New Video Highlights Accessibility and Inclusion at NASA  

NASA’s mission to explore the secrets of the universe for the benefit of all is made possible through the contributions of its diverse workforce, including employees with disabilities. To promote accessibility and inclusion, NASA’s Mission Support Directorate (MSD) released a video in October 2023 for National Disability Employment Awareness Month. MSD fuels NASA’s Mission Support community, which provides the essential services for NASA’s missions and centers to accomplish their work.  

Bob Gibbs, the associate administrator of MSD, says the video underscores the importance of accessibility and inclusion at NASA. “People are our special sauce at NASA, and they must have the opportunity to bring who they truly are to work,” says Gibbs. “Inclusion and belonging foster innovation and groundbreaking ideas, and that leads to even greater success.”  

Titled Explorers, Adventurers, and Innovators with a Disability at NASA, the video features four NASA employees who share their perspectives on accessibility and inclusion at NASA. Featured employees include Gibbs; Theodore (Ted) Gutman, deputy associate administrator for the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity; Dana Bolles, the NASA responsible official for Science.NASA.gov in the Science Mission Directorate; and Jimmy Acevedo, an education outreach specialist in Exploration and Space Communications.  

The video also shares resources for employees and supervisors to learn about the disability community at NASA, how to access information and resources about disability in the workplace, and how to support accessibility and inclusion at NASA. Accessibility focuses on creating an organization in which all people, including people with disabilities, can fully and independently participate. As one of NASA’s core values, inclusion creates an environment where all employees feel welcome, respected, and engaged. 

National Disability Employment Awareness Month is an effort to educate the public about the issues related to disability and employment. According to the Library of Congress, it began in 1945 when Congress enacted Public Law 176, declaring the first week of October each year as National Employ the Physically Handicapped Week. In 1962, the word “physically” was removed to acknowledge the employment needs and contributions of individuals with all types of disabilities. Some 25 years later, Congress expanded the week to a month and changed the name to National Disability Employment Awareness Month. 

Visit the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity to learn about NASA’s Resources for Individuals with Disabilities. 

Discover How You Can Champion Accessibility and Inclusion

For a deeper understanding of disability in the workplace, the talented disability community at NASA, and to discover how you can champion accessibility and inclusion, explore:   

https://www.nasa.gov/careers/individuals-with-disabilities  

https://www.eeoc.gov

https://askjan.org

https://www.whatcanyoudocampaign.org/

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NASA’s Webb Makes First Detection of Heavy Element From Star Merger

Webb’s study of the second-brightest gamma-ray burst ever seen reveals tellurium.

A team of scientists has used multiple space and ground-based telescopes, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, and NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, to observe an exceptionally bright gamma-ray burst, GRB 230307A, and identify the neutron star merger that generated an explosion that created the burst. Webb also helped scientists detect the chemical element tellurium in the explosion’s aftermath.

Image: Gamma-Ray Burst 230307A

Other elements near tellurium on the periodic table – like iodine, which is needed for much of life on Earth – are also likely to be present among the kilonova’s ejected material. A kilonova is an explosion produced by a neutron star merging with either a black hole or with another neutron star.

“Just over 150 years since Dmitri Mendeleev wrote down the periodic table of elements, we are now finally in the position to start filling in those last blanks of understanding where everything was made, thanks to Webb,” said Andrew Levan of Radboud University in the Netherlands and the University of Warwick in the UK, lead author of the study.

While neutron star mergers have long been theorized as being the ideal “pressure cookers” to create some of the rarer elements substantially heavier than iron, astronomers have previously encountered a few obstacles in obtaining solid evidence.

Long Gamma-Ray Burst

Kilonovae are extremely rare, making it difficult to observe these events. Short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), traditionally thought to be those that last less than two seconds, can be byproducts of these infrequent merger episodes. (In contrast, long gamma-ray bursts may last several minutes and are usually associated with the explosive death of a massive star.)

The case of GRB 230307A is particularly remarkable. First detected by Fermi in March, it is the second brightest GRB observed in over 50 years of observations, about 1,000 times brighter than a typical gamma-ray burst that Fermi observes. It also lasted for 200 seconds, placing it firmly in the category of long duration gamma-ray bursts, despite its different origin.

“This burst is way into the long category. It’s not near the border. But it seems to be coming from a merging neutron star,” added Eric Burns, a co-author of the paper and member of the Fermi team at Louisiana State University.

Opportunity: Telescope Collaboration

The collaboration of many telescopes on the ground and in space allowed scientists to piece together a wealth of information about this event as soon as the burst was first detected. It is an example of how satellites and telescopes work together to witness changes in the universe as they unfold. 

After the first detection, an intensive series of observations from the ground and from space, including with Swift, swung into action to pinpoint the source on the sky and track how its brightness changed. These observations in the gamma-ray, X-ray, optical, infrared, and radio showed that the optical/infrared counterpart was faint, evolved quickly, and became very red – the hallmarks of a kilonova.

“This type of explosion is very rapid, with the material in the explosion also expanding swiftly,” said Om Sharan Salafia, a co-author of the study at the INAF – Brera Astronomical Observatory in Italy. “As the whole cloud expands, the material cools off quickly and the peak of its light becomes visible in infrared, and becomes redder on timescales of days to weeks.”

Image: Killanova – Webb vs Model

At later times it would have been impossible to study this kilonova from the ground, but these were the perfect conditions for Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) and NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instruments to observe this tumultuous environment. The spectrum has broad lines that show the material is ejected at high speeds, but one feature is clear: light emitted by tellurium, an element rarer than platinum on Earth.

The highly sensitive infrared capabilities of Webb helped scientists identify the home address of the two neutron stars that created the kilonova: a spiral galaxy about 120,000 light-years away from the site of the merger.

Prior to their venture, they were once two normal massive stars that formed a binary system in their home spiral galaxy. Since the duo was gravitationally bound, both stars were launched together on two separate occasions: when one among the pair exploded as a supernova and became a neutron star, and when the other star followed suit.

In this case, the neutron stars remained as a binary system despite two explosive jolts and were kicked out of their home galaxy. The pair traveled approximately the equivalent of the Milky Way galaxy’s diameter before merging several hundred million years later.

Scientists expect to find even more kilonovae in the future due to the increasing opportunities to have space and ground-based telescopes work in complementary ways to study changes in the universe. For example, while Webb can peer deeper into space than ever before, the remarkable field of view of NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will enable astronomers to scout where and how frequently these explosions occur.

“Webb provides a phenomenal boost and may find even heavier elements,” said Ben Gompertz, a co-author of the study at the University of Birmingham in the UK. “As we get more frequent observations, the models will improve and the spectrum may evolve more in time. Webb has certainly opened the door to do a lot more, and its abilities will be completely transformative for our understanding of the universe.”

These findings have been published in the journal Nature.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.

Media Contacts

Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Hannah Braun – hbraun@stsci.edu , Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edi
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.

Downloads

Download full resolution images for this article from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Research results published in the journal Nature.

Related Information

Neutron Stars – https://universe.nasa.gov/stars/types/#otp_neutron_stars

Universe/Stars Basics – https://universe.nasa.gov/stars/basics/

Universe Basics – https://universe.nasa.gov/universe/basics/

More Webb News – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/latestnews/

More Webb Images – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/multimedia/images/

Webb Mission Page – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/

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NASA Retires UHF SmallSat Tracking Site Ops at Wallops

On Sept. 30, 2023, NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility marked the formal conclusion of the Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) Small Satellite (SmallSat) Tracking Operations in Wallops Island, Virginia, placing its workhorse, 60-plus-year-old, 18-meter antenna system in low-level maintenance status.

“Since 2011, the Wallops tracking site has tracked more than 25 spacecraft over 16,912 passes,” said Doug Voss, deputy chief of the Range and Mission Management Office at Wallops. “It has been an honor to operate this unique tracking capability in support of the Small Satellite Science community.”

Stepping back more than 60 years to 1959, MIT-Lincoln Labs built the dual-band UHF/X-Band antenna system, which included the repurposing of a Twin 5-inch, 38 MK 32 gun mount used extensively by the U.S. Navy in World War II. The mount enabled a precision pointing capability for the UHF antenna. The UHF and X-band antenna system was used for hypersonic missile re-entry plasma physics experiments up to 1965, and then various NASA atmospheric research programs.

In 2011, an agreement was established between NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to dedicate the system to UHF SmallSat tracking. SmallSats, which are small spacecraft with a mass less than 180 kilograms or the size of a large kitchen refrigerator, are typically placed in a low-Earth orbit of about 160-320 kilometers above the Earth. The antenna system supported command and high data-rate downlink of these SmallSats, and nanosatellites called CubeSats, for the next decade plus. According to Voss, compared to most other UHF SmallSat communications systems, the Wallops system provided significantly higher data rates. Its precision pointing ability was critical to helping customers find “lost SmallSats.”  

With the increase of SmallSat missions from 2018 to 2020, the system was upgraded to provide end-to-end connectivity and increased automation. However, with more than a dozen spacecraft being supported and heavy pass schedules, the aging hardware was heavily taxed. As a result, in 2021, significant maintenance issues and obsolete parts created a need to reduce the pass schedule to decrease risk. At the same time, as the need for greater data rates continued to increase, SmallSat/CubeSat markets started to shift away from UHF to other higher frequency bands.

“UHF SmallSat tracking operations ended because the customer base has decreased over the years, which has prompted a steady reduction in tracking services. It is anticipated that no new UHF customers are on the horizon,” said Rachel Albertson, project manager for the UHF SmallSat tracking site at Wallops.

While the system formally concluded SmallSat tracking operations, future plans include support of special ionospheric radar experiments as a part of an initiative to establish a significantly increased Wallops Geophysical Observatory capability supporting mid-latitude heliophysics research. The system may be called on to support special emergent SmallSat needs. 

For more information, visit nasa.gov/wallops.

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Record Number of Sea Turtles Hatch at NASA Spaceport

Humans aren’t the only living creatures using NASA’s Kennedy Space Center as their launchpad to the future. This year, a record number of sea turtle hatchlings got their start in nests built on the undisturbed beaches of the Florida spaceport.

Biologists counted 13,935 sea turtle nests along Kennedy’s shoreline during the 2023 nesting season, 639 more nests than 2022 and the most found on center in a single year since record-keeping began in 1984. All of those sea turtle nests belong to species identified by the U.S. National Park Service as endangered or threatened, including the green (Chelonia mydas) and loggerhead (Caretta caretta).

“All our effort to protect Kennedy’s habitat is bearing fruit,” said NASA Environmental Protection Specialist Jeff Collins. “Kennedy’s use of turtle-friendly lighting and having a properly maintained dune helps to keep our beach dark and that really makes a difference to sea turtle nesting success.”

NASA partners to preserve the turtles and other fauna and flora at the spaceport with the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and Canaveral National Seashore, which share a boundary with Kennedy. Working together, biologists found more than 8,800 nests at Kennedy this year were made by greens, with loggerheads creating almost 5,100.

“Kennedy’s sea turtle nests usually make up around 10% of the number Florida Fish and Wildlife reports in any given year,” said United States Fish and Wildlife Service Biologist Michael Legare. “Brevard, the Florida county where Kennedy is located, is particularly important to the future of loggerheads. That county and five others nearby – Indian River, St. Lucie, Martin, Palm Beach, and Broward – usually report around 80% of all loggerhead nests yearly in the Sunshine State.”

Florida normally sees between 40,000 to 84,000 sea turtle nests built annually, according to state Fish and Wildlife data.

From the beginning of March through the end of October, the sand on Kennedy’s beaches is marked with the tracks of adult sea turtles as they emerge from the sea and make their way to where they lay their eggs. If all goes well, much smaller sand tracks follow months later when the hatchlings leave their nests and head to the sea, assuming they have the proper guidance to get there.

“Giving the sea turtles, especially the hatchlings, nothing but the moon and stars to shine their path to the ocean is one big way humans can help them,” Collins said. “Any other light can disorient them enough to where they’ll never find the ocean, making them easy prey while leading them away from the food and water they need to survive.”

That is why closing window blinds or removing artificial beach lights are also important for shoreline buildings. “If the lights have to stay, then it’s essential that the bulbs be dimmed or replaced with amber or low wave-length lighting. Such simple things can make the difference between life and death for the turtles,” Legare said.

This year’s count includes 26 leatherback (Dermochelys coriacea) nests and one Kemp’s ridley (Lepidochelys kempii) nest, one of the world’s most endangered sea turtle species. There were no hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata) nests discovered this season at Kennedy. Like the Kemp’s ridley, the endangered hawksbill has been documented at Kennedy in the past, but both species are a rare sight on the spaceport’s beaches.

The leatherback, the largest of the sea turtle species that regularly nests at Kennedy, is normally among the first to lay their eggs in March. If any Kemp’s ridley or hawksbills come on shore to build their nests, that usually starts a month or so after the leatherbacks. Greens and loggerheads, the more common sea turtle species at Kennedy, often start nesting in late spring and continue through the summer months into fall.

The number of eggs in each nest and how many of them hatch successfully aren’t tracked by state biologists, but on average, greens lay around 110 per nest, with loggerheads (100) and leatherbacks (80) close behind. Hawksbills lay around 160 eggs per nest on average, while Kemp’s ridley average around 100 per nest.

It generally takes around two months for the sea turtle babies to emerge from their nest once the eggs are inside, but that can vary depending on the species. Sand temperature also plays a big role in determining the sex of the new turtles. Cooler temperatures produce more males and warmer temperatures bring more females.

Florida Fish and Wildlife data shows about one of every 1,000 baby turtles makes it to adulthood.

“The continued success of sea turtle nests at Kennedy shows that it is possible to explore space while maintaining the ecosystem,” Collins said. “As the spaceport’s launch cadence grows, we will continue our efforts to preserve that balance into the future.”

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Messod C. Bendayan