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By NASA
NASA/Bill Ingalls President Donald Trump speaks inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, following the launch of NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission on May 30, 2020. The mission was the first crewed launch of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. This marked the first time American astronauts launched on an American rocket from American soil to low-Earth orbit since the conclusion of the Space Shuttle Program in 2011.
Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
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By NASA
Explore This Section Science NASA STEM Projects NASA Interns Conduct Aerospace… Overview Learning Resources Science Activation Teams SME Map Opportunities More Science Activation Stories Citizen Science 3 min read
NASA Interns Conduct Aerospace Research in Microgravity
The NASA Science Activation program’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Enhancement in Earth Science (SEES) Summer Intern Program, hosted by the University of Texas Center for Space Research, continues to expand opportunities for high school students to engage in authentic spaceflight research. As part of the SEES Microgravity Research initiative, four interns were selected to fly with their experiments in microgravity aboard the ZERO-G parabolic aircraft. The students had 11 minutes of weightlessness over 30 parabolas in which to conduct their experiments.
This immersive experience was made possible through a collaboration between SEES, Space for Teachers, the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium, and the International Space Station National Laboratory (CASIS). Together, these partners provide students with access to industry-aligned training and direct experience in aerospace experiment design, testing, and integration.
Congratulations to the 2025 SEES Microgravity Research Team:
Charlee Chandler, 11th grade, Rehobeth High School (Dothan, AL): Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation (GVS) and Vestibular-Ocular Reflex (VOR) in Microgravity Aya Elamrani-Zerifi, 11th grade, Hereford High School (Parkton, MD): Thermocapillary-Induced Bubble Dynamics Lily Myers, 12th grade, Eastlake High School (Sammamish, WA): Propellant Slosh Damping Using Polyurethane Foam Nathan Scalf 11th grade, Lexington Christian Academy (Lexington, KY): Wound Irrigation System for Microgravity Selected from nearly 100 proposals submitted by 2024 SEES interns, these four students spent months preparing for flight through weekly technical mentorship and structured milestones. Their training included proposal development, design reviews, safety assessments, hardware testing, and a full payload integration process, working through engineering protocols aligned with industry and mission standards.
In addition to their individual experiments, the students also supported the flight of 12 team-designed experiments integrated into the ZQube platform, a compact research carrier co-developed by Twiggs Space Lab, Space for Teachers, and NASA SEES. The ZQube enables over 150 SEES interns from across the country to contribute to microgravity investigations. Each autonomous experiment includes onboard sensors, cameras, and transparent test chambers, returning valuable video and sensor data for post-flight analysis.
This microgravity research opportunity supports the broader SEES mission to prepare students for careers in aerospace, spaceflight engineering, and scientific research. Through direct engagement with NASA scientists, academic mentors, and commercial aerospace experts, students gain real-world insight into systems engineering and the technical disciplines needed in today’s space industry.
The SEES summer intern program is a nationally competitive STEM experience for 10th-11th grade high school students. Interns learn how to interpret NASA satellite data while working with scientists and engineers in their chosen area of work, including astronomy, remote sensing, and space geodetic techniques to help understand Earth systems, natural hazards, and climate. It is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number NNH15ZDA004C and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio. Learn more about how Science Activation connects NASA science experts, real content, and experiences with community leaders to do science in ways that activate minds and promote deeper understanding of our world and beyond: https://science.nasa.gov/learn/about-science-activation/
Nathan Scalf, one of four NASA SEES interns, from Lexington KY, tests his Wound Irrigation System for Microgravity experiment aboard the ZERO-G G-FORCE ONE® in May 2025. Steve Boxall, ZERO-G Share
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Last Updated May 27, 2025 Editor NASA Science Editorial Team Related Terms
Biological & Physical Sciences Earth Science Internships NASA STEM Projects Opportunities For Students to Get Involved Planetary Science Science Activation Explore More
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By NASA
6 min read
NASA’s Dragonfly Mission Sets Sights on Titan’s Mysteries
When it descends through the thick golden haze on Saturn’s moon Titan, NASA’s Dragonfly rotorcraft will find eerily familiar terrain. Dunes wrap around Titan’s equator. Clouds drift across its skies. Rain drizzles. Rivers flow, forming canyons, lakes and seas.
Artist’s concept of NASA’s Dragonfly on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. The car-sized rotorcraft will be equipped to characterize the habitability of Titan’s environment, investigate the progression of prebiotic chemistry in an environment where carbon-rich material and liquid water may have mixed for an extended period, and even search for chemical indications of whether water-based or hydrocarbon-based life once existed on Titan. NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben But not everything is as familiar as it seems. At minus 292 degrees Fahrenheit, the dune sands aren’t silicate grains but organic material. The rivers, lakes and seas hold liquid methane and ethane, not water. Titan is a frigid world laden with organic molecules.
Yet Dragonfly, a car-sized rotorcraft set to launch no earlier than 2028, will explore this frigid world to potentially answer one of science’s biggest questions: How did life begin?
Seeking answers about life in a place where it likely can’t survive seems odd. But that’s precisely the point.
“Dragonfly isn’t a mission to detect life — it’s a mission to investigate the chemistry that came before biology here on Earth,” said Zibi Turtle, principal investigator for Dragonfly and a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. “On Titan, we can explore the chemical processes that may have led to life on Earth without life complicating the picture.”
On Earth, life has reshaped nearly everything, burying its chemical forebears beneath eons of evolution. Even today’s microbes rely on a slew of reactions to keep squirming.
“You need to have gone from simple to complex chemistry before jumping to biology, but we don’t know all the steps,” Turtle said. “Titan allows us to uncover some of them.”
Titan is an untouched chemical laboratory where all the ingredients for known life — organics, liquid water and an energy source — have interacted in the past. What Dragonfly uncovers will illuminate a past since erased on Earth and refine our understanding of habitability and whether the chemistry that sparked life here is a universal rule — or a wonderous cosmic fluke.
Before NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission, researchers didn’t know just how rich Titan is in organic molecules. The mission’s data, combined with laboratory experiments, revealed a molecular smorgasbord — ethane, propane, acetylene, acetone, vinyl cyanide, benzene, cyanogen, and more.
These molecules fall to the surface, forming thick deposits on Titan’s ice bedrock. Scientists believe life-related chemistry could start there — if given some liquid water, such as from an asteroid impact.
Enter Selk crater, a 50-mile-wide impact site. It’s a key Dragonfly destination, not only because it’s covered in organics, but because it may have had liquid water for an extended time.
Selk crater, a 50-mile-wide impact site highlighted on this infrared image of Titan, is a key Dragonfly destination. Landing near Selk, Dragonfly will explore various sites, analyzing the surface chemistry to investigate the frozen remains of what could have been prebiotic chemistry in action. NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Nantes/University of Arizona The impact that formed Selk melted the icy bedrock, creating a temporary pool that could have remained liquid for hundreds to thousands of years under an insulating ice layer, like winter ponds on Earth. If a natural antifreeze like ammonia were mixed in, the pool could have remained unfrozen even longer, blending water with organics and the impactor’s silicon, phosphorus, sulfur and iron to form a primordial soup.
“It’s essentially a long-running chemical experiment,” said Sarah Hörst, an atmospheric chemist at Johns Hopkins University and co-investigator on Dragonfly’s science team. “That’s why Titan is exciting. It’s a natural version of our origin-of-life experiments — except it’s been running much longer and on a planetary scale.”
For decades, scientists have simulated Earth’s early conditions, mixing water with simple organics to create a “prebiotic soup” and jumpstarting reactions with an electrical shock. The problem is time. Most tests last weeks, maybe months or years.
The melt pools at Selk crater, however, possibly lasted tens of thousands of years. Still shorter than the hundreds of millions of years it took life to emerge on Earth, but potentially enough time for critical chemistry to occur.
“We don’t know if Earth life took so long because conditions had to stabilize or because the chemistry itself needed time,” Hörst said. “But models show that if you toss Titan’s organics into water, tens of thousands of years is plenty of time for chemistry to happen.”
Dragonfly will test that theory. Landing near Selk, it will fly from site to site, analyzing the surface chemistry to investigate the frozen remains of what could have been prebiotic chemistry in action.
Morgan Cable, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and co-investigator on Dragonfly, is particularly excited about the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS) instrument. Developed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with a key subsystem provided by the CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales), DraMS will search for indicators of complex chemistry.
“We’re not looking for exact molecules, but patterns that suggest complexity,” Cable said. On Earth, for example, amino acids — fundamental to proteins — appear in specific patterns. A world without life would mainly manufacture the simplest amino acids and form fewer complex ones.
Generally, Titan isn’t regarded as habitable; it’s too cold for the chemistry of life as we know it to occur, and there’s is no liquid water on the surface, where the organics and likely energy sources exist.
Still, scientists have assumed that if a place has life’s ingredients and enough time, complex chemistry — and eventually life — should emerge. If Titan proves otherwise, it may mean we’ve misunderstood something about life’s start and it may be rarer than we thought.
“We won’t know how easy or difficult it is for these chemical steps to occur if we don’t go, so we need to go and look,” Cable said. “That’s the fun thing about going to a world like Titan. We’re like detectives with our magnifying glasses, looking at everything and wondering what this is.”
Dragonfly is being designed and built under the direction of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), which manages the mission for NASA. The team includes key partners at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dragonfly is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
For more information on Dragonfly, visit:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dragonfly/
By Jeremy Rehm
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.
Media Contacts:
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
Mike Buckley
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory
443-567-3145
michael.buckley@jhuapl.edu
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By NASA
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon spacecraft lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 4:15 a.m. EDT on April 21 2025, on the company’s 32nd commercial resupply services mission for the agency to the International Space Station.Credit: NASA Following the successful launch of NASA’s SpaceX 32nd Commercial Resupply Services mission, new scientific experiments and supplies are bound for the International Space Station.
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, carrying approximately 6,700 pounds of cargo to the orbiting laboratory for NASA, lifted off at 4:15 a.m. EDT Monday, on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Live coverage of the spacecraft’s arrival will begin at 6:45 a.m., Tuesday, April 22, on NASA+. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms.
The spacecraft is scheduled to autonomously dock at approximately 8:20 a.m. to the zenith, or space-facing, port of the space station’s Harmony module.
The resupply mission will support dozens of research experiments during Expedition 73. Along with food and essential equipment for the crew, Dragon is delivering a variety of science experiments, including a demonstration of refined maneuvers for free-floating robots. Dragon also carries an enhanced air quality monitoring system that could help protect crew members on exploration missions to the Moon and Mars, and two atomic clocks to examine fundamental physics concepts, such as relativity, and test global synchronization of precision timepieces.
These are just a sample of the hundreds of investigations conducted aboard the orbiting laboratory each year in the areas of biology and biotechnology, physical sciences, and Earth and space science. Such research benefits humanity and helps lay the groundwork for future human exploration through the agency’s Artemis campaign, which will send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future missions to Mars.
The Dragon spacecraft is scheduled to remain at the orbiting laboratory until May, when it will depart and return to Earth with time-sensitive research and cargo, splashing down off the coast of California.
Learn more about the commercial resupply mission at:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission/nasas-spacex-crs-32/
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Julian Coltre / Josh Finch
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
julian.n.coltre@nasa.gov / joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov
Stephanie Plucinsky / Steven Siceloff
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
321-876-2468
stephanie.n.plucinsky@nasa.gov / steven.p.siceloff@nasa.gov
Sandra Jones
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Apr 21, 2025 LocationNASA Headquarters Related Terms
International Space Station (ISS) Commercial Resupply ISS Research Johnson Space Center Kennedy Space Center SpaceX Commercial Resupply View the full article
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