Members Can Post Anonymously On This Site
Europe to support Artemis CubeSats in return to the Moon
-
Similar Topics
-
By NASA
Scientists have hypothesized since the 1960s that the Sun is a source of ingredients that form water on the Moon. When a stream of charged particles known as the solar wind smashes into the lunar surface, the idea goes, it triggers a chemical reaction that could make water molecules.
Now, in the most realistic lab simulation of this process yet, NASA-led researchers have confirmed this prediction.
The finding, researchers wrote in a March 17 paper in JGR Planets, has implications for NASA’s Artemis astronaut operations at the Moon’s South Pole. A critical resource for exploration, much of the water on the Moon is thought to be frozen in permanently shadowed regions at the poles.
“The exciting thing here is that with only lunar soil and a basic ingredient from the Sun, which is always spitting out hydrogen, there’s a possibility of creating water,” Li Hsia Yeo, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “That’s incredible to think about,” said Yeo, who led the study.
Solar wind flows constantly from the Sun. It’s made largely of protons, which are nuclei of hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons. Traveling at more than one million miles per hour, the solar wind bathes the entire solar system. We see evidence of it on Earth when it lights up our sky in auroral light shows.
Computer-processed data of the solar wind from NASA’s STEREO spacecraft. Download here: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/20278/ NASA/SwRI/Craig DeForest Most of the solar particles don’t reach the surface of Earth because our planet has a magnetic shield and an atmosphere to deflect them. But the Moon has no such protection. As computer models and lab experiments have shown, when protons smash into the Moon’s surface, which is made of a dusty and rocky material called regolith, they collide with electrons and recombine to form hydrogen atoms.
Then, the hydrogen atoms can migrate through the lunar surface and bond with the abundant oxygen atoms already present in minerals like silica to form hydroxyl (OH) molecules, a component of water, and water (H2O) molecules themselves.
Scientists have found evidence of both hydroxyl and water molecules in the Moon’s upper surface, just a few millimeters deep. These molecules leave behind a kind of chemical fingerprint — a noticeable dip in a wavy line on a graph that shows how light interacts with the regolith. With the current tools available, though, it is difficult to tell the difference between hydroxyl and water, so scientists use the term “water” to refer to either one or a mix of both molecules.
Many researchers think the solar wind is the main reason the molecules are there, though other sources like micrometeorite impacts could also help by creating heat and triggering chemical reactions.
In 2016, scientists discovered that water is released from the Moon during meteor showers. When a speck of comet debris strikes the moon, it vaporizes on impact, creating a shock wave in the lunar soil. With a sufficiently large impactor, this shock wave can breach the soil’s dry upper layer and release water molecules from a hydrated layer below. NASA’s LADEE spacecraft detected these water molecules as they entered the tenuous lunar atmosphere. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab Spacecraft measurements had already hinted that the solar wind is the primary driver of water, or its components, at the lunar surface. One key clue, confirmed by Yeo’s team’s experiment: the Moon’s water-related spectral signal changes over the course of the day.
In some regions, it’s stronger in the cooler morning and fades as the surface heats up, likely because water and hydrogen molecules move around or escape to space. As the surface cools again at night, the signal peaks again. This daily cycle points to an active source — most likely the solar wind—replenishing tiny amounts of water on the Moon each day.
To test whether this is true, Yeo and her colleague, Jason McLain, a research scientist at NASA Goddard, built a custom apparatus to examine Apollo lunar samples. In a first, the apparatus held all experiment components inside: a solar particle beam device, an airless chamber that simulated the Moon’s environment, and a molecule detector. Their invention allowed the researchers to avoid ever taking the sample out of the chamber — as other experiments did — and exposing it to contamination from the water in the air.
“It took a long time and many iterations to design the apparatus components and get them all to fit inside,” said McLain, “but it was worth it, because once we eliminated all possible sources of contamination, we learned that this decades-old idea about the solar wind turns out to be true.”
Using dust from two different samples picked up on the Moon by NASA’s Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972, Yeo and her colleagues first baked the samples to remove any possible water they could have picked up between air-tight storage in NASA’s space-sample curation facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and Goddard’s lab. Then, they used a tiny particle accelerator to bombard the dust with mock solar wind for several days — the equivalent of 80,000 years on the Moon, based on the high dose of the particles used.
They used a detector called a spectrometer to measure how much light the dust molecules reflected, which showed how the samples’ chemical makeup changed over time.
In the end, the team saw a drop in the light signal that bounced to their detector precisely at the point in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum — near 3 microns — where water typically absorbs energy, leaving a telltale signature.
While they can’t conclusively say if their experiment made water molecules, the researchers reported in their study that the shape and width of the dip in the wavy line on their graph suggests that both hydroxyl and water were produced in the lunar samples.
By Lonnie Shekhtman
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Explore More
5 min read NASA’s Hubble Tracks a Roaming Magnetar of Unknown Origin
Article
2 hours ago
3 min read What Does NASA Science Do For Me?
Article
4 hours ago
3 min read Exploring the Universe Through Sight, Touch, and Sound
Article
20 hours ago
View the full article
-
By NASA
This long-duration photograph highlights the Roscosmos segment of the International Space Station with the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft docked to the Rassvet module. Star trails and Earth’s atmospheric glow also are pictured from the orbital outpost as it soared 258 miles above the Pacific Ocean.Credit: NASA NASA astronaut Don Pettit, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, will depart the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft and return to Earth on Saturday, April 19.
Pettit, Ovchinin, and Vagner will undock from the orbiting laboratory’s Rassvet module at 5:57 p.m. EDT, heading for a parachute-assisted landing at 9:20 p.m. (6:20 a.m. Kazakhstan time, Sunday, April 20) on the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan. Landing will occur on Pettit’s 70th birthday.
NASA’s live coverage of return and related activities will stream on NASA+. Learn how to stream NASA content through a variety of platforms.
A change of command ceremony also will stream on NASA platforms at 2:40 p.m. Friday, April 18. Ovchinin will handover station command to JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi for Expedition 73, which begins at the time of undocking.
Spanning 220 days in space, Pettit and his crewmates will have orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3 million miles over the course of their mission. The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft launched and docked to the station on Sept. 11, 2024.
This was Pettit’s fourth spaceflight, where he served as flight engineer for Expedition 71 and 72. He has a career total of 590 days in orbit. Ovchinin completed his fourth flight in space, totaling 595 days, and Vagner has earned an overall total of 416 days in space during two trips to the orbiting laboratory.
After returning to Earth, the three crew members will fly on a helicopter from the landing site to the recovery staging city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Pettit will board a NASA plane and return to Houston, while Ovchinin and Vagner will depart for a training base in Star City, Russia.
NASA’s coverage is as follows (all times Eastern and subject to changed based on real-time operations):
Friday, April 18:
2:40 p.m. – Expedition 72/73 change of command ceremony begins on NASA+.
Saturday, April 19:
2 p.m. – Farewells and hatch closing coverage begins on NASA+.
2:25 p.m. – Hatch closing
5:30 p.m. – Undocking coverage begins on NASA+.
5:57 p.m. – Undocking
8 p.m. – Coverage begins for deorbit burn, entry, and landing on NASA+.
8:26 p.m. – Deorbit burn
9:20 p.m. – Landing
For more than two decades, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge, and making research breakthroughs that are not possible on Earth. The station is a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight and to expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit. As commercial companies focus on providing human space transportation services and destinations as part of a robust low Earth orbit economy, NASA is focusing more resources on deep space missions to the Moon as part of Artemis in preparation for future human missions to Mars.
Learn more about International Space Station research and operations at:
https://www.nasa.gov/station
-end-
Claire O’Shea / Josh Finch
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
claire.a.o’shea@nasa.gov / joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov
Sandra Jones
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov
Share
Details
Last Updated Apr 14, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
Humans in Space International Space Station (ISS) View the full article
-
-
By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
From left, Ramon Pedoto, Nathan Walkenhorst, and Tyrell Jemison review information at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The three team members developed new automation tools at Marshall for flight controllers working with the International Space Station (Credit: NASA/Tyrell Jemison Two new automation tools developed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, are geared toward improving operations for flight controllers working with the International Space Station from the Huntsville Operations Support Center.
The tools, called AutoDump and Permanently Missing Intervals Checker, will free the flight control team to focus on situational awareness, anomaly response, and real-time coordination.
The space station experiences routine loss-of-signal periods based on communication coverage as the space station orbits the Earth. When signal is lost, an onboard buffer records data that could not be downlinked during that period. Following acquisition of signal, flight controllers previously had to send a command to downlink, or “dump,” the stored data.
The AutoDump tool streamlines a repetitive data downlinking command from flight controllers by detecting a routine loss-of-signal, and then autonomously sending the command to downlink data stored in the onboard buffer when the signal is acquired again. Once the data has been downlinked, the tool will automatically make an entry in the console log to confirm the downlink took place.
“Reliably and quickly sending these dump commands is important to ensure that space station payload developers can operate from the most current data,” said Michael Zekoff, manager of Space Systems Operations at Marshall.
As a direct result of this tool, we have eliminated the need to manually perform routine data dump commands by as much as 40% for normal operations.
Michael Zekoff
Space Systems Operations Manager
AutoDump was successfully deployed on Feb. 4 in support of the orbiting laboratory.
The other tool, known as the Permanently Missing Intervals Checker, is another automated process coming online that will improve team efficiency.
Permanently missing intervals are gaps in the data stream where data can be lost due to a variety of reasons, including network fluctuations. The missing intervals are generally short but are documented so the scientific community and other users have confirmation that the missing data is unable to be recovered.
“The process of checking for and documenting permanently missing intervals is challenging and incredibly time-consuming to make sure we capture all the payload impacts,” said Nathan Walkenhorst, a NASA contractor with Bailey Collaborative Solutions who serves as a flight controller specialist.
The checker will allow NASA to quickly gather and assess payload impacts, reduce disruptions to operations, and allow researchers to get better returns on their science investigations. It is expected to be deployed later this year.
In addition to Walkenhorst, Zekoff also credited Ramon Pedoto, a software architect, and Tyrell Jemison, a NASA contractor and data management coordinator with Teledyne Brown Engineering Inc, for their work in developing the automation tools. The development of the tools also requires coordination between flight control and software teams at Marshall, followed by extensive testing in both simulated and flight environments, including spacecraft operations, communications coverage, onboard anomalies, and other unexpected conditions.
“The team solicited broad review to ensure that the tool would integrate correctly with other station systems,” Zekoff said. “Automated tools are evaluated carefully to prevent unintended commanding or other consequences. Analysis of the tools included thorough characterization of the impacts, risk mitigation strategies, and approval by stakeholders across the International Space Station program.”
The Huntsville Operations Support Center provides payload, engineering, and mission operations support to the space station, the Commercial Crew Program, and Artemis missions, as well as science and technology demonstration missions. The Payload Operations Integration Center within the Huntsville Operations Support Center operates, plans, and coordinates the science experiments onboard the space station 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.
For more information on the International Space Station, visit:
www.nasa.gov/international-space-station/
Share
Details
Last Updated Apr 11, 2025 EditorBeth RidgewayLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms
Marshall Space Flight Center Explore More
3 min read NASA’s IMAP Arrives at NASA Marshall For Testing in XRCF
Article 4 hours ago 7 min read NASA’s First Flight With Crew Important Step on Long-term Return to the Moon, Missions to Mars
Article 3 days ago 3 min read NASA Selects Finalist Teams for Student Human Lander Challenge
Article 1 week ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
Missions
Humans in Space
Climate Change
Solar System
View the full article
-
By NASA
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Portrait of David Mitchell, Thursday, Jan. 27, 2022, NASA Headquarters Mary W. Jackson building in Washington.NASA/Bill Ingalls David Mitchell, the Associate Administrator for MSD.
Have you ever wondered how NASA manages to achieve all the incredible missions it does, like probing the Sun and studying the history of our Universe? We do it through teamwork, one of our core values. And an essential part of NASA’s team is what we call Mission Support. Mission Support makes sure NASA’s missions, centers, and programs have the capabilities and services they need to explore the unknown, innovate for the future, and inspire the world.
To illustrate Mission Support at NASA, look at the example of the Roman Space Telescope. It’s not just scientists and engineers who are making the telescope happen. The program works with NASA’s financial office to plan the budget for the telescope. Engineers design the telescope with tools developed in coordination with NASA’s shared services and information technology offices. NASA’s engineering authority checks the design, and international relations manages NASA’s collaborations with other countries on the telescope. All of this is Mission Support.
Of course, there is much more to Mission Support, but I think you get the picture. MSD enables Mission Support by:
Planning and executing the Mission Support budgets for safety, security, and mission services as well as construction and environmental management. Executing strategy and governance to ensure Mission Support is financially sound, aligned with the agency’s goals, and serving NASA’s missions. Addressing Mission Support’s financial, operational, legal, and reputational risks to ensure resilience and mission success. Working with mission directorates and centers to ensure NASA is prioritizing the Mission Support services they need most urgently to be successful. Integrating Mission Support services across the agency to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. Current and future missions require significant support to be successful. MSD is working today to ensure Mission Support is there for NASA to explore the unknown, innovate for the future, and inspire the world.
To learn more, visit MSD Organization.
View the full article
-
-
Check out these Videos
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.