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By Space Force
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III announced seven initiatives to improve the quality of life for service members and their families.
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By NASA
For some people, working for NASA is a lifelong dream. For others, it is an interesting and perhaps unexpected opportunity that comes up at just the right time and place.
Everything from family ties and influential teachers to witnessing human spaceflight history and enjoying sci-fi entertainment has helped bring people of all backgrounds together at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Several of them recently shared their inspiration to join the NASA team.
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“As a kid, I always had my head up looking at the stars. I loved astronomy and seeing videos of humans walking on the Moon fascinated me! I wanted to be the first female to walk on the Moon. When Star Wars came out, I wanted to build my own R2-D2 that could explore the galaxies. I was curious how things worked (so I could build a robot) and a cousin told me about engineering. That was the name for what I wanted to do! So, I went to the High School for Engineering Professions in Houston. The guidance counselor there told me about an opportunity to apply for a summer internship with NASA as a junior. I got in and I’ve worked with NASA as much as I could since I was 16 years old – internships and full-time positions. I may not get the chance to be an astronaut and walk on the Moon, but I know I will play a role in helping achieve that dream for another female and a person of color!”
– Alicia Baker, engineering project manager for Portable Life Support System test support, JSC Engineering, Technology, and Science (JETS) Contract
Alicia Baker in a spacesuit test chamber at Johnson Space Center.NASA/David DeHoyos “My dad was an aerospace engineer with Lockheed Martin. I went to take your kid to work day and got to stand in front of a booster engine. I’ve wanted to work in the space industry ever since. I almost didn’t enter the field after getting my aerospace degree, but I was fortunate to take an Intro to Human Spaceflight class during my last quarter of college. Without that class and the professor (who had worked at Johnson) I wouldn’t be here today. I’m so glad my path led me here. Johnson is such a great place to be, and I can look back and tell little Margaret that we did it!”
– Margaret Kennedy, aerospace systems engineer, Engineering Directorate Crew and Thermal Systems Division
Margaret Kennedy and her dad visited Space Center Houston when she started her job at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in October 2019.Image courtesy of Margaret Kennedy “In first grade, my teacher organized a ‘Space Week’ in which we learned about outer space. Her sons – who were studying engineering in college – came and launched model rockets for us. I knew from that point on that I wanted to work at NASA when I grew up.”
– Krista Farrell, International Space Station attitude determination and control officer and motion control systems instructor; Boeing Starliner guidance, navigation, and control instructor
Krista Farrell (center) stands with members of the Expedition 71 crew. From left: NASA astronauts Jeannette Epps, Matt Dominick, and Mike Barratt; Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin; and NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson. NASA/Josh Valcarcel “I didn’t think I would ever work for NASA. But multiple professors in college encouraged me to challenge myself and do some space research. I realized that it was something that I was very passionate about. Thanks to my research work for the Europa Clipper as an undergraduate student, I got my first internship at NASA and subsequently an offer to join the Pathways Program. Now I am part of a small group of engineers that solve entry, descent, and landing problems for multiple missions on Earth, the Moon, and Mars.”
– Sergio Sandoval, guidance engineer, Engineering Directorate Flight Mechanics and Trajectory Design Branch
Sergio Sandoval helps staff a NASA table during a Johnson Space Center community engagement event.Image courtesy of Sergio Sandoval
“Dad would take me to the viewing room of the original Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) during the Apollo era. He was one of the people supporting MOCR in the Staff Support Room. I have worked at Johnson for 27 years [as a contractor] for Lockheed Martin, Hamilton Sundstrand, and Jacobs Technology.”
– David Fanelli, software engineer, Energy Systems Test Area
“In early 1969, when I was a boy, my uncle visited the Johnson Space Center and brought back astronaut and mission photos of the recently completed Apollo 8 lunar orbiting mission. Those photos, coupled with a Saturn V rocket model I assembled, and the Time Life records and books about the Apollo space program my parents purchased for me, sparked my imagination. I knew I wanted to work for NASA one day. It wasn’t until many years later that that dream became a reality, when I joined NASA’s co-op program for college students during my second attempt to become an aeronautical engineer. After I graduated college, I began working full time as a civil servant engineer at Johnson.”
– David Fletcher, NASA lead, Gateway-Ready Avionics Integration Lab
David Fletcher (center) with his daughters Jessica (left) and Erica (right). Image courtesy of David Fletcher
“I remember watching Star Trek and Star Wars as a kid with my dad. I found some of his college notes in a box one day and thought the small, neat print on graph paper pads was really pretty. He went to the University of Texas at Austin to study astrophysics and engineering, but he never got to finish. Fast forward to 2022 and I find myself in Houston for an unknown amount of time, so I decided to go out and make some friends. I met a woman at a Geeky Game Night, and I learned that she was a food scientist at NASA! After talking some more, she told me to send her my resume. Later that week I received a call to set up an interview. I’m still in awe of how that one chance connection led me to my childhood dream of working at NASA.”
– Kristin Dillon, document/IT specialist, Space Food Systems Laboratory
“I grew up in a small agricultural village in India. My first introduction to spaceflight was reading Russian cosmonauts’ translated accounts of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project as a young girl. I am still not sure whether my father picked that book for me on a whim or with a grand dream for his daughter, but it certainly had me hooked. However, I found my true calling to make human spaceflight safer and more efficient after witnessing the Columbia mishap. India, at the time, did not have a human spaceflight program. Thus started a 20-year-long grand adventure of seeking opportunities, pursuing them, immigrating to the United States, and finding my path to NASA, which culminated in a Pathways internship at Johnson.”
– Poonampreet Kaur Josan, three-time Pathways intern, currently supporting the Human Health and Performance Directorate Habitability and Human Factors Branch
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By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
University of Florida researcher Rob Ferl (seated) and co-principal investigator Anna-Lisa Paul practice the experiment to study the effect of gravity transitions on the plants’ gene expression.University of Florida For the first time, a NASA-funded researcher will fly with their experiment on a commercial suborbital rocket. The technology is one of two NASA-supported experiments, also known as payloads, funded by the agency’s Flight Opportunities program that will launch aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket system on a flight test no earlier than Thursday, Aug. 29.
The researcher-tended payload, from the University of Florida in Gainesville, seeks to understand how changes in gravity during spaceflight affect plant biology. Researcher Rob Ferl will activate small, self-contained tubes pre-loaded with plants and preservative to biochemically freeze the samples at various stages of gravity. During the flight, co-principal investigator Anna-Lisa Paul will conduct four identical experiments as a control. After the flight, Ferl and Paul will examine the preserved plants to study the effect of gravity transitions on the plants’ gene expression. Studying how changes in gravity affect plant growth will support future missions to the Moon and Mars.
The university’s flight test was funded by a grant awarded through the Flight Opportunities program’s TechFlights solicitation with additional support from NASA’s Division of Biological and Physical Sciences. This experiment builds on NASA’s long history of supporting plant research and aims to accelerate the pace and productivity of space-based research.
The other Flight Opportunities supported payload is from HeetShield, a small business in Flagstaff, Arizona. Two new thermal protection system materials will be mounted to the outside of New Shepard’s propulsion module to assess their thermal performance in a relevant environment, since conditions will be similar to planetary entry. After the flight, HeetShield will analyze the structure of the materials to determine how they were affected by the flight.
Flight Opportunities, within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, facilitates demonstration of technologies for space exploration and the expansion of space commerce through suborbital testing with industry flight providers. Through various mechanisms, the program funds flight tests for internal and external technology payloads.
To learn more, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/space-technology-mission-directorate/
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Last Updated Aug 28, 2024 EditorLoura Hall Related Terms
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By NASA
5 Min Read Webb Finds Early Galaxies Weren’t Too Big for Their Britches After All
This image shows a small portion of the field observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) for the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey. The full image appears below. Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, S. Finkelstein (University of Texas) It got called the crisis in cosmology. But now astronomers can explain some surprising recent discoveries.
When astronomers got their first glimpses of galaxies in the early universe from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, they were expecting to find galactic pipsqueaks, but instead they found what appeared to be a bevy of Olympic bodybuilders. Some galaxies appeared to have grown so massive, so quickly, that simulations couldn’t account for them. Some researchers suggested this meant that something might be wrong with the theory that explains what the universe is made of and how it has evolved since the big bang, known as the standard model of cosmology.
According to a new study in the Astrophysical Journal led by University of Texas at Austin graduate student Katherine Chworowsky, some of those early galaxies are in fact much less massive than they first appeared. Black holes in some of these galaxies make them appear much brighter and bigger than they really are.
“We are still seeing more galaxies than predicted, although none of them are so massive that they ‘break’ the universe,” Chworowsky said.
The evidence was provided by Webb’s Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey, led by Steven Finkelstein, a professor of astronomy at UT Austin and study co-author.
Image A : CEERS Deep Field (NIRCam)
This image shows a small portion of the field observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) for the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey. It is filled with galaxies. Some galaxies appear to have grown so massive, so quickly, that simulations couldn’t account for them. However, a new study finds that some of those early galaxies are in fact much less massive than they first appeared. Black holes in some of those galaxies make them appear much brighter and bigger than they really are. NASA, ESA, CSA, S. Finkelstein (University of Texas)
View 8k pixel full resolution version of the image
Black Holes Add to Brightness
According to this latest study, the galaxies that appeared overly massive likely host black holes rapidly consuming gas. Friction in the fast-moving gas emits heat and light, making these galaxies much brighter than they would be if that light emanated just from stars. This extra light can make it appear that the galaxies contain many more stars, and hence are more massive, than we would otherwise estimate. When scientists remove these galaxies, dubbed “little red dots” (based on their red color and small size), from the analysis, the remaining early galaxies are not too massive to fit within predictions of the standard model.
“So, the bottom line is there is no crisis in terms of the standard model of cosmology,” Finkelstein said. “Any time you have a theory that has stood the test of time for so long, you have to have overwhelming evidence to really throw it out. And that’s simply not the case.”
Efficient Star Factories
Although they’ve settled the main dilemma, a less thorny problem remains: There are still roughly twice as many massive galaxies in Webb’s data of the early universe than expected from the standard model. One possible reason might be that stars formed more quickly in the early universe than they do today.
“Maybe in the early universe, galaxies were better at turning gas into stars,” Chworowsky said.
Star formation happens when hot gas cools enough to succumb to gravity and condense into one or more stars. But as the gas contracts, it heats up, generating outward pressure. In our region of the universe, the balance of these opposing forces tends to make the star formation process very slow. But perhaps, according to some theories, because the early universe was denser than today, it was harder to blow gas out during star formation, allowing the process to go faster.
More Evidence of Black Holes
Concurrently, astronomers have been analyzing the spectra of “little red dots” discovered with Webb, with researchers in both the CEERS team and others finding evidence of fast-moving hydrogen gas, a signature of black hole accretion disks. This supports the idea that at least some of the light coming from these compact, red objects comes from gas swirling around black holes, rather than stars – reinforcing Chworowsky and their team’s conclusion that they are probably not as massive as astronomers initially thought. However, further observations of these intriguing objects are incoming, and should help solve the puzzle about how much light comes from stars versus gas around black holes.
Often in science, when you answer one question, that leads to new questions. While Chworowsky and their colleagues have shown that the standard model of cosmology likely isn’t broken, their work points to the need for new ideas in star formation.
“And so there is still that sense of intrigue,” Chworowsky said. “Not everything is fully understood. That’s what makes doing this kind of science fun, because it’d be a terribly boring field if one paper figured everything out, or there were no more questions to answer.”The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
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Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov, Rob Gutro – rob.gutro@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Marc Airhart – mairhart@austin.utexas.edu
University of Texas at Austin
Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Related Information
VIDEO: CEERS Fly-through data visualization
ARTICLE: Webb Science – Galaxies Through Time
INFOGRAPHIC: Learn More about black holes
VIDEO: Webb Science Snippets Video: “The Early Universe”
INFOGRAPHIC: What is Cosmological Redshift?
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By NASA
5 min read
How Students Learn to Fly NASA’s IXPE Spacecraft
Amelia “Mia” De Herrera-Schnering is an undergraduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and command controller for NASA’s IXPE mission at LASP. The large wall monitor displaying a countdown shows 17 seconds when Amelia “Mia” De Herrera-Schnering tells her teammates “We have AOS,” meaning “acquisition of signal.”
“Copy that, thank you,” Alexander Pichler replies. The two are now in contact with NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-Ray Polarimeter Explorer) spacecraft, transmitting science data from IXPE to a ground station and making sure the download goes smoothly. That data will then go to the science team for further analysis.
At LASP, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, students at the University of Colorado, Boulder, can train to become command controllers, working directly with spacecraft on pointing the satellites, calibrating instruments, and collecting data. De Herrera-Schnering recently completed her sophomore year, while Pichler had trained as a student and now, having graduated, works as a full-time professional at LASP.
“The students are a key part in what we do,” said Stephanie Ruswick, IXPE flight director at LASP. “We professionals monitor the health and safety of the spacecraft, but so do the students, and they do a lot of analysis for us.”
Students also put into motion IXPE’s instrument activity plans, which are provided by the Science Operations Center at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The LASP student team schedules contacts with ground stations to downlink data, schedules observations of scientific and calibration targets, and generates the files necessary to translate the scientific operations into spacecraft actions. If IXPE experiences an anomaly, the LASP team will implement plans to remediate and resume normal operations as soon as possible.
Exploring the high-energy universe
The students take part in IXPE’s exploration of a wide variety of celestial targets. In October, for example, students monitored the transmission of data from IXPE’s observations of Swift J1727.8-1613, a bright black hole X-ray binary system. This cosmic object had been recently discovered in September 2023, when NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory detected a gamma-ray burst. IXPE’s specialized instruments allow scientists to measure the polarization of X-rays, which contains information about the source of the X-rays as well as the organization of surrounding magnetic fields. IXPE’s follow-up of the Swift object exemplifies how multiple space missions often combine their individual strengths to paint a fuller scientific picture of distant phenomena.
Team members also conduct individual projects. For example, students analyzed how IXPE would fare during both the annular eclipse on Oct. 14, 2023, and the total eclipse that moved across North America on April 8, to make sure that the spacecraft would have adequate power while the Moon partially blocked the Sun.
While most of the students working on IXPE at LASP are engineering majors, some are physics or astrophysics majors. Some didn’t initially start their careers in STEM such as flight controller Kacie Davis, who previously studied art.
Prospective command controllers go through a rigorous 12-week summer training program working 40 hours per week, learning “everything there is to know about mission operations and how to fly a spacecraft,” Ruswick said.
Cole Writer, an aerospace engineering student, remembers this training as “nerve-wracking” because he felt intimidated by the flight controllers. But after practicing procedures on his own laptop, he felt more confident, and completed the program to become a command controller.
“It’s nice to be trained by other students who are in the same boat as you and have gone through the same process,” said Adrienne Pickerill, a flight controller who started with the team as a student and earned a Master’s in aerospace engineering at the university in May .
Sam Lippincott, right, a graduate student lead at LASP, trained as a command controller for NASA’s IXPE spacecraft as an undergraduate. In the background are flight controllers Adrienne Pickerill, left, and Alexander Pichler, who also trained as students. How they got here
As a teenager Writer’s interests focused on flying planes, and he saved money to train for a pilot’s license, earning it the summer after high school graduation. Surprisingly, he has found many overlaps in skills for both activities – following checklists and preventing mistakes. “Definitely high stakes in both cases,” he said.
Sam Lippincott, now a graduate student lead after serving as a command controller as an undergraduate, has been a lifelong sci-fi fan, but took a career in space more seriously his sophomore year of college. “For people that want to go into the aerospace or space operations industry, it’s always important to remember that you’ll never stop learning, and it’s important to remain humble in your abilities, and always be excited to learn more,” he said.
De Herrera-Schnering got hooked on the idea of becoming a scientist the first time she saw the Milky Way. On a camping trip when she was 10 years old, she spotted the galaxy as she went to use the outhouse in the middle of the night. “I woke up my parents, and we just laid outside and we were just stargazing,” she said. “After that I knew I was set on what I wanted to do.”
Rithik Gangopadhyay, who trained as an undergraduate command controller and continued at LASP as a graduate student lead, had been interested in puzzles and problem-solving as a kid and had a book about planets that fascinated him.. “There’s so much out there and so much we don’t know, and I think that’s what really pushed me to do aerospace and do this opportunity of being a command controller,” he said.
Coding is key to mission operations, and much of it is done in the Python language. Sometimes the work of flying a spacecraft feels like any other kind of programming — but occasionally, team members step back and consider that they are part of the grand mission of exploring the universe.
“If it’s your job for a couple of years, it starts to be like, ‘oh, let’s go ahead and do that, it’s just another Tuesday.’ But if you step back and think about it on a high-level basis, it’s really something special,” Pichler said. “It’s definitely profound.”
Media Contact
Elizabeth Landau
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0845
elandau@nasa.gov
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