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By NASA
The Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) team hosts a Media Day at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on April 11, 2023.Credit: NASA Media are invited to visit NASA’s simulated Mars habitat on Monday, March 10, at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The simulation will help prepare humanity for future missions to the Red Planet.
This is the second of three missions as part of NASA’s CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog), set to begin in May 2025 when volunteer crew members enter the 3D printed habitat to live and work for a year.
During the mission, crew members will carry out different types of mission activities, including simulated “marswalks,” robotic operations, habitat maintenance, personal hygiene, exercise, and crop growth. Crew also will face planned environmental stressors such as resource limitations, isolation, and equipment failure.
The in-person media event includes an opportunity to speak with subject matter experts and capture b-roll and photos inside the habitat. Crew members will arrive for training at a later date and will not be available at this event.
To attend the event, U.S. media must request accreditation by 5 p.m. CDT Monday, March 3, and international media by 5 p.m., Monday, Feb. 24, via the NASA Johnson newsroom at: 281-483-5111 or jsccommu@nasa.gov. Media accreditation will be limited due to limited space inside the habitat. Confirmed media will receive additional details on how to participate.
For more information about CHAPEA, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/chapea
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Cindy Anderson / James Gannon
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Kelsey Spivey
Johnson Space Center, Houston
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Victoria Segovia
Johnson Space Center, Houston
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Last Updated Feb 20, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
During the Apollo program, when NASA sent humans to the Moon, those missions took several days to reach the Moon. The fastest of these was Apollo 8, which took just under three days to go from Earth orbit to orbit around the Moon.
Now it’s possible to save some fuel by flying different kinds of trajectories to the Moon that are shaped in such a way to save fuel. And those trajectories can take more time, potentially weeks or months, to reach the Moon, depending on how you do it.
Mars is further away, about 50 percent further away from the Sun than Earth is. And reaching Mars generally takes somewhere between seven to ten months, flying a relatively direct route.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission took about seven and a half months to reach Mars. And NASA’s MAVEN mission took about ten months to reach Mars.
Jupiter is about five times further away from the Sun than the Earth is. And so in order to make those missions practical, we have to find ways to reduce the fuel requirements. And the way we do that is by having the spacecraft do some flybys of Earth and or Venus to help shape the spacecraft’s trajectory and change the spacecraft’s speed without using fuel. And using that sort of approach, it takes between about five to six years to reach Jupiter.
So NASA’s Galileo mission, the first mission to Jupiter, took just a little over six years. And then NASA’s second mission to Jupiter, which was called Juno, took just under five years.
So to get to the Moon takes several days. To get to Mars takes seven to ten months. And getting to Jupiter takes between five and six years.
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5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
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NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover captured these drifting noctilucent, or twilight, clouds in a 16-minute recording on Jan. 17. (This looping clip has been speeded up about 480 times.) The white plumes falling out of the clouds are carbon dioxide ice that would evaporate closer to the Martian surface.NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/SSI While the Martian clouds may look like the kind seen in Earth’s skies, they include frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice.
Red-and-green-tinted clouds drift through the Martian sky in a new set of images captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover using its Mastcam — its main set of “eyes.” Taken over 16 minutes on Jan. 17 (the 4,426th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s mission), the images show the latest observations of what are called noctilucent (Latin for “night shining”), or twilight clouds, tinged with color by scattering light from the setting Sun.
Sometimes these clouds even create a rainbow of colors, producing iridescent, or “mother-of-pearl” clouds. Too faint to be seen in daylight, they’re only visible when the clouds are especially high and evening has fallen.
Martian clouds are made of either water ice or, at higher altitudes and lower temperatures, carbon dioxide ice. (Mars’ atmosphere is more than 95% carbon dioxide.) The latter are the only kind of clouds observed at Mars producing iridescence, and they can be seen near the top of the new images at an altitude of around 37 to 50 miles (60 to 80 kilometers). They’re also visible as white plumes falling through the atmosphere, traveling as low as 31 miles (50 kilometers) above the surface before evaporating because of rising temperatures. Appearing briefly at the bottom of the images are water-ice clouds traveling in the opposite direction roughly 31 miles (50 kilometers) above the rover.
Dawn of Twilight Clouds
Twilight clouds were first seen on Mars by NASA’s Pathfinder mission in 1997; Curiosity didn’t spot them until 2019, when it acquired its first-ever images of iridescence in the clouds. This is the fourth Mars year the rover has observed the phenomenon, which occurs during early fall in the southern hemisphere.
Mark Lemmon, an atmospheric scientist with the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, led a paper summarizing Curiosity’s first two seasons of twilight cloud observations, which published late last year in Geophysical Research Letters. “I’ll always remember the first time I saw those iridescent clouds and was sure at first it was some color artifact,” he said. “Now it’s become so predictable that we can plan our shots in advance; the clouds show up at exactly the same time of year.”
Each sighting is an opportunity to learn more about the particle size and growth rate in Martian clouds. That, in turn, provides more information about the planet’s atmosphere.
Cloud Mystery
One big mystery is why twilight clouds made of carbon dioxide ice haven’t been spotted in other locations on Mars. Curiosity, which landed in 2012, is on Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, just south of the Martian equator. Pathfinder landed in Ares Vallis, north of the equator. NASA’s Perseverance rover, located in the northern hemisphere’s Jezero Crater, hasn’t seen any carbon dioxide ice twilight clouds since its 2021 landing. Lemmon and others suspect that certain regions of Mars may be predisposed to forming them.
A possible source of the clouds could be gravity waves, he said, which can cool the atmosphere: “Carbon dioxide was not expected to be condensing into ice here, so something is cooling it to the point that it could happen. But Martian gravity waves are not fully understood and we’re not entirely sure what is causing twilight clouds to form in one place but not another.”
Mastcam’s Partial View
The new twilight clouds appear framed in a partially open circle. That’s because they were taken using one of Mastcam’s two color cameras: the left 34 mm focal length Mastcam, which has a filter wheel that is stuck between positions. Curiosity’s team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California remains able to use both this camera and the higher-resolution right 100 mm focal length camera for color imaging.
The rover recently wrapped an investigation of a place called Gediz Vallis channel and is on its way to a new location that includes boxwork — fractures formed by groundwater that look like giant spiderwebs when viewed from space.
More recently, Curiosity visited an impact crater nicknamed “Rustic Canyon,” capturing it in images and studying the composition of rocks around it. The crater, 67 feet (20 meters) in diameter, is shallow and has lost much of its rim to erosion, indicating that it likely formed many millions of years ago. One reason Curiosity’s science team studies craters is because the cratering process can unearth long-buried materials that may have better preserved organic molecules than rocks exposed to radiation at the surface. These molecules provide a window into the ancient Martian environment and how it could have supported microbial life billions of years ago, if any ever formed on the Red Planet.
More About Curiosity
Curiosity was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego built and operates Mastcam.
For more about Curiosity, visit:
science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity
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Last Updated Feb 11, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
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When Rose Ferreira first saw an image of a field of galaxies and galaxy clusters from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in July, she “went into the restroom and broke down a little,” she said. This “Deep Field” image showed galaxies not only sharper, but deeper into the universe than a similar image she loved from the Hubble Space Telescope.
“Being able to contribute in any way to the efforts of the team within NASA that released this new Deep Field just felt like such a profound thing for me,” said Ferreira, a student at Arizona State University who interned with NASA this summer. “I was just a little bit in shock for, like, a week.”
Rose Ferreira estudia ciencias planetarias y astronomía en la Universidad Estatal de Arizona.Credits: James Mayer Webb, the largest space science telescope ever, which launched in December 2021, played a big role in Ferreira’s internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. She also supported a series of live news interviews for Webb’s first images and multimedia tasks for NASA’s Spanish-language communications program.
Growing up in the Dominican Republic, Ferreira said she didn’t have access to science education. She was taught skills like cooking and cleaning; she didn’t know NASA existed at that time.
But during the frequent blackouts in her village, when the Moon provided the only light, Rose Ferreira often wondered – what is the Moon all about? “The moonlight is a lot of what I used to see, and I was always so curious about that,” she said. “That obsession is what made me start asking questions.”
When she came to New York, she was placed in an underserved high school that sent her back multiple grades because they weren’t satisfied with her English language skills. She left and earned a GED diploma instead, hoping to go to college faster.
At age 18, Ferreira became homeless in New York and lived in train stations. By working as a home health aide, she was able to earn enough to rent an apartment in Queens and, eventually, get an associate degree.
Life threw other major challenges at her, including getting hit by a car and a cancer diagnosis.
Ferreira ultimately enrolled in a planetary science and astronomy degree program at Arizona State University. She received a “great birthday present” in the spring of 2022: her official acceptance to NASA’s internship program.
Among the highlights of her NASA experience was recording a voice-over in Spanish for a This Week at NASA video. She also served as a panelist at an event for the Minority University Research and Education Project, organized by NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement.
Ferreira dreams of becoming an astronaut and has a shorter-term goal of earning a doctorate. But the internship also fueled her passion for sharing space science with the public. Chatting with Goddard astrophysicist Dr. Michelle Thaller, host of the Webb broadcasts, was especially meaningful to her.
Rose Ferreira, foreground, in the broadcast control room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in July 2022.Credits: NASA She has this advice for young people who are also interested in pursuing space science: “Coming from a person who had it a bit harder to get there, I think: first, figure out if it is really what you love. And if it is really what you love, then literally find a way to do it no matter who says what.”
Besides Webb, Ferreira is excited about NASA’s Artemis program, which connects with her passion for the Moon. Through Artemis, NASA will send astronauts to establish a long-term presence on and around the Moon. She’s looking forward to what Artemis will uncover about the Moon’s geology and history while the agency uses the Moon to get ready for human exploration of Mars.
“Even when I was living on the streets, the Moon used to be the thing I looked at to calm myself. It’s my sense of comfort, even today when I’m overwhelmed by things,” she said. “It’s like a driving force.”
Written by Elizabeth Landau
NASA Headquarters
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