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By European Space Agency
Hera asteroid mission launch kit
Everything you'd ever want to know about ESA's first planetary defence mission
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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson smiles for a portrait in the vestibule between the Kibo laboratory module and the Harmony module aboard space station.NASA NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson is returning home after a six-month mission aboard the International Space Station. While on orbit, Dyson conducted an array of experiments and technology demonstrations that contribute to advancements for humanity on Earth and the agency’s trajectory to the Moon and Mars.
Here is a look at some of the science Dyson conducted during her mission:
Heart-Shaped Bioprints
NASA NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson operates the BioFabrication Facility for the Redwire Cardiac Bioprinting Investigation, which 3D prints cardiovascular tissue samples. In microgravity, bio inks used for 3D printing are less likely to settle and retain their shape better than on Earth. Cardiovascular disease is currently the number one cause of death in the United States, and findings from this space station investigation could one day lead to 3D-printed organs such as hearts for patients awaiting transplants.
Wicking in Weightlessness
NASA NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson handles hardware for the Wicking in Gel-Coated Tubes (Gaucho Lung) experiment. This study uses a tube lined with various gel thicknesses to simulate the human respiratory system. A fluid mass known as a liquid plug is then observed as it either blocks or flows through the tube. Data regarding the movement and trailing of the liquid plug allows researchers to design better drug delivery methods to address respiratory ailments.
Programming for Future Missions
NASA NASA NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson runs student-designed software on the free-flying Astrobee robot. This technology demonstration is part of Zero Robotics, a worldwide competition that engages middle school students in writing computer code to address unique specifications. Winning participants get to run their software on an actual Astrobee aboard the space station. This educational opportunity helps inspire the next generation of technology innovators.
Robo-Extensions
NASA As we venture to the Moon and Mars, astronauts may rely more on robots to ensure safety and preserve resources. Through the Surface Avatar study, NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson controls a robot on Earth’s surface from a computer aboard station. This technology demonstration aims to toggle between manipulating multiple robots and “diving inside” a specific bot to control as an avatar. This two-way demonstration also evaluates how robot operators respond their robotic counterparts’ efficiency and general output. Applications for Earth use include exploration of inhospitable zones and search and rescue missions after disasters.
Capturing Earth’s Essence
NASA For Crew Earth Observations, astronauts take pictures of Earth from space for research purposes. NASA astronauts Suni Williams (left) and Tracy C. Dyson (right) contribute by aiming handheld cameras from the space station’s cupola to photograph our planet. Images help inform climate and environmental trends worldwide and provide real-time natural disaster assessments. More than four million photographs have been taken of Earth by astronauts from space.
Multi-faceted Crystallization Processor
NASA NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson holds a cassette for Pharmaceutical In-Space Laboratory – 04 (ADSEP-PIL-04), an experiment to crystallize the model proteins lysozyme and insulin. Up to three cassettes with samples can be processed simultaneously in the Advanced Space Experiment Processor (ADSEP), each at an independent temperature. Because lysozyme and insulin have well-documented crystal structures, they can be used to evaluate the hardware’s performance in space. Successful crystallization with ADSEP could lead to production and manufacturing of versatile crystals with pharmaceutical applications.
Cryo Care
NASA NASA astronauts Tracy C. Dyson and Matthew Dominick preserve research samples in freezers aboard the space station. Cryopreservation is essential for maintaining the integrity of samples for a variety of experiments, especially within the field of biology. The orbiting laboratory has multiple freezer options with varying subzero temperatures. Upon return, frozen samples are delivered back to their research teams for further analysis.
Welcoming New Science
NASA NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson is pictured between the Unity module and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft in preparation for depressurization and departure from the International Space Station. On long-duration missions, visiting vehicles provide necessities for crew daily living as well as new science experiments and supplies for ongoing research. This vehicle brought experiments to test water recovery technology, produce stem cells in microgravity, study the effects of spaceflight on microorganism DNA, and conduct science demonstrations for students.
Diana Garcia
International Space Station Research Communications Team
NASA’s Johnson Space Center
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Expedition 71
Expedition 71 began on April 5, 2024 and ends in September 2024. This crew will explore neuro-degenerative diseases and therapies,…
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This artist’s concept depicts NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter. The mission is targeting an Oct. 10, 2024, launch.NASA/JPL-Caltech The first NASA spacecraft dedicated to studying an ocean world beyond Earth, Europa Clipper aims to find out if the ice-encased moon Europa could be habitable.
NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft, the largest the agency has ever built for a planetary mission, will travel 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to Europa, an intriguing icy moon of Jupiter. The spacecraft’s launch period opens Thursday, Oct. 10.
Learn more about how NASA’s Europa Clipper came together – and how it will explore an ocean moon of Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Data from previous NASA missions has provided scientists with strong evidence that an enormous salty ocean lies underneath the frozen surface of the moon. Europa Clipper will orbit Jupiter and conduct 49 close flybys of the moon to gather data needed to determine whether there are places below its thick frozen crust that could support life.
Here are eight things to know about the mission:
1. Europa is one of the most promising places to look for currently habitable conditions beyond Earth.
There’s scientific evidence that the ingredients for life — water, the right chemistry, and energy — may exist at Europa right now. This mission will gather the information scientists need to find out for sure. The moon may hold an internal ocean with twice the water of Earth’s oceans combined, and it may also host organic compounds and energy sources under its surface. If the mission determines that Europa is habitable, it would mean there may be more habitable worlds in our solar system and beyond than we have imagined.
2. The spacecraft will fly through one of the most punishing radiation environments in our solar system — second only to the Sun’s.
Jupiter is surrounded by a gigantic magnetic field 20,000 times stronger than Earth’s. As the field spins, it captures and accelerates charged particles, creating radiation that can damage spacecraft. Mission engineers designed a spacecraft vault to shield sensitive electronics from radiation, and they plotted orbits that will limit the time Europa Clipper spends in most radiation-heavy areas around Jupiter.
3. Europa Clipper will orbit Jupiter, studying Europa while flying by the moon dozens of times.
The spacecraft will make looping orbits around Jupiter that bring it close to Europa for 49 science-dedicated flybys. On each orbit, the spacecraft will spend less than a day in Jupiter’s dangerous radiation zone near Europa before zipping back out. Two to three weeks later, it will repeat the process, making another flyby.
4. Europa Clipper features NASA’s most sophisticated suite of science instruments yet.
To determine if Europa is habitable, Europa Clipper must assess the moon’s interior, composition, and geology. The spacecraft carries nine science instruments and a gravity experiment that uses the telecommunications system. In order to obtain the best science during each flyby, all the science instruments will operate simultaneously on every pass. Scientists will then layer the data together to paint a full picture of the moon.
5. With antennas and solar arrays fully deployed, Europa Clipper is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission.
The spacecraft extends 100 feet (30.5 meters) from one end to the other and about 58 feet (17.6 meters) across. That’s bigger than a basketball court, thanks in large part to the solar arrays, which need to be huge so they can collect enough sunlight while near Jupiter to power the instruments, electronics, and other subsystems.
6. It’s a long journey to Jupiter.
Jupiter is on average some 480 million miles (about 770 million kilometers) from Earth; both planets are in motion, and a spacecraft can carry only a limited amount of fuel. Mission planners are sending Europa Clipper past Mars and then Earth, using the planets’ gravity as a slingshot to add speed to the spacecraft’s trek. After journeying about 1.8 billion miles (2.9 billion kilometers) over 5½ years, the spacecraft will fire its engines to enter orbit around Jupiter in 2030.
7. Institutions across the U.S. and Europe have contributed to Europa Clipper.
Currently, about a thousand people work on the mission, including more than 220 scientists from both the U.S. and Europe. Since the mission was officially approved in 2015, more than 4,000 people have contributed to Europa Clipper, including teams who work for contractors and subcontractors.
8. More than 2.6 million of us are riding along with the spacecraft, bringing greetings from one water world to another.
As part of a mission campaign called “Message in a Bottle,” the spacecraft is carrying a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, cosigned by millions of people from nearly every country in the world. Their names have been stenciled onto a microchip attached to a tantalum metal plate that seals the spacecraft’s electronics vault. The plate also features waveforms of people saying the word “water” in over 100 spoken languages.
More About Europa Clipper
Europa Clipper’s three main science objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition, and to characterize its geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.
Managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory leads the development of the Europa Clipper mission in partnership with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The main spacecraft body was designed by APL in collaboration with JPL and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The Planetary Missions Program Office at Marshall executes program management of the Europa Clipper mission.
NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at Kennedy, manages the launch service for the Europa Clipper spacecraft, which will launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy.
Find more information about Europa here:
https://europa.nasa.gov
Europa Clipper Teachable Moment See Europa’s Chaos Terrain in Crisp Detail Europa Clipper Gets Its Super-Size Solar Arrays News Media Contacts
Gretchen McCartney
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-6215
gretchen.p.mccartney@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
2024-125
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Last Updated Sep 17, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
NASA wants you to visualize the future of space exploration! This art challenge is looking for creative, artistic images to represent NASA’s Moon to Mars Architecture, the agency’s roadmap for crewed exploration of deep space. With NASA’s Moon to Mars Objectives in hand, the agency is developing an architecture for crewed exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Using systems engineering processes, NASA has begun to perform the analyses and studies needed to make informed decisions about a sustained lunar evolution and initial human missions to Mars. NASA’s Moon to Mars Architecture currently includes four segments of increasing complexity: Human Lunar Return, Foundational Exploration, Sustained Lunar Evolution, and Humans to Mars. For this competition, NASA is interested in your artistic interpretation of the latter two segments: Sustained Lunar Evolution and Humans to Mars. These depictions could include operations in space, on the surface, or both. Artists may develop and submit a still image for either the lunar and Mars exploration segments.
Award: $10,000 in total prizes
Open Date: September 12, 2024
Close Date: October 31, 2024
For more information, visit: https://nasa.yet2.com/
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Tests on Earth appear to confirm how the Red Planet’s spider-shaped geologic formations are carved by carbon dioxide.
Spider-shaped features called araneiform terrain are found in the southern hemisphere of Mars, carved into the landscape by carbon dioxide gas. This 2009 image taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows several of these distinctive formations within an area three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) wide. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona Dark splotches seen in this example of araneiform terrain captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2018 are believed to be soil ejected from the surface by carbon dioxide gas plumes. A set of experiments at JPL has sought to re-create these spider-like formations in a lab. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona Since discovering them in 2003 via images from orbiters, scientists have marveled at spider-like shapes sprawled across the southern hemisphere of Mars. No one is entirely sure how these geologic features are created. Each branched formation can stretch more than a half-mile (1 kilometer) from end to end and include hundreds of spindly “legs.” Called araneiform terrain, these features are often found in clusters, giving the surface a wrinkled appearance.
The leading theory is that the spiders are created by processes involving carbon dioxide ice, which doesn’t occur naturally on Earth. Thanks to experiments detailed in a new paper published in The Planetary Science Journal, scientists have, for the first time, re-created those formation processes in simulated Martian temperatures and air pressure.
Here’s a look inside of JPL’s DUSTIE, a wine barrel-size chamber used to simulate the temperatures and air pressure of other planets – in this case, the carbon dioxide ice found on Mars’ south pole. Experiments conducted in the chamber confirmed how Martian formations known as “spiders” are created.NASA/JPL-Caltech “The spiders are strange, beautiful geologic features in their own right,” said Lauren Mc Keown of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “These experiments will help tune our models for how they form.”
The study confirms several formation processes described by what’s called the Kieffer model: Sunlight heats the soil when it shines through transparent slabs of carbon dioxide ice that built up on the Martian surface each winter. Being darker than the ice above it, the soil absorbs the heat and causes the ice closest to it to turn directly into carbon dioxide gas — without turning to liquid first — in a process called sublimation (the same process that sends clouds of “smoke” billowing up from dry ice). As the gas builds in pressure, the Martian ice cracks, allowing the gas to escape. As it seeps upward, the gas takes with it a stream of dark dust and sand from the soil that lands on the surface of the ice.
When winter turns to spring and the remaining ice sublimates, according to the theory, the spiderlike scars from those small eruptions are what’s left behind.
These formations similar to the Red Planet’s “spiders” appeared within Martian soil simulant during experiments in JPL’s DUSTIE chamber. Carbon dioxide ice frozen within the simulant was warmed by a heater below, turning it back into gas that eventually cracked through the frozen top layer and formed a plume.NASA/JPL-Caltech Re-Creating Mars in the Lab
For Mc Keown and her co-authors, the hardest part of conducting these experiments was re-creating conditions found on the Martian polar surface: extremely low air pressure and temperatures as low as minus 301 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 185 degrees Celsius). To do that, Mc Keown used a liquid-nitrogen-cooled test chamber at JPL, the Dirty Under-vacuum Simulation Testbed for Icy Environments, or DUSTIE.
“I love DUSTIE. It’s historic,” Mc Keown said, noting that the wine barrel-size chamber was used to test a prototype of a rasping tool designed for NASA’s Mars Phoenix lander. The tool was used to break water ice, which the spacecraft scooped up and analyzed near the planet’s north pole.
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This video shows Martian soil simulant erupting in a plume during a JPL lab experiment that was designed to replicate the process believed to form Martian features called “spiders.” When a researcher who had tried for years to re-create these conditions spotted this plume, she was ecstatic. NASA/JPL-Caltech For this experiment, the researchers chilled Martian soil simulant in a container submerged within a liquid nitrogen bath. They placed it in the DUSTIE chamber, where the air pressure was reduced to be similar to that of Mars’ southern hemisphere. Carbon dioxide gas then flowed into the chamber and condensed from gas to ice over the course of three to five hours. It took many tries before Mc Keown found just the right conditions for the ice to become thick and translucent enough for the experiments to work.
Once they got ice with the right properties, they placed a heater inside the chamber below the simulant to warm it up and crack the ice. Mc Keown was ecstatic when she finally saw a plume of carbon dioxide gas erupting from within the powdery simulant.
“It was late on a Friday evening and the lab manager burst in after hearing me shrieking,” said Mc Keown, who had been working to make a plume like this for five years. “She thought there had been an accident.”
The dark plumes opened holes in the simulant as they streamed out, spewing simulant for as long as 10 minutes before all the pressurized gas was expelled.
The experiments included a surprise that wasn’t reflected in the Kieffer model: Ice formed between the grains of the simulant, then cracked it open. This alternative process might explain why spiders have a more “cracked” appearance. Whether this happens or not seems dependent on the size of soil grains and how embedded water ice is underground.
“It’s one of those details that show that nature is a little messier than the textbook image,” said Serina Diniega of JPL, a co-author of the paper.
What’s Next for Plume Testing
Now that the conditions have been found for plumes to form, the next step is to try the same experiments with simulated sunlight from above, rather than using a heater below. That could help scientists narrow down the range of conditions under which the plumes and ejection of soil might occur.
There are still many questions about the spiders that can’t be answered in a lab. Why have they formed in some places on Mars but not others? Since they appear to result from seasonal changes that are still occurring, why don’t they seem to be growing in number or size over time? It’s possible that they’re left over from long ago, when the climate was different on Mars— and could therefore provide a unique window into the planet’s past.
For the time being, lab experiments will be as close to the spiders as scientists can get. Both the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers are exploring the Red Planet far from the southern hemisphere, which is where these formations appear (and where no spacecraft has ever landed). The Phoenix mission, which landed in the northern hemisphere, lasted only a few months before succumbing to the intense polar cold and limited sunlight.
News Media Contacts
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
2024-122
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Last Updated Sep 11, 2024 Related Terms
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