In A Male Dominated Profession, What Were Some Obstacles You Faced As The First Hispanic Female Flight

Setting the Standards for Unmanned Aircraft

From advanced wing designs, through the hypersonic frontier, and onward into the era of composite structures, electronic flight controls, and energy efficient flight, our engineers and researchers have led the way in virtually every aeronautic development. And since 2011, aeronautical innovators from around the country have been working on our Unmanned Aircraft Systems integration in the National Airspace System, or UAS in the NAS, project.  

This project was a new type of undertaking that worked to identify, develop, and test the technologies and procedures that will make it possible for unmanned aircraft systems to have routine access to airspace occupied by human piloted aircraft. Since the start, the goal of this unified team was to provide vital research findings through simulations and flight tests to support the development and validation of detect and avoid and command and control technologies necessary for integrating UAS into the NAS.  

That interest moved into full-scale testing and evaluation to determine how to best integrate unmanned vehicles into the national airspace and how to come up with standards moving forward. Normally, 44,000 flights safely take off and land here in the U.S., totaling more than 16 million flights per year. With the inclusion of millions of new types of unmanned aircraft, this integration needs to be seamless in order to keep the flying public safe.

Working hand-in-hand, teams collaborated to better understand how these UAS's would travel in the national airspace by using NASA-developed software in combination with flight tests. Much of this work is centered squarely on technology called detect and avoid.  One of the primary safety concerns with these new systems is the inability of remote operators to see and avoid other aircraft.  Because unmanned aircraft literally do not have a pilot on board, we have developed concepts allowing safe operation within the national airspace.  

In order to better understand how all the systems work together, our team flew a series of tests to gather data to inform the development of minimum operational performance standards for detect and avoid alerting guidance. Over the course of this testing, we gathered an enormous amount of data allowing safe integration for unmanned aircraft into the national airspace. As unmanned aircraft are becoming more ubiquitous in our world - safety, reliability, and proven research must coexist.

Every day new use case scenarios and research opportunities arise based around the hard work accomplished by this incredible workforce. Only time will tell how these new technologies and innovations will shape our world.

Want to learn the many ways that NASA is with you when you fly? Visit nasa.gov/aeronautics.



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Hi!! I’m a high school sophomore and I love the work NASA does! I’ve always wondered, what’s an astronaut’s first thought when leaving earth? What kind of experiences do you leave the expedition with? Thanks! :) - Lauren

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Our solar system is huge, so let us break it down for you. Here are a few things you should know this week:

1. Science at the Edge

As the New Horizons spacecraft speeds away at more than 31,000 miles per hour (14 km/s) it continues to explore the Kuiper Belt, the region of icy bodies beyond Neptune. New Horizons has now twice observed 1994 JR1, a 90-mile-wide object orbiting more than 3 billion miles from the sun.

2. A Spaceship, Refined

This artist’s rendering shows our Europa mission spacecraft, which is being developed for a launch sometime in the 2020s. The mission will place a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter to explore the giant planet’s moon Europa. This updated concept image shows tow large solar arrays extending from the sides of the spacecraft, to which the mission’s ice-penetrating radar antennas are attached. A saucer-shaped high-gain antenna is also side mounted with a magnetometer boom placed next to it. Find out more about the spacecraft HERE.

3. Sojourn at Saturn

The Cassini spacecraft is hard at work this week, orbiting Saturn to study the planet and its rings. The recent pictures are spectacular, take a look at them HERE.

4. Talking Juno

Our Juno mission arrives at Jupiter on July 4, and that presents a unique opportunity for educators, science communicators and anyone interested in space exploration. We are providing a growing set of Juno-related information resources. Take a look at them HERE.

5. Now THAT’S a Long Distance Call

How do explorers on Earth talk to astronauts and robotic spacecraft flung across the far reaches of space? They use the remarkable technology deployed by our Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) Program Office. This month, SCaN is celebrating its 10th anniversary of managing the ultimate network. Find out how it works HERE.

Want to learn more? Read our full list of the 10 things to know this week about the solar system HERE.

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What's Up? - May 2018

What’s Up For May?

The Moon and Saturn meet Mars in the morning as our InSight spacecraft launches to the Red Planet on May 5!

You won't want to miss red Mars in the southern morning skies this month.

InSight, our first mission to explore Mars' deep interior, launches on May 5th with a launch window that begins at 4:05 a.m. PDT and lasts for two hours.

Some lucky viewers in central and southern California and even parts of the Mexican Pacific coast will get a chance to see the spacecraft launch with their unaided eyes AND its destination, Mars, at the same time.

Mars shines a little brighter than last month, as it approaches opposition on July 27th. That's when Mars and the Sun will be on opposite sides of the Earth. This will be Mars' closest approach to Earth since 2003! 

Compare the planet's increases in brightness with your own eyes between now and July 27th. 

The Eta Aquarid meteor shower will be washed out by the Moon this month, but if you are awake for the InSight launch anyway, have a look. This shower is better viewed from the southern hemisphere, but medium rates of 10 to 30 meteors per hour MAY be seen before dawn.

Of course, you could travel to the South Pacific to see the shower at its best!

There's no sharp peak to this shower--just several nights with good rates, centered on May 6th. 

Jupiter reaches opposition on May 9th, heralding the best Jupiter-observing season, especially for mid-evening viewing. That's because the king of the planets rises at sunset and sets at dawn. 

Wait a few hours after sunset, when Jupiter is higher in the sky, for the best views. If you viewed Jupiter last month, expect the view to be even better this month!

Watch the full What’s Up for May Video: 

There are so many sights to see in the sky. To stay informed, subscribe to our What’s Up video series on Facebook. Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.   

Black Holes are NICER Than You Think!

We’re learning more every day about black holes thanks to one of the instruments aboard the International Space Station! Our Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) instrument is keeping an eye on some of the most mysterious cosmic phenomena.

We’re going to talk about some of the amazing new things NICER is showing us about black holes. But first, let’s talk about black holes — how do they work, and where do they come from? There are two important types of black holes we’ll talk about here: stellar and supermassive. Stellar mass black holes are three to dozens of times as massive as our Sun while supermassive black holes can be billions of times as massive!

Stellar black holes begin with a bang — literally! They are one of the possible objects left over after a large star dies in a supernova explosion. Scientists think there are as many as a billion stellar mass black holes in our Milky Way galaxy alone!

Supermassive black holes have remained rather mysterious in comparison. Data suggest that supermassive black holes could be created when multiple black holes merge and make a bigger one. Or that these black holes formed during the early stages of galaxy formation, born when massive clouds of gas collapsed billions of years ago. There is very strong evidence that a supermassive black hole lies at the center of all large galaxies, as in our Milky Way.

Imagine an object 10 times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City — or cramming a billion trillion people into a car! These two examples give a sense of how incredibly compact and dense black holes can be.

Because so much stuff is squished into such a relatively small volume, a black hole’s gravity is strong enough that nothing — not even light — can escape from it. But if light can’t escape a dark fate when it encounters a black hole, how can we “see” black holes?

Scientists can’t observe black holes directly, because light can’t escape to bring us information about what’s going on inside them. Instead, they detect the presence of black holes indirectly — by looking for their effects on the cosmic objects around them. We see stars orbiting something massive but invisible to our telescopes, or even disappearing entirely!

When a star approaches a black hole’s event horizon — the point of no return — it’s torn apart. A technical term for this is “spaghettification” — we’re not kidding! Cosmic objects that go through the process of spaghettification become vertically stretched and horizontally compressed into thin, long shapes like noodles.

Scientists can also look for accretion disks when searching for black holes. These disks are relatively flat sheets of gas and dust that surround a cosmic object such as a star or black hole. The material in the disk swirls around and around, until it falls into the black hole. And because of the friction created by the constant movement, the material becomes super hot and emits light, including X-rays.  

At last — light! Different wavelengths of light coming from accretion disks are something we can see with our instruments. This reveals important information about black holes, even though we can’t see them directly.

So what has NICER helped us learn about black holes? One of the objects this instrument has studied during its time aboard the International Space Station is the ever-so-forgettably-named black hole GRS 1915+105, which lies nearly 36,000 light-years — or 200 million billion miles — away, in the direction of the constellation Aquila.

Scientists have found disk winds — fast streams of gas created by heat or pressure — near this black hole. Disk winds are pretty peculiar, and we still have a lot of questions about them. Where do they come from? And do they change the shape of the accretion disk?

It’s been difficult to answer these questions, but NICER is more sensitive than previous missions designed to return similar science data. Plus NICER often looks at GRS 1915+105 so it can see changes over time.

NICER’s observations of GRS 1915+105 have provided astronomers a prime example of disk wind patterns, allowing scientists to construct models that can help us better understand how accretion disks and their outflows around black holes work.

NICER has also collected data on a stellar mass black hole with another long name — MAXI J1535-571 (we can call it J1535 for short) — adding to information provided by NuSTAR, Chandra, and MAXI. Even though these are all X-ray detectors, their observations tell us something slightly different about J1535, complementing each other’s data!

This rapidly spinning black hole is part of a binary system, slurping material off its partner, a star. A thin halo of hot gas above the disk illuminates the accretion disk and causes it to glow in X-ray light, which reveals still more information about the shape, temperature, and even the chemical content of the disk. And it turns out that J1535’s disk may be warped!

Image courtesy of NRAO/AUI and Artist: John Kagaya (Hoshi No Techou)

This isn’t the first time we have seen evidence for a warped disk, but J1535’s disk can help us learn more about stellar black holes in binary systems, such as how they feed off their companions and how the accretion disks around black holes are structured.

NICER primarily studies neutron stars — it’s in the name! These are lighter-weight relatives of black holes that can be formed when stars explode. But NICER is also changing what we know about many types of X-ray sources. Thanks to NICER’s efforts, we are one step closer to a complete picture of black holes. And hey, that’s pretty nice!

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How do you guys help with climate change?

Mission Possible: Redirecting an Asteroid

As part of our Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), we plan to send a robotic spacecraft to an asteroid tens of millions of miles away from Earth, capture a multi-ton boulder and bring it to an orbit near the moon for future crew exploration.

This mission to visit a large near-Earth asteroid is part of our plan to advance the new technologies and spaceflight experience needed for a human mission to the Martian system in the 2030s.

How exactly will it work?

The robotic spacecraft, powered by the most advanced solar electric propulsion system, will travel for about 18 months to the target asteroid.

After the spacecraft arrives and the multi-ton boulder is collected from the surface, the spacecraft will hover near the asteroid to create a gravitational attraction that will slightly change the asteroid’s trajectory.

After the enhanced gravity tractor demonstration is compete, the robotic vehicle will deliver the boulder into a stable orbit near the moon. During the transit, the boulder will be further imaged and studied by the spacecraft.

Astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft will launch on the Space Launch System rocket to explore the returned boulder.

Orion will dock with the robotic vehicle that still has the boulder in its grasp. 

While docked, two crew members on spacewalks will explore the boulder and collect samples to bring back to Earth for further study.

The astronauts and collected samples will return to Earth in the Orion spacecraft.

How will ARM help us send humans to Mars in the 2030s?

This mission will demonstrate future Mars-level exploration missions closer to home and will fly a mission with technologies and real life operational constraints that we’ll encounter on the way to the Red Planet. A few of the capabilities it will help us test include: 

Solar Electric Propulsion – Using advanced Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) technologies is an important part of future missions to send larger payloads into deep space and to the Mars system. Unlike chemical propulsion, which uses combustion and a nozzle to generate thrust, SEP uses electricity from solar arrays to create electromagnetic fields to accelerate and expel charged atoms (ions) to create a very low thrust with a very efficient use of propellant.

Trajectory and Navigation – When we move the massive asteroid boulder using low-thrust propulsion and leveraging the gravity fields of Earth and the moon, we’ll validate critical technologies for the future Mars missions. 

Advances in Spacesuits – Spacesuits designed to operate in deep space and for the Mars surface will require upgrades to the portable life support system (PLSS). We are working on advanced PLSS that will protect astronauts on Mars or in deep space by improving carbon dioxide removal, humidity control and oxygen regulation. We are also improving mobility by evaluating advances in gloves to improve thermal capacity and dexterity. 

Sample Collection and Containment Techniques – This experience will help us prepare to return samples from Mars through the development of new techniques for safe sample collection and containment. These techniques will ensure that humans do not contaminate the samples with microbes from Earth, while protecting our planet from any potential hazards in the samples that are returned. 

Rendezvous and Docking Capabilities – Future human missions to Mars will require new capabilities to rendezvous and dock spacecraft in deep space. We will advance the current system we’ve developed with the international partners aboard the International Space Station. 

Moving from spaceflight a couple hundred miles off Earth to the proving ground environment (40,000 miles beyond the moon) will allow us to start accumulating experience farther than humans have ever traveled in space.

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The Moon in Motion

Happy New Year! And happy supermoon! Tonight, the Moon will appear extra big and bright to welcome us into 2018 – about 6% bigger and 14% brighter than the average full Moon. And how do we know that? Well, each fall, our science visualizer Ernie Wright uses data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to render over a quarter of a million images of the Moon. He combines these images into an interactive visualization, Moon Phase and Libration, which depicts the Moon at every day and hour for the coming year. 

Want to see what the Moon will look like on your birthday this year? Just put in the date, and even the hour (in Universal Time) you were born to see your birthday Moon.

Our Moon is quite dynamic. In addition to Moon phases, our Moon appears to get bigger and smaller throughout the year, and it wobbles! Or at least it looks that way to us on Earth. This wobbling is called libration, from the Latin for ‘balance scale’ (libra). Wright relies on LRO maps of the Moon and NASA orbit calculations to create the most accurate depiction of the 6 ways our Moon moves from our perspective.

1. Phases

The Moon phases we see on Earth are caused by the changing positions of the Earth and Moon relative to the Sun. The Sun always illuminates half of the Moon, but we see changing shapes as the Moon revolves around the Earth. Wright uses a software library called SPICE to calculate the position and orientation of the Moon and Earth at every moment of the year. With his visualization, you can input any day and time of the year and see what the Moon will look like!

2. Shape of the Moon

Check out that crater detail! The Moon is not a smooth sphere. It’s covered in mountains and valleys and thanks to LRO, we know the shape of the Moon better than any other celestial body in the universe. To get the most accurate depiction possible of where the sunlight falls on the lunar surface throughout the month, Wright uses the same graphics software used by Hollywood design studios, including Pixar, and a method called ‘raytracing’ to calculate the intricate patterns of light and shadow on the Moon’s surface, and he checks the accuracy of his renders against photographs of the Moon he takes through his own telescope.

3. Apparent Size 

The Moon Phase and Libration visualization shows you the apparent size of the Moon. The Moon’s orbit is elliptical, instead of circular - so sometimes it is closer to the Earth and sometimes it is farther. You’ve probably heard the term “supermoon.” This describes a full Moon at or near perigee (the point when the Moon is closest to the Earth in its orbit). A supermoon can appear up to 14% bigger and brighter than a full Moon at apogee (the point when the Moon is farthest from the Earth in its orbit). 

Our supermoon tonight is a full Moon very close to perigee, and will appear to be about 14% bigger than the July 27 full Moon, the smallest full Moon of 2018, occurring at apogee. Input those dates into the Moon Phase and Libration visualization to see this difference in apparent size!

4. East-West Libration

Over a month, the Moon appears to nod, twist, and roll. The east-west motion, called ‘libration in longitude’, is another effect of the Moon’s elliptical orbital path. As the Moon travels around the Earth, it goes faster or slower, depending on how close it is to the Earth. When the Moon gets close to the Earth, it speeds up thanks to an additional pull from Earth’s gravity. Then it slows down, when it’s farther from the Earth. While this speed in orbital motion changes, the rotational speed of the Moon stays constant. 

This means that when the Moon moves faster around the Earth, the Moon itself doesn’t rotate quite enough to keep the same exact side facing us and we get to see a little more of the eastern side of the Moon. When the Moon moves more slowly around the Earth, its rotation gets a little ahead, and we see a bit more of its western side.

5. North-South Libration

The Moon also appears to nod, as if it were saying “yes,” a motion called ‘libration in latitude’. This is caused by the 5 degree tilt of the Moon’s orbit around the Earth. Sometimes the Moon is above the Earth’s northern hemisphere and sometimes it’s below the Earth’s southern hemisphere, and this lets us occasionally see slightly more of the northern or southern hemispheres of the Moon! 

6. Axis Angle

Finally, the Moon appears to tilt back and forth like a metronome. The tilt of the Moon’s orbit contributes to this, but it’s mostly because of the 23.5 degree tilt of our own observing platform, the Earth. Imagine standing sideways on a ramp. Look left, and the ramp slopes up. Look right and the ramp slopes down. 

Now look in front of you. The horizon will look higher on the right, lower on the left (try this by tilting your head left). But if you turn around, the horizon appears to tilt the opposite way (tilt your head to the right). The tilted platform of the Earth works the same way as we watch the Moon. Every two weeks we have to look in the opposite direction to see the Moon, and the ground beneath our feet is then tilted the opposite way as well.

So put this all together, and you get this:

Beautiful isn’t it? See if you can notice these phenomena when you observe the Moon. And keep coming back all year to check on the Moon’s changing appearance and help plan your observing sessions.

Follow @NASAMoon on Twitter to keep up with the latest lunar updates. 

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Great Scott, it’s Back to the Future Day – Oct. 21, 2015

What would a time traveler from 1985 discover about   NASA today?

It’s Back to the Future Day, the date in the second film that Marty and Doc traveled to in the future. When they arrived in 2015, it looked much different than today’s reality. Although we may not have self-drying jackets or flying cars, we do have some amazing spacecraft and technologies that were not around back when the film was made.

For example, in 1985 we did not have the capability to capture an image like this of our Earth. This full-Earth view captured Monday (10/19/15) by our camera on the Deep Space Climate Observatory, or DSCOVER, was not previously possible. The DSCOVR mission captures a daily sequence of images that show the Earth as it rotates, revealing the whole globe over the course of a day. These images will allow scientists to study daily variations over the entire globe in such features as vegetation, ozone, aerosols and cloud height and reflectivity.

So, we might not be cruising down the street on hover boards, but the movies didn’t get it all wrong in terms of how advanced we’d be in 2015.

When you were a kid, what technologies did you dream we’d have in the future that we may or may not have today? Here’s what two astronauts said:

NASA is much different than it was in 1985. Could we have dreamed these amazing accomplishments that have changed our world and understanding of the universe?

1. “There will be an orbiting laboratory where astronauts from around the world will live and work together.”

When Back to the Future II was set, the International Space Station didn’t exist yet. The first piece of the space station was launched in 1998, and the first crew arrived in 2000. Since November 2000, the station has been continuously occupied by humans. 

2. "We will find planets orbiting in the habitable zone of a star, and possibly suited for life."

The first exoplanet, or planet orbiting around a star, was found in 1995. Since then, we’ve discovered around a dozen habitable zone planets in the Earth-size range. While we aren’t able to zoom in to these planets that are light-years away, we’re still closer to finding another Earth-like planet in 2015 than we were in 1985. 

3. “Mars will become more populated.”

No, not by humans...yet. But, since the release of Back to the Future II, Mars has become a bit more populated with rovers and orbiters. These scientific spacecraft have played an important role in learning about the Red Planet. We currently have six missions at Mars. With the most recent news of liquid water on the surface of Mars, we can look forward to future missions returning even more data and images. The historical log of all Mars missions, both domestic and international can be found HERE. 

4. “We will launch a telescope into orbit that’s capable of looking at locations more than 13.4 billion light years from Earth.”

When Back to the Future II was released, our Hubble Space Telescope had not yet launched into orbit -- something that wouldn’t happen until April 1990. Since then, Hubble has made more than 1.2 million observations, and has traveled more than 3 billion miles along a circular low Earth orbit. For updates on Hubble’s findings, check HERE.

For more information about the technology that we’re developing at NASA, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology

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Juno: Exploring Jupiter’s Intense Radiation

Since 2011, our Juno spacecraft has been heading towards Jupiter, where it will study the gas giant’s atmosphere, aurora, gravity and magnetic field. Along the way, Juno has had to deal with the radiation that permeates space.

All of space is filled with particles, and when these particles get moving at high speeds, they’re called radiation. We study space radiation to better protect spacecraft as they travel through space, as well as to understand how this space environment influences planetary evolution. Once at Jupiter, Juno will have a chance to study one of the most intense radiation environments in our solar system.

Near worlds with magnetic fields – like Earth and Jupiter – these fast-moving particles can get trapped inside the magnetic fields, creating donut-shaped swaths of radiation called radiation belts.

Jupiter’s radiation belts – the glowing areas in the animation below – are especially intense, with particles so energetic that they zip up and down the belts at nearly the speed of light.

Earth also has radiation belts, but they aren’t nearly as intense as Jupiter’s – why? First, Jupiter’s magnetic field is much stronger than Earth’s, meaning that it traps and accelerates faster particles.

Second, while both Earth’s and Jupiter’s radiation belts are populated with particles from space, Jupiter also has a second source of particles – its volcanically active moon Io. Io’s volcanoes constantly release plumes of particles that are energized by Jupiter’s magnetic field. These fast particles get trapped in Jupiter’s radiation belts, making the belts that much stronger and more intense.  

In addition to studying this vast space environment, Juno engineers had to take this intense radiation into consideration when building the spacecraft. The radiation can cause instruments to degrade, interfere with measurements, and can even give the spacecraft itself an electric charge – not good for something with so many sensitive electronics.  

Since we know Jupiter is a harsh radiation environment, we designed Juno with protections in place to keep it safe. Most of Juno’s electronics live inside a half-inch-thick titanium vault, where most of the radiation can’t reach them. We also planned Juno’s orbit to swoop in very close to Jupiter’s surface, underneath the most intense pockets of radiation in Jupiter’s radiation belts.

Juno arrives at Jupiter on July 4th. Throughout its time orbiting the planet, it will send back data on Jupiter’s magnetic field and energetic particles, helping us understand this intense radiation environment better than ever before.

For updates on the Juno mission, follow the spacecraft on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com