Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
NASA Astronaut, Crewmates Reach Space Station for Science Expedition
-
Similar Topics
-
By European Space Agency
On 18–19 September, Europe’s space industry from start-up companies to large system integrators gathered at ESA–ESTEC in the Netherlands for Industry Space Days 2024.
View the full article
-
By European Space Agency
Image: The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission has snapped a souvenir of the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock desert in Nevada. View the full article
-
By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NAACP Board Chair Leon Russell, left, and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, right, sign a Space Act Agreement between NASA and the NAACP during a 5th Annual Hidden Figures Street Naming Anniversary event Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024, at the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters building in Washington. NASA/Keegan Barber During an event Thursday, NASA and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) signed a Space Act Agreement to increase engagement and equity for underrepresented students pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and to improve access to agency activities and opportunities.
“NASA and the NAACP share a longstanding commitment to attracting more diverse students to STEM education and ultimately careers,” said Shahra Lambert, senior advisor for engagement and equity, NASA headquarters. “This agreement reaffirms that commitment and solidifies a partnership that will enable us to expand opportunities for more students of color to build their STEM identity and gain real-world experience through NASA STEM education, mentorship, and career awareness. With the NAACP’s help we’ll be able to truly impact young minds who will be our future scientists, engineers, explorers and more.”
As part of the agreement, the NAACP will incorporate NASA STEM lessons, content, and themes into its Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO) achievement program, which is a series of competitions where students compete for scholarships and other incentives in areas ranging from performing and culinary arts to business and STEM. In turn, NASA will provide guidance on programming, participate in information sharing, provide mentorship, and facilitate tours of NASA facilities when appropriate.
“Much like NASA, brave, brilliant, Black women were critical to the success of the NAACP,” said Leon W. Russell, Chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors. “For years, we’ve worked to increase the number of diverse STEM students by providing scholarships and establishing key initiatives. Through our ACT-SO program and this new partnership with NASA, both organizations will make even greater progress to help pave the way for more Katherine Johnsons and Mary Jacksons. By enacting today’s agreement, we hope to increase the number of Black and underrepresented students in the STEM fields and help them reach for the stars.”
While initial efforts will be led by NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement, the umbrella agreement also allows for further collaboration and partnership in the future. Specifically, the agency and the NAACP will look to support certain areas of NASA’s Equity Action Plan.
NASA works to explore the secrets of the universe and solve the world’s most complex problems, which requires creating space for all people to participate in and learn from its work in space. Providing access to opportunities where young minds can be curious and see themselves potentially at NASA and beyond is how the agency will continue to inspire the next generation of STEM innovators.
For more information on how NASA inspires students to pursue STEM visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/learning-resources
Share
Details
Last Updated Sep 19, 2024 Related Terms
General Explore More
1 min read NASA Glenn Attends Air Shows in Cleveland and Wisconsin
Article 12 hours ago 3 min read Giant Leaps Start at Johnson for NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 Commander Nick Hague
Article 1 day ago 3 min read NASA to Develop Lunar Time Standard for Exploration Initiatives
Article 1 week ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By NASA
The Roscosmos Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft is pictured docked to the International Space Station’s Prichal module in this long-duration photograph as it orbited 258 miles above Nigeria.Credit: NASA NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Nikolai Chub and Oleg Kononenko, will depart from the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft, and return to Earth.
Dyson, Chub, and Kononenko will undock from the orbiting laboratory’s Prichal module at 4:37 a.m. EDT Monday, Sept. 23, heading for a parachute-assisted landing at 8 a.m. (5 p.m. Kazakhstan time) on the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan.
NASA’s live coverage of return and related activities will stream on NASA+ and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media.
A change of command ceremony also will stream on NASA platforms at 10:15 a.m. Sunday, Sept. 22. Kononenko will hand over station command to NASA astronaut Suni Williams for Expedition 72, which begins at the time of undocking.
Spanning 184 days in space, Dyson’s mission includes covering 2,944 orbits of the Earth and a journey of 78 million miles. The Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft launched March 23, and arrived at the station March 25, with Dyson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus. Novitskiy and Vasilevskaya were aboard the station for 12 days before returning home with NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara on April 6.
Kononenko and Chub, who launched with O’Hara to the station on the Soyuz MS-24 spacecraft last September, will return after 374 days in space and a trip of 158.6 million miles, spanning 5,984 orbits.
Dyson spent her fourth spaceflight aboard the station as an Expedition 70 and 71 flight engineer, and departs with Kononenko, completing his fifth flight into space and accruing an all-time record 1,111 days in orbit, and Chub, who completed his first spaceflight.
After returning to Earth, the three crew members will fly on a helicopter from the landing site to the recovery staging city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Dyson will board a NASA plane and return to Houston, while Kononenko and Chub will depart for a training base in Star City, Russia.
NASA’s coverage is as follows (all times Eastern and subject to change based on real-time operations):
Sunday, Sept. 22
10:15 a.m. – Expedition 71/72 change of command ceremony begins on NASA+ and the agency’s website.
Monday, Sept. 23
12:45 a.m. – Hatch closing coverage begins on NASA+ and the agency’s website.
1:05 a.m. – Hatch closing
4 a.m. – Undocking coverage begins on NASA+ and the agency’s website.
4:37 a.m. – Undocking
6:45 a.m. – Coverage begins for deorbit burn, entry, and landing on NASA+ and the agency’s website.
7:05 a.m. – Deorbit burn
8 a.m. – Landing
For more than two decades, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge, and making research breakthroughs that are not possible on Earth. The station is a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight and to expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit. As commercial companies focus on providing human space transportation services and destinations as part of a robust low Earth orbit economy, NASA is focusing more resources on deep space missions to the Moon as part of Artemis in preparation for future human missions to Mars.
Learn more about International Space Station research and operations at:
https://www.nasa.gov/station
-end-
Josh Finch / Claire O’Shea
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / claire.a.o’shea@nasa.gov
Sandra Jones
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov
Share
Details
Last Updated Sep 19, 2024 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
International Space Station (ISS) Astronauts Humans in Space ISS Research Johnson Space Center Tracy Caldwell Dyson View the full article
-
By NASA
3 min read
NASA Develops Process to Create Very Accurate Eclipse Maps
New NASA research reveals a process to generate extremely accurate eclipse maps, which plot the predicted path of the Moon’s shadow as it crosses the face of Earth. Traditionally, eclipse calculations assume that all observers are at sea level on Earth and that the Moon is a smooth sphere that is perfectly symmetrical around its center of mass. As such, these calculations do not take into account different elevations on Earth or the Moon’s cratered, uneven surface.
For slightly more accurate maps, people can employ elevation tables and plots of the lunar limb — the edge of the visible surface of the Moon as seen from Earth. However, now eclipse calculations have gained even greater accuracy by incorporating lunar topography data from NASA’s LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) observations.
Using LRO elevation maps, NASA visualizer Ernie Wright at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, created a continuously varying lunar limb profile as the Moon’s shadow passes over the Earth. The mountains and valleys along the edge of the Moon’s disk affect the timing and duration of totality by several seconds. Wright also used several NASA data sets to provide an elevation map of Earth so that eclipse observer locations were depicted at their true altitude.
The resulting visualizations show something never seen before: the true, time-varying shape of the Moon’s shadow, with the effects of both an accurate lunar limb and the Earth’s terrain.
“Beginning with the 2017 total solar eclipse, we’ve been publishing maps and movies of eclipses that show the true shape of the Moon’s central shadow — the umbra,” said Wright.
A map showing the umbra (the Moon’s central shadow) as it passes over Cleveland at 3:15 p.m. local time during the April 8, 2024, total solar eclipse. NASA SVS/Ernie Wright and Michaela Garrison “And people ask, why does it look like a potato instead of a smooth oval? The short answer is that the Moon isn’t a perfectly smooth sphere.”
The mountains and valleys around the edge of the Moon change the shape of the shadow. The valleys are also responsible for Baily’s beads and the diamond ring, the last bits of the Sun visible just before and the first just after totality.
A computer simulation of Baily’s beads during a total solar eclipse. Data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter makes it possible to map the lunar valleys that create the bead effect. NASA SVS/Ernie Wright Wright is lead author of a paper published September 19 in The Astronomical Journal that reveals for the first time exactly how the Moon’s terrain creates the umbra shape. The valleys on the edge of the Moon act like pinholes projecting images of the Sun onto the Earth’s surface.
A visualization of Sun images being projected from lunar valleys that are acting like pinhole projectors. Light rays from the Sun converge on each valley, then spread out again on their way to the Earth. NASA SVS/Ernie Wright The umbra is the small hole in the middle of these projected Sun images, the place where none of the Sun images reach.
Viewed from behind the Moon, the Sun images projected by lunar valleys on the Moon’s edge fall on the Earth’s surface in a flower-like pattern with a hole in the middle, forming the umbra shape. NASA SVS/Ernie Wright The edges of the umbra are made up of small arcs from the edges of the projected Sun images.
This is just one of several surprising results that have emerged from the new eclipse mapping method described in the paper. Unlike the traditional method invented 200 years ago, the new way renders eclipse maps one pixel at a time, the same way 3D animation software creates images. It’s also similar to the way other complex phenomena, like weather, are modeled in the computer by breaking the problem into millions of tiny pieces, something computers are really good at, and something that was inconceivable 200 years ago.
For more about eclipses, refer to:
https://science.nasa.gov/eclipses
By Ernie Wright and Susannah Darling
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Nancy Neal-Jones
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-0039
nancy.n.jones@nasa.gov
Share
Details
Last Updated Sep 19, 2024 Editor wasteigerwald Contact wasteigerwald william.a.steigerwald@nasa.gov Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) Solar Eclipses Uncategorized Explore More
3 min read Eclipse Soundscapes AudioMoth Donations Will Study Nature at Night
Article
3 weeks ago
14 min read The Making of Our Alien Earth: The Undersea Volcanoes of Santorini, Greece
Article
4 weeks ago
4 min read Into The Field With NASA: Valley Of Ten Thousand Smokes
To better understand Mars, NASA’s Goddard Instrument Field Team hiked deep into the backcountry of…
Article
4 weeks ago
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.