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By NASA
NASA has selected David Korth as deputy for Johnson Space Center’s Safety and Mission Assurance directorate. Korth previously served as deputy manager of the International Space Station Avionics and Software Office at Johnson Space Center prior to serving as acting deputy for Safety and Mission Assurance.
I’m excited to embark on my new role as deputy for Johnson’s Safety and Mission Assurance directorate,” Korth said. “Safety has been a priority for me throughout my NASA career. It is at the forefront of every decision I make.”
Korth brings more than 34 years’ experience to NASA human space flight programs. Prior to supporting the space station Avionics and Software Office, Mr. Korth served as deputy manager of the program’s Systems Engineering and Integration Office where he also led the agency Commercial Destination program’s procurement culminating in the selection of Axiom Space.
Mr. Korth began his NASA career as an engineer in the space station program’s operations planning group where he helped develop initial operational concepts and planning system requirements for the orbiting laboratory. He converted to civil servant in 1998 and was among the first three individuals to achieve front room certification as a space station ‘OPS PLAN’ front room operator. Korth also served as the lead operations planner for Expedition 1 – the first space station crewed expedition, was awarded two NASA fellowships, served as the operations division technical assistant in the Mission Operations Directorate, and was selected as a flight director in May 2007and served as lead space station flight director for Expeditions 21, 22, and 37, lead flight director for Japanese cargo ship mission HTV3, and lead flight director for US EVAs 22, 23,and 27.
“David did an excellent job supporting Johnson’s many programs and institutional safety needs while serving as acting deputy manager,” said Willie Lyles, director of the Safety and Mission Assurance directorate. “He successfully weighed in on several critical risk-based decisions with the technical authority community. David’s program and flight operations experience is unique and is an asset to this role.”
Throughout his career, Korth has been recognized for outstanding technical achievements and leadership, receiving a Rotary National Award for Space Achievement, a Silver Snoopy award, two Superior Achievement awards, two NASA Outstanding Leadership medals, and a NASA Exceptional Achievement medal.
“David is an outstanding leader and engineer who truly understands NASA’s safety environment and protocols,” said Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center. “His leadership will ensure the center continues its ‘safety first’ ideology. I am extremely pleased to announce his selection for this position.”
Mr. Korth earned his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Texas A&M University, and a master’s degree in statistics from the University of Houston-Clear Lake.
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By NASA
Pandora, NASA’s newest exoplanet mission, is one step closer to launch with the completion of the spacecraft bus, which provides the structure, power, and other systems that will enable the mission to carry out its work.
Watch to learn more about NASA’s Pandora mission, which will revolutionize the study of exoplanet atmospheres.
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center “This is a huge milestone for us and keeps us on track for a launch in the fall,” said Elisa Quintana, Pandora’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The bus holds our instruments and handles navigation, data acquisition, and communication with Earth — it’s the brains of the spacecraft.”
Pandora, a small satellite, will provide in-depth study of at least 20 known planets orbiting distant stars in order to determine the composition of their atmospheres — especially the presence of hazes, clouds, and water. This data will establish a firm foundation for interpreting measurements by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and future missions that will search for habitable worlds.
Pandora’s spacecraft bus was photographed Jan. 10 within a thermal-vacuum testing chamber at Blue Canyon Technologies in Lafayette, Colorado. The bus provides the structure, power, and other systems that will enable the mission to help astronomers better separate stellar features from the spectra of transiting planets. NASA/Weston Maughan, BCT “We see the presence of water as a critical aspect of habitability because water is essential to life as we know it,” said Goddard’s Ben Hord, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow who discussed the mission at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland. “The problem with confirming its presence in exoplanet atmospheres is that variations in light from the host star can mask or mimic the signal of water. Separating these sources is where Pandora will shine.”
Funded by NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program for small, ambitious missions, Pandora is a joint effort between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and NASA Goddard.
“Pandora’s near-infrared detector is actually a spare developed for the Webb telescope, which right now is the observatory most sensitive to exoplanet atmospheres,” Hord added. “In turn, our observations will improve Webb’s ability to separate the star’s signals from those of the planet’s atmosphere, enabling Webb to make more precise atmospheric measurements.”
Astronomers can sample an exoplanet’s atmosphere when it passes in front of its star as seen from our perspective, an event called a transit. Part of the star’s light skims the atmosphere before making its way to us. This interaction allows the light to interact with atmospheric substances, and their chemical fingerprints — dips in brightness at characteristic wavelengths — become imprinted in the light.
But our telescopes see light from the entire star as well, not just what’s grazing the planet. Stellar surfaces aren’t uniform. They sport hotter, unusually bright regions called faculae and cooler, darker regions similar to sunspots, both of which grow, shrink, and change position as the star rotates.
An artist’s concept of the Pandora mission, seen here without the thermal blanketing that will protect the spacecraft, observing a star and its transiting exoplanet. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab Using a novel all-aluminum, 45-centimeter-wide (17 inches) telescope, jointly developed by Livermore and Corning Specialty Materials in Keene, New Hampshire, Pandora’s detectors will capture each star’s visible brightness and near-infrared spectrum at the same time, while also obtaining the transiting planet’s near-infrared spectrum. This combined data will enable the science team to determine the properties of stellar surfaces and cleanly separate star and planetary signals.
The observing strategy takes advantage of the mission’s ability to continuously observe its targets for extended periods, something flagship missions like Webb, which are in high demand, cannot regularly do.
Over the course of its year-long prime mission, Pandora will observe at least 20 exoplanets 10 times, with each stare lasting a total of 24 hours. Each observation will include a transit, which is when the mission will capture the planet’s spectrum.
Pandora is led by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory provides the mission’s project management and engineering. Pandora’s telescope was manufactured by Corning and developed collaboratively with Livermore, which also developed the imaging detector assemblies, the mission’s control electronics, and all supporting thermal and mechanical subsystems. The infrared sensor was provided by NASA Goddard. Blue Canyon Technologies provided the bus and is performing spacecraft assembly, integration, and environmental testing. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley will perform the mission’s data processing. Pandora’s mission operations center is located at the University of Arizona, and a host of additional universities support the science team.
Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
By Francis Reddy
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 Jan 16, 2025 Related Terms
Astrophysics Astrophysics Division Exoplanet Atmosphere Exoplanet Exploration Program Exoplanet Science Exoplanet Transits Exoplanets Goddard Space Flight Center Studying Exoplanets The Universe View the full article
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By NASA
NASA’s Dawn spacecraft captured this image of Vesta as it left the giant asteroid’s orbit in 2012. The framing camera was looking down at the north pole, which is in the middle of the image.NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA Known as flow formations, these channels could be etched on bodies that would seem inhospitable to liquid because they are exposed to the extreme vacuum conditions of space.
Pocked with craters, the surfaces of many celestial bodies in our solar system provide clear evidence of a 4.6-billion-year battering by meteoroids and other space debris. But on some worlds, including the giant asteroid Vesta that NASA’s Dawn mission explored, the surfaces also contain deep channels, or gullies, whose origins are not fully understood.
A prime hypothesis holds that they formed from dry debris flows driven by geophysical processes, such as meteoroid impacts, and changes in temperature due to Sun exposure. A recent NASA-funded study, however, provides some evidence that impacts on Vesta may have triggered a less-obvious geologic process: sudden and brief flows of water that carved gullies and deposited fans of sediment. By using lab equipment to mimic conditions on Vesta, the study, which appeared in Planetary Science Journal, detailed for the first time what the liquid could be made of and how long it would flow before freezing.
Although the existence of frozen brine deposits on Vesta is unconfirmed, scientists have previously hypothesized that meteoroid impacts could have exposed and melted ice that lay under the surface of worlds like Vesta. In that scenario, flows resulting from this process could have etched gullies and other surface features that resemble those on Earth.
To explore potential explanations for deep channels, or gullies, seen on Vesta, scientists used JPL’s Dirty Under-vacuum Simulation Testbed for Icy Environments, or DUSTIE, to simulate conditions on the giant asteroid that would occur after meteoroids strike the surface.NASA/JPL-Caltech But how could airless worlds — celestial bodies without atmospheres and exposed to the intense vacuum of space — host liquids on the surface long enough for them to flow? Such a process would run contrary to the understanding that liquids quickly destabilize in a vacuum, changing to a gas when the pressure drops.
“Not only do impacts trigger a flow of liquid on the surface, the liquids are active long enough to create specific surface features,” said project leader and planetary scientist Jennifer Scully of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the experiments were conducted. “But for how long? Most liquids become unstable quickly on these airless bodies, where the vacuum of space is unyielding.”
The critical component turns out to be sodium chloride — table salt. The experiments found that in conditions like those on Vesta, pure water froze almost instantly, while briny liquids stayed fluid for at least an hour. “That’s long enough to form the flow-associated features identified on Vesta, which were estimated to require up to a half-hour,” said lead author Michael J. Poston of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.
Launched in 2007, the Dawn spacecraft traveled to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to orbit Vesta for 14 months and Ceres for almost four years. Before ending in 2018, the mission uncovered evidence that Ceres had been home to a subsurface reservoir of brine and may still be transferring brines from its interior to the surface. The recent research offers insights into processes on Ceres but focuses on Vesta, where ice and salts may produce briny liquid when heated by an impact, scientists said.
Re-creating Vesta
To re-create Vesta-like conditions that would occur after a meteoroid impact, the scientists relied on a test chamber at JPL called the Dirty Under-vacuum Simulation Testbed for Icy Environments, or DUSTIE. By rapidly reducing the air pressure surrounding samples of liquid, they mimicked the environment around fluid that comes to the surface. Exposed to vacuum conditions, pure water froze instantly. But salty fluids hung around longer, continuing to flow before freezing.
The brines they experimented with were a little over an inch (a few centimeters) deep; scientists concluded the flows on Vesta that are yards to tens of yards deep would take even longer to refreeze.
The researchers were also able to re-create the “lids” of frozen material thought to form on brines. Essentially a frozen top layer, the lids stabilize the liquid beneath them, protecting it from being exposed to the vacuum of space — or, in this case the vacuum of the DUSTIE chamber — and helping the liquid flow longer before freezing again.
This phenomenon is similar to how on Earth lava flows farther in lava tubes than when exposed to cool surface temperatures. It also matches up with modeling research conducted around potential mud volcanoes on Mars and volcanoes that may have spewed icy material from volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
“Our results contribute to a growing body of work that uses lab experiments to understand how long liquids last on a variety of worlds,” Scully said.
Find more information about NASA’s Dawn mission here:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dawn/
News Media Contacts
Gretchen McCartney
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-287-4115
gretchen.p.mccartney@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Dec 20, 2024 Related Terms
Dawn Asteroids Ceres Jet Propulsion Laboratory Vesta Explore More
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