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By NASA
NASA Stennis partnered with Mississippi Enterprise for Technology to host more than 100 members of the 57th Rocket Test Group on March 18-19.
NASA Stennis partnered with Mississippi Enterprise for Technology to host more than 100 members of the 57th Rocket Test Group on March 18-19.NASA/Jason Richard The group toured the south Mississippi NASA center on March 19, learning how NASA Stennis operates as NASA’s primary, and America’s largest, rocket propulsion test site to serve the nation and commercial sector with its unique capabilities and expertise.
NASA Stennis partnered with Mississippi Enterprise for Technology to host more than 100 members of the 57th Rocket Test Group on March 18-19.NASA/Jason Richard The day included tours of test stands and facilities hosted by NASA Stennis test complex personnel. Visits included the Fred Haise Test Stand, where NASA Stennis tests RS-25 engines to help power NASA’s Artemis missions to the Moon and beyond; the Thad Cochran Test Stand, where NASA Stennis will test NASA’s exploration upper stage for future Artemis missions; the E Test Complex, where NASA Stennis supports agency and commercial propulsion test activity; and the L3Harris Technologies (formerly Aerojet Rocketdyne) Engine Assembly Facility, where RS-25 engines are produced.
NASA Stennis partnered with Mississippi Enterprise for Technology to host more than 100 members of the 57th Rocket Test Group on March 18-19.NASA/Jason Richard The group also received overviews from site personnel on the Rocket Propulsion Test Program Office located at NASA Stennis, on lessons learned from testing at the E Test Complex, and on the NASA Data Acquisition System developed onsite.
NASA Stennis partnered with Mississippi Enterprise for Technology to host more than 100 members of the 57th Rocket Test Group on March 18-19.NASA/Jason Richard The Rocket Test Group originally formed in response to a congressional demand for an ongoing working group crossing agency and company boundaries. It is a volunteer organization intended to allow rocket test facility operators to come together to recommend solutions for difficult testing problems; lower testing costs by reducing time spent on solving critical issues and eliminating duplicate programs; facilitate the activation of new facilities; learn from each other by viewing different methods and touring various facilities; provide a networking opportunity for testing advice and problem solving support; and allow test facility operators to stay informed on the newest developments.
NASA Stennis partnered with Mississippi Enterprise for Technology to host more than 100 members of the 57th Rocket Test Group on March 18-19.L3Harris TechnologiesView the full article
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By European Space Agency
Image: This image shows Webb’s recent observation of the asteroid 2024 YR4 using both its Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). Data from NIRCam shows reflected light, while the MIRI observations show thermal light.
On 8 March 2025, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope turned its watchful eye toward asteroid 2024 YR4, which we now know poses no significant threat to Earth in 2032 and beyond.
This is the smallest object targeted by Webb to date, and one of the smallest objects to have its size directly measured.
Observations were taken to study the thermal properties of 2024 YR4, including how quickly it heats up and cools down and how hot it is at its current distance from the Sun. These measurements indicate that this asteroid does not share properties observed in larger asteroids. This is likely a combination of its fast spin and lack of fine-grained sand on its surface. Further research is needed, however this is considered consistent with a surface dominated by rocks that are roughly fist-sized or larger.
Asteroid 2024 YR4 was recently under close watch by the team at ESA's Near Earth Objects Coordination Centre, located in Italy. Planetary defence experts from the Agency's Space Safety programme worked with NASA and the international asteroid community to closely watch this object and refine its orbit, which was eventually determined to not pose a risk of Earth impact. Read details on this unusual campaign via ESA's Rocket Science blog and in news articles here and here.
Webb’s observations indicate that the asteroid measures roughly 60 meters (comparable to the height of a 15-story building).
The new observations from Webb not only provide unique information about 2024 YR4’s size, but can also complement ground-based observations of the object's position to help improve our understanding of the object’s orbit and future trajectory.
Note: This post highlights data from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process.
[Image description: A collage of three images showing the black expanse of space. Two-thirds of the collage is taken up by the black background sprinkled with small, blurry galaxies in orange, blue, and white. There are two images in a column at the right side of the collage. On the right side of the main image, not far from the top, a very faint dot is outlined with a white square. At the right, there are two zoomed in views of this area. The top box is labeled NIRCam and shows a fuzzy dot at the center of the inset. The bottom box is labeled MIRI and shows a fuzzy pinkish dot.]
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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This team from University High School in Irvine, California, won the 2025 regional Oceans Science Bowl, hosted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. From left: Nethra Iyer, Joanne Chen, Matthew Feng, Avery Hexun, Angelina Yan, and coach David Knight.NASA/JPL-Caltech The annual regional event puts students’ knowledge of ocean-related science to the test in a fast-paced academic competition.
A team of students from University High School in Irvine earned first place at a fast-paced regional academic competition focused on ocean science disciplines and hosted by NASA’S Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Eight teams from Los Angeles and Orange counties competed at the March 29 event, dubbed the Los Angeles Surf Bowl. It was the last of about 20 regional competitions held across the U.S. this year in the lead-up to the virtual National Ocean Sciences Bowl finals event in mid-May.
Santa Monica High School earned second place; Francisco Bravo Medical Magnet High School in Los Angeles came in third. With its victory, University repeated its winning performance from last year. The school also won the JPL-hosted regional Science Bowl earlier this month.
Teams from all eight schools that participated in the JPL-hosted 2025 regional Ocean Sciences Bowl pose alongside volunteers and coaches.NASA/JPL-Caltech For the Ocean Sciences Bowl, teams are composed of four to five students and a coach. To prepare for the event, team members spend months answering multiple-choice questions with a “Jeopardy!”-style buzzer in just five seconds. Questions come in several categories, including biology, chemistry, geology, and physics along with related geography, technology, history, policy, and current events topics.
A question in the chemistry category might be “What chemical is the principal source of energy at many of Earth’s hydrothermal vent systems?” (It’s hydrogen sulfide.) Other questions can be considerably more challenging.
When a team member buzzes in and gives the correct answer to a multiple-choice question, the team earns a bonus question, which allows teammates to consult with one another to come up with an answer. More complicated “team challenge questions” prompt students to work together for a longer period. The theme of this year’s competition is “Sounding the Depths: Understanding Ocean Acoustics.”
University High junior Matthew Feng, a return competitor, said the team’s success felt like a payoff for hours of studying together, including on weekends. He keeps coming back to the competition partly for the sense of community and also for the personal challenge, he said. “It’s nice to compete and meet people, see people who were here last year,” Matthew added. “Pushing yourself mentally — the first year I was shaking so hard because I wasn’t used to that much adrenaline.”
Since 2000, JPL’s Public Services Office has coordinated the Los Angeles regional contest with the help of volunteers from laboratory staff and former Ocean Sciences Bowl participants in the local community. JPL is managed for NASA by Caltech.
The National Ocean Sciences Bowl is a program of the Center for Ocean Leadership at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a nonprofit consortium of colleges and universities focused in part on Earth science-related education.
News Media Contact
Melissa Pamer
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-314-4928
melissa.pamer@jpl.nasa.gov
2025-044
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Last Updated Mar 31, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
The innovative team of engineers and scientists from NASA, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, and more than 40 other partner organizations across the country that created the Parker Solar Probe mission has been awarded the 2024 Robert J. Collier Trophy by the National Aeronautic Association (NAA). This annual award recognizes the most exceptional achievement in aeronautics and astronautics in America with respect to improving the performance, efficiency, and safety of air or space vehicles in the previous year.
“Congratulations to the entire Parker Solar Probe team for this well-earned recognition,” said NASA acting Administrator Janet Petro. “This mission’s trailblazing research is rewriting the textbooks on solar science by going to a place no human-made object has ever been and advancing NASA’s efforts to better understand our solar system and the Sun’s influence, with lasting benefits for us all. As the first to touch the Sun and fastest human-made object ever built, Parker Solar Probe is a testament to human ingenuity and discovery.”
An artist’s concept of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe. NASA On Dec. 24, 2024, Parker Solar Probe made its closest approach to the Sun, passing deep within the Sun’s corona, just 3.8 million miles above the Sun’s surface and at a top speed of close to 430,000 mph, ushering in a new era of scientific discovery and space exploration.
“This award is a recognition of the unrelenting dedication and hard work of the Parker Solar Probe team. I am so proud of this team and honored to have been a part of it,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “By studying the Sun closer than ever before, we continue to advance our understanding of not only our closest star, but also stars across our universe. Parker Solar Probe’s historic close approaches to the Sun are a testament to the incredible engineering that made this record-breaking journey possible.”
Three novel aerospace technology advancements were critical to enabling this record performance: The first is the Thermal Protection System, or heat shield, that protects the spacecraft and is built to withstand brutal temperatures as high as 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The Thermal Protection System allows Parker’s electronics and instruments to operate close to room temperature.
Additional Parker innovations included first-of-their-kind actively cooled solar arrays that protect themselves from overexposure to intense solar energy while powering the spacecraft, and a fully autonomous spacecraft system that can manage its own flight behavior, orientation, and configuration for months at a time. Parker has relied upon all of these vital technologies every day since its launch almost seven years ago, in August 2018.
“I am thrilled for the Parker Solar Probe team on receiving this well-deserved award,” said Joe Westlake, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters. “The new information about the Sun made available through this mission will improve our ability to prepare for space weather events across the solar system, as well as better understand the very star that makes life possible for us on Earth.”
Parker’s close-up observations of solar events, such as coronal mass ejections and solar particle events, are critical to advancing our understanding of the science of our Sun and the phenomena that drive high-energy space weather events that pose risks to satellites, air travel, astronauts, and even power grids on Earth. Understanding the fundamental physics behind events which drive space weather will enable more reliable predictions and lower astronaut exposure to hazardous radiation during future deep space missions to the Moon and Mars.
“This amazing team brought to life an incredibly difficult space science mission that had been studied, and determined to be impossible, for more than 60 years. They did so by solving numerous long-standing technology challenges and dramatically advancing our nation’s spaceflight capabilities,” said APL Director Ralph Semmel. “The Collier Trophy is well-earned recognition for this phenomenal group of innovators from NASA, APL, and our industry and research partners from across the nation.”
First awarded in 1911, the Robert J. Collier Trophy winner is selected by a group of aviation leaders chosen by the NAA. The Collier Trophy is housed in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
“Traveling three times closer to the Sun and seven times faster than any spacecraft before, Parker’s technology innovations enabled humanity to reach inside the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time,” said Bobby Braun, head of APL’s Space Exploration Sector. “We are all immensely proud that the Parker Solar Probe team will join a long legacy of prestigious aerospace endeavors that redefined technology and changed history.”
“The Parker Solar Probe team’s achievement in earning the 2024 Collier is a shining example of determination, genius, and teamwork,” said NAA President and CEO Amy Spowart. “It’s a distinct honor for the NAA to acknowledge and celebrate the remarkable team that turned the impossible into reality.”
Parker Solar Probe was developed as part of NASA’s Living With a Star program to explore aspects of the Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. The Living With a Star program is managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Applied Physics Laboratory designed, built, and operates the spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA.
By Geoff Brown
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
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Last Updated Mar 25, 2025 Editor Sarah Frazier Contact Abbey Interrante abbey.a.interrante@nasa.gov Location Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions Mars Home 4 min read
Sols 4484-4485: Remote Sensing on a Monday
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Left Navigation Camera on March 17, 2025 — sol 4483, or Martian day 4,483 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission — at 09:38:17 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech Written by Conor Hayes, Graduate Student at York University
Earth planning date: Monday, March 17, 2025
Last week I was in Houston, Texas, at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The mid-March weather in Houston is often more like mid-summer weather here in Toronto, so it has been a bit of a shock coming home to temperatures that are hovering around freezing rather than being in the upper 20s (degrees Celsius, or the low to mid 80s for those of you still using Fahrenheit). Still, Toronto is positively balmy compared to Gale Crater, where temperatures usually range between minus 80°C and minus 20°C (or minus 110°F to minus 5°F) during this part of the year. These cold temperatures and their associated higher demands on the rover’s available power for heating are continuing to motivate many of the decisions that we make during planning.
We received the double good news this morning that the weekend’s drive completed successfully, including the mid-drive imaging of the other side of “Humber Park” that Michelle mentioned in Friday’s blog, and that our estimates of the weekend plan’s power consumption ended up being a little conservative. So we started planning exactly where we wanted to be, and with more power to play around with than we had expected. Yay!
The weekend’s drive left us parked in front of some rocks with excellent layering and interesting ripples that we really wanted to get a closer look at with MAHLI. (See the cover image for a look at these rocks as seen by Navcam.) Sadly, we also ended up parked in such a way that presented a slip hazard if the arm was unstowed. As much as we would have loved to get close-up images of these rocks, we love keeping Curiosity’s arm safe even more, so we had to settle for a remote sensing-only plan instead.
Both the geology and mineralogy (GEO) and the environmental science (ENV) teams took full advantage of the extra power gifted to us today to create a plan packed full of remote sensing observations. Because we’re driving on the first sol of this two-sol plan, any “targeted” observations, i.e. those where we know exactly where we want to point the rover’s cameras, must take place before the drive. The first sol is thus packed full of Mastcam and ChemCam observations, starting with a 14×3 Mastcam mosaic of the area in front of us that’s outside of today’s workspace. Individual targets then get some Mastcam love with mosaics of various ripple and layering features at “Verdugo Peak,” “Silver Moccasin Trail,” and “Jones Peak.” Mastcam and ChemCam also team up on a LIBS target, “Trancas Canyon,” and some more long-distance mosaics of Gould Mesa, a feature about 100 meters away from us (about 328 feet) that we’ll be driving to the south of as we continue to head toward the “boxwork” structures.
After a drive, there often aren’t many activities scheduled other than the imaging of our new location that we’ll need for the next planning day. However, in this plan ENV decided to take advantage of the fact that Navcam observations can take place at the same time that the rover is talking to one of the spacecraft that orbit Mars. This is a useful trick when power is tight as it allows us to do more science without adding additional awake time (since the rover needs to be awake anyway to communicate with the orbiters). Today, it’s being used to get some extra cloud observations right before sunset, a time that we don’t often get to observe. These observations include a zenith movie that looks straight up over the rover and a “phase function sky survey,” which takes a series of nine movies that form a dome around the rover to examine the properties of the clouds’ ice crystals.
The second sol of this plan is much more relaxed, as post-drive sols often are because we don’t know exactly where we’ll be after a drive. Today, we’ve just got our usual ChemCam AEGIS activity, followed by a pair of Navcam cloud and cloud shadow movies to measure the altitude of clouds over Gale. As always, we’ve also got our usual set of REMS, RAD, and DAN activities throughout this plan.
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Last Updated Mar 20, 2025 Related Terms
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