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What Are You Looking At?

A Florida redbelly turtle looks warily at the camera in this photo from Feb. 29, 2000. This image was captured on the grounds of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, which shares a border with the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge contains 92,000 acres that are a habitat for more than 330 species of birds, 31 mammals, 117 fishes, and 65 amphibians and reptiles – including suspicious turtles.

Image Credit: NASA

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Monika Luabeya

NASA Exploring Alternative Mars Sample Return Methods

NASA is moving forward with ten studies to examine more affordable and faster methods of bringing samples from Mars’ surface back to Earth as part of the agency’s Mars Sample Return Program. As part of this effort, NASA will award a firm-fixed-price contract for up to $1.5 million to conduct 90-day studies to seven industry proposers.

Additionally, NASA centers, CalTech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Laboratory are producing studies. Once completed, NASA will assess all studies to consider alterations or enhancements to the Mars Sample Return architecture.

“Mars Sample Return will be one of the most complex missions NASA has undertaken, and it is critical that we carry it out more quickly, with less risk, and at a lower cost,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “I’m excited to see the vision that these companies, centers and partners present as we look for fresh, exciting, and innovative ideas to uncover great cosmic secrets from the Red Planet.”

Over the last quarter century, NASA has engaged in a systematic effort to determine the early history of Mars and how it can help us understand the formation and evolution of habitable worlds, including Earth. As part of that effort, Mars Sample Return has been a long-term goal of international planetary exploration for the past two decades. NASA’s Perseverance rover has been collecting samples for later collection and return to Earth since it landed on Mars in 2021.

The following companies and proposals were selected from among those that responded to an April 15 request for proposals:

• Lockheed Martinin Littleton, Colorado: “Lockheed Martin Rapid Mission Design Studies for Mars Sample Return”
• SpaceX in Hawthorne, California: “Enabling Mars Sample Return With Starship”
• Aerojet Rocketdyne in Huntsville, Alabama: “A High-Performance Liquid Mars Ascent Vehicle, Using Highly Reliable and Mature Propulsion Technologies, to Improve Program Affordability and Schedule”
• Blue Origin in Monrovia, California: “Leveraging Artemis for Mars Sample Return”
• Quantum Space, in Rockville, Maryland: “Quantum Anchor Leg Mars Sample Return Study”
• Northrop Grumman in Elkton, Maryland: “High TRL MAV Propulsion Trades and Concept Design for MSR Rapid Mission Design”
• Whittinghill Aerospace in Camarillo, California: “A Rapid Design Study for the MSR Single Stage Mars Ascent Vehicle”

NASA’s Mars Sample Return is a strategic partnership with ESA (the European Space Agency). Returning scientifically selected samples to Earth for study using the most sophisticated instruments around the world can revolutionize our understanding of Mars and would fulfill one of the highest priority solar system exploration goals as identified by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

For more information on Mars Sample Return, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-sample-return/

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Dewayne Washington
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
dewayne.a.washington@nasa.gov

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Abbey A. Donaldson

NASA Crew Flight Test Astronauts to Call White House, NASA Leaders

Following their safe arrival at the International Space Station, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will participate in a pair of Earth to space calls Monday, June 10, regarding their historic mission aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft:

Known as NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test, the duo will speak first at 1 p.m. EDT with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, Associate Administrator Jim Free, and Johnson Space Center Director Vanessa Wyche.

Coverage of the call will stream live on NASA+, NASA Television, and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media.

At 2:40 p.m., the astronauts will participate in a Q&A moderated by Chirag Parikh, deputy assistant to President Joe Biden and executive secretary for the White House’s National Space Council.

Coverage of the call will stream live on NASA+, NASA Television, and the agency’s website.

Wilmore and Williams launched at 10:52 a.m. June 5, on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida for NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test mission. They docked to the orbiting laboratory at 1:34 p.m., June 6, and will remain for a week-long stay, testing Starliner and its subsystems as the next step in the spacecraft’s certification for rotational missions as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program is delivering on its goal of safe, reliable, and cost-effective transportation to and from the International Space Station from the United States through a partnership with American private industry. This partnership is opening access to low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station to more people, science, and commercial opportunities. The space station remains the springboard to NASA’s next great leap in space exploration, including future missions to the Moon under Artemis, and ultimately, to Mars.

For more information about the mission, visit:

www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew

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Faith McKie / Josh Finch
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
faith.d.mckie@nasa.gov / joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov

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Tiernan P. Doyle

‘Super’ Star Cluster Shines in New Look From NASA’s Chandra

Westerlund 1 is the biggest and closest “super” star cluster to Earth. New data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, in combination with other NASA telescopes, is helping astronomers delve deeper into this galactic factory where stars are vigorously being produced.

This is the first data to be publicly released from a project called the Extended Westerlund 1 and 2 Open Clusters Survey, or EWOCS, led by astronomers from the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in Palermo. As part of EWOCS, Chandra observed Westerlund 1 for about 12 days in total.

Currently, only a handful of stars form in our galaxy each year, but in the past the situation was different. The Milky Way used to produce many more stars, likely hitting its peak of churning out dozens or hundreds of stars per year about 10 billion years ago and then gradually declining ever since. Astronomers think that most of this star formation took place in massive clusters of stars, known as “super star clusters,” like Westerlund 1. These are young clusters of stars that contain more than 10,000 times the mass of the Sun. Westerlund 1 is between about 3 million and 5 million years old.

This new image shows the new deep Chandra data along with previously released data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The X-rays detected by Chandra show young stars (mostly represented as white and pink) as well as diffuse heated gas throughout the cluster (colored pink, green, and blue, in order of increasing temperatures for the gas). Many of the stars picked up by Hubble appear as yellow and blue dots.

Only a few super star clusters still exist in our galaxy, but they offer important clues about this earlier era when most of our galaxy’s stars formed. Westerlund 1 is the biggest of these remaining super star clusters in the Milky Way and contains a mass between 50,000 and 100,000 Suns. It is also the closest super star cluster to Earth at about 13,000 light-years.

These qualities make Westerlund 1 an excellent target for studying the impact of a super star cluster’s environment on the formation process of stars and planets as well as the evolution of stars over a broad range of masses.

This new deep Chandra dataset of Westerlund 1 has more than tripled the number of X-ray sources known in the cluster. Before the EWOCS project, Chandra had detected 1,721 sources in Westerlund 1. The EWOCS data found almost 6,000 X-ray sources, including fainter stars with lower masses than the Sun. This gives astronomers a new population to study.

One revelation is that 1,075 stars detected by Chandra are squeezed into the middle of Westerlund 1 within four light-years of the cluster’s center. For a sense of how crowded this is, four light-years is about the distance between the Sun and the next closest star to Earth.

The diffuse emission seen in the EWOCS data represents the first detection of a halo of hot gas surrounding the center of Westerlund 1, which astronomers think will be crucial in assessing the cluster’s formation and evolution, and giving a more precise estimate of its mass.

A paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, led by Mario Guarcello from the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in Palermo, discusses the survey and the first results. Follow-up papers will discuss more about the results, including detailed studies of the brightest X-ray sources. This future work will analyze other EWOCS observations, involving NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and NICER (Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer).

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science from Cambridge Massachusetts and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

For more Chandra images, multimedia and related materials, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission/chandra-x-ray-observatory/

Visual Description:

This is an image of the Westerlund 1 star cluster and the surrounding region, as detected in X-ray and optical light. The black canvas of space is peppered with colored dots of light of various sizes, mostly in shades of red, green, blue, and white.

At the center of the image is a semi-transparent, red and yellow cloud of gas encircling a grouping of tightly packed gold stars. The shape and distribution of stars in the cluster call to mind effervescent soda bubbles dancing above the ice cubes of a recently poured beverage.

News Media Contact

Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Center
Cambridge, Mass.
617-496-7998

Jonathan Deal
Marshall Space Flight Center
Huntsville, Ala.
256-544-0034

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Lee Mohon

NASA to Discuss Upcoming Spacewalks for Station Repairs, Upgrades

NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station will conduct three spacewalks targeted for June. NASA will discuss the upcoming spacewalks during a news conference at 4 p.m. EDT Tuesday, June 11.Live coverage will air on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, YouTube, and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through a variety of platforms including social media.

Participants in the news conference include:

• Dina Contella, deputy program manager, International Space Station
• Rebecca Wingfield, flight director, spacewalk 90
• Nicole McElroy, flight director, spacewalk 91
• Sandy Fletcher, spacewalk officer, spacewalk 90
• Faruq Sabur, spacewalk officer, spacewalk 91 and 92

U.S. media interested in participating in person must contact the Johnson newsroom no later than 4 p.m. Monday, June 10, at: 281-483-5111 or jsccommu@mail.nasa.gov. To ask questions, media must dial in no later than 15 minutes before the start of the news conference. Questions also may be submitted on social media using #AskNASA.

For the first spacewalk, NASA astronauts Tracy C. Dyson and Matt Dominick will exit the station’s Quest airlock to complete the removal of a faulty electronics box, called a radio frequency group, from a communications antenna on the starboard truss of the space station. The pair also will collect samples for analysis to understand the ability of microorganisms to survive and reproduce on the exterior of the orbiting laboratory.

Dyson will serve as spacewalk crew member 1 and will wear a suit with red stripes. Dominick will serve as spacewalk crew member 2 and will wear an unmarked suit. U.S. spacewalk 90 will be the fourth for Dyson and the first for Dominick. NASA will announce participating crew members for U.S. spacewalks 91 and 92 following the completion of the first and will provide additional coverage details.

For the second spacewalk, astronauts will remove and replace the external high-definition camera located at camera port nine on the orbiting laboratory. This camera is one of several to provide external views of the space station. Additionally, crew members will complete a cable connection fit check for the alpha magnetic spectrometer, a particle physics experiment on the station’s exterior. If not completed during U.S. spacewalk 90, the astronauts will begin by collecting microorganism samples.

For the third spacewalk, crew members will remove and replace a rate gyro assembly, which provides data on the orientation of the space station. Astronauts will then attach a support bracket, called a modification kit, in preparation for future installation of the orbiting laboratory’s next International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Array on the 2A power channel on the port truss.

Learn more about the space station, its research, and crew, at:

https://www.nasa.gov/station

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Josh Finch / Claire O’Shea
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / claire.a.o’shea@nasa.gov
Sandra Jones / Anna Schneider
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov / anna.c.schneider@nasa.gov

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Abbey A. Donaldson