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By NASA
Explore This Section Science Science Activation Eclipses to Auroras: Eclipse… Overview Learning Resources Science Activation Teams SME Map Opportunities More Science Activation Stories Citizen Science 3 min read
Eclipses to Auroras: Eclipse Ambassadors Experience Winter Field School in Alaska
In 2023 and 2024, two eclipses crossed the United States, and the NASA Science Activation program’s Eclipse Ambassadors Off the Path project invited undergraduate students and amateur astronomers to join them as “NASA Partner Eclipse Ambassadors”. This opportunity to partner with NASA, provide solar viewing glasses, and share eclipse knowledge with underserved communities off the central paths involved:
Partnering with an undergraduate/amateur astronomer Taking a 3-week cooperative course (~12 hours coursework) Engaging their communities with eclipse resources by reaching 200+ people These Eclipse Ambassador partnerships allowed participants to grow together as they learned new tools and techniques for explaining eclipses and engaging with the public, and Eclipse Ambassadors are recognized for their commitment to public engagement.
In January 2025, the Eclipse Ambassadors Off the Path project held a week-long Heliophysics Winter Field School (WFS), a culminating Heliophysics Big Year experience for nine undergraduate and graduate Eclipse Ambassadors. The WFS exposed participants to career opportunities and field experience in heliophysics, citizen science, and space physics. The program included expert lectures on space physics, aurora, citizen science, and instrumentation, as well as hands-on learning opportunities with Poker Flat Rocket Range, the Museum of the North, aurora chases, and more. Students not only learned about heliophysics, they also actively participated in citizen science data collection using a variety of instruments, as well as the Aurorasaurus citizen science project app. Interactive panels on career paths helped prepare them to pursue relevant careers.
One participant, Sophia, said, “This experience has only deepened my passion for heliophysics, science communication, and community engagement.” Another participant, Feras, reflected, “Nine brilliant students from across the country joined a week-long program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ (UAF) Geophysical Institute, where we attended multiple panels on solar and space physics, spoke to Athabaskan elders on their connection to the auroras, and visited the Poker Flat Research Range to observe the stunning northern lights.”
This undertaking would not have been possible without the coordination, planning, leadership of many. Principal Investigators included Vivian White (Eclipse Ambassadors, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, ASP) and Dr. Elizabeth McDonald (Aurorasaurus, NASA GSFC). Other partners included Lynda McGilvary (Geophysical Institute at UAF), Jen Arseneau (UAF), Shanil Virani (ASP), Andréa Hughes (NASA), and Lindsay Glesener (University of Minnesota), as well as knowledge holders, students, and scientists.
The Eclipse Ambassadors Off the Path project is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number 80NSS22M0007 and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. To learn more, visit: www.eclipseambassadors.org.
Winter Field School Participants standing under the aurora. Andy Witteman Share
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Last Updated Feb 18, 2025 Editor NASA Science Editorial Team Related Terms
Science Activation 2023 Solar Eclipse 2024 Solar Eclipse Auroras Opportunities For Students to Get Involved Explore More
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By NASA
Teams with NASA are gaining momentum as work progresses toward future lunar missions for the benefit of humanity as numerous flight hardware shipments from across the world arrived at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the first crewed Artemis flight test and follow-on lunar missions. The skyline at Kennedy will soon see added structures as teams build up the ground systems needed to support them.
Crews are well underway with parallel preparations for the Artemis II flight, as well as buildup of NASA’s mobile launcher 2 tower for use during the launch of the SLS (Space Launch System) Block 1B rocket, beginning with the Artemis IV mission. This version of NASA’s rocket will use a more powerful upper stage to launch with crew and more cargo on lunar missions. Technicians have begun upper stage umbilical connections testing that will help supply fuel and other commodities to the rocket while at the launch pad.
In summer 2024, technicians from NASA and contractor Bechtel National, Inc. completed a milestone called jack and set, where the center’s mega-mover, the crawler transporter, repositioned the initial steel base assembly for mobile launcher 2 from temporary construction shoring to its six permanent pedestals near the Kennedy’s Vehicle Assembly Building.
Teams at Bechtel National, Inc. use a crane to lift Module 4 into place atop the mobile launcher 2 tower chair at its park site on Jan. 3, 2025, at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Module 4 is the first of seven modules that will be stacked vertically to make up the almost 400-foot launch tower that will be used beginning with the Artemis IV mission.Betchel National Inc./Allison Sijgers “The NASA Bechtel mobile launcher 2 team is ahead of schedule and gaining momentum by the day,” stated Darrell Foster, ground systems integration manager, NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program at NASA Kennedy. “In parallel to all of the progress at our main build site, the remaining tower modules are assembled and outfitted at a second construction site on center.”
As construction of the mobile launcher 2’s base continues, the assembly operations shift into integration of the modules that will make up the tower. In mid-October 2024, crews completed installation of the chair, named for its resemblance to a giant seat. The chair serves as the interface between the base deck and the vertical modules which are the components that will make up the tower, and stands at 80-feet-tall.
In December 2024, teams completed the rig and set Module 4 operation where the first of a total of seven 40-foot-tall modules was stacked on top of the chair. Becthel crews rigged the module to a heavy lift crane, raised the module more than 150-feet, and secured the four corners to the tower chair. Once complete, the entire mobile launcher structure will reach a height of nearly 400 feet – approximately the length of four Olympic-sized swimming pools placed end-to-end.
On the opposite side of the center, test teams at the Launch Equipment Test Facility are testing the new umbilical interfaces, which will be located on mobile launcher 2, that will be needed to support the new SLS Block 1B Exploration Upper Stage. The umbilicals are connecting lines that provide fuel, oxidizer, pneumatic pressure, instrumentation, and electrical connections from the mobile launcher to the upper stage and other elements of SLS and NASA’s Orion spacecraft.
“All ambient temperature testing has been successfully completed and the team is now beginning cryogenic testing, where liquid nitrogen and liquid hydrogen will flow through the umbilicals to verify acceptable performance,” stated Kevin Jumper, lab manager, NASA Launch Equipment Test Facility at Kennedy. “The Exploration Upper Stage umbilical team has made significant progress on check-out and verification testing of the mobile launcher 2 umbilicals.”
https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/eusu-test-3-5b-run-1.mp4 Exploration Upper Stage Umbilical retract testing is underway at the Launch Equipment Test Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 22, 2024. The new umbilical interface will be used beginning with the Artemis IV mission. Credit: LASSO Contract LETF Video Group The testing includes extension and retraction of the Exploration Upper Stage umbilical arms that will be installed on mobile launcher 2. The test team remotely triggers the umbilical arms to retract, ensuring the ground and flight umbilical plates separate as expected, simulating the operation that will be performed at lift off.
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By NASA
3 Min Read NASA Scientists Find New Human-Caused Shifts in Global Water Cycle
Cracked mud and salt on the valley floor in Death Valley National Park in California can become a reflective pool after rains. (File photo) Credits: NPS/Kurt Moses In a recently published paper, NASA scientists use nearly 20 years of observations to show that the global water cycle is shifting in unprecedented ways. The majority of those shifts are driven by activities such as agriculture and could have impacts on ecosystems and water management, especially in certain regions.
“We established with data assimilation that human intervention in the global water cycle is more significant than we thought,” said Sujay Kumar, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The shifts have implications for people all over the world. Water management practices, such as designing infrastructure for floods or developing drought indicators for early warning systems, are often based on assumptions that the water cycle fluctuates only within a certain range, said Wanshu Nie, a research scientist at NASA Goddard and lead author of the paper.
“This may no longer hold true for some regions,” Nie said. “We hope that this research will serve as a guide map for improving how we assess water resources variability and plan for sustainable resource management, especially in areas where these changes are most significant.”
One example of the human impacts on the water cycle is in North China, which is experiencing an ongoing drought. But vegetation in many areas continues to thrive, partially because producers continue to irrigate their land by pumping more water from groundwater storage, Kumar said. Such interrelated human interventions often lead to complex effects on other water cycle variables, such as evapotranspiration and runoff.
Nie and her colleagues focused on three different kinds of shifts or changes in the cycle: first, a trend, such as a decrease in water in a groundwater reservoir; second, a shift in seasonality, like the typical growing season starting earlier in the year, or an earlier snowmelt; and third a change in extreme events, like “100-year floods” happening more frequently.
The scientists gathered remote sensing data from 2003 to 2020 from several different NASA satellite sources: the Global Precipitation Measurement mission satellite for precipitation data, a soil moisture dataset from the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites for terrestrial water storage data. They also used products from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite instrument to provide information on vegetation health.
“This paper combines several years of our team’s effort in developing capabilities on satellite data analysis, allowing us to precisely simulate continental water fluxes and storages across the planet,” said Augusto Getirana, a research scientist at NASA Goddard and a co-author of the paper.
The study results suggest that Earth system models used to simulate the future global water cycle should evolve to integrate the ongoing effects of human activities. With more data and improved models, producers and water resource managers could understand and effectively plan for what the “new normal” of their local water situation looks like, Nie said.
By Erica McNamee
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
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Last Updated Jan 16, 2025 EditorKate D. RamsayerContactKate D. Ramsayerkate.d.ramsayer@nasa.gov Related Terms
Earth Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Goddard Space Flight Center Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Water & Energy Cycle Explore More
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By NASA
Humans are returning to the Moon—this time, to stay. Because our presence will be more permanent, NASA has selected a location that maximizes line-of-sight communication with Earth, solar visibility, and access to water ice: the Lunar South Pole (LSP). While the Sun is in the lunar sky more consistently at the poles, it never rises more than a few degrees above the horizon; in the target landing regions, the highest possible elevation is 7°. This presents a harsh lighting environment never experienced during the Apollo missions, or in fact, in any human spaceflight experience. The ambient lighting will severely affect the crews’ ability to see hazards and to perform simple work. This is because the human vision system, which despite having a high-dynamic range, cannot see well into bright light and cannot adapt quickly from bright to dark or vice versa. Functional vision is required to perform a variety of tasks, from simple tasks (e.g., walking, operating simple tools) through managing complex machines (e.g., lander elevator, rovers). Thus, the environment presents an engineering challenge to the Agency: one that must be widely understood before it can be effectively addressed.
In past NASA missions and programs, design of lighting and functional vision support systems for extravehicular activity (EVA) or rover operations have been managed at the lowest program level. This worked well for Apollo and low Earth orbit because the Sun angle was managed by mission planning and astronaut self-positioning; helmet design alone addressed all vision challenges. The Artemis campaign presents new challenges to functional vision, because astronauts will be unable to avoid having the sun in their eyes much of the time they are on the lunar surface. This, combined with the need for artificial lighting in the extensive shadowing at the LSP, means that new functional vision support systems must be developed across projects and programs. The design of helmets, windows, and lighting systems must work in a complementary fashion, within and across programs, to achieve a system of lighting and vision support that enables crews to see into darkness while their eyes are light-adapted, in bright light while still dark-adapted, and protects their eyes from injury.
Many of the findings of the assessment were focused on the lack of specific requirements to prevent functional vision impairment by the Sun’s brilliance (which is different from preventing eye injury), while enabling astronauts to see well enough to perform specific tasks. Specifically, tasks expected of astronauts at the LSP were not incorporated into system design requirements to enable system development that ensures functional vision in the expected lighting environment. Consequently, the spacesuit, for example, has flexibility requirements for allowing the astronauts to walk but not for ensuring they can see well enough to walk from brilliant Sun into a dark shadow and back without the risk of tripping or falling. Importantly, gaps were identified in allocation of requirements across programs to ensure that the role of the various programs is for each to understand functional vision. NESC recommendations were offered that made enabling functional vision in the harsh lighting environment a specific and new requirement for the system designers. The recommendations also included that lighting, window, and visor designs be integrated.
The assessment team recommended that a wide variety of simulation techniques, physical and virtual, need to be developed, each with different and well-stated capabilities with respect to functional vision. Some would address the blinding effects of sunlight at the LSP (not easily achieved through virtual approaches) to evaluate performance of helmet shields and artificial lighting in the context of the environment and adaptation times. Other simulations would add terrain features to identify the threats in simple (e.g., walking, collection of samples) and complex (e.g., maintenance and operation of equipment) tasks. Since different facilities have different strengths, they also have different weaknesses. These strengths and limitations must be characterized to enable verification of technical solutions and crew training.
NESC TB 2024- discipline-focus-hfView the full article
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