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Multiple Generations of Stars in the Tarantula Nebula
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By NASA
The NASA Ames Science Directorate recognizes the outstanding contributions of (pictured left to right) Sigrid Reinsch, Lori Munar, Kevin Sims, and Matthew Fladeland. Their commitment to the NASA mission represents the entrepreneurial spirit, technical expertise, and collaborative disposition needed to explore this world and beyond.
Space Biosciences Star: Sigrid Reinsch
As Director of the SHINE (Space Health Impacts for the NASA Experience) program and Project Scientist for NBISC (NASA Biological Institutional Scientific Collection), Sigrid Reinsch is a high-performing scientist and outstanding mentor in the Space Biosciences Research Branch. Her dedication to student training and her efforts to streamline processes have significantly improved the experience of welcoming summer interns at NASA Ames.
Space Science and Astrobiology Star: Lori Munar
Lori Munar serves as the assistant Branch Chief of the Exobiology Branch. In the past few months, she has gone above and beyond to organize a facility and laboratory surplus event that involved multiple divisions over multiple days. The event resulted in considerable savings across the groups involved and improved the safety of N239 staff and the appearance of offices and labs.
Space Science and Astrobiology Star: Kevin Sims
Kevin Sims is a NASA Technical Project Manager serving the Astrophysics Branch as a member of the Flight Systems Implementation Branch in the Space Biosciences Division. Kevin is recognized for outstanding project management for exoplanet imaging instrumentation development in support of the Habitable Worlds Observatory. Kevin has streamlined, organized, and improved the efficiency of the Ames Photonics Testbed being developed as part the AstroPIC Early Career Initiative project.
Earth Science Star: Matthew Fladeland
Matthew Fladeland is a research scientist in the Earth Science Division managing NASA SMD’s Program Office for the Airborne Science Program, located at Ames. He is recognized for exemplary leadership and teamwork leading to new reimbursable agreements with the Department of Defense, for accelerating science technology solutions through the SBIR program, and for advancing partnerships with the US Forest Service on wildland ecology and fire science.
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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
With Voyager 2 in the background, John Casani holds a small U.S. flag that was sewn into the spacecraft’s thermal blankets before its 1977 launch. Then Voyager’s project manager, Casani was first to envision the mission’s Golden Record, which lies before him with its cover at right. NASA/JPL-Caltech During his work on several historic missions, Casani rose through a series of technical and management positions, making an indelible mark on the nation’s space program.
John R. Casani, a visionary engineer who served a central role in many of NASA’s historic deep space missions, died on Thursday, June 19, 2025, at the age of 92. He was preceded in death by his wife of 39 years, Lynn Casani, in 2008 and is survived by five sons and their families.
Casani started at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California in 1956 and went on to work as an electronics engineer on some of the nation’s earliest spacecraft after NASA’s formation in 1958. Along with leading the design teams for both the Ranger and Mariner series of spacecraft, he held senior project positions on many of the Mariner missions to Mars and Venus, and was project manager for three trailblazing space missions: Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini.
His work helped advance NASA spacecraft in areas including mechanical technology, system design and integration, software, and deep space communications. No less demanding were the management challenges of these multifaceted missions, which led to innovations still in use today.
JPL’s John Casani receives the National Air & Space Museum’s Lifetime Achievement Award.Carolyn Russo/NASM, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution “John had a major influence on the development of spacecraft that visited almost every planet in our solar system, as well as the people who helped build them,” said JPL director Dave Gallagher. “He played an essential role in America’s first attempts to reach space and then the Moon, and he was just as crucial to the Voyager spacecraft that marked humanity’s first foray into interplanetary — and later, interstellar — space. That Voyager is still exploring after nearly 50 years is a testament to John’s remarkable engineering talent and his leadership that enabled others to push the boundaries of possibility.”
Born in Philadelphia in 1932, Casani studied electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. After a short stint at an Air Force research lab, he moved to California in 1956 and was hired to work at JPL, a division of Caltech, on the guidance system for the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency’s Jupiter-C and Sergeant missile programs.
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first human-made Earth satellite, alarming America and changing the trajectory of both JPL and Casani’s career. With the 1958 launch of Explorer 1, America’s first satellite, the lab transitioned to concentrating on robotic space explorers, and Casani segued from missiles to spacecraft.
One of his jobs as payload engineer on Pioneer 3 and 4, NASA’s first missions to the Moon, was to carry each of the 20-inch-long (51-cm-long) probes in a suitcase from JPL to the launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida, where he installed them in the rocket’s nose cone.
At the dawn of the 1960s, Casani served as spacecraft systems engineer for the agency’s first two Ranger missions to the Moon, then joined the Mariner project in 1965, earning a reputation for being meticulous. Four years later, he was Mariner project manager.
Asked to share some of his wisdom in a 2009 NASA presentation, Casani said, “The thing that makes any of this work … is toughness. Toughness because this is a tough business, and it’s a very unforgiving business. You can do 1,000 things right, but if you don’t do everything right, it’ll come back and bite you.”
Casani’s next role: project manager for NASA’s high-profile flagship mission to the outer planets and beyond — Voyager. He not only led the mission from clean room to space, he was first to envision attaching a message representing humanity to any alien civilization that might encounter humanity’s first interstellar emissaries.
“I approached Carl Sagan,” he said in a 2007 radio interview, “and asked him if he could come up with something that would be appropriate that we could put on our spacecraft in a way of sending a message to whoever might receive it.” Sagan took up the challenge, and what resulted was the Golden Record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.
Once Voyager 1 and 2 and their Golden Records launched in 1977, JPL wasted no time in pointing their “engineer’s engineer” toward Galileo, which would become the first mission to orbit a gas giant planet. As the mission’s initial project manager, Casani led the effort from inception to assembly. Along the way, he had to navigate several congressional attempts to end the project, necessitating multiple visits to Washington. The 1986 loss of Space Shuttle Challenger, from which Galileo was to launch atop a Centaur upper-stage booster, led to mission redesign efforts before its 1989 launch.
After 11 years leading Galileo, Casani became deputy assistant laboratory director for flight projects in 1988, received a promotion just over a year later and then, from 1990 to 1991, served as project manager of Cassini, NASA’s first flagship mission to orbit Saturn.
Casani became JPL’s first chief engineer in 1994, retiring in 1999 and serving on several nationally prominent committees, including leading the investigation boards of both the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander failures, and also leading the James Webb Space Telescope Independent Comprehensive Review Panel.
In early 2003, Casani returned to JPL to serve as project manager for NASA’s Project Prometheus, which would have been the nation’s first nuclear-powered, electric-propulsion spacecraft. In 2005, he became manager of the Institutional Special Projects Office at JPL, a position he held until retiring again in 2012.
“Throughout his career, John reflected the true spirit of JPL: bold, innovative, visionary, and welcoming,” said Charles Elachi, JPL’s director from 2001 to 2016. “He was an undisputed leader with an upbeat, fun attitude and left an indelible mark on the laboratory and NASA. I am proud to have called him a friend.”
Casani received many awards over his lifetime, including NASA’s Exceptional Achievement Medal, the Management Improvement Award from the President of the United States for the Mariner Venus Mercury mission, and the Air and Space Museum Trophy for Lifetime Achievement.
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Matthew Segal / Veronica McGregor
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-8307 / 818-354-9452
matthew.j.segal@jpl.nasa.gov / veronica.c.mcgregor@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Jun 25, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
Farah Al Fulfulee was just four years old when she started climbing onto the roof of her family’s house in Iraq to gaze at the stars.
“It scared me how vast and quiet the sky was, but it made me very curious. I grew a deep passion for the stars and constellations and what they might represent,” she said.
Her father noticed her interest and began bringing home books and magazines about space. Al Fulfulee first read about NASA in those pages and was fascinated by the agency’s mission to explore the cosmos for the benefit of all humanity.
“Right then I knew I had to be an astronaut! I must go to space myself and get a closer look,” she said. “I knew I must find a way to go and work for NASA and fulfill my dream, working with other people like me who had a passion to explore the universe.”
Farah Al Fulfulee poses outside the Sonny Carter Training Facility at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Image courtesy of Farah Al Fulfulee As a girl growing up in the Middle East, Al Fulfulee had few opportunities to pursue this dream, but she refused to give up. Her dedication to schoolwork and excellence in science and math earned her a spot at the University of Baghdad College of Engineering. She completed a degree in electronic and communication engineering — similar to American electrical and computer engineering programs — and graduated as one of the top 10 students in her class. “We had a graduation party where you dress up as what you want to be in the future,” she recalled. “I wore a spacesuit.”
Farah Al Fulfulee celebrates her graduation from the University of Baghdad while wearing a spacesuit costume. Image courtesy of Farah Al Fulfulee Al Fulfulee was ready to launch her career, but Iraq did not have a developed space industry and finding work as a female engineer was a challenge. She accepted a project engineer position with a prominent Iraqi engineering firm in the information technology sector and spent four years working for the company in Iraq, Turkey, and Jordan, but she was disappointed to discover that her role involved very little engineering. “I was the only female on the team,” she said. “It was not common for a woman to work in the field or with customers, so I was always left behind to do office work. The job was not fulfilling.”
Still determined to join NASA, Al Fulfulee kept looking for her chance to come to the United States and finally found one in 2016, when she moved to Oklahoma to be near her sister. A new challenge soon rose: Without a degree from an American school or previous work experience in the United States, engineering opportunities were hard to come by. Al Fulfulee spent the next six years working in quality assurance for a human resources software company while she completed a MicroMasters program in software verification and management from the University of Maryland and honed her English and leadership skills.
Her big break came in 2022, when she landed a job with Boeing Defense, Space, and Security as a software quality engineer. “I was so excited,” she said. “I knew I was much closer to my dream since Boeing worked in the space industry and I would be able to apply internally to work on a space program.”
Farah Al Fulfulee participates in a NASA study that evaluated and compared the use of virtual reality and physical mockups to assess space vehicle and systems designs. Image courtesy of Farah Al Fulfulee Less than one year later, Al Fulfulee became a system design and analysis engineer for the International Space Station Program and joined the Station Management and Control Team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. She helps develop requirements, monitors performance, and validates testing for electrical systems and software supporting space station payloads. She also designs hardware, software, and interface specifications for those systems. Al Fulfulee has served as the team’s point of contact, delivering verification assessment and data assessment reports for NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 and Crew-10 missions, as well as the upcoming Axiom Mission 4 flight. She is currently working to support testing and verification for NASA’s SpaceX Crew-11.
“I could not be happier,” she declared.
She is also not stopping. “I won’t quit until I wear the blue suit.”
Farah Al Fulfulee tending to her backyard garden.Image courtesy of Farah Al Fulfulee Al Fulfulee has been an enthusiastic volunteer for various NASA studies, including the Exploration Atmosphere Studies that tested spacewalk safety protocols in an analog environment. She is pursuing a master’s degree in Space Operations Engineering from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She is an avid gardener and learning how to grow produce indoors as a volunteer experimental botanist with the Backyard Produce Project, noting that such knowledge might come in handy on Mars.
She is also helping to inspire the next generation. Earlier this year, Al Fulfulee was a guest speaker at the Women in Tech & Business Summit in Iraq – an event designed to encourage Iraqi women to pursue technology careers. “I was the only person representing women in space,” she said. “It was a really moving experience.” Al Fulfulee provided practical advice on breaking barriers in aerospace and shared her story with the crowd.
“I know my path is long and across the continents,” she said, “but I am enjoying my journey.”
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By European Space Agency
On 31 May, a live performance of The Blue Danube – often referred to as the ‘anthem of space’ – was transmitted by the European Space Agency (ESA) into the vastness of space. The event marked a double celebration: ESA’s 50th anniversary and the 200th birthday of the King of Waltz Johann Strauss II.
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By NASA
5 Min Read 3 Black Holes Caught Eating Massive Stars in NASA Data
A disk of hot gas swirls around a black hole in this illustration. Some of the gas came from a star that was pulled apart by the black hole, forming the long stream of hot gas on the right, feeding into the disk. Credits:
NASA/JPL-Caltech Black holes are invisible to us unless they interact with something else. Some continuously eat gas and dust, and appear to glow brightly over time as matter falls in. But other black holes secretly lie in wait for years until a star comes close enough to snack on.
Scientists have recently identified three supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, each of which suddenly brightened when it destroyed a star and then stayed bright for several months. A new study using space and ground-based data from NASA, ESA (European Space Agency), and other institutions presents these rare occurrences as a new category of cosmic events called “extreme nuclear transients.”
Looking for more of these extreme nuclear transients could help unveil some of the most massive supermassive black holes in the universe that are usually quiet.
“These events are the only way we can have a spotlight that we can shine on otherwise inactive massive black holes,” said Jason Hinkle, graduate student at the University of Hawaii and lead author of a new study in the journal Science Advances describing this phenomenon.
The black holes in question seem to have eaten stars three to 10 times heavier than our Sun. Feasting on the stars resulted in some of the most energetic transient events ever recorded.
This illustration shows a glowing stream of material from a star as it is being devoured by a supermassive black hole. When a star passes within a certain distance of a black hole — close enough to be gravitationally disrupted — the stellar material gets stretched and compressed as it falls into the black hole. NASA/JPL-Caltech These events as unleash enormous amount of high-energy radiation on the central regions of their host galaxies. “That has implications for the environments in which these events are occurring,” Hinkle said. “If galaxies have these events, they’re important for the galaxies themselves.”
The stars’ destruction produces high-energy light that takes over 100 days to reach peak brightness, then more than 150 days to dim to half of its peak. The way the high-energy radiation affects the environment results in lower-energy emissions that telescopes can also detect.
One of these star-destroying events, nicknamed “Barbie” because of its catalog identifier ZTF20abrbeie, was discovered in 2020 by the Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in California, and documented in two 2023 studies. The other two black holes were detected by ESA’s Gaia mission in 2016 and 2018 and are studied in detail in the new paper.
NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was critical in confirming that these events must have been related to black holes, not stellar explosions or other phenomena. The way that the X-ray, ultraviolet, and optical light brightened and dimmed over time was like a fingerprint matching that of a black hole ripping a star apart.
Scientists also used data from NASA’s WISE spacecraft, which was operated from 2009 to 2011 and then was reactivated as NEOWISE and retired in 2024. Under the WISE mission the spacecraft mapped the sky at infrared wavelengths, finding many new distant objects and cosmic phenomena. In the new study, the spacecraft’s data helped researchers characterize dust in the environments of each black hole. Numerous ground-based observatories additionally contributed to this discovery, including the W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes through their NASA-funded archive and the NASA-supported Near-Earth Object surveys ATLAS, Pan-STARRS, and Catalina.
“What I think is so exciting about this work is that we’re pushing the upper bounds of what we understand to be the most energetic environments of the universe,” said Anna Payne, a staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and study co-author, who helped look for the chemical fingerprints of these events with the University of Hawaii 2.2-meter Telescope.
A Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) grant from the agency helped enable Hinkle to search for these black hole events. “The FINESST grant gave Jason the freedom to track down and figure out what these events actually were,” said Ben Shappee, associate professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii, a study coauthor and advisor to Hinkle.
Hinkle is set to follow up on these results as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign through the NASA Hubble Fellowship Program. “One of the biggest questions in astronomy is how black holes grow throughout the universe,” Hinkle said.
The results complement recent observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope showing how supermassive black holes feed and grow in the early universe. But since only 10% of early black holes are actively eating gas and dust, extreme nuclear transients — that is, catching a supermassive black hole in the act of eating a massive star — are a different way to find black holes in the early universe.
Events like these are so bright that they may be visible even in the distant, early universe. Swift showed that extreme nuclear transients emit most of their light in the ultraviolet. But as the universe expands, that light is stretched to longer wavelengths and shifts into the infrared — exactly the kind of light NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was designed to detect.
With its powerful infrared sensitivity and wide field of view, Roman will be able to spot these rare explosions from more than 12 billion years ago, when the universe was just a tenth of its current age. Scheduled to launch by 2027, and potentially as early as fall 2026, Roman could uncover many more of these dramatic events and offer a new way to explore how stars, galaxies, and black holes formed and evolved over time.
“We can take these three objects as a blueprint to know what to look for in the future,” Payne said.
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