Webb’s study of the second-brightest gamma-ray burst ever seen reveals tellurium.

A team of scientists has used multiple space and ground-based telescopes, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, to observe an exceptionally bright gamma-ray burst, GRB 230307A, and identify the neutron star merger that generated an explosion that created the burst. Webb also helped scientists detect the chemical element tellurium in the explosion’s aftermath.

Image: Gamma-Ray Burst 230307A

Other elements near tellurium on the periodic table – like iodine, which is needed for much of life on Earth – are also likely to be present among the kilonova’s ejected material. A kilonova is an explosion produced by a neutron star merging with either a black hole or with another neutron star.

“Just over 150 years since Dmitri Mendeleev wrote down the periodic table of elements, we are now finally in the position to start filling in those last blanks of understanding where everything was made, thanks to Webb,” said Andrew Levan of Radboud University in the Netherlands and the University of Warwick in the UK, lead author of the study.

While neutron star mergers have long been theorized as being the ideal “pressure cookers” to create some of the rarer elements substantially heavier than iron, astronomers have previously encountered a few obstacles in obtaining solid evidence.

Long Gamma-Ray Burst

Kilonovae are extremely rare, making it difficult to observe these events. Short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), traditionally thought to be those that last less than two seconds, can be byproducts of these infrequent merger episodes. (In contrast, long gamma-ray bursts may last several minutes and are usually associated with the explosive death of a massive star.)

The case of GRB 230307A is particularly remarkable. First detected by Fermi in March, it is the second brightest GRB observed in over 50 years of observations, about 1,000 times brighter than a typical gamma-ray burst that Fermi observes. It also lasted for 200 seconds, placing it firmly in the category of long duration gamma-ray bursts, despite its different origin.

“This burst is way into the long category. It’s not near the border. But it seems to be coming from a merging neutron star,” added Eric Burns, a co-author of the paper and member of the Fermi team at Louisiana State University.

Opportunity: Telescope Collaboration

The collaboration of many telescopes on the ground and in space allowed scientists to piece together a wealth of information about this event as soon as the burst was first detected. It is an example of how satellites and telescopes work together to witness changes in the universe as they unfold. 

After the first detection, an intensive series of observations from the ground and from space, including with Swift, swung into action to pinpoint the source on the sky and track how its brightness changed. These observations in the gamma-ray, X-ray, optical, infrared, and radio showed that the optical/infrared counterpart was faint, evolved quickly, and became very red – the hallmarks of a kilonova.

“This type of explosion is very rapid, with the material in the explosion also expanding swiftly,” said Om Sharan Salafia, a co-author of the study at the INAF – Brera Astronomical Observatory in Italy. “As the whole cloud expands, the material cools off quickly and the peak of its light becomes visible in infrared, and becomes redder on timescales of days to weeks.”

Image: Killanova – Webb vs Model

At later times it would have been impossible to study this kilonova from the ground, but these were the perfect conditions for Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instruments to observe this tumultuous environment. The spectrum has broad lines that show the material is ejected at high speeds, but one feature is clear: light emitted by tellurium, an element rarer than platinum on Earth.

The highly sensitive infrared capabilities of Webb helped scientists identify the home address of the two neutron stars that created the kilonova: a spiral galaxy about 120,000 light-years away from the site of the merger.

Prior to their venture, they were once two normal massive stars that formed a binary system in their home spiral galaxy. Since the duo was gravitationally bound, both stars were launched together on two separate occasions: when one among the pair exploded as a supernova and became a neutron star, and when the other star followed suit.

In this case, the neutron stars remained as a binary system despite two explosive jolts and were kicked out of their home galaxy. The pair traveled approximately the equivalent of the Milky Way galaxy’s diameter before merging several hundred million years later.

Scientists expect to find even more kilonovae in the future due to the increasing opportunities to have space and ground-based telescopes work in complementary ways to study changes in the universe. For example, while Webb can peer deeper into space than ever before, the remarkable field of view of NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will enable astronomers to scout where and how frequently these explosions occur.

“Webb provides a phenomenal boost and may find even heavier elements,” said Ben Gompertz, a co-author of the study at the University of Birmingham in the UK. “As we get more frequent observations, the models will improve and the spectrum may evolve more in time. Webb has certainly opened the door to do a lot more, and its abilities will be completely transformative for our understanding of the universe.”

These findings have been published in the journal Nature.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

Media Contacts

Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Hannah Braun – hbraun@stsci.edu , Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edi
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.

Downloads

Download full resolution images for this article from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Research results published in the journal Nature.

Related Information

Neutron Stars – https://universe.nasa.gov/stars/types/#otp_neutron_stars

Universe/Stars Basics – https://universe.nasa.gov/stars/basics/

Universe Basics – https://universe.nasa.gov/universe/basics/

More Webb News – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/latestnews/

More Webb Images – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/multimedia/images/

Webb Mission Page – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/

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On Sept. 30, 2023, NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility marked the formal conclusion of the Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Small Satellite (SmallSat) Tracking Operations in Wallops Island, Virginia, placing its workhorse, 60-plus-year-old, 18-meter antenna system in low-level maintenance status.

“Since 2011, the Wallops tracking site has tracked more than 25 spacecraft over 16,912 passes,” said Doug Voss, deputy chief of the Range and Mission Management Office at Wallops. “It has been an honor to operate this unique tracking capability in support of the Small Satellite Science community.”

Stepping back more than 60 years to 1959, MIT-Lincoln Labs built the dual-band UHF/X-Band antenna system, which included the repurposing of a Twin 5-inch, 38 MK 32 gun mount used extensively by the U.S. Navy in World War II. The mount enabled a precision pointing capability for the UHF antenna. The UHF and X-band antenna system was used for hypersonic missile re-entry plasma physics experiments up to 1965, and then various NASA atmospheric research programs.

In 2011, an agreement was established between NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to dedicate the system to UHF SmallSat tracking. SmallSats, which are small spacecraft with a mass less than 180 kilograms or the size of a large kitchen refrigerator, are typically placed in a low-Earth orbit of about 160-320 kilometers above the Earth. The antenna system supported command and high data-rate downlink of these SmallSats, and nanosatellites called CubeSats, for the next decade plus. According to Voss, compared to most other UHF SmallSat communications systems, the Wallops system provided significantly higher data rates. Its precision pointing ability was critical to helping customers find “lost SmallSats.”  

With the increase of SmallSat missions from 2018 to 2020, the system was upgraded to provide end-to-end connectivity and increased automation. However, with more than a dozen spacecraft being supported and heavy pass schedules, the aging hardware was heavily taxed. As a result, in 2021, significant maintenance issues and obsolete parts created a need to reduce the pass schedule to decrease risk. At the same time, as the need for greater data rates continued to increase, SmallSat/CubeSat markets started to shift away from UHF to other higher frequency bands.

“UHF SmallSat tracking operations ended because the customer base has decreased over the years, which has prompted a steady reduction in tracking services. It is anticipated that no new UHF customers are on the horizon,” said Rachel Albertson, project manager for the UHF SmallSat tracking site at Wallops.

While the system formally concluded SmallSat tracking operations, future plans include support of special ionospheric radar experiments as a part of an initiative to establish a significantly increased Wallops Geophysical Observatory capability supporting mid-latitude heliophysics research. The system may be called on to support special emergent SmallSat needs. 

For more information, visit nasa.gov/wallops.

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On Oct. 24, 1998, NASA launched the Deep Space 1 spacecraft. Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Deep Space 1 served as a testbed for 12 new technologies, including solar electric, also known as ion propulsion, for use in future deep space and interplanetary missions. The spacecraft, the first in NASA’s New Millennium program, flew by asteroid Braille and comet Borrelly, returning images and scientific data about the two small bodies. The ion propulsion engine that Deep Space 1 successfully demonstrated allowed the Dawn spacecraft to explore the protoplanet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres using that technology. The Psyche spacecraft currently on its way to explore the asteroid of the same name, also uses ion propulsion. Future programs such as Gateway will use ion propulsion to enable human lunar exploration. Deep Space 1 completed its mission on Dec. 18, 2001.

Left: The fully assembled Deep Space 1 spacecraft prepared for launch. Middle: View of the Deep Space 1 spacecraft’s ion propulsion engine. Right: Launch of Deep Space 1 on a Delta II rocket from Launch Pad 17A at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, in Florida.

The 12 technologies Deep Space 1 tested included the ion propulsion system; the autonomous navigation system; an autonomous control system; a beacon system that sends simple tones to Earth to advise controllers of spacecraft health; a solar array with concentrator lenses; an integrated camera and imaging spectrometer; an integrated ion and electron spectrometer; a small deep-space transponder; a Ka-band solid-state power amplifier; low-power electronics; a multifunctional structure testing new packaging technology; and a power activation and switching module. Scientists also gathered data on whether the ion engine’s plume interfered with any of the spacecraft’s instruments. The ion engine used xenon gas as its propellant and obtained power from the spacecraft’s high-efficiency solar arrays. Although providing low thrust overall, the engine achieved more thrust than any chemical engine.

The Deep Space 1 spacecraft’s primary mission trajectory, including the flyby of asteroid 1992 KD, renamed 9969 Braille.

The launch of Deep Space 1 took place atop a Delta II rocket on Oct. 24, 1998, from Launch Pad 17A at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, now Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, in Florida. After entering an initial parking orbit around the Earth, the rocket’s third stage boosted Deep Space 1 into solar orbit. The initial mission plan included demonstration of the new technologies and a flyby of asteroid 1992 KD, renamed 9969 Braille shortly before the spacecraft’s encounter. On Nov. 10, ground controllers commanded the ion engine to commence firing but it only operated for 4.5 minutes. They tried again on Nov. 24 with the spacecraft 3 million miles from Earth, and this time the engine firing succeeded, running for the planned 14 days. Over the next six months, the spacecraft successfully tested all 12 of its technology demonstrations, completing the activity in June 1999.

Left: Illustration of Deep Space 1 and the blue exhaust of its ion propulsion engine. Middle: Blurry image of asteroid 9969 Braille. Right: Highest quality image of comet 19P/Borrelly.

Due to an onboard computer crash shortly before the encounter, as well as the inability of the autonomous navigation system to lock onto the darker than expected asteroid, Deep Space 1’s flyby of Braille on July 29, 1999, occurred at a distance of 16 miles instead of the planned 790 feet. Thus, the images the spacecraft returned did not show any detail, while other instruments provided good data. When the spacecraft’s primary mission ended on Sept. 18, 1999, mission managers approved an extended mission to target a flyby of comet 19P/Borrelly. The spacecraft’s star tracker failed on Nov. 11, 1999, putting the comet flyby in jeopardy. Over the next five months, ground controllers built a new attitude control system that did not rely on the star tracker, and the flyby could proceed. Deep Space 1 entered comet Borrelly’s coma on Sept. 22, 2001, and flew by its nucleus at a distance of 1,350 miles. The spacecraft provided the most detailed images of a comet’s nucleus up to that time. Having operated well beyond its expected lifetime and with its attitude control fuel running low, ground controllers turned off the spacecraft on Dec. 18, 2001. Its ion propulsion engine had operated for 16,265 hours, far longer than any previous spacecraft, and provided a total velocity change of three miles per second, the largest achieved by any spacecraft with its own propulsion system.

Left: Dawn spacecraft image of dwarf planet Ceres. Middle: Illustration of the Psyche spacecraft during its encounter with the asteroid of the same name. Right: Illustration of Gateway Habitation and Logistics Outpost and Power and Propulsion Element using ion propulsion.

The ion propulsion technology that Deep Space 1 demonstrated has found use in interplanetary uncrewed missions and will see use in future human lunar exploration. Launched in 2007, the Dawn spacecraft’s ion propulsion system enabled it to explore two worlds between 2011 and 2018, the protoplanet Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres, entering orbit around each to conduct in-depth studies not otherwise possible. The Psyche spacecraft, currently on its way to explore the asteroid of the same name, also uses ion propulsion. In the arena of future human space exploration, the Gateway, part of NASA-led Artemis missions to return astronauts to the Moon, will establish a human presence in lunar orbit. The Gateway’s Power and Propulsion Element plans to use its Advanced Electric Propulsion System to arrive in lunar orbit and to maintain that orbit enabling regular astronaut visits.

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To explore the mysterious ice-encrusted moon Europa, the mission will need to endure bombardment by radiation and high-energy particles surrounding Jupiter.

When NASA’s Europa Clipper begins orbiting Jupiter to investigate whether its ice-encased moon, Europa, has conditions suitable for life, the spacecraft will pass repeatedly through one of the most punishing radiation environments in our solar system.

Hardening the spacecraft against potential damage from that radiation is no easy task. But on Oct. 7, the mission put the final piece of the spacecraft’s “armor” in place when it sealed the vault, a container specially designed to shield Europa Clipper’s sophisticated electronics. The probe is being put together, piece by piece, in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California ahead of its launch in October 2024.

“Closing the vault is a major milestone,” said Kendra Short, Europa Clipper’s deputy flight system manager at JPL. “It means we’ve got everything in there that we have to have in there. We’re ready to button it up.”

Just under a half-inch (1 centimeter) thick, the aluminum vault houses the electronics for the spacecraft’s suite of science instruments. The alternative of shielding each set of electronic parts individually would add cost and weight to the spacecraft.

“The vault is designed to reduce the radiation environment to acceptable levels for most of the electronics,” said JPL’s Insoo Jun, the co-chair of the Europa Clipper Radiation Focus Group and an expert on space radiation.

Punishing Radiation

Jupiter’s gigantic magnetic field is 20,000 times as strong as Earth’s and spins rapidly in time with the planet’s 10-hour rotation period. This field captures and accelerates charged particles from Jupiter’s space environment to create powerful radiation belts. The radiation is a constant, physical presence – a kind of space weather – bombarding everything in its sphere of influence with damaging particles.

“Jupiter has the most intense radiation environment other than the Sun in the solar system,” Jun said. “The radiation environment is affecting every aspect of the mission.”

That’s why when the spacecraft arrives at Jupiter in 2030, Europa Clipper won’t simply park in orbit around Europa. Instead, like some previous spacecraft that studied the Jovian system, it will make a wide-ranging orbit of Jupiter itself to move away from the planet and its harsh radiation as much as possible. During those looping orbits of the planet, the spacecraft will fly past Europa nearly 50 times to gather scientific data.

The radiation is so intense that scientists believe it modifies the surface of Europa, causing visible color changes, said Tom Nordheim, a planetary scientist at JPL who specializes in icy outer moons – Europa as well as Saturn’s Enceladus.

“Radiation on the surface of Europa is a major geologic modification process,” Nordheim said. “When you look at Europa – you know, the reddish-brown color – scientists have shown that this is consistent with radiation processing.”

Chaotic Icescape

So even as engineers work to keep radiation out of Europa Clipper, scientists like Nordheim and Jun hope to use the space probe to study it.

“With a dedicated radiation monitoring unit, and using opportunistic radiation data from its instruments, Europa Clipper will help reveal the unique and challenging radiation environment at Jupiter,” Jun said.

Nordheim zeroes in on Europa’s “chaos terrain,” areas where blocks of surface material appear to have broken apart, rotated, and moved into new positions, in many cases preserving preexisting linear fracture patterns.

Deep beneath the moon’s icy surface is a vast liquid-water ocean, scientists believe, that could offer a habitable environment for life. Some areas of Europa’s surface show evidence of material transport from the subsurface to the surface. “We need to understand the context of how radiation modified that material,” Nordheim said. “It can alter the chemical makeup of the material.”

The Power of Heat

Because Europa’s ocean is locked inside an envelope of ice, any possible life forms would not be able to rely directly on the Sun for energy, as plants do on Earth. Instead, they’d need an alternative energy source, such as heat or chemical energy. Radiation raining down on Europa’s surface could help provide such a source by creating oxidants, such as oxygen or hydrogen peroxide, as the radiation interacts with the surface ice layer.

Over time, these oxidants could be transported from the surface to the interior ocean. “The surface could be a window into the subsurface,” Nordheim said. A better understanding of such processes could provide a key to unlock more of the Jupiter system’s secrets, he added: “Radiation is one of the things that makes Europa so interesting. It’s part of the story.”

More About the Mission

Europa Clipper’s main science goal is to determine whether there are places below Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa, that could support life. The mission’s three main science objectives are to determine the thickness of the moon’s icy shell and its surface interactions with the ocean below, to investigate its composition, and to characterize its geology. The mission’s detailed exploration of Europa will help scientists better understand the astrobiological potential for habitable worlds beyond our planet.

More information about Europa can be found here:

europa.nasa.gov

News Media Contacts

Gretchen McCartney
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-6215
gretchen.p.mccartney@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

Written by Pat Brennan

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FAIRMONT – The NASA Independent Verification & Validation Program’s Orion Team received an award for their contributions to the Artemis I Mission during a ceremony hosted at the I-79 Technology Park, in Fairmont.

The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) Space Flight Awareness (SFA) Award Ceremony is an annual event recognizing employees and teams who have made strides in their role in promoting astronaut safety and mission success. Members of the IV&V Orion Team took home the team award for significant contributions “to improving the quality, reliability, and safety of the Orion Program’s safety and mission critical software in support of the Artemis I Mission.”

Artemis I was an uncrewed lunar flight test and the first in a series of increasingly complex missions that will enable human exploration at the Moon and future missions to Mars.

The IV&V winners were among those honored at a recent ceremony in Fairmont, West Virginia, with IV&V Program Director Wes Deadrick and NASA Astronaut and Scientist Stanley Love among those speaking at the event.

“It’s a treat to be able to come out and shake hands with some of the folks who keep us safe and keep our missions going,” Love said.

According to the SFA Program, the IV&V Orion Team identified and helped resolve nearly 3,000 high-severity issues and risks, working closely with its customers in the Orion Program and others.

According to the agency, on Artemis missions, Orion will carry the crew to space, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during the space travel, and provide safe re-entry from deep space return velocities.

“NASA’s human spaceflight missions greatly rely on evolving systems and software, and if the safety for these systems fail then the mission fails,” Deadrick said during the ceremony. “In this regard, both for human spaceflight missions and for science missions, the IV&V Program has become indispensable to Goddard and the agency.”

To learn more about the Artemis Program: Artemis – NASA

For more on the SFA Program and Awards, visit: Space Flight Awareness – NASA

While the International Space Station orbited 260 miles above Earth on Oct. 20, 2023, astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli snapped this image of a storm in the Arabian Sea, less than 700 miles off the coast of Oman. In addition to photographing our planet from the space station, NASA also observes Earth with satellites. These satellites collect data on storms that scientists can then use to create near real-time products to support disaster response.

For example, NASA and JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite frequently observes the structure of precipitation within tropical cyclones and hurricanes, and the Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for GPM product maps their intense rainfall rates over time to provide situational awareness for potential flood events. Following landfall, optical data collected by the Aqua, Terra, Landsat, or Suomi NPP satellites can map the extent and severity of flooding – and should clouds obscure the region, SAR data from ESA Sentinel satellites or NASA Airborne Science instruments can also be used to detect flooding. In addition to giving insights into how storms form and intensify, NASA satellites also supply key inputs to weather models to help generate life-saving forecasts.

Image Credit: NASA/Jasmin Moghbeli

It was a hazy August day on Chicago’s South Side, and Nedra Sims Fears was hosting a small gathering to talk about the air. Interstate-94, which bisects her Chatham neighborhood, hummed nearby.

“This was the summer I spent watching summer out my window,” Fears said.

That’s because asthma runs in her family, and smoke from wildfires in Canada had wafted into Chicago, making it difficult for her to breathe. Many of her neighbors don’t have air conditioning, which means they don’t have the luxury of shutting their windows against the tiny hazardous particles contained in the smoke.

The fine particles, called PM2.5, are more than 35 times smaller than a grain of sand and can infiltrate deep into lung tissue. They degrade air quality in Chicago neighborhoods that are already disproportionately exposed to fossil fuel emissions. These include South and West Side neighborhoods located near highways, warehouses, and intermodal facilities, where freight-loaded trains and trucks converge. Thousands of such facilities are spread throughout Illinois, and they are hot spots of diesel exhaust and nitrogen oxides.

“Walking down the road, you see truck after truck after truck going into these facilities,” said Fears, who leads the Greater Chatham Initiative to revitalize a host of South Side neighborhoods. “Those neighborhoods live with day-to-day air pollution. It doesn’t take Canada being on fire for them to suffer.”

This was the summer I spent watching summer out my window.

Nedra Sims Fears

Chicago community leader

The result is that residents of Chicago and communities downwind are breathing harmful air pollutants including PM2.5, fossil fuel emissions, and smog. These pollutants move throughout the atmosphere and change by the hour, periodically exceeding the levels considered safe by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

A version of this story plays out in every city in America. In New York and Los Angeles, tailpipe emissions spew from congested streets. In Phoenix, record-breaking heat stokes ozone formation. In port cities like Baltimore and Houston, emissions from ships, as well as oil refineries and chemical plants, contribute to dirty air.

While air quality monitors are distributed throughout the country, they are sparse in some regions, which means they cannot tell every neighborhood’s story. A NASA mission aims to change that with new tools to monitor air pollutants from the streets to the stratosphere.

STAQing Up Observations

Several thousand feet above the Fears’ home, one of the largest flying laboratories in the world circled the skies over Chicago.

The plane – NASA’s four-engine DC-8 jet – is a storied research craft. Over the past 25 years it has supported field campaigns across all seven continents. On this August 2023 day, it carried 40 researchers and a pack of scientific instruments investigating air pollution over the cities and pasturelands of the Midwest.

From his seat over the wing, Barry Lefer watched the city’s iconic skyline rise from Lake Michigan.

“Air pollution has dramatically improved across the U.S. in the past few decades due to environmental regulations, but some communities are still hot spots of poor air quality,” said Lefer, head of the Tropospheric Composition Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The researchers onboard – from NASA, NOAA, and multiple universities – converged this summer on cities across North America. In coordinated research campaigns, they studied a range of air pollutants from industrial emissions to volatile chemical products used in cleaning agents and personal care items.

NASA’s part of the mission was called STAQS, short for Synergistic TEMPO Air Quality Science, and it focused on Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto. STAQS included two Gulfstream jets equipped with state-of-the-art sensors and ground crews deployed in mobile research trailers across the country.

At the heart of the mission were two overarching questions: How do air pollutants change and move through the atmosphere, and which communities are disproportionately exposed?

A Vivid New Picture

2023 was a noteworthy summer for another reason: More than 22,000 miles above Earth’s surface, a new NASA-funded instrument started scanning Earth. TEMPO, short for Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, is the first space-based instrument designed to continuously measure daytime air quality over North America at the resolution of a few square miles. TEMPO launched in April, and NASA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory released its first data maps in August.

TEMPO plus field campaigns like STAQS are giving scientists a more vivid picture of the air pollutants that contribute to disease and premature deaths in the U.S. These include nitrogen oxides, a byproduct of fossil fuel combustion commonly emitted by tailpipes and smokestacks; aerosols such as dust and soot particles; volatile organic compounds; and heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as methane and water vapor. As that new data is gathered and analyzed, air pollution scientists will have details down to a level that matters to people on the street.

The data will be freely accessible, Lefer said, and particularly useful to researchers, state agencies, and local policymakers working to develop solutions. “The hope is that the detailed new data we’re collecting will help communities make their air safer to breathe,” Lefer said.

Ground-level ozone, a main ingredient in smog, is a particularly compelling target for Lefer and the STAQS team. While ozone high in the atmosphere protects Earth from dangerous solar radiation, ground-level ozone aggravates respiratory diseases. It often spikes after rush hour, as nitrogen oxides react with chemicals called volatile organic compounds and sunlight. Each year, ground-level ozone and PM2.5 particles lead to more than 100,000 premature deaths and billions of dollars in annual damages in the U.S, according to the National Weather Service.

In the Chicago area, Lake Michigan’s powerful influence on local weather and winds cause ozone plumes to “travel on air currents, causing pollution levels to exceed EPA standards in rural communities hundreds of miles away,” Lefer said.

Plume Over the Prairie

A short drive up Interstate-94 from Chicago, ozone was on the mind of Todd McKinney, who was scrambling in the dark. A raging Lake Michigan storm had knocked out power in his research trailer nestled in a Wisconsin prairie blooming with wildflowers just across the state line from Illinois. McKinney, a graduate student from the University of Alabama-Huntsville, was trying to get the lights back on before members of a Wisconsin environmental agency arrived for a tour.

For much of the summer, he has been living and working in the trailer, which is one part camper van, two parts high-tech laboratory. Its centerpiece is a custom-built lidar for measuring ozone in different layers of the lower atmosphere, also known as the troposphere. The mobile facility is part of NASA’s Tropospheric Ozone Lidar Network (TOLNet), a high-powered array of lasers used to identify and locate air pollutants.

Is the ozone that we’re seeing coming from an industrial source or the whole city? Is it caused by people idling in their cars at rush hour? We don’t know yet, but we’re working to track it back.

Todd McKinney

University of Alabama, Huntsville Graduate Student

The instruments were originally designed to be stationary. But McKinney said that the development of TEMPO was an inspiration for many researchers, who wanted to get out into the field and contribute real-time data to the summer’s air quality campaign. The trailer he’s working from has been in the making for 10 years – ever since the first announcement of TEMPO. Such ground-based measurements — which also include hourly drone flights and a continual stream of high-altitude weather balloons — help crosscheck the early data coming down from TEMPO in space.

Located downwind from Chicago, shoreline areas like Chiwaukee Prairie are occasionally dosed with ozone that has blown in from the city, he said. But the source is often difficult to pinpoint.

“Is the ozone that we’re seeing coming from an industrial source or the whole city?” he said. “Is it caused by people idling in their cars at rush hour? We don’t know yet, but we’re working to track it back.”

And tracking it back is the first step to developing a solution.

Empowering communities

Using advanced computer modeling to map air pollution hotspots across Chicago, a research team from Northwestern University found that neighborhoods alongside Lake Michigan experience more ground-level ozone pollution than the rest of the city. The researchers also found that neighborhoods located near highways like I-94 experience twice the concentration of nitrogen dioxide and dust than communities with the best air quality in the city.

“Empowering communities with data is an environmental justice issue,” said Daniel Horton, assistant professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences at Northwestern, who leads this research. He hopes that NASA measurements will inform clean-air solutions, such as the electrification of heavy-duty trucks and buses, and more green space in urban neighborhoods.

Air pollution is not an intractable problem, emphasized Zac Adelman, whose regional consortium works with state agencies in the Upper Midwest to improve air quality. The solution lies in devoting resources where they’ll be most effective.

“The question is, what do we control?” said Adelman, executive director of the Lake Michigan Air Directors Consortium. “What are the sources that we need to be concerned about, and what’s actionable information that we can bring to the state regulators and to the federal government, too?”

Empowering communities with data is an environmental justice issue.

Daniel Horton

Northwestern University professor and researcher

“The STAQS campaign and associated monitoring activities that are growing up around it are giving us an opportunity to try to answer those questions,” he added. “That’s a pretty empowering concept, right?”

Sacred Space Requires Clean Air

Back in her living room, Nedra Fears and atmospheric scientist Scott Collis of Argonne National Laboratory discussed how more trees, open spaces, and green rooftops might improve air quality in hard-hit neighborhoods. It’s part of a project they’re collaborating on called CROCUS, short for Community Research on Climate and Urban Science.

Combining scientific research and community guidance, the CROCUS team studies climate challenges in urban Chicago. Community input is critical, Collis said, to identify questions and topics – from localized flooding to heat waves – and ensure that research results directly benefit local residents. The team contributed to the summer’s air quality campaign using a network of sensors deployed throughout the region. CROCUS is funded by the Department of Energy.

Air quality is a complicated issue, but for Fears, the goal is simple. She wants to go on morning walks with her husband. She wants her neighbors’ concerns to be heard. Mostly, she wants to breathe clean air in her own living room, not shut the windows against the pollution she can often feel at the back of her throat.

“You don’t want that pollution in your house,” she said. “Your house is your sacred space where you can be joyful and well.”

Story by Sally Younger.  Video and stills by Kathleen Gaeta. 

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Earth Science Missions

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Earth

Earth—our home planet—is the only place we know of so far that’s inhabited by living things.

Like a sonar using light instead of sound, lidar technology increasingly helps NASA scientists and explorers with remote sensing and surveying, mapping, 3D-image scanning, hazard detection and avoidance, and navigation.

Cutting edge innovations by NASA researchers seek to refine lidars into smaller, lighter, more versatile tools for exploration.

“There are a lot of flavors of lidar right now,” said Cheryl Gramling, assistant chief for technology at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s such an important technology because of the precision and versatility that it offers.”

Light detection and ranging, or lidar, is a remote sensing technology related to sonar and radar. Lidar uses pulses of light to measure distances and properties of objects accurately, by measuring the time it takes the light to reflect back to the lidar sensor.

Goddard innovators are looking to expand the usefulness of lidar applications in communication and navigation, planetary exploration, and space operations. Here are a few of the current investigations.

Foldable, Flat Lidar Optics

Research engineer Mark Stephen is developing a deployable, segmented telescope to capture the returning light signal using state-of-the-art flat-panel optics organized in foldable, origami-inspired panels. Working with researchers at Brigham Young University, their team seeks to provide future missions with the benefits of lidar technology without the current technologies’ high cost and limited efficiency.

Lidar typically is a high-cost technology that may not make the cut for tomorrow’s smaller, lighter, and more efficient missions. Size, weight, and power demands limit the technology’s ability to be implemented in more missions.

“Most people want really high performance,” Stephen said, “But they want it in a small, light, and power-efficient package. We’re trying to find the best balance, and cost matters. Often the cost comes more from the size, weight, and power than it does from the actual development if we’re launching something into space. That is where it gets expensive.”

Stephen is wrapping up a three-year effort to improve lidars through a Radical Innovation Initiative grant within Goddard’s Internal Research and Development (IRAD) program. Their project has been picked up by NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office to fund further improvements.

Typically, lidar receivers depend on bulky lenses to capture light, each lens needs a specific curvature and size to bend the light, in addition to the structures which hold the lenses, and other mechanics, Stephen said. Larger lenses are more effective, and that is where lidar technology tends to get heavy.

Flat optics use new types of nano-structured materials to manipulate individual photons, he said. These meta-materials allow thin and lightweight optics to perform the same functions as much larger and more expensive three-dimensional counterparts.

“We are working toward being able to have a family of instruments where we have some flexibility and agility to meet the needs of a given mission,” Stephen said. “We want to develop a tool where you can make a better trade in terms of size, weight and power versus performance.”

One Laser, Many Wavelengths

Goddard engineer Guangning Yang is looking to improve lidar by producing multiple wavelengths of light from a single beam. Most modern lidars use multiple beams of a single wavelength to increase their accuracy.

Yang is the primary investigator for CASALS, or Concurrent Artificially intelligent Spectrometry and Adaptive Lidar System, a lidar technology that can sweep a large area more efficiently.

CASALS starts with one laser pulse, but instead of splitting that pulse into the many directions it needs to travel, their technology changes the wavelength of the laser at a very high speed. The different wavelengths of light then exit the laser transmitter at different angles based on their wavelength.

This pulse sequence produces a broom-like array sweeping across the object, landscape, or celestial body being studied.

“We have improved the efficiency,” Yang said, “and that will allow us to reduce the instrument’s size dramatically.”

Along with improvements in efficiency, CASALS is smaller than a typical lidar instrument. Yang said CASALS could help provide higher-density mapping of Earth and of other planets and moons as well as assisting with autonomous descents and landings.

Both flat optics and wavelength scanning offer new possibilities for lidar technology and are part of an array of investigations expected to unlock new opportunities in science and navigating distant worlds, Gramling said.

By Elizabeth Markham

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

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New Software Enables Atmospheric Modeling with Greater Resolution

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New Software Enables Atmospheric Modeling with Greater Resolution

PROJECT

High Performance GEOS-Chem

SNAPSHOT

An ESTO investment in software optimization helps researchers and citizen scientists model air quality and greenhouse gases with greater resolution, allowing them to better understand how global atmospheric trends impact local areas.

Next-generation software is making it easier for researchers, policy makers, and citizen scientists to model air quality and greenhouse gases using NASA meteorological data.

This novel software, “High Performance GEOS-Chem,” uses equations representing the Earth’s atmospheric chemistry and boundary conditions from NASA’s Goddard Earth Observation System (GEOS) to represent global atmospheric chemistry across three dimensions at a horizontal spatial resolution of 12 kilometers by 12 kilometers per pixel—an area about one-fifth the size of New York City.

For comparison, the original GEOS-Chem model that was developed in 2001 only produced global simulations at a spatial resolution of about 200 by 250 square kilometers – an area about twice as large as the entire state of New Jersey.

With this improved resolution, researchers interested in air quality and atmospheric chemistry in specific communities can use models, simulations, and visualizations built with NASA data to better understand how global atmospheric trends impact local areas.

GEOS-Chem is an open-source model freely accessible here. More information about High Performance Geos-Chem – including manuals and tutorials – can be found here.

“This new generation of High Performance GEOS-Chem offers major advancements for ease of use, computational performance, versatility, resolution, and accuracy,” said Randall Martin, a professor at Washington University’s McKelvey School of Engineering and Primary Investigator for the High Performance GEOS-Chem project.

In a recent technical demonstration of their improved GEOS-Chem software, Martin and his team showed two images mapping tropospheric nitrogen dioxide – a pollutant typically produced by burning fossil fuels.

The image produced with High Performance GEOS-Chem featured 200 million more grid cells than the image produced with the original GEOS-Chem software. In other words, High Performance GEOS-Chem creates images more resolute by a factor of about 200.

“We’re really excited. Many features can be examined that aren’t resolved at all at the coarser resolution,” said Martin.

For researchers interested in global air quality and atmospheric composition with local resolution, this new generation of the High Performance GEOS-Chem marks the beginning of a new era for creating descriptive models.

Martin and his team added a number of technological innovations to High Performance GEOS-Chem. In particular, they incorporated a cubed-sphere computation grid into their GEOS-Chem software, reducing noise at the poles and allowing for higher resolution.

High Performance GEOS-Chem also includes a cloud computing capability. This spreads the resource-intensive computation work of generating detailed atmospheric models across dispersed computing nodes, such as Amazon Web Services.

Martin and his team pride themselves on ensuring GEOS-Chem remains an open and accessible tool for anyone interested in simulating atmospheric composition. Their website includes a full suite of tutorial videos, manuals, and guides for using GEOS-Chem effectively.

“NASA enabled us to develop this new generation of GEOS-Chem that has both the additional technical performance and offers the ease of use that this large community requires,” said Martin.

Future iterations of GEOS-Chem could feature further improvements. Developing a better user interface and increasing the modularity of GEOS-Chem are just a few objectives Martin and his team have in mind.

NASA’s Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST), a part of NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), funded this program.

PROJECT LEAD

Randall Martin, Washington University in St. Louis

SPONSORING ORGANIZATION

Earth Science Division’s Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program

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Maricela Lizcano never dreamed of working for NASA.

In fact, she wasn’t planning on furthering her education until she had a revelation in her late twenties.

“I was watching one of those forensic shows, and I loved the way they caught the criminals with science,” said Lizcano, research materials engineer at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. “I wanted to be able to do that. I realized I should be studying science and engineering.”

It took Lizcano about ten years to prepare mentally and financially to go back to school, and during that time, she received some startling news.

“I found out that I was losing my sight, and it was very scary,” Lizcano said. “I think that was one of the things that tossed me off the rails. I had so many questions: ‘What am I going to do? How am I going to work or go to school? How quickly am I losing my vision?’ There were no answers.”

Lizcano was diagnosed with Stargardt disease, a rare genetic eye disease that occurs when fatty material builds up on the macula — the small part of the retina needed for sharp, central vision.

“My Stargardt disease started on the outer edges of my macula, and over time, it grew to the center,” Lizcano said. “By the time I was 45 years old, it had pretty much taken all of my central vision, and now I rely on my peripheral vision to see.”

Eventually, Lizcano viewed this as another obstacle to hurdle, no different from any others she had experienced in her life. She attended the University of Texas–Pan American, now called the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She started during a second summer session, easing her way to full-time attendance while also holding a job.

Because of her new disability, she couldn’t see what professors were writing on the board. She taught herself to listen intently to the topics being discussed in the lecture, then after class, she read the textbook and rewrote the lecture notes using special magnification tools.

“It took that much longer, but you learn to adapt,” Lizcano said. “There are certain skills you develop because of the changes you have to make when you have a disability. I learned that I really have to listen.”

After five years, Lizcano completed her mechanical engineering degree. She didn’t get a job right away after graduation, so she continued her education and earned master’s and doctorate degrees.

“I can’t just look at my disability as some great thing that I really had to overcome,” Lizcano said. “I think a lot of people overcome many obstacles because we are driven by the desire to achieve things. You don’t see the challenges as challenges, you just see them as something to conquer to get to your goal.”

In 2010, former President Barack Obama signed an executive order to increase federal employment of individuals with disabilities. The executive order directed executive departments and agencies to improve their efforts to employ workers with disabilities through increased recruitment, hiring, and retention of these individuals.

“Through the Workforce Recruitment Program, I had the opportunity to interview with representatives from federal agencies,” Lizcano said. “I heard nothing for a long time, but then suddenly I got an email from NASA Glenn asking if I’d present my research.”

She accepted a job as a research materials engineer and now leads a team working on high-voltage materials for electrified aircraft. She collaborates with various universities to develop composite insulation materials and lightweight conductors.

Even now working at NASA, Lizcano faces challenges that she finds ways to overcome. She depends on her fellow colleagues to carpool to work and accessibility tools — like the magnifier app — to use her computer.

“Understanding my needs allowed me to get over the fact that I lost my independence,” Lizcano said. “It was a mind shift to be all right with asking for help.”

Lizcano’s recommends a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics career to anyone looking for a challenge or excitement.

“We’re always solving problems. If you’re one of those people who really wants to make a difference in the world, STEM careers are a good place to start,” Lizcano said. “Any challenge that you may have in result of a disability is no different than the challenge you’re trying to solve, and it will give you the motivation and unique skills you need to be successful.”

NASA is in a Golden Era of aeronautics and space exploration. In partnership with commercial and private businesses, NASA is currently making history with significant missions such as Artemis, Quesst, and electrified aviation. The NASA’s Modern History Makers series highlights members of NASA Glenn’s workforce who make these remarkable missions possible.

Jacqueline Minerd
NASA’s Glenn Research Center

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NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide one of the deepest-ever views into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. The mission will monitor hundreds of millions of stars in search of tell-tale flickers that betray the presence of planets, distant stars, small icy objects that haunt the outskirts of our solar system, isolated black holes, and more. Roman will likely set a new record for the farthest-known exoplanet, offering a glimpse of a different galactic neighborhood that could be home to worlds quite unlike the more than 5,500 that are currently known.

Roman’s long-term sky monitoring, which will enable these results, represents a boon to what scientists call time-domain astronomy, which studies how the universe changes over time. Roman will join a growing, international fleet of observatories working together to capture these changes as they unfold. Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will focus on the Milky Way, using the telescope’s infrared vision to see through clouds of dust that can block our view of the crowded central region of our galaxy.

“Roman will be an incredible discovery machine, pairing a vast view of space with keen vision,” said Julie McEnery, the Roman senior project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Its time-domain surveys will yield a treasure trove of new information about the cosmos.”

When Roman launches, expected by May 2027, the mission will scour the center of the Milky Way for microlensing events, which occur when an object such as a star or planet comes into near-perfect alignment with an unrelated background star from our viewpoint. Because anything with mass warps the fabric of space-time, light from the distant star bends around the nearer object as it passes close by. The nearer object therefore acts as a natural magnifying glass, creating a temporary spike in the brightness of the background star’s light. That signal lets astronomers know there’s an intervening object, even if they can’t see it directly.

In current plans, the survey will involve taking an image every 15 minutes around the clock for about two months. Astronomers will repeat the process six times over Roman’s five-year primary mission for a combined total of more than a year of observations.

“This will be one of the longest exposures of the sky ever taken,” said Scott Gaudi, an astronomy professor at Ohio State University in Columbus, whose research is helping inform Roman’s survey strategy. “And it will cover territory that is largely uncharted when it comes to planets.”

Astronomers expect the survey to reveal more than a thousand planets orbiting far from their host stars and in systems located farther from Earth than any previous mission has detected. That includes some that could lie within their host star’s habitable zone – the range of orbital distances where liquid water can exist on the surface – and worlds that weigh in at as little as a few times the mass of the Moon.

Roman can even detect “rogue” worlds that don’t orbit a star at all using microlensing. These cosmic castaways may have formed in isolation or been kicked out of their home planetary systems. Studying them offers clues about how planetary systems form and evolve.

Roman’s microlensing observations will also help astronomers explore how common planets are around different types of stars, including binary systems. The mission will estimate how many worlds with two host stars are found in our galaxy by identifying real-life “Tatooine” planets, building on work started by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope and TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).

Some of the objects the survey will identify exist in a cosmic gray area. Known as brown dwarfs, they’re too massive to be characterized as planets, but not quite massive enough to ignite as stars. Studying them will allow astronomers to explore the boundary between planet and star formation.

Roman is also expected to spot more than a thousand neutron stars and hundreds of stellar-mass black holes. These heavyweights form after a massive star exhausts its fuel and collapses. The black holes are nearly impossible to find when they don’t have a visible companion to signal their presence, but Roman will be able to detect them even if unaccompanied because microlensing relies only on an object’s gravity. The mission will also find isolated neutron stars – the leftover cores of stars that weren’t quite massive enough to become black holes.

Astronomers will use Roman to find thousands of Kuiper belt objects, which are icy bodies scattered mostly beyond Neptune. The telescope will spot some as small as about six miles across (about 1 percent of Pluto’s diameter), sometimes by seeing them directly from reflected sunlight and others as they block the light of background stars.

A similar type of shadow play will reveal 100,000 transiting planets between Earth and the center of the galaxy. These worlds cross in front of their host star as they orbit and temporarily dim the light we receive from the star. This method will reveal planets orbiting much closer to their host stars than microlensing reveals, and likely some that lie in the habitable zone.

Scientists will also conduct stellar seismology studies on a million giant stars. This will involve analyzing brightness changes caused by sound waves echoing through a star’s gaseous interior to learn about its structure, age, and other properties.

All of these scientific discoveries and more will come from Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, which will account for less than a fourth of the observing time in Roman’s five-year primary mission. Its broad view of space will allow astronomers to conduct many of these studies in ways that have never been possible before, giving us a new view of an ever-changing universe.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.

Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

​​Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
301-286-1940

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NASA’s Starling CubeSats are zipping through low Earth orbit in the agency’s latest test of robotic swarm technologies for space.  The four Starling spacecraft, launched in July 2023, are testing a group of small satellites ability to coordinate and cooperate independently without real-time updates from mission control.

NASA invites the public to follow the Starling mission live in NASA’s Eyes on the Solar System 3D visualization, which uses real-time data in an interactive solar system simulation. The positions of the planets, moons, and spacecraft – including Starling – are shown as they travel through space.

The Starling mission, managed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, will test multiple flight patterns and autonomous capabilities, including maneuvering to stay together as a group, creating and patching their own communications network, keeping track of each other’s relative position without use of GPS,  and autonomously changing their combined science data collection strategy based on the latest readings from onboard sensors.

Autonomous technologies are vital to NASA’s space science and exploration goals, especially when exploring environments far from Earth where signal delays make real-time maneuvering impractical or impossible. Satellites and spacecraft operating in a networked, autonomous, and coordinated capacity will help humanity explore the unknown and conduct better science than ever before.

NASA’s Ames Research Center leads the Starling project. NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology program, based at Ames and within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), funds and manages the Starling mission. Blue Canyon Technologies designed and manufactured the spacecraft buses and is providing mission operations support. Rocket Lab USA, Inc. provided launch and integration services. Partners supporting Starling’s payload experiments include Stanford University’s Space Rendezvous Lab in Stanford, California, Emergent Space Technologies of Laurel, Maryland, CesiumAstro of Austin, Texas, L3Harris Technologies, Inc., of Melbourne, Florida, and NASA Ames – with funding support by NASA’s Game Changing Development program within STMD.

For news media:

Members of the news media interested in covering this topic should reach out to the NASA Ames newsroom.

NASA, on behalf of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), has awarded a delivery order under the Rapid Spacecraft Acquisition IV (Rapid-IV) contract to Southwest Research Institute of San Antonio for the QuickSounder spacecraft.

The firm-fixed-price delivery order covers all phases of QuickSounder’s operations to include spacecraft development, integration of NOAA’s Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder Engineering Development Unit, spacecraft shipment, supporting launch operations, three years of mission operations, and eventual spacecraft decommissioning.

The total value of the order is $54,973,400 with the period of performance beginning Wednesday, Oct. 25, and scheduled to run until May 2029.

QuickSounder is the first project in NOAA’s Near Earth Orbit Network. As a pathfinder mission, QuickSounder will support NOAA’s next generation satellite architecture for its future low Earth orbit program, which will provide mission-critical data to support NOAA’s National Weather Service and the nation’s weather industry.

Rapid IV contracts serve as a fast and flexible means for the government to acquire spacecraft and related components, equipment, and services in support of NASA missions and/or other federal government agencies. The spacecraft designs, related items, and services may be tailored, as needed, to meet the unique needs of each mission.

The Near Earth Orbit Network is a collaborative mission between NASA and NOAA. NASA will manage the development and launch of the satellites for NOAA, which will operate them and deliver data to users worldwide. NOAA, as the mission lead, provides funding, technical requirements, and post-launch operations. NASA and NOAA will work with commercial partners to design and build the network’s spacecraft and instruments.      

For information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov

-end-

Abbey Donaldson
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
abbey.a.donaldson@nasa.gov

Jeremy Eggers
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
757-824-2958
jeremy.l.eggers@nasa.gov