia Costera de Estados Unidos como arquitecto naval, ingeniero de salvamento, asistente de control de daños y oficial de cubierta. Recientemente fue miembro sénior del personal del Laboratorio de Física Aplicada de la Universidad Johns Hopkins en Laurel, Maryland, trabajando en robótica marítima, defensa planetaria y misiones de exploración espacial para la NASA. Jack Hathaway, comandante de la Marina de Estados Unidos, es oriundo de Connecticut. Obtuvo licenciaturas en física e historia de la Academia Naval de Estados Unidos y completó sus estudios de posgrado en la Universidad de Cranfield en Inglaterra y en la Escuela Profesional de Guerra Naval de Estados Unidos. Como aviador naval, Hathaway voló y fue desplegado con el Escuadrón de Caza y Ataque 14 de la Marina a bordo del USS Nimitz y el Escuadrón de Caza y Ataque 136 a bordo del USS Truman. Se graduó de la Escuela de Pilotos de Prueba del Imperio en Wiltshire, Inglaterra, apoyó al Estado Mayor Conjunto en el Pentágono y, más recientemente, fue asignado como futuro oficial ejecutivo del Escuadrón de Caza y Ataque 81. Tiene más de 2.500 horas de vuelo en 30 tipos de aeronaves, más de 500 aterrizajes en portaaviones y ha volado en 39 misiones de combate. Anil Menon, teniente coronel de la Fuerza Aérea de Estados Unidos, nació y creció en Minneapolis. Fue el primer médico de la tripulación de vuelo de SpaceX, ayudando a llevar al espacio a los primeros seres humanos que viajaron con esta empresa, durante la misión Demo-2 de SpaceX para la NASA, y desarrollando una organización médica para apoyar a los sistemas humanos durante futuras misiones. Antes de eso, sirvió en la NASA como médico de la tripulación de vuelo para diferentes expediciones de transporte de astronautas a la Estación Espacial Internacional. Menon es un médico especializado en medicina de emergencia en ejercicio activo con formación en medicina rural y aeroespacial. Como médico, fue socorrista durante el terremoto de 2010 en Haití, el terremoto de 2015 en Nepal y el accidente del Salón Aeronáutico de Reno de 2011. En la Fuerza Aérea, Menon apoyó a la 45.a Ala Espacial como médico de la tripulación de vuelo y a la 173.a Ala de Combate, donde realizó más de 100 salidas en el avión de combate F-15 y transportó a más de 100 pacientes como parte del equipo de transporte aéreo de cuidados críticos. Christopher Williams creció en Potomac, Maryland. Se graduó de la Universidad de Stanford con una licenciatura en física y obtuvo un doctorado en física del Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts, donde dedicó sus investigaciones a la astrofísica. Williams es físico médico certificado, y completó su formación como residente en la Escuela de Medicina de Harvard en Boston, antes de unirse al cuerpo docente como físico clínico e investigador. Recientemente trabajó como físico médico en el Departamento de Oncología Radioterápica en el hospital Brigham and Women’s y en el Instituto de Investigación contra el Cáncer Dana-Farber en Boston. Fue el físico principal del programa de radioterapia adaptativa guiada por resonancia magnética de ese instituto. Su investigación se centró en el desarrollo de técnicas de orientación por imagen para tratamientos contra el cáncer. Jessica Wittner, teniente comandante de la Marina de Estados Unidos, es originaria de California y cuenta con una distinguida carrera en servicio activo como aviadora naval y piloto de pruebas. Tiene una licenciatura en ingeniería aeroespacial de la Universidad de Arizona en Tucson y una maestría en ingeniería aeroespacial de la Escuela Naval de Postgrado de Estados Unidos. Wittner fue comisionada como oficial naval mediante un programa de preparación para reclutas y ha servido operativamente volando aviones de combate F/A-18 con el Escuadrón de Caza y Ataque 34 en Virginia Beach, Virginia, y el Escuadrón de Caza y Ataque 151 en Lemoore, California. Graduada de la Escuela de Pilotos de Pruebas Navales de Estados Unidos, también trabajó como piloto de pruebas y oficial de proyectos con el Escuadrón de Pruebas y Evaluación Aérea 31 en China Lake, California. Los candidatos a astronauta de los Emiratos Árabes Unidos son: Nora AlMatrooshi, nacida en Sharjah, la primera mujer astronauta emiratí y árabe, fue seleccionada en el segundo grupo de candidatos a astronauta de los EAU y forma parte de la promoción de candidatos a astronautas de la NASA de 2021 que reciben su formación en Estados Unidos. AlMatrooshi tiene una licenciatura en ingeniería mecánica de la Universidad de los Emiratos Árabes Unidos y completó un semestre en la Universidad de Ciencias Aplicadas de Vaasa en Finlandia. Es miembro de la Sociedad Estadounidense de Ingenieros Mecánicos y anteriormente trabajó como ingeniera de tuberías en la National Petroleum Construction Co. Durante su trabajo allí, contribuyó a importantes proyectos de ingeniería para las empresas Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. y Saudi Aramco, y se desempeñó como especialista técnica. También fue vicepresidenta del Consejo Juvenil de la Empresa Nacional de Construcción Petrolera durante tres años. Mohammed AlMulla, nacido en Dubai, también fue seleccionado en el segundo grupo de candidatos a astronauta de los EAU y forma parte de la promoción de candidatos a astronauta de la NASA de 2021 que reciben su formación en Estados Unidos. A los 19 años, obtuvo una licencia de piloto comercial de la autoridad de seguridad de la aviación civil de Australia, lo que lo convirtió en el piloto más joven de la policía de Dubai. A los 28 años, estableció otro récord al convertirse en el instructor más joven de esta misma organización después de recibir su licencia de entrenador de pilotos. AlMulla obtuvo una licenciatura en derecho y economía en 2015 y una maestría ejecutiva en administración pública de la Escuela de Gobierno Mohammed Bin Rashid en 2021. Con más de 15 años de experiencia, también se desempeñó como jefe del Departamento de Capacitación del Centro del Ala Aérea de la Policía de Dubai. Todos los candidatos a astronautas han completado su capacitación en caminatas espaciales, robótica, sistemas de estaciones espaciales, dominio del jet T-38 y el idioma ruso. En la ceremonia, cada candidato recibirá un pin de astronauta, lo que marcará su graduación de la capacitación básica y su elegibilidad para ser seleccionado para volar en el espacio. La NASA continúa su trabajo a bordo de la estación espacial, el cual ha mantenido más de 23 años consecutivos de presencia humana. La agencia también permite el desarrollo de nuevas estaciones espaciales comerciales donde los integrantes de la tripulación continuarán realizando actividades científicas en beneficio de la exploración de la Tierra y el espacio profundo. Como parte de la campaña Artemis de la NASA, la agencia establecerá las bases para la exploración científica a largo plazo en la Luna, pondrá en la superficie lunar a la primera mujer, a la primera persona no blanca y al primer astronauta de sus socios internacionales, y se preparará para las expediciones humanas a Marte en beneficio de todos. Encuentra fotos adicionales de los candidatos a astronautas y más acerca de su formación aquí: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmXdVHhc -fin- Josh Finch / Claire O’Shea Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1100 joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / claire.a.o’shea@nasa.gov Courtney Beasley Johnson Space Center, Houston 281-483-5111 courtney.m.beasley@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Feb 07, 2024 LocationNASA Headquarters Related TermsNASA HeadquartersAstronautsBecoming an AstronautCandidate AstronautsHumans in SpaceJohnson Space Center View the full article

NASA’s astronaut candidate class is pictured at an event near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Dec. 7, 2021. NASA will honor the next generation of Artemis astronaut candidates to graduate at 10:30 a.m. EST Tuesday, March 5, at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. After completing more than two years of basic training, these candidates will earn their wings and become eligible for spaceflight, including assignments to the International Space Station, future commercial destinations, missions to the Moon, and eventually, missions to Mars. The 2021 class includes 10 NASA candidates, as well as two United Arab Emirates (UAE) candidates from the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center who have been training alongside the NASA candidates. After the ceremony, at 11:45 a.m., NASA will host a Q&A session with students and media in the audience. Those following the session on social media may ask questions using #AskNASA. The new graduates also will be available for in-person and remote media interviews. Both the ceremony and Q&A session will stream live on NASA+, NASA Television, and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media. International media must request credentials to participate in person by 5 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 21, from the Johnson newsroom at 281-483-5111 or jsccommu@mail.nasa.gov. U.S. media wishing to participate in person must request credentials no later than 5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 29, to the Johnson newsroom. All media seeking an in-person or remote interview with the astronauts must request credentials by 5 p.m. Feb. 29, from the Johnson newsroom. NASA’s astronaut candidates are: Nichole Ayers, major, U.S. Air Force, is a native of Colorado who graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and a minor in Russian. She later earned a master’s degree in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Rice University in Houston. Ayers has more than 200 combat hours and more than 1,400 hours of total flight time in the T-38 and the F-22 Raptor fighter jet. One of the few women to have flown the F-22, in 2019 Ayers led the first ever all-woman formation of the aircraft in combat. Marcos Berríos, major, U.S. Air Force, grew up in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. Berríos worked as an aerospace engineer for the U.S. Army Aviation Development Directorate at Moffett Federal Airfield in California and as a combat search and rescue helicopter pilot for the California Air National Guard. He is a test pilot who holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering as well as a doctorate in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Berríos has accumulated more than 110 combat missions and 1,400 hours of flight time in more than 21 different aircraft. Chris (Christina) Birch grew up in Gilbert, Arizona, and graduated from the University of Arizona in Tucson, with degrees in Mathematics and Biochemistry and Molecular biophysics. After earning a doctorate in biological engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she taught bioengineering at the University of California in Riverside, and scientific writing and communication at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. She subsequently left academia to become a track cyclist on the U.S. National Team. Deniz Burnham calls Wasilla, Alaska, home. A former intern at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, she earned a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of California in San Diego, and a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Burnham is an experienced leader in the energy industry, having managed drilling projects on oil rigs for over a decade, including the Arctic in Alaska, Northern Alberta in Canada, and Texas. Burnham served in the U.S. Navy Reserves as an engineering duty officer. She is a licensed private pilot with the following ratings: airplane single engine land and sea, instrument airplane, and rotorcraft-helicopter. Luke Delaney, major, retired, U.S. Marine Corps, grew up in Debary, Florida. He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering from University of North Florida in Jacksonville, and a master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Delaney is a naval aviator who participated in exercises throughout the Asia Pacific region and conducted combat missions in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. As a test pilot, he executed flights evaluating weapon systems integration, and he served as an instructor. Delaney most recently worked as a research pilot at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where he supported airborne science missions. Including his NASA career, Delaney has logged more than 3,900 flight hours on 48 models of jet, propeller, and rotary wing aircraft. Andre Douglas is a Virginia native. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and a doctorate in Systems Engineering from the George Washington University in Washington. Douglas served in the U.S. Coast Guard as a naval architect, salvage engineer, damage control assistant, and officer of the deck. He most recently was a senior staff member at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, working on maritime robotics, planetary defense, and space exploration missions for NASA. Jack Hathaway, commander, U.S. Navy, is a native of Connecticut. He earned bachelor’s degrees in Physics and History from the U.S. Naval Academy and completed graduate studies at Cranfield University in England and the U.S. Naval War College. A naval aviator, Hathaway flew and deployed with Navy’s Strike Fighter Squadron 14 aboard the USS Nimitz and Strike Fighter Squadron 136 aboard the USS Truman. He graduated from Empire Test Pilots’ School in Wiltshire, England, supported the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, and was most recently assigned as the prospective executive officer for Strike Fighter Squadron 81. He has more than 2,500 flight hours in 30 types of aircraft, more than 500 carrier arrested landings, and flew 39 combat missions. Anil Menon, lieutenant colonel, U.S. Air Force, was born and raised in Minneapolis. He was SpaceX’s first flight surgeon, helping to launch the company’s first humans to space during NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission and building a medical organization to support the human system during future missions. Prior to that, he served NASA as the crew flight surgeon for various expeditions taking astronauts to the International Space Station. Menon is an actively practicing emergency medicine physician with fellowship training in wilderness and aerospace medicine. As a physician, he was a first responder during the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, 2015 earthquake in Nepal, and the 2011 Reno Air Show accident. In the Air Force, Menon supported the 45th Space Wing as a flight surgeon and the 173rd Fighter Wing, where he logged more than 100 sorties in the F-15 fighter jet and transported over 100 patients as part of the critical care air transport team. Christopher Williams grew up in Potomac, Maryland. He graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in Physics and a doctorate in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research was in astrophysics. Williams is a board-certified medical physicist, completing his residency training at Harvard Medical School in Boston, before joining the faculty as a clinical physicist and researcher. He most recently worked as a medical physicist in the Radiation Oncology Department at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. He was the lead physicist for the institute’s MRI-guided adaptive radiation therapy program. His research focused on developing image guidance techniques for cancer treatments. Jessica Wittner, lieutenant commander, U.S. Navy, is a native of California with a distinguished career serving on active duty as a naval aviator and test pilot. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and a master’s in Aerospace Engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. Wittner was commissioned as a naval officer through an enlisted-to-officer program and has served operationally flying F/A-18 fighter jets with Strike Fighter Squadron 34 in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Strike Fighter Squadron 151 in Lemoore, California. A graduate of U.S. Naval Test Pilot School, she also worked as a test pilot and project officer with Air Test and Evaluation Squadron 31 in China Lake, California. UAE’s astronaut candidates are: Nora AlMatrooshi, born in Sharjah, the first Emirati and Arab woman astronaut, was selected in the second group of UAE astronaut candidates and is part of NASA’s astronaut candidate class of 2021 undergoing training in the U.S. AlMatrooshi holds a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from the United Arab Emirates University and completed a semester at Vaasa University of Applied Sciences in Finland. She is a member of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers and previously worked as a piping engineer at the National Petroleum Construction Co. During her time there, she contributed to significant engineering projects for the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. and Saudi Aramco and served as a technical specialist. She also was vice president of the Youth Council at the National Petroleum Construction Company for three years. Mohammed AlMulla, born in Dubai, also was selected in the second group of UAE astronaut candidates, and is part of NASA’s astronaut candidate class of 2021 undergoing training in the U.S. At 19 years old, he had obtained a commercial pilot’s license from Australia civil aviation safety authority, making him the youngest pilot in Dubai Police. At age 28, he set another record by becoming the youngest trainer in the same organization after receiving his pilot trainer license. AlMulla earned a bachelor’s degree in Law and Economics in 2015 and an executive master’s in Public Administration from the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government in 2021. With more than 15 years of experience, he also served as the Head of Training Department of the Air Wing Centre at Dubai Police. All astronaut candidates have completed training in spacewalking, robotics, space station systems, T-38 jet proficiency, and Russian language. At the ceremony, each candidate will receive an astronaut pin, marking their graduation from basic training and their eligibility to be selected to fly in space. NASA continues its work aboard the space station, which has maintained more than 23 consecutive years of human presence. The agency also is enabling the development of new commercial space stations where crew members will continue conducting science to benefit Earth and deep space exploration. As part of NASA’s Artemis campaign, the agency will establish the foundation for long-term scientific exploration at the Moon, land the first woman, first person of color, and its first international partner astronaut on the lunar surface, and prepare for human expeditions to Mars for the benefit of all. Find additional photos of the astronaut candidates and their training here: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmXdVHhc -end- Josh Finch / Claire O’Shea Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1100 joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / claire.a.o’shea@nasa.gov Courtney Beasley Johnson Space Center, Houston 281-483-5111 courtney.m.beasley@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Feb 07, 2024 LocationNASA Headquarters Related TermsNASA HeadquartersAstronautsHumans in SpaceJohnson Space Center View the full article

1 min read For Your Processing Pleasure: The Sharpest Pictures of Jupiter’s Volcanic Moon Io in a Generation Jupiter’s moon Io, its night side illuminated by reflected sunlight from Jupiter, or “Jupitershine.” Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Emma Wälimäki © CC BY NASA’s Juno spacecraft just made the closest flybys of Jupiter’s moon Io that any spacecraft has carried out in more than 20 years. An instrument on this spacecraft called “JunoCam” returned spectacular, high-resolution images—and raw data are now available for you to process, enhance, and investigate. On Dec. 30th, 2023, Juno came within about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the surface of the solar system’s most volcanic world. It made a second ultra-close flyby of Io just this week. The second pass went predominantly over the southern hemisphere of Io, while prior flybys have been over the north. There’s a lot to see in these photos! There’s evidence of an active plume, tall mountain peaks with well-defined shadows, and lava lakes—some with apparent islands. It will be a challenge to sort all of this out, and the JunoCam scientists need your help. Previous JunoCam volunteers like Gerald Eichstadt have seen their processed images appear in multiple scientific publications and press releases. You can find the new raw images, see the creations of other image processors, and submit your own work at: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing. Share Details Last Updated Feb 07, 2024 Related Terms Citizen Science Jupiter Jupiter Moons Planetary Science View the full article

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the powerful gravity of a galaxy embedded in a massive cluster of galaxies producing multiple images of a single distant supernova far behind it. The image shows the galaxy’s location within a large cluster of galaxies called MACS J1149.6+2223, located more than 5 billion light-years away. In the enlarged inset view of the galaxy, the arrows point to the multiple copies of an exploding star, named Supernova Refsdal, located 9.3 billion light-years from Earth.Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Rodney (JHU) and the FrontierSN team; T. Treu (UCLA), P. Kelly (UC Berkeley), and the GLASS team; J. Lotz (STScI) and the Frontier Fields team; M. Postman (STScI) and the CLASH team; and Z. Levay (STScI) Astronomers investigating one of the most pressing mysteries of the cosmos – the rate at which the universe is expanding – are readying themselves to study this puzzle in a new way using NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Once it launches by May 2027, astronomers will mine Roman’s wide swaths of images for gravitationally lensed supernovae, which can be used to measure the expansion rate of the universe. There are multiple independent ways astronomers can measure the present expansion rate of the universe, known as the Hubble constant. Different techniques have yielded different values, referred to as the Hubble tension. Much of Roman’s cosmological investigations will be into elusive dark energy, which affects how the universe is expanding over time. One primary tool for these investigations is a fairly traditional method, which compares the intrinsic brightness of objects like type Ia supernovae to their perceived brightness to determine distances. Alternatively, astronomers could use Roman to examine gravitationally lensed supernovae. This method of exploring the Hubble constant is unique from traditional methods because it’s based on geometric methods, and not brightness. “Roman is the ideal tool to let the study of gravitationally lensed supernovae take off,” said Lou Strolger of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, co-lead of the team preparing for Roman’s study of these objects. “They are rare, and very hard to find. We have had to get lucky in detecting a few of them early enough. Roman’s extensive field of view and repeated imaging in high resolution will help those chances.” Using various observatories like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered just eight gravitationally lensed supernovae in the universe. However, only two of those eight have been viable candidates to measure the Hubble constant due to the type of supernovae they are and the duration of their time-delayed imaging. Gravitational lensing occurs when the light from an object like a stellar explosion, on its way to Earth, passes through a galaxy or galaxy cluster and gets deflected by the immense gravitational field. The light splits along different paths and forms multiple images of the supernova on the sky as we see it. Depending on the differences between the paths, the supernova images appear delayed by hours to months, or even years. Precisely measuring this difference in arrival times between the multiple images leads to a combination of distances that constrain the Hubble constant. “Probing these distances in a fundamentally different way than more common methods, with the same observatory in this case, can help shed light on why various measurement techniques have yielded different results,” added Justin Pierel of STScI, Strolger’s co-lead on the program. This illustration, using Hubble Space Telescope images of Supernova Refsdal, shows how the gravity of massive galaxy cluster MACS J1149.6+2223 bends and focuses the light from the supernova behind it, resulting in multiple images of the exploding star. The upper graphic shows that when the star explodes, its light travels through space and encounters the foreground galaxy cluster. The light paths are bent by the cluster’s gravity and redirected onto new paths, several of which are pointed at Earth. Astronomers, therefore, see multiple images of the exploding star, each one corresponding to one of those altered light paths. Each image takes a different route through the cluster and arrives at a different time. In the lower graphic, the redirected light passes through a giant elliptical galaxy within the cluster. This galaxy adds another layer of lensing.Credit: Illustration: NASA, ESA, A. Fields (STScI), and J. DePasquale (STScI). Science: NASA, ESA, and S. Rodney (JHU) and the FrontierSN team; T. Treu (UCLA), P. Kelly (UC Berkeley), and the GLASS team; J. Lotz (STScI) and the Frontier Fields team; M. Postman (STScI) and the CLASH team; and Z. Levay (STScI) Finding the Needle in the Haystack Roman’s extensive surveys will be able to map the universe much faster than Hubble can, with the telescope “seeing” more than 100 times the area of Hubble in a single image. “Rather than gathering several pictures of trees, this new telescope will allow us to see the entire forest in a single snapshot,” Pierel explained. In particular, the High Latitude Time Domain Survey will observe the same area of sky repeatedly, which will allow astronomers to study targets that change over time. This means there will be an extraordinary amount of data – over 5 billion pixels each time – to sift through in order to find these very rare events. A team led by Strolger and Pierel at STScI is laying the groundwork for finding gravitationally lensed supernovae in Roman data through a project funded by NASA’s Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES) Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Research and Support Participation Opportunities program. “Because these are rare, leveraging the full potential of gravitationally lensed supernovae depends on a high level of preparation,” said Pierel. “We want to make all the tools for finding these supernovae ready upfront so we don’t waste any time sifting through terabytes of data when it arrives.” The project will be carried out by a team of researchers from various NASA centers and universities around the country. The preparation will occur in several stages. The team will create data reduction pipelines designed to automatically detect gravitationally lensed supernovae in Roman imaging. To train those pipelines, the researchers will also create simulated imaging: 50,000 simulated lenses are needed, and there are only 10,000 actual lenses currently known. The data reduction pipelines created by Strolger and Pierel’s team will complement pipelines being created to study dark energy with Type Ia supernovae. “Roman is truly the first opportunity to create a gold-standard sample of gravitationally lensed supernovae,” concluded Strolger. “All our preparations now will produce all the components needed to ensure we can effectively leverage the enormous potential for cosmology.” The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California. By Hannah Braun Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. ​​Media Contact: Claire Andreoli NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 301-286-1940 Christine Pulliam Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. Explore More 7 min read NASA’s Roman Mission to Probe Cosmic Secrets Using Exploding Stars Article 3 years ago 8 min read NASA’s WFIRST Will Help Uncover Universe’s Fate Article 4 years ago 6 min read How NASA’s Roman Space Telescope Will Chronicle the Active Cosmos Article 3 months ago Share Details Last Updated Feb 07, 2024 LocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related TermsNancy Grace Roman Space TelescopeDark EnergyGalaxies, Stars, & Black HolesGoddard Space Flight CenterMissionsStarsSupernovaeThe Universe View the full article

5 Min Read NASA to Demonstrate Autonomous Navigation System on Moon When the second CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) delivery is launched to the Moon in mid-February, its NASA payloads will include an experiment that could change how human explorers, rovers, and spacecraft independently track their precise location on the Moon and in cis-lunar space. Demonstrating autonomous navigation, the Lunar Node-1 experiment, or LN-1, is a radio beacon designed to support precise geolocation and navigation observations for landers, surface infrastructure, and astronauts, digitally confirming their positions on the Moon relative to other craft, ground stations, or rovers on the move. These radio beacons also can be used in space to help with orbital maneuvers and with guiding landers to a successful touchdown on the lunar surface. IM-1, the first NASA Commercial Launch Program Services launch for Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander, will carry multiple payloads to the Moon, including Lunar Node-1, demonstrating autonomous navigation via radio beacon to support precise geolocation and navigation among lunar orbiters, landers, and surface personnel. NASA’s CLPS initiative oversees industry development of small robotic landers and rovers to support NASA’s Artemis campaign. “Imagine getting verification from a lighthouse on the shore you’re approaching, rather than waiting on word from the home port you left days earlier,” said Evan Anzalone, principal investigator of LN-1 and a navigation systems engineer at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. “What we seek to deliver is a lunar network of lighthouses, offering sustainable, localized navigation assets that enable lunar craft and ground crews to quickly and accurately confirm their position instead of relying on Earth.” The system is designed to operate as part of a broader navigation infrastructure, anchored by a series of satellites in lunar orbit as being procured under NASA’s Lunar Communications Relay and Navigation Systems project. Together, future versions of LN-1 would utilize LunaNet-defined standards to provide interoperable navigation reference signals from surface beacons as well as orbital assets. Currently, navigation beyond Earth is heavily reliant on point-to-point services provided by NASA’s Deep Space Network, an international array of giant radio antennas which transmit positioning data to interplanetary spacecraft to keep them on course. These measurements typically are relayed back to Earth and processed on the ground to deliver information back to the traveling vehicle. But when seconds count during orbital maneuvers, or among explorers traversing uncharted areas of the lunar surface, LN-1 offers a timely improvement, Anzalone said. Lunar Node-1, an autonomous navigation payload that will change how human explorers safely traverse the Moon’s surface and live and work in lunar orbit, awaits liftoff as part of Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 mission, its first under NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative. LN-1 was developed, built, and tested at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. NASA/Intuitive Machines The CubeSat-sized experiment is one of six payloads included in the NASA delivery manifest for Intuitive Machines of Houston, which will be launched via a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Designated IM-1, the launch is the company’s first for NASA’s CLPS initiative, which oversees industry development, testing, and launch of small robotic landers and rovers supporting NASA’s Artemis campaign. The Nova-C lander is scheduled to touch down near Malapert A, a lunar impact crater in the Moon’s South Pole region. LN-1 relies on networked computer navigation software known as MAPS (Multi-spacecraft Autonomous Positioning System). Developed by Anzalone and researchers at NASA Marshall, MAPS was successfully tested on the International Space Station in 2018 using NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation testbed. Engineers at NASA Marshall conducted all structural design, thermal and electronic systems development, and integration and environmental testing of LN-1 as part of the NASA-Provided Lunar Payloads project funded by the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. Anzalone and his team delivered the payload in 2021, having performed the payload build during the COVID pandemic. Since then, they refined the operating procedures, conducted thorough testing of the integrated flight system, and in October 2023, oversaw installation of LN-1 on Intuitive Machines’ lander. The payload will transmit information briefly each day during the journey to the Moon. Upon lunar touchdown, the LN-1 team will conduct a full systems checkout and begin continuous operations within 24 hours of landing. NASA’s Deep Space Network will receive its transmissions, capturing telemetry, Doppler tracking, and other data and relaying it back to Earth. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and at Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky, also will monitor LN-1’s transmissions throughout the mission, which is scheduled to last approximately 10 days. Eventually, as the technology is proven and its infrastructure expanded, Anzalone expects LN-1 to evolve from a single lighthouse on the lunar shore into a key piece of a much broader infrastructure, helping NASA evolve its navigation system into something more akin to a bustling metropolitan subway network, wherein every train is tracked in real time as it travels its complex route. “Spacecraft, surface vehicles, base camps and exploratory digs, even individual astronauts on the lunar surface,” Anzalone said. “LN-1 could connect them all and help them navigate more accurately, creating a reliable, more autonomous lunar network.” Marshall’s LN-1 team is already discussing future Moon to Mars applications for LN-1 with NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) program – which oversees more than 100 NASA and partner missions. They’re also consulting with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) and ESA (European Space Agency), aiding the push to unite spacefaring nations via an interconnected, interoperable global architecture. Eventually, these same technologies and applications we’re proving at the Moon will be vital on Mars, making those next generations of human explorers safer and more self-sufficient as they lead us out into the solar system. Evan Anzalone Principal investigator of LN-1 “Eventually, these same technologies and applications we’re proving at the Moon will be vital on Mars, making those next generations of human explorers safer and more self-sufficient as they lead us out into the solar system,” Anzalone said. NASA’s CLPS initiative enables NASA to buy a complete commercial robotic lunar delivery service from leading aerospace industry contractors. The provider is responsible for launch services, owns its lander design, and leads landing operations. Learn more here. Jonathan Deal Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala. 256-544-0034 jonathan.e.deal@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Feb 07, 2024 LocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related TermsMarshall Space Flight CenterCommercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) Explore More 3 min read NASA Tests New Spacecraft Propellant Gauge on Lunar Lander Article 1 day ago 5 min read NASA’s Laser Navigation Tech Enables Commercial Lunar Exploration Article 2 days ago 4 min read Tiny NASA Cameras to Picture Interaction Between Lander, Moon’s Surface Article 5 days ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Missions Humans in Space Climate Change Solar System View the full article

2 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) A group of spectators view a solar eclipse at Great Lakes Science Center in 2017.Credit: NASA/Andrew Dolph Media are invited to attend an open house from 10 a.m. to noon on Tuesday, Feb. 13, at Great Lakes Science Center, home of the NASA Glenn Visitor Center. During the open house, news outlets will get a preview of the Science Center’s Total Eclipse Fest, which is scheduled to take place April 6-8, and learn everything they need to know to cover the total solar eclipse on April 8. Representatives from NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Great Lakes Science Center, and The Cleveland Orchestra will share what to expect during the three-day festival, including: Things to do and see at the festival How to film an eclipse NASA TV broadcast and telescope feeds Notable interview opportunities Festival coverage logistics NASA Glenn experts also will talk about the science behind the solar eclipse, how to view the eclipse safely, and how NASA studies eclipses to make new discoveries about the Sun, Earth, and our space environment. For more information on NASA Glenn, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/NASAinCLE -end- Jacqueline Minerd Glenn Research Center, Cleveland 216-905-6774 jacqueline.minerd@nasa.gov Joe Yachanin Great Lakes Science Center 216-696-3644 yachaninj@glsc.org Jen Steer The Cleveland Orchestra 216-231-7637 jsteer@clevelandorchestra.com Explore More 3 min read NASA Tests New Spacecraft Propellant Gauge on Lunar Lander Article 24 hours ago 4 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… Article 5 days ago 4 min read NASA’s Fission Surface Power Project Energizes Lunar Exploration Article 1 week ago View the full article

NASA/Don Richey Daniel Andrews, project manager for NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) (left), stands next to a full-scale model of the rover alongside visitors from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA): Dr. Hitoshi Kuninaka, Vice President of JAXA and Director General of JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS); Nobuhiro Takahashi of the ISAS Management and Integration Department; and Shintaro Chofuku, a JAXA engineer on detail to NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley (right), during a visit to Ames on Feb. 1, 2024. Following briefings about both agencies’ space science and spaceflight missions, Kuninaka toured several Ames facilities supporting NASA and JAXA’s exploration of the solar system. The heat shield for JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission, which delivered a sample of an asteroid to Earth in 2020, was tested in the center’s arc jet facility, and a portion of that sample is now being studied by Ames researchers. An upcoming JAXA mission to study the two moons of Mars, called Martian Moons eXploration (MMX), was also tested in the arc jet. Present and future exploration of the Moon was a focus of the day, including a stop at Ames’ Lunar Imaging Lab following the VIPER briefing. VIPER will be delivered to Mons Mouton near the Moon’s South Pole in late 2024 to map water and other potential resources and explore the characteristics of the lunar environment where NASA plans to send future astronauts as part of the Artemis campaign. Last month, JAXA’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) arrived on the lunar surface, after reaching its targeted landing site with great accuracy. The mission aimed to demonstrate accurate lunar landing techniques by a small explorer, to help accelerate study of the Moon and planets using lighter exploration systems. Japan is a significant partner for NASA and for Ames, specifically,” said Center Director Eugene Tu. “From testing with our teams the X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft design to JAXA’s contributions to Artemis and Gateway, where astronauts on future lunar missions will stay, our work together runs broad and deep. We look forward to many more fruitful collaborations.” Dr. Hitoshi Kuninaka, vice president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and director general of JAXA’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) (left), Dr. Eugene Tu, center director at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and Nobuhiro Takahashi of the ISAS Management and Integration Department gather for a photo during the JAXA representatives’ visit to Ames on Feb. 1, 2024.NASA/Don RicheyView the full article

NASA/JPL-Caltech Workforce statement and memo to employees. JPL statement issued on Feb. 6, 2024: After exhausting all other measures to adjust to a lower budget from NASA, and in the absence of an FY24 appropriation from Congress, we have had to make the difficult decision to reduce the JPL workforce through layoffs. JPL staff has been advised that the workforce reduction will affect approximately 530 of our colleagues, an impact of about 8%, plus approximately 40 additional members of our contractor workforce. The impacts will occur across both technical and support areas of the Lab. These are painful but necessary adjustments that will enable us to adhere to our budget allocation while continuing our important work for NASA and our nation. The following is the text of a memo sent earlier today from JPL Director Laurie Leshin to employees. Dear Colleagues, Today I’m writing to share some difficult news. While we still do not have an FY24 appropriation or the final word from Congress on our Mars Sample Return (MSR) budget allocation, we are now in a position where we must take further significant action to reduce our spending, which will result in layoffs of JPL employees and an additional release of contractors. These cuts are among the most challenging that we have had to make even as we have sought to reduce our spending in recent months. The workforce reduction will affect approximately 530 of our JPL colleagues, an impact of about 8%, and approximately 40 additional members of our contractor workforce. I am writing to share as much detail and clarity on our actions as I can, including reviewing the factors that have led to this decision, and our next steps. First, how we got here. Without an approved federal budget including final allocation for MSR FY24 funding levels, NASA previously directed JPL to plan for an MSR budget of $300M. This is consistent with the low end of congressional markups of NASA’s budget and a 63% decrease over the FY23 level. In response to this direction, and in an effort to protect our workforce, we implemented a hiring freeze, reduced MSR contracts, and implemented cuts to burden budgets across the Lab. Earlier this month, we further reduced spending by releasing some of our valued on-site contractors. Unfortunately, those actions alone are not enough for us to make it through the remainder of the fiscal year. So in the absence of an appropriation, and as much as we wish we didn’t need to take this action, we must now move forward to protect against even deeper cuts later were we to wait. To adjust to the much lower MSR budget levels in NASA’s direction to us, we must reduce our workforce in both technical and support areas of the Lab, and across different organizations. We must streamline our operations while maintaining a level of expertise, creativity, technical agility, and innovation that will enable us to continue to do vital work and deliver on our current missions, including MSR. As I have shared before, the decisions we are making and our path forward are based on our assessment of future mission needs and work requirements across the Lab. I’d like to share some details about what to expect. Our desire in this process is that impacted employees quickly get to the point where they will receive personalized attention during this transition. In an effort to bring clarity to everyone as quickly as we can, the details of our workforce reductions will be communicated in a single day – tomorrow. We are sharing this information with you today so that you can make personal arrangements for working from home and plan your schedules to be available for the virtual workforce update meetings described below. Given the challenge and scale of this workforce action, our approach has prioritized minimizing stress by notifying everyone quickly whether they are impacted or not. Then we can rapidly pivot to focus on providing opportunities for personalized support to our impacted colleagues, including scheduling dedicated time to discuss their benefits and several other forms of assistance. For additional important details, please read the following information carefully: 1. I am directing most employees to work from home tomorrow, Wednesday, February 7, so everyone can be in a safe, comfortable environment on a stressful day. Most individuals will not be able to enter the Lab during this mandatory remote work day. A Lab access list has been created and those who will have access will be notified by email shortly. If you do not receive an email instructing you to be on Lab, please plan to work remotely, regardless of your telework agreement status. In addition, and to ensure we have everyone’s accurate contact information, I am also asking everyone to please review and update your personal email and phone number in Workday today. 2. Tomorrow, leadership (mostly at the Division and Directorate level) will hold brief mandatory virtual workforce update meetings with their JPL teams. You will each be invited to one of these. Please look out for those online meeting invitations and ensure your attendance. Meeting times will vary depending on the organization, but all will happen tomorrow. In those meetings, your managers will reiterate some of the details I’m sharing here, along with giving some insight into the impact of the layoff in that organization. Even those organizations that do not have impacted employees will be meeting to ensure we are all hearing the same information. Importantly, we will not be sharing any specifics about any individual employees who are impacted. 3. Just following their virtual workforce update meeting, every employee who was invited to the meeting will receive an email notifying them whether they are being impacted by the layoff or not. We encourage impacted employees to forward this email to their personal email account immediately, as NASA requires that access to JPL systems be shut off very shortly following the notification. 4. If your role is impacted, you will receive personalized information electronically, and you will be able to schedule discussions with trained professionals to review the information about your benefits and the transitional support options available to you. All impacted employees will continue to receive their base pay and benefits through their 60-day notice period, though they will not be on Lab or be expected to work during this time, unless specific transitional input is requested. If eligible, impacted employees will be offered a severance package as outlined in Caltech’s severance policy, transitional benefits including placement services, and other benefits resource information. 5. If you are not an impacted employee, following your virtual workforce update meeting, you will receive an email letting you know that you are not impacted by the workforce reduction. There will also be resources available for you. As we move forward, I am asking your leaders and managers to meet with you and your teams to address your questions and concerns as best they can, to create space where our teams can support each other, and reinforce access to additional resources. We will also be scheduling a Town Hall soon to share more information about our path forward, and offer space for discussion. To our colleagues who will be leaving JPL, I want you to know how grateful I am for the exceptional contributions you have made to our mission and our community. Your talents leave a lasting mark on JPL. You will always be a part of our story and you have made a positive difference here. This is by far the hardest action I have had to take since becoming Director of JPL, and I know I join all of you in wishing it was not necessary. We will always value our colleagues who are leaving the Laboratory and they will be missed as we go forward. For those continuing on JPL’s journey, we will come through this difficult time and keep moving ahead on our essential missions, research, and technology work for NASA and the nation. Thank you for your support of one another in this challenging moment. Laurie Share Details Last Updated Feb 06, 2024 Related TermsJet Propulsion Laboratory Explore More 2 min read University High School Wins Regional Science Bowl at NASA’s JPL Article 1 day ago 6 min read NASA Puts Next-Gen Exoplanet-Imaging Technology to the Test Article 6 days ago 6 min read Poised for Science: NASA’s Europa Clipper Instruments Are All Aboard Article 1 week ago View the full article

On Feb. 3, 1984, space shuttle Challenger took off on its fourth flight, STS-41B. Its five-person crew of Commander Vance D. Brand, Pilot Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson, and Mission Specialists Ronald E. McNair, Robert L. Stewart, and Bruce McCandless flew an eight-day mission ending with the first return to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Many of the flight activities practiced tasks required for the upcoming Solar Maximum Mission satellite retrieval and repair mission. Among these, successful test flights of the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) astronaut propulsion device during two untethered spacewalks proved the most critical, and visually spectacular. The two commercial communications satellites, Westar VI and Palapa-B2, successfully deployed during the mission ended up in non-operational orbits due to upper stage failures. Left: The STS-41B crew of (clockwise from bottom left) Commander Vance D. Brand, Mission Specialists Robert L. Stewart, Ronald E. McNair, and Bruce McCandless, and Pilot Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson. Middle: The STS-41B crew patch. Right: Challenger’s payload bay for STS-41B. On Feb. 4, 1983, NASA announced Brand, Gibson, McNair, Stewart, and McCandless as the STS-11 crew. Brand, the flight’s only veteran, had flown on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975 and commanded STS-5 in 1982. For the other four, STS-41B represented their first trip into space, although McCandless had served as an astronaut since his selection in 1966. He helped to develop the MMU and as a backup crew member for the Skylab 2 mission in 1973, he helped train astronauts to fly the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit, the MMU’s predecessor, inside Skylab. Gibson, McNair, and Stewart joined NASA as astronauts in 1978. At the time of the crew announcement, the seven-day mission’s objectives included the Large Format Camera for Earth photography, deploying the Palapa-B2 communications satellite for Indonesia, and the Payload Deployment and Retrieval System (PDRS) to test the Canadian-built Remote Manipulator System (RMS), or robotic arm. Over the course of the next year, both the mission’s designation and its payload complement changed due to a shuffling of payloads among shuttle flights. The PDRS moved up to STS-8, replaced by the Westar VI communications satellite for Western Union. In addition to the two spacewalks by McCandless and Stewart to test the MMU, the mission, re-designated STS-41B in September 1983, now included the Shuttle Pallet Satellite-01A (SPAS-01A), a reflight of the German-built deployable satellite flown on STS-7 in June 1983. The mission also included practicing rendezvous maneuvers with the Integrated Rendezvous Target (IRT), an inflatable 6-foot balloon deployed from the payload bay. During their spacewalks, McCandless and Stewart planned to perform the first tests of the Manipulator Foot Restraint (MFR), a work platform attached to the end of the RMS. Left: Aerial view at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and the Shuttle Landing Facility, where STS-41B made the first landing of the program. Middle: Workers in the VAB prepare to lift space shuttle Challenger to mate it with its External Tank and twin Solid Rocket Boosters. Right: The STS-41B crew arrives at KSC three days before launch. After its previous mission, STS-8, Challenger arrived at KSC on Sept. 9, 1983, and workers towed it to the Orbiter Processing Facility to refurbish it for STS-41B. They replaced the orbiter’s three Auxiliary Power Units following a fire during Columbia’s landing on STS-9. They towed Challenger to the Vehicle Assembly Building on Jan. 6, 1984, 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 dress rehearsal for the actual countdown, on Jan. 16, and senior managers held the Flight Readiness Review on Jan. 25 to confirm the Feb. 3 launch date. Engineers began the countdown on Jan. 31, the same day the crew arrived at KSC. Left: Liftoff of space shuttle Challenger on the STS-41B mission. Middle: Congressman C. William “Bill” Nelson, left, of Florida cheers on the STS-41B launch. Right: Challenger rises into the sky. Liftoff occurred on schedule at 8:00 a.m. EST, with Challenger taking its five-member crew into the skies. Among the guests on hand to view the launch, Florida Congressman C. William “Bill” Nelson, who two years later flew on Columbia’s STS-61C mission, and in 2021 became NASA’s 14th administrator. Nine minutes after liftoff, Challenger’s three main engines cut off. The astronauts had reached space and experienced weightlessness for the first time, although they had not yet achieved orbit. The shuttle’s two Orbital Maneuvering System engines fired twice to complete the insertion into a circular 190-mile-high orbit. Left: Astronauts Ronald E. McNair, left, and Robert L. Stewart minutes after Challenger reached orbit. Middle: Deploy of the Westar VI communications satellite for Western Union. Right: Deploy of the Palapa-B2 communications satellite for Indonesia. Once in orbit, the astronauts opened Challenger’s payload bay doors, deployed the Ku-band high-gain antenna to communicate with the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, and closed the protective sunshields around the two satellites at the back of the payload bay. They tested the cameras in the payload bay and found that the one on the forward bulkhead’s starboard side did not tilt and panned only slowly, and only provided black and white imagery. Approximately eight hours into their first day, after opening its sunshield, the astronauts deployed the Westar VI communications satellite. Although the deployment went perfectly, 45 minutes later when the satellite’s Payload Assist Module-D (PAM-D) upper stage ignited to send it to geosynchronous transfer orbit, it fired for only a few seconds, stranding the satellite in a low, elliptical, and operationally useless orbit. Mission managers decided to delay the deployment of the Palapa satellite from the mission’s second day to the fourth day since it used an identical PAM-D upper stage. This provided engineers time to determine the cause of the first PAM-D failure. In place of the delayed deployment, the astronauts began several of the mission’s experiments, including activating the SPAS, and performed an initial checkout of the spacesuits. The third flight day included two retrograde OMS burns to lower Challenger’s orbit to a circular 173-mile-high orbit, and had planned to include the rendezvous operations with the IRT. However, shortly after its deployment from the payload bay, the balloon initially failed to inflate and then exploded, leaving no suitable target for a rendezvous. Using the shuttle’s radar and star trackers, the astronauts tracked the remains of the balloon to a distance of about 63 miles before abandoning the activity. In place of the IRT rendezvous, the crew checked out the RMS, with McNair at the controls. Left: The Shuttle Pallet Satellite-01A (SPAS-01A) in Challenger’s payload bay. Right: Robert L. Stewart wears the launch entry helmet during a pre–breathe activity prior to a spacewalk. The morning of flight day four, the astronauts decreased the shuttle’s cabin pressure from 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi) to 10.2 psi. This reduced the time the two spacewalkers needed to prebreathe pure oxygen to rid their blood of excess nitrogen that could result in the bends when working in their spacesuits at 4.3 psi. The astronauts deployed the Palapa satellite, and oriented the orbiter so that cameras on the RMS could observe the firing of the PAM-D engine. The burn initially appeared to go as planned, but engineers later determined that this engine suffered the same failure as the Westar PAM-D, similarly stranding Palapa in a low, elliptical, and operationally useless orbit. As a footnote, spacewalking astronauts flying MMUs retrieved both satellites during the STS-51A mission in November 1984 and returned them to Earth for reflight. Views of Bruce McCandless during the first test flight of the Manned Maneuvering Unit, and a view, right, of Challenger from McCandless’ vantage point. On flight day five, McCandless and Stewart began the second spacewalk of the shuttle program. After opening the airlock hatch, McCandless checked out the MMUs, donning the port side unit, designated with a number “3,” while Stewart prepared the Trunnion Pin Attachment Device (TPAD) and the MFR for use later in the spacewalk. As he began his first test flight in the MMU, McCandless said, “that may have been one small step for Neil, but it’s a heck of a big leap for me,” humorously echoing Apollo 11 astronaut Neil A. Armstrong’s first words after stepping onto the lunar surface. As an historical footnote, McCandless has served as capsule communicator during Armstrong’s historic Moonwalk. Floating just outside the flight deck aft windows, McCandless checked out the MMU’s flying in all three axes. He next translated down the length of the payload bay before beginning his long-distance travel. He flew 150 feet away from the orbiter, with a helmet mounted camera showing the receding shuttle, returned to the spacecraft, then backed out again to 320 feet before returning to the payload bay and stowing the MMU. With McNair operating the RMS, Stewart attached the MFR to the arm’s end effector. With the astronauts running slightly behind schedule, Mission Control decided to skip Stewart’s checkout of the MFR so he could proceed to his checkout of the MMU, the same unit McCandless just finished flying. McNair maneuvered McCandless in the MFR to the the SPAS to practice activities required for the Solar Max repair mission. Meanwhile Stewart began his test of the MMU, flying out to 150 feet, stopping, flying out to 300 feet, and returning to the payload bay. Once there, he attached the TPAD to the front of the MMU and practiced docking to the trunnion pin attached to the SPAS. He then returned the MMU to its stowage location. The two astronauts ended the spacewalk after 5 hours 55 minutes. View in Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston during the first STS-41B spacewalk as Bruce McCandless makes the first flight of the Manned Maneuvering Unit. Three views of Bruce McCandless testing the Manipulator Foot Restraint at the end of the Remote Manipulator System, operated by Ronald E. McNair. Left: Robert L. Stewart begins his first test flight of the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU). Middle: Stewart during his flight away from the payload bay. Right: Bruce McCandless prepares to dock his MMU with the attached Trunnion Pin Attachment Device to the SPAS-01A in Challenger’s payload bay. Left: Astronaut Ronald E. McNair poses with the camera for the Cinema 360 project, wearing a humorous “Cecil B. McNair” name tag, sunglasses, and beret. Right: McNair plays the soprano saxophone while floating in the middeck. On flight day six, McCandless and Stewart busied themselves with cleaning and recharging their spacesuits for the next day’s second spacewalk. McNair, an accomplished saxophonist, took some free time to play an instrument he brought along, the first musical instrument played on the shuttle. Space limitations in the shuttle precluded McNair flying his favorite tenor sax, so he learned to play the smaller soprano version of the instrument. McNair encountered unexpected effects of weightlessness on his playing. The water that normally accumulates inside wind instruments on Earth resulted instead in unwanted “bubbly” effects. The shuttle cabin’s dry air had unplanned effects on the instrument’s felt and leather pads, requiring several minutes of “rehydration” before proper playing. The reduced cabin atmospheric pressure for the spacewalks also required special reeds and mode of playing. Another historic event on this day, the Soviet Union launched a trio of cosmonauts to their Salyut-7 space station, bringing the total number of people in space to a then record-setting eight. This prompted one of the astronauts to comment, “It’s really getting to be populated up here.” Left: Bruce McCandless flies the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) above Challenger’s payload bay during the second spacewalk. Middle: McCandless grabs the Manipulator Foot Restraint that had floated away. Right: Robert L. Stewart flies the MMU above Challenger’s payload bay. On the seventh flight day, when Gibson began to operate the RMS, it did not respond as expected due to a failure in its wrist joint, and Mission Control requested that he stow it. Without the RMS, McCandless and Stewart could not practice docking with a slowly rotating SPAS, a critical test for the Solar Max mission. Instead, they practiced docking with the satellite berthed in the payload bay. McCandless placed himself in the starboard MMU, designated with a “2,” attached the TPAD, and practiced dockings before returning the MMU to its stowage location. Meanwhile, Stewart recharged the port MMU’s nitrogen tanks and took flight to practice dockings with the TPAD to the SPAS. He then returned the MMU to its portside location. At one point during the spacewalk, the MFR got loose and began drifting away. In an impromptu demonstration of rescuing an untethered astronaut, Brand maneuvered the orbiter so McCandless could retrieve it. McCandless donned the portside MMU to conduct evaluations of its automatic attitude hold and translation and rotational acceleration capabilities. In the meantime, Stewart practiced a hydrazine transfer operation using red-dyed freon as a substitute for the hazardous fuel. President Ronald W. Reagan called the astronauts during the spacewalk to congratulate them. McCandless returned the MMU to the port station while Stewart put away the fuel transfer equipment and tools. They climbed back into the airlock to close out the 6-hour 17-minute spacewalk, the longest of the shuttle program up to that time. Shortly after, the astronauts removed their spacesuits, exited the airlock, and repressurized Challenger’s cabin to 14.7 psi. The STS-41B crew members pose near the end of their successful mission, in the middeck, left, and on the flight deck, right. On flight day eight, the day before entry, the astronauts busied themselves with stowing equipment. Brand and Gibson tested Challenger’s reaction control system thrusters and flight control surfaces in preparation for the next day’s landing. They held a 30-minute press conference with reporters on the ground asking them questions about their mission, with special emphasis on the historic spacewalks. Left: The astronauts close the payload bay doors at the end of the STS-41B mission. Middle: Orange glow outside the windows during Challenger’s reentry. Right: A chase plane photographs Challenger during its descent to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Space shuttle Challenger touches down on the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Left: Space shuttle Challenger rolls down the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Middle: STS-41B astronauts depart space shuttle Challenger at the SLF. Right: A welcome home ceremony for the STS-41B crew at the KSC Visitor Center. On entry day, Feb. 11, the astronauts opened the two sunshields that protected the two satellites before their deployments, retracted and stowed the Ku antenna, and closed the payload bay doors. Brand and Gibson oriented Challenger with its tail in the direction of flight and fired its two OMS engines to slow the spacecraft enough to drop it out of orbit. They reoriented the orbiter to fly with its heat shield exposed to the direction of flight as it entered Earth’s atmosphere. The buildup of ionized gases caused by the heat of reentry prevented communications for about 15 minutes. The shuttle’s reentry path took it over the U.S. Gulf coast as it traveled toward the Shuttle Landing Facility at KSC. At an altitude of 110,000 feet and traveling at Mach 4.3, Challenger crossed Florida’s west coast, carrying out roll reversal maneuvers to reduce its speed. As the shuttle went subsonic, it made its final turn onto the KSC runway. Gibson lowered Challenger’s landing gear and Brand brought the shuttle down for its first landing at KSC, just a few miles from where it launched 7 days 23 hours 16 minutes earlier. Enjoy the crew narrated video of the STS-41B mission. Read Brand’s and Gibson’s recollections of the STS-41B mission in their oral histories with the JSC History Office. Explore More 4 min read The Iconic Photos from STS-41B: Documenting the First Untethered Spacewalk Article 4 days ago 9 min read 30 Years Ago: STS-60, the First Shuttle-Mir Mission Article 4 days ago 25 min read Honoring Black Astronauts During Black History Month 2024 Article 5 days ago View the full article

NASA astronaut and Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman exits the side of a mockup of the Orion spacecraft during a training exercise in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston Jan. 23, 2024. As part of training for their mission around the Moon next year the crew of four astronauts practiced the recovery procedures they will use when the splash down in the Pacific Ocean. Artemis II is the first crewed mission on NASA’s path to establishing a long-term presence at the Moon for scientific discovery and exploration through the Artemis campaign. The approximately 10-day flight will test NASA’s foundational human deep space exploration capabilities, the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft, for the first time with astronauts. Image Credit: NASA/Josh Valcarcel View the full article

7 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) Procurement manager Sislyn “Pauline” Barrett takes great joy in helping people go beyond what they think they can. Name: Sislyn “Pauline” Barrett Title: Procurement Manager Formal Job Classification: Supervisory Contract Specialist (1102) Organization: Engineering Procurement Office, Procurement Division (Code 175) Pauline Barrett is a procurement manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.Courtesy of Pauline Barrett What do you do and what is most interesting about your role here at Goddard? I manage a wide array of procurement actions for the center and agency. In my role I serve as a highly skilled senior level manager with a contracting officer’s warrant. I am responsible for the management of multiple complex high value acquisitions, including pre-award through post award. My team supports all contract types including large service contracts, the development and administration of space flight hardware instruments, and research and development. What I most enjoy is the ability to pour into others who are assigned to me and to watch them grow and become more knowledgeable and proficient at their jobs. What is your educational background? Bachelor of Science in Business Management from Waynesburg University in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, 1987 Master’s in Acquisition Management from the University of Maryland, University College, 2011 Master of Business Administration from the University of Maryland, University College, 2012. Project Management Certification from the University of Maryland, University College, 2022. Where did you work prior to coming to Goddard? After graduating from college in 1987, I was hired as a buyer for the University of Maryland, College Park. I procured goods and services for the university, specifically in the food division, where I procured food on a daily basis for the campus community, and the police division, where I procured the motorcycles for the University police department. In 1999, I was hired as a senior buyer with Prince George’s County procuring mostly IT equipment. In 2001, I began working for the District of Columbia government as a contract specialist, initially supporting D.C. Public Schools and then was elevated as a contracting officer to the Office of the Chief Financial Officer. How did you get to Goddard? I was always interested in procurement at the federal level. In 2009, on a whim I applied for a contract specialist position via USAJobs and nine months later, I began my career here at Goddard. Where have you worked at Goddard? I began my career here at Goddard supporting the Earth Science Division as a contract specialist, eventually becoming a contracting officer/team lead. In 2013, I joined the Headquarters Procurement Office on a 12-month detail as a procurement manager. In 2014, I joined the Space Science Division as a permanent procurement manager and stayed there for seven years. I currently work in the Engineering Procurement Office and have been here since 2021. What excites you about working in the Engineering Procurement Office? Procuring the services needed to perform the work required here at NASA, has been enlightening. What I mean by that is NASA is such a niche area, and as such we cannot just buy your typical services from anyone (i.e., GSA) to do the type of work we perform here. We procure specific types of services that comes with specific educational requirements and experiences, thus we have specialized and unique contracts, like the big IDIQ (Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity) service contracts that my office manages to obtain services, or the hardware needed to perform our work. So, knowing I have been a part of making that happen is exciting. As a mentor, what is the most important advice you give? When serving as a mentor, my initial meeting is to understand what that individual would like to work on, or what they want to gain from our interactions. Based on their response, I offer suggestions on how they can get to where they want to be by generating an action plan and provide guidance on achieving the goal they set. For example, in my arena, if a contract specialist wants to become a contracting officer, I suggest things such as taking specific classes, that will increase their knowledge, giving guidance on tools they can utilize, such as looking for those challenging work assignments that will help them grow. I share with them that it is not only doing the work, but it is being able to understand the process and speak to it. If you understand something well enough to explain it, then you really know the subject. A “want” becomes a “need” with a path there. Thus, it gives me great joy to see people go beyond what they think they can. I love helping them grow. In a leadership class, I learned that you know people are growing when you see them go further than you are. What is your role with the African Diaspora Employee Resource Group (ADERG)? I am a member of the African Diaspora Employee Resource Group (ADERG) and have been so for over five years. In this group, we come together as a community to talk about common things that are important to the African American community, such as Juneteenth and how it became a national holiday a couple years ago, and what that represents for us. Our group tries to expand people’s knowledge about African Americans and their place in our country’s history through various programs and activities. We also enjoy and celebrate things such as Black History Month. In 2022 our group led the first agencywide Black History Month celebration where our administrator participated, and we had great speakers like the late Curtis Graves, who was a noted Civil Rights activist. Graves walked with Dr. Martin Luther King. He was also a member of the Texas House of Representatives, and he worked at NASA’s Academic Affairs Division and was the director for civil affairs. Most recently our own senior Champion Cynthia Simmons was appointed as the deputy center director. We share ideas, we support each other, and we talk through whatever is affecting us here at Goddard. When we have significant issues, our chairs bring them to the attention of the center director. Why do you love being at Goddard? I love being at Goddard because of the diversity of people here. You can meet a Nobel Prize laureate and you can meet a young man or woman just out of college who is excited about science and engineering. You can meet someone who has been here for years and get their perspective, and you can meet a junior scientist or engineer, who just started and is excited about working at Goddard. NASA is the Mecca of space, and so I want the next generation to see NASA Goddard as someplace they want to be. Those are some of the things that makes me love working here. What do you do for fun? I enjoy reading, all genres, and am a member of a book club. I love to travel. I have been to China, Denmark, Switzerland, Sarajevo, England, Scotland, Mexico, Belgium, Bahamas, France, Italy, Monaco, Monte Carlo, Greece, Brazil, Holland, and Germany. Next, I want to go to Australia and New Zealand. I love to exercise. I enjoy cardio, weights, anything that will keep my body active. I am in the gym every morning at 5 a.m. working out. I do a bootcamp fitness class and I also like walking Goddard’s campus. What is your motto? Wherever you are, whatever you do, if you become unlearned then you are no longer good to the organization because we all should be learning every day. I also say, “Keep your faith, whatever your faith is, and everything else will follow.” What is your “six-word memoir”? A six-word memoir describes something in just six words. Always learning, always teaching, ever growing. By Elizabeth M. Jarrell NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Conversations With Goddard is a collection of Q&A profiles highlighting the breadth and depth of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s talented and diverse workforce. The Conversations have been published twice a month on average since May 2011. Read past editions on Goddard’s “Our People” webpage. Share Details Last Updated Feb 06, 2024 EditorMadison ArnoldContactElizabeth M. Jarrell Related TermsGoddard Space Flight CenterPeople of GoddardPeople of NASA Explore More 2 min read Hubble Views a Dim but Distinct Galaxy This image of the softly luminous spiral galaxy UGC 11105 is from the NASA/ESA Hubble… Article 4 days ago 3 min read Hubble Sees a Merged Galaxy This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows ESO 185-IG013, a luminous blue compact galaxy… 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

7 min read Gamma-ray Bursts: Harvesting Knowledge From the Universe’s Most Powerful Explosions The most powerful events in the known universe – gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) – are short-lived outbursts of the highest-energy light. They can erupt with a quintillion (a 10 followed by 18 zeros) times the luminosity of our Sun. Now thought to announce the births of new black holes, they were discovered by accident. Two neutron stars begin to merge in this artist’s concept, blasting jets of high-speed particles. Collision events like this one create short gamma-ray bursts. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/ A. Simonnet, Sonoma State University The backstory takes us to 1963, when the U.S. Air Force launched the Vela satellites to detect gamma rays from banned nuclear weapons tests. The United States had just signed a treaty with the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union to prohibit tests within Earth’s atmosphere, and the Vela satellites ensured all parties’ compliance. Instead, the satellites stumbled upon 16 gamma-ray events. By 1973, scientists could rule out that both Earth and the Sun were the sources of these brilliant eruptions. That’s when astronomers at Los Alamos National Laboratory published the first paper announcing these bursts originate beyond our solar system. Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center quickly confirmed the results through an X-ray detector on the IMP 6 satellite. It would take another two decades and contributions from the Italian Space Agency’s BeppoSax and NASA’s Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory to show that these outbursts occur far beyond our Milky Way galaxy, are evenly distributed across the sky, and are extraordinarily powerful. The closest GRB on record occurred more than 100 million light-years away. Though discovered by chance, GRBs have proven invaluable for today’s researchers. These flashes of light are rich with insight on phenomena like the end of life of very massive stars or the formation of black holes in distant galaxies. Still, there are plenty of scientific gems left to discover. In 2017, GRBs were first linked to gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of space-time – steering us toward a better understanding of the how these events work. The Long and Short of GRBs Astronomers separate GRBs into two main classes: short (where the initial burst of gamma rays lasts less than two seconds) and long events (lasting two seconds or longer). Shorter bursts also produce fewer gamma rays overall, which lead researchers to hypothesize that the two classes originated from different progenitor systems. Astronomers now associate short bursts with the collision of either two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole, resulting in a black hole and a short-lived explosion. Short GRBs are sometimes followed by kilonovae, light produced by the radioactive decay of chemical elements. That decay generates even heavier elements, like gold, silver, and platinum. Long bursts are linked to the explosive deaths of massive stars. When a high-mass star runs out of nuclear fuel, its core collapses and then rebounds, driving a shock wave outward through the star. Astronomers see this explosion as a supernova. The core may form a either a neutron star or a black hole. In both classes, the newly born black hole beams jets in opposite directions. The jets, made of particles accelerated to near the speed of light, pierce through and eventually interact with the surrounding material, emitting gamma rays when they do. As a high-mass star explodes in this artist’s concept, it produces a jet of high-energy particles. We see GRBs when such gets point almost directly at Earth. Credit: NASA/Swift/Cruz deWilde This broad outline isn’t the last word, though. The more GRBs astronomers study, the more likely they’ll encounter events that challenge current classifications. In August 2020, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope tracked down a second-long burst named GRB 200826A, over 6 billion light-years away. It should have fallen within the short-burst class, triggered by mergers of compact objects. However, other characteristics of this event – like the supernova it created – suggested it originated from the collapse of a massive star. Astronomers think this burst may have fizzled out before it could reach the duration typical of long bursts. Fermi and NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory captured its opposite number, GRB 211211A in December 2021. Located a billion light-years away, the burst lasted for about a minute. While this makes it a long GRB, it was followed by a kilonova, which suggests it was triggered by a merger. Some researchers attribute this burst’s oddities to a neutron star merging with a black hole partner. As astronomers discover more bursts lasting several hours, there may still be a new class in the making: ultra-long GRBs. The energy created by the death of a high-mass star likely can’t sustain a burst for this long, so scientists must look to different origins. Some think ultra-long bursts occur from newborn magnetars – neutron stars with rapid rotation rates and magnetic fields a thousand times stronger than average. Others say this new class calls for the power of the universe’s largest stellar residents, blue supergiants. Researchers continue to explore ultra-long GRBs. Afterglows Shedding New Light While gamma rays are the most energetic form of light, they certainly aren’t the easiest to spot. Our eyes see only a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. Studying any light outside that range, like gamma rays, hinges tightly on the instruments our scientists and engineers develop. This need for technology, alongside GRBs’ already fleeting nature, made bursts more difficult to study in early years. The Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 revealed the infrared afterglow (circled) of GRB 221009A and its host galaxy, seen nearly edge-on as a sliver of light extending to upper left from the burst. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Levan (Radboud University); Image Processing: Gladys Kober GRB afterglows occur when material in the jets interact with surrounding gas. Afterglows emit radio, infrared, optical, UV, X-ray, as well as gamma-ray light, which provides more data about the original burst. Afterglows also linger for hours to days (or even years) longer than their initial explosion, creating more opportunities for discovery. Studying afterglows became key to deducing the driving forces behind different bursts. In long bursts, as the afterglow dims, scientists eventually see the source brighten again as the underlying supernova becomes detectable. Although light is the universe’s fastest traveler, it can’t reach us instantaneously. By the time we detect a burst, millions to billions of years may have passed, allowing us to probe some of the early universe through distant afterglows. Bursting With Discovery Despite the expansive research conducted so far, our understanding of GRBs is far from complete. Each new discovery adds new facets to scientists’ gamma-ray burst models. Fermi and Swift discovered one of these revolutionary events in 2022 with GRB 221009A, a burst so bright it temporarily blinded most space-based gamma-ray instruments. A GRB of this magnitude is predicted to occur once every 10,000 years, making it likely the highest-luminosity event witnessed by human civilization. Astronomers accordingly dubbed it the brightest of all time – or the BOAT. This is one of the nearest long burst ever seen at the time of its discovery, offering scientists a closer look at the inner workings of not only GRBs, but also the structure of the Milky Way. By peering into the BOAT, they’ve discovered radio waves missing in other models and traced X-ray reflections to map out our galaxy’s hidden dust clouds. NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory detected X-rays from the initial flash of GRB 221009A for weeks as dust in our galaxy scattered the light back to us, shown here in arbitrary colors. Credit: NASA/Swift/A. Beardmore (University of Leicester) GRBs also connect us to one of the universe’s most sought-after messengers. Gravitational waves are invisible distortions of space-time, born from cataclysmic events like neutron-star collisions. Think of space-time as the universe’s all-encompassing blanket, with gravitational waves as ripples wafting through the material. In 2017, Fermi spotted the gamma-ray flash of a neutron-star merger just 1.7 seconds after gravitational waves were detected from the same source. After traveling 130 million light-years, the gravitational waves reached Earth narrowly before the gamma rays, proving gravitational waves travel at the speed of light. Scientists had never detected light and gravitational waves’ joint journey all the way to Earth. These messengers combined paint a more vivid picture of merging neutron stars. With continued research, our ever-evolving knowledge of GRBs could unravel the unseen fabric of our universe. But the actual burst is just the tip of the iceberg. An endless bounty of information looms just beneath the surface, ready for the harvest. By Jenna Ahart About the Author NASA Universe Web Team Share Details Last Updated Feb 06, 2024 Related Terms Astronomy Astrophysics Black Holes Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Gamma Rays Gamma-Ray Bursts Neutron Stars Stars The Universe Explore More 11 min read What is Dark Energy? Inside our accelerating, expanding Universe Article 20 hours ago 2 min read UNITE All-Nighter Delights Amateur Astronomers Article 4 days ago 2 min read Hubble Views a Dim but Distinct Galaxy 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 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)