NEW FROM NASA
NEW FROM NASA NEWS
NASA’s Day of Remembrance: “NASA will observe its annual Day of Remembrance on Thursday, Jan. 23, honoring the members of the NASA family who lost their lives in the pursuit of exploration and discovery for benefit of humanity. The event, traditionally held every year on the fourth Thursday of January, remembers the crews of Apollo 1 and the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia.” For more information, see: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-day-of-remembrance-honors-fallen-heroes-of-exploration . Also, don’t forget the astronauts that perished in flight related to their astronaut and other duties; see the Space Mirror Memorial here.
Sustainable Business Model Challenge: NASA is Looking for “entrepreneurs, startups, and researchers to leverage the agency’s publicly available Earth system science data to develop commercial solutions for climate challenges.” NASA is looking for ways to “foster a new set of sustainable enterprises capable of turning climate insights into tangible market-ready services, ultimately contributing to a more resilient future for vulnerable communities, businesses, and ecosystems.” A fuller treatment from the quoted source can be found at: https://www.nasa.gov/general/nasa-opens-new-challenge-to-support-climate-minded-business-models.
Planetary Defenders at Sundance: NASA made a documentary program showcasing how NASA would attempt to protect Earth if an asteroid on a collision course were detected. The program’s premiere will be at the Sundance Film Festival, with a number of NASA people attending. NASA will conduct a pre-screening panel discussion on its streaming service, showcasing the elements of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office. Both NASA and the Festival are extremely pleased to have this event! For more, see: https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-planetary-defenders-head-to-the-sundance-film-festival.
NEW FROM NASA FYI
NASA Results at AAS: Several annual science conferences are showcases for NASA science. The American Geophysical Union meeting last month, reported on here, is one of them. The Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in the spring is another. An important third is the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, coming up this week. You can find out more about it at: https://science.nasa.gov/directorates/smd/astrophysics-division/nasa-research-to-be-featured-at-american-astronomical-society-meeting!
NISAR: NASA routinely partners with other nations on Space projects. The biggest of them is the European Space Agency, followed by Russia, but NASA has partnered with Italy, Germany, Japan, and others along the way. One country partner we don’t hear much about in the U.S. is the India Space Research Organization (ISRO), which has a pretty robust Earth monitoring capability.
The latest collaboration is the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission. SAR instruments have been flown before, but NISAR, with its two operating wavelengths, is more capable, and will be able to measure land deformation, monitor the status of glaciers and ice sheets, assess growth/loss of forests and wetlands, and much more. For more about the mission, see: https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov/news/123/how-us-indian-nisar-satellite-will-offer-unique-window-on-earth.
NISAR is being assembled at JPL, and it is unclear at this writing how the wildfires will affect its flight schedule, which had planned for a March, 2025 launch.
New NASA Administrator Selected: President-elect Trump has selected Jared Isaacman to be the next NASA Administrator, pending Congressional approval. While he has no prior government experience, he has flown in Space twice and was one of the four private citizens to make a Spacewalk, further cementing his close ties with Elon Musk and SpaceX. He is a billionaire from his on-line payment company, Shift 4, and has personally invested $27.5 million in SpaceX as of 2021. Shift 4 has also entered a five-year partnership with SpaceX’s satellite internet service, Starlink, to serve as the Starlink payment platform. The NASA Administrator’s position requires Congressional approval, pretty much assured. Isaacman did post this statement on X: “With the support of President Trump, I can promise you this: We will never again lose our ability to journey to the stars and never settle for second place.” [Who’s gonna tell him?] For more information on Isaacman and the appointment, see: https://www.npr.org/2024/12/04/nx-s1-5215889/trump-chooses-billionaire-astronaut-jared-isaacman-to-run-nasa.
NASA Puts Three on TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions List: For the past two decades, TIME Magazine selects 200 new inventions in a wide variety of fields to promote as the “best” inventions of the year. NASA placed three of the seven selected inventions in the “Aerospace” category!
NASA Deep Space Optical Communications: A test version of this device was installed on the Psyche spacecraft now en route to the asteroid Psyche. When tested last year, it achieved a data transmission rate of 267 megabits/second, in the same ballpark as internet broadband. For an example of how much of an improvement the new system could be, it could deliver ultra-high-definition video from Mars, rather than the one or two large images per day now being delivered! But wait, there’s more! Psyche uses a new type of thruster, where solar panels generate electricity which will create a strong electromatic field that accelerates xenon ions to provide thrust, rather than use a chemical reaction. It’s been tested before in Earth orbit, but Psyche’s will be the first use beyond the Moon. For more about Psyche’s new communications system, see: https://www.nasa.gov/mission/deep-space-optical-communications-dsoc and for TIME’s entry on it see: https://time.com/7094951/nasa-deep-space-optical-communications. BTW: DSOC was designed and built at JPL…!
NASA Advanced Composite Solar Sail System: Using sunlight to propel a spacecraft has been a staple of old-time science fiction for decades. NASA recently conducted a small-scale test of concept to make a solar sail-powered spacecraft a reality. Last April, the Advanced Composite Solar Sail spacecraft was launched conventionally. In August, the spacecraft, about the size of a bank box, unfurled its 860 square-foot sail and off it went. Managing a sail of that size was no mean feat, but its success paves the way for CubeSats to ply the Solar System without conventional power. Concept proved! See TIME’s Best Invention entry here: https://time.com/7094949/nasa-advanced-composite-solar-sail-system.
HST and Quasar 3C 273: The very first quasar, 3C 273, was identified in 1963 by astronomer Maarten Schmidt. It looked like a star, but its red shift indicated it was extremely far away. Its apparent brightness, combined with its distance, means it was much brighter than any star, or any entire galaxy for that matter. Schmidt called it a ‘quasi-stellar object,’ or quasar for short. Fast-forward 60+ years to today. Even though the JWST gets the lion’s share of attention to Space-borne telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope is still in productive operation, as evidenced by its recent high-resolution image of 3C 273. The key instrument involved is HST’s coronagraph, which can create the artificial eclipse of a very bright object in order to observe much fainter items nearby. We now know that the source of a quasar’s huge energy output is a gigantic galactic-core black hole assimilating a galactic-sized mass. For more information, and a look at the HST image mentioned, see: https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-takes-the-closest-ever-look-at-a-quasar . See also a previous Item of the Week about two Schmidts, one the type of a telescopic camera, the other the afore-mentioned Maarten; see here.
Apollo 12 Graphic Novel Updated! Tuesday (11/19) was the 55th anniversary of the landing on the Moon of Apollo 12’s LM, Intrepid, with astronauts Pete Conrad and Al Bean aboard. Celebrate this milestone two ways: See the two previous Items of the Week that spotlight the mission here and my personal hero, Al Bean, here. Also, check out the NASA graphic novel of the Apollo 12 mission augmented by info about Artemis (The NASA links to it are dead, but I downloaded it from Wikipedia Commons, and it is listed as being fully in the public domain; you can find it in the “Archive: Other Stuff” section of my website at: https://www.airandspacethisweek.com/otherstuff.
No Surprise Here! NASA Earns “Best Place to Work in Government for the 12th Straight Year! The Partnership for Public Service has been compiling Federal employees’ viewpoints regarding Agency leadership, work/life balance, and other job factors since 2003, and I am NOT surprised that NASA has won AGAIN. For more on PPS and their evaluation, see here.
NEW FROM NASA LINKS AND OTHER INFORMATION
JPL’s Theodore von Kármán Lecture Series is an outstanding educational resource. One recent lecture was “Shake & Bake: How Spacecraft Are Tested to Handle the Harsh Environment of Space,” mentioned below. JPL has posted 115 past von Kármán lectures, covering a wide range of topics; see: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jpl-and-the-community/lecture-series.
Preparing for Space: Space is hostile to people and equipment alike. Have you ever wondered about how NASA makes sure its spacecraft can survive and operate successful in interplanetary Space and on other planets? NASA recently streamed one of the JPL von Kármán Lecture Series entitled “Shake & Bake: How Spacecraft are Tested to Handle the Harsh Environment of Space.” The featured lecturers are Brad Kinter, a Group Supervisor in JPL’s Environmental Thermal Testing unit at JPL and Pete Landry, Systems Integration and Test Engineer at JPL. The lecture is now available on YouTube at: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/jpl-and-the-community/lecture-series/the-von-karman-lecture-series-2024/may-2024-shake-bake-how-spacecraft-are-tested-to-handle-the-harsh-environment-of-space.
Theodore von Kármán was an aerodynamics expert who came to the USA in 1930, fleeing rising tide of Nazism. He was a member of the National Academy of Science and one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The lecture series named for him routinely offers a number of interesting Space-related lectures, “Shake and Bake,” being one of the most recent. For more information on von Kármán, see: https://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/von-karman-theodore.pdf.
Did you know that NASA has an entire Scientific Visualization Studio at the Goddard Space Flight Center? The data they make relatable is really terrific, check it out at: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov.
Introducing NASA On-Demand Streaming Service: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrlDv-ts2f0&ab_channel=NASA! As only NASA can.
Latest News Releases: https://www.nasa.gov/news/releases/latest/index.html
Media Contact Info: https://www.nasa.gov/news/media/info/index.html
JPL News: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news