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By NASA
Peru’s Vice Minister of Defense Policies for Ministry of Defense César Medardo Torres Vega, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, and Director of Peru’s National Commission for Aerospace Research and Development (CONIDA) Maj. Gen. Roberto Melgar Sheen meet in Lima, Peru, Nov. 14, 2024, where the U.S. and Peru signed a memorandum of understanding agreeing to study a potential sounding rocket campaign.Credit: U.S. Embassy Peru NASA and Peru’s National Commission for Aerospace Research and Development (CONIDA) laid the groundwork for a potential multi-year scientific rocket launch campaign in the South American country.
Both countries signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding Thursday that includes safety training, a joint feasibility study for the potential campaign, and technical assistance for CONIDA on sounding rocket launches. Sounding rockets are small, low-cost rockets that provide suborbital access to space.
“We are excited to look at the possibility of once again launching sounding rockets from Peru,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who signed on behalf of the United States. “This agreement deepens our international partnership with Peru and the scientific research we conduct because of the country’s location along the magnetic equator. Together we will go farther.”
Maj. Gen. Roberto Melgar Sheen, head of CONIDA, signed on behalf of Peru. Brian Nichols, assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs for the U.S. State Department, and Stephanie Syptak-Ramnath, U.S. ambassador to Peru, also participated, among other Peruvian officials. The event took place during the week of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum beginning Nov. 9 in Lima.
During his visit to Peru, Nelson also discussed the importance of international partnerships and collaboration in space and celebrated Peru’s signing of the Artemis Accords earlier this year.
The United States and Peru have a long history of space cooperation. NASA conducted sounding rocket campaigns at CONIDA’s Punta Lobos launch base in 1975 and 1983.
NASA uses sounding rockets to carry scientific instruments into space on suborbital flights to collect important science data and test prototype instruments. They yield invaluable data that enhance our understanding of Earth’s atmosphere and weather, our solar system, and the universe, and test equipment for deeper space travel.
Understanding our Earth’s atmosphere and how it is influenced by the Sun is crucial to protecting ground and space-based assets that we rely on every day, from the power grid to weather data and even navigation.
For more information about NASA’s international partnerships, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/oiir
-end-
Meira Bernstein / Elizabeth Shaw
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
meira.b.bernstein@nasa.gov / elizabeth.a.shaw@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Nov 14, 2024 EditorJessica TaveauLocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
Office of International and Interagency Relations (OIIR) Sounding Rockets View the full article
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
The NISAR mission will help researchers get a better understanding of how Earth’s surface changes over time, including in the lead-up to volcanic eruptions like the one pictured, at Mount Redoubt in southern Alaska in April 2009.R.G. McGimsey/AVO/USGS Data from NISAR will improve our understanding of such phenomena as earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides, as well as damage to infrastructure.
We don’t always notice it, but much of Earth’s surface is in constant motion. Scientists have used satellites and ground-based instruments to track land movement associated with volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, and other phenomena. But a new satellite from NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) aims to improve what we know and, potentially, help us prepare for and recover from natural and human-caused disasters.
The NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission will measure the motion of nearly all of the planet’s land and ice-covered surfaces twice every 12 days. The pace of NISAR’s data collection will give researchers a fuller picture of how Earth’s surface changes over time. “This kind of regular observation allows us to look at how Earth’s surface moves across nearly the entire planet,” said Cathleen Jones, NISAR applications lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
Together with complementary measurements from other satellites and instruments, NISAR’s data will provide a more complete picture of how Earth’s surface moves horizontally and vertically. The information will be crucial to better understanding everything from the mechanics of Earth’s crust to which parts of the world are prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. It could even help resolve whether sections of a levee are damaged or if a hillside is starting to move in a landslide.
The NISAR mission will measure the motion of Earth’s surface — data that can be used to monitor critical infrastructure such as airport runways, dams, and levees. NASA/JPL-Caltech What Lies Beneath
Targeting an early 2025 launch from India, the mission will be able to detect surface motions down to fractions of an inch. In addition to monitoring changes to Earth’s surface, the satellite will be able to track the motion of ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice, and map changes to vegetation.
The source of that remarkable detail is a pair of radar instruments that operate at long wavelengths: an L-band system built by JPL and an S-band system built by ISRO. The NISAR satellite is the first to carry both. Each instrument can collect measurements day and night and see through clouds that can obstruct the view of optical instruments. The L-band instrument will also be able to penetrate dense vegetation to measure ground motion. This capability will be especially useful in areas surrounding volcanoes or faults that are obscured by vegetation.
“The NISAR satellite won’t tell us when earthquakes will happen. Instead, it will help us better understand which areas of the world are most susceptible to significant earthquakes,” said Mark Simons, the U.S. solid Earth science lead for the mission at Caltech in Pasadena, California.
Data from the satellite will give researchers insight into which parts of a fault slowly move without producing earthquakes and which sections are locked together and might suddenly slip. In relatively well-monitored areas like California, researchers can use NISAR to focus on specific regions that could produce an earthquake. But in parts of the world that aren’t as well monitored, NISAR measurements could reveal new earthquake-prone areas. And when earthquakes do occur, data from the satellite will help researchers understand what happened on the faults that ruptured.
“From the ISRO perspective, we are particularly interested in the Himalayan plate boundary,” said Sreejith K M, the ISRO solid Earth science lead for NISAR at the Space Applications Center in Ahmedabad, India. “The area has produced great magnitude earthquakes in the past, and NISAR will give us unprecedented information on the seismic hazards of the Himalaya.”
Surface motion is also important for volcano researchers, who need data collected regularly over time to detect land movements that may be precursors to an eruption. As magma shifts below Earth’s surface, the land can bulge or sink. The NISAR satellite will help provide a fuller picture for why a volcano deforms and whether that movement signals an eruption.
Finding Normal
When it comes to infrastructure such as levees, aqueducts, and dams, NISAR’s ability to provide continuous measurements over years will help to establish the usual state of the structures and surrounding land. Then, if something changes, resource managers may be able to pinpoint specific areas to examine. “Instead of going out and surveying an entire aqueduct every five years, you can target your surveys to problem areas,” said Jones.
The data could be equally valuable for showing that a dam hasn’t changed after a disaster like an earthquake. For instance, if a large earthquake struck San Francisco, liquefaction — where loosely packed or waterlogged sediment loses its stability after severe ground shaking — could pose a problem for dams and levees along the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
“There’s over a thousand miles of levees,” said Jones. “You’d need an army to go out and look at them all.” The NISAR mission would help authorities survey them from space and identify damaged areas. “Then you can save your time and only go out to inspect areas that have changed. That could save a lot of money on repairs after a disaster.”
More About NISAR
The NISAR mission is an equal collaboration between NASA and ISRO and marks the first time the two agencies have cooperated on hardware development for an Earth-observing mission. Managed for the agency by Caltech, JPL leads the U.S. component of the project and is providing the mission’s L-band SAR. NASA is also providing the radar reflector antenna, the deployable boom, a high-rate communication subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid-state recorder, and payload data subsystem. The U R Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, India, which leads the ISRO component of the mission, is providing the spacecraft bus, the launch vehicle, and associated launch services and satellite mission operations. The ISRO Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad is providing the S-band SAR electronics.
To learn more about NISAR, visit:
https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov
News Media Contacts
Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874
jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov / andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov
2024-155
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Last Updated Nov 08, 2024 Related Terms
NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) Earth Science Earthquakes Jet Propulsion Laboratory Natural Disasters Volcanoes Explore More
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s SPHEREx observatory undergoes integration and testing at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in April 2024. The space telescope will use a technique called spectroscopy across the entire sky, capturing the universe in more than 100 colors. BAE Systems The space telescope will detect over 100 colors from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. Here’s what astronomers will do with all that color.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission won’t be the first space telescope to observe hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies when it launches no later than April 2025, but it will be the first to observe them in 102 colors. Although these colors aren’t visible to the human eye because they’re in the infrared range, scientists will use them to learn about topics that range from the physics that governed the universe less than a second after its birth to the origins of water on planets like Earth.
“We are the first mission to look at the whole sky in so many colors,” said SPHEREx Principal Investigator Jamie Bock, who is based jointly at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, both in Southern California. “Whenever astronomers look at the sky in a new way, we can expect discoveries.”
Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, SPHEREx will collect infrared light, which has wavelengths slightly longer than what the human eye can detect. The telescope will use a technique called spectroscopy to take the light from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies and separate it into individual colors, the way a prism transforms sunlight into a rainbow. This color breakdown can reveal various properties of an object, including its composition and its distance from Earth.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission will use spectroscopy — the splitting of light into its component wavelengths — to study the universe. Watch this video to learn more about spectroscopy. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Here are the three key science investigations SPHEREx will conduct with its colorful all-sky map.
Cosmic Origins
What human eyes perceive as colors are distinct wavelengths of light. The only difference between colors is the distance between the crests of the light wave. If a star or galaxy is moving, its light waves get stretched or compressed, changing the colors they appear to emit. (It’s the same with sound waves, which is why the pitch of an ambulance siren seems to go up as its approaches and lowers after it passes.) Astronomers can measure the degree to which light is stretched or compressed and use that to infer the distance to the object.
SPHEREx will apply this principle to map the position of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D. By doing so, scientists can study the physics of inflation, the event that caused the universe to expand by a trillion-trillion fold in less than a second after the big bang. This rapid expansion amplified small differences in the distribution of matter. Because these differences remain imprinted on the distribution of galaxies today, measuring how galaxies are distributed can tell scientists more about how inflation worked.
Galactic Origins
SPHEREx will also measure the collective glow created by all galaxies near and far — in other words, the total amount of light emitted by galaxies over cosmic history. Scientists have tried to estimate this total light output by observing individual galaxies and extrapolating to the trillions of galaxies in the universe. But these counts may leave out some faint or hidden light sources, such as galaxies too small or too distant for telescopes to easily detect.
With spectroscopy, SPHEREx can also show astronomers how the total light output has changed over time. For example, it may reveal that the universe’s earliest generations of galaxies produced more light than previously thought, either because they were more plentiful or bigger and brighter than current estimates suggest. Because light takes time to travel through space, we see distant objects as they were in the past. And, as light travels, the universe’s expansion stretches it, changing its wavelength and its color. Scientists can therefore use SPHEREx data to determine how far light has traveled and where in the universe’s history it was released.
Water’s Origins
SPHEREx will measure the abundance of frozen water, carbon dioxide, and other essential ingredients for life as we know it along more than 9 million unique directions across the Milky Way galaxy. This information will help scientists better understand how available these key molecules are to forming planets. Research indicates that most of the water in our galaxy is in the form of ice rather than gas, frozen to the surface of small dust grains. In dense clouds where stars form, these icy dust grains can become part of newly forming planets, with the potential to create oceans like the ones on Earth.
The mission’s colorful view will enable scientists to identify these materials, because chemical elements and molecules leave a unique signature in the colors they absorb and emit.
Big Picture
Many space telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and James Webb, can provide high-resolution, in-depth spectroscopy of individual objects or small sections of space. Other space telescopes, like NASA’s retired Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), were designed to take images of the whole sky. SPHEREx combines these abilities to apply spectroscopy to the entire sky.
By combining observations from telescopes that target specific parts of the sky with SPHEREx’s big-picture view, scientists will get a more complete — and more colorful — perspective of the universe.
More About SPHEREx
SPHEREx is managed by JPL for NASA’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace) built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions across the U.S. and in South Korea. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. The mission principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available.
For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/spherex/
News Media Contact
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
2024-152
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Last Updated Oct 31, 2024 Related Terms
SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe and Ices Explorer) Astrophysics Galaxies Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Search for Life The Universe Explore More
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By NASA
1 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
This September 2024 aerial photograph shows the coastal launch range at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Wallops is the agency’s only owned-and-operated launch range.Courtesy Patrick J. Hendrickson; used with permission NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia is scheduled to support the launch of a suborbital sounding rocket for the U.S. Department of Defense during a launch window that runs 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. EDT each day from Wednesday, Oct. 23 to Friday, Oct. 25.
No real-time launch status updates will be available. The launch will not be livestreamed nor will launch status updates be provided during the countdown. The Wallops Visitor Center will be closed to the public.
The rocket launch is expected to be visible from the Chesapeake Bay region.
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Last Updated Oct 22, 2024 LocationWallops Flight Facility Related Terms
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