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NASA's Europa Clipper is seen here on Aug. 21, 2024, in a clean room at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The photo was taken as engineers and technicians deployed and tested the spacecraft's giant solar arrays, each of which measures about 46.5 feet (14.2 meters) long and about 13.5 feet (4.1 meters) high.

NASA/Frank Michaux

On Aug. 21, 2024, engineers and technicians deployed and tested NASA’s Europa Clipper giant solar arrays. Each array measures about 46.5 feet (14.2 meters) long and about 13.5 feet (4.1 meters) high.

Europa Clipper is scheduled to launch Oct. 10, 2024, on the first mission to conduct a detailed science investigation of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Scientists predict Europa has a salty ocean beneath its icy crust that could hold the building blocks necessary to sustain life.

Learn how this spacecraft’s solar arrays will power flybys.

Image credit: NASA/Frank Michaux

The International Space Station is pictured from the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour during a fly around.NASA

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov are headed to the International Space Station for the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission in September. Once on station, these crew members will support scientific investigations that include studies of blood clotting, effects of moisture on plants grown in space, and vision changes in astronauts.

Here are details on some of the work scheduled during the Crew-9 expedition:

Blood cell development in space

Megakaryocytes Orbiting in Outer Space and Near Earth (MeF1) investigates how environmental conditions affect the development and function of megakaryocytes and platelets. Megakaryocytes, large cells found in bone marrow, and platelets, pieces of these cells, play important roles in blood clotting and immune response.

“Understanding the development and function of megakaryocytes and platelets during long-duration spaceflight is crucial to safeguarding the health of astronauts,” said Hansjorg Schwertz, principal investigator, at the University of Utah. “Sending megakaryocyte cell cultures into space offers a unique opportunity to explore their intricate differentiation process. Microgravity also may impact other blood cells, so the insights we gain are likely to enhance our overall comprehension of how spaceflight influences blood cell production.”

Results could provide critical knowledge about the risks of changes in inflammation, immune responses, and clot formation in spaceflight and on the ground.

Scanning electron-microscopy image of human platelets prior to launch to the International Space Station.University of Utah/Megakaryocytes PI Team Patches for NICER

The Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) telescope on the exterior of the space station measures X-rays emitted by neutron stars and other cosmic objects to help answer questions about matter and gravity.

In May 2023, NICER developed a “light leak” that allows sunlight to interfere with daytime measurements. Special patches designed to cover some of the damage will be installed during a future spacewalk, returning the instrument to around-the-clock operation.

“This will be the fourth science observatory and first X-ray telescope in orbit to be repaired by astronauts,” said principal investigator Keith Gendreau at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “In just a year, we diagnosed the problem, designed and tested a solution, and delivered it for launch. The space station team — from managers and safety experts to engineers and astronauts — helped us make it happen. We’re looking forward to getting back to normal science operations.”

This view shows NICER’s 56 X-ray concentrators. Astronauts plan to cover some of them with special patches on a future spacewalk. NASA Vitamins for vision

Some astronauts experience vision changes, a condition called Spaceflight-Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome. The B Complex investigation tests whether a daily B vitamin supplement can prevent or mitigate this problem and assesses how genetics may influence individual response.

“We still do not know exactly what causes this syndrome, and not everyone gets it,” said Sara Zwart, principal investigator, at the University of Texas Medical Branch, Houston. “It is likely many factors, and biological variations that make some astronauts more susceptible than others.”

One such variation could be related to a metabolic pathway that requires B vitamins to function properly. Inefficiencies in this pathway can affect the inner lining of blood vessels, resulting in leaks that may contribute to vision changes. Providing B vitamins known to affect blood vessel function positively could minimize issues in genetically at-risk astronauts.

“The concept of this study is based on 13 years of flight and ground research,” Zwart said. “We are excited to finally flight test a low-risk countermeasure that could mitigate the risk on future missions, including those to Mars.”

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei conducts a vision exam on the International Space StationNASA Watering the space garden

As people travel farther from Earth for longer, growing food becomes increasingly important. Scientists conducted many plant growth experiments on the space station using its Veggie hardware, including Veg-01B, which demonstrated that ‘Outredgeous’ red romaine lettuce is suitable for crop production in space.

Plant Habitat-07 uses this lettuce to examine how moisture conditions affect the nutritional quality and microbial safety of plants. The Advanced Plant Habitat controls humidity, temperature, air, light, and soil moisture, creating the precise conditions needed for the experiment.

Using a plant known to grow well in space removes a challenging variable from the equation, explained Chad Vanden Bosch, principal investigator at Redwire, and this lettuce also has been proven to be safe to consume when grown in space.

“For crews building a base on the Moon or Mars, tending to plants may be low on their list of responsibilities, so plant growth systems need to be automated,” Bosch said. “Such systems may not always provide the perfect growing conditions, though, so we need to know if plants grown in suboptimal conditions are safe to consume.”

This preflight image shows lettuce grown under control (left) and flood (right) moisture treatments. Plant Habitat-07 team

Melissa Gaskill

International Space Station Research Communications Team

NASA’s Johnson Space Center

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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) A laser powder directed energy deposition (LP-DED) 3D printer at RPM Innovations’ facility additively manufactures a large-scale aerospike rocket engine nozzle from one of Elementum 3D’s specialized, 3D-printable aluminum alloys.RPM Innovations Inc.

In the fall of 2023, NASA hot fire tested an aluminum 3D printed rocket engine nozzle. Aluminum is not typically used for 3D printing because the process causes it to crack, and its low melting point makes it a challenging material for rocket engines. Yet the test was a success.

Printing aluminum engine parts could save significant time, money, and weight for future spacecraft. Elementum 3D Inc., a partner on the project, is now making those benefits available to the commercial space industry and beyond.

The hot fire test was the culmination of a relationship between NASA and Elementum that began shortly after the company was founded in 2014 to make more materials available for 3D printing. Based in Erie, Colorado, the company infuses metal alloys with particles of other materials to alter their properties and make them amenable to additive manufacturing. This became the basis of Elementum’s Reactive Additive Manufacturing (RAM) process.

A rocket engine nozzle 3D printed from Elementum 3D’s A6061 RAM2 aluminum alloy undergoes hot fire testing at Marshall Space Flight Center. Credit: NASA

NASA adopted the technology, qualifying the RAM version of a common aluminum alloy for 3D printing. The agency then awarded funding to Elementum 3D and another company to print the experimental Broadsword rocket engine, demonstrating the concept’s viability.

Meanwhile, a team at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, was working to adapt an emerging technology to print larger engines. In 2021, Marshall awarded an Announcement of Collaborative Opportunity to Elementum 3D to modify an aluminum alloy for printing in what became the Reactive Additive Manufacturing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution project.

The project also made a commonly used aluminum alloy available for large-scale 3D printing. It is already used in large satellite components and could be implemented into microchip manufacturing equipment, Formula 1 race car parts, and more. The alloy modified for the Broadsword engine is already turning up in brake rotors and lighting fixtures. These various applications exemplify the possibilities that come from NASA’s collaboration and investment in industry. 

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Details Last Updated Sep 12, 2024 Related Terms

• Technology Transfer & Spinoffs
• Marshall Space Flight Center
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NASA wants you to visualize the future of space exploration! This art challenge is looking for creative, artistic images to represent NASA’s Moon to Mars Architecture, the agency’s roadmap for crewed exploration of deep space. With NASA’s Moon to Mars Objectives in hand, the agency is developing an architecture for crewed exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Using systems engineering processes, NASA has begun to perform the analyses and studies needed to make informed decisions about a sustained lunar evolution and initial human missions to Mars. NASA’s Moon to Mars Architecture currently includes four segments of increasing complexity: Human Lunar Return, Foundational Exploration, Sustained Lunar Evolution, and Humans to Mars. For this competition, NASA is interested in your artistic interpretation of the latter two segments: Sustained Lunar Evolution and Humans to Mars. These depictions could include operations in space, on the surface, or both. Artists may develop and submit a still image for either the lunar and Mars exploration segments.

Award: $10,000 in total prizes

Open Date: September 12, 2024

Close Date: October 31, 2024

For more information, visit: https://nasa.yet2.com/

The Moon is pictured on Dec. 7, 2022, the day before its Full Moon phase from the International Space Station as it orbited above the southern Indian Ocean.Credit: NASA

NASA will coordinate with U.S. government stakeholders, partners, and international standards organizations to establish a Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC) following a policy directive from the White House in April. The agency’s Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) program is leading efforts on creating a coordinated time, which will enable a future lunar ecosystem that could be scalable to other locations in our solar system.

The lunar time will be determined by a weighted average of atomic clocks at the Moon, similar to how scientists calculate Earth’s globally recognized Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Exactly where at the Moon is still to be determined, since current analysis indicates that atomic clocks placed at the Moon’s surface will appear to ‘tick’ faster by microseconds per day. A microsecond is one millionth of a second. NASA and its partners are currently researching which mathematical models will be best for establishing a lunar time.

To put these numbers into perspective, a hummingbird’s wings flap about 50 times per second. Each flap is about .02 seconds, or 20,000 microseconds. So, while 56 microseconds may seem miniscule, when discussing distances in space, tiny bits of time add up.

“For something traveling at the speed of light, 56 microseconds is enough time to travel the distance of approximately 168 football fields,” said Cheryl Gramling, lead on lunar position, navigation, timing, and standards at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “If someone is orbiting the Moon, an observer on Earth who isn’t compensating for the effects of relativity over a day would think that the orbiting astronaut is approximately 168 football fields away from where the astronaut really is.”

As the agency’s Artemis campaign prepares to establish a sustained presence on and around the Moon, NASA’s SCaN team will establish a time standard at the Moon to ensure the critical time difference does not affect the safety of future explorers. The approach to time systems will also be scalable for Mars and other celestial bodies throughout our solar system, enabling long-duration exploration.

As the commercial space industry grows and more nations are active at the Moon, there is a greater need for time standardization. A shared definition of time is an important part of safe, resilient, and sustainable operations,” said Dr. Ben Ashman, navigation lead for lunar relay development, part of NASA’s SCaN program.

NASA’s SCaN program serves as the office for the agency’s space communications operations and navigation. More than 100 NASA and non-NASA missions rely on SCaN’s two networks, the Near Space Network and the Deep Space Network, to support astronauts aboard the International Space Station and future Artemis missions, monitor Earth’s weather and the effects of climate change, support lunar exploration, and uncover the solar system and beyond.

Learn more about NASA’s plan to return to the Moon at:

https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis

A new book looks at the latest scientific insights versus a key question in astronomy and space science.

It’s tough to answer a scientific question, with a just data point of one. How special are we, and how common (or rare) is the story of how life arose on the Earth in the grander drama of the cosmos?

A new book out this week entitled Is Earth Exceptional? The Quest for Cosmic Life by Mario Livio and Jack Szostak looks at the scientific state of answering this key question. The book offers a sweeping view of the nascent science of astrobiology, a multi-disciplinary field melding biology, chemistry, astronomy and more.

Astrophysicist Mario Livio is also the author of Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein, Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists that Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe and The Equation That Couldn’t be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry.

Co-author and Nobel laureate Jack Szostak worked on the Human Genome Project and was the co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for discovering how telomeres defend chromosomes.

The basic premise of the book looks at the riddle of how the basic building blocks of life—from amino acids, RNA and the first cells—emerged on Earth. Could the same processes by common elsewhere?

An artist’s conception, of an Earth analog. Credit: NASA

Remember Rare Earth from about 20 years back? That book definitely made ripples in the fledgling field of astrobiology, by positing that a series of rare circumstances led to life to arise on the Earth. Is Earth Exceptional? Updates the science on this question and debate a generation later.

Exceptional Earth

The book doesn’t shy away from some pretty extensive organic chemistry in the first half. It’s rather tantalizing to researchers that simple life came into existence almost as soon as the conditions were ready for it. Was this a fluke, or a cosmic imperative? The chemistry of primordial life is a big mystery. Is Earth Exceptional looks at the latest findings, and what breakthroughs may be imminent in the field of astrobiology.

We live in an amazing time, a golden age of astronomy that may give us hard answers to these questions in our lifetimes. SETI searches, exoplanet surveys, and space telescopes such as TESS, JWST and the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope (set to launch in 2027) could bare fruit this century. The book points out that even a null result—however disappointing—could still be profound.

JWST’s direct views of an exoplanet. Credit: NASA/ESA/CSA/Alyssa Pagan(STScI)

The answer could come from missions to worlds in our own solar system searching for signs of life past or present on Mars, Europa or Titan. The book deals with prospects for life on worlds in our solar system, and implications of such a discovery. Farther afield, detections of signs in exoplanet spectra could also herald the detection of exobiology on distant worlds.

An artist’s conception of ‘Orbilander’ on the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Credit: NASA

For example, we now have the ability to see what’s known as the Vegetation Red Edge. This would be a very strong hint that photosynthesis was afoot via chlorophyll. This is a molecule that—as far as we know—only arises due to life.

A conceptualization of Earth’s ‘Red Edge’ due to vegetation. Credit: NASA

All amazing thoughts to consider, as you read Is Earth Special and ponder the state of modern astrobiology.

The post Book Review: Is Earth Exceptional? appeared first on Universe Today.

Hurricane Francine, the sixth storm of this year's Atlantic hurricane season, made landfall on the Louisiana coast late afternoon on Wednesday.

5 Min Read NASA’s Webb Peers into the Extreme Outer Galaxy

This image shows a portion of the star-forming region, known as Digel Cloud 2S (full image below).

Credits:
NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, M. Ressler (JPL)

Astronomers have directed NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to examine the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy. Scientists call this region the Extreme Outer Galaxy due to its location more than 58,000 light-years away from the Galactic Center. (For comparison, Earth is approximately 26,000 light-years from the center.)

A team of scientists used Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) to image select regions within two molecular clouds known as Digel Clouds 1 and 2. With its high degree of sensitivity and sharp resolution, the Webb data resolved these areas, which are hosts to star clusters undergoing bursts of star formation, in unprecedented detail. Details of this data include components of the clusters such as very young (Class 0) protostars, outflows and jets, and distinctive nebular structures.

These Webb observations, which came from telescope time allocated to Mike Ressler of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, are enabling scientists to study star formation in the outer Milky Way in the same depth of detail as observations of star formation in our own solar neighborhood.

“In the past, we knew about these star forming regions but were not able to delve into their properties,” said Natsuko Izumi of Gifu University and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, lead author of the study. “The Webb data builds upon what we have incrementally gathered over the years from prior observations with different telescopes and observatories. We can get very powerful and impressive images of these clouds with Webb. In the case of Digel Cloud 2, I did not expect to see such active star formation and spectacular jets.”

Image A: Extreme Outer Galaxy (NIRCam and MIRI) Scientists used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to examine select star-forming areas in the Extreme Outer Galaxy in near- and mid-infrared light. Within this star-forming region, known as Digel Cloud 2S, the telescope observed young, newly formed stars and their extended jets of material. This Webb image also shows a dense sea of background galaxies and red nebulous structures within the region. In this image, colors were assigned to different filters from Webb’s MIRI and NIRCam: red (F1280W, F770W, F444W), green (F356W, F200W), and blue (F150W; F115W). NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, M. Ressler (JPL) Stars in the Making

Although the Digel Clouds are within our galaxy, they are relatively poor in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. This composition makes them similar to dwarf galaxies and our own Milky Way in its early history. Therefore, the team took the opportunity to use Webb to capture the activity occurring in four clusters of young stars within Digel Clouds 1 and 2: 1A, 1B, 2N, and 2S.

For Cloud 2S, Webb captured the main cluster containing young, newly formed stars. This dense area is quite active as several stars are emitting extended jets of material along their poles. Additionally, while scientists previously suspected a sub-cluster might be present within the cloud, Webb’s imaging capabilities confirmed its existence for the first time. 

“We know from studying other nearby star-forming regions that as stars form during their early life phase, they start emitting jets of material at their poles,” said Ressler, second author of the study and principal investigator of the observing program. “What was fascinating and astounding to me from the Webb data is that there are multiple jets shooting out in all different directions from this cluster of stars. It’s a little bit like a firecracker, where you see things shooting this way and that.”

The Saga of Stars

The Webb imagery skims the surface of the Extreme Outer Galaxy and the Digel Clouds, and is just a starting point for the team. They intend to revisit this outpost in the Milky Way to find answers to a variety of current mysteries, including the relative abundance of stars of various masses within Extreme Outer Galaxy star clusters. This measurement can help astronomers understand how a particular environment can influence different types of stars during their formation.

“I’m interested in continuing to study how star formation is occurring in these regions. By combining data from different observatories and telescopes, we can examine each stage in the evolution process,” said Izumi. “We also plan to investigate circumstellar disks within the Extreme Outer Galaxy. We still don’t know why their lifetimes are shorter than in star-forming regions much closer to us. And of course, I’d like to understand the kinematics of the jets we detected in Cloud 2S.”

Though the story of star formation is complex and some chapters are still shrouded in mystery, Webb is gathering clues and helping astronomers unravel this intricate tale.

These findings have been published in the Astronomical Journal.

The observations were taken as part of Guaranteed Time Observation program 1237.

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 CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

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View/Download all image products at all resolutions for this article from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

View/Download the research results from the Astronomical Journal.

Media Contacts

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

Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu, Abigail Major – amajor@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.

Related Information

Animation Video: “Exploring Star and Planet Formation”

Interactive: Explore the jets emitted by young stars in multiple wavelengths

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Sep 12, 2024

Editor Marty McCoy Contact Laura Betz laura.e.betz@nasa.gov

Related Terms

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