30 Doradus B: NASA Telescopes Start the Year With a Double Bang
This deep dataset from Chandra of the remains of a supernova known as 30 Doradus B (30 Dor B) reveals evidence for more than one supernova explosion in the history of this remnant. Unusual structures in the Chandra data cannot be explained by a single explosion. These images of 30 Dor B also show optical data from the Blanco telescope in Chile, and infrared data from Spitzer. Additional data from Hubble highlights sharp features in the image.
NASA to Brief Media on Climate Mission to Study Ocean Life, Air
NASA’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) mission, seen here in an artist’s concept, is scheduled to launch no earlier than Feb. 6, 2024, to study Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, and climate.
NASA/Conceptual Image Laboratory
NASA will host a media teleconference at 12 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Jan. 17, to discuss the upcoming launch and science objectives of the agency’s PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) mission.
Once in orbit above Earth, the satellite will shed light on the impact of tiny things – microscopic life in water and microscopic particles in the air. With new global insights, PACE will help answer questions about how our oceans and atmosphere interact in a changing climate.
The audio-only teleconference will be livestreamed on the agency’s website.
NASA’s PACE is scheduled to launch no earlier than 1:30 a.m., Tuesday, Feb. 6, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
NASA’s PACE To Investigate Oceans, Atmospheres in Changing Climate
6 Min Read
NASA’s PACE To Investigate Oceans, Atmospheres in Changing Climate
Earth is complex – the atmosphere, ocean, land, and each small interwoven facet of those systems is a puzzle piece that connects and fills out the full picture. With a changing climate, the puzzle is becoming more complex – and important – to understand.
Credits: NASA / Ryan Fitzgibbons and Emme Watkins
Earth’s oceans and atmosphere are changing as the planet warms. Some ocean waters become greener as more microscopic organisms bloom. In the atmosphere, dust storms born on one continent affect the air quality of another, while smoke from massive wildfires can blanket entire regions for days.
NASA’s newest Earth-observing satellite, called PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem), is launching in February 2024 to help us better understand the complex systems driving these and other global changes that come with a warming climate.
PACE will help assess ocean health by measuring the distribution of phytoplankton – tiny plant-like organisms and algae that sustain the marine food web. It will also extend records of key atmospheric variables associated with air quality and Earth’s climate.
Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
“The ocean and atmosphere interact in ways that need ongoing research to fully understand,” said Jeremy Werdell, project scientist for the PACE mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.“With PACE, we’ll open our eyes to many new aspects of climate change.”
Phytoplankton are microscopic, plant-like organisms that float near the water’s surface and form the center of the aquatic food web, providing food to all sorts of animals ranging from shellfish to finfish to whales. There are thousands of species of phytoplankton, each with different niches in the ocean.
During the spring and summer in the Barents Sea, north of Norway and Russia, blue and green blooms of phytoplankton are often visible. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this true-color image on July 15, 2021. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
While a single phytoplankton typically can’t be seen with the naked eye, communities of trillions of phytoplankton, called blooms, can be seen from space. Blooms often take on a greenish tinge due to the chlorophyll molecules that phytoplankton, like land-based plants, use to make energy through photosynthesis.
According to Ivona Cetinić, an oceanographer in the Ocean Ecology Lab at NASA Goddard, phytoplankton are responding to changes in their environment. Differences in ocean temperatures, nutrients, or sunlight availability can cause a species to boom or bust.
From space, those changes in phytoplankton populations manifest as differences in hue, allowing scientists to study phytoplankton abundance and diversity from afar, and at a global scale. And scientists recently found that the ocean is turning a touch greener.
After analyzing ocean color data from the MODIS instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite, scientists found that portions of the ocean had greened up with more chlorophyll-carrying phytoplankton. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
PACE’s Ocean Color Instrument (OCI), a hyperspectral sensor, will take marine science a leap further by allowing researchers to remotely differentiate phytoplankton by type. (Historically, species could only be determined by direct sampling of the water.) Each community has its own color signature that an instrument like OCI can identify.
Identification of phytoplankton types is key because different phytoplankton play vastly different roles in aquatic ecosystems. They have beneficial roles, like fueling the food chain or drawing down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for photosynthesis. Some phytoplankton populations sequester carbon as they die and sink to the deep ocean; others release the gas back into the atmosphere as they decay near the surface.
But some, like those in harmful algae blooms, can negatively impact humans and aquatic ecosystems. And the presence of harmful algae can also tell us something about the quality of the water sources, such as the presence of too many nutrients from human activities. By identifying these communities in the ocean, scientists can tease out information about how and where phytoplankton are affected by climate change, and how changes in these tiny organisms may affect other creatures and ocean ecosystems.
Particles in the air feed phytoplankton at sea
Beyond their role as the grass of the sea, phytoplankton also play a role in a complex dance between atmosphere and ocean. And PACE will see both partners in this dance.
From space, with a view of the whole planet every two days, PACE will track both microscopic organisms in the ocean and microscopic particles in the atmosphere called aerosols. How these two interact will provide scientists with additional insights into the impact of a changing climate.
This model shows the movement of aerosols over land and water in Aug. 2017. Hurricanes and tropical storms stand out due to the large amounts of sea salt particles caught up in their swirling winds. Dust blowing out of the Sahara can get caught by water droplets and rained out of the atmosphere. Smoke from massive wildfires in the Pacific Northwest of North America are carried across the Atlantic to Europe. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
For example, when aerosol particles from the atmosphere are deposited onto the ocean, they can provide essential nutrients to spark phytoplankton blooms. Winds sometimes carry ash and dust from wildfires and dust storms over the ocean. When these particles fall into the water, they can act as a fertilizer, providing nutrients such as iron that allow phytoplankton populations to grow.
As we go forward in a warming climate, with a potential for more forest fires and, therefore, a greater amount of ash deposition, we can assume there are going to be changes in the phytoplankton communities,
Ivona Cetinić
Oceanographer – Ocean Ecology Lab at NASA Goddard
This visualization shows an example of a wildfire transitioning from day to night in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
While PACE’s color-detecting instrument will see changes in phytoplankton, the satellite also carries two instruments called polarimeters – SPEXone and HARP2 – that use properties of light (polarization) to observe aerosol particles and clouds. Scientists will be able to measure the size, composition, and abundance of these microscopic particles in our atmosphere.
Smoke, pollutants and dust seed the clouds, too
New data from PACE characterizing atmospheric particles will enable scientists to examine one of the trickiest components of climate change to model: how clouds and aerosols interact.
Clouds form when water condenses on airborne particles such as smoke and ash. One easy to spot example is ship tracks, which occur when water vapor condenses and forms bright, low-lying clouds on pollutants emitted by ships.
Ship tracks above the northern Pacific Ocean. NASA image captured July 3, 2010, by the Aqua satellite. Credit: NASA
NASA
Different types of aerosols also influence the characteristics of clouds, such as their brightness, which is driven by cloud droplet size and number. These traits can lead to different impacts – either warming or cooling – on Earth’s surface.
For instance, a bright cloud or plume of aerosol particles hovering low over a much darker ocean reflects more light back into space, causing a localized cooling effect. Other times, both clouds and aerosols have a warming effect called blanketing. Thin plumes high up in the atmosphere absorb heat from Earth’s surface and then radiate it back toward the ground.
“From a climate perspective, the relationship between aerosols and clouds is one of the largest sources of uncertainty in our understanding of the climate,” said Kirk Knobelspiesse, polarimetry lead for the PACE mission at NASA Goddard. The satellite’s new insights into aerosol particles will help scientists fill in knowledge gaps and deepen our understanding of that relationship.
Brr, It’s Cold in Here! NASA’s Cryo Efforts Beyond the Atmosphere
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
A 2019 image of the SHIIVER tank sitting inside the In-Space Propulsion Facility’s vacuum chamber at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio. The tank was part of a Cryogenic Fluid Management project effort to test the tank at extreme temperatures and ensure the new technologies kept the propellants inside cold and in a liquid state.
Credit: NASA
Establishing sustained operations at the Moon and Mars presents a multitude of opportunities and challenges NASA has yet to encounter. Many of these activities require new technologies and processes to ensure the agency is prepared for its ambitious Artemis missions and those beyond.
One of those challenges is working with cryogenic fluids, meaning fluids existing in a liquid state between minus 238 degrees Fahrenheit and absolute zero (minus 460 F). These fluids – liquid hydrogen (the most difficult to work with), methane, and oxygen – are vital to spacecraft propulsion and life support systems. The fluids may also be produced in the future on the lunar and Martian surfaces via in-situ resource utilization (ISRU).
Human exploration in deep space requires storing large amounts of cryogenic fluids for weeks, months, or longer, as well as transferring between spacecraft or fuel depots in orbit and on the surface. Each aspect is challenging, and, to date, large amounts of cryogenic fluids have only been stored for hours in space. Engineers working in NASA’s Cryogenic Fluid Management (CFM) portfolio – led by Technology Demonstration Missions within the Space Technology Mission Directorate and managed at the agency’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama – are solving those issues ahead of future missions.
“This is a task neither NASA, nor our partners, have ever done before,” said Lauren Ameen, deputy CFM Portfolio manager. “Our future mission concepts rely on massive amounts of cryogenic fluids, and we have to figure out how to efficiently use them over long durations, which requires a series of new technologies far exceeding today’s capabilities.”
Cryogenic Challenges
For a cryogenic fluid to be useable, it must remain in a frigid, liquid state. However, the physics of space travel – moving in and out of sunlight and long stays in low gravity – make keeping those fluids in a liquid state and knowing how much is in the tank complicated.
The heat sources in space – like the Sun and the spacecraft’s exhaust – create a hot environment inside and around storage tanks causing evaporation or “boiloff.” When fluid evaporates, it can no longer efficiently fuel a rocket engine. It also increases the risk of leakage or, even worse, a tank rupture.
Being unsure of how much gas is left in the tank isn’t how our explorers want to fly to Mars. Low gravity is challenging because the fuel wants to float around – also known as “slosh” – which makes accurately gauging the amount of liquid and transferring it very difficult.
“Previous missions using cryogenic propellants were in space for only a few days due to boiloff or venting losses,” Ameen noted. “Those spacecraft used thrust and other maneuvers to apply force to settle propellant tanks and enable fuel transfers. During Artemis, spacecraft will dwell in low gravity for much longer and need to transfer liquid hydrogen in space for the first time, so we must mitigate boiloff and find innovative ways to transfer and measure cryogenic propellants.”
So, What’s NASA Doing?
NASA’s CFM portfolio encompasses 24 development activities and investments to reduce boiloff, improve gauging, and advance fluid transfer techniques for in-space propulsion, landers, and ISRU. There are four near-term efforts taking place on the ground, in near-Earth orbit, and soon on the lunar surface.
Flight Demos
In 2020, NASA awarded four CFM-focused Tipping Point contracts to American industry – Eta Space, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, and United Launch Alliance – to assist in developing and demonstrating CFM technologies in space. Each company is scheduled to launch its respective demonstration in either 2024 or 2025, performing multiple tests using liquid hydrogen to validate technologies and processes.
Radio Frequency Mass Gauge
To improve gauging, NASA has developed Radio Frequency Mass Gauges (RFMG) to allow for more accurate fluid measurement in low-gravity or low-thrust conditions. Engineers do this by measuring the electromagnetic spectrum, or radio waves, within a spacecraft’s tank throughout the mission, comparing them to fluid simulations to accurately gauge remaining fuel.
The RFMG has been proven in ground tests, sub-orbital parabolic flight, and on the International Space Station, and it will soon be tested on the Moon during an upcoming Commercial Lunar Payload Services flight with Intuitive Machines. Once demonstrated in the lunar environment, NASA will continue to develop and scale the technology to enable improved spacecraft and lander operations.
Cryocoolers
Cryocoolers act like heat exchangers for large propellant tanks to mitigate boiloff when combined with innovative tank insulation systems. With industry partners, like Creare, NASA has begun testing high-capacity cryocooler systems that pump the “working” fluid through a network of tubes installed on the tank to keep it cool. NASA plans to increase tank size and capabilities to meet mission requirements before conducting future flight demonstrations.
CryoFill
NASA is also developing a liquefaction system to turn gaseous oxygen into liquid oxygen on the surface of the Moon or Mars to refuel landers using propellant produced in situ. This approach uses various methods to cool oxygen down to critical temperature (at least minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit), where it condenses, turning from a gas to a liquid. Initial development and testing have proven NASA can do this efficiently, and the team continues to scale the technology to relevant tank sizes and quantities for future operations.
Ultimately, NASA efforts to develop and test CFM systems that are energy-, mass-, and cost-efficient are critical to the success of the agency’s ambitious missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
NASA Sets Coverage for Axiom Mission 3 Briefing, Events, Broadcast
The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft is pictured docked to the space-facing port on the International Space Station’s Harmony module.
NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX will provide coverage of the upcoming prelaunch and launch activities for the third private astronaut mission to the International Space Station.
Liftoff of Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) is scheduled for 5:11 p.m. EST Wednesday, Jan. 17, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew will travel to the orbiting outpost aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft after launching on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket.
Watch live coverage of prelaunch and launch activities, as well as docking operations on the NASA+ streaming service. Coverage also will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms, including social media.
NASA’s mission responsibility is for integrated operations, which begins during the spacecraft’s approach to the International Space Station, continues during the crew’s stay aboard the orbiting laboratory conducting science, education, and commercial activities, and concludes once Dragon exits the area of the space station.
The Ax-3 crew members are Commander Michael López-Alegría, Pilot Walter Villadei of Italy, Mission Specialist Alper Gezeravcı of Turkey, and ESA (European Space Agency) project astronaut Marcus Wandt of Sweden.
NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX joint coverage of the Ax-3 launch is as follows (all times Eastern):
Tuesday, Jan. 16
8 p.m. – Prelaunch News Conference (targeted for one hour following the Launch Readiness Review)
The prelaunch news conference will focus on final preparations for the Ax-3 mission. It will discuss the results of the Launch Readiness Review, which evaluates the mission hardware and its readiness for launch. NASA will provide a live stream of the audio at:
Dana Weigel, deputy manager, NASA’s International Space Station Program
Angela Hart, manager, NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program
Derek Hassmann, chief of mission integration and operations, Axiom Space
Benji Reed, senior director, Human Spaceflight Programs, SpaceX
Arlena Moses, launch weather officer, 45th Weather Squadron, U.S. Space Force
This briefing will be via teleconference. Media must register to participate in the call by 12 p.m., Monday, Jan. 15. For details and to RSVP, please contact: media@axiomspace.com.
Wednesday, Jan. 17
3:15 p.m. – Joint Axiom Space and SpaceX broadcast launch webcast begins 4:15 p.m. – NASA joins launch coverage
NASA will stream the Ax-3 launch on NASA+, NASA Television, and the agency’s website.
The broadcast will end following orbital insertion, which is approximately 15 minutes after launch. As it is a commercial launch, NASA will not provide a clean feed for this launch, neither on the NASA Media Channel nor on site at NASA Kennedy.
Friday, Jan. 19
3:15 a.m. – NASA docking coverage begins and airs through the conclusion of the welcome remarks
5:15 a.m. – Docking
7 a.m. – Hatch Opening
7:35 a.m. – Crew Welcome Remarks
For more information about NASA’s low Earth orbit commercialization activities, visit:
