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Stephanie Duchesne: Leading with Integrity and Openness for CLDP
Of all the lessons learned throughout her NASA career, the importance of relationship and personal integrity is one that has been repeatedly reinforced for Stephanie Duchesne, a Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program (CLDP) project executive.
“Each person you work with has their own unique perspectives and concerns, and in order to solve a problem or resolve a conflict, it is critical that you try and understand where they are coming from and build trust that you will do what you say,” she said. “That has been true at all levels of my career. I’ve learned that I never had to be the smartest person in the room to be able to help bring out the best ideas of the team, ask the right questions, and come up with effective and efficient solutions – that it is the collective mind and cohesion of the team that really creates the best solutions.”
Stephanie Duchesne and her wife on a camping trip near Lake Livingston in Texas. Image courtesy of Stephanie Duchesne
Based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Duchesne has been part of CLDP since 2021, but her NASA career spans more than 20 years. She started in 2003 as a contractor for KBR Wyle Services, supporting the International Space Station Program as a biomedical engineering flight controller. She worked with the flight control and medical teams to address real-time anomalies and support crewmembers through key milestones and also spent seven months in Germany to help the ESA (European Space Agency) establish its own biomedical engineering flight controller program.
Duchesne then moved to the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) engineering team, where she worked with the fledgling Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Program as an ECLSS integrator and managed the integration strategy between NASA and Russian ECLSS on the International Space Station. She also served as the lead system manager for emergency response, helping to develop the space station’s ammonia leak response and related hardware. Duchesne became a civil servant in 2017 when she was hired as a Mission Evaluation Room (MER) manager for the program’s Vehicle Office.
Stephanie Duchesne (center right) and fellow International Space Station Mission Evaluation Room (MER) managers enjoy a lighthearted moment as a team. Image courtesy of Stephanie Duchesne
Duchesne said being a MER manager was a standout experience. “It was both humbling and inspiring to come to work every day knowing that I could pull from the best minds in the space industry to find a solution to any problem that came our way,” she said. Still, she is hard-pressed to identify a favorite role or project among her varied experiences. “I’ve been fortunate to work in a lot of different areas at NASA and experience perspectives that have all provided challenges, successes, and lessons learned.”
In her current role with CLDP, Duchesne applies her extensive space station experience to leading NASA’s Space Act Agreement with commercial space station developer Starlab Space. “I love being part of the future of low Earth orbit and being able to provide these new companies with lessons learned from my years working station and connecting our partners with all the knowledgeable subject matter experts at NASA,” she said. “It feels rewarding to help the commercial industry stand on our shoulders to do new great things.”
Beyond her technical work, Duchesne strives to provide an example to her colleagues by being her authentic self in the workplace and honoring those who do the same. “I think it is so important for all of us to create safe spaces for each person to bring their whole selves to what we’re trying to achieve,” she said. “People’s unique life experiences and backgrounds provide rich space for connection and different perspectives on problems that NASA is trying to solve.”
Duchesne takes pride in NASA’s celebration of diversity in the workplace, and the value the agency places on all team members being able to live and work openly and authentically. “I feel fortunate to work in a community where I’m able to live this value in front of my children, and all the younger generations, so that it is no longer considered exceptional, but expected in their future,” she said.
Outside of work, Duchesne enjoys spending time with her wife – who also works for NASA – and their three children. “We love family road trips which give us time to connect and be together. Our dog Aston is the real boss of the house and joins us on all of our adventures.”
Stephanie Duchesne (foreground, center) and her family during a visit to Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, on one of their family road trips.Image courtesy of Stephanie Duchesne
She hopes to share with her children and other members of the Artemis Generation a love for exploring the unknown and the confidence to achieve greatness in their own ways. “I look forward to them taking the reins, using the unique skills and techniques they have honed in today’s world – which is different than the one we grew up in,” she said. “I know this next generation will continue to accomplish great things for our world and beyond doing it their way, with open mindedness, acceptance, and integrity. I hope they remain inspired by human ingenuity and the amazing things we can accomplish when we work together, while holding reverence and awe toward all that we don’t yet know.”
First of Its Kind Detection Made in Striking New Webb Image
Alignment of bipolar jets confirms star formation theories
For the first time, a phenomenon astronomers have long hoped to directly image has been captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). In this stunning image of the Serpens Nebula, the discovery lies in the northern area (seen at the upper left) of this young, nearby star-forming region.
Astronomers found an intriguing group of protostellar outflows, formed when jets of gas spewing from newborn stars collide with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. Typically these objects have varied orientations within one region. Here, however, they are slanted in the same direction, to the same degree, like sleet pouring down during a storm.
Image: Serpens Nebula (NIRCam) In this image of the Serpens Nebula from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers found a grouping of aligned protostellar outflows within one small region (the top left corner). Serpens is a reflection nebula, which means it’s a cloud of gas and dust that does not create its own light, but instead shines by reflecting the light from stars close to or within the nebula.
The discovery of these aligned objects, made possible due to Webb’s exquisite spatial resolution and sensitivity in near-infrared wavelengths, is providing information into the fundamentals of how stars are born.
“Astronomers have long assumed that as clouds collapse to form stars, the stars will tend to spin in the same direction,” said principal investigator Klaus Pontoppidan, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “However, this has not been seen so directly before. These aligned, elongated structures are a historical record of the fundamental way that stars are born.”
So just how does the alignment of the stellar jets relate to the rotation of the star? As an interstellar gas cloud crashes in on itself to form a star, it spins more rapidly. The only way for the gas to continue moving inward is for some of the spin (known as angular momentum) to be removed. A disk of material forms around the young star to transport material down, like a whirlpool around a drain. The swirling magnetic fields in the inner disk launch some of the material into twin jets that shoot outward in opposite directions, perpendicular to the disk of material.
In the Webb image, these jets are signified by bright clumpy streaks that appear red, which are shockwaves from the jet hitting surrounding gas and dust. Here, the red color represents the presence of molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
“This area of the Serpens Nebula – Serpens North – only comes into clear view with Webb,” said lead author Joel Green of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “We’re now able to catch these extremely young stars and their outflows, some of which previously appeared as just blobs or were completely invisible in optical wavelengths because of the thick dust surrounding them.”
Astronomers say there are a few forces that potentially can shift the direction of the outflows during this period of a young star’s life. One way is when binary stars spin around each other and wobble in orientation, twisting the direction of the outflows over time.
Stars of the SerpensThe Serpens Nebula, located 1,300 light-years from Earth, is only one or two million years old, which is very young in cosmic terms. It’s also home to a particularly dense cluster of newly forming stars (~100,000 years old), seen at the center of this image. Some of these stars will eventually grow to the mass of our Sun.
“Webb is a young stellar object-finding machine,” Green said. “In this field, we pick up sign posts of every single young star, down to the lowest mass stars.”
“It’s a very complete picture we’re seeing now,” added Pontoppidan.
So, throughout the region in this image, filaments and wisps of different hues represent reflected starlight from still-forming protostars within the cloud. In some areas, there is dust in front of that reflection, which appears here with an orange, diffuse shade.
This region has been home to other coincidental discoveries, including the flapping “Bat Shadow,” which earned its name when 2020 data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope revealed a star’s planet-forming disk to flap, or shift. This feature is visible at the center of the Webb image.
Video: A Tour Of The Serpens Nebula Future StudiesThe new image, and serendipitous discovery of the aligned objects, is actually just the first step in this scientific program. The team will now use Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) to investigate the chemical make-up of the cloud.
The astronomers are interested in determining how volatile chemicals survive star and planet formation. Volatiles are compounds that sublimate, or transition from a solid directly to a gas, at a relatively low temperature – including water and carbon monoxide. They’ll then compare their findings to amounts found in protoplanetary disks of similar-type stars.
“At the most basic form, we are all made of matter that came from these volatiles. The majority of water here on Earth originated when the Sun was an infant protostar billions of years ago,” Pontoppidan said. “Looking at the abundance of these critical compounds in protostars just before their protoplanetary disks have formed could help us understand how unique the circumstances were when our own solar system formed.”
These observations were taken as part of General Observer program 1611. The team’s initial results have been accepted in the Astrophysical Journal.
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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Science Paper: The science paper by J. Green et al., PDF (7.93 MB)
Media ContactsLaura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov, Rob Gutro – rob.gutro@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Hanna Braun hbraun@stsci.edu Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edu
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
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NASA Preserves Its Past at Kennedy While Building Future of Space
Current and former employees of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida gathered recently to celebrate the installation of a Florida Historical Marker cast in bronze at the location of the spaceport’s old headquarters building.
The first of its kind inside the center’s secure area, the marker is the latest example of the center’s commitment to remembering its rich history as it continues to launch humanity’s future.
At the forefront of NASA Kennedy’s commitment to preservation is Katherine Zeringue, who serves as cultural resources manager, overseeing the center’s historic resources from buildings to historic districts to archaeological sites.
“Traditional approaches attempt to preserve things to a specific time period, including historic materials,” Zeringue said. “But that’s a challenge here because we still actively use our historic assets, which need to be modified to accommodate new missions and new spacecraft. Therefore, we rely on an adaptive reuse approach, in which the active use of a historic property helps to ensure its preservation.”
Many iconic structures are still in service at NASA Kennedy, like the Beach House where Apollo astronauts congregated with their families, the Vehicle Assembly Building where NASA rockets are still stacked, the Launch Control Center, and Launch Complex 39A. All told, 83 buildings, seven historic districts, and one National Historic Landmark are either listed or are eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
To conserve these resources, the spaceport follows a variety of federal laws, regulations, and executive orders, including the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. This includes making a reasonable and good faith effort to identify any historic properties under its care and considering how its decisions affect historic properties.
“The Cultural Resources Management Program aims to balance historic preservation considerations with the agency’s mission and mandate to ensure reliable access to space for government and commercial payloads,” Zeringue said. “Finding that proper balance is challenging in the dynamic environment of our spaceport.”
Perhaps no other location embodies the center’s commitment to the past and the future more than Launch Complex 39A. Created in 1965, the launch complex was initially designed to support the Saturn V rocket, which powered the agency’s Apollo Program as it made numerous trips to the Moon. Outside of launching Skylab in 1973, the pad stood unused following Apollo’s end in 1972 until the agency’s Space Shuttle Program debuted in 1981. The transition from Apollo to space shuttle saw Launch Complex 39A transform from support of a single-use rocket to supporting the nation’s first reusable space launch and landing system.
By the time the program ended in 2011, 135 space shuttle launches had taken place within Kennedy’s boundary, 82 of which were at Launch Complex 39A. Many of those were among the program’s most notable, including the flights of astronauts Sally Ride, NASA’s first woman in space, and Guion Bluford, NASA’s first Black astronaut in space, as well as the first flight to the newly created International Space Station in 1998.
The launch complex began another transformation in 2014 when NASA signed a 20-year lease agreement with SpaceX as part of Kennedy’s transformation into a multi-user spaceport. SpaceX reconfigured Launch Complex 39A to support its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, which today launch robotic science missions and other government and commercial payloads, as well as crew and cargo to the space station. Apollo-era infrastructure is incorporated in the SpaceX Crew Launch Tower.
“Launch Complex 39A exemplifies the balance between historic preservation and supporting the mission,” Zeringue noted. “Each chapter of the space program brings change, and those changes become additional chapters in the center’s historical legacy as we continue to build the future in space exploration.”
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Too young to be so cool: lessons from three neutron stars
ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra spacecraft have detected three young neutron stars that are unusually cold for their age. By comparing their properties to different neutron star models, scientists conclude that the oddballs’ low temperatures disqualify around 75% of known models. This is a big step towards uncovering the one neutron star ‘equation of state’ that rules them all, with important implications for the fundamental laws of the Universe.
Scientists spot hidden companions of bright stars
Detecting faint objects close to bright stars is incredibly difficult. Yet, by combining data from ESA's Gaia space telescope with ESO’s GRAVITY instrument on the ground, scientists managed just that. They captured the first light signals of so far unseen dim companions of eight luminous stars. The technique unlocks the tantalising possibility to capture images of planets orbiting close to their host stars.
Perseverance Found Some Strange Rocks. What Will They Tell Us?
NASA’s Perseverance Rover has left Mount Washburn behind and arrived at its next destination, Bright Angel. It found an unusual type of rock there that scientists are calling ‘popcorn rock.’ The odd rock is more evidence that water was once present in Jezero Crater.
Perseverance’s mission is centred on life on ancient Mars. Along with searching for fossilized evidence of ancient life, it’s searching for and trying to understand environments that could’ve supported life. That’s why it’s in Jezero Crater, an ancient paleolake with a delta of sediments and other intriguing geological features.
On Sol 1175 of its mission, Perseverance arrived at Bright Angel, a scientifically interesting region that’s part of the river channel that fed into Jezero Crater. Bright Angel is noted for light-toned rocky outcrops that are either ancient sediments that filled the channel or much older rock exposed by the river.
The image below shows the rover’s path leading to Bright Angel. The white portion shows where Perseverance paralleled the Neretva Vallis river channel, and the blue portion shows where it travelled through the channel. The light-toned rocks of Bright Angel are clearly visible.
This Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image was captured by the orbiter’s HiRISE camera, and it shows the Neretva Vallis river channel with Perseverance’s route overlain. It has left Mount Washburn behind and has reached Bright Angel. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of ArizonaAs Perseverance worked its way toward Bright Angel, mission personnel could see the light rocks in the distance. But the route to the new destination wasn’t easy. The rover encountered a boulder field that proved so arduous that operators changed course.
“We started paralleling the channel in late January and were making pretty good progress, but then the boulders became bigger and more numerous,” said Evan Graser, Perseverance’s deputy strategic route planner lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “What had been drives averaging over a hundred meters per Martian day went down to only tens of meters. It was frustrating.”
Perseverance has two modes of travel. In rougher terrain, the route planning team uses images to plan the rover’s route about 30 meters at a time. To travel further than that in a single sol, the team relies on Perseverance’s autopilot mode, called AutoNav. But as the route through the boulder field became more difficult, AutoNav struggled. It sometimes just stopped, which is the safest option. But that means the drive to Bright Angel was taking far longer than anticipated.
“We had been eyeing the river channel just to the north as we went, hoping to find a section where the dunes were small and far enough apart for a rover to pass between — because dunes have been known to eat Mars rovers,” said Graser. “Perseverance also needed an entrance ramp we could safely travel down. When the imagery showed both, we made a beeline for it.”
The rover was rerouted through the dune field and across the river channel, reducing its drive by several weeks.
Perseverance captured this image of Bright Angel with one of its Navcams on June 6th, 2024. Bright Angel is the light-toned area in the distance on the right. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechPerseverance is nearing the end of its fourth science phase. It’s been searching for carbonate rocks and olivine in the Margin Unit, which is along the inside of Jezero Crater’s rim. But at Bright Angel, it hoped to find different rocks.
That’s exactly what’s happened.
According to a NASA press release, geologists were mesmerized by what they saw. Some of the rocks are densely packed with spheres, which earned them the name ‘popcorn rocks.’ The rocks are also full of ridges that look like mineral veins. Mineral veins occur when water transports minerals through rock and deposits them.
These rocks in Bright Angel have unusual popcorn-like textures and abundant mineral veins. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASUMineral veins are common on wet, watery Earth, and rovers have spotted them elsewhere on Mars.
The MSL Curiosity rover captured this image of mineral veins in Martian rocks in 2015. The area is called Garden City, and it’s on lower Mt. Sharp in Gale Crater. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSThe popcorn features could also be evidence of water. Like the mineral veins, they indicate that water flowed through these rocks.
The next step is to determine what minerals are present in these popcorn rocks. Perseverance will work its way up Bright Angel, taking measurements as it goes. On the weekend, it’ll use its abrasion tool and other instruments to take an even closer look. It’ll vaporize some of the rock and use its SuperCam suite of instruments to examine the rocks’ chemistry. The decision to take a sample for eventual return to Earth (hopefully) will rest on those results.
Once Perseverance is finished at Bright Angel, the rover will make its way south again, across Neretva Vallis, to its next destination: Serpentine Rapids.
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Walking helps keep people free of lower back pain for longer
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Marsquakes Can Help Us Find Water on the Red Planet
Earth is a seismically active planet, and scientists have figured out how to use seismic waves from Earthquakes to probe its interior. We even use artificially created seismic waves to identify underground petroleum-bearing formations. When the InSIGHT (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) lander was sent to Mars, it sensed Marsquakes to learn more bout the planet’s interior.
Researchers think they can use Marsquakes to answer one of Mars’ most pressing questions: Does the planet hold water trapped in its subsurface?
Ground-penetrating radar can tell us what’s underground on Earth. However, it has limitations. It can reach about 30 meters underground in low-conductivity materials and as shallow as one meter in conductive materials. Scientists are developing other methods, including seismological interferometers, to use seismology to detect deeper aquifers, but those methods are not fully developed. There’s also so much water inside Earth that it creates noisy signals.
These methods are not applicable to Mars, where equipment is limited.
However, researchers from Penn State University think they can use a different type of seismology to detect Mars’ subsurface water. It’s called the seismoelectric method, and it combines seismology and electromagnetism. It senses the electromagnetic signals that come from the propagation of seismic waves in a planet’s interior.
Their new research, “Characterizing Liquid Water in Deep Martian Aquifers: A Seismo-Electric Approach,” has been published in JGR Planets. Nolan Roth, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geosciences at Penn State, is the lead author.
“The scientific community has theories that Mars used to have oceans and that, over the course of its history, all that water went away,” Roth said. “But there is evidence that some water is trapped somewhere in the subsurface. We just haven’t been able to find it. The idea is, if we can find these electromagnetic signals, then we find water on Mars.”
This artist’s impression shows how Mars may have looked about four billion years ago. The young planet Mars would have had enough water to cover its entire surface in a liquid layer about 140 metres deep, but it is more likely that the liquid would have pooled to form an ocean occupying almost half of Mars’s northern hemisphere and in some regions reaching depths greater than 1.6 kilometres. Credit: ESO/M. KornmesserSeismology works by detecting elastic waves that propagate through the Earth. These waves are divided into subtypes, especially P-waves, or primary waves, and S-waves, or secondary waves. Each type of wave travels differently depending on the material it’s moving through. In broad terms, P-waves travel faster than S-waves, so they arrive at seismographic sensors at different times. The differences in those times and other factors reveal the characteristics and densities of the material the waves are travelling through.
The seismoelectric method detects the electromagnetic signals created by seismic waves rather than the waves themselves. As the waves travel through a planet, materials like rock or water move differently in response. Those differences create magnetic fields that surface sensors can detect.
“If we listen to the marsquakes that are moving through the subsurface, if they pass through water, they’ll create these wonderful, unique signals of electromagnetic fields,” Roth said. “These signals would be diagnostic of current, modern-day water on Mars.”
This method is especially suited to Mars. On Earth, water is mixed throughout the subsurface, not just in aquifers, making detection difficult. But Mars is extremely dry, other than potential subsurface aquifers. If we detect buried water on Mars with the seismoelectric method, it’s almost certainly a subsurface aquifer.
Artist’s impression of water under the Martian surface. Credit: ESA/Medialab“In contrast to how seismoelectric signals often appear on Earth, Mars’ surface naturally removes the noise and exposes useful data that allows us to characterize several aquifer properties,” said co-author Tieyuan Zhu, associate professor of geosciences at Penn State and Roth’s adviser.
The seismoelectric method involves two types of electromagnetic fields: co-seismic waves and interface responses (IR). There are two types of interface responses: radiating interface responses (RIRs) and evanescent interface responses (EIRs.)
“Interface responses (IRs) are generated when a seismic wave creates a charge imbalance across a saturated interface,” the authors explain. RIRs radiate from the interface independently at electromagnetic velocities, regardless of how much fluid is in the medium. EIRs are generated when a seismic wave impinges on a saturated interface at a particular angle. Both types of IRs are generated in the presence of mobile fluids, but they don’t require a saturated layer to propagate further. RIRs, in particular, can travel through kilometres of rock. The two types of interface responses can be separated and analyzed independently.
It all adds up to a new method of “seeing” inside Mars and finding saturated layers.
Roth and his co-researchers started by creating a model of subsurface Mars. Then, they added aquifers to simulate how the seismoelectric method could work. The results showed they could use the seismoelectric technique to uncover details about the aquifers, including their dimensions and chemical properties, like salinity.
“Aquifer depth, thickness, and quantity affect interface response arrival times and shape,” the authors write in their research. “Aquifer water saturation fraction, chemistry, and salinity strongly impact the interface response strength but have little to no affect on the waveform shape.”
“Seismo-electric signals can be used to constrain estimates of aquifer depth, volume, location, and bulk chemical composition,” they added.
This illustration from the research shows how the seismoelectric method could detect subsurface water on Mars. It shows three different cases: a dry Mars, a Mars with a deep aquifer, and an Earth-analog model. There’s a lot of complexity, but the main takeaway is that the different interface responses behave differently and arrive at sensors at different times. See the published research for more details. Image Credit: Roth et al. 2024.“SE measurements give us a way to detect and image Martian groundwater kilometres below the surface,” the authors write in their conclusion. “As SE exploration becomes more widespread on Earth, this study represents the first foray of the method to other worlds.”
“If we can understand the signals, we can go back and characterize the aquifers themselves,” Roth said in a press release. “And that would give us more constraints than we’ve ever had before for understanding water on Mars today and how it has changed over the last 4 billion years. And that would be a big step ahead.”
The most exciting part about using the seismoelectric method on Mars is that it doesn’t require a new mission. NASA’s InSIGHT lander acquired ample seismic data during its mission. It also had a magnetometer, and future work will combine the signals from both to open a new window into subsurface Mars.
If the method proves fruitful, seismometers and magnetometers could be included in future missions, not only to Mars but also to other worlds. Frozen ocean moons like Europa and Enceladus are prime exploration targets in the search for life, and the technique could work there.
“This shouldn’t be limited to Mars — the technique has potential, for example, to measure the thickness of icy oceans on a moon of Jupiter,” Zhu said. “The message we want to give the community is there is this promising physical phenomena — which received less attention in the past — that may have great potential for planetary geophysics.”
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