A yearlong journey of cultural and professional development overseas has a NASA Deep Space Logistics employee excited about current and future collaboration with one of America’s key international partners in the agency’s Artemis program.   

Katherine Cook, who develops cargo delivery services for NASA’s Gateway, recently returned to the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida after an immersive experience in Japan. There, she collaborated with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), government ministries contributing to Japan’s space activities, and The National Diet’s House of Representatives.

“Everything I did involved Artemis and human exploration,” Cook said. “Developing technologies for Moon to Mars is challenging, but if we can find a good balance of leveraging the strengths of each partner and continue to evolve the partnership, we’ll be able to share knowledge in an even more integrated way.”     

As part of her trip, Cook spent about five months at the Tsukuba Space Center, approximately one hour north of Tokyo, working under JAXA Vice President and Director General for Human Spaceflight Technology Hiroshi Sasaki. She partnered with JAXA subject matter experts to host themed discussions for the directorate team, sharing and discussing ideas about the U.S and Japanese approaches, including future partnering opportunities.  

Her research themes included: NASA’s Moon to Mars objectives; commercial capabilities such as commercial low Earth orbit development; lunar surface transportation such as rovers and utility vehicles; lunar in-situ resource utilization, human landing systems, and science priorities to enable human exploration to the Moon and beyond. This required intense language training – before and throughout Cook’s trip – so she could understand, write, and speak Japanese with an audience ranging from students and coworkers to Japanese dignitaries, such as the Minister of Foreign Affairs Yoshimasa Hayashi and JAXA President Dr. Hiroshi Yamakawa.          

“I think a lot of growth came out of challenging myself – both in learning more about NASA and U.S. agencies collaborating on space and learning about it deeply enough to explain it and communicate it in a succinct way that could make it through translation,” Cook said.

Cook was just the third NASA person selected in the nearly 30-year history of the Mansfield Fellowship, a program named for former U.S. Senate Majority Leader and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Mike Mansfield.

Invited to lecture at several university graduate programs, Cook was inspired by students’ interest in NASA’s Moon to Mars plans, as well as their knowledge and in-depth questions. Her interaction with Japanese colleagues was equally positive, as they welcomed her to their group with open arms.

During the Artemis I launch in November 2022, Cook invited members of the JAXA human spaceflight team to a launch viewing party. Aware that she was disappointed about missing the launch live, they blew her away by showing up in great numbers, doling out high-fives and ecstatically cheering on the launch in front of a big screen TV at the Tsukuba Space Center.

“One thing that leaves an impression on you from Japan is their hospitality. The word for it is ‘omotenashi,’” Cook said. “It’s more than just a word; it’s culturally ingrained in how they interact with each other and the level of consideration that they put into everything they do.”

Enriched technically, culturally, and spiritually from her transformative experience in Japan, Cook returned to NASA “forever changed.” She learned a great deal about science, life, and her own agency. She even picked up a saying that she incorporated into her daily work routine.    

“In Japan, at the end of every day, you say, ‘Otsukaresama deshita,’ which means, ‘Thank you for your hard work.’ When you pass a coworker in the hall and when you toast in celebration with coworkers, you say ‘Otsukaresama des,’ ” Cook said. “Even still, when I meet with my Japanese counterparts, I will often say it. And it reminds me to carry that appreciation of my team throughout my day back at NASA. The simple phrase bonds us all together across the international Artemis work we do.”

NISAR will help researchers explore how changes in Earth’s forest and wetland ecosystems are affecting the global carbon cycle and influencing climate change.

Once it launches in early 2024, the NISAR radar satellite mission will offer detailed insights into two types of ecosystems – forests and wetlands – vital to naturally regulating the greenhouses gases in the atmosphere that are driving global climate change.

NISAR is a joint mission by NASA and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), and when in orbit, its sophisticated radar systems will scan nearly all of Earth’s land and ice surfaces twice every 12 days. The data it collects will help researchers understand two key functions of both ecosystem types: the capture and the release of carbon.

Forests hold carbon in the wood of their trees; wetlands store it in their layers of organic soil. Disruption of either system, whether gradual or sudden, can accelerate the release of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Tracking these land-cover changes on a global scale will help researchers study the impacts on the carbon cycle – the processes by which carbon moves between the atmosphere, land, ocean, and living things.

“The radar technology on NISAR will allow us to get a sweeping perspective of the planet in space and time,” said Paul Rosen, the NISAR project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “It can give us a really reliable view of exactly how Earth’s land and ice are changing.”

Tracking Deforestation

Forestry and other land-use changes account for about 11% of net human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. NISAR’s data will improve our understanding of how the loss of forests around the world influences the carbon cycle and contributes to global warming.

“Globally, we do not understand well the carbon sources and sinks from terrestrial ecosystems, particularly from forests,” said Anup Das, an ecosystems scientist and co-lead of the ISRO NISAR science team. “So we expect that NISAR will greatly help address that, especially in less dense forests, which are more vulnerable to deforestation and degradation.”

The signal from NISAR’s L-band radar will penetrate the leaves and branches of forest canopies, bouncing off the tree trunks and the ground below. By analyzing the signal that reflects back, researchers will be able to estimate the density of forest cover in an area as small as a soccer field. With successive orbital passes, it will be able to track whether a section of forest has been thinned or cleared over time. The data – which will be collected in early morning and evening and in any weather – could also offer clues as to what caused the change, such as disease, human activity, or fire.

It’s an important set of capabilities for studying vast, often cloud-covered rainforests such as those in the Congo and Amazon basins, which lose millions of wooded acres every year. Fire releases carbon into the air directly, while the deterioration of forests reduces the absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The data could also help improve accounting of deforestation and forest degradation – as well as forest growth – as countries that rely on logging try to shift toward more sustainable practices, said Josef Kellndorfer, a member of the NISAR science team and founder of Earth Big Data LLC, a provider of large data sets and analytic tools for research and decisions support. “Reducing deforestation and degradation is low-hanging fruit to address a substantial part of the global carbon emission problem,” he added.

Monitoring Wetland Flooding

Wetlands present another carbon puzzle: Swamps, bogs, peatlands, inundated forests, marshes, and other wetlands hold 20 to 30% of the carbon in Earth’s soil, despite constituting only 5 to 8% of the land surface.

When wetlands flood, bacteria go to work digesting organic matter (mostly dead plants) in the soil. Through this natural process, wetlands are the planet’s largest natural source of the potent greenhouse gas methane, which bubbles to the water’s surface and travels into the atmosphere. Meanwhile, when wetlands dry out, the carbon they store is exposed to oxygen, releasing carbon dioxide.

“These are huge reservoirs of carbon that can be released in a relatively short time frame,” said Erika Podest, a NISAR science team member and a carbon cycle and ecosystems researcher at JPL.

Less well understood is how changing temperature and precipitation patterns due to climate change – along with human activities such as development and agriculture – are affecting the extent, frequency, and duration of flooding in wetlands. NISAR will be able to monitor flooding, and with repeated passes, researchers will be able to track seasonal and annual variations in wetlands inundation, as well as long-term trends.

By coupling NISAR’s wetlands observations with separate data on the release of greenhouse gases, researchers should gain insights that inform the management of wetland ecosystems, said Bruce Chapman, a NISAR science team member and JPL wetlands researcher. “We have to be careful to reduce our impact on wetland areas so that we don’t worsen the situation with the climate,” he added.

NISAR is set to launch in early 2024 from southern India. In addition to tracking ecosystem changes, it will collect information on the motion of the land, helping researchers understand the dynamics of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, and subsidence and uplift (when the surface sinks and rises). It will also track the movements and melting of both glaciers and sea ice.

More About the Mission

NISAR is an equal collaboration between NASA and ISRO and marks the first time the two agencies have cooperated on hardware development for an Earth-observing mission. JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, leads the U.S. component of the project and is providing the mission’s L-band SAR. NASA is also providing the radar reflector antenna, the deployable boom, a high-rate communication subsystem for science data, GPS receivers, a solid-state recorder, and payload data subsystem. ISRO’s U R Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru, which is leading the ISRO component of the mission, is providing the spacecraft bus, the S-band SAR electronics, the launch vehicle, and associated launch services and satellite mission operations.

To learn more about NISAR, visit:
https://nisar.jpl.nasa.gov/

News Media Contacts

Andrew Wang / Jane J. Lee
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307
andrew.wang@jpl.nasa.gov / jane.j.lee@jpl.nasa.gov

2023-151

“Obviously, Spanish has a lot to do with accessibility and broadening our audiences. We are using Spanish as a tool to break those barriers to connect with audiences. Spanish is the language I grew up with in Uruguay, and the language that I feel more comfortable with. It is amazing that I get to use it as a bridge to communicate with our audiences on different platforms.

“We want to inform, but we also want to inspire and tell the stories that go beyond the mission and science. We want to tell the personal stories in [‘Universo Curioso de la NASA,’ NASA’s first-ever Spanish podcast].

“We started as a bonus episode of a miniseries of an existing podcast, ‘NASA’s Curious Universe,’ but we wanted to build something that was unique, specifically tailored to the Hispanic audience in the U.S. and worldwide. That would have our style and our voice. And I feel very, very lucky and proud and thankful to have had that opportunity to kind of build the podcast from the ground up with the guidance and work of other colleagues.

“As an immigrant myself reporting on stories about other immigrants, I want to show people that space is for all, and that’s something that we repeat over and over. I keep confirming how true that message is because it goes beyond NASA. It goes beyond the United States. There are no borders in space. These people that work on these missions are doing something for humanity, not just for the space agency. I am not a scientist or an engineer, and I feel a part of it. I am a part of these historic moments, like when we launched Artemis and DART [the Double Asteroid Redirection Test].”

– Noelia González, NASA en español Senior Science Writer and Editor, ADNET Systems, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Image Credit: NASA / Angeles Miron
Interviewer: NASA / Angel Kumari

Check out some of our other Faces of NASA.

Media are invited to hear a discussion on the design and cultural significance of the worm logotype with NASA and its creator Richard Danne at 11:30 a.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 6, at the agency’s headquarters in Washington.

The logotype, a simple, red unique type style of the word NASA, replaced the agency’s official logo (meatball) for several decades beginning in the 1970s before it was retired. The worm has since been revived for limited use.

The event will air live on NASA Television, the NASA app, YouTube, and on the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms.

Following opening remarks by Marc Etkind, associate administrator for NASA’s Office of Communications at NASA Headquarters, Danne and David Rager, creative art director at NASA, will provide remarks followed by a panel discussion with Danne and others including:

• Bert Ulrich, entertainment and branding liaison, NASA Headquarters
• Michael Beirut, designer, Pentagram
• Shelly Tan, design reporter, The Washington Post (moderator)
• Julia Heiser, head of live event merchandise, Amazon Music

NASA experts and Danne are available for on-site interviews, as well as remote interviews after the event.

Media interested in participating in person must RSVP to the NASA Headquarters newsroom by 3 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 3, at hq-media@mail.nasa.gov. NASA’s media accreditation policy is online.

The televised event will take place in the agency’s Webb Auditorium in the West Lobby inside NASA Headquarters located at 300 E St. SW in Washington.

Learn more about NASA’s missions at:

https://www.nasa.gov

-end-

News Media Contacts:

Claire O’Shea / Melissa Howell
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
claire.a.oshea@nasa.gov / melissa.e.howell@nasa.gov

A new sounding rocket mission is headed to space to understand how explosive stellar deaths lay the groundwork for new star systems. The Integral Field Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Experiment, or INFUSE, sounding rocket mission, will launch from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on Oct. 29, 2023, at 9:35 p.m. MDT.

For a few months each year, the constellation Cygnus (Latin for “swan”) swoops through the northern hemisphere’s night sky. Just above its wing is a favorite target for backyard astronomers and professional scientists alike: the Cygnus Loop, also known as the Veil Nebula.

The Cygnus Loop is the remnant of a star that was once 20 times the size of our Sun. Some 20,000 years ago, that star collapsed under its own gravity and erupted into a supernova. Even from 2,600 light-years away, astronomers estimate the flash of light would have been bright enough to see from Earth during the day.

Supernovae are part of a great life cycle. They spray heavy metals forged in a star’s core into the clouds of surrounding dust and gas. They are the source of all chemical elements in our universe heavier than iron, including those that make up our own bodies. From the churned-up clouds and star stuff left in their wake, gases and dust from supernovae gradually clump together to form planets, stars, and new star systems.

“Supernovae like the one that created the Cygnus Loop have a huge impact on how galaxies form,” said Brian Fleming, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and principal investigator for the INFUSE mission.

The Cygnus Loop provides a rare look at a supernova blast still in progress. Already over 120 light-years across, the massive cloud is still expanding today at approximately 930,000 miles per hour (about 1.5 million kilometers per hour).

What our telescopes capture from the Cygnus Loop is not the supernova blast itself. Instead, we see the dust and gas superheated by the shock front, which glows as it cools back down.

“INFUSE will observe how the supernova dumps energy into the Milky Way by catching light given off just as the blast wave crashes into pockets of cold gas floating around the galaxy,” Fleming said.

To see that shock front at its sizzling edge, Fleming and his team have developed a telescope that measures far-ultraviolet light – a kind of light too energetic for our eyes to see. This light reveals gas at temperatures between 90,000 and 540,000 degrees Fahrenheit (about 50,000 to 300,000 degrees Celsius) that is still sizzling after impact.

INFUSE is an integral field spectrograph, the first instrument of its kind to fly to space. The instrument combines the strengths of two ways of studying light: imaging and spectroscopy. Your typical telescopes have cameras that excel at creating images – showing where light is coming from, faithfully revealing its spatial arrangement. But telescopes don’t separate light into different wavelengths or “colors” – instead, all of the different wavelengths overlap one another in the resulting image.

Spectroscopy, on the other hand, takes a single beam of light and separates it into its component wavelengths or spectrum, much as a prism separates light into a rainbow. This procedure reveals all kinds of information about what the light source is made of, its temperature, and how it is moving. But spectroscopy can only look at a single sliver of light at a time. It’s like looking at the night sky through a narrow keyhole.

The INFUSE instrument captures an image and then “slices” it up, lining up the slices into one giant “keyhole.” The spectrometer can then spread each of the slices into its spectrum. This data can be reassembled into a 3-dimensional image that scientists call a “data cube” – like a stack of images where each layer reveals a specific wavelength of light.

Using the data from INFUSE, Fleming and his team will not only identify specific elements and their temperatures, but they’ll also see where those different elements lie along the shock front.

“It’s a very exciting project to be a part of,” said lead graduate student Emily Witt, also at CU Boulder, who led most of the assembly and testing of INFUSE and will lead the data analysis. “With these first-of-their-kind measurements, we will better understand how these elements from the supernova mix with the environment around them. It’s a big step toward understanding how material from supernovas becomes part of planets like Earth and even people like us.”

To get to space, the INFUSE payload will fly aboard a sounding rocket. These nimble, crewless rockets launch into space for a few minutes of data collection before falling back to the ground. The INFUSE payload will fly aboard a two-stage Black Brant 9 sounding rocket, aiming for a peak altitude of about 150 miles (240 kilometers), where it will make its observations, before parachuting back to the ground to be recovered. The team hopes to upgrade the instrument and launch again. In fact, parts of the INFUSE rocket are themselves repurposed from the DEUCE mission, which launched from Australia in 2022.

NASA’s Sounding Rocket Program is conducted at the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Virginia, which is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. NASA’s Heliophysics Division manages the sounding rocket program for the agency. The development of the INFUSE payload was supported by NASA’s Astrophysics Division.

NASA and Boeing are working to complete the agency’s verification and validation activities ahead of Starliner’s first flight with astronauts to the International Space Station. While Boeing is targeting March to have the spacecraft ready for flight, teams decided during a launch manifest evaluation that a launch in April will better accommodate upcoming crew rotations and cargo resupply missions this spring.

Once the spacecraft meets the agency’s safety requirements, NASA’s Boeing Starliner Crew Flight Test (CFT) will see astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams perform the first crewed mission of the spacecraft designed to take astronauts to and from the orbital laboratory.

Ahead of CFT, Boeing has completed P213 tape removal in the upper dome of the Starliner crew compartment and work is underway to remove or remediate the tape in the lower dome of the spacecraft. These hardware remediation efforts inside the Starliner production facility at NASA Kennedy are expected to be completed during the next several weeks. After the P213 tape remediation efforts conclude, engineers will conduct final assessments to ensure acceptable risk of any remaining tape.

A set of parachutes is on track to be delivered and installed on the CFT spacecraft by the end of this year to support the current target launch date. Separately, the team also is planning a drop test of Starliner’s updated drogue and main parachutes. The parachutes will incorporate a planned strengthening of main canopy suspension lines and the recent design of the drogue and main parachute soft-link joints, which will increase the safety factor for the system. The drop test is planned for early 2024 based on the current parachute delivery schedule.

Boeing and NASA also are planning modifications to the active thermal control system valves to improve long-term functionality following a radiator bypass valve issue discovered during ground operations earlier this year. As discussed during a Starliner media teleconference in June, teams have modified the spacecraft hardware and identified forward work to prevent a similar issue in the future. Options include a system purge to prevent stiction, component upgrades and operational mitigations.

Additionally, about 98% of the certification products required for the flight test are complete, and NASA and Boeing anticipate closure on remaining CFT certification products early next year. Meanwhile, NASA and Boeing have made significant progress on requirement closures related to manual crew control of the spacecraft and abort system analysis.

The latest version of Starliner’s CFT flight software completed qualification testing and is undergoing standard hardware and software integration testing inside Boeing’s Avionics and Software Integration Lab. Starliner’s crew and service modules remain mated and await continuation of standard preflight processing.

The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket also is in Florida at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station awaiting integration with the spacecraft.

The NASA astronauts who will fly aboard CFT continue to train for their roughly eight-day mission to the orbiting laboratory, which includes working with operations and mission support teams to participate in various simulations across all phases of flight.

Starliner completed two uncrewed flight tests, including Orbital Flight Test-2, which docked to the space station on May 21, 2022, following a launch two days prior from Kennedy. The spacecraft remained docked to space station for four days before successfully landing at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Follow NASA’s commercial crew blog or CFT mission blog for the latest information on progress. Details about NASA’s Commercial Crew Program can be found by following the commercial crew blog, @commercial_crew on X, and commercial crew on Facebook.

NASA and its industry partners Boeing and SpaceX are planning for the next set of missions to the International Space Station for the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.

Crew-8

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 mission to the orbiting laboratory is targeted to launch no earlier than mid-February. The mission will carry NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, commander; Michael Barratt, pilot; and mission specialist Jeanette Epps, as well as Roscosmos cosmonaut mission specialist Alexander Grebenkin to the space station to conduct a wide range of operational and research activities. Routine maintenance and processing of the Crew-8 SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft is in work. This will be the first spaceflight for Dominick, Epps, and Grebenkin, and the third for Barratt. Crew-8 is expected to return to Earth in late August 2024, following a short handover with the agency’s Crew-9 mission.

Starliner Crew Flight Test (CFT)

The first crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft, named NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test (CFT), is planned for no earlier than mid-April. CFT will send NASA astronauts and test pilots Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on a demonstration flight to prove the end-to-end capabilities of the Starliner system. Starliner will launch atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, spend approximately eight days docked to the space station, and return to Earth with a parachute and airbag-assisted ground landing in the desert of the western United States.

NASA will provide an updated status of CFT readiness as more information becomes available.

Crew-9

Looking further ahead in 2024, NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than mid-August for the launch of the agency’s Crew-9, SpaceX’s ninth crew rotation mission to the space station for NASA. A crew of four will be announced at a later date.

10th Crew Rotation Mission

The 10th commercial crew rotation opportunity to the space station is targeted for early 2025. NASA is planning for either SpaceX’s Crew-10 or Boeing’s Starliner-1 mission in this slot. The Starliner-1 date was adjusted to allow for the post-flight review of the Crew Flight Test and incorporation of anticipated learning, approvals of final certification products, and completion of readiness and certification reviews ahead of that mission.

For more insight on NASA’s Commercial Crew Program missions to the orbiting laboratory follow the commercial crew blog. More details can be found @commercial_crew on X and commercial crew on Facebook.

The Flight Research Building, or hangar, at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland has not only housed the center’s aircraft and Flight Operations team for decades, but has also served as a visual representation of the center for the public. NASA has taken advantage of the hangar’s size and shape — along with its location near the center’s main entrance, the Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, and multiple freeways — to raise awareness about Glenn to both the local community and Cleveland visitors.

In the fall of 1941, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) completed the first building at its Cleveland laboratory: the hangar. The letters “N-A-C-A” over a pair of wings were installed above its front and back aircraft entrances shortly thereafter. In 1946, “N-A-C-A” was painted in large white block letters onto the black roof facing the airport. This configuration remained in place for twelve years.

On Oct. 1, 1958, the NACA disbanded, and the laboratory was incorporated into NASA — the nation’s new space agency — as the Lewis Research Center. The next day, the “C” on the hangar roof was painted over with an “S,” and two weeks later, the NACA wings on the front and back were taken down and replaced with small “N-A-S-A” lettering.

During this period, the new agency asked its employees to submit concepts for an official seal. In December 1958, the NASA administrator approved the design of James Modarelli, a graphic illustrator at Lewis and head of the Technical Publications Division. Soon thereafter, he was asked to create a simpler, easier to reproduce version to be used more broadly. In early 1959, Modarelli came up with the large blue insignia that later became known as the “meatball.”

In September 1962, a large NASA insignia was installed on the front entrance of the Lewis hangar facing Brookpark Road, where it remained along with the “N-A-S-A” letters on the back and roof for nearly 30 years. In an effort to rebrand the agency in the mid-1970s, NASA replaced Modarelli’s blue insignia with the highly-stylized logo type, also known as “the worm.” Although the change of logos was mandated, the meatball never fully went away, and it remained on the front of the Lewis hangar.

With its fiftieth anniversary approaching in 1991, the center began developing strategies to improve its visibility in the community. The most significant action was a redesign of the hangar graphics. In November 1990, the large red worm logo was installed on the front, and “Lewis Research Center” was added below with lighting to make graphics visible at night.

In 1992, new NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin decided to reinstate the meatball as the agency’s insignia to improve morale. Two large new meatball signs were constructed in the center’s shops to replace the worm on the front of the hangar and take the place of the 35-year-old insignia on the back. To mark the occasion, the center invited the retired Modarelli to participate in a rededication event at Lewis on Oct. 1, 1997. Modarelli and many of the 250 attendees signed their names on the back of the emblem, which remained above the back entrance until 2022.

In 1993, Congress decided to rename the Cleveland facility the Glenn Research Center. By early 1999, the Lewis Research Center text on the front of the hangar was changed to “Glenn Research Center” with “Lewis Field” in smaller type underneath.

The hangar roof was painted white in the early 1990s, first with black “N-A-S-A” letters, then with pale blue ones. In 2016, the center chose to repaint the roof with a large NASA meatball insignia, with “Glenn Research Center” in text below.

The meatball remains today, a larger-than-life symbol of NASA Glenn’s presence in the community.

Read more about the development and applications of the NACA and NASA logos and insignias: https://go.nasa.gov/3FcOGe5

Robert S. Arrighi

NASA’s Glenn Research Center

Lee esta historia en inglés aquí.

Hoy en día, los pasajeros de avión esperan un viaje tranquilo con pocas turbulencias. Aunque las turbulencias no siempre pueden evitarse, las consideraciones y diseños de los aviones limitan lo que siente el pasajero.

Los aviones eléctricos de despegue y aterrizaje vertical (eVTOL por sus siglas en inglés) podrían ser una parte fundamental de la próxima generación de transporte aéreo, pero para crear un mercado viable, los diseñadores tendrán que crear una experiencia cómoda para el pasajero.

La misión de Movilidad Aérea Avanzada (AAM por sus siglas en inglés) de la NASA está investigando la calidad de viajes para comprender mejor cómo deben diseñarse estas aeronaves para una experiencia ideal del pasajero. La investigación de la NASA proporciona orientación de diseño a los fabricantes de la industria para garantizar que los pasajeros disfruten de un viaje tranquilo y seguro.

“Nosotros creemos que las aeronaves de AAM deberán tener un bajo nivel de ruido en la cabina, una baja vibración de los rotores y ser más resistentes a las turbulencias”, dijo Carlos Malpica, jefe técnico de dinámica y control de vuelo del proyecto de tecnología de elevación vertical revolucionaria (RVLT por sus siglas en inglés) de la NASA. “Tendrán que ser volados de una manera predecible, repetible y no agresiva que no resulte en aceleraciones o rotaciones repentinas de la aeronave”.

La misión AAM de la NASA está investigando la respuesta fisiológica humana a los estímulos de movimiento, vibración y ruido que el equipo espera que experimenten los pasajeros en los aviones eVTOL.

El año pasado, el proyecto RVLT llevó un estudio en el Simulador de Movimiento Vertical del Centro de Investigación Ames de la NASA en Silicon Valley (California). Voluntarios que se hicieron pasar por pasajeros experimentaron dos vuelos de simulador de corta duración en diferentes niveles de turbulencia. Un viaje fue tranquilo y el otro agitado. El estudio examinó la susceptibilidad al mareo en estas condiciones en aviones eVTOL. La NASA está planeando otros estudios de este tipo para mejor comprender las consecuencias para los pasajeros.

La misión AAM incluye varios proyectos centrados en distintas áreas para ayudar a que los aviones eVTOL y otras aeronaves innovadoras vuelen por los cielos. Esto incluye trabajos sobre automatización, ruido, vertipuertos y diseño de vehículos, así como integración del espacio aéreo para mantener la seguridad de todos mientras vuelan. Las agencias gubernamentales, la industria y el público necesitarán combinar sus esfuerzos para construir nuevas autopistas en el cielo.

La visión de la NASA consiste en diseñar nuevos sistemas de transporte aéreo seguros, accesibles y económicos junto con socios de la industria, la comunidad, y la Administración Federal de Aviación. Estas nuevas capacidades permitirían a los pasajeros y a la carga viajar a pedido en aviones innovadores y automatizados a través de la ciudad, entre ciudades vecinas o a otros lugares a los que hoy en día se suele acceder en automóvil.

Artículo Traducido por: Elena Aguirre

NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems conducts a water flow test with the mobile launcher at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center’s in Florida on Oct. 24, 2023. It is the third in a series of tests to verify the overpressure protection and sound suppression system is ready for launch of the Artemis II mission.

During liftoff, 400,000 gallons of water will rush onto the pad to help protect NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, mobile launcher, and launch pad from any overpressurization and extreme sound produced during ignition and liftoff.

Artemis II is the first crewed mission under Artemis and will test all the Orion spacecraft’s systems with astronauts aboard.

Get Artemis II updates on the blog.

Image credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

The map could help the agency decide where the first astronauts to the Red Planet should land. The more available water, the less missions will need to bring.

Buried ice will be a vital resource for the first people to set foot on Mars, serving as drinking water and a key ingredient for rocket fuel. But it would also be a major scientific target: Astronauts or robots could one day drill ice cores much as scientists do on Earth, uncovering the climate history of Mars and exploring potential habitats (past or present) for microbial life.

The need to look for subsurface ice arises because liquid water isn’t stable on the Martian surface: The atmosphere is so thin that water immediately vaporizes. There’s plenty of ice at the Martian poles – mostly made of water, although carbon dioxide, or dry ice, can be found as well – but those regions are too cold for astronauts (or robots) to survive for long.

That’s where the NASA-funded Subsurface Water Ice Mapping project comes in. SWIM, as it’s known, recently released its fourth set of maps – the most detailed since the project began in 2017.

Led by the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, SWIM pulls together data from several NASA missions, including the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), 2001 Mars Odyssey, and the now-inactive Mars Global Surveyor. Using a mix of data sets, scientists have identified the likeliest places to find Martian ice that could be accessed from the surface by future missions.

Instruments on these spacecraft have detected what look like masses of subsurface frozen water along Mars’ mid-latitudes. The northern mid-latitudes are especially attractive because they have a thicker atmosphere than most other regions on the planet, making it easier to slow a descending spacecraft. The ideal astronaut landing sites would be a sweet spot at the southernmost edge of this region – far enough north for ice to be present but close enough to the equator to ensure the warmest possible temperatures for astronauts in an icy region.

“If you send humans to Mars, you want to get them as close to the equator as you can,” said Sydney Do, JPL’s SWIM project manager. “The less energy you have to expend on keeping astronauts and their supporting equipment warm, the more you have for other things they’ll need.”

Building a Better Map

Previous iterations of the map relied on lower-resolution imagers, radar, thermal mappers, and spectrometers, all of which can hint at buried ice but can’t outright confirm its presence or quantity. For this latest SWIM map, scientists relied on two higher-resolution cameras aboard MRO. Context Camera data was used to further refine the northern hemisphere maps and, for the first time, HiRISE (High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) data was incorporated to provide the most detailed perspective of the ice’s boundary line as close to the equator as possible.

Scientists routinely use HiRISE to study fresh impact craters caused by meteoroids that may have excavated chunks of ice. Most of these craters are no more than 33 feet (10 meters) in diameter, although in 2022 HiRISE captured a 492-foot-wide (150-meter-wide) impact crater that revealed a motherlode of ice that had been hiding beneath the surface.

“These ice-revealing impacts provide a valuable form of ground truth in that they show us locations where the presence of ground ice is unequivocal,” said Gareth Morgan, SWIM’s co-lead at the Planetary Science Institute. “We can then use these locations to test that our mapping methods are sound.”

In addition to ice-exposing impacts, the new map includes sightings by HiRISE of so-called “polygon terrain,” where the seasonal expansion and contraction of subsurface ice causes the ground to form polygonal cracks. Seeing these polygons extending around fresh, ice-filled impact craters is yet another indication that there’s more ice hidden beneath the surface at these locations.

There are other mysteries that scientists can use the map to study, as well.

“The amount of water ice found in locations across the Martian mid-latitudes isn’t uniform; some regions seem to have more than others, and no one really knows why,” said Nathaniel Putzig, SWIM’s other co-lead at the Planetary Science Institute. “The newest SWIM map could lead to new hypotheses for why these variations happen.” He added that it could also help scientists tweak models of how the ancient Martian climate evolved over time, leaving larger amounts of ice deposited in some regions and lesser amounts in others.

SWIM’s scientists hope the project will serve as a foundation for a proposed Mars Ice Mapper mission – an orbiter that would be equipped with a powerful radar custom-designed to search for near-surface ice beyond where HiRISE has confirmed its presence.

News Media Contacts

Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Fox / Alana Johnson
NASA Headquarters, Washington
301-286-6284 / 202-358-1501
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov

2023-150

Communities worldwide now have access to a powerful tool to increase their awareness of landslide hazards, thanks to NASA and the Pacific Disaster Center.

After years of development and testing, NASA’s Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness model (LHASA) has been integrated into the Pacific Disaster Center’s (PDC) multi-hazard monitoring, alerting, and decision-support platform, DisasterAWARE. LHASA allows researchers to map rainfall-triggered landslide hazards, giving DisasterAWARE users around the world a robust tool for identifying, tracking, and responding to these threats. The aim is to equip communities with timely and critical risk awareness that bolsters disaster resilience and safeguards lives and livelihoods.

Landslides cause thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damage every year. Developing countries often bear disproportionate losses due to lack of access to hazard early warning systems and other resources for effective risk reduction and recovery. Reports from the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction emphasize that early warning systems and early action are among the most effective ways to decrease disaster-related deaths and losses.

“Some local authorities develop their own systems to monitor landslide risk, but there isn’t a global model that works in the same way. That’s what defines LHASA: it works all the time and it covers most regions of the world,” says Robert Emberson, NASA Disasters associate program manager and a key member of the NASA landslides team. “Thanks to our collaboration with the Pacific Disaster Center, this powerful landslide technology is now even more accessible for the communities that need it most.”

LHASA uses a machine learning model that combines data on ground slope, soil moisture, snow, geological conditions, distance to faults, and the latest near real-time precipitation data from NASA’s IMERG product (part of the Global Precipitation Measurement mission). The model has been trained on a database of historical landslides and the conditions surrounding them, allowing it to recognize patterns that indicate a landslide is likely.

The result is a landslide “nowcast” – a map showing the potential of rainfall-triggered landslides occurring for any given region within the past day. This map of hazard likelihood can help agencies and officials rapidly assess areas where the current landslide risk is high. It can also give disaster response teams critical information on where a landslide may have occurred so they can investigate and deploy life-saving resources.  

Partnering to Protect the Vulnerable

Generating landslide nowcasts is merely the first step. To be truly effective, vulnerable communities must receive the data in a way that is accessible and easy to integrate into existing disaster management plans. That’s where the Pacific Disaster Center comes in.

PDC is an applied research center managed by the University of Hawaii, and it shares NASA’s goal to reduce global disaster risk through innovative uses of science and technology.  Its flagship DisasterAWARE software provides early warnings and risk assessment tools for 18 types of natural hazards and supports decision-making by a wide range of disaster management agencies, local governments, and humanitarian organizations. Prominent users include the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA), and the World Food Programme (WFP).

“The close pairing of our organizations and use of PDC’s DisasterAWARE platform for early warning has been a special recipe for success in getting life-saving information into the hands of decision-makers and communities around the world,” said Chris Chiesa, PDC deputy executive director.

The collaboration with PDC brings NASA’s landslide tool to tens of thousands of existing DisasterAWARE users, dramatically increasing LHASA’s reach and effectiveness. Chiesa notes that teams in El Salvador, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic have already begun using these new capabilities to assess landslide hazards during the 2023 rainy season.

PDC’s software ingests and interprets LHASA model data and generates maps of landslide risk severity. It then uses the data to generate landslide hazard alerts for a chosen region that the DisasterAWARE mobile app pushes to users. These alerts give communities critical information on potential hazards, enabling them to take protective measures.

DisasterAWARE also creates comprehensive regional risk reports that estimate the number of people and infrastructure exposed to a disaster – focusing specifically on things like bridges, roads, and hospitals that could complicate relief efforts when damaged. This information is critical for allowing decision-makers to effectively deploy resources to the areas that need them most. 

This effort between NASA and the PDC builds upon a history of fruitful cooperation between the organizations. In 2022, they deployed a NASA global flood modeling tool to enhance DisasterAWARE’s flood early-warning capabilities. They have also shared data and expertise during multiple disasters, including Hurricane Iota in 2020, the 2021 earthquake in Haiti, and the devastating August 2023 wildfires in Maui, PDC’s base of operations.

“The LHASA model is all open-source and leverages publicly available data from NASA and partners,” says Dalia Kirschbaum, lead of the NASA landslides team and director of Earth Sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “This enables other researchers and disaster response communities to adapt the framework to regional or local applications and further awareness at scales relevant to their decision-making needs.” Kirschbaum and her team were recently awarded the prestigious NASA Software of the Year award for their work developing LHASA. 

Some 30 years ago, a young engineer named Christopher Walker was home in the evening making chocolate pudding when he got what turned out to be a very serendipitous call from his mother.

Taking the call, he shut off the stove and stretched plastic wrap over the pot to keep the pudding fresh. By the time he returned, the cooling air in the pot had drawn the wrap into a concave shape, and in that warped plastic, he saw something – the magnified reflection of an overhead lightbulb – that gave him an idea that could revolutionize space-based sensing and communications.

That idea became the Large Balloon Reflector (LBR), an inflatable device that creates wide collection apertures that weigh a fraction of today’s deployable antennas. Now, with an assist from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, funded by the agency’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, which supports visionary innovations from diverse sources, Walker’s decades-old vision is coming to fruition.

The concept turns part of the inside surface of an inflated sphere into a parabolic antenna. A section comprising about a third of the balloon’s interior surface is aluminized, giving it reflective properties.

With NIAC funding, and a grant from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Walker was able to develop and demonstrate technologies for a 33-foot-diameter (10 meters) LBR that was carried to the stratosphere by a giant balloon. For comparison, the aperture of NASA’s massive James Webb Space Telescope is over 21 feet (6.5 meters) in diameter.

“There was no place other than NIAC within NASA to get this off the ground,” says Walker, now a astronomy and optical engineering professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “At first, I was afraid to share the idea with colleagues because it sounded so crazy. You need a program within NASA that will actually look at the radical ideas, and NIAC is it.”

Parabolic dish antennas use their concave shape to capture and concentrate electromagnetic radiation. The larger the antenna’s diameter, or aperture, the more effective it is for capturing light or radio waves and transmitting radio signals over great distances.

In astronomy, there is a tremendous advantage to placing telescopes above the Earth’s atmosphere, which tends to distort or degrade signals coming from space. The challenge is that traditional large reflector antennas are heavy, unwieldy, and difficult to stow, leading to launch constraints and risky in-space deployment schemes.

The LBR design solves both problems. Made of a thin film structure, it inflates like a beachball, providing a stable parabolic-dish shape without the need for bulky and complex deployable hardware, and can fold into a tiny volume.  

In 2018, Freefall Aerospace, a company co-founded by Walker to develop and market the technology, demonstrated the LBR’s potential aboard NASA’s stadium-sized stratospheric balloon, which carried a 3.28-foot scale model to an altitude of 159,000 feet.

Next up for the technology is a high-speed communications demonstration in low Earth orbit aboard a 6-unit CubeSat, about the size of a shoebox, called CatSat. It was selected for flight in 2019 as part of NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative. It is a joint effort involving NASA, Freefall Aerospace, the University of Arizona, and Rincon Research Corporation in Tucson, Arizona.

After reaching low-Earth orbit, CatSat’s inflatable antenna deployment system will deploy from its container, inflate to a diameter of about one-and-a-half feet, and begin transmitting back high-definition Earth photos. The mission is slated for launch with several other CubeSats on Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket as part of the Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELaNa) 43 mission.

A more ambitious lunar mission concept is also being explored. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, would use the inflatable antenna in tandem with a new instrument called Terahertz Spectrometer for In-Situ Resource Utilization, a miniature, high-power laser precisely calibrated to detect water, a critical exploration resource.

“The technology demonstrated by CatSat opens the door to the possibility of future lunar, planetary and deep-space missions using CubeSats,” said Walker.

It might be difficult to believe this all started because a young engineer’s idea of dinner one evening was what most would consider dessert. Then again, one could say the proof was in the pudding.