NASA Sees Progress on Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef Life Support System

A NASA-funded commercial space station, Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef, recently completed testing milestones for its critical life support system as part of the agency’s efforts for new destinations in low Earth orbit.

The four milestones are part of a NASA Space Act Agreement originally awarded to Blue Origin in 2021 and focused on the materials and designs for systems to clean, reclaim, and store the air and water critical for human spaceflight.

NASA is working closely with commercial companies to develop new space stations capable of providing services to NASA and others, which will ensure that the U.S. maintains a continuous human presence in low Earth orbit and provides direct benefits for people on Earth.

“These milestones are critical to ensuring that a commercial destination can support human life so NASA astronauts can continue to have access to low Earth orbit to conduct important scientific research in the unique microgravity environment,” said Angela Hart, manager of NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program. “Additionally, each milestone that is completed allows NASA to gain insight into our partner’s progress on station design and development.”

Humans living and working in space do so in a closed environment that must be monitored and controlled. On the International Space Station, components for the environmental control and life support system maintain clean air and water for astronauts. The regenerative system recycles and reclaims most of the water and oxygen produced by normal human activities. This significantly reduces the amount of mass that would have to be launched to the orbiting laboratory for these functions.

Orbital Reef will have a similar system in place. All four milestones tested different parts of the system, including a trace contaminant control test, water contaminant oxidation test, urine water recovery test, and water tank test.

The trace contaminant control test screened materials to remove harmful impurities from the air. The water containment oxidation test, urine water recovery test, and water tank test all focused on potential cleaning, reclaiming, and storing technologies.

NASA is supporting the design and development of multiple commercial space stations, including Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef, through funded and unfunded agreements. The current design and development phase will be followed by the procurement of services from one or more companies, where NASA aims to be one of many customers for low Earth orbit destinations.

NASA’s commercial strategy for low Earth orbit will provide the government with reliable and safe services at a lower cost and enable the agency to focus on Artemis missions to the Moon in preparation for Mars, while also continuing to use low Earth orbit as a training and proving ground for those deep space missions.

For more information about NASA’s commercial space strategy, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/commercial-space/

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Carrie Gilder

NASA to Select Lunar Terrain Vehicle for Artemis Missions

NASA will host a news conference to announce the company, or companies, selected to move forward in developing the LTV (Lunar Terrain Vehicle), which will help Artemis astronauts explore more of the Moon’s surface on future missions. The televised event will take place at 4 p.m. EDT (3 p.m. CDT), Wednesday, April 3, at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The news conference will air live on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media.

Event participants will include:

• Vanessa Wyche, director, NASA Johnson
• Jacob Bleacher, chief exploration scientist, NASA Headquarters
• Lara Kearney, manager, Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility Program, NASA Johnson

International media interested in participating in person must request credentials by 6 p.m. Thursday, March 21. U.S. media interested in attending in person must request credentials by 6 p.m. Wednesday, March 27. All media interested in participating by phone must request details by 2 p.m., April 3. To participate, contact the NASA Johnson newsroom at 281-483-5111 or jsccommu@mail.nasa.gov. NASA’s media accreditation policy is online.

Through Artemis, NASA will land the first woman, first person of color, and its first international partner astronaut on the surface of the Moon to explore for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build the foundation for crewed missions to Mars.

Learn more about NASA’s Artemis campaign at:

https://www.nasa.gov/artemis

-end-

Kathryn Hambleton
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
kathryn.a.hambleton@nasa.gov

Victoria Ugalde / Nilufar Ramji
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
victoria.d.ugalde@nasa.gov / nilufar.ramji@nasa.gov

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Tiernan P. Doyle

NASA, Industry Improve Lidars for Exploration, Science

NASA engineers will test a suite of new laser technologies from an aircraft this summer for Earth science remote sensing. Called lidar, the instruments could also be used to improve models of the Moon’s shape and aid the search for Artemis landing sites.

Similar to sonar, but using light instead of sound, lidars calculate distances by timing how long a laser beam takes to reflect off a surface and return to an instrument. Multiple pings from the laser can provide the relative speed and even 3D image of a target. They increasingly help NASA scientists and explorers navigate, map, and collect scientific data.

Engineers and scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, continue to refine lidars into smaller, lighter, more versatile tools for science and exploration, with help from hardware provided by small business and academic partners.

“Existing 3D-imaging lidars struggle to provide the 2-inch resolution needed by guidance, navigation and control technologies to ensure precise and safe landings essential for future robotic and human exploration missions,” team engineer Jeffrey Chen said. “Such a system requires 3D hazard-detection lidar and a navigation doppler lidar, and no existing system can perform both functions.”

Enter CASALS, the Concurrent Artificially intelligent Spectrometry and Adaptive Lidar System. Developed through Goddard’s IRAD, Internal Research and Development program, CASALS shines a tunable laser through a prism-like grating to spread the beam based on its changing wavelengths. Traditional lidars pulse a fixed-wavelength laser which is split into multiple beams by bulky mirrors and lenses to split it into multiple beams. One CASALS instrument could cover more of a planet’s surface in each pass than lidars used for decades to measure Earth, the Moon, and Mars.

CASALS’s smaller size, weight, and lower power requirements enable small satellite applications as well as handheld or portable lidars for use on the Moon’s surface, Goddard engineer and CASALS development lead Guangning Yang said.

The CASALS team received funding from NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office to test their improvements by airplane in 2024, bringing their system closer to spaceflight readiness.

What Color is Your Lidar?

As lidars become more specialized, CASALS can incorporate different wavelengths, or colors of laser light for applications like Earth science, exploring other planets and objects in space, and navigation and rendezvous operations.

The CASALS Team used Goddard IRAD and NASA SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research Program) funding along with commercial partners Axsun Technologies and Freedom Photonics to develop new fast-tuning lasers in the 1-micron portion of the infrared spectrum for Earth science and planetary exploration. By comparison, commonly available lidars used for self-driving vehicle development typically use 1.5-micron lasers for range and speed calculations.

On Earth, wavelengths near 1 micron pass readily through the atmosphere and are good at differentiating vegetation from bare ground, said Ian Adams, Goddard’s chief technologist for Earth sciences. Wavelengths near 0.97 and 1.45 microns offer valuable information about water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere but do not travel as efficiently to the surface.

In a related project, the team partnered with Left Hand Design Corporation to develop a steering mirror to extend CASALS’s 3D-imaging coverage and improve resolution. He said the lidar’s higher pulse rate can build up signal sensitivity to provide range and velocity measurements at up to 60 miles.

Artemis-related missions seeking to land near the Moon’s South Pole could also use CASALS’s sharper imaging to help assess the safety of potential landing sites.

Bringing the Moon into Focus

More detailed 3D models of the Moon drove Goddard planetary scientist Erwan Mazarico’s IRAD effort to refine CASALS’s ability to measure surface details smaller than 3 feet. He said this will help understand the Moon’s sub-surface structures and changes over time.

Every month, Earth’s path across the lunar sky moves within 10 or 20 degrees of the center of the side facing Earth.

“We’ve predicted based on our understanding of its inner structure that Earth’s shifting pull could change the tidal bulge or shape of the Moon,” Mazarico said. “High-resolution measurements of that deformation could tell us more about potential variations within the Moon. Is it responding like a fully uniform body in the interior?”

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has measured Earth’s natural satellite since 2009, modeling the Moon’s terrain and providing a wealth of discoveries with the help of LOLA, its Lunar Orbiting Lidar Altimeter. LOLA fires 28 laser pulses per second, split into five beams touching the surface 65 feet to 100 feet apart. Scientists use LRO images to estimate smaller surface features between laser measurements.

CASALS’s laser, however, allows the equivalent of several hundred thousand pulses per second, reducing the distance between surface measurements.

“A denser and more accurate data set would allow us to study much smaller features,” Mazarico said, including those from impacts, volcanic activity, and tectonics. “We’re talking orders of magnitude more measurements. That could be quite a big game changer in terms of the type of data we get from lidar.”

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Sketch the Shape of the Sun for Science During the Solar Eclipse

Calling all eclipse admirers!

The SunSketcher team is looking for one million volunteers to capture photos on their cell phones during the April 8 total solar eclipse. These images will help scientists learn about the size, shape, and inner structure of the Sun.

This NASA-funded citizen science project invites anyone who will be within the path of totality in the U.S. to take photos of the Baily’s Beads effect, which occurs when little points of sunlight pass through the valleys in between the mountains on the edge of the Moon. It’s the last piece of the Sun seen before totality and the first to appear after totality. For a few seconds, these glimmers of light look like beads along the Moon’s edge.

The SunSketcher app will use smartphones to automatically take a sequence of images as Baily’s Beads appear. Volunteers will simply download a free app, activate it just before totality, set the phone down with the rear camera pointed at the Sun, and leave it alone. The app will use the phone’s GPS location to calculate when Baily’s Beads will be visible.

“All you need is a cell phone,” says Gordon Emslie, SunSketcher’s project lead and professor of physics and astronomy at Western Kentucky University. “How many science projects can you do with the equipment you already have in your pocket?”

Emslie says the cell phone images of Baily’s Beads will look fairly simple, but the tiny dots of light will provide crucial data about our star.

“It’s the precise timing of when these flashes appear and disappear that can tell you how big the Sun is and what shape it is,” Emslie says.

The SunSketcher team will merge the images collected from various viewpoints on the eclipse path to create an evolving pattern of beads. This pattern will be compared with 3D maps that show the exact locations and distances between lunar craters, mountains, and valleys on the surface of the Moon from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The combined measurements will allow researchers to calculate the precise size and shape of the Sun based on the timing of the images captured over 90 minutes of eclipse observations.

“The fascinating thing about this is you can really only do this by having observers stretched over the whole eclipse path,” Emslie explains. “No one observer can monitor an eclipse for more than about four or five minutes.”

The Sun is round but not a perfect sphere. It bulges out slightly along the equator with a diameter of about 865,000 miles. Scientists suspect the shape of the Sun changes slightly as it goes through 11-year cycles of fluctuating solar activity. The Sun is a rotating ball of gas and plasma with complicated internal flows of material, energy, and magnetic fields beneath the surface that vary over that cycle and impact its overall shape.

“All of these flows connect to the surface somehow, and so the shape of the surface is determined by the details of the flows,” Emslie says. “If we can understand the subsurface flows, we can better understand the Sun’s internal structure.”

The Sun’s shape also determines its gravitational field, which affects the motions of the planets, so measuring the Sun’s precise shape will help scientists test theories of gravity.

Participants in the SunSketcher project can be located anywhere in the eclipse’s path of totality in the U.S., which stretches from Texas to Maine, on April 8. Emslie says the more people involved, the more worthwhile the project will be. “Literally, we’re looking for a million people to play.”

For more info on SunSketcher, visit: https://sunsketcher.org/

How to Become a SunSketcher and Be a Part of History 

Before the Eclipse

• Download the free app from your phone’s app store (available now on iOS and coming soon on Android).
• Initiate the app around five minutes before totality. No internet connection is required.
• If possible, turn on “Do Not Disturb” in your phone’s settings to prevent vibrations that could disturb the image sequence.
• Prop the phone against a steady surface (such as a rock, book, phone stand, or tripod) with the rear (back-facing) camera pointed at the Sun.
• Let it be! The app will automatically take images of Baily’s Beads at the correct times.
• Enjoy the eclipse! Remember to use specialized eye protection for solar viewing except during the brief total phase of a total solar eclipse, when the Moon completely blocks the Sun.

After the Eclipse

• The app will show a directory of images taken and will request user permission to share them. Only time and location data will be recorded with the images. No personally identifiable or private information will be collected.

• Once an internet connection is established, the images will be automatically uploaded to a central server and a screen will appear with a thank-you message.

By Rose Brunning
Communications Lead, NASA Heliophysics Digital Resource Library (HDRL)

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