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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
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Last Updated Mar 31, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
NASA Technicians do final checks on NASA’s Spirit rover in this image from March 28, 2003. The rover – and its twin, Opportunity – studied the history of climate and water at sites on Mars where conditions may once have been favorable to life. Each rover is about the size of a golf cart and seven times heavier (about 405 pounds or 185 kilograms) than the Sojourner rover launched on the Mars Pathfinder to Mars mission in 1996.
Spirit and Opportunity were sent to opposite sides of Mars to locations that were suspected of having been affected by liquid water in the past. Spirit was launched first, on June 10, 2003. Spirit landed on the Martian surface on Jan. 3, 2004, about 8 miles (13.4 kilometers) from the planned target and inside the Gusev crater. The site became known as Columbia Memorial Station to honor the seven astronauts killed when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart Feb. 1, 2003, as it returned to Earth. The plaque commemorating the STS-107 Space Shuttle Columbia crew can be seen in the image above.
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Image credit: NASA
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:09:13 Meet Andrea Patassa—test pilot, aviator, passionate outdoor adventurer, and Member of ESA’s Astronaut Reserve.
In this miniseries, we take you on a journey through the ESA Astronaut Reserve, diving into the first part of their Astronaut Reserve Training (ART) at the European Astronaut Centre (EAC) near Cologne, Germany. Our “ARTists” are immersing themselves in everything from ESA and the International Space Station programme to the European space industry and institutions. They’re gaining hands-on experience in technical skills like spacecraft systems and robotics, alongside human behaviour, scientific lessons, scuba diving, and survival training.
ESA’s Astronaut Reserve Training programme is all about building Europe’s next generation of space explorers—preparing them for the opportunities of future missions in Earth orbit and beyond.
This interview was recorded in November 2024.
You can also listen to this episode on all major podcast platforms.
Keep exploring with ESA Explores!
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By USH
On March 26, 2020, a French astronomer Mark Carlotto used a telescope to capture a video showing the moon at night. Dr. M. Carlotto is a specialist in digital video analysis of space objects. The video shows three objects rising above the Moon’s limb, flying across the lunar surface and disappearing in the Moon’s shadow.
The fact that some of these objects are so clearly visible and close enough to the moon to be able to cast noticeable shadows immediately suggests that they are quite large. Using the large Endymion crater as a benchmark, the sizes of the objects were determined.
The size of the object flying over Endymion is about 5 miles long and about 1 to 3 miles wide. The other two objects appear to be comparable in size.
By measuring the displacement of the object it appears that the object is traveling at about 31 mps. It is traveling more than 30 times faster than if it were in lunar orbit.
A paper was recently published that attempts to prove that the original video is a fake. Arxiv.org analyzed the video (not included in the analysis) but extracted and provided three images of the recorded objects for examination, as seen above, and they then conducted calculations to verify its authenticity.
Despite government and space agency denials of UFO existence, photographic evidence and subsequent analysis suggest the presence of large extraterrestrial craft near the Moon and elsewhere in space.View the full article
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