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By Space Force
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III announced seven initiatives to improve the quality of life for service members and their families.
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By European Space Agency
Video: 00:06:50 The first of four satellites that make up ESA’s Cluster mission is coming safely back down to Earth, marking a brilliant end to this remarkable mission.
The satellite’s orbit was tweaked back in January to target a region as far as possible from populated regions. This ensures that any spacecraft parts that survive the reentry will fall over open ocean.
During 24 years in space, Cluster has sent back precious data on how the Sun interacts with Earth’s magnetic field, helping us better understand and forecast potentially dangerous space weather.
With this first ever targeted reentry, Cluster goes down in history for a different reason, taking ESA well beyond international space safety standards and helping ensure the long-term sustainability of space activities.
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By NASA
On the left, the Canopee transport carrier containing the European Service Module for NASA’s Artemis III mission arrives at Port Canaveral in Florida, on Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2024, before completing the last leg of its journey to the agency’s Kennedy Space Center’s Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout via truck. On the right, NASA’s Pegasus barge, carrying several pieces of hardware for Artemis II, III, and IV arrives at NASA Kennedy’s Launch Complex 39 turn basin wharf on Thursday, Sept. 5, 2024. Credit: NASA From across the Atlantic Ocean and through the Gulf of Mexico, two ships converged, delivering key spacecraft and rocket components of NASA’s Artemis campaign to the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
On Sept. 3, ESA (European Space Agency) marked a milestone in the Artemis III mission as its European-built service module for NASA’s Orion spacecraft completed a transatlantic journey from Bremen, Germany, to Port Canaveral, Florida, where technicians moved it to nearby NASA Kennedy. Transported aboard the Canopée cargo ship, the European Service Module—assembled by Airbus with components from 10 European countries and the U.S.—provides propulsion, thermal control, electrical power, and water and oxygen for its crews.
“Seeing multi-mission hardware arrive at the same time demonstrates the progress we are making on our Artemis missions,” said Amit Kshatriya, deputy associate administrator, Moon to Mars Program, at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We are going to the Moon together with our industry and international partners and we are manufacturing, assembling, building, and integrating elements for Artemis flights.”
NASA’s Pegasus barge, the agency’s waterway workhorse for transporting large hardware by sea, ferried multi-mission hardware for the agency’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket, the Artemis II launch vehicle stage adapter, the “boat-tail” of the core stage for Artemis III, the core stage engine section for Artemis IV, along with ground support equipment needed to move and assemble the large components. The barge pulled into NASA Kennedy’s Launch Complex 39B Turn Basin Thursday.
The spacecraft factory inside NASA Kennedy’s Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building is set to buzz with additional activity in the coming months. With the Artemis II Orion crew and service modules stacked together and undergoing testing, and engineers outfitting the Artemis III and IV crew modules, engineers soon will connect the newly arrived European Service Module to the crew module adapter, which houses electronic equipment for communications, power, and control, and includes an umbilical connector that bridges the electrical, data, and fluid systems between the crew and service modules.
The SLS rocket’s cone-shaped launch vehicle stage adapter connects the core stage to the upper stage and protects the rocket’s flight computers, avionics, and electrical devices in the upper stage system during launch and ascent. The adapter will be taken to Kennedy’s Vehicle Assembly Building in preparation for Artemis II rocket stacking operations.
The boat-tail, which will be used during the assembly of the SLS core stage for Artemis III, is a fairing-like structure that protects the bottom end of the core stage and RS-25 engines. This hardware, picked up at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, will join the Artemis III core stage engine section housed in the spaceport’s Space Systems Processing Facility.
The Artemis IV SLS core stage engine section arrived from NASA Michoud and also will transfer to the center’s processing facility ahead of final assembly.
Under the Artemis campaign, NASA will land the first woman, first person of color, and its first international partner astronaut on the lunar surface, establishing long-term exploration for scientific discovery and preparing for human missions to Mars. The agency’s SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, and supporting ground systems, along with the human landing system, next-generation spacesuits and rovers, and Gateway, serve as NASA’s foundation for deep space exploration.
For more information on NASA’s Artemis missions, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/artemis
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Rachel Kraft
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
Rachel.h.kraft@nasa.gov
Allison Tankersley, Antonia Jaramillo Botero
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
321-867-2468
Allison.p.tankersley@nasa.gov/ antonia.jaramillobotero@nasa.gov
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By European Space Agency
The two new Galileo satellites launched in April have entered service, completing the second of three constellation planes. With every addition to the constellation, the precision, availability and robustness of the Galileo signal is improved. The next launch is planned in the coming weeks and the remaining six Galileo First Generation satellites will join the constellation in the next years.
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
More than 100 scientists will participate in a field campaign involving a research vessel and two aircraft this month to verify the accuracy of data collected by NASA’s new PACE satellite: the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem mission. The process of data validation includes researchers comparing PACE data with data collected by similar, Earth-based instruments to ensure the measurements match up. Since the mission’s Feb. 8, 2024 launch, scientists around the world have successfully completed several data validation campaigns; the September deployment — PACE-PAX — is its largest. From sea to sky to orbit, a range of vantage points allow NASA Earth scientists to collect different types of data to better understand our changing planet. Collecting them together, at the same place and the same time, is an important step used to verify the accuracy of satellite data.
NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite launched in February 2024 and is collecting observations of the ocean and measuring atmospheric particle and cloud properties. This data will help inform scientists and decision makers about the health of Earth’s ocean, land surfaces, and atmosphere and the interactions between them.
Technicians work to process the NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) observatory on a spacecraft dolly in a high bay at the Astrotech Space Operations Facility near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, Dec. 4, 2023. Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett To make sure the data from PACE’s instruments accurately represent the ocean and the atmosphere, scientists compare (or “validate”) the data collected from orbit with measurements they collect at or near Earth’s surface. The mission’s biggest validation campaign, called PACE Postlaunch Airborne eXperiment (PACE-PAX), began on Sept. 3, 2024, and will last the entire month.
“If we want to have confidence in the observations from PACE, we need to validate those observations,” said Kirk Knobelspiesse, mission scientist for PACE-PAX and an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This field campaign is focused on doing just that.”
Scientists will make measurements both from aircraft and ships. Based out of three locations across California — Marina, Santa Barbara, and NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards — the campaign includes more than 100 people working in the field and several dozen instruments.
“This campaign allows us to validate data for both the atmosphere and the ocean, all in one campaign,” said Brian Cairns, deputy mission scientist for PACE-PAX and an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City.
On the ocean, ships, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) research vessel Shearwater, will gather data on ocean biology and the optical properties of the water. Scientists onboard will gather water samples to help define the types of phytoplankton at different locations and their relative abundance, something that PACE’s hyperspectral Ocean Color Instrument measures from orbit.
Members of the PACE-PAX team – from left to right, Cecile Carlson, Adam Ahern (NOAA), Dennis Hamaker (NPS), Luke Ziemba, and Michael Shook (NASA Langley Research Center) – in front of the Twin Otter aircraft as they prep for the start of the campaign. Credit: Judy Alfter/NASA Overhead, a Twin Otter research aircraft operated by the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, will collect data on the atmosphere. At altitudes of up to 10,000 feet, the aircraft will sample and measure cloud droplet sizes, aerosol sizes, and the amount of light that those particles scatter and absorb. These are the atmospheric properties that PACE observes with its two polarimeters, SPEXOne and HARP2.
At a higher altitude — approximately 70,000 feet up — NASA’s ER-2 aircraft will provide a complementary view from above clouds, looking down on the atmosphere and ocean in finer detail than the satellite, but with a narrower view.
The NASA ER-2 high-altitude aircraft preparing for flight on Jan. 29, 2023. The aircraft is based at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center Building 703 in Palmdale, California.Credit: NASA/Carla Thomas The plane will carry several instruments that are similar to those on PACE, including two prototypes of PACE’s polarimeters, called SPEXAirborne and AirHARP. In addition, two instruments called the Portable Remote Imaging SpectroMeter and Pushbroom Imager for Cloud and Aerosol Research and Development — from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasedena, California, and NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, respectively — will measure essentially all the wavelengths of visible light (color). The remote sensing measurements are key for scientists who want to test the methods they use to analyze PACE satellite data.
Together, the instruments on the ER-2 approximate the data that PACE gathers and complement the in situ measurements from the ocean research vessel and the Twin Otter.
As the field campaign team gathers data, PACE will be observing the same areas of the ocean surface and atmosphere. Once the campaign is over, scientists will look at the data PACE returned and compare them to the measurements they took from the other three vantage points.
“Once you launch the satellite, there’s no more tinkering you can do,” said Ivona Cetinic, deputy mission scientist for PACE-PAX and an ocean scientist at NASA Goddard.
Though the scientists cannot alter the satellite anymore, the algorithms designed to interpret PACE data can be adjusted to make the measurements more accurate. Validation checks from campaigns like PACE-PAX help scientists ensure that PACE will be able to return accurate data about our oceans and atmosphere — critical to better understand our changing planet and its interconnected systems — for years to come.
“The ocean and atmosphere are such changing environments that it’s really important to validate what we see,” Cetinic said. “Understanding the accuracy of the view from the satellite is important, so we can use the data to answer important questions about climate change.”
By Erica McNamee
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Sep 04, 2024 EditorKate D. RamsayerContactErica McNameeerica.s.mcnamee@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Earth Airborne Science Goddard Space Flight Center PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem) Explore More
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