On Sept. 16, 1994, astronaut Mark C. Lee tested out the Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue (SAFER) system, a system designed for use in the event a crew member becomes untethered while conducting a spacewalk. Occurring during the STS-64 mission, this was the first untethered U.S. spacewalk in 10 years.
This SAFER test was the first phase of a larger SAFER program whose objectives were to establish a common set of requirements for both space shuttle and space station program needs, develop a flight demonstration of SAFER, validate system performance and, finally, develop a production version of SAFER for the shuttle and station programs.
First NASA-Supported Researcher to Fly on Suborbital Rocket
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
University of Florida researcher Rob Ferl (seated) and co-principal investigator Anna-Lisa Paul practice the experiment to study the effect of gravity transitions on the plants’ gene expression.
University of Florida
For the first time, a NASA-funded researcher will fly with their experiment on a commercial suborbital rocket. The technology is one of two NASA-supported experiments, also known as payloads, funded by the agency’s Flight Opportunities program that will launch aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket system on a flight test no earlier than Thursday, Aug. 29.
The researcher-tended payload, from the University of Florida in Gainesville, seeks to understand how changes in gravity during spaceflight affect plant biology. Researcher Rob Ferl will activate small, self-contained tubes pre-loaded with plants and preservative to biochemically freeze the samples at various stages of gravity. During the flight, co-principal investigator Anna-Lisa Paul will conduct four identical experiments as a control. After the flight, Ferl and Paul will examine the preserved plants to study the effect of gravity transitions on the plants’ gene expression. Studying how changes in gravity affect plant growth will support future missions to the Moon and Mars.
The university’s flight test was funded by a grant awarded through the Flight Opportunities program’s TechFlights solicitation with additional support from NASA’s Division of Biological and Physical Sciences. This experiment builds on NASA’s long history of supporting plant research and aims to accelerate the pace and productivity of space-based research.
The other Flight Opportunities supported payload is from HeetShield, a small business in Flagstaff, Arizona. Two new thermal protection system materials will be mounted to the outside of New Shepard’s propulsion module to assess their thermal performance in a relevant environment, since conditions will be similar to planetary entry. After the flight, HeetShield will analyze the structure of the materials to determine how they were affected by the flight.
Flight Opportunities, within NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, facilitates demonstration of technologies for space exploration and the expansion of space commerce through suborbital testing with industry flight providers. Through various mechanisms, the program funds flight tests for internal and external technology payloads.
NASA Assigns Astronaut Jonny Kim to First Space Station Mission
Official portrait of NASA astronaut Jonny Kim in an EMU suit.
Credit: NASA
During his first mission to the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Jonny Kim will serve as a flight engineer and member of the upcoming Expedition 72/73 crew.
Kim will launch on the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft in March 2025, accompanied by Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky. The trio will spend approximately eight months at the space station.
While aboard the orbiting laboratory, Kim will conduct scientific investigations and technology demonstrations to help prepare the crew for future space missions and provide benefits to people on Earth.
NASA selected Kim as an astronaut in 2017. After completing the initial astronaut candidate training, Kim supported mission and crew operations in various roles including the Expedition 65 lead operations officer, T-38 operations liaison, and space station capcom chief engineer.
A native of Los Angeles, Kim is a United States Navy lieutenant commander and dual designated naval aviator and flight surgeon. Kim also served as an enlisted Navy SEAL. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of San Diego and a medical degree from Harvard Medical School in Boston, and completed his internship with the Harvard Affiliated Emergency Medicine Residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
For more than two decades, humans have lived and worked continuously aboard the International Space Station, advancing scientific knowledge, and making research breakthroughs not possible on Earth. The station is a critical testbed for NASA to understand and overcome the challenges of long-duration spaceflight and to expand commercial opportunities in low Earth orbit. As commercial companies focus on providing human space transportation services and destinations as part of a robust low Earth orbit economy, NASA is able to more fully focus its resources on deep space missions to the Moon and Mars.
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NASA Project in Puerto Rico Trains Students in Marine Biology
7 Min Read
NASA Project in Puerto Rico Trains Students in Marine Biology
A forested green peninsula of Culebra Island juts into the blue waters of the Caribbean as a rain storm hits in the distance. The teal blue surrounding the island indicates shallow waters, home to the island’s famous coral reefs.
Credits: NASA Ames/Milan Loiacono
Tainaliz Marie Rodríguez Lugo took a deep breath, adjusted her snorkel mask, and plunged into the ocean, fins first. Three weeks earlier, Rodríguez Lugo couldn’t swim. Now the college student was gathering data on water quality and coral reefs for a NASA-led marine biology project in Puerto Rico, where she lives.
“There is so much life down there that I never knew about,” Rodríguez Lugo said. “And it’s beautiful.”
“There is so much life down there that I never knew about, and it’s beautiful.”
Tainaliz Marie Rodríguez Lugo
OCEANOS 2024 Intern
The sea whip and purple sea fans in the photo above are found off the coast of Playa Melones, Culebra, a small island off the east cost of Puerto Rico and a popular destination for snorkelers.
Puerto Rico is home to more than 1,300 square miles of coral reefs, which play a vital role in protecting the island from storms, waves, and hurricanes. Reef-related tourism provides nearly $2 billion in annual income for the island.
But coral reefs in Puerto Rico and around the world are experiencing more frequent and severe bleaching events. High ocean temperatures in regions around the globe have led to coral bleaching, which is when corals expel zooxanthellae – the colorful, symbiotic microscopic algae that live inside coral tissues and provide 80-90% of its nutrients. When stressors persist, the corals eventually starve and turn bone-white.
In April 2024, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) announced that the world was experiencing a global bleaching event, the fourth on record. You can see bleached spots in the lobed star coral pictured above, which is also colonized by Ramicrusta, an invasive, burnt orange algae that poses an additional threat to reefs.
Students Are Given Ocean Research Tools
Beginning in June, the month-long program that Rodriguez and 29 other local students participated in is called the Ocean Community Engagement and Awareness using NASA Earth Observations and Science for Hispanic/Latino Students (OCEANOS). The goal of OCEANOS is twofold: to teach Puerto Rican students about marine ecology and conservation, and to train students through hands-on fieldwork how to use marine science tools to monitor the health of coral reefs.
The course included classroom instruction, scientific fieldwork, collecting and analyzing ocean data from La Parguera and Culebra Island, and a final presentation.
In the photo, OCEANOS instructor Samuel Suleiman shows a 3D-printed clump of staghorn coral to a group of students off the coast of Culebra. In areas where coral habitats have been damaged, conservationists use 3D-printed corals to attract and protect fish, algae, and other wildlife.
To practice coral surveying techniques and evaluate biodiversity,students used compact cameras to snap a photo every half second, recording seven-meter by seven-meter quadrants of the ocean floor. Back on land, the students stitched these images – roughly 600 images per quadrant – into high-resolution mosaics, which they then used to catalog the types and distributions of various coral species.
Low Light, Poor Water Quality, and Invasive Species Threaten Coral Reefs
Students also built their own low-cost instruments, with sensors on each end to measure temperature and light, to help assess water quality and characteristics.
The ideal temperature range for coral falls between 77- 82 degrees Fahrenheit (25-28 degrees Celsius). Water above or below this range is considered a potential stressor for coral and can impair growth. It can also increase the risk of disease, bleaching, and reproductive issues.
Coral relies on light for growth. Less light means less photosynthesis for the zooxanthellae that live inside the coral, which in turn means less food for the coral itself. Cloudy water due to excessive sediment or phytoplankton can dim or block sunlight.
Additional threats to coral include fishing equipment, boat groundings, chemical runoff, and invasive species.
In the photo above, OCEANOS instructor Juan Torres-Pérez holds two clumps of cyanobacteria, a type of bacteria that has choked a section of reef near Playa Melones. The exact cause of this excessive cyanobacteria growth is unclear, but it is likely due to land-based pollution leaching into nearby waters, he said. In the background, dark brown piles of cyanobacteria littering the ocean floor are visible.
Students Help Grow and Plant New Coral
Suleiman walked students through the process of planting new coral, which involved tying loose staghorn and elkhorn corals into a square frame. Each frame holds about 100 individual pieces of coral. Suleiman leads a group called Sociedad Ambiente Marino (SAM), which has been working for more than 20 years to cultivate and plant more than 160,000 corals around Puerto Rico.
Divers anchored these frames to the ocean floor. Under ideal conditions, branching species like elkhorn and staghorn coral grow one centimeter per month, or about 12-13 centimeters per year, making them ideal candidates for coral reef restoration. By comparison, mountainous and boulder coral, also prevalent in the Caribbean Sea, grow an average of just one centimeter per year.
The frames will remain on the ocean floor for 10 to 14 months, until the corals have quadrupled in size. At any given time, SAM has about 45 of these frames in coral ‘farms’ around Culebra, totaling almost 4,500 corals.
Once the corals are ready to be planted, they will be added to various reefs to replace damaged or bleached corals, and shore up vulnerable habitats.
In the photo above, Suleiman gathers loose corals to place around an endangered coral species Dendrogyra cylindrus, more commonly referred to as Pillar Coral (front left). This underwater “garden,” as he called it, should attract fish and wildlife such as sea urchins, which will give the endangered coral — and the other species in this small reef — a better chance of survival.
A New Generation of Marine Scientists
From the 2023 OCEANOS class, roughly half of the undergraduate students went on to pursue marine science degrees, and many hope to continue with a post-graduate program. For a scientific field historically lacking diverse voices, this is a promising step.
Among the high school students in the 2023 class, three went on to change their degree plans to oceanography after participating in the OCEANOS program, while others are finding ways to incorporate marine science into their studies.
Francisco Méndez Negrón, a 2023 OCEANOS graduate, is now a computer science student at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras and wants to apply robotics to marine ecology. “My goal is to integrate computer science and oceanography to make something that can contribute to the problems marine ecosystems are facing, mostly originated by us humans,” Méndez Negrón said. He returned to the OCEANOS program to serve as a mentor for the 2024 class.
As for Tainaliz Marie Rodriguez Lugo, she managed to overcome her swim anxiety while discovering a love of the ocean. She credited the instructors who were patient, encouraging, and never left her side in the water.
“I was really scared going into this internship,” Rodríguez Lugo said. “I didn’t know how to swim, and I was starting a program literally called ‘Oceans.’ But now I love it: I could spend all day in the ocean.”
I was really scared going into this internship. I didn’t know how to swim, and I was starting a program literally called ‘Oceans.’ But now I love it: I could spend all day in the ocean.
Tainaliz Marie Rodríguez Lugo
OCEANOS 2024 Intern
When asked how she would describe coral to someone who has never seen one, Rodríguez Lugo just laughed. “I can’t. There are no words for it. I would just take them to the reefs.”
NASA Pilot Program Continues to Award Small Business Innovators
Earlier this month, nine small businesses received 2023 NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Ignite Phase II awards to further develop technologies that may be used in the agency’s missions and in the commercial space industry.
The SBIR Ignite Phase II awardees, who will receive up to $850,000 to fund their projects, are developing technology capabilities in the detection of wildfires, support for water management in agriculture, in-space debris detection, mineral mining from lunar regolith, in-space production, and more. These capabilities are vital to supporting deep space exploration, low Earth orbit missions, and preserving life on our home planet for the benefit of all. The businesses initially were selected for Phase I awards in 2023 and provided six months and up to $150,000 to prove their concepts before competing for Phase II.
“We want to support innovators across the aerospace industry because their technologies have the potential to make a big impact in the commercial market. A rich and diverse marketplace creates more opportunity for us all. These Phase II awards illuminate a clear path for a unique range of technologies that we believe will positively influence the lives of all Americans.”
Jason L. Kessler
NASA SBIR/STTR Program Executive
The SBIR Ignite pilot initiative supports product-driven small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs that have commercialization at the forefront of their innovation strategies and processes but that are not targeting NASA as a primary customer. The pilot initiative provides funding and other support to mitigate risk in technologies that have strong commercial potential by offering lower barriers to entry, a streamlined review and selection process, and accelerated technology development and awards as compared to the NASA SBIR program’s main solicitation. It also focuses on helping make participating companies more appealing to investors, customers, and partners, while fulfilling SBIR’s mission of increasing commercialization of innovations derived from federal research and development.
While the agency’s main Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer solicitations focus on technologies with potential for infusion in both NASA missions and commercialization in the marketplace, the SBIR Ignite opportunity is less prescriptive and focuses on topics that are relevant to emerging commercial markets in aerospace, such as accelerating in-space production applications in low Earth orbit.
The awarded companies are:
Astral Forge, LLC, Palo Alto, California
Astrobotic Technology Inc., Pittsburgh
Benchmark Space Systems, Burlington, Vermont
Brayton Energy, LLC, Hampton, New Hampshire
Channel-Logistics LLC dba Space-Eyes, Miami
GeoVisual Analytics, Westminster, Colorado
Space Lab Technologies, LLC, Boulder, Colorado
Space Tango, Lexington, Kentucky
VerdeGo Aero, De Leon Springs, Florida
The third year of NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Ignite is underway, as the 2024 SBIR Ignite Phase I solicitation closed on July 30, 2024. Those selections are expected to be announced Fall 2024.
NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer program is part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and is managed by NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
