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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover sees its tracks receding into the distance at a site nicknamed “Ubajara” on April 30, 2023. This site is where Curiosity made the discovery of siderite, a mineral that may help explain the fate of the planet’s thicker ancient atmosphere.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS New findings from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover could provide an answer to the mystery of what happened to the planet’s ancient atmosphere and how Mars has evolved over time.
Researchers have long believed that Mars once had a thick, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere and liquid water on the planet’s surface. That carbon dioxide and water should have reacted with Martian rocks to create carbonate minerals. Until now, though, rover missions and near-infrared spectroscopy analysis from Mars-orbiting satellites haven’t found the amounts of carbonate on the planet’s surface predicted by this theory.
Reported in an April paper in Science, data from three of Curiosity’s drill sites revealed the presence of siderite, an iron carbonate mineral, within the sulfate-rich rocky layers of Mount Sharp in Mars’ Gale Crater.
“The discovery of abundant siderite in Gale Crater represents both a surprising and important breakthrough in our understanding of the geologic and atmospheric evolution of Mars,” said Benjamin Tutolo, associate professor at the University of Calgary, Canada, and lead author of the paper.
To study the Red Planet’s chemical and mineral makeup, Curiosity drills three to four centimeters down into the subsurface, then drops the powdered rock samples into its CheMin instrument. The instrument, led by NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, uses X-ray diffraction to analyze rocks and soil. CheMin’s data was processed and analyzed by scientists at the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“Drilling through the layered Martian surface is like going through a history book,” said Thomas Bristow, research scientist at NASA Ames and coauthor of the paper. “Just a few centimeters down gives us a good idea of the minerals that formed at or close to the surface around 3.5 billion years ago.”
The discovery of this carbonate mineral in rocks beneath the surface suggests that carbonate may be masked by other minerals in near-infrared satellite analysis. If other sulfate-rich layers across Mars also contain carbonates, the amount of stored carbon dioxide would be a fraction of that needed in the ancient atmosphere to create conditions warm enough to support liquid water. The rest could be hidden in other deposits or have been lost to space over time.
In the future, missions or analyses of other sulfate-rich areas on Mars could confirm these findings and help us better understand the planet’s early history and how it transformed as its atmosphere was lost.
Curiosity, part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program (MEP) portfolio, was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the mission on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
For more information on Curiosity, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/msl-curiosity
News Media Contacts
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Apr 17, 2025 Related Terms
Ames Research Center Astromaterials Curiosity (Rover) General Jet Propulsion Laboratory Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Explore More
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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
As an adventurous individual, Becky Brocato, Ph.D., has a deep curiosity for understanding the conditions of the human body, especially as it pertains to spaceflight. This passion directly translates to her role at NASA, where Brocato serves as the Element Scientist in the Human Health Countermeasures division and oversees research that seeks to reduce medical risks that astronauts face from spaceflight, ensuring the continual health and safety of current and future NASA astronauts.
As part of the Human Research Program, the group strives to understand the physiological effects of spaceflight and develop strategies to mitigate any detrimental effects on human health and performance. For Brocato, her role presents the exciting opportunity to tangibly improve the lives of astronauts and actively contribute to the success of their missions.
Becky Brocato, Human Health Countermeasures Element Scientist for NASA’s Human Research Program “The thrill of my job comes from the sheer audacity of what we are undertaking—enabling humans to conquer the challenges of deep space,” said Brocato. “I’m invested in ensuring our astronauts are not just prepared—but confident—as they tackle immense physical and mental demands.”
Brocato attributes her early interest in flight and space research to her father and grandfather, who built a plane together when Brocato was younger. She recalls sitting in the plane’s fuselage, pretending she was traveling the world.
“My dad was my childhood hero for opening my eyes to the skies,” said Brocato. Fueled by this passion, she began her career as an aerospace engineer at the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, where she tested parachutes for aerial delivery, including the parachute designed for NASA’s X-38 crew return vehicle.
Now, having worked at NASA for four years, Brocato is excited to pass down her insight to younger generations, teaching them how her work ensures the sustainability of future space missions. Recently, after delivering a seminar on the methods to counter the risks humans face from spaceflight, Brocato spoke with college students eager to learn more about the complexities of the human body.
Becky Brocato gives a presentation on the research strategy for NASA’s Human Research Program to the Food and Nutrition Risk at the International Space Life Sciences Working Group Plant Symposium, held in Liverpool, England in September 2024.Becky Brocato “I felt like I wasn’t just sharing knowledge; I was helping to inspire a new generation of potential researchers to tackle the challenges of space exploration that was a real bright spot,” said Brocato. “Seeing their enthusiasm reaffirmed exactly why I came to NASA.”
This enthusiasm manifests in Brocato’s personal life: as a mother, she loves witnessing her child’s reaction to launches. “It was awesome to see the pure, unadulterated awe in my 7-year-old’s eyes when NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 lifted off,” said Brocato. “Moments like that are a reminder that spaceflight can touch all generations, which fuels my passion both at work and at home.”
For Brocato, prioritizing her personal time is crucial, and she enjoys spending it pursuing physical activities. She is an avid runner, whether she is jogging to work at NASA’s Johnson Space Center or competing in local adventure races. She has even been skydiving, which is where she met her husband.
Brocato is excited to witness NASA continue to push boundaries in human exploration, returning to the Moon and onto Mars. As a dedicated worker known for her curiosity and enthusiasm, Brocato’s work is crucial to advancing NASA’s mission.
NASA’s Space Operations Mission Directorate maintains a continuous human presence in space for the benefit of people on Earth. The programs within the directorate are the hub of NASA’s space exploration efforts, enabling Artemis, commercial space, science, and other agency missions through communication, launch services, research capabilities, and crew support.
To learn more about NASA’s Space Operation Mission Directorate, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/space-operations
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Last Updated Apr 17, 2025 EditorHeather Monaghan Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:02:14 On 12 March 2025, ESA’s Hera spacecraft soared just 5000 km above Mars and passed within 300 km of its distant moon, Deimos. Captured by Hera’s 1020x1020 pixel Asteroid Framing Camera, this video sequence offers a rare view of the red planet and its enigmatic moon. The original greyscale images have been colour-enhanced based on known surface features.
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By NASA
Nick Kopp is a Dragon flight lead in the Transportation Integration Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston. He is currently leading NASA’s efforts to prepare, launch, and return the agency’s 32nd SpaceX commercial resupply services mission. He works directly with SpaceX and collaborates with NASA’s many internal, external, and international partners to ensure the success of this and other cargo missions to the International Space Station.
Read on to learn about his career with NASA and more!
Nick Kopp’s official portrait.NASA/Bill Stafford The time and effort spent building, maintaining, and conducting science on the International Space Station is spent by people in our community and communities around the world to further humanity's collective understanding of the universe around us.
Nick Kopp
Transportation Integration Office Flight Lead
Where are you from?
I am from Cleveland, Ohio.
Tell us about your role at NASA.
I work directly with SpaceX to ensure the Dragon cargo spacecraft meets NASA’s requirements to visit the space station. I also collaborate with NASA’s various partners who are safely flying science investigations and other cargo to and from the space station. For the upcoming flight, I’ve worked extensively with SpaceX to prepare to return the Dragon cargo spacecraft off the coast of California.
How would you describe your job to family or friends who may not be familiar with NASA?
I’m responsible for getting stuff to and from the International Space Station safely.
How long have you been working for NASA?
I have been working for NASA for about 15 years at both Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and Johnson Space Center in Texas.
What advice would you give to young individuals aspiring to work in the space industry or at NASA?
It takes so many different people with all kinds of different skills working together to make missions happen. I would suggest looking at NASA’s websites to find the skill or task that makes you want to learn more and then focusing your energy into that skill. Surround yourself with people with similar goals. Connect with people in the industry and ask them questions. You are in control of your destiny!
Nick Kopp in front of the International Space Station Payload Operations Center at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. What was your path to NASA?
I’ve wanted to work at NASA since I was a kid and my grandfather showed me the Moon through his home-built telescope. I studied aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois, where I joined Students for the Exploration and Development of Space and attended a conference at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. I met some folks from the Payload Operations Integration Center and learned of the awesome space station science operations at Marshall. I was lucky enough to be chosen for a contractor job working directly with astronauts on the space station to conduct science experiments!
Is there someone in the space, aerospace, or science industry that has motivated or inspired you to work for the space program? Or someone you discovered while working for NASA who inspires you?
After working with him from the ground when he was aboard the space station, I was lucky enough to spend many overnight shifts getting to know NASA astronaut and Flight Director TJ Creamer. TJ’s path to NASA and his servant leadership have left an ongoing legacy for people at the agency. His general attitude, extreme competence, friendly demeanor, and genuine care for people around him continue to inspire me every day to become a great leader.
What is your favorite NASA memory?
My favorite NASA memory is being selected as a payload operations director on the International Space Station Payload Operations and Integration Center flight control team. I looked up to those in this position for 10 years and did everything I could to gather the skills and knowledge I needed to take on the role. I became responsible for the minute-to-minute operations of astronauts conducting science investigations on the space station. I vividly remember the joy I felt learning of the news of my assignment, taking my first shift, my first conversation with an astronaut in space, and the bittersweet decision to leave and continue my career goals at NASA in a different role.
Nick Kopp, right, behind a console in the International Space Station Payload Operations Integration Center at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center. What do you love sharing about station? What’s important to get across to general audiences to help them understand the benefits to life on Earth?
Although it takes place off the planet, research on the space station is conducted for people on Earth. The time and effort spent building, maintaining, and conducting science on the International Space Station is spent by people in our community and communities around the world to further humanity’s collective understanding of the universe around us. When we understand more about science, we can be more successful. So many people around the planet have had life-changing benefits from experiments that can only be done by people conducting research in microgravity, above the atmosphere, where you can view most of Earth.
If you could have dinner with any astronaut, past or present, who would it be?
I would have dinner with anyone from the Apollo 13 crew. I’d love to learn how they felt that NASA’s culture drove the outcome of that mission.
Do you have a favorite space-related memory or moment that stands out to you?
While working a night shift at the operations center in Huntsville, Alabama, we were monitoring payloads returning to Earth on a Dragon cargo spacecraft. We took a quick break outside the control center to watch as the spacecraft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere above us on its way to splash down off the coast of Florida. It was a clear night. As the spacecraft flew overhead, we saw the ablative heat shield create a shimmering trail of fire and sparkles that stretched across the whole night sky. It looked as though Tinker Bell just flew over us!
What are some of the key projects you’ve worked on during your time at NASA? What have been your favorite?
Some of my favorite projects I’ve worked on include:
Serving as the International Space Station Program’s representative as flight lead for NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission Troubleshooting unexpected results when conducting science on the space station Writing instructions for astronauts filming a virtual reality documentary on the space station Assessing design changes on the Space Launch System rocket’s core stage Managing and training a team of flight controllers Helping NASA move Dragon spacecraft returns from Florida to California Nick Kopp enjoys sailing on his days off. What are your hobbies/things you enjoy outside of work?
I love playing board games with my wife, sailing, flying, traveling around the world, and learning about leadership and project management theory.
Day launch or night launch?
The Crew-8 night launch, specifically, where the Falcon 9 booster landed just above me!
Favorite space movie?
Spaceballs
NASA “worm” or “meatball” logo?
Meatball
Every day, we’re conducting exciting research aboard our orbiting laboratory that will help us explore further into space and bring benefits back to people on Earth. You can keep up with the latest news, videos, and pictures about space station science on the Station Research & Technology news page. It’s a curated hub of space station research digital media from Johnson and other centers and space agencies.
Sign up for our weekly email newsletter to get the updates delivered directly to you.
Follow updates on social media at @ISS_Research on Twitter, and on the space station accounts on Facebook and Instagram.
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This mosaic showing the Martian surface outside of Jezero Crater was taken by NASA’s Perseverance on Dec. 25, 2024, at the site where the rover cored a sample dubbed “Silver Mountain” from a rock likely formed during Mars’ earliest geologic period.NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS The diversity of rock types along the rim of Jezero Crater offers a wide glimpse of Martian history.
Scientists with NASA’s Perseverance rover are exploring what they consider a veritable Martian cornucopia full of intriguing rocky outcrops on the rim of Jezero Crater. Studying rocks, boulders, and outcrops helps scientists understand the planet’s history, evolution, and potential for past or present habitability. Since January, the rover has cored five rocks on the rim, sealing samples from three of them in sample tubes. It’s also performed up-close analysis of seven rocks and analyzed another 83 from afar by zapping them with a laser. This is the mission’s fastest science-collection tempo since the rover landed on the Red Planet more than four years ago.
Perseverance climbed the western wall of Jezero Crater for 3½ months, reaching the rim on Dec. 12, 2024, and is currently exploring a roughly 445-foot-tall (135-meter-tall) slope the science team calls “Witch Hazel Hill.” The diversity of rocks they have found there has gone beyond their expectations.
“During previous science campaigns in Jezero, it could take several months to find a rock that was significantly different from the last rock we sampled and scientifically unique enough for sampling,” said Perseverance’s project scientist, Katie Stack Morgan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But up here on the crater rim, there are new and intriguing rocks everywhere the rover turns. It has been all we had hoped for and more.”
One of Perseverance’s hazard cameras captured the rover’s coring drill collecting the “Main River” rock sample on “Witch Hazel Hill” on March 10, 2025, the 1,441st Martian day, or sol, of the mission. NASA/JPL-Caltech That’s because Jezero Crater’s western rim contains tons of fragmented once-molten rocks that were knocked out of their subterranean home billions of years ago by one or more meteor impacts, including possibly the one that produced Jezero Crater. Perseverance is finding these formerly underground boulders juxtaposed with well-preserved layered rocks that were “born” billions of years ago on what would become the crater’s rim. And just a short drive away is a boulder showing signs that it was modified by water nestled beside one that saw little water in its past.
Oldest Sample Yet?
Perseverance collected its first crater-rim rock sample, named “Silver Mountain,” on Jan. 28. (NASA scientists informally nickname Martian features, including rocks and, separately, rock samples, to help keep track of them.) The rock it came from, called “Shallow Bay,” most likely formed at least 3.9 billion years ago during Mars’ earliest geologic period, the Noachian, and it may have been broken up and recrystallized during an ancient meteor impact.
About 360 feet (110 meters) away from that sampling site is an outcrop that caught the science team’s eye because it contains igneous minerals crystallized from magma deep in the Martian crust. (Igneous rocks can form deep underground from magma or from volcanic activity at the surface, and they are excellent record-keepers — particularly because mineral crystals within them preserve details about the precise moment they formed.) But after two coring attempts (on Feb. 4 and Feb. 8) fizzled due to the rock being so crumbly, the rover drove about 520 feet (160 meters) northwest to another scientifically intriguing rock, dubbed “Tablelands.”
Data from the rover’s instruments indicates that Tablelands is made almost entirely of serpentine minerals, which form when large amounts of water react with iron- and magnesium-bearing minerals in igneous rock. During this process, called serpentinization, the rock’s original structure and mineralogy change, often causing it to expand and fracture. Byproducts of the process sometimes include hydrogen gas, which can lead to the generation of methane in the presence of carbon dioxide. On Earth, such rocks can support microbial communities.
Coring Tablelands went smoothly. But sealing it became an engineering challenge.
Sealing the “Green Gardens” sample — collected by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover from a rock dubbed “Tablelands” along the rim of Jezero Crater on Feb. 16, 2025 — pre-sented an engineering challenge. The sample was finally sealed on March 2.NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS Flick Maneuver
“This happened once before, when there was enough powdered rock at the top of the tube that it interfered with getting a perfect seal,” said Kyle Kaplan, a robotics engineer at JPL. “For Tablelands, we pulled out all the stops. Over 13 sols,” or Martian days, “we used a tool to brush out the top of the tube 33 times and made eight sealing attempts. We even flicked it a second time.”
During a flick maneuver, the sample handling arm — a little robotic arm in the rover’s belly — presses the tube against a wall inside the rover, then pulls the tube away, causing it to vibrate. On March 2, the combination of flicks and brushings cleaned the tube’s top opening enough for Perseverance to seal and store the serpentine-laden rock sample.
Eight days later, the rover had no issues sealing its third rim sample, from a rock called “Main River.” The alternating bright and dark bands on the rock were like nothing the science team had seen before.
Up Next
Following the collection of the Main River sample, the rover has continued exploring Witch Hazel Hill, analyzing three more rocky outcrops (“Sally’s Cove,” “Dennis Pond,” and “Mount Pearl”). And the team isn’t done yet.
“The last four months have been a whirlwind for the science team, and we still feel that Witch Hazel Hill has more to tell us,” said Stack. “We’ll use all the rover data gathered recently to decide if and where to collect the next sample from the crater rim. Crater rims — you gotta love ’em.”
More About Perseverance
A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover is characterizing the planet’s geology and past climate, to help pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet and is the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith.
NASA’s Mars Sample Return Program, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), is designed to send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.
The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio and the agency’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includes Artemis missions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.
For more about Perseverance:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance
News Media Contacts
DC Agle
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-9011
agle@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
2025-051
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Last Updated Apr 10, 2025 Related Terms
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