NASA

1 Min Read Coming Spring 2025: Planetary Defenders Documentary David Rankin, Senior Survey Operations Specialist at Catalina Sky Survey, is seen opening the dome structure surrounding the telescope at the asteroid-hunting facility in Mt. Lemmon, AZ. Credits: NASA How would humanity respond if we discovered an asteroid headed for Earth? NASA’s Planetary Defenders is a gripping documentary that delves into the high-stakes world of asteroid detection and planetary defense. Journey alongside a dedicated team of astronomers and scientists working tirelessly to track and monitor near-Earth asteroids, aiming to protect our planet from potential impacts. This documentary captures the intricate and collaborative efforts of these unsung heroes, blending cutting-edge science with personal stories to reveal the human spirit behind this critical global endeavor. Witness the drama, the challenges and the triumphs of those on the front lines of planetary defense. The dinosaurs went extinct because they didn’t have a space program. We do have one. Dr. vishnu reddy Professor of Planetary Science, University of Arizona Dr. Shantanu Naidu, Asteroid Radar Researcher, from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory points toward the Goldstone Solar System Radar in Barstow, CA – the most powerful planetary radar on Earth. NASA In 2016, NASA established the Planetary Defense Coordination Office (PDCO) to manage the agency’s ongoing mission of finding, tracking, and better understanding asteroids and comets that could pose an impact hazard to Earth. I really like that I am protecting the planet. And yes, I’m not the one that’s with a cape pushing the asteroid away, that’s not what I do. In some ways, my little contribution might not help just myself, but someone in the future, and I think it’s very important to do that. Dr. CASSANDRA LEJOLY RESEARCHER, SPACEWATCH® Dr. Cassandra Lejoly, a researcher with the University of Arizona’s SPACEWATCH® program, sits at a computer console at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tuscon, AZ, where she conducts follow up observations on near-Earth objects. NASA Planetary Defenders is an original NASA documentary that showcases the challenges and the triumphs of those on the front lines of planetary defense. This documentary will be released on NASA+ and other streaming platforms in Spring 2025. Stay tuned for updates! About the Author efurfaro Share Details Last Updated Dec 03, 2024 Related Terms Planetary Defense Planetary Defense Coordination Office Science Mission Directorate Explore More 5 min read NASA-Led Team Links Comet Water to Earth’s Oceans Scientists find that cometary dust affects interpretation of spacecraft measurements, reopening the case for comets… Article 49 mins ago 2 min read Hubble Captures an Edge-On Spiral with Curve Appeal Article 2 weeks ago 5 min read NASA’s Hubble Finds Sizzling Details About Young Star FU Orionis Article 2 weeks ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Missions Humans in Space Climate Change Solar System View the full article

7 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) As the program manager for people, culture and equity, “people whisperer” Edward Victor Gonzales helps ensure people’s wellbeing, comfort, and safety. Name: Edward Victor Gonzales Title: Program Manager for People, Culture, and Equity Organization: Heliophysics Division, Science and Exploration Directorate (Code 670) Eddie Gonzales is the program manager for People, Culture, and Equity for the Heliophysics Division at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.NASA What do you do and what is most interesting about your role here at Goddard? As the program manager for people, culture, and equity officer for heliophysics, I am responsible for people’s wellbeing, comfort, and safety. What is most interesting to me is the vast diversity across Goddard. How did you come to Goddard? I went to college late in life, but never graduated. After high school, I started at Mount San Antonio Community College in Walnut, California, but had to work full time when my then-girlfriend became pregnant. I started in the mail room of an international law firm, gradually working my way into director of the support staff. I worked there for 15 years, often staying overnight. I could not attend night school and there were no online learning options at the time. In 2001, Warren Christopher, who was the managing partner at the law firm and later became secretary of state in the Clinton administration, wrote me a recommendation that helped me get a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California as a business administrator. Apollo 13 inspired me to want to work for NASA. After obtaining the job at NASA JPL, I took a few classes at Pasadena Community College. In 2009, I was detailed to NASA Headquarters to work in the Office of STEM Education. After two years, I returned to JPL to work on minority-serving programs. In 2014, I returned to Headquarters for a fellowship to work in the Minority University Research Educational Programs. After a year and a half, I returned to JPL to manage underserved, underrepresented undergraduate programs. In 2018, I came to Goddard to do outreach for NASA Goddard’s heliophysics division. Three years later, I became the diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility officer for heliophysics and now, my current role as people, culture, and equity officer. As the people, culture, and equity officer, what are your responsibilities? First, I observe. There are a lot of cues and things that happen in the world that others, including leadership, can sometimes miss. We need to be conscious of these things. We need to be respectful and kind — always. When something happens in the world that impacts a colleague, I make sure to check in with them daily. On a broader scale, when something happens in the world that affects a particular culture, I check in with that particular group. I also go to underserved, underrepresented national conferences across the country. At the American Indian Science and Engineering Society conference, I talked about employment opportunities at NASA. It was important for those students to see someone who looked like them. I am half Native American and half Latinx [a gender-neutral term for those with Latin American heritage]. “I was labeled a troublemaker. Teachers wouldn’t help me. My career counselor said I would do amazing work at a car wash and that’s what I should consider doing and not to continue my education. But I didn’t listen.” — Edward Gonzales, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Lead, Goddard Space Flight CenterNASA/Taylor Mickal In August 2024, the NASA administrator appointed you to the NASA Advisory Council. What do your duties there entail? The council has five committees: aeronautics, human exploration, science, STEM, and technology. I am a member of the science committee. My plan is to discuss the cultural role we all play at NASA. What skills do you use in speaking with underserved, underrepresented communities? I test the waters and the temperature of leadership. I am very active with the employees. I have an open-door policy. In addition, I think I am highly culturally aware overall. At conferences, I try to dress, speak, and act approachably for the students who attend. Most importantly, my cell phone is never to be seen. When interacting with someone, I am very observant of the other person’s body language overall, which helps me understand the other person better. Sometimes body language rather than words will tell you what you need to hear. My wife calls me a “people whisperer.” What does cultural awareness mean to you? Know your audience. I do not think about how I do things: I focus on how the next generation will do things. I try to speak their language. And listen, very important to listen. Typically, when I go to a national conference, students will approach me with a résumé. But at a Native American national conference, the elders may approach me with a student and a résumé. It is important to address the elder first and ask permission to speak to the student. Also, you would say that the student could bring knowledge learned at Goddard back to their reservation instead of saying that the student could leave their reservation. I also always acknowledge the tribe associated with where I am speaking. Whenever we send a team to a national conference, we send people who are culturally aware of that particular group’s culture. I also conduct cultural awareness training at Goddard. What are your hopes for Godard’s DEIA programs? I want to continue to create a pipeline of future employees that is more diverse, filled with great ideas and solutions, with a safe and welcoming environment for them. What advice do you give students? The path to NASA is not linear. You have to find your path. Eddie Gonzales looks out for colleagues wellbeing, comfort, and safety within NASA Goddard’s diverse workforce. Courtesy of Eddie Gonzales You’ve mentioned that DEIA is essentially about kindness. How do you define kindness? How do you teach it? Kindness in my humble opinion is about grace, integrity and understanding. And the willingness to learn about others and their cultures. To agree to disagree and have a polite conversation, to create that understanding. Teaching starts in the home, bad behavior, lack of understanding and racism are taught traits. We must do better and lead by example. To treat others how we want to be treated. Who are your mentors? One is Christopher Gardner, whose life was portrayed in “The Pursuit of Happyness.” I recently brought Christopher Gardner to Goddard to do a keynote speech and he even stayed with me. I met him because I saw his movie, read his book, and contacted him. I teach this lesson to students: Everyone is interested when you take the time to learn what is important to them. If there is someone you want to meet, network to try to meet them. All you have to do is ask. But first, research them so that you can talk to them about themselves and their work. If they say no, then you can move on to the next person. Gardner told me to focus on my plan A because plan B is not good. If you know that you have a plan B, then you won’t put everything you have into plan A. Tread forward as if there is nothing that you can fall back on. Another mentor is José Hernández, the first Hispanic astronaut. I proposed to my wife while staying at his condo. He told me to find my “yes” and to never give up. He applied to the astronaut program 13 times before he was finally selected. What are the next big things on your bucket list? I want to see the Northern Lights and continue to travel. I just lost 70 pounds and want to lose 20 more. I gave up meat for about six months and now eat chicken and turkey, but no longer eat red meat. I also exercise and now feel great. I want to continue to attend concerts around the country. By Elizabeth M. Jarrell NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Conversations With Goddard is a collection of Q&A profiles highlighting the breadth and depth of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s talented and diverse workforce. The Conversations have been published twice a month on average since May 2011. Read past editions on Goddard’s “Our People” webpage. Share Details Last Updated Dec 03, 2024 Related TermsPeople of GoddardGoddard Space Flight CenterPeople of NASA Explore More 6 min read Alfonso Delgado Bonal Has His Head in the Clouds — for Research Article 7 days ago 5 min read NASA Data Reveals Role of Green Spaces in Cooling Cities As any urban dweller who has lived through a heat wave knows, a shady tree… Article 1 week ago 3 min read Emerging Engineering Leader Basil Baldauff Emphasizes Osage Values Article 1 week ago View the full article

Let’s begin by Inquiring into your early years, your childhood, where you were born, where you grew up, what your family was like? Do you have siblings? What did your parents do, and how young were you when you developed an interest in what has become your career? I was born in Boston. My mom lived in Vermont at the time, so it’s kind of a home state. We moved to the Washington DC area, to Alexandria, when I was about four. I have a brother whose name is Ian. He is not quite 2 years older than I am. He lives in Maine. Unfortunately, my mom, my father, and my stepfather, I’ll talk all about them, none of them are with us anymore. When my mom lived in Vermont, she was a postal carrier but was dissatisfied with that life. She had been an executive at the age of 22 In New York City, in the early 1960’s, which was very unusual at the time. She worked for the Wool Bureau. For the what bureau? The Wool Bureau? I didn’t know there was one. You’ve seen the wool label in wool clothes? The one that says “It’s Real Wool”? Well, that’s her. She actually made that happen. She’s the one who turned that into a nationwide thing. Anyway, she and my father parted ways when I was quite young, so she was a single mother and decided that she was going to take a one way trip to Virginia to throw herself into the mill there. She started a newsletter as a single parent with two little kids. I was five years old when Star Wars came out. The movie had a pretty significant effect on my life, particularly given that the main character has the same name I do. But my first inkling that I wanted to do something associated with the stars and space exploration may have actually come a little bit before that, when I was four. One day we were at a laundromat, and I was left in the back of the station wagon. Let’s remember that this was the ‘70s. My mom had some library books in the car, and there was this book on astronomy. I was young enough at the time that reading for me was still very new, and I looked at big paragraphs as scary things. I remember just looking at the pictures of the stars and thinking how wonderful it all was. And by the time I was nine years old it was all over and I wanted to be – am I really going say this to the whole world? – I wanted to be a scientist, an engineer, and an astronaut. All those things. What’s the matter with saying that to the whole world? Those are laudable goals. What I wanted to do at such an early age seems embarrassing but the fun part is I’ve actually gotten two of the three. Yes! I suppose I’ve made my peace with it all. I had figured out very early that I wanted to be in science, but my stepfather didn’t think much of it. He used to tell me things like “a physicist is a boy with a toy” and other disparaging things about my chosen vocation. We moved from Alexandria to Calvert County, Maryland, and I lived there from the age of 9 to 14. So I spent those really formative years in what I felt as a kid to be a very boring part of the world with not a lot of friends, and I was an intense geek at the time. Being a geek is OK now, being a nerd is cool, right? We’re all nerds. That wasn’t true when I was ten, and so I didn’t have the best time growing up. I was so dissatisfied with life in Calvert County that I decided I was going to get the heck out of Dodge and go to college, and so I did that at the age of 14 by going to Simon’s Rock College in Western Massachusetts. I was there for two years and then I went to the University of Maryland. But there was a little problem for me, going to college at 14: I’d never done homework. Homework wasn’t a thing for me. I didn’t care. If you’re in college and you sit down at the physics class, I was the kid that you despised because I was the kid that would come in, take the test, and ace it, having never done anything. Well, let me interrupt because you mentioned that you went to college at age 14 and I was about to ask if you were in Mensa or something? Because that’s quite an accomplishment to be able to do that. And then you said you didn’t do any homework, and that’s even more amazing. So how did that come about? Do you just have natural ability? Truth is, I was actually bored and it was kind of unhealthy. The not doing homework thing is really bad, you don’t want to do that. I got over it later, I’ll come to that, but I’ve learned lots of lessons on the way, chief of which is that brains are neither necessary nor sufficient a condition to do great things in life. It helps, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient. Anyway, I was never in Mensa, I never bothered with Mensa. I went to one Mensa meeting and I found it impossibly boring. So yeah, I was a little bit weird. I was a little bit of a mutant in school but truth is, I was terribly bored and I only started doing better in school when they skipped me a grade and started letting me skip ahead and do other things. I started doing summer programs with the Center for Advancement of Academically Talented Youth (CTY). They sent me to Arizona State University for a summer. I went to Franklin and Marshall University in Pennsylvania the following summer. I learned Greek. After that I went to the Rock, but when I was 16, I went to the University of Maryland as a junior . . . and promptly fell apart because you can get away with what I did for only so long. Not doing homework might have worked in the introductory physics classes, but once I got into the upper division classes, that’s when reality hit and it hit hard. I was weeded out. I flunked out of physics. I did. My last semester as a physics major the first time around I had a C, a D and an F on my transcript in physics. I got a C in quantum mechanics, largely because the professor was being kind. I got a D in electricity and magnetism because that’s what I deserved, and I got an F in my lab class. My lab class! Remember that one for later, because I absolutely deserved it. I did nothing. I was horrible. I was really out of it. You have more than the average number of degrees, so I’m trying to put this all together. You’re going to walk us through how that all came about, right? How despite all this you are very well credentialed? Yeah, I can do that. So I got the C, D and the F and my stepfather, who never wanted me to be a physicist anyway, took the opportunity, since I’d been in college for 4 1/2 years, to apply a little pressure. And so he said to me: “You will graduate by the end of the year or you’re just out. We’re not paying for you anymore.” And I said (to myself), “Well, I want to graduate, so what can I graduate in?” And I thought, I can graduate in German, because in addition to physics, I had also been taking German classes. I’ve also studied Russian, Latin, Greek, Gothic and Middle High German. So I know a very little bit of a whole bunch of languages, but I love language. Language is great! Let me jump in here again because I saw that German was one of your B.A. degrees and I thought, well maybe you have German ancestry and you were trying to connect in that way with your family history? Nope. The closest my family gets to Germany is that my grandfather’s parents came from Brest-Litovsk, in what is now Belarus near the Polish border. It was invaded by Germany. They were Jews. Well, that wasn’t what I was thinking. I thought perhaps Sollitt might be a German name. But anyway, this is very impressive. Please continue. OK. Well so I flunked out and I thought, well, I can get a degree in German because I’ve been studying German. I started taking German when I was 12 or something, 11 or 12, and I kept at it. Then I did Russian for a couple of years. I did German when I transferred to University of Maryland, so I said “I can do that”. I had to take all the senior level requirements in a single semester. The chairman of the department said, “I don’t think you’re going to make it” but I did and he wasn’t very happy: I didn’t do any homework. It wasn’t a big deal to take a couple of summer classes, and then I was out. I got my degree in German, a degree that I had never wanted. I had wanted a physics degree. And I was 19, I had just turned 19. I was, in fact, a little disappointed that I didn’t get my degree at age 18, but I got it at 19, and graduated in August of 1990. That was right around the time when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and we had the biggest recession since the Great Depression, and you had Harvard graduates waiting tables in Boston, that was all they could get. That was the environment into which I graduated with my unwanted degree in German with, you know, some lousy grades, although my GPA wasn’t awful. My first job was doing temp work for WFTY-TV channel 50. I did accounts receivable. I worked with a temp agency and I had to learn the job of accounts receivable by taking the test to see if I could do the job. So I thought “I don’t know how to do this, but OK, I’ll take the test.” It’s like this is how you do this and that’s how you do that, so OK, you can do receivables now! I worked for them for a couple months and then I went through the Administrative Careers with America test, a very, very brief resurrection of the Civil Service Exam. And very foolishly, where it said you can indicate where you’re willing to work, for some insane reason, I said “Los Angeles.” I’d never been there but it sounded like fun. So I put that down as a potential location, with a bunch of other places, and the only offer I got was from the Internal Revenue Service in the Los Angeles district. I read about the IRS in your bio, and I was going to ask about it, so please tell us about that experience. I was employed as a Revenue Officer. It so doesn’t fit with what you’ve been telling us about who you are. But go ahead (laughs). Let’s just say it’s been a circuitous route! I joined the IRS as a Revenue Officer in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, thanking my lucky stars that I had an actual job. And it was for a rather miserable salary that I drove my mom’s car across the country to get there. A Revenue Officer is the person who knocks on doors and collects the taxes. I was hired as a GS-7. This was not a job that I liked. In fact, it was a job I viscerally hated but I did this job for nearly 4 1/2 years of my life. It taught me some really important lessons. My first lesson came on the very first day, when I attended a training session for hundreds of people (there had been a huge District-wide hire). About the first thing the first speaker said was that because we are now in the government, we must not only avoid impropriety, but the very appearance of impropriety. And that is something that I have lived by ever since. I think it’s the way you must be. I was in what they sometimes call retail government. My job was to literally go knock on doors of delinquent taxpayers and say, “Hi, you owe the government money or there are government tax returns that you haven’t filed”. I would do this driving my own car. And back in 1991, when I started, April of 1991, I was 19 years old. One taxpayer joked that he didn’t realize that the IRS was hiring from high school these days! (laughs) Yeah, I looked pretty young. I started off wearing a suit and tie and the whole bit with the badge and everything. Everybody was terrified of me. So I ditched the suit. I ditched the tie. I grew my hair out. I wore rumpled blue jeans and a rumpled shirt. I mean, I looked terrible. But everybody talked to me. I never brought out the pocket commission unless I had to. And what I found was that I ended up being really, really good at the job. I was the number two rated Revenue Officer at GS-9, the year I was rated in the district. The first-rated GS-9 Revenue Officer in LA District that year was a really nice lady named Gail, a really neat lady, a grandmother. As a Revenue Officer, my attitude was markedly different from many. I didn’t approach delinquent taxpayers as, well, delinquents. I just went there thinking that they were people with a problem that needed to get fixed. My attitude was, “Hi, I’m from the IRS, I’m here to help, and I’m serious. Let me help you”. I never, ever, ever wanted to seize things. I never seized a car. I never seized a house. Other people did. They were keen to do it but I wasn’t. I managed to avoid all that stuff by basically dealing with taxpayers like real people. And I ended up closing tons and tons and tons of cases, something like three or four times as many cases as the next person in my group, because of the way I dealt with people, treating them differently, respectfully. I got my GS-11 at the age of 22. I was the youngest GS-11 that anyone could think of, and one day one of my co-workers said that I would eventually be the Assistant Commissioner of the IRS. That idea filled me with dread… But I mean no disrespect to the hardworking Revenue Officers and others at the IRS – their job is truly thankless, but so utterly necessary. So I was doing the job, although I despised it, and then one of the best jobs in the IRS came up, which was to do the exact same job for the International District. I transferred to L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC and International sent me as far as eastern Canada for my first training trip. I went from Montreal to Quebec City to New Brunswick to Halifax to Prince Edward Island to Newfoundland. What a great trip. It was wonderful. I met interesting new people and it’s a very different sort of thing there because you have no enforcement authority whatsoever. You basically have to ask very nicely, but I was pretty good at that because that’s how I did my job in LA. Had people gone there to escape the oversight of the IRS? No, it’s not that they were trying to escape the long arm of the IRS, it’s just that people who live abroad still have U.S. tax obligations. They still have to pay tax on their worldwide income, whether they live in America or live outside of America. A U.S. citizen living in Canada still has to file a U.S. tax return, and they run into tax trouble, too. But you were talking about enforcement authority. You don’t have it in Canada or overseas, right? Yeah, the way it works is the revenue officer gets a case once it’s been through the automated collection system. Automated collection systems are at the big IRS centers and they’re the ones who make the phone calls, send the registered letters, and all that stuff. I’m not sure what they do today. This was 30 years ago. And once the automated collection system runs through all the stuff they do, they ship it out to revenue officers who go and knock on the doors and say “You need to talk to me”. And if they get ignored, or they don’t comply with the agreements that they make with the revenue officer, which would have to be signed off by group managers, then the Revenue Officer can take action under civil enforcement authority. Civil enforcement authority includes things like seizures and levies. You can levy wages, you can levy bank accounts, you can levy rents. You can levy any form of income, any asset. You can place a notice of federal tax lien on the person, which then attaches to all their real estate. You can actually make seizures of anything a taxpayer owns. If they have nice artwork, you can seize that, too. It’s a lot of power, and to be honest it’s pretty scary. But the reason you can do that is because the long arm of federal law exists throughout the country. When you go to a place like Canada, you’re way past federal law. You can’t seize anything or levy anything unless there’s a tax treaty with that country. And if there is, then you can do things according to the way the treaty is written. I think in Canada that enforcement was done through requests to Revenue Canada. But to first order, you have no power in Canada, so what you’re reduced to is “Let’s try to make this work”, because if you have somebody who’s been living in Canada for 40 years and doesn’t want to go back, well, then their obvious move is to renounce U.S. citizenship and tell you to go away. That’s if they never want to go back, if they don’t care about their U.S. citizenship. But most folks do. Anyway, so I did that trip and I was planning my next one, until one day, and you have to understand I went to the University of Maryland in College Park, which is literally down the road from L’Enfant Plaza. It’s like 10 miles away or so, and I was back in familiar areas. In fact, I grew up in the area when I lived in Maryland and Alexandria, so I knew the place really, really well. I was living on Capitol Hill at the time. And one day, I’m not kidding here, at International, I was literally sitting at my desk scribbling physics equations, just like the Gary Larson cartoon (The Far Side): “What’s this? Jenkins, physics equations? Do you enjoy your job here as a cartoonist?” The cartoon character Jenkins, was literally me. I was scribbling physics equations, and I looked down and I said, “Oh, God, I really have unfinished business”. So I went right up to the University of Maryland, to my old faculty advisor, a guy named Joe Redish. And I marched into his office, waved my hand, and said “Hi, Joe. How do I restart? How do I get back in? What do I do?” And he started off listing books for me on how to get ready for it, saying “Do this book, do that book”. And then he stopped, thought about it for a moment, and said “No, forget all that. Go get the Feynman Lectures on Physics and give them a read.” And I said “OK, sure”. So I got the Feynman Lectures on Physics and started reading them. They’re brilliant. I mean brilliant. I’m sure they are. But they’re not effective if you’re learning physics for the first time. It’s the last thing you want to do. It is effective if you’re doing something like what I was doing, which is getting back into the field or getting a different perspective, or as a great reference book. They’re wonderful for the right purposes, and I started reading the Feynman lectures that summer. I read them every day, all day. I read them on the subway to and from work. I read them on lunch hour. I read them on breaks. And as I read the lectures, I finally decided that I had to see about going back to school. So I went back up to the University of Maryland, walked into the registrar’s office and said “OK, I graduated a bunch of years ago and I want to come back. What’s the process?” And they said, “Well, here’s a 3×5 card. Fill it out, please.” So I filled it out and handed it back to them, and they said “You’re in!” And I said, “What? That’s it?” I just filled out a 3×5 card and then arranged for student loans. I told my mom what I was doing – I was talking to her about returning to physics before I re-enrolled. She was very, very supportive of my going back to get my physics degree. It was unfinished business. But I didn’t tell my stepfather right away because I knew he wouldn’t approve. I knew I would have to tell him eventually. My opportunity came on Father’s Day, 1995. By this time, my Mom and stepfather had divorced. But it was a crowded affair: my step-siblings were there with spouses and families, other friends were there. And I finally announced to everyone what I was going to do at the end of summer, which was leave the IRS and go back to school to get my degree in physics. Everybody in the room congratulated me, saying what a wonderful idea that was, and isn’t that great. Except my stepfather. He didn’t say a word. I knew he would not be happy about this – especially the way I ambushed him with it, in front of this huge crowd. But I knew that I absolutely had to present my decision as a fait accompli: if I had gone to him to tell him I was thinking about doing this, he would have been on me until I dropped it. At the end of the day I was the last person there and he walked up to me and he said, “I don’t know how to react to this news, that you’re going back to school. It’s as if you’ve told me that you’re quitting your successful government career to go back and study remedial English”. That’s a quote. Oh my! Yeah. So it wasn’t just a matter that he was paying for your education. He really objected to what you wanted to become through your education. Yes, that’s why he would say things like “A physicist is a boy with a toy”. He saw physicists as unserious, as non-intellectuals, which is a huge mistake. I should say. But I went back and set myself a goal. Now you remember those classes that I got the C, the D, and the F in? I registered for the same three classes and the graduate secretary told me “You can’t do that. It’s too much work. You’re going to die!” But I thought that I needed to do it and I knew if I got 3 A’s I was doing the right thing. If I got one A or less, I knew that at least I’d given it the good college try. I’d gone back and addressed this one great failure in my life, one that made my whole life feel incomplete. At least I’d done it and I could move on to other things in life now and not worry about it anymore. If I got two A’s, I didn’t know what it would mean, but if I got three A’s, I knew it was cool. So I went back and within two weeks, I was just drowning in the work. It turns out there’s a Physics Class Invariance Principle: every upper division undergraduate physics class takes 20 hours of homework per week. 20 hours, plus all the time that you’re in class. Three classes means 60 hours of work per week, more than a full-time job. But my attitude was very different in that I now had five years of work experience under my belt. I had been away from physics for five years when I went back and my attitude was that I went to Maryland in the morning and my classes were just part of my work day. I spent the rest of the day working in the library and other places at Maryland, and I went home at night, and was done, except when I started having experiments. I remember that first semester I was in the advanced undergraduate lab, the one I had got the F in, and something had changed. Suddenly, it was my favorite class! I had the exact same lab manual, and I despised it just as much the second time around. Only this time I had enough confidence to look at it and say, “This thing is horribly written. I mean, this is awful. Where does this come from? Oh, they have a source in here. Adrian Melissinos.” Anyway, it was Melissinos’ “Experiments in Modern Physics”. I went and found it in the library and started reading it and that became my textbook. Not just that book – I looked up every single source cited in all those experiment write-ups: books, monographs, reference materials. One of the sources was the book “Alpha-, Beta- and Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy” by Kai Siegbahn. I read the source material to actually learn what they were doing, and I had a blast. Oh my God, that was fun! I mean fun. One of the most fun things I did was the cosmic ray experiment. It was a timing experiment that used scintillator paddles. As a particle passed through a scintillator paddle, it would knock electrons off of the sodium iodide crystals. The electrons would be reabsorbed into the matrix, releasing light that would then be picked up by photomultiplier tubes. The four paddles were hooked up to some simple logic boards to generate a coincidence circuit, where a coincidence gate would be opened by triggering the first paddle. You’d get simple yes/no signals from subsequent paddles, and if you got four yesses (energy deposited in each of the paddles within the timing gate duration), you’d have a coincidence, and add that particle to your measured cosmic ray flux. You learn something about the energies of the cosmic rays by varying the shielding between pairs of scintillator paddles. More shielding means you get fewer yesses in the paddles below the shielding. And I thought, OK, that’s cool. What about trying a direct measurement of the energies of these things? I went to the professor, Phillip Roos, who was a member of the board of directors of the Jefferson Laboratory (the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, a high-energy electron-positron collider in Virginia). He loaned me a very thick scintillator and I started doing actual spectroscopy with this thing. And I learned all about the Landau curve. Basically, it’s what happens when a high energy particle penetrates a thin layer. How much energy does it give up? It’s a quasi-stochastic process, but the distribution of energies deposited in the layer by particles from a monoenergetic beam is something called the Landau Curve. It is incredibly complicated and way past the purview of an undergraduate class to try to model or do anything with. But I did my best. And so I put that together as one of my experiments for the class and I just absolutely loved it. I just loved it. In quantum mechanics, I absolutely died. Completely. And I realized that I had major problems. I even had a call with my mom, telling her “I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing”. Looking for a way forward, I realized I couldn’t do it myself. I needed to join a study group, so I started looking around, asking folks, “Can I join your study group?” And I kept getting the cold shoulder. What I didn’t realize was that they didn’t have study groups. And finally, at one point I just said OK, nobody wants me to join their study group, not realizing they didn’t exist, and I decided to do a study group of my own. I started inviting people, and they were eager to join. Quantum mechanics is still the thing I know best from that period, because I ended up teaching it. I had about five or six people, mostly from a student group called Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS). It was the undergraduate space exploration gang. And I ended up teaching them quantum mechanics. It was wonderful, you’re jumping into it and the book is throwing all the math at you up front, like it’s hitting you with a baseball bat. And at the same time, I took E&M as well. In that class I did actually fall in with a couple of guys and the three of us became an established study group for that and kept it going for a number of classes. But it ended up being 20 hours a week per class, 60 hours easy. I was in the lab at times until midnight or later, as well as on weekends, and I ended up getting 3 A’s! So in the end, I did it right. So I stuck around. I could have finished my degree in a year but I had a strategy: I wanted to get into a good grad school and I figured that no grad school would touch me with those C, D, & F grades on my transcript. Remember those? I think a C or a D in one of my math classes is really bad, but I knew no one would touch me if I didn’t have really, really good follow up grades, so I needed to take two years, not one. So that’s what I did and I also knew that I needed a really good recommendation to get into a good grad school, so I signed up with something that fell out of the cosmic ray work. Originally, I didn’t understand what I was getting with the energy measurements from the thick scintillator. I didn’t realize yet that I was looking at a Landau curve. And Dr. Roos said. “Hey, go talk to Dr. Jordan Goodman, who is one of our younger professors. He does cosmic rays.” So I talked to Dr. Goodman, and he literally laughed me out of his office. He was brutal. He was in particle astrophysics. He said I was doing things wrong. He told me what I was doing wrong. He said I had put my big thick simulator between the four paddles. There’s two paddles above, two paddles below. I put the simulator in between them. He wanted me to put the simulator at the bottom. And so having been chased out of his office like a scolded dog, I went back to my experiment. I played with what I was doing. I got the Landau curve. That’s how I learned about the Landau curve. And I actually went and studied up on it. I found out by looking through things. And then I went back. I took Kai Siegbahn’s book “Alpha-, Beta- and Gamma-Ray Spectroscopy”, a really good book, and I got my new results. I tried it his way and I tried it my way and my way worked better, and I marched right back into his office and said “OK, I did this and I did this and I did this and I get this, this is the Landau curve. It looks like this crazy equation, but here’s where it’s coming from with the physics. I tried it your way and I tried it my way and my way worked better. He didn’t laugh and I ended up working for him. He sent me first to New Mexico to work on the MILAGRO detector. This was a Cherenkov detector. Cherenkov detectors, they’re water, ultra-pure water, and particles go through them at very, very high speed, faster than the speed of light in water, and they are giving off shock waves, just like supersonic shockwaves. Only this is light. It’s called Cherenkov radiation. It’s blue. I forget exactly why the physics makes it blue, but it does, and there’s an opening angle cone, it’s the same physics, just with light instead of sound, and you pick those up with photomultiplier, tubes set in the water. It’s actually quite similar to the work with scintillators, but you’re putting photomultiplier tubes in the water instead of on a scintillator. Same kind of deal. Different physics makes the light, but from the photomultiplier tube out, it’s the same thing. So I had a one heck of an adventure one summer in New Mexico. One of the other two guys in my study group, named Aaron Eichelberger, went out with me. And we both worked on the detector over the summer. That was good times. Up at 10,000 feet, I was in the best shape I’ve ever been in my life. I’ll bet. Just about. We were building. We had these sand filled PVC pipes at 100 pounds a pop and I would pick one up and take it into the detector, you know? I was basically doing grunt construction work. I helped tear down the Cygnus detector too, which was another scintillation detector. The following winter Jordan Goodman sent me to the Super-K detector in Japan. He also wrote my recommendation letters for grad school. And my plan, long story short, paid off. I was accepted by the University of Colorado at Boulder’s APS Department, which is Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. That’s a very, very good program and I was going to go there until I was accepted by Caltech. Caltech is where I always wanted to go. I had applied to Caltech for transfer when I was fifteen and they said no, but for grad school they said yes. I figured they might because I was weird and Caltech does weird. Caltech is weird. (laughs) I applied to Berkeley, too, mostly for my stepfather because he was a Berkeley man, but I figured Berkeley wouldn’t touch me with a 10 foot pole, and they didn’t. They said: “No, thank you!” So I went to Tech and I ended up working in cosmic rays. I worked for Ed Stone, who was the director of JPL, who went from managing 5,000 people at JPL when he retired to managing me! (smiles). That was kind of an intense experience, but he taught me wonderful, wonderful things. I started off as an anomalous cosmic ray physicist. That’s what I wanted to do, looking for the termination shock, but Voyager didn’t get there during my time in graduate school. I remember spending a long six months trying to figure out, can I do this? I did my candidacy exam and advanced to candidacy based on anomalous cosmic rays, but then realized I didn’t have enough for a thesis. That was a low point. I was depressed but one day I came into my office and there on my chair was a stack of papers about solar particles. And I said “OK, I’m a solar particle physicist now!” So I ended up doing a thesis on solar particles. And I found, you know, cosmic rays, solar particles, the guy who did the thesis before me put into his acknowledgements that “it is often a dry field.” That’s a hard thing. Most folks who get cosmic ray, space cosmic ray degrees, end up elsewhere, and I did too. I was in grad school. I graduated. I did my thing and actually my defense was fun. I didn’t want my defense to last forever, so I wanted to schedule it for 11:00 o’clock, right before lunch, because noon rolls around and everybody at Caltech goes to lunch at noon, the whole campus, everyone turns out for lunch. It’s the only time you ever see people on campus, noon. And I figured that my thesis wasn’t nearly as important to my thesis committee as lunch, so I figured they would give me an easy pass. So I proposed this time to my advisor, and he said no. He rescheduled it for, I think, 8:00 o’clock in the morning or something horrible like that, 9:00 o’clock, and I gave my talk, I did my thing. I even had one of the guys there who loves to kill grad students. We were required to have at least one of those people on our committee and I had them both times (candidacy and defense). They just love to murder the ill-prepared grad student. So I gave my talk, it was like forty, fifty minutes, and I solicited questions. And one of them said, “Well, you’ve got a typo on page 2”. And the other one said “It’s kind of thin, it’s only 125 pages. Did you do more than that? And I said, “Well, I did. I worked on anomalous cosmic rays, but I didn’t think that was worthy of going into this thesis because it’s different. And they said “OK”. They had essentially no questions for me. Ed looked at me and said, “I’ve been doing this for 35 years and I’ve never seen that!” So apparently I did pretty well. You know, you would have ace’d a PhD in behavioral psychology! There are so many ways that you did things, interacting with other human beings, understanding their motivations and what impels them, developing your own strategies for success. Well, you know, I learned a lot of that in the IRS. There you’re walking into a situation which is absolutely beyond question, adversarial. Yeah, you changed the job that you had there. The way they set you up to go out with a suit and tie on, and then you found that what works better is to be human and meet people at their level. And your results bore that out. Yep. they did. But that was you. It was almost reverse psychology that you worked on people. Instead of coming in with a hammer, you came in with a handshake, saying “What can I do to help you comply?” Yeah, I had people actually thank me for coming into their lives. Because my assumption, my feeling, is there’s this willful naivete, which I call honor. But one mustn’t misunderstand. It is a naivete about the world and the people in it, and I decide to be that way. I decide that people have good intentions, generally speaking, but not all of them. Clearly there’s some bad apples out there. There’s no question that if you do life this way you’re going to get hurt. It does happen. But you live better. You just live better. I think that’s a good philosophy. Now let me direct this a bit because we’ve already gone longer than most of these interviews go, but your story is fascinating. I’ve pretty much thrown away the interview questions because you’re telling about yourself and that’s what we wanted you to do. It’s just a wonderful story. It’s been different from the other ones that we’ve done and probably better for that, so I’m not concerned, but there are a couple of things we want to touch on, get your thoughts on, and then when we get this back to you on paper, if there’s more you want to say about this, or if you want to talk about something else, you can conduct your own interview and just write the way you want it. I don’t think it matters how long it is. It’ll probably be one of the longer ones, but I think when we post it, it can go down as far as there are words and people are willing to hang in there and read it. It’s a fascinating read, that’s for sure. But one of the things we like to ask is, OK, you’ve had a very, as you said “circuitous” route to getting your job, but you’re good at it, and it’s what you apparently love, because you went back to it twice, into physics, and now planetary physics. But if you weren’t a NASA research scientist, or a physicist, what would your dream job be? Well, I mean, the dream job for me, I have to admit, as I told you: scientist, engineer, astronaut. OK, you did answer that already. The neat part is, when I got out of grad school, I went to work for Northrop Grumman as a system engineer and I learned about system engineering. So I’ve actually ticked off two of the three. Yes, you have. Let me give you a slightly different and slightly better answer than that, which is I have had a cataract in my left eye, starting from when I was very, very young, so I was unable to pursue what I otherwise might have done, which is that I would have gone after being a pilot in the Air Force or the Navy. That’s the other thing I wanted to do. I love to fly. You’ve told us a lot about your education and about your work, but what do you do for fun? Well, I have a family, first off. Tell us about your family. We want to know about that, too. My wife, Marie, actually has a PhD in developmental psychology from Cornell, which she completed in my living room at Caltech. Really? Because I sat her down and fed her for a summer, and allowed her to do nothing but her thesis for the summer. I feel very proud of that. But her real passion is books; she’s a librarian. So I actually put her through library school too. She’s now a librarian over at San Jose City Library and loving it, I hope. At least I think she is. We have two children, a daughter, Lynn, who is 17 and a senior in high school. And she loves cats. We have a cat, it’s a long story. Our son Tristan is 14. He just started high school. He likes building stuff. I need to get him focused on his math, but he likes building things and that’s very cool. I want him to keep doing that. He can be wildly creative. Mostly he likes to work in paper, but now I’m trying to get him to work in other things. So that’s the family. We like to travel. We like to go places, just go visit stuff, you know. I’m trying to sell them on California too, because I did uproot them from South Carolina, which they had known basically their whole lives, and it’s been quite a readjustment. But in terms of other things I like to do, well there’s the standard stuff, you know, music and various things and reading. And in fact, if you’re wondering about what kind of books I like to read the most, it used to be science fiction. I like science fiction, but I‘ve got to be honest: the latest thing I’m into is primary sources. That’s actually always been true and I’m going to sound really horrible here, but I’m the kind of guy who reads the original Marco Polo. I’ve read Voltaire, Giraldus Cambrensis, also called Gerald of Wales, who wrote in the 13th century. I read the English translations. Sometimes I try to read the others, but it’s difficult. My ancient languages aren’t that good. I kind of wish they were. I’d like them to be, but they’re not. I like reading histories as well, and biography and things like that. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. I’ve been trying to learn a lot about the history of the Spanish-American War period and the First World War. It’s very, very interesting. Other things I do: I’m a private pilot and in fact, I am in the middle of a long odyssey to pick up an airplane and bring it home. It’s my own. It’s called a Varga, and it’s a tandem two-seat training aircraft. It’s got a glass canopy and a low wing, and looks like a little fighter airplane from the ‘40s or something. I’m halfway through flying it from Minnesota to here. I had a few problems along the way, and had to stop in Amarillo for repairs. Hopefully I’ll be finishing the trip soon. So in the near future I’m going to have a blast. I like driving, too. I have a Jeep. It’s a funky diesel from Japan. I also like to hike, though I haven’t done a whole lot of hiking lately. You mentioned music. Do you play an instrument? No, no, not really. I tried. I failed. Where does your taste run in music, then? Oh, to all kinds of things. I grew up in the ‘70s and the ‘80s and you know, I was poisoned by Sting, The Police, Genesis, stuff like that. But I’m a big fan of folk music. American folk music, but also English folk music and Scottish and Irish folk music as well. Even Welsh. That’s really great stuff actually. Breton and other things like that. I’m a big fan of Newfoundland folk music, I discovered that in Newfoundland on my trip for the IRS. So I do a lot of that sort of thing and lately in the last 15 years or so, I’ve actually become a devotee of some forms of country music, so shoot me! No, no, no, it’s all good stuff. I mean, music is music. It’s good stuff. I like classical music too. I’m a big fan of all sorts of things classical. I used to love Baroque music exclusively, but my tastes have become a little more sophisticated since then. I like all sorts of things now. That’s very eclectic and I appreciate that. I think about when people ask me what my favorite color is and I’ve thought, how can you answer a question like that? The colors are all in context, they’re all beautiful. They’re all wonderful. We would miss any one of them if they weren’t there. On the kids, by the way, our daughter is a violist and our son’s a cellist, so they like music too. My kids at Badwater Basin, Death Valley. I gave a talk at the Dark Sky Festival, February 2024 Yes, you mentioned you have an airplane and a Jeep. Are you interested in mechanics at all? I know Jeeps tend to have a good amount of repairs. I don’t know if pilots fix their own planes, how does that end up going? Luke’s Varga airplane parked at Reid-Hillview airport after he flew it to California from Minnesota. Luke flying solo. And with his daughter. You don’t do a lot of fixing of your plane as a pilot (unless you really want to). The Jeep I have is a diesel from Japan, so it’s incredibly reliable. I’ve never breaks. But I have to admit, when I was in grad school, I desperately wanted to get involved in lab work. I went downstairs one day and I talked to the post doc who was leading a balloon flight project for high energy cosmic rays. And I said, “I want to get into lab work”. And she said, “Great! I’m so glad you want to get into lab work. Here, analyze this data.” And I got pegged as a theorist, my whole career. But that all changed after I left grad school and I started working with JPL. Northrup Grumman sent me to work at JPL two days a week for a good long time, and I learned about lab work. I learned all sorts of fun things. I learned about experiment design and I started doing it. I started building things and I have really found the joy of building an experiment and making it work. I adore it. I love it. I’m doing it on a project called SPARTA, right now. I’ve actually had to build it, build the experiment, a couple of times. The last time was for Zero-G flight, and when I showed up at the airport, the PI was there and he handed me a bag. That’s not hyperbole. He handed me a bag of broken parts that I had never seen and said “Here’s your experiment. And it has to be ready in 40 hours. And we don’t know how to do it.” So I had to figure it out and make it work, in 40 hours. From nothing. And I did. And we flew and we got data and I was very, very proud of that. Aboard Zero-G light for SPARTA You are absolutely one of the most fascinating people that I have ever had to privilege of talking with and knowing. I’m just incredulous at your story. It’s wonderful. It’ll play very well in our series, but it really belongs in a book or a biography or something like that. A lot of people could learn from it. Well, I have to tell you, coming here to Ames is in many ways absolutely a culmination. I giggle when I come to work, are you kidding me? And I tell everybody this, I’m a NASA fan boy. And I will put the disclaimer out first that I understand that NASA is a large, dysfunctional government agency that is going to break your heart. OK, it’s going to do it because that’s what big dysfunctional government agencies do. It’s going to enrage. It’s going to make you frustrated. You’re going to want to kill it. But I love it. I am a massive fan. Yes, you’re absolutely right. But it needs people like you. Yeah, but when I come in, I like coming into Ames because I just giggle! I can’t believe I’m here. I can’t believe that I’m a bona fide NASA rocket scientist! After all this time, I get to finally do it. I wanted to be a scientist, you know. And the other thing that comes to me is I can’t believe they took me. I had the exact same reaction in grad school at Caltech. And by the way, so did everybody else. I went and talked to lots of graduate students at Caltech and they all said the same thing: “I can’t believe they took me”. It wasn’t until I got to the NSF that I learned about imposter syndrome. Right. It’s like, whoa, that’s my problem: imposter syndrome. Everybody has it. I’m hesitant to bring this to a close, but we do need to and I need to explain a couple of things to you. Sure. One of them is that when we finally get this into a transcript narrative that you’re comfortable with, then we would like to include pictures from your life, from yourself, from your family, not just of your work, but things we’ve talked about. Anything that would go along with the narrative, You can think about that because there will be a few weeks, but we’d like you to provide a few pictures. If you’ve seen some of the other interviews you’ve seen the pictures. Pictures go a long way to illustrate and bring to life what you’ve talked about, helping people understand who you are. And we also like to ask if you have a favorite quote, something we might see on your desk or wall, something that motivates you or that you find particularly meaningful. You’ve already said one earlier in this conversation that comes from you that I really liked. Which one was that? It was toward the beginning, you were talking about the people who do great things. It was something like “brains are neither necessary nor sufficient to do great things”. They’re not. Now you’ve got to work hard. You got to work hard. Yeah. That resonated with me when I heard it. That’s a good quote. For me the difference was that I actually sorted myself out and actually started figuring out how to do the work and that made all the difference. You don’t need genius to succeed. And genius is not enough to succeed. I like that. And if there’s something that has been sort of a lodestar for you, maybe from Feynman or from someone along the line that you just thought, “Oh, I like that, that’s motivating” or something, that helps people understand who you are, what motivates or impels your life toward who you are today. It’s just an opportunity and you can think about it and put it in later. It’s not a problem. It’s just something that helps tell your story. I don’t know. I used to put a quote, I thought it was from Alcuin, an 8th century philosopher, a neat guy, he taught Charlamagne, and was a student of Venerable Bede. Anyway, from early medieval history and I have found it to be a very significant quote. It may not be eloquent, but it is (he quotes it in Latin: “Claudit iter bellis, qui portam pandit in Astris”): “That road does not lead toward war, whose gate lies open to the stars”. That’s profound. It is and what’s particularly profound about it is that this is coming out of the medieval Christian period and you would have thought it would be “heavens”, as in “heaven”. But it’s not. It’s astris, stars, and what that means to me is that exploration is where it’s at. Exploration keeps us away from the darker aspects of our being. We can avoid war by exploring. If war expresses the worst parts of humanity, exploration expresses the best parts of humanity. OK. And first of all, I think that’s the first quote we’ve gotten in spoken Latin. That was Latin you were speaking? Yes, it was. I thought so. OK. But this is something that brings us together in a cooperative venture. The explorations that we’ve done that have included cooperation with other nations have certainly been among the few things in our world that have brought nations together. There are a lot of things that push nations apart and cause them to go to war but this is something that brings them together in a cooperative venture that transcends earth, really. Absolutely. That’s a wonderful quote. It is particularly true of what we do here at NASA. Yes. I mean exploration. Ask me sometime about the defense value of ISS. Because the ISS is probably one of the most important national security things we’ve ever done and for reasons that are completely out of left field. Yes, absolutely. You’re right. And we’ve seen that recently with the whole thing that’s going on over in the Ukraine. Yeah. They pulled out of a lot of things, but they didn’t pull out of the space station. They didn’t. Not yet. Anyway, this has been an absolutely fascinating interview so let’s put a close to it and then we’ll see what we’ve got when it comes out on paper. And then you can do with it what you want. And no matter what we do, this will have a limited audience on our website, but I hope you’ll give some thought to eventually writing an autobiography. It’s a story well worth hearing. I would buy it and read it, I’ll tell you that. I was actually told to do that 20 years ago. And I thought, “What?” Well, you’re still young! Alright. Thank you, Luke. This has been a joy, a delight and we’ll get back to you when we have something, and I think this will make a wonderful addition to our interview series. I’m glad to help, alright. OK. And yes, anything else? Any other questions or anything? No, that’s all I got for now. Thank you. Take care, gentlemen. Luke and his children in the shadow of SOFIA, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. Interview conducted by Fred Van Wert on January 25, 2023 View the full article

Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions The Solar System The Sun Mercury Venus Earth The Moon Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto & Dwarf Planets Asteroids, Comets & Meteors The Kuiper Belt The Oort Cloud 3 min read 4375-4381: A Stuffed Holiday Plan NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity captured this image of raised polygonal ridges on a rock in its workspace, intriguing to mission geologists. The rover used its Mast Camera (Mastcam) to capture the image on sol 4369 – Martian day 4,369 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission – on Nov. 20, 2024 at 04:29:24 UTC. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Earth planning date: Monday, Nov. 25, 2024 Today we planned a mammoth seven-sol plan, to cover the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday period. Unfortunately, our weekend drive ended a little early and we didn’t receive all of our needed confirmation imagery. At 7 feet high and weighing about 2,000 pounds, the rover itself is as big as a large car (check out this page, with a 3D interactive model of the rover, and more details about its dimensions). However, the contact science instruments are at the end of the arm, which stretches for another 7 feet (2.1 meters) when fully extended — for example, when reaching for a target in the workspace. We really need those confirmation images to be sure that all six wheels are firmly planted on the ground before taking out the arm to do contact science — no one wants our rover to be all wibbly-wobbly, like a giant tower of Thanksgiving jello! So, no APXS or MAHLI this Thanksgiving; but we have so many other activities, it’s a very stuffed plan. Mastcam has more than five hours of activity across the plan. A planned mosaic of Texoli butte and surrounding area grew so large, it was split into two distinct activities of a 50×4 mosaic (four rows of 50 images) and a 50×1 mosaic. This dusty workspace has so many interesting features, with abundant spherical nodular or concretionary features (typically less than 2 centimeters, or 0.79 inches, in diameter), thin dark-toned layers interbedded with the more dominant paler-colored bedrock and some well-preserved polygonal ridges. Mastcam will image the workspace in a 4×4 mosaic, giving us a lot more information on nodule size and distribution, and on the relative stratigraphic placement of the darker-toned layers, polygonal raised ridges (like those in the accompanying image), and nodules. A second (4×3) mosaic to the right of the rover at “Saurian Crest” looks at variations in bedding layers. ChemCam will take LIBS measurements on some of the larger nodular areas at “Golden Bear Lake” and “Frying Pan Lake” and a further measurement on part of a polygonal ridge at “Caltech Peak.” The environmental theme group (ENV) will run activities across the plan too. The REMS instrument will acquire data right across the week. A series of single frame change detection Mastcam images on two areas of converging ripples (“Ostrander Hut”) are planned — these will be taken on three different sols to look for changes in the sediment pattern, which could give information on wind movement, strength, and direction. Mastcam will take three “tau” measurements, imaging the sky to quantify the amount of dust in the atmosphere, and Navcam will acquire dust-devil movies and suprahorizon movies on three separate sols. Our drive on the sixth day of the plan will set us in a new workspace. As one of the NASA engineers said today, we will be looking at “rocks billions of years old, on another planet that has never been looked at before by human eyes” — we have a lot to be grateful for this Thanksgiving holiday! Written by Catherine O’Connell-Cooper, Planetary Geologist at University of New Brunswick Share Details Last Updated Dec 02, 2024 Related Terms Blogs Explore More 3 min read Sols 4732-4735: I’ll Zap You, My Pretty, and Your Pebble Too Article 1 hour ago 2 min read You Are Now Arriving at ‘Pico Turquino’ Article 6 hours ago 2 min read Sol 4370-4371: All About the Polygons Article 1 week ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited… All Mars Resources Explore this collection of Mars images, videos, resources, PDFs, and toolkits. Discover valuable content designed to inform, educate, and inspire,… Rover Basics Each robotic explorer sent to the Red Planet has its own unique capabilities driven by science. Many attributes of a… Mars Exploration: Science Goals The key to understanding the past, present or future potential for life on Mars can be found in NASA’s four… View the full article

3 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) A group of middle school students engage with a model aircraft while learning from NASA experts in the model lab at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California during an event hosted by NASA’s California Office of STEM Engagement.NASA/Steve Freeman In celebration of National Aviation History Month, experts from NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, spoke with middle school students during a recent event hosted by NASA’s California Office of STEM Engagement. NASA Armstrong employees shared stories about the center’s role in aviation history and current research projects while also talking about their own paths to working at NASA. During the virtual and in-person event on Nov. 6, Southern California middle school students were presented with the importance of pursing their passions, the value of internships and exploring diverse career opportunities within NASA. Kicking off the event, NASA Armstrong Center Director Brad Flick talked about his journey from a small town to becoming a NASA engineer. “I never, in my wildest dreams thought I had the opportunity to work for someplace like NASA,” Flick said. “I’ve been here for almost 40 years and at a little part of NASA that most people don’t know exists, right? Which is really cool that we’re tying this to aviation history month, because this is one of the places where aviation history has been made, is being made and will continue to be made.” Flick encouraged students to participate in STEAM programs that integrate the arts with science, technology, engineering, and math and stressed the importance of asking questions and being curious. A panel of four NASA Armstrong experts – Laurie Grindle, deputy center director; Troy Asher, director of Flight Operations; Nicki Reid, lead operations engineer; and Julio Trevino, operations engineer – shared their stories about their career paths and experiences at NASA. NASA Armstrong experts share their stories about their career paths and experiences at NASA to middle school students during an event hosted by NASA’s California Office of STEM Engagement at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. From left to right: Laurie Grindle, Julio Trevino, Nicki Reid and Troy Asher.NASA/Steve Freeman Reid talked about her initial struggle with math and science and how it didn’t stop her from obtaining an engineering degree and applying for internships, which is what ultimately opened the door for her at NASA. “It was a really cool experience because it gives you a chance to decide whether or not you like the job and I got to learn from different people every summer,” Reid said. Grindle’s dream as a kid was to become an astronaut and although did not happen for her, her interest in aviation and space continued, which ultimately led to working at NASA as a student. “I had a lot of different opportunities working in different roles. I had fun while doing it and did a job I really enjoyed that made it not like work,” Grindle said. For Asher, determination and commitment helped him become a pilot. “I remember sitting in the back seat of the airplane, looking out and thinking, ‘I love this. I’m doing this forever,’” Asher said. “But it took me five or six years before I had that moment, and it was the commitment the kept me going.” A group of middle school students and their teachers sit in the control room for a hands-on experience at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California during an event hosted by NASA’s California Office of STEM Engagement for National Aviation History Month.NASA/Steve Freeman Stories and experiences like these are important for students to hear to inspire them in their own journeys into adulthood. Students also received tours around the center with stops in the model lab, life support office and control room. “This was a wonderful opportunity for my seventh-grade students to learn more about careers and career paths in NASA,” said Shauna Tinich, Tropico Middle School teacher. “They were surprised that people other than astronauts and rocket scientists work for NASA, and this excited many of my students.” NASA’s California Office of STEM Engagement collaborates with the regional STEM community to provide opportunities like these, with the support of Next Gen STEM, to help students in sparking their interest and inspiring the next generation of leaders. To learn more, visit www.nasa.gov/learning-resources. Share Details Last Updated Dec 02, 2024 EditorDede DiniusContactElena Aguirreelena.aguirre@nasa.govLocationArmstrong Flight Research Center Related TermsArmstrong Flight Research CenterAeronauticsLearning ResourcesNext Gen STEMSTEM Engagement at NASA Explore More 4 min read Aaron Yazzie: Bridging Indigenous Heritage and Space Exploration Article 5 days ago 2 min read Why NASA Is a Great Place to Launch Your Career Article 1 week ago 3 min read Northwestern University Takes Top Honors in BIG Idea Lunar Inflatables Challenge Article 2 weeks ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center Learning Resources Armstrong People Armstrong Flight Research Center History View the full article

Curiosity Navigation Curiosity Home Mission Overview Where is Curiosity? Mission Updates Science Overview Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Curiosity Raw Images Images Videos Audio Mosaics More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions The Solar System The Sun Mercury Venus Earth The Moon Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto & Dwarf Planets Asteroids, Comets & Meteors The Kuiper Belt The Oort Cloud 3 min read Sols 4732-4735: I’ll Zap You, My Pretty, and Your Pebble Too NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity used its Mast Camera (Mastcam) to capture this image, with a horizon of platy, dark-toned bedrock at the forefront, on Nov. 20, 2024 at 05:54:55 UTC. Curiosity acquired the image on sol 4369 — Martian day 4,369 of the Mars Science Laboratory mission. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS Earth planning date: Friday, Nov. 22, 2024 For more than a year, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been climbing through layers of sulfate-rich rock in Gale Crater, where alternating thick light- and dark-toned bands are visible by satellite. After a successful 24.55-meter drive (about 81 feet), Curiosity traversed across a light-toned band into a dark-toned one, entering a workspace that contains the characteristic features of these dark-toned bands: platy, dark-toned material interbedded with lighter-toned bedrock. The origin of this dark-toned, platy material remains a mystery. To help solve it, the Geology and Mineralogy Theme Group focused the weekend’s science plan on continuing our documentation of the sedimentary textures, structures, and chemistry of this bedrock, aiming to uncover clues about the processes that formed the dark-toned, platy material. My role as Keeper of the Geology Plan meant keeping track of all the geology-related requests, which made for a busy day! To investigate further, we plan to brush away surface dust from a section of light-toned bedrock and capture detailed images using the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI). This close-up view will be paired with chemical and mineralogical analysis using the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS). Meanwhile, Mastcam will focus on two nearby outcrops nicknamed “Hanging Valley Ridge” 1 and 2, where the dark-toned platy material is visibly layered within the light-toned bedrock. ChemCam will add to the data by zapping both the brushed light-toned area and the dark-toned material to work out their compositions and compare the two. In addition to studying the sulfate layers, we’re continuing our long-term investigation of Gediz Vallis Ridge, believed to be a remnant of an ancient debris channel that we’ve been investigating for some time. To build on our previous observations, we’ve planned a Mastcam mosaic and a long-distance Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) observation to further document its morphology and sedimentary structures. Interestingly, we’ve also identified a dark-toned pebble in our workspace that could have been transported from Gediz Vallis Ridge. To test this idea, we’ll use ChemCam to zap the pebble to work out its composition and compare it to the dark-toned material in the outcrop. While Curiosity focuses on the Martian surface, we’re also monitoring the planet’s atmosphere. The Environmental Theme Group is using the rover’s downtime to conduct a series of dust- and cloud-monitoring activities. One highlight of the weekend plan is an approximately 30-minute ChemCam passive sky observation, which will help us study atmospheric conditions in Gale Crater. As Americans prepare for Thanksgiving here on Earth, the Curiosity team is gearing up for a special holiday “mega plan.” This seven-sol schedule will keep the rover hard at work, ensuring that science and exploration continue while the team enjoys their celebrations. Stay tuned to see what this plan has in store next week! Written by Amelie Roberts, Ph.D. candidate at Imperial College London Share Details Last Updated Dec 02, 2024 Related Terms Blogs Explore More 2 min read You Are Now Arriving at ‘Pico Turquino’ Article 5 hours ago 2 min read Sol 4370-4371: All About the Polygons Article 1 week ago 3 min read Sols 4368-4369: The Colors of Fall – and Mars Article 2 weeks ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited… All Mars Resources Explore this collection of Mars images, videos, resources, PDFs, and toolkits. Discover valuable content designed to inform, educate, and inspire,… Rover Basics Each robotic explorer sent to the Red Planet has its own unique capabilities driven by science. Many attributes of a… Mars Exploration: Science Goals The key to understanding the past, present or future potential for life on Mars can be found in NASA’s four… View the full article

Many team members at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston may recognize Alicia Baker as the talented flutist in the Hispanic Employee Resource Group’s Mariachi Celestial band. Or, they may have worked with Baker in her role as a spacesuit project manager, testing NASA’s prototype spacesuits and preparing Johnson’s test chambers to evaluate vendor spacesuits. Alicia Baker in a spacesuit test chamber at Johnson Space Center.NASA/David DeHoyos They might be surprised to learn that Baker juggled these responsibilities and more while also caring for her late husband, Chris, as he fought a terminal illness for 16 years. “It was hard taking care of a loved one with cancer and working full-time,” Baker said. “My husband was also disabled from a brain tumor surgery, so I had to help him with reading, writing, walking, and remembering, while managing the household.” Baker worked closely with her manager to coordinate schedules and get approval to telework so that she could work around her husband’s medical appointments and procedures. She also took medical leave when her husband entered hospice care in 2020. Baker said her manager’s flexibility “saved her job” and allowed her to continue providing for her family. She was even able to advance from project engineer to test director to project manager during this time period. Alicia Baker and her husband Chris on their wedding day. Image courtesy of Alicia Baker Baker is one of the many Johnson employees who are or have been a caregiver for a loved one. These caregivers provide help to a person in need who often has a medical condition or injury that affects their daily functioning. Their needs may be temporary or long-term, and they could be physical, medical, financial, or domestic in nature. Recognizing the challenging and critical role caregivers play in their families, the Johnson community provides a variety of resources to support team members through the Employee Assistance Program. Additionally, Johnson’s No Boundaries Employee Resource Group (NoBo) supports caregivers through its programs and initiatives. Baker participates in both the support group and NoBo activities and takes comfort in sharing her and her husband’s story with others. “I would do it all over again,” she said of her caregiver role. Now she looks forward to future missions to the Moon, when NASA astronauts will conduct spacewalks on the lunar surface while wearing new spacesuits. “Then I can say I helped make that possible!” Throughout all of her experiences, Baker has learned to never give up. “If you have a dream, keep fighting for it,” she said. View the full article

Maxar Space Systems Technicians guide the equipment that will house Gateway’s xenon and liquid fuel tanks in this photo from July 1, 2024. The tanks are part of Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element, which will make the lunar space station the most powerful solar electric spacecraft ever flown. Once fully assembled and launched to lunar orbit, the Power and Propulsion Element’s roll-out solar arrays will harness the Sun’s energy to energize xenon gas and produce the thrust to get Gateway to the Moon’s orbit where it will await the arrival of its first crew on the Artemis IV mission. Image credit: Maxar Space Systems View the full article

Dec. 2, 2024 NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, Jeanette Epps, and Tracy C. DysonNASA RELEASE: J24-015 Expedition 71 Astronauts to Discuss Mission in NASA Welcome Home Event Four NASA astronauts will participate in a welcome home ceremony at Space Center Houston after recently returning from a mission aboard the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, Jeanette Epps, and Tracy C. Dyson will share highlights from their mission beginning at 6 p.m. CST Wednesday, Dec. 4, during a free, public event at NASA Johnson Space Center’s official visitor center. The crew will also recognize key contributors to mission success in an awards ceremony following the presentation. The astronauts will be available at 5 p.m. for media interviews before the event. Media may request an in-person interview no later than 5 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 3, by emailing Dana Davis at dana.l.davis@nasa.gov. Expedition 71 NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission launched to the space station in March 2024 as the eighth commercial crew rotation mission. The crew spent 235 days in space, traveled 100 million miles, and completed 3,760 orbits around the Earth, splashing down off the coast of Pensacola, Florida, on Oct. 25, 2024. This was the first spaceflight for Dominick and Epps and the third spaceflight for Barratt, who has logged 447 days in space over the course of his career. The crew also saw the arrival and departure of eight visiting vehicles during their mission. Dyson flew with an international crew, launching aboard the Soyuz MS-25 in March 2024. The six-month research mission was the third spaceflight of her career, and her second long-duration spaceflight. Dyson’s third spaceflight covered 2,944 orbits of the Earth and a journey of 78 million miles as an Expedition 70/71 flight engineer. She has now logged a total of 373 days in space, including more than 23 hours in four spacewalks. Dyson and her crewmembers landed safely in Kazakhstan on Sept. 24, 2024. While aboard the station, the Expedition 71 crew contributed to hundreds of technology demonstrations and experiments including the bioprinting of human tissues. These higher quality tissues printed in microgravity could help advance the production of organs and tissues for transplant and improve 3D printing of foods and medicines on future long-duration space missions. The crew also looked at neurological organoids, created with stem cells from patients to study neuroinflammation, a common feature of neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. The organoids provide a platform to study these diseases and their treatments and could help address how extended spaceflight affects the brain. Stay current on space station activities by following @space_station and @ISS_Research on X, as well as the station Facebook and Instagram accounts and the space station blog. -end- Jaden Jennings Johnson Space Center, Houston 713-281-0984 jaden.r.jennings@nasa.gov Dana Davis Johnson Space Center, Houston 281-244-0933 dana.l.davis@nasa.gov View the full article

Mars: Perseverance (Mars 2020) Perseverance Home Mission Overview Rover Components Mars Rock Samples Where is Perseverance? Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Mission Updates Science Overview Objectives Instruments Highlights Exploration Goals News and Features Multimedia Perseverance Raw Images Images Videos Audio More Resources Mars Missions Mars Sample Return Mars Perseverance Rover Mars Curiosity Rover MAVEN Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mars Odyssey More Mars Missions The Solar System The Sun Mercury Venus Earth The Moon Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto & Dwarf Planets Asteroids, Comets & Meteors The Kuiper Belt The Oort Cloud 2 min read You Are Now Arriving at ‘Pico Turquino’ NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image following a successful 107-meter (about 351 feet) drive on sol 1332, Martian day 1,332 of the Mars 2020 mission. The rocks in the foreground are part of “Pico Turquino,” a large ridge exposed in the Jezero crater rim that the mission team plans on investigating up-close. The rover acquired this image of the area in front of it using its onboard Front Left Hazard Avoidance Camera A, on Nov. 18, 2024 at the local mean solar time of 12:43:14. NASA/JPL-Caltech Earth planning date: Monday, Nov. 18, 2024 Perseverance has been continuing its sightseeing tour of the Jezero crater rim, with this week’s travel itinerary including an up-close look at “Pico Turquino.” Here, the team hopes to investigate the history recorded in this approximately 200-meter-long region (about 656 feet) of exposed outcrop. Such rocks may reveal clues of ancient geologic processes including those that predate or are related to the violent impact that formed Jezero crater. Recently, the team has been studying a number of outcropping ridges during the rover’s ascent of the crater rim, with the goal of characterizing the compositional diversity and structure of these exposed rocks. After paralleling Pico Turquino about 70 meters (about 230 feet) to the south last week, the team planned a close approach over the weekend that positioned the rover at the southwestern extent of the ridge. Prior to the 107-meter drive (about 351 feet) on sol 1332, the team planned two sols of targeted remote sensing with Mastcam-Z and SuperCam to investigate local regolith and conduct long distance imaging of a steep scarp and 20-meter (about 66 feet) diameter crater to the northwest. The successful approach drive on sol 1332 allowed the team to come into Monday’s planning with the focus of assessing outcrop amenable for proximity science and repositioning the rover for upcoming abrasion activities. Following our abrasion activities at Pico Turquino, the rover will be hitting the road en route to its next science stop at “Witch Hazel Hill.” Orbital views of Witch Hazel Hill suggest the area may contain layered and light-toned bedrock that likely record important information of the planet’s ancient climate. Prior to arriving at Witch Hazel Hill, the rover plans to pass through a high point known as Lookout Hill that will afford the team incredible views looking back into the crater, as well as get a glimpse westward of terrain far beyond Jezero. Written by Bradley Garczynski, Postdoctoral Scientist at Western Washington University Share Details Last Updated Dec 02, 2024 Related Terms Blogs Explore More 2 min read Sol 4370-4371: All About the Polygons Article 1 week ago 3 min read Sols 4368-4369: The Colors of Fall – and Mars Article 2 weeks ago 3 min read Sols 4366–4367: One of Those Days on Mars (Sulfate-Bearing Unit to the West of Upper Gediz Vallis) Article 2 weeks ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Mars Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun, and the seventh largest. It’s the only planet we know of inhabited… All Mars Resources Explore this collection of Mars images, videos, resources, PDFs, and toolkits. Discover valuable content designed to inform, educate, and inspire,… Rover Basics Each robotic explorer sent to the Red Planet has its own unique capabilities driven by science. Many attributes of a… Mars Exploration: Science Goals The key to understanding the past, present or future potential for life on Mars can be found in NASA’s four… View the full article

Skywatching Home What’s Up: December 2024… Skywatching Skywatching Home What’s Up Eclipses Explore the Night Sky Night Sky Network More Tips and Guides FAQ Download the Video Catch December’s Celestial Highlights! This month, Venus dazzles as the “Evening Star,” Jupiter reaches its brightest for the year, and the Geminid meteor shower peaks under challenging moonlit skies. Skywatching Highlights All Month – Planet Visibility: Mercury: Visible very low in the southeast just before sunrise during the last half of the month. Venus: Shines brightly as the “Evening Star” in the southwest after sunset, climbing higher each evening. Mars: Brightens significantly during December, rising in the east-northeast and visible from late evening to early morning. Jupiter: Reaches opposition on December 7, making it visible all night, rising in the east-northeast. Saturn: Visible after sunset in the southern sky, shifting slightly westward as the month progresses. December 3-5 – Venus and the Moon: Look southwest after sunset to see a beautiful pairing. On December 4, a slim crescent Moon will sit directly below Venus. December 7 – Jupiter at Opposition: Jupiter will shine at its brightest for the year, rising in the east-northeast among Taurus’s stars. Best viewed through a telescope for details like the Galilean moons and atmospheric belts. December 14 – Jupiter, the Moon, and Aldebaran: Look for Jupiter midway between the nearly full Moon and bright orange star Aldebaran in the evening sky. December 17 – Mars and the Moon: Mars, glowing brightly in its approach to opposition, appears super close to the waning gibbous Moon. All Month – Winter Triangle: Formed by Sirius, Procyon, and Betelgeuse, this asterism marks the arrival of winter skies and is a prominent feature throughout the season. December 13-14 – Geminid Meteor Shower: The peak occurs under a nearly full Moon, reducing visibility, but bright meteors may still be spotted the week before. December 21 – Winter Solstice: At 4:20 a.m. EST, the solstice marks the beginning of winter in the Northern Hemisphere and summer in the Southern Hemisphere. Transcript What’s Up for December? Venus, Jupiter, and Mars shine brightly; the stars of winter and their pointy little friend; and “Meteors, meet the Moon.” Sky chart showing the changing position of Venus after sunset during December. NASA/JPL-Caltech Starting off with the planets, Venus is hard to miss in the southwest after sunset – it’s that dazzling bright “evening star.” You’ll find it getting a bit higher in the sky each evening through the month. On December 4th, look for a slim crescent Moon hanging right below it, making for a great photo opportunity! Sky chart showing the changing position of Venus after sunset during December. NASA/JPL-Caltech Saturn is visible toward the south beginning at nightfall. Look for it to track a bit farther to the west as the weeks go by. Meanwhile, Jupiter reaches opposition on December 7th, meaning it’s at its brightest for the year and visible all night long. You’ll find it rising in the east-northeast as darkness falls, among the stars of the constellation Taurus. Mid-month, around December 14th, watch for Jupiter sitting between the nearly full Moon and Taurus’s brightest star, orange-colored Aldebaran. Next, Mars will also be putting on its own show, doubling its brightness during December as it heads toward its own opposition in January. Early in the month, it rises about four hours after dark, but by New Year’s Eve, it’s rising just about 90 minutes after sunset – always shining with its distinctive reddish hue. And on December 17th, you’ll find the Red Planet super close to the Moon, which will be just two days past its full phase. The stars of winter are making their grand entrance in December. As evening falls, you’ll see the mighty hunter Orion rising in the east, with Taurus the bull above it, and the stars of the twins in Gemini to their left. These constellations host some wonderful sights – like the Crab Nebula and Pleiades star cluster in Taurus and the misty Orion Nebula, which hangs below Orion’s belt. If you look to the western sky soon after dark, you can still spot the three bright stars of the Summer Triangle getting quite low on the horizon. But as they depart, three bright stars of winter bring their own prominent triangular shape to mark the season. Once you spot Orion’s distinctive belt of three stars, you’re well on your way to finding what we call the Winter Triangle. Just follow the belt stars to the left and slightly downward – they point right to Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Then look upward and to the left of Sirius to spot Procyon, and back up toward Orion to find reddish Betelgeuse at its shoulder. These three bright stars form an equilateral triangle that’s visible throughout the season. The Geminid meteor shower peaks after midnight in the early morning of December 14th, and they’re usually one of the best meteor showers of the year under good conditions. This year, the nearly full Moon will wash out the fainter meteors on the peak night. Still, the Geminids are known for bright meteors, and it’s common to spot their shooting stars up to a week before the peak. If you’re up before dawn that week, it’s worth looking up, just in case you spot a speck of dust from space streaking through the morning sky. And here are the phases of the Moon for December. The phases of the Moon for December 2024. NASA/JPL-Caltech Stay up to date on all of NASA’s missions exploring the solar system and beyond at NASA Science. I’m Preston Dyches from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and that’s What’s Up for this month. Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Solar System Exploration Asteroids, Comets & Meteors Planets Moons View the full article

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft departs the International Space Station as it orbits 264 miles above the south Pacific Ocean northeast of New Zealand.Credit: NASA NASA and its international partners are set to receive scientific research samples and hardware as a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft departs the International Space Station on Thursday, Dec. 5, for its return to Earth. NASA’s live coverage of undocking and departure begins at 10:50 a.m. EST on NASA+. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media. The Dragon spacecraft will undock from the forward port of the space station’s Harmony module at 11:05 a.m., and fire its thrusters to move a safe distance away from the station after receiving a command from ground controllers at SpaceX. After re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft will splash down off the coast of Florida. NASA will not stream the splashdown and will post updates on the agency’s space station blog. Filled with nearly 6,000 pounds of crew supplies, science investigations, and equipment, the spacecraft arrived to the orbiting laboratory Nov. 5 after it launched Nov. 4 on a Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the agency’s SpaceX 31st commercial resupply services mission. Dragon will carry back to Earth thousands of pounds of supplies and scientific experiments designed to take advantage of the space station’s microgravity environment. Splashing down off the coast of Florida enables quick transportation of the experiments to NASA’s Space Systems Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, allowing researchers to collect data with minimal sample exposure to Earth’s gravity. Scientific hardware and samples returning to Earth include GISMOS (Genes in Space Molecular Operations and Sequencing), which successfully conducted in-orbit sequencing of microbial DNA from the space station water system, and marks the first real look at the microbial population of the water system. In addition, SpaceTED (Space Tissue Equivalent Dosimeter) returns to Earth after collecting data on crew radiation exposure and characterizes the space radiation environment. The dosimeter is a student-developed technology demonstration and effectively operated for 11 months on station – six months longer than intended because of its success. Additionally, two specimens printed with ESA’s (European Space Agency) Metal 3D Printer, will go to researchers for post-processing and analysis. Researchers will compare the specimens printed in microgravity with those printed on Earth. The goal is to demonstrate the capability to perform metal deposition, or the layering of metals, in 3D under sustained microgravity conditions and manufacture test specimens. Researchers aim to understand the performance and limitations of the chosen technology and become familiar with crewed and remote operations of the instrument onboard a space habitat. Also returning on spacecraft is the International Space Art and Poetry Contest, which invited students and educators around the world to submit drawings, paintings, or poems. Winning art submissions were printed on station, photographed in the cupola, and will be returned to their creators on Earth. In addition, Plasmonic Bubbles researchers will observe high-speed video of bubble behavior in microgravity to understand fundamental processes that occur on a heated bubble surface. Results may improve understanding of how molecules are deposited on bubble surfaces and enhance detection methods for health care and environmental industries. For more than two decades, people have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge, and making research breakthroughs that are not possible on Earth. The station is a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight and to expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit. As commercial companies focus on providing human space transportation services and destinations as part of a robust low Earth orbit economy, NASA is focusing more resources on deep space missions to the Moon as part of its Artemis campaign in preparation for future human missions to Mars. Get breaking news, images and features from the space station on Instagram, Facebook, and X. Learn more about the International Space Station at: https://www.nasa.gov/international-space-station -end- Claire O’Shea / Joshua Finch Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1100 claire.a.o’shea@nasa.gov / joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov Sandra Jones Johnson Space Center, Houston 281-483-5111 sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Dec 02, 2024 LocationNASA Headquarters Related TermsInternational Space Station (ISS)Commercial ResupplyISS ResearchJohnson Space CenterSpaceX Commercial Resupply View the full article

jsc2024e064444 (Sept. 30, 2024) — The crew members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission (from left) mission specialist Kirill Peskov of Roscosmos, NASA astronauts Nichole Ayers, pilot, and Anne McClain, commander, along with Mission Specialist Takuya Onishi of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), pose for a picture during training at SpaceX in Hawthorne, California. SpaceX Digital content creators are invited to register to attend the launch of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission to carry astronauts to the International Space Station for a science expedition mission as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. This will be the 14th time a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft launched by a Falcon 9 rocket takes crews to the orbital laboratory. Launch of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission is targeted for no earlier than February 2025 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. The launch will carry NASA astronauts Anne McClain, commander, and Nichole Ayers, pilot, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi, mission specialist, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov. If your passion is to communicate and engage the world online, then this is the event for you! Seize the opportunity to see and share the #Crew10 mission launch. A maximum of 50 social media users will be selected to attend this two-day event and will be given exclusive access to Kennedy. NASA Social participants will have the opportunity to: View a crewed launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft Tour NASA facilities at Kennedy Space Center Meet and interact with Crew-10 subject matter experts Meet fellow space enthusiasts who are active on social media NASA Social registration for the Crew-10 launch opens on Monday, Dec. 2, and the deadline to apply is at 10 a.m. EDT on Monday, Dec. 16. All social applications will be considered on a case-by-case basis. APPLY NOW Do I need to have a social media account to register? Yes. This event is designed for people who: Actively use multiple social networking platforms and tools to disseminate information to a unique audience. Regularly produce new content that features multimedia elements. Have the potential to reach a large number of people using digital platforms, or reach a unique audience, separate and distinctive from traditional news media and/or NASA audiences. Must have an established history of posting content on social media platforms. Have previous postings that are highly visible, respected and widely recognized. Users on all social networks are encouraged to use the hashtag #NASASocial and #Crew10. Updates and information about the event will be shared on X via @NASASocial and @NASAKennedy, and via posts to Facebook and Instagram. How do I register? Registration for this event opens on Monday, Dec. 2, and closes at 10 a.m. EDT on Monday, Dec. 16. Registration is for one person only (you) and is non-transferable. Each individual wishing to attend must register separately. Each application will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Can I register if I am not a U.S. citizen? Yes, this event is open for all to apply. When will I know if I am selected? After registrations have been received and processed, an email with confirmation information and additional instructions will be sent to those selected. We expect to send the acceptance notifications by Jan. 24. What are NASA Social credentials? All social applications will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Those chosen must prove through the registration process they meet specific engagement criteria. If you do not make the registration list for this NASA Social, you still can attend the launch offsite and participate in the conversation online. Find out about ways to experience a launch here. What are the registration requirements? Registration indicates your intent to travel to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and attend the two-day event in person. You are responsible for your own expenses for travel, accommodations, food, and other amenities. Some events and participants scheduled to appear at the event are subject to change without notice. NASA is not responsible for loss or damage incurred as a result of attending. NASA, moreover, is not responsible for loss or damage incurred if the event is cancelled with limited or no notice. Please plan accordingly. Kennedy is a government facility. Those who are selected will need to complete an additional registration step to receive clearance to enter the secure areas. IMPORTANT: To be admitted, you will need to provide two forms of unexpired government-issued identification; one must be a photo ID and match the name provided on the registration. Those without proper identification cannot be admitted. For a complete list of acceptable forms of ID, please visit: NASA Credentialing Identification Requirements. All registrants must be at least 18 years old. What if the launch date changes? Many different factors can cause a scheduled launch date to change multiple times. If the launch date changes, NASA may adjust the date of the NASA Social accordingly to coincide with the new target launch date. NASA will notify registrants of any changes by email. If the launch is postponed, attendees may be invited to attend a later launch date, but is not guaranteed. NASA Social attendees are responsible for any additional costs they incur related to any launch delay. We strongly encourage participants to make travel arrangements that are refundable and/or flexible. What if I cannot come to the Kennedy Space Center? If you cannot come to the Kennedy Space Center and attend in person, you should not register for the NASA Social. You can follow the conversation online using #NASASocial. You can watch the launch on NASA+ or plus.nasa.gov. NASA will provide regular launch and mission updates on @NASA, @NASAKennedy, and @Commercial_Crew, as well as on NASA’s Commercial Crew Program blog. If you cannot make this NASA Social, don’t worry; NASA is planning many other Socials in the near future at various locations! Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Missions Humans in Space ISS National Laboratory Commercial Crew Spacecraft View the full article

8 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) Virtual meetings feeling a little stale? NASA has just unveiled a suite of new Artemis backgrounds to elevate your digital workspace. From the majesty of the Artemis I launch lighting up the night sky to the iconic image of the Orion spacecraft with the Moon and Earth in view, these virtual backgrounds allow viewers to relive the awe-inspiring moments of Artemis I and glimpse the bright future that lies ahead as the Artemis campaign enables humans to live and work at the Moon’s South Pole region. Scroll through to download your next virtual background for work, school, or just for fun, and learn about all things Artemis as the agency and its partners cross off milestones leading up to Artemis II and missions beyond. Artemis I Launch Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft launches on the Artemis I flight test on Nov. 16, 2022, from Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA’s Artemis I mission was the first integrated flight test of the agency’s deep space exploration systems: the Orion spacecraft, SLS rocket, and ground systems. SLS and Orion launched at 1:47 a.m. EST from Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy. Artemis II Crew Credit: NASA Meet the astronauts who will fly around the Moon during the Artemis II mission. From left are Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch from NASA, and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen from the Canadian Space Agency. Astronaut Regolith Credit: NASA An artist’s concept of two suited Artemis crew members working on the lunar surface. The samples collected during future Artemis missions will continue to advance our knowledge of the solar system and help us understand the history and formation of Earth and the Moon, uncovering some of the mysteries that have long eluded scientists. Exploration Ground Systems Credit: NASA NASA’s mobile launcher, atop Crawler Transporter-2, is at the entrance to High Bay 3 at the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) on Sept. 8, 2018, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This is the first time that the modified mobile launcher made the trip to the pad and the VAB. The mobile launcher is the structure that is used to assemble, process, and launch the SLS rocket. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky NASA’s SLS rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard is seen atop a mobile launcher at Launch Pad 39B on Nov. 4, 2022, as Crawler Transporter-2 departs the pad following rollout at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: NASA After Orion splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, west of Baja California, the spacecraft was recovered by personnel on the USS Portland from the U.S. Department of Defense, including Navy amphibious specialists, Space Force weather specialists, and Air Force specialists, as well as engineers and technicians from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and Lockheed Martin Space Operations. Personnel from NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems led the recovery efforts. Credit: NASA/Keegan Barber NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard is seen atop a mobile launcher as it rolls out to Launch Complex 39B for the first time on March 17, 2022, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At left is the Vehicle Assembly Building. First Woman Credit: NASA “First Woman” graphic novel virtual background featuring an illustration of the inside of a lunar space station outfitted with research racks and computer displays. To learn more about the graphic novel and interactive experiences, visit: nasa.gov/calliefirst/ Credit: NASA “First Woman” graphic novel virtual background featuring the illustration of the inside of a lunar space station outfitted with research racks and computer displays, along with zero-g indicator suited rubber duckies floating throughout. To learn more about the graphic novel and interactive experiences, visit: nasa.gov/calliefirst/ Credit: NASA This “First Woman” graphic novel virtual background features an illustrated scene from a lunar mission. At a lunar camp, one suited astronaut flashes the peace sign while RT, the robot sidekick, waves in the foreground. To learn more about the graphic novel and interactive experiences, visit: nasa.gov/calliefirst/ Gateway Credit: NASA The Gateway space station hosts the Orion spacecraft and SpaceX’s deep space logistics spacecraft in a polar orbit around the Moon, supporting scientific discovery on the lunar surface during the Artemis IV mission. Credit: Northrop Grumman and Thales Alenia Space The Gateway space station’s HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost) module, one of two of Gateway’s habitation elements where astronauts will live, conduct science, and prepare for lunar surface missions, successfully completed welding in Turin, Italy. Following a series of tests to ensure its safety, the future home for astronauts will travel to Gilbert, Arizona, for final outfitting ahead of launch to lunar orbit. Gateway will be humanity’s first space station in lunar orbit and is an essential component of the Artemis campaign to return humans to the Moon for scientific discovery and chart a path for human missions to Mars. Lunar Surface Credit: SpaceX Artist’s concept of SpaceX Starship Human Landing System, or HLS, which is slated to transport astronauts to and from the lunar surface during Artemis III and IV. Credit: Blue Origin Artist’s concept of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK-2 human lunar lander, which is slated to land astronauts on the Moon during Artemis V. Credit: NASA The “Moon buggy” for NASA’s Artemis missions, the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), is seen here enabling a pair of astronauts to explore more of the Moon’s surface and conduct science research farther away from the landing site. NASA has selected Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab to advance capabilities for an LTV. Credit: JAXA/Toyota An artist’s concept of the pressurized rover — which is being designed, developed, and operated by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) — is seen driving across the lunar terrain. The pressurized rover will serve as a mobile habitat and laboratory for the astronauts to live and work for extended periods of time on the Moon. Logo Credit: NASA The NASA “meatball” logo. The round red, white, and blue insignia was designed by employee James Modarelli in 1959, NASA’s second year. The design incorporates references to different aspects of NASA’s missions. Credit: NASA The NASA meatball logo (left) and Artemis logo side by side. Moon Phases Credit: NASA The different phases of the Moon, shown in variations of shadowing, extend across this virtual background. Orion Credit: NASA On flight day 5 during Artemis I, the Orion spacecraft took a selfie while approaching the Moon ahead of the outbound powered flyby — a burn of Orion’s main engine that placed the spacecraft into lunar orbit. During this maneuver, Orion came within 81 miles of the lunar surface. Credit: NASA On flight day 13 during Artemis I, Orion reached its maximum distance from Earth at 268,563 miles away from our home planet, traveling farther than any other spacecraft built for humans. Credit: NASA This first high-resolution image, taken on the first day of the Artemis I mission, was captured by a camera on the tip of one of Orion’s solar arrays. The spacecraft was 57,000 miles from home and distancing itself from planet Earth as it approached the Moon and distant retrograde orbit. Silhouettes Credit: NASA In this virtual background, various scenes from Earth, Moon, and Mars are depicted within the silhouette outlines of three suited astronauts, artistically representing the interconnected nature of human space exploration from low Earth orbit to the Moon and, one day, human missions to Mars. SLS (Space Launch System) Credit: Joel Kowsky In this sunrise photo at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA’s SLS rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard is seen atop the mobile launcher at Launch Pad 39B as preparations continued for the Artemis I launch. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky In this close-up image, NASA’s SLS rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard is seen atop the mobile launcher at Launch Pad 39B on Nov. 12, 2022, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky NASA’s SLS rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard is seen at sunrise atop the mobile launcher at Launch Pad 39B on Nov. 7, 2022, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Earth, Moon, and Mars Credit: NASA From left, an artist’s concept of the Moon, Earth, and Mars sharing space. NASA’s long-term goal is to send humans to Mars, and we will use what we learn at the Moon to help us get there. This is the agency’s Moon to Mars exploration approach. Credit: NASA In this artist’s concept, the upper portion of a blended sphere represents the Earth, Moon, and Mars. Credit: NASA An artist’s concept showing, from left, the Earth, Moon, and Mars in sequence. Mars remains our horizon goal for human exploration because it is a rich destination for scientific discovery and a driver of technologies that will enable humans to travel and explore far from Earth. About the AuthorCatherine E. Williams Share Details Last Updated Dec 02, 2024 Related TermsHumans in SpaceArtemisArtemis 1Artemis 2Artemis 3Artemis 4Artemis 5Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate Explore More 6 min read NASA’s Commercial Partners Make Progress on Low Earth Orbit Projects Article 7 days ago 4 min read NASA Marshall Thermal Engineering Lab Provides Key Insight to Human Landing System Article 1 week ago 8 min read Preguntas frecuentes: La verdadera historia del cuidado de la salud de los astronautas en el espacio Article 2 weeks ago Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Missions Humans in Space Climate Change Solar System View the full article

4 min read December’s Night Sky Notes: Spot the King of Planets by Kat Troche of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Jupiter is our solar system’s undisputed king of the planets! Jupiter is bright and easy to spot from our vantage point on Earth, helped by its massive size and banded, reflective cloud tops. Jupiter even possesses moons the size of planets: Ganymede, its largest, is bigger than the planet Mercury. What’s more, you can easily observe Jupiter and its moons with a modest instrument, just like Galileo did over 400 years ago. This image taken on Feb. 7 by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, reveals swirling cloud formations in the northern area of Jupiter’s north temperate belt. Citizen scientist Kevin M. Gill processed the image using data from the JunoCam imager. NASA, JPL-Caltech, SwRI, MSSS | Image processing by Kevin M. Gill, © CC BY Jupiter’s position as our solar system’s largest planet is truly earned; you could fit 11 Earths along Jupiter’s diameter, and in case you were looking to fill up Jupiter with some Earth-size marbles, you would need over 1300 Earths to fill it up – and that would still not be quite enough! However, despite its formidable size, Jupiter’s true rule over the outer solar system comes from its enormous mass. If you took all of the planets in our solar system and put them together, they would still only be half as massive as Jupiter all by itself. Jupiter’s mighty mass has shaped the orbits of countless comets and asteroids. Its gravity can fling these tiny objects towards our inner solar system and also draw them into itself, as famously observed in 1994 when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, drawn towards Jupiter in previous orbits, smashed into the gas giant’s atmosphere. Its multiple fragments slammed into Jupiter’s cloud tops with such violence that the fireballs and dark impact spots were not only seen by NASA’s orbiting Galileo probe but also by observers back on Earth! Look for Jupiter near the Eye of the Bull, Aldebaran, in the Taurus constellation on the evening of December 15, 2024. Binoculars may help you spot Jupiter’s moons as small bright star-like objects on either side of the planet. A small telescope will show them easily, along with Jupiter’s famed cloud bands. How many can you count? Credit: Stellarium Web Jupiter is easy to observe at night with our unaided eyes, as well-documented by the ancient astronomers who carefully recorded its slow movements from night to night. It can be one of the brightest objects in our nighttime skies, bested only by the Moon, Venus, and occasionally Mars, when the red planet is at opposition. That’s impressive for a planet that, at its closest to Earth, is still over 365 million miles (587 million km) away. It’s even more impressive that the giant world remains very bright to Earthbound observers at its furthest distance: 600 million miles (968 million km)! While the King of Planets has a coterie of 95 known moons, only the four large moons that Galileo originally observed in 1610 – Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Calisto – can be easily observed by Earth-based observers with very modest equipment. These are called, appropriately enough, the Galilean moons. Most telescopes will show the moons as faint star-like objects neatly lined up close to bright Jupiter. Most binoculars will show at least one or two moons orbiting the planet. Small telescopes will show all four of the Galilean moons if they are all visible, but sometimes they can pass behind or in front of Jupiter or even each other. Telescopes will also show details like Jupiter’s cloud bands and, if powerful enough, large storms like its famous Great Red Spot, and the shadows of the Galilean moons passing between the Sun and Jupiter. Sketching the positions of Jupiter’s moons during the course of an evening – and night to night – can be a rewarding project! You can download an activity guide from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific at bit.ly/drawjupitermoons Now in its eighth year, NASA’s Juno mission is one of just nine spacecraft to have visited this impressive world. Juno entered Jupiter’s orbit in 2016 to begin its initial mission to study this giant world’s mysterious interior. The years have proven Juno’s mission a success, with data from the probe revolutionizing our understanding of this gassy world’s guts. Juno’s mission has since been extended to include the study of its large moons, and since 2021 the plucky probe, increasingly battered by Jupiter’s powerful radiation belts, has made close flybys of the icy moons Ganymede and Europa, along with volcanic Io. What else will we potentially learn in 2030 with the Europa Clipper mission? Find the latest discoveries from Juno and NASA’s missions to Jupiter at science.nasa.gov/jupiter/ Originally posted by Dave Prosper: February 2023 Last Updated by Kat Troche: November 2024 View the full article

4 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) Aaron Yazzie’s dream of being part of humanity’s exploration of space took him on a journey from his childhood home on the Navajo Nation to working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California. His journey reflects not only his personal ambition, but also a commitment to elevating Indigenous representation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. “Getting an internship at NASA was the culmination of a lot of work done by myself, and many of the Indigenous trailblazers that came before me, to make a path and a space for Indigenous peoples at places where there might not have been any Indigenous Peoples in any rooms,” said Yazzie. Born in Tuba City, Arizona, Yazzie is of the Salt Clan and born for the Bitter Water Clan, which reflect his maternal and paternal lineage, respectively. The Navajo clan system communicates family heritage and where their families come from. Yazzie’s path to NASA began with a passion for engineering, which he pursued at Stanford University in Stanford, California, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 2008. NASA is a dream job for many, from artists to engineers, and Yazzie was no exception. Securing an internship at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 2008 marked a significant milestone for him, particularly as an Indigenous person in STEM where Indigenous people are underrepresented. Throughout his academic and professional journey, he frequently found himself as the only Indigenous voice in the room with Indigenous people representing less than 0.6% of the American STEM workforce. Yazzie’s work at NASA is deeply intertwined with his cultural identity. In the Navajo culture, traditional stories tell how the Diné (the people) came to exist in Dinétah (Navajo homelands). Yazzie’s contributions to missions exploring Mars, including testing the Curiosity Rover’s sample acquisition system and developing drill bits for the Perseverance Rover, resonate with the Navajo creation story, which emphasizes nurturing life on a developing Earth—paralleling his efforts to support the possibility of life on Mars. He approaches his role with a sense of purpose, reflecting on the importance of understanding origins–both of the Earth and of life itself. “By studying Mars, we learn about how rocky, terrestrial planets, like Mars and Earth, formed over billions of years,” said Yazzie, “And by searching for ancient microbial life on Mars, we might learn how life on Earth originated. I am proud to be doing what my ancestors have been doing before me.” Emphasizing a commitment to lifelong learning, Yazzie advises future interns to “embrace the opportunities of growth and learning that come with working at NASA.” His advice: learn how to be a good learner. Yazzie’s diverse responsibilities, from test engineer to systems engineer, keep him engaged and continuously evolving. “I think I am most proud of the outreach work I have been able to do, especially to Indigenous communities,” said Yazzie, “I want to help Indigenous students understand that they can exist and thrive at places like NASA.” Yazzie’s work has been recognized with awards from NASA JPL, Stanford University, and his own tribe, reinforcing his role as a trailblazer for generations. As he continues to contribute to humanity’s understanding of Mars and its potential for past life, he honors his ancestors by paving the way for a more inclusive future in space exploration. Through his work, Yazzie inspires a new generation of Diné scientists and engineers, proving their voices have an essential place in the story of the cosmos. Like Yazzie, NASA is devoted to mentoring the next generation of Indigenous doers, thinkers, and innovators. Anyone interested in following his footsteps may consider applying for a NASA Internship. Outside of internships NASA offers numerous routes to help Indigenous students get involved with STEM. Additionally, through NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP), the agency provides financial assistance via competitive awards to Minority Serving Institutions. The MUREP American Indian and Alaska Native STEM Engagement (MAIANSE) program offers funding dedicated to supporting Indigenous students launch their careers at NASA. Want to learn more about interns at NASA? Read More View the full article

The Thanksgiving holiday typically brings families and friends together in a celebration of common gratitude for all the good things that have happened during the previous year. People celebrate the holiday in various ways, with parades, football marathons, and attending services, but food remains the over-arching theme. For astronauts embarked on long-duration space missions, separation from family and friends is inevitable and they rely on fellow crew members to share in the tradition and enjoy the culinary traditions as much as possible. Over the past decades, astronauts have celebrated the holiday during their time in space in a variety of unique ways. Enjoy the stories and photographs from orbital Thanksgiving celebrations over the years. Skylab 4 astronauts Edward G. Gibson, left, William R. Pogue, and Gerald P. Carr demonstrate eating aboard Skylab during Thanksgiving in 1973. NASA Skylab 4 astronauts Gerald P. Carr, Edward G. Gibson, and William R. Pogue hold the distinction as the first crew to celebrate Thanksgiving in space on Nov. 22, 1973. On that day, their seventh of an 84-day mission, Gibson and Pogue completed a 6-hour and 33-minute spacewalk, while Carr remained in the Multiple Docking Adapter, with no access to food. All three made up for missing lunch by consuming two meals at dinner time, although neither included special items for Thanksgiving. Twelve years passed before the next orbital Thanksgiving celebration. On Nov. 28, 1985, the seven-member crew of STS-61B, NASA astronauts Brewster H. Shaw, Bryan D. O’Connor, Jerry L. Ross, Mary L. Cleave, and Sherwood C. “Woody” Spring, and payload specialists Charles D. Walker from the United States and Rodolfo Neri Vela from Mexico, feasted on shrimp cocktail, irradiated turkey, and cranberry sauce aboard the space shuttle Atlantis. STS-80 astronauts Tamara E. Jernigan, left, Kent V. Rominger, and Thomas D. Jones enjoy Thanksgiving dinner in Columbia’s middeck in 1996.NASA Neri Vela introduced tortillas to space menus, and they have remained favorites among astronauts ever since. Unlike regular bread, tortillas do not create crumbs, a potential hazard in weightlessness, and have multiple uses for any meal of the day. The crew of STS-33, NASA astronauts Frederick D. Gregory, John E. Blaha, Manley L. “Sonny” Carter, F. Story Musgrave, and Kathryn C. Thornton, celebrated Thanksgiving aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1989. Gregory and Musgrave celebrated their second Thanksgiving in space two years later, joined by fellow STS-44 NASA astronauts Terrence T. “Tom” Henricks, James S. Voss, Mario Runco, and Thomas J. Hennen aboard space shuttle Atlantis. In 1996, Blaha celebrated his second Thanksgiving in space with Russian cosmonauts Valeri G. Korzun and Aleksandr Y. Kaleri aboard the space station Mir. Blaha watched the beautiful Earth through the Mir windows rather than his usual viewing fare of football. The STS-80 crew of NASA astronauts Kenneth D. Cockrell, Kent V. Rominger, Tamara E. Jernigan, Thomas D. Jones, and Musgrave, now on his third turkey day holiday in orbit, celebrated Thanksgiving aboard space shuttle Columbia. Although the eight crew members worked in different spacecraft in different orbits, they exchanged holiday greetings via space-to-space radio. This marked the largest number of people in space on Thanksgiving Day up to that time. One year later, NASA astronaut David A. Wolf celebrated Thanksgiving with his Russian crewmates Anatoli Y. Solovev, who translated the holiday into Russian as den blagodarenia, and Pavel V. Vinogradov aboard Mir. They enjoyed smoked turkey, freeze-dried mashed potatoes, peas, and milk. Also in orbit at the time was the crew of STS-87, NASA astronauts Kevin R. Kregel, Steven W. Lindsey, Kalpana Chawla, and Winston E. Scott, Takao Doi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and Leonid K. Kadenyuk of Ukraine, aboard Columbia. The nine crew members aboard the two spacecraft broke the one-year-old record for the largest number of people in space at one time for Thanksgiving, also setting the record for the most nations represented, four. NASA astronaut Frank L. Culbertson, left, and Vladimir N. Dezhurov of Roscosmos enjoy Thanksgiving dinner aboard the International Space Station in 2001.NASA The Expedition 1 crew of NASA astronaut William M. Shepherd, and Yuri P. Gidzenko and Sergei K. Krikalev of Roscosmos celebrated the first Thanksgiving aboard the International Space Station on Nov. 23, 2000, three weeks after their arrival aboard the facility. The crew took time out of their busy schedule to enjoy ham and smoked turkey and send words of thanks to people on the ground who provided excellent support to their flight. Crews have celebrated Thanksgiving in space every November since then. In 2001, Expedition 3 crew members NASA astronaut Frank L. Culbertson, and Vladimir N. Dezhurov and Mikhail V. Tyurin of Roscosmos enjoyed the first real Thanksgiving aboard the space station, complete with a cardboard turkey as decoration. The following year’s orbital Thanksgiving celebration included the largest number of people to that time, the combined 10 crewmembers of Expedition 5, STS-113, and Expedition 6. After a busy day that included the first Thanksgiving Day spacewalk from the space station, the crews settled down to a dinner of smoked turkey, mashed potatoes, and green beans with mushrooms. Blueberry-cherry cobbler rounded out the meal. The crews of Expeditions 18 and STS-126 share a Thanksgiving meal in the space shuttle middeck in 2008. NASA Expedition 18 crew members NASA astronauts E. Michael Fincke and Gregory E. Chamitoff and Yuri V. Lonchakov representing Roscosmos, welcomed the STS-126 crew of NASA astronauts Christopher J. Ferguson, Eric A. Boe, Heidemarie M. Stefanyshyn-Piper, Donald R. Pettit, Stephen G. Bowen, R. Shane Kimbrough, and Sandra H. Magnus during Thanksgiving in 2008. They dined in the space shuttle Endeavour’s middeck on smoked turkey, candied yams, green beans and mushrooms, cornbread dressing and a cranapple dessert. The following year saw the largest and an internationally diverse group celebrating Thanksgiving in space. The six Expedition 21 crew members, NASA astronauts Jeffrey N. Williams and Nicole P. Stott, Roman Y. Romanenko and Maksim V. Suraev of Roscosmos, Frank L. DeWinne of the European Space Agency, and Robert B. Thirsk of the Canadian Space Agency hosted the six members of the STS-129 crew, NASA astronauts Charles O. Hobaugh, Barry E. Wilmore, Michael J. Foreman, Robert L. Satcher, Randolph J. Bresnik, and Leland D. Melvin. The twelve assembled crew members represented the United States, Russia, Belgium, and Canada. The celebration took place two days early, since the shuttle undocked from the space station on Thanksgiving Day. We hope you enjoyed these stories and photographs from Thanksgivings celebrated in space. We would like to wish everyone here on the ground and the seven-member crew of Expedition 72 aboard the space station a very Happy Thanksgiving! For NASA astronauts Barry “Butch” E. Wilmore and Donald R. Pettit, this will mark the third time they celebrate the holiday in space. Expedition 42 crew members enjoy Thanksgiving dinner aboard the space station in 2014.NASA Expedition 45 crew members gather at the Thanksgiving dinner table aboard the orbital outpost in 2015. NASA Expedition 50 crew members at the Thanksgiving dinner table aboard the orbiting laboratory in 2016. NASA The Expedition 53 crew awaits the start of Thanksgiving dinner aboard the space station in 2017.NASA Expedition 66 crew members enjoy a Thanksgiving feast in 2021.NASA Expedition 70 crew members Andreas E. Mogensen, of the European Space Agency, front left, NASA astronauts Loral A. O’Hara and Jasmin Moghbeli, and Satoshi Furukawa of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency beam down their Thanksgiving message to everyone on the ground in 2023. The astronauts presented their favorite Thanksgiving space food items.NASA View the full article

NASA On Nov. 30, 2002, NASA astronauts John Herrington (pictured) and Michael Lopez-Alegria performed the third and final spacewalk of the STS-113 mission. The goal of the mission was to install and activate the Port 1 Integrated Truss Assembly (P1). The first major component installed on the left side of the Station, the P1 truss provides an additional three External Thermal Control System radiators. Herrington, an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation, was the first Native American in space. On STS-113, he logged over 330 hours in space, including 3 spacewalks totaling 19 hours and 55 minutes. Image credit: NASA View the full article

NASA Lewis Research Center’s DC-9 commences one of its microgravity-producing parabolas in the fall of 1994. It was the center’s largest aircraft since the B-29 Superfortress in the 1940s.Credit: NASA/Quentin Schwinn A bell rings and a strobe light flashes as a pilot pulls the nose of the DC-9 aircraft up sharply. The blood quickly drains from researchers’ heads as they are pulled to the cabin floor by a force twice that of normal gravity. Once the acceleration slows to the desired level, and the NASA aircraft crests over its arc, the flight test director declares, “We’re over the top!” The pressure drops as the aircraft plummets forward in freefall. For the next 20 to 25 seconds, everybody and everything not tied down begins to float. The researchers quickly tend to their experiments before the bell rings again as the pilot brings the aircraft back to level flight and normal Earth gravity. By flying in a series of up-and-down parabolas, aircraft can simulate weightlessness. Flights like this in the DC-9, conducted by NASA’s Lewis Research Center (today, NASA Glenn) in the 1990s, provided scientists with a unique way to study the behavior of fluids, combustion, and materials in a microgravity environment. Researchers conduct experiments in simulated weightlessness during a flight aboard the DC-9. The aircraft sometimes flew up to 40 parabolas in a single mission.Credit: NASA/Quentin Schwinn Beginnings In the 1960s, NASA Lewis used a North American AJ-2 to fly parabolas to study the behavior of liquid propellants in low-gravity conditions. The center subsequently expanded its microgravity research to include combustion and materials testing. So, when the introduction of the space shuttle in the early 1980s led to an increase in microgravity research, NASA Lewis was poised to be a leader in the agency’s microgravity science efforts. To help scientists test experiments on Earth before they flew for extended durations on the shuttle, Lewis engineers modified a Learjet aircraft to fly microgravity test flights with a single strapped-down experiment and researcher. The DC-9 flight crew in May 1996. Each flight required two pilots, a flight engineer, and test directors. The flight crews participated in pre- and post-flight mission briefings and contributed to program planning, cost analysis, and the writing of technical reports.Credit: NASA/Quentin Schwinn Bigger And Better In 1990, NASA officials decided that Lewis needed a larger aircraft to accommodate more experiments, including free-floating tests. Officials determined the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 would be the most economical option and decided to assume responsibility for a DC-9 being leased by the U.S. Department of Energy. In the fall of 1993, 50 potential users of the aircraft visited the center to discuss the modifications that would be necessary to perform their research. In October 1994, the DC-9 arrived at Lewis in its normal passenger configuration. Over the next three months, Lewis technicians removed nearly all the seats; bolstered the floor and ceiling; and installed new power, communications, and guidance systems. A 6.5-by-11-foot cargo door was also installed to allow for the transfer of large equipment. The DC-9 was the final element making NASA Lewis the nation’s premier microgravity institution. The center’s Space Experiments Division had been recently expanded, the 2.2-Second Drop Tower and the Zero Gravity Facility had been upgraded, and the Space Experiments Laboratory had recently been constructed to centralize microgravity activities. NASA Lewis researchers aboard the DC-9 train the STS-83 astronauts on experiments for the Microgravity Science Laboratory (MSL-1).Credit: NASA/Quentin Schwinn Conducting the Flights Lewis researchers partnered with industry and universities to design and test experiments that could fly on the space shuttle or the future space station. The DC-9 could accommodate up to eight experiments and 20 research personnel on each flight. The experiments involved space acceleration measurements, capillary pump loops, bubble behavior, thin film liquid rupture, materials flammability, and flame spread. It was a highly interactive experience, with researchers accompanying their tests to gain additional information through direct observation. The researchers were often so focused on their work that they hardly noticed the levitation of their bodies. The DC-9 flew every other week to allow time for installation of experiments and aircraft maintenance. The flights, which were based out of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, were flown in restricted air space over northern Michigan. The aircraft sometimes flew up to 40 parabolas in a single mission. Seth Lichter, professor at Northwestern University, conducts a thin film rupture experiment aboard the DC-9 in April 1997.Credit: NASA/Quentin Schwinn A Lasting Legacy When the aircraft’s lease expired in the late 1990s, NASA returned the DC-9 to its owner. From May 18, 1995, to July 11, 1997, the Lewis microgravity flight team had used the DC-9 to fly over 400 hours, perform 70-plus trajectories, and conduct 73 research projects, helping scientists conduct hands-on microgravity research on Earth as well as test and prepare experiments designed to fly in space. The aircraft served as a unique and important tool, overall contributing to the body of knowledge around microgravity science and the center’s expertise in this research area. NASA Glenn’s microgravity work continues. The center has supported experiments on the International Space Station that could improve crew health as well as spacecraft fire safety, propulsion, and propellants. Glenn is also home to two microgravity drop towers, including the Zero Gravity Research Facility, NASA’s premier ground-based microgravity research lab. Additional Resources: Learn more about why NASA researchers simulate microgravity Take a virtual tour of NASA Glenn’s Zero Gravity Research Facility Discover more about Glenn’s expertise in space technology Explore More 6 min read Art Meets Exploration: Cosmic Connections in Galveston Article 1 day ago 3 min read Emerging Engineering Leader Basil Baldauff Emphasizes Osage Values Article 1 day ago 6 min read NASA’s Commercial Partners Make Progress on Low Earth Orbit Projects Article 2 days ago View the full article

3 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) The focus of Airspace Technology Demonstration 2 was IADS, a software that coordinates flight schedules between the ramp, tower, terminal, and center control facilities. This visual representation of data helps minimize delays on the ground.NASA / Jim Banke If every commuter drove the same few roads at the same time every day, the traffic would be unbearable. That’s exactly what’s happening in the skies above the nation, known as national airspace (NAS). Multiple flights from different airlines try to use the most direct flight paths, converging on the same airports. With limited runway space, that causes jumbo-sized traffic congestion. “The majority of uncertainty in the NAS can be attributed to surface operations, and in particular, uncertainty related to when a flight will be available to push back from the gate,” said Jeremy Coupe of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California. To help develop a solution, NASA Ames focused on how to improve managing traffic on the ground and scheduling departures. Holding airplanes at the gate until just before takeoff allows them to run on power supplied by the airport. American Airlines saved millions of gallons of fuel and maintenance costs and tons of harmful emissions by only running engines when arriving at and leaving the gate.NASA Working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), commercial airlines, and airports, NASA developed and tested a new program to manage airport traffic on the ground – the Integrated Arrival, Departure, and Surface (IADS) system. In 2022, the FAA began incorporating this system’s capabilities at 27 of the busiest airports in the country. Just as a traffic officer can prevent gridlock at a busy intersection, IADS is designed to prevent similar traffic tangles. The first test site for the program development was Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina, the second-busiest airport on the East Coast with only three runways. About 75% of those are connecting flights. Before IADS, one challenge the airport faced was a technology mismatch – the airport’s control tower used one software program and ground management used a different one, with no way to integrate them. A phone call was the most common way to notify each other about changes or problems. With approximately 115 aircraft on the ground at any time, a delay in communication could create complications. A plane leaving the gate before being notified of a delay could result in several planes waiting in line at the runway. “Knowing that you’re going to get where you need to go when the airline says it’s going to deliver you is what people stress about when they’re traveling, especially if they’re trying to make connections in an airport like Charlotte,” said Lee Davis, communications director for the airport. Many factors, including weather, influence timeliness, but making ground operations run predictably is fundamental. With near real-time data related to on-time departures and delays, airlines can actively address issues related to connections for crew, customers, and cargo. Whether it’s in space or the skies above, NASA innovations continue to make travel more efficient. Read More Share Details Last Updated Nov 27, 2024 Related TermsTechnology Transfer & SpinoffsSpinoffsTechnology Transfer Explore More 2 min read Super Insulation Requires Super Materials NASA researchers helped create an insulation coating that blocks heat and sunlight Article 1 week ago 2 min read From Mars Rovers to Factory Assembly Lines NASA-funded AI technology enabling autonomous rovers and drones now keeps an eye on conveyor belts Article 4 weeks ago 2 min read The View from Space Keeps Getting Better After 50 years of Landsat, discovery of new commercial and scientific uses is only accelerating Article 1 month ago Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics Aeronautics Air Traffic Management Research Ames Research Center Missions View the full article

“I love my country. I love serving my country. I think that was ingrained in me in the military, where I grew to realize how lucky we are to live in America and have the freedoms that we have. When I returned from [my first duty station] in Germany, I separated from the Air Force for about nine months, but I missed it so much, I was like, ‘Well, I guess I could join the reserves.’ I did want to get my education. I was ready by then. “So, I enrolled in school and went into the Reserves, and then 9/11 happened. That will change a person. I called my unit that afternoon and said, “Whatever you need, I’m ready.” I was activated supporting the mission, but I didn’t deploy like my husband. [9/11] is what touched my life more than anything: how quickly things can change in the blink of an eye. That’s what strengthened my respect of the Air Force core values: service before self and integrity, and excellence in all we do. “Then, when I got pregnant, I thought I might want to be home, so I continued in civil service and just fell in love with my kids. That’s when my relationship with loving the Air Force changed. It evolved. I still value all that time I had and served and the lessons I learned growing up [in the Air Force]. The biggest thing I have and will continue to pass on to my kids is respect for your country, even if you don’t follow the route I did. Respect your country and the people who serve it.” – Tami Wisniewski, Management and Program Analyst, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center Image Credit: NASA/Charles Beason Interviewer: NASA/Tahira Allen Check out some of our other Faces of NASA. View the full article

NASA, on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has selected Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory of Laurel, Maryland, to build the Suprathermal Ion Sensors for the Lagrange 1 Series project, part of NOAA’s Space Weather Next Program. This cost-plus-fixed-fee contract is valued at approximately $20.5 million and includes the development of two Suprathermal Ion Sensor instruments. The anticipated period of performance for this contract will run through Jan. 31, 2034. The work will take place at the awardee’s facility in Maryland, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The contract scope includes design, analysis, development, fabrication, integration, test, verification, and evaluation of the Suprathermal Ion Sensor instruments, launch support, supply and maintenance of ground support equipment, and support of post-launch mission operations at the NOAA Satellite Operations Facility. The Suprathermal Ion Sensors will provide critical data to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, which issues forecasts, warnings and alerts that help mitigate space weather impacts, including electric power outages and interruption to communications and navigation systems. The instruments will measure suprathermal ions and electrons across a broad range of energies, and will provide real-time, continuous observations to ensure early warning of various space weather impacts. They also will monitor ions to characterize solar ejections including coronal mass ejections, co-rotating interaction regions, and interplanetary shocks. Analysis of these spectra aids in estimating the arrival time and strength of solar wind shocks. NASA and NOAA oversee the development, launch, testing, and operation of all the satellites in the L1 Series project. NOAA is the program owner that provides funds and manages the program, operations, and data products and dissemination to users. NASA and commercial partners develop, build, and launch the instruments and spacecraft on behalf of NOAA. For information about NASA and agency programs, please visit: https://www.nasa.gov -end- Jeremy Eggers Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. 757-824-2958 jeremy.l.eggers@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Nov 26, 2024 EditorRob GarnerContactJeremy EggersLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related TermsNOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)Goddard Space Flight CenterHeliophysicsHeliophysics Division View the full article

Space Station Astronauts Deliver a Thanksgiving Message for 2024

NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) invite media to the official launch celebration of the new SERVIR Central America regional hub, located in Costa Rica, on Tuesday, Dec. 3, at 11 a.m. EST. The event will be hosted by NASA SERVIR Program Manager Daniel Irwin, U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador William H. Duncan, and a representative from El Salvador’s Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN). Betzy Hernandez from SERVIR’s Science Coordination Office leads a land cover mapping workshop in Belize. NASA and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are opening a new SERVIR Central America regional hub, located in Costa Rica, on Tuesday, Dec. 3. NASA Central America is the latest addition to SERVIR’s global network, a NASA and USAID initiative that has been operating in Asia, Africa, and Latin America since 2005. Implemented by the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center (CATIE), SERVIR Central America will strengthen climate resilience, sustainable resource management, and biodiversity conservation through satellite data and geospatial technology. The SERVIR Central America hub will support evidence-based decision-making at local, national, and regional levels, strengthening the resilience of more than 40 million people in one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions. The event will be in Spanish with English translation available. For press access and location details, please RSVP to Belarminda Quijano at belarminda@bqcomunicaciones.com by Monday, Dec. 2. NASA’s media accreditation policy is online. The event will be livestreamed. For more information on SERVIR, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/servir Elizabeth Vlock Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1600 elizabeth.a.vlock@nasa.gov Lane Figueroa Huntsville, Alabama 256-544-0034 lane.e.figueroa@nasa.gov Explore More 4 min read NASA Marshall Thermal Engineering Lab Provides Key Insight to Human Landing System Article 4 days ago 2 min read NASA, SpaceX Illustrate Key Moments of Artemis Lunar Lander Mission Article 6 days ago 5 min read NASA’s Chandra, Hubble Tune Into ‘Flame-Throwing’ Guitar Nebula Article 6 days ago View the full article

NASA/Ben Smegelsky Employees at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and NASA astronaut Victor Glover (right) happily snap a photo of themselves during a visit on Nov. 8, 2024. The employees are part of the agency’s Exploration Ground Systems (EGS), which develops and operates the systems and facilities needed to process and launch rockets and spacecraft for NASA’s Artemis missions. EGS plays a primary role in assembly, launch, and recovery of rockets and spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky View the full article