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By NASA
Imagine designing technology that can survive on the Moon for up to a decade, providing a continuous energy supply. NASA selected three companies to develop such systems, aimed at providing a power source at the Moon’s South Pole for Artemis missions.
Three companies were awarded contracts in 2022 with plans to test their self-sustaining solar arrays at the Johnson Space Center’s Space Environment Simulation Laboratory (SESL) in Houston, specifically in Chamber A in building 32. The prototypes tested to date have undergone rigorous evaluations to ensure the technology can withstand the harsh lunar environment and deploy the solar array effectively on the lunar surface.
The Honeybee Robotics prototype during lunar VSAT (Vertical Solar Array Technology) testing inside Chamber A at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.NASA/David DeHoyos The Astrobotic Technology prototype during lunar VSAT testing inside Chamber A at Johnson Space Center. NASA/James Blair In the summer of 2024, both Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin company from Altadena, California and Astrobotic Technology from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania put their solar array concepts to the test in Chamber A.
Each company has engineered a unique solution to design the arrays to withstand the harsh lunar environment and extreme temperature swings. The data collected in the SESL will support refinement of requirements and the designs for future technological advancements with the goal to deploy at least one of the systems near the Moon’s South Pole.
The contracts for this initiative are part of NASA’s VSAT (Vertical Solar Array Technology) project, aiming to support the agency’s long-term lunar surface operations. VSAT is under the Space Technology Mission Directorate Game Changing Development program and led by the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, in collaboration with Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.
“We foresee the Moon as a hub for manufacturing satellites and hardware, leveraging the energy required to launch from the lunar surface,” said Jim Burgess, VSAT lead systems engineer. “This vision could revolutionize space exploration and industry.”
Built in 1965, the SESL initially supported the Gemini and Apollo programs but was adapted to conduct testing for other missions like the Space Shuttle Program and Mars rovers, as well as validate the design of the James Webb Space Telescope. Today, it continues to evolve to support future Artemis exploration.
Johnson’s Front Door initiative aims to solve the challenges of space exploration by opening opportunities to the public and bringing together bold and innovative ideas to explore new destinations.
“The SESL is just one of the hundreds of unique capabilities that we have here at Johnson,” said Molly Bannon, Johnson’s Innovation and Strategy specialist. “The Front Door provides a clear understanding of all our capabilities and services, the ways in which our partners can access them, and how to contact us. We know that we can go further together with all our partners across the entire space ecosystem if we bring everyone together as the hub of human spaceflight.”
Chamber A remains as one of the largest thermal vacuum chambers of its kind, with the unique capability to provide extreme deep space temperature conditions down to as low as 20 Kelvin. This allows engineers to gather essential data on how technologies react to the Moon’s severe conditions, particularly during the frigid lunar night where the systems may need to survive for 96 hours in darkness.
“Testing these prototypes will help ensure more safe and reliable space mission technologies,” said Chuck Taylor, VSAT project manager. “The goal is to create a self-sustaining system that can support lunar exploration and beyond, making our presence on the Moon not just feasible but sustainable.”
The power generation systems must be self-aware to manage outages and ensure survival on the lunar surface. These systems will need to communicate with habitats and rovers and provide continuous power and recharging as needed. They must also deploy on a curved surface, extend 32 feet high to reach sunlight, and retract for possible relocation.
“Generating power on the Moon involves numerous lessons and constant learning,” said Taylor. “While this might seem like a technical challenge, it’s an exciting frontier that combines known technologies with innovative solutions to navigate lunar conditions and build a dynamic and robust energy network on the Moon.”
Watch the video below to explore the capabilities and scientific work enabled by the thermal testing conducted in Johnson’s Chamber A facility.
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By NASA
This illustration shows a red, early-universe dwarf galaxy that hosts a rapidly feeding black hole at its center. Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of astronomers have discovered this low-mass supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. It is pulling in matter at a phenomenal rate — over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole’s “feast” could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/M. Zamani A rapidly feeding black hole at the center of a dwarf galaxy in the early universe, shown in this artist’s concept, may hold important clues to the evolution of supermassive black holes in general.
Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of astronomers discovered this low-mass supermassive black hole just 1.5 billion years after the big bang. The black hole is pulling in matter at a phenomenal rate — over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole’s “feast” could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.
Supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, and modern telescopes continue to observe them at surprisingly early times in the universe’s evolution. It’s difficult to understand how these black holes were able to grow so big so rapidly. But with the discovery of a low-mass supermassive black hole feasting on material at an extreme rate so soon after the birth of the universe, astronomers now have valuable new insights into the mechanisms of rapidly growing black holes in the early universe.
The black hole, called LID-568, was hidden among thousands of objects in the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s COSMOS legacy survey, a catalog resulting from some 4.6 million Chandra observations. This population of galaxies is very bright in the X-ray light, but invisible in optical and previous near-infrared observations. By following up with Webb, astronomers could use the observatory’s unique infrared sensitivity to detect these faint counterpart emissions, which led to the discovery of the black hole.
The speed and size of these outflows led the team to infer that a substantial fraction of the mass growth of LID-568 may have occurred in a single episode of rapid accretion.
LID-568 appears to be feeding on matter at a rate 40 times its Eddington limit. This limit relates to the maximum amount of light that material surrounding a black hole can emit, as well as how fast it can absorb matter, such that its inward gravitational force and outward pressure generated from the heat of the compressed, infalling matter remain in balance.
These results provide new insights into the formation of supermassive black holes from smaller black hole “seeds,” which current theories suggest arise either from the death of the universe’s first stars (light seeds) or the direct collapse of gas clouds (heavy seeds). Until now, these theories lacked observational confirmation.
The new discovery suggests that “a significant portion of mass growth can occur during a single episode of rapid feeding, regardless of whether the black hole originated from a light or heavy seed,” said International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab astronomer Hyewon Suh, who led the research team.
A paper describing these results (“A super-Eddington-accreting black hole ~1.5 Gyr after the Big Bang observed with JWST”) appears in the journal Nature Astronomy.
About the Missions
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/chandra
https://chandra.si.edu
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Elizabeth Laundau
NASA Headquarters
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Lane Figueroa
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
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lane.e.figueroa@nasa.gov
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By NASA
1 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Shauntina Lilly, a NASA Glenn public affairs officer, speaks to students about NASA’s available internships and educational resources during the STEM Goes Red for Girls event at Great Lakes Science Center, home of the NASA Glenn Visitor Center, on Oct. 21.Credit: NASA/Debbie Welch NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland supported this year’s STEM Goes Red for Girls event at Great Lakes Science Center on Oct. 21. The program provides seventh and eighth grade students exposure to some of Greater Cleveland’s leading STEM companies. The event also featured a hands-on exhibitor fair, speed mentoring, and educational classes.
Hosted by the American Heart Association, this year’s event welcomed its largest audience to date with 352 students and educators from 32 schools within Northeast Ohio. NASA Glenn’s presence focused heavily on internships and career advice, but also highlighted the center’s work with the Space Communications and Navigation program’s Deep Space Network. Glenn’s Julie Sufka also served as a mentor, speaking to young girls about STEM opportunities in mathematics.
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By NASA
4 min read
NASA’s Swift Studies Gas-Churning Monster Black Holes
A pair of monster black holes swirl in a cloud of gas in this artist’s concept of AT 2021hdr, a recurring outburst studied by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California. NASA/Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State University) Scientists using observations from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have discovered, for the first time, the signal from a pair of monster black holes disrupting a cloud of gas in the center of a galaxy.
“It’s a very weird event, called AT 2021hdr, that keeps recurring every few months,” said Lorena Hernández-García, an astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, the Millennium Nucleus on Transversal Research and Technology to Explore Supermassive Black Holes, and University of Valparaíso in Chile. “We think that a gas cloud engulfed the black holes. As they orbit each other, the black holes interact with the cloud, perturbing and consuming its gas. This produces an oscillating pattern in the light from the system.”
A paper about AT 2021hdr, led by Hernández-García, was published Nov. 13 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
The dual black holes are in the center of a galaxy called 2MASX J21240027+3409114, located 1 billion light-years away in the northern constellation Cygnus. The pair are about 16 billion miles (26 billion kilometers) apart, close enough that light only takes a day to travel between them. Together they contain 40 million times the Sun’s mass.
Scientists estimate the black holes complete an orbit every 130 days and will collide and merge in approximately 70,000 years.
AT 2021hdr was first spotted in March 2021 by the Caltech-led ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility) at the Palomar Observatory in California. It was flagged as a potentially interesting source by ALeRCE (Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events). This multidisciplinary team combines artificial intelligence tools with human expertise to report events in the night sky to the astronomical community using the mountains of data collected by survey programs like ZTF.
“Although this flare was originally thought to be a supernova, outbursts in 2022 made us think of other explanations,” said co-author Alejandra Muñoz-Arancibia, an ALeRCE team member and astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics and the Center for Mathematical Modeling at the University of Chile. “Each subsequent event has helped us refine our model of what’s going on in the system.”
Since the first flare, ZTF has detected outbursts from AT 2021hdr every 60 to 90 days.
Hernández-García and her team have been observing the source with Swift since November 2022. Swift helped them determine that the binary produces oscillations in ultraviolet and X-ray light on the same time scales as ZTF sees them in the visible range.
The researchers conducted a Goldilocks-type elimination of different models to explain what they saw in the data.
Initially, they thought the signal could be the byproduct of normal activity in the galactic center. Then they considered whether a tidal disruption event — the destruction of a star that wandered too close to one of the black holes — could be the cause.
Finally, they settled on another possibility, the tidal disruption of a gas cloud, one that was bigger than the binary itself. When the cloud encountered the black holes, gravity ripped it apart, forming filaments around the pair, and friction started to heat it. The gas got particularly dense and hot close to the black holes. As the binary orbits, the complex interplay of forces ejects some of the gas from the system on each rotation. These interactions produce the fluctuating light Swift and ZTF observe.
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Watch as a gas cloud encounters two supermassive black holes in this simulation. The complex interplay of gravitational and frictional forces causes the cloud to condense and heat. Some of the gas is ejected from the system with each orbit of the black holes. F. Goicovic et al. 2016 Hernández-García and her team plan to continue observations of AT 2021hdr to better understand the system and improve their models. They’re also interested in studying its home galaxy, which is currently merging with another one nearby — an event first reported in their paper.
“As Swift approaches its 20th anniversary, it’s incredible to see all the new science it’s still helping the community accomplish,” said S. Bradley Cenko, Swift’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “There’s still so much it has left to teach us about our ever-changing cosmos.”
NASA’s missions are part of a growing, worldwide network watching for changes in the sky to solve mysteries of how the universe works.
Goddard manages the Swift mission in collaboration with Penn State, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Northrop Grumman Space Systems in Dulles, Virginia. Other partners include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Brera Observatory in Italy, and the Italian Space Agency.
Download high-resolution images and videos.
By Jeanette Kazmierczak
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
301-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Nov 13, 2024 Editor Jeanette Kazmierczak Related Terms
Astrophysics Black Holes Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Research Goddard Space Flight Center Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory Science & Research Supermassive Black Holes The Universe View the full article
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By NASA
4 min read
Final Venus Flyby for NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Queues Closest Sun Pass
On Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will complete its final Venus gravity assist maneuver, passing within 233 miles (376 km) of Venus’ surface. The flyby will adjust Parker’s trajectory into its final orbital configuration, bringing the spacecraft to within an unprecedented 3.86 million miles of the solar surface on Dec. 24, 2024. It will be the closest any human made object has been to the Sun.
Parker’s Venus flybys have become boons for new Venus science thanks to a chance discovery from its Wide-Field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, or WISPR. The instrument peers out from Parker and away from the Sun to see fine details in the solar wind. But on July 11, 2020, during Parker’s third Venus flyby, scientists turned WISPR toward Venus in hopes of tracking changes in the planet’s thick cloud cover. The images revealed a surprise: A portion of WISPR’s data, which captures visible and near infrared light, seemed to see all the way through the clouds to the Venusian surface below.
“The WISPR cameras can see through the clouds to the surface of Venus, which glows in the near-infrared because it’s so hot,” said Noam Izenberg, a space scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
Venus, sizzling at approximately 869 degrees Fahrenheit (about 465 C), was radiating through the clouds.
The WISPR images from the 2020 flyby, as well as the next flyby in 2021, revealed Venus’ surface in a new light. But they also raised puzzling questions, and scientists have devised the Nov. 6 flyby to help answer them.
Left: A series of WISPR images of the nightside of Venus from Parker Solar Probe’s fourth flyby showing near infrared emissions from the surface. In these images, lighter shades represent warmer temperatures and darker shades represent cooler. Right: A combined mosaic of radar images of Venus’ surface from NASA’s Magellan mission, where the brightness indicates radar properties from smooth (dark) to rough (light), and the colors indicate elevation from low (blue) to high (red). The Venus images correspond well with data from the Magellan spacecraft, showing dark and light patterns that line up with surface regions Magellan captured when it mapped Venus’ surface using radar from 1990 to 1994. Yet some parts of the WISPR images appear brighter than expected, hinting at extra information captured by WISPR’s data. Is WISPR picking up on chemical differences on the surface, where the ground is made of different material? Perhaps it’s seeing variations in age, where more recent lava flows added a fresh coat to the Venusian surface.
“Because it flies over a number of similar and different landforms than the previous Venus flybys, the Nov. 6 flyby will give us more context to evaluate whether WISPR can help us distinguish physical or even chemical properties of Venus’ surface,” Izenberg said.
After the Nov. 6 flyby, Parker will be on course to swoop within 3.8 million miles of the solar surface, the final objective of the historic mission first conceived over 65 years ago. No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker’s data will be charting as-yet uncharted territory. In this hyper-close regime, Parker will cut through plumes of plasma still connected to the Sun. It is close enough to pass inside a solar eruption, like a surfer diving under a crashing ocean wave.
“This is a major engineering accomplishment,” said Adam Szabo, project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
The closest approach to the Sun, or perihelion, will occur on Dec. 24, 2024, during which mission control will be out of contact with the spacecraft. Parker will send a beacon tone on Dec. 27, 2024, to confirm its success and the spacecraft’s health. Parker will remain in this orbit for the remainder of its mission, completing two more perihelia at the same distance.
Parker Solar Probe is 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 Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, manages the Parker Solar Probe mission for NASA and designed, built, and operates the spacecraft.
By Miles Hatfield
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Nov 04, 2024 Related Terms
Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Heliophysics Division Parker Solar Probe (PSP) Solar Wind The Sun Venus Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA
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