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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This image shows an aviation version of a smartphone navigation app that makes suggestions for an aircraft to fly an alternate, more efficient route. The new trajectories are based on information available from NASA’s Digital Information Platform and processed by the Collaborative Departure Digital Rerouting tool.NASA Just like your smartphone navigation app can instantly analyze information from many sources to suggest the best route to follow, a NASA-developed resource is now making data available to help the aviation industry do the same thing.
To assist air traffic managers in keeping airplanes moving efficiently through the skies, information about weather, potential delays, and more is being gathered and processed to support decision making tools for a variety of aviation applications.
Appropriately named the Digital Information Platform (DIP), this living database hosts key data gathered by flight participants such as airlines or drone operators. It will help power additional tools that, among other benefits, can save you travel time.
Ultimately, the aviation industry… and even the flying public, will benefit from what we develop.
Swati Saxena
NASA Aerospace Engineer
“Through DIP we’re also demonstrating how to deliver digital services for aviation users via a modern cloud-based, service-oriented architecture,” said Swati Saxena, DIP project manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.
The intent is not to compete with others. Instead, the hope is that industry will see DIP as a reference they can use in developing and implementing their own platforms and digital services.
“Ultimately, the aviation industry – the Federal Aviation Administration, commercial airlines, flight operators, and even the flying public – will benefit from what we develop,” Saxena said.
The platform and digital services have even more benefits than just saving some time on a journey.
For example, NASA recently collaborated with airlines to demonstrate a traffic management tool that improved traffic flow at select airports, saving thousands of pounds of jet fuel and significantly reducing carbon emissions.
Now, much of the data gathered in collaboration with airlines and integrated on the platform is publicly available. Users who qualify can create a guest account and access DIP data at a new website created by the project.
It’s all part of NASA’s vision for 21st century aviation involving revolutionary next-generation future airspace and safety tools.
Managing Future Air Traffic
During the 2030s and beyond, the skies above the United States are expected to become much busier.
Facing this rising demand, the current National Airspace System – the network of U.S. aviation infrastructure including airports, air navigation facilities, and communications – will be challenged to keep up. DIP represents a key piece of solving that challenge.
NASA’s vision for future airspace and safety involves new technology to create a highly automated, safe, and scalable environment.
What this vision looks like is a flight environment where many types of vehicles and their pilots, as well as air traffic managers, use state-of-the-art automated tools and systems that provide highly detailed and curated information.
These tools leverage new capabilities like machine learning and artificial intelligence to streamline efficiency and handle the increase in traffic expected in the coming decades.
Digital Services Ecosystem in Action
To begin implementing this new vision, our aeronautical innovators are evaluating their platform, DIP, and services at several airports in Texas. This initial stage is a building block for larger such demonstrations in the future.
“These digital services are being used in the live operational environment by our airline partners to improve efficiency of the current airspace operations,” Saxena said. “The tools are currently in use in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and will be deployed in the Houston airspace in 2025.”
The results from these digital tools are already making a difference.
Proven Air Traffic Results
During 2022, a NASA machine learning-based tool named Collaborative Digital Departure Rerouting, designed to improve the flow of air traffic and prevent flight delays, saved more than 24,000 lbs. (10,886 kg.) of fuel by streamlining air traffic in the Dallas area.
If such tools were used across the entire country, the improvements made in efficiency, safety, and sustainability would make a notable difference to the flying public and industry.
“Continued agreements with airlines and the aviation industry led to the creation and expansion of this partnership ecosystem,” Saxena said. “There have been benefits across the board.”
DIP was developed under NASA’s Airspace Operations and Safety Program.
Learn about NASA’s Collaborative Digital Departure Rerouting tool and how it uses information from the Digital Information Platform to provide airlines with routing options similar to how drivers navigate using cellphone apps. About the Author
John Gould
Aeronautics Research Mission DirectorateJohn Gould is a member of NASA Aeronautics' Strategic Communications team at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. He is dedicated to public service and NASA’s leading role in scientific exploration. Prior to working for NASA Aeronautics, he was a spaceflight historian and writer, having a lifelong passion for space and aviation.
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Last Updated Jul 12, 2024 EditorJim BankeContactJim Bankejim.banke@nasa.gov Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
ESA’s EarthCARE mission has completed its important ‘Launch and Early Orbit Phase’ and is ready to begin the commissioning of its four scientific instruments. The data they gather will improve our understanding of the role that clouds and aerosols play in Earth’s radiation balance and benefit both climate modelling and weather forecasting.
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By NASA
“If I knew that I was going to get to where I’m at [today], I would have gone through it all over again. I would have went through changing my major. I would have gone through the divorce. I would have went through the heartbreak of thinking, ‘I’m not going to be what I wanted to be when I grow up.’ That’s OK.
“Back then, when I realized that I wasn’t going to be an on-air meteorologist, it was heartbreaking. But now, I’m all right with that. It’s been a bumpy ride for me, but in the end, it’s been the greatest thing.
“…I love to share the messy ride. It’s OK that you have bumps. It’s OK if there’s obstacles. You have your goals, but it’s OK if there’s hiccups. You can still be a mess and be successful.”
– Emily Timko, Icing Cloud Characterization Engineer, NASA’s Glenn Research Center
Image Credit: NASA/Quentin Schwinn
Interviewer: NASA/Thalia Patrinos
Check out some of our other Faces of NASA.
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By NASA
5 min read
Night-Shining Cloud Mission Ends; Yields High Science Results for NASA
NASA’s Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere (AIM) mission, seen in this visualization, contributed to NASA’s understanding of the region that borders between Earth’s atmosphere and space. NASA After 16 years studying Earth’s highest clouds for the benefit of humanity – polar mesospheric clouds – from its orbit some 350 miles above the ground, NASA’s Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere, or AIM, mission has come to an end.
Initially slated for a two-year mission, AIM was extended numerous times due to its high science return. While AIM has faced hurdles over the years – from software hiccups to hardware issues – an incredibly dedicated team kept the spacecraft running for much longer than anyone could have anticipated. On March 13, 2023, the spacecraft’s battery failed following several years of declining performance. Multiple attempts to maintain power to the spacecraft were made, but no further data could be collected, so the mission has now ended.
“AIM was dedicated to studying the atmospheric region that borders between our atmosphere and space,” said AIM mission scientist Diego Janches, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “AIM’s help understanding this region has been of critical importance to providing insights on how the lower atmosphere affects space weather.”
Known as night-shining or noctilucent clouds, they are seen at twilight in the summer months, typically at high latitudes near the North and South Poles. Before the mission, scientists knew these types of clouds varied with latitude, season, and solar activity, but didn’t know why. This mission was launched to understand the variations and study why the clouds form and their links to climate change by measuring the thermal, chemical, and other properties of the environment in which the clouds form.
Noctilucent clouds appeared in the sky above Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada on July 2, 2011. NASA/Dave Hughes “NASA’s AIM has been an incredibly successful mission,” said Scott Bailey, AIM principal investigator and professor at Virginia Tech. “It has answered core questions that have helped us understand how noctilucent clouds and atmospheric gravity waves vary over time and location.”
Over the years, AIM made many big discoveries. Data from the mission has thus far led to nearly 400 peer-reviewed publications. This includes findings on how these clouds can be created by meteor smoke and water vapor from rocket exhaust, how events near Earth’s surface can trigger changes in the clouds, and how ice high in the atmosphere can cause mysterious radar echoes, which are created in certain regions of the atmosphere during the summer.
As the mission progressed, scientists realized AIM’s data could also be used to study undulations in the air called atmospheric gravity waves. These waves transfer momentum and energy as they travel through the atmosphere. They link weather events at Earth’s surface with atmospheric disturbances that occur far away from the initial event, including in the uppermost part of the atmosphere where they can disrupt GPS signals.
“We’ve had many difficulties, but we’ve still gotten an incredible amount of data from AIM because of our really excellent, heroic, and hardworking team that comes through every time,” Bailey said.
AIM’s first hurdles started only months after launch in 2007, when the telecommunication receiver started to malfunction intermittently. With a clever use of radio signals, the team was able to reprogram the spacecraft to communicate in Morse code, which allowed it to maintain communications even after the receiver stopped working. While communication with the spacecraft became thousands of times slower than planned, AIM was still able to make its measurements and send home 99% of the data it collected.
Shortly thereafter, the spacecraft again encountered a mission-threatening issue. The spacecraft repeatedly sent itself into safe mode, which effectively shut down the spacecraft and required a time-consuming series of tasks to reboot. But again, the engineers were able to upload new software to the spacecraft to circumvent the issue and keep AIM functional. The new software patch has prevented over a thousand such incidents on the spacecraft since.
In 2019, AIM’s battery started to decline, but through great effort and ingenuity, the mission operations team maintained the battery power, enabling the spacecraft to continue returning data. In early 2023, the battery experienced a significant drop-off in performance which meant the spacecraft could not regularly receive commands or collect data. Unfortunately, this hardware issue was not one that could be repaired remotely, and the satellite finally ceased collecting data in March 2023.
“We’re saddened to see AIM reach the end of its lifetime, but it’s been amazing how long it has lasted,” Bailey said. “It’s given us more data and insight into noctilucent clouds and atmospheric gravity waves than we could ever have hoped for.”
Though the spacecraft has seen its last night-shining clouds, scientists will continue to study AIM’s data for years to come. As for the spacecraft itself, it will slowly lose orbital height and burn up upon atmosphere re-entry in 2026.
“There are still gigabytes upon gigabytes of AIM data to study,” said Cora Randall, AIM deputy principal investigator and senior research scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder, Colorado. “And as our models and computational capabilities continue to improve, people will make many more discoveries using the AIM datasets.”
For more information about the mission, visit: https://go.nasa.gov/3TgIDwD
By Mara Johnson-Groh
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Mar 01, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
3 min read
Discovery Alert: Glowing Cloud Points to a Cosmic Collision
This illustration depicts the aftermath of a collision between two giant exoplanets. What remains is a hot, molten planetary core and a swirling, glowing cloud of dust and debris. Mark A. Garlick The Discovery:
A glowing cosmic cloud has revealed a cataclysmic collision.
Key Facts:
Even within our own solar system, scientists have seen evidence of giant, planetary collisions from long ago. Remaining clues like Uranus’ tilt and the existence of Earth’s moon point to times in our distant history when the planets in our stellar neighborhood slammed together, forever changing their shape and place in orbit. Scientists looking outside our solar system to far off exoplanets can spot similar evidence that, across the universe, planets sometimes crash. In this new study, the evidence of such an impact comes from a cloud of dust and gas with a strange, fluctuating luminosity.
Details:
Scientists were observing a young (300-million-year-old) Sun-like star when they noticed something odd: the star suddenly and significantly dipped in brightness. A team of researchers looked a little closer and they found that, just before this dip, the star displayed a sudden spike in infrared luminosity.
In studying the star, the team found that this luminosity lasted for 1,000 days. But 2.5 years into this bright event, the star was unexpectedly eclipsed by something, causing the sudden dip in brightness. This eclipse endured for 500 days.
The team investigated further and found that the culprit behind both the spike in luminosity and the eclipse was a giant, glowing cloud of gas and dust. And the most likely reason for the sudden, eclipse-causing cloud? A cosmic collision between two exoplanets, one of which likely contained ice, the researchers think.
In a new study detailing these events, scientists suggest that two giant exoplanets anywhere from several to tens of Earth masses crashed into one another, creating both the infrared spike and the cloud. A crash like this would completely liquify the two planets, leaving behind a single molten core surrounded by a cloud of gas, hot rock, and dust.
After the crash, this cloud, still holding the hot, glowing remnant of the collision, continued to orbit the star, eventually moving in front of and eclipsing the star.
Fun Facts:
This study was conducted using archival data from NASA’s now-retired WISE mission – the spacecraft continues to operate under the name NEOWISE. This star was first detected in 2021 by the ground-based robotic survey ASAS-SN (All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae).
While this data revealed remnants of this planetary collision, the glow of this crash should still be visible to telescopes like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. In fact, the research team behind this study is already putting together proposals to observe the system with Webb.
Discoverers:
The study, “A planetary collision afterglow and transit of the resultant debris cloud,” was published Oct. 11, 2023, in Nature by lead author Matthew Kenworthy alongside 21 co-authors.
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Last Updated Feb 16, 2024 Related Terms
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