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By NASA
NASA 55 years ago on July 16, 1969, NASA’s Apollo 11 spacecraft launched from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as seen in this photo. Astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin were aboard.
Apollo 11’s primary mission objective was to fulfill a national goal set by President John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961: perform a crewed lunar landing and return safely to Earth before the decade ended. Additional flight objectives included scientific exploration by the lunar module (LM) crew, deployment of a television camera to transmit signals to Earth, and deployment of a solar wind composition experiment, seismic experiment package, and a Laser Ranging Retroreflector. During the exploration, Armstrong and Aldrin were to gather samples of lunar-surface materials for return to Earth. They also were to extensively photograph the lunar terrain, the deployed scientific equipment, the LM spacecraft, and each other, both with still and motion picture cameras.
Experience the countdown to liftoff.
Image credit: NASA
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By NASA
From left, team members Annie Meier, Malay Shah, and Jamie Toro assemble the flight hardware for NASA’s Orbital Syngas Commodity Augmentation Reactor, or OSCAR, on Oct. 10, 2019, in the Space Station Processing Facility at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. OSCAR began as an Early Career Initiative project at the spaceport that studies technology to convert trash and human waste into useful gasses such as methane, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide. NASA/Cory Huston There’s no “I” in team, and that holds true for NASA and its partners as the agency ramps up efforts to recruit tenured professors to research science for a semester at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The tenured teachers work for up to a year in an area where the agency needs specific expertise.
NASA often finds tenured professors – someone who has been guaranteed a job with their university until they retire – through seminars or publications. Assignments must be mutually beneficial to the agency and organizations involved.
“At NASA, we want researchers who are doing something that could help us, that could be synergistic, and to not reinvent the wheel,” said Dr. Jose Nuñez, University Partnerships and Small Sat Capabilities manager at NASA Kennedy. “The goal is to find professors who can benefit the agency in an area that needs more research.”
The U.S. government’s Intergovernmental Personnel Act Mobility Program allows the temporary assignment of personnel between the federal, state, local governments, colleges and universities, Indian tribal governments, federally funded research and development centers, and other eligible organizations.
Dr. Reza Toufiq, an associate professor of chemical engineering at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida, is the first professor to leverage school funds to spend a semester at NASA Kennedy and work on projects dealing with waste and resource recovery.
Toufiq specializes in how to convert everyday trash into energy, including the ash or char left behind from thermally treated trash. He worked with Dr. Annie Meier, who leads a team that converts astronauts’ trash into gasses that can be used for fuel.
Flight hardware for NASA’s Orbital Syngas Commodity Augmentation Reactor, or OSCAR, is inside the Applied Physics Lab inside the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Facility at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 21, 2022. By processing small pieces of trash in a high-temperature reactor, OSCAR is advancing new and innovative technology for managing waste in space. NASA/Kim Shiflett “I wanted to learn on the terrestrial side how we can infuse some of our technology, and he wanted to learn from us to grow into the space sector, so it was a really cool match,” said Meier, technical lead for situ resource utilization and waste management resource recovery systems at NASA Kennedy.
Although Toufiq’s sabbatical with NASA is over, his work is not. Meier just received approval for a project through a Space Act Agreement, which allows a research sponsor to use NASA scientists and facilities to benefit both parties. Meier and other researchers at NASA will give Toufiq information on space waste products and lunar regolith stimulants; in turn, he will do the testing, and provide data to the agency because some of that information is currently unknown.
“He’s learning a lot about the fundamentals of different things with waste that we aren’t really doing, so we lean on academia to get some of that information and offer a fresh perspective,” Meier said.
An intergovernmental assignment is generally approved for up to two years, but it can extend for up to six years with authorization. The length of the appointment also depends on the agency’s needs and university’s sabbatical guidelines, which could pay for one or more semesters.
The University Partnerships team now is working to bring on two professors to NASA Kennedy next semester.
“There are many tenured professors and universities who would like to come here, but we are careful to use due diligence to make sure what they’re doing is something that aligns with our research and technology interests,” Nuñez said.
To learn more about the wide range of research happening at the Florida spaceport, click here.
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By NASA
Cosmic Road Trip: four distinct composite images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope, presented in a two-by-two grid, Rho Ophiuchi at lower right, the heart of the Orion Nebula at upper right, the galaxy NGC 3627 at lower left and the galaxy cluster MACS J0416.X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical/Infrared: (Hubble) NASA/ESA/STScI; IR: (JWST) NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI It’s time to take a cosmic road trip using light as the highway and visit four stunning destinations across space. The vehicles for this space get-away are NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope.
The first stop on this tour is the closest, Rho Ophiuchi, at a distance of about 390 light-years from Earth. Rho Ophiuchi is a cloud complex filled with gas and stars of different sizes and ages. Being one of the closest star-forming regions, Rho Ophiuchi is a great place for astronomers to study stars. In this image, X-rays from Chandra are purple revealing infant stars that violently flare and produce X-rays. Infrared data from Webb are red, yellow, cyan, light blue and darker blue and provide views of the spectacular regions of gas and dust.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/C. Canizares; IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/K. Pontoppidan; Image Processing: NASA/ESA/STScI/Alyssa Pagan, NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and J. Major The next destination is the Orion Nebula. Still located in the Milky Way galaxy, this region is a little bit farther from our home planet at about 1,500 light-years away. If you look just below the middle of the three stars that make up the “belt” in the constellation of Orion, you may be able to see this nebula through a small telescope. With Chandra and Webb, however, we get to see so much more. Chandra reveals young stars that glow brightly in X-rays, colored in red, green, and blue, while Webb shows the gas and dust in darker red that will help build the next generation of stars here.
X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/E.Fei It’s time to leave our galaxy and visit another. Like the Milky Way, NGC 3627 is a spiral galaxy that we see at a slight angle. NGC 3627 is known as a “barred” spiral galaxy because of the rectangular shape of its central region. From our vantage point, we can also see two distinct spiral arms that appear as arcs. X-rays from Chandra in purple show evidence for a supermassive black hole in its center while Webb finds the dust, gas, and stars throughout the galaxy in red, green, and blue. This image also contains optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope in red, green, and blue.
Spiral galaxy NGC 3627.X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESO/STScI, ESO/WFI; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/JWST; Image Processing:/NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Major Our final landing place on this trip is the farthest and the biggest. MACS J0416 is a galaxy cluster, which are among the largest objects in the Universe held together by gravity. Galaxy clusters like this can contain hundreds or even thousands of individual galaxies all immersed in massive amounts of superheated gas that Chandra can detect. In this view, Chandra’s X-rays in purple show this reservoir of hot gas while Hubble and Webb pick up the individual galaxies in red, green, and blue.
ACS J0416 galaxy cluster.X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/G. Ogrean et al.; Optical/Infrared: (Hubble) NASA/ESA/STScI; IR: (JWST) NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Jose M. Diego (IFCA), Jordan C. J. D’Silva (UWA), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Jake Summers (ASU), Rogier Windhorst (ASU), Haojing Yan (University of Missouri) NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science from Cambridge Massachusetts and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
For more Chandra images, multimedia and related materials, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission/chandra-x-ray-observatory/
Visual Description:
This release features four distinct composite images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope, presented in a two-by-two grid.
At our lower right is Rho Ophiuchi, a cloud complex filled with gas, and dotted with stars. The murky green and gold cloud resembles a ghostly head in profile, swooping down from the upper left, trailing tendrils of hair. Cutting across the bottom edge and lower righthand corner of the image is a long, narrow, brick red cloud which resembles the ember of a stick pulled from a fire. Several large white stars dot the image. Many are surrounded by glowing neon purple rings, and gleam with diffraction spikes.
At our upper right of the grid is a peek into the heart of the Orion Nebula, which blankets the entire image. Here, the young star nursery resembles a dense, stringy, dusty rose cloud, peppered with thousands of glowing golden, white, and blue stars. Layers of cloud around the edges of the image, and a concentration of bright stars at its distant core, help convey the depth of the nebula.
In the lower left of the two-by-two grid is a hazy image of a spiral galaxy known as NGC 3627. Here, the galaxy appears pitched at an oblique angle, tilted from our upper left down to our lower right. Much of its face is angled toward us, making its spiral arms, composed of red and purple dots, easily identifiable. Several bright white dots ringed with neon purple speckle the galaxy. At the galaxy’s core, where the spiral arms converge, a large white and purple glow identified by Chandra provides evidence of a supermassive black hole.
At the upper left of the grid is an image of the distant galaxy cluster known as MACS J0416. Here, the blackness of space is packed with glowing dots and tiny shapes, in whites, purples, oranges, golds, and reds, each a distinct galaxy. Upon close inspection (and with a great deal of zooming in!) the spiraling arms of some of the seemingly tiny galaxies are revealed in this highly detailed image. Gently arched across the middle of the frame is a soft band of purple; a reservoir of superheated gas detected by Chandra.
News Media Contact
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Chandra X-ray Center
Cambridge, Mass.
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Lane Figueroa
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By NASA
NASA The space shuttle Columbia launches from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 8, 1994. This was the second flight of International Microgravity Laboratory (IML-2), carrying more than twice the number of experiments and facilities as IML-1. The crew split into two teams to perform around-the-clock research. More than 80 experiments, representing more than 200 scientists from six space agencies, were in the Spacelab module. Fifty of these experiments delved into life sciences, including bioprocessing, space biology, human physiology, and radiation biology.
STS-65’s crew included NASA astronauts Robert D. Cabana, James D. Halsell Jr., Richard J. Hieb, Carl E. Walz, Leroy Chiao, and Donald A. Thomas, as well as National Space Development Agency (NASDA) of Japan astronaut Chiaki Naito-Mukai. On this flight, Naito-Mukai became the first Japanese woman in space.
Image Credit: NASA
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By NASA
Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket leaves a glowing trail above the skies of Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 3, 2024. Firefly Aerospace/Trevor Mahlmann As part of NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative, Firefly Aerospace launched eight small satellites on July 3 aboard the company’s Alpha rocket. Named “Noise of Summer,” the rocket successfully lifted off from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 9:04 p.m. PDT.
The CubeSat missions were designed by universities and NASA centers and cover science that includes climate studies, satellite technology development, and educational outreach to students.
Firefly Aerospace completed its Venture-Class Launch Services Demonstration 2 contract with this launch. The agency’s venture-class contracts offer launch opportunities for new providers, helping grow the commercial launch industry and leading to cost-effective competition for future NASA missions.
NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative provides a low-cost way for universities, non-profits, science centers, and other researchers to conduct science and technology demonstrations in space.
Image Credit: Firefly Aerospace/Trevor Mahlmann
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