New NASA Strategy Envisions Sustainable Future for Space Operations

To address a rapidly changing space operating environment and ensure its preservation for generations to come, NASA released the first part of its integrated Space Sustainability Strategy, on Tuesday advancing the agency’s role as a global leader on this crucial issue.

“The release of this strategy marks true progress for NASA on space sustainability,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy. “Space is busy – and only getting busier. If we want to make sure that critical parts of space are preserved so that our children and grandchildren can continue to use them for the benefit of humanity, the time to act is now. NASA is making sure that we’re aligning our resources to support sustainable activity for us and for all.”

For decades, NASA has served as a proactive leader for responsible and sustainable space operations. Entities across the agency develop best practices, analytic tools, and technologies widely adopted by operators around the world. The new strategy seeks to integrate those efforts through a whole-of-agency approach – allowing NASA to focus its resources on the most pressing issues. To facilitate that integration, NASA will appoint a new director of space sustainability to coordinate activities across the agency.

Key aspects of our approach include providing global leadership in space sustainability, supporting equitable access to space, and ensuring NASA’s missions and operations enhance space sustainability. 

Space environments currently are seeing the rapid emergence of commercial capabilities, many of them championed by NASA. These capabilities include increased low Earth orbit satellite activity and plans for the use of satellite constellations, autonomous spacecraft, and commercial space destinations. However, this increased activity also has generated challenges, such as an operating environment more crowded with spacecraft and increased debris. Understanding the risks and benefits associated with this growth is crucial for space sustainability. 

Developed under the leadership of a crossagency advisory board, the space sustainability strategy focuses on advancements NASA can make toward measuring and assessing space sustainability in Earth orbit, identifying cost-effective ways to meet sustainability targets, incentivizing the adoption of sustainable practices through technology and policy development, and increasing efforts to share and receive information with the rest of the global space community.

NASA’s approach to space sustainability recognizes four operational domains: Earth, Earth orbit, the orbital area near and around the Moon known as cislunar space, and deep space, including other celestial bodies. The first volume of the strategy focuses on sustainability in Earth orbit. NASA plans to produce additional volumes focusing on the other domains.

Learn more about the Space Sustainability Strategy at:

https://www.nasa.gov/spacesustainability

-end-

Amber Jacobson / Rob Margetta
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
amber.c.jacobson@nasa.gov / robert.j.margetta@nasa.gov

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Tiernan P. Doyle

Seeing Totality

On April 8, 2024, a NASA photographer captured the total solar eclipse in Dallas. A small part of North America, from Mexico’s Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland, Canada, saw the total solar eclipse, while all North America and parts of Central America and Europe saw a partial solar eclipse. The next total solar eclipse that will travel across the lower 48 states from coast to coast is in 2045.

See more photos of the eclipse on Flickr.

Image Credit: NASA/Keegan Barber

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Monika Luabeya

Through Astronaut Eyes, Virtual Reality Propels Gateway Forward  

Astronauts living aboard the Gateway lunar space station will be the first humans to make their home in deep space. To fine-tune the design of the next-generation science lab, solar-powered spaceship, and home-away-from home for international teams of astronauts, NASA calls on the likes of Raja Chari and Nicole Mann, experienced astronauts who know a thing or two about living and working on a space station.  

Commanders of the SpaceX Crew-3 and Crew-5 missions to the International Space Station, respectively, Chari and Mann recently brought their long-duration mission experience to bear when they strapped into virtual reality (VR) headsets to tour Gateway, humanity’s first space station to orbit the Moon.  

During VR testing, astronauts engage in a variety of tasks that they expect to encounter in their day-to-day life on Gateway during real Artemis missions, including performing science experiments, retrieving supplies, and preparing warm meals. By combining VR models with real-world astronaut experience, NASA designers can make tweaks to Gateway’s interior design for a safer and comfier space station.  

Gateway is poised to revolutionize deep space exploration at the Moon and beyond as a testbed for next-generation technology and new science to better understand the impact of space on humans. This space station is a critical component of the Artemis campaign to return humans to the lunar surface for scientific discovery and pave the way for the first human missions to Mars. 

Image credits: NASA/Bill Stafford/Josh Valcarcel

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Dylan Connell

Making Ultra-fast Electron Measurements in Multiple Directions to Reveal the Secrets of the Aurora

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Making Ultra-fast Electron Measurements in Multiple Directions to Reveal the Secrets of the Aurora

The energetic electrons that drive the aurora borealis (the northern lights) have a rich and very dynamic structure that we currently do not fully understand.  Much of what we know about these electrons comes from instruments that have fundamental limitations in their ability to sample multiple energies with high time resolution. To overcome these limitations, NASA is using an innovative approach to develop instrumentation that will enhance our measurement capabilities by more than an order of magnitude—revealing a wealth of new information about the amazing physics happening within the aurora.

Typical electron instruments rely on a technique called electrostatic deflection, which requires changing a voltage to select different energies of electrons to measure.  These instruments have been flown on many different space missions and have provided almost all of the in-situ electron measurements made inside the aurora.  They work great when observing on timescales of seconds or even down to around a tenth of a second, but they fundamentally cannot observe down to smaller (millisecond) timescales due to the time it takes to sweep through voltages.

Ground-based optical observations of the aurora have shown that there can be rapid spatial and temporal variations that are beyond the observing capabilities of traditional electron instruments.  Therefore, members of the Geophysics Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center developed an instrument called the Acute Precipitating Electron Spectrometer (APES) that can measure electron precipitation within the aurora at a one millisecond cadence.  APES uses a strong magnetic field inside the instrument to separate electrons with different energies onto different spatial regions of the detector.  This method allows the instrument to measure the entire electron energy spectrum simultaneously at a very high rate (every 1 ms).

In the design of APES, one major trade-off had to be made.  For the magnetic field geometry to work properly, the instrument can only observe in one direction. This concept works well if the goal is just to measure the precipitating (downgoing) electrons in the aurora that ultimately hit the atmosphere.  However, we know that electrons in the aurora also move in other directions; in fact, these electrons contain a lot of information about other physical processes happening farther out in space.

To enable measurement of electrons in more than one direction, the Goddard team developed the APES-360 instrument concept. To create the APES-360 design, the team employed the same operating principles used in APES, but updated them to accommodate a multi-look direction geometry that covers a 360-degree field of view using 16 different sectors.  The team had to overcome several technical challenges to develop the APES-360 concept.  In particular, the electronics design had to accommodate many more anodes (charge detecting surfaces) and the associated circuitry in a small area. 

The APES-360 prototype that is currently being built will be tested and calibrated at Goddard and will fly on a sounding rocket into active aurora in the winter of 2025.  This flight will provide real-life data from inside the aurora that will be used to validate the instrument performance and inform future design improvements.

The APES-360 instrument is being designed to fit into a CubeSat form factor so that it can be used on future CubeSat missions to study the aurora. The instrument could also ultimately be flown on larger orbital missions, as well.

PROJECT LEAD:

Dr. Robert G Michell, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC)

SPONSORING ORGANIZATIONS:

Heliophysics, Geospace Physics Laboratory (GSFC Code 673) and H-TIDeS.

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NASA Wallops Launches 3 Rockets During Eclipse in Virginia

Three Black Brant IX sounding rockets launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia April 8, 2024, during the solar eclipse. The rockets launched for the Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) mission to study the disturbances in the electrified region of Earth’s atmosphere known as the ionosphere created when the Moon eclipses the Sun. The rockets launched before, during, and after peak local eclipse time on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.

Photo Credit: NASA/Garon Clark

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Jamie Adkins