People Behind the Work at NASA Stennis

NASA’s Stennis Space Center brings together people from all backgrounds to support NASA’s mission to explore the secrets of the universe for the benefit of all and inspire the world through discovery. NASA Stennis also supports the agency’s core values of safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and inclusion – and in 2023, the south Mississippi site was recognized by Forbes Magazine as the Best Employer in Mississippi.

However, one does not need to take the magazine’s word for it – NASA Stennis employees are quick to say the same.

They say when you enjoy what you do, then you will never work a day in your life, and I believe that is true. I look forward to coming in every day because each day offers a new challenge, whether it’s building up a new system or meeting the ever-changing test requirements of the RS-25 or improving a system that has been installed for years by implementing a new technology and using existing alternate industry practices.

Bradley Tyree

NASA Stennis engineer

Our focus is to ensure that we maintain a work environment where all employees feel welcomed, respected, connected, and engaged. I want to empower all employees to contribute their unique talents to ensure the success of NASA’s mission.

Katrina Emery

NASA Stennis Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity manager

It is such an honor to share NASA’s story and the career possibilities with people from all walks of life, especially those that might not normally be exposed to such opportunities. It brings great joy to see their faces light up when they know that people just like them work for NASA. Representation truly matters.

Samone wilson

NASA Stennis public affairs specialist

The center is not necessarily the infrastructure (test stands and buildings); it’s also the people, the community that makes things work and go. It is because of the community that is here that things go so well.

Tom lipski

NASA Stennis technical manager

There are very exciting times ahead. Our agency and center are changing and adapting to our new commercial friends joining us in space. It requires us to change as well, and not all change is bad. I look to our future at NASA with optimism and to my opportunities with excitement and pride.

Kris Mobbs

NASA Stennis engineer

As a member of the Office of Procurement at NASA Stennis, I have experienced a wonderfully inclusive workforce that always overcomes any obstacle to achieve the mission goals. It has been my experience that NASA Stennis seeks to ensure all individuals are valued for their ideas and unique perspectives.

Amy Langdale

NASA Stennis auditor

The ability to flex into new paradigms and processes is more important to successful change than any other factor. These brilliant, diverse people at NASA Stennis are truly our greatest resource for the future.

Ken Griffey

Chief of staff for NASA Stennis Center Operations

I knew working at NASA Stennis would be a great opportunity following my time as a college student intern, and it continues to exceed my expectations.

Paula Hensarling

Chief of NASA Stennis Mechanical Design Branch

For 11 years in a row, NASA has been ranked as the Best Place to Work in the federal government, and it has been the thrill of my life to be part of NASA Office of STEM Engagement for more than seven years. I am grateful for all of the mentors and colleagues that have helped me along this amazing journey.

Louis Thompson

NASA Stennis education specialist

The workplace culture at NASA Stennis is like working with family. Everyone knows each other and genuinely cares about one another. Whether you work for a contractor or are a civil servant, we treat everyone with respect. That is how we achieve cohesion in such a diverse workforce.

Gina Ladner

Deputy chief of NASA Stennis Facility Services Branch

It is exciting, stimulating, utterly mind-blowing knowing years from now, we will be witnessing humans return to the Moon, then Mars, and maybe beyond. Just knowing I am part of a team of professionals enabling that historic feat is immeasurable. We are literally a part of something truly historic.

Van Ward

Chief of NASA Stennis Center Protective Services

I just feel like (being hired by NASA), that’s my greatest achievement as far as my career goes.

Anita Wilson

NASA Stennis budget analyst

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LaToya Dean

NASA’s Tech Demo Streams First Video From Deep Space via Laser

The video, featuring a cat named Taters, was sent back from nearly 19 million miles away by NASA’s laser communications demonstration, marking a historic milestone.

NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment beamed an ultra-high definition streaming video on Dec. 11 from a record-setting 19 million miles away (31 million kilometers, or about 80 times the Earth-Moon distance). The milestone is part of a NASA technology demonstration aimed at streaming very high-bandwidth video and other data from deep space – enabling future human missions beyond Earth orbit.

“This accomplishment underscores our commitment to advancing optical communications as a key element to meeting our future data transmission needs,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy. “Increasing our bandwidth is essential to achieving our future exploration and science goals, and we look forward to the continued advancement of this technology and the transformation of how we communicate during future interplanetary missions.”

The demo transmitted the 15-second test video via a cutting-edge instrument called a flight laser transceiver. The video signal took 101 seconds to reach Earth, sent at the system’s maximum bit rate of 267 megabits per second (Mbps). Capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals, the instrument beamed an encoded near-infrared laser to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego County, California, where it was downloaded. Each frame from the looping video was then sent “live” to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, where the video was played in real time.

The laser communications demo, which launched with NASA’s Psyche mission on Oct. 13, is designed to transmit data from deep space at rates 10 to 100 times greater than the state-of-the-art radio frequency systems used by deep space missions today. As Psyche travels to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the technology demonstration will send high-data-rate signals as far out as the Red Planet’s greatest distance from Earth. In doing so, it paves the way for higher-data-rate communications capable of sending complex scientific information, high-definition imagery, and video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.

“One of the goals is to demonstrate the ability to transmit broadband video across millions of miles. Nothing on Psyche generates video data, so we usually send packets of randomly generated test data,” said Bill Klipstein, the tech demo’s project manager at JPL. “But to make this significant event more memorable, we decided to work with designers at JPL to create a fun video, which captures the essence of the demo as part of the Psyche mission.”

Feline Frequency

Uploaded before launch, the short ultra-high definition video features an orange tabby cat named Taters, the pet of a JPL employee, chasing a laser pointer, with overlayed graphics. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche’s orbital path, Palomar’s telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater’s heart rate, color, and breed are also on display.

“Despite transmitting from millions of miles away, it was able to send the video faster than most broadband internet connections,” said Ryan Rogalin, the project’s receiver electronics lead at JPL. “In fact, after receiving the video at Palomar, it was sent to JPL over the internet, and that connection was slower than the signal coming from deep space. JPL’s DesignLab did an amazing job helping us showcase this technology – everyone loves Taters.”

There’s also a historical link: Beginning in 1928, a small statue of the popular cartoon character Felix the Cat was featured in television test broadcast transmissions. Today, cat videos and memes are some of the most popular content online.

Milestone After Milestone

This latest milestone comes after “first light” was achieved on Nov. 14. Since then, the system has demonstrated faster data downlink speeds and increased pointing accuracy during its weekly checkouts. On the night of Dec. 4, the project demonstrated downlink bit rates of 62.5 Mbps, 100 Mbps, and 267 Mbps, which is comparable to broadband internet download speeds. The team was able to download a total of 1.3 terabits of data during that time. As a comparison, NASA’s Magellan mission to Venus downlinked 1.2 terabits during its entire mission from 1990 to 1994.

“When we achieved first light, we were excited, but also cautious. This is a new technology, and we are experimenting with how it works,” said Ken Andrews, project flight operations lead at JPL. “But now, with the help of our Psyche colleagues, we are getting used to working with the system and can lock onto the spacecraft and ground terminals for longer than we could previously. We are learning something new during each checkout.”

More About the Mission

The Deep Space Optical Communications demonstration is the latest in a series of optical communication demonstrations funded by the Technology Demonstration Missions (TDM) program under NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and supported by NASA’s SCaN (Space Communications and Navigation) program within the agency’s Space Operations Mission Directorate.

The Psyche mission is led by Arizona State University. JPL is responsible for the mission’s overall management, system engineering, integration and test, and mission operations. Psyche is the 14th mission selected as part of NASA’s Discovery Program under the Science Mission Directorate, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, managed the launch service. Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto, California, provided the high-power solar electric propulsion spacecraft chassis

For more information about the laser communications demo, visit:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/dsoc

News Media Contact

Ian J. O’Neill
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-2649
ian.j.oneill@jpl.nasa.gov

2023-184

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Naomi Hartono

Cosmic Companionship Quest Marks Major Milestone

Are we alone in the universe? About 30,000 volunteers want to know! These volunteers visited arewealone.earth to sift through a huge data set from the 100 meter Green Bank Telescope—inspecting it for signals that might indicate intelligent extraterrestrial life. As of this week, this giant team has made ONE MILLION inspections!

“We are thrilled that our volunteers have accomplished so much in the short 10-month period since our launch,” said project PI Jean-Luc Margot.

It’s a major milestone to be sure. But does that mean this search is over? Not even close. The Green Bank Telescope collects millions of signals per hour! So UCLA graduate student Megan Li is building on the volunteer-submitted data to design and train a machine learning application that will help tackle that enormous data rate. She will present her preliminary results at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society this January. 

If you’ve been helping out—thank you!  And please come help some more! The 10th batch of UCLA SETI data has now been uploaded to the platform. Moreover, thanks to volunteer translators, the project is now available in French (translated by Louis Verhaeghe) and in Portuguese (translated by Fernando Nogal).

“Are we alone in the universe?” was built by UCLA SETI on the Zooniverse platform with funding from The Planetary Society and the NASA Citizen Science Seed Funding Program.

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Ice Flows on Mars

On Aug. 18, 2023, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured ridged lines carved onto Mars’ landscape by the gradual movement of ice. While surface ice deposits are mostly limited to Mars’ polar caps, these patterns appear in many non-polar Martian regions.

As ice flows downhill, rock and soil are plucked from the surrounding landscape and ferried along the flowing ice surface and within the icy subsurface. While this process takes perhaps thousands of years or longer, it creates a network of linear patterns that reveal the history of ice flow.

The MRO has been studying Mars since 2006. Its instruments zoom in for extreme close-up photography of the Martian surface, analyze minerals, look for subsurface water, trace how much dust and water are distributed in the atmosphere, and monitor daily global weather. These studies are identifying deposits of minerals that may have formed in water over long periods of time, looking for evidence of shorelines of ancient seas and lakes, and analyzing deposits placed in layers over time by flowing water.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

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Monika Luabeya

NASA’s BurstCube Passes Milestones on Journey to Launch

Scientists and engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have completed testing for BurstCube, a shoebox-sized spacecraft designed to study the universe’s most powerful explosions. Members of the team have also delivered the satellite to their partner Nanoracks (part of Voyager Space) in Houston, Texas, where it will be packed for launch.

“Even a satellite as tiny as BurstCube requires extensive verification before it can go to space,” said Goddard’s Lucia Tian, the mission’s science instrument lead. “We characterized its magnetic field, tested it at extreme temperatures, and recreated the shaking it will experience at launch – just to name a few assessments.”

BurstCube will search the sky for short gamma-ray bursts, brief flashes of the highest-energy form of light. Dense stellar remnants called neutron stars create these bursts when they collide with other neutron stars or black holes.

Small missions like BurstCube provide valuable opportunities for early career scientists and engineers to see all aspects of a project from start to finish.

Jeremy Perkins

BurstCube principal investigator

Astronomers are interested in learning more about these collisions because they’re an important source of the universe’s heavy elements, like gold and platinum. BurstCube’s goal is to detect and locate bursts and alert other observatories to coordinate detailed follow-up studies. BurstCube will join a growing network of satellites and telescopes working together to witness changes in the universe as they unfold.

The spacecraft is slated for takeoff in March 2024 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a resupply mission to the International Space Station.

To ensure it can withstand the rattling it will experience at launch, the mission team transported BurstCube to Washington Laboratories in Frederick, Maryland, for vibration testing. Engineers strapped the satellite to a plate, which then vibrated at frequencies ranging from 20 to 20,000 hertz. Translated into sound, that spans bass to the upper limit of human hearing.

BurstCube will use Earth’s magnetic field to orientate itself as it scans the sky. To do so, the mission team had to map the spacecraft’s own magnetic field using a special facility at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

“The magnetic calibration chamber generates a known magnetic field that cancels out Earth’s,” said Goddard engineer Kate Gasaway. “Our measurements of BurstCube’s field in the chamber will help us figure out where the satellite is pointing once in space, so we can locate gamma-ray bursts and tell other observatories where to look.”

As BurstCube orbits, it will experience major temperature swings every 90 minutes as it passes in and out of daylight. The team evaluated how the spacecraft will operate in these new conditions using a thermal vacuum chamber at Goddard, where temperatures ranged from minus 4 to 113 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 to 45 Celsius).

In addition to these tests, the team ran many other assessments, like software and communications checks and ensuring the solar panels will open uninhibited after deployment from the space station.

“Small missions like BurstCube provide valuable opportunities for early career scientists and engineers to see all aspects of a project from start to finish,” said Jeremy Perkins, BurstCube’s principal investigator at Goddard. “Now that we’ve completed testing, the team and BurstCube are gearing up for the next steps toward launch.”

By Jeanette Kazmierczak
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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