NASA Leader Casey Swails Learns About Wildfire Work at NASA Ames

NASA Deputy Associate Administrator Casey Swails views a demonstration on screen in the Airspace Operations Laboratory at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. Researchers presented the diverse, long-running efforts in aeronautics at Ames that have helped lay the foundation for agency work related to wildfire response.

These include a project to help integrate drones into the airspace with Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management, their application to disaster response with the Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations project, and how those informed NASA’s newest effort to make wildfire response more targeted and adaptable, the Advanced Capabilities for Emergency Response Operations project.

Michael Falkowski, program manager for the Applied Sciences Wildland Fire program at NASA Headquarters presented wildfire efforts happening under NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, such as the FireSense project, led out of Ames.

The importance of collaborations within NASA and with partner agencies was also highlighted. Wildfires are complex phenomena and tackling their challenges will require the work of many, for the benefit of all.

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Abby Tabor

Artemis II Mission Manager Matthew Ramsey

Matthew Ramsey is keenly aware of the responsibility he shoulders to ensure the agency’s missions to the Moon are safe and successful. As the mission manager for Artemis II, NASA’s first crewed mission under Artemis, Ramsey is charged with helping to define the requirements and priorities for the missions and certifying that the hardware and operations needed to support flight are ready.

“For me, it’s all about the crew and ensuring their safety as they venture to the Moon and come home,” said Ramsey. “Sending people thousands of miles from home and doing it in a way that sets the stage for long-term exploration and scientific discovery is an incredibly complex task.”

During the leadup to Artemis II, Ramsey is responsible for oversight of the daily preparations as NASA prepares to launch and fly the agency’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket with a crew of four inside the Orion spacecraft. He will adjudicate issues that arise in the weeks and months ahead of the flight test and serve as deputy of the Mission Management Team — a tiger team that forms two days before launch to accept the risks associated with the mission and make decisions during the flight to address any changes or concerns.

A native of Hernando, Mississippi, Ramsey pitched for the Mississippi State University baseball team before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering from the school.

“There are a lot of similarities between mission management and pitching,” he said. “You control many aspects of the tempo, and there’s a lot of weight on your shoulders.”

Ramsey began his career in the intelligence and defense sectors before joining the space agency in 2002 to work on guidance, navigation, and control for the X-37 Approach and Landing Test Vehicle. Later, he worked on the design of the Ares I and V rockets as part of NASA’s Constellation Program before transitioning in 2010 to the SLS Program in support of the chief engineer at the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

During the Artemis I launch, Ramsey was the SLS Engineering Support Center manager at Marshall, coordinating across engineering teams to provide data and solutions to issues encountered during the multiple launch attempts. He then supported the Mission Management Team during Artemis I in an observational role, preparing for his position as Artemis II mission manager.

While NASA and its partners are preparing for Artemis II, work toward other Artemis missions is also underway. Ramsey also will serve as the mission manager for Artemis IV, the first Gateway assembly mission that also will include a lunar landing.

“With Artemis II on the horizon, most of my time is focused on making sure we’re ready to fly Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy around the Moon and bring them safely home,” Ramsey said. “For Artemis IV, we’re in the mission concept-planning phase, establishing mission priorities and objectives and defining how we’ll transfer crew between all the hardware elements involved.”

As Artemis II nears, Ramsey is blending his operational experience and expertise in design, development, testing, and evaluation so that NASA is primed for what lies ahead: sending humans back to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years and laying the foundation for future missions that will ultimately enable human exploration of Mars.

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Rachel H. Kraft

Discovery Alert: Glowing Cloud Points to a Cosmic Collision

The Discovery: 

A glowing cosmic cloud has revealed a cataclysmic collision.

Key Facts:

Even within our own solar system, scientists have seen evidence of giant, planetary collisions from long ago. Remaining clues like Uranus’ tilt and the existence of Earth’s moon point to times in our distant history when the planets in our stellar neighborhood slammed together, forever changing their shape and place in orbit. Scientists looking outside our solar system to far off exoplanets can spot similar evidence that, across the universe, planets sometimes crash. In this new study, the evidence of such an impact comes from a cloud of dust and gas with a strange, fluctuating luminosity. 

Details: 

Scientists were observing a young (300-million-year-old) Sun-like star when they noticed something odd: the star suddenly and significantly dipped in brightness. A team of researchers looked a little closer and they found that, just before this dip, the star displayed a sudden spike in infrared luminosity. 

In studying the star, the team found that this luminosity lasted for 1,000 days. But 2.5 years into this bright event, the star was unexpectedly eclipsed by something, causing the sudden dip in brightness. This eclipse endured for 500 days. 

The team investigated further and found that the culprit behind both the spike in luminosity and the eclipse was a giant, glowing cloud of gas and dust. And the most likely reason for the sudden, eclipse-causing cloud? A cosmic collision between two exoplanets, one of which likely contained ice, the researchers think.

In a new study detailing these events, scientists suggest that two giant exoplanets anywhere from several to tens of Earth masses crashed into one another, creating both the infrared spike and the cloud. A crash like this would completely liquify the two planets, leaving behind a single molten core surrounded by a cloud of gas, hot rock, and dust.

After the crash, this cloud, still holding the hot, glowing remnant of the collision, continued to orbit the star, eventually moving in front of and eclipsing the star.

Fun Facts: 

This study was conducted using archival data from NASA’s now-retired WISE mission – the spacecraft continues to operate under the name NEOWISE. This star was first detected in 2021 by the ground-based robotic survey ASAS-SN (All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae). 

While this data revealed remnants of this planetary collision, the glow of this crash should still be visible to telescopes like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. In fact, the research team behind this study is already putting together proposals to observe the system with Webb. 

Discoverers: 

The study, “A planetary collision afterglow and transit of the resultant debris cloud,” was published Oct. 11, 2023, in Nature by lead author Matthew Kenworthy alongside 21 co-authors. 

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