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By NASA
NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov (Credit: NASA) Editor’s note: This release was updated on Aug. 30, 2024, to correct Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov’s role to mission specialist.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will launch no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 24, on the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, previously announced as crewmates, are eligible for reassignment on a future mission.
Hague and Gorbunov will fly to the space station as commander and mission specialist, respectively, as part of a two-crew member flight aboard a SpaceX Dragon.
The updated crew complement follows NASA’s decision to return the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test uncrewed and launch Crew-9 with two unoccupied seats. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched aboard the Starliner spacecraft in June, will fly home with Hague and Gorbunov in February 2025.
The decision to fly Hague was made by NASA chief astronaut Joe Acaba at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Acaba had to balance flying a NASA crew member with previous spaceflight experience to command the flight, while ensuring NASA maintains an integrated crew with a Roscosmos cosmonaut who can operate their critical systems for continued, safe station operations.
“While we’ve changed crew before for a variety of reasons, downsizing crew for this flight was another tough decision to adjust to given that the crew has trained as a crew of four,” said Acaba. “I have the utmost confidence in all our crew, who have been excellent throughout training for the mission. Zena and Stephanie will continue to assist their crewmates ahead of launch, and they exemplify what it means to be a professional astronaut.”
The agency will share reassignment details for Cardman and Wilson when available.
“I am deeply proud of our entire crew,” said Cardman, “and I am confident Nick and Alex will step into their roles with excellence. All four of us remain dedicated to the success of this mission, and Stephanie and I look forward to flying when the time is right.”
Wilson added, “I know Nick and Alex will do a great job with their work aboard the International Space Station as part of Expedition 72.”
With 203 days logged in space, this will be Hague’s third launch and second mission to the orbiting laboratory. During his first launch in March 2018, Hague and his crewmate, Roscosmos’ Alexey Ovchinin, experienced a rocket booster failure, resulting in an in-flight, post-launch abort, ballistic re-entry, and safe landing in their Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft. Five months later, Hague launched aboard Soyuz MS-12 and served as a flight engineer aboard the space station during Expeditions 59 and 60. Hague conducted three spacewalks to upgrade space station power systems and install a docking adapter for commercial spacecraft. An active-duty colonel in the U.S. Space Force, Hague completed a developmental rotation at the Defense Department, and served as the Space Force’s director of test and evaluation from 2020 to 2022. In August 2022, Hague resumed duties at NASA, working on the Boeing Starliner Program until this flight assignment. Follow @astrohague on X and Instagram.
This will be Gorbunov’s first trip to space and the station. Born in Zheleznogorsk, Kursk region, Russia, he studied engineering with qualifications in spacecraft and upper stages from the Moscow Aviation Institute. Gorbunov graduated from the military department with a specialty in operating and repairing aircraft, helicopters, and aircraft engines. Before his selection as a cosmonaut in 2018, he worked as an engineer for Rocket Space Corp. Energia and supported cargo spacecraft launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Hague and Gorbonov will become members of the Expedition 72 crew aboard the station. They will join Wilmore, Williams, fellow NASA astronaut Don Pettit, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner conducting scientific research and maintenance activities into the station’s 24th year of continuous human presence.
Learn more about International Space Station research and operations at:
https://www.nasa.gov/station
-end-
Josh Finch / Jimi Russell
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / james.j.russell@nasa.gov
Courtney Beasley
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
courtney.m.beasley@nasa.gov
View the full article
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By NASA
Portraits of NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. (Credit: NASA) NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will launch no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 24, on the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, previously announced as crewmates, are eligible for reassignment on a future mission.
Hague and Gorbunov will fly to the space station as commander and pilot, respectively, as part of a two-crew member flight aboard a SpaceX Dragon.
The updated crew complement follows NASA’s decision to return the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test uncrewed and launch Crew-9 with two unoccupied seats. NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched aboard the Starliner spacecraft in June, will fly home with Hague and Gorbunov in February 2025.
The decision to fly Hague was made by NASA chief astronaut Joe Acaba at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Acaba had to balance flying a NASA crew member with previous spaceflight experience to command the flight, while ensuring NASA maintains an integrated crew with a Roscosmos cosmonaut who can operate their critical systems for continued, safe station operations.
“While we’ve changed crew before for a variety of reasons, downsizing crew for this flight was another tough decision to adjust to given that the crew has trained as a crew of four,” said Acaba. “I have the utmost confidence in all our crew, who have been excellent throughout training for the mission. Zena and Stephanie will continue to assist their crewmates ahead of launch, and they exemplify what it means to be a professional astronaut.”
The agency will share reassignment details for Cardman and Wilson when available.
“I am deeply proud of our entire crew,” said Cardman, “and I am confident Nick and Alex will step into their roles with excellence. All four of us remain dedicated to the success of this mission, and Stephanie and I look forward to flying when the time is right.”
Wilson added, “I know Nick and Alex will do a great job with their work aboard the International Space Station as part of Expedition 72.”
With 203 days logged in space, this will be Hague’s third launch and second mission to the orbiting laboratory. During his first launch in March 2018, Hague and his crewmate, Roscosmos’ Alexey Ovchinin, experienced a rocket booster failure, resulting in an in-flight, post-launch abort, ballistic re-entry, and safe landing in their Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft. Five months later, Hague launched aboard Soyuz MS-12 and served as a flight engineer aboard the space station during Expeditions 59 and 60. Hague conducted three spacewalks to upgrade space station power systems and install a docking adapter for commercial spacecraft. An active-duty colonel in the U.S. Space Force, Hague completed a developmental rotation at the Defense Department, and served as the Space Force’s director of test and evaluation from 2020 to 2022. In August 2022, Hague resumed duties at NASA, working on the Boeing Starliner Program until this flight assignment. Follow @astrohague on X and Instagram.
This will be Gorbunov’s first trip to space and the station. Born in Zheleznogorsk, Kursk region, Russia, he studied engineering with qualifications in spacecraft and upper stages from the Moscow Aviation Institute. Gorbunov graduated from the military department with a specialty in operating and repairing aircraft, helicopters, and aircraft engines. Before his selection as a cosmonaut in 2018, he worked as an engineer for Rocket Space Corp. Energia and supported cargo spacecraft launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Hague and Gorbonov will become members of the Expedition 72 crew aboard the station. They will join Wilmore, Williams, fellow NASA astronaut Don Pettit, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner conducting scientific research and maintenance activities into the station’s 24th year of continuous human presence.
Learn more about International Space Station research and operations at:
https://www.nasa.gov/station
-end-
Josh Finch / Jimi Russell
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / james.j.russell@nasa.gov
Courtney Beasley
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
courtney.m.beasley@nasa.gov
View the full article
-
By NASA
6 Min Read NASA Discovers a Long-Sought Global Electric Field on Earth
The geographic North Pole seen from the Endurance rocket ship at 477 miles (768 kilometers) altitude above the Arctic. The faint red and green streaks at the top of the image are artifacts of lens flare. Credits: NASA Key Points
A rocket team reports the first successful detection of Earth’s ambipolar electric field: a weak, planet-wide electric field as fundamental as Earth’s gravity and magnetic fields. First hypothesized more than 60 years ago, the ambipolar electric field is a key driver of the “polar wind,” a steady outflow of charged particles into space that occurs above Earth’s poles. This electric field lifts charged particles in our upper atmosphere to greater heights than they would otherwise reach and may have shaped our planet’s evolution in ways yet to be explored.
Using observations from a NASA suborbital rocket, an international team of scientists has, for the first time, successfully measured a planet-wide electric field thought to be as fundamental to Earth as its gravity and magnetic fields. Known as the ambipolar electric field, scientists first hypothesized over 60 years ago that it drove how our planet’s atmosphere can escape above Earth’s North and South Poles. Measurements from the rocket, NASA’s Endurance mission, have confirmed the existence of the ambipolar field and quantified its strength, revealing its role in driving atmospheric escape and shaping our ionosphere — a layer of the upper atmosphere — more broadly.
Understanding the complex movements and evolution of our planet’s atmosphere provides clues not only to the history of Earth but also gives us insight into the mysteries of other planets and determining which ones might be hospitable to life. The paper was published Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2024, in the journal Nature.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Lacey Young
Download this video and related animations from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. An Electric Field Drawing Particles Out to Space
Since the late 1960s, spacecraft flying over Earth’s poles have detected a stream of particles flowing from our atmosphere into space. Theorists predicted this outflow, which they dubbed the “polar wind,” spurring research to understand its causes.
Some amount of outflow from our atmosphere was expected. Intense, unfiltered sunlight should cause some particles from our air to escape into space, like steam evaporating from a pot of water. But the observed polar wind was more mysterious. Many particles within it were cold, with no signs they had been heated — yet they were traveling at supersonic speeds.
“Something had to be drawing these particles out of the atmosphere,” said Glyn Collinson, principal investigator of Endurance at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the paper. Scientists suspected a yet-to-be-discovered electric field could be at work.
The hypothesized electric field, generated at the subatomic scale, was expected to be incredibly weak, with its effects felt only over hundreds of miles. For decades, detecting it was beyond the limits of existing technology. In 2016, Collinson and his team got to work inventing a new instrument they thought was up to the task of measuring Earth’s ambipolar field.
Launching a Rocket from the Arctic
The team’s instruments and ideas were best suited for a suborbital rocket flight launched from the Arctic. In a nod to the ship that carried Ernest Shackleton on his famous 1914 voyage to Antarctica, the team named their mission Endurance. The scientists set a course for Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago just a few hundred miles from the North Pole and home to the northernmost rocket range in the world.
“Svalbard is the only rocket range in the world where you can fly through the polar wind and make the measurements we needed,” said Suzie Imber, a space physicist at the University of Leicester, UK, and co-author of the paper.
On May 11, 2022, Endurance launched and reached an altitude of 477.23 miles (768.03 kilometers), splashing down 19 minutes later in the Greenland Sea. Across the 322-mile altitude range where it collected data, Endurance measured a change in electric potential of only 0.55 volts.
“A half a volt is almost nothing — it’s only about as strong as a watch battery,” Collinson said. “But that’s just the right amount to explain the polar wind.”
The Endurance rocket ship launches from Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard. Credit: Andøya Space/Leif Jonny Eilertsen Hydrogen ions, the most abundant type of particle in the polar wind, experience an outward force from this field 10.6 times stronger than gravity. “That’s more than enough to counter gravity — in fact, it’s enough to launch them upwards into space at supersonic speeds,” said Alex Glocer, Endurance project scientist at NASA Goddard and co-author of the paper.
Heavier particles also get a boost. Oxygen ions at that same altitude, immersed in this half-a-volt field, weigh half as much. In general, the team found that the ambipolar field increases what’s known as the “scale height” of the ionosphere by 271%, meaning the ionosphere remains denser to greater heights than it would be without it.
“It’s like this conveyor belt, lifting the atmosphere up into space,” Collinson added.
Endurance’s discovery has opened many new paths for exploration. The ambipolar field, as a fundamental energy field of our planet alongside gravity and magnetism, may have continuously shaped the evolution of our atmosphere in ways we can now begin to explore. Because it’s created by the internal dynamics of an atmosphere, similar electric fields are expected to exist on other planets, including Venus and Mars.
“Any planet with an atmosphere should have an ambipolar field,” Collinson said. “Now that we’ve finally measured it, we can begin learning how it’s shaped our planet as well as others over time.”
By Miles Hatfield and Rachel Lense
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Endurance was a NASA-funded mission conducted through the Sounding Rocket Program at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The Svalbard Rocket Range is owned and operated by Andøya Space. The European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association (EISCAT) Svalbard radar, located in Longyearbyen, made ground-based measurements of the ionosphere critical to interpreting the rocket data. The United Kingdom Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Research Council of Norway (RCN) funded the EISCAT radar for the Endurance mission. EISCAT is owned and operated by research institutes and research councils of Norway, Sweden, Finland, Japan, China, and the United Kingdom (the EISCAT Associates). The Endurance mission team encompasses affiliates of the Catholic University of America, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Leicester, U.K., the University of New Hampshire, and Penn State University.
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Last Updated Aug 28, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
4 Min Read Into The Field With NASA: Valley Of Ten Thousand Smokes
NASA scientists begin a day’s field research in Katmai National Park. Credits:
NASA/Patrick Whelley In June 2024, the Goddard Instrument Field Team (GIFT) hiked deep into the backcountry of Alaska’s Katmai National Park to study the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, site of the largest volcanic eruption of the twentieth century. The team’s task: traverse a vast volcanic debris field layered with glacier ice, gathering data and samples to help us better understand this place on Earth and similar terrain on other worlds.
Buried glaciers on Mars and Earth. Top: Orbital view of partially-exposed ice beneath an eroding deposit on Mars, from HiRISE. Bottom: Edge-on view of a partially buried glacier in Alaska with a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) device in the foreground, from the Goddard Instrument Field Team. Novarupta, the volcano that erupted here in 1912, ejected more than three cubic miles of ash from Earth’s subsurface. The ice nearby is now insulated by, and mixed with, thick layers of geologically “young” volcanic debris. (For comparison, many of the eruption sites NASA teams study are tens of thousands to millions of years old.) Mars, too, has glaciers and ice sheets covered in layers of airfall materials, including dust and volcanic ash.
On Mars, as on Earth, some of the planet’s history is in disguise. Ancient volcanic materials are buried underneath newer deposits of ashy debris. Patterns in these layers (think thickness or thinness, color and texture, chemical and mineral signatures) hold a lot of information, but the message isn’t always clear. Erosion and other surface processes hide evidence of past eruptions, even enormous ones. Since relatively fresh volcanic material blankets the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, it’s an ideal place to observe the early stages of these changes.
Cherie Achilles raises a rock hammer as Alexandra Matiella Novak stands by with a hand-held spectrometer and Alice Baldridge holds a container of rock samples. The hand-held spectrometer gives on-the-spot information about what its targets are made of, helping the team decide which samples to collect and bring back to the lab. In three days of violent eruption, Novarupta blasted an uncommonly wide variety of clays, minerals, and volcanic rocks throughout the surrounding valley. Since then, hot, sulfurous gases have filtered up through underground channels and escaped into the air via countless fumaroles (a.k.a. the “ten thousand smokes”). Fumaroles, together with erosion and other alteration processes, affect how minerals near Novarupta move and change. Research here can help us understand mineral movement and alteration on Mars and other worlds, too. The range of starting materials and alteration patterns in this valley, all from a single eruption, is difficult to match anywhere else.
Heather Graham studies a fumarole – a place where volcanic gases escape from underground – using a hydrogen sulfide collector and sampling equipment. Their goal: check the fumarole for encrusted evidence that microscopic organisms once lived here, consuming energy and changing the rocks’ composition. Research on these kinds of biosignatures helps us understand what the search for life could look like on other worlds. It’s a tough field site to access, especially with heavy science instruments. GIFT worked closely with local collaborators including Katmai National Park to coordinate the expedition. After years of planning and months of training, twelve field team members gathered and geared up in Anchorage, Alaska. Two tiny airplane flights, one all-terrain bus ride, and sixteen hiking miles later, they set up a base camp. From there, small groups hiked out and back each day, gathering data and sample material from throughout the valley.
Left to right: Tabb Prissel, Emileigh Shoemaker, Heather Graham, Andrew Johnson, Justin Hayles, Aditi Pandey, and Patrick Whelley hike out of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Scientists teamed up to carry large equipment from place to place and bring each other data from far-flung targets. Some results were predictable, like a new library of samples collected from several different “packages” of differently-composed volcanic debris. Some were surprising–like a core sample that came up containing a pocket of empty space instead of buried glacial ice.
Emileigh Shoemaker and her team use Ground Penetrating Radar (the red box shown here is the GPR antenna) to gather information about long stretches of Earth’s subsurface before physically breaking ground. Here, Shoemaker stands on a huge pile of volcanic ash; hidden beneath the debris is a glacier. GPR data, combined with core samples, soil moisture measurements, and pits dug at strategic locations, can reveal how the glacier is preserved. Analyzing the samples, processing the data, and putting it all together will take time. This is the beginning of GIFT’s Novarupta research, but it’s a chapter of a science story long in the making. Previous studies of the 1912 eruption and its aftermath influenced this expedition’s science plan. The 2024 data and samples, and the new questions arising from the team’s time in the field, are already shaping ideas about future work. NASA has visited before, too. Apollo astronauts and their geology trainers spent time in the Valley in 1965, finding it an unusually Moon-like place to study.
Fieldwork still plays a role in astronaut training–and in advancing lunar science. For example: Novarupta’s chemistry is partly a result of Earth’s plate tectonics. The Moon has volcanic landscapes with similar chemistry, but no tectonic plates. So, what else could explain the parallel? To help address this question, the 2024 team collected samples and ground-truth data from a range of rock formations comparable to the Moon’s Gruithuisen Domes.
Tabb Prissel, Aditi Pandey, and Justin Hayles at Novarupta. The dome of dark rubble behind the scientists is what’s left of the volcano itself: in 1912, material erupted from this spot buried miles of glaciated valley. On Earth, the Moon, Mars, and beyond, geologic processes encode pieces of our solar system’s history. Volcanic deposits store details about a world’s insides at the time of an eruption and evidence of what’s happened at the surface since. Rippling fields of sand dunes, gravel, and ash record the influence of wind where atmospheres exist, like on Venus, Mars, and Titan. Glaciers can tell us about climate history and future–and on Mars, ice research also helps to lay the groundwork for human exploration. It’s much easier to take a close look at these features and processes here on Earth than anywhere else. So, to understand planets (including our own), NASA field scientists start close to home.
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About the Author
Caela Barry
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Last Updated Aug 22, 2024 Related Terms
Analog Field Testing Earth Earth Science Earth Surface & Interior Goddard Space Flight Center Planetary Environments & Atmospheres Planetary Geosciences & Geophysics Planetary Science Planetary Science Division Science & Research Science Mission Directorate The Solar System Uncategorized Explore More
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By NASA
Personnel from the MSFC Earth Science Branch and local partners participated in the Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IMPACTS), and they are members of the IMPACTS team that recently won the prestigious Presidential Rank Group Achievement Award from NASA. IMPACTS was a highly successful NASA Earth Venture Suborbital airborne field campaign that examined why and how heavy snowfalls occur, as well as how NASA missions can better detect and measure these events. The suborbital mission had three flight campaigns in 2020, 2022, and 2023, and used the NASA ER-2 and P-3 aircraft. MSFC contributed the Advanced Microwave Precipitation Radiometer (AMPR) and the Lightning Instrument Package (LIP) to IMPACTS, and both instruments flew on the ER-2.
MSFC Earth science and engineering civil servants that contributed to IMPACTS over the years include Timothy Lang, Chris Schultz, Mason Quick, Rich Blakeslee (Emeritus), Paul Meyer (Emeritus), Patrick Duran, Eric Cantrell, Max Vankeuren, Kurt Dietz, David Hyde, Tom Phillips, Patrick Fulda, and Mark James. MSFC partners for IMPACTS included University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH; Doug Huie, Jonathan Hicks, Julia Burton, Philip Alldredge, Dave Simmons, Sue O’Brien, Amanda Richter, Corey Amiot, Sebastian Harkema, Monte Bateman, Mike Stewart, Scott Podgorny, David Corredor, Dennis Buechler, Jeff Daskar, Dan Walker), Universities Space Research Association (USRA; Doug Mach), Jacobs (Mark Sloan, Lisa Gibby), and The Aerospace Corporation (Sayak Biswas). MSFC resource analyst support for IMPACTS was provided by Robyn Rudock, Jennifer Thovson, Jacob Guthrie,Chris Anthony, and Lisa Dorsett.
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