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Capturing the ripples of spacetime: LISA gets go-ahead
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By NASA
Crane operator Rebekah Tolatovicz, a shift mechanical technician lead for Artic Slope Regional Corporation at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, operates a 30-ton crane to lift the agency’s Artemis II Orion spacecraft out of the recently renovated altitude chamber to the Final Assembly and Systems Testing, or FAST, cell inside NASA Kennedy’s Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building on April 27.
During her most recent lift July 10, Tolatovicz helped transfer Orion back to the FAST cell following vacuum chamber qualification testing in the altitude chamber earlier this month. This lift is one of around 250 annual lifts performed at NASA Kennedy by seven operator/directors and 14 crane operators on the ASRC Orion team.
“At the time of the spacecraft lift, I focus solely on what’s going on in the moment of the operation,” explains Tolatovicz. “Listening for the commands from the lift director, making sure everyone is safe, verifying the vehicle is clear, and ensuring the crane is moving correctly.”
All Orion crane operators are certified after classroom and on-the-job training focusing on areas such as rigging, weight and center of gravity, mastering crane controls, crane securing, assessing safety issues, and emergency procedures. Once certified, they progress through a series of the different lifts required for Orion spacecraft operations, from simple moves to the complex full spacecraft lift.
“It’s not until after the move is complete and the vehicle is secured that I have a moment to think about how awesome it is to be a part of history on the Orion Program and do what I get to do every day with a team of the most amazing people,” Tolatovicz said.
Photo credit: NASA/Amanda Stevenson
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
The JunoCam instrument aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured two volcanic plumes rising above the horizon of Jupiter’s moon Io. The image was taken Feb. 3 from a distance of about 2,400 miles (3,800 kilometers).Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS, Image processing by Andrea Luck (CC BY) Infrared imagery from the solar-powered spacecraft heats up the discussion on the inner workings of Jupiter’s hottest moon.
New findings from NASA’s Juno probe provide a fuller picture of how widespread the lava lakes are on Jupiter’s moon Io and include first-time insights into the volcanic processes at work there. These results come courtesy of Juno’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument, contributed by the Italian Space Agency, which “sees” in infrared light. Researchers published a paper on Juno’s most recent volcanic discoveries on June 20 in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment.
Io has intrigued the astronomers since 1610, when Galileo Galilei first discovered the Jovian moon, which is slightly larger than Earth. Some 369 years later, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft captured a volcanic eruption on the moon. Subsequent missions to Jupiter, with more Io flybys, discovered additional plumes — along with lava lakes. Scientists now believe Io, which is stretched and squeezed like an accordion by neighboring moons and massive Jupiter itself, is the most volcanically active world in the solar system. But while there are many theories on the types of volcanic eruptions across the surface of the moon, little supporting data exists.
In both May and October 2023, Juno flew by Io, coming within about 21,700 miles (35,000 kilometers) and 8,100 miles (13,000 kilometers), respectively. Among Juno’s instruments getting a good look at the beguiling moon was JIRAM.
Infrared data collected Oct. 15, 2023, by the JIRAM instrument aboard NASA’s Juno shows Chors Patera, a lava lake on Jupiter’s moon Io. The team believes the lake is largely covered by a thick, molten crust, with a hot ring around the edges where lava from Io’s interior is directly exposed to space.NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM/MSSS Designed to capture the infrared light (which is not visible to the human eye) emerging from deep inside Jupiter, JIRAM probes the weather layer down to 30 to 45 miles (50 to 70 kilometers) below the gas giant’s cloud tops. But during Juno’s extended mission, the mission team has also used the instrument to study the moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. The JIRAM Io imagery showed the presence of bright rings surrounding the floors of numerous hot spots.
“The high spatial resolution of JIRAM’s infrared images, combined with the favorable position of Juno during the flybys, revealed that the whole surface of Io is covered by lava lakes contained in caldera-like features,” said Alessandro Mura, a Juno co-investigator from the National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome. “In the region of Io’s surface in which we have the most complete data, we estimate about 3% of it is covered by one of these molten lava lakes.” (A caldera is a large depression formed when a volcano erupts and collapses.)
Fire-Breathing Lakes
JIRAM’s Io flyby data not only highlights the moon’s abundant lava reserves, but also provides a glimpse of what may be going on below the surface. Infrared images of several Io lava lakes show a thin circle of lava at the border, between the central crust that covers most of the lava lake and the lake’s walls. Recycling of melt is implied by the lack of lava flows on and beyond the rim of the lake, indicating that there is a balance between melt that has erupted into the lava lakes and melt that is circulated back into the subsurface system.
This animation is an artist’s concept of Loki Patera, a lava lake on Jupiter’s moon Io, made using data from the JunoCam imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft. With multiple islands in its interior, Loki is a depression filled with magma and rimmed with molten lava. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS “We now have an idea of what is the most frequent type of volcanism on Io: enormous lakes of lava where magma goes up and down,” said Mura. “The lava crust is forced to break against the walls of the lake, forming the typical lava ring seen in Hawaiian lava lakes. The walls are likely hundreds of meters high, which explains why magma is generally not observed spilling out of the paterae” — bowl-shaped features created by volcanism — “and moving across the moon’s surface.”
JIRAM data suggests that most of the surface of these Io hot spots is composed of a rocky crust that moves up and down cyclically as one contiguous surface due to the central upwelling of magma. In this hypothesis, because the crust touches the lake’s walls, friction keeps it from sliding, causing it to deform and eventually break, exposing lava just below the surface.
An alternative hypothesis remains in play: Magma is welling up in the middle of the lake, spreading out and forming a crust that sinks along the rim of the lake, exposing lava.
“We are just starting to wade into the JIRAM results from the close flybys of Io in December 2023 and February 2024,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator for Juno at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “The observations show fascinating new information on Io’s volcanic processes. Combining these new results with Juno’s longer-term campaign to monitor and map the volcanoes on Io’s never-before-seen north and south poles, JIRAM is turning out to be one of the most valuable tools to learn how this tortured world works.”
Juno executed its 62nd flyby of Jupiter — which included an Io flyby at an altitude of about 18,175 miles (29,250 kilometers) — on June 13. The 63rd flyby of the gas giant is scheduled for July 16.
More About the Mission
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Italian Space Agency (ASI) funded the Jovian InfraRed Auroral Mapper. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built and operates the spacecraft.
More information about Juno is available at:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/juno
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DC Agle
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NASA Headquarters
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Last Updated Jun 26, 2024 Related Terms
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By NASA
Researchers are diving into a synthetic universe to help us better understand the real one. Using supercomputers at the U.S. DOE’s (Department of Energy’s) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, scientists have created nearly 4 million simulated images depicting the cosmos as NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by NSF (the National Science Foundation) and DOE, in Chile will see it.
Michael Troxel, an associate professor of physics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, led the simulation campaign as part of a broader project called OpenUniverse. The team is now releasing a 10-terabyte subset of this data, with the remaining 390 terabytes to follow this fall once they’ve been processed.
“Using Argonne’s now-retired Theta machine, we accomplished in about nine days what would have taken around 300 years on your laptop,” said Katrin Heitmann, a cosmologist and deputy director of Argonne’s High Energy Physics division who managed the project’s supercomputer time. “The results will shape Roman and Rubin’s future attempts to illuminate dark matter and dark energy while offering other scientists a preview of the types of things they’ll be able to explore using data from the telescopes.”
This graphic highlights part of a new simulation of what NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could see when it launches by May 2027. The background spans about 0.11 square degrees (roughly equivalent to half of the area of sky covered by a full Moon), representing less than half the area Roman will see in a single snapshot. The inset zooms in to a region 300 times smaller, showcasing a swath of brilliant synthetic galaxies at Roman’s full resolution. Having such a realistic simulation helps scientists study the physics behind cosmic images –– both synthetic ones like these and future real ones. Researchers will use the observations for many types of science, including testing our understanding of the origin, evolution, and ultimate fate of the universe.C. Hirata and K. Cao (OSU) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center A Cosmic Dress Rehearsal
For the first time, this simulation factored in the telescopes’ instrument performance, making it the most accurate preview yet of the cosmos as Roman and Rubin will see it once they start observing. Rubin will begin operations in 2025, and NASA’s Roman will launch by May 2027.
The simulation’s precision is important because scientists will comb through the observatories’ future data in search of tiny features that will help them unravel the biggest mysteries in cosmology.
Roman and Rubin will both explore dark energy –– the mysterious force thought to be accelerating the universe’s expansion. Since it plays a major role in governing the cosmos, scientists are eager to learn more about it. Simulations like OpenUniverse help them understand signatures that each instrument imprints on the images and iron out data processing methods now so they can decipher future data correctly. Then scientists will be able to make big discoveries even from weak signals.
“OpenUniverse lets us calibrate our expectations of what we can discover with these telescopes,” said Jim Chiang, a staff scientist at DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, who helped create the simulations. “It gives us a chance to exercise our processing pipelines, better understand our analysis codes, and accurately interpret the results so we can prepare to use the real data right away once it starts coming in.”
Then they’ll continue using simulations to explore the physics and instrument effects that could reproduce what the observatories see in the universe.
This photo displays Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s now-retired Theta supercomputer. Scientists use supercomputers to simulate experiments they can’t conduct in real life, such as creating new universes from scratch. Argonne National Laboratory Telescopic Teamwork
It took a large and talented team from several organizations to conduct such an immense simulation.
“Few people in the world are skilled enough to run these simulations,” said Alina Kiessling, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California and the principal investigator of OpenUniverse. “This massive undertaking was only possible thanks to the collaboration between the DOE, Argonne, SLAC, and NASA, which pulled all the right resources and experts together.”
And the project will ramp up further once Roman and Rubin begin observing the universe.
“We’ll use the observations to make our simulations even more accurate,” Kiessling said. “This will give us greater insight into the evolution of the universe over time and help us better understand the cosmology that ultimately shaped the universe.”
The Roman and Rubin simulations cover the same patch of the sky, totaling about 0.08 square degrees (roughly equivalent to a third of the area of sky covered by a full Moon). The full simulation to be released later this year will span 70 square degrees, about the sky area covered by 350 full Moons.
Overlapping them lets scientists learn how to use the best aspects of each telescope –– Rubin’s broader view and Roman’s sharper, deeper vision. The combination will yield better constraints than researchers could glean from either observatory alone.
“Connecting the simulations like we’ve done lets us make comparisons and see how Roman’s space-based survey will help improve data from Rubin’s ground-based one,” Heitmann said. “We can explore ways to tease out multiple objects that blend together in Rubin’s images and apply those corrections over its broader coverage.”
This pair of images showcases the same region of sky as simulated by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (left, processed by the Legacy Survey of Space and Time Dark Energy Science Collaboration) and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (right, processed by the Roman High-Latitude Imaging Survey Project Infrastructure Team). Roman will capture deeper and sharper images from space, while Rubin will observe a broader region of the sky from the ground. Because it has to peer through Earth’s atmosphere, Rubin’s images won’t always be sharp enough to distinguish multiple, close sources as separate objects. They’ll appear to blur together, which limits the science researchers can do using the images. But by comparing Rubin and Roman images of the same patch of sky, scientists can explore how to “deblend” objects and implement the adjustments across Rubin’s broader observations. J. Chiang (SLAC), C. Hirata (OSU), and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientists can consider modifying each telescope’s observing plans or data processing pipelines to benefit the combined use of both.
“We made phenomenal strides in simplifying these pipelines and making them usable,” Kiessling said. A partnership with Caltech/IPAC’s IRSA (Infrared Science Archive) makes simulated data accessible now so when researchers access real data in the future, they’ll already be accustomed to the tools. “Now we want people to start working with the simulations to see what improvements we can make and prepare to use the future data as effectively as possible.”
OpenUniverse, along with other simulation tools being developed by Roman’s Science Operations and Science Support centers, will prepare scientists for the large datasets expected from Roman. The project brings together dozens of experts from NASA’s JPL, DOE’s Argonne, IPAC, and several U.S. universities to coordinate with the Roman Project Infrastructure Teams, SLAC, and the Rubin LSST DESC (Legacy Survey of Space and Time Dark Energy Science Collaboration). The Theta supercomputer was operated by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems, Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a federal project jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the DOE Office of Science, with early construction funding received from private donations through the LSST Discovery Alliance.
Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
301-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Jun 12, 2024 Related Terms
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Astrophysics Dark Energy Dark Matter Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Research Goddard Space Flight Center High-Tech Computing Missions Science & Research Science-enabling Technology Stars Technology Technology Research The Universe 6 Min Read NASA’s Roman Mission Gets Cosmic ‘Sneak Peek’ From Supercomputers
This synthetic image is a slice of a much larger simulation depicting the cosmos as NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will see it when it launches by May 2027. Every blob and speck of light represents a distant galaxy (except for the urchin-like spiky dots, which represent foreground stars in our Milky Way galaxy). Credits: C. Hirata and K. Cao (OSU) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center View the full article
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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Lisa Ziehmann is the Acting Deputy Center Director at NASA Langley Research Center.NASA/Angelique Herring Lisa Ziehmann is the Acting Deputy Center Director of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Ziehmann’s lifelong love of numbers and problem solving led her to graduate from Christopher Newport College, now Christopher Newport University, with a degree in accounting. After spending time in the Mission Support Directorate at NASA’s Headquarters, she found her way back to Langley, where she now helps lead the center on its quest to innovate for the benefit of humanity.
Who or what inspired you to choose your career and why?
My inspiration for my career path was my parents. They were both public servants; my father served in the Air Force for a number of years, and my mother volunteered for the Red Cross and worked in the public school system. So, I come from parents who were very much dedicated to public service. I feel like that’s been my guide in life.
What do you find most rewarding about working with NASA?
It’s the people, not just here at NASA Langley, but across the entire agency. We just have the best workforce that I could ever imagine working with. They are so dedicated and passionate about the mission of NASA. It’s a varied mission, so there’s something for everyone. And we don’t hesitate to solve the tough problems, either. We work together. It’s like a family–we all rely on each other’s strengths.
What do you enjoy doing outside of work?
I like to go on long walks with my dog, garden, and bake—all kinds of baking, but especially cakes and pies! I also like to travel to experience different cultures throughout the United States and around the world. And I enjoy being with family and friends, too. We’re all busy working, so finding the time to connect with family and friends is really important.
How does your background and heritage contribute to your perspective and approach in your role at NASA?
My grandfather on my mother’s side worked in coal mines, and my grandfather on my dad’s side was a farmer. So, we came from a very humble upbringing. On my dad’s side, they immigrated to the United States when my dad was nine, and they really had to work hard. It’s just that hard work and can-do attitude that I think I experienced growing up and certainly has done me well in my career. I’m a collaborator and a problem solver, and in coal mines and farming, you have to do all that, too, right? You have to be flexible, and I think I learned that organically as I grew up.
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By European Space Agency
When it comes to predicting what our climate will be like in the future, vegetation matters. Plants and trees exert a powerful influence over both the energy cycle and the water cycle. And, crucially, it is estimated that vegetation draws down well over three billion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere each year – this is equivalent to a third of greenhouse-gas emissions from human activity.
Accounting for vegetation growth is clearly important in the complex climate puzzle – and the release of a new satellite dataset is set to help climate modellers with the challenge of evaluating the impacts of climate change.
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