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By European Space Agency
Just a month after its launch, ESA’s Arctic Weather Satellite has already delivered its first images, notably capturing Storm Boris, which has been wreaking havoc across central Europe.
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By NASA
As the hub of human spaceflight, NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston holds a variety of unique responsibilities and privileges. Those include being the home of NASA’s astronaut corps.
One of those astronauts – Nick Hague – is now preparing to launch to the International Space Station along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov on the ninth rotational mission under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. This will be the third launch and second mission to the space station for Hague, who was selected as a NASA astronaut in 2013 and has spent 203 days in space.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 Commander Nick Hague smiles and gives two thumbs up during the crew equipment interface test at SpaceX’s Dragon refurbishing facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.SpaceX Hague was born and raised in Kansas but has crisscrossed the country for college and career. He earned degrees from the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and he attended the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Hague’s military career has taken him to New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., and included a five-month deployment to Iraq. Hague transferred from the Air Force to the U.S. Space Force in 2020 after serving as the Space Force’s director of test and evaluation at the Pentagon.
No stranger to new places, Hague vividly recalls making his first trip to Johnson when he was interviewing to join NASA’s astronaut corps. “I had no idea what to expect, and it was a bit overwhelming. I knew everyone was watching me and judging me,” he said. “Luckily, even though I wasn’t selected then, I got another chance a few years later. It’s a pretty magical place.”
Hague completed his astronaut training in July 2015 as part of NASA’s 21st astronaut class. He was the first astronaut from that group to be assigned to a mission, which launched in October 2018 but was aborted shortly after takeoff. His next spaceflight occurred in 2019, when he joined three of his classmates – NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Christina Koch, and Andrew Morgan – aboard the International Space Station for Expeditions 59 and 60.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague suits up for spacewalk training in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. NASA/James Blair Hague has made many memories at Johnson, but one that stands out is his experience working onsite amid the 2013 government shutdown. “I’m active-duty military so I still came to work,” he explained. “I remember being onsite and the center being completely empty. Being able to ride around an empty campus on the free-range bikes – it was peaceful and surreal.” It was also a preview of what many Johnson employees experienced during the pandemic and how NASA maintains round-the-clock support for spaceflight operations regardless of extenuating circumstances.
Hague now looks ahead to another journey to low Earth orbit. NASA and SpaceX officials currently plan to launch the Crew-9 mission no earlier than Wednesday, Sept. 25. The crew will lift off from Launch Complex 40 from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft.
Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov (left) and NASA astronaut Nick Hague during a visit to Kennedy Space Center for training. SpaceX Hague and Gorbonov will become members of the Expedition 72 crew aboard the station. They will join NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore, Suni Williams, and Don Pettit, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, and will spend about six months conducting scientific research in microgravity and completing a range of operational activities before returning home.
More details about the mission and crew can be found by following the Crew-9 blog, @commercial_crew on X, or commercial crew on Facebook. You can also follow @astrohague on X and Instagram.
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By NASA
Mars: Perseverance (Mars 2020) Perseverance Home Mission Overview Rover Components Mars Rock Samples Where is Perseverance? Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Mission Updates Science Overview Objectives Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Perseverance Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions The Solar System The Sun Mercury Venus Earth The Moon Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto & Dwarf Planets Asteroids, Comets & Meteors The Kuiper Belt The Oort Cloud 2 min read
Persevering Through the Storm
A region-wide seasonal dust storm obscures the Jezero Crater in this image from NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover, acquired using its Left Mastcam-Z camera. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover’s mast. Perseverance captured the image on Aug. 20, 2024 (Sol 1244, or Martian day 1,244 of the Mars 2020 mission) at the local mean solar time of 16:05:34. This image is part of a Mastcam-Z mosaic of the “northern fan,” a part of Jezero Crater that Perseverance never drove through, but is an area that’s thought to have been deposited in a similar way to the delta that the rover did explore. NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU It is dust-storm season on Mars! Over the past couple of weeks, as we have been ascending the Jezero Crater rim, our science team has been monitoring rising amounts of dust in the atmosphere. This is expected: Dust activity is typically highest around this time of the Martian year (early Spring in the northern hemisphere). The increased dust has made our views back toward the crater hazier than usual, and provided our atmospheric scientists with a great opportunity to study the way that dust storms form, develop, and spread around the planet.
Perseverance has a suite of scientific instruments well-suited to study the Martian atmosphere. The Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer (MEDA) provides regular weather reports, the cadence of which has increased during the storm to maximize our science. We also routinely point our Mastcam-Z imager toward the sky to assess the optical density (“tau”) of the atmosphere.
There are not any signs that this regional dust storm will become planetwide — like the global dust storm in 2018 — but every day we are assessing new atmospheric data. Hopefully the skies will further clear up as we continue to climb in the coming weeks, because we are expecting stunning views of the crater floor and Jezero delta. This will offer the Perseverance team a unique chance to reflect on the tens of kilometers we have driven and years we have spent exploring Mars together.
Written by Henry Manelski, Ph.D. student at Purdue University
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Last Updated Sep 05, 2024 Related Terms
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5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Data from one of the two CubeSats that comprise NASA’s PREFIRE mission was used to make this data visualization showing brightness temperature — the intensity of infrared emissions — over Greenland. Red represents more intense emissions; blue indicates lower intensities. The data was captured in July.
NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio The PREFIRE mission will help develop a more detailed understanding of how much heat the Arctic and Antarctica radiate into space and how this influences global climate.
NASA’s newest climate mission has started collecting data on the amount of heat in the form of far-infrared radiation that the Arctic and Antarctic environments emit to space. These measurements by the Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-Infrared Experiment (PREFIRE) are key to better predicting how climate change will affect Earth’s ice, seas, and weather — information that will help humanity better prepare for a changing world.
One of PREFIRE’s two shoebox-size cube satellites, or CubeSats, launched on May 25 from New Zealand, followed by its twin on June 5. The first CubeSat started sending back science data on July 1. The second CubeSat began collecting science data on July 25, and the mission will release the data after an issue with the GPS system on this CubeSat is resolved.
The PREFIRE mission will help researchers gain a clearer understanding of when and where the Arctic and Antarctica emit far-infrared radiation (wavelengths greater than 15 micrometers) to space. This includes how atmospheric water vapor and clouds influence the amount of heat that escapes Earth. Since clouds and water vapor can trap far-infrared radiation near Earth’s surface, they can increase global temperatures as part of a process known as the greenhouse effect. This is where gases in Earth’s atmosphere — such as carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor — act as insulators, preventing heat emitted by the planet from escaping to space.
“We are constantly looking for new ways to observe the planet and fill in critical gaps in our knowledge. With CubeSats like PREFIRE, we are doing both,” said Karen St. Germain, director of the Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “The mission, part of our competitively-selected Earth Venture program, is a great example of the innovative science we can achieve through collaboration with university and industry partners.”
Earth absorbs much of the Sun’s energy in the tropics; weather and ocean currents transport that heat toward the Arctic and Antarctica, which receive much less sunlight. The polar environment — including ice, snow, and clouds — emits a lot of that heat into space, much of which is in the form of far-infrared radiation. But those emissions have never been systematically measured, which is where PREFIRE comes in.
“It’s so exciting to see the data coming in,” said Tristan L’Ecuyer, PREFIRE’s principal investigator and a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “With the addition of the far-infrared measurements from PREFIRE, we’re seeing for the first time the full energy spectrum that Earth radiates into space, which is critical to understanding climate change.”
This visualization of PREFIRE data (above) shows brightness temperatures — or the intensity of radiation emitted from Earth at several wavelengths, including the far-infrared. Yellow and red indicate more intense emissions originating from Earth’s surface, while blue and green represent lower emission intensities coinciding with colder areas on the surface or in the atmosphere.
The visualization starts by showing data on mid-infrared emissions (wavelengths between 4 to 15 micrometers) taken in early July during several polar orbits by the first CubeSat to launch. It then zooms in on two passes over Greenland. The orbital tracks expand vertically to show how far-infrared emissions vary through the atmosphere. The visualization ends by focusing on an area where the two passes intersect, showing how the intensity of far-infrared emissions changed over the nine hours between these two orbits.
The two PREFIRE CubeSats are in asynchronous, near-polar orbits, which means they pass over the same spots in the Arctic and Antarctic within hours of each other, collecting the same kind of data. This gives researchers a time series of measurements that they can use to study relatively short-lived phenomena like ice sheet melting or cloud formation and how they affect far-infrared emissions over time.
More About PREFIRE
The PREFIRE mission was jointly developed by NASA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate and provided the spectrometers. Blue Canyon Technologies built and now operates the CubeSats, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison is processing and analyzing the data collected by the instruments.
To learn more about PREFIRE, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/prefire/
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Science in Space: July 2024
This time of year, managing heat is on everyone’s mind. Especially now, as May 2024 marked a full year of record-high monthly temperatures – an unprecedented streak, according to scientists from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
NASA experts analyze data from thousands of land-, sea-, and sky-based instruments to calculate Earth’s global temperature. Knowing how hot it is helps scientists, health care workers, and public officials plan for and respond to the heat’s effects on people and infrastructure.
Crew members on the International Space Station deal with a different type of heat – that generated by electronics, life support systems, and other equipment. Managing this heat is essential to the operation of the spacecraft and the health and safety of its occupants.
Taking out the heat
Hardware for the packed bed water recovery reactor experiment. The packing media is visible in the long clear tube.NASA Packed bed reactors (PBRs) are structures packed with beads of different materials to increase contact between a liquid and a gas flowing through them. They are widely used for many applications, including thermal control or heat management, life support systems, and water filtration and offer low power consumption, compact size, and reliability. Packed Bed Reactor Experiment: Water Recovery Series (PBRE-WRS) continues evaluation of how microgravity affects the performance of different packing media. The material used and the shape and size of the beads all contribute to the effectiveness of heat exchange in a PBR. This investigation could inform the design and operation of these systems in microgravity and on the Moon and Mars and lead to improvements in this technology for applications on Earth such as water purification and cooling systems.
Previous investigations, PBRE and PBRE-2, provided fundamental understanding of simultaneous gas and liquid flow through PBRs in microgravity. This improved understanding helps to support development of more efficient and lightweight thermal management and life support systems for future missions.
Boiling heat away
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In this video from the FBCE, as liquid begins to boil, small bubbles form at the heated surface (top of the image) and grow larger over time.NASA As electronic devices add more features, they generate more heat, which becomes increasingly challenging to remove. Flow boiling is a method of thermal management that uses this heat to boil a moving liquid and generate vapor bubbles that lift the heat from the surface, then change back to a liquid via condensation. But using boiling for heat management is less efficient in microgravity because, in the absence of buoyancy, bubbles grow larger and remain near the surface.
The Flow Boiling and Condensation Experiment (FBCE) tested a model for a flow boiling and condensation facility for the space station. Researchers identified important factors affecting this process in microgravity and how they differ from those on Earth. The findings could help researchers identify ways to improve the operation of these systems in microgravity.
This research also led to development of an artificial neural network (ANN) trained on data from the FBCE experiment to predict heat flow and transfer for use in the design and analysis of thermal systems. ANNs are a type of artificial intelligence made of computational units similar to neurons in the nervous systems of living things.
NASA astronaut Josh Cassada works on the PFMI-ASCENT investigation.NASA The PFMI-ASCENT investigation found that adding microscopic teeth or rachets to a surface caused more bubbles to form and increased the transfer of heat. This finding helps further improve flow boiling systems used to remove heat from electronics in space.
Going with the flow
Close-up view of the Capillary Flow Experiment-2 test chamber.NASA Liquids behave differently in space than they do on Earth. Capillary Flow Experiment-2 studied wetting, or a liquid’s ability to spread across a surface, in different container shapes in microgravity. Results showed that models adequately predict liquid flow for various container shapes. These predictions support improved design of systems that process liquids aboard spacecraft, including systems for thermal control.
Melissa Gaskill
International Space Station Research Communications Team
NASA’s Johnson Space Center
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