Kansas Students to Hear from NASA Astronauts Aboard Station

Students from Topeka, Kansas, will have the opportunity Wednesday, Aug. 21, to have NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick and Tracy C. Dyson answer their prerecorded questions aboard the International Space Station.

The 20-minute space-to-Earth call with students from Mose J. Whitson Elementary, Most Pure Heart Catholic School, and Aviation Explorers Post 8, will stream live at 10:30 a.m. EDT Aug. 21, on NASA+, NASA Television, the NASA app, and the agency’s website. Learn how to stream NASA TV through various platforms, including social media.

Media interested in covering the event must RSVP no later than 5 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 19, by contacting Aaron Gray at agray@tps501.org or 785-295-2900.

In preparation for the event, students from Whitson Elementary joined high school members of Aviation Explorers Post 8 for a local airport control tower tour and a pre-flight inspection demonstration. The Lawrence Amateur Astronomy Club, University of Kansas graduate students, and other astronomy enthusiasts provided presentations for the Whitson Starry Night Astronomy Title I family night. On the day of the event more than five schools from across the community will tune in.

For more than 23 years, astronauts have continuously lived and worked aboard the space station, testing technologies, performing science, and developing skills needed to explore farther from Earth. Astronauts aboard the orbiting laboratory communicate with NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston 24 hours a day through SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) Near Space Network.

Important research and technology investigations taking place aboard the International Space Station benefit people on Earth and lays the groundwork for other agency missions. As part of NASA’s Artemis campaign, the agency will send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future human exploration of Mars; inspiring Artemis Generation explorers and ensuring the United States will continue to lead in space exploration and discovery.

See videos and lesson plans highlighting space station research at:

https://www.nasa.gov/stemonstation

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Abbey Donaldson / Gerelle Dodson
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
Abbey.a.donaldson@nasa.gov / gerelle.q.dodson@nasa.gov

Sandra Jones 
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov

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Abbey A. Donaldson

Hubble Rings in a New Galactic View

The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is situated in the Perseus Cluster, also known as Abell 426, 320 million light-years from Earth. It’s a barred spiral galaxy known as MCG+07-07-072, seen here among a number of photobombing stars that are much closer to Earth than it is.

MCG+07-07-072 has quite an unusual shape for a spiral galaxy, with thin arms emerging from the ends of its barred core to draw a near-circle around its disk. It is classified as an SBc(r) galaxy: the c denotes that its two spiral arms are loosely wound, each only performing a half-turn around the galaxy, and the (r) is for the ring-like structure they create.

Rings in galaxies come in quite a few forms, from merely uncommon, to rare and scientifically important! Lenticular galaxies are a type that sit between elliptical and spiral galaxies. They feature a large disk, unlike an elliptical galaxy, but lack any spiral arms. Lenticular means lens-shaped, and these galaxies often feature ring-like shapes in their disks.

Meanwhile, the classification of “ring galaxy” is reserved for peculiar galaxies with a round ring of gas and star formation, much like spiral arms look, but completely disconnected from the galactic nucleus — or even without any visible nucleus! They’re thought to be formed in galactic collisions. Finally, there are the famous gravitational lenses, where the ring is in fact a distorted image of a distant, background galaxy, formed by the ‘lens’ galaxy bending light around it. Ring-shaped images, called Einstein rings, only form when the lensing and imaged galaxies are perfectly aligned.

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Media Contact:

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

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Southern California Student Wins NASA Scholarship

Sabrina Redifer, a 2024 graduate of Quartz Hill High School in Lancaster, California, won a NASA College Scholarship Award.

Redifer plans to major this fall in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She earned a 4.0 grade-point average – a weighted GPA of 5.29 – and ranked fourth academically out of a class of 794 students.

“My dream of becoming a physician stems from a love of science, innovation, and equality,” she said. “I want to develop new treatments through molecular and cellular research, and I want to make those treatments accessible to all people, regardless of their economic status or where they live.”

Redifer won the scholarship following an agency-wide application for NASA employee dependents planning to pursue a science, technology, engineering, or math degree. The scholarship is $2,000 per year for up to four years.

She is the daughter of Matthew Redifer, who is X-59 aircraft flight systems lead at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, and Saynne Redifer, of Palmdale, California.

“I didn’t think I was going to win,” Sabrina Redifer said. “I was super excited when I did!”

Sabrina Redifer is a valedictorian, received a 2023 and a 2024 Advanced Placement Scholar Award with Distinction, and the Advanced Placement Capstone Diploma, a special two-year course conducted in tandem with Advanced Placement classes.

Redifer was president of Quartz Hill High School’s National Honor Society, the varsity girls golf team president, and co-president of the Asian Student Union. She qualified for California Interscholastic Federation golf tournaments multiple times and ranked top six in the Golden League all four years.

In her community, she volunteered for two years at the Antelope Valley Medical Center in the gift shop and emergency room and at the Quartz Hill Food Pantry, where she helped pack food

for distribution. In addition, she shadowed physicians this summer, following and observing as they met with patients.

For more about NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong

– End –

For more information, contact:

Jay Levine
NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center
(661) 276-3459
jay.levine-1@nasa.gov

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Geospatial AI Foundation Model Team Receives NASA Marshall Group Achievement Award 

NASA’s science efforts aim to empower scientists with the tools to perform research into our planet and universe. To this end, a collaborative effort between NASA and IBM created an AI geospatial foundation model, which was released as an open-source application in 2024. 

Trained on vast amounts of NASA Earth science data, the foundation model can be adapted for Earth science applications such as flood, burn scar, and cropland studies. Tailoring the model for a specific task takes far less data than the original training set, providing an easy path for researchers to perform AI-powered studies. 

For their groundbreaking work on this project, the development team behind the foundation model has received the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Group Achievement Award. Their success with the model showcases their commitment to advancing AI and scientific research and will inspire progress in this field for years to come.

The team members from NASA’s Marshall Space Fight Center /IMPACT (Interagency Implementation and Advanced Concepts Team) are:

• Rahul Ramachandran 
• Manil Maskey 
• Elizabeth Fancher 

The team members from the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) are: 

• Sujit Roy 
• Ankur Kumar 
• Christopher Phillips 
• Iksha Gurung 
• Muthukumaran Ramasubramanian

The team members from IBM are: 

• Ranjini Bangalore 
• Juan Bernabe-Moreno 
• Dario Augusto Borges Oliveira 
• Linsong Chu 
• Blair Edwards 
• Paolo Fraccaro 
• Carlos Gomes 
• Raghu Ganti 
• Adnan Hoque 
• Johannes Jakubik 
• Levente Klein 
• Devyani Lambhate 
• Gabby Nyirjesy 
• Naomi Simumba 
• Johannes Schmude 
• Mudhakar Srivatsa 
• Harini Srinivasan 
• Daniela Szwarcman 
• Rob Parkin 
• Kommy Weldemariam 
• Campbell Watson 
• Bianca Zadrozny 

The team members from Clark University are:

• Hamed Alemohammad 
• Michael Cecil 
• Steve Li 
• Sam Khallaghi 
• Denys Godwin 
• Maryam Ahmadi 
• Fatemeh Kordi

To learn more about the NASA projects improving accessible science discovery for the benefit of all, visit the Open Science at NASA page. 

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