NASA’s DART Team Earns AIAA Space Systems Award for Pioneering Mission

NASA’s DART (Double​ Asteroid Redirection Test) mission continues to yield scientific discoveries and garner accolades for its groundbreaking achievements. The mission team was recently recognized by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)with the 2024 Space Systems Award during this year’s AIAA ASCEND event, held July 29 to Aug. 2 in Las Vegas.​

The award, presented by the AIAA Space Systems Technical Committee, celebrates outstanding achievements in the architecture, analysis, design and implementation of space systems. The DART team was lauded for “outstanding achievement in the development and operation of the DART spacecraft, completing humanity’s first in-space demonstration of planetary defense technology.”

Designed, built and operated for NASA by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, the DART spacecraft was launched in 2021 and, roughly 10 months later, successfully impacted the asteroid Dimorphos in the fall of 2022. The deliberate collision altered the asteroid’s orbit around its larger companion asteroid, Didymos, by 33 minutes. That historic achievement showcased the potential to divert hazardous asteroids, offering a critical tool for safeguarding Earth from real possible impacts in the future.

The Space Systems Award has regularly recognized extraordinary achievements in space system design and implementation. The DART mission joins a distinguished list of past recipients who have significantly advanced the field of aerospace science and technology. 

APL managed the DART mission for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office as a project of the agency’s Planetary Missions Program Office. NASA provided support for the mission from several centers, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California; Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; Johnson Space Center in Houston; Glenn Research Center in Cleveland; and Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

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August 2024 Supermoon Rises Near NASA Marshall

A super blue Moon rises over Huntsville, Alabama, home to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Aug. 19. Visible through Wednesday, Aug. 21, the full Moon is both a supermoon and a Blue Moon. As the Moon reaches its closest approach to Earth, the Moon looks larger in the night sky with supermoons becoming the biggest and brightest full Moons of the year. While not blue in color, the third full Moon in a season with four full Moons is called a “Blue Moon.”

Huntsville is known as the “Rocket City” because of its proximity to NASA Marshall, which manages vital propulsion systems and hardware, engineering technologies, cutting-edge science, and launch vehicles for Apollo, shuttle, and Artemis. (NASA/Michael DeMocker)

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Beth Ridgeway

Hubble Peers Into the Center of a Star-forming Powerhouse

This view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope plunges into the center of spiral galaxy Messier 33 (M33), also known as the Triangulum Galaxy. 

Located within the triangle-shaped constellation Triangulum and about half the size of our Milky Way galaxy, M33 is the third-largest member of our Local Group of galaxies after the Andromeda galaxy (M31) and the Milky Way. 

M33 is known to be a hotbed of starbirth, forming stars at a rate 10 times higher than the average of its neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. Interestingly, M33’s neat, organized spiral arms indicate little interaction with other galaxies, so its rapid starbirth is not fueled by galactic collision, as in many other galaxies. The galaxy contains plenty of dust and gas for churning out stars, and numerous ionized hydrogen clouds, also called H-II regions, that give rise to tremendous star formation. Researchers have offered evidence that high-mass stars are forming in collisions between massive molecular clouds within M33.

This image captures reddish clouds of ionized hydrogen interspersed with dark lanes of dust. The apparent graininess of the image is actually swarms of countless stars. M33 is one of less than 100 galaxies close enough for telescopes like Hubble to resolve individual stars, as evident here. 

M33 is known to lack a central bulge, and there is no evidence of a supermassive black hole at its core ― strange since most spirals have a central bulge made up of densely concentrated stars and most large galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centers. Galaxies with this type of structure are called “pure disk galaxies,” and studies suggest they make up around 15-18 percent of galaxies in the universe. 

M33 may lose its streamlined appearance and undisturbed status in a dramatic fashion ― it’s on a possible collision course with both the Andromeda galaxy and the Milky Way. This image was taken as part of a survey of M33 in an effort to help refine theories about such topics as the physics of the interstellar medium, star-formation processes, and stellar evolution.

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Media Contact:

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

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NASA Awards 15 Grants to Support Open-Source Science

NASA awarded $1.4 million to 15 teams developing new technologies that advance and streamline the open sharing of scientific information.

High Priority Open-Source Science (HPOSS) awards fund projects that aim to increase the accessibility, inclusivity, or reproducibility of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) research. Projects include open-source tools, software, frameworks, data formats, or libraries that will have a significant impact to the SMD science community. HPOSS awards are for one year and approximately $100,000.

The HPOSS solicitation is one of several cross-divisional funding opportunities funded by NASA’s Office of the Chief Science Data Officer (OCSDO) with a focus on advancing open science practices. These solicitations are unique among NASA’s annual omnibus solicitation for basic and applied research, Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES), providing cross-divisional support for new work with strong potential to advance the adoption of open science practices across SMD.

“We are excited to be able to fund these opportunities to enable modern research through NASA’s support of open science,” said Chelle Gentemann, program officer for HPOSS and open science program scientist for OCSDO at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. on an Intergovernmental Personnel Act assignment from the International Computer Science Institute. “Open science is crucial in improving the transparency, security, and reproducibility of scientific research.”

The HPOSS solicitation for ROSES-2024 is currently available as F.14 on NSPIRES. Under ROSES-2024, HPOSS has expanded to include the development of capacity-building materials, like curricula, tutorials, and other training materials, reflecting the program’s commitment to fostering open science practices.

The HPOSS solicitation has no fixed due date. Proposers are encouraged to submit their proposals via NSPIRES at any time. Proposals are evaluated by peer review panels and selections are made throughout the year.

“The proposals selected thus far illustrate the breadth of this solicitation, ranging from projects that will increase the accessibility of data relevant to specific research communities to open-source tools that will be relevant across multiple SMD divisions,” said Gentemann.

The selected awardees for the ROSES-22 and ROSES-23 calls are:

Roses-2022 Awardees

Erin Buchanan, Harrisburg University of Science & Technology, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
STAPLE: Science Tracking Across the Project Lifespan

James Colliander / Code For Science And Society, INC., Portland, Oregon
Ephemeral Interactive Computing for NASA Communities

Gretchen Daily, Stanford University, Stanford, California
Metadata Tools for More Transparent, Reproducible, and Accessible Geospatial Analysis

Douglas Moore, 39 Alpha Research, Tempe, Arizona
Dorothy: Making Scientific Data Transparent, Accessible, and Reproducible

Matthew Turk, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois
Synergistic Software Tooling for Geophysical and Astrophysical Analysis: Linking yt and Xarray

Richard Townsend, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
Catalyzing an Open-Source Ecosystem for the GYRE Stellar Oscillation Code

Andrew Jiranek, Sciencecast Inc., Towson, Maryland
Advancing Equitable Scientific Publishing through Open-Science Digital Innovations

Jami Montgomery, Georgetown University, Washington, District of Columbia
Web-based Planetary Topography Toolkit

Roses-2023 Awardees

Russell Turner, Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon
Creation of an Open Access 3-Dimensional Image and Data Library for Rat Bones from Space Shuttle Experiments

Hans-Peter Marshall / Boise State University, Boise, Idaho
The SnowEx DB Open-Source Project — Standardized Data Access to Maximize Mission Data Use and Accelerate Research​

Leila DeFloriani / University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 
An Open-Source Library for Processing Forest Point Clouds Based on Topological Data Analysis

Michael Phillips / University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona
Spectral Cube Analysis Tool: A Python Graphical User Interface for Analyzing Spectral Image Data

Julie Barnum / University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado
A Heliophysics Software Search Interface Portal

Benjamin Keller / University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee
Portable and Reproducible Initial Conditions for Galaxy Simulations

Ryan Curtin / NumFocus, Austin, Texas
Enhance Usability and Discoverability of mlpack for Low-Resource Spaceflight Machine Learning

Summaries of previously selected proposals can be found under the “Selections” section on the HPOSS NSPIRES pages for ROSES-2022 and ROSES-2023. 

To learn more about the HPOSS program element, a recording of a recent informational webinar is available, along with the presentation slides. 

To learn more about NASA open science funding opportunities, visit: science.nasa.gov/open-science/nasa-open-science-funding-opportunities/

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