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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
As students head back to school, teachers have a new tool that brings NASA satellite data down to their earthly classrooms.
The My NASA Data homepage categorizes content by areas of study called spheres and also Earth as a system. NASA/mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov For over 50 years of observing Earth, NASA’s satellites have collected petabytes of global science data (that’s millions and millions of gigabytes) – with terabytes more coming in by the day. Since 2004, the My NASA Data website has been developing ways for students and teachers of grades 3-12 to understand, and visualize NASA data, and to help incorporate those measurements into practical science lessons.
“We have three different types of lesson plans, some of which are student-facing and some are teacher-facing,” said Angie Rizzi, My NASA Data task lead, based at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “Teachers can download complete lesson plans or display a wide variety of Earth data. There are also lessons written for students to interact with directly.”
An image from My NASA Data’s Earth System Data Explorer visualization tool showing the monthly leaf index around the world as measured by NASA satellites in August 2020. Data parameters for this visualization were set to biosphere under the sphere dropdown and vegetation as a category. NASA/mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov A key component of the My NASA Data site is the newly updated Earth System Data Explorer visualization tool, which allows users to access and download NASA Earth data. Educators can explore the data then create custom data tables, graphs, and plots to help students visualize the data. Students can create and investigate comparisons between land surface temperatures, cloud cover, extreme heat, and a wide range of other characteristics for a specific location or region around the globe.
An image from My NASA Data’s visualization tool showing various searchable categories under the atmosphere dataset selection. NASA/mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov “The Earth System Data Explorer tool has a collection of science datasets organized by different spheres of the Earth system,” explained Desiray Wilson, My NASA Data scientific programmer. The program highlights six areas of study: atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and Earth as a system. “The data goes as far back as the 1980s, and we are getting more daily datasets. It’s really good for looking at historical trends, regional trends, and patterns.”
My NASA Data had over one million site visits last year, with some of the most popular searches focusing on temperatures, precipitation, water vapor, and air quality.
My NASA Data program leaders and instructors collaborating with educators from the North Carolina Space Grant at NASA’S Langley Research Center June 26, 2024. Teachers were at NASA Langley as part of the North Carolina Space Education Ambassadors (NCSEA) program and were given demonstrations of the My NASA Data website. NASA/David C. Bowman Natalie Macke has been teaching for 20 years and is a science teacher at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, New Jersey. Teachers like Macke help shape the lessons on the site through internships with the My NASA Data team. Teachers’ suggestions were also incorporated to enhance the visualization tool by adding new features that now allow users to swipe between visual layers of data and make side-by-side comparisons. Users can also now click on a location to display latitude and longitude and variable data streamlining the previous site which required manual input of latitude and longitude.
“The new visualization tool is very much a point-and-click layout like our students are used to in terms of just quickly selecting data they want to see,” said Macke. “Instantaneously, a map of the Earth comes up, or just the outline, and they can get the satellite view. So if they’re looking for a specific city, they can find the city on the map and quickly grab a dataset or multiple datasets and overlay it on the map to make visual comparisons.”
Map of the East Coast of the United States from the My NASA Data visualization tool from August 2023 before adding layers of atmospheric satellite data. The image below shows the same map layered with atmospheric measurements.NASA/mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov The East Coast of the United States shown with monthly daytime surface (skin) temperatures from August 2023 overlayed from Earth-observing satellite data using the My NASA Data Earth System Data Explorer visualization tool. The image above shows the same region without the data layer added.NASA/mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/ Even more valuable than creating visualizations for one specific lesson, elaborated Macke, is the opportunity My NASA Data provides for students to understand the importance of interpreting, verifying, and using datasets in their daily lives. This skill, she said, is invaluable, because it helps spread data literacy enabling users to look at data with a discriminating eye and learn to discern between assumptions and valid conclusions.
“Students can relate the data map to literally what’s happening outside their window, showing them how NASA Earth system satellite data relates to real life,” said Macke. “Creating a data literate public – meaning they understand the context and framework of the data they are working with and realizing the connection between the data and the real world – hopefully will intrigue them to continue to explore and learn about the Earth and start asking questions. That’s what got me into science when I was a little kid.”
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Charles G. Hatfield
Earth Science Public Affairs Officer, NASA Langley Research Center
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Last Updated Sep 16, 2024 Related Terms
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The My NASA Data homepage categorizes content by areas of study called spheres and also Earth as a system. View the full article
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Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Mars Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions All Planets Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto & Dwarf Planets 5 min read
Sols 4232-4233: Going For a Ride, Anyone?
This image shows some of the sand ripples we spot all around the rover between the rocks. It was taken by Mast Camera (Mastcam) onboard NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 4225 (2024-06-25 01:10:39 UTC). Earth planning date: Monday, July 1, 2024
Have you ever wondered what it might look like to ride along with the rover? Probably not as much as we have here on the planning team, where we are looking at the images on a daily basis. I always wish I could walk around there myself, or drive around in a vehicle, maybe. As you likely know, we don’t even get video, “just” images. But of course those images are stunning and the landscape is unique and – apart from being scientifically interesting – so very, very beautiful. And some cameras record images so often that it’s actually possible to create the impression of a movie. The front hazard camera is among them. And that can create a stunning impression of looking out of the front window! If you want to see that for yourself, you can! If you go to the NASA interactive tool called “Eyes on the Solar System” there is a Curiosity Rover feature that allows you to do just that: simulate a drive between waypoints and look out of the window, which is the front hazard camera. Here is the link to “Experience Curiosity.” The drive there is a while back, but the landscape is just so fascinating, I can watch and rewatch that any number of times!
Now, after reminiscing about the past, what did we do today? First of all: change all plans we ever had. We don’t have – as scheduled – the SAM data on Earth just yet. But we have a good portion of the sample still in the drill, and if SAM gets their data and wants to do more analysis with that sample, then we can’t move the arm as we originally had planned. Why didn’t we consider that to begin with? Normally, there isn’t enough sample for all the analysis; you may have seen this blog post: “Sols 4118-4119: Can I Have a Second Serving, Please? Oh, Me Too!” But it’s the sample that dictates how much we get to begin with, and how much we need, which only becomes clear as the data come in. And there is an unusually lucky combination here that would avoid us having to drill a second hole for getting the second helping. Instead, we just sit here carefully holding the arm still so we do not lose sample. That saves a lot of rover resources. But then, once we had settled how we adjust to keeping our current position, we also learnt that the uplink time might shift from the original slot we had been allocated to a later one… And all of this with a pretty new-to-the-role Science Operations Working Group (SOWG) chair (me) and a similarly new Geology and Mineralogy theme group science lead. Well, we managed, with lots of help from the great team around us.
Those sudden-change planning days are so tricky because there is so much more to remember. It’s not, “This is what we came to do…,” and it had been carefully pre-planned, and it is all in the notes. Instead, the pre-planning preparation doesn’t fit the new reality anymore, and all that work has to be redone. So we have to do all the pre-planning work, and the actual planning work, and sometimes also account for some “if… then…” scenarios in the same amount of time we usually have to do the planning on the basis of all the pre-planning work.
Sounds stressful? Yes, I can tell you it is!
Once we had changed all the skeleton plans, the team got very excited about the extra time. This is such an interesting area, there are rocks that are almost white, there are darker rocks, very interesting sand features with beautiful ripples, so much to look at! Mars has much to offer here, so the team got to work swiftly and the plan filled up with a great set of observations. ChemCam used LIBS on the target “Tower Peak,” which is one of those white-ish rocks, and on “Quarry Peak.” Mastcam delivers all the pictures to go along with these two activities and gets its own science, too. These are mainly so-called “change detection” images, where the same area is pictured repeatedly to see what particles might move in the time between the two images. ChemCam uses its long-distance imaging capability to add to the stunning images they are getting from faraway rocks. They have two mosaics on a target called “Edge Bench.” There is also a lot of atmospheric science in the plan; looking for dust devils and the opacity of the atmosphere are just two examples. REMS and DAN are also active throughout, to assess the wind, and the water underground, respectively. And as if that weren’t enough, CheMin also performs another night of analysis. We get to uplink a full plan, and we’ll see what the data say and what decisions we’ll make for next Wednesday.
Written by Susanne Schwenzer, Planetary Geologist at The Open University
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Last Updated Jul 02, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
2 Min Read Going the Extra 500 miles for Alaskan River Ice
Fresh Eyes on Ice science team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks stop in the Alaska Native village of Shageluk on a community and citizen science journey of 550 mile by snow mobile. Credits:
Photo by Amanda Byrd, UAF Teachers and students in remote Alaskan villages have become vital NASA climate researchers. These special volunteers are so important that last year, climate scientists took an epic 550 mile snowmobile journey to collaborate with them! You can learn all about it in a new video from the Fresh Eyes on Ice project.
The researchers stopped at several remote Alaskan villages, where teachers and students at the local schools already understood why this work was so crucial. When you drive over ice-covered rivers every day—as many Alaskan residents do—tracking ice thickness is no joke. Neither is climate change.
“We knew that climate change was happening around us.” explains Joyanne Hamilton, a teacher whose students worked with the team. “Our elders here in Shageluk were talking about changes that were happening….the data they’re gathering is ultimately important to the tribe.”
The new video features Hamilton, her students, and Fresh Eyes on Ice researchers Dr. Chris Arp, Allen Bondurant and Sarah Clement. It follows their journey along the Innoko, Kukokwim and Yukon Rivers and the Iditarod Sled Dog Trail.
Fresh Eyes on Ice science team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks stop in the Alaska Native village of Shageluk on a community and citizen science journey of 550 mile by snow mobile. Photo by Amanda Byrd, UAF Do you live in Alaska or elsewhere in North America where ice forms? All you need to help out is a smartphone and NASA’s GLOBE Observer Landcover app. Your photos will be used in near-real time by river forecasters to help predict spring ice jam flooding, and by scientists to understand how ice timing and extent is changing. Join Fresh Eyes on Ice here!
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Last Updated Dec 21, 2023 Related Terms
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By NASA
NASA / Scott Battaion NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility C-130 aircraft, shown in this image from Oct. 28, 2023, delivered the agency’s Galactic/Extragalactic ULDB Spectroscopic Terahertz Observatory (GUSTO) payload to McMurdo Station, Antarctica. This was the first mission to Antarctica for the plane.
The GUSTO mission, launching aboard a football-stadium-sized, zero-pressure scientific balloon in December 2023, will fly an Ultralong-Duration Balloon (ULDB) carrying a telescope with carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen emission line detectors. This unique combination of data will supply the spectral and spatial resolution information needed for the mission team to untangle the complexities of the cosmic material found between stars, and map out large sections of the plane of our Milky Way galaxy and the nearby galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud.
See more photos from the C-130’s voyage to Antarctica.
Image Credit: NASA/Scott Battaion
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By NASA
NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate connects the public to the agency’s missions and explores creative possibilities for addressing the agency’s research and technology development needs through prizes, challenges, and crowdsourcing opportunities. These challenges bridge NASA’s institutional expertise with the ingenuity of industry experts, universities, and the public at large, resulting in collaborations that help advance space technology solutions. For many solvers, success doesn’t stop when the NASA challenge ends. Past participants have gone on to work with NASA in other ways and take their technology to new heights in the commercial sector.
CO2 Conversion Challenge (2020) – NASA’s Centennial Challenges has an impact far greater than just space travel – just ask Air Co., a Brooklyn-based company that competed and won a three-way tie in the CO2 Conversion Challenge, which ran from 2018 to 2021. Air Co. founders Gregory Constantine (left) and Stafford Sheehan (right) used their innovative idea, which originally existed to convert carbon dioxide into glucose, to create immediately usable hand sanitizer at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Image courtesy of Air Co. Commercializing Challenge-Supported CO2 Technology
Air Company of Brooklyn, New York, was one of three teams to win the final round of NASA’s CO2 Conversion Challenge, which concluded in August 2021. This challenge asked the public to develop ways to convert carbon dioxide (CO2), an abundant resource on Mars, into sugar, which could be used by astronauts to make products including plastics, adhesives, fuels, food, and medicine. Air Company received a $700,000 award in the final phase of the competition for its thermochemical sugar production. First, CO2 and hydrogen are combined to make methanol, then hydrogen is removed to turn methanol into formaldehyde. The third chemical reaction produces a simple sugar called D-glucose.
Since participating in the CO2 Conversion Challenge, Air Company has commercialized its CO2-converting technology in unique ways, producing hand sanitizer, fragrance oil, and even vodka. The CO2 used is sourced from biogenic emissions – mitigating emissions that are released into the atmosphere from ethanol fermentation facilities.1 The company has also gone on to compete in NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge and developed a system and processes for turning air, water, electricity, and yeast into food. In May 2023, Air Company was named a winner in Phase 2 of the challenge, receiving a $150,000 prize from NASA and a chance to compete in Phase 3 for a grand prize of $750,000 from a total prize purse of up to $1.5 million.
Cross-Program Competitors Advance Lunar Power Solutions
Astrobotic Technology, a small business based in Pittsburgh, was named a grand prize winner of Phase 1 of NASA’s Watts on the Moon Challenge in May 2021. The company is no stranger to NASA – in fact, John Thornton, CEO of Astrobotic, credits early NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding as “the lifeblood of the company,” starting with its first award in 2009. Astrobotic has also received funding from NASA’s Tipping Point program and was selected to deliver scientific and technology payloads to the Moon as part of the agency’s Commercial Lunar Payloads Services (CLPS) initiative.
Having continuous power throughout the lunar day and night during missions on the surface of the Moon is an essential technology asset for long-term crew and scientific exploration. For the Watts on the Moon Challenge, teams were asked to submit ideas for up to three parts of a hypothetical mission scenario: generating power from a plant to harvest water and oxygen from a dark crater on the Moon’s South Pole. Astrobotic received the grand prize in response to the first part of the scenario, proposing a fleet of small rovers that transport power cables between the solar array power source and the rover that operates inside the crater. The team also received a prize for collaborating with Montreal startup Eternal Light Photonics Corp. for a wireless mobile power beaming solution.
According to Astrobotic, the prizes contribute to the company’s development of lunar surface power infrastructure.2 In August 2022, the company was selected by NASA to receive $6.2 million to help advance Vertical Solary Array Technology (VSAT) under the agency’s Game Changing Development program.3
Printing Homes for Extraterrestrial Lands and on Earth
In November 2022, small business ICON, based in Austin, Texas, received a $57.2 million contract from NASA to develop construction technologies that could support infrastructure such as landing pads, habitats, and roads on the Moon. This effort supports NASA’s Moon to Mars Planetary Autonomous Construction Technologies (MMPACT) project. Preceding this, the company participated in NASA’s 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge, which ran from 2015 to 2019. This challenge asked competitors to design, develop, and test several areas of 3D printing that could contribute to potential human shelter on Mars. ICON partnered with the Colorado School of Mines in Phase 3: Level 1 of the challenge. The team was named a top ten finalist for their digital representation of a house on Mars using building information modeling software tools.
The technology ICON initially developed through the NASA challenge has helped pave several paths for the company. In addition to designing extraterrestrial infrastructure, ICON also impacts global housing by constructing 3D printed homes on Earth. The company created the first 3D printed community of homes in Nacajuca, Mexico.4 Taking its challenge journey full circle, ICON has also released its own global architecture competition open to the public.
Global Participation Leads to Mini Rover Missions
Based in Budapest, Hungary, Puli Space Technologies is an example of the global collaboration that is possible through prize, challenge, and crowdsourcing opportunities. In 2020, the company participated in the Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload competition, which sought designs for miniature science instruments – about the size of a bar of soap – that could help scout the lunar surface, collecting key information about the Moon, its resources, and the environment. The challenge was sponsored by NASA’s Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative to cultivate new ideas, spur innovation and enhance the development of capabilities for exploration of the lunar surface. The challenge received 132 entries from 29 countries. Puli Space won first prize in the first iteration of the challenge for its conceptual Puli Lunar Water Snooper (PLWS) to identify hydrogen and all hydrogen-bearing volatiles, like water-ice, on the Moon.
Following the challenge, NASA released Honey, I Shrunk the NASA Payload Challenge, the Sequel, a two-year challenge that asked teams to develop, build, and prototype their miniature rover payloads. Out of the 14 finalists from the original challenge, four teams were chosen to advance to stage 2 of the sequel challenge. As part of the challenge, NASA provided $675,000, which was split between the four teams to fund development. Puli Space placed second in the sequel challenge for developing PLWS. According to Puli Space CEO Tibor Pacher, the connections made in preparing for the challenge led to PLWS’s placement on at least two planned commercial Moon missions.5
Endnotes
[1] https://www.aircompany.com/
[2] https://www.astrobotic.com/astrobotic-wins-two-nasa-prizes-for-lunar-power-infrastructure/
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/three-companies-to-help-nasa-advance-solar-array-technology-for-moon
[4] https://www.iconbuild.com/projects/3d-printed-homes-in-nacajuca-mexico-with-new-story
[5] https://lsic.jhuapl.edu/Resources/files/Newsletters/LSIC-Newsletter_2023_June_v4.pdf
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Last Updated Nov 07, 2023 Related Terms
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