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Two Virginia Schools Make Final Cut in Space Station Contest

Two Hampton Roads high schools will soon have their creations judged by NASA to see if they make it aboard the International Space Station. One is a food recipe for astronauts. The other is hardware for the space station.

Students from Phoebus High School prepare their breakfast dish at HUNCH's Preliminary Culinary Challenge at NASA's Langley Research Center.

Credits: NASA/David C. Bowman

Both projects are part of a NASA program called HUNCH, or High school students United with NASA to Create Hardware.

NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, hosted a preliminary culinary challenge March 5, where two schools cooked up a breakfast entrée. The shrimp and grits with gouda cheese dish from Phoebus High School in Hampton made it to the final competition at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston scheduled for April 26.

Their work will be judged by Johnson Food Lab personnel, industry professionals, the space station program office, and astronauts for quality and taste. They’ll also be rated on a research paper and presentation video. The winning entree will be created by the Johnson Space Food Lab and sent up to the space station for astronauts to enjoy.

Space Hardware

Poquoson High School student Travis Redman, left, talks with Glenn Johnson, a design engineer at NASA's Johnson Space Center, about an astronaut boot that would lock in place preventing floating in a no gravity environment.

Credits: NASA/George Homich

Langley also hosted a critical design review March 6, when four schools showed off the real-world products they fabricated to tackle challenges faced by astronauts living in space. The team from Poquoson High School in Poquoson, Virginia, was selected as a finalist and faces a final design and prototyping review April 25 at Johnson.

The hardware includes a pin kit, can squisher, exercise harness, crew reminder tool, location app tool, and hygiene caddy. Many of the hardware projects are items personally requested by space station crew.

The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, who also presented their projects at Langley, will join Poquoson High to present their works at Johnson. The projects the team from the Durham-based school had were an augmented reality object identification annotation tool, automatic location stowage system, and a single point exercise harness.

“The HUNCH Program can change the trajectory of a student’s life, by providing various avenues beyond the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) field and opportunities to participate in the global effort to research in space,” said Yolanda Watford Simmons, manager of Langley’s HUNCH program.

In 2015, a culinary team from Phoebus High won the culinary challenge and their entrée, Jamaican rice and beans with coconut milk, is now included in an astronaut cookbook. Read more on their success here.

For more information on HUNCH, go here.

Eric Gillard NASA Langley Research Center

SAGE III Science Data Validation Efforts Begin

From its perch on the International Space Station, SAGE III is measuring stratospheric ozone as well as other gases and aerosols.

An orbiting science instrument whose legacy dates back 34 years continues to beam back data on Earth’s protective ozone layer – this time, from a perch on the hull of the International Space Station.

The Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III (SAGE III), a NASA Langley Research Center-led mission, was launched on Feb. 19, 2017 and installed on the International Space Station during a 10-day robotic operation.

Since March 2017, the instrument has been measuring and collecting data on Earth’s sunscreen, stratospheric ozone, as well as other gases and aerosols, which are tiny particles in the atmosphere at all altitudes.

The SAGE III instrument makes these measurements through occultation, which involves looking at the light from the Sun or the Moon as it passes through Earth’s atmosphere at the edge, or limb, of the planet. The initial set of atmospheric data collected from the SAGE III instrument was released publicly in October 2017, and the first lunar data was released in January 2018.

Because the SAGE III instrument makes measurements through remote sensing - collecting data from some distance away - the science validation team cannot be sure if the data they are receiving is accurate without first validating it.

To do that, SAGE III science data must be compared to in-situ measurements, or measurements made by other instruments or systems that come in direct contact with the ozone, aerosol, or gas data being collected. These in-situ measurements are collected by the Network for Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC), an international group, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, composed of research sites across the world collecting data on the Earth’s atmosphere.

“These sites have been vetted, validated, and have a long statistical history of making science measurements with their instruments,” said SAGE III Science Manager Marilee Roell.

The NDACC will collect these validated measurements through various methods, with two primary methods being through lidar - light detection and ranging - and sondes. Lidar is a ground-based measurement technique that uses a laser to shoot a beam into the Earth’s atmosphere, causing light to scatter by the atmospheric gases and particles. Being able to detect the distance to these gases and particles, the lidar can gather data on the Earth’s atmospheric composition.

Sondes are lightweight, balloon-borne instruments that are flown thousands of feet into the Earth’s atmosphere. As the instrument ascends, it transmits measurements of particle and gas concentrations by radio to a ground-based receiving station. Sondes are used daily across the globe to capture meteorological data, allowing people to check weather conditions each morning.

The science validation team is using NDACC ozone and aerosol lidar data, as well as ozone and water vapor sonde measurements, to validate science data collected from SAGE III.

“We want to match our vertical science product to an externally validated source. It helps the science community have confidence in our data set,” said Roell.

The team is working towards having an externally validated aerosol sonde to compare to the collected SAGE III data. This effort is in the preliminary stages of validating the aerosol balloon sonde against a suite of aerosol sounders, including lidar.

The team is working to validate science data with NDACC locations in Boulder, Colorado and Lauder, New Zealand, which fall within similar latitude bands in the northern and southern hemispheres. To be precise in validation efforts, the lidar or sonde measurement is taken at the same time and location that SAGE III is passing over and collecting equivalent data.

One of the most recent validation efforts took place in Table Mountain, California, and Haute Provence in France. Both locations include validated lidar systems, with lidar being operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Table Mountain, California.

Validation efforts were taken a step further by including a third source of measurements: NASA’s DC-8 aircraft. The aircraft, based out of NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, operates as a flying science laboratory. It helps validate the accuracy of other remote-sensing satellite data, such as SAGE III, and can fly under the satellite’s path to collect the same measurements.

Validating the science data using this method required SAGE III, the NASA DC-8 aircraft, and the lidar system in California or France to be taking measurements at the same time and location. The science validation team worked to have all three systems line up while taking measurements and collected some coinciding science data.

NASA also created a validation website for other NDACC sites to use. The site displays SAGE III overpasses of NDACC sites that are three weeks out or less. These sites can choose to make lidar or sonde measurements at the same time as the instrument overpass, and compare them to SAGE III data collected to see if the two sets coincide. The validation team is pursuing additional NDACC sites to coordinate overpass timeframes when the sites may be taking lidar and sonde measurements.

The SAGE III team will present initial science validation data at the European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna, Austria this April.

SAGE III is the latest in a legacy of Langley instruments that go back to the Stratospheric Aerosol Measurement (SAM), which flew on the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission. SAGE II, operational from 1984 to 2005, measured global declines in stratospheric ozone that were later shown to be caused by human-induced increases in atmospheric chlorine. Data from it and other sources led to the development of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.

After the passage of the protocol, SAGE II data also provided key evidence that the ozone layer was showing signs of recovery.

SAGE III, which launched to the station Feb. 19 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will continue to monitor that recovery, but with more of Earth’s atmosphere in its sights. SAGE II monitored only the stratosphere. SAGE III is monitoring both the stratosphere and the mesosphere, which is the layer directly above the stratosphere.

Ozone in the upper atmosphere acts as Earth’s sunscreen, protecting the surface from cancer-causing, crop-damaging ultraviolet rays. Atmospheric aerosols contribute to variability in the climate record.

Allison Leybold NASA Langley Research Center

New Gravity Map Gives Best View Yet Inside Mars

A new map of Mars' gravity made with three NASA spacecraft is the most detailed to date, providing a revealing glimpse into the hidden interior of the Red Planet.

"Gravity maps allow us to see inside a planet, just as a doctor uses an X-ray to see inside a patient," said Antonio Genova of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts. "The new gravity map will be helpful for future Mars exploration, because better knowledge of the planet's gravity anomalies helps mission controllers insert spacecraft more precisely into orbit about Mars. Furthermore, the improved resolution of our gravity map will help us understand the still-mysterious formation of specific regions of the planet." Genova, who is affiliated with MIT but is located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the lead author of a paper on this research published online March 5 in the journal Icarus.

The improved resolution of the new gravity map suggests a new explanation for how some features formed across the boundary that divides the relatively smooth northern lowlands from heavily cratered southern highlands. Also, the team confirmed that Mars has a liquid outer core of molten rock by analyzing tides in the Martian crust and mantle caused by the gravitational pull of the sun and the two moons of Mars. Finally, by observing how Mars' gravity changed over 11 years – the period of an entire cycle of solar activity -- the team inferred the massive amount of carbon dioxide that freezes out of the atmosphere onto a Martian polar ice cap when it experiences winter. They also observed how that mass moves between the south pole and the north pole with the change of season in each hemisphere.

The map was derived using Doppler and range tracking data collected by NASA's Deep Space Network from three NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars: Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), Mars Odyssey (ODY), and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Like all planets, Mars is lumpy, which causes the gravitational pull felt by spacecraft in orbit around it to change. For example, the pull will be a bit stronger over a mountain, and slightly weaker over a canyon.

Slight differences in Mars' gravity changed the trajectory of the NASA spacecraft orbiting the planet, which altered the signal being sent from the spacecraft to the Deep Space Network. These small fluctuations in the orbital data were used to build a map of the Martian gravity field.

The gravity field was recovered using about 16 years of data that were continuously collected in orbit around Mars. However, orbital changes from uneven gravity are tiny, and other forces that can perturb the motion of the spacecraft had to be carefully accounted for, such as the force of sunlight on the spacecraft's solar panels and drag from the Red Planet's thin upper atmosphere. It took two years of analysis and computer modeling to remove the motion not caused by gravity.

"With this new map, we've been able to see gravity anomalies as small as about 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) across, and we've determined the crustal thickness of Mars with a resolution of around 120 kilometers (almost 75 miles)," said Genova. "The better resolution of the new map helps interpret how the crust of the planet changed over Mars' history in many regions."

For example, an area of lower gravity between Acidalia Planitia and Tempe Terra was interpreted before as a system of buried channels that delivered water and sediments from Mars' southern highlands into the northern lowlands billions of years ago when the Martian climate was wetter than it is today. The new map reveals that this low gravity anomaly is definitely larger and follows the boundary between the highlands and the lowlands. This system of gravity troughs is unlikely to be only due to buried channels because in places the region is elevated above the surrounding plains. The new gravity map shows that some of these features run perpendicular to the local topography slope, against what would have been the natural downhill flow of water.

An alternative explanation is that this anomaly may be a consequence of a flexure or bending of the lithosphere -- the strong, outermost layer of the planet -- due to the formation of the Tharsis region. Tharsis is a volcanic plateau on Mars thousands of miles across with the largest volcanoes in the solar system. As the Tharsis volcanoes grew, the surrounding lithosphere buckled under their immense weight.

The new gravity field also allowed the team to confirm indications from previous gravity solutions that Mars has a liquid outer core of molten rock. The new gravity solution improved the measurement of the Martian tides, which will be used by geophysicists to improve the model of Mars' interior.

Changes in Martian gravity over time have been previously measured using the MGS and ODY missions to monitor the polar ice caps. For the first time, the team used MRO data to continue monitoring their mass. The team has determined that when one hemisphere experiences winter, approximately 3 trillion to 4 trillion tons of carbon dioxide freezes out of the atmosphere onto the northern and southern polar caps, respectively. This is about 12 to 16 percent of the mass of the entire Martian atmosphere. NASA's Viking missions first observed this massive seasonal precipitation of carbon dioxide. The new observation confirms numerical predictions from the Mars Global Reference Atmospheric Model – 2010.

The research was funded by grants from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission and NASA's Mars Data Analysis Program.

Bill Steigerwald

Why We Celebrate Search and Rescue Technologies on 4/06

Today (4/06), we celebrate the special radio frequency transmitted by emergency beacons to the international search and rescue network. 

This 406 MHz frequency, used only for search and rescue, can be “heard” by satellites hundreds of miles above the ground! The satellites then “forward” the location of the beacon back to Earth, helping first responders locate people in distress worldwide, whether from a plane crash, a boating accident or other emergencies.

Our Search and Rescue office, based out of our Goddard Space Flight Center, researches and develops emergency beacon technology, passing the technology to companies who manufacture the beacons, making them available to the public at retail stores. The beacons are designed for personal, maritime and aviation use.

The search and rescue network, Cospas-Sarsat, is an international program that ensures the compatibility of distress alert services with the needs of users. Its current space segment relies on instruments onboard low-Earth and geosynchronous orbiting satellites, hundreds to thousands of miles above us. 

Space instruments forward distress signals to the search and rescue ground segment, which is operated by partner organizations around the world! They manage specific regions of the ground network. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operates the region containing the United States, which reaches across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as well as parts of Central and South America.

NOAA notifies organizations that coordinate search and rescue efforts of a 406 MHz distress beacon’s activation and location. Within the U.S., the U.S. Air Force responds to land-based emergencies and the U.S. Coast Guard responds to water-based emergencies. Local public service organizations like police and fire departments, as well as civilian volunteers, serve as first responders.

Here at NASA, we research, design and test search and rescue instruments and beacons to refine the existing network. Aeronautical beacon tests took place at our Langley Research Center in 2015. Using a 240-foot-high structure originally used to test Apollo spacecraft, our Search and Rescue team crashed three planes to test the survivability of these beacons, developing guidelines for manufacturers and installation into aircraft.

In the future, first responders will rely on a new constellation of search and rescue instruments on GPS systems on satellites in medium-Earth orbit, not hundreds, but THOUSANDS of miles overhead. These new instruments will enable the search and rescue network to locate a distress signal more quickly than the current system and achieve accuracy an order of magnitude better, from a half mile to approximately 300 feet. Our Search and Rescue office is developing second-generation 406 MHz beacons that make full use of this new system.

We will also incorporate these second-generation beacons into the Orion Crew Survival System. The Advanced Next-Generation Emergency Locator (ANGEL) beacons will be attached to astronaut life preservers. After splashdown, if the Orion crew exits the capsule due to an emergency, these beacons will make sure we know the exact location of floating astronauts! Our Johnson Space Center is testing this technology for used in future human spaceflight and exploration missions.

If you’re the owner of an emergency beacon, remember that beacon registration is free, easy and required by law. 

To register your beacon, visit: beaconregistration.noaa.gov

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The Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) is one of the largest buildings in the world (525 ft 10 in tall, 716 ft long, and 518 ft wide) . It was originally built for assembly of Apollo/Saturn vehicles and was later modified to support Space Shuttle operations and now, Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft for Exploration Mission 1.

In this view looking up from the floor of the VAB at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, four levels of new work platforms are now installed on the north and south sides of High Bay 3. The G-level work platforms were most recently installed, at about the 14th floor level. Below them are the H, J and K level platforms.

The G-level work platforms are the fourth of 10 levels of work platforms that will surround and provide access to SLS. The Ground Systems Development and Operations Program is overseeing upgrades and modifications to VAB High Bay 3, including installation of the new work platforms, to prepare for NASA’s journey to Mars.

Just me meeting my hero Katherine Johnson after interviewing her in the newsroom for another article I’m writing. nbd ((VERY BIG DEAL)) •🚀•🚀• Katherine G. Johnson is a pioneer in American space history. A NASA mathematician, Johnson’s computations have influenced every major space program from Mercury through the Shuttle. She even calculated the flight path for the first American mission space. In 1953, Johnson was contracted as a research mathematician at the Langley Research Center with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the agency that preceded NASA. She worked in a pool of women performing math calculations until she was temporarily assigned to help the all-male flight research team, and wound up staying there. Johnson’s specialty was calculating the trajectories for space shots which determined the timing for launches, including the Mercury mission and Apollo 11, the mission to the moon. (at NASA Langley Research Center)

Apollo 10 Audio — Publicly Available Since 1970s

Recent news articles have reported that “newly declassified” audiotapes reveal that Apollo 10 astronauts heard “outer-spacey” music as the spacecraft flew around the far side of the moon in 1969. 

Here are the facts:

While listed as ‘confidential’ in 1969 at the height of the Space Race, Apollo 10 mission transcripts and audio have been publicly available since 1973.  Since the Internet did not exist in the Apollo era, we have only recently provided digital files for some of those earlier missions. The Apollo 10 audio clips were uploaded in 2012, but the mission’s audio recordings have been available at the National Archives since the early 1970s.

As for the likely source of the sounds, Apollo 10 Lunar Module Pilot Gene Cernan told us on Monday, ‘I don’t remember that incident exciting me enough to take it seriously. It was probably just radio interference. Had we thought it was something other than that we would have briefed everyone after the flight. We never gave it another thought.’

If you’d like to listen to the audio file, it is available HERE (starting at 2:50). 

The full transcript is available HERE.

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Learn more about the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) at: http://tess.gsfc.nasa.gov/ 

Watch live coverage of today’s (Wed. April 18, 2018) launch at: http://www.nasa.gov/nasalive/

The James Webb Space Telescope

Like your backyard telescope, just MUCH more powerful

In 2018, we’re launching the world’s biggest space telescope ever - the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb will look back in time, studying the very first galaxies ever formed. While Webb doesn’t have a tube like your typical backyard telescope, because it’s also a reflector telescope it has many of the same parts! Webb has mirrors (including a primary and a secondary) just like a small reflector telescope, only its mirrors are massive (6.5 meters across) and coated in gold (which helps us reflect infrared light).

How does a reflector telescope work? Light is bounced from the primary to the smaller secondary mirror, and then directed to your eye:

Webb works pretty much the same way!

Taking the place of your eye to the eyepiece is a package of science instruments, including cameras and spectrographs, which will capture the light directed into them by the telescope’s mirrors.    

In order to install these instruments, we had to move the telescope structure upside down… an impressive sight!

Once Webb was in place on the assembly stand in the cleanroom, the team at Goddard Space Flight Center installed the instrument module (which we call the ISIM, or Integrated Science Instrument Module), with surgical precision. ISIM has four instruments, three of which were contributed by our partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. 

All four will detect infrared light from stars and galaxies as far away as 13.6 billion light years. In addition to seeing these first sources of light in the early Universe, Webb will look at stars and planetary systems being formed in clouds of dust and gas. It will also examine the atmospheres of planets around other stars – perhaps we will find an atmosphere similar to Earth’s!

Here is an image with the science instruments being lowered into their spot behind the primary mirror. You can see the golden mirror is face-down.

Here’s another perspective of the instruments being fit into the telescope. 

What you’ve seen come together above is just the telescope part of the James Webb Space Telescope mission – next comes putting together the rest of the observatory. This includes our massive tennis court-sized sunshield (which acts like the tube-part of your backyard telescope, protecting the mirrors from stray light and heat), as well as the parts that do things like power the telescope and let us communicate with it.

It actually takes several weeks for Webb to completely unfold into its full deployment!

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for updates on our progress. You can also visit our site for more information: http://jwst.nasa.gov

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Photo Credit #1: NASA/Chris Gunn. Photo Credit #2: NASA/Desiree Stover

NASA Invites Public to Send Artwork to an Asteroid

NASA is calling all space enthusiasts to send their artistic endeavors on a journey aboard NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft. This will be the first U.S. mission to collect a sample of an asteroid and return it to Earth for study.

OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to launch in September and travel to the asteroid Bennu. The #WeTheExplorers campaign invites the public to take part in this mission by expressing, through art, how the mission’s spirit of exploration is reflected in their own lives. Submitted works of art will be saved on a chip on the spacecraft. The spacecraft already carries a chip with more than 442,000 names submitted through the 2014 “Messages to Bennu” campaign.

“The development of the spacecraft and instruments has been a hugely creative process, where ultimately the canvas is the machined metal and composites preparing for launch in September,” said Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It is fitting that this endeavor can inspire the public to express their creativity to be carried by OSIRIS-REx into space.”

A submission may take the form of a sketch, photograph, graphic, poem, song, short video or other creative or artistic expression that reflects what it means to be an explorer. Submissions will be accepted via Twitter and Instagram until March 20. For details on how to include your submission on the mission to Bennu, go to:

http://www.asteroidmission.org/WeTheExplorers

“Space exploration is an inherently creative activity,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “We are inviting the world to join us on this great adventure by placing their art work on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, where it will stay in space for millennia.”

The spacecraft will voyage to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu to collect a sample of at least 60 grams (2.1 ounces) and return it to Earth for study. Scientists expect Bennu may hold clues to the origin of the solar system and the source of the water and organic molecules that may have made their way to Earth.

Goddard provides overall mission management, systems engineering and safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. The University of Arizona, Tucson leads the science team and observation planning and processing. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver is building the spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program.  NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages New Frontiers for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information on OSIRIS-Rex, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex