NASA Administrator Names New Head of Small Business Programs

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced Monday Dwight Deneal will serve as the new assistant administrator for the Office of Small Business Programs (OSBP) at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, effective immediately.

In this role, Deneal provides executive leadership, policy direction, and management for programs that help ensure all small businesses are given a fair chance to work with NASA. He succeeds Glenn Delgado, who retired from the agency in December 2023.

“Dwight brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to NASA’s Office of Small Business Programs,” said Nelson. “Small businesses play a critical role in propelling our country forward with new technologies and scientific discoveries to maintain American leadership in space and benefit all humanity. I am confident his leadership will help NASA continue to promote and integrate America’s small businesses into every aspect of our missions.”

Prior to his NASA appointment, Deneal served as the director for the Defense Logistics Agency’s Office of Small Business Programs, supervising all small business programs and contracting activities that equated to more than $45 billion of annual contract spending and $18 billion in small business spending. He also was responsible for maintaining strategic partnerships that attract small businesses into the defense supply chain, helping grow the national defense industrial base.

Deneal also previously served as the director for the Small Business and Industry Liaison Programs at the U.S. Coast Guard, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. In this capacity, he led all small business and socio-economic related guidelines, policies, regulations and was the authority for planning and carrying out acquisition activities in support of small business programs. From 2013 to 2017, Deneal served as a team lead small business specialist at the Department of Health and Human Services. His experience also includes supporting the Department of Education and U.S Department of Navy as a contract specialist.

In addition to his NASA role, Deneal also serves as the vice chairman of the Federal Interagency Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization Directors Council. This organization of federal small business program officials that meets regularly to exchange and discuss information on small business methods, issues, and strategies.

A native of Columbia, South Carolina, Deneal graduated from Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia, where he earned a bachelor’s in Business Management. He also is a graduate of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government Executive Education program. Deneal was the recipient of the 2018 U.S. Department of Homeland Security Chief Procurement Officer Excellence in Industry Engagement Award. He is married and has two children.

Learn more about NASA’s Office of Small Business Programs at:

https://www.nasa.gov/osbp

-end-

Faith McKie / Abbey Donaldson
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
faith.d.mckie@nasa.gov / abbey.a.donaldson@nasa.gov

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Abbey A. Donaldson

Meet NASA’s Twin Spacecraft Headed to the Ends of the Earth

Launching in spring 2024, the two small satellites of the agency’s PREFIRE mission will fill in missing data from Earth’s polar regions.

Two new miniature NASA satellites will start crisscrossing Earth’s atmosphere in a few months, detecting heat lost to space. Their observations from the planet’s most bone-chilling regions will help predict how our ice, seas, and weather will change in the face of global warming.

About the size of a shoebox, the cube satellites, or CubeSats, comprise a mission called PREFIRE, short for Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment. Equipped with technology proven at Mars, their objective is to reveal the full spectrum of heat loss from Earth’s polar regions for the first time, making climate models more accurate.

PREFIRE has been jointly developed by NASA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with team members from the universities of Michigan and Colorado.

The mission starts with Earth’s energy budget. In a planetary balancing act, the amount of heat energy the planet receives from the Sun should ideally be offset by the amount it radiates out of the Earth system into space. The difference between incoming and outgoing energy determines Earth’s temperature and shapes our climate.

Polar regions play a key role in the process, acting like Earth’s radiator fins. The stirring of air and water, through weather and ocean currents, moves heat energy received in the tropics toward the poles, where it is emitted as thermal infrared radiation – the same type of energy you feel from a heat lamp. Some 60% of that energy flows out to space in far-infrared wavelengths that have never been systematically measured.

PREFIRE can close that gap. “We have the potential to discover some fundamental things about how our planet works,” said Brian Drouin, scientist and deputy principal investigator for the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

“In climate projections, a lot of the uncertainty comes in from what we don’t know about the North and South poles and how efficiently radiation is emitted into space,” he said. “The importance of that radiation wasn’t realized for much of the Space Age, but we know now and are aiming to measure it.”

Launching from New Zealand two weeks apart in May, each satellite will carry a thermal infrared spectrometer. The JPL-designed instruments include specially shaped mirrors and detectors for splitting and measuring infrared light. Similar technology is used by the Mars Climate Sounder on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to explore the Red Planet’s atmosphere and weather.

Miniaturizing the instruments to fit on CubeSats was a challenge for the PREFIRE engineering team. They developed a scaled-down design optimized for the comparatively warm conditions of our own planet. Weighing less than 6 pounds (3 kilograms), the instruments make readings using a device called a thermocouple, similar to the sensors found in many household thermostats.

Ground Zero for Climate Change

To maximize coverage, the PREFIRE twins will orbit Earth along different paths, overlapping every few hours near the poles.

Since the 1970s, the Arctic has warmed at least three times faster than anywhere else on Earth. Winter sea ice there has shrunk by more than 15,900 square miles (41,200 square kilometers) per year, a loss of 2.6% per decade relative to the 1981-2010 average. A change is occurring on the opposite side of the planet, too: Antarctica’s ice sheets are losing mass at an average rate of about 150 billion tons per year.

The implications of these changes are far reaching. Fluctuations in sea ice shape polar ecosystems and influence the temperature as well as circulation of the ocean. Meltwater from mile-thick ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica is responsible for about one-third of the rise in global mean sea level since 1993.

“If you change the polar regions, you also fundamentally change the weather around the world,” said Tristan L’Ecuyer, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the mission’s principal investigator. “Extreme storms, flooding, coastal erosion – all of these things are influenced by what’s going on in the Arctic and Antarctic.”

To understand and project such changes, scientists use climate models that take into account many physical processes. Running the models multiple times (each time under slightly different conditions and assumptions) results in an ensemble of climate projections. Assumptions about uncertain parameters, such as how efficiently the poles emit thermal radiation, can significantly impact the projections.

PREFIRE will supply new data on a range of climate variables, including atmospheric temperature, surface properties, water vapor, and clouds. Ultimately, more information will yield a more accurate vision of a world in flux, said L’Ecuyer.

“As our climate models converge, we’ll start to really understand what the future’s going to look like in the Arctic and Antarctic,” he added.

News Media Contacts

Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874

Written by Sally Younger

2024-014

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Sense the Solar Eclipse with NASA’s Eclipse Soundscapes Project

When darkness sweeps across the landscape during a total solar eclipse, unusual things start happening. Fooled by the false dusk, birds stop singing, crickets start chirping, and bees return to their hives.

Reports of these atypical animal behaviors date back centuries, but the effects of an eclipse on plant and animal life are not fully understood. So, on April 8, 2024, the NASA-funded Eclipse Soundscapes Project will collect the sights and sounds of a total solar eclipse with help from interested members of the public to better understand how an eclipse affects different ecosystems.

“Eclipses are often thought of as a visual event – something that you see,” said Kelsey Perrett, Communications Coordinator with the Eclipse Soundscapes Project. “We want to show that eclipses can be studied in a multi-sensory manner, through sound and feeling and other forms of observation.”

A total solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes directly in front of the Sun, blocking its light from reaching parts of the planet. In areas where the Sun’s light is completely blocked – known as the path of totality – it looks as if dusk has fallen, temperatures drop, and some stars become visible. These changes can trick animals into altering their usual daytime behaviors. A total solar eclipse will pass over the heads of over 30 million people in North America on April 8, 2024, providing the perfect opportunity for a large-scale citizen science project.

The Eclipse Soundscapes Project aims to replicate a similar study conducted by American scientist William M. Wheeler following a 1932 total solar eclipse that passed over the northeast reaches of Canada and the United States. The near-century-old study captured almost 500 observations from the public.

The Eclipse Soundscapes Project hopes modern tools will replicate and expand upon that study to better understand animal and insect behavior. This will be achieved through multisensory observations, such as audio recordings and written accounts of what is seen, heard, or felt during the eclipse. The project, which is particularly interested in learning about cricket behavior, aims to answer questions like do nocturnal and diurnal animals act differently or become more or less vocal during a solar eclipse?

“The more audio data and observations we have, the better we can answer these questions,” Perrett said. “Contributions from participatory scientists will allow us to drill down into specific ecosystems and determine how the eclipse may have impacted each of them.”

The Eclipse Soundscape project invites people to become involved with the study at all levels – from learning about eclipses online, to collecting multisensory observations and audio data, to analyzing the data – and in all locations, whether they’re on the path of totality or not. The project is open to people of all backgrounds and abilities. All project roles have been designed with accessibility in mind to invite people who are blind or have low vision to participate alongside their sighted peers. 

People on or near the path of totality can participate as “Data Collectors” by using an AudioMoth device, a low-cost audio recording device called equipped with a micro-SD card, to capture the sounds of an eclipse. People can also participate as “Observers” by writing down their multisensory observations and submitting them to the project website after the eclipse. Anyone with an internet connection, can participate as an “Apprentice” by learning about eclipses or as a “Data Analyst” to help analyze the audio data after the eclipse. After completing an Eclipse Soundscapes role, a downloadable certificate will be available.

“When it comes down to it, answering our science questions about how eclipses impact life on Earth depends entirely on the data that people volunteer to contribute,” Perrett said. “Our participants, including our project partners and facilitators, allow us to span the entire eclipse path and collect way more data than would be possible for just one small team.”

To learn more about the project and how to become involved, visit: https://eclipsesoundscapes.org/

By Mara Johnson-Groh

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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Do NASA Science LIVE on February 21! What’s it mean to be cool?

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