NASA Astronauts, Leadership Visit Children’s Hospital, Cancer Moonshot Event

NASA astronauts, scientists, and researchers, and leadership from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) met with cancer patients and gathered in a discussion about potential research opportunities and collaborations as part of President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative on Oct. 4.

Roundtable discussions centered conversation around the five hazards of human spaceflight: space radiation, isolation and confinement, distance from Earth, gravity, and closed or hostile environments. Many of these hazards have direct correlations to a cancer patient’s lived experience, like the isolation of a hospital room and long-term effects of radiation.

During the visit with patients at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, NASA astronaut Yvonne Cagle and former astronaut Kenneth Cockrell answered questions about spaceflight and life in space.

Patients also received a video message from NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore from the International Space Station, and met with Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Eugene Tu, director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, and other agency leaders.

By connecting the dots between human space research and cancer research, NASA and the University of California hope to open doors to innovative new research opportunities. NASA is working with researchers, institutions, and agencies across the federal government to help cut the nation’s cancer death rate by at least 50% in the next 25 years, a goal of the Cancer Moonshot Initiative.

Learn more about the Cancer Moonshot at:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/cancermoonshot

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Tara Friesen

Project Engineer Miranda Peters Flips the Script on Neurological Differences

In her six years working with NASA, Miranda Peters has filled a variety of roles. She trained in flight control for the International Space Station, worked as a safety engineer in the station’s program office, and served as a project engineer working on next-generation spacesuit assembly and testing.

She has also embraced an unofficial duty: speaking openly and honestly about her neurodivergence.

“I used to hide it or avoid talking about it. I used to only see it as an impediment, but now I see how I can also do things or think about things in a unique way because of my disability,” she said. Peters said that when her neurodivergence impacts her ability to do something, she is honest about it and seeks help from her colleagues. “My hope is that when I talk about it openly, I am creating an environment where others with disabilities also feel comfortable being their true selves, in addition to humanizing the disabled community for those who are not a part of it.”

Over time, Peters has also shifted her self-perception. “I’m an anxious person and was made to feel self-conscious about that in the past, but that anxiety also makes me transparent about what I’m doing and where the gaps in my knowledge are, which has earned praise from team leadership,” she said. Similarly, while Peters once saw her sensitivity as a weakness, she learned to appreciate her ability to empathize with and anticipate the needs of others. “That makes me a good mentor and leader,” she said.

Learning to filter feedback has been another important lesson. “Advice and criticism are both useful tools, but not all of the time,” she explained. “I found myself tightly holding on to all of the criticism I received. It was easier to determine which advice didn’t work for me.” When Peters stopped to ask herself if she would take advice from the same person who was critiquing her, it became easier to take their feedback “with a pinch of salt.”

Peters applies these lessons learned as a design verification and test hardware lead within the Spacesuit and Crew Survival Systems Branch at Johnson Space Center in Houston. She currently supports tests of the Portable Life Support System (xPLSS) that will be integrated into the new spacesuits worn by astronauts on future missions to explore the lunar surface. She is responsible for assembling and disassembling test units, making hardware and software updates, and integrating the xPLSS with various components of the spacesuit, known as the xEMU.   

Peters’ most recent prior position was assembly and integration engineer within the same branch. She had an opportunity to serve as the interim xPLSS hardware lead when a colleague went on leave for several months, and suddenly found herself managing a major project. “We got a lot done in a short amount of time without loss of procedural integrity, even when we encountered unexpected changes in schedule,” she said. “I also used this large amount of lab work as an opportunity to train new hires and interns in assembly processes.” When the colleague returned, Peters was promoted to the newly created  role overseeing design verification and testing.

“I really love how universal spacesuits are in their ability to excite and draw wonder from across the human spaceflight community and the general public,” she said. “Working on the xEMU project has affirmed for me that human surface mobility is the field that I want to make my career.” That realization inspired Peters to pursue a graduate degree in space architecture from the University of Houston, which she expects to complete in May 2026.

Peters looks forward to a future where NASA’s astronaut classes include individuals with different abilities. She encourages agency leaders, contractors, and others to have open conversations about workplace accommodations early in their hiring and performance review processes. “I think if we provide the opportunity to talk about accommodations and how to request them, employees would be more empowered to ask for what they need to be successful,” she said. Educating managers about available accommodations and allocating resources to expand the accessibility of those accommodations would also be helpful.

Peters hopes to pass that feeling of empowerment on to the Artemis Generation. “Empowerment to be themselves, to do the hard things, and to not limit themselves,” she said. “We need to take advantage of all the opportunities we can, and not let the fear of failure or not being ‘good enough’ stop us from going where we want to.”

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Linda E. Grimm

420 Years Ago: Astronomer Johannes Kepler Observes a Supernova

In October 1604, a new star appeared in the sky, puzzling astronomers of the day. First observed on Oct. 9, German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) began his observations on Oct. 17 and tracked the new star for over a year. During that time, it brightened to magnitude -2.5, outshining Jupiter, and for several weeks remained visible in the daytime. Publication of his detailed observations in 1606 led astronomers to call the star Kepler’s Supernova, today formally designated as supernova SN 1604. Astronomers of the day did not know what caused the star’s sudden appearance and eventual disappearance, but the phenomenon helped shape European cosmology toward the heliocentric model proposed by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus half a century earlier. Today, astronomers designate SN 1604 as a Type Ia supernova, resulting from the explosion of a white dwarf star, and use ground-based and space-based telescopes to study its remnants.

Left: Portrait of Johannes Kepler by August Köhler. Middle: Kepler’s book about his observations of the 1604 supernova open to the page depicting the location of the new star. Right: Closeup of Kepler’s illustration of the location of the new star, designated N, in the constellation Ophiuchus near the right foot of the serpent-bearer.

Italian astronomer Lodovico delle Colombo first observed the supernova in the constellation Ophiuchus on Oct. 9. Kepler, then working in Prague, heard rumors of the new star but did not observe it until Oct. 17. He continued to monitor the star for over a year, inspired by the earlier work of Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe’s observations of a similar phenomenon, the 1572 supernova. The new star quickly brightened to magnitude -2.5, outshining Jupiter, and for three weeks could be seen in the daytime before finally fading into obscurity in March 1606. Kepler could only make naked eye observations, since Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei didn’t turn his newly invented telescope to the skies for another four years after SN 1604 faded from view.

Later in 1606, Kepler summarized his observations in his book De Stella nova in pede Serpentarii (On the New Star in Ophiuchus’ Foot), published in Prague. SN 1604 is believed to be about 20,000 light years away, near the edge of a dark nebula complex. Kepler and his contemporaries observed not only the last known supernova to occur in the Milky Way Galaxy but also the last supernova visible to the naked eye until 1987. That one, Supernova 1987A, appeared in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

A Type Ia supernova results from a white dwarf drawing in material from a nearby red giant star, the additional mass leading to a runaway thermonuclear explosion.

Astronomers today understand that what Kepler and others believed as the birth of a new star actually represented the violent death of a star. Astronomers today classify supernovas according to their characteristics, and SN 1604 belongs to the group known as Type Ia supernovas, typically found in binary star systems composed of a white dwarf and a red giant. The gravitation force of the white dwarf draws in material from its larger less dense companion until it reaches a critical mass, around 1.4 times the mass of our Sun. At that point, a runaway thermonuclear chain reaction begins, causing a release of tremendous amounts of energy, including light, that we see as a sudden brightening of an otherwise dim star.

Images of Kepler’s supernova remnants in different portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Left: X-ray image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Middle: Visible image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Right: Infrared image from the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Supernova explosions leave remnants behind and those of SN 1604 remain visible today. Ground-based and space-based instruments using different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum study these remnants to gain a better understanding of their origins. The remnants of SN 1604 emit energy most strongly in the radio and X-ray parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. In recent years, astronomers have used Type Ia supernovas to determine the rate of expansion of the universe. Because Type Ia supernovas all occur in stars of about 1.4 solar masses, they give out about the same amount of light. This makes them useful as distance indicators – if one Type Ia supernova is dimmer than another one, it is further away by an amount that astronomers can calculate. Based on this information, astronomers believe that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, possibly caused by the presence of a mysterious substance called dark energy.

Events in world history in 1604:

January 1 – First performance of William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.

March 22 – Karl IX begins his rule as King of Sweden.

August 5 – Sokolluzade Mehmed Pasha becomes the new Ottoman Grand Vizier in Constantinople.

August 18 – England and Spain sign the Treaty of London, ending their 20-year war.

September 1 – Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Sikhism’s religious text, is installed at Hamandir Sahib in Amritsar, India.

October 4 – Emperor of Ethiopia Za Dengel is killed in battle with the forces of Za Sellase, who restores his cousin Yaqob to the throne.

November 1 – First performance of William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello.

December 29 – A magnitude 8.1 earthquake shakes the Taiwan Strait causing significant damage.

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NASA’s Hubble, New Horizons Team Up for a Simultaneous Look at Uranus

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons spacecraft simultaneously set their sights on Uranus recently, allowing scientists to make a direct comparison of the planet from two very different viewpoints. The results inform future plans to study like types of planets around other stars.

Astronomers used Uranus as a proxy for similar planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, comparing high-resolution images from Hubble to the more-distant view from New Horizons. This combined perspective will help scientists learn more about what to expect while imaging planets around other stars with future telescopes.

“While we expected Uranus to appear differently in each filter of the observations, we found that Uranus was actually dimmer than predicted in the New Horizons data taken from a different viewpoint,” said lead author Samantha Hasler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and New Horizons science team collaborator.

Direct imaging of exoplanets is a key technique for learning about their potential habitability, and offers new clues to the origin and formation of our own solar system. Astronomers use both direct imaging and spectroscopy to collect light from the observed planet and compare its brightness at different wavelengths. However, imaging exoplanets is a notoriously difficult process because they’re so far away. Their images are mere pinpoints and so are not as detailed as the close-up views that we have of worlds orbiting our Sun. Researchers can also only directly image exoplanets at “partial phases,” when only a portion of the planet is illuminated by their star as seen from Earth.

Uranus was an ideal target as a test for understanding future distant observations of exoplanets by other telescopes for a few reasons. First, many known exoplanets are also gas giants similar in nature. Also, at the time of the observations, New Horizons was on the far side of Uranus, 6.5 billion miles away, allowing its twilight crescent to be studied—something that cannot be done from Earth. At that distance, the New Horizons view of the planet was just several pixels in its color camera, called the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera.

On the other hand, Hubble, with its high resolution, and in its low-Earth orbit 1.7 billion miles away from Uranus, was able to see atmospheric features such as clouds and storms on the day side of the gaseous world.

“Uranus appears as just a small dot on the New Horizons observations, similar to the dots seen of directly-imaged exoplanets from observatories like Webb or ground-based observatories,” added Hasler. “Hubble provides context for what the atmosphere is doing when it was observed with New Horizons.”

The gas giant planets in our solar system have dynamic and variable atmospheres with changing cloud cover. How common is this among exoplanets? By knowing the details of what the clouds on Uranus looked like from Hubble, researchers are able to verify what is interpreted from the New Horizons data. In the case of Uranus, both Hubble and New Horizons saw that the brightness did not vary as the planet rotated, which indicates that the cloud features were not changing with the planet’s rotation.

However, the importance of the detection by New Horizons has to do with how the planet reflects light at a different phase than what Hubble, or other observatories on or near Earth, can see. New Horizons showed that exoplanets may be dimmer than predicted at partial and high phase angles, and that the atmosphere reflects light differently at partial phase.

NASA has two major upcoming observatories in the works to advance studies of exoplanet atmospheres and potential habitability.

“These landmark New Horizons studies of Uranus from a vantage point unobservable by any other means add to the mission’s treasure trove of new scientific knowledge, and have, like many other datasets obtained in the mission, yielded surprising new insights into the worlds of our solar system,” added New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute.

NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch by 2027, will use a coronagraph to block out a star’s light to directly see gas giant exoplanets. NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, in an early planning phase, will be the first telescope designed specifically to search for atmospheric biosignatures on Earth-sized, rocky planets orbiting other stars.

“Studying how known benchmarks like Uranus appear in distant imaging can help us have more robust expectations when preparing for these future missions,” concluded Hasler. “And that will be critical to our success.”

Launched in January 2006, New Horizons made the historic flyby of Pluto and its moons in July 2015, before giving humankind its first close-up look at one of these planetary building block and Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth, in January 2019. New Horizons is now in its second extended mission, studying distant Kuiper Belt objects, characterizing the outer heliosphere of the Sun, and making important astrophysical observations from its unmatched vantage point in distant regions of the solar system.

The Uranus results are being presented this week at the 56th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences, in Boise, Idaho.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Southwest Research Institute, based in San Antonio and Boulder, Colorado, directs the mission via Principal Investigator Alan Stern and leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Media Contacts:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

Hannah Braun, Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD

Science Contacts:

Samantha Hasler
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

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Artemis I Radiation Measurements Validate Orion Safety for Astronauts

NASA’s Orion spacecraft is designed to keep astronauts safe in deep space, protecting them from the unforgiving environment far from Earth. During the uncrewed Artemis I mission, researchers from NASA, along with several collaborators, flew payloads onboard Orion to measure potential radiation exposure to astronauts.

Radiation measurements were taken inside Orion by 5,600 passive sensors and 34 active radiation detectors during its 25.5-day mission around the Moon and back, which provided important data on exposure within the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belt. These detailed findings were published in a recent scientific article through a collaborative effort by NASA’s Space Radiation Analysis Group, the DLR (German Space Center), and ESA (European Space Agency). The measurements show that while radiation exposure can vary depending on location within Orion, the spacecraft can protect its crew from potentially hazardous radiation levels during lunar missions.

Space radiation could pose major risks to long-duration human space flights, and the findings from the Artemis I mission represent a crucial step toward future human exploration beyond low Earth orbit, to the Moon, and eventually to Mars.

NASA’s HERA (Hybrid Electronic Radiation Assessor) and Crew Active Dosimeter, which were tested previously on the International Space Station, and ESA’s Active Dosimeter, were among the instruments used to measure radiation inside Orion. HERA’s radiation sensor can warn crew members need to take shelter in the case of a radiation event, such as a solar flare. The Crew Active Dosimeter can collect real-time radiation dose data for astronauts and transmit it back to Earth for monitoring. Radiation measurements were conducted in various areas of the spacecraft, each offering different levels of shielding.

In addition, the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment, a collaboration between NASA and DLR, involved radiation sensors placed on and inside two life-sized manikin torsos to simulate the impact of radiation on human tissue. These manikins enabled measurements of radiation doses on various body parts, providing valuable insight into how radiation may affect astronauts traveling to deep space.

Researchers found that Orion’s design can protect its crew from potentially hazardous radiation levels during lunar missions. Though the spacecraft’s radiation shielding is effective, the range of exposure can greatly vary based on spacecraft orientation in specific environments. When Orion altered its orientation during an engine burn of the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, radiation levels dropped nearly in half due to the highly directional nature of the radiation in the Van Allen belt.

“These radiation measurements show that we have an effective strategy for managing radiation risks in the Orion spacecraft. However, key challenges remain, especially for long-duration spaceflights and the protection of astronauts on spacewalks,” said Stuart George, NASA’s lead author on the paper.

NASA’s long-term efforts and research in mitigating space radiation risks are ongoing, as radiation measurements on future missions will depend heavily on spacecraft shielding, trajectory, and solar activity. The same radiation measurement hardware flown on Artemis I will support the first crewed Artemis mission around the Moon, Artemis II, to better understand the radiation exposure seen inside Orion and ensure astronaut safety to the Moon and beyond.

For more information on NASA’s Artemis campaign, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/artemis

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Laura Sorto