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Tytuł: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Listopad 27, 2022, 22:37
Gravity Assist: Season 5 Trailer – What’s Your Gravity Assist?
Apr 9, 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pkhD96dMdg
Go behind the scenes at NASA with Chief Scientist Jim Green in the Gravity Assist podcast. We’ll talk to people who work in lots of different areas to make space missions and scientific investigations happen. How does someone become an astronaut, or an engineer working on the Ingenuity helicopter, or a science communicator? Everyone has a gravity assist – that person, place, thing, or event that inspired them to do what they’re doing now. New episodes will be released on Fridays. Check out the podcast at https://www.nasa.gov/gravityassist .

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-season-5-trailer-what-s-your-gravity-assist

Season 5

01)  Trailer – What’s Your Gravity Assist? Apr 9, 2021
       https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg180047#msg180047

02) Black Hole Mysteries, with Jeremy Schnittman (2) Apr 16, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg180048#msg180048

03) Talking to Ingenuity and Other Space Robots, with Nacer Chahat Apr 23, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg180573#msg180573

04) Breaking Barriers, with Dana Bolles (2) Apr 30, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg181073#msg181073

05) Always an Astronaut, with Ken Bowersox (2) May 14, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg181428#msg181428

06) Listening to the Universe, with Kim Arcand (2) May 21, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg181552#msg181552

07) Before You Launch: Practice, Practice, Practice (2)  Jun 4, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg181854#msg181854

08) From Space Camp to Mission Control, with Tara Ruttley (2) Jun 11, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg182171#msg182171

09) Let’s Talk About Climate Change, with Gavin Schmidt (2) Jun 18, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg182487#msg182487

10) This Asteroid Is Metal, With Lindy Elkins-Tanton (2) Jul 2, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg182750#msg182750

11) A Dream, a Team, a Chance to Fly on Mars, with MiMi Aung (2) Jul 9, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg183069#msg183069

12) Onward to Venus, with Lori Glaze (2) Jul 23, 2021
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg183685#msg183685

13) Diving Into NASA History, with NASA Intern Felicia Ragucci (2)  Jul 30, 2021
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg184071#msg184071

14) Freaky Physics on the Space Station, with Ethan Elliott (2) Aug 6, 2021
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg184420#msg184420

15) Goodbye Saturn, Hello Earth, with Janelle Wellons (2) Aug 27, 2021
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg184579#msg184579

16) Lucy and the Space Fossils, with Hal Levison (2) Oct 8, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg184781#msg184781

17) Meet a Space Weather Scientist, with Yaireska Collado-Vega (2) Oct 22, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg184879#msg184879

18) Solar Power for the Moon, with Lyndsey McMillon-Brown Oct 29, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg185008#msg185008

19) How to Move an Asteroid, with Nancy Chabot (2) Nov 19, 2021
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg185165#msg185165

20) A New Set of X-Ray Eyes is Launching, with Martin Weisskopf (2) Dec 3, 2021
     https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg185329#msg185329

21) Meet NASA’s New Chief Scientist and Senior Climate Advisor, with Kate Calvin (2)  Jan 28, 2022
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg185478#msg185478

22) In Case of Space Station Emergency, with Sunny Panjwani (2) Feb 18, 2022
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg185626#msg185626

23) Using Webb to Trace Galactic Histories, with Aaron Yung (2) Mar 4, 2022
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg185762#msg185762

24) These Space Rocks Have Seen It All, with Neyda Abreu (2) Mar 18, 2022
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg185869#msg185869

25) Do Other Planets Make Pollution? With Ravi Kopparapu (2) Apr 8, 2022
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg185979#msg185979

26) Walking on Broken Ice, with Catherine Walker (2) Apr 22, 2022
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg186109#msg186109

27) How to Grow Food on the Moon (2) May 13, 2022
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg186222#msg186222

28) What Will We Eat on Mars? (2) May 20, 2022
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg186461#msg186461

29) This is What Mars Sounds Like, with Nina Lanza (2) Jun 17, 2022
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg186621#msg186621

30) It’s Raining Diamonds on These Planets (2) Jul 1, 2022
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg186749#msg186749

31)  How We Make Webb (and Hubble) Images (2) Jul 8, 2022
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg186890#msg186890

32)  Meet a Webb Scientist Who Looks Back in Time (2) Jul 29, 2022
       https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg187026#msg187026

33) Finale: Thanks for All the Gravity Assists (2) AUG 12, 2022
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg187160#msg187160

===============================
Season 1

01)   NASA’s New “Gravity Assist” Podcast Debuts Nov. 15, 2017
02)   The Sun with Nicky Fox (2) Nov. 15, 2017
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3065.msg112114#msg112114
03)   Mercury with Faith Vilas (2) Nov. 22, 2017
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3073.msg112378#msg112378
04)   Venus with David Grinspoon (2) Nov. 29, 2017
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3077.msg112450#msg112450
05)   Earth with Tom Wagner (2) Dec. 6, 2017
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3079.msg112545#msg112545
06)   The Moon with Sarah Noble (2) Dec. 13, 2017
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3088.msg112732#msg112732
07)   Mars with Bruce Jakosky and Michael Meyer (2) Dec. 20, 2017
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3092.msg112853#msg112853
08)   Jupiter with Jared Espley (2) Jan. 3, 2018
         https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3114.msg113630#msg113630
09)   Saturn with Linda Spilker (2) Jan. 10, 2018
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3118.msg113918#msg113918
10)   Ice Giants (Uranus & Neptune) with Amy Simon (2) Jan. 17, 2018
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3125.msg114215#msg114215
11)   Pluto with Alan Stern (2) Jan. 24, 2018
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3136.msg114620#msg114620
12)  The Kuiper Belt with Alan Stern (2) Jan. 31, 2018
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3143.msg114895#msg114895
13)  Science & Science Fiction with Andy Weir (2) Feb. 7, 2018
       https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3146.msg115419#msg115419

Season 2

01)  Explorer 1 & Jim Green’s ‘Gravity Assist’ (2) March 1, 2018
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3164.msg116246#msg116246
02)  TESS & Exoplanets with Martin Still (2) April 12, 2018
       https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3195.msg117388#msg117388
03)  Mars and InSight with Bruce Banerdt (2) May 2, 2018
       https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3208.msg117997#msg117997
04)  Exploring Mars with Spirit and Opportunity with Steve Squyres (2) July 3, 2018
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3253.msg120252#msg120252
05)  Asteroid Hunting with Lindley Johnson (2) July 17, 2018
       https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3262.msg120599#msg120599
06)  Exoplanet Hunting with Jon Jenkins (2) Aug. 1, 2018
       https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3280.msg121254#msg121254
07)  Mars Dust Storm with Melinda Kahre Aug. 15, 2018
       https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3282.msg121334#msg121334
08)  Sunspots and Solar Flares with Alex Young (2) Sept. 11, 2018
       https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3319.msg122573#msg122573
09)  Planetary Defense and Oumuamua with Kelly Fast (2) Sept. 26, 2018
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3328.msg122952#msg122952
10)  The Sun’s Mysteries with Thomas Zurbuchen (2) Dec. 11, 2018
        https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3435.msg126096#msg126096

Season 3

01)  Trailer Apr 1, 2019
02)  With Jim Bridenstine (2) April 11, 2019
       https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3597.msg131086#msg131086
03)  Buying a Ride to the Moon Through Commercial Partnerships, with Steven Clarke April 24, 2019
       https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3614.msg131531#msg131531
04)  Where Could We Go on the Moon? With Steve Mackwell (2) May 2, 2019
       https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3626.msg131782#msg131782
05)  Why Do We Have a Moon? With Robin Canup (2) May 9, 2019
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3644.msg132221#msg132221
06)  Where's the Water on the Moon? With Jen Heldmann (2) May 30, 2019
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3668.msg132722#msg132722
07)  Why So Many Craters on the Moon? With David Kring (2) June 6, 2019
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3683.msg133195#msg133195
08)  Mapping the Moon, with Noah Petro (2) June 13, 2019
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3685.msg133250#msg133250
09)  The Moon Rocks! With Barbara Cohen (2) June 21, 2019
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3703.msg133580#msg133580
10)  Your Moon Questions Answered (2) June 28, 2019
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3704.msg133584#msg133584
11)  Beyond Apollo with Planetary Geologist Jake Bleacher (2) July 18, 2019
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3737.msg134472#msg134472
12)  When the Moon Was Like a Magnet, with Sonia Tikoo (2) Aug. 23, 2019
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3823.msg137887#msg137887
13)  Fire Fountains on the Moon, with Dave Draper (2) Sept. 12, 2019
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3824.msg137889#msg137889
14)  The Moon Quakes! With Walter Kiefer (2) Sept. 27, 2019
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3825.msg137891#msg137891
15)  The Moon's Holy GRAIL, with Maria Zuber (2) Dec. 10, 2019
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3889.msg140017#msg140017
16)  Astronauts Go Back to Moon School, with Kelsey Young (2) Dec. 19, 2019
      https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=3890.msg140019#msg140019

Season 4
1-26)
https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=4354.0
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Listopad 27, 2022, 22:37
Jedna na 1000 gwiazd staje się czarną dziurą, czyli czeka Wszechświat dość czarna przyszłość.

Cytuj
But one in 1,000 stars becomes a black hole at the end of its life. And if you think about the fact that we have over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, you do the math and you end up with over 100 million black holes floating around the Milky Way. And we've seen 40 of them. So that leaves 99,999,000 and change that we've never even detected, and they're just going to be sprinkled throughout the, the Milky Way, just like all the stars.

Gravity Assist: Black Hole Mysteries, with Jeremy Schnittman (1)
Apr 16, 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQcKIN9vj3U
Explore how the extreme gravity of two orbiting supermassive black holes distorts our view. In this visualization, disks of bright, hot, churning gas encircle both black holes, shown in red and blue to better track the light source. The red disk orbits the larger black hole, which weighs 200 million times the mass of our Sun, while its smaller blue companion weighs half as much. Zooming into each black hole reveals multiple, increasingly warped images of its partner. Watch to learn more. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell

What is a black hole? How do we study them when we can’t see them? Astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center joins NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green for a fascinating conversation about the latest black hole research.

Jim Green: NASA’s celebrating black hole week. Let's talk to an expert that can tell us about these very strange and mysterious objects.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Jeremy Schnittman. And he is a research astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He joins us here on Black Hole Week, when NASA is celebrating that very strange and mysterious object we call black holes. Welcome, Jeremy, to Gravity Assist.

Jeremy Schnittman: Thanks, Jim. It's great to be here.

Jim Green: Your NASA webpage states that you call yourself a “general purpose astrophysicist theorist.” What does that mean? And what do you do?

Jeremy Schnittman: Well, I think maybe it'll help to, to describe to the audience first what is an astrophysicist in the first place? Right? Almost sounds like a made-up job. Sometimes I think it is. It's such a great job. Not to compare myself, but I think really the first astrophysicist that we know of it was Isaac Newton. Right? He was an astrophysicist because he took the laws of physics that he could see on Earth, right, the famous one about the apple falling, he could measure gravity on Earth. And he applied it to the heavens, he applied it to astronomy. So that's how you get “astrophysicist.” You're taking what we know about physics from a laboratory or from theories that we develop here on Earth, and applying it to the entire universe. And so that's, that's what I do.

Jeremy Schnittman: Why do I call myself a “general purpose astrophysicist” — I guess it's because I'm not really expert in anything, but you know, try to dabble a little bit in everything. When it comes to black holes, they really are a great intersection of everything.

Jim Green: You're right, black holes requires all kinds of knowledge. So, what got you really interested in the topic of black holes?

Jeremy Schnittman: I guess it started with, you know, right the beginning of graduate school. I mean, everybody, we grew up learning about black holes a little bit in school, and everybody knows that they're really cool and mysterious objects. But when I got to graduate school, I started learning about, you know, what, what a black hole really is. What does it really mean to be a black hole? What does it really mean to study black holes?

Jim Green: What exactly is a black hole?

Jeremy Schnittman: Even amongst the experts, I think you could probably find a disagreement about whether a black hole is an object, or is it just a part of space? It, it obviously starts off as an object, it starts off, most of them, we believe start off as massive stars that burn up all of their fuel during their lifetime. When you have a star that's much bigger than the sun, it it burns this fuel much hotter, and much faster. And after just a few million years, as opposed to the sun, which is billions of years old. After just a few million years, you're done with your fuel.

Jeremy Schnittman: So there's no more heat holding the Sun up, and the gravity, there’s still all the gravity, you just don't have that hot gas and, and pressure holding the star up, the gravity is going to win. And it collapses into, into what we call a singularity. Which is like just an explosion of density, of energy, of mass, we're not really quite sure. I personally just think of it as a, as a hole in space right? They’re a nice round hole described by a lot of mathematical equations.

Jeremy Schnittman:You have this famous edge of the black hole we call the event horizon. And that's really where nothing, nothing can escape from not light, not particles. Nothing at all.

Jim Green: So if we can't see them, because the light is not allowed to leave this particular area, how do we really study them?

Jeremy Schnittman: There’s this kind of irony of black holes that are black and invisible. But they're also some of the brightest objects in the entire known universe. And the reason is, because when you tend to get too close to a black hole, if you're a planet or a star cloud of gas, you get whipped around into a really fast orbit going nearly the speed of light, heated up to millions of degrees and shining out in bright ultraviolet, X-ray, radio, just really bright, bright sources of light coming from not the black hole itself, but from the effect that it has on anyone who gets too close to it. So that's why, that's how we see them. That's how we study them. For the most part.

Jeremy: There are a couple other ways that you can study them, not through the material immediately around the black hole. Anything that is affected by gravity, we’ll be able to, to measure it and use it kind of indirectly to infer the properties of the black hole. So if you see a star in the middle of space, just moving around in a circle around nothing, that's a pretty good hint that there's something like a black hole right next to it.

Jim Green: Well, how close can you get to a black hole before you fall in?

Jeremy Schnittman: I guess this depends on your rocket ship. If you're just, you know, a run of the mill astronaut floating through space, you really want to keep your distance. You don't want to get anywhere within, you know, the strong, strong gravitational pull of a black hole, maybe 10s or 20s of times the black hole’s radius.

Jeremy Schnittman: If you have a really good rocket where you can fire your retro rockets and you know, kind of get down close and then pull away again, you can get up to about twice the black hole’s radius, what we call the Schwartzschild radius. And still escape if your rocket is, you know, can get you almost up to the speed of light. If you basically turn yourself into a photon going the speed of light, then you can get just up to the event horizon. But you better turn yourself perfectly around and head straight out again, before it's too late. Once you get past that, and there's no return.

Jim Green: Well, as you mentioned, some of the stars and produce supernova explosions are massive enough to become black holes. So we do see supernovae. We see them in other galaxies and even our own galaxy. So how far away is our closest black hole?

Jeremy: So of the of the black holes that, we've seen and observed in our own galaxy in the Milky Way. It's really not that many.

Jeremy Schnittman: But one in 1,000 stars becomes a black hole at the end of its life. And if you think about the fact that we have over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, you do the math and you end up with over 100 million black holes floating around the Milky Way. And we've seen 40 of them. So that leaves 99,999,000 and change that we've never even detected, and they're just going to be sprinkled throughout the, the Milky Way, just like all the stars. And again, you do a little bit of math, and the chances are, that there's a black hole that we've never even seen within only, say, 25 light-years of the Earth. I mean, it doesn't pose any immediate risk. But I tell you, when whenever it happened, you know, billion years ago, when it went supernova, it would have been a pretty bright day out.

Jim Green: Yeah, no kidding.

Jeremy Schnittman: But if you had to bet, and you look up into the sky and you see a galaxy, I’d put pretty good money, that there's a black hole in it.

Jim Green: Okay, so, are there tiny black holes? How small can a black hole be?

Jeremy Schnittman: Ah, that's a good question. Since the only ones we really understand at all are these ones that come from collapsed stars. So those are kind of the smallest we've seen so far. But there's no real reason you can't form a smaller black hole. There's a famous effect, predicted by Stephen Hawking, about, well, appropriately enough, called Hawking radiation, where a black hole actually leaks out a little bit of radiation from the surface, due to complicated quantum mechanical effects that I can't claim to understand.

Jeremy Schnittman: But we, we know that we've never actually seen this in the lab or in space, but we know that if it exists, the smaller the black hole, the brighter the radiation, interestingly enough, so if you get too small, the black hole actually gives off a lot of radiation and then actually just evaporates and disappears in a in a big bang and flash of gamma rays.

Jeremy Schnittman: So, if you if you think about what, how small can you be it kind of is a question of how small can you be and still survive the Hawking radiation? It would be much, much smaller than the size of the Earth. And we haven't yet seen anything like that. But again, no reason they might not exist.

Jim Green: So do more massive galaxies have more massive black holes do you think?

Jeremy Schnittman: They do. There seems to be a pretty tight relationship as you get to be a bigger and bigger galaxy, or more specifically, a bigger and bigger bulge, right? Just that that center region of stars, they get bigger and bigger. I mean, we think of 4 million times the size of the Sun is mind bogglingly huge. But by galaxy standards, it's a, you know, it's a drop in the bucket. We've seen black holes that are a billion times the size of the Sun, or even larger.

Jeremy Schnittman: And, but, but kind of interestingly, as you get to the really big galaxies with the really big black hole holes, the, the actual density of stars in that center region seems to go down a little bit. It's what we call a core, it's almost like a blender has scoured out those middle regions of the galaxy. And, and that's kind of what we think happened is that the two galaxies merge, and they each had a black hole, the black holes fall in towards the center of the galaxy, they start whipping around each other, and just blend, you know, “Mix Master” throwing stars out left and right, and kind of clear out a little bubble in the center. And, and that's what we're seeing in some of these big galaxies.

Jim Green: Well, sometimes those two will merge. So what happens when we have two black holes merge?

Jeremy: So that is, that is the biggest brightest thing that ever happened in the universe, the merger of two black holes when they actually come together, give off something called gravitational waves. And those gravitational waves have energy just like electromagnetic waves, or ocean waves, or sound waves. The amount of energy that those things give off, actually, outshines the entire known universe, entire universe just from one pair of black holes for that, you know, five seconds, or even five hours depending on the size, how long it taking them to merge.

Jeremy Schnittman: Now, we can't see this because our eyes don't see gravitational waves. So it doesn't, it's not like a supernova where, you know, big bright blast in the sky. It's more like a, a sound, a bang, than a flash in the sky. So only very, very recently, were we able to make the ears on Earth that could hear the sound of the of the gravitational waves, these ripples in the very fabric of reality that go propagating throughout the entire universe.

Jim Green: Jeremy, what is LIGO? And how did it make those spectacular measurements of gravitational waves?

Jeremy Schnittman: LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, is actually two different observatories in the United States. One is located in Louisiana, and one is in Washington State. And it's been a big, massive project funded by the NSF. And there's another sister observatory called Virgo In Europe, that's also really leading the revolution in gravitational wave science.

Jeremy Schnittman: Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space time. And one of the important things is, is it easy to picture ripples in space, right, like a piece of fabric stretching and shrinking. But it's also important to think of it as the ripples in time, right? So it actually changes the amount of time it takes for a laser beam or a particle of light to go a certain distance. So the way that LIGO measures this, it's very, really, really clever. It sends a race between two rays of light, and it kind of splits them with the mirror, and it sends one, one way in one the other way, and bounces off another mirror, which is actually miles away down a long tube, bounces the light back to the starting line and sees which, which light got there first. And from that you can tell, which, you know, kind of which leg of the race was a tiny bit shorter or a tiny bit longer due to this gravitational wave.

Jeremy Schnittman: And, you know, it sounds very simple and straightforward, but at the end of the day, we're talking about light that’s going over 4 kilometers, and then 4 kilometers back in the one, and one ray of light is beating the other one by a fraction of the radius of a proton.

Jim Green: Wow!
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Listopad 27, 2022, 22:38
Gravity Assist: Black Hole Mysteries, with Jeremy Schnittman (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/jeremybanner.jpg)
Astrophysicist Jeremy Schnittman works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Credits: NASA

Jeremy Schnittman: So it is no small task from a technological point of view to run this race, but they did it and we've been reaping the benefits ever since.

Jim Green: How excited were you? And what were you thinking about when you, when you heard about these results?

Jeremy Schnittman: I mean, it was it was really cool. I, I sometimes think of it as you know, when you have your when you have your first child, right? It's very exciting. But you know, it's not a huge surprise. I mean, you had nine months to somewhat prepare for it, you know, it's coming but still when it, when it finally happens, even though you've been working on it for years, in cases, it's still just a magical experience and it’s, you know, as a physicist working in in black holes and gravitational waves, it is also kind of, you know, like telling us, “Oh, you guys, you were right all along.” And you know, who doesn't like to hear that?

Jim Green: Well, you know, it really opens up a new horizon for us in terms of developing new telescopes or techniques to measure these gravitational waves. What are the particularly new telescopes or upcoming observations that you're excited about?

Jeremy Schnittman: Yes, so especially for the gravitational waves. When two black holes collide, they make gravitational waves. But like a bell or a, or tuning fork, right, different size, black holes make different types of waves, you can get a really, kind of, short, high-pitched sound or a very long, deep ripple going through, through space. So, like we've been talking about, we have these two different types of black holes, the ones about the size of the Sun, or a few times the size of the Sun. And those are the ones that we've detected the gravitational waves from with LIGO, which are these giant lasers on the surface of the Earth.

Jeremy Schnittman: To get the supermassive black holes, the gravitational waves from those, they're going to be at a much lower frequency. So to hear those, we actually need to build a detector in space. And that's one of the big projects that we here at NASA are working on, called LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. And it's interesting, that it’s called an “antenna,” as opposed to an “observatory,” right. “Observatory,” you think of kind of like a telescope, you pointed out a star and you take a picture. An antenna, it's just going to be listening all the time to everything in space. And that's what we're going to use to hear these deep rumble waves from merging supermassive black holes throughout the universe.

Jim Green: So LISA is a fantastic European Space Agency project that NASA and several other agencies are really excited about. And it requires at least three spacecraft that look at each other with lasers. Do you think that's gonna really solve a lot of the next problems that we want to know about black holes?

Jeremy Schnittman: For sure, one of the biggest ones that we want to answer is, like we were saying before, where do these supermassive ones come from? I mean, it would, it would be like if, if living on Earth, you know, we knew of, you know, insects and dinosaurs, and nothing else. Like, how is that even possible. But if you look at the fossil record, you can kind of piece them all together, all the missing links in between. And we hope that LISA will help us kind of dig through the fossil record in real time. Because, you know, one of the great things about astronomy is you look at things far away, you see what they were looking like a long time ago. So by looking at the entire universe, which LISA will be able to do, you can see the evolution from really just a short time after the Big Bang all the way up to now.

Jim Green: So, you've been working on this, I don't know, at least a decade, maybe more, what's some of the most exciting results that have come out recently?

Jeremy Schnittman: So I think hands down the, the biggest recent discovery with, with black holes, I guess, since the LIGO era hit in 2015, was this very famous release of the Event Horizon Telescope image where they took an actual picture of a black hole, released just about two years ago in in April 2019, using this huge network of radio interferometers. And these are different interferometers than LIGO. But they're used to actually take a picture of a black hole so that they could zoom into this tiny, tiny, tiny space millions of light-years away, and actually see what the what the black hole looks like. Again, it's not, not the actual black hole, we're picturing the gas immediately around the black hole. But for all intents and purposes, that's the same thing. And we're really excited about seeing where, where we can go next with this type of technology.

Jim Green: Out of all the unknowns about black holes? What's the one question that you, Jeremy, would like to be the one to answer?

Jeremy Schnittman: It's kind of obscure. But one of the things that I, I actually made a prediction of in graduate school is that when you have two of these black holes orbiting around each other, and getting closer and closer and merging into a single black hole through gravitational waves, the spins of the black hole, kind of the way that they're oriented, should be aligned in a very specific way. So we haven't yet got enough data to prove that one way or another. But hopefully within the next few years with something like LIGO, we'll be able to identify this effect and maybe even proven an old prediction right. So that would be exciting. For me, personally, I don't know if anybody else would care.

Jim Green: Oh, I think that's fantastic. I would. I'll be on the lookout for that. That's wonderful.

Jim Green: Well, you know, Jeremy, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was that event or person place or thing that got them so excited about becoming the scientists they are today? Now it’s very appropriate today in particular that I call that event a gravity assist. So Jeremy, what was your gravity assist?

Jeremy Schnittman: Yeah, I was, I was thinking about that, too, Jim, is you know, as gravity assist is the perfect name for our discussion today, because black holes are all about gravity. That being said, my, you know, my real foray into physics and real physics research, had nothing to do with gravity. It was when I was a junior in high school, I got to do a summer research program very fortunate and privileged to have been able to participate in that the University of Rochester and they have a giant laser lab where they use mega, megawatt mega-megawatt lasers to do nuclear fusion experiments.

Jeremy Schnittman: And I, you know, got to see firsthand what, what real physics research was, was like. It wasn't like homework. It was finding answers to problems that nobody had ever solved before. And it was just captivating and you know, never looked back. From then on, I just knew exactly that's this is what I wanted to do.

Jim Green: Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, Jeremy, thanks so much for joining me in this fascinating discussion about black holes.

Jeremy Schnittman: Oh, it was a pleasure. I always love talking about space and I love talking about black holes. Thank you.

Jim Green: Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green and this is your Gravity Assist.


Last Updated: Apr 16, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-black-hole-mysteries-with-jeremy-schnittman
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Grudzień 16, 2022, 11:18
Gravity Assist: Talking to Ingenuity and Other Space Robots, with Nacer Chahat
Apr 23, 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HqZn1BePqM
The Ingenuity helicopter made history on April 19, 2021, with the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. How do engineers talk to a helicopter all the way out on Mars? How about other spacecraft? We’ll hear about it from Nacer Chahat of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who works on antenna and telecommunication systems for a variety of NASA missions. He chats with NASA’s Chief Scientist Jim Green in this episode of the Gravity Assist podcast.

Jim Green: NASA flies spacecraft all over the solar system, and orbits the Earth. How do we communicate with them when they're so far away? Let's find out from an expert.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Nacer Chahat, and he is the senior antenna and microwave engineer with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory out in Pasadena, California. He has worked on one of the most important challenges for NASA and that is, in designing a spacecraft, how do you make it communicate back and forth with Earth? So welcome to Gravity Assist.

Nacer Chahat: Thank you for having me here.


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Nacer Chahat of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory with a model of the Ingenuity helicopter. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Jim Green: A lot of people are familiar with the idea of an antenna from a radio or TV set, for which they receive a signal. But when we look at a spacecraft, we see all kinds of different antennas. What's their main function?

Nacer Chahat: Yes, so, the principle is the same. However, every single spacecraft have different instruments, So, depending on the requirement, whether they are instruments or ­­communication, they come in different form, different aspects. So, most of the communication antennas will be the typical dishes that we see. So, those are the ones that you see the most often on spacecraft. But whenever we push the boundary of what we are trying to do, we have to come up with different innovative antenna solutions to address the needs of our scientists.

Jim Green: You know a lot of the antennas that you use, you use for what we call remote sensing. What's that really mean?

Nacer Chahat: So, remote sensing allows us to get something from afar and so we're using radio frequency to transmit pulses. These pulses are reflecting back from the surface of what we want to study, and then we're processing this data to make conclusions.

Jim Green: Yeah, that's everything from having the opportunity to bounce radio waves off surfaces to even penetrate those radio waves into surfaces like, like the ice caps or even the Sahara Desert.

Nacer Chahat Yeah, and that also allows us to get images of things we cannot see. So, for example if the weather is bad and Earth is completely covered with clouds, we can still see what's happening under them.

Jim Green: Well, you know, communication with our surface assets on Mars is kind of complicated. You know, when we landed Curiosity, I don't see it carrying a big truck with a big dish behind it. So how do we communicate back and forth with, with our surface assets, like InSight, like Perseverance, like Curiosity?

Nacer Chahat: Yes, so we have two concepts to do so. The first one is to communicate with the orbiter. So we have orbiters around Mars which we can, they are dedicated for science, but for a critical event like that, we can use them to relay the data to Earth. And we also have on these landers and rover, high gain antennas that allow us to communicate directly with Earth but at lower data rate. So it's really a trade-off. When, when we should be using the orbiter or when we should be using the high gain antenna. Most of the time, we end up using the orbiter because it allows us to transmit the science much faster. So those are the reasons and most of the Mars mission have always worked this way. So we transmit the data to the orbiter and the orbit transmits back to the to the Deep Space Network on Earth.

Jim Green: Yeah, that sounds complicated, but it provides an infrastructure that allows any asset that's on the surface to be able to be relayed through our orbiting satellites. It's really an exciting time in in this particular field.

Jim Green: You know when the InSight lander arrived landed on Mars in November 2018 it carried with a two CubeSats and we call those CubeSats “MarCO.” What were they supposed to be doing and how important was communication for them?

Nacer Chahat: Yeah so MarCO was actually one of my first projects, and when I joined JPL the former director of the lab, Charles Elachi, challenged the lab to find a way to do real time communication during the lending of InSight. So with the existing orbiter we were able to collect all the information from InSight during the landing However because of the alignment of the orbiter, we couldn't get the data right away. 

Nacer Chahat: So the role of these two CubeSats was actually to receive data from the lander, InSight, and transmit these data in real time so the, the main challenge was to be able from these very, very tiny satellites which are the size of a shoebox, being able to transmit at the same data rate which was roughly around 8 kilobits per second. This was really difficult because we needed an antenna that was three times the size of the satellite itself. So we had to find a way to fold the antenna and deploy it. That's also the first interplanetary CubeSat so we had to ensure that we could actually survive the flight to Mars, which we did very successfully.

Nacer Chahat: When we witnessed the landing of InSight we were all excited because for those who actually follow the landing you should remember when they were saying oh we are now 100 meter 90 meter 20 meter and all the excitement was coming up all I had in mind was oh that's my antenna who's transmitting all these data and then he landed we exploded with joy and we finally received these first pictures from InSight on the surface of Mars which also got relayed using the MarCO antenna.

Nacer Chahat: If we did not have the CubeSats we would have had to wait more than two hours after that.

Jim Green: Wow.

Nacer Chahat: Because the orbiter was not on the line of sight.

Nacer Chahat So, that's such an amazing accomplishment that we've been able to do and that's really what's beautiful about working at NASA is that we're able to do things that nobody has done before.

Jim Green: Yeah i remember that time I was head of planetary science and it was really riveting and i was just delighted that the MarCO spacecraft worked.

Jim Green: And in fact, it was really nailbiting for the simple reason that we were having problems with one of the MarCO spacecraft very close to the encounter time. Do you remember that? And what happened?

Nacer Chahat: I do, I do, and we were very worried about that. So one of them actually restarted? Like, I think it was a few hours before maybe a day before, I don't recall exactly. So we were worried that one of the CubeSats would not be able to relate to data. But after it rebooted, it went in safe mode and rebooted in a nominal mode. And they both successfully related the data.

Jim Green: Well, you know, we're flying a helicopter on Mars for the first time. And we call that Ingenuity. Did you get involved in that? And what's your role?

Nacer Chahat: When I saw the first flight, I couldn’t help but think of all these hours spent working really hard to solve technical problems. All these people working on delivering hardware that you don’t necessarily see on TV. This achievement is absolutely historical and I am happy I got to contribute.

Nacer Chahat: My contribution was with the telecommunication subsystem, to ensure that the rover can send commands to the helicopter, and the helicopter can send images or telemetry back to the rover. So, I worked on the antenna design and also worked on the system engineering.

Jim Green: Wow, that sounds really difficult because this is a very small vehicle. What's that antenna look like? I don't remember seeing it. Does it stick out? Or is it part of… does it go up to the top or, where's it at?

Nacer Chahat: Yeah. So on the top of the helicopter, there is a solar panel, which allows us to recharge our battery. And we decided to locate the antenna on this surface, because this is what provided the largest area to use as a reflective surface. So this is the simplest type of antenna that you can ever use. This is called a monopole. So monopole is basically a single wire, which is resonant at the frequency of operation, and located on top of a reflective surface. And the reflective surface in this case is the solar array.

Nacer Chahat: This wire allows us to operate at the frequency of interest. But this antenna, this type of monopole antenna are being used when you need to communicate what we call omni, omni directionally. Meaning, we need to communicate this with the same capabilities in any direction, because we don't know where the helicopter or rover will be because it will constantly move when it's flying. Right. So that's the reason why we use such an antenna.

Nacer Chahat: It's very small it's about five to six centimeter which is basically a quarter wavelength or the frequency of operation.

Jim Green: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, yeah, you move the copter and it comes back down. And it's not necessarily in that same orientation.

Nacer Chahat: Exactly.

Jim Green: So you want to broadcast. So it sounds…

Nacer Chahat: Yeah

Jim Green: …like though the Ingenuity communication is only with, with Perseverance, and then it's up to Perseverance to package that data and then send it up to an orbiter which then relays it back to Earth.

Nacer Chahat: That's, that's exactly it. And the reason is very simple is that obviously with such a small helicopter, we will not be able to communicate directly to the orbiter, and even less with Earth. So that's the concept that that we, we use. The helicopter is also has to, to, to stay away from the rover itself because the rover needs to be completely safe. So we have to keep-out zone which is roughly above 100 meters. So the helicopter to will never fly within 100 meters of the rover. So the telecommunication subsystem was designed to communicate from 100 meter to one kilometer, which is very far away. And we've done a lot of testing nearby our lab outside, a field test, which was very, very exciting, where we had a real size mock-up of the rover and the helicopter and we located it in different direction to make sure that all of our models and analyses were correct.

Jim Green: Wow, that sounds really fun. Another thing that NASA likes to do is think about missions that are in the future. And even though we're sending a spacecraft to Europa, called Clipper, we're also been thinking about what it might be like to get down on the surface, a lander. Now, you were also involved in the communication system for a lander on Europa. What would that be like? And how does that have to work?

Nacer Chahat: The original concept of the Europa lander concept was to send an orbiter as well, along with the lander, and the orbiter will have communication telecommunication capabilities to relay the data back to Earth. However, doing so would have been cost-prohibitive. So, we were asked very quickly to revise the concept to reduce the cost so that this mission could someday be possible.

Nacer Chahat: And the only way to do so was to communicate directly with earth so that we don't have to have an orbiter as well. So, to do that, the conclusion that was that we needed an antenna with an efficiency of more than 80%, which to give you an idea, has never done before. All of the Mars rover or lander, they have efficiencies of less than 45%, roughly. But the lander has additional constraints. The antenna needed to be flat, it needed to survive the environment, and very high radiation of Europa. And for those reason, people thought it was just not possible to do so.

Nacer Chahat: So we came up with an antenna design that fulfills all these requirements and achieved the efficiency we fully tested be something to the environment of Europa, to qualify the something out for a potential Europa lander mission in the future. And so now we're in a very, very, very good shape, because we know that this Europa mission concept is possible. We have all the technology that are needed to do that, because NASA supported us to develop all of these technologies.

Jim Green: Yeah, that's really great. Now coming back to the Earth, your current project is on SWOT, which is the Surface Water and Ocean Topography Mission. What are you up to with that? And have we launched it yet?

Nacer Chahat: No, we are right now we are in integration and testing, what we call INT. So the payload is fully assembled. Right now, we're actually currently doing all the environmental testing on the payload before we ship it to France to our partner in France, CNES, to integrate it with the spacecraft. So this mission is very exciting because we're pushing the boundaries of the science measurement accuracy. So the role of SWOT is to measure the surface topology of the ocean, but also the water surface for the first time. So we will have a global map of the entire Earth and we will be able to know where the water is continuously. And so that's, that's the beauty of SWOT. There is a lot of new technology that needed to be developed to do that, to improve the accuracy of these measurements. And so we're very, very excited to see this mission moving along and getting very ready to fly.

Jim Green: So what's the new advancement in antenna technologies?

Nacer Chahat: Every single mission have different requirements. So we tend to design a new antenna every single time. I would say that the holy grail of the antenna, from my point of view, would be to design an antenna that could be applied for every mission to meet any requirements. So obviously, that's, that's almost impossible to do so. But for communication, that's not impossible, you could come up with an antenna that could shave the beam in any way we want for a given aperture. And that's what I'm working on, on my research science, to achieve such a thing.

Jim Green: Sounds great.

Jim Green: Nacer, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was that event that person, place or thing that got them so excited about being the engineer they are today. And I call that event a gravity assist. So Nacer, what was your gravity assist?

Nacer Chahat: The scientists that I respected the most is Marie Curie, who was also from the same country that I am from, from France. But really, what I like about my inquiry is her dedication for work. And I think nobody was as dedicated as her because she actually gave her life for her work. And the work ethic that she has demonstrated is what, what I share the most with Marie Curie.

Nacer Chahat: So but I would, I would say, as well, that it's not necessarily an engineer, or a scientist that really inspired me, in my case. My parents are from a very poor country, in Algeria, north of Africa. And they didn't have access to education. So, after they moved in France, I was born and raised in France, they really share this notion of understanding that the education is a gift. They didn't have the chance, and they wanted to make sure that that I realized the chance I had, and we could take advantage of the education I was given as much as possible. So that's why I always worked really, really hard to do as much as I could and learn as much as I could.

Nacer Chahat: And so I would say that my gravity assist are not engineers or scientists, but actually my parents.

Jim Green: Now, that's a wonderful story. Thank you so much for sharing it with me.

Jim Green: Nacer, thank you so much for joining me in discussing this fantastic topic.

Nacer Chahat: It was my pleasure. It's always it's, it's always great to share the experience that we have delivered developing new technology at JPL. So thank you for having me.

Jim Green: Join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Video producer: Sonnet Apple
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-talking-to-ingenuity-and-other-space-robots-with-nacer-chahat
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Styczeń 08, 2023, 09:52
Wspomnienia inżyniera bezpieczeństwa m.in.  ładunku w programie STS.

Gravity Assist: Breaking Barriers, with Dana Bolles (1)
Apr 30, 2021

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Dana Bolles has worked in many exciting areas of NASA including assuring the safety of experiments and spacecraft going to space, managing environmental programs, and thinking about the possibility of life beyond Earth. In her journey as a space professional, a key challenge has been encountering other people’s assumptions about what she can and cannot do. Dana gets around in a wheelchair and uses hooks for hands. In this episode, she talks about her experiences around NASA and how everyone can be a better ally for people with diverse abilities: “By getting to know us first, without preconceived notions, the benefit is seeing the community for the beauty we bring to living life every day.”

Jim Green: Behind the scenes of NASA, so many things have to work right for us to be able to make a mission successful.

Jim Green: Let's talk to somebody who has worked in many different areas of NASA.

Dana Bolles: With my disability, people tend to make assumptions about what I can and can’t do.

Dana Bolles: I would say that’s been the biggest challenge.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dana Bolles. And she works for the science engagement and partnership division at NASA Headquarters. Dana was first hired as a payload safety engineer at the Kennedy Space Center in 1995. And since then, she has worked at four NASA centers and mission support roles, and at least 10 more years in the human exploration and science divisions. Welcome, Dana to Gravity Assist.

Dana Bolles: Thank you, Jim, for inviting me. I appreciate it.

Jim Green: My pleasure. Well, I really want to know what really got you excited and wanted to work for NASA.

Dana Bolles: So, you know, most kids would say, "Oh, I want to work for NASA". Right? That's a common, common thing. But more specifically, when I was younger, when I was thinking of all the different jobs to have, I thought, an astronaut, being an astronaut would be perfect, because it would, I would be in an environment where I wouldn’t need the wheelchair, and the fact that I don't have legs would be okay. And in fact, it can even be an advantage, right?

Dana Bolles: Because you're having to launch in these, these little spaces, these small spaces where you're all crammed in like, like sardines. And I thought, well I’d be, I'd be at an advantage, I wouldn't need leg space. And thirdly, I, I use artificial arms. So I, I was born without arms, and I use my artificial legs since I was two years old, so I'm pretty proficient in them. So I thought, that's a third reason why it might be an advantage to hire me as an astronaut, because I could use my hooks, you know, like the astronauts use the robotic arms. And so there you go, three, three reasons to hire me. (laughs)

Jim Green: Well, what was your biggest challenge, you know, that you faced when you prepared for your career at NASA?

Dana Bolles: One of the biggest challenges was, you know, I was getting my engineering degree in the early 90s. And still, at that time, there were, there was a handful of us girls and women in the class, but we were largely outnumbered. And so that, that was a weird feeling, right, being, being one of the few women and, going through the major. Also, the biggest thing for me is, with my disability, people tend to make assumptions about what I can and can't do. So I would say, the biggest challenge in, in my success in my career and working at NASA or wherever, is just having to always put up against those, those assumptions and limiting me so that, I would say that's the biggest challenge. And it gets kind of tiring, always having to, to prove myself, you know.

Jim Green: Yeah. But do you remember the time that you know you first came to NASA and how did you feel?

Dana Bolles: Oh, I remember that quite well, even though it was over 25 years ago. It was scary. I was going to the other side of the country. I grew up in California. And so here I was in Florida. But it was a really, it was exciting. It was scary. One thing that, that I remember quite well is the first months I was there, there were a lot of tours. And I'm sure you've been to Kennedy, and it's an amazing facility and…

Jim Green: It is.

Dana Bolles: And my favorite was to go to the Vehicle Assembly Building and you know, that building is what, 525 feet high? At the time, it was the second or third largest building and volume in the in the world. And I was just in awe when I got to see that and know that this was a place where the orbiter was mated with the external tank and the solid rocket boosters. And you know, looking at the crawler and learning all, all the process of what it takes to launch, was just it was exciting. It was overwhelming, and a bit scary. You know, that the responsibility of that. But yeah, amazing. It was incredible.

Jim Green: Yeah, that building we call fondly the VAB.

Dana Bolles: Right.

Jim Green: Indeed, I have never had the opportunity to be in it when they put together the Shuttle and the external tank and then the solid rocket boosters in the building and then put it on the crawler and then roll it out…

Dana Bolles: Right.

Jim Green: …to the pad. You know, but you see it on films and it's just it's just not the same. I tell you.

Dana Bolles:  Yeah, yeah.

Jim Green:Well, as a payload safety engineer, what was, specifically did you have to do? Is that for every Shuttle flight, or were there other things that you did along the way?

Dana Bolles: So let me let me first define payload. For people who don't know, the payload is basically, it's the purpose of the mission. So, it could be anything from an experiment, it could be a spacecraft, it could be the Mars rover, which, which recently landed, Perseverance. Those are all payloads. So at Kennedy, I was part of the ground safety review panel. So we looked at the payload from the time it arrived at Kennedy until the time it launched and cleared the tower. That was kind of our purview.

Dana Bolles: And we were assigned payloads and, and we would look at everything that was done to it for pre, pre-launch processing. So at Kennedy could be, it's everything from the time it comes through the gate, and you take it from the vehicle, and you put it on a stand, we had to make sure as the payload safety engineers, did the sling, you know, what is the rating of the sling? And when is it, when was it last tested?

Dana Bolles: And so it's basically looking at everything we're doing to it from the time they comes in the gate, is it safe for the people working on, it for the from the facilities and from the spacecraft itself, because it's thousands and thousands of dollars, that, of the American people's money. So those are the things we looked at.

Dana Bolles: Let's say the spacecraft has to be fueled, then we had to make sure that all the procedures in that process, you know, that they had all the safety built into it.

Dana Bolles: And then finally, with launch, that was really exciting, because we would have to be there at least a couple hours before launch, so that if there was an anomaly on the pad, we could help the managers know what to do next, for the process and the procedures.

Jim Green: Yeah. Now, this included not only shuttle payloads, but rocket payloads, too.

Dana: Right.

Jim Green: So, spacecraft that would be mounted on the top and then blasted into space.

Dana Bolles: Right. In fact, I had one of my payloads was an expendable launch vehicle payload, the EOV payload, it was the Mars Orbiter.

Jim Green: Oh, wow. Now, from there, you moved to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to work as a fire protection safety engineer. What led you to make that switch?

Dana Bolles: You know, it was really hard to leave because I loved what I was doing at Kennedy and I loved the center. But coming from San Francisco, it was a really big difference for me to live in that environment, and I really wanted to be closer to a more metropolitan area.

Dana Bolles So with Goddard, it made more sense because it was closer to DC. And I had that access. And so that was my main driver, is, I just kind of I wanted a different, I want to live somewhere different. Goddard was, you know, I met some really good people. And it was in the life safety code, ensuring that we met the fire protection. It was a good experience. I learned a lot, but I was there only a very short year-and-a-half before I transferred to Ames Research Center on the West Coast.

Jim Green: Well, how did that opportunity come up for you to go from Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, all the way back then to California?

Dana Bolles: So as I mentioned earlier, I am a West Coast gal. And so what happened during that that time that I transferred… my mom, my mom was in remission from cancer for about 11-and-a-half years. And so while I was at Goddard her, that was when her cancer came back.

Jim Green: Oh wow.

Dana Bolles So that's when I decided I need to go back and actually the first year, I was back in California, I drove down from the Bay Area down to LA 10 times in the year so I could spend more time with her. And…yeah, so that was the main driver, plus just the fact that I really like living on the West Coast a lot. So it was, I was back. And then I was back in the Bay Area, which is where my heart was. So, um everything kind of came together perfectly.

Jim Green: Well, what's really great about NASA is it has 10 centers in many different states across the United States.

Dana Bolles: Yep.

Jim Green: So indeed, it gives you a flexibility to take your skills and ability and go and work at another center.

Dana Bolles: Right.

Jim Green: Well, what did you do when you're at Ames?

Dana Bolles: When I first transferred to Ames, I transferred into the Environmental Services Division, and I was a an environmental compliance specialist. So I managed the center's biggest environmental programs in air quality, hazardous materials storage and industrial wastewater discharge. And what I love about NASA is: We follow all of the environmental regulations. There's federal, state and local laws, and whatever is the most stringent is what we’ll follow. And so living in the Bay Area, that was a really challenging job. We had the most stringent environmental regs in the whole country. And so what that meant was I was mostly dealing with local regulators.

Jim Green: Well, is there one NASA mission or activity that you worked on that really stands out in terms of something that you're really glad you're worked on?

Dana Bolles: What I think when I, when I look at my entire career, I would have to say that payload safety engineer was the most exciting time because I was, that was the closest ties I had with the mission, was as a payload safety engineer. But I really appreciate… all of my jobs I've had through my 25-year career have been really awesome. And I've learned a lot from each one of them.

Dana Bolles And another another program that I was really impressed with being part of was the Human Research Program. And that was a really, in my opinion, that was a really top-notch program of NASA. And it was a, it was an honor to be part of their team, more at the program level, helping with all the elements, integrating them all, and also coordinating their program status review every two years. So, so that was a, that was an incredible experience.

Jim Green: Wow.

Dana Bolles: Mhm.

Jim Green: So you most recently came to NASA Headquarters to work in the Science Mission Directorate, and in particular, science communications. What got you interested in that topic?

Dana Bolles:  So what happened was when the call came out, through Headquarters for people who were interested in doing details, you know, I, it's funny, I, throughout my career, up until this time, when I did apply, which is this last time when I got it, I had no interest in doing a detail at Headquarters. But I just feel like the timing was just right.

Dana Bolles: And not only that, but the fact that you know, communicating NASA to the public. That's always been a great passion of mine. I mean, I do a lot of public speaking about NASA, and it's my favorite thing to encourage youth to go into the STEM fields, because we need our best and brightest. If we want to stay in this, you know, in the space game, right? We have to have the best and the brightest, so it's important to encourage them.

Jim Green: Well, in your work at NASA Headquarters in the science communication area, you've been doing a lot of thinking about the search for life beyond Earth. And that's a huge topic of interest in NASA. And in fact last season's Gravity Assist, we talked about the search for life. Well tell us about what you've been doing to support NASA in this area.

Dana Bolles: Well, my first year of my detail, I helped to create this toolkit. And basically, it was, it's an electronic resource for NASA employees, anybody who has a NASA email could access it. And it's to help people so that they can communicate about the search for life to the public. So it could be for people who want to speak about it, like, let's say an elementary school wants to hear about it. So somebody is interested, they can go here and learn about what NASA has done, and also part of that first year, I helped, I led a team of experts in the search for life, and kind of thinking about how can NASA be better prepared in mak[ing] an announcement in the future about finding life beyond Earth?

Dana Bolles: And so it's really it's been an incredible experience just sitting with this team that we have, listening to them just have very light, informal discussions about what can we do? What can we do to kind of help, and a lot of it is preparing the public on what we mean when we say certain things. And then there's another piece of it, you know, when the announcement does come up, what are some of the things we want to think about?

Jim Green: In fact, as you know, you and I've talked about that particular subject on a number of occasions,

Dana Bolles: Yeah

Jim Green: It’s one of my favorites.

Dana Bolles: Yeah.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Styczeń 08, 2023, 09:52
Gravity Assist: Breaking Barriers, with Dana Bolles (2)

Jim Green: And indeed, NASA is doing so many things across many of the different centers. And having a place where that can be accumulated and, and brought together is, is really important.

Jim Green: So in the area of search for life, as you're pulling together important information for all of us to use and leverage, what are some of the things that you think are perhaps misconceptions by the public in NASA's effort to find life beyond Earth?

Dana Bolles: I think the biggest challenge in making an announcement is that people are going to hear it and they're going to immediately go to the image of the great little green Martians on Mars, right? So a lot of it has to do with science fiction, and I think that feeds a lot into people's mis- misperceptions of what, what it looks like, what it could be.

Dana Bolles: I mean, more than likely, you know, based on what we know, now, it's it's going to be microbial, which we're not even going to be able to see. So, those are the things that are the biggest challenges. Just sensationalizing and that not to mention just, the media likes to sensationalize everything anyway to make a good story so that that kind of doesn't help when we're trying to be realistic about, you know, what it is that we're doing and how and what we're finding out there.

Jim Green: Now, I've heard that you've been named, and IF/THEN Ambassador by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dana Bolles: Yes.

Jim Green: So first, congratulations.

Dana Bolles: Thank you.

Jim Green: And tell us what that program is all about.

Dana Bolles: So IF/THEN is an initiative of the Lyda Hill Philanthropies. And what she wanted to do was she wanted to encourage young girls like middle school-ish age to go into STEM. And so she thought, well, if we support a woman in STEM, then she could change the world. That's kind of their motto. So what, what they did, what this initiative does is it takes the talent agency model, and it promotes all of the ambassadors. There's like 125 of us. And it promotes us across the country in all these different venues and ways so that we could reach the most number of girls.

Dana Bolles: There's a virtual classroom experience where you talk to classrooms. It's called Nepris. So they're one of the collaborators with IF/THEN, and they get a lot of their speakers through the ambassadorship program. And there's show there's Saturday morning shows geared towards kids that encourage girls to go into STEM and there's all kinds of different ways that they're promoting us. And it's just been incredible. And in fact, one really awesome thing is there was a study done in 2016. Rosie Rios commissioned a study in 10 largest cities in the, in the United States. And what they did is they looked at all the statues that are in public, in the public view, and they found that of all of them, less than half a dozen were of real women, nonfictional women. And so based on that Lyda Hill thought, you know, I'm gonna change that. And so she took 3D scans of all of us. And they're going to display full, full size models of all of us all at once, all in one place. And it’ll be largest display of real women in science in, in the country, if not the world.

Jim Green: Wow, that sounds like a spectacular opportunity.

Dana Bolles: Yep.

Jim Green: In fact, middle school girls in particular, I guess, that's a critical time for which they then make decisions about whether they're really interested in science or not. So seeing the role models, seeing that they can actually step up and make a career of these kind of science and engineering and mathematics that, that they may be good at, is really important.

Dana Bolles: Yeah.

Jim Green: And I'm sure you're, you've really helped a number of kids along the way.

Dana Bolles: Yeah, it's important. It's important. They see, they see women like them, you know, because that way, it gives them more of a reality check that, hey, I could do it.

Jim Green: Well, what's the one thing that people could do to really be a better ally for the disability community?

Dana Bolles: Jim, thanks for asking that question. The one thing that people could do, to be a better ally to the community is to not see us for what we can't do. But be curious about what we can do. So while people's initial reaction to disability is often negative, and feeling sorry for us, they don't, they don't see that living this experience makes us better problem solvers. So by getting to know us first, without preconceived notions, the benefit is seeing the community for the beauty we bring to living life every day.

Jim Green: Well, NASA really looks for a diversity of people, because each and every one of our experiences, and that includes people with disabilities, brings a certain level of sensitivity, and a certain ability to solve some of the most complex problems that that, you know, we really face if we're going to learn to live and work on a planetary surface.

Jim Green: Dana, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was the event, the person, place, or thing that got them so excited about being the engineer, they are today in NASA. And I call that event a gravity assist? So Dana, what was your gravity assist?

Dana Bolles: This is a really difficult question for me to answer. You know, at first, I thought it was, of course, it's my mom, she's the one who gave me my backbone. She, she helped build my confidence. And then, and then I thought, well, then it could be the principal and the teachers who mainstreamed me at such a young age. It could be my father who, not knowing him for the first 39 years of my life, when I do find him, I find that he builds spacecraft models for living.

Dana Bolles: So when I look at all of this, you know, I would say, if I had to narrow it down, I would say it would be people. You know, it's my family, my friends, my mentors. All of that kind of helped to give me the gravity assist, to come to NASA and to be successful.

Jim Green: Dana, thanks so much for joining me and discussing this fascinating topic of all the activities that you've been doing in NASA.

Dana Bolles: Thank you. It was a great honor.

Jim Green: Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to see what happens underneath the hood in NASA. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Apr 30, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-breaking-barriers-with-dana-bolles
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Styczeń 22, 2023, 08:17
Ken Bowersox (https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=140.msg34950#msg34950) brał udział w 5. lotach kosmicznych (http://lk.astronautilus.pl/astros/271.htm)

Gravity Assist: Always an Astronaut, with Ken Bowersox (1)
May 14, 2021

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/ksc-02pd-1686.jpg)
Ken Bowersox preparing for the launch of Expedition 6 on Space Shuttle Endeavour in 2003.Credits: NASA/JSC

“In some ways, spaceflight changes you forever,” says Ken Bowersox. Since he was 7 years old, Ken knew he wanted to become an astronaut. In his astronaut career, he participated in many exciting missions, including an extended stay on the International Space Station. What did he eat? How did he feel when he came home? Now a leader in NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate, Ken currently works on plans for sending astronauts to the Moon through the Artemis program, with an eventual goal of Mars.

Jim Green: What's it like for humans in space? What do they encounter? And how do they get ready to go? Let's find out from an astronaut.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Ken Bowersox. Ken is the Deputy Associate Administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate. Ken is also United States Navy captain and a former astronaut. He is a veteran of five space shuttle missions, and an extended stay aboard the International Space Station. Ken, welcome to Gravity Assist.

Ken Bowersox: Thanks, Jim. It's great to be here with you today. And, and a couple corrections. I got on my last mission, I got to come home on a Soyuz so I take credit for that too.

Jim Green: Oh, great!

Ken Bowersox: And whenever we say “former astronaut” people give us a hard time. So I usually say “retired,” because you never know, with the way things are going in commercial space, I might get a chance to fly again.

Jim Green: (laughs)

Ken Bowersox: So there's always that chance. There's never the last flight right. It's always your your most recent flight. And you're never a former, even though you can be retired.

Jim Green: I understand completely.

Jim Green: Did you always know you wanted to be an astronaut?

Ken Bowersox: Well, I wouldn't say always, but I started on the path to becoming an astronaut at a very young age. You know, when I look back on it, I think there was a lot of things that made me think about it, right? I, I can remember going to air shows when I was, you know, just a few years old. But the thing that really got me was when I was about 7, I was riding in the family car with my father. And on the radio, we heard about John Glenn orbiting the Earth. And I remember asking my Dad, what's that mean? And he explained it to me. And I thought, ‘I want to do that. I want to be an astronaut someday.’ And, and so that was kind of the start.

Jim Green: Wow, that's unbelievable. Well, you know, you flew as a pilot on the space shuttle missions STS 50, which was Columbia, and then STS 61, which was Endeavour. And for each of these missions, of course, there's always a commander and a pilot. What, what's the roles, because you were a pilot on those missions?

Ken Bowersox: Well, if it was on a commercial airliner, the pilot would be called a copilot. But, but we wanted to have fancy titles in the in the space shuttle world. So instead of being pilot and co-pilot, we made it commander and pilot.

Ken Bowersox: But, but the way things usually work, the commander, in addition to running the mission would do a lot of the critical flying tasks, and the pilot would back up the commander. You’d made sure that the vehicle was going the direction it should be going that all the systems were functioning properly. And then the most important thing that you did on the whole mission was making sure that the landing gear went down. The commander would be flying, you’d get down to a few hundred feet and hit the button to put down the landing here. And if you didn't do that it was going to be really ugly. So that was that was, we used to say that was the most important thing the pilot had to do.

Jim Green: (laughs) Okay, that's pretty fantastic. Well, on that STS 61, now was the first Hubble repair mission. Now, what was your role on that mission?

Ken Bowersox: Well, I was the pilot for that mission. So Dick Covey and Steve Hawley were back at the flight station when we did the initial rendezvous. And I got to sit up in the commander's seat, watching all the systems. I remember Dick Covey, he told me when I'm flying the vehicle, getting up close to the Hubble Space Telescope, my brain is going to be shrunk to the size of a pea. And he says, “I'm going to need you, kind of, looking at all the different systems in the vehicle to make sure things are going well, because I won't have the bandwidth to do that. And I'll be counting on you to watch that for me.”

Ken Bowersox: And I remember being so impressed with the way he trusted me, right, and the way he explained what his limitations would be, and I can remember telling my pilot on STS 61, when I got to fly the rendezvous to Hubble, the same thing. And it was really true. I mean, you're so excited you're concentrated on, on making sure you don't do something that might damage the telescope, you're not thinking as much as you'd like to about all the other things that have to work on the vehicle. And it's great to have somebody else on the team taking that big picture and looking out for you.

Jim Green: Yeah, so during those times, you have to be laser-focused on what you're doing. Well, you had an opportunity to watch these guys do spacewalks at the time and, and, and the start that process of taking the telescope apart and putting new pieces back and forth. Did you want at that time to get out there to help them with that repair?

Ken Bowersox: Oh, yeah, I desperately wanted to go outside. I used to joke that I've probably seen, watched more more spacewalks than just about anybody because I saw a five on the first HST servicing mission and then another five on, on the second servicing mission. And I had trained for a spacewalk on my first flight as a sort of a contingency crew member. But, but you know, of course, never got to do it.

Ken Bowersox: But the, on my, on the first Hubble servicing mission, though, the, the EVA team was so kind to me, they actually let me get into one of the suits and see what it felt like to be pressurized in the suit inside the cabin, they needed to check out a suit. So they figured, hey, well, we might as well put a person in it while we're checking it out. And so they let me do that, which was a wonderful experience. But yeah, I would have, I would have loved to have gone outside and actually work on this done the telescope. Instead, I just got to take pictures and watch them and help them get in and out of their suits.

Jim Green: And Hubble of course, has just been the premier scientific instrument for NASA. It’s generated more data and more scientific papers and any other mission. So the repair of Hubble has just been spectacular. And the fact that that you were on two of the repair missions is pretty special.

Ken Bowersox: Well, I feel really lucky to have been on those missions, you know, it was so amazing to be up there near Hubble and get up in the morning and look out the window and see it back there in the payload bay, it really was exciting. I remember one of the neatest things that the crew got to do was on my first Hubble servicing mission. We needed to build some little covers, right? That that would go over the magnetometers up on top, because some of the insulation was degrading and, and we spent, I don't know, a few hours building these covers, the folks inside the vehicle. And then we took those covers and the EVA crew went outside and just in a few minutes in an EVA they put those covers on the telescope, right.

Ken Bowersox: But I remember when I got home thinking, ‘My covers are up there flying on the Hubble Space Telescope.’ And, and it was so it was just so neat thinking I touched those there on the telescope, they're still in orbit. And, and I think about all the people that that touched all the different pieces of Hubble making it and, and how they must feel with that telescope up there, now, still today and all the data that's come back from it and, and the way it's changed how we think about our universe.

Jim Green: Well, STS 82 was a Discovery shuttle. So you've been in a Columbia, Endeavour, and Discovery. How different are they? Well, you know, are they different, in terms of how they fly or maneuver? Or what, what it what is it like? Or are they all identical?

Ken Bowersox: Well, you know, there are little differences. And if you've, if you've been in them enough, you could notice the little differences, but each one of them whether it was the oldest or the newest, it they all felt like brand new cars, you know, they, they, they didn't really have quite the new car smell, but almost right there. Everything that's done, people wear bunny suits, they're just really, really clean. At least from my point of view, they were really clean. When we’d come back, sometimes folks would complain about dust or other things that come up because you you just can't get everything but but I always thought they were amazingly, amazingly clean and felt new every, every time I flew one. You know, you you'd expect little scratches on the panels and things like that.

Ken Bowersox: We had those in the simulator, the simulator spelt like us cars, right? They, they felt well worn, but the actual vehicles just, you know, they were they were sparkling inside. And, and as far as the way they flew, I think they all sort of flew the same, the bigger influence was what you were carrying in the payload bay, you know, on a spacelab mission, the vehicle would fly a little bit different on the landing than on a Hubble mission. When you come back with a with a lot less cargo in the payload. The vehicle’s response was just a little bit differently. They both flew fine, but it was enough that it was worth training on the difference. And, and we had some great simulators, airborne and, and and, and ground simulators that could get you a feel for what the vehicle was like, so that when you'd roll out at whatever runway you were landing on, you felt really comfortable and at home, you know. You're well prepared for whatever vehicle you were flying.

Jim Green: So after you came back from STS 82, you became, you changed positions, you became a mission specialist, you know, getting ready to go to space station. So, how did that go? Well, what was the big change in your training?

Ken Bowersox: Well, you know, there was a lot of differences, training for an international space station mission as a mission specialist over training as a commander or a pilot for shuttle mission. You know, commanders, pilots, we trained to do the simpler science experiments.

Ken Bowersox: And on ISS, we were going to be training for experiments that would take a higher level of preparation, and we would train in a lot more detail for the science. So that was one area where it was a little bit different. The other area was in the area of international cooperation, training on systems from another country, and living and working in another country. Before I flew in expedition six, you know, in, in short periods, I accumulated about two years living in Russia, and I think the longest period was a little over three months. And it, but, but, you know, four to six weeks over in Russia, back to the US over to Russia, back to the US, working in, in Russian, trying to learn Russian systems, and, and getting to know the Russian people and, and that was again, very rewarding; a different kind of reward, then I remember from the Hubble missions, but, but, but still very satisfying.

Ken Bowersox: But often it's the relationships that we're building that really last and, and change the world around us. And I think that was probably the other bigger, the big change of ISS is that we weren't just building a science platform, we were actually doing something to try and change the world a little bit. And I think that's true. Honestly, when you look back about every mission, right, every mission that we fly, whether it's a robotic mission, or a mission with a human in it, those are exploration missions, and we're trying to change the world by what we learn, by, by the way our teams work together, by, by the way, we show people how we work.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Styczeń 22, 2023, 08:17
Gravity Assist: Always an Astronaut, with Ken Bowersox (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/99131main_iss006e09287.jpg)
Ken Bowersox was the commander of Expedition 6. He is shown on the International Space Station on Dec. 17, 2003.Credits: NASA/JSC

Jim Green: Yeah, I personally think that the International Space Station is just been such a wonderful venue for improving our international relationships, understanding different cultures and, and, and teams of people working together from different backgrounds. It's just so important for us to do. That diversity really makes us stronger.

Jim Green: While you're up in space, you have all kinds of things to eat, I'm sure. So what was your favorite food? Was it the ice cream or not?

Ken Bowersox: I never ate the astronaut ice cream in space. The closest thing I had to a dairy product that I really liked was instant breakfast, and I hated it on the ground. But when I got in space, I loved it. And I don't know why. But it was like having a great milkshake at a fancy diner. It was just really, really good. I loved that stuff when I was up in space. But that wasn't my favorite food. My favorite food was this this stew. It was a Russian stew called takana. And, and then on Saturday mornings, I'd have a, an American cinnamon roll, and a bag of Russian tea because the Russian tea was made with real tea bags, and real sugar. And it was a great treat to sit there read my email on Saturday morning with a with a bagged cinnamon roll and, and a fresh bag of tea.

Jim Green: So, while you're on the International Space Station, we have the Columbia disaster, which was so sad, I remember those days, quite vividly in my career. But then you end up coming home on a Soyuz, how different was that?

Ken Bowersox: The chance to fly home on the Soyuz was a big surprise for us. We were supposed to come home on a shuttle.

Ken Bowersox: But when the Columbia accident happened, the, the team decided that we should take a closer look at the shuttles before we fly anymore to, to station to deliver or pickup crews and the international team came up with a plan to bring us home on a Soyuz.

Ken Bowersox: But the actual flight home was just fantastic. It's so different on a Soyuz than a shuttle, I mean, a shuttle is kind of, like flying in an airliner and you, you if you were leaving station, it would take a couple days after you left station before you finally came back down at a runway and, and were met by the ground team and, and went off for all your post flight medical testing.

Ken Bowersox: On the Soyuz it’s, first of all, it's just a lot shorter. It's hours, instead of days after you leave station before you're on the ground. The G loads are a lot higher. And then on our flight, we had the extra excitement of a ballistic entry, But the big difference is you land about 300 miles or so away from the normal landing site.

Ken Bowersox: When we landed there was nobody there to meet us, which was a lot different than landing at a runway with a with a big bus there to meet you and, and haul you back to, to the crew quarters.

Ken Bowersox: Well, that the day we landed on Expedition 6 was in May, early May, the steppes of Kazakhstan. So it's, it's a little bit like the high deserts in the US. It's, there's a lot of, I think of it as reddish brown loamy soil. It's desert soil, it's really pretty dry.

Ken Bowersox: So we spent a few hours out in the wilds of Kazakhstan waiting for the, the ground forces to come pick us up and that was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life, just at peace, there, on the opposite side of the world from, from my house in Houston, Texas, but just feeling at home because I'd returned along with Don Pettit and, and Nikolai Budarin to our to our home, to our home planet. And I still get that feeling when I go to Kazakhstan today. And it's a long way away, but I still feel like, like I'm returning home. It’s neat.

Jim Green:  Well, did you have to mentally readjust every time you return to Earth's gravity? What was that like?

Ken Bowersox: Yeah, it, coming back to Earth gravity is as big an adventure is going into microgravity. Your body has to go through certain changes whenever you come back. And the longer you're in space, the bigger the transition is. It helps to be mentally prepared. The first thing you feel is that you're just really, really heavy, and your body tells you that you're so heavy, you may not even be able to move.

Ken Bowersox: It's kind of like getting out of a swimming pool. You know, if you've been in a swimming pool for a long time and then you climb out you'll feel really heavy on the ladder, or the opposite of taking off a pair of skates. Sometimes you'll take a pair of skates off your, off your feet and your feet will feel really, really light where it's it's the opposite of that you just feel heavy. Now your body is plenty strong and it's capable of moving. But your brain is telling you, “I don't know if this is gonna work.” But if you just concentrate really hard, everything works fine, right? That's the first thing.

Ken Bowersox: The second thing is something we call orthostatic intolerance. It just means if you if you stand up too quickly, you're, you'll get a little bit lightheaded. So that can last for a few hours where you just need to be careful if you, if you stand up, and a few hours to a few days; it varies with different people.

Ken Bowersox: And then the third thing is the way your vestibular system reacts. There are organs in your inner ear that kind of detect the gravity and the tilt of your body. Up in microgravity, you don't really use them the same way. You use those sensors to sort of sense your lateral acceleration. Right. So when you, when you come back, you can get this odd sensation that when you're tilting your head, you're moving sideways, right? And, and it's really strong when you get back, initially, but then it starts to fade away after a few days.

Ken Bowersox: So, so those are the kind of things and you know, over the next month or two, you gradually rebuild your, your postural muscles, the ones that you don't use a lot up in space, the, the muscles that back up and your neck up, and, and you get back pretty close to normal in that area after about a month.

Ken Bowersox: And then, and then in some ways, spaceflight changes you forever.

Ken Bowersox: When you're up in space, you'll hear it from every astronaut, you don't really see borders, although there are some borders, you can see, honestly. You know, borders, cut by rivers, and there are some places where you can actually see changes in the way land is managed from one country to the next.

Ken Bowersox: But for the most part, you don't, you don't see evidence that the different countries exist, you just see this big landmass and you see how connected we are. I remember on one flight I saw a dust storm over in Mongolia and that dust spread all the way around the world. You know, it touched other countries. It spread all the way around the northern hemisphere, and then the, the rains came and and washed that dust out of the air, and you could see the rain just moving around around the hemisphere.

Ken Bowersox: And seeing how the planet is connected, how it responds to things in different parts of the world, you realize that, that we all are connected, and that even though we have different countries, we're all related to our planet. And that is, is to me very profound.

Ken Bowersox: And I think it makes you less judgmental it, at least for me, it made me less judgmental, and, and more just wanting to understand how other people live and, and realizing how important it is that we all work together to protect our planet.

Ken Bowersox: And you start to think of our planet as a spacecraft. You know, after you've been away from it. And looking back, you start to think of as our spacecraft straight through the solar system.

Jim Green: Yeah, no, that's very important. Yeah. It's called the overview effect, how that really changes your perspective.

Jim Green: Well, so now you're the Deputy Associate Administrator for Human Exploration Operations Mission Directorate, and you're working towards getting astronauts to the Moon. How excited are you about our current plans and activities?

Ken Bowersox: Well, I, you know, I am so excited about our Artemis program and moving to get humans to the Moon. And, and, and beyond, right, the thing that that gets me most is we're not just talking about going to the Moon, we're talking about going out into our solar system, and we're going to the Moon to learn what we need to get further into the solar system. And there's a lot we have to learn, right and, and, and I'm, I'm excited about the, the missions that we're going to undertake, to gather that knowledge.

Ken Bowersox: And it's it, it's knowledge about how humans are going to work in a different radiation environment, how we're going to work on even longer duration stays out in, in deep space. And for the human spaceflight community, we have some thinking to do about trajectories, and gravity assists, that our our robotic explorer teams have been working for a long, long time. Ballistic trajectories. And that's, that's what's the I think the coolest thing about Artemis, to me is, is we're not just talking about the Moon, we're not just talking about Mars, we're talking about both and further. And I love that.

Jim Green: Well, Ken, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was the event or person, place, or thing that got them so excited about being the person in the space program that they are today. I call that event a gravity assist. So Ken, what was your gravity assist?

Ken Bowersox: For me it was that, that that time in the car with my father listening to the radio, and hearing about the, the mission of John Glenn, and the first US astronaut to orbit Earth, that that was the assist for me, that was what got the fire going. And then and then many, many places along the way. I got support and, and additional help from other mentors. I was just thinking about that the other day, how many different people in you know, maybe 10 minutes session while we were sitting waiting for something, they gave me some critical piece of advice or just encouraged me along the way. You know, so I've had lots of little gravity assist besides that big one.

Jim Green: Well, Ken, thanks so much for joining me and discussing this fascinating topic of what it's like behind the scenes to make a human exploration mission happen.

Ken Bowersox: It's been a lot of fun. It brought back a lot of great memories.

Jim Green: So join me next time as we continue our journey to look behind the scenes at making NASA work. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: May 14, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-always-an-astronaut-with-ken-bowersox
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Styczeń 29, 2023, 08:11
O przekładaniu fal elekromagnetycznych na dźwięki Kosmosu

Gravity Assist: Listening to the Universe, with Kim Arcand (1)
May 21, 2021

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coFE7-E6LRg
NASA spacecraft deliver stunning visual imagery of the cosmos, but we can also experience that data by turning it into sound. Kim Arcand at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory has helped develop many different sonifications including from galaxies, black holes, nebulae and more. Kim chats with NASA’s Chief Scientist Jim Green about her process of choosing instruments to represent different kinds of light, and plays a few examples of these cosmic sounds. Check out the full series of sonifications at chandra.si.edu/sound (https://chandra.si.edu/sound/).

Jim Green: From Earth, when we look into the sky, we use our eyes. But can we use our ears?

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Kim Arcand, and she is a visualization scientist and a science communicator for NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. She's based at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Boston, and has been working on turning satellite data all across the universe into spectacular images and sounds. Welcome, Kim, to Gravity Assist.

Kim Arcand: Hi, thanks so much for having me today.

Jim Green: Well, it's really a pleasure because this sonification idea is really nifty. How we can use our senses to really understand data and looking at it in a different way.

Jim Green: Kim, can you tell us a little bit more about Chandra and what it's been looking at?

Kim Arcand: Yeah, so Chandra was launched back in July of 1999, and has kind of been NASA's flagship mission for X-ray astronomy. Chandra gets to look at amazing things like exploding stars, areas around black holes and some of the largest gravitationally bound objects in the universe or galaxy clusters. But it also gets to look at other things too, like nearby and our solar system. It looks at planets and comets and lots of things. So it's all about being able to understand those high-energy processes and just figure out so many different answers to the questions that X-ray astronomers have had for quite a few years.

Jim Green: You know, I just recently went to the dentist and I had my mouth X-rayed. Is that the same kind of frequency and it as Chandra does, when it looks into the sky?

Kim Arcand: It's related. So you, when you go to the dentist, there is a machine that's pointing at your mouth, and it's directing X-rays to you, Chandra is not a machine that's pointing X-rays out into the universe, but rather, it's a series of detectors and other kinds of equipment that is capturing that X-ray information that is coming to us — traveling, if you will, across the universe from these various cosmic sources, whether it's a star that's exploded, or whether it's a neutron star, or whether it's something else entirely.

Kim Arcand: We have all of these different kinds of light from radio waves, and microwaves up to x-rays, and gamma rays. And for astronomers, all of those different kinds of light, they're like a different kind of tool that they can pluck out of their toolbox to be able to ask a question and try to figure something out, or try to get you know, more information on something. And so it really is important today, I feel like the, the modern astronomers’ strength is being able to have all of these different kinds of light at their disposal. And you can kind of think of it like, if you are at all musical, and you could say, play the piano, which disclaimer, I cannot play the piano. But just as an analogy, if you sat down and you found middle C, and you played that, and then you played a couple keys on either side, that amount of sound would be equivalent to optical light. So you would have all the rest of the keys, all the rest of those 88 keys on the keyboard that you wouldn't be hearing if you were only paying attention to that optical information. So by listening and understanding the microwaves, ultraviolet light, the gamma rays, what have you, you're able to hear all of those keys on your keyboard, essentially, and you're going to get a much richer set of information.

Jim Green: Okay, well, you've led the development of some really cool techniques like data sonification, which we're going to talk about in a minute, but tell us in general, how do you approach this challenge of turning satellite data into sounds?

Kim Arcand: For us data sonification really is a way of taking information that for the most part, humans can't see, right? If you're working with X-ray light, no human naturally can see X-rays. If you're working with infrared light or ultraviolet and even in the optical, many times our human eyes are not not strong enough or sensitive enough to be able to pick up all that emission anyway. So that's why we have these telescopes people to do that really hard work for us. So it's all about translating something you can't see into something you can experience. And astronomy has sort of prioritized visuals for a long time. But there's no reason why you can't include other senses as well in that bigger sort of storytelling product. So you can use sound, you can even use haptic or vibrational information.

Jim Green: Well, let's really get into it, I want to hear what you're talking about. You know, now some of our listeners will be familiar with the spectacular image called the Pillars of Creation that Hubble Space Telescope initially made just so beautiful. And what exactly is the Pillars of Creation, and let's talk about that before we listen to it.

Kim Arcand: Sure. So the Pillars of Creation is just this beautiful, iconic clump of data that the Hubble originally released back in 1995, I believe, and other observatories have been looking at it ever since. It's this beautiful stellar nursery, where stars are being born. And so if you're looking at that in optical light, you're seeing these tall pillars of gas and dust. And there's three main pillars, and they're sort of offset from each other in space. But if you're looking at the same patch of sky in X-ray light, you're instead seeing hundreds, if not thousands, and a broader field of view of these more compact sources. And those are essentially very, very young stars or stars that are in the process of forming what are called protostars. So you're getting all of the little tiny bits of high-energy light from those baby stars in progress. So when you combine the two different kinds of light, the X-ray and the optical, you get a really rich sense of the pillars themselves, where stars are forming, and then the wider area around it where all of these other stars are being detected in X-ray light that are in the process of developing. And so you can take that information from the data and then translate it into sound.

Jim Green: All right, well, let's listen to the Pillars of Creation.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VS9Od9qM1k&t=22s
By turning spacecraft data into sound, we can experience cosmic objects in new ways. Here are a few examples, including the center of the Milky Way, the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, and the spectacular star-forming region known as the Pillars of Creation. Credits: : NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)

Jim Green: Wow, that sounds neat! So how did you go about translating a beautiful image with the stars are forming, eating up gas, blowing away the rest creating these pillars? And how did you get that into that sound?

Kim Arcand: Well, so what we did is we sort of take that image and and map it, right, so you're, in this case, you're moving across the image horizontally from left to right. And both of the sounds that you're hearing, you're hearing both optical and X-ray light represented as different kinds of sounds, right. So in this case, there's like this continuous range of pitches. And for the optical data, it's so very, sort of, structured. So that sort of, like sweeping sound that you're hearing is really trying to depict the shape of those pillars. And then that higher pitch sound that you're hearing — those, sort of, bright sources that you're hearing — that is the young stars that we're detecting, in X-ray light.

Jim Green: Well, another really great one that you recently released was the Chandra Deep Field South. What was your approach in turning that into sound and let's listen to it.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg7whxKFQsk
This is the deepest image ever taken in X-rays, representing over seven million seconds of Chandra observing time. For that reason, and because the observed field is in the southern hemisphere, astronomers call this region the “Chandra Deep Field South.” Credits: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)

Kim Arcand: So that's very different, I think than the last one.

Jim Green: It is! It is!

Kim Arcand:…that we heard. And what's nice about this is it's a very, very different object, if you will, so the Pillars of Creation, those are relatively nearby. It's what perhaps 5,000 light-years away from Earth. The Chandra Deep Field South is incredibly distant. It's the deepest X-ray image we've ever obtained. And it's like 11, 12 and 13 billion light-years away the various objects in that field. So it's a very different type of data to approach. And so we used a very different technique. And in this case, because it was such a busy field of view of all of these little dots, which are essentially black holes, or galaxies, what we wanted to do is approach it from the bottom up so that you could have a stereo sound. And each of those dots then the color represents the different X ray energies or with the lower notes, for example, representing the lowest energy X-rays and the highest notes representing the highest energy X-rays. So as you're sort of scooting up through that data set, you can hear all of the different kinds of sources, all of those different black holes, hundreds and hundreds of black holes as you're going through the entire field of the Chandra Deep Field South.

Jim Green: Well, another really great one is the Crab Nebula, you know, that's a cosmic object that we've studied for, you know, centuries, you know, because it originally started in 1054, with a massive explosion.

Kim Arcand: Yeah, it's a, it's a great object. It's very famous, it's relatively nearby, it's perhaps 6,000 light years away in the Milky Way. It's in a great location for us to be able to view and many, many, many different telescopes, observatories have been used to capture fantastic information of that object over time. So the Chandra X-ray observatory has been looking at, looking at that object pretty much since it was launched back in 1999. And the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope have looked at it many times as well. So this data set is a collection of those three different kinds of light, the X-ray light from Chandra, the infrared light from Spitzer, and the optical light from Hubble. And when you're looking at the data set, it's this very dramatic, sort of wispy looking thing. It's got all of these rings and a jet, and then all of this massive, nebulous stuff all around it. And so you're looking at the leftovers of that stellar explosion. You've got the spinning neutron star, the pulsar at the very center, and that's the brightest, most energetic region, you've got all of the rings and the jets that are coming out of it. And then you've got the cooler gas and dust that are in the infrared and optical data all around the perimeter.

Jim Green: Well, let's listen.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Styczeń 29, 2023, 08:11
Gravity Assist: Listening to the Universe, with Kim Arcand (2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtymxN67eEE
The Crab Nebula has been studied by people since it first appeared in Earth's sky in 1054 A.D. Modern telescopes have captured its enduring engine powered by a quickly spinning neutron star that formed when a massive star collapsed. The combination of rapid rotation and a strong magnetic field generates jets of matter and anti-matter flowing away from its poles, and winds outward from its equator. For the translation of these data into sound, which also pans left to right, each wavelength of light has been paired with a different family of instruments. X-rays from Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue and white) are brass, optical light data from Hubble Space Telescope (purple) are strings, and infrared data from Spitzer (pink) can be heard in the woodwinds. In each case, light received towards the top of the image is played as higher pitched notes and brighter light is played louder.  Credits: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)

Kim Arcand: So for this piece, we wanted to be able to hear those individual things, right. So the X-rays from Chandra are like, a harsh breath sound. And the optical light from the Hubble Space Telescope would be like the lighter strings, and the infrared data from Spitzer, which is the lowest energy material that is like soft woodwinds type of sound. So again, you have to think of it as sort of like a map. And so in this case, the, the light that we're seeing towards the top of the image is being played as higher pitch notes. And the brighter light overall is being played louder. So there's a lot going on.

Jim Green: Wow, I think that is my favorite at the moment. But let's do another one. Let's listen to your rendition of the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. And then tell us how you put that together.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N9RnmwIWbA
The center of our Milky Way galaxy is too distant for us to visit in person, but we can still explore it. Telescopes gives us a chance to see what the Galactic Center looks like in different types of light. But what about experiencing these data in other senses like hearing? Sonification is the process that translates data into sound, and a new project brings the center of the Milky Way to listeners for the first time. The translation begins on the left side of the image and moves to the right, with the sounds representing the position and brightness of the sources. The light of objects located towards the top of the image are heard as higher pitches while the intensity of the light controls the volume. Credits: NASA/CXC/SAO/K.Arcand, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)

Kim Arcand: This one might be my favorite, though, it's really hard to pick, just because it was one of the first ones that we worked on.

Kim Arcand: But for the galactic center, this is a very classic image. It's of course, our home galaxy. We're looking at the inner about 400 lightyear region around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A star at the very core of the Milky Way. And again, we have incredible bits of information from various NASA observatories, we've got the X-ray light from Chandra, of course, we also have the infrared light from Spitzer and additional information from the Hubble Space Telescope. And they look very different when you're looking at these different kinds of light.

Kim Arcand: And particularly as you approach the supermassive black hole, as you skew across the image from left to right, you'll hear there's this massive crescendo, and it's where all the sort of action is happening. So again, just sound-wise, what you're listening for, the infrared is going to be played as a soft piano, the optical or the mid-range will be played as a plucky violin. And then the highest energy X-rays will be this really high-noted xylophone sound.

Kim Arcand: And I should say, none of this would have been possible without the incredible diligence and talented work of the colleagues that I've been working with this for this entire project on and they're from System Sound. Matt Russo's an astrophysicist and musician and Andrew Santaguida is a sound engineer and it really is a major group effort. There's really no “me” in science, it's all “we,” so just, just wanted to bring them into the story because I feel like they've just been incredibly talented and how they approach this.

Jim Green: But you know, besides all your work in sonification, and data visualization, I know you've been very active in public outreach, especially trying to get our young people interested in astronomy. So can you give me a little insight as to what you've been doing in that area recently?

Kim Arcand: Yeah, it really is a complete joy to be able to do this type of work, I just love it. Like, I really, really love it. My sort of areas of expertise tend to be in things like helping other people to be able to experience the universe. So a lot of the work we've done at Chandra has been taking objects and modeling them into 3-D so that we can 3-D print them, bring them into virtual reality, or holograms, or augmented reality. And that project, I think, really sort of opened up my eyes as to just the many different ways that we can all experience the universe. For someone who is either blind or visually impaired, being able to access 3d printed model or the data sonification provides a really rich experience. And so with these types of projects, we work with people, either astrophysicists or amateur astronomers or other students, for example, who are blind or visually impaired in order to really improve the product and make it something that the community is going to be able to appreciate.

Jim Green: Yeah, sounds fantastic. Well, you know, Kim, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what that event, person place or thing that got them so excited about becoming the scientists they are today. And I call that event a gravity assist. So Kim, what was your gravity assist?

Kim Arcand: You know, I'm not sure if it was someone who helped me realize that science would be for me, or it's just somebody who helped me realize that there are different ways of experiencing things. I was a super, super shy kid, like, you know, hide behind my mom type of shy kid when I was little. And I didn't make friends easily. I was just so shy. And so when I went to kindergarten, I remember being like really anxious. And I had a hard time making friends. But my very first friends is this little girl. She was deaf, and she actually helped teach me sign language so I could communicate with her and she had an assistant teacher who also helped us.

Kim Arcand: And I think that experience never left me. I think I always just sort of realized from day one, like, how important is it is for other people to bring you into their worlds and vice versa. And so I think that's kind of. that was kind of like a first step for me. It took many, many years before ended up doing work at all related to those types of experiences. But I think it was just a key moment that stuck with me my whole life of being able to appreciate other people's perspectives. And the kindness that she offered me as someone who didn't friends easily was definitely something that I appreciate. And I wish I remember, like her name, and I could find her again, because I will actually love to say thank you to her. But yeah, I'll have to give her credit for “gravity assist.”

Jim Green: Well, I know being shy, you really have to work on being able to project and talk about your ideas and everything. And I think you've been doing a fantastic job, allowing us to listen to data in new and unique ways. So Kim, thanks so much for joining me and discussing this fascinating topic.

Kim Arcand: Thank you so much. This was really fun.

Jim Green: Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA, and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Video producers: Elizabeth Landau and Lacey Young
Last Updated: May 24, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-listening-to-the-universe-with-kim-arcand
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Luty 12, 2023, 05:50
Geobiolog i egzobiolog dr Darlene Lim Darlene zawodowo zajmuje się przygotowaniem astronautów do naukowej eksploracji Księżyca i Marsa. Ma analogowe doświadczenie w misjach na Marsa.
Prowadzi projekt BASALT (Biologic Analog Science Associated with Lava Terrains).

Cytuj
Darlene Lim: So the goal was to really have a merger, an integration of, you know, natural science, social science goals, as well as exploration goals. And we did so with the aim to answer the question: How do we support and enable scientific exploration during huan Mars missions? And so to do this, we took our team into two different analog sites, one in Idaho at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, and one on the Big Island of Hawaii in the, in the Hawaii Volcano National Park. And what we did is we conducted scientific expeditions that were geared at answering astrobiologically relevant questions. But with a twist: We conducted all of those expeditions under simulated Mars mission conditions.

Gravity Assist: Before You Launch: Practice, Practice, Practice (1)
Jun 4, 2021

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/darlenelim.jpg)
Darlene Lim in Mauna Uma, Hawaii Credits: NASA

The Moon doesn’t have WiFi; neither does Mars. When future astronauts explore the surfaces of the Moon, Mars, or beyond, they’ll have big challenges communicating with Mission Control back on Earth. Darlene Lim at NASA Ames Research Center has been organizing expeditions on Earth that simulate science operations on other planetary bodies. Her team demonstrates how astronauts, scientists, and mission operations specialists can collaborate on expeditions, despite communication delays and location differences. She also discusses her role on VIPER, a rover that will explore ice deposits on the Moon and drill in shadowed craters colder than Pluto.

Jim Green: How does an astronaut know what to do when they are walking on the surface of the Moon or Mars?

Jim Green: Let's talk to an expert who helps the astronauts do their job.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Darlene Lim. Darlene is a NASA geobiologist and exobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, out in Mountain View, California. Darlene works on preparing astronauts for scientific exploration of the Moon and Mars. Her expertise involves Mars human analog missions. And analogs are places that we go to here on Earth that are extreme, and have the physical attributes for the harsh environments that we're going to send humans to in space. Welcome, Darlene, Gravity Assist.

Darlene Lim: Thank you so much for having me here. It's such a joy, such a privilege. Thank you, Jim.

Jim Green: Oh, my pleasure. Well, we're gonna have fun talking about analogs, you know, and you've, you've really done some fantastic work in using places here on Earth for these analogs that represent other worlds. How do you identify those sites here on Earth to go to?

Darlene Lim: Well, we start with the question, you know, what is it that we're trying to answer? What are we interested in as a team? What's driving us forward?

Darlene Lim: And then we'll actually look for environments on Earth that are suitable in terms of allowing our teams to answer the particular questions that we're interested in.

Darlene Lim: And then we look at the safety associated with going with to those regions, the accessibility of those regions, and then we look at the cost and so forth. So we're very disciplined about how we select for the analog that we want to explore. And I think that's a really important process to put forward because, you know, a lot of times the public will see us operating in fairly exotic, you know, extreme locations, but there, but we don't just go to those areas because they look cool, because they're on somebody's bucket list. It's because they help us answer very specific questions, research questions, as well as applied questions that will help us eventually get us to a place where we can design science teams that will support missions, human missions to the Moon, onwards, to Mars.

Jim Green: Well, you run a project called BASALT. Now, what does BASALT stand for? And what is its goal?

Darlene Lim: So BASALT, the acronym stands for Biologic Analog Science Associated with Lava Terrains.

Darlene Lim: I'll tell you something funny. You know, the in-joke is that we select the project name, and then we, we put that out to our team, as we're writing our proposals to say, okay, can somebody come up with a good acronym for BASALT?

Darlene Lim: So the goal was to really have a merger, an integration of, you know, natural science, social science goals, as well as exploration goals. And we did so with the aim to answer the question: How do we support and enable scientific exploration during huan Mars missions? And so to do this, we took our team into two different analog sites, one in Idaho at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve, and one on the Big Island of Hawaii in the, in the Hawaii Volcano National Park. And what we did is we conducted scientific expeditions that were geared at answering astrobiologically relevant questions. But with a twist: We conducted all of those expeditions under simulated Mars mission conditions.

Darlene Lim: And we really wanted to do that so that we could figure out how best to enable science teams to interact with future astronauts that are going to be conducting science on our behalf, on humanity's behalf.

Darlene Lim: Could we affect these EVAs, extravehicular activities, where the astronauts were out on the surface of Mars, exploring scientifically relevant areas? Could we affect those EVAs while they were happening? And the prevailing thought in the community was that no, in fact, because of the distance and the speed that it takes, or the time that it takes from a signal and a communication to go from the Earth to Mars, it's too long, it's anywhere from like 3 to 20 minutes one way, it's too long to actually affect an EVA. While it's happening.

Darlene Lim: Well, we actually wanted to test that. So we came into the process with a hypothesis that actually, if we did our jobs, right, if we attended to the devil in the details, if you will, we could set up support mechanisms, software, hardware capabilities, processes, architectures, that enabled science teams to actually interact with the astronauts while they were on EVA. And we found that this, you know, to cut to the punch line, this was possible. And if like, fact, that's a major finding of our project, and in the process, you know, so much in terms of peer-reviewed scientific publications also came to, to, to fruition, even though the scientists were removed from the actual collection of the samples. And they enabled a small subset, you know, of people who were the astronauts, if you will, to collect and to do their science for them. So it was a really remarkable journey.

Jim Green: Now, there's another project that you've led, and you mentioned it earlier. It's called SUBSEA, I guess, right?

Darlene Lim: Right. You got it.

Jim Green: What does that stand for? And how did that project get started?

Darlene Lim: So it stands for Systematic Underwater Biogeochemical Science and Exploration Analog. How it got started is really through conversation between myself through partners that we have at NOAA, learning about the Ocean Exploration Trust, which is a not-for-profit organization that helps to manage one of the two federal exploration ships that we have in the United States, one of them, this one in particular, called the Nautilus, and starting to understand the infrastructure that they use to conduct ocean science.

Darlene Lim: What was fascinating to me, you know, in terms of like, how this particular project got shaped is that I started to hear about telepresence in the realm of how the oceanographers will have a small group of individuals go out to sea, but start to, you know, they always work to link a broader set of scientists on shore into the expedition.

Darlene Lim: And I'm like, “Hey, you know what, we, this is exactly what we're trying to work towards in the scientific exploration realm when it comes to spaceflight. And what happened is, is, you know, we very fortunately found a wonderful group of scientists found partners in the Ocean Exploration Trust, as well as NOAA to come together write a proposal and eventually get it funded through NASA. We also had, you know, at, at our core, some natural science questions related to exploring hydrothermal systems that have analogous components to what we anticipate finding on Enceladus as well as Europa. So, so many pieces fell into place, so quickly, Jim, it was just, it was a joy to write the proposal, in fact, I know, it sounds a little weird. But it really was a joy to see it come together. And then, you know, of course, to go to sea a couple years in a row, and to see the work that's coming out of that at this point in time.

Jim Green: Well, what's it like to be on the boat when your, when your robot is exploring underwater?

Darlene Lim: It is intense, Jim. Like, it really is, we're on four-hours-on, eight-hours-off shifts. So you're, you know, any given moment in time, you're either up or you're trying to sleep or trying to grab a quick meal or, you know, exercise or catch up on work or whatever. And the whole time, the ship is holding station. So when we're operating, we can be down, you know, a kilometer, a few kilometers down underwater, on a cable, on a tether. And at the end of it, as you explain it, there's not one but two robots conducting our science and exploring these incredibly beautiful extreme areas deep in our, you know, on Earth's oceans. And so the ship has to stay still.

Darlene Lim: We have to really be very disciplined about our communication. We cannot, you know, communicate via FaceTime with our families, because that draws on our bandwidth when you're sitting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. And we really have to be disciplined about how we run our lives so that we are awake, we're alert when you're actually on shift. So there's a lot that's going on, in any moment in time to enable this extreme, extremely difficult and complex exploration.

Jim Green: In the SUBSEA expeditions, what are you learning?

Darlene Lim: Ah, that's such a great question. So actually, we're at the point right now of our research program, where the publications are coming together, we have one that's recently come out, that was led by Vincent Milesi, as well as Everett Shock out of Arizona State University. And what they put forward into the literature is a process for uptaking geochemical information as it comes in from the ship as we're exploring the hydrothermal systems that we were exploring, and actually, you know, synthesizing that information and putting forward some decisioning around where they anticipate we should go next, that would best answer the questions at hand.

Darlene Lim: And there are several more that are coming out in terms of the microbial populations that we found associated with these hydrothermal the seamounts and hydrothermal systems. And there's one as well, which examines the science operations, the integration of scientists at a remote setting in a distributed setting, and how that pertains to spaceflight missions. And, you know, both with robotic systems as well as human and robotic systems. So I think you'll really start to see all those publications come out in the next 12 months or so.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Luty 12, 2023, 05:50
Gravity Assist: Before You Launch: Practice, Practice, Practice (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/03_viper_hi_res_explore.jpg)
NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, is a mobile robot that will roam around the Moon’s south pole looking for water ice. The VIPER mission will give us surface-level detail of where the water is and how much is available for us to use. This will bring us a significant step closer towards NASA’s ultimate goal of a sustainable, long-term presence on the Moon – making it possible to eventually explore Mars and beyond. Credits: NASA Ames/Daniel Rutter

Jim Green: Well, what's your favorite story about SUBSEA expeditions?

Darlene Lim: From a research standpoint, it was watching the progression from our first year at sea in 2018 to 2019, when we use the first year to understand how the telepresence system was working, what components were, were being utilized by the oceanographic community. And then between, you know, the end of that particular expedition out to sea, where we went actually to the Lōʻihi Seamount, which is just off the coast of the Big Island of Hawaii.

Darlene Lim: From that moment, you know, forward for the next year forward, there was a lot of research a lot of data processing that went into place to create new infrastructure for the 2019 expedition when we went out to a place called Gorda Ridge, which is just off the coast of where California and Oregon meet. And what happened is that we created a process for a science team to be co-located at the University of Rhode Island where they have something called the Inner Space Center, which is basically a mission control. And we created software as well as process, you know, capabilities that enable the science team to really be interactive, in a manner which was, which was very much akin to what we anticipate certain exploration conditions to be like going back to the Moon, moving on to Mars, with robotic and human elements, you know, in play.

Darlene Lim: But then from a personal standpoint, I think, when I would have to get up right on the cusp of where the sun was coming up, and sleepily come out, get my coffee, climb up this couple sets of stairs to go to the mission deck, Mission Control deck on the ship. And I would see the sun just kind of come up over the Pacific. And there were always those moments where I was there by myself, and it was so beautiful. And just very, I felt very grateful in that moment to be in the line of work that I'm in, to have had all of the support mechanisms in my life in place, so I could be there in that very moment in time. And that was extremely special for me and will always, you know, be embedded in my fiber.

Jim Green: Wow. Yeah, I understand. Those. Those moments indeed are so precious.

Jim Green: So when you're out in the field and things don't work, right, I'm sure you get frustrated. What happens when that occurs and how do you overcome it?

Darlene Lim: That is such a great question because every day something goes wrong. And the only thing that we can be certain about when we plan for these missions is that something will go wrong. And so you can think about every single contingency possible. But inevitably, you know, there will be something that pops up that is a little bit different than somebody had thought about. So I think the key thing is to in the pre-expedition season, to build camaraderie, collegiality, and trust between the humans that are involved with the mission. That, it sounds like a very simple thing to do. But it really is difficult when you have a lot of people coming together for the first time from different disciplines. And, but if you if that trust is built from the get-go, then when these very difficult moments pop up, then you know, everybody trusts their colleagues to come with the right answers at the right moment and solve them.

Darlene Lim: Now, there have been other circumstances where weather has come in just sudden inclement weather, and affected our communications, architecture and so forth, and you know, we've had to, of course, fix things on the fly. Our engineers are very capable, very ruggedized human beings. But we also had process[es] in place to say: Everybody's got to stand down, everybody's got to head back to these safe areas, because number one is the safety of our humans out in the field. And I think that is very high fidelity as well, for when we send humans back to the Moon and Mars. Their safety comes first, above and beyond anything else.

Jim Green: Well, I know you're involved in another really exciting mission to the Moon, and it's called VIPER. So what does VIPER stand for? And what is it supposed to learn?

Darlene Lim: So VIPER stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER. And, you know, as it as it is written out, it's a mobile robot, it's going to go to the south pole of the  Moon. And it's going to prospect it's going to explore it's very exciting. It is looking for, for volatiles, it's looking for water resources, that we can finally you know, really map extensively and then understand, characterize, because this has implications for, you know, near-term missions back to the Moon, as well as human missions back to the Moon, that we're anticipating as well coming online.

Darlene Lim: And so it's very exciting to be a part of this really groundbreaking project. And my role in it is actually to help lead the science operations as well as the science integration with the broader engineering efforts. And what this is, is, you know, really a labor of love for me, because all of the many years, the 20 years of working in analogs, and you know, really starting to take that knowledge, which, you know, as I mentioned, has been focused on understanding how to integrate science and science decisioning into any sort of exploration endeavor is now you know, in, I'm now in a position where I get to apply that knowledge firsthand to a mission a flight mission. And that is, you know, a dream come true from any which way you look at it.

Darlene Lim: But what's cool about VIPER and what we have to innovate on is having a science team which is going to be able to make near-real-time decisions that will affect, for example, where we select a drill site. So we're going to be drilling with this, with this rover as well. And, and the science team will actually have the capability of providing feedback to that process of where we actually drill. And, so because of the capability for us to receive information from the Moon fairly quickly, we're actually going to be receiving quite a lot of data that the science team has to synthesize, has to analyze and then has to, you know, make decisions on and push forward to the Mission Operations Center in a way which is you know, quickly can be quickly uptaken by those that have to drive the rover and make some really important tactical decisions.

Jim Green: Well, you know, Viper as a rover on the Moon, it's going to the south pole. And it's going to be in areas where the Sun doesn't shine, what we call permanently shadowed areas, is Viper designed to go in, get a drill full of material and analyze it and come back out?

Darlene Lim: Well, that's, yes, exactly. And it is, it's, I'm so happy you brought it up, because it really is non, nontrivial, right? I mean, this is a very difficult thing to go into an area where you will be in a very cold area, you will be without light. And so what's fascinating about the way that the VIPER mission is being run, is that we are, you know, going to be nominally operating for three lunar days. So, you know, a lunar day is about 28 days. But within each of those lunar days, there, there are going to be about two weeks where we don't actually have a line of sight to the rover, that will enable us to conduct near-real time activities. And so there's like a two weeks on, kind of, two weeks off cadence that we're going to be experiencing as a science team. And indeed, as you mentioned, there are moments where the where the rover is going to dip into these permanently shadowed regions, very difficult operational environments to work in.

Jim Green: Well, these areas on the Moon, where the sun doesn't get to, we call the permanently shadowed areas, and they are some of the coldest places in the solar system. In fact, they are colder than the surface of Pluto. So being able to get in, get your drill going, get a sample, analyze it, look at it, and then get back out, is really going to be difficult to do. So I really appreciate how hard this is.

Jim Green: Well, Darlene, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was that event or person, place or thing that got them so excited about being the scientists they are today? I call that event a gravity assist. So Darlene, what was your gravity assist?

Darlene Lim: Well, I am so grateful for you to ask this question. Because I tell you, it’s taken a village to get me to where I am. And I will answer your question with two answers. First, it's people, many people there are the colleagues that have believed in me, there are my parents who have showed me what hard work is, gave me an appreciation for the natural world. They were immigrants to Canada, and they really wanted to embrace their new country. And we spent a lot of time camping and fishing and so forth, that gave me such a love of the natural world and you know, imbued me to this day with that love. And my mom, you know, my mom, she, she, came to help care for my kids, when they were young, I have two children, so that I could go into the field, so that there was that possibility, and I couldn't have done anything without her. She was a huge gravity assist in my life. There's my husband, who's a true partner in every sense of the word.

Darlene Lim: And then there are my kids who inspire me to be better to work smarter, to be more focused every single day. There is not a spare moment because I want to be present for them too. So as a collective, I see all of these people as being so intrinsically part of the gravity assist.

Darlene Lim: And then the second thing I want to mention is that event-wise, every single failure that I have been through in my life, every single anxiety, moment of difficulty, I wouldn't be here in this, you know, place speaking to you if it wasn't for all of those failures that we don't see captured in our CVs that we don't see captured in, in even these types of conversations, but they're there. And they've helped me understand how to be better at my job, how to be more thoughtful, how to be more inclusive, how to, you know, get through difficult things and know that it'll be okay on the other end. And that's such a big part of learning to work with other people.

Jim Green: Well, Darlene, thank you so much for joining me in discussing these fantastic things that you do to help make this agency successful.

Darlene Lim: Thank you so much for having me on this wonderful program, Jim. I really appreciate it.

Jim Green: My pleasure. Join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your gravity assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Jul 28, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-before-you-launch-practice-practice-practice
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Luty 26, 2023, 17:08
Zastępca głównego naukowca ds. badań nad mikrograwitacją w Kwaterze Głównej NASA opowiada o aspektach biomedycznych lotów kosmicznych i swoich doświadczeniach w programie NEEMO.

Gravity Assist: From Space Camp to Mission Control, with Tara Ruttley (1)
Jun 11, 2021

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/44911459904_375bc02163_k_0.jpg)
The International Space Station has been a unique orbiting laboratory for astronauts for more than 20 years.
Credits: NASA


How do astronauts exercise on the International Space Station? How do they train underwater? Tara Ruttley, associate chief scientist for microgravity research at NASA Headquarters, has worked on a lot of fascinating projects to support the human spaceflight program. She also holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience and discusses how NASA studies the brain health of astronauts.

Jim Green: Our astronauts in space need all kinds of help. They need to be healthy. They need to work experiments. We need people on the ground to interact with them to make a mission happen.

Tara Ruttley: Being a part of real-life space program and really helping an astronaut get something accomplished like that was a real joy.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Tara Ruttley. And she is the associate chief scientist for microgravity research at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC. But prior to that, she was the associate program Scientist for the International Space Station, working at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Welcome, Tara, to Gravity Assist.

Tara Ruttley: Thanks for the invitation to be here. It's super cool to finally be on this really great podcast.

Jim Green: You know, I would say your background’s really unique since you started out, as I understand an engineer, and then became a scientist. How did that happen?

Tara Ruttley: Well, I never wanted to be an engineer, quite honestly. But I have always wanted to work for NASA.

Tara Ruttley: And it was, in particular, in high school where I took a trip to the Johnson Space Center. And it was a field trip, and I got to meet an astronaut. And I said, what does it take to be an astronaut? He said, Just do what you love. Because the chances are, it's really tough to get into the astronaut office. And, and you don't want to spend your entire life doing something you don't love. So do what you love. We want to hire successful and happy people in the astronaut office.


(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/console.jpeg)
Tara Ruttley at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Credits: NASA

Tara Ruttley: And that's what I did I that's why I pursued science. But while I was working on my undergraduate degree in biology, I ended up having to work with a lot of mechanical engineering students, because I had these great ideas for designs for exercise equipment for use in space. And I needed someone to help me implement them, and and come up with ideas and concepts. And so I got to know the mechanical engineering students at Colorado State University where I was going to school. And not only did they help me implement my concept, I learned how to use the machine shop, how to help do design, I learned a lot about mechanical engineering.

Tara Ruttley: And I got accepted to the mechanical engineering master's degree at Colorado State University. And when I was just about to graduate out of that, that is when I applied to work for NASA, my dream job. And NASA said, well, we're in a hiring freeze, we can't hire right now. But give us your resume anyway. So I gave them my resume. And they called me a few days later. And as luck would have it, they were creating a new division in the engineering directorate called Biomedical Systems Division. And they wanted me to come work on exercise equipment and medical hardware for the International Space Station. And I say it was luck. But what it really was, was being prepared for the big opportunity. So that opportunity came I was I was fully prepared, and I ended up going to work as an engineer at NASA. That's where I worked for the first eight years, and it was everything I could have wished for. I could not have made that that career up. That was the perfect fit for me.

Jim Green: Well, you also got your PhD in neuroscience. So what does neuroscience has to do with space exploration?

Tara Ruttley: So while I was an engineer, I went ahead and pursued my PhD in neuroscience as well. And you know, I thought about this question, Jim, a lot.

Tara Ruttley: Space exploration, neuroscience. They're both exploratory type sciences, right? You're you're trying to solve a lot of the problems of the universe, the questions, the big questions in the universe, I think with both of those, and I think I'm just naturally drawn to them. I mean, think about it. I think I've read that. In terms of what we can see in the universe, we can we humans only see like 5% of what's really out there.

Tara Ruttley: And the brain is the same way. There's so much more out there about our own brain inside of our heads, we don't even know. And so both of these could keep scientists busy forever and ever trying to trying to solve all the problems in answer all the questions. And so I really think and I never meant to put those two things together, I just really think that I think that's the type of curious thinker I am. And maybe I'm trying to search for, you know, the philosophical answers to who we are where we came from. Maybe that's what drove me.

Jim Green: Absolutely, I understand completely. Well, you know, you started then at Johnson Space Center. And as I understand it, it was all about developing an exercise bike for Space Station users.

Tara Ruttley: Yeah.

Jim Green: All right, for those astronauts. What's the bike all about? And why was that important?

Tara Ruttley: So the bike is one of three, what we call exercise countermeasures that we have on the International Space Station. So on station for the last 20 years, we've had anywhere from three to six people who stay on the station for up to six months. We've also had up to a year. And the reason we do this is to find scientific discoveries, right? First, we want our humans up there so that we can understand the changes in their bodies so that we can prepare them to stay longer, and go beyond low Earth orbit to places like the Moon and Mars. So we study their their changes the body changes in space.

Tara Ruttley: But we also do things like try to understand why plants are having a hard time growing or how fluid behaves or how we put out fires in space. So this big orbiting laboratory up there now needs people to run it. So those people need to stay healthy. So to do that, the bike is one of three. So we have the bike, we have a treadmill, and we have a resistive exercise device. The bike, the purpose of the bike, is to maintain a heart-healthy situation. We want to keep the heart the cardiovascular system healthy for the astronauts. Because the heart is a muscle. And if you don't use it, you lose it. And on earth, we use it every day as we climb stairs and walk and run and move.

Tara Ruttley: But in space, you don't use your muscles so much. You don't move as much against gravity. So your heart could be at risk of getting smaller, and what we call atrophy. So we have to keep that that heart pumping like a muscle. The treadmill is also for cardiovascular and it's good for heel strike.

Tara Ruttley: So when your foot hits the ground, it actually imparts a force to the bones, and the bones stay healthy that way too. And then the resistive exercise device is based on the vacuum of space, if that's the resistive component, because you can imagine if there were regular weights, they would just float away.

Tara Ruttley: Now the bike was cool, because yes, that was the first thing I worked on as an engineer. And it's just like the bike you would ride on Earth, except for a few things. First of all, think about when you're biking, you're, you're moving a lot, you're vibrating a lot, you're causing a force, they hit the ground with your bike. So this exercise device, this bike, which is located in the US lab, is actually on these springs, so to speak, or these wires, that, that cause that remove the vibrations from the bike to the station, because if that that bike was hard mounted to station and you were pedaling away, the whole station would start vibrating. And so it's it's basically detached and kind of floating around as you bike it dampening the vibrations.

Tara Ruttley: Secondly, it doesn't have, the bike doesn't have a seat, you don't need a seat. And if you've ever ridden the bike for a long period of time, you're probably glad about that. But it doesn't have a seat bottom. Because you're floating, you don't really have a place to need to put a seat bottom, but it does have a back. So you strap yourself down to the bike, you've got a back support, and you're just pedaling away, you've got the shoes that will clip in just like on earth, and then you just dial up the watts to what your exercise prescription is for the day.

Jim Green: Well, you know, Space Station is a wonderful place to do all kinds of research in an environment we call microgravity. What is microgravity?

Tara Ruttley: Yeah, microgravity is not that you're simply floating, it is that you're falling out at the same rate of the earth right. So you're freefall you're in freefall around the planet, it's it's a nice balance of, of the physics.

Tara Ruttley: And now you can study behaviors of systems in a way that you can't study on Earth. Because we are all we are everything you see all the behaviors you see the way that we are designed, we're all because of that huge gravity vector, the biggest force that we encounter, so when you take that away, things like sedimentation, or particles settling to the to the bottom of a glass in fluid, that goes away. You don't have sedimentation in microgravity. You don't have buoyancy or the mixing of things in microgravity. You don't have bubbles that are floating to the surface and you don't have very good heat transfer or convection either.

Tara Ruttley: Every science experiment you've ever done on Earth, think about how that might be if that gravity vector of that dominant force was removed, what might the outcome be. And so that's what's really cool about getting to be involved in the science on the space station, we have a lot of scientists who've been the first ones to see a whole lot of really new discoveries. And so that's what makes it exciting working in this field, too, is nothing is what you'd expect it at all all the time.

Jim Green: So what's your favorite story about working with the astronauts on space station?

Tara Ruttley: So when I was a new engineer, I also worked on something called a temporary sleep station, which was test for short. And really, it was so early in the space station program that they didn't have any sleeping quarters, they would just kind of, you know, not they would nothing private. So they would just kind of attach themselves to the wall like they did for shuttle. So we were busy working on a compartment that was the size of those of a standard rack in Space Station, that could actually give them a door and some privacy for a laptop, and also provide a little bit of extra radiation while they sleep.

Tara Ruttley: Because while they sleep, they close their eyes, they could see bright sparks of light hit their eyelids while they're sleeping, it's just a little bit of radiation coming through. So what was really fun was helping to design certain components that I got a little bit in on the design, but I was really fortunate to sit in on Mission Control when it was being installed. And so it was an overnight install, we were all tired. It was like the middle of the night or 2 am. It took several hours. But at the end of it all, and just sitting on console and being there real-time as a young early engineer, and getting all that feedback and that rush of being a part of real-life space program and really helping an astronaut get something accomplished like that was a real joy. You know, since then there are a lot of great science advancements and things that I've been involved in on Space Station. But for me, that one just sticks out the most.

Jim Green: So how hard was it for these astronauts in zero G to fit these beds in the space station?

Tara Ruttley: Yeah, it wasn't as easy as you would think. Because the temporary sleep station is like building a room, So a space station has these big long racks that are a little bit taller than humans. So the the crew members had to first outfit the surrounding the rack with this cloth liner that we created, then they had the stuff in some plastic blocks to fit that we designed to hopefully fit just right to to be that that radiation protection, they had to install the doors. And then they had to outfit it.

Tara Ruttley: It's not the same as just taking a sleeping bag and strapping it to the wall. This was your building the room that you're going to sleep in. And so now once they did that, though, they had access to being able to watch movies in their own in their own little rooms, change in their rooms call down and talk to people at home or their have conversations with their flight surgeons in that room. And so psychologically, and I would imagine physiologically, it was just it was just so needed that that that that sleep station on orbit.

Jim Green: Cool, that sounds great. Well, back here on Earth, you also were involved in a NASA program called NEEMO.

Tara Ruttley: Yeah.

Jim Green: And so what is NEEMO?

Tara Ruttley: So what this is, is it's a it's an underwater habitat called Aquarius. And it's located off the coast of Florida, about 65 feet deep. And it's actually run by NOAA. And it's used around year round by marine biologists who want to stay in a in a environment under the ocean that they can just go out and scuba dive every day and study marine biology. And when you're 65 feet down, but you're breathing air pumped in from the surface, you become saturated you what we call saturated diving. So nitrogen starts to take over the place in your tissues where oxygen usually is, if you're a diver, you know that you can only dive so deep for so long before you have to stop and slowly decompress and slowly come to the surface over time, so that you can get that nitrogen out and get the oxygen back in your tissues. And you can avoid the bends.

Tara Ruttley: So but when you're going down into that habitat, you're down there for 65 days, they're there for two weeks at a time, they're saturated. And so that's what we so that's what we call an extreme environment. That's why NASA was interested in working with NOAA on using that environment for about two missions a year. So what that what we did was spend 10 days under the ocean in that habitat, doing lots of experiments, that that I helped coordinate and design that we might on hardware that we might want to use on the space station someday.

Tara Ruttley: So it was me and three other astronauts and two techs down there for 10 days doing simulated spacewalks. But we were also doing coral reef measurements, contributing to marine biology solutions, and testing hardware for what we might want to use on the space station.

Tara Ruttley: We were also doing a lot of communication activities like we had to, we had to work together as a team to build an underwater structure that was that was sort of frustrating, but was meant for you to, to learn how to be a good team. And the reason NASA chose that place is because you can't easily just come to the surface if something happens. It's like going to the moon or Mars. You can't just come home right away if something an emergency happens. You can't just swim to the surface. You'll get the bends.

Tara Ruttley: So it's NASA way of training the astronauts and testing out experiments and hardware in what we call an analog or simulated environment that would be as extreme as you might see or close that you possibly could get on Earth to what you might see on a on a lunar or Martian mission.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Luty 26, 2023, 17:08
Gravity Assist: From Space Camp to Mission Control, with Tara Ruttley (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/neemo_0.jpg)
The NEEMO 6 crew lived underwater at the Aquarius Underwater Research Facility for 10 days in 2004. Front row: Tara Ruttley and Nicholas J.M. Patrick. Back row: John Herrington and Douglas H. Wheelock. Credits: NASA

Jim Green: Now, how big is the habitat that's sitting down at 65 feet? And how easy can you get around? And do you wear a scuba suit all the time, or?

Tara Ruttley: Okay, so the habitat itself, I forget the real dimensions of it, but it was about the size of a space station module. So it wasn't that big. I mean, I think it had a bedroom. And then it had a dining area, which was also a lab and then it has something called a wet porch. So when you're inside of it, no, you don't wear the scuba suit. And you get to look out the window and see all the fish and maybe fellow scuba divers going by, but you're inside nice and dry, and warm. And in our bedrooms, there were bunks and you could see out at night, you could see the fish go by which was really neat. And so we ate foods that you would eat in space, maybe there were freeze dried or camping type of food. And, and there was a shower facility and a bathroom. And there was that wet porch. So the wet porch was the area that you would don on your scuba gear and go down into the water.

Tara Ruttley: So that wet porch type piece was kind of like an inverted bell where the the air pressure was on the top and the water was on the bottom. So you literally put on your scuba gear, walk downstairs into the water and swam away. We did do scuba dives for up to eight hours a day. Even at that level you could become you could get something called nitrogen narcosis because you still have a lot of nitrogen in your tissues. And we went a little deeper when we did our scuba dives and stay longer. And so we were constantly monitoring each other for the sillies for the sillies because nitrogen narcosis can make people silly and confused and disoriented. So it was our job as buddies very safety conscious to monitor each other the whole time. We were actually scuba diving, once we got back into the environment, we were we were much better. And I will say it was funny in the environment because you're at two and a half atmospheric pressure, our voices changed our vocal cords didn't vibrate the way they do at one at one atmosphere. So I mean, I sounded the same, but the guys (laughs) sounded more like me. (laughs), And I got to tease them a lot for that.

Tara Ruttley: And then our astronaut crew lead, our chief was John Herrington. John said that two and a half atmospheric pressure felt like it was pressing on his sinuses. We constantly felt like we had a little bit of a puffy head kind of sinus issue. He said that felt a lot like what it was like to be in space.

Jim Green: Well, you know, I'm a diver, too. I haven't done yeah, years. But I want to know, after you got saturated, what did it take to come out? You know, you had to go through a decompression stages. What was that like?

Tara Ruttley: What they do is they close the doors to the habitat. And, and they have you for the first, the first eight to 12 hours, I can't quite remember, you lay flat on your bunk so that all of your joints are, are, you know, laid out flat, there's no no bubbles gathering in your joints. And they start to slowly decrease the atmospheric pressure. So they start to start start to simulate you slowly coming up to the surface, they take it in increments over a 24 hour period. So the first 12 hours, you're laying flat and your bunk so it's overnight while you're sleeping, or you're watching TV or something. And then the second 12 hours, you you're able to move around as you're getting ready to pack up and go. And then when they get to the surface, right the surface, you're still 65 feet deep, but the pressure is that of the surface, they open the doors, you have your gear on, and then you can just swim right out to the top. So you've done that decompression already.

Jim Green: Got it. Wow, that's neat. I never thought I thought you'd have to get in your scuba gear and then hang onto a line at certain levels. But I’m glad you didn’t have to do that.

Tara Ruttley: It's really neat. And I will say anybody who came to visit us had to hurry up and leave. So if we had any any goods brought down to us, or if we needed medical attention, or someone wanted to come take a picture or something, they had to go down and it's 65 feet deep, so you can't stay but maybe 10, 15 minutes, and then go back to the surface. So we had brief visitors, but not a whole lot.

Jim Green: So, Tara, relative to neuroscience activity, what's happening on space station in that area?

Tara Ruttley: There are a few different areas actually are many different areas of of neuroscience activity happening on the station. One is that we have found over the last several years that our astronauts are coming back with vision problems, not all of them a good number of them enough for our human research program to be interested in. Why is this happening? Finally asking the question Why? Why is some of our crew members having eyesight problems in space, and it may be that it's associated with the fluid shifts, as we are in space, the fluid a lot of the fluid shifts from our lower body up to our heads. And, and that fluid tends to put some pressure on the brain and as a result, the eyeballs and we think this might be something to do with what's causing some of the vision problems that our astronauts are experiencing. Again, it's not all of them, but it's enough to for us to take a look.

Tara Ruttley: There are also other studies, investigating crew mental health and behavioral health. In fact, for a long time now, for the last 20 years or so on station, the crew has been keeping what's called a journal and it's it's that it's a research, it's a research experiments and investigation of crew members writing in their journals about their feelings about their experiences, there are certain questions they can answer. And those things are under constant evaluation for ensuring the crew is mentally healthy and behaviorally sound. Right now we're in low Earth orbit, where they stay maybe six months, and occasionally we've had one year, but now they're going to get longer and further, further away from their planet. What does this mean for their behavioral health and, their motivation and things like that.

Jim Green: You know, Tara, I always like to ask my guests: What was that event or person, place or thing that got them so excited about being the scientist and engineer that they are today? I call that event a gravity assist. So Tara, what was your gravity assist?

Tara Ruttley: So when I was in high school, the movie Space Camp came out. That was probably 30 years ago now. And you know, as silly as it was, then it made me dream. And I thought, because there's such a thing as space camp. So who would like I literally called the operator, zero, and I said, Can you connect me with space camp? And she's like, yes, please hold.

Tara Ruttley: And I was like, there's a thing called space camp? And, and for them, we did not have computers. So I couldn't go to the website, right. So I got in touch with space camp. And they sent me the fliers the books for years, they sent me books every year about their new camp programs. And every year, we started saving money to be able to send me and when I finally went in high school, it's where I met my tribe, people like me, who loved space as much as I did, because I didn't know anybody who knew who loves space, I was really the outlier in my group, in my community. No one, no one was interested in that.

Tara Ruttley: So I met my tribe, I learned all the different ways that I could get into the space program. For a week, I was immersed in pretending to be part of the space program. And, and I was the one who picked, you know, the scientist position. I didn't want the pilot, I didn't want the commander, I wanted the scientist position, which was always easy. Everyone's like, fine, take it. And so and then, and then I understood what I needed to do in terms of my career as well. I'd always known I had what I needed a PhD, I wanted a PhD. But attending Space Camp is honestly, what took my brain on a goal path, like from just from dreaming about it and thinking, yes, I want to I want to work for NASA one day, I want to be an astronaut one day, to getting there and getting the actual resources and getting immersed in that environment and to know that it's a real thing that I can actually achieve. So I would have to say that space camp is my gravity assist.

Jim Green: Wow, that's fantastic. Well, you know, you're not the only one. I have heard this on several occasions. So the movie has sparked interest.

Tara Ruttley: Yeah.

Jim Green: Well, thanks so much for joining me in discussing your fascinating career working with astronauts and how you help them become healthier, and enable the work that they do on Space Station. Thanks so much.

Tara Ruttley: Thank you so much. This is such a fun interview. And I really appreciate being here. Thanks for the opportunity.

Jim Green: Well join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. This is Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Jun 11, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-from-space-camp-to-mission-control-with-tara-ruttley
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Marzec 12, 2023, 05:17
Człowiek nie był prekursorem, zmieniając klimat.

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Gavin Schmidt: Why is something that's happening now so special? And it's because, because we're special. We're notm we're not the first species to have altered the composition of the atmosphere. I think that laurel goes to two cyanobacteria, some 2 billion years ago when, when they started producing massive amounts of oxygen. But, but right now, we are making, you know, geological scale changes to the atmosphere. We've increased the carbon dioxide concentrations by about 50%.

Gravity Assist: Let’s Talk About Climate Change, with Gavin Schmidt (1)
Jun 18, 2021

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/gsfc_20160107_2016-3955_021_0.jpg)
Gavin Schmidt, acting senior climate advisor. Credits: NASA

What’s the difference between climate and weather? How does NASA monitor changing sea levels, melting glaciers, and other effects of climate change? Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s acting senior climate advisor, explains how rising temperatures lead to many complex changes both in the oceans and on land. When it comes to climate change: “It's real. It's us. But we still have choices about how bad we let it get,” he says.

Jim Green: NASA has been observing the Earth from space for several decades and seeing some astounding changes.

Gavin Schmidt: It's real. It's us. But we still have choices about how bad we let it get.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Gavin Schmidt, and Gavin is NASA climatologist, climate modeler, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. And he's also a co-founder of the award-winning climate science blog Real Climate. But since February 2021, Gavin was named the acting senior advisor on climate to the NASA administrator. Welcome, Gavin, to Gravity Assist.

Gavin Schmidt: Thank you very much for having me.

Jim Green: So how would you describe the difference between climate and weather?

Gavin Schmidt: So people have come up with all sorts of great analogies to explain this difference. One of the ones that I like the best is thinking about your wardrobe. Right? So what you have available to wear any morning is, you know, there's a lot of different things that you could, you could put on. And, and that kind of sets the choices that could happen in that day.

Gavin Schmidt: But what you actually put on is a unique outfit, right? It's not necessarily going to be repeated, except kind of during the pandemic, when it's repeated every day. Um, but you know, you have a, you have a change, that, that's available, but, but you're limited, right, you can't just do anything. And then sometimes somebody can come along and buy you a new bunch of shirts. And now that's, that's closet change, right? And your and your choices then change and your and your choices for what you're going to wear in any one day, can also change because, you know, things in your closet have changed.

Jim Green: Our planet has been through a lot of different climate changes in its history.

Gavin Schmidt: Right.

Gavin Schmidt: How do you study these more ancient periods, you know, like ice ages?

Gavin Schmidt: We’re continually searching the geological record, which, which consists of things like the ice core records, and ocean sediment records, and, and rock records, and pollen records and cave records, and all sorts of very inventive ways to get a sense of what's happened in the past. And we're looking for examples for where we have a potential mechanism for why climate changed. And then we have examples of how climate changed, and then we try and piece these things together such that, you know, we can ask that question, you know, does that cause, now which could be a massive asteroid, it could be wobbles in the Earth's orbit, it could be massive volcanism, it could be a shift in the continents, do any of these causes lead you to see the changes that we've recorded in these other records, and when we can do that we gain both a deeper understanding of the things that cause climate change, but also more credibility in our ability to understand the things that cause climate change. And so we use, we use those changes in the past, to evaluate the models that we're building for today, and to see whether they're in the right ballpark, and, and they do pretty well.

Jim Green: So the phase of climate change that we're in right now, why is that so different than the past?

Gavin Schmidt: Why is something that's happening now so special? And it's because, because we're special. We're notm we're not the first species to have altered the composition of the atmosphere. I think that laurel goes to two cyanobacteria, some 2 billion years ago when, when they started producing massive amounts of oxygen. But, but right now, we are making, you know, geological scale changes to the atmosphere. We've increased the carbon dioxide concentrations by about 50%.

Gavin Schmidt: We've more than doubled methane concentrations, levels of water vapor are increasing at about 7% per degree of warming. We've had more than a degree Celsius of warming since the 19th century. And we're seeing, you know, geologically significant shifts in, in the amount of glacial ice, in the amount of sea level, and the amount of, you know, temperature and, and the ecosystem responses to those things. And we can go back. And you know, in a lot of times, you're seeing something that that is kind of unique, in a few hundred years, maybe unique in a few thousand years. There are some places where we can go now, like on Baffin Island in the Canadian archipelago, where we are seeing changes in the ice caps there that are revealing that these ice caps are melting, and they're revealing surfaces that have not been exposed to the air, perhaps for 125,000 years.

Gavin Schmidt: Right? So, so we have pushing the system in ways that are, you know, quantitatively large compared to the history of the planet, and that that continues to blow me away. But things that things are shifting. So how do we know why that's changing? That's a great question.

Gavin Schmidt: And then, as you mentioned, you know, over the history of the planet, lots of things have caused climate change volcanoes variations in the sun, the wobbles of the Earth's orbit, you know, changes in outgassing, the, the shape of the continents, where the continents are, the ocean circulation itself, all of those things have caused things to change. But we can, we can look and see what's happened over the last 150 years.

Gavin Schmidt: And we haven't had any big volcanoes, you know, we've had a couple, but we haven't had massive, massive volcanoes. We haven't had an asteroid. We haven't had a big shift in the continents, they are moving very slowly. The Earth's orbit does not wobble, you know, in some anomalous way. But what has happened is, we've increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we've chopped down a whole bunch of forests, we've increased the amount of air pollution. We've irrigated, large amounts of land, and we can put all of those things in and ask the question, if only the natural things that happened, if only the volcanoes and the sun and the orbital walls, if only they had to change, where would we end up?

Gavin Schmidt: Where would we have ended up? And then you can say, well, if only the things that we've done, had changed, where would we have ended up? And then what happens when you put all of those things together, and it turns out, they kind of add up pretty linearly. And if you just look at the natural, forced changes, you don't end up with very much change over the last 150 years. But when you put in the human cause of change, then it lines up with what we see. And not just in the surface temperature, but also in the changes of heat in the ocean, the changes in Arctic sea ice, the changes in the stratosphere, the changes in the tropics, that changes the pole, the changes on land versus on ocean, all of those things fit, right.

Gavin Schmidt: And the fingerprint that we see in all of those records, in all of those changes, is our fingerprint. It's not anybody else's, it's not the Sun, it's not the volcanoes, it's us.

Jim Green: You know, there's all kinds of natural things as you point out that happen year after year after year, like hurricanes or wildfires, but climate change is exasperating those. And how does that do that?

Gavin Schmidt: Going back to our, our closet analogy, it's, it’s no, it's like somebody is throwing out all the cold weather gear and just kind of stocking your closet with, with shorts and t-shirts. And things are things are changing and, and you know, not every day, you're going to be able to pick out exactly what's going to happen. But but we're seeing, particularly with things like hurricane intensity, or rainfall intensity, drought intensity, with we're seeing these being juiced by the changes in temperature. So increasing surface temperatures in the ocean leads to the possibility for more intense hurricanes. And so we've seen an increase in the, in the more intense hurricanes over, over the last 50 years, we've seen the heat waves are more intense and more and more frequent across a whole part of the Northern Hemisphere. We're seeing that when it rains, it rains more intensely. And we're seeing that not just as functions of the big storms, but, but more generally. And again, that's something that's due to the warmer sea surface temperatures.

Gavin Schmidt: I mean, some good news, we're seeing less cold weather outbreaks, despite you know what happened in Texas this year, we are actually seeing less of those over time. And when they come they're less cold. So you know, that's moderately good news. We're seeing extended growing seasons, also moderately good news. Unless, you know, you care about kudzu and pine bark beetles and invasive species and those kinds of things. But we, yeah, I mean, the changes that have happened so far with climate, are now evident in a whole suite of new variables, a whole suite of new extremes.

Jim Green: Well, as you say, we see those things because we can measure them here on Earth. But NASA has a really unique perspective. And that is from looking at it from space, and getting global ideas as to what's going on. So what are some of the measurements, the important measurements that NASA's Earth Science program is making that gives us an idea of what's happening in the climate change area?

Gavin Schmidt: We have the trends in the radiation at the top of the atmosphere from, from the CERES measurements, we have the trends in Gravity from the GRACE satellites, and the GRACE follow on satellites. We have sea level rise from a whole series of laser altimeters, which we just launched the you know, I think the fifth in the series. We have a records of Arctic sea ice going back from 1979 onwards, where we can see very clearly how things have been have been changing. We can see the changes in ice itself from, from visual records from from Landsat, for instance, you know, we can see, you know, the, the decline in mountain glaciers in Alaska and in the Himalayas, and in the Rockies and in the Andes, and in the Alps, and on Kilimanjaro, and in Papua New Guinea, and all of the places where we have ice on the planet. We're seeing changes that are consistent with the temperature changes, in temperature over this over this time period.

Jim Green: You know, one of the satellites I really like is ICESat and as you mentioned, it uses lasers that then allow us to determine height; laser altimetry, how does that really work?

Gavin Schmidt: Magic? How does that work? So it works because the satellite has has a laser on it. And we know the satellites position very, very accurately, it sends down a laser to the surface, and then it bounces back up, and how quickly it bounces back up is a measure of how far it's traveled. And how far is traveled tells you how high the surfaces and the precision of these measurements allow us to at a global scale, you know, see clearly changes in the global sea level of a few millimeters per year. And, and allow us to see, you know, changes in elevation on on the on the ice sheets themselves of, you know, a few meters per year. It's I mean, it's really very impressive.

Jim Green: Yeah, remarkable set of measurements indeed.

Jim Green: So NASA just announced that we're developing a new set of missions. We call them the Earth System Observatory. What are they all about? And what will they measure?

Gavin Schmidt: So this is a suite of new missions, that are partially to continue the series of measurements that we've been making over the last few decades, but also to measure important new things that we haven't been able to capture. Before you know what one of those new things is really fine grained information about aerosols. So particles that are in the atmosphere, they're made up of lots of different things, you know, dust and sea salts and sulfur dioxide and then sulfate particles and soot and pollen and all sorts of different things. But really getting an idea of where those aerosols are, when -- it's a very confused and complicated picture, we haven't had that global view of that in enough detail up until now. So that's going to be a big part of one of the new, one of the new missions.

Gavin Schmidt: We’re continuing to build on these, these gravity measurements. So that we can continue to track not just where the ice in Greenland and Antarctica is going, but also changes in groundwater, and changes in other kinds of, of water storage on on land, because that turns out to be really important, as well, oh, we have a one of these missions is to look at vertical land movement, which is so important for understanding how changes in global sea level are going to impact regionally in any particular location

Jim Green: So, in the monitoring that we do, are there measurements that we can make or are making that would help people understand the elevation of water and threatening of the ocean fronts that we have here on in the world?

Gavin Schmidt: Yes, and no. So measurements only tell us what's going on right now. And and in order to prepare for what might happen in the future, you need models. But we are making we are making the measurements that feed into those forecast models. We're looking at the satellite altimeter data that's giving us regional sea level, you know, very close to the shore, we're looking at the, the INSAR data and the NISAR data, there's going to be upcoming, there's going to tell us more about vertical land movement, which is which is the other part of risks associated with relative sea level change. So yes, you know, we are making those measurements, but they need to be fed into the analysis, they need to be fed into the modeling, so that we can project things going forward, that we don't yet have observations for.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Marzec 12, 2023, 05:17
Gravity Assist: Let’s Talk About Climate Change, with Gavin Schmidt (2)

Jim Green: Well, to understand this concept of altitude of land isn't it true that as, as ice or snow in mountain peaks then wither away, the land becomes more buoyant and moves up. And so you have to not only factor in the, the change in ocean height, but the change in, in mass that is occurring on the land.

Gavin Schmidt: Yes, you do. And in fact, it's even more complicated and more fascinating. Because when you when you move the ice, when the ice moves, and it melts and goes into the ocean, you're also changing the mass distribution on Earth, which changes gravity. And so if you lose a chunk of ice on Greenland, that means that there's less gravity pulling water towards Greenland. And in fact, sea level goes down near Greenland, and goes up elsewhere. And, and it turns out that there's a small change in the rotation of the Earth as well, which also changes the shape of the geode, and you need to have all of those things calculated, if you're going to be able to predict what's going to happen to sea level in New York, or in Johan-- or in South Africa, or also or in or in Shanghai. And each of those places has a different fingerprint from where the ice is melting, or where the terrestrial water storage is changing.

Jim Green: Gavin, what lessons should we take away from the climate environment during the global pandemic?

Gavin Schmidt: Okay, so let me start off by saying that I'm not going to recommend a global pandemic in order to reduce emissions.

Jim Green: Good, good, good.

Gavin Schmidt: Nonetheless, the restrictions that were put in place, it did impact a lot of different emissions. So as you rightly say, you know, we, in the US, we reduced carbon dioxide by I think about 10%, in 2020, compared to the year before, globally, it was about a 7% decrease in carbon dioxide emissions, mostly from changes in transportation. So people weren't driving as much they weren't flying as much. And, and that had impacts on other things, too. So, so people not driving reduce the amount of nitrous oxides. So those are a precursor of smog, there are very bad, health wise, in cities, mostly everywhere, we saw reductions in ozone, and not, not so much in some of the most polluted parts, but, but we saw big changes in in the short-lived pollutants that we that we saw from space, everywhere, where there were big restrictions put in place.

Gavin Schmidt: So there's, there's two lessons, I think, to take from that. One is that just making people stay at home and not do anything, is not a good climate plan. Right? That's, that's, it's not sufficient. The systematic changes that need to be made in how power is generated and how industry is run. Those are the big players and, and without tackling those, you know, individual choices about you know, working from home or going into the city or taking a car or taking a bus taking a bike, all of those things are small comparatively.

21:25 Gavin Schmidt: The second thing to learn from that, though, is that anything that we do that is going to reduce emissions is always going to affect these other things. It's also going to affect air pollution, it's also going to affect smog. And there are things that we can design there are, there are policies that we can design that allow us to reduce emissions and clean up the air at the same time, and reduce, you know, public health problems associated with particulates or with ozone or with smog. And so these things are connected. And I think the, you know, one of the most important lessons from, from the COVID pandemic has been: Those connections are very, very clear. And we need to be able to build those into our, our plans going forward.

Jim Green: So in terms of being a good steward of this planet, are there things that individuals could do that would help out?

Gavin Schmidt: It's important to remember that even though you're an individual, you wear many hats, you know, you're, you're an individual consumer. You're a commuter, you can, you can work from home or take a bike or take public transport, rather than driving a car, you can swap out your car for an electric vehicle. You can be a citizen, you know, you're you can be a parent, you can be a member of a faith community. And through those communities, you can influence decisions that are being made at a higher scale, right? You can influence the, the insulation that that's being put into the school or your new building, you can influence where your town buys its energy, you can influence the politicians that are making decisions about utility choices, you can influence, you know, the readers of your local newspaper. You can influence the people at your local town halls, you have a lot of different roles that are there that can amplify your values and your choices, such that they can impact bigger and bigger and bigger decisions.

Jim Green: So everyone can play a role and an important one at that.

Gavin Schmidt: Yep.

Jim Green: Well, you know, Gavin, I always like to ask my guests to tell me, what was the event or person, place, or thing, that got them so excited about being the scientists they are today? I call that event a gravity assist. So Gavin, what was your gravity assist?

Gavin Schmidt: So back when I was a postdoc, I was working at McGill University in Montreal. And Montreal, as I'm sure you know, is is bilingual, right? So there's, there's an English population, there’s a French speaking population. And I’m fortunate enough to speak a little bit of French and so I was able to kind of, you know, go between the two. And, and I remember, you know, pretty early on, when I was there, I was giving a talk, and it was a, it was a French language scientific conference, and I was giving a talk on the Cretaceous, and what, and how the climate of the Cretaceous might have been. And immediately after I gave my talk this, this, this, this journalist came up to me and, and he said, Oh, you know, I'm from from Radio Canada, which is the French, the French network there.

Gavin Schmidt: And he says, you know, my audience is absolutely fascinated by by the Cretaceous, you know, because, you know, there were dinosaurs, and everybody loves dinosaurs. And, and he said, You know, I just, you know, can you tell me something about the predictions? So, he, you know, the camera starts rolling. And this is all in French. And the guy says, What would he says to me, you know, “Comment était le crétacé?” So, what was it like in the Cretaceous? And I said, “Chaud.” Hot. And he says, you know, how hot? I said, “Très chaud,” very hot. And he said, Thank you very much. And that was it. And I was going, Okay, well, that was that was that was interesting.

Gavin Schmidt: And, and, you know, and I bring that up, because, you know, what's kind of pushed me to be kind of where I am, as has been a kind of innate desire to help people out to explain stuff to folks. And one of the things that I realized at that moment was that even if I don't know everything, I still know a lot more than a lot of other people. And that's kind of the need to know a lot about the need to know a lot about a lot of things, and see how they fit together. And then be able to explain what's going on in the ocean to the people that care about the clouds, or what's going on in the radiation to the people that care about paleoclimate or explained to somebody that cares about the dinosaurs how climate change, you know, impact or impacted or impacted them. You can be that translator, you can be that conduit of interesting information. You know, that was that was when I kind of realized that that was something that could be done. And that, and that I could do it.

Gavin Schmidt: What's pushed me into climate change has been both that kind of evolution of, of my thinking about what science is for, but also this massive interest that the public and another people have about climate change.

Jim Green: Well, I gotta tell you, you really upped your game since that last interview. (laughs)

Gavin Schmidt: Well, it’s a craft, yes.

Jim Green: Yeah, that's right. And and indeed it it takes a lot of practice and a lot of exposure. And, and it's hard for scientists to talk about, you know, some of these esoteric subjects.

Jim Green: So Gavin, thank you.

Gavin Schmidt: Thank you very much.

Jim Green: Will join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Jun 18, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-let-s-talk-about-climate-change-with-gavin-schmidt
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Marzec 26, 2023, 08:10
O źródłach misji Psyche

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Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Because, you know, it seems like a very, very niche topic to discuss, doesn't it? But to those of us who are in planetary science, it was kind of a big idea. And so we presented at conference and we have people lined up at the microphones before we even started talking, it was standing room only there were hundreds of people crammed in the room. Because for the 200 people in the world who care about this, it was a really big and controversial idea. And so that's what got us thinking, how do we look inside a planetesimal? And that's what eventually led us to Psyche.

Gravity Assist: This Asteroid Is Metal, With Lindy Elkins-Tanton (1)
Jul 2, 2021

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/pia24471.jpg)
This illustration, created in March 2021, depicts the 140-mile-wide (226-kilometer-wide) asteroid Psyche, which lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Psyche is the focal point of NASA's mission of the same name. The Psyche spacecraft is set to launch in August 2022 and arrive at the asteroid in 2026, where it will orbit for 21 months and investigate its composition. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

What’s inside a planet? We can’t drill into the center of Earth. But with the upcoming Psyche mission, scientists will have the opportunity to visit a unique object in the asteroid belt called Psyche, which may be the exposed metallic core of a planetary body that stopped growing before it became a big planet like Earth. Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton describes her fascination with Psyche as well as the rock record here on Earth. 

Jim Green: A mission to the most mysterious asteroid in the asteroid belt is getting ready to fly. What is that object? And why is it important for us to explore it?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: It’s probably the first metallic object we humans will ever go visit.

Jim Green:  Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton and Lindy is the vice president of the Arizona State University's interplanetary initiative. And she is also the principal investigator of the Psyche mission. Now, Psyche was selected in 2017 when I was head of planetary science. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: (laughs)

Jim Green: Yes, that's right. And it has a window to launch beginning in August 2022. So Lindy, welcome to Gravity Assist. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Thank you so much, Jim. It's really great to join you here. 

Jim Green: Well, you know, your background in geology and geochemistry is really fascinating, you know, because you specialized in the formation of terrestrial planets. So how does the rock record really give us insight into how our terrestrial planets form?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: The question is, what rock record are we talking about? Because for centuries, for millennia, we tried to understand our Earth by looking at the rock record we have here on Earth. And it turns out, it doesn't go back far enough. Our oldest rocks on Earth are really about 4 billion years old. But that is several hundred million years after the formation of our planets, it turns out, because of our weathering, and our plate tectonics and all the things that happen on the surface of the Earth, we don't have the record of the very early formation of planets. So for that, we have to go to meteorites, the remnants, the shrapnel of planet-forming, and we need to leave the Earth and look at other planets and asteroids that have earlier surfaces. 

Jim Green: So indeed, we had to brin rocks back from the Moon and find out that they were older than the oldest rocks here on Earth to really tease that out.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Exactly. That's exactly right. And so then we were able to get some information about when the Moon formed, but then to find out when the majority of the Earth formed before that, and also when Mars formed really, really early. And then the very earliest bodies in the solar system, the ones that I really love these days, planetesimals, meaning little planets, these little planets that formed in just the equivalent of if our solar system was 24 hours long, they would have formed in the first 10-20 seconds. And they're really the materials like the raw materials like the eggs and the flour from which our big planets were formed. And so it turns out, there are stages and stages of earlier and earlier information we can get. So starting with the Moon earlier, than the, than the Earth's surface that we have today, and then stepping backwards in time even further.

Jim Green: Well, you know, one of the things that we recognize as humans here on Earth, is that species come and go. Is there evidence of that in our rock record?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Yes. All right. So here's what our rock record on Earth is amazing at, is telling us what has happened on our Earth in the last 3 to 4 billion years. But even better at doing it in the last, say, 700 million years, just the most recent, say, one-fifth of our Earth's age. And by looking at those rocks, we can see the record of species developing, you can see their fossils in the rocks, and then fossils disappear with younger rocks. And we know that species went extinct, and then new species show up. We can track the branching and the extinctions of life on Earth by looking at the rocks. 

Jim Green: Now, you did some fieldwork and collected samples when you were looking at extinction events. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Mhmm. 

Jim Green: What was your most memorable field experience?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Oh, my goodness, those experiences were unbelievable. I was just, I was just chatting about this with my husband last night. Amazingly, I spent five field seasons in Siberia in very remote places, finding samples of rocks with a big team, eight nations, 30 scientists, all different disciplines, because you need everybody at the table to answer these questions. Trying to understand if the world's largest ever volcanic event, the Siberian flood basalts, caused the world's largest ever extinction event, the end Permian extinction. And just when I say it like that, probably your response is, “Well, duh, like that seems like it would be pretty obvious that that could happen.” 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: But exactly how the volcano could cause the extinction really wasn't clear. So we spent lots and lots of time selecting those rocks and bringing them back and analyzing them and getting our answers. But so memorable. And I was just, what I was saying to my husband last night is that is that an adventure is what you call it when it wasn't a tragedy. (laughs) 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: And we had so many adventures going down these big Arctic rivers in like ridiculous inflatable boats and flying in planes that turned out the seats weren't bolted to the plane, and being out, you know, hundreds of kilometers from any person, hundreds of kilometers from any railroad or road. And really, they were some of the most amazing experiences of my life. 

Jim Green: Well, I’m so glad you made it through that, so that it wasn't a tragedy. But indeed wasn't the end of the Permian a big tragedy?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: I guess it was a big tragedy. That was the biggest extinction that we have recorded. So far in Earth history. We lost, maybe above 95% of ocean species all went extinct, leaving just a few percent left. And at least 70% of land species went extinct. It was pretty close to the end of multicellular life on Earth for a while. Recovery came very quickly. But it was a very, very dramatic event. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: And one of the things that went extinct people often ask me, well, Wasn't this the dinosaurs? No, not the dinosaurs. Before the dinosaurs. dinosaurs hadn't even come to exist yet when this happened. So what exactly went extinct? Well, one thing that went extinct, which is one of my favorite animals of the past, was trilobites. They look a little bit like horseshoe crabs, but they're quite different organisms. And there were so many of them, and they all went extinct. That was the end of trilobites.

Jim Green: So in the last 500 million years, there's been, what? Five extinctions? Where's the Permian in that set?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Right? The five big extinctions? Well, the famous dinosaur one is about 66 million years ago. And the Permian was 252 million years ago. And an interesting thing about it is that these five extinctions when you think about it always being an asteroid strike, which was certainly a big contributor with the dinosaurs. The other ones all seem to be more related to big volcanic eruptions, and in fact, the global climate change they caused by changing the chemistry of the atmosphere. 

Jim Green: Well, I tell you, you know, we are the first species on this planet that recognize we can become extinct. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Yeah.

Jim Green: We're also the first species that actually could do something about it. 

Jim Green: Everyone associates, you know, the extinction of the dinosaurs with a major impact event. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Mmm. 

Jim Green: You know, an asteroid that's come to us. So this brings us to, I think, another really super topic that connects well, and that's your Psyche mission. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Psyche! 

Jim Green: Yeah. So what exactly is Psyche? And what do we know about it so far?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Oh, my goodness. This is so fun to talk about. Psyche is the name of an asteroid that orbits out past Mars, in the outer main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. And it is also the name of our robotic spacecraft that is going to visit this asteroid Psyche. Psyche was named after the goddess Psyche, by the man who discovered this asteroid back in the 1800s. Now, what do we know about Psyche? Surprisingly little, which makes it an incredibly fun kind of exploration to do. We're so privileged as planetary explorers to send robots to Mars and learn more about Mars to send robots and soon humans to the Moon, again, to learn about the Moon. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: But what about going to a place where we've never been, and where we've actually never had a close-up photograph? We don't even really know what it looks like. So we're exploring a whole new kind of object where we don't have any answers yet. What we know so far is that it's unusually dense. It's so dense that it can't be just made of rock. It has to also be made of metal and so it makes it probably the first metallic object we humans will ever go visit. 

Jim Green: Well, Lindy, when was the first time you recognized that Psyche was so special, and that we needed to go out and visit it?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: You know, it was after we started planning the mission. And I think a lot of people think of that as backwards. You know, that the principal investigator and the team of people. At one point we were 800 people, by the ways, big teams. Think that you start with this idea. I'm going to the Moon, I'm going to Mars, I'm going to Ceres, but actually we started with the science question. People were interested in a paper that we'd written in a hypothesis we had about how planetesimals form and it took us a few months to decide that the very best place in our whole solar system we could go to learn about this science question was Psyche. So the science question came first. And then Psyche came second.

Jim Green: Wow, that's interesting. (laughs) 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Back in 2011, I published a paper with my friends Ben Weiss and Maria Zuber, thinking about what the structure of these little planetesimals these tiny planets could be. And it had been generally thought that they either melted entirely and had a rocky exterior and a metal core, or they didn't melt at all. And we started working on could they melt partly, could they have a metal core inside, but then an unmelted lid on the outside, which matches a bunch of observations of meteorites. And this is the kind of thing, this cracks me up to talk about. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Because, you know, it seems like a very, very niche topic to discuss, doesn't it? But to those of us who are in planetary science, it was kind of a big idea. And so we presented at conference and we have people lined up at the microphones before we even started talking, it was standing room only there were hundreds of people crammed in the room. Because for the 200 people in the world who care about this, it was a really big and controversial idea. And so that's what got us thinking, how do we look inside a planetesimal? And that's what eventually led us to Psyche.

Jim Green: So how does one get all this metal together?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Yeah. Why is there a big chunk of metal out there? Well, I can tell you with some confidence, it's not the Death Star because those who know the Death Star say the size is not correct. So how do we collect metal? Well, that is a natural process of making rocky planets. It turns out that we know this from meteorites, that the most primitive material just like the building blocks of planets has little bits of metal and little bits of rock all mixed together really intimately like, centimeters, millimeter size grains. And when you put all that material clumped together into a planetesimal, to return to that tiny planet idea, the little bodies that formed early, I mean things that are 10s or hundreds of kilometers in diameter, like the size of a state, maybe the size of Australia, they’re heated up by those early short lived radioisotopes. Turns out there was enough of one of them aluminum 26 to actually melt those planetesimals. So when you melt the mixed up rock and metal, in a body the size of Australia, the metal sinks to the middle because it's denser. And that's how you get a big clump of metal. We've got a big clump of metal, our core, inside of the Earth. There's one inside of the Moon, amazingly, inside of Mars inside of Mercury, inside of Venus, but we never, ever get to see them. It's too hot. It's too pressurized. Like, no matter what Jules Verne says, we are never going to go to the Earth's core. So Psyche gives us, we think, a way to see the core of a planetessimal, maybe the only way humans will ever see a core if our ideas are right.

Jim Green: But that tells us that the metal must be exposed for us to be able to…

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Mhmm. 

Jim Green: … when we get there see it on the surface. How did that happen?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Oh, okay, so they're so Psyche went through something that really went beyond an adventure a bit into a tragedy. And we think this is our best idea. We think that that's Psyche was part of a planetesimal. And it had that metal core and that rocky outside, and that as it collided with other planetesimals rather than clumping up into bigger and bigger things like the Earth, instead, it got bashed into pieces. And so its rock was bashed off of it and some of its metal was exposed. Maybe it's all metal, it could be all metal, it could be half metal, we really are not sure. But we think it must be a fragment of a larger body that finally had its metal revealed on the surface through impacts that were destructive to it.

Jim Green: Well, you know, this really makes sense to me. Because, you know, when I was in grade school a long time ago, I was told that the asteroid belt was where two planets collided, and here's the debris. But isn't it true that the asteroid belt is actually trying to become a planet…

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: (laughs) Right.

Jim Green: But Jupiter is not letting it.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Yes.

Jim Green: It's pulling those pieces apart?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: That's exactly right. And you know, that idea that there was a planet there has been around for centuries. And it turns out that if you clumped up everything in the asteroid belt, it would be just really tiny, it wouldn't even make a planet even if you get it together. But Jupiter is the great disrupter, you're right. Its gravity interacts with the asteroid belt objects and keeps them apart. And so in fact, there's really lovely dynamical work done by theorists who can show that Jupiter actually starved Mars. It disrupted the material in that area so much that Mars could not grow beyond its you know, we don't like Mars to feel bad, but small size.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: And this idea, you know, what is the asteroid belt and where is the planet that belongs there is something that has been around for centuries and, and in the early 1800s. This is just my favorite story about asteroids, that… that Franz Xavier von Zach in Germany, organized all these astronomers all over Europe into a team to find the missing planet. And they started searching because at that time, they didn't know about asteroids they hadn't been seen yet. And so they just saw a big blank space between Mars and Jupiter. And the reason I love this story twofold. One is that their nickname was Die Himmels Polizei, the, the celestial police is how people translate it, they were going to set the heavens straight, they were going to set them to order by finding the missing planet. And then they started looking at one of the things they found was Psyche. So thank them for looking.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Marzec 26, 2023, 08:10
Gravity Assist: This Asteroid Is Metal, With Lindy Elkins-Tanton (2)

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Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a planetary scientist with expertise in planet formation and evolution. She is the Principal Investigator for NASA’s Psyche mission, the first NASA mission ever to explore a metal-rich asteroid. Credits: Abigail Weibel

Jim Green: Yeah, in fact, the first set of things they found like Ceres and Vesta, 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Exactly.

Jim Green: They thought they were planets.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Right? Right. Maybe they're just really far away. And they're big planets. But now they're just little sparks of light. So, asteroids.

Jim Green: Right. And that led them to believe that there's a field of smaller bodies. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Mhmm. 

Jim Green: Well, how many of these smaller bodies do we expect out there? In the asteroid belt?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Well, I think that we're, we're expecting in excess of a million. And as much as as those numbers just boggle us to think of, a million objects orbiting there, the fact is, it's really mostly empty space. Space is really, really empty. Even finding another asteroid that we could look at from a distance as we sent our spacecraft to Psyche, it turns out there was just nothing nearby, even with, you know, a million objects, it's just space.

Jim Green: So we really have to reorient ourselves from the Millennium Falcon flying through the asteroid belt, to then be able to realize if we can get to one, that's the that's the goal of the Psyche mission.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Exactly, exactly. And that Millennium Falcon image is just in our brains permanently. It's very hard to get away from that.

Jim Green: Well, what instruments are onboard the spacecraft and really be able to look at the body and tease out what it's all about?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: It was such an interesting challenge to go through the the process of trying to figure out what instruments would allow us to measure what we needed to measure no matter what Psyche ended up being. Because there's a there's a wide range of possibilities. Here, we have our favorite hypothesis, but there's other ideas. So in the end, what we settled on was, first of all, magnetometers on Psyche, because if it was a core, and if that core made what's called a dynamo, and created a magnetic field, like we have on Earth, created by our core, then we should be able to measure its record. Won't have one now. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Very cold, nothing happening on Psyche now. But the record of the past. We could use the magnetometers for that. Then we're sending imagers, of course, because we always want to know, what does it look like. And the imagers also allow us to create a topographic map of all the hills and faults and impact craters and all the things we hope to see there. And again, we don't really know. And then our third instrument is what's called a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer. And this is this is an instrument that I did not have a lot of experience with before this planning process started. And I think it is just such a miracle of ingenuity. And should I take us just a second and describe what this instrument does, because it's so incredible? 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: So there are these things called galactic cosmic rays. And we think they are created in the middle of galaxies in their black holes, and they go shooting out through all the star systems in between galaxies and two other galaxies. They're these little tiny, super energetic particles. And sometimes they hit a body that has no air on it, like Psyche. They hit the surface of this airless body. And what they do with the galactic cosmic ray, when it hits Psyche, it hits an atom on Psyche’s surface. And that atom then gives off to other pieces of radiation: a neutron and another gamma ray. And we have our spacecraft orbiting fortuitously around Psyche with a special crystal to intercept the gamma ray and a special tube to intercept the neutron.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: And it turns out that those gamma rays have exactly the energy of the atom that gave them off. And so by counting those gamma rays, produced by cosmic rays that come possibly from other galaxies We are able to count up and know exactly what the atoms are that make up the surface of Psyche and, and figure out its composition. And to me, that is just astonishing innovation. 

Jim Green: That's a great instrument. Now, Psyche is at least a 30-light minute trip away from Earth. So that means it's very far out there. So we got to have enough fuel one propellant to get there. What are some of the really creative ideas that came out that allowed Psyche to get out to the asteroid Psyche, way out in the asteroid belt?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Right, right, so, so very often of spacecraft are trying to go far away from the Earth, they might have a radioisotope power source. But that was not an option for us. Too expensive, not something we were going to create for this mission. And so, and so how are we going to do it? How are we going to be able to have enough propellant to get all the way out there? Well, we rely on this beautiful, I sort of think of it is as like as like the sustainability option for space travel. It's called solar electric propulsion. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: So what we're doing is we're flying huge solar arrays that will unfold from the spacecraft after launch into things that look like huge wings. They would cover a whole singles tennis court, 20-odd meters across. And at Earth, these solar panels will create 20 kilowatts of energy, out of Psyche about a 10th of that. And so what do we do with all that power, what we do is we power little thrusters called Hall thrusters. And the propellant that we use is the noble gas xenon. We're going to bring over 1000 kilograms of xenon with us in a big tank. And we take that electricity from the solar arrays, and we ionize individuals, xenon atoms, we pull an electron off of them. And then we shoot them out the back of the spacecraft through these Hall thrusters in what's called a little a little potential, in other words, that the charge of the atom will drive itself out of the out of the hall thruster, and that little tiny atom gives a little tiny push to the spacecraft. And so we do that over and over again. And we're going to go very slowly and at very high efficiency, all the way out to Psyche using solar electric propulsion, and the noble gas, xenon. And I just want to tag on to this, that this is all made possible for this mission by our fantastic industry partner Maxar, because they have vast experience in building just this kind of power system and chassis for Earth orbiters. Only this time, we're going to send it all the way out to Psyche.

Jim Green: Well, I also know that you're going to use another technique, which is flying by Mars.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Oh!

Jim Green: And now why do you do that?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: We do it so that we can shout out “gravity assist!” (laughs)

Jim Green: Absolutely. (laughs)

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: That’s the whole point here. Yes. So great. So Mars is in fact going to give us a gravity assist. You know, people always say, and it's a beautiful metaphor, if you're holding hands and ice skating and one person stops and the other person slings around them and then speeds up tremendously -- that's what Mars is going to do for us. And so we're going to fly by Mars, and it's going to give us a gravity assist and send us on our way to Psyche.

Jim Green: Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, I can't wait for the launch window to open up. August of 2022. Oh, my gosh.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: I know that it's over a year away. But it feels like tomorrow. And you know better than I do, how this goes every single day as scheduled. You know, hour by hour between now and launch. There's so much still to do. But we're going strong.

Jim Green: Well, we know you're in for a whole series of surprises when you get there. But what's the top thing that you would like to learn about Psyche? 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Well, our number one science objective is to figure out whether or not Psyche is a core. Is it part of that metal middle of a planetesimal? But here's my secret favorite thing. My secret favorite thing is that all our ideas about Psyche are wrong. And when we get there, we're going to discover a kind of material and a kind of body that we had not anticipated. And it'll teach us something entirely new about how planets are formed. That's my secret wish.

Jim Green: You know, I think you'll be right. Well, Lindy, you know, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what that event or person, place ,or thing that got them so excited about being the scientists they are today. And I call that a gravity assist, of course. So Lindy, what was your gravity assist?

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Oh, this is a really lovely question to answer and I don't, I'm going to tell you right now I have a little bit of a narrative about it. I don't have just a single answer. So many people have told me their gravity assist was seeing Saturn or seeing Jupiter through a telescope when they were 10, 11, 12 years old. Like, so formative. I saw Saturn when I was 10 I think and I still wanted to be a veterinarian. 

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: So when did my gravity assist come along? It wasn't until much later in my life when I realized that the thing that transformed my own life and gave me huge impetus to keep working in this direction was the ability to work on a team of people, where the thing we were producing was so much more than what any one of us could do alone, and where we had a big aspirational goal. And those things together add up to just making me want to jump out of bed in the morning and get the thing done and feel like we really have meaning and purpose. And it's hard to imagine, for me, a bigger and more motivating goal than expanding human knowledge by visiting a place we've never been. And so that's, that's my gravity assist, is working with the team after I realized in my 20s that that was what really made me happy.

Jim Green: Well, Lindy, thanks so much for joining me in discussing this fantastic topic, the asteroid belt, and the history of the Earth and our rock record and what we can learn by visiting one of the most mysterious asteroids in the asteroid belt. Thank you.

Lindy Elkins-Tanton: Jim, thank you so much. 

Jim Green: You're very welcome. Well join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.
 

Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Jul 7, 2021
Editor: Michael Bock

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-this-asteroid-is-metal-with-lindy-elkins-tanton
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Kwiecień 09, 2023, 10:21
O historii Mars Ingenuity helicopter

Cytuj
MiMi Aung: And so he turned to René and me, and he says, “Why aren't we doing, you know, things like this at Mars? Why aren’t we flying at Mars?” So, from the division position, we connected Dr. Elachi with Dr. Bob Balram, right, who had done research at JPL on, you know, Mars helicopters in the 90s. And so, Bob and Dr. Elachi and Dr. Jakob van Zyl, who was you know, the associate director of strategy at the time, and they kind of, you know, quietly said “Hmmm, this, it may be worth, you know, investigating.” Well, over that year, Bob's analysis did show that perhaps with the advancement of technologies now, you know, his research was in the 90s. Now, in the 2013 era, technology maybe may have advanced that maybe we can build an autonomous system light enough that we could, perhaps build the Mars helicopter.

Gravity Assist: A Dream, a Team, a Chance to Fly on Mars, with MiMi Aung (1)
Jul 9, 2021

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NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its left Mastcam-Z camera. Mastcam-Z is a pair of cameras located high on the rover’s mast. This is one still frame from a sequence captured by the camera while taking video. This image was acquired on Apr. 22, 2021. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS

The idea for NASA’s Mars Ingenuity helicopter began at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with a team of dedicated engineers who believed in something seemingly impossible. MiMi Aung served as the project manager on the helicopter, which has now achieved nine flights on Mars. In this episode of Gravity Assist, she shares the history of the helicopter project as well as her secrets for leading groups of people to accomplish things no one has ever done before.

Jim Green: We know how to land a rover on Mars. But what does it really take to fly a helicopter on the red planet? It takes Ingenuity.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with MiMi Aung. And Mimi is the lead engineer on the Mars Ingenuity helicopter, developed and managed out of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Welcome, MiMi, to Gravity Assist.

MiMi Aung: Thank you, Jim. It's really great to be here.

Jim Green: So when you were young, what were your childhood dreams?

MiMi Aung: Well, you know, I grew up, you know, different parts of the world. Right. So, I mean, I was born here a while my, you know, in the U.S, while my parents were, you know, getting their PhDs. And then when we went back to Burma, Myanmar, and, you know, I grew up there. My formative years. And then I moved to, we moved to Malaysia, you know, I had further and I had my education was always progressing along there. And then I came back to the U.S. So just being you know, all over the world, it wasn't clear to me if I would ever have a chance, you know, to explore space. I mean, but one thing that always fascinated me wherever you are, which, regardless of what part of the globe you're in, you can always see the sky, the stars, and the fundamental question, you know, of, you know, what's out there? Is there life elsewhere. Are we alone? That's the question that I've always had.

Jim Green: You studied electronic engineering at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where you earned a bachelor's and then a master's degree. How did you go from there to Jet Propulsion Laboratory?

MiMi Aung: When time came to look for my first job, and that was exciting, right, you've been in school all your life.

Jim Green: Right. (laughs)

MiMi Aung: And, and one of the professors said, you know, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, you know, they have the Deep Space Network that tracks these tiny little signals with, you know, large antennas and extremely low-noise amplifiers that actually, you know, let you amplify the signals, which after that, you have to process very carefully, you know, to retrieve the signals. And that comment really connected me back, you know, to what I really loved studying, right, really the signal processing algorithms and the communication systems, and then the idea of Deep Space Network and tracking these tiny little signals in deep space. Anyway, that got me to say, “I am going to get an interview with that place.”


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Members of NASA's Ingenuity helicopter team in the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory react to data showing that the helicopter completed its first flight on April 19, 2021. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Mimi Aung: And the University of Illinois hosts, you know, recruiting groups, right, from all the different companies, different agencies, and JPL was there. They had a little star system with, you know, gold and silver, and, you know, I don't know how many colors, but it was all the gold stars I could stick on to get an interview with JPL. And I did. (laughs)

Jim Green: (laughs)

Mimi Aung: And that's how it started. And I can tell you, Jim, the day, I clearly remember that day, it's been now, you know, over 30 years, that interview, but when I walked in on lab, and all the conversations, I remember who I talked to, very clearly, and it was just magic, you know. Once I walked in, and the kinds of work that was being done at NASA JPL and I could see all the different places where I can apply, pursuing, doing things that, you know, you have dreamed of doing until then.

Mimi Aung: Driving down that Oak Grove Drive, right? Like that feeling of, “I'm driving into the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I can't believe it.” That feeling? It really never went away. I mean, just the other day, right. I mean, now we're, you know, working remotely. But going back on lab, I have the same feeling. And I've had it like, every day that I drive in. And so anyway, it really has been a dream come true. And I've enjoyed it for three decades. 30 years!

Jim Green: Well, you know, the Deep Space Network, as you, as you've already noted, is just tremendous capability for not only NASA, but for the nation. I mean, it is our way of communicating with all our probes. So what were some of the kinds of projects that you did, what did they assign you to do?

MiMi Aung: All right, well, this answer is gonna date me. But (laughs)…

MiMi Aung: This was 1990. When I was arriving, the DSN, the Deep Space Network, was just putting in their first digital receiver. They were replacing the analog receivers with a digital receiver. So I joined the Block-V Receiver group, which is the first digital receiver. And, and by the way, Block-V Receiver is still operational in the field today. So you can imagine that as the signal processing engineer, right, it's just a dream come true.

MiMi Aung: So I was an analyst in the signal processing communications area for the Block-V receiver with, I was in the team. We designed the algorithms, and then when they got implemented into the hardware and the software, and then we you know, after that team implemented it, we did the integration and test, and then followed all the way through deployment into the DSN, you know, across in California, in Madrid, Spain, and Canberra, Australia. And it was just, it was just fantastic to see, get a chance to participate all the way from the algorithms, and then really participate through the implementation all the way to deployment and making a system work.

MiMi Aung: I've been to all the complexes and I, I love the DSN. That was my initial home, so to speak. Yes.

Jim Green: Yeah, well, you've managed so many teams that have done enormous amount of important work for, for the nation and for NASA. What's your secret in building these teams?

MiMi Aung: Well, I think the first secret, I think you have to be truly passionate, passionate about the cause that the team is pursuing, you know, whether in my case, it's been the Mars helicopter or autonomous system capabilities for the future. It's definitely not a, you know, 9 to 5 job. And I really believe in having team members that believe and are as passionate as I am. And really, once you enroll them, so I always say, you know, “I'm enrolling you deep down to your heart,” and people look at me funny, but I think after people who work with me after a while, get what I'm saying. Because then what we do is, I really also respect every person. There is no hierarchy in terms of importance of what you can contribute. And there is no hierarchy on how easily you can also bring the entire system down.

MiMi Aung: I really believe in diversity, the technical diversity, and the technical responsibility. And there is no hierarchy, which means everybody really needs to respect the system, and everybody has to respect everybody else. Otherwise, you know, the kinds of systems we do here at NASA, and you know, and myself personally in JPL, they are not things that are straightforward by any means. And, and so you really have to respect every single discipline. And so I think my secret sauce is: Have passion, respect what everybody's bringing to the table, and then, you know, really expect the excellence, the best of yourself and all the teammates. And I really think you can make, you know, really, really, really big things happen.

Jim Green: Yeah, magic happens when that occurs.

Jim Green: I'd also heard that you worked on the Psyche mission, you know, and that's that fabulous spacecraft going to a really unique asteroid that may be a metal core. So what was your contribution on Psyche?

MiMi Aung: Yeah, Psyche is, you know, fabulous mission. And, you know, in addition to the primary goal, to go to Psyche, right to the asteroid, they are also hosting a new technology, Deep Space Optical Communications, a technology demonstration package. And so, now, they are two different objectives, you know, two different projects, so to speak, that come together on the same flight system. And so my contribution was to join, and to be the accommodation manager on Psyche, to accommodate the Deep Space Optical Communication. And that was a perfect position for me, because, you know, Jim, we were just talking about my fundamental belief in getting new capabilities infused into future missions. And whenever there is a deep space mission, it is the ultimate platform, right, for a technology demonstration opportunity to mature a technology. And so, again, the optical comm getting demonstrated in deep space, for the first time, making this successful, I was definitely motivated.

MiMi Aung: And it really was a fun job.

Jim Green: We're moving into that era where humans will be walking on the surface of the Moon and then on to Mars. We're going to want high resolution video, data, voice, and that requires these kind of communication systems for us to investigate. So that's a great step.

Jim Green: So I was always a big proponent of technology demonstrations. All right? So that gets us to I think the next huge step in your career. How did you get involved in building that helicopter for Mars?

MiMi Aung: (laughs) Oh, yes. That's another major technology infusion activity, very motivated, very driven, you know, for the future. So, yeah, at the time the helicopter concept was born or revived, I was the deputy manager of the autonomous systems division. So I remember, actually, there was a tour of our division by our prior director, you know, Dr. Elachi. And one of the demos we showed was some drones being used to demonstrate autonomous navigation algorithms, OK. This was just in a room with drones. And on the way out, he said to me and René Fradet who was the deputy director of the engineering and science directorate at the time. 

MiMi Aung: And so he turned to René and me, and he says, “Why aren't we doing, you know, things like this at Mars? Why aren’t we flying at Mars?” So, from the division position, we connected Dr. Elachi with Dr. Bob Balram, right, who had done research at JPL on, you know, Mars helicopters in the 90s. And so, Bob and Dr. Elachi and Dr. Jakob van Zyl, who was you know, the associate director of strategy at the time, and they kind of, you know, quietly said “Hmmm, this, it may be worth, you know, investigating.” Well, over that year, Bob's analysis did show that perhaps with the advancement of technologies now, you know, his research was in the 90s. Now, in the 2013 era, technology maybe may have advanced that maybe we can build an autonomous system light enough that we could, perhaps build the Mars helicopter.

MiMi Aung: And then once it started to mature, it looks like it is possible, may be possible, still may be, we started to put more funding into that. And that was about the time I joined from the autonomous systems division deputy manager position to leading the Mars helicopter. So I joined Bob and the team. And then we started growing the team from there. And it was still internal, we first demonstrated that we could lift with a little 1/3 scale vehicle, that was about the time that I joined in 2014. So from there, I was still, you know, keeping my other job as the in the autonomous systems division management position and kind of going part time. And it was an interesting, again, pivot, because it was hard to tell where it was going.

Jim Green: Well, you know, about that time, Charles Elachi, you know, loved that idea, gave me a call, I was the head of Planetary, of course, at NASA Headquarters, and said, “Jim, I want to helicopter on Mars. And, you know, how can we make that happen?” And I said, Charles, well  we’re going to put out a call for instruments on what now is Perseverance. I said,”You must propose it, I can't just tell you to go do it.” All right. And indeed, JPL put together a fabulous proposal. And eventually, as you know, we we said, let's do this. A wonderful tech demo, a wonderful opportunity for us to move forward.

MiMi Aung: We really started with the question of whether it was possible. And so the way we started is, we started with a fairly compact team. And one of the, you know, first thing is to really grasp the concept and map it down.

MiMi Aung: And I remember, I think, one of the first meetings saying, “Look, all of us have the ability to, enabling position to make this happen. But each of us also have the ability to bring this thing down, literally.” And so that was just a principle we all worked on that if we ever made a decision that was great for just our, our own area, but are not aware of what it is, it is so easy to really destroy the entire system. And so that's the fundamental principle that we followed from that day one, I remember that meeting, I said “All of us have to be system engineers, as well as we have to be as the best we can in each of our areas, or else, it just won't work.”

MiMi Aung: And we were also, also jointly so excited and passionate, really, from day one about this chance to fly something in the atmosphere of another planet outside of Earth. And that passion was really deep in all of us. And it goes all the way from not just the technical, you know, technical excellence that came out of each of us. But the personal dedication. I mean, there were a lot of people that made personal career choices.

MiMi Aung: So the job I was talking about the deputy division manager position, I was part time on it, but after a while, it you know, [the] helicopter really grew and you know, need it all, you know, one’s attention. And it was the most uncertain job for you to walk away to the other one. But those are examples. And there are many of us, and so many people, you know, put off their honeymoon for seven months.

Jim Green: Wow.

MiMi Aung: And somebody cancelled a vacation on the spot because there’s tests that needed a few days. And his flight was in a couple of days. And he just said, “Nope, I'm not getting onto that plane to Taiwan, you know, I'll put off the trip.” And it's all driven by this opportunity to add that aerial dimension to space exploration.

Jim Green: Well, as you said, you and your team made it happen. It was as you made these major increments and demonstrated more and more. We were going to keep going. So long as you were successful, you were going to get the green light.

MiMi Aung: This is the beauty of the NASA culture, everybody just chips in, and gives their very best. And there was so many technical challenges that we all overcame, but the reason we did was we thought together, and we solved together.

Jim Green: Well, you know, as head of Planetary, I saw that all the time. You know, it was almost like we were doing miracles, one right after the other, you know, at the centers and the missions we were accomplishing. And it really is all about that team effort, it all about is that vision that everyone gets on that wavelength and then works as hard as they do to make it happen.

Jim Green: When you know, the first flight of Ingenuity took place on April 19. Now, if it wasn't for the pandemic, I would have been there.

MiMi Aung: Yes.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Kwiecień 09, 2023, 10:21
Gravity Assist: A Dream, a Team, a Chance to Fly on Mars, with MiMi Aung (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/pia23161_modest.jpg)
Teddy Tzanetos, MiMi Aung and Bob Balaram of NASA's Mars Helicopter project observe a flight test. The image was taken on Jan. 18, 2019 as the flight model of the Mars Helicopter was tested in the Space Simulator, a 25-foot-wide (7.62 meter-wide) vacuum chamber at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Jim Green: As you probably know. But what was that moment like? I mean, I saw it from afar. And and I was I was jumping up and down with the best of you. But what, what was it like? How did you feel when it really took off?

MiMi Aung: Oh, it was, it was phenomenal, really, you know, and the thing that I didn't realize until the day is coming up to it, well maybe I realized that it really hits you is you really had to be prepared for every possible outcome. So until that moment, right, you have three or four scenarios, right, ranging from “it didn't work, it didn't start flying and we have to try again” to “it flew but crashed” to “it flew and landed exactly the way you thought it would.” And there is no way of telling where it was going to be.

MiMi Aung: Because we've done all the simulation. We've done all the tests on Earth, and it really, you know, should work, right? We had no doubt. And so, so there was a whole range of emotions that you're preparing for, right? And you have to, you know, just be ready for everything. That's what engineering is, right? You analyze, you design, you test, it's gonna work, but until you go over that threshold of really doing it, you know, you don't know the results.

MiMi Aung: So for me, it was it was really exciting. And they were getting hints we were starting to get about you know, the event reports that were starting to come down and they were looking nominal, right, like, hey, it looks like it started out right. And I think Håvard and Michael were reading what visibility we have and we were starting to smile. But for me the thing that hit it was the altimeter plot. Once I saw the altimeter plot that just shot up to the three-meter altitude and then very quickly coming down. I think that's the point I jumped up, I couldn't can't stay anymore. So yeah, because at that point, you say “Wow, we've nailed it.” You know, we promised NASA right, at least one flight, right. So there was our 100% success flight.

MiMi Aung: And whenever there were difficult moments, what got us going forward was this dream of it flying at Mars, right. And so really, for me, the most important flight. There are beautiful, much more challenging flights going on, as we, you know, that we have proceeded on with, but I think the first flight will be ever, forever, will be the most important flight. It was a dream come true moment, and not just even dreams, like, you know, when you work for a reward, you know, this is like the absolute definition of a reward right, in every dimension.

Jim Green: It was indeed beautiful. I agree. Well, you know, to me, as you moved on to other flights, you also ran into flight number six. And that was pretty exciting. Can you tell us a little bit about what happened?

MiMi Aung: Yes, so flight number six was when we had a very long distance flight, right, and I'm trying to remember, about over 200 meters, you know, kind of flight. And then at the end of the flight, we were making maneuvers, you know, to turn and to take color pictures to construct stereo imaging, and then, in fact, come back a little bit, about 50 meters back and then land. So it's, it's very sophisticated, you know, a large distance, and then almost a little slight U turn, and then to land. Well, at the end of the long the first long leg, right? We took some color image, we took a color image, and just the activity, the increased activity on board triggered a time tagging-issue on the black and white camera, the navigation camera.

MiMi Aung: What happened was because the onboard estimations were off, right, as you know, where we were actually were versus, you know, where what the camera time-tagging, it was telling, it became a rugged flight. And so, the vehicle thought, you know, these errors, because you're going like large errors, and I have to be here, but I'm here and there was a lot of confusion. So, flight control stability margins were stretched, but it's still within, it stayed stable, you know, the vehicle stayed stable, and the vehicle landed, and at the end, it ended up within five meters of the targeted position.

MiMi Aung: It really was quite a stress test. And it was great because, because it all did, you know, work and Ingenuity, again, it landed safely within five meters, which is fantastic performance.

MiMi Aung: We really got a lot of really great data on the performance of our vehicle, so yes.

Jim Green: Yeah, you ran into an anomaly, but indeed, you were able to then overcome that. And, as you say, learn an enormous amount from that. Congratulations, that that was really exciting.

Jim Green: You know, for young ladies who have an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and they all may be listening, what would your advice be to give them the gravity assist they need to step into your shoes one day?

MiMi Aung: Oh, my advice? Oh, follow your heart. And I know it sounds motherhood, apple pie, you know, but it matters. I think it's important for everyone to really figure out what makes you passionate, like what do you want to make happen for the world? Right? Or for whatever, what do you really want to make happen? And it turns out, each of us have different, you know, callings, you know, for me, it's, you know, first-of-a-kind systems that answers big questions or big causes, okay, so at NASA is first of a kind systems and my passion has been, you know, is there life elsewhere? Are we alone and as an engineer, you know, things that I can do to help make systems you know, that really will help answer the questions. So for all these 30 years, you know, I've been here, that's what's drawn me, okay? So, but for you, you know, all of you out there, right, the next generation, it will be your own quest that draws you, okay?

MiMi Aung: But you really have to find what really draws you. Once you find that, find an intersection of what you can do for that cause and an area that, that you're good in and that you love to do. And I really believe it has to be an intersection of what you love to do, what you're good at, and what is needed in the world that you really believe in. And once you find something like that, go after it, you know, go after it, and don't don't say, “Oh, I'm only this. Or you know, I don't have opportunities.” One step at a time, really, you can get there, if you believe in it, you know, and it comes all the way from talking to people or, you know, searching for more information and starting at even a remote opportunity that you can work your way up to get there. And because you're passionate about it, you will find a way.

MiMi Aung: Don't let anybody talk you out of it. Don't let yourself talk out of it. Don't say I'm not good enough. Or sometimes, and I have to share with you, you know, when I was younger, it's like, “It's just me, it's just me,” right?

MiMi Aung: Don’t let that happen to you. You will find a way, you know towards achieving that. So that's my advice. (laughs)

Jim Green: No, I think that's great advice. I can't agree with you more. Well, MiMi, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was that event or person place or thing that got them so excited about the being the engineer that they are today. And I call that event a gravity assist? So Mimi, what was your gravity assist?

MiMi Aung: So Jim, I think more of a solar electric propulsion type person.

Jim Green: Little pulses along the way, yes.

MiMi Aung: Pulses all along the way. And I think my first you know, big one, of course, is finding that I really wanted to work in space exploration or space-based systems. And never, you know, knowing… growing up, I didn't know if I would have that opportunity. And then once you know that, that that really coming on driving on lab to JPL, NASA JPL, you know, for the interview. And that was a huge moment for me.

MiMi Aung: And, and really, once I got to talk to the people who were doing space exploration. I think that was a huge maybe there's a gravity assist moment, because to me, it was more like Well, I'm here like I really, it could be as cool as I thought it was going to be and if I think that's where I became mentally committed. I think you need that gravity assistance. So that was one. And then my, you know, this Block-V receiver group, I know I go back to it a lot and but it really was how I got grounded right into how do you turn these algorithms that I was learning in school to a really big system.

MiMi Aung: And that really propelled me into and this is where I owe, you know, a majority [of] that to my first supervisor, you know, Ernie Stone, because he just didn't lead he taught us, all of us in the group, what it took, it takes a whole village, it takes every engineering discipline, you know, all the way, right, from somebody soldering, you know, all the way to, you know, somebody climbing up the antenna to do something to you know, they're all the fancy algorithms or whatever, you know, everybody really had to contribute together. So that was another huge assist, and probably gravity assist, but maybe over seven years. (laughs)

Jim Green: (laughs)

MiMi Aung: And then entering the world of now the spacecraft side, going from the ground side to the spacecraft side. And then the other gravity assist turning moment was really… again, I keep going back into you have to be passionate, you have to love what you do. Once on the spacecraft side, after being there, I just became obsessed with wanting to push the autonomous capability of systems. And so being obsessed with that, and then of course, you know, and that led into everything I do. And then ultimately, helicopter, Mars helicopter is an example of where I actually got to then dip back down into the details to make one of those, you know, future capabilities happen.

MiMi Aung: You know, I literally grew up in NASA JPL, right, walking in as a 23-year-old. And I am, you know, as I move on to take, there's a next big thing that I want to pursue as I move on, you know, like somebody who grows up as you move away from your village to go on to the next, you know, village or whatever. It's, it's, it's, it's a, it's emotional. And I guess I had this fear of, you know, this place that I've loved so much, and all the people I've bonded with. I just hope I won't be forgotten. So the thing I want to say…

Jim Green: I don't see how that's possible.

MiMi Aung: So the only thing is, please don't forget me. I think that's what I want to leave with. So…

Jim Green: No, no, no, no, no, MiMi, you're well placed in history. And I certainly will not forget you.

Jim Green: So MiMi Thanks so much for joining me and discussing your fascinating career.

MiMi Aung: Thank you. And it's been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much, Jim.

Jim Green: Well join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Jul 9, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-a-dream-a-team-a-chance-to-fly-on-mars-with-mimi-aung
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Kwiecień 23, 2023, 23:00
Bliska, a bardzo zagadkowa planeta

Cytuj
Lori Glaze: Well, we have lots of indicators that make us think that yes, Venus once had a lot of water. We have measurements from the Pioneer Venus large probe mission in the 1970s, that had some measurements that made us think that yes, there was an enormous amount of water present in the past. We also know that the, the molecules that got delivered to Earth that would have been a source for water on Earth would have also come to Venus. And there's every indication that Venus started out very similar to Earth with lots of water, that it would have been a water planet in the past. But we just know that somehow over time, that atmosphere heated up, and a lot of that water was lost to space.

Gravity Assist: Onward to Venus, with Lori Glaze (1)
Jul 23, 2021

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/4764_lori_glaze_in_front_of_a_giant_screen_showing_all_nasa_space_missions.jpeg)
Lori Glaze, director of planetary science at NASA, described NASA's Mars exploration strategy at a briefing before the InSight spacecraft Mars landing in 2018. Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Venus is so close, and yet so far in terms of our understanding of its history and geology. Early in its history it may have had an ocean just like Earth’s, and volcanoes may be erupting there today. The only way to find out more is to take the latest technology to Venus and take a closer look! NASA is sending two missions to Venus this decade and participating in a European Space Agency mission there, too. Lori Glaze, director of planetary science at NASA, discusses these missions and why she’s so excited about what we’re about to learn.

Jim Green: The bright morning star and evening star turns out to be the planet Venus. What is NASA doing about exploring that next?

Lori Glaze: There's every indication that Venus started out very similar to Earth with lots of water, that it would have been a water planet in the past.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Lori Glaze. And Lori is the director of Planetary Science at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC. In fact, Lori got this fabulous job after I left to become the chief scientist. Welcome, Lori, to Gravity Assist.

Lori Glaze: Thanks, Jim. Great to be here.

Jim Green: Well, you know, before coming to NASA Headquarters, you were at Goddard Space Flight Center. What did you do there?

Lori Glaze: Oh, gosh, when I was at Goddard, I did a lot of different things. I was a scientist. So I did a lot of science where I did research on volcanoes across the solar system, including volcanoes on Mars; and volcanoes on Venu; and volcanoes on Io, the moon of Jupiter. And so that was my, my main science background. But I also got really interested in developing new mission concepts that could explore the solar system; in particular, exploring Venus.

Jim Green: Well, you know, we've got a lot of missions that have gone to Venus in the past. So we do know a few things about it. Can you tell me why the fascination with this beautiful planet? Where is it in our solar system?

Lori Glaze: So Venus is actually our closest neighbor in the solar system. It's our closest neighbor. And it's actually closer to the Sun than us as well. So Mercury, and then Venus and then Earth. And what's so fascinating about Venus is that both Earth and Venus are about the same size. Venus is a little smaller, but not much. So they have similar gravity. They formed in the same part of the solar system, they probably formed at about the same time. And so we would assume that they were all made up of the same materials, they started in the same place. And you would think that they would have evolved very similarly. But they didn't, they have, somewhere along the way, they took very, very different paths. Earth and Venus went very different directions.

Lori Glaze: Where Earth now has an oxygen rich atmosphere, we have liquid water on the surface, we have an environment that's very comfortable for us as, as humans and for lots of different types of life. On Venus, the atmosphere is almost all carbon dioxide, about 95% carbon dioxide, and there's so much of that carbon dioxide. It's such a thick atmosphere that it has a really strong greenhouse effect, meaning that the solar radiance comes into the atmosphere, but the thermal energy can't escape and it is incredibly hot at the surface.

Lori Glaze: So what we really want to understand is, as we're discovering thousands of new exoplanets, it's hard for us to tell when we look at them, are they going to be exo-Earth's or exo-Venus's? And so the more we understand about Venus, the more we'll be able to understand exactly what makes an Earth? What makes a planet become Earth-like or makes a planet become Venus-like?

Jim Green: Well, you know, Venus's atmosphere is so thick as you say, 90 times our atmosphere, that it almost acts like a fluid on the planet. And so the temperature and pressure is the pretty much the same anywhere you go on the day side and the night side. Pretty remarkable.

Lori Glaze: It is remarkable. I'll tell you another fun fact about Venus. You're absolutely right that the temperature doesn't change with day to night, it changes from equator to pole, but Venus actually also rotates backwards from Earth, and it rotates on its axis so slowly that a day on Venus is longer than its year, meaning that it takes longer to rotate on its axis than it takes for it to make the entire trip all the way around the Sun. It's a weird place, but definitely fascinating.

DAVINCI+ will send a meter-diameter probe to brave the high temperatures and pressures near Venus’ surface to explore the atmosphere from above the clouds to near the surface of a terrain that may have been a past a continent.


(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/davincinadirprobealpha.png)
This is an artist’s concept of DAVINCI+, a mission that will send a m probe to brave the high temperatures and pressures near Venus’ surface. During its final kilometers of free-fall descent, the probe will capture spectacular images and chemistry measurements of the deepest atmosphere on Venus for the first time. Credits: NASA GSFC visualization by CI Labs Michael Lentz and others

Jim Green: (laughs) But you love it.

Lori Glaze: I do.

Jim Green: The only blue planet on our solar system today is Earth. And there's been a lot of discovery at Mars, indicating that Mars was a blue planet. Also, early on in its history. What about Venus?

Lori Glaze: Well, we have lots of indicators that make us think that yes, Venus once had a lot of water. We have measurements from the Pioneer Venus large probe mission in the 1970s, that had some measurements that made us think that yes, there was an enormous amount of water present in the past. We also know that the, the molecules that got delivered to Earth that would have been a source for water on Earth would have also come to Venus. And there's every indication that Venus started out very similar to Earth with lots of water, that it would have been a water planet in the past. But we just know that somehow over time, that atmosphere heated up, and a lot of that water was lost to space.

Jim Green: Well, you recently announced two new missions, what we call Discovery missions, and they're going to Venus, what are they all about? Tell us what are they gonna do?

Lori Glaze: I am really excited about both of these missions, two missions to Venus, one of them called VERITAS and the other one called DAVINCI.

Lori Glaze: And these two missions are really highly complementary. They're both interested in helping us answer questions about how a rocky planet with an atmosphere, how that those planets form and how they evolve over time. But they go about the different observations in very, very different ways to help us answer some of those questions.

Lori Glaze: So the VERITAS mission is an orbiter, it's going to go into orbit around Venus, and it's going to carry with it an amazing synthetic aperture radar system that actually has two antennas and allows it to, in one orbit, collect topography and understand the the topography of the surface of Venus understand the elevations of the ground below. That's a really challenging thing to do on Venus, because there's such a thick atmosphere that you can't see to the surface in the normal visible wavelengths. You have to use a radar system really to see through and measure this topography. Do they're going to get the highest resolution topography we've ever seen for Venus globally, so that'll be amazing.

Lori Glaze: They also are going to carry an infrared instrument that does allow them to kind of poke through and see through the clouds at certain wavelengths and measure how the surface reflects in those wavelengths, and how it emits energy and those wavelengths. And that'll help tell us more about the crust and its properties.

Jim Green: In addition to that, isn't it going to be looking for hotspots, perhaps volcanoes?

Lori Glaze: So VERITAS will be looking for potential hotspot. That infrared detector will be able to look for things that may be emitting energy at higher temperatures. And so perhaps there may be some indication of active volcanoes on Venus. An earlier instrument flown by European Space Agency thought that maybe they saw hints of that in these infrared wavelengths. And so we'll see with VERITAS, you know, whether we can see similar signals on Venus.

Lori Glaze: Many of us are really intrigued by the idea that Venus could have active volcanoes today. And Venus being almost the same size as Earth, the interior should still be hot. And one of the main ways Earth loses its heat is through volcanoes. And so it seems like Venus should still have active volcanoes. We've actually seen some evidence of that, possibly some measurements, where we've seen sulfur dioxide, big spikes, where there's a sudden increase in the amount of sulfur dioxide that we can see at the cloud tops of Venus. And we know on Earth, that volcanoes put out a lot of sulfur dioxide. So some people have suggested maybe the sulfur dioxide we see on Venus might be from volcanoes. We've also seen in infrared images, looking at the emissivity of the surface spots, that look like they may be warmer, and that may be active lava flows. So we don't really have a smoking gun yet. But there's, there's a lot of good indicators. And certainly, it seems like a place where volcanoes should still be active.

Jim Green: The other discovery mission is DAVINCI+. So once again, a fabulous mission. What is it supposed to do?

Lori Glaze: So the DAVINCI mission is really a cool mission to fly a small probe, which is about a meter across, a big sphere. And that mission is going to send that probe down into the Venus atmosphere to measure the gases in the atmosphere. And there's going to make the types of measurements that you can't make from space, the only way you can make these measurements is to actually suck in the gas and sniff it and, and measure directly the chemicals that are contained in the gas.

Lori Glaze: So it's going to measure gases like helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, all of these gases that are called noble gases because they don't like to play nice with the other gases, they don't like to combine with anything. And so those gases are really good indicators, kind of like little molecular fossils in the Venus atmosphere, to let us see back into what Venus's atmosphere was like billions of years ago, and how it may have changed over time.

Lori Glaze: So very cool measurements, also going to measure water vapor in the atmosphere, and it's going to measure two different kinds of water, the heavy water which is deuterium and the lighter water, which is hydrogen. And by measuring those two, it'll help us understand the story of water in Venus's past, because we think Venus had a lot more water way long ago and billions of years ago that has all escaped, and that deuterium and hydrogen, the hydrogen escapes more easily, we'll be able to measure that ratio, and that will give us a sense of how much of that that water has actually been lost.

Lori Glaze: And then finally, it's also going to measure the trace gas chemistry, all of the chemicals like sulfur dioxide, carbonyl sulfide, carbon monoxide in the lowest part of the atmosphere, it's never been measured before. And then I guess I should say one more thing it's going to do: Its carrying a camera, which is always awesome, because as it comes down at the very end of its descent, it's going to take pictures that we can see for the first time what some of the really rugged terrain on Venus looks like up close. So that'll be really cool as well.

Jim Green: Is it expected to survive all the way down to the surface?

Lori Glaze: Yeah, the DAVINCI probe is expected to survive all the way to the surface. Now that is a hard thing just by itself. It takes about an hour for that probe to descend all the way through the atmosphere. It's not like Mars where you have seven minutes of terror. It's more like an hour of, of extreme nervousness as it comes down. And the atmosphere of Venus of course is very, very hot. Very, very hot near the surface —  850, 900 degrees Fahrenheit — you've got incredible pressures, essentially, it's about 100 times more atmospheric pressure than on Earth. And so it's like if you were half a mile underwater, so really not, not a comfortable place for a spacecraft. But it should survive all the way to the surface. It doesn't have to survive after landing. But, you know, we'll see if perhaps it's able to take one more picture once it once it lands.

Jim Green: So let me get this straight. We're going to drop a probe off at Venus. It’s going to fly through sulfuric acid. It's going to encounter enormous temperatures hot enough to melt lead and crushing depths. How do you build such a probe?

Lori Glaze: It's not an easy thing. So I'll tell you that the, the probe itself is actually made of titanium. And the titanium is very resistant to the sulfuric acid. It's also, structurally, it's one of the strongest, but lightest metals that we can use. So we're we really want to keep our mass down as low as possible. So that titanium lets us be really strong, you know, resist the pressure of that really dense atmosphere, but also be lightweight.

Lori Glaze: Now, we have to stay cool and that is really hard. And so I will tell you that what we're going to do with DAVINCI is it is going to carry something we call a phase change material. So think about ice cubes, right? That as the ice melts, it, it keeps your water at the same temperature doesn't get warmer or, or colder, right until all of the ice is melted. On DAVINCI, they're not going to carry ice cubes, of course, they carry some type of a salt material or a wax material and, you know, depending on what they've chosen. And that as it melts, helps keep the inside of that probe all at the same cool temperature, cool relative to the outside temperature, so that all the electronics and the instruments can operate at the same temperatures that they are comfortable operating at.

Lori Glaze: You know, that'll melt pretty fast. And it, you've, you've only got an hour to get through. So they just have to carry enough to survive that hour. And I'll tell you another fun fact about Venus, the world record for surviving on the surface of Venus is two hours by one of the Venera landers that was launched by the Soviet Union. So, you know, two hours is the is the best we've done so far, surviving in that high temperature environment.

Jim Green: Indeed, Venus is so hot, we don't expect any liquid water on its surface. So as it has evaporated the water, there's been chemical interactions in the upper atmosphere and it creates sulfuric acid. So is DAVINCI+ able to punch through the level of sulfuric acid in the clouds of Venus?

Lori Glaze: It will punch through the, the clouds. It'll come right down through there. And that's exactly where it'll start making its measurements is when it's in the clouds, in those sulfuric acid clouds. And I will just say one note, there was a mission that went to Venus, back in the 1970s, called Pioneer Venus. And they actually when they tried to measure the atmosphere, they actually sucked in one of those sulfuric acid droplets, and it clogged up their tubes. And so they weren't able to make all the rest of the measurements that they wanted to make. So DAVINCI has lots of plans for not letting that happen to make sure that they are able to make all the gas measurements they want to make all the way down to the surface.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Kwiecień 23, 2023, 23:00
Gravity Assist: Onward to Venus, with Lori Glaze (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/imagesveritas20200626veritas-cut7-16.width-1280.jpg)
This artist’s concept shows the VERITAS spacecraft, which will use its radar to produce high-resolution maps of the topographic and geologic features on Venus. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Jim Green: Well, you know, Venus doesn't have a magnetic field and the solar wind continues to strip its atmosphere. But yet it seems to have such a thick atmosphere. How is that possible?

Lori Glaze: That's always a great question because we think a lot about you know, that what we know about the Mars atmosphere, and we know that Mars has lost so much of its atmosphere. And a lot of times that is explained by the fact that Mars doesn't have a magnetic field. And so it’s unable to protect itself from the solar wind. And then you go to the Venus case, and you say, “but how is that true at Venus because Venus also has no magnetic field to protect itself from the solar wind?”

Lori Glaze: But there are some other factors that are at play here. One is that Venus, of course, has much higher gravity than Mars does. And so losing your atmosphere from the solar wind is, is partly a balance between the gravitational pole that's holding the atmosphere in and then that, that stripping from, from the solar wind, and there may also be other processes in play. We're actually still trying to better understand how exactly the Venus atmosphere is lost.

Jim Green: Now in addition to our two discovery missions going to Venus, European Space Agency also announced their mission to Venus. Is NASA involved in that too?

Lori Glaze: We are absolutely involved in that mission. So the European Space Agency, they also selected a Venus mission. It's called EnVision, and NASA is really proud to be participating with ESA on that mission. We're actually going to be contributing a synthetic aperture radar. It's similar, but actually quite different, from the radar that's going to fly on VERITAS. And this radar system is going to be focused on taking very high spatial resolution images in targeted locations on Venus. So that will be awesome.

Lori Glaze: It also is going to carry a ground penetrating radar, and a spectrometer that looks across several different wavelength regions. And so that will really help us characterize the atmosphere, and also, in some cases, be able to penetrate down to the surface. So these missions are all really complementary and between VERITAS, DAVINCI and EnVision, it's going to be a great resurgence of Venus science. And we're looking forward to a coordinated effort across all of our international science community.

Jim Green: Well, what's the order of launch between these three missions?

Lori Glaze: Right now, the scheduled plan is that VERITAS would be the first one to launch. At around the 2028, I believe is the, the schedule right now and then followed shortly by DAVINCI in 2029. Possibly 2030. But very close there together. And then the EnVision mission would follow after those two. Its baseline is to launch in 2032. But I know ESA is actually looking at trying to see if there's a way to launch a little earlier. So they're going to launch very close to each other. This will be a really synergistic exploration of Venus at the end of the 2020s.

Jim Green: Right, and so with VERITAS, first getting that broad picture, enabling then EnVision to really hone in on just the right places. That will be spectacular.

Lori Glaze: Absolutely, that's exactly the way this should happen. That you know, VERITAS is going to do the global mapping, EnVision’s going to do the high-resolution imaging. And then you know, DAVINCI is going to add on top of this incredible in situ chemistry measurements.

Jim Green: Wow, can’t wait.

Jim Green: So you're the director of planetary science at NASA. And I would say you have the job to be the top advocate in the federal government for planetary missions. Can you give us an overview of what your job is like?

Lori Glaze: Oh, my gosh, yeah. And you're right. The main purpose of this job or the main responsibility is to be that advocate, and to really speak to the amazing science that we're doing. And the planetary science portfolio right now is just chock full of incredible science missions. Last time, I counted, I think we have 39 missions in our portfolio that are including our participation on partner-led missions going to Mercury, we got now missions going to Venus, we have a whole slew of missions going to the Moon. We've got a bunch of things at Mars, we've got missions at Jupiter, we're going to have a new mission going to Europa, the moon of Jupiter.

Lori Glaze: We've got missions all the way out into the Kuiper Belt. So it's incredible science, you know, my day-to-day job is I get to learn about the incredible science going on on all of those missions. I get to talk with the scientists that are, you know, developing those missions, and then talk to the scientists, of course that are then using the data and making the fantastic new discoveries. It's, it's an amazing job, as you well know.

Jim Green: I do, I do, but I have to tell you, I do appreciate how hard it is. It’s, to me, it's the toughest job I ever had. I greatly admire you and all the efforts that you're doing to make this work and it's just really spectacular. Well, what's the next mission you're going to launch?

Lori Glaze: So the next mission that we're going to launch is called Lucy. And the Lucy mission is going to launch in October of this year. And Lucy is a really interesting mission that's going to go study these unusual asteroids that are trapped in Jupiter's orbit. These are unusual in their location, and also in the unique ability of this one mission, one spacecraft to actually visit seven different asteroids that are out there, a great alignment of orbital dynamics, and the physics of our solar system that allows this spacecraft to go visit multiple asteroids.

Lori Glaze: And these are amazing remnants of our early solar system and by visiting lots of different asteroids will help tell us that, that early story of how that, the, the solar system formed and where the larger planets migrated during that early formation time. So it'll be a fantastic and exciting mission.

Jim Green: Well, Lori, I always like to ask my guests to tell me that event or person place or thing that got them so excited about being the scientists they are today. I call that event a gravity assist. So Lori, what was your gravity assist?

Lori Glaze: I would say that my gravity assist was an event that happened in May, actually on May 18, 1980, which was the day that Mount St. Helens erupted in, in Washington State. And at that time, I was in high school. And I was living in Bellevue, Washington just up, up the highway from, from where Mount St. Helens erupted. And there was just something about that whole time and the, the leading up to the eruption, when there was a lot of discussion about what was happening at the volcano that I just found absolutely fascinating.

Lori Glaze: And I didn't directly go into studying volcanoes when I went to college. But I got my bachelor's in physics. And I had an opportunity when I did my masters to apply my physics background to studying volcanoes and understanding how lava flows move and how the ash columns rise up into the atmosphere.

Lori Glaze: And I really attribute that event back at that time when I was in high school to what really got me excited about science and got me super excited about volcanoes, and then ultimately led to my real fascination with planetary science.

Jim Green: Well, Lori, thanks so much for joining me and discussing the fantastic things that you do to make NASA's planetary missions happen.

Lori Glaze: Thank you.

Jim Green: Well join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-onward-to-venus-with-lori-glaze
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Maj 07, 2023, 08:55
O znaczeniu NBS (Neutral Buoyancy Simulator) w operacjach kosmicznych.
Cytuj
Felicia Ragucci: So the NBS was used to practice the procedures for deploying, like the protective solar sail and how to save those Space Station. And they were, there were engineers actually doing those procedures in the tank at the same time as the astronauts, we're doing them in space. So that's one, one huge accomplishment of the NBS. And another huge thing is the design and the development of the Hubble Space Telescope, which is amazing because the Hubble Space Telescope is something that many so many people know about. And it's one of the most productive scientific instruments that NASA or anyone has ever created. And this telescope itself was designed and then developed using the NBS. So we were able to make a serviceable telescope by working with hardware under the water in a weightless environment.

Gravity Assist: Diving Into NASA History, with NASA Intern Felicia Ragucci (1)
Jul 30, 2021

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/739268main_8334107_full.jpg)
On April 1, 1983, divers and astronauts at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, prepared for the first satellite repair mission in space. Before the repair, the crew of Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-41-C spent months at the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator, an underwater training facility that is now a historic landmark. Pictured at the top of this image is Jim Green, who is now NASA’s Chief Scientist and host of Gravity Assist. Credits: NASA

In honor of National Intern Day, Gravity Assist features Felicia Ragucci, an undergraduate at Dartmouth College who recently completed an internship with NASA’s History Office and the Office of the Chief Scientist. During her time at NASA, Felicia researched the history of the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator, an underwater training facility where astronauts practiced satellite repairs and other activities. Felicia explains how she researched the history of this place during her internship.

Jim Green: NASA loves interns, and we employ hundreds of them across all the activities that we do, including the history of NASA.

Felicia Ragucci: One of the big questions that was guiding my project is:

Felicia Ragucci How do we practice what we do in human space exploration?

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Felicia Ragucci. And she is an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College. She recently completed an internship here at NASA in the History Office, and also working with the Office of Chief Scientist. NASA has always had tremendous interns, both during the summer, but also during other times of the year. They perform very important work for NASA.

Jim Green: Welcome, Felicia, to Gravity Assist.

Felicia Ragucci: Thanks, Jim. Great to be here.

Jim Green: So what actually did you do to find out that NASA needed interns, particularly in the history department?

Felicia Ragucci: So I interned during the pandemic. And it was kind of during a time when I had just finished taking classes. And then I was going to take my next term of school off. And so I was looking for an opportunity to do an internship or some other experience. And then my dad, one day, told me that NASA was looking for interns, and he saw something about it online, or in an email or something. And I was like, Oh, that's amazing, because, you know, he knows that I love science and love space. So I looked at the application and saw that it was due. This was on a Friday, and it was due on a Monday. And I was so I was like, “Oh no, how am I gonna get this application together?” But I was able to get all my parts done. And a really wonderful professor of mine was able to send in a recommendation just in time, like one hour before the application was due.

Jim Green: Your internship project was to research a historic facility at the Marshall Space Flight Center called the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator. We also call that the NBS. Now the NBS is where astronauts train on how to perform outside work in space, but they do it here on Earth in a water tank, and I was personally a safety diver for many years there.

Jim Green: Well, how would you describe the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator?

Felicia Ragucci: So the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator, it's really cool. I wish I could see it in person. And hopefully I can one day, but since we were remote during the pandemic, I haven't seen it yet. But basically, it is a huge water tank. It's 43 feet deep. And I think 75 feet across, holds like 1.3 million gallons of water. And so the whole idea of this facility is to simulate weightlessness. And so the way that you do that is by achieving a state of neutral buoyancy. And I'm no physics major or anything. But neutral buoyancy is basically when an object is neither going to sink in the water or float in the water. So it's kind of just going to hover there. And you do that by using a combination of weights and flotation devices.

Felicia Ragucci: And you can kind of wade out a suited subject who's wearing a pressure suit, you can use little what lead weights, weigh them out till they're neutrally buoyant, and then they're just kind of hovering there in the water. So effectively, you're using the tank to simulate weightlessness in space. And of course, it is a simulation. So it's not perfect. There are things like water drag, which you'll find in the tank, which won't be in space. But it's a really good simulation for how to work with objects and how to move things, heavy structures around in a zero-gravity environment here on Earth.

Jim Green: Why was the NBS so important to NASA?

Felicia Ragucci: NBS was really important to NASA because it played a role in so many critical missions that NASA has done over the years. And I didn't even know this. So it's really amazing to kind of dig into this history and realize that the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator played a role in so many critical missions, including, I mean, one of the first things did is it played a role in saving Skylab, which was the first space station.

Felicia Ragucci: So the NBS was used to practice the procedures for deploying, like the protective solar sail and how to save those Space Station. And they were, there were engineers actually doing those procedures in the tank at the same time as the astronauts, we're doing them in space. So that's one, one huge accomplishment of the NBS. And another huge thing is the design and the development of the Hubble Space Telescope, which is amazing because the Hubble Space Telescope is something that many so many people know about. And it's one of the most productive scientific instruments that NASA or anyone has ever created. And this telescope itself was designed and then developed using the NBS. So we were able to make a serviceable telescope by working with hardware under the water in a weightless environment.

Felicia Ragucci: And that way, we were able to place handrails and foot rails on the telescope in a way that allowed astronauts to go service the telescope and which is why, you know, we serviced it so that it's still functional today and still producing data.

Jim Green: So as you gathered information about the history of the tank, you interviewed all kinds of people. What were some of the memorable stories that you ran across in your research?

Felicia Ragucci: Yeah, so the conducting oral history interviews was probably my favorite part of this history research project, because it was really fun to be able to talk to so many different people who were involved with the tank, and just really fun to talk to NASA people in general, because I think that this is definitely, yeah, they are, in general, very passionate, and I'm very eager to talk to students and people about their work.

Felicia Ragucci: So for the researching the NBS, I interviewed kind of four different categories of people. The first was engineers, also astronauts, and then divers who worked in the tank, the test conductors and other test personnel who kind of worked at the facility itself full time. So those are the four groups of people that I interviewed. And it was really, really fun to talk to engineers about the tank, because really, at its heart, the neutral buoyancy simulator was a design and development facility. So it was used for concept testing, concept development and creation. So you know, engineers would get in there, get into the pressure suit, have an idea, you know, put up, put in some hardware, some mock ups and try something out. And that's how they would really go about engineering the structures that we find in space today.

Felicia Ragucci: I also got to speak with one astronaut, and that was George D. Nelson, who flew on the Solar Maximum repair mission. And that was a really, really fun conversation. I got to talk with him about the tank and he was telling me about his close friendship with Story Musgrave and how he passed on, kind of, all the responsibilities for taking care of the suit to George, and so how, you know, he was in charge of that as when he was in the astronaut office, and also, you know, in his dives in the NBS, and I also got to talk to him about the Solar Maximum mission and preparing for that in the tank.

Felicia Ragucci: And kind of the, the amazing things that they were able to do with the Manned Maneuvering Unit and how they demonstrated the success of that in space. And they kind of they also had an underwater mock-up of the MMU that they used in the NBS. So that really shows how, you know, side by side, you have the space, you know, doing whatever you're doing in space, and they were able to simulate it really effectively in the water at the NPS.

Jim Green: I should mention the Solar Maximum Mission was a satellite that went awry, and it had the capability of being repaired. And indeed, that mission was spectacular, grabbing this absolutely enormous satellite, and getting it in into the shuttle bay.

Jim Green: Well, now that you know all about the history of the tank, and all the positions that the divers did, and the suited subjects, if you were going to participate in any of the NBS dives, what role would you be and what would the dive be?

Felicia Ragucci: Oh, that's a really fun question. Oh, let me think I think. Hmm, well, if I were to go in the NBS, I think that I don't know if I want to be the suited subject just because that seems like it's a very high pressure roll, and also a bit claustrophobic. So I think of being in the pressure suit might be a little difficult for me, even though it would be really fun. So I think that I would want to be there's a whole network of divers that were really critical to all of the NBS dives. You know, you had safety divers, water safety divers, photo divers, utility divers who were setting up the hardware in the mock ups.

Felicia Ragucci: So I might want to be a photo diver and you know, holding one of these underwater cameras, and videotaping the whole test from start to finish, which they did, because that was the data that each test produced. And so you get this whole video of the test. And you'd be able to extract from that, you know, the important the important knowledge about the spacewalk and about the equipment that they were engineering. So I think being a photo diver would be really fun. And then I'd be able to see, you know, the test from start to finish.

Felicia Ragucci: Jim, I know that you yourself, were a diver in the tank. So can you tell us a little bit about that?

Jim Green: Yeah, I had wonderful memories, many wonderful dives between 1980 and 1985. I did about 150 dives in the neutral buoyancy tank. But my position was as safety diver. So I was responsible for the life of the person in the suit, whether it was an engineer or an astronaut. And indeed, I had a wonderful opportunity to wade them out, I could do that rather quickly.

Jim Green: In three minutes, I could get them neutrally buoyant, put them in any position, let them go, and they would stay there, they wouldn't rise or fall or their roll over on their back, completely neutral, and then take them down to their station where they needed to do their work.

Jim Green: And then watch them as they as they did their work. And as they got into more complicated dives, really ensure that they were always safe and always ready for, for me to step in and, and help them any way necessary to make their job successful. So those dives were great. And I certainly enjoyed that time. And unfortunately, I had to leave in 1985 and go to my next job, which was at Goddard Space Flight Center.

Felicia Ragucci: Yeah, definitely all the divers and people that I talked to always say that they have great memories about diving in the tank. So it seems to be a very fondly remembered thing by lots of folks at NASA.

Jim Green: Well, it really is, when you think about it, you're watching the development or the procedures they're going to use in space, where they're really trying to make something happen, where it doesn't always work, right, where they have to figure out what the next steps are. And it's like being there, it's like being you know, in a suit, watching them, supervising them, in terms of making something happen, like repairing a satellite. And so this really connects all the divers with the human exploration in space.

Jim Green: You know, and they know the essential part of what they do in the tank is fundamental process of getting these people ready to repair or build structures, and make really something important happen in space. And that's been going on since the late 60s. And it's just been tremendously successful. This is one of the reasons why human exploration has done what it's done. And we're in space. For the last 20 years, we've had somebody in space on the International Space Station, which we built. And many of those operations were practiced in the tank.

Felicia Ragucci: Yep. And that couldn't have been done without all the divers and all the people who volunteered. So they definitely played an incredible, incredible role.

Jim Green: Well, in addition to the interviews, you had an opportunity to look over a variety of material. What was the most important material that you uncovered in the history of the NBS?

Felicia Ragucci: Yeah, so for the material that I worked with, it spanned you know, written papers and reports that were written about the NBS. Also a lot of photographic evidence. So there were tons and tons of pictures of the of the all the dives that happened in the NBS and so there's an online archive of those. So I've worked with those photos, as well. is these photos stored at the at Marshall Space Flight Center. But I think one of the most important sources that I worked with was this newsletter, this archived, archived issues of a newsletter that was weekly newsletter that was published at Marshall called the Marshall star. And so we had archived issues of that newsletter from 1968, all the way to 1997, which could span the entire lifetime of the tank.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Maj 07, 2023, 08:56
Gravity Assist: Diving Into NASA History, with NASA Intern Felicia Ragucci (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/ragucci_hike_photo.jpeg)
Felicia Ragucci recently completed an internship at NASA Headquarters, where she researched the Neutral Buoyancy Simulator. Credits: John J. Cho

Jim Green: And so using that archive of these newsletter issues, I was able to go through and kind of really extract a pretty comprehensive history of the tank, and the who was there, what test they were doing, when it was happening, and any other important news about the tank. And using that information from that archive, I created a 60 page timeline, which kind of covered like, all the basics about the tank and what happened at it. And then from there, we were able to use that to kind of cross reference other sources, figure out dates and times. And people who came to the tank so that that source was was really invaluable to my project.

Jim Green: Well, as you say, this was the first tank that NASA had starting in the late 60s. But as you also mentioned, it was no longer in use after 1997. What happened to it?

Felicia Ragucci: Yeah, so the story of the decommission of the tank, I think, gets a little tricky. So you have the tank at Marshall, which is the neutral buoyancy simulator, the NBS, which is really being used for engineering design and development. But then you also have simultaneously there is a series of tanks, Johnson as well. One was like the weightless environment training facility, then now today, it is the NBL. So the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, which is much larger than the NBS. And so that's kind of the tank that's been in use since the NBS got decommissioned in 1997.

Felicia Ragucci: And that tank is really used more for astronaut training. So a lot of the people I talked to who worked and dove in the NBS, thought it was really unfortunate that the tank was decommissioned, because it really was playing a different role, as opposed to the NBL at Johnson. So it really was at Marshall about engineering, design, development and concept creation. And that type of work is really important to conduct when we're figuring out how to do new things in space and pioneering new missions.

Jim Green: Well, how do you think the history of the NBS really relates to the history of NASA as a whole?

Felicia Ragucci: Yeah, so the history of the NBS, I think, I think it's really important, because kind of one of the big questions that was guiding my project is kind of a simple question. But you when you start to think about it, it's really important. And that question is, how do we practice what we do in human space exploration? That's kind of what NASA is all about. And what the agency is all about is putting humans in space and exploring space in different ways using technology, and engineering and science. And so the tank really encapsulates that idea. And it's all about practicing for that human space exploration, creating new missions, creating new concepts, and testing them out to make sure that, that when we send people and astronauts into space, that they're going to be safe, that they have procedures, and they have the tools necessary to do what they need to do safely. So I think that the NBS is really, really captures NASA's mission.

Jim Green: You know, in terms of doing all this research and accumulating all this fantastic information. What do you think the next step should be to preserve the concepts of the neutral buoyancy tank that was done at Marshall?

Felicia Ragucci: Yeah, so the neutral buoyancy tank, I believe that the facility itself, I mean, it's been decommissioned since 1997. And I believe that the facility is going to be tore down or destroyed, unfortunately, so but I think even without the physical facility itself, there are definitely ways to preserve the knowledge that was gained from it.

Felicia Ragucci: The main data that was collected from the NBS was these videotapes of all these different tests. And then there the various offices that worked in conjunction with the tank and kind of kept all that data and have the marshal so I think that, that that data and all the pictures and the photos and the videos from the tank should definitely be preserved. And especially since neutral buoyancy isn't a dead concept, it's still being done. It's just being done at Johnson now and also at various other space agencies. So neutral buoyancy is really widely used. And so definitely the data and the lessons that we learned should be kept.

Felicia Ragucci: And the other thing too is this came up in one of the interviews that I had with an engineer, but he was talking about technology transfer and how you kind of transfer technology and science to different people. And he said that the way to do that is not to disseminate the technology, but to disseminate the people who worked with it. So I think that the NBS was really great, because it brought so many people together from across NASA, they were, you know, all these all the divers who worked at the tank were volunteers from the center.

Felicia Ragucci: So they thought they had different day jobs, and then they would all come together and dive in the tank so that they would able to, they would be able to meet new people and work on different missions. And they take those lessons with them. So I think that's, that's another key concept too.

Jim Green: Well, I think you'll be happy to learn that you've accumulated so much great information, that indeed, we've started the process of getting a major historian to write up the history based on the material that you put together. And that historian is Roger Launius, who is well known throughout all of NASA, and in the history of space. So congratulations on all that very hard work that you did, it's going to really pay off into, I think, a really great book about the neutral buoyancy simulator.

Felicia Ragucci: Well, thanks. Yeah, it's great to hear, and thanks for all the support that I had during the internship. And I think it's great that it's going to be put into an E book. And you know, hopefully, then it's really accessible to so many people, and they can learn about the history of the tank, which makes all the missions of so many of the missions that we know about possible.

Jim Green: So Felicia, how does your internship relate to what you're going to be doing next?

Felicia Ragucci: That is a wonderful question. My internship came at a really a really interesting time, I guess during the pandemic. I was really, really feel fortunate to have had such a wonderful opportunity and so during my internship was over a period of months when I took up some extra time from school. So I'm currently an undergraduate right now, and I have about six terms of schooling left before I graduate. So I definitely do not know exactly what I want to do still, after I graduate, but I think it will be something that combines Humanities and Sciences in some way.

Felicia Ragucci: And so that's why I really enjoyed this internship experience where, you know, my position was working with both the Office of the Chief Scientist and also the history office. So, you know, it's really been great to have more and more experiences as I get older, that show me that those two things are intertwined. And it's not sciences are separate from humanities, but the two things are really intertwined and depend on one another.

Felicia Ragucci: And I think this podcast and what you do, Jim is a great example of that, because you're doing, you know, science communication, and in telling the public about the science and everything that goes on at NASA, which I think is really important. So science, communication is definitely a field that I would consider, along with other things like medicine, or other things like that. So we will see, but I think this internship has really taught me a lot and helped me develop skills, both in sciences and humanities that I'll use in the future.

Jim Green: Well, Felicia, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was that event person place or thing that got them so excited that they ended up working at NASA? I call that event a gravity assist. So Felicia, what was your gravity assist?

Felicia Ragucci: So I was thinking about this question and trying to think back to back to my past and younger days and think about something that got me interested in science and in space exploration. And one memory that has always stuck with me is watching. It was a special on Nova, I think it was the Fabric of the Cosmos with Brian Greene, the physicist, and it was like a four part special or something like that. That was on Nova and, and I remember watching that, and just being so fascinated, because I was pretty young.

Felicia Ragucci: And he was talking about, you know, quantum physics and all these sorts of crazy things that happened in that world. So I think that really could capture anyone's imagination. And it definitely did mine and, and I would also credit my dad too, because he's a doctor. So he's a scientist. And he has, you know, he's been a really great inspiration and just seeing him work in his his, like, seeing his example has always gotten me interested in science and curious about the world around me. So yeah, that's my gravity assist.

Jim Green: Okay, sounds great. Well, Felicia, thanks so much for joining me in discussing your fantastic work supporting NASA.

Felicia Ragucci: Thanks for having me.

Jim Green: Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Jul 30, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-diving-into-nasa-history-with-nasa-intern-felicia-ragucci
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Maj 21, 2023, 07:24
O symulacji kosmicznych środowisk fizycznych w laboratorium
Cytuj
Ethan Elliott: So it's a self-contained lab that includes all the seven lasers, all the electronics, and the ultra-high vacuum chamber needed to cool atoms to under a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. It was installed on the interior of the ISS in June of 2018. So it's been operating for about three years. It's created the first Bose-Einstein condensate in orbit, and demonstrated the first atom interferometer in orbit.

Gravity Assist: Freaky Physics on the Space Station, with Ethan Elliott (1)
Aug 6, 2021

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/imagescoldatomlab20180516coldatomlab-16.width-1280.jpg)
The Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) is a science experiment on the International Space Station that creates an environment 10 billion times colder than the vacuum of space. Credits: NASA/iGoal Animation

The laws of physics get very, very weird in the realm of particles too small for the eye to see. Aboard the International Space Station, an experiment called the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL) is exploring how the universe works on a fundamental level by cooling atoms down to a billionth of a degree above the coldest temperature possible, absolute zero. By using special lasers and magnetic fields, CAL is making unusual structures called Bose-Einstein condensates almost every day. Ethan Elliott of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory talks about the exciting possibilities that this experiment offers for the future of physics.

Jim Green: Space is cold, really cold. What happens to the very tiny world of atoms when they are so far away from any sun?

Ethan Elliott: 10 billion times colder than the core of your body is now on the International Space Station.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Ethan Elliott, and he is an atomic physicist and research technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He's been working on Cold Atom Laboratory, a really neat piece of research up on the International Space Station, and it's operating right now. Welcome, Ethan, to Gravity Assist.

Ethan Elliott: Thank you, Jim. Very excited to be here.

Jim Green: What exactly is the Cold Atom Lab, Ethan, and what's it trying to do up in space?

Ethan Elliott: So it's a self-contained lab that includes all the seven lasers, all the electronics, and the ultra-high vacuum chamber needed to cool atoms to under a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. It was installed on the interior of the ISS in June of 2018. So it's been operating for about three years. It's created the first Bose-Einstein condensate in orbit, and demonstrated the first atom interferometer in orbit.

Jim Green: So when you talk about the Bose-Einstein condensates, what exactly do you mean?

Ethan Elliott: The Bose-Einstein condensate takes its name from two physicists, you know, we're pretty familiar with Einstein. And Einstein predicted the condensate, but all of that work was based on the work of the Indian physicist, Bose, who very generally worked out these, these quantum statistics that predicted not just the BEC, but know that this whole range of physics involving photons at the time in 1925, and he sent this paper to Einstein and Einstein realized, oh, wow, there, there's really something here and officially translated into German himself. And that's where Einstein's name get, get attached to it.

Ethan Elliott: It's, it's a fifth state of matter beyond solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. But fundamentally, we describe it as a macroscopic quantum object. And I realize that's the kind of answer that gives scientists a bad name because it raises 10 more questions. Right, so what is a macroscopic quantum object?

Ethan Elliott: So a quantum object follows the laws of quantum mechanics, which were rules scientists discovered, when they started studying the smallest objects in the universe like electrons. They found they could behave like waves and particles. And that's very strange, because we know waves and particles are different things. When particles collide, they bounce off of each other. But when waves collide, they can move through each other, or waves can be at different places at once.

Ethan Elliott: And by trapping and cooling atoms, we can exploit a law that quantum mechanics applies not just to the smallest, but also to the coldest. Advances in technology and techniques over the last 40 years, have allowed us to reach these temperatures where we can actually amplify quantum mechanics. So in science fiction terms, we can't shrink something down and enter the quantum realm. But we can enlarge the quantum realm itself. And the experimental machines that do this work better in microgravity, and that's where the ISS comes in.

Ethan Elliott: Another way to think about cold atoms in space is that the cold gives you the amplification of quantum mechanics, while the freefall of the ISS gives you an extension of the amount of time you have to interact with gravity. So that's like a kind of an amplification of gravity.

Jim Green: So when we say cold, how cold is it? And how do you work so hard to make it at that temperature?

Ethan Elliott: So when we when we say cold, we're talking a billionth, less than a billionth of a degree above absolute zero. So you think, “Oh, you know, one degree above absolute zero, that sounds pretty cold.” This is a billion times colder than that. And the way we reach these temperatures, we actually have to start by getting the atoms hot, we take a solid piece of metal, we heat that to about 700 degrees Kelvin, and make a metal vapor. And once that's done, the first stage of cooling uses laser light to corral the atoms near the center of our of, our vacuum chamber.

Ethan Elliott: Lasers cool the atoms that are then loaded into a container with walls that are made out of magnetic fields. And these magnetic fields give the atoms of frictionless bowl to evaporate in, kind of like a like a hot cup of coffee. So the atoms collide with each other, they exchange energy, and a portion of the atoms accumulate enough energy to escape over the walls of the trap, taking that energy away with them and leaving the remaining atoms colder.

Ethan Elliott: And eventually, the evaporation will stagnate when the sample of atoms is cooled so much that no atoms can build up enough energy to escape. But we force the evaporation process to continue by sending in very specifically tuned radio waves or microwaves. And its frequency is chosen so that the atoms can reach a particular magnetic field, where they will have the orientation of their electrons relative to the nucleus altered in a way that changes them from magnetically attractive to magnetically repulsive ejecting them from the trap. And because this slices out the hottest atoms from the trap would call this an RF knife.

Ethan Elliott: And as the temperature drops there, that's where we get into the range of a billionth of a degree above absolute zero, your strange behavior or really, quantum mechanical behavior starts to starts to happen.

Ethan Elliott: So, what a Bose-Einstein Condensate really is, is when enough of the atoms get into this lowest energy state with the largest wavelength, so that you have this collection of ultra-cold atoms with the same wavelength that as far as quantum mechanics is concerned, is the same atom.

Jim Green: Wow, that sounds fantastic. So why do scientists care so much about studying atoms when they get so close and cold in that Bose-Einstein condensate regime?

Ethan Elliott: Yeah, so there are three broad categories of, of uses for ultra cold atoms, and many kinds of experiments in each category. And that's one of the reasons why CAL is a multi user instrument, different scientists want to use it for different things. So you can use ultra cold atoms, one for fundamental science. You know, there's always a state of the art quantum calculation that needs checking. You can also, number two, use the control and organization that you get by cooling atoms to arrange them into models for other systems in nature, such as the lattices of a superconducting metal, or the interior of a neutron star. Or, third reason: You can use atoms themselves as probes of inertial forces.

Ethan Elliott:  By inertial forces, I mean, accelerations, rotations or gravity. And gravity in particular is what really gets physicists interested and raises the single eyebrow.

Jim Green: Ethan, last year, NASA reported that your project and, and all the people in your organization were able to create that fifth state of matter up on the International Space Station. How did you feel when that occurred?

Ethan Elliott: I mean, it, it felt amazing, you know, there was so much work leading up to this, you know, that that rockets leaving when that that rockets leaving, so a lot of a lot of late nights to get everything working. And then, you know, once the atoms are on the on the ISS, there are all these different stages to checking out the the instrument and making that each part of it, making sure that each part of it works. I mean, when the instrument was first powered, and you know, there's just a green LED that comes on for the first time, you know, the “whoa!” You know, the whole room is going, going nuts that they just got this little little light on.

Ethan Elliott: But yeah, so when it when it comes to actually observing these, these ultra-cold atoms, yeah, so how do you observe something this cold? We actually make the sample of ultracold atoms, then we send in a final laser beam that blows the cloud apart, but the atoms that were there cast a shadow on a camera behind this, this laser beam. And that's how we tell what the atoms are doing, tell whether there's a Bose-Einstein condensate there or not.

Ethan Elliott: We start getting these first pictures down that look like they have the BEC spike at the center. And, you know, the physicists in the room are just starting to glance back and forth at each other you know, and to say through our teeth like like is that is that it like that could be it? Oh, boy. No, okay. All right. You know, play it Cool, let's let's get it. Get a couple more of these. You know, make sure it's make sure it's repeatable, okay, all right, that could really, that could really be it. And yeah, that was a great a great moment. But then, you know, then you do have to do your scientific due diligence. And now this has got to stand up to peer review, what's the temperature? What how to how does the How does the BEC flow when we shut the shut the trap off. So yeah, that was, that was a very exciting time.

Jim Green: Well, since then, how many times if you've gotten these atoms in that state, that fifth state of matter, that Bose Einstein concentrate, concentrate, (laughs) condensate?

Ethan Elliott: It is a mouthful. The, you know, it starts out as this, you know, as this huge as this huge milestone, and then it just turns into a daily occurrence. So now when the instrument is started up each day, there is a warmup period for our lasers, and the first stage of cooling is this laser cooling to load atoms into the magnetic trap. And then the next step is okay, you know, confirm that there's a BEC and that's kind of our, you know, our, our daily standard, our daily gate for then starting in on the day’s science.


(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/cal-unloading-iss.jpg)
Astronaut Christina Koch unloads new hardware for the Cold Atom Lab aboard the International Space Station the week of Dec. 9, 2019. Credits: NASA-International Space Station

Jim Green: That's fantastic.

Jim Green: Well, once you get them in that state, these several thousand atoms, what are some of the measurements that you do next?

Ethan Elliott: Well, yeah, I so I talked about these beat these three broad uses for ultra cold atoms, fundamental science, simulating other systems and using the atoms themselves to to make measurements. And that brings us to that something we call a atom interferometer. So an interferometer detects the interference of waves to make measurements, it's an interfere-o-meter, right, and we can now use the quantum mechanical waves that we've created. So we've taken matter and forced it to have a wavelength.

Ethan Elliott: We can use the interference of these waves to give extremely precise measurements of inertial forces like accelerations, rotations, and gravity. And as physicists we are very interested in gravitational measurements.

Ethan Elliott: And scientists don't understand how to combine our best description of gravity, which is general relativity, with quantum mechanics, which is our, our best description of the macroscopic world. You know, General Relativity says that mass distorts space time and moves around in a curved space time. But quantum mechanics says that, you know, mass can also be a wave and kind of being in two different places at once and how to combine that we don't don't really know how to how to do yet. And if there's a problem with these theories, it's not it's not the logical steps of the theories themselves. If there's a problem with these theories, it's all the way back at the fundamental assumptions that went into them.

Ethan Elliott: So one of the fundamental assumptions of general relativity of gravity is something called Einstein's equivalence principle, which, basically, if you were to stand at the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and drop your your pebble and your boulder, it should hit the ground at the, at the same time. That might not actually be true. And if you were to, for example, take two quantum mechanical matter waves, you know, that have different masses say one's made out of rubidium one's made out of potassium, and you drop those matter waves simultaneously in an interferometer, do they fall the same? And if you do that, not only are you very accurately testing this fundamental assumption of, of gravity, of general relativity, but you're doing it with quantum mechanics.

Jim Green: Fantastic. Well, I heard that it wasn't too long ago that we brought up to the International Space Station and upgrade to the experiment. What were some of the changes that were made from the first implementation of Cold Atom Lab?

Ethan Elliott: So that's, that's one of the great things about being on the ISS that there's a human presence, right. There's astronauts that are available to upgrade the instrument, or, or fix it, if something were to go really wrong, which we haven't, haven't needed yet.

Ethan Elliott: So, the atom interferometer that I talked about, that was installed in January of 2020, by astronaut Christina Koch. The atom interferometer was installed as part of replacing the heart of the instrument, this, the science module, and the science module contains the ultra-high vacuum chamber that you need for the thermal isolation of the atoms from the environment. So you the atom cooling happens inside a vacuum chamber to even allow them to be to be cold.

Ethan Elliott: This is really the, the heart of the instrument. So that was replaced about a year and a half ago, but just this this July 15th, we had a new upgrade that was installed by astronaut Megan McArthur. And we're actually now just in the, in the process of, of testing this now.

Ethan Elliott: So this upgrade, it's a, it's a new frequency source, it's a new source of microwave photons that we can use to manipulate the ultra-cold atoms And it's going to allow us to cool not just one species of atoms, but two and this opens up many new possible experiments.

Jim Green: Well, Ethan, what is your role in working with the JPL team on Cold Atom lab?

Ethan Elliott: Look, I have the best job that there is. I study quantum mechanics in space. Officially, I'm the lead of the engineering model testbed, which is a copy of the instrument on the ground where we test new upgrades, or troubleshoot problems. I'm the deputy lead of CAL’s flight operations. And I'm one of the scientists using this instrument to collect data and conduct experiments. And there are teams all over the world using this instrument for their own experiments, including three physicists that were such pioneers of this field of atom cooling and trapping that they already have Nobel prizes.

Jim Green: Well, Ethan, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was that event or person, place or thing that got them so excited about being the scientists they are today. I call that event a gravity assist. So Ethan, what was your gravity assist?

Ethan Elliott: Well, generally, I think I was always excited to be a scientist. And I wish I could say it's because I grew up reading Newton or Einstein, or the Feynman lectures or anything by actual great scientists of history. But no. As a kid, what excited me was when I would turn on cartoons after school, and watch space adventures and superheroes with the understanding that most of the superheroes were scientists, right? It was always some crazy invention that would save the day or the, or the superpowers themselves were derived from a freak accident in the lab.

Ethan Elliott: And honestly, if you don't mind, something that I'm very passionate about is not what brings students into science, but how they manage to stay in science when it gets tough, and it will get tough. And, but I've been very lucky to have had great mentors through undergrad and outstanding graduate advisor and mentors at JPL. I think there is great science outreach to get students excited. But I'm most interested in reaching the undergrad and the graduate students who are already working in science have put in so much work, but are starting to just feel overwhelmed or maybe that they can't do this, or that they've made a mistake. And I just want them to know that it's it's going to work out and to keep going.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Maj 21, 2023, 07:24
Gravity Assist: Freaky Physics on the Space Station, with Ethan Elliott (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/ethan.jpg)
Ethan Elliott is the lead of the Cold Atom Laboratory engineering model testbed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Ethan Elliott: I think motivation or the ability to keep going comes from the story or a narrative that we tell ourselves and the trouble starts when we hit something where that story fails. So, let me try to quickly explain how once the story I was telling myself failed.

Ethan Elliott: In my PhD, I was working on a very specific application of ultra-cold atoms to test consistency with a string theory conjecture. I had to learn all day, all this hydrodynamics and thermodynamics. And to do that I was reading rocketry textbooks, and really starting to wish I had done something more space-related. But why would NASA hire a cold atom scientist?

Ethan Elliott: So I got it in my head that I needed to demonstrate what a good physicist I was, to be a successful scientist, I would need to graduate in five years. So then towards the end of my fourth year, my entire experiment need to move from one university to another, you know, meticulously aligned optics, diode laser 130 watt, carbon dioxide, laser, optical fiber is laser walking electronics, power supplies, high back and components, control hardware, you know, the whole deal. And I thought my, my career was over. I had given myself completely made up deadline that was now impossible. I thought I was a complete failure, you know, that the narrative that I've been telling myself is broken. And I thought seriously about quitting. And I only snapped out of it with a new story: you know, that the conviction that okay, a true scientist would show the knowledge, skill, patience, to personally rebuild an ultra-cold atom experiment from the ground up, and know, maybe better than it was even.

Ethan Elliott: And I graduated, and my advisor told me that he saw an ad that NASA was trying to build a cold atom experiment to put in space. And yeah, I thought, you know, the, sign me up for that I was on the plane to that interview so fast. And then the drive to to move my family out to JPL. So I just want any student to be very careful about the story that they're telling themselves and make sure that it's not made-up nonsense. They can, they can generate their own gravity assist, kind of, by changing their perspective. And now, when things go wrong in the lab, you don't get literal superpowers. But those are the times that that make you better. And you know, you make mistakes in school so that you don't later and no one asked me now how long I was in school, but they do ask me to lead troubleshooting on the only quantum lab in orbit. So to any graduate student alone in a dark lab right now: Don't quit. It's going to be okay.

Jim Green: Yeah, that's absolutely tremendous advice. I mean, I remember, of course, in my own graduate career, the ups and downs that occur. But indeed, you've got to be able to be passionate, and stick it out and find your way. And I'm so delighted you were able to do that. Ethan, thanks so much for joining me and discussing your fantastic experiment and your important career that led you to Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Ethan Elliott: Thank you so much, Jim. Great conversation.

Jim Green: Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Aug 6, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-freaky-physics-on-the-space-station-with-ethan-elliott
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Maj 28, 2023, 08:57
Rozmowa ze specjalistką misji Cassini , a po jej zakończeniu LRO, Sentinel-6, SWOT

Gravity Assist: Goodbye Saturn, Hello Earth, with Janelle Wellons (1)
Aug 27, 2021

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/cgf_still_00022.png)
Artist's concept of the Cassini spacecraft diving between Saturn and its innermost ring. Cassini’s mission ended by plunging into Saturn in 2017. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Janelle Wellons likes to say that she operates “fancy space cameras.” At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she creates commands that allow spacecraft to take valuable scientific data in our solar system and here at planet Earth. She also monitors the health of spacecraft, like a space robot doctor. She has worked on the Cassini mission to Saturn, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Sentinel-6/Michael Freilich, and more. In this episode, she reflects on her experiences at JPL and why outreach and diversity and inclusion efforts are so important.

Jim Green: Every spacecraft that NASA builds is so unique, whether they orbit Saturn or the Earth. Let's talk to an instrument engineer that creates the commands that tell our instruments what to measure.

Janelle Wellons: Space is not this gatekeeper that says if you didn't make it after college, then it's not for you. Space is a place for everyone.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Janell Wellons, and she is an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, and it's in Pasadena, California. She has worked on missions to the Moon and Saturn and right now, also here at Earth. Welcome, Janelle, to Gravity Assist.

Janelle Wellons: Thank you so much. I am so excited to be here.

Jim Green: Well, I'm, I'm just as excited having because we're going to talk about your activity and what led you to JPL? How did, how did you get your, what I would say, your dream job? Right.

Janelle Wellons: Right. Right. It was definitely not a clear shot, I could tell you that much.

Janelle Wellons: So you know, I'm a kid in New Jersey. Neither my parents are in the sciences or engineering. But my parents from a young age instilled in me that curiosity was always going to be a good thing. And so that meant when I went to Toys R Us, I didn't just have to go into the pink aisle with all the Barbie dolls and the kitchen sets. I was allowed to go to the blue aisle, too.

Janelle Wellons: And that…

Jim Green: Cool.

Janelle Wellons: Made all the difference for me thinking about what my future could be. But it also kind of led to some issues. I call them issues and maybe they're not so much of issues. Because I got to high school, I realized that all of the classmates around me, they knew exactly what they wanted to do. And I didn't even know where to start. It wasn't something that was at the forefront because my parents, they also didn't graduate from any four-year universities.

Janelle Wellons: But I was actually getting mail addressed to me from colleges, all around the nation college, they had never heard of talking about their track programs, talking about, oh, we have this kind of math major, or this kind of literature. It was amazing. But it was also overwhelming. I was taking these letters, I was storing them in a container underneath my bed. And when I ran out of room in the container, they were going in the trash can.

Jim Green: Okay.

Janelle Wellons: My mom turns and happens to notice there's a pamphlet for school called the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a school I had never heard of in my life. But my mom, thank goodness for my mom, she had heard of this school. And she said, You need to look at this. This is a great school.

Jim Green: Yes, MIT.

Janelle Wellons: MIT. (laughs)

Janelle Wellons: And so we did look at it, we spread it out on the kitchen table. And it was talking about how they had this summer program for juniors going into their senior year. And you're going to learn all about the sciences and you're going to be all these other students from around the nation and if you get in, it's also totally free of cost which, my mom's saw that part and she's like, “You're applying to this.”

Janelle Wellons: I went back and realized that the previous year, they had over 2000 applicants and only admitted one person from New Jersey. “Like, Oh, well, it’s a wrap, I’m definitely not getting in.” I mean, come on. I'm not even top of my class in the middle of nowhere New Jersey, sorry. I just didn't think, you know, that, why would choose me? I'm not the perfect SAT. I'm not the perfect grades. And so when my mom called me that spring, saying “you need to rush home, there's a package in the mail,” I’m like, well, we already went over this, but fine, I'll come home.”

Janelle Wellons: And I opened it up and saw that word, “congratulations.” It changed my life.

Jim Green: All right. So then you graduate. How did you get to JPL from there?

Janelle Wellons: Well, I was taking all these classes in my major. And my professors kept on talking about this NASA JPL place. That three-letter word was just everywhere. Oh, let's pretend we're gonna land something on Mars, like JPL. Let's pretend we're gonna send a spacecraft out of our solar system like JPL. It's like, this name just kept coming up, coming up. And suddenly a place I didn't know. I started to know. And I started to become really interested in working for JPL. I mean, cool space robotics! Like, if I'm going to study aerospace engineering, then I want to work for them. They seem super cool. And so because of that, of course, I was going for the internship every year, getting in that line of the career fair, holding my resume, listening to my classmates in front of me talk about all their cool projects, hoping that maybe I'll be cool, too. (laughs) But I never landed the internship.

Janelle Wellons: And I'm glad that it happened the way that it did, because I realized that even I didn't believe that I was an engineer at that point. It took until my senior year to really start getting the confidence that I belonged here.

Janelle Wellons: And I remember it was right around Thanksgiving, that I got a phone call. Phone call was coming from I believe someone in HR saying, “hey, has anyone talked to you about salary yet?” I said, “Salary? Wait a second! Did I get the job?” He’s was like, “Oh, wait. You didn't hear that yet? Yes, you did.” I said, “Excuse me,” while I put ‘em on mute. And I had the biggest celebration you can imagine right there, my dorm room jumping up and down. I couldn't believe it. I finally landed the job at JPL. And not long after that, when I graduated from MIT, I flew out to California for maybe the third time in my entire life, and started my new life here, working there.

Jim Green: Fantastic. Well, you followed your passion. And because of that, you met your goals. And they are lofty goals. So your first mission at JPL was Cassini, I found out. Well, can you tell me more about what you did working on Cassini?

Janelle Wellons: Absolutely. So I'm starting at JPL. I’m a new person, nervous all over again, because you got the job and now it's time to prove yourself, right? And when I was hired, I was hired into a group that does instrument operations engineering. But to be quite honest, I really did not know what that was, you know, between the interviews and talking to all the people, your excitement can get the best of you, and you're just excited to be there.

Janelle Wellons: And soon I found out that this this job of instrument operations engineering, basically meant that I could do some of the coolest things imaginable. Because on Cassini, I learned what that job title was all about. It was about basically operating the scientific instruments that we put on the spacecraft that go to all these places, so that we can learn more about them -- the how, the why, the what, all those questions asked by the scientists, I was there to make it happen.

Janelle Wellons: And so I was trained on Cassini to generate commands that had the ones and zeros, the machine language and our instruments can understand. And in particular, on this mission, I was commanding the imaging science subsystem, and the visible and infrared mapping spectrometer, but I kind of like to call them fancy space cameras, because the end product that you got from these instruments, were these absolutely beautiful images of Saturn, its rings, its moons. I mean, seeing those images come down and realizing that we're there. We captured this, this isn't an artist's rendition, this is real. I was sending them to my friends. They just they couldn't believe it. I couldn't either. But that was my job: commanding these instruments, these cameras and getting back these wonderful pictures.

Janelle Wellons: And the other half of it was making sure that things were running smoothly. You know, we kind of talk about instruments and spacecraft like their people sometimes, making sure they're healthy and safe. And I kind of like to compare my job to somewhat like a doctor and their patient, you know, you come in, you're not feeling so well. They look at the charts and: Oh, your blood levels are spiking all your temperature’s high. It's the same thing that we're doing every day that we come into work, we're looking at the charts of the instrument: is the voltages doing okay, the currents, the temperatures, all the commands, are they executing the right way. And over time, you really get to know how your instrument behaves, and when things are going well, or even when they're not going well, even if it's not because it's out of a limit, just because you have a good understanding of how it works.

Janelle Wellons: Cassini was actually this really amazing part of its journey. It was at the end. We were approaching fastly approaching the grand finale of the Cassini mission.

Jim Green: That’s right. That's right.

Jim Green: And while you were doing that, while you were out there working on the instrument, I was NASA Headquarters. And I don't know how you felt when we decided Cassini needed to die by plunging into Saturn in 2017, but I'm the one that signed off on it.

Janelle Wellons: Are you serious? Oh, my goodness.

Jim Green: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, It was a, it was something that had to be done because the what we found in terms of the possible life on Enceladus, and Titan was such a fantastic moon, that we just couldn't risk the spacecraft hitting either one of those moons.

Janelle Wellons: Yeah.

Jim Green: So we, we needed, we needed to plunge it into the atmosphere. So how did you feel when that happened?

Janelle Wellons: I feel honored. I’m meeting the man who signed the line, who brought the end to Cassini, a very fitting and to Cassini, too. When I heard that news. Honestly, I was so excited. I could not believe my luck. I’m on my first project at JPL and you're telling me that we are purposefully going to destroy a spacecraft? I’m like, when is the next opportunity that this is gonna happen for me? I was psyched. (laughs)

Jim Green: Unfortunately, it was me, but JPL proposed this fabulous mission of jumping in between the rings and the clouds of Saturn. Wow, what's not to like about that?

Janelle Wellons: Yeah.

Jim Green: We've learned so much from that.

Janelle Wellons: I realized over time that I needed to kind of keep my excitement on the inside a little bit. ‘Cause I got the feeling that maybe not everyone around me was quite as excited as I was.

Jim Green: They were very sad. They were I know, I you know. So I was in the control room when it happened. And it was a rather somber affair.

Jim Green: Mhm.

Janelle Wellons: I was at Caltech, and we were watching on the screen, everybody in mission control. And at the end, when everyone stood up, and we announced the end, and people were hugging, I saw. And he was crying like ugly tears crying.

Jim Green: Yeah, I know.

Janelle Wellons: when I saw him do that. I started crying, the hardest I ever had. This team was like a family. And they were the family that welcomed me. And it was going to be the start of the end to that too. Maybe at JPL. But of course not in our personal lives outwards. We still meet. I'll never forget it because of that.

Jim Green: Well, after Cassini did you get involved in your next big mission? Was at the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter?

Janelle Wellons: Yes, it was. So while I was working on Cassini, I started to learn about that project. And I started to learn that half my time will be spent on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. And so I joined that team. And it was in stark contrast to the Cassini team, because of the sheer size of it. So I went from working with all these people to be on a team of five at JPL. And it was a big change, but a very cool one. It kind of showed me that there are so many differences in the missions that we operate and how we go about them what the team dynamic is. In this case, on LRO, I was going to be operating the Diviner instrument.

Janelle Wellons: That's a radiometer. And so being on LRO was very cool. Because one, I remember being able to go outside at night, look at the Moon and say, we're there. Like we're there.

Jim Green: Wow. That's right.

Janelle Wellons: And in the very beginning, I was sending commands in real time, like on the headset, with the folks out at NASA Goddard who were in charge of operating the spacecraft and getting all the official lingo like command on the way or go for uplink it was just so cool.

Jim Green: Diviner is a fabulous instrument, measuring the temperature the surface. This is how we know those permanently shadowed areas are colder than the surface of Pluto. And it's from the diviner instrument on LRO.

Janelle Wellons: Colder than Pluto! That's really cool.

Jim Green: They, they are, you know, and so volatiles fall on them, you know, water’s in there and it's just not coming out because it's just frozen solid. So that's one of the reasons why LRO is such a fabulous mission. Now it's still operating.

Janelle Wellons: Yeah.

Jim Green: Are you still involved in that? Or did you go on to something else?

Janelle Wellons: I'm working on three Earth missions, which is not something I ever imagined for myself coming to JPL. Because like I said earlier, I knew them from the Mars, and the Venus and the Sun and Saturn, I didn't really know them for Earth. Come to find out though Earth is one, a planet and two, our home, so why wouldn't we be doing all this great science for our own planet?

Jim Green: Right.

Janelle Wellons: And so while I was working on LRO, I started to get introduced to this project called the Multi-Angle Instrument for Aerosols. I didn't know much about it, but I was told by my supervisor, this is something you want to be involved in early on. I said, “Yes, ma'am. I definitely trust your judgment.” And she was right. I joined that project very early on.

Janelle Wellons: And I think what makes this project truly special, is that its mission is something that is absolutely, absolutely going to impact people here on Earth. Because MAIA, MAIA is this instrument, it's a camera, ‘course, the fancy space camera, that's going to be measuring particulate matter, or pollution, in cities all over the world. And by measuring this pollution, they're also going to be doing health studies in those same areas.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Maj 28, 2023, 08:57
Gravity Assist: Goodbye Saturn, Hello Earth, with Janelle Wellons (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/gawellons.jpeg)
Janelle Wellons at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Jim Green: So, in addition to MAIA, you're also working on a couple other Earth science missions. What are they?

Janelle Wellons: Yes, I am also working on a mission called Sentinel-6 that launched last November. I was on the team then wish I was because oh, man, can you imagine your project being launched just the adrenaline to be there to see your accomplishment? But I'm so happy I'm on it now. Because when I joined, they were doing a lot of very cool activities to make sure the instruments were performing the way they should be. And so I got to do that real time stuff again, on the console. Everybody paid attention. Are you ready? Watching the telemetry or the monitoring the, the temperatures of voltages, the things we spoke about before. And I'm also on this project called SWOT. And SWOT is not yet in space, but it is making its way shortly there. It is in the lab, is being integrated, put together tested, we're in that phase of development. And it's my job in that capacity to figure out once again, how we operate this once it actually gets up in space.

Jim Green: Now, of course, Sentinel-6 is also called Michael Freilich and Michael Freilich was the division director of Earth science when I was the planetary science director. And so Mike and I were good friends. And he has passed away. And I'm delighted that Sentinel-6 has been named after him.

Janelle Wellons: I wish I had had the pleasure to meet him. And sounds like you were really good friends. I'm sorry for your loss, but so happy because his legacy obviously, is, is living on.

Jim Green: Well, you know, I know you enjoy public outreach activities. And so when you talk, what does the public want to know?

Janelle Wellons: You know, when I talk, my goal, my mission is, it may be seem like it's a simple one. But it's just to inspire at least one person in the room. I don't care who it is, because inspiration doesn't stop when you're just a kid. Space is not this gatekeeper that says “if you didn't make it after college, then it's not for you.” Space is a place for everyone.

Janelle Wellons: So when I do outreach, my goal is specifically to talk to people who may not think that it's possible for them to one day work for NASA, kind of the same way, I wasn't exactly thinking it was possible for me to one day, and share with them that not only did my journey feel very much full of chances, opportunities, maybe it wouldn't have even happened if not for a pamphlet in the mail. But also not giving up after the first bit of failure, of rejection. That's a part of what actually helps you grow and helps you get better. And so that's the message that I like to share. So that by the end, there’s someone out there who may not have thought that this was for them, who now thinks, “I can do it too.”

Jim Green: Janelle, you work in the diversity and inclusion activities at JPL. What's that like? And what do you guys do?

Janelle Wellons: I got into the diversity, inclusion and equity part of the lab, honestly, because when I came into JPL, I was looking for that community. I was wondering to myself, “you know, I'm out here in California by myself, you know, my whole family's back on the east coast. And here I am. It would just really be great if I had a community of people, specifically of black engineers, who can relate to my experience in a lot of ways, that I could just talk to.” And so after doing some digging, we found there was an organization out there, but they had kind of been dormant, doing maybe one event per year. And I proposed: Do you mind if me and some of my friends revive this? Can we make this something new? And they gave us the total thumbs up with support. And that's exactly what we did.

Janelle Wellons: And at first, we went from building the community: let's all go for a hike, let's meet in the cafeteria for games on Friday, during lunch. But we were able to grow so much more beyond that, especially with the help of the other employee resource groups at the lab. And we went from building that community to using that community to institute real change that can only improve NASA as a whole, to make that future for those who never imagined themselves in a place like this, who maybe have never pictured themselves as an engineer, because maybe they've never seen someone who looks like them in that space.

Janelle Wellons: So now, we're out there doing outreach for K through 12. for going to the conventions, we're recruiting, we are helping the lab with creating new events to allow employees to talk with each other about the experiences that we go through to really just make that inclusive environment that NASA is all about. And so I'm so proud to be involved in all those efforts. And I'm looking forward to all the great things that will come from it.

Jim Green: Well, that's fantastic. Because Janelle as you know, so well, many of our young students don't see a future in some of these things. They don't even know what's going on in some areas. So getting them exposed and being that, you know, role model that you are is a huge step to help them on their way. And I'm sure you're giving gravity assists along the way.

Jim Green: Well, Janelle, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was that event or person, place or thing that got them so excited about being the engineer they are today? I call that event a gravity assist. So Janelle, what was your gravity assist?

Janelle Wellons: My gravity assist happened my freshman year at MIT. So I come out of that program. I was so excited to be there. And I realized that I didn't exactly know what I wanted to do. I knew that math was cool, for sure. I absolutely loved math. And I convinced myself, I was going to become a theoretical mathematician.

Janelle Wellons: And all these upperclassmen were telling me, “you know, MIT is a school that's known for its engineering. So we’re just gonna encourage you to take at least one introductory class to engineering.” All right.

Janelle Wellons: But then I came across one called aerospace engineering. And I was the type of kid who was up watching Jimmy Neutron building a rocket in his backyard and launch into space thinking, “How can I be the kid in the neighborhood that does the same thing?” And you know, the black hole videos late at night. You know, space is cool. I don't know many people who don't think so.

Jim Green: That’s right.

Janelle Wellons: And so, how about I give that one a try? And this is when the gravity assist comes in, because I'm in the class on the first day, and the professor is going over the syllabus. And he's talking about how we're going to learn the rocket equation, we're going to learn about how planes fly. And we're also going to learn a little bit about the history of spaceflight. And he shows this image of an astronaut fixing the Hubble telescope. And I remember looking at that, and thinking, “this is unreal. Some people really, they have a job that lets them work on something in space? And then my professor, Professor Jeffrey Hoffman, says that he is the man in the photo.

Jim Green:  Yes, he is. Jeff is a very good friend of mine.

Janelle Wellons: Wow. I mean, I think I may have been the only person in the room who didn't know who he was prior to that class. Because I seem to be the only one with my jaw on the desk in disbelief that I was in the same room as an astronaut. Are you serious? Never met anyone from NASA. You’re telling me my professor is an astronaut? That moment, that moment was everything for me because I couldn't imagine turning down the opportunity to learn aerospace engineering from someone like him. And, you know, I went on to continue with the major knowing nothing about this subject, but learning every step of the way. And even doing an internship where he was my mentor over in Italy, and them rolling out the red carpet for him because he had flown with the Italians in space. I mean, he doesn't even know this, he likely does not know this. But he was the gravity assist that really set me on this path to be here at JPL.

Jim Green: Well, that's fantastic. Well, Janelle, thanks so much for joining me in discussing your fantastic career.

Janelle Wellons: Thank you so much.

Jim Green: My pleasure.

Jim Green: Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.

Jim Green: Gravity Assist is going to be taking a mid-season break. Come back in October when we’ll discuss the Lucy mission to the Trojan asteroids, space weather, and much, much more. In the meantime, check out other NASA podcasts at NASA.gov/podcasts.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Aug 27, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-goodbye-saturn-hello-earth-with-janelle-wellons
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Czerwiec 04, 2023, 08:48
O tym jak to kiedyś mogło być i o oczekiwaniach związanych z misją Lucy.

Cytuj
Hal Levison: What we learned when we looked at this particular period of evolution, is that the Trojan asteroids, which are the this population of asteroids that lead and follow Jupiter's orbit by about 60 degrees, get captured into their orbits during this evolution. So let me explain a little bit more detail about what we're talking about. We envision that the giant planets formed in a much more compact configuration. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, all forming within let's say, 12, 13 astronomical units from the Sun right now, Neptune's out at 30 astronomical units.

Gravity Assist: Lucy and the Space Fossils, with Hal Levison (1)
Oct 8, 2021

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/1895_final_lucy_high-end-render_pira.jpg)
NASA’s Lucy mission will study the Trojan asteroids. It is scheduled to launch in October 2021. Credits: NASA

The planets of our solar system didn’t have such stable orbits a few billion years ago. The giant outer planets moved around chaotically in their orbits, and Uranus and Neptune may have even switched places. To get a more complete understanding of the full history of our solar system, NASA is sending a spacecraft called Lucy to investigate the Trojans, mysterious small objects that share an orbit of the Sun with Jupiter. Principal investigator Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute’s branch in Boulder, Colorado, discusses this exciting mission, launching Oct. 16, 2021.

Learn more about the Lucy mission (https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/2007/nasas-lucy-mission-a-journey-to-the-young-solar-system/)

--

Jim Green: We're launching the mission Lucy. It's going to a special place in Jupiter's orbit, where objects called Trojans are captured. What are they? And what can they tell us about the evolution of our solar system?

Hal Levison If you think about it, almost everything is chaotic. The stock market, the weather, everything is chaotic. And so is the solar system.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Hal Levison. And he is the principal investigator of a fantastic mission called Lucy. And he's based out of Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Lucy will be launching very soon, and will be visiting some of the very special asteroid objects that share an orbit with Jupiter. So welcome Hal to Gravity Assist.

Hal Levison: Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. I can't wait to fill you in and let your listeners know about the Lucy mission. It's very exciting.

Jim Green: It is very exciting. But I want to start, actually, a little earlier. What got you into studying how the solar system evolved? And how it may have even moved around over time?

Hal Levison: Well, when I was a kid, I was always interested in asking the questions where we came from, how we got here, how the Earth got the way it is. And so the study of planet formation, you know, was just filling in one of the niches of that question, right? I mean, obviously, there are many aspects of that question from cosmology all the way up to evolution. Right? But for me, I decided working on trying to understand how the Earth and the other planets got to be, is really what my passion is.

Hal Levison: My whole career has been trying to understand how planets came by building large numerical computer simulations following the orbits of things around the Sun as they accrete to form the planets.

Jim Green: What's really neat about that whole concept is that it led you to some really exciting discoveries. The concept of how planets form, and then how they interact with each other, and actually move their orbits based on that interaction. That that is a fantastic story, you know, moving something the size of Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. How did that come about?

Hal Levison: Let me take a step back, right, because, you know, the concept of planet formation back when I got into this field, I'm a gray beard at this point in my career, was the planets sort of formed out of a narrow region of what we call the protoplanetary disk, which is made of gas and dust.

Hal Levison: And the planets slowly accumulated objects around that.

Hal Levison: What we did, through my career, over the last 20 years or so, was to understand that that's not how planets form. Planet formation is actually very violent. The system evolves together, right. So rather than having this little isolated region where the Earth grew, materials handed back and forth between the planets as they grow, the planets are pushing each other around. They're competing for resources, the ones that are successful grow, and become the planets that we see today.

Hal Levison: And it was that understanding of this evolution from a very quiescent situation to a very violent one that sort of led us to this understanding that the planets had to move around. And in particular, what we noted when we tried to run our models of the outer solar system, is that you can never build Uranus and Neptune where we see them today.

Hal Levison: Jupiter and Saturn, which are closer to the Sun, and thereby, in the standard picture form much faster, much faster, stop Uranus and Neptune from growing at all. So we needed to come up with an idea which allowed the four giant planets to grow together.


(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/697015main_pia16211_full.jpg)
Sharing Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun, the Trojan asteroids may hold clues to the evolution of the solar system. NASA’s Lucy mission will explore them. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Hal Levison: And what, what we came up with was the idea that they formed as a very compact group, as a system of four planets. And then we needed to get Uranus and Neptune out where we see them. Right?

Jim Green: Right.

Hal Levison: And that led to this, what we call it, we call it the Nice model, which is a really a global instability, where the orbits of the planets become really become nuts. And they cross each other and gravitationally scatter each other around -- gravity assists, right? Jupiter, Saturn gave Uranus, and Neptune a gravity assist to basically kick them out to the orbits we see today.

Jim Green: So Hal, in the Nice Model, did the order of the planets remain the same? Or did they change places?

Hal Levison: Um, it depends on the details of the model. Jupiter, and Saturn, their orbits remained the same. Uranus and Neptune. It's about 50-50, which one ends up the inner planet and which one is the outer planet. There's also a version of the Nice Model, which is actually becoming quite popular at the moment, where there was another ice giant that was actually ejected into interstellar space during this event, so that the solar system originally had nine planets in this idea, and now it's down to eight.

Hal Levison: The reason why we need this extra planet is because we need gravitational interactions between Jupiter and this planet to get the orbit of Jupiter, right.

Jim Green: Oh, interesting.

Hal Levison: But once Jupiter grabs on to one of these things, the most likely scenario is it gets ejected.

Jim Green: Completely out of the solar system.

Hal Levison: Completely out of the solar system.

Jim Green: Wow, OK.

Hal Levison: So it's, it's, it's gone. It's history. If this is right.

Jim Green: And isn't it true that the small bodies tell us this telltale sign of the dynamics of the solar system in its early formation?

Hal Levison: It's the place to look, right? The way I like to put it is the small bodies are the fossils of planet formation, right? The planets evolved from them by accreting them and growing, right. That's, by the way, why we named Lucy, Lucy. It's named after the human ancestor fossil that we know, right? Because these things are really the places to go. Right? If you want to understand the history of planet formation.

Hal Levison: So that's why NASA and other space agencies have put so much effort into understanding these small bodies, because they tell us about our history.

Jim Green: Yeah, that's fantastic. And of course, Lucy is going to go to several small bodies. How did you make the decision to go to certain small bodies to uncover this early dynamical period of the solar system?

Hal Levison: What we learned when we looked at this particular period of evolution, is that the Trojan asteroids, which are the this population of asteroids that lead and follow Jupiter's orbit by about 60 degrees, get captured into their orbits during this evolution. So let me explain a little bit more detail about what we're talking about. We envision that the giant planets formed in a much more compact configuration. Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, all forming within let's say, 12, 13 astronomical units from the Sun right now, Neptune's out at 30 astronomical units.

Jim Green: Wow, yeah.

Hal Levison: So that gives you how the scale of the solar system changed during this time. And that there was this disk of small bodies, outside the orbit of the giant planets, that extended out through about 30 AU where we see Neptune today. We believe, or this model predicts is probably a better way of putting it, that the stuff that's in the Trojan swarms now are a remnant of that disk that originally formed outside the orbit of the giant planets.

Hal Levison: And that disk is now gone. Because Uranus and Neptune went through it. Most of it is in interstellar space. And the way to understand what that period of time looked like and what that disk looked like, is found in the Trojans.

Hal Levison: So that’s sort of the theoretical reason to go to these bodies. There's another aspect of this, right? If you look around the solar system, there are several small major small body populations and the Trojans because they're sort of at the edge of what we can do with solar power missions are the ones we have yet to go to. So they're the ones that are really, are not explored. And in addition to that, right, because of their proximity to Jupiter, they're the only small body population that isn't supplying us with meteorites. So in a way, we have less information about the Trojans than any other small body population in the solar system.

Jim Green: You know, not all small bodies are created equal, so to speak, you know, we've got the rocky asteroids in the asteroid belt, but as you go further out, there's a lot of small bodies that are in the Kuiper belt. So when we say these objects, Trojan asteroids, are captured around Jupiter, do we believe they're all from the asteroid belt?

Hal Levison: This model would predict that these objects, the Trojans, formed in this disk beyond the orbit of the planets, but we don't know that for sure. We need the data. Right? So that's one reason why we're doing Lucy is to get the data to test our theories about the evolution of the outer planets also, because according to the Nice Model, these objects formed at different distances from the Sun, they should have different compositions because at different distances, you have different temperatures, right.

Hal Levison: And so as a result, we should be able, by looking at these things close up, determine sort of where they formed, hopefully…

Jim Green: Mhm.

Hal Levison: …how they formed. And we hopefully can put that together with a story of the migration of the planets to figure out the history of the solar system. That's the overarching goal.

Jim Green: Right. And that's what Lucy is all about. And it's launching very soon. So how do you feel about that? (laughs)

Hal Levison: I'm scared.

Jim Green: (laughs)

Hal Levison: But the, I mean, it's been, it's been one hell of a ride. We started working on Lucy, in March of 2014. For all these years, until about a year, year and a half ago, it was just Power Point slides, and CAD diagrams, and things like that. And so over only about a year and a half, a very short period of time, it's gone from something that's on paper to really, a real spacecraft that's completed. The beginning of the launch period is October 16. So that's very exciting.

Jim Green: You're not just going to visit one object. How many of these Trojan asteroids are you going to visit?

Hal Levison: We are breaking records. So we're visiting eight asteroids. No other mission is gone that before, seven of which are Trojans. We rattle around the inner solar system for a while and use Earth gravity assists to actually pump up the orbit of the spacecraft so it can get out as far as Jupiter. On the way out, it passes a main belt asteroid, which we've named after Donald Johanson, the discoverer of the Lucy fossil.

Jim Green: Right, very appropriate.

Hal Levison  Yeah, thank you. And that's actually an interesting object, in and of itself, because it is part of an asteroid family, which formed about 130 million years ago. So it's one of the youngest objects in the solar system. And then we're heading out to the Trojan swarms. We are going to do two orbits around the Sun. The first we'll take us through the L4, the leading swarm. And then we come back to the Earth, do an Earth gravity assist, and go out to the trailing swarm which is called the L5.

Jim Green: Well, how many Trojans are there trapped in the Lagrangian point L4 and L5 at Jupiter, do you think?

Hal Levison: There are, estimates are there are a couple million.

Jim Green: Wow!

Hal Levison: Of these things there. Most of them are really small, right? There are only a few thousand that are what we would call macroscopic big things like the ones we're going to.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTVN19h4nMg
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Czerwiec 04, 2023, 08:48
Gravity Assist: Lucy and the Space Fossils, with Hal Levison (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/hal.png)
Hal Levison is the principal investigator of NASA’s Lucy mission. Credits: NASA

Jim Green: So after you go to L4, and visit a couple of the Trojans, why do you have to come back to Earth and get a gravity assist to go to L5?

Hal Levison: Well, we need to do this, and we need the gravity assist in the beginning, in order to save fuel. Right, putting together a trajectory like this is actually very difficult. And it's limited by the mass of the spacecraft, which includes the fuel at launch. So if we were going to try to go, let's say, directly from the L4 to the L5, it would require fuel tanks that are just way too big. And so the trick that we're using here is to use the Earth as a targeting mechanism. That's why we have three Earth gravity assists through the entire mission. We're letting Earth do the work rather than our main engines, and that saves fuel and makes the spacecraft lighter, which saves fuel and money in the long run.

Hal Levison Let me just give you a little bit more background of Trojans. One of the interesting, and some surprising aspects of this population is when you look at them, they're very different from one another. Right? This is, this is what leads people to believe that they formed at different locations in the solar system or were captured. But in order to understand what they're telling us about the history of the solar system, we have to understand that diversity. And so Lucy itself was designed to visit as many of these things as we could. The planets literally are aligning to allow us to do this mission.

Jim Green: That's right. This is a great opportunity to, to really understand this, this hidden idea of how the solar system came about by studying these small bodies. Well, how long does the total mission take?

Hal Levison: So the mission is roughly 12 years. Our last encounter is with my favorite object, which is a near-equal mass binary. So these are two 100-kilometer size things. They're almost the same size, in nearly circular orbit around one another. Fascinating. I think they're leftovers from the formation of the planets, the original formation of the planets. That is on March 3, 2033.

Jim Green: Wow. (laughs) That's fantastic. Well, what are the instruments that you're taking on Lucy?

Hal Levison: So Lucy has three basic scientific instruments. There's a narrow field panchromatic camera called L’LORRI. We put a an L apostrophe before all our instrument names for Lucy.

Jim Green: (laughs) I see.

Hal Levison: So it’s L’LORRI that came out of APL that's going to do our high resolution imaging for crater counts and looking at geology. And it's going to do our satellite searches and look for rings and various things like that. We have a thermal infrared instrument spectrograph, which is out of Arizona State University. Right? It is going to allow us to measure the temperature of the object over various locations, that will tell us how the rocks on the surface heat and cool, which will tell us something about the structure of the surface, whether it's sandy or whether it's rocky.

Hal Levison We have an instrument called L’Ralph, which is out of Goddard, which is actually two instruments and one. It's a color camera. And it's a near infrared spectrograph, imaging spectrograph, which is going to give us information about the chemical makeup of the surface. In addition to that, we're going to use our high-gain antenna to measure the mass of the objects as we go by, as they gravitational tug on the spacecraft, we can measure how massive they are through Doppler shift. And we have a navigation camera, which is a wide field panchromatic camera, which is going to give us its shape. So with the mass and the shape, we should be able to get a dense density, which is a very important diagnostic for figuring out how these things formed.

Jim Green: So as you said, many of these Trojans are different in their spectral appearance. So are we visiting each and every one of the variations of the Trojans?

Hal Levison: Yes, as far as we can tell, right? I mean, the mission was designed to do that. Now a lot of this is luck, but what we set out to do was to visit the extremes, right. So we have one object, which is our first Trojan that we encounter called Euripides, it's really cool object. And it's very gray. So we're going to that one. And then we looked for an object of similar size and a similar orbit as Euripides, but very red.

Hal Levison: And what we tried to do is make them so similar in every other way, that any differences that we see is due to the composition of their surfaces. And so we're going to be able to do a direct comparison between a gray and red object. And then we just filled in what we could do, and the objects we could find. You know, once we did that, we saw we saw a whole spectrum of objects that fit the diversity that we needed

Jim Green: So Hal, what's been the greatest challenge in putting this mission together?

Hal Levison: Well, I mean, it's rocket science.

Jim Green: (laughs)

Hal Levison: There's been many challenges. Some we expected, some we didn't. Lucy, another record that we're breaking with Lucy is we're going further from the Sun than any solar powered spacecraft in history.

Jim Green: Oooh.

Hal Levison: So we have very large solar arrays. And we're in order to save mass for we used, I wouldn't say the new design, but it's certainly never been used on deep space missions before. And we had to scale them up, because they're big. And so typically, these things are two, three meters in diameter. Ours is 7.3 meters in diameter. Scaling those up turned out to be a real challenge.

Jim Green: Well, you know, I just say, making these solar arrays very large, that's one thing. But you've got the other problem of folding them up and how you get them into a fairing to launch and then bringing them out and fully extending them.

Hal Levison:  Yes. And then there's the challenge: They have to be lightweight.

Jim Green: Right.

Hal Levison: So these things have fold up and unfold like oriental fans. And although the solar cells are, are not made out of cloth, the entire supporting structure is made out of cloth.

Hal Levison: I encourage your listeners to go online and see some videos of our arrays. They are really amazing. And it makes the spacecraft really large. Lucy from wingtip to wingtip is about 50 feet.

Jim Green: Wow, okay.

Hal Levison So it’s big. most of it is solar arrays.

Jim Green: Rocket science at its best.

Hal Levison Rocket science at its best. So, we've been in contact with Donald Johanson the discoverer of the Lucy fossil, through this whole thing, which has been, he's a fascinating guy.

Jim Green: Yes, he is.

Hal Levison: But he said something to me, I think, is insightful. He said, what makes human beings human beings is our ability to communicate and collaborate, to be able to do more than an individual person or creature can do. That's what makes us human. And while he's so into what we're doing here, is this is sort of the ultimate example of doing that. Going to space and building a spacecraft. Right? It really is rocket science.

Jim Green: Really exciting. Well, Hal, I always like to ask my guests to tell me that event or person, place or thing that got them so excited about being the scientists they are today. And I call that event a gravity assist. So, Hal, what was your gravity assist?

Hal Levison: I would say there were two events, right. Like I said, I've always been interested in where we came from. What got me interested in the astronomical side of things, was, you know, I grew up in the 70s. And actually, at the time, we were putting a lot of money in the public schools for teaching science and that kind of thing. And my high school had a planetarium, with a planetarium director, his name was Scott Negley. And I, when I showed up at high school, I took a little class from him and got hooked. I spent my high school years working in the planetarium, going out teaching, teaching elementary school kids and things like that.

Hal Levison: So that was also combined with, what NASA was doing at that time. That was the time of Pioneer and Viking and Voyager. So a lot was going on, the initial reconnaissance of the outer solar system, for example, that got me hooked.

Hal Levison: I remember, in particular, the Pioneer plaque.

Jim Green: Yeah!

Hal Levison: Really inspired me, right. There's a Plaque on pioneer, that sort of a message to aliens that can pick it up some time. But really, it made me understand that we’re really part of the galaxy, we really are part of the universe, right? We are part of the solar system, this idea, most people sit around and say, “Well, here's us, and then there's space, right, and space is separate from us.”

Hal Levison: And it's not true, we are embedded in it, We are part of it. And that's kind of a lesson that these kinds of plaques and things send to people and indeed, Lucy has a plaque on it.

Jim Green: Ah!

Hal Levison: It’s different, because Lucy will end its life in orbit around the Sun. Our calculation showed, if no one goes and picks it up, it'll spend almost a million years just orbiting between the Earth and Jupiter. And so what we did is we put a plaque on Lucy, with messages to our descendants, rather than messages to alien civilizations. So we've asked some cultural leaders within our community to contribute quotes that are on the plaque. And the plaque was put on the spacecraft a few weeks ago, and we're gonna launch it to the, to the planets.

Jim Green: Wow, that's fantastic. Indeed, I remember the Pioneer 10 and 11 plaques and, and that they were made, very simply showing here are the planets and here's where the spacecraft came from. And here's a man and a woman and the size of the spacecraft next to it, some really elementary images that helped understand the origin of our first two spacecraft that are leaving the solar system. Well, Hal, thanks so much for joining me and discussing your fantastic career and I wish you the best and the launch of Lucy.

Hal Levison: It's going to be an exciting day. And a beautiful launch because it's a nighttime launch. So it's going to be really beautiful to watch.

Jim Green: Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do, I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Oct 8, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-lucy-and-the-space-fossils-with-hal-levison
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Czerwiec 11, 2023, 09:34
Rozmowa z ekspertka od pogody kosmicznej.
Głównym celem jej zespołu jest wspieranie obecności ludzi w kosmosie.
Dodatkowo jest dbanie o ochronę misji robotycznych.
Bez poznania pełnej natury CME trudno wyobrazić sobie dalsze podróże kosmiczne.
Cytuj
Yaireska Collado-Vega: It does, for example, the solar energetic particles that we spoke about, those particles can cause instrumentation damage. And that doesn't mean only on Earth, it means in actually all the space. So when you have a event happening on the Sun that is towards a mission, you have to have those predictions so the mission can try to protect from the Sun's activity. So it actually affects every mission that we have out there.

Gravity Assist: Meet a Space Weather Scientist, with Yaireska Collado-Vega (1)
Oct 22, 2021

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Yaireska Collado-Vega studies space weather at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Credits: NASA

Our Sun lights up the solar system, but it’s as not calm or predictable as it may seem. Flares and explosions called coronal mass ejections unleash fast-moving particles and radiation that pose dangers to spacecraft and astronauts alike. Yaireska Collado-Vega leads a team at NASA’s Goddard Spacecraft Center that is studying the solar weather environment so that robots and people exploring space can be protected. In this episode of Gravity Assist, she describes the excitement and challenges of understanding space weather, and how she got to be a NASA scientist.

Jim Green: When we look into space, it looks black and empty. But that turns out to be completely wrong. In space, huge, invisible storms can occur.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: You don't want a mission to be damaged by the Sun's activity. Because that would mean that you lose every single data that that mission can give you.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Yaireska Collado-Vega and she is the director of the Moon to Mars Space Weather Analysis Office at the Goddard Space Flight Center. She is an expert in predicting space weather. Welcome, Yari, to Gravity Assist.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: Thank you so much for having me. Jim, I'm so glad to be here.

Jim Green: To start off, what exactly is space weather?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: Space weathers are the conditions in space that are mostly dominated by the Sun's activity. So the Sun is our star, right? That's why we have life on Earth. But the Sun can have solar storms that come in different types, like for example, coronal mass ejections, solar flares. And also this activity can actually accelerate particles to fractions of the speed of light. This kind of activity can cause what we call space weather effects that here on Earth can actually include problems with communications, GPS signal loss, and in the most dangerous types, it can actually cause power grid disruptions.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: Now, when we talk about humans in space, those energetic particles that are accelerated to fractions of the speed of light can cause a hazardous environment to the astronauts. And those particles also can cause problems to the instrumentation of the satellites in space. So it can actually damage our technology, the technologies that we use every day.

Jim Green: Well, you know, the Sun is really pretty far away. And so as you say, it goes through a variety of changes, creating really enormous changes in the wind that it produces. And, and so these events propagate from the Sun outward into our solar system. And so how long does it take for those kinds of events to hit the Earth?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: It depends on each event. Each event has a different timeline. For example, if you talk about solar flare, when we see a solar flare, this signal here on Earth is already here. It travels to the speed of light, it’s eight minutes, that's all it takes. So flares are something that is very difficult to predict. So we do have some models that try to do predictions of solar flares. Now when we talk about coronal mass ejections, that's different, because we're talking about big explosions of particles coming from the solar corona. And depending on the speed, they take about two to four days to arrive to Earth. And then if you talk about solar energetic particles, now we're talking about fractions of the speed of light, so you can have an event arriving on Earth in half an hour, or in hours.

Jim Green: Wow. So how hard is it to predict when these flares and coronal mass ejections occur?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: It is it is difficult. We use a lot of models. We use different observatories. For example, we use the Solar Dynamical Observatory to look at the Sun's Earth-facing disk in different wavelengths. So you're actually looking at the Sun in different temperatures, different layers, so you can see more what is happening in in the solar corona.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: Now, to see a coronal mass ejection though, you need a coronagraph, which is an artificial eclipse. You're actually blocking the Sun to be able to see what's coming out of it. So it's not an easy way to predict this kind of events. And we don't have that many observatories as we would like to have. And then when we see the coronal mass ejections from the coronagraph, we have tools that we use to analyze and have measurements of those coronal mass ejections.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: For example, speed, width, direction, and those are the measurements that we put in into the simulations that could give us a prediction on when and where those coronal mass ejections are going to impact. Now SEPs, there are different models that can actually try to do predictions of SEPs, solar energetic particles. And these are actually trying to understand when the event is going to happen, the intensity of the event, and the duration of the events. And it's not easy, and we need more data sets to actually be able to improve this kind of models.

Jim Green: Well, it sounds like you do a lot of computer work with a lot of models that are going on. But once these events leave the Sun, do they change as they propagate out into the solar wind and through the solar system?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: They do. In terms of solar flares, you know, it depends on the direction of where you are. It’s an abrupt eruption of radiation, right? So depends on where you are. If you're here on Earth, whether your observer is, it depends on where you are whether you actually will get more affected. Now when you talk about coronal mass ejections, you know, depending on the eruption, per se, that's what you will have erupting. And some eruptions accelerate, some decelerate, some actually rotate. So it's a very unpredictable environment. And it's actually really fun to do. And it's something that I actually tell my team all the time, like, this is something that is fairly new in the field of physics, right?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: This is something that we just started to do, starting in the 1950s, let's just say. And then when we analyze these things, we comprehend how dynamic the Sun can be, and how many effects it could have in the different technology and the instrumentation that we use. So my team, the main goal is to support human exploration activities. But we also have a secondary goal that we protect NASA missions. It doesn't matter where a coronal mass ejection is going, we analyze it, and we make sure that we have those predictions. And we can send those prediction to the NASA missions, so they can protect themselves from the activity.

Jim Green: Well, what typically happens then when a CME, this coronal mass ejection, hits the Earth or the Earth's magnetosphere?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: When the CME actually arrives at Earth, then it will actually create what we call like a punch. It will actually punch the Earth magnetic field and that actually causes while we call a geomagnetic storm. There's different things that you have to take into consideration when you talk about the effects depending on the velocity of the coronal mass ejection and depending on the direction if it hits face on or if it's actually a glancing blow all, or, you know, the magnetic field inside the coronal mass ejection is also really, really important because if you have a magnetic field inside the CME that is actually southward, which means that’s pointing down, that means that you're going to have a higher probability to have a higher geomagnetic storm because you will have what we call magnetic reconnection. And it's actually a transfer of energy that happens from that magnetic field to the particles.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: When you have higher geomagnetic storms, that's when you get really, really nice auroras, and I love auroras. I haven't seen one in person though. When you have the auroras, they're amazing. I call them the rainbows of space weather. But when auroras happen, that means that you have a high activity happening on the magnetic field of the Earth caused by the Sun. And this will mostly be caused by that CME arriving and causing that geomagnetic storm.

Jim Green: Right. Every time the magnetosphere gets hit with a coronal mass ejection, we're going to have aurorae. Really fantastic. Well, what kind of instruments do we need to really monitor space weather, and where do we put them in space?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: We need different types of instruments. For example, we need imagers that will actually be able to see the Sun in different wavelengths, UV for example, and then we also need coronagraphs that will actually let us see the coronal mass ejections being ejected from the solar corona. Not only that, we also need magnetograms, we need to understand how the magnetic field the Sun changes, because depending on how that magnetic field changes, and evolves, that's how you have to have the activity happen. So we need different observatories. And we use right now the Solar Dynamics Observatory, we use the STEREO mission, we use SOHO, which is more than 25 years old, and we still use it.

Jim Green: So why is space weather so important to know relative to the other spacecraft that are orbiting the Earth or tracking out into the solar system, going to places? Does space weather affect these missions?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: It does, for example, the solar energetic particles that we spoke about, those particles can cause instrumentation damage. And that doesn't mean only on Earth, it means in actually all the space. So when you have a event happening on the Sun that is towards a mission, you have to have those predictions so the mission can try to protect from the Sun's activity. So it actually affects every mission that we have out there. And we have to be able to predict it because you don't want a mission to be damaged by the Sun's activity. Because that would mean that you lose every single data that that mission can give you. So as a NASA entity, my team is, you know, trying to protect those NASA missions across the whole solar system.

Jim Green: Well, you know, as humans, leave lower Earth orbit, go to the moon and live and work on a planetary surface, then we're going on to Mars, should astronauts be concerned about space whether?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: The same solar energetic particles, those are the one that created the high radiation environment that could be hazardous to the astronauts. So right now, for example, we have astronauts in the International Space Station. The International Space Station is nside the magnetic field of the Earth, so that means that they have that shield. But now when we talk about getting those humans out of that shield, now we have to take into consideration that they're going to be exposed to a higher radiation dosage. So now we have to be able to predict better those solar energetic particle events, so we can actually communicate that to the astronauts so they can get protected from those events.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: And we, our team are working really close with the Johnson Space Center space radiation analysis group, to be able for us to communicate what the SEP models predict, so they can actually communicate that to the astronauts. It's a very intense work. (laughs) There's a lot of stress. (laughs) But it's something that is really exciting because you're protecting those astronauts out in space. And it will actually help us go further than the Moon later on in the future, going to Mars, because we're preparing now to go to the Moon, but eventually we will also calibrate all these models to be able to predict that kind of event at Mars.

Jim Green: Well, indeed from SOHO as you say, we can see these CMEs coming. When we see them, what can we do?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: So in terms of my team, we actually send the analysis to the missions, and they decide what to do. But in terms of what they can do, they can actually try to not face the storm. They can maneuver the spacecraft not to face the storm, or they can put instrumentation in safe mode. The last thing that you would like or want to do is to turn anything off, because when you do that, you never know if it's going to be turned on again.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: Now, when we talk about astronauts, then we're talking about shielding. There's a lot of research now that is going to how the astronauts going to be shielded from these events if they happen. And not only that, it's not only the shielding, but the communication to when the events are going to happen. There should be a type of autonomous way that the astronauts could actually see the events and understand what is happening if, for example, they’re on the surface of Mars. So those things are things that we're still working on.

Jim Green: Well, have you been working with the Perseverance rover team and the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, and is space weather of interest to those teams?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: We don't work directly with the Perseverance and Ingenuity teams. However, every time there’s a Mars-directed event, we do talk to the teams. And we had an incident, for example, that happened, not so long ago, that we had a flare that happened close to the time that they were going to have the Ingenuity’s first flight. And that event actually caused a coronal mass ejection that was predicted to arrive the day of the second flight. We communicated with the team, with Ingenuity team, to make sure that we could analyze the event to make sure that the event wasn't going to cause a higher radiation environment that could actually cause problems to the Ingenuity instruments.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: And it was, it was, it was stressful, you know, it was communication back and forth, and making sure that we could analyze the event completely. And one of the main things that we had to do is, you know, you have the event traveling, so we looked at other places that the event was going to arrive to see what was the environment in that place. And that happened with Solar Orbiter. So we looked also at the Solar Orbiter data to see what exactly was the environment caused by the CME impact, and then we could actually say, okay, there's nothing going to happen, you're gonna be okay. But that shows you that we need to get this asset protected from this event. And sometimes, you know, it's not realized until it happens, but you know, my team work really hard on that.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Czerwiec 11, 2023, 09:34
Gravity Assist: Meet a Space Weather Scientist, with Yaireska Collado-Vega (2)

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Yaireska Collado-Vega grew up in Puerto Rico and knew she wanted to work at NASA when she was 6 years old. Credits: NASA

Jim Green: How far out into the solar system can we really monitor space weather today?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: In my team, for example, we do monitor anything that goes towards the orbit of Jupiter. After that, there's many limitations, many physical factors that you take into consideration that the model cannot actually predict very well. You can have an idea of what it’s going towards after that. But to take it, you need to take it as a grain of salt, because there's a lot of limitations there in the models that could actually affect the result that you're getting. But in terms of you know, until the orbit of Jupiter, we're pretty good.

Jim Green: You know, with all our missions in space and making observations of the Sun and the solar wind, are there questions, or at least one thing in particular, you would really like to know about, that we haven't uncovered the answer yet?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: One of the things that we really don't know exactly how it happens is the acceleration of those solar energetic particles. And that's something that we're trying right now to understand with the new missions that we sent out to space, for example, Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter. Those are one of the key scientific questions that they're trying to answer. And for us, it's really important to understand how these particles get accelerated, because those are the particles that cause hazardous environments to astronauts, those are the particles that we're trying to predict, to protect them. You know, more information that we can get with what happens with those particles, how they can get accelerated at fraction, so the speed of light, where they actually travel, how they travel with the magnetic field lines, all that kind of information is vital for those models to do better predictions, so we can communicate that to the astronauts.

Jim Green: Well, what's a typical day like for you when you go to work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: A typical day well, during the pandemic, it hasn't been typical. But we, in terms of my team, we do, the first thing that we do is look at the Sun, look at the activity, what's going on. We also look at what happened the day before, so we can actually see if there's anything that we need to expect. We also understand and analyze what's going on and the predictions of the models. We actually also try to see if we can actually understand that there are any outages in the model, sometimes it happens you have some data outages, that actually would create a domino effect. And then the model will not have a prediction. And then we do have tag ups. We'd have a tag up with our team where we explain the whole space weather environment, if there were any CMEs, were there any flares, if we're expecting anything, if we have geomagnetic storms, all that kind of nice stuff. And then later on we do have a specialized tag up with the space radiation analysis group where we actually only discuss the radiation environment. So now we're talking about solar energetic particle events and how the models are predicting, what's going on and the CMEs that are related to that kind of activity. So it's a pretty busy environment.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: When you are doing your real time forecasting and analysis and you have something happening for example, I don't know, you have to go get your kid from school which happens, you have to make sure that you have a backup because the Sun is not going to wait. Actually what you do is you prepare your analysis, you send it to your secondary person, and that person takes over for the time that you're not going to be in charge. So it's a different pace than research. Research, you're used to be calm, relaxed, and you know, sometimes, waiting you know. It's coding and reading. Here is very fast paced and you cannot leave the computer. And if you do you have to make sure there's somebody else watching.

Jim Green: Well, Yari, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was that event, person, place, or thing that got them so excited about being the scientist they are today? And I call that event a gravity assist. So Yari, what was your gravity assist?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: I was always interested in science but my my parents, I come from a very humble, you know, home in Puerto Rico. They decided to do a trip to Orlando for my sister’s quinceañera and everybody's very excited. We're gonna go to Disney World. Yeah! But because they knew I was very excited. about science, they took me to Kennedy Space Center. And I'm not gonna lie, that was the first time that I said, I want to work for NASA. I want to do this for the future. And I was six years old. And people laughed at me every time I said that I wanted to work for NASA, because you know, a little girl from an island, you know, working for NASA something that at that time, you didn't realize it, you didn't think it was possible, but every time I somebody laughed at me, I would be like, “I'm gonna do this, and I'm gonna show you that I can do this.”

Yaireska Collado-Vega: When I went to high school, you know, things got a little diffused. I actually thought about going into tourism, and then I thought about going to law school. But then I had a really nice teacher that said, “No, your thing is physics. But then, you know, everybody that I said, I wanted to go through physics, people were like, “Oh, no, don't go through physics, as a scientist, you're not going to earn any money.” And I was like, “I want to do this, not because of the money, because this is what I love.”

Yaireska Collado-Vega  And I actually went to University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez, and I did my physics undergrad. But the key element that got me to this specific field was when I got an internship. I actually was not accepted that the first time. The second time was the time that I got accepted. I always tried, I was like, I'm never gonna, I'm never gonna quit doing this out. always gonna try. And the second time, I got accepted. And that's when my mentor sat down with me and explained me what space weather was. And for me, it was like, I was mind-blown. I had no idea that it's the Sun could cause so many effects. And you know, I heard about auroras before, but I had no idea exactly what was happening behind the curtains, like we say, and I fell in love of the field. I said, “Wow, this is a fairly new field and physics. There's a lot of new things that we need to know. There's a lot of uncertainties. This is where I want to be. This is where I want to stay.” And that's, that's what happened and here I am.

Jim Green: Yari, you've had such a fantastic experience getting involved in space weather in space science. What advice would you give those students that would love to follow in your footsteps?

Yaireska Collado-Vega: I guess I would tell them to never stop being themselves. I had many instances that people will tell me, “Well, you don’t look like a scientist.” And if I left that common, get into me, that will have been really, really damaging to my career. But it's difficult to stay yourself when you're surrounded by, you know, so many different people. And it happens, you know, you have good experiences, you have bad experiences. But I think you always need to stay true to yourself.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: And not only that. Network, talk to people, don't be afraid. Every scientist is a normal person. I remember when I was starting at NASA, and I will be, like, afraid of talking to people. And then, you know, I went out with my mentor. And I realized that she had a family that she had two daughters, two amazing daughters. And that, you know, she was just a normal person. I was like, “Oh, wow.”  And that's when my connection to my mentor actually grew. Because I understood that I could actually be human with her.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: And I think that's something that I tell all my students: Never forget to be yourself. And also never forget that everybody here is human. Everybody here had a career, everybody here had obstacles, and everybody could be actually a mentor to you. So take advantage of that. And don't forget to do internships, they're amazing. And they will show you know how the environment works outside of academia. It’s not the same to go to school, to go to college, as to go to work. It’s not the same. And do an internship will show you that even before you graduate. And that will give you an idea of what you want to do for your future.

Jim Green: Thanks so much for joining me and discussing our wonderful space weather activities that we do here at NASA and your fascinating career.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: Thank you, Jim. Thank you for having me. And I hope this encourages you know, early career people you know, those kids to be involved with the space weather field because we have a lot going on. Not only space weather, heliophysics, you know, it's a big field and it's an amazing thing. And there's a lot of uncertainties that we still need to discover. So, we have a lot of work to do.

Jim Green: We do indeed and I'm delighted you're involved in it.

Yaireska Collado-Vega: Thank you so much.

Jim Green: Join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green and this is your Gravity Assist.
 

Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Oct 22, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-meet-a-space-weather-scientist-with-yaireska-collado-vega
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Czerwiec 18, 2023, 11:44
Gravity Assist: Solar Power for the Moon, with Lyndsey McMillon-Brown
Oct 29, 2021

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Lyndsey McMillon-Brown at NASA’s Glenn Research Center is developing a new type of solar cell that uses innovative materials and offers many advantages over the current state-of-the-art-technology. Credits: NASA/Bridget Caswell

As NASA prepares to send astronauts to the Moon through the Artemis program, engineers are working on technologies that will give these explorers power – solar power, that is. In space, the harsh radiation and huge temperature changes make for a challenging environment. Lyndsey McMillon-Brown at NASA’s Glenn Research Center leads a study of solar cells made from a material called perovskite. This material has the potential to help power lunar habitats one day. Learn about this innovation and Lyndsey’s journey to NASA.

Jim Green: We get energy here on Earth in many different ways, such as using the Sun with solar cells. But we use them in space also.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: You go from, very hot to very cold, very often in space. So we're looking at how do we protect these materials? And how do we design them to be robust?

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is a new season of Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Lyndsey McMillon-Brown and she is a research scientist and engineer at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Lyndsey is the principal investigator for a project that is working on solar cells for space applications, including the Moon and Mars. Welcome, Lyndsey, to Gravity Assist.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Hello, and thank you for having me. I am so excited to be here with you.

Jim Green: Well, how did you get started working with NASA?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: It was really fortunate, you know. When I was younger, actually, I went to space camp. So I always want to mention that first.

Jim Green: Cool, mhm.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: I was in fourth grade, and went on a Space Camp trip. And like everyone, I feel like, you can't go there without being amazed and really intrigued by the work. But then fast forward a few years, when I was in college, I was really interested in working at NASA again. And since that love for science stuck with me, you know, over all those years since Space Camp, I was an engineering undergrad. So I applied for an internship. And for me, the access to NASA wasn't super difficult because NASA Glenn is in Cleveland, and I grew up outside of the Cleveland area. So I was pretty familiar with knowing there was a NASA center close to home.

Jim Green: Well, that's really great. So that internship program is called a co-op program. So what did you do as a co-op?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Yeah, I had a great time as a co-op. And I feel like it really allowed me to find and center myself as an engineer, and then discover research and realize that I wanted to pursue that as a career. So as a co-op, I had this opportunity to do work in school rotations. And on each rotation, maybe I would be, you know, at NASA for about eight to 10 weeks.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown So one thing I was able to do was work on transparent solar cells for adaptive windows. For example, if you think of smart windows for your home that would tint dark to prevent the Sun from coming in and heating your home. And we wanted those to be powered by solar. So we were working on: Is there a thin coating you could develop that could be on your window, but not disruptive to the light that you're getting in your home? So I worked on that for a while. And that was my introduction to solar cells. And I found the work to be really intriguing and exciting.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Another project I got the opportunity to work on during a different rotation was a Mars hopper. We were looking at carbon sequestration. So, can you have a hopper that sits on the surface of Mars, absorbs the CO2, and then basically splits it and harvests energy from, you know, the resulting water or oxygen. And I was really thrilled to know that in my tinkering in the lab, I was helping this mission that we've had in our minds to go to Mars, you know, and sustain life for a long time. So I really enjoyed that work, too.

Jim Green: Well, then you became a regular employee at Glenn Research Center, and steeped into solar systems and solar cell technologies. And I heard you'd written a paper about what happened on Mars with Opportunity’s solar panels. Can you tell us about it?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Yes, I was so excited about that work. So with that one, we took a look at standard, state of the art solar cells that are triple junction solar cells. So they're, if you think of like a sandwich, they have many different layers, three layers, triple junction, and each layer is responsible for optimizing a certain part of the solar spectrum. And one of the challenges with those cells is sometimes they can be brittle, because they're crystalline. So they are sometimes susceptible to breaking or cracking.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: And we set up an experiment in our lab that would expose these solar cells to Mars dust storm conditions. So we varied the angle that the solar cells were placed at and we had this oncoming high speed wind blowing Martian simulated dust, since we don't have real Mars dust in hand yet in the labs. And this was really fun. I was working in the sandblaster box so I was able to get dirty. You know, I would come out kind of dusted with this, you know, red dust, and I got a kick out of that.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: But we were also really able to accurately model and simulate how these solar cells perform on Mars. And we checked that our in-lab simulation was accurate by using Opportunity rover data that we had courtesy from JPL.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: The Opportunity rover had a really long life and great exploration, and it provided us with lots of data. But ultimately, it stopped operating because a lot of dust accumulated on it solar cells, and it didn't have enough power to operate anymore.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown  And we were able to compare our simulations to the actual solar cell performance on Opportunity. And that was such a rewarding experience.

Jim Green: So how did they turn out in that comparison?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Yeah, they turned out really interesting. So a couple of the things that we learned was that when these solar cells are exposed to dust, of course, the dust will accumulate on the cell, and then less light will get through the coating of dust. Think of a dirty windshield, you know, in your car, you're getting less light as the driver. But another thing that happened, we would then clean off the cells, blow them with air to clean off the dust.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: So we figured the solar cells would then return back to normal. But actually, we don't fully understand what, but something electrical changes inside those solar cells as a result to the exposure to dust. So even the cells that looked fine, there's no cracks or damage to them. Their open circuit voltage decreased a bit. So the efficiency that the electrons move around in the solar cell changes when it's exposed to those dust storms.

Jim Green: Wow. Okay.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Yeah.

Jim Green: So there's other types of solar cell technology, then that we need to use on Mars to maintain that high efficiency once you blow the dust off.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Right!

Jim Green: Since dust seems to be a concern on Mars, are we still going to need solar panels on future experiments?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: I think we will. Dust is a concern. But through this investigation, we found ways that you can mitigate it. For example, if you place your solar cells between a 45 to 60 degree angle, that's really helpful for the dust to roll off. And we're also learning other things about coatings that will help keep the dust off of the solar cells and prolong the lifetimes.

Jim Green: Well, you're also working on solar cells for future lunar missions.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Yes.

Jim Green: Are they the same as what you would use on Mars or not?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: So that's what we're looking at, we think they could be the same, we could continue to use these triple junction, you know, state of the art solar cells. But the Moon affords us another opportunity that we might be able to use lower cost solar cells, which is what I'm studying right now. And those are called perovskites. And perovskites are like plastic solar cells, more or less. So they're made from a solution. And since they're thin, that allows them to be deposited on different types of substrates. So they can be flexible, and lightweight. And they have a lot more versatility than these more rigid triple junction crystal solar cells that we've been talking about earlier. And the Moon affords us this opportunity, because there's a lot of real estate on the Moon. So we can really spread out and have a very large solar farm, if you would imagine, of these thin and flexible arrays and that would significantly drop the cost of production, manufacturing, and it drops the cost potentially, of launch. How do you get it up to the Moon?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: So the way I envision this is: You're gonna have different kind of habitats, almost like different houses. And you will have these large solar farms like an array that you might see when you're driving down the highway now. So we'll have this large area, many different panels all lined in a row, we're going to have to find the best angle to set them at or perhaps they track the Sun, so that they're always illuminated, appropriately without shadow.

Jim Green: Well, what's really exciting about going to the Moon and the Artemis program is we're going to the South Pole. And on the South Pole, there are places where there's eternal darkness, we call those permanently shadowed craters. But at the higher altitudes, at the crater rims, there are places of eternal light, and they see the Sun all the time. Perfect place to be able to put these type of solar panels. Are discussions going on at Glenn about using those places on the Moon of eternal light?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Absolutely those you know, as a solar cell engineer, that's where you'd like to find me. So we definitely want to follow the light. But we work very closely with the battery people, power storage, management and distribution, because I'm one piece of a larger puzzle that has to work together and make sure you know if I can absorb it, and collect it, can you store it? Can you get it where it needs to go? Because we're also very interested in exploring some of those dark and permanently shadowed regions.

Jim Green: Yeah, the ability to then acquire that but then beam that energy somewhere that you need it down to a habitat or some other location, that's going to be real important. Well, do special materials like that suffer in space?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: They do. And that happens with any material you know, we have yet to find the “holy grail” perfect material that's impervious to space. Especially because space is particularly harsh. So for the perovskites that I'm looking at right now, they do a fairly good job at dealing with the radiation in space. And we call that radiation tolerance. So they have a high radiation tolerance. Now to study that, we've been sending some samples up to fly on the International Space Station.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: I'm largely involved with Materials in the International Space Station Experiment, which we call MISSE. And MISSE is this great opportunity for us to send up samples aboard the ISS. And our samples are placed outside of the International Space Station on the wing, and they're exposed to low-Earth orbit for six months, then the best part is those samples are really collected and returned to us. And we're able to analyze them and see exactly what changes they underwent when they were exposed to low-Earth orbit. So specifically, I've been able to send up these perovskite thin film samples. And we're interested in seeing how do they perform and how durable are they when they're exposed to all of the, you know, all the intricacies of space at once. That's the thermal cycling, that's being in vacuum, that's having radiation, and that's being illuminated by the Sun. And these are things that on the ground, we can test one by one in our different experimental chambers. But it's so valuable to be able to test it all at once in the true environment.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: And they do a better job than some of the existing technology. But we still do see some damage even when exposed to some higher energy particles. So we're concerned about that. And another challenge is the temperature cycling because you go from very hot to very cold, very often in space. So we're looking at how do we protect these materials? And how do we design them to be robust to thermal cycling?

Jim Green: Perovskite sounds really bizarre and exotic, but what is it and how is it made? What are its elements?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Yeah, so perovskites for solar cells actually get that name, because the solar cells take on the same crystalline structure that the natural occurring perovskite mineral has.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: We generate our perovskites in the lab by combining various chemicals in a solution and when those chemicals come together, they arrange themselves in this order. And that results in a perovskite thin film.

Jim Green: Well, you know, I heard him about a method of making these called electrospraying.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Yes.

Jim Green: What is that all about?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Yeah, so electrospraying, that work is led by our collaborators at U.C. Merced. And electrospraying is really cool because it uses electricity to disperse a liquid into like a fine aerosol, like a cone of spray. And that cone of your dispersed material allows you to coat your substrate evenly. And once that, that liquid aerosol arrives to your substrate, we've noticed that the particles merge together, and they coalesce, and they make a really nice organized crystalline film without us having to do anything, and we call that self-assembly. So we really like the concept of electrospray. Because this can allow us to more quickly manufacture these solar cells. If you imagine like an assembly line, you have this substrate moving through, and it gets coated by the spray, and it just keeps on going for future processing down the line.

Jim Green: So it sounds like electrospraying is just like spraying on paint?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown  Exactly. It's just like spray paint.

Jim Green: So it sounds like there's still so many different techniques that you need to investigate to really be able to create the right solar panels. And it's different between solar panels on spacecraft or those on Mars or the Moon. What do you think the future of solar cell research is all about? Can we make them more efficient and smaller? Or, or is it going in a different direction?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Yeah, I think the future is bright, pun intended. But I think that we have so many opportunities. And what I would love to see is us designing unique solar cells for specific applications. I think some are really good. They have a high power density. So you only need a few solar cells to get a lot of power. Maybe we want to use those on smaller satellites or things like that, then if you open up and you’re on the Moon, maybe you want to have this large, cheap, but flexible array. So I would love to see us tailor-making solar cells or have you know, a Rolodex, so to speak of: these are the four solar cells that go best for these different types of missions.

Jim Green: So Lyndsey, what's a typical day like for you when you go to work?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: So a typical day is pretty diverse. And I love that. So I will collect some data and work in the lab and maybe make some thin film samples by spin coating. Then I will take those samples and I will measure them. I'll expose them to some light and see how well do they perform. Then I also have to analyze the data. So, in the afternoons, I'll typically sit down and have a lot of data in front of me. I'll make some graphs. I'll compare some things and get a plan. And then at least once a week I meet with my team, and we discuss other experiments that we're interested in and we devise a plan so that we’re always kind of moving forward in the right direction.

Jim Green: So Lyndsey, what is the next step in your research?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: So to date in our research, we've been looking at the different layers of a perovskite solar cell, and we've been working to improve them so that they can be durable in space. And now it's the time for us to combine them all and really work on the solar cell as a whole. And we're going to be looking at exactly how we might be manufacturing this solar cell for space.

Jim Green: Well, you know, you have a bachelor's degree at Miami University in mechanical and manufacturing engineering and a Master's and PhD at Yale in chemical engineering. But I also noticed that you really Recently, were named as a notable alumni from the Miami University College of Engineering and Computing. How does that make you feel?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: I was elated when I found that out. I was so proud and honored and shocked. That list of notable alums is not very long. And I was so thrilled that my alma mater, you know, thinks that I'm deserving to be on that list. So it makes me so happy. I love Miami University, and I've remained engaged with them. But that was definitely one of the brightest moments in my career so far.

Jim Green: Lyndsey, what is your advice to the young people out there that would love to have an engineering career at NASA?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: I would give the advice to have fun and learn something new. But don't be too hard on yourself. To be a NASA scientist, you don't have to have perfect grades. We have our weaknesses, too. But view your weaknesses as an opportunity to improve and learn more.

Jim Green: Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, Lyndsey, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was that event, person, place, or thing that got them so excited about being the engineer they are today. And I call that a gravity assist. So Lyndsey, what was your gravity assist?

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: My gravity assist was my village. You always hear, you know, “it takes a village to raise a child.” And I feel like there's so many great people, my parents, my husband, a great professor I had in college, Dr. Osama Ettouney. And they all rallied around me and encouraged me and inspired me, and gave me the tools that I needed and helped me build that skill set to be the scientists that I am today.

Jim Green: Well, that's fantastic. Lyndsey, thanks so much for joining me in discussing your career. It's bright. It's all about solar cells.

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown: Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun.

Jim Green: You're very welcome. Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-solar-power-for-the-moon-with-lyndsey-mcmillon-brown
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Czerwiec 25, 2023, 10:10
Prawdziwy rezerwuar obcych światów w bliskim zasięgu  ;)
Więcej rozważań o układzie Dimorphos - Didymos przed poddaniem go dynamicznemu działaniu.

Cytuj
Nancy Chabot: What's amazing about Antarctica is you'd be down there for six weeks, and an average field season finds between 100 and over 1000 meteorites during that period of time, just in those few weeks. Depending on where you are, you could find 100 a day, sometimes. They're just sitting there collected by these natural ice movements waiting, you know, sort of, for us to find them and then share them with the world so we can uncover all their secrets. I don't know it's hard to pick favorites among meteorites, I have my own personal ones, I personally worked on iron meteorites a lot. And pallasites are closely related, which are made of olivine and metal intermixed together.

Gravity Assist: How to Move an Asteroid, with Nancy Chabot (1)
Nov 19, 2021

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Planetary scientist Nancy Chabot has been to Antarctica five times to look for meteorites. Credits: Antarctic Search for Meteorites Program/Nancy Chabot

A spacecraft is about to begin its journey to crash into an asteroid on purpose. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test Mission, or DART, will deliberately impact a small asteroid called Dimorphos to deflect its orbit around a bigger object, Didymos. While this system presents no danger to Earth, an asteroid the size of Dimorphos would cause regional devastation if it hit our planet. DART will demonstrate a potential method of protecting Earth from hazards in the future. Nancy Chabot, planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, has the details. She also discusses searching for meteorites in Antarctica and discovering the secrets of planet Mercury.

Jim Green: NASA has a mission called DART that will help us understand how to defend the planet against incoming Near-Earth Objects.

Nancy Chabot: It’s purposely going to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid to move it a little bit. And this is the sort of thing that you might want to do if there was an asteroid in the future that was headed towards the Earth and you wanted to move it a little bit so it wouldn't hit the Earth.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Nancy Chabot. And she is the planetary chief scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Nancy, you also have an asteroid named after you, asteroid 6899 Nancy Chabot. Nancy, welcome to Gravity Assist.

Nancy Chabot: Thanks. I'm so happy to be here.

Jim Green: Well, you have been so active in researching what we typically call small bodies of the solar system, such as meteorites on up to even bigger small bodies. That material really comes together and over time builds up planets and larger objects. How did you get involved in that field?

Nancy Chabot: I actually didn't even knew this field existed until I went to grad school. I was an undergrad in physics, because I wanted to go into space science. And I thought, rhis is what you needed to do to go to into astronomy actually didn't even realize that, like planetary science was a thing that you could do with your life. And then even when I went to planetary science school, I sort of thought more about like missions and that kind of stuff. And it wasn't until, you know, somebody introduced me to meteorites, and then all of a sudden, it was like, wow, these aren't just things that we can look at, we can actually hold them in our hands. So rocks from space that you can actually hold in your hand and bring into the lab and inspect on a fine scale that you can't possibly do otherwise. So, I think that just really was an aha moment for me that it's like you could study space, but you can do it here and get your hands on it too.

Jim Green: Well, where do meteorites come from? And why are they so interesting?

Nancy Chabot: Well, mostly, meteorites come from asteroids, which is fascinating in itself. Though I'll just say, you know, quickly that we do have a few from the Moon. And there are only samples from Mars currently, that we have that, here on the Earth. And so that makes them really valuable. But my research has been mostly with the asteroids. And, you know, I think the thing is that sometimes people are really surprised to learn that, you know, meteorites are all different, just like Earth rocks are all different, right?

Nancy Chabot: I mean, there's really no reason that you would think everything out there in space would sort of be the same. People have this one vision a lot of times have this is what a meteorite is and it's like, no, no, no meteorites are sampling this huge diversity of different bodies. I mean, some of them are, you know, 4.5 billion years old, they predate the planets. They're like the garbage bag and leftovers that didn't form the planets, but they let you look back into the first solids that solidified in the solar system, what was going on in our solar system before there were planets. And then some of them made, like, mini-planets, planetesimals, right, where they melted, and they made these metallic cores and these rocky mantles and had volcanic processes on the surface. And we have samples of those too, and they all look different. But similar to some of the Earth’s rocks to it just shows you the you know, the Earth is just part of our solar system. So it really ties it all together.

Jim Green: Meteorites that are different. Does that mean they're generated or put together in different places of our solar system?

Nancy Chabot: Yeah, maybe. We think that some of the stuff we're learning from meteorites right now, some of the cutting-edge research has to do with these isotope systems, which is a really detailed measurement, again, showing you the power of meteorites and using Earth-based analysis to do this. And now we have samples from both of these populations of the inner solar system and the outer solar system potentially. And that's one reason things can look different. But things can also just look different depending on how big the planetesimal grew. So if things never grew very big, they didn't melt. And so you can retain these primitive characteristics. But you know, if things grew to 10 kilometers, 100 kilometers, or larger, then that could have different processes that go on as well, just because the bodies are different sizes. But yeah, where they formed in the solar system can have different compositions. You know, this might be why Mercury looks different than Mars, for example. So meteorites help to put all of this into context.

Jim Green: Well, I heard that you've been to Antarctica five times. What was that like? And what were you doing there? Looking for meteorites?

Nancy Chabot: I was so fortunate to go the first time when I was in grad school with the Antarctic search for meteorites program, ANSMET. Yeah, which is a great program that joint with NSF and NASA and the Smithsonian. It’s been going on for decades, and is hugely successful at collecting meteorites. Antarctica is just an amazing place to go get meteorites, and I got to go the first time as a grad student.

Jim Green: Did you have an easy time or was it hard and cold?

Nancy Chabot: Antarctica pretty much is always cold. But it was an amazing experience. So, what we do for ANSMET, every season, is we get teams of between four to eight people. And then we get dropped off in the middle of nowhere on these blue ice fields, where you're 100 miles away from the next people in the entire world. The Sun is up 24 hours a day when we go. And the landscape is really other-worldly in a lot of ways. Big horizons and ice, a lot of ice. There's some mountains too. And it's very different than your, my life and most other people's lives on a daily basis. You're chipping ice in order to get your water. You're you know, getting to know your other campmates very, very well. (laughs) Because there's nobody else around. It's hard. I mean, for sure. But it's, it's amazing. And it's a great opportunity that everybody who's been able to go with ANSMET really appreciates and this, sort of this, moment in your life that you would never trade.

Jim Green: So you get in snowmobiles. And you, you start across the ice sheet. And and you see these black objects, and they're meteorites. Any of particular interest to you?

Nancy Chabot: What's amazing about Antarctica is you'd be down there for six weeks, and an average field season finds between 100 and over 1000 meteorites during that period of time, just in those few weeks. Depending on where you are, you could find 100 a day, sometimes. They're just sitting there collected by these natural ice movements waiting, you know, sort of, for us to find them and then share them with the world so we can uncover all their secrets. I don't know it's hard to pick favorites among meteorites, I have my own personal ones, I personally worked on iron meteorites a lot. And pallasites are closely related, which are made of olivine and metal intermixed together.

Nancy Chabot: Pallasites are a type of meteorite that we think comes from the core mantle-boundary of an asteroid, because they have really beautiful olivine crystals in them, like gem quality.

Nancy Chabot: I remember one time we were on a pretty small field team, there was four of us. And we were driving around on our snowmobiles. And we found this giant pallasite. In fact, it was so heavy, I couldn't pick it up. (laughs) We had to get like two people to put it onto their, onto this sled.

Nancy Chabot: And we're like, wow, this is great. But then you know what? Then we found another one, another giant one! And then we found another giant one! And it turns out there was this whole strewn field of pallasites along this site. And it never got old. you might think, oh, after a few days, aren't you tired of finding these giant pallasites from space? And it's like, nope, nope, just keep bringing it on. I’ll take all of them that you would give me.

Jim Green: Well, you've also worked on NASA's MESSENGER to the planet Mercury. How did you get involved in that mission? And what was the most exciting results that that you found in analyzing that data?

Nancy Chabot: Yeah, I feel like I've been really fortunate to have a lot of opportunities. I mean going to Antarctica, you know, five times was was one of those and then getting this job here at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab allowed me to become involved with the MESSENGER mission. I actually started off on that mission helping run their website. So I was sort of updating the science content for the website. And one of the things related to that was putting out featured images from the camera. Well, then it turned out, “Hey, maybe you want to get involved with the camera team?” And I'm like, “Yeah, I want to get involved with the camera team. That sounds amazing.” You know, and, and then by the end of the mission, I was actually the lead scientist for, for the camera on MESSENGER and in charge of the geology discipline group. So leading a lot of the science that was going on.

Nancy Chabot: And I think one of the things that I love working in planetary science is that you always have to learn new stuff. And so you know, here, I came from this physics background. And then I was doing this geochemistry of meteorites and going to Antarctica. And then I had to learn all about spacecraft cameras and image analysis and looking at the planet. But it was really, I just relished and appreciate having had that opportunity.

Nancy Chabot: So you asked about some of the like, most exciting parts. Before MESSENGER, we only seen 45% of the planet. Like literally, here's another planet in our solar system. And we don't even know what it looks like, right?

Nancy Chabot: And so these images are just streaming back. And they're parts of the planet that we've never seen before. We're literally mapping the planet for the first time creating the first global view of what it looks like. And I just can't. It was like a childhood dream come true to like, look at my computer each day and see these new views of something that we had never seen before. And I know I'm not the only one on the team that felt that way. And that was also, made it so rewarding to be on this team where we were doing this all together and so much data was coming in and really revealing this new world right before our eyes.

Jim Green: Well, you know, the next mission to Mercury is the ESA-JAXA BepiColombo mission. And I hear you're involved in that too.

Nancy Chabot: I am.

Jim Green: How did that happen?

Nancy Chabot: So when I worked on MESSENGER, I started to specialize a lot on ice in the poles. So there's these regions on Mercury that never get direct sunlight. It just doesn't have much tilt. And so these craters are just always very, very cold. And there's ice in them. MESSENGER made a lot of good discoveries in order to tell us about that. And, and that's sort of what positioned me then to be able to join the BepiColombo team to take that to the next step with BepiColombo, and what is going to tell us about the ice at the poles of Mercury.

Jim Green: Well, you know, another fantastic mission that's about to launch is called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART. What is DART going to do? And how does it do it?

Nancy Chabot: DART is an amazing mission. It's launching very soon. And it is a planetary defense mission. And what it's going to do is it’s purposely going to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid to move it a little bit. And this is the sort of thing that you might want to do if there was an asteroid in the future that was headed towards the Earth and you wanted to move it a little bit so it wouldn't hit the Earth.

Jim Green: Wow, that sounds fantastic. Well, what asteroid are you gonna hit and deflect?

Nancy Chabot: So like the name says, it's a double asteroid system, hence the double asteroid redirection test, and there's two asteroids. There's the larger Didymos, which is 780 meters in diameter and it has a small moon that's named Dimorphos. and it goes around every 11 hours and 55 minutes, it's 160 meters in diameter. So smaller, much smaller than Didymos. We know this because telescopes here on the Earth have been looking at these asteroids for decades. And they've mapped this out. They’ve discovered this double asteroid system. And so what DART is going to do is it's going to target Dimorphos, the smaller of those two asteroids, and it is going to hit into Dimorphos.

Nancy Chabot: And it's going to ever so slightly deflect how Dimorphos goes around Didymos. So moving the asteroid, just a tiny bit, about how it goes around the larger asteroid. And so it's a small little nudge, this is what you would want to do for planetary defense. Planetary defense with a kinetic impactor technology like this is definitely about deflection not disruption. This is in no way looking to blow the asteroid up. It's just going to give it a small nudge and make a small change in its period. And we think it might be about 10 minutes, so maybe 11 hours and 45 minutes will be what the telescopes measure after DART’s collision. But we don't know for sure, and that's one of the main goals for the DART mission is to make that measurement.

Jim Green: What kind of damage would an asteroid the size of the moon of Didymos cause if it hit the Earth?

Nancy Chabot: Yes, Dimorphos at 160 meters is one that we really are concerned about, if something the size of that hit the Earth. So sort of a kilometer and up are the size that you worry about for global extinction events. So dinosaur killers, if you will, and happy to say that we've found the majority of those asteroids, the large majority over 90%, none of those are on a collision course with the Earth. We're tracking them. So global extinction events, and like the dinosaurs are not in our future. But these few hundred-meter size ones – we've only found less than half of the population actually. So we are still looking. And that's an important part of planetary defense. planetary defense is not just about deflecting asteroids, it's also finding all the asteroids, figuring out where they are characterizing them, keeping track of them. But then it's also taking this first step to be ready in case you needed to. So something on the size of Dimorphos, if it was to hit the Earth, would be regional devastation, it would be hundreds of kilometers wiped out. And sort of, you know, devastating over large urban areas or something the size of a small state in the United States. So regional devastation. It would be catastrophic.

Jim Green: Is there a chance in the future that it will come around and hit the Earth?

Nancy Chabot: Yeah, there is no chance that Didymos and Dimorphos, or a danger or a threat to the Earth. They're not on a collision course with the Earth in the future. That makes them really appropriate for this first test. You know, being the double asteroid system, that binary asteroid system really is enabling for the telescopes. But of course, if you're going to do a first test of asteroid deflection, you want to do it on something that's not a danger to the Earth as well.

Jim Green: Well, how fast is DART moving when it impacts Dimorphos?

Nancy Chabot: So DART comes speeding in really fast, 15,000 miles per hour. It needs to be going really fast, it needed to give this asteroid a small nudge, because the spacecraft itself, the main body of it without the solar arrays is about 100 times smaller than the asteroid that it's trying to move. So you can see you have to come in pretty fast just to give it this small nudge.

Jim Green: Well, you know, that impact’s going to happen next year. Will the public have an opportunity to see it if they look up into the sky?

Nancy Chabot: The impact is happening late September, potentially, October 1st, we'll know once we launch for sure what the impact date is. And this time of 2022 was specifically chosen, because the distance between Earth and Didymos is at a local minimum. So it's actually not going to be this close to the Earth again for another 40 years. So that enables the telescopes here on the Earth to get the best data possible. But we're still going to use some pretty big telescopes in order to be able to make that measurement.

Nancy Chabot: So just looking up, you won't necessarily be able to see a bright flash and a lot of ejecta all over there. But, Hubble Space Telescope is going to give it a try. And James Webb Space Telescope, hopefully, will also be giving it a try to get whatever data they can. So, but we are going to be streaming the images back to Earth, one per second. And so we'll be getting these smart-nav images sent back to Earth at the same time. And we'll be seeing them one a second, one a second, it's not going to look like much until you get really close. And then it's going to be speeding in, show the surface of the asteroid, and then the images will stop. So people can look forward to seeing that at least.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Czerwiec 25, 2023, 10:10
Gravity Assist: How to Move an Asteroid, with Nancy Chabot (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/dartjune20201.jpg)
Nancy Chabot and Andy Rivkin, researchers at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, are pictured with the DART spacecraft. Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory

Jim Green: Well, let's hope they stop, because that means you’ve impacted Dimorphos.

Nancy Chabot: (laughs) Yeah, that's, it's, that last image is going to be pretty spectacular for sure.

Jim Green: So Nancy, after the impact of DART on the moon of Didymos, what happens next?

Nancy Chabot: Well, what happens next is there's an Italian CubeSat called LICIACube. And it actually makes a close flyby three minutes after DART’s collision. And it captures some spectacular images of the ejecta and the collision event itself. And but it's actually going to take it a few weeks to send all those images back to Earth. So those images will be streaming back. And we'll be looking forward to them to see the ejecta pattern. But then the telescope here on Earth also get to work because they have to map out how much this period is changed. And so but you can't, if this is not a single measurement.

Nancy Chabot: In order to do that, they have to observe the asteroid over time, because the way that you map out the period is what's called a light curve. That's when the brightness changes. And right now that brightness changes every 11 hours in 55 minutes. So to map out what the new one is, you need to get a lot of measurements over an extended baseline, to be confident in how much you've changed it. So the telescopes will do that, but then the moon will come up, which you know, the moon has a lot of good redeeming features about it. But for ground-based astronomy, it kind of gets in the way sometimes.

Nancy Chabot: So you have to kind of wait those weeks, and then you get to go look again, and try to make some more measurements. And so it'll really take actually, you know, maybe about a month, month and a half until we have a good measurement of how much we've deflected this asteroid. But the telescopes will actually be able to work until March of 2023, to look at this system. Again, this is why we’re targeting 2022 for the DART collision. So the telescopes here on Earth can make these fantastic measurements for many, many months, to measure this deflection very accurately.

Jim Green: So where's the spacecraft now? And when is it going to launch?

Nancy Chabot: So the spacecraft is in California, it's going to be launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base, and the launch period opens November 23. Pacific time. So the evening of November 23, on the California coast, 10:20pm.

Nancy Chabot: Hopefully, it'll just go right then.

Jim Green: Wow.

Nancy Chabot: It's got a really long launch period. And so it can actually extend into February. But we're targeting November 23, and just ready to get into space.

Jim Green: That flexibility of launch period, is that because you actually have an ion engine on board of DART?

Nancy Chabot: Well, we do have an ion engine onboard DART. And we're excited to be testing that out as a demonstration. But it actually has more to do with that DART never actually gets very far from Earth, because we're going to this near Earth asteroid and we're targeting this near Earth asteroid at the time when the distance between it and the Earth is minimized. And so DART sort of launches and just kind of stays pretty close to Earth the whole time. And so that that gives you a lot of flexibility in the launch window.

Jim Green: Well, that's gonna be absolutely fantastic. But now that you've had experience with meteorites, is there any connection between Didymos or Dimorphos and the meteorites that you've studied?

Nancy Chabot: Yeah, I think it's this is kind of fun to like, bring it full circle. So from spectral observations of Didymos that we've done with telescopes here on the Earth, we know that it's linked to a meteorite type that's called ordinary chondrites. And ordinary chondrites are some of these primitive building blocks of the planets. So they've got grains of metal next to grains of rock, and you can date these back to ages that are earlier than the planets. And so if that's what the main moon Didymos is composed stuff, we don't actually have any measurements for what the spectral type of Dimorphos, but from models of how binary asteroids form, they all predict that it should be the same material as Didymos. So this is, this is a fascinating type of meteorite, it's actually the most common type of meteorite to hit the Earth. And then that makes it extra relevant for planetary defense, which is applied science, and you want to be doing this on the most relevant, appropriate common type of targets. So that makes these Dimorphos even more appropriate for this first planetary defense test.

Jim Green: Yeah, this is really exciting our ability for the first time to figure out ways that we may have to in the future, defend our planet. So all eyes are going to be on APL and what you guys are doing, to be able to start the process of helping the Earth survive in the long run. So thanks much, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Nancy Chabot: Thanks, I'm super looking forward to it too. And I think it's really exciting that it, there's a lot more for planetary defense yet to come to, I mean, you know, the follow on with the NEO Surveyor mission to find all the asteroids and get a dedicated space telescope up there. And then there's the HERA mission, the European Space Agency is sending to the Didymos-Dimorphos system that will get there in 2026. And they'll be able to see that crater made by darts and, and get the mass of Dimorphos and really characterize the system. And so DART with HERA will do more together than any one mission can combine on their own. And I think that's really exciting for planetary defense, too, because it is, it is a global issue, it affects the entire planet. So working internationally and having that collaboration and having a whole team of doing this really makes it very rewarding.

Jim Green: Nancy, you know, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was that event? person, place or thing that got them so excited about being the scientist they are today? And I call that event a gravity assist? So Nancy, what was your gravity assist?

Nancy Chabot: So when I was a kid, I really loved Star Wars. I thought Star Wars was amazing, was like the most amazing thing I had ever seen. And I used to, I really liked the story. But what I really liked about it was thinking about these different worlds and seeing them on the big screen, like worlds with two suns, and worlds made out of ice, and worlds where people lived in the clouds and asteroids with giant caverns. And I would ask my parents, how did they come up with all of this? And my parents told me at the time: They just dreamed it. And I used to go to bed at night and like, close my eyes and be like, tonight's the night I'm going to dream like Star Wars that it's gonna be amazing. I’d wake up in the morning like disappointed. My dreams were not that good. But I think that that sort of like wonder and fascination just really stuck with me. And you know, in some sort of way that maybe I haven't fully realized. And, and now, I mean, I literally feel like I'm living the dream. I don't have to close my eyes anymore. It's like, I'm a part of this part of NASA's exploration of the solar system to all these new worlds, and it's just amazing.

Jim Green: And now you know that some of those dreams are coming true, where we're finding planets that are orbiting two stars. And, and now you're working with asteroids and deflecting them. So it's, in a way, it's a dream come true, Nancy.

Nancy Chabot: It indeed is, for sure.

Jim Green: Well, thanks so much for joining me and discussing your fantastic career and what you're up to. I'm really looking forward to these missions,

Nancy Chabot: As am I, and everything else that comes after that as well. I mean, it's just great to be part of all of these teams. That's one of the things actually that I really like about this field as well is that it takes a lot of people to accomplish all of this. It's way more than any one of us could do on our own. But together we're doing these amazing things.

Jim Green: Indeed. Well, join me next time as we continue to journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-how-to-move-an-asteroid-with-nancy-chabot
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Lipiec 02, 2023, 10:29
Dr. Martin C. Weisskopf (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_C._Weisskopf) byl głównym naukowcem  misji Chandra i IXPE (https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=4826.msg172101#msg172101).

Gravity Assist: A New Set of X-Ray Eyes is Launching, with Martin Weisskopf (1)
Dec 3, 2021

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/pia21474_orig.jpg)
This image of the Crab Nebula combines data from five different telescopes: the VLA (radio) in red; Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared) in yellow; Hubble Space Telescope (visible) in green; XMM-Newton (ultraviolet) in blue; and Chandra X-ray Observatory (X-ray) in purple.  Credits: NASA, ESA, G. Dubner IAFE, CONICET-University of Buenos Aires et al.; A. Loll et al.; T. Temim et al.; F. Seward et al.; VLA/NRAO/AUI/NSF; Chandra/CXC; Spitzer/JPL-Caltech; XMM-Newton/ESA; and Hubble/STScI

NASA is about to launch a new spacecraft to look at the universe in X-ray light. The Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer, IXPE, will look at extreme objects such as black holes, neutron stars, and supernovae, asking fundamental questions about how high-energy light gets produced. The mission’s principal investigator, Martin Weisskopf, based at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has been studying these objects for more than 40 years with other telescopes including the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. He discusses some of the fascinating objects Chandra has looked at, and what IXPE may soon reveal about them.

Jim Green: To reveal important secrets of the universe, we use light that humans cannot see. But our spacecraft can.

Jim Green: Let’s talk to an astrophysicist who has X-ray vision.

Martin Weisskopf: X-ray astronomers’ main interests -- they're mostly interested in supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies and how the universe evolves.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this is Gravity Assist. We're going to explore the inside workings of NASA in making these fabulous missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Martin Weisskopf. And he is the project scientist for NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the chief scientist for X-ray astronomy in the Space Sciences Laboratory at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I have known Martin since I started working at Marshall Space Flight Center in 1980. So it's a real treat for me to have Martin on gravity assist. Welcome.

Martin Weisskopf: Thank you, Jim. It's nice to see you again. I got there in ‘77, three years before you.

Jim Green: We've been long term friends and long term NASA employees, and you've got so much experience. But your field of interest is really studying the universe with X-rays. How did you get interested in doing that?

Martin Weisskopf: I went to Columbia University as a postdoc, because I wanted to switch fields. So I did my PhD in atomic physics. And I was going to switch fields every five years, and they were doing X-ray astronomy at the beginning. And so it was very exciting. Sounding rockets!

Jim Green: Wow, sounding rockets. Yeah. And we still use sounding rockets for many, many purposes. Where do we find X-rays in our universe?

Martin Weisskopf: The amazing thing is, and very surprising over the years, is that you find them everywhere. X-rays are light at extremely high energies. And they're found in regions where there's extremes of matter at high temperatures, millions of degrees, super strong magnetic fields, things like that.

Jim Green: You were the project scientist for the Chandra X-Ray Observatory mission, one of NASA's great observatories.

Jim Green: Martin, when did Chandra launch and what were some of its goals?

Martin Weisskopf: Chandra launched on July 23, 1999. It's supposed to launch two days or three days earlier and every day there was some reason we had to postpone, but the third time was a charm.

I was hired in 1977, after Headquarters decided it was a great idea, this kind of X-ray telescope that could look at X-ray objects with much higher sensitivity and better angular resolution than before. I was hired at Marshall in 1977. They all thought I was too young to be the project scientist. Now they think I'm too old to be the project scientist. But, just, you can't win.

And its scientific goals were really huge. They were to try to understand how the universe works, especially through its X-ray emission. Exploring the universe to try to see what kind of X-ray sources were out there. Were all classes astronomical objects, X ray sources? And if so, why? Why is this happening, you could understand how neutron stars might be in a binary system, might get their energy from gravity, kind of wave your hands, normal stars, magnetospheres are something we've been trying to understand for decades. And we're still trying to understand, they're very complex. But these are the kind of goals to really nail down the emission mechanisms of astronomical objects and to understand the evolution of the universe.

Jim Green: What has Chandra been finding out recently?


(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/0fd4115.jpg)
Martin Weisskopf is the principal investigator of the IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) satellite. Credits: NASA

Martin Weisskopf: Well, Chandra has made, most recently, a fantastic discovery. It’s discovered evidence for a planet in another galaxy. Isn’t that amazing?

Jim Green: Indeed, I can hardly imagine that. And it's a beautiful spiral galaxy too. How did that happen?

Martin Weisskopf: Well, it happened because the, the scientists who wanted to take the observation wanted to study that galaxy. And they knew about these various candidate stars that have possibly planets around them. And they just stumbled into the right information.

Jim Green: So for them to be able to make that fantastic measurement, they actually had to make many observations over and over again, waiting for the right time for the planet to move in front of a very active X-ray star. Isn't that right?

Martin Weisskopf: That's right. And there, it's the active X-ray star and the galaxy itself. 

Jim Green: Well, what kind of star was it that has to emit these huge high energy X rays?

Martin Weisskopf: This is one of the great amazing, interesting things. Not only stars like the Sun have solar flares, but other stars flare and we found that we see X-rays for various different reasons, from essentially all categories of stars. Although that's not the X-ray astronomer’s main interest. They're mostly interested in supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, and how the universe evolves.

Jim Green: Well, what's been one of your favorite Chandra discoveries?

Martin Weisskopf: Oh, my. I would have to say, because I've been interested in this target since I did my first experiments in 1970, is the Crab Nebula and its pulsar. This is a source where a star exploded and left and nebulosity around where the material of this star is running around and crashing into the interstellar medium and getting very hot and it left a compact object.

Martin Weisskopf: When I say compact, I mean compact, about the size of a city like Huntsville, Alabama, but weighs as much as the Sun. The density on the surface of this star is like 10 billion people per raindrop. So these are really cool stars and we want to study them. And I have been studying that object, the Crab and its pulsar, since the beginning of my career and for one reason or another, then with Chandra I did some discoveries, with Hubble, with various different things. And I hope to with this new instrument that I'm fortunate to be principal investigator of IXPE, the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer.

Jim Green: Those collapsed stars, those neutron stars, as you say, that are emitting enormously intense X-rays. How are they doing that? And what do we know? And how can we call them pulsars? Does the radiation turn on and off?

Martin Weisskopf: It does. That's one of the exciting things the radio astronomers discovered the first pulsars and X-ray astronomers quickly followed with X-ray pulsars, some of which are also radio pulsars, some of which are not. The X- rays do pulse, like that one in the Crab pulses 33 milliseconds is the period, it’s very fast. And we even have pulsars that are sub-millisecond in rotation. Where does the energy come from? Well, the quick answer is from the fact that these objects are spinning. So if you're spinning, you have angular momentum, you store energy, and we watch the systems slow down. So they're losing energy, that energy goes into producing charged particles and X-rays.

Jim Green: One of the properties of all light is that it has a polarization to it. What exactly is polarization and why is that so interesting to us?

Martin Weisskopf: Light is electromagnetic wave. And that's a fancy word by saying that in addition to the direction of travel at right angles to that direction, there's an electric field and a magnetic field.

Martin Weisskopf: And if each X-Ray has all the electric fields lined up, we call it 100% polarized. If on the other hand, all of the electric fields are at different orientations, it’ll average to, their net direction will average to zero, it’s unpolarized. So the question is, we want to measure polarization from the X-rays from objects and see what it is and then we have a theory that explains it. And in preparing for our missions, we have done a lot of theoretical work to try to anticipate where we might see polarization and some of these things are really neat.

Jim Green: When I think of polarization, I think of going out onto the lake and light coming down and reflecting off the surface of the water. And then that produces a glare. And that's polarization too.

Martin Weisskopf: Yes, what's happening there is when the light comes in and reflects off the surface, that reflection only allows one orientation of the electric field, the one that's parallel to the surface to come through.

Martin Weisskopf: But what we're trying to do is we're trying to do is to measure the glare. If you like. Not to get rid of it, we want to measure it. The light that we're seeing from the lake and the glare is polarized. And if you put it a polaroid into, to suppress certain directions of the electric vector, then you get rid of the glare. Now we're not trying to get rid of the glare, we want to see how much glare is there. And which way is it polarized?

Jim Green: The more the glare, the better.

Martin Weisskopf: That would be nice. That would be nice.

Jim Green: I understand that you had an experiment many years ago to measure the polarization of X-ray light. What was it and what did you find out?

Martin Weisskopf: Now that's amazingly enough, that in 1971, on February 22, flew a sounding rocket from Wallops Island, Virginia. And we looked at that source, the exploded star, the Crab Nebula, and its pulsar, and lo and behold, in that little rocket experiment, which was five minutes above the atmosphere, we measured the integrated polarization from that system. And that, at the time, was extremely important because how were the X-ray is being produced? The answer was synchrotron emission, a type of emission where electronic gets accelerated in a magnetic field. And if that was the correct theory, we would see strongly polarized light. And we saw about 20% polarization, which is very strong in astrophysical terms. And so yes, we nailed it. And then we did a follow up experiment on a satellite called Orbiting Solar Observatory 8 in the mid-70s. And measured it, 20 plus or minus 1%. So we nailed it.

Jim Green: Wow, that's fantastic to be on the ground floor of using an important wavelength that we can't see normally, and making new and exciting discoveries using these concepts of polarization. Now, most recently, you became the principal investigator for the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer or IXPE. What’s IXPE going to do?

Martin Weisskopf: Well, IXPE is the first mission that's dedicated to X-ray polarimetry. That's what it does. It has a beautiful, incredible technology that was started at Marshall Space Flight Center, and then developed independently and by their colleagues in Italy, which provided polarization-sensitive detectors, and we at Marshall built X-ray telescopes to put in front of them. We have three optics and three detectors in IXPE. And we're going to spend all of our time looking at the bright sources and trying to measure the polarization for the first time. And confound the theorists.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Lipiec 02, 2023, 10:29
Gravity Assist: A New Set of X-Ray Eyes is Launching, with Martin Weisskopf (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/martin_1971.jpg)
NASA’s Martin Weisskopf and colleagues from Columbia University in 1971 pose with the Aerobee-350 sounding rocket they used to detect X-ray polarization from a celestial object for the first time. Left to right are Robert Novick, Gabriel Epstein, Weisskopf, Richard Wolff, and Richard Linke.

Jim Green: I'm sure that will happen. But what are some of the objects that you're going to look at with IXPE?

Martin Weisskopf: Yes, well, one class of objects is what we call stellar mass black holes. These are black holes, they weigh about 10 times to 20 times as much as the Sun. And they're in a binary system, they are orbiting around a normal star and from near the black hole, we can't see the black hole, but from near the black hole, the conditions are right that X-rays are produced. Now, one of the things that our simulations in theory tells us is that the polarization as a function of energy depends on the spin. So we will not only measure the polarization as a function of energy, just to understand what's going on, but measure the spin of the black hole in a way that's never been done before. That's one of the many cool things that IXPE will try to do, and I'm sure will do.

Jim Green: Well, you know, I'm really excited about other things that IXPE can do, such as looking at active galactic nuclei. What do we expect to see when we do that? The, the center of galaxies that are not ours?

Martin Weisskopf: Yes. So we come back to first of all, we come back to black holes again, because we find it that the center of galaxies are supermassive black holes, millions to billions the solar mass. And often, as part of the way these physics of how these things interact with the galaxy, they form jets. So there's jets of X-ray emitting material that's pouring out from this object. And we’re trying to understand how that happens. And that will give us some further insight into exactly the details of how do these beasts produce all this energy, not only X-rays, but visible light, radio waves, etc.

Jim Green: So the launch is coming up soon. And once you get it on orbit, how long does it take to check it out before you really start observing things?

Martin Weisskopf: Yeah the launch is in early December. Right now we have the target date of December 9th. And we have a 30-day period from the time of the launch to check everything out. A very important aspect of the, that sequence is a week after launch, we have a boom, an expandable boom that separates the telescopes from the detectors. That has to work. We've tested it up a lot, you can imagine, but it has to work. Because if it doesn't work, we're in trouble. But I'm very confident that it will. And that happens a week into the launch and then we turn on the instruments for the next three weeks, check them out, and then we start taking data a month into the mission.

Jim Green: Well, you know, since Chandra didn't measure X-Ray polarization, IXPE is a huge advance. Are you going to be using the same targets that Chandra did, or even more?

Martin Weisskopf: We'll be using many of the targets that Chandra has done, and we're, especially for the imaging part where we're looking at polarization of extended objects, we will be using the Chandra images because Chandra can see a dime at 12 miles. IXPE can't do that. Chandra is subarcsecond resolution. IXPE is 30 arcsecond resolution, and we will be using Chandra images to guide our images.

Jim Green: Well, will there be opportunities to look at the same object at the same time between IXPE and Chandra?

Martin Weisskopf: Yes, in fact, some of my colleagues have already proposed such and we're looking at the galactic center at the same time where, with Chandra, as we are with IXPE, so yes indeed, a lot of science gets done, as you know where well, by using the whole suite of instruments, scientific instruments that NASA has provided -- things like Chandra, the NuSTAR, which is a higher energy experiment, Hubble, and then hopefully JWST in the future. So, very near future I might gather too. So that’ll be very exciting.

Jim Green: Yeah, that's fantastic. Now is the launch out of Kennedy Space Center?

Martin Weisskopf: Yes, it's at Kennedy Space Center. But the orbit will end up going around the equator. We do that to, to keep our charged particle background low. And so the Falcon 9 will take us into orbit, maneuver us down to the equator and then let us go.

Jim Green: That's fantastic. Well, what are you personally most looking forward to about IXPE observations?

Martin Weisskopf: One is the Crab Pulsar, as a function of pulse phase. Polarization as a function of pulse phase. I tried to do that years ago, we just didn't have sensitive enough polarimeters, want to see that done. The other one is one of the magnetar experiments.

Martin Weisskopf: Magnetars are called that because we think their magnetic fields are 10 to the 15th Gauss, 1000 times more than a conventional neutron star. And it those field strengths, the physics changes where you have to worry about fancy things like not classical electricity and magnetism. But stuff like quantum electrodynamics, that is, the quantum theory of the fields is very important.

Martin Weisskopf: There was a physicist who in 1934 wrote a paper on what happens to propagation of light when magnetic fields get beyond the critical field of about 10 to the 13 Gauss. That was my uncle Victor. And so I would just love to be able to have, do an experiment that says yes, quantum electrodynamics is right in this context of a magnetar, and I quote Vicky's paper and it just feels so good, it feels so good. I would have loved to have done that while he was alive. But still, I'm looking forward to that.

Jim Green: Oh, wow. I understand completely. Well, Martin, I always like to ask my guests to tell me, what was that event or person, place or thing that got them so excited about being the scientist they are today? I call that event a gravity assist. So Martin, what was your gravity assist?

Martin Weisskopf: It's a very tough question, in the sense I've been fortunate enough to have several. But I think that first experiment we talked about when I was a young postdoc at Columbia. After doing the data analysis in my office, I realized at that moment that I was the only person ever alive that I had ever existed that knew that the Crab was 20% polarized.

Martin Weisskopf: And it was just, the feeling of awe came over me. I thought I was in church for a few minutes, and that was my first such moment. And being able to be project scientist, which I still am for Chandra, to have been one of the people to build what we call, well, one of my scientists called, a scientific cathedral, one of the great observatories of NASA has been another moment that actually keeps going. We built it designed for three years with a goal of five. We celebrated our 22nd year this year, and the observatory keeps putting out fabulous new unexpected results.

Jim Green: Yeah, indeed, it does. But it also sounds like your family has been involved in astrophysics over the years. What's that been like?

Martin Weisskopf: Well, I have a, I have a family of intellectuals that are all smarter than I am. My uncle was a physicist. My father was an economist, my mother taught  romance languages. My aunt was a psycho, psychologist, taught that at university. So it's just nice, little frightening. Can't read my father's papers, because he uses words that are longer than I can pronounce. I can read my uncle's papers, because the math is way beyond me. But I've done a few things too. And I'm experimentalist, and I love building hardware.

Jim Green: Well, that's wonderful. And congratulations on being the PI of IXPE. Martin, thanks so much for joining me in discussing your fantastic career, and the opportunity to look forward to even more results.

Martin Weisskopf: I hope so. Just takes a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work by hundreds of people throughout the world. And it's showing. And NASA has played such an important role in this. If you young person want to get into something exciting, no matter whether it's from the engineering, management, science or any other aspect of it, come to work with us at NASA. You'll love it.

Jim Green: Well join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Dec 3, 2021
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-a-new-set-of-x-ray-eyes-is-launching-with-martin-weisskopf
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Lipiec 09, 2023, 06:46
Rozmowa z głównym naukowcem i starszym doradcą ds. klimatu NASA od 2022 roku.
Do 2050, wg planów, ma być osiągnięty cel zrównoważonej emisji CO2 (zerowej emisji netto).
Ale czy się uda. ?
Przez jakiś czas powinno być jeszcze coraz bardziej ciepło.
M.in. misja SWOT czy instrument EMIT zainstalowany na zewnątrz ISS pozwalają pozyskiwać dane klimatologiczne.
Cytuj
Kate Calvin: So warming will stop when we get emissions to what's called net zero, so that effectively any extra carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere, we're also taking out. And at that point, you know, there's some other nuances in that. But that's really that's how you stop warming.

Gravity Assist: Meet NASA’s New Chief Scientist and Senior Climate Advisor, with Kate Calvin (1)
Jan 28, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/3122_main_image.jpg)
Close-up view of sea ice floes from NASA's DC-8 Research aircraft. The dark features on the ice are melt ponds, and the dark areas of between the floes are open water of the Arctic Ocean. Credits: NASA/Steve Wofsy

Climate change is one of the most important issues facing our planet, and NASA has lots of space missions and programs in the works to monitor and understand its drivers and effects. Kate Calvin, NASA’s new chief scientist, is also the agency’s senior climate advisor. In this episode, Kate previews  upcoming Earth science missions and discusses cutting-edge research endeavors to explore climate change.

Jim Green: The Earth's climate is changing. And NASA is making key observations to see what it's all about. 

Kate Calvin: Climate change is about more than just changes in temperature. There's a whole host of other earth system changes that come along with this, like changes in the water cycle, which can lead to more floods and more droughts at the same time.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this Gravity Assist, NASA’s interplanetary talk show. We’re going to explore the inside workings of NASA and meet fascinating people who make space missions happen.

Jim Green: Welcome back to Gravity Assist. I'm your host, Jim Green, and I have a new job.

Jim Green: In January 2022. I retired from NASA, but they hired me back working on some very special projects.

Jim Green: So in our first episode of season six, it gives me great pleasure to talk to the new chief scientist of NASA, Dr. Katherine Calvin. And she is also the agency's climate advisor. You know, climate change is such an important topic, and we are thrilled to have Kate on board at NASA.

Jim Green: Kate is a distinguished climate scientist who comes to us from the joint Global Change Research Institute at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. She has also been a research scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park. Welcome, Kate, to gravity assist.

Kate Calvin: Thanks, Jim. It's great to be here.

Jim Green: First, tell us a little bit about what are you going to be doing in your new role?

Kate Calvin: Yeah, I'm really excited. I'm now the chief Scientist and senior climate advisor at NASA, and as senior climate advisor my role is really to connect the climate science within NASA. NASA does a lot of climate science throughout all of the mission directorates and trying to bring that together so people know what they're doing and what everyone's doing. I'm also going to be working towards communicating that science externally, working with other agencies in the United States, and communicating with the public. In general, as chief scientist, my role is really broader than that, focusing on all of NASA science. 

Jim Green: Wonderful, this is really going to be a wonderful era, where NASA takes a larger role in explaining the changes that are occurring on our beautiful blue planet. Well, can you talk about how you got into climate science? Is this something that you've always wanted to do?

Kate Calvin: So I My background is in math and computer science and engineering. And when I was going into grad school, I knew I liked math and computer science, but I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted to do with it. I've always loved being outside, though. So as a kid, we grew up around boats, and I did a lot of camping. Over time, I got more into hiking and biking. And climate change was one of these ways of combining my technical skills with something that really mattered to me. So when you spend a lot of time outside, you develop an appreciation for nature. And you notice weather. And climate change is a really nice way for me to tie together something that I loved was something I knew how to do.

Jim Green: Well, you know, a lot of people get confused between weather and extremes of weather, and what we talk about as climate of the Earth. Can you give everyone a little insight as to the difference between those two?

Kate Calvin: Sure, from a scientist, what we like to think of is: Climate is long term weather. So if you're, you know, then if you look at how many hot days you have any year, there's going to be some variation from one year to the next over time, if you have more hot days, that's a climate signal. The analogy I heard most recently, actually, on one of your podcasts was about wardrobe, though. And so you can think about your outfit for the day being weather and climate being your wardrobe. And so I think if you think about climate change in that context, over the pandemic, I think we all bought a lot more sweatpants since we were working from home. And so that's sort of a shift in our wardrobe. So you could still wear jeans, because that was the weather that you had access to. But with more sweat pants in there, you're seeing more and more sweatpant days. And so in the in again, in the analogy of climate change, you know, your wardrobe is climate. And so as we get warmer and warmer, you have more and more hot days.

Jim Green: Why do you think it's important that NASA is focusing so much energy on climate change right now?

Kate Calvin: So NASA has been doing climate and Earth Science for decades. So they have a decade's long set of data on Earth and atmospheric conditions that give us a sense of both where the Earth is today, but also where we've come from, since we've been doing this for decades. And one of the things you can see from NASA data and others is that climate’s changing. So we just had a release of the update of the temperature record jointly with NOAA, and 2021 was tied for the sixth warmest year on record, and the last eight years are the warmest years on record. And so we're experiencing these more extreme events, and they're going to continue with warming. And NASA has this unique vantage point of space to see the Earth and to be able to provide information that's relevant to decision makers and stakeholders.

Jim Green: Well, tell us about the upcoming NASA climate science activities. I know we've got a bunch of launches. What are you excited about in this area this year?

Kate Calvin: Yeah, we have a lot of launches planned for 2022, I'll just highlight a few. So one of them is the SWOT mission that's coming out towards the end of 2022. This is a satellite that's jointly developed with CNES, the French space agency, with contributions from the UK and Canadian space agencies. And it's focused on measuring oceans and surface water. So it's going to look at lakes and rivers and how rivers flow. And also how oceans are changing. And oceans are really important in climate because they absorb a lot of the heat. So as the Earth warms, the oceans are taking up quite a bit of that. Similarly, they absorb a lot of carbon and SWOT will allow us to better understand the oceans role in a changing climate. 

Kate Calvin: One of the other ones I'm really excited for is an instrument that's going to be launched onto the International Space Station. This is called EMIT and it measures mineral dust from the space station and mineral dust is important both for local climate, but also air quality. So it affects the quality of the air, which has implications for human health and other things.

Jim Green: Well, you know, when I was at Goddard Space Flight Center, and I was working with their climate people, on occasion, what I was seeing coming out of their models, over time, as they added CO2 was changing weather patterns. You know, where areas that were desert was getting more rain, where there were forests, they would become, you know, more arid over time. And so breaking records, temperature records, and looking at those extremes over long periods of time, seems to already give us the idea that the climate is changing. Is that still going on today?

Kate Calvin: Yes, so the climate is changing. We are seeing again, these increases in heat extreme increases in fire weather, which is particularly important in parts of the US. And NASA has a modeling program that does look at, you know, how is this changed in the past and how it might change in the future so that we can better understand those effects going forward. 

Kate Calvin: But I think on your point, it's, you know, climate change is about more than just changes in temperature. There's a whole host of other Earth system changes that come along with this, like changes in the water cycle, which you know, can lead to more floods and more droughts at the same time. And it can lead to changes in our forests and changes in in the whole Earth system. And so that's something that we're looking into both from an observation perspective to understand where we are now and how we got here, but also from a modeling perspective to understand where we might go.

Jim Green: Is there a particular question about our changing climate that you're really interested in answering scientifically?

Kate Calvin: Yeah. So there's a lot of things as a scientist that I'm really interested in the one that sort of stands out for me, has to do with exactly understanding how much the Earth will warm for a given level of emissions. This is something in the science community called climate sensitivity. And we've recently narrowed that range, so we have a better understanding than we did before. Unfortunately, that narrowing is that we've eliminated the possibility of low warming responses. So now we think that the warming for a given emissions level is at least a certain level higher than we thought before. 

Kate Calvin: But really understanding how climate responds to emissions is really important for decision makers as they're planning mitigation actions, but also adaptation. So how much warming might we expect? And how do we respond to that? And so I think the more precise we can give that information, the better it is for people making decisions.

Jim Green: Isn't it also true that there's some climate inertia going on? And maybe that's not the right way to describe it, where, where, even though we may be making progress, and overall reducing our emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, it's gonna take a while for the climate to really respond to that?

Kate Calvin: So warming will stop when we get emissions to what's called net zero, so that effectively any extra carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere, we're also taking out. And at that point, you know, there's some other nuances in that. But that's really that's how you stop warming. 

Kate Calvin: I think you could think of this like a bathtub. And so as long as the faucets on and waters going in, the water level is going to keep going up. If you can turn off that faucet, or balance the water coming in with water you're scooping out, then the water level will stop. And so that's that's where we understand about climate change. So stopping carbon dioxide emissions is a precursor to stopping warming.

Jim Green: ell, you've done a lot of computer modeling studies, I see, about different scenarios in the future, and ways to mitigate these effects of climate change. Tell us about a couple of those that you're especially proud of.

Kate Calvin: Yeah, so one of the highlights for me was this effort I worked on a little more than 10 years ago. For people in the science world, it's called the representative concentration pathways or RCPs. But what these were was a set of scenarios that were really designed to tie together the research community. So there are people out there that look at how do changes in emissions affect climate. There are other people that looked at how you might change emissions, and how does changes in energy affect emissions? There are people that study what the impacts are. So if we have warmer weather, what does that mean for wildfire and heat extremes? What does that mean for food production? And those are all separate groups of researchers. And this project was a way of connecting all of that. 

Jim Green: Have you ever gone out into the field as part of your research?

Kate Calvin: Yeah, I got this opportunity a few years ago. It's not a tradition in the world I come from because we build computer models. So we write code and we stare at computers But one of my co-workers was a forest and soil scientist. And he took me with him to do some field research his area at the time, he was looking at how forests recover after fire. So we spent a week hiking around in measuring trees in Canada. And it was a really, really interesting experience for me both to see where the data that I was using in my model comes from. So I was doing a lot of modeling of forests. And here was an actual forest. And so I could see where are these numbers I'm using coming from. 

Kate Calvin: It was also really useful to see heterogeneity. So not every tree is the same, not every forest is the same. And that's hard to see when you're just looking at a computer. I think it also really gave me an appreciation of satellites. So in one week, the two of us carried covered a very, very small fraction of one part of the world and measured those trees. And if you really want to understand the world's trees, you need to be able to do more and see more. And that's something that satellites give us.

Jim Green: But indeed, that that fieldwork is really critically important because it gives you what we call ground truth, of course. And then you can compare those observations from the ground with those from space and make other inferences.

Kate Calvin: Absolutely, I think the fieldwork in the on the ground research is really important those that understanding the system you're in and that satellites do give us global coverage. After you've done that.

Jim Green: Can you tell us a story about a moment in your work when you had to surmount an obstacle? And what was the challenge and how you overcame it?

Kate Calvin: So a lot of the challenges I’ve faced in my work have to do with communication. So I a lot of my work is very interdisciplinary. I work with physicists, ecologists, economists, chemists. And when you're working across disciplines, one of the challenges comes, are we speaking the same language? And are we doing the things that we intend to do? And so one of the projects I worked on a few years ago, was about linking these two different types of models of the climate system. So one of the parts of the project was about looking at how climate effects land, another part of it was looking at humans might respond to those changes in land. 

Kate Calvin: And we were trying to link information back and forth between them. After a couple of rounds of exchanging information, we started to get some results that were surprising. And when we dug into it a little bit, what we found was that what one model was producing wasn't actually what the other model needed, but we didn't notice it, because we didn't communicate clearly enough when we are setting up this design.

Kate Calvin:  And I've had a lot of variations of this challenge in my career about that. And I think it's pretty natural, different words mean different things to different communities. And the way that we address these sorts of things, is to just keep asking questions to be precise in our language, but also verbose. So not just giving an acronym or a word, but also explaining what that means to us. And so you have to be open to the idea that a word might mean something different to someone else, and really work with them to communicate that clearly.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Lipiec 09, 2023, 06:46
Gravity Assist: Meet NASA’s New Chief Scientist and Senior Climate Advisor, with Kate Calvin (2)
Jan 28, 2022

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Dr. Kate Calvin at the NASA Headquarters Mary W. Jackson building in Washington. Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Jim Green: Well, you know, I have always said, science isn't done until you communicate it. And I mean, between scientists but also the public. What do you think are some of the really big challenges to talk about the current observations and what may evolve with our climate to the public?

Kate Calvin: So some of the challenge, I think with the current observations, it's sometimes it's a little bit easier in the sense that people see that right. So we know that there were wildfires, we see extreme heat events, I think the numbers can get challenging there. So you hear one degree Celsius. And that's hard to interpret. It sounds very small. But really all of these impacts come along with it. And I'd say also on that, since I just said Celsius, depending on the audience you're speaking to, you have to think about units. And so the science community works in metric units. A lot of people in the United States understand Fahrenheit. And so trying to think about that and do that translation, as you're talking is really important. When you're thinking about future. One of the challenges there, I think is that, you know, future warming depends on future emissions. So we can't tell you for sure how warm that will be, in part, because it depends on what happens between now and then. And I think that's a really hard thing to communicate sometimes is that, you know, what we understand what we don't why we don't understand it. And so a lot of this future warming, it's because it depends on our emissions between now and the future.

Jim Green: Well, you've also done some work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or what is commonly called the IPCC. What is that organization? And what does it do?

Kate Calvin: Yeah, so the IPCC is the United Nations body for assessing the state of climate science. The reports are written by scientists, for the IPCC. And they come out every seven or so years, and they assess the state of climate science. So they're not doing new science. They’re looking at all of the peer reviewed publications that have come out in the last decade, and assessing what do we know about climate change, and what don't we? And one of the nice things about the way that the IPCC works is it every sentence that they write has a confident statement. So we can tell you how much do scientists agree on this? How much knowledge do we have in this space? And where do we need more? 

Kate Calvin: The other thing that's really interesting for me about the IPCC, and back to our communication, conversation, is at IPCC, the final summary for policymakers, they're approved word by word by governments and scientists. And so it's, it's an opportunity to really think about how do I communicate my science clearly to someone that needs to use it?

Jim Green: So as chief scientist, you also look over all the other science activity that NASA is doing, what else that we have in our portfolio is exciting you?

Kate Calvin: I'm really excited about the James Webb Space Telescope. I'm sure most people are. So I got up early Christmas morning to watch the launch. And I've been following as it’s unfolded the mirrors and we're expecting first images from it this summer. And so I'm really looking forward to that. I'm also intrigued by the DART mission, which is going to try to change the orbit of an asteroid. And then as someone that you know, watched Apollo 13 as a kid, we have some upcoming robotic and human missions to the Moon under Artemis, that'll be really fun to watch.

Jim Green: Well, I know there's a lot of budding scientists in our audience. And math and computer science is so important. What would you suggest people do to get excited about going into this field?

Kate Calvin: So one of the best pieces of advice I got in grad school was to just take the best opportunity when it comes. So don't try to plan too far ahead, look at what excites you that day, and pursue that. And I think for me, that's what I really been focused on. I started out, I just, I knew I liked math. When I got to undergrad, I decided I liked computer science, too. When I got to grad school that turned into climate science. When I got to my my job, joint Global Change Research Institute, it turned into interdisciplinary science. And now I'm doing science more broadly, not just climate science. And so I think, just follow where it leads and be curious, ask questions. There's no wrong question.

Jim Green: Well, Kate, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was that person, place, event, or thing that got them so excited about being the scientist they are today. And I call that event a Gravity Assist. So Kate, what was your gravity assist?

Kate Calvin: Yeah, so there's a lot of people that have had an influence on my career. So my high school calculus teachers, the reason I majored in math. My grad school PhD advisor is the reason I do climate. But the person I've been thinking about the most, in the last few weeks since I started at NASA is a guy by the name of Tony Janetos, who was the director of the joint Global Change Research Institute when I started. He was also a former NASA program manager. And at the point where I started at the institute, you know, I was doing climate research, but I was very much engineering-focused. And I worked with a lot of people that were like me, had degrees in my department. And Tony was an ecologist. And he was very much encouraged me to do interdisciplinary research, and to talk to people that had a different perspective than me. And I don't think I'd be where I am today if it weren't for the encouragement that he gave me.

Jim Green: Well, Kate, thanks so much for joining me and talking about this incredibly important topic, and how NASA can play an important role into the future.

Kate Calvin: Thank you so much for having me.

Jim Green: Well join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist. 


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Jan 28, 2022
Editor: Michael Bock

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-meet-nasa-s-new-chief-scientist-and-senior-climate-advisor-with-kate-calvin
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Lipiec 16, 2023, 08:54
Ziemia monitoruje bez przerwy parametry określające stan ISS.
Rozmowa z kontrolerem lotu z ETHOS (Environmental and Thermal Operating Systems).
Czasem pojawiają się sytuacje awaryjne
https://blogs.nasa.gov/spacestation/tag/mission-control-center/
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Sunny Panjwani: So think about, you know, crew needs water to drink, crew needs oxygen to breathe. So we could keep sending oxygen up there. And we could keep sending water up there. But sending things to space is pretty expensive. So we've learned that we can generate water on the space station through byproducts from the crew. So crew members generate three main waste products that I can think of. So, urine is one, you've got sweat whenever they're working out and just moving about the cabin through their work day. And then even when they breathe out, the moisture, the humidity and their breath as they exhale that, we collect all of those, we purify them, and we produce potable drinking water — water, that's honestly a lot cleaner than what comes out of my sink.
Cytuj
So we are there 24/7/365. There's always one person at least on console, monitoring tons of data coming down from all this hardware for you, know, generating the water, generating the oxygen, monitoring all these various systems that we have. So there's always somebody plugged in.

Gravity Assist: In Case of Space Station Emergency, with Sunny Panjwani (1)
Feb 18, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/sunny.png)
Sunny Panjwani is a flight controller at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Credits: NASA

In space, we have to expect the unexpected. Sunny Panjwani of NASA’s Johnson Space Center shares how he got thrown into an emergency situation on his first day as a flight controller. His team makes sure that astronauts have a safe environment on board the International Space Station. Learn how he got to NASA and how he handles high-pressure circumstances in and out of Mission Control.

Jim Green: For more than 20 years, the International Space Station has been in space with astronauts safely on board.

Jim Green: But what happens if something goes wrong?

Sunny Panjwani: In the training process, as a flight controller, you will go through some pretty rigorous simulations.

Sunny Panjwani: It was just surreal being there my first day and feeling like I was still stuck in a simulation.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this Gravity Assist, NASA’s interplanetary talk show. We’re going to explore the inside workings of NASA and meet fascinating people who make space missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Sunny Panjwani. And he is a flight controller for the International Space Station based out of Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Welcome, Sunny, to Gravity Assist.

Sunny Panjwani: Hey, Jim, thanks. It's great to be here. And I have to say you just made a cool job sound even cooler. So thank you for, for doing it like that.

Jim Green: Oh, my pleasure. I mean, wow, running the entire space station with flight controllers on the ground. It sounds so complicated. But before we talk about that, I really want to know how you got to NASA. And what made you so interested in space?

Sunny Panjwani: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it always starts off for us, you know, being kids and being interested in something from a young age. And for me, it was always the night sky. That was always like my best friend, it was always that silent observer, that listener for me when I was alone.

Sunny Panjwani: And so I became, you know, kind of obsessed with the night sky and all the things I heard about astronauts doing and people going up there to the Moon and things like that. And, you know, being a kid, I had the whole “shoot for the stars” thing, I took that kind of realistically, and I wanted to be an astronaut, but I also wanted to be a doctor. So I wanted to be a doctor-astronaut. And, you know, someone had told me that some astronauts are doctors, so I believe that and my parents told me, “Hey, you know, shoot a little bit, a little bit lower, but you know, just keep dreaming.” And I said, “Okay, sure.” And I grew up and I thought, Okay, I will be a doctor that works with astronauts. So you know, we also have those at the center called flight surgeons.

Sunny Panjwani: Now, I stayed on that path for a while, you know, through middle school, in high school, like a lot of people, we took medical classes, and I certified to be an EMT. For me, what really changed was: there was a loss in my family when I entered college. My father was, was shot and killed when I was younger.

Jim Green: Oh, I’m so sorry.

Sunny Panjwani: Thank you, I appreciate that. And he was shot and killed at his workplace very suddenly. And that that kind of threw me off my core, so veered off, and I lost hope in myself. And, you know, when that happened, just as for a lot of people, when things like that happen, I just I stopped and just threw everything off to the side and thought, “Hey, I can't chase my dream anymore. I can't keep going in that direction.”

Sunny Panjwani: So I chose something safer. And I'll tell you what I did. I, I started off as a biology major in college that first year, and then after losing my dad, I, the next week, I switched over to accounting, because I thought, “hey, I need a job that puts some, some money on the table.” And Jim, we just met like five minutes ago, and I will tell you, I'm never gonna be that friend that you can call to help with your taxes. (laughs)

Jim Green: (laughs)

Sunny Panjwani: I'm not, I'm not that guy.

Sunny Panjwani: And it was never my love and passion, but I tried staying with it. And you know, people always told me, Sunny, do what gets you through the day, you know, just go and do a degree that will get you a job, do what gets you through the day. And they said, you know, if you'd like biology, if you like science, keep that in, you know, in your back pocket as a minor. So that's exactly what I did. I was the one business major I knew that had a science minor. And, you know, it took a while for me to understand that I didn't want to do what got me through the day, I wanted to chase after what made me want to stay up at night. And that's what so many of us here at NASA do we chase what makes us want to stay up. And so long story short, you know, it took some time, but I think I ended up in the right place.


(https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/44911449294_f975da8c74_o_0.jpg)
The International Space Station photographed by Expedition 56 crew members from a Soyuz spacecraft after undocking. Credits: NASA/Roscosmos

Jim Green: That's fantastic. I'm really glad that you did. And I hear that you work in the environmental systems branch of the space station. What does that involve?

Sunny Panjwani: So you know, the environmental and thermal operating systems is a mouthful. So you'll hear me say ETHOS, and that's what the acronym is for that whole thing. So the big part of that, again, like you said, is the Environmental Systems part. So what is that? What does that mean? So let's kind of take it a step back. What do humans need to survive in space? Well, first, you need shelter. So we have the ISS, the actual shell, but you got to pressurize it, you have to have oxygen, you've got to have nitrogen, just like we do here on Earth. And we got to keep those pressures pretty similar to what we have here on Earth. Now, you know, Jim, what's your favorite space movie? Just a personal question.

Jim Green: Oh, “The Martian,” of course.

Sunny Panjwani: Okay. “The Martian,” you know, that's, that's a that's a good one. I think mine has to be Apollo 13. And, okay, Apollo 13. A lot of people can think back and remember the scene where they have to fix their CO2 [carbon dioxide] scrubber because they have a lot of CO2 building up. That's another thing we conquer here at ethos. We're monitoring the CO2 levels, monitoring things like toxins in the air and making sure we're scrubbing that. And then one of the biggest things we do is recycling. And when I say recycling, I'm talking about regenerative life support.

Sunny Panjwani: So think about, you know, crew needs water to drink, crew needs oxygen to breathe. So we could keep sending oxygen up there. And we could keep sending water up there. But sending things to space is pretty expensive. So we've learned that we can generate water on the space station through byproducts from the crew. So crew members generate three main waste products that I can think of. So, urine is one, you've got sweat whenever they're working out and just moving about the cabin through their work day. And then even when they breathe out, the moisture, the humidity and their breath as they exhale that, we collect all of those, we purify them, and we produce potable drinking water — water, that's honestly a lot cleaner than what comes out of my sink.

Sunny Panjwani: So it sounds gross. But I promise I promise it's not that bad. It's, it's very clean water.

Sunny Panjwani: So now that we have this water, we can take that and we can run a current through it — an electrical current —and produce oxygen by splitting the water in half. So the urine, the sweat, the condensate, all of this is being turned into drinkable water and breathable air throughout the day. And that's such an important part of what we do, because that keeps the crew alive and healthy. It keeps costs down. And it makes exploring past, you know, the moon, past Mars one day, hopefully, it makes those things possible.

Jim Green: Yeah, as you say, all that activity is what we would call sustainability. You know, a self-contained environment, you, you manage your waste, minimize that, and use those resources over and over again.

Sunny Panjwani: And I think going back to your, your movie when you said “The Martian,” I mean, that's exactly what he's doing. Right. He's taking his way and making potatoes out of it. And before I have us move on, Jim, I just wanted to mention, the biggest thing we do in ETHOS that I neglected to mention the most important thing, the part of life support that we care about the most is preserving life. So when there's an emergency on the space station, think about a fire, for example, or a rapid depressurization. So let's say you're in an airplane and somebody pokes a hole in the side of it, that air rushing out. That's one of the worst-case scenarios on the space station or a toxic atmosphere. Say there's a gas leak on the space station. When there's an emergency like that, this is the team that leads the crew and leads the rest of the flight control team through that scenario.

Jim Green: Well, in your role, do you often sit at a console and observe what's happening with the incoming data?

Sunny Panjwani: Yeah, and I love these questions, because you gave me a chance to go back to again, my favorite movie. So if you if you think back to Apollo 13, you think back to the the guys in the white shirts and the black ties sitting at consoles, you know, a console is a shorthand for that desk that's surrounded by a bunch of computer screens, and papers, documents everywhere. And that's kind of where we sit day to day when we're on console. Now a lot of work happens in the office, you can say most of the work happens in the office where we have people supporting the people sitting on console that week. But for ETHOS, we are what's called a core console. So we are there 24/7/365. There's always one person at least on console, monitoring tons of data coming down from all this hardware for you, know, generating the water, generating the oxygen, monitoring all these various systems that we have. So there's always somebody plugged in.

Jim Green: So out of your of your group how many are there? And then do you take turns sitting behind the console?

Sunny Panjwani: Yeah, that's a good question. So in our group, we have a few dozen certified flight controllers. And you know, I know that sounds like a lot. But when you think about someone always having to be there, 24/7/365, three shifts a day, it adds up. And it takes a toll on the group. So we have enough to be sustainable, but we're always trying to select more people to become flight controllers and to help plan, train, and fly missions.

Jim Green: Well, what's your day to day activity like? And then what do you do in the office when you're not on console?

Sunny Panjwani: So the day-to-day, let's say I'm walking into console. And actually, that's a great question, because I'm walking into console today after we're done. So you know, we have schedules that are planned out based on people's availability, it's just like any other job, you know, that's the normal part of it. The not=normal part is you're walking into Mission Control. So you're walking past and big doors, you're walking up to the console itself, setting up all your data, your plots, and preparing for the day. And when you're on console, you know, one, you're monitoring all this data coming down. But then you're also planning ahead days ahead, weeks ahead, looking at hey, what's coming three days from now, what's coming six days from now, what's coming a month from now?

Sunny Panjwani: So in the office, when you're not working console, you might be a subject matter expert on some specific piece of hardware for the office. So let's say you're really into that oxygen generator, you know a lot about it. So if there's some kind of new hardware that's flying up that associates with that, that piece of hardware, you might be working with the teams to make sure that all those things are integrated correctly. So really, it's it's a big team effort. And I like to say, none of us is there trying to be the world's best flight controller, we're showing up every day trying to be the world's best flight control team. And that's really what we focus on is the teamwork.

Jim Green: Well, you must prepare for emergency. How are you trained, then, during those times you're not on console? Do you go into a simulator or are you actually walking around something that looks like one of the modules that is attached to Space Station?

Sunny Panjwani: So in the training process, as a flight controller, you will go through some pretty rigorous simulations. So, one, you have all that technical learning, you have to do the book homework, and then you have the actual practice and gaining experience. So you'll walk into a simulator, which is, it's really just a room, it looks just like a flight control room. You're surrounded by all your monitors, all your data is there, your procedures and such. And the data flowing down through all these screens is simulated data based on the software and the hardware you would really have on the space station. So you're getting the same data, except, you know, when you show up for this simulation, it's going to be one of the worst days of your life on console. Because those are the days, those are the days that they really want to prepare you for, and test you, and test you, and break down little bitty things.

Sunny Panjwani: You know, you might have an eight hour simulation, and it was a great sim, but that one part of the sim, that one time you kind of messed up. And that's what they're going to go into at the end of the day, because that's where you can make the improvement. So you know, there's that famous NASA quote that goes, “failure is not an option.” And you know, that might be a great quote, but I would submit that for life and for learning, failure is a requirement. Failure is a prerequisite to success, you know. If we don't fail, if we don't falter, we will never get close to breaking our limits, we won't even get close to our limits. So failure is a big part of the training system.

Jim Green: What kind of emergencies do occur on the ISS?

Sunny Panjwani: My first day on console was last year when I certified to be a back-room flight controller.

Sunny Panjwani: So it was my first day being a co-pilot, basically. And this was the day that the Russian Space Agency was bringing up a vehicle, I'm gonna butcher the name, it's called Nauka, or MLM. And it was an expansion to their space station, their side of the space station.

Sunny Panjwani: Now, sometime after the ship docked about an hour, maybe two hours, all of a sudden, we get a message on the board. And it says loss of attitude control. So attitude control, meaning the positioning of the space station. So that space station was tilting away from its normal position, and we hadn't commanded it to do so, we hadn't told to do so. And then we look up at the screen at these external cameras, and I can see all this ice and debris and dust coming off of the thruster that's now, you know, docked to the space station. So for people who don't kind of, who can't picture this, I want you to imagine going down a highway and I'm in a truck and your car is hitched to my truck, and we're driving down the highway just fine. And all of a sudden you start slamming on the pedal. And now we're veering off in a different direction. And that's exactly what started happening.

Sunny Panjwani: Now the space station did something like one and a half backflips with seven crew inside of it. And it wasn't a rapid spin. But it was a roll. And during that time, my pilot that day was Christopher Brown, just a great flight controller, and he was there to help me and we both talked about, you know, what if the crew has to do an emergency undock. What if there is a rupture in the cabin, what are we looking for? And the data isn't there right now because the space station has veered off of its axis.

Sunny Panjwani: So we're not seeing all this data come down because it's pointed the wrong way. But when it comes back around, we'll get some data. So we're thinking, Okay, let's talk about all the possibilities. What are we looking for? What's the worst case? What's the next worst failure. And of course, we have people from the office tuned in watching this all happen. So we still had support. Now, thankfully, it did stop firing. And we did regain attitude control some time later that day. And the crew was never in any extreme danger.

Sunny Panjwani: But it was just surreal being there my first day and feeling like I was still stuck in a simulation. Snd it really taught me that our training is there, to push us to our limits again, and, and sometimes, you know, you just you're sitting there and you can't believe what's happening, but you're calm, and you're collected, and you're ready to work the problem.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Lipiec 16, 2023, 08:55
Gravity Assist: In Case of Space Station Emergency, with Sunny Panjwani (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/51384546243_b3f783eefe_o.jpg)
Spacewalker Thomas Pesquet of ESA (European Space Agency) waves to the camera 261 miles above Western Sahara as he works to complete the installation of the second roll out solar array on the International Space Station's Port-6 truss structure on June 25, 2021. Flight controllers in Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center support activities such as this from Mission Control. Credits: NASA/ESA

Jim Green: Well, it sounds like you're prepared for a really high pressured situation, since you were just, you know, thrown right into the mixing bowl on your very first, first day as a as your co-pilot controller. Are these things really, that you learned -- can you apply them to your own life?

Sunny Panjwani: Yeah, and you know, preparing for high stress situations, I learned quickly after I became an EMT after high school and work that job for a little bit. I learned that I need those high-pressure situations a lot of us do because being in a high-pressure environment means that your performance your actions have consequences. And sometimes we need that to drive us forward and to always pay attention to things. So I learned that that's a great fit for me in a job and this job is perfect for that.

Sunny Panjwani: So your question on taking something away, I would have to say, the one thing that I really take away is, is to always play something out to the very end, it's not over until it's over. And especially when the deck is stacked against you. You know that that whole failure is not an option thing. Just keep that in your mind sometimes and keep going, things are gonna keep getting thrown at you, life is gonna put things in your way. But you have to keep going until it's the end, you don't call the ball game you play until the end?

Jim Green: Well, you know, it really sounds like there's always something to learn. And there's always things that could go wrong. And that every day is different. Is that Is that true? And do you really enjoy going into work looking for that next challenge?

Sunny Panjwani: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the great parts of the job is, you know, we do have things in space that are procedural. But with it being a space environment, I wouldn't say that things are routine. There's always variation in things, there's always something that could go wrong. And, of course, we're trying to manage, you know, just basic hardware problems. But we're also trying to make sure that we're not wasting the crew’s time. The crew is up there for six months, usually, and their time is very precious. So we're making sure that they have all all that they need to perform science throughout the day, and that things aren't, you know, giving them hiccups throughout the day and holding them up in places. So we're always just trying to make sure we're in sync with the crew on those things.

Jim Green: Well, I'd be willing to bet most people don't realize how many people are actually in space station at any one time, and that it changes, what's the largest number of astronauts on orbit and in space station at a given time?

Sunny Panjwani: At a given time, you can bet that there are about seven people on the space station. Now, we've had more we've had less. But the six to seven is a the approximate crew complement for any given time. So you know, whenever that space station flies over your house, and it goes around the Earth 16 times a day, there are seven people zooming above your head. And the Space Station has been continuously inhabited for over 20 years. So we've always had at least a person up there and you know, more than one person up there, zipping around the earth for 20 years, which is incredible

Jim Green: Yeah.

Sunny Panjwani: and just a monumental achievement by all the partners.

Jim Green: Yeah, indeed, very much. So we know NASA is planning to send astronauts to the moon through the Artemis program, with a view of someday making it to Mars. Are you involved in any of those activities?

Sunny Panjwani: Well, okay, so I'm a newer flight controller. So I'm not directly involved in the ETHOS group when it comes to the Artemis program. And I love I would love to be in I hope to be one day. But let me let me answer that maybe an analogous way. So if if you think about the ISS as a testbed for taking us further, the ISS is kind of like our training field, right. This is where we plan train and fly to currently, and we're going to the ISS so we can learn about how we can go farther. So we've been to the Moon before, that's a ball game that we've won before. And we're trying to make the Moon the next practice field. And once that's our practice field, and we get good at that, then hopefully we can go to Mars, and that's the Superbowl right? So you know, everything we do day to day, is trying to help us get to that Super Bowl and make that a reality.

Jim Green  33:42

Well, of course, what NASA is doing over the next several years is building an infrastructure at the Moon. And the big infrastructure is called the Gateway.

Sunny Panjwani: That's right.

Jim Green: Of course, astronauts will be in the Gateway. And they'll be performing different types of experiments and all kinds of things in addition to living in the Gateway. And it's from the Gateway that they'll land on the surface of the moon, and then go back to the Gateway. And so you know, controllers are going to be involved in that perhaps that will be your next big step.

Sunny Panjwani: I can only hope so. That sounds incredible.

Jim Green: Yeah, it sounds like fun to me too. Well, what advice would you offer a young person who wants to go into a job like yours?

Sunny Panjwani: Oh, man, I get this one so often. And I I'm never prepared for the answer because I feel like a young guy who just kind of lucked out being you know, here and living my dream day to day. I would say the one thing to take away is serendipity. And I mean, serendipity surrounds us day to day, just chance and you know, sometimes we think about things just falling into place. I would argue that, you know, you have to be the right person in the right place at the right time. And of course for the right thing.

Sunny Panjwani: The one thing that's always going to be in your control is being the right person. So do what it takes to be prepared when that opportunity shows up at your doorstep. So you know, get the degree that you need to make sure you have the experience that would help you be a good team member learn how to communicate professionally, things like that. So become the right person. And when the right place and the right time are there, you'll be the right person for those.

Jim Green: Yeah, that sounds like a good set of advice. Well, Sunny, I always like to ask my guests to tell me, what was the event or person place or thing that got them so excited about being the engineer and the flight controller they are today. And I call that event a gravity assist. So Sunny, what was your gravity assist?

Sunny Panjwani: I love that name. Jim, I knew you were going to ask you this question, because I've heard your podcast, which by the way, love the podcast.

Jim Green: Thank you.

Sunny Panjwani: And so I kind of thought about this question. And the best answer I can give is that my gravity assist has been my family, both the one that I was born into, and the one that I've been so lucky to cultivate through my life. You know, I told you, I changed my major to accounting, and then I switched back to biology. You know, I changed that back to biology three and a half years into college, I changed back to biology because I couldn't sleep at night, and I wanted to chase what kept me up. And before that, you know, I was like, well, if I go back to biology, I don't know what I can do with that degree, because medical school is still too expensive. And I didn't want to take the time away from my family after losing my father, and I would have to go home, once I switched my degree back to bio. And my mom would be there and she would ask me at night, you know, I'd come home from college, on those weekends. And she'd say, “Hey, so how are things going?” And then she would eventually ask, you know, “So do you know what you want to do yet?” And it would break my heart because I would have to look at her and say, “No, I, I still don't know what I want to do. “

Sunny Panjwani: And, you know, to her credit, being the person she is She took my hand every time and she said, you'll find it. You just keep going, you know, your dad and I are with you, and you'll find it. And before that when I was last that I was working, you know, a hotel job while I was in community college, before I'd even gone to a major university, I met a person named Sherry, who's part of my family now. And she was just a guest who was checking into the hotel during this big NASA conference. And, you know, I was a business major at the time. So I was very geeked out talking to all these people. And she struck a conversation up with me that week.

Sunny Panjwani: And she took an interest in me and she extended her hand and you know, a person she'd never known, never owed anything to, and told me to keep in contact. And she said, you know, don't give up on your dream so soon. You deserve to chase your dreams. And even when I showed up at NASA as an intern, after she convinced me to apply, and after I showed up as an intern, the team that I was working with saw that I had this crippling imposter syndrome that you know, a lot of us carry here at NASA. Working in one of the greatest places to be in the world kind of comes with that imposter syndrome sometimes, and they saw that I had that. And my mentors, Brian and David, they, they took my hand, a kid who had no research experience, who had no background for his degree, and they said, “We trust you, you know, keep pushing.” And they pushed me forward. And so my family has been my gravity assist. And every day I walk into work, and I see all those partner flags for the International Space Station, and I see that mission control patch, and the flight ops patch, I think of all those people, and without all those people, I wouldn't be where I am today.

Jim Green: Well, that's fantastic, Sunny, I really appreciate having the time talking to you about controlling Space Station. And I'm really delighted that you're behind the console. I would feel comfortable if I was an astronaut living in working on Space Station, and then having you work with me when I go to the Gateway and then to the Moon. All right? Let's do that.

Sunny Panjwani: Yeah. Well, I hope I hope we can send you there, Jim.

Jim Green: Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see what we do and how we do it. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Feb 18, 2022
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-in-case-of-space-station-emergency-with-sunny-panjwani
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Lipiec 23, 2023, 15:15
Dr Aaron Yung, astrofizyk z Goddard Space Flight Center przedstawia oczekiwania związane z obserwacjami JWST.
Cytuj
Aaron Yung: Spoiler alert there, we’re waiting for the JWST images. So something we know for sure is that they are going to be really red. And they are also likely to be irregular in shape, because spiral galaxies take several mergers to merge, and they're usually bigger. But these early galaxies, they’re so red, and we are going to see them in infrared, because you see, we expect these galaxies to emit a lot of ultraviolet light. But because this light traveled a long way to get to us, and along its long journey, the light wave has been stretched so much that it becomes infrared. And Webb is designed specifically to detect light in this regime. And we also expect these galaxies to be smaller than the ones we saw in a nearby Universe. Because there was so little time has elapsed after the Big Bang, they don't really have a lot of time to evolve, to grow mass yet. But they're also expected to be brighter than the nearby galaxies of similar mass, because they're full of young stars and young stellar populations are expected to be significantly brighter than older populations.

Gravity Assist: Using Webb to Trace Galactic Histories, with Aaron Yung (1)
Mar 4, 2022

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To help scientists predict what the James Webb Space Telescope will see, Aaron Yung at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center creates simulations of galaxies in the early universe. At left, an Ultra-Deep Field image from the Hubble Space Telescope; middle, a simulation of Hubble’s view; right, a simulation of what Webb will see.  Credits: Yung et al.

Learn more about these simulations at the Webb blog (https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/02/24/to-find-the-first-galaxies-webb-pays-attention-to-detail-and-theory/)

The James Webb Space Telescope, which launched Dec. 25, will allow us to see the farthest galaxies and better understand the origins of the Milky Way. Aaron Yung at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is preparing for these historic observations by simulating what Webb will see in the early universe. But Aaron’s path to mind-bending research wasn’t easy. When he came to the United States as a teenager, he spoke a different native language and didn’t have the preparation other kids had for math and physics. Learn about Aaron’s journey in this episode of Gravity Assist.

Jim Green: Our new James Webb Space Telescope is a time machine, observing the early stars and gas that make up the early universe.

Aaron Yung: By looking at galaxies from far away to nearby, we can put together the universe’s evolution history.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this Gravity Assist, NASA’s interplanetary talk show. We’re going to explore the inside workings of NASA and meet fascinating people who make space missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Aaron Yung, and he is a NASA postdoctoral fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Aaron has been working on a variety of projects related to how the James Webb Space Telescope will study the early universe. James Webb is of course, our most powerful infrared space telescope we've ever launched. It will start groundbreaking science later this year with its first observations coming up. So welcome, Aaron, to Gravity Assist.

Aaron Yung: Thank you for having me, Jim.

Jim Green: Well, I'm just delighted to talk to you because James Webb has such a spectacular telescope. And as we talk, they're going through their calibration and aligning the mirrors. And I can't wait for those first observations. So how did you get involved with NASA and the Webb telescope?

Aaron Yung: So my background is actually in theoretical astrophysics. And I specialize in modeling galaxy formation. So my work is all about understanding the physics that drives the formation and evolution of galaxies, especially the ones that form in the very early universe, and the way they evolved and interact with the cosmos. So these studies are the key to answering big open questions like how the universe works,  and how did we get here. You can see that these questions align very well with the mission of the James Webb Space Telescope. So in anticipation of our next great observatory, I did a dissertation on making predictions for galaxies in the early universe, which JWST will help us see for the first time, and I call this work semi-analytic forecasts for JWST. I use theoretical models to predict what JWST will see in galaxy surveys. And this simulated data helps optimize the way we look for galaxies.

Aaron Yung: It also helps interpret and understand the galaxies we see. So right after I received my Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2020, I joined Goddard Space Flight Center as a JWST fellow through the NASA postdoctoral program. And the position allows me to continue working with observing teams, which I provide theory support for future JWST observations. And I also get to continue my work on creating forecasts for other flagship telescopes.

Jim Green: That's fantastic. So that early work you did in your thesis is really what got you the attention of NASA. And then, you know, we just had to have you on the team.

Jim Green: But why do we care about the early galaxy formations?

Aaron Yung: So before we talk about early galaxies, we need to talk about the time machine aspect of JWST. You see, because light travels at a finite speed. So we have light from different parts of the universe constantly streaming to us, since this light carries information about the universe at the time it was emitted. So the longer the light has traveled, the older the information is, and is therefore showing us what the universe was like further back in time. So by looking at galaxies from far away to nearby, we can put together the universe’s evolution history.


(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/withjim1.jpg)
Postdoctoral fellow Aaron Yung, at right, with NASA Gravity Assist host Jim Green. Credits: Aaron Yung

Aaron Yung: So now why do we care? Because in addition to living on the planet, and in a solar system, we also live inside a very big galaxy. And naturally, we are curious about its history. Current theory says that galaxy formed hierarchically, starting with the small ones, and then later [they] grow bigger through mergers and accretion. And we think our Milky Way galaxy went through the same process. So these first galaxies that JWST will see, are not the progenitor of our own Milky Way. But looking at these galaxies, we can get a sense of what universe was like in the past. And that will give us clues about what our Milky Way galaxy has undergone in the past.

Jim Green: So Aaron, based on what we think we know, there's a start of the universe called the big bang. And then after that, what happens?

Aaron Yung: So by measuring how fast the universe expands, we think the Big Bang happened about 13.8 billion years ago. And that was the beginning of the universe’s timeline. So after that the universe [has] undergone some violent expansion, and then the content of the universe gradually cooled. And then at some point, baryonic matter can exist.

Aaron Yung: So this baryonic matters are the things that made up of stars and galaxies and you and me. So after these baryonic matter forms, they will have to gradually coagulate under the effects of gravity. And then we experienced a phase of the universe that we call the dark age. So galaxies kind of formed, but we can't really see them because they're obscured or blocked by neutral gas. But over time, when galaxies start to pump out radiations to the universe, to the intergalactic medium, so space between galaxies, the universe gradually becomes ionized, or, in other words becomes transparent. So light can travel freely through the universe, and now we can see the universe clearly.

Jim Green: Okay, so after the Big Bang, we get a time period where matter starts forming into stars, and then stars and dust and galaxies are formed from that. And, of course, what happens later, our solar systems are made around stars. In fact, our solar system is only 4.6 billion years old. So this big bang happened a long time ago.

Jim Green: Well, how do we define a galaxy? Is it made up of a certain number of stars? Is there a limit?

Aaron Yung: So galaxies are actually more than stars. There's also gas in there, multi-phase gas, hot and cold and ionized. And also they interact with their own dark matter halo. And when galaxies form in a cluster, they also interact with their neighbors. So there are all sorts of things going on, and there's not really a limit on how many stars there need to be to become a galaxy.

Jim Green: Well, what do we think these are early galaxies look like? Do they start out being spiral galaxies right away?

Aaron Yung: Spoiler alert there, we’re waiting for the JWST images. So something we know for sure is that they are going to be really red. And they are also likely to be irregular in shape, because spiral galaxies take several mergers to merge, and they're usually bigger. But these early galaxies, they’re so red, and we are going to see them in infrared, because you see, we expect these galaxies to emit a lot of ultraviolet light. But because this light traveled a long way to get to us, and along its long journey, the light wave has been stretched so much that it becomes infrared. And Webb is designed specifically to detect light in this regime. And we also expect these galaxies to be smaller than the ones we saw in a nearby Universe. Because there was so little time has elapsed after the Big Bang, they don't really have a lot of time to evolve, to grow mass yet. But they're also expected to be brighter than the nearby galaxies of similar mass, because they're full of young stars and young stellar populations are expected to be significantly brighter than older populations.

Jim Green: So those young stars, do they get really massive and, and do we see stars today that big? Or are they something special to behold?

Aaron Yung: They are likely to be even more massive than the stars we have today because when the universe starts off, there isn't really a lot of heavy elements. So we expected these stars formed out of gas that are pristine from the Big Bang, and because they don't really have metal in them. So the gases are cooling very inefficiently. And that will lead to the formation of bigger stars. So they tend to be brighter, but they also burn up their fuel faster. And that plays a role into why the younger stellar populations is brighter, because they contain more of this massive but short-lived stars. And when the stellar population grow old, these young stars star to die out. And the older, longer lasting stars are intrinsically less bright. And that's why.

Jim Green: Ah, so that's why we want to go back in time and look at these early galaxies, because the primary stars that make them up are so different than the kind of stars that we have today, particularly the typical ones. So this is really an exciting opportunity for us to really tease out that early phase of the evolution of the solar system and our stars and other galaxies. Well, what are the features of the Webb observatory that really allow you to study this early universe?

Aaron Yung: So there's so many things that went into the design of JWST that makes it the greatest of all time for studying the early universe. And here, let me just highlight a few.

Aaron Yung: First, JWST's iconic primary mirror is extremely large. It is 6.5 meters across, and its area is nearly seven times bigger than Hubble. The large mirror will help collect more light and give us a chance to detect the sources that are extremely distant and faint. And since Webb will observe the universe, in infrared, the mirror is coated with a thin layer of gold, which is the best material for reflecting infrared. And since everything with the temperature glows in infrared, it is important to keep the telescope’s optical components and scientific instruments cool, like really, really cool.

Aaron Yung: So instead of orbiting Earth like Hubble does, Webb is at an orbit 1 million miles away from us, and to keep it cool from the Sun's radiation, Webb is also equipped with a sunshield that is the size of a tennis court. And that will keep Webb at its operating temperature of 50 Kelvin, or negative 370 degrees Fahrenheit. And the mid-infrared instrument has its own cryogenic cooler that cools it even further to below 6 Kelvin, or negative 449 degrees Fahrenheit.

Aaron Yung: So both the big mirror and the low operating temperature are required for the extremely sensitive scientific instruments to operate. These instruments will process the light that reaches us and turn them into images or spectra, and through them, we will be able to see the early universe.

Jim Green: Well, you know, Aaron, a lot of people know a lot about the Hubble Space Telescope. And now we have the JWST telescope almost operational. What's going to be the major differences that we will have from the observations that these two spacecraft make?

Aaron Yung: So one that JWST is going to be 100 times more sensitive than Hubble. So it will be able to detect galaxies that are fainter than what Hubble can see. And that will show us galaxies are also further out, forming at even earlier times. So that is very exciting. And additionally, JWST also has additional mid-infrared capability that Hubble doesn't have. So that will help us see other things like stars behind the cloud of dust, or AGN that are obscured by its host galaxies.

Jim Green: Aaron, do the early galaxies have black holes? Or are they formed later?

Aaron Yung: Indeed, we think there will be black holes in them. So the current theory is that there could be some supermassive black hole seeds that are left behind by the very first stars. So these black hole seeds will sit there quietly as the galaxy forms. So they might not have a strong effect on the galaxies. But over time when they grow in mass, and they start accreting, they can indeed affect their host galaxies. So besides supporting JWST observations, I'm also the PI of a JWST cycle I theory program, which I will be developing a theoretical framework to explore the symbiotic relation between the early forming black holes and their host galaxies. So when a black hole accretes matter rapidly, you can have strong impact on their host galaxies in many ways. However, the black holes themselves are probably obscured by their host galaxies. So even with JWST, we might not be able to see them directly. So my theoretical framework will tie this early forming black holes to the properties of their host galaxies, and suggests ways that we can probe them indirectly through signals that are observable by JWST.

Jim Green: Yeah, that's fantastic. What do you expect, then, to see, to verify your simulations? Will that come in one image or a series of images or are all the images have to be put together before you see the early universe?

Aaron Yung: So that will have to wait until the exciting JWST program to happen. So it's unlikely to be one single image, but it's probably a mosaic of images that we get from a large JWST survey.

Aaron Yung: We already have several programs that are planned to do deep galaxy surveys within the first year of operation.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Lipiec 23, 2023, 15:15
Gravity Assist: Using Webb to Trace Galactic Histories, with Aaron Yung (2)

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Aaron Yung simulates the early universe at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Credits: Aaron Yung

Jim Green: Well, what is Webb doing right now? What's been going on since it was launched?

Aaron Yung: Right. Since the big launch a little under two months ago, JWST has undergone a series of delicate steps to unfold itself. So remember that gigantic mirror and sunshield that I mentioned, the whole telescope is so big that it must be folded up to fit inside the rocket that launches it to space. In the first two weeks of its journey, we saw successful deployment of everything. So big kudos to all the engineers who design and build the telescope.

Aaron Yung: JWST was then successfully inserted into his target orbits the second Lagrangian point, and would go through a six month long commissioning process. So right now, the team at the JWST Mission Control Center in Maryland, is working on aligning the 18 segments of the primary mirror. At [the] start, each segment is kind of doing its own thing. And the goal is to make all of the segments work coherently as one giant mirror. So right now, Webb is looking at a bright star, but 18 different bright dots show up in the detector. The team needs to first identify which dot corresponds to which segment, and then the mirror segments will need to be moved and individually adjusted. And at the end, they will move the mirror once again to stack the 18 images to make all the segments work as one. So we got to be patient.

Jim Green: Well, did you always want to be a scientist?

Aaron Yung: Well, the answer is a bit, a yes and no. I always have a thing for physics, but never had the confidence to make it my career. I remember when I was little at an age when I was still building towers and bridges with wooden blocks, I became aware of the invisible rules that all my toys seem to follow, you know, the way things fall, the way certain things bounce after falling, or colliding, or the trajectory of [a] baseball, that sort of thing. I was really curious about the kinds of rules that are sort of behind the scenes. And to see if I got them right, I actually emulate[d] things in my head, like imagine a tower blocks, and you give it a little push in your head and you can, you can use your imagination to follow the cascade of the blocks. And that was really fantastic for a kid who had to wait to see the doctor all the time.

Aaron Yung: And I, I wanted to learn more. So later I learned that these rules are called physics. And it wasn't the English word physics, but the Chinese phrase for physics, which is made up of two words: matter and logic. So together, they spell “making sense of things.” And that idea kind of stuck with me.

Aaron Yung: So fast forward a decade, I immigrated to the United States with my family when I was 15. And I grew up in Hawaii. So that was fun. But at the beginning, it was pretty rough, because I had to catch up with the language. I started high school in the last month of ninth grade. So I practically missed a whole year of high school. And I needed to catch up with the credits. So I was catching up so hard that I took extra classes before school, after school, online and over the summer. I graduated high school a whole year earlier. But I didn't have a chance to take any advanced physics and math classes. So I wasn't prepared to take physics. And I actually started college as a finance major. But a year later, I decided to switch majors to physics. I went back to tell my high school physics teacher about it. And she wasn't exactly encouraging. Well, maybe she knew I wasn't prepared for that.

Aaron Yung: Everyone told me physics is hard, and you need to be really good at math to get in. And that's why I never had the confidence to even consider doing it for my career. And to be fair, I say that sort of things too, sometimes. So maybe there is some truth to it. But would I add a little twist to it. Instead of saying that, I should say, “If you do physics, you will need a lot of math. But no matter where you are at now, you will need to work your hardest, and get used to learning things on the fly. So as long as you have the strength to persevere, you will be fine.”

Jim Green: Yeah, that's really a good philosophy. You know, and I have a little modification, if I may, that I say in the same way you do. And that is all math is not created equal. I really enjoyed various types of math, but not everything. For instance, I was horrible in geometry. But I did not let that stop me going on, completing a variety of math and physics courses. So indeed, it's really about determination, and being able to enjoy what you're doing.

Jim Green: Well, Aaron, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was that event or person place or thing that got them so excited about being a scientist that they are today? I call that event a gravity assist. So Aaron, what was your gravity assist?

Aaron Yung: So like the Voyager missions, I actually had several and I will limit myself to just three. So the first gravity assist that changed my life trajectory happened in my undergrad. At first I wanted to do research in mathematical physics, but I was turned down by the person who I wanted to work with. And the astronomy professor next door took me in, her name is Aparna Venkatesan. She talked me into her research group and brought astronomy in to my life. So as an undergrad working with her, I also got to observe at the Arecibo Observatory at Puerto Rico, which was my first experience working with a big telescope. So the next one I had. And also, the biggest one I had so far is from my thesis advisor, Rachel Somerville, her life research launched in my whole career and gave me the necessary acceleration towards working on theoretical astrophysics and working with JWST.

Aaron Yung: And finally, NASA, the one that I'm experiencing right now, NASA took me in at a time when the field was still quite uncertain about when JWST would be launched. So joining NASA and having direct access to the people that work closely with JWST, and the Roman Space Telescope is really setting me up to continue developing all the work, I have started and get inspired to take this work to new directions. And here is a bonus one. Since I joined NASA during the early phase of the pandemic, I've spent most of my time working remotely. And that took a toll on experience working as a part of the agency. So the silver lining is that we're spending more time online. And I ran into you, Jim. So, Jim and I met through social media about a year ago. And since then, we have been working together on two weekly shows that we engage with a live public audience. And we talk about literally everything on astronomy and space exploration. So I obviously enjoyed my front row seat to all your exciting stories on Mars exploration, planetary science, and countless NASA missions and histories. But I also feel incredibly privileged working with you in this capacity. So thank you for all the science communication training, and being my role model for making science accessible.

Jim Green: Well, that was really kind of you to say Aaron, and and I have to say, I've really enjoyed working with you, when we get together and talk on Clubhouse. Indeed, it's it's wonderful to have many different people from many different walks of life, around the world, sitting in listening to us talk about science, and then allowing them to ask us some really great and penetrating questions. So Aaron, thanks so much for joining me on Gravity Assist in talking about the fantastic things that you're doing, modeling all those early galaxies, waiting for JWST data to come in.

Aaron Yung: Thank you, Jim.

Jim Green: Well join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Mar 4, 2022
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-using-webb-to-trace-galactic-histories-with-aaron-yung
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Lipiec 30, 2023, 08:23
Czy meteoryty mogą pochodzić z Merkurego?
Cytuj
Neyda Abreu: So there have been some people who have suggested that some rocks that we have in a meteorite collection might come from Mercury. That is a difficult question to answer, right. And one of the obstacles that we run into when we think about how a rock from Mercury might have made it into Earth is that the Sun is the 10 to the 30 kilogram gorilla in this solar system, and that it's a very large gravity well, and getting that rock from that interior region of the solar system into Earth would be difficult. Now, there are still some open discussion as to whether some samples might come from Mercury.

Gravity Assist: These Space Rocks Have Seen It All, with Neyda Abreu (1)
Mar 18, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/imagefull-1367.png)
Blue ice field in the Miller Range, near the edge of a moraine, in Antarctica. Moraines are piles of rocks deposited along the edge of a glacier. Often they are good hunting grounds for meteorites, but the samples from space are mixed in with lots of terrestrial rocks. Credits: NASA/Cindy Evans

How do we know if a rock came from the Moon, Mars, or an asteroid? Planetary scientist Neyda Abreu has looked inside all kinds of meteorites to understand where they came from and what’s inside them. She also traveled to Antarctica to hunt for space rock treasure. Since she was a child in Venezuela, she has been curious about the life cycles of stars and planets. Learn about her work with meteorites and her journey to become a scientist. 

Jim Green: Small pieces of the earliest rock fall on the Earth every day. How do we find them? And what can they tell us about the makeup of our planet? And perhaps how life started on Earth?

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green. And this Gravity Assist, NASA’s interplanetary talk show. We’re going to explore the inside workings of NASA and meet fascinating people who make space missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Neyda Abreu. And she's a planetary scientist, and the senior advisor for science and research at NASA's Langley Research Center. Welcome, Neyda, to Gravity Assist.

Neyda Abreu: I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation. And thank you for having me.

Jim Green: My pleasure. Now, I understand that you've been involved in studying meteorites, what are meteorites?

Neyda Abreu: The most simplified way to explain it is rocks from space. Now, I think it was Muriel Rukeyser, who said that the universe is made out of stories, not of atoms. And if that's the case, then meteorites are some of the most interesting storytellers that you can imagine. They have been in the right places at the right times. And one of the things that really excited me about being able to look at these samples was the ability to piece together these stories of the solar system by understanding what had happened to these rocks.

Neyda Abreu: And they rain on us, so they make it easy on us to be able to ask those questions and to be able to see how these very small samples sometimes can tell us about very large processes, and how they can tell us about things that have happened over periods of times that are incredibly extensive.

Jim Green: Well, what originally got you interested in studying meteorites?

Neyda Abreu: So I was interested in origins of the solar system for quite a long time. I, as I said, I like stories. And this is, in some ways, the grandest story that you can probably tell.

Neyda Abreu: Well, I grew up in the Venezuelan Andes. And that's very north of South America. And there's some big mountains. And one of the nice things about being high up is there were some very nice telescopes. Some of the few equatorial latitude telescopes were located in my hometown. So that attracted me to going into astronomy as well. And eventually, I decided to come to the US to continue my studies. So when I was, I believe, 17, I came to Minnesota, I went to the University of Minnesota, and had a really fantastic opportunity to do my undergraduate in physics and astronomy.

Neyda Abreu: And then I realized that I wanted to have something tangible. And in some ways, being able to have this artifact, this piece of solar system history in my hands on my desk, being able to go back to the lab all the time and be able to look at these samples, sometimes I was the first person looking at some of these samples, [it] was extremely exciting.

Jim Green: Well, what kind of meteorites do we know about?


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Neyda Abreu, senior advisor for science and research at NASA's Langley Research Center, on a meteorite-collecting trip in Antarctica.  Credits: Neyda Abreu/Antarctic Search for Meteorites

Neyda Abreu: There’s a variety of different types, but at the largest scale, you can subdivide them in different ways. One way in which I like to think about them is there's meteorites that come from asteroids. So those are small, planet like bodies. Then there's meteorites that come from the Moon. And then there's meteorites that come from Mars. Other like other people like to think about them in terms of what they're made out of. So some, some of them think about them in terms of meteorites that are mainly made out of metals. They're ones that have some metal and some rocky components, silicate components inside of them, and some of them that are mostly rocky silicates. So there's ways in which you can cut the different types of meteorites depending on how you want to tell the story.

Jim Green: Well, how these meteorites that that you call metals, how do they form that way?

Neyda Abreu: So this is one of those very fascinating things about meteorites, and that is that some of asteroidal meteorites, the one that comes from these planetesimals, can come from different parts of an asteroid, right? So asteroids are traveling around, that's how we get meteorites here. And they collide with one another, as they collide with one another, they can break up and sometimes parts of the asteroid can be exposed that they normally wouldn't, and that they would normally not be available from very large bodies like the Earth or Mars or the Moon. So we can get pieces from the interior, from the metal rich-core of planets and being able to understand also processes that may be happening in other terrestrial planets, terrestrial planets are the rocky ones in the inside of the solar system. And we wouldn't be able to get any direct confirmation to our theories and our understanding of the interior of planets without having access to the interior of asteroids. So they're very exciting.

Jim Green: Well, you know, I have heard that maybe as much as 100 tons of meteoritic material fall on the Earth every day. I mean, that sounds like we ought to be able to walk outside our door and pick up a rock and say, hey, this rock came from space!

Neyda Abreu: And every once in a while people can do that. (laughs)

Jim Green: Yeah. Wow! So what are what should we be looking for? What are those features that make a meteoric rock look so different than the rocks here on Earth?

Neyda Abreu: Well, that's one of the hard parts. So in particular, for these meteorites that come from the Moon or come from Mars, they can be very similar to rocks that are part of our planet. Sometimes, even when we are actually looking for meteorites, and are out there specifically thinking about wanting to find meteorites, it can be difficult to tell them apart from terrestrial rocks. However, there is one thing that is very helpful, and that thing is the fusion crust.

Neyda Abreu: So before it becomes a meteorite, a rock that is crossing the atmosphere is called a meteor at and it interacts with the terrestrial atmosphere. So what happens is that most of the material that really is in contact with the atmosphere gets ablated. Basically, we lose it due to the interaction between the atmosphere and the meteorite. But there is a thin rind of this darkened material that is called a fusion crust, and it's very thin, you wouldn't be expecting anything that is like an inch thick. It's more like a fingernail thick. And it's dark. And in many cases, it can be continuous around the whole sample. So that is one of the ways to tell. It is also possible that some meteorites contain quite a bit of magnetic metal in them. Not every rock that attaches to a magnet is a meteorite. But many meteorites do (laughs) do attract a magnet. So it's more like accumulating a variety of different characteristics before you can definitely tell whether or not that's a meteorite.

Jim Green: So in 2013, one of the most spectacular meteorite falls happened in Russia in Chelyabinsk.

Jim Green: Well, a friend of mine sent me a piece of Chelyabinsk. And what I what I really enjoy about it, indeed, is that black fusion crossed over part of it. And that's, as you say, was exposed to the atmosphere. It literally melted rock. But inside it when I look, I don't see a uniform color. I see different types of, of colors, in terms of gray and, and not so gray and even white. What are those things?

Neyda Abreu: So it really depends on the meteorite, right. So in a meteorite that comes from Mars, or come from the moon, it would be minerals that are typically found in igneous rocks. When you move to asteroidal meteorites you can get a variety of other types of minerals. So if you were to look at, for example, some of the these meteorites that contain a lot of iron and not a lot of nickel, then you would get these iron nickel alloys. And if you were to actually polish that surface, you would get these incredibly intricate patterns. So that would be very different from a meteorite that came from Mars or the Moon. And then the asteroidal meteorites that come from bodies that never had that core-mantle-crust structure, will have a very different assortment of minerals as well.

Jim Green: So the accumulation of these minerals make up the different colors.

Neyda Abreu: Mhm.

Jim Green: Well, that's fascinating when you think about it. But I heard you also have been on a variety of expeditions to look for them. So does that mean you just get into a field and walk across looking for meteorites?

Neyda Abreu: In certain parts of the planet, that is actually a possibility. (laughs) And one of the most striking places to do that is Antarctica.

Jim Green: Wow. Antarctica! Why there?

Neyda Abreu: Why there? Well, for one thing, it's easy, right? You have an immense amount of ice, and you have black rocks on top of it. In certain parts of the ice, that's all the rocks that you get. So it's extremely easy. You go out, you see something black, that's a meteorite. It's not always that easy to find meteorites in in Antarctica, but in the ideal world, it is. So yeah, pretty spectacular place.

Jim Green: So what happens then is a group or a team will go down to Antarctica and get into snowmobiles, and then cruise across these glaciers looking for the black rocks. So how many expeditions like that have you been on?

Neyda Abreu: Just the once. And I have to say, can you imagine anything more fun than doing that?

Jim Green: (laughs)

Jim Green: Yeah, riding snowmobiles in the snow looking for meteorites. I understand that would be a blast. How long were you there? And then how many meteorites did you bring back?

Neyda Abreu: Oh, my God, we got so extremely lucky in my one season in Antarctica. So altogether, you have to spend some time ahead of time in Antarctica in a station called McMurdo, getting ready, getting trained grant getting supplies. So that took a couple weeks. Then we spent, I think it was about seven weeks, living in tents in the Transantarctic Mountains. And then we had to come back and pack everything that had been used and the meteorites make sure that everything was safe. So all together, it was a bit over two months.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Lipiec 30, 2023, 08:23
Gravity Assist: These Space Rocks Have Seen It All, with Neyda Abreu (2)
Mar 18, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/antarctica_2.jpg)
Planetary scientist Neyda Abreu visited Antarctica during a two-month fieldtrip in 2009 to 2010 to collect meteorites
Credits: Neyda Abreu/Antarctic Search for Meteorites


Jim Green: So what happened during that time period for celebrating the holidays?

Neyda Abreu: Oh, my goodness, we had such a fantastic winter holiday celebrations on the ice. We had really good weather. So we were able to have an outdoors, December 25th dinner, and we were able to take the covers of the snowmobile. you get all of this ice drifting towards them. So you don't want for them to accumulate all the ice. So you put these covers on top of them. But we were able to repurpose those covers to make a tablecloth. So we had a bunch of buckets, tablecloths from the snowmobile(s).   

Neyda Abreu: And we had a little oven. It was a very small oven. But we could use that to make our dinner, to make our turkey. And then we were very excited. We had everything set up for the outdoors part of the dinner. But we forgot that thawing a turkey in the field in Antarctica might be a tad of a challenge. So part of our team just decided we're gonna do this. We're gonna do this no matter what. So we have this monster thing. Tried to put it in the oven. There's no way. The turkey is much bigger than the oven. So there had to be a way to take this thing apart. And some of our teammates took a chainsaw to cut the turkey. So I do not know of another Christmas dinner celebration involving a chainsaw preparation of a turkey.

Jim Green: (laughs) You know, as you're saying this, I was thinking, well, if you're going to defrost the turkey, maybe everybody would have to take turns holding it, you know, trying to defrost it. But the chainsaw is much better way. (laughs)

Jim Green: And how many meteorites did you find? Do you remember?

Neyda Abreu: Yes, we went over the thousand individual samples.

Jim Green: Wow, that was a good season. Yeah.

Jim Green: So when we look through our collection, and we find perhaps, something from Mars, and perhaps something from the moon, are we also looking for rocks from Venus or other bodies in the solar system? And do we find them?

Neyda Abreu: So there have been some people who have suggested that some rocks that we have in a meteorite collection might come from Mercury. That is a difficult question to answer, right. And one of the obstacles that we run into when we think about how a rock from Mercury might have made it into Earth is that the Sun is the 10 to the 30 kilogram gorilla in this solar system, and that it's a very large gravity well, and getting that rock from that interior region of the solar system into Earth would be difficult. Now, there are still some open discussion as to whether some samples might come from Mercury.

Neyda Abreu: Venus is not as close to the sun, but it has its own set of challenges. We actually don't know all that much about what the surface of Venus, the rocky part of Venus, might be like. All we know is that it's really hot out in there. So if we think about the process of process of a collision and breaking a piece of, of planetary body, if you think about at an impactor coming in and colliding with the marshmallow-like surface of Venus, that becomes a bit of a challenge to be able to, to get some rocky material out.

Jim Green: Well, I also heard that you got involved in in analyzing some samples from one of the Japanese missions called Hayabusa2. Did you just get thesr samples and, and what do they like?

Neyda Abreu: Well, this is really quite an amazing opportunity. And I am so incredibly grateful to the Japanese team for letting us, being part of something that has taken so much time, so much effort, so much dedication, from JAXA and being able to share those samples internationally.

Neyda Abreu: But Hayabusa 1 and 2 went to asteroids. So these are the first time(s) that we get samples directly from asteroids. So these missions are the first opportunity that we've ever had to say, these samples come from this asteroid, and being able to create a bigger story around how they might have formed. So it's an incredible opportunity.

Jim Green: Well, they must also be related in a way to perhaps the development of life or providing an environment for which life could have started. What do we know about their relationship to life on Earth?

Neyda Abreu: So we are learning more and more as we go. Over the years that I have been involved in planetary sciences, we really have learned quite a bit about, first of all, the variety of the different organic compounds that that we can find in meteorites. We have also been able to ask questions about in what environments they could have formed. Some organics, some people theorize that they form in the interstellar medium, so interstellar space, some of them could have formed in the asteroids themselves. One line of thinking is that those asteroids would give us enough of a high temperature and enough water to be able to have those molecules interact with each other, become more complex. And they also give us surfaces in which those reactions can occur. Some of these minerals can act as catalysts for reactions that are happening, allowing for the more complex chemistry to occur. How that jump from having amino acids and sugars and hydrocarbons in carbonaceous chondrites goes into forming RNA or DNA, that's a big gap. And we are still trying to understand that. That is a very active area of research. But it really feels like the more meteorites we get, the more variety of different environments that we can trace those meteorites to. And now the Hayabusa2 samples, the Hayabusa samples as well, the more we can understand how this happened, because obviously, the organics came with the rocky stuff. So at some point, (laughs) they had to have been able to form these more complex organic chemistry.

Jim Green: Right. So before life can get started, you at least have to start out with all the right material.

Neyda Abreu: Yeah.

Jim Green: Well, you're currently working at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia as the senior advocate for science and research, what exactly is that position all about?

Neyda Abreu: Well, if you can find a dream job for me, that would be it. My job is to basically find the obstacles that keep scientists and researchers in engineering, from accomplishing their goals and try to find solutions for those, advocate for solutions for those. So when I was thinking about what my next step as a scientist was, I was a professor, and I was working on my research, it really felt that the most important thing that I could do was to help others. And this is an incredible opportunity to do that.

Jim Green: Well, Neyda, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what that person place or event was that got them so excited about being in the sciences they are today. And I call that event a gravity assist. So Neyda, what was your gravity assist?

Neyda Abreu: Well, I, I had an interesting set of events, actually. And obviously, I've had a lot of wonderful people who have really contributed to my position in the sciences, to my interest in the sciences, etc. But if I were to go back in time, and go back to that initial moment, there were three events that happened when I was a first grader. And that is, when I decided that I wanted to work for NASA. So, no pressure there.

Jim Green: (laughs)

Neyda Abreu: And this was 1986, which was a very interesting year from the standpoint of NASA, very difficult year, in many ways. So between January and February of 1986, there were three events, one very personal, my great grandmother, who was very old and had a wonderful life passed, unfortunately. And there was also the terrible tragedy of the Challenger in early 1986. In the midst of all of these, a comet called Halley was making perihelion. Now, Halley is a fascinating comet. And one of the things that makes it really fascinating is that it comes by every 76 years.

Neyda Abreu: So when I was thinking about these tragedies, and the loss of life, and the cycle of life, and it was the first time that I thought about the things as a little kid, the idea of having this little piece of the solar system come with that regularity, and within the cycle of human life, really made me think about these big questions and these big cycles. So, as humans, we have birth, you grow, you have these adult stages, and then you die. And in some ways, stars do the same. And that was a shock.

Neyda Abreu: So it was those cycles, it was the ability to connect with others that have lived maybe thousands of years before me and with people who will live a thousand years into the future. And the stories that we were able to tell. I wanted to learn more about solar systems, how they formed, how these little bits of ice and rock traveled around and witness all our happy times, sad times, stable times, unstable times, and continue to tell stories about our world. So that's how I got to be a scientist.

Jim Green: Oh, wow. From very early on. That's fantastic. Well, Neyda, thanks so much for joining me.

Neyda Abreu: Well, thank you so much for having me.

Jim Green: Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Mar 18, 2022
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-these-space-rocks-have-seen-it-all-with-neyda-abreu
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Sierpień 06, 2023, 07:49
jak poszukiwać technosygnatur na egzoplanetach ?
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Ravi Kopparapu: So if you find CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons] and you think, oh, maybe that's a technology, then you want to find corresponding other kind of pollutants in your data. And maybe for that you need to have a different kind of a telescope to do that, because not everything will be seen at the same time. And so if you find several different signatures of gases, if you do find other pollutants, then you know, hey, you know, there's something going on that planet. Yeah, that's great.

Gravity Assist: Do Other Planets Make Pollution? With Ravi Kopparapu (1)
Apr 8, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/587_5k_exo_beauty_lores_final.png)
What do planets outside our solar system, or exoplanets, look like? A variety of possibilities are shown in this illustration. Scientists discovered the first exoplanets in the 1990s. As of 2022, the tally stands at just over 5,000 confirmed exoplanets. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

On a quest to find out if we are not alone in the universe, Ravi Kopparapu at NASA Goddard studies how we could use telescopes to detect signs of life beyond our solar system. These include both signs of biology and technology, since there are certain kinds of signals and chemicals that do not occur naturally. Learn about the planets that are most exciting to Ravi and how science fiction inspired his journey to become a scientist.

Jim Green: Is there intelligent life beyond our solar system? And how are we ever going to find it? 

Ravi: No one signal is a good signature of technology or biology. You need a combination of things.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green, and this Gravity Assist, NASA’s interplanetary talk show. We’re going to explore the inside workings of NASA and meet fascinating people who make space missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Ravi Kopparapu. And he is a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, who thinks a lot about the signs of life and what they might be on a planet outside our solar system. We call that planet an exoplanet. Ravi makes climate models of exotic faraway worlds and investigates how we could detect biology, but also technology, coming from these exoplanets. Welcome, Ravi, to Gravity Assist.

Ravi Kopparapu: Thank you, Jim. I'm super excited to be here.

Jim Green: Well, you know, I heard that you used to study something completely different: gravitational waves. What are those? And, and why did you stop working on that particular topic?

Ravi Kopparapu: Yes. (laughs) So I did my PhD in physics, in the field of gravitational waves. To give a brief summary: Imagine you're throwing a rock into a clear water. And the ripples after you throw the rock into the water, the ripples coming from there are essentially what we think of as gravitational waves coming from an object. Any object in this universe has gravity. And so gravitational waves are essentially when you have a moving object, they're very dense moving objects, going around each other, or, you know, exploding stars. They emit these spacetime waves, you know, Einstein theorized that there could be spacetime, right? So these are the spacetime waves traveling across the universe.

Ravi Kopparapu: Why did I leave this field? I was at Penn State working as a postdoc on gravitational waves. But at that time, I heard about this new field of science that's just coming out exoplanets. And I was like, Okay, wait, this sounds interesting. And the main thing I wanted to do is that, can I explain my work to my mother? And if she asked me, “Hey, Ravi, what are you doing?” And I'll say, “Oh, I'm working to find alien life.” And that’s simple for me to explain to her. And it was exciting. And my daughter used to say that, you know, “my dad finds aliens.” I felt like a Hollywood star. And so I thought, “Okay, let's go ahead and do it.” And then that's how I started.

Jim Green: Well, that's fantastic. But you're really doing it in a very important way. And that is looking at atmospheres of exoplanets, and not just any old atmosphere. How did you end up making that decision?

Ravi Kopparapu: Right. So the reason why I study these atmospheres of exoplanets is because I think, the ultimate goal of answering the question, “Are we alone in this universe?” with the existing telescopes and existing instruments, is to look at the atmospheres of these exoplanets because they're so far away, it's really not likely anytime soon for us to travel to those planets, right? And so the best thing we can do at this point is to point our telescopes collect the light coming from the atmospheres of the planet, and then look [at] what kind of gases they are. And that was exciting to me. And so I started working on the climate models of these planets.

Jim Green: Well, why do you think, and I believe it's the majority of planetary scientists and astrophysicists think that there could be complex or intelligent life on planets beyond our solar system?

Ravi Kopparapu: So, just to give you an idea, right now, we know more than 5000 exoplanets, planets orbiting other stars. On average now  we think there is at least one planet for every star in our galaxy. And our galaxy has at least a minimum of 100 billion stars. So there are at least 100 billion planets in our galaxy. And imagine the statistics of having so many planets around in our galaxy, and many of them could be smaller, Earth sized planets that could host life.

Jim Green: Well, I know you've done some really fascinating work on exoplanet climate models. What are some of the climate conditions you expect on these exoplanets?

Ravi Kopparapu: If you asked me this question, 30 years ago, I would say oh, all of them are going to be Earth-like, conditions or maybe you know, Jupiter-like planets, because how else plants are going to form other than our solar system arrangement, right? I mean, come on. Everyone should look like us. Right?

Jim Green: Right. Right.

Ravi Kopparapu: Of course.

Jim Green: (laughs)

Ravi Kopparapu: But then what guess what happened in 1995? When they first found the exoplanet the first exoplanet around a sun-like star, it's a Jupiter sized planet, in a four-day orbit around a sun like star.

Jim Green: Wow.

Ravi Kopparapu: Yes. And it was unexpected. And that's why we wanted to see how these planet conditions are going to change from star to star. What we are seeing is only a small subset of the climate conditions that we are discovering right now. Super-hot, small-size, planets, large size planets, and also habitable Earth sized planets are also we found them and with lots of different kinds of missions. One important thing though, Kepler Mission, which was launched in 2009, found that the most common type of planet is some were in between Earth and the Neptune size. And we don't have that in our solar system.

Jim Green: So yeah, we call that a super-Earth or a mini-Neptune.

Ravi Kopparapu:  Exactly.

Jim Green: Yeah. So something happened as our planets evolved, that that one of those didn't form. Well, what do you think that was?

Ravi Kopparapu: Those kinds of planets are somewhere in between, transitioning between a gas giant and a rocky planet. They don't have as dense atmospheres as Jupiter or Neptune, or they don't have completely thin atmospheres like our Earth. They have somewhere intermediate between both the planets. They may have little of hydrogen, little of, you know, carbon dioxide or ammonia, but not too much, not too little.

Jim Green: Yes, that's what makes them fascinating, that we don't see them in our own solar system, but we can see them around other stars. Well, are there any exoplanets that you're really excited about right now?

Ravi Kopparapu: Yes, actually. Our closest star is Proxima Centauri. And four or five years ago, astronomers have discovered a planet, an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone around Proxima Centauri. It's called Proxima Centauri b. So this is what I'm really excited about, that opportunity right now.

Jim Green: Well, that star and the planet is only about 4 light-years away. There's another planetary system a little further that I'm also excited about and that's TRAPPIST-1, and that's it about 40 light-years away. What can you tell us about the TRAPPIST-1 system of planets?

Ravi Kopparapu: So you asked if I'm excited, and what kind of a planet I’m excited about. I said Proxima Centauri b. Well, we won't be able to characterize or at least look at the atmosphere of the planet in the next decade or so. But for TRAPPIST, we have James Webb Space Telescope up there, and it is one of the primary targets in the habitable zone planets with James Webb Space Telescope. So there are seven planets in that system.

Ravi Kopparapu: TRAPPIST-1 system has three habitable zone planets in it.

Ravi Kopparapu: We would like to see if the planets themselves can retain the atmosphere, because the star is pretty small. And these small stars usually have very high flaring and ejections of very high intensity X-rays and the UV rays. So we would like to see, first of all, do they have any atmosphere? And if they do, do they have water-based atmosphere? Because water is essential for life.

Jim Green: It turns out that star, as you said, is a small dwarf star, those planets are really close. And like our Moon, are they tidally locked? Do they always have one face pointing to the star, and the other pointing away?

Ravi Kopparapu: Yes, they are tidally locked. In fact, I would even go ahead and say they are synchronously rotating. Essentially what it means is what Moon is doing to us, always facing the same side of the planet to the star. And because of that, so this is exactly what I do in my research work in my climate modeling. We model these tidally locked planets around these cool stars. And, and because these planets are tidally locked, or synchronously rotating facing only one side all the time, the the climate and the weather is completely different than what how we have it on Earth. For example, if you're on that planet, there is always a thick cloud cover right in front of the Sun side of the planet, always all the time. And because of that, that cloud will try to protect or at least try to not increase the surface temperatures as much as it would have if you if you don't have the cloud cover. And so the climate is totally different.

Jim Green: What is the concept of this habitable zone around a star?

Ravi Kopparapu: So the way we define in the exoplanet field, the habitable zone is, it's the region around a star, where a rocky-size planet with suitable atmosphere also has liquid water on its surface, and you can see how I carefully try to craft this definition. Well, liquid water is essential for life. And so we want to see if there is liquid water on the planet. Why surface? Why not subsurface? Well, these planets are exoplanets. They are quite far away from us. So within our solar system, there are Jupiter's moons and Saturn moons where we think there are, there is subsurface, liquid water. So we have the luxury of sending missions to those planets and see if we can find the water under these moons. We don't have that kind of luxury for exoplanets. So we have to focus only on the surface liquid water. And that's the reason why we focus habitable zone concept on that.

Ravi Kopparapu: We have to understand that our Earth's example is only one possible way of having life and intelligent life. So every planet’s evolution would be different. So that that that's something that when we have to look when we are looking for exoplanet life.

Jim Green: Yeah, in fact, one can also think that we actually co-evolved with the Earth. We were in the right place, the right time, our moon helped us in many different ways. Our climate was great. And that really enabled us to develop into intelligent beings. This brings up a really fascinating topic in that is, how might we detect signs of technologies developed by intelligent beings on other planets around other stars? And we call that technology technosignatures. So what kind of technosignatures should we be looking for?

Ravi Kopparapu: So we know already one technosignatures that several of our colleagues are doing the radio technosignatures, radio, it's called a SETI search for extraterrestrial intelligence. There are other ways that we can do, for example, pollution on the planet produced by industrialized civilizations. Maybe they have some sort of laser pulses sending as a beacon towards us. We can also detect them with the night-side city lights. Every civilization needs energy to produce and you know, to sustain. If we can build a telescope and look at the planet and if we detect nightside city lights, we know a that's one of the technosignatures. So there are several of them like that.

Ravi Kopparapu: Chlorofluorocarbons, the CFCs that we use in our refrigerants, there is nothing in the nature that we know of, and that we can think of that can produce CFCs naturally, biologically, or hey, even abiotically. There is only one way to do that. And that's through technology -- that we know of.

Jim Green: That begs the question then, what would be the next set of observations you would then make?

Ravi Kopparapu: Okay, this is even, another excellent point. No one signal is a good signature of technology or biology, you need a combination of things, okay.

Ravi Kopparapu: So if you find CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons] and you think, oh, maybe that's a technology, then you want to find corresponding other kind of pollutants in your data. And maybe for that you need to have a different kind of a telescope to do that, because not everything will be seen at the same time. And so if you find several different signatures of gases, if you do find other pollutants, then you know, hey, you know, there's something going on that planet. Yeah, that's great.

Ravi Kopparapu: One of the important things that we have to do is to remove or identify false positives.

Jim Green: Now, what do you mean by that? (laughs)

Ravi Kopparapu: Ah, that's a good point. And, and also false negatives. I'm going to say about both them,

Jim Green: Okay, okay.

Ravi Kopparapu: Okay. The false positive is that you detect a signal, and you think it is your, the signal that you want, you know, “I found an alien technosignature or something.” But then it turns out to be out something the nature produced, or maybe some instrumental problem. So that's a false positive. False negative is, you detect something, and you say that, “Oh, it's  instrumental noise. It's nothing there. It's from coming from the star.” But it actually is a signal from the thing that you want to detect!
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Sierpień 06, 2023, 07:49
Gravity Assist: Do Other Planets Make Pollution? With Ravi Kopparapu (2)

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Dr. Ravi Kopparapu studies climate models of exoplanets at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Credits: NASA

Jim Green: Yeah, I'm concerned about that, too, as you probably know. You know, we have to be able to be confident, you know, create a level of confidence in each one of the observations. But what's exciting about the field is, we make these analyses on signals, we get that out, the scientific community thinks of new and inventive and creative ways to either disprove the idea or enhance the idea. And that's the process of science that we want to have.

Jim Green: Well, I have to tell you, you know, they'll come a time when we may have to say we're very confident that we have seen signs of extraterrestrial life. Do you think we humans, as a civilization here on Earth, are ready for that news?

Ravi Kopparapu: I think we are ready.

Jim: (laughs)

Ravi: I one-hundred-percent believe we are ready. And I'll tell you why.

Jim Green: (laughs) Okay, because I've been asked that. And I've said I don't think we're ready. So, so I'm very fascinated to hear your response.

Ravi Kopparapu: Okay, so I like to say this: With the discoveries of exoplanets and with the discoveries of, you know, habitable zone, Earth, with water on Mars, and every aspect of science, we are not suddenly breaking out. It's not 30 years ago, if you say that, Oh, we found a life on other planets, then everybody -- “Oh, what? What did you do?” So here we found we are saying that okay, we found several thousands of planets. We are inching closer and closer. So we are getting everyone ready to accept to the point that “hey, you know, just, we are finding lots of neighborhoods, we are finding lots of houses. It's just a matter of time before we find people in those houses.”

Jim Green: Okay.

Ravi Kopparapu: So I think we are ready.

Jim Green: All right. I don't think we're ready. And the reason why is I'm not sure what the observations are that will be the smoking gun that tell us what we've really found when we actually make the announcement and that's going to require a lot more educating everyone as to what we've really measured and why we really think we have a high level of confidence to determine that it's life.

Ravi Kopparapu: Okay, that's a scientists’ problem.

Jim Green: (laughs)

Ravi Kopparapu: Not the general public’s problem. (laughs)

Jim Green: (laughs) Okay, okay.

Ravi Kopparapu: (laughs)

Jim Green: Well, you know, I've also heard that you've been involved in looking at unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs. And and you're approaching that from a scientific perspective, of course. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Ravi Kopparapu: So this is what I say, when we talk about the UAPs and search for life. They are two completely independent topics. We cannot combine them, unless we have super compelling information that, okay, they are somehow connected. For me, the search for life is what we just talked about all this time, exoplanets and telescopes and instruments and whatever. UAPs are something that are in our skies, and we don't know what they are.

Ravi Kopparapu: And essentially, that's where I stop and say, okay, because we don't know what they are, we have to observe them with different instruments, collect the data, analyze, and then you figure out what they are. Apart from that everything else is speculation. And this is what I call a scientific applying a scientific methodology to studying the UAPs.

Jim Green: These UAPs may not be technological in nature. The many possibilities are atmospheric events or other natural phenomena. We just don’t know yet. 

Jim Green: Well do you have enough data to make a determination? Or do we still lack a lot of knowledge and observations of UAPs, to make a determination?

Ravi Kopparapu: I think we do need a lot of data, collection of data, before we do any kind of determination. And that's where we are right now collecting the data.

Jim Green: Well, Ravi, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what that person place or event was that got them so excited about being in the sciences that they are today. And I call that event a gravity assist. So Ravi, what was your gravity assist?

Ravi Kopparapu: My gravity assist, there were two of them. One, before I entered my PhD program. I'm a big fan of Star Trek. And I felt that that was a community where I could relate to and I wanted to study life from, you know, other planets. And that really, really motivated me since I was in eighth or ninth grade. And, and that really motivated me to pursue science, math, physics, and I was told to do well in those to become a scientist. And I kept that goal all the time, all, all through my life.

Ravi Kopparapu: The second one was had that happened about nine years ago, when I was writing a paper and the paper was about how common earth like planets in our galaxy. And I found, I did some calculation, I found that they are more than what I expected, and I literally jumped out of my chair, like, literally. I was like, “This can't be possible. I'm standing in front of history that's happening right now that we will for the first time in our life, we know, how common are Earth-like planets.” And and that really motivated me to study. You know, how do we find even more out? Okay, if they're so common, where can we find this life? And that's really motivated me to pursue more and more opportunities. And that's why I'm at NASA Goddard, because this is where the missions happen. This is where we try to find life on other planets. And that's, that's my second gravity assist, I would say.

Jim Green: Well, that's fantastic. You know, your excitement about the science and the things that you learn propel you to keep going and accelerate you. And hopefully, you will be the one to announce that we have found life beyond Earth.

Ravi Kopparapu: (laughs) Oh, I hope you will be with me at that time, Jim.

Jim Green: I'll at least be able to interview you. (laughs) Well, Ravi, thanks so much for joining me for this fantastic look at finding habitable worlds in other solar systems.

Ravi Kopparapu: Oh, thank you so much, Jim. This is wonderful. Thank you.

Jim Green: Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Apr 8, 2022
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-do-other-planets-make-pollution-with-ravi-kopparapu
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Sierpień 13, 2023, 07:29
Poprzez badanie przejawów życia organicznego głęboko pod grubą pokrywą lodową w ziemskich warunkach można spekulować nad możliwościami istnienia życia na wodnych Księżycach w Układzie słonecznym.
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Catherine Walker: So a few things, I guess, out in the solar system, we're working on a project to try to look at how life might have evolved in Europa’s ocean, looking at sort of how you might expect things to evolve with the lack of sunlight, which is usually what we think of here on Earth, we think of “oh, you need photosynthesis and sunlight and water to survive.” And obviously, they have enough water on Europa, but none of those other things, and a lot of radiation, which we don't have here on Earth. And so we have to sort of rethink how we think about how life forms and how it maintains itself. So we're looking at that.

Gravity Assist: Walking on Broken Ice, with Catherine Walker (1)
Apr 22, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/cwalker_antarctica_iceshelf.jpeg)
NASA management fellow and visiting scientist Catherine Walker is seen in October 2014 on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica, in front of Mount Erebus, an active volcano (in the background). Credits: Jacob Buffo/Dartmouth College

An ice shelf collapsed in East Antarctica in March 2022, concerning scientists who track melting glaciers, sea level rise, and other effects of climate change. Catherine Walker, a visiting scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, uses NASA satellite data to look at the progression of events like this one to understand how large ice structures collapse. She is also looking at Jupiter’s moon Europa and what kind of life might be able to survive under the ice there. Learn about her Antarctica adventures and her scientific journey on this episode of Gravity Assist.

Jim Green: On Earth Day, we're going to talk about water and ice.

Catherine Walker: The ice sheets of the Earth, Greenland and Antarctica are sort of two of the biggest uncertainties, in future climate projections.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green, and this Gravity Assist, NASA’s interplanetary talk show. We’re going to explore the inside workings of NASA and meet fascinating people who make space missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Catherine Walker, and she is a management fellow at NASA Headquarters and a visiting scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. Catherine has done fantastic research, looking at the oceans and ice on Earth, as well as other planetary bodies. Welcome, Catherine, to Gravity Assist.

Catherine Walker: Thanks. It's very exciting to be here. (laughs)

Jim Green: Well, you know, I'm really delighted to talk to you about, you know, one of my favorite topics, which is water in whatever form we can get it in. And indeed, you've gotten interested in studying oceans and glaciers. How did that happen?

Catherine Walker: Early in my life, we lived near the beach. And so we saw the ocean all the time. And I was sort of just captured by its power, because it, living right on the coast, you get a lot of storm damage and things like that. And other days, you'd look in, it's flat, calm. And so it was just sort of this dynamic system that you can see moving and doing things on the Earth on really short timescales. And so you know, on a human level, you just want to understand that.

Catherine Walker: Early on in my career, though, I was a geologist. And eventually, that turned into looking at planetary surfaces, things like Mars and the Moon, early in my undergrad career. And then eventually, there was a newspaper article about Cassini had seen Enceladus. And I learned that there were these planets that were made entirely of ice, which, you know, in some, in some sort of thought process that is similar to rock when it's that far in the solar system. And so I ended up looking at ice on planetary scales, and then coming back down to Earth and saying, “Hey, what does it do here on Earth?” And so I sort of did a roundabout way of becoming a glaciologist.

Jim Green: Well, when you go out in the field, you've been actually looking at glaciers. What are you trying to do when you go out and, you know, explore?

Catherine Walker: Yeah, that's a great question. And I guess there's multiple answers. The first, first and sort of foremost, when we go out to look at glaciers in my research anyway, we're looking for how, right at that point where the ocean and ice meet. So these are called marine terminating glaciers. These exist in Greenland, they exist in Alaska, and obviously, Antarctica, which is surrounded by the ocean. And so we look at how the ocean and ice sort of interactions happen over time, and how the warming ocean since that's the sort of big sink of heat here on Earth, how that changes and how that then affects our ice caps and ice sheets on the Earth. And so we go out there and measure how the ice has, is shrinking, mostly, sometimes growing, but usually using airborne science and satellites. And then some, you know, ground measurements that we go out and measure things like radar, measurements of thickness and things like that. Another answer, though, is we use Earth's ice sheets to better understand ice on other planets and how it interacts with oceans or water there. And so a lot of the times we go out with the intention of sort of measuring these things, not just for the processes here on Earth, but trying to understand the physics of it so we can sort of take that knowledge and move it to other planets.

Jim Green: Didn't we just have a big glacial disconnection, where a big ice sheet was broken off? And that and that's because it just got thinner and thinner and broke off? What do we know about that? And how large was that glacier that broke apart?

Catherine Walker: Yeah, the Conger Ice Shelf, which was in East Antarctica, completely collapsed, which is not totally unprecedented. There have been a few ice shelf collapses in West Antarctica, which is generally thought of as the warmer part of Antarctica. It's sort of hard to think about Antarctica being warm at all.

Jim Green: (laughs)

Catherine Walker: But the western side is generally what we think about when we think about these melting glaciers and ice sheets that we that we hear about in the news.

Catherine Walker: East Antarctica, on the other hand, scientists generally think of as relatively stable. We sort of have that as our bank of, of freshwater ice on the Earth. It's very cold, it's very slow. It's like the definition of glacial pace over there. Doesn't really do much. And so we were sort of thinking that it of that place is stable. But yeah, a couple of weeks ago, a small ice shelf called Conger Ice Shelf, which is about 1,200 square kilometers in area. We were watching it over a few months now. But now that we have, now that we know we collapsed, we can use that satellite record to look backwards in time and see what it was doing over time. And we could see that it was just getting thinner and thinner, as the ocean warmed it.

Catherine Walker: And eventually, something called an atmospheric river arrived in Antarctica in early March. And what an atmospheric river is, it's a big weather event that sort of brings in heat and moisture from the tropics, which is not unprecedented, but very rare in Antarctica, and you get these temperatures and winds and waves that came in with this, with this sort of low pressure event that turned it into this, sort of, “too much to handle” for this thinning ice shelf, so it collapsed.

Jim Green: Wow. Well, what happens to it then? Does it eventually completely get consumed by the ocean that it swims in and then the ocean rises?

Catherine Walker: Yeah, so the ice shelf, as it broke up, it made a few big icebergs that are now floating off into the southern ocean and they'll go on to melt probably within a few months or a year. You know, sort of trailing freshwater and changing the nutrient amounts for, for ecosystems down there as they go. The other sort of, I guess, concern that we have is now that that ice shelf has come away from the coast, there's nothing holding back the glaciers behind it. And that's usually what we worry about when we talk about sea level rise. When these ice shelves around edges of the continent collapse, they can release all this ice uphill, to slide more quickly into the ocean, and that's what will cause sea level rise.

Jim Green: Wow. Well, how does your research fit into the bigger picture of climate change?

Catherine Walker: Yeah, that's a great question. So the ice sheets of the Earth, Greenland and Antarctica, are sort of two of the biggest uncertainties, in future climate projections and in particular projections, for sea level rise, timing and volume, I guess. So when we think about how, you know, studying ice and ocean interactions, how those inform on future climate predictions, we usually think about how those will affect sea level as we know it.

Catherine Walker: And one of the biggest unknowns right now anyway, in glacier science is how quickly something can collapse, which seems like a big, fairly easy question to answer, like, you know, if you look at the Cliffs of Dover, for example, why aren't those collapsing? How are they holding themselves up? You know, it's not a miracle. That sort of material, rocky material has a strength to it, it can hold itself up to a certain degree, and then you get these little calving off periods.

Catherine Walker: Same thing happens for ice. We just watch things like this recent Conger collapse, Conger Ice Shelf collapse. We use those events to study how strong ice is. And then we can study how quickly these retreats can happen, and how then how quickly sea level rise will happen. So yeah, that's how those two sort of feed into our expectations for the future.

Jim Green: Well, I heard that you also had a robot in Antarctica. What were you doing down there? And what was that project all about?

Catherine Walker: Yeah. So this is a nice tie-in to this sort of cross between Earth science and planetary science. So when I was a postdoc researcher at Georgia Tech, I was working on a project looking at the ice-ocean interface. So when we think about these ice shelves in Antarctica, it's just this big slab of ice that's about, can be up to 100 meters thick. So we're talking substantial ice cover. So you have this ocean underneath that is completely removed from sunlight, or really any current activity or anything like that.

Catherine Walker: It's just sort of this cavity underneath ice. And so we were down there, trying to study what's happening right at that interface between the ocean and the ice underneath, and what sort of life lives under there. And so, you know, how else do you do that, but you send down a submersible vehicle. Unfortunately, people couldn't go in it, which would have been fun, but we couldn't go. It was just a little, basically a camera and some oceanographic instruments. And we sent it down. It sort of looked like a torpedo.

Catherine Walker: And we sent it down through a hole in the ice, and it swam around down there. And it was really neat, because I guess as a, as a glaciologist, or an ice person, I was sort of just there to see what the shape of the ice looked like and what how much was melting and things like that. But once we got to the sea floor, we could actually see these, you know, anemones and starfish and like something I thought was a lobster but it was just a giant shrimp. It was it was really cool. And you know, just thinking of how these things live down there with no sunlight. And no, you know, no nutrient source or anything like that was, was sort of super cool to see. Just sort of proved the point of like, you never know what you're going to find when you go exploring.

Jim Green: That's right. And you always have to look. So yeah, so these interfaces between the ice and the water are really important. And I'm just delighted that you were continuing to find life in those interfaces, because the Earth is not the only planet that has those kinds of interfaces. But before we talk about things out in the solar system, I want to ask you about some memorable stories that you may have had in the Antarctic.

Catherine Walker: Sure. So one of the most memorable things that happened to me when I was there. So maybe this is, you know, not clear to anyone who hasn't been there, maybe. And I didn't know this before I got there. But so GPS doesn't work near the poles, just because it sort of searches and searches for north or south but can't find it. So you can't use that to figure out where you are. And since we had this robot underneath the ice, we also couldn't visually see it, because it's covered, you know, there's ice, but then there's lots of snow on top of it. So you can't see through the ice or anything.

Catherine Walker: And so to figure out where the robot was below us, when we were standing on top of the ice, we had these giant magnetic rings that we had to hold and wear earphones. And when the magnetic pinger on the robot was below us, it would make a buzz in our, in our ears. And so we were sort of wandering around this great big area on the ice, hoping to hear a ping to figure out where the robot was. And I saw this sort of hill, and I was like, “Oh, I'm gonna go that way.” And so I started walking up. And I knew from my experience in my PhD that usually those hills meant that this was the transition between sea ice and an ice shelf. It's just windblown snow, that sort of making that transition. So sea ice is not permanent ice, it's, it's frozen out of the ocean in the winter.

Catherine Walker: And so that's what I had been walking on. And I was like, “I'm gonna go up onto the ice shelf, which is where we thought the robot was underneath.” And so knowing my significant experience looking at satellite images of the area, I said, “Oh, I didn't realize they were attached to each other, the sea ice and the ice shelf.” But in my eye at the time, I was like, “No, it looks connected, I'm going to walk up this hill.” And so I walked up, and suddenly I dropped up to my armpits, basically, into the snow. And I had to hoist myself out.

Catherine Walker: And I grabbed the, the magnetic ring. I was like, “Oh, my God, what happened?” and I looked back down, to where I popped out of, and there was this giant opening. And it was basically it wasn't connected, I was right, from my satellite experience. There was about a 20-meter drop down into the ocean from there, and so survived that. (laughs) But that teaches you to trust your intuition and not your visual sight. (laughs)

Jim Green: Wow. Yeah, that could have been dangerous. I'm so glad you survived that, indeed. (laughs)

Jim Green: So as our ice sheets begin to melt, and that's going to continue to happen. Is there a process for which they can come back?

Catherine Walker: That's a great question, one that's sort of goes to our hope for the for the future, right? Because we hear a lot of news reports and things that say, Hey, you know, expect the worst. Another ice sheet or an ice other ice shelf has collapsed? Oh, no. Which it is sad to watch them collapse, of course. And there is a large amount of evidence that the ice on Earth is shrinking, of course, but one of the things that we don't know, aside from some of the stuff I talked about before about how it's holding itself together, we also don't know, you know, as more ice melts into the ocean, we don't know how all that freshwater getting added to the system will change the ocean currents in the ocean system as well.

Catherine Walker: And so most of what we think about in terms of how If we expect things to change in the in the future is set up based on how things work now. But we don't exactly know, you know, if you add a whole bunch of, you know, say all of West Antarctica disintegrated, which hopefully it doesn't. But even if it all did, you know, what would that actually do to the ocean? And it might even stop itself, it might change current systems and things like that to either slow or stop the process from continuing.

Catherine Walker: So we don't know a lot of those natural feedbacks that might actually kick in to help, you know, reverse the, the process. They're also, you know, a lot of, I guess geoengineering ideas about how to sort of enhance the albedo of the earth and reflect more sunlight back up. You know, the Earth has a natural process in sea ice formation that does that already. But if we can sort of prop up that process and cool things down maybe, there are a lot of ideas like that circulating as well. So it's not all it's not all bad news.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Sierpień 13, 2023, 07:29
Gravity Assist: Walking on Broken Ice, with Catherine Walker (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/catherine-pic.jpg)
Catherine Walker in Antarctica in 2014. Credits: Jacob Buffo/Dartmouth College

Jim Green: Well, your experience on Earth about oceans and ice, and we're finding those kinds of objects out in the solar system. What are the top icy moons that you're interested in when you when you think about these, these wonderful phenomena?

Catherine Walker: Well, the first one that comes to mind, of course, is Europa. It’s sort of this perfect, or seemingly perfect laboratory, for life to maybe evolve if it's there. It's got a liquid ocean underneath a nearly pure water ice ice shell. We can see in the cracks on the surface, that there's a lot of salts and things that you might expect from an ocean very similar to ours. So that one's sort of a pretty obvious one.

Catherine Walker: There's also Enceladus which is a moon of Saturn. (laughs) Which also likely has a, well, it at least has a south polar ocean if not a global ocean, also a pure water ice ice shell. And there's other ones I guess, like, you know, Ganymede or Callisto, which are older well and Ganymede, it's much larger. But a lot of these places that maybe people don't think about all the time, but I think it's hard for us to imagine an ocean below any sort of solid crust, but there's a lot of these places. a lot of these icy moons out there that, you know, look very solid to us and are expected to be solid because they're sitting out in the middle of, you know, way-below-freezing solar system, but they actually have a lot of water. And you know, comparatively Earth is pretty dry compared to some of these places. So it's exciting.

Jim Green: It sounds to me like our new view of the solar system is that the solar system is a soggy place.

Catherine Walker: (laughs) It’s a good way to put it.

Jim Green: (laughs) Well, what projects are you currently working on now?

Catherine Walker: So a few things, I guess, out in the solar system, we're working on a project to try to look at how life might have evolved in Europa’s ocean, looking at sort of how you might expect things to evolve with the lack of sunlight, which is usually what we think of here on Earth, we think of “oh, you need photosynthesis and sunlight and water to survive.” And obviously, they have enough water on Europa, but none of those other things, and a lot of radiation, which we don't have here on Earth. And so we have to sort of rethink how we think about how life forms and how it maintains itself. So we're looking at that.

Catherine Walker: Another project I'm working on is looking at that Conger Ice Shelf that we were talking about earlier, how that is going to affect that particular region of Antarctica, in the near term and long term. And another project that I'm working on now is just looking at sort of how to how to better I guess, observe high mountain regions. The ICESAT spacecraft, it's a really great spacecraft to look at flat things which is good for ice sheets, for example, but it doesn't do so well on things that are highly sloped. For example, like mountain regions, or quickly changing glaciers so at the edges of the ice, you get these places that are highly cracked and are moving really quickly and unfortunately ICESAT doesn't do as well there. So we're looking at designing new technologies to try to figure out how to do that better.

Jim Green: In thinking about the possibility of life underneath the icy crust of Europa, how could they possibly survive? And what would they look like?

Catherine Walker: That's a great question. And I'm sure a lot of people have a lot of answers. But one of the things we can think about on Earth is that, you know, a few decades ago, I think the general idea of life on Earth was, you need sunlight, you need water, you need certain number of nutrients. But, you know, over, over the last few decades, even this is new, sort of science, you know, we know now, things called extremophiles have been found things that live in, you know, some of the hottest places, the bottom the ocean at those vents, those sort of mid-Atlantic ridge vents, never would have thought of that before, you know, a few decades ago, that that would be a place that anybody would like to live.

Catherine Walker  But, you know, we found organisms that not only don't need sunlight, but then they can also live with these high-high-heat places in the darkness, and things like that. And we also found underneath the ice sheets on Earth, you know, we've drilled a really deep hole in the ice in the middle of the ice sheet in Antarctica, you know, 1,200 meters down, found a pocket of water, and there was literally a shrimp in there living — you know, no sunlight, no, nothing that we think of as nutrients. But he was living down there, probably with a family. And so there's the sources of energy and things that we don't, we still don't know all about. And so, you know, I imagine at Europa, there's very similar sort of resourceful organisms that can figure out how to survive and how to sort of turn that, any energy they can get into something they can live on.

Jim Green: Yeah, that would be fantastic, if we could find life in the ocean of Europa. It would tell us that, that life is a pretty universal thing, and perhaps all over our galaxy.

Jim Green: Well, Catherine, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what was the person, place or event that has gotten them so excited about being the scientist they are today. And I call that event a gravity assist. So Catherine, what was your gravity assist?

Catherine Walker: So I guess I have a two-fold gravity assist, I think I like to think of it as maybe my exit from low-Earth orbit. And then the next one was a, you know, slingshot around the moon or something like that. So the first one that I can think of, that sort of got me into getting interested in being a scientist, was, this is gonna sound silly, but I saw the movie Apollo 13, when I was about 10 years old.

Catherine Walker: I told my parents, I said, “I'm gonna be an astronaut,” which is basically the same as most 10 year olds, probably. And then unlike most other folks, I think I'd never let that go. As I continued through my career, I said, “Oh, you know, I liked the ocean. I like geology.” And I said, “hey, those things would actually help me be an astronaut someday.” And so I never gave that up. Later in my career, once I was getting through college and things like that, I got an internship at the University of New Hampshire with a scientist named Antoinette Galvin, and she was the PI on the, one of the instruments on the STEREO mission. And I got a summer internship there. I was excited. It was close to home.

Catherine Walker: And it was exciting because it was an actual mission at NASA, and I was, you know, finally working on a NASA thing. And she was very kind to me, I'd never had any sort of spacecraft experience before. So, you know, it was perfectly reasonable if she was sort of like, “Hey, do this summer project, and then you're done.” But she, you know, she was super helpful and encouraging. And she kept me on after the summer. She said, “Would you like to keep working with us, we'd love to have you on the team.” And she was just one of those people that didn't have to be that nice. But she was and she was interested, I guess, in you know, sort of paying it forward in the in the field. And so that really got me started at NASA. And got me even more excited about being involved in stuff like this. So yeah, she's, she's the person that sort of pushed me forward.

Jim Green: That's fantastic. Well, Catherine, thanks so much for joining me and talking about a fantastic look at water, not only as liquid but as ice.

Catherine Walker: You're welcome. Thanks so much for having me.

Jim Green: Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Apr 25, 2022
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-walking-on-broken-ice-with-catherine-walker
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Sierpień 20, 2023, 07:11
Jak wyhodowano Arabidopsis thaliana z użyciem księżycowego regolitu.
Cytuj
Anna-Lisa Paul: So the samples actually came from three locations: from Apollo 11, Apollo 12, and Apollo 17. And so the three sites that the astronauts worked on had different characteristics. All of the materials are what are called basaltic. And so most of them were sort of ground up basalt, lava kind of, kind of materials. But each of the sites were exposed to the surface for different periods of time. And what that means is that the regolith has what's called different levels of maturity.

Gravity Assist: How to Grow Food on the Moon (1)
May 13, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/plants_in_soil_from_the_moon3.jpg)
Researchers at the University of Florida successfully grew plants in lunar regolith brought back during three different Apollo missions. In this photo, a scientist places a plant grown during the experiment in a vial for eventual genetic analysis. Credits: UF/IFAS photo by Tyler Jones

Space botanists are working on strategies to grow crops on the lunar surface, as NASA makes strides toward sending astronauts to the Moon through the Artemis program. A team of scientists at the University of Florida successfully grew small plants in lunar soil brought back during three different Apollo missions. How did they do it, and what does it mean for the future of space exploration? Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul explains.

Jim Green: Can we grow food on the Moon? This may end up being a fundamental question of survival in space. Let's talk to a space botanist.

Anna-Lisa Paul The only way that humans can be explorers is if we take our plants with us.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green, and this Gravity Assist, NASA’s interplanetary talk show. We’re going to explore the inside workings of NASA and meet fascinating people who make space missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul. And she is the professor of horticultural sciences at the University of Florida's Institute for Food and Agricultural Sciences. And she is the director of the University of Florida's Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnological Research.

Jim Green: Dr. Paul and her colleagues just published a fantastic new study. And this study describes how plants grow in samples of lunar soil brought back by astronauts in the Apollo program. Wow! I can't wait to hear how this was pulled off. So welcome Anna-Lisa to Gravity Assist.

Anna-Lisa Paul: Thank you. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

Jim Green: The paper that's out now is really exciting, because it tells us that we now have options of going to the Moon and being able to live and work on a planetary surface for long periods of time, because we have an aspect of sustainability by growing food. So is this project something you've been wanting to do for a long time?

Anna-Lisa Paul: Absolutely. This is a project that has been sort of on my, and my colleague, Rob Ferl’s radar, for decades, because when you think about if the only way that we can humans can be explorers, is if we take our plants with us. Plants are what allows us to be explorers, they can go past the limits of a picnic basket. So for us who work in space biology, we wanted to know if when we get to a new surface, can we use the resources that are already existing there, the in situ resources? And for the Moon, that would be the regolith, which can be used as the dirt to grow plants.

Two scientists, wearing white lab coats gaze into several large clear boxes, each containing two smaller boxes of six to seven small dark objects. This image in bathed in pink light.


(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/plants_in_soil_from_the_moon.jpg)
University of Florida researchers Rob Ferl, left, and Anna-Lisa Paul, examine a collection of culture plates – some filled with lunar regolith, some with simulated regolith -- under LED lights. Credits: UF/IFAS photo by Tyler Jones

Jim Green: Well, how hard was it to get your hands on these samples, the original samples from the Apollo program?

Anna-Lisa Paul: It was pretty hard to get those. You have to remember, they're a national treasure, they are completely irreplaceable in their original form. And so when you have a couple of biologists who go to an institution of higher archiving from NASA of the original Apollo samples, and you say, “Yes, we’d please like to have some of your precious materials and get them all messy and grow plants in them!” They say, “Excuse me, you want to do what?” And so it took three different iterations of proposals, which also include a ton of background information and tests with lunar simulants before we could convince the powers that be that, yes, yes, we will take good care of them. We're good representatives of what science can be done, and they let us have some. In fact, they let us have 12 grams.

Jim Green: 12 grams. I know that doesn't sound a lot.

Jim Green: Well, what's really amazing to me when we think about plants growing in regolith is, is what regolith is. You know, it's really ground up rock, that comes from impacts over and over, billions of years of impacts on the Moon, blasting everything apart. And when you look at the regolith, this ground-up rock, in a microscope, it's got all these shards. It's, it's very sharp, which is one of the reasons why we're worried about this regolith, when humans walk around in spacesuits, getting into their lungs.

Jim Green: And so the concept that we can actually grow plants in it, was really amazing. So, tell us about these lunar samples. Did they come from one location or many locations?

Anna-Lisa Paul: So the samples actually came from three locations: from Apollo 11, Apollo 12, and Apollo 17. And so the three sites that the astronauts worked on had different characteristics. All of the materials are what are called basaltic. And so most of them were sort of ground up basalt, lava kind of, kind of materials. But each of the sites were exposed to the surface for different periods of time. And what that means is that the regolith has what's called different levels of maturity.

Anna-Lisa Paul And so the regolith from the Apollo 11 site, for instance, was more mature. That means it has been exposed to the cosmic wind for longer. So the particles are smaller, the edges are sharper. The Apollo 17 samples were particularly interesting in that it, the type we got was actually a compendium of materials from all over the site, because it was the dirt, if you will, that got caught underneath a bumper on the lunar rover.

Anna-Lisa Paul: And as, as they were leaving, Harrison Schmidt said, wow, there's a whole bunch of stuff here. Let's not let that go to waste. And he dumped it all into a bag and it came back to Earth for, for us eventually.

Jim Green: Wow, that's fantastic. So tell me about the experiment. If you only had a little bit from each of these sites, how are you going to really grow plants in them?

Anna-Lisa Paul: So we used the plant called Arabidopsis thaliana. And the cool thing about Arabidopsis is, in addition to being very well characterized at the genomic level, and gene level, it’s small, it's really small, and you can actually grow an almost full size plant in a single gram of material.

Jim Green: Wow.

Anna-Lisa Paul: So what we did is we had these specialized plates that are normally used for cell culture, there are only about 12 millimeters across -- each one of these little pots, if you will. And we put the regolith inside these little pots and then planted seeds on top of them, watered them from below and: instant lunar garden.

Jim Green: Wow, that's unbelievable. So you had a regimen of just adding water to the to the seed and that’s all it took?

Anna-Lisa Paul: It took a little bit of nutrients, too.

Jim Green: Okay.

Anna-Lisa Paul: And so how it was set up was a little plug of material called rockwool, which is essentially just spun lava rocks, that makes a sponge, and then the regolith goes on top of that little sponge. And so now the sponge acts as a capillary wick to get liquids up into the regolith. So the nutrient solution that went down into the base of the tray got wicked up into the regolith, and it was essentially watered from below.

Jim Green: Wow, interesting. So then it's easy to think about how that could work by developing a greenhouse with these kind of attributes on the Moon and then just bringing in the regolith. 

Jim Green: So at the end of the experiment, did you then take apart the regolith to see how the roots grew with in the planter?

Anna-Lisa Paul: We did. Because we planted more than just a single seed at first, when we thinned the little tiny seedlings away to just leave a single plant in each one of those little micro pots, we also got to look at the roots there. And so we could see that the plants that were growing in the simulant, it's called this JSC-1A, it's a type of volcanic ash that’s mined on Earth, that's what we use as our control.

Anna-Lisa Paul: Compared to the lunar regolith, the JSC-1 simulants were nice and long and tapered and looked very healthy, but the roots that were growing in the regolith were kind of scrunched up and they weren't quite as healthy looking. Nonetheless, once they grew, you could get decent looking plants growing in the regolith. And just to look at them with your eye, they'd look a little smaller than the ones in the controls. But the real key was when you ground them up, and you look at what genes are being expressed.

Jim Green: Now, as you said, you use simulant, which means we think we've been able to develop a process that can make lunar-like regolith without bringing it from the Moon. But as you said, already, there's some differences between that simulant and what the real regolith looks like. But that's an important control factor. That also helps us figure out if we're making those simulants correctly or not.

Anna-Lisa Paul: Yup.

Jim Green: So what did you find out?

Anna-Lisa Paul: So when you take a look at the controls, I have to say, any experiment is only as good as your control, right?

Jim Green: Right.

Anna-Lisa Paul: And so, the control material really did look a lot like the lunar regolith. It behaved a lot like the lunar regolith in the way it absorbed water and the way that it kind of just settled into the pots and everything. But when we’ve looked at the example of even if you take two plants that looked very similar between the control and the lunar regolith grown, we found that the kind of genes that the plants expressed different from the ones that were in the control were mostly genes that are associated with metal stress, like heavy metals, or salts, or what we call oxidative stress.

Jim Green: Oooh!

Anna-Lisa Paul: Even though those materials per se weren't necessarily in those regoliths. It's not like the regoliths were actually salty. But the plants perceived the type of stress they were seeing in that material as salt stress, as metal stress. And so that was an interesting insight that they were changing the way they express their genes to adapt to that new and novel environment.

Jim Green: Oooh. So this is really critical to understand. Because once you understand that, there may be processes and procedures that you could do that alleviate that plant stress that allows them on, on the real example, on the Moon in a greenhouse, to then really flourish better than even what you did in the laboratory.

Anna-Lisa Paul: That's exactly right. That's button on. So the Arabidopsis is really closely related to some of your favorite vegetables, like, say, broccoli. And we know that if we want our broccoli plants or kale plants to be healthy and growing in the lunar regolith, in a greenhouse, we know that we'll have to mitigate some of these kind of stress responses. We can do that in two ways. You can engineer their environment by mitigating perhaps some of the materials that are in the regolith, you can also engineer the plants themselves. And you can make them less sensitive to some of these aspects. And so instead of putting their energy into the stress response, they put that energy into making more broccoli.

Jim Green: Right! That's really a, just a huge advance. By doing this on the Moon, we're going to also learn the processes and procedures we'll have to do on Mars. So that will be really critical. S o I really dearly love this idea. So if I was in the lab, and we were done with the experiment, we were taking them apart and looking at the roots, I might be tempted to eat one of these. Did anyone do that?

Anna-Lisa Paul: Well, we didn't eat any of those because, think about it: they’re a very small and very precious resource that we wanted to save to do the biochemical analyses. You could eat Arabidopsis. People have eaten them before, but it's not exactly something that would be good in a salad.

Jim Green: (laughs) So not so tasty after all.

Jim Green: I can imagine walking into the lab, when it, when you had started these plants growing. And the first time you realized this was gonna work. What was that like?

Anna-Lisa Paul: Oh, so the preparation that went into this experiment is extraordinary. All the background, all the setup, everything, the way we planted them, every aspect of it was complex. And so then at the end, Rob, and I walk out to our secure growth chamber where these things are going to go, we set them all up under their pink LED lighting systems that will keep them going. And we closed the door and we thought, all right, three days, things should be germinating in three days. Well, two days later, we walked back in there just to kind of check, and we’re looking down at all those plates. And every single one had germinating seeds in it.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Sierpień 20, 2023, 07:11
Gravity Assist: How to Grow Food on the Moon (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/crater_1.jpg)
University of Florida researchers Anna-Lisa Paul and Rob Ferl are seen at the Haughton Crater impact site in northern Canada. NASA uses this crater for Moon and Mars analog research. Credits: Pascal Lee

Jim Green: Wow!

Anna-Lisa Paul: The controls, the lunar samples, everything was germinating. There's this tiny nascent greenness, every single one, and it just took our breath away. It worked. It really worked. How cool is that?

Jim Green: You know, it reminds me of the theme in the movie “The Martian,” where Mark Watney goes over to his potato plant that is now growing for the very first time, touches the leaf, and says “hello.”

Anna-Lisa Paul: Yes, exactly.

Jim Green: Wow, that's great. I can also imagine that this will enable you to think of the next best experiment to do. Have you been thinking about and formulating your next steps?

Anna-Lisa Paul: Oh, absolutely. One of the things that would be wonderful to do is to have additional replicates for this. With four grams each from each site, we could obviously only have four replicates of one individual plant each. Being able to have a larger volume of material so that we could try different kinds of mitigations. All of the samples had to be treated with the same nutrient solution for instance. And so if we had enough material, we could also change the variables of what kind of nutrients we did. Are there other ways to mitigate some of the effects of the regolith? Those are the kinds of things you can only do with more material.

Jim Green: I understand you've done some field tests in far off places here on Earth.

Anna-Lisa Paul: Yeah, so I've definitely had the privilege to explore some very interesting, what we call analog sites, in the in the world. The first step was, Rob Ferl and I went to the far north Canadian Arctic at an old impact site, called the Haughton Crater on Devon Island. And one of the reasons we went to Devon Island was to practice utilizing in situ resources in a greenhouse that was growing there.

Anna-Lisa Paul: And so we collected these, what we call, brecciated materials from this old impact crater, which was 20-plus miles across, that was very lunar looking. And we’ve use some of those materials in the greenhouse. We also used the JSC-1 simulant in the greenhouse, along with other kinds of materials and asked: Can we populate a greenhouse substrate with these kinds of non-traditional growth substrates to create materials and crops over the winter?

Jim Green: So what did you find out when you did that?

Anna-Lisa Paul: Well, we find that they actually like growing in the JSC-1 simulant a little better than they liked growing in the brecciated materials we dug out of the crater. (laughs) And part of that is because a lot of the materials have different types of chemicals in them that are actually in some ways more analogous to what it would be on Mars. Whereas the lunar regolith is pretty much just devoid of everything, the Martian regolith i, looks to be, although nobody's brought any back, it looks to be high in, say, perchlorates and other kinds of reactive chemicals that would have to be, again, ameliorated before you could grow plants in it. But you'd be have to be able to use the materials from where you land.

Jim Green: So on the Moon, I imagine we're going to have a greenhouse, but can we really grow these out in the vacuum of space?

Anna-Lisa Paul: Well, they would have to have a greenhouse just like a human would have to have a greenhouse because that there's no atmosphere on the surface of the Moon. So all of the plant growth would be being carried on in some kind of greenhouse or other sort of enclosed habitat along with its attending humans.

Jim Green: Well, you know, another part about that, that I like, is the fact that these plants as they grow will smell wonderful. And you get not only this the green of the plant, you also get the smells, and it's gotta remind astronauts of home.

Anna-Lisa Paul: That that is so true. And I have actually a personal experience that, that speaks to that very well. I mentioned the work that I've done in the high Canadian Arctic. Well, I've also been down in Antarctica for a while. And again, working on a greenhouse that was essentially called the Future Exploration Greenhouse, part of the Eden ISS project, that was an analogue of what you might find on the Moon or Mars.

Anna-Lisa Paul: I was down there for several days, and the weather was just horrible, and nobody could go outside, it was absolutely impossible, and everything was dark, and bleak and awful. And then, when the weather started to clear just a little bit, we went out to the greenhouse for the first time on that trip and walked into the door, and you're met by the smells and the moisture and the greenness. And it was like, all of the stress evaporated from all of us. And we were home for a bit. And I can well imagine it would be like that for an astronaut. And you can't underestimate how powerful, how powerful a plant can be from that context, as well as the fact that it cleans your air and gives you clean water and gives you food. It also gives you something spiritual.

Jim Green: Very nice.

Jim Green: Well, Anna-Lisa, I always like to ask my guests to tell me what that person place or event was that got them so excited about being in the sciences that they are today. And I call that event, a gravity assist. So Anna-Lisa, what was your gravity assist?

Anna-Lisa Paul: Well, gravity assist for me has been people, and the very first person was my mom. And I can remember quite keenly as a little kid asking my mother about how something worked. And she would say, “I don't know, let's find out.” And so it was always this, this journey of discovery. I would be given science books as a small kid, even though I couldn't quite read them at that level. And we'd go through as a family trying to figure out how to do the kind of experiments we could do in the backyard. And I got really interested in plants, because plants were the only things that were taking the energy that comes into the planet, and turning it into stuff that we needed.

Anna-Lisa Paul: So as I got older and started wondering about how plants work, it kept taking me one step after another until I decided I'd like to understand how plants respond to novel environments, and the most novel environment out there is space.

Jim Green: Wow, fantastic. That, that's a wonderful environment to be in, where you can work with your parents on a journey of discovery, and then realize how you can make a wonderful career out of it. So thanks so much for telling us about this really fundamental and exciting research.

Anna-Lisa Paul: I'm pretty lucky. Thanks.

Jim Green: You're very, very welcome. Well, next time, we're going to talk to a researcher at the Kennedy Space Center, who also works on growing plants in space. But in this case, it's all about astronauts growing them on the space station. You won't want to miss that. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: May 13, 2022
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-how-to-grow-food-on-the-moon
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Sierpień 27, 2023, 11:25
O różnych aspektach hodowli roślin w kosmosie.
Podczas pierwszego lotu duńskiego astronauty  jeden z 10. z eksperymentów polegał na stworzeniu sztucznego ekosystemu w małym pojemniku, w którym rośliny i mikroorganizmy mogą żyć i tworzyć żywność dla astronautów.
Podczas obecnego lotu Duńczyka wśród 10. narodowych eksperymentów nie ma podobnego.
Czy podczas następnych krótkich lotów astronautów ESA znajdzie się miejsce na biologiczne eksperymenty?
Cytuj
Christina Johnson: One of those workhorse plants that can grow really well is mizuna, It's a mustard plant. And that one's been growing in pretty much every platform since we started growing plants in space. It grew on Mir, it grew on the shuttle, it grows on the space station. We've had many successful harvests with it and in many different kinds of plant hardware. That one's, that one's kind of our go to for, for testing to it's like okay, well this one work? Let's try it with mizuna. Mizuna does great, okay. Let's try it with something else. So mizuna one of those that just keeps coming up. And astronauts love to eat it too because it has this mustardy flavor. It's not a boring green.

Gravity Assist: What Will We Eat on Mars? (1)
May 20, 2022

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Plants growing in the Veggie plant growth chamber on the International Space Station. Credits: NASA/ISS

Astronauts on the International Space Station have been conducting experiments to grow food, including peppers and radishes. Christina Johnson, a NASA postdoc fellow at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, has been working on a variety of techniques to grow food in space. Learn what she thinks about the future of growing food beyond our planet, including on Mars.

Jim Green: For humans to live, we need food. So how are we going to survive when we begin to live and work in faraway places in space?

Christina Johnson: It's really fun to see all these leafy greens that we've been growing in space for the last few years because the astronauts can eat them right away.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green, and this Gravity Assist, NASA’s interplanetary talk show. We’re going to explore the inside workings of NASA and meet fascinating people who make space missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Christina Johnson. And she is a NASA postdoc fellow at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Christina works on a variety of projects related to growing plants in space. Welcome, Christina, to Gravity Assist.

Christina Johnson: Oh, thank you so much for having me here.


(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/cmj-lab-measuring.jpg)
Christina Johnson works on plants in her laboratory at Kennedy Space Center. Credits: Raymond Wheeler/NASA

Jim Green: You know, when we think about growing plants in space, what are the kind of challenges that we have to consider? And how do we overcome them?

Christina Johnson: Oh, that's such a great question. So when we grow plants here on Earth, we have gravity, we have good airflow, we have the sunlight. And when we get into space, we lose a lot of that we, we can't access the sun because it's not safe to have that much sunlight in the space occupied by the crew. And so we need to bring in our own lights, we use LED lighting, because it's very lightweight, and we can bring just the right lights that we want, then we also have to think about airflow. In space, you get pockets of air, you get pockets with high co2 and low co2, and those plants need a more homogenous air source.

Christina Johnson: And so we use fans who bring fans in to move the air around the plants. Another thing that we run into is water. We love water, plants need water. And we need to deliver that water in a way that also delivers a little bit of air and oxygen to those roots. They'll suffocate without getting a little bit of air along with the water. And you don't really think about that. Because here on Earth, you have a lot of mixing in the water. And in space, you don't get that mixing so well, that’s really unique problems,

Jim Green: Yeah, boy, that sounds like a pretty tough challenge to me. So you know, when we take plants up? Or actually what do we do? Do we take the seeds up and grow the seeds? Or do we actually have starter plants? What's the best way to do that?

Christina Johnson: Oh, that's a great question. So there are a lot of different ways that we can do this, and a lot of different ways that have been done over the decades that we've been growing plants in space. But our favorite way right now is to send up seeds and grow things from seeds.

Jim Green: Wow. That's, that's phenomenal. Yeah. So So you know, so it's not like you got seeds floating around in the cabin, you got some sort of containment? What does that look like? And how do you how do you get the seeds to get going? Is it just from light and water? Or what kind of nutrients do they have to have?

Christina Johnson: So when we bring our seeds up there, they're stuck between two wicks, or they are stuck on seed films, which are a really great invention that we came up with here at Kennedy Space Center we have this, this film that the seeds are embedded in. And then we can take that film out, again, have it in a filing cabinet basically, and put that in in the hardware when we want to grow them. So that one was a great innovation, then we also have I've been playing around with pre-seeding mats, but we haven't sent those to space yet. Where I have the mats that I'm going to be growing my plants on. The seeds are glued down on that and very stable. And then we could plant them and add water.

Christina Johnson: So the key for getting germination going is adding water. And we can choose to add light at the same time or we can choose to add light a little bit later. And that's actually something I'm looking at to: At what point do we need to add that light to have really good growth? Do we need to add it right away? Different seeds actually have different requirements some plants really germinate the best when they're in the dark, and other plants germinate the best when they're in the light. And so determining which crops we're going to grow that's one of those little tests we have to do before we decide to grow them in space.

Jim Green: So what are the plants that we have really been successful and growing on the International Space Station?

Christina Johnson: One of those workhorse plants that can grow really well is mizuna, It's a mustard plant. And that one's been growing in pretty much every platform since we started growing plants in space. It grew on Mir, it grew on the shuttle, it grows on the space station. We've had many successful harvests with it and in many different kinds of plant hardware. That one's, that one's kind of our go to for, for testing to it's like okay, well this one work? Let's try it with mizuna. Mizuna does great, okay. Let's try it with something else. So mizuna one of those that just keeps coming up. And astronauts love to eat it too because it has this mustardy flavor. It's not a boring green.

Christina Johnson: Another one that does really, really well is outraged-gous red romaine lettuce, I just love the name of that one. We also have like a dragoon lettuce, that's also a red lettuce. And it's, it's kind of fun, because there's such a different color than what you'd expect out of a lettuce a lot of people think of green and they think of lettuce. And these are like a red, reddish, purplish green, kind of a bunch of different colors in the leaves. And they're really beautiful to look at. And, and they also taste really great too. They're more of a neutral flavor.

Christina Johnson: It's really fun to see all these leafy greens that we've been growing in space for the last few years because the astronauts can eat them right away. We call them “pick and eat” crops. We, we grow them, they can pick them and eat them right away. They don't have to do any preparation. Because you don't have the kitchen prep that you would have here on Earth in space. You know, we're looking not at replacing their diet, we're looking at supplementing their diet. So it's like okay, they can make lettuce wraps with this lettuce. They can do all these fun things with the food that they have.

Christina Johnson: Another thing that grew really, really well in space: That's peppers.

Jim Green: Peppers! All right.

Christina Johnson: So spicy hot peppers grew in the advanced plant habitat. And those did so well and the astronauts loved them and they took their tortillas and made tacos with them and things when it came time to eat them. So those, those were one that we were doing a lot of prep work for in advance of putting them up in space and LaShelle Spencer really screened a whole bunch of pepper plants and Matt Romeyn as well. They just, they just went through so many different kinds of peppers and they were like “okay, these do great with LED lighting.”

Christina Johnson: But the airflow, the direction of the airflow, wasn't quite what we needed. The flowers were pointing in a different direction than we expected, because of the lack of gravity. Basically, that's what it came down to.

Jim Green: Wow.

Christina Johnson: And the astronauts went in there and hand pollinated them. They took, you know, they took their little tools, and they came in, and they picked up some pollen from one flower and moved it over to the other so that the astronauts got to be the bees, right?

Jim Green: Wow.

Christina Johnson: So it was, it was really great. We ended up with a couple of great harvests and just recently came back to Earth for analysis.

Jim Green: When you think about plants here on Earth, you know, go through a day-night cycle, and therefore they have a certain length of time for which they can be harvested. How does that change on Space Station when you can actually have them under light the whole time? Or do you have to take them off and make it dark? Or well, how does that work?

Christina Johnson: That’s a great question. If we have too much light, we end up with photo bleaching. And we need to make sure we don't have constant light because those plants need a break.

Jim Green: Interesting.

Christina Johnson:  So we'll have photo periods. That’s the time when the light’s on compared with the time that lights are off. And so something like 16 hours on, eight hours off, in a given 24-hour period is pretty good. Sometimes we do 12 hours on, 12 hours off. It really depends on the crop, and what that crop really thrives with. But for a lot of crops, if we do 24/7 lights, it wears them down. Their chloroplasts break down, they end up bleaching out, and they aren't appetizing. (laughs)

Jim Green: Wow, that's fantastic. I mean, you know, they've evolved in [an] environment where there's a certain amount of time in light and dark, and taking them to space. You know, they need to rest just like humans do.

Christina Johnson:  Yeah, they do.

Jim Green: Who would have thought! Who would have thought? But doing that kind of research tells us also, that once we establish perhaps plants on Mars, which has about you know, the same kind of light and dark cycles we have on Earth. You know, one day on Mars is just a little more

Christina Johnson: A little bit longer.

Jim Green: …than 24 hours. Yeah, you know, they ought to do well.

Christina Johnson: For sure.

Jim Green: we don't have to change their clock or anything, right?

Christina Johnson: Yeah, their circadian rhythm is going to adjust pretty well. We have plenty of plants here on Earth that that do well in environments, where if you think about, in Alaska, there's months where you have sunshine and months where you have darkness. And there are plenty of plants that can just go dormant, and then come back.

Christina Johnson: So we might have variation like that on Mars where we have like, “Okay, in this area, you get more sun this time of the year and this area, you get less than this time of the year,” and depending on where we're growing on Mars, we might have different needs.

Jim Green: That's right, there are seasons on Mars, too.

Christina Johnson: Yeah. (laughs)

Jim Green: Well, you know, every astronaut I talked to that comes back from the International Space Station really loves to go into the module with the plants. And you know, I've been calling that the “green effect,” no pun intended.

Christina Johnson: (laughs) Love it. (laughs)

Jim Green: Because, you know, they get to see the beautiful greenery of the plant. But I think there's more to it. Why do you think this is happening? What really piques their interest in these plants?

Christina Johnson: Well, there's the connection to the Earth. A lot of astronauts are from agricultural roots. And they've grown up with gardens and they've grown up with plants and they don't realize until it's gone just how much they missed that.

Christina Johnson: Another thing we notice: One of our horticulturists [Jess Bunchek] just recently came back from Antarctica. She overwintered in Antarctica and was taking care of a greenhouse the entire time there and supplementing her crew’s diet with that. There were 10 people who overwintered in Antarctica. And this is called the Eden ISS project and it's a collaboration with the DLR, which is the German Aerospace Agency. She took care of these plants. It was a separate module from the rest of what they were living in. So, she had to walk in white-out conditions following a rope to this greenhouse where she would walk in, she would get rid of all of her winter clothes, and she would be in this amazing green, lush environment. And she would take care of the plants, and then she would trudge back with a cooler full of delicious produce to share with the rest of her crew, right?

Christina Johnson: And just the fact that she was so isolated and so... [in] such a boring environment all around them. I mean, Antarctica is beautiful, some days, but other days, you just can't see anything. It's just white. And she was able to come back and have that fresh fruit to share with people and the crew was like, “Oh, can I go help you in there today?” (laughs)

Jim Green: Well, I think also it's the smells!

Christina Johnson: Yes, the smells. Oh, another thing. When the world kind of shut down in March of 2020, we had a lot of students interested in growing plants. Jacob Torres, who's one of the horticulturists here at Kennedy Space Center, he started the Space Chile Grow a Pepper Plant challenge. And he sent seeds to teachers and students, and [it] ended up being a big community outreach effort where they would grow pepper plants in their house, in whatever lighting they had, and I participated in this, I had a little aerogarden that I decided to grow pots of pepper plants in. And I had that, that light, and we had them in our living room for a good, hmmm, six months. And it smelled like peppers in our living room as they were fruiting and flowering. And it was just so fun.

Christina Johnson: But eventually, it got to the point where it was like, “Okay, peppers all the time! Oh, my goodness! When are we going to call this done? (laughs)

Jim Green: (laughs)

Christina Johnson: When are we going to grow something different?” Because we would planted other things and have other things growing like beans, but the peppers would just take over. And that's another thing to consider when growing things. The peppers were growing in the Advanced Plant Habitat at the International Space Station, which is enclosed. If they were growing in Veggie it would be a very different experience for the crew. Something we found in our house -- which maybe doesn't relate to spaceflight, I don't know -- but with our six pepper plants we had days when there were lots of fruit on those plants. And we'd walk up to that corner of the room and our eyes would start watering and it was just spicy tasting the air.

Jim Green: (laughs)

Christina Johnson: (laughs) I didn’t expect that!

Jim Green: Well, this brings up of course, the question about, you know, what do you think are the type of plants we should be growing on the Moon and then on Mars?

Christina Johnson: I think that on the Moon, it's a great opportunity for us to test things for Mars later. But it's also a great opportunity to test things for the Moon. (laughs) Because I do think that we'll have a sustained human presence on the Moon in the near future.

Christina Johnson: I think that we're going to need supplemental food, because when we're on the Moon, we can get regular food delivery from Earth. It's expensive. It's hard. But it's not impossible. When we're talking about Mars, it's really hard to get resupply out there. We're talking years, and by the time the food gets there, it might not be the best quality. Vitamins degrade over time, we're going to be lacking in vitamin C. That's one that falls apart within it a year and a half. We're going to be lacking in Vitamin K, [it’s] one of my favorites because people don't really know about vitamin K that one's found in leafy greens and it's absolutely essential for human life. Yeah, so when we're talking about the Moon, we're talking about things to supplement the existing food system. When we're talking about Mars, we're talking about more staple crops. Maybe we're talking about the rice and the potatoes and the sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are one of my favorites, because you can eat the leaves, too – the young leaves, which are really tasty.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Sierpień 27, 2023, 11:25
Gravity Assist: What Will We Eat on Mars? (2)
May 20, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/cmj-startrek-headshot.jpg)
Christina Johnson is a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. She works on plant experiments for the International Space Station. Credits: Christina Johnson

Jim Green: Well, what are some of those questions that we need to answer in terms of getting the astronauts to grow their own food, say on Mars?

Christina Johnson: So when we're having our astronauts grow their own food, do we want to have them doing the manual labor? Or do we want to have it automated? How much automation is desirable? And this is actually a trade-off that we see now, with vertical farms and indoor agriculture here on Earth. There's some companies that have made the conscious choice to have no automation whatsoever, and just rely on their own crew to handle all of the seeding and all of the harvesting, and all of that, because they found that when they added automation, it added the need for additional engineering staff, and they realized they could actually run a leaner business with their people doing everything.

Christina Johnson: But then there's others [businesses] that grow really big, and the automation is everything, and it's an economy of scale. So are we feeding astronauts and having this food that we make in space be their sole source of nutrition? When we get to that, we're going to need that scale. We're going to need some automation or a lot of automation. When we're looking at supplementing, maybe we don't need that automation quite as much. Maybe we could automate seeding and maybe automate harvesting, but the daily care of those plants, the astronauts would still do.

Christina Johnson: Another thing that we want to think about is: How do we help those astronauts? Are we going to choose astronauts who are agronomists and botanists and horticulturists? Or are we going to choose engineers? If we need those astronauts to be dependent on the agronomists here on Earth, the ground crews, then we need to make sure that communication is going to be adequate, and fast enough and good enough. And maybe we'll want some multispectral or hyperspectral imaging on those plants, like we have on the fields here on Earth. The USDA and NASA worked together to get the satellite imagery for the fields. Maybe we need that on the crops that are in space.

Christina Johnson: And we can we can talk back and forth and say, you know, “these plants are diseased, please cull them now, so that it doesn’t spread.” And maybe we'll want to say, “Oh, these are dehydrated, there might be a fault in the water delivery system? Please check for that.” Who do we send and do we send both? Do we send the engineers and the plant scientists?

Jim Green: In the last episode, we talked to Dr. Anna-Lisa Paul of the University of Florida where she and her team were able to grow plants called Arabidopsis thaliana in samples of lunar regolith brought back by the Apollo astronauts. Really cool. Christina, you also used this same species in your Ph.D. research, right?

Christina Johnson: So for my PhD, I got out to Miami University, which is a small school in Ohio. And I thought I was just going to be in a lab where other people did a bunch of spaceflight research. And I got to look at the plants that came back. But turns out while I was there, my first semester, I started writing a grant proposal for spaceflight. And turns out, that proposal ended up being useful because there was a call that came out suddenly, for a series of experiments on the Shuttle. They were looking for three investigative teams to run some experiments in the BRIC hardware, which is a closed system with Petri plates that you can grow plants in.

Christina Johnson: And our proposal got picked up, I was very excited about that. And so I got to see from start to finish what it was like to do a spaceflight study. I got to come out to Kennedy Space Center and put my plants, get them into the hardware, get them loaded up in the hardware, say goodbye to them, as they loaded them up onto the shuttle, I got to watch the shuttle launch, I got to watch them come back. Oh, my goodness, a Shuttle landing is such an experience. And then once they came back, within a couple hours, those samples were back in our hands, and I got to take them back to the lab and start looking at them right away. And I was so excited for that experience. I looked at how they grew physically, their morphology, the physical characteristics, and that's where I noticed, the roots were tilting. That was very interesting. And then we also had the opportunity to do some transcriptomics on those plants as well. And so I got to see what genes were upregulated and downregulated in spaceflight, and the differences there. And then I was able to compare my results with the other three investigative teams that also grew very similar plants at the same time under those same conditions. So that was really a great experience from my PhD.

Jim Green: Well, I can talk to you forever about some of the research that you're doing and what we also need to do to get ready to live and work on a planetary surface. But unfortunately, we must come to a close. So I always ask my guests to tell me the person, place, or event that gave them so much energy, so much excitement, that they became the scientists they are today. And I call that event a “gravity assist.” So Christina, what was your “gravity assist?”

Christina Johnson: Okay, so I thought a lot about this. And I'm gonna talk about two things. So first, when I was a child, I really liked Star Trek: The Next Generation. It just came out when I was young. And I was very much into the world of make believe. And so I really clung to this one character, Keiko O'Brien, she's the head of the Conservatory on the Enterprise. And later, she was on Deep Space Nine too. But I thought she was only in a few episodes here and there. But the would interact with Beverly Crusher, the doctor, and she would bring in plants and, and they would have this great exchange of information like, “Oh, this plant would be good for human health.

Christina Johnson: And so in my mind, I built this whole fantasy around O'Brien and I would go on xeno-ethnobotanical expeditions to go collect the best medicines from the most far reaches of the universe, and I would bring them back to my sister who was pretending to be Beverly Crusher. And I would, you know, I would be like, “Oh, look, I can save your patient because I found this!” And she would be like, “Oh, great, yes, let's use that.” And Keiko O'Brien was definitely my inspiration for thinking about space and plants. But then that was all fantasy. I had no idea that this was a real area of research, until I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley working in the lab of Dr. Chelsea Specht.

Christina Johnson: And she mentioned I was working on ginger floral development, you know, beautiful things. very applicable to Earth. Ginger is great. I think we should definitely have it on Mars.

Jim Green: (laughs) Okay.

Christina Johnson: She was like, “Christina, you love space!” I'm like, “Yes, I do. I really love space.” She's like and you love plants. “Did you know you can bring those two together?” And I was like, “Wait, what?” She was like, “I think for your PhD, you should really work with space and plants. And here's a few researchers who do this.” And so I wrote a blog entry about John Kiss, who does space research, he had plants growing on the European Modular Cultivation System. I just wrote a blog entry about him and his research. He found that blog entry and reached out to me and said, “Come visit our lab. Let's see if it's a good fit for graduate school.”

Jim Green: Wow! And I was hooked.

I was like, “You've got to be kidding me. I can do space and plants at the same time?”

Jim Green: Your dream came true.

Christina Johnson: Yes. So my gravity assist was Keiko O'Brien fiction. And then reality was Chelsea Specht to who told me “Hey, this is a thing.” And then John Kiss who was like, “Yes, let's get you. Let's get you into this area of research.”

Jim Green: Fantastic. Christina, thanks so much for joining me for a fascinating look at how we are planning and do grow plants in space well beyond Earth.

Christina Johnson: Thank you so much.

Jim Green: Join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your gravity assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Jun 22, 2022
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-what-will-we-eat-on-mars
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Wrzesień 03, 2023, 10:21
Co słychać na Marsie?
Cytuj
Nina Lanza: And really excitingly we also added a microphone, which seems a little bit crazy, but it's not. There's a great science reason for it. We want it to listen to the sound of the LIBS laser as it vaporized material because it actually makes like a shockwave as that plasma expands. And you can learn a lot about a rock by listening to that.

Gravity Assist: This is What Mars Sounds Like, with Nina Lanza (1)
Jun 17, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/nina-mars.jpg)
Nina Lanza, the principal investigator for the Curiosity rover’s ChemCam instrument, holds a model of Mars in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Credits: Minesh Bacrania

With two microphones aboard the Perseverance rover, we can listen to Mars from its surface like never before. In addition to hearing how wind sounds on Mars, we can also listen to Perseverance driving on the surface, the Ingenuity helicopter flying nearby, and more. Nina Lanza of Los Alamos National Laboratory plays some of these sounds and explains why these awe-inspiring sounds also have scientific and engineering value.

Jim Green: What does Mars sound like?

Nina Lanza: We've had these beautiful panoramic images of Mars for a long time. But now to add that sound, it really just makes me feel that much closer to standing on the surface.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green, and this Gravity Assist, NASA’s interplanetary talk show. We’re going to explore the inside workings of NASA and meet fascinating people who make space missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. Nina Lanza. And she is the team lead for space and planetary exploration in space and remote sensing organization at the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico. She is the principal investigator for the ChemCam instrument aboard the Curiosity rover, and a science team member for the SuperCam instrument on the Perseverance rover. Welcome, Nina, to Gravity Assist.

Nina Lanza: Thanks, Jim. I'm excited to be here.

Jim Green: Well, first, what I want to do is hear a little bit about these fantastic instruments you work on.

Jim Green: Curiosity’s got 10 instruments. And when I started at NASA Headquarters, it was moving to a key decision point. And we selected this beautiful instrument called ChemCam. Tell us about the ChemCam instrument.

Nina Lanza: Well, sure. Yeah. So, you know, when ChemCam was actually selected, I’m the second PI, I was only a graduate student. And I actually started working on the project essentially right after the selection. So I was able to see this project through this entire time, which has been an incredible learning experience for me.

Nina Lanza: So its name is short for “chemistry and camera.” So as you might imagine, we do both chemistry measurements and we take pictures. So our main chemistry technique is called laser induced breakdown spectroscopy, or LIBS, L-I-B-S. And the way this works simply is that you can focus a laser at a target at a distance from the rover of up to 7 meters, so about 23 feet. So you don't have to touch a sample. And you vaporize just the little materials. So you're actually heating that up so hot that it turns into a vapor, and that plasma emits light, and you can look at the color of that light back on the rover. And that will tell you what elements are in that rock.

Jim Green: Yeah, it's really fantastic, the concept of taking a laser and beaming it on a rock and vaporizing it.

Jim Green: Well, what's been some of your favorite results from ChemCam?

Nina Lanza: There are so many good results. And it's been 10 years, so there's so many good ones, you know. I mean, I think the biggest one was really our first result, where we figured out that the soils on Mars are hydrated. They have water in them. And that's an amazing result. People always ask, “Well, where did all that water on Mars go?” And I tell them, “It's still there. It's there right now, it's just not in a form that we tend to recognize.”

Nina Lanza: There are previous missions that, you know, using remote sensing, orbiting spacecraft instruments, you know, we could tell that there were hydrated signatures. And some of those signatures made sense with the context, but others just really didn't. Or like, what's hydrated there? And the answer is: the dust, and the dust is everywhere. Dust is ubiquitous on the surface of Mars. So that was a really incredible results that really answered some outstanding questions we had about Mars for a long time.

Nina Lanza: You know, we've just learned so much about Mars in these 10 years. I think ChemCam has about 900,000 individual spectra. So that’s 900,000 laser shots. I mean, that's a crazy amount of data. And I'm sure there are many PhD theses waiting to be written, right? We have barely scratched the surface of what those data can tell us.

Jim Green: Yeah, that's fantastic. And I know Curiosity is still very healthy and going strong. Well, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about another spectacular rover on the surface of Mars. And that's Perseverance.

Jim Green: You know, the landing site of Curiosity is this big crater, Gale Crater, and another crater Jezero Crater, is where Perseverance is. Are they close? Or are they far apart?

Nina Lanza: Well, they're not that close, you know, on Mars. And people always think they look close, because they look at a map, but that's thousands of kilometers away. So we're just going to wave our robotic arms at each other, we'll never go and visit. But these craters are actually very similar in a lot of ways because they both represent similar aged craters that were probably filled with liquid water. They represent this time on Mars’s history where water appears to have been abundant. And so we have these lakes. So they give us these two different views of what lakes on Mars were like.

Jim Green: The way I think about it, too, in terms of how far apart they are, is: when the Sun is going down with Curiosity, it's overhead at Perseverance.

Nina Lanza: That's a great way to look at it. You know, I actually hadn't thought about the time zone change, you know. But of course, they are in different time zones. I love that.

Jim Green: You know, I was head of the [NASA] Planetary Science Division when we landed Curiosity. And then we immediately started to get the approval process together for the next big rover. And that ended up being Perseverance. Well, we finally created a package of seven fabulous instruments, several from other countries. And one of these instruments is the SuperCam instrument. So can you tell us a little bit about SuperCam?

Nina Lanza: Of course, yes, so SuperCam is really the sister instrument of ChemCam. And thank you for bringing up that, you know, this is really an international effort. So ChemCam is actually a joint project between the US and France. And so now, SuperCam continues that really strong collaboration with France. And we've actually added some Spanish collaborators as well. So I think it's really important to note, you know, we don't do these things necessarily alone. This is really a team effort.

Nina Lanza: SuperCam has a lot of the same instrumentation techniques as ChemCam, but has a few extra tricks up her sleeve. So we continue to do the chemistry with the LIBS, laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy. We still zap rocks. But we've also added another laser technique called Raman spectroscopy.

Nina Lanza: Now, this laser doesn't actually vaporize material; it scatters light off of molecular bonds. So you can actually figure out, with the same instrument, both chemistry -- so what are the elements -- and mineralogy -- how are those elements arranged. And with those two pieces of information, you can actually uniquely identify geologic materials. So it's really a very powerful combination of techniques.

Nina Lanza: And really excitingly we also added a microphone, which seems a little bit crazy, but it's not. There's a great science reason for it. We want it to listen to the sound of the LIBS laser as it vaporized material because it actually makes like a shockwave as that plasma expands. And you can learn a lot about a rock by listening to that.

Jim Green: Well, I tell you, the concept of having a microphone on Mars has been something I have wanted to do for many years. And I am so delighted we ended up with two on Perseverance. And indeed it really turned out to be science-driven, engineering-driven.

Jim Green: What really happened that really helped that argument of getting a microphone on Perseverance really started with Curiosity. As Curiosity was driving along, and it was going through a very rough area, and the rocks were so sharp, it was punching holes in the wheels, and we didn't realize that. And of course, if you don't have any wheels, you're not going to go anywhere. And so the concept is, how are we going to determine this?

Jim Green: We needed additional sensor capability. And having some sort of microphone where we can hear the creeks and the cracks and, and try to understand what's happening to the rover as a function of time was really going to be an important addition to it. And now Perseverance with these two microphones, [we] have the opportunity to really hear what's going on on Mars. So how do these microphones work?

Nina Lanza: So both of these microphones and I know what it's one is the entry, descent and landing, or EDL microphone, which is bolted to, I think, the lower left. and the SuperCam microphone, which is bolted to, essentially attached to the mast unit, which is, you know, the head of the rover. So they're separate instruments. Both of them are really pretty straightforward. They’re pretty simple instruments, right, they're not, they're nothing fancy. They're both really commercial off-the-shelf parts, which people are really shocked by, but microphones inherently are very simple instruments. They just essentially need to sense pressure. So they just need this membrane that will vibrate and turn that into an electrical signal.

Nina Lanza: They're very simple, but they can actually tell you so much just about the environment. We can use them to do, you know, both science and engineering, right? So one of the things that SuperCam has been doing is, many times when we when the MOXIE instrument turns on -- this is the in-situ oxygen generating experiment -- you know, we'll turn on our microphone to listen to the sound of their compressor, because actually listening to the compressor gives you a very good sense of how well it's functioning.

Nina Lanza: So we can actually help them understand the state of their instrument’s health, just by listening to it, you know. And, of course, I think the EDL microphone has recorded the sounds of the, the wheels of Perseverance driving, which is a very unusual sound, but it also tells you that you can, you can hear that things are okay with those wheels, you don't have to just rely on looking at them. You know, but then, of course, we can listen to the sounds around us of Mars, which is an amazing dimension to add. You know, we've had these beautiful panoramic images of Mars for a long time. But now to add that sound, it really just makes me feel like that much closer to standing on the surface.

Jim Green: Yeah, I know what you mean. I really wanted to have the microphones on all the time, bringing that data back, pumping it into my office.

Nina Lanza: (laughs)

Jim Green: So as I'm sitting there working, I can hear the sounds on Mars, that would be fantastic. And in fact, of course, at night on Mars, I wanted to hear the crickets.

Nina Lanza: (laughs)

Jim Green: Okay, so…(laugh) the pressure on Mars, you know, the atmosphere is so much different than here on Earth. It's about a percent of our atmospheric pressure. And the composition is so much different because it's dominated by carbon dioxide. So we expect these sounds to sound different than they would here on Earth. Were there any kind of surprises when you started to hear the sounds because of that?

Nina Lanza: Yes! When we thought about what would we expect to hear on Mars, we understand very well, the differences in the atmosphere between Earth and Mars. So we have some sense of how those sounds would be different. But of course, you know, models are great, and they really help us, but they are not observations. And so we really had to take observations to say, okay, are our models correct? And the answer was: no. (laughs) They were not correct. It turns out that sound actually propagates a lot more readily in the Martian atmosphere than our models suggested.

Nina Lanza: Before we even sent these microphones, some naysayers said, “Oh, you'll never hear anything, you'll never hear anything, there's just no way sound can propagate.” And it turns out sound is propagating extremely well. So things are louder than we would have thought. Now, that being said, they’re quite quiet, you know, there's not a lot of air molecules on Mars.

Nina Lanza: So its sounds are attenuated. But we can hear sounds much further away than we had predicted. And so it's really meaning that these observations are allowing us to understand the Martian atmosphere and a whole new way that models never could have let us see.

Jim Green: Well, I know you've got a bunch of sound files, and I'm dying to hear them. So pick one and let's listen to it and then talk about what we're hearing.

Nina Lanza: Well, sure, let's see. Maybe since we were just talking about sound propagation, let's maybe listen to the sound of the helicopter, Ingenuity.

Jim Green: Okay, okay.

Listen to the sound of the Ingenuity helicopter (https://soundcloud.com/nasa/listen-to-nasas-ingenuity-helicopter-as-it-flies-on-mars?in=nasa/sets/sounds-from-mars&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing)

Jim Green: Well, that's fantastic. And I mean, you know, when you think about it, Ingenuity is not really very close to the rover.

Nina Lanza: No!

Jim Green: We don't want Ingenuity crashing into Perseverance. So it's at least, you know, 50 meters away. So the ability to hear anything about what the helicopter is doing is really exciting. And as you said, it really gives us a great idea of how that sound is propagating even over long distances.

Nina Lanza: Exactly, you know, so our models predicted we would not be able to hear that sound more than 60 meters away. We heard it over 100 meters away, which is amazing. And what Ingenuity allows us to do is have a standard sound that we can, you know, put at a known distance from the rover. It's like the perfect acoustic experiment.

Nina Lanza: You know, and of course, it wasn't designed as that. But it really allowed us to do this project where we say, look, let's get this sound. We understand exactly the, signal of those rotors, so we know where, and we know where it is, so that we can actually put that together to make and improve our models of attenuation in the Martian atmosphere. And it has worked beautifully. And again, we were shocked. We could hear this. In some ways, it's [a] very mundane sound. We've all heard the sound of rotors, but that's the first rotorcraft on another planet, which is amazing!

Jim Green: Yes, it really is amazing. I tell you. So you know, when we know a lot about the climate on Mars. We have a weather station from Spain, on both Perseverance and on Curiosity. And so we can measure the wind velocity, and the pressure and a number of things like that. And so, indeed, can we hear the wind on Mars?

Nina Lanza: We can. And you know, in many ways, it sounds like the wind on Earth, but in other ways it doesn't. So maybe we can take a listen.

Jim Green: Yeah, let's do that.

Listen to the sound of wind on Mars (https://soundcloud.com/nasa/perseverance-mars-supercam-sounds-18-hours-after-landing?in=nasa/sets/sounds-from-mars)

Jim Green: You know, that's kind of like a windy day. Is it like that all the time that you turn it on? Is that kind of the background? Or can it be really quiet with no wind at times?

Nina Lanza: It's incredibly variable. So it really depends on a lot of factors, you know, the season, the time of day, and just, you know, random perturbations in the atmosphere, right? So there are times of day on Mars that are louder and quieter. So that is probably a mid-day sound, right, where we have the most turbulence. So we hear that wind, which is a kind of a low frequency sound very similar to what we would hear on Earth. Now the difference, of course, is that you know, even though that wind, it sounds very similar, it doesn't have the same force behind it because the atmosphere is so, so much less dense than Earth.

Nina Lanza: So you know, you hear it sounds like it's a really strong wind, and it is for Mars. But if you were to stand out there and feel it, you probably would barely feel it on your skin. Of course, I don't recommend standing on Mars without a spacesuit. So you shouldn't do that experiment, but it's a gentler winter than it sounds.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Wrzesień 03, 2023, 10:21
Gravity Assist: This is What Mars Sounds Like, with Nina Lanza (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/nina-arctic.jpg)
Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, on Axel Heiberg Island, Nunavut (Canadian Arctic) in May 2022. Credits: Leila Battinson

Jim Green: That's incredibly fascinating. Well, what other sounds do you have on Mars? Can we hear the rover drive?

Nina Lanza: We can, and we've actually recorded that. And it's a very weird sound as you'll hear, because the rover doesn't have nice squishy tires. It actually has metal wheels. And so you can actually hear that sound of that metal on the rocks in the soil and it's kind of a little unnerving, I think. It sounds like something's wrong, but of course, nothing is wrong. Everything's fine. So maybe we'll take a listen.

Listen to the sound of Perseverance driving (https://soundcloud.com/nasa/sounds-of-perseverance-mars-rover-driving-sol-16-90-second-highlights?in=nasa/sets/sounds-from-mars)

Jim Green: Yeah, it sounds like it's creeping, crawling along. And then you know, stopping for a second or two and then creeping some more, and when you think about it, you know, Perseverance has got a heritage of intelligent software that's really started with Spirit and Opportunity and then developed into what Curiosity is using and that means, we tell it where it wants you to be at a certain location, and you figure out how to get there. And so it's got to take pictures, it's got to do some analysis in and in having it creeped along.

Nina Lanza: It's amazing, right? The rover can just decide, hey, you know, I don't want to drive straight from point A to B, I need to make a little turn here for my own safety, which is remarkable, right? It's amazing that that we have built a machine that can make those kinds of decisions.

Jim Green: Yeah, I hope from now on every time we go to Mars, we take a microphone. I'm really hoping that that will be a main part of our infrastructure. I think it's just so essential. Now, are there any other scientific insights that we're learning from the sound recordings?

Nina Lanza: Oh yes, well, maybe I can play you one more sound, my favorite sound,

Jim Green: Okay!

Nina Lanza: …which is of course the SuperCam lasers zapping that's the one that I listened to the most, because that's what I'm using to study rocks. So what this sound is, essentially, is that when you shoot the laser at a rock, it's at a distance from the rover. So then you make this plasma, the shockwave that makes a snapping sound, that snapping sound, then vibrates through the air and travels back to the microphone on the mast. And so you can actually hear this at a distance. It's a very small thing, but we can hear it very clearly. So maybe we'll take a listen.

Listen to the sound of the SuperCam laser (https://soundcloud.com/nasa/perseverance-mars-supercam-laser-impacts-on-rock-target?in=nasa/sets/sounds-from-mars)

Jim Green: Now, what we heard, you know, are the individual beams. But it was for only one hole, right? We didn't go to the next hole? So we're really burning that one hole in the rock.

Nina Lanza: Exactly right. So this is just, you could hear its 3 hertz cycle. So it's not that fast. And each time you hear that snap, you vaporize just a little more material in the same hole. We're drilling down into the surface of a rock, but you know, only a few microns, but that's what you're hearing.

Jim Green: Wow, that's fantastic.

Jim Green: What's next up for both Curiosity and Perseverance and their instruments?

Nina Lanza: Oh my goodness, so much. It's such a great time to be a Mars scientist! You know, there are so many things going on. So for Curiosity, of course, we're continuing our ascent of Mount Sharp, and we're continuing to explore unexplored terrains. And so we're going to go through this transitional period to understand you know, how do the lakes end up drying up in in Gale Crater? And so, you know, I'm really looking forward just to continuing to see, you know, this progression. In Jezero crater, you know, I am so excited about sample return.

Nina Lanza: So one of the things that Perseverance is doing, it's actually not only a standalone science mission, it's also collecting samples to return to Earth in a future sample return mission. And so one of the most exciting things that we do is to select samples to return to Earth. And these are going to be samples that are going to be in our laboratories within the next 10 years. It's so exciting, it's going to change everything. So for me, that's one of the most exciting aspects of Perseverance. And of course, we're on right now, in this beautiful delta, which is a deposit made by flowing water.

Nina Lanza: And so all of us on the team, like, really want a piece of that delta. That's like the most exciting sample I can think of, you know, from Mars. So, you know, we're going to be able to take those samples. And of course, we're going to have to be patient and wait for them to come back. But we know they're coming back.

Jim Green: Well, Nina, I always like to ask my guests to tell me that person, place or event, or thing that happened to him that got them so excited about getting in the sciences and being the scientists they are today. And I call that event a gravity assist. So Nina, what was your gravity assist?

Nina Lanza: Well, when I was seven years old, my parents took me to an open observing night at a local university to see Halley's Comet. And so this was, you know, this a comet, a short period comet that comes back every about 76 years. So it was a really a big event. I didn't know anything about space. So there was a lecture before the observing. And I admit that I don't remember anything about that. But when we went out onto the roof, and I looked through that telescope, I was shocked to see something that looked so, just, real, something that I had never seen before.

Nina Lanza: And I realized at that moment, that the sky was not a dome. The sky is three-dimensional space and who knows what's out there! And for me, that was just a pivotal moment. I realized there was nothing more interesting or exciting to me than figuring out what was out there. And so I have really pursued that for the rest of my life. I had no idea, of course, when I was seven, how to do that or what that really meant, but that that sparked this lifelong fascination with space that I carry with me today.

Jim Green: That's great. Well, Nina, thanks so much for telling me about the science and the sounds of Mars.

Nina Lanza: Thank you so much for having me. I love chatting about this stuff. And thank you so much for, for helping us get there!

Jim Green: My pleasure.

Jim Green: Well join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA to see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Jun 17, 2022
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-this-is-what-mars-sounds-like-with-nina-lanza
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Wrzesień 10, 2023, 07:45
O nadziejach związanych m.in. z poszerzeniem wiedzy nt. Urana dzięki obserwacjom JWST.
Cytuj
Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Just like on Earth, we have like things like the mantle happening inside. It's like the remnant of the, the creation of the planet is still hot on the inside and it's only very slowly cooling down. And that's what we expect to see with all of the other planets as well — a hot interior leftover from creation. And that's not what we see at Uranus. We see a negligible internal heat. So it looks like there's no internal heat really going on at all inside. And that's very strange. And one explanation is that Uranus was hit by something really big, and kind of turned inside out. And all of that internal heat got lost.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_scores_another_ringed_world_with_new_image_of_Uranus

Gravity Assist: It’s Raining Diamonds on These Planets (1)
Jul 1, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/uranus_and_neptune_0.jpg)
Left: Arriving at Uranus in 1986, Voyager 2 observed a bluish orb with subtle features. A haze layer hid most of the planet's cloud features from view. Right: This image of Neptune was produced from data from Voyager 2’s flyby of Neptune in 1989, and shows the Great Dark Spot and its companion bright smudge. Credits: Left: NASA/JPL-Caltech ; Right: NASA

Uranus and Neptune are two of the many exciting and mysterious objects in our universe that the James Webb Space Telescope will soon begin to explore. Temperature and pressure conditions are so extreme on these planets that carbon atoms could be crushed into diamonds in their atmospheres. And did you know that Uranus orbits on its side? Learn more about these planets and the Webb telescope’s upcoming observations from astrophysicist Naomi Rowe-Gurney, our guest on this week’s Gravity Assist.

Jim Green: We have two ice giant planets in our solar system, Uranus and Neptune. What will we find out about them when the James Webb Space Telescope takes a look?

Naomi Rowe Gurney: That will give us a massive insight into these other solar systems that we're seeing.

Naomi Rowe Gurney: I had so many teachers and tutors, and just people in my life that said:

Naomi Rowe Gurney: Maybe science is a little bit hard. Like, try doing something else. And I'm really glad that I didn't listen to them and I let my heart decide.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green, and this Gravity Assist, NASA’s interplanetary talk show. We’re going to explore the inside workings of NASA and meet fascinating people who make space missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Naomi Rowe-Gurney. And she is a postdoctoral research associate at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, through the Howard University in Washington, DC. Now, she specializes in the study of two of my favorite planets, Uranus, and Neptune. And she'll be using the Webb Telescope to find out more about these fabulous ice giants of our solar system. So welcome, Naomi, to Gravity Assist.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Jim Green: Well, I've got to tell you, you know, we just haven't been back to the ice giants in so long after Voyager 2 flew by both of them [in the 1980s]. Not Voyager 1, Voyager 1 went on its way. But only Voyager 2 has observed, you know, those two beautiful ice giants. And you've been studying those for a long time. What is your favorite aspects of these ice giants? And why do we call them that? Why aren't they just gas giants?

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yeah, so I love the ice giants. I think I love them mostly because they haven't been looked at very much. I initially wanted to do my PhD on these two planets because there were so many unanswered questions. And we just really don't know even like the fundamentals of where they came from, and why they are the way they are, and why they're called ice giants. I mean, people are still kind of debating that name and whether it's appropriate and whether they should really be called rock giants, because who knows what's inside?

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: It really takes a mission, a proper mission with like an orbiter to look at the gravity of a planet to be able to figure out what's happening on the inside.

Jim Green: Now the composition of the atmosphere has kind of given us that clue that they're different than Jupiter and Saturn. And that's because it's got a variety of ices.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Mhm.

Jim Green: And you've been working on the thermal structure and composition, what is the most exciting things that you've been finding out?

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yeah, so that's the reason why they're blue, because they have high levels of methane in their atmosphere. I study the middle atmosphere, which is like the stratosphere and the upper troposphere. And that's kind of down to around one bar, which is around the same pressure that we have here on Earth, on air. So that's kind of the level that I look at.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: And what we see there is that the Sun interacts with the methane in the atmosphere, and it breaks down the methane into lots of different hydrocarbons. So lots of these chains of different things with hydrogen and carbon in [them], with lots of fancy names like diacetylene and acetylene and methylacetylene, all of these. And we still don't really know everything, like the composition of everything that's in there, and we're still finding new things all the time. And that's why the JWST is so exciting, because we are going to be able to see a lot more of what's going on, and a lot more of these like complex hydrocarbons and things.

Jim Green: A couple of news releases that I've seen have concepts where carbon gets hardened, almost to the point, or maybe to the point of being diamonds. Do we see those kinds of things and Uranus and Neptune's atmospheres?

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: So I mentioned methane being the reason why these two planets are blue. Well, methane has carbon in it and that carbon can occur by itself and also be crushed by the immense pressures that happen, like, deep in the atmosphere, so much deeper than the levels that I look at. And inside the planet, when it gets really hot and really dense, these, these diamonds form and accumulate, and then they become even heavier. And that means that they kind of rain down in the atmosphere. But it's not the rain that we see here because these pressures are extreme, and you'll never be able to get there as a human. So even if these diamonds do exist, we would never be able to go and grab them. So… unfortunately.

Jim Green: Yeah, unfortunately. Okay. (laughs)

Jim Green: Well, you know, one of the really exciting things about planetary science is that when we go from planet to planet, we look at some things that are similar, in addition to the differences. And one thing we look for is lightning. Now here on Earth, we see our lightning but in the upper atmosphere there's some really spectacular forms like “sprites,” we call them and “elves” and blue “jets” and all kinds of exotic discharges that happen in our own atmosphere. Do you think we'll find those at Uranus and Neptune?

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yeah, definitely. I think that there's already been some research done on the kind of traces that we find in, in chemicals that is left behind by lightning and things. That research has already been done using some ground-based telescopes. So that is exciting stuff that's already happening on Uranus and Neptune that we're seeing. The lightning on other planets is similar, I think, to the lightning that we have on Earth as well. So all of those, like elves and sprites and things are also things that we're trying to look for, on, on other planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Jim Green: Well, you know, I think the Voyagers using the plasma wave experiment, did indeed find lightning, at least at Neptune, and at Uranus. That's really exciting. So, so that changes chemistry, too, in the atmosphere.

Jim Green: One of the one of the really great things that that have happened, is we've been monitoring Uranus and Neptune with Hubble, you know. So we have many years of Uranus and Neptune data. Hubble observed some big spots on Neptune recently. What's that all about?

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yeah, so Hubble looks at the near-infrared and the visible wavelengths and in visible we can look at what's happening in every color that we can see with our eyes. So these spots on Uranus and Neptune appear as like these blue dark spots, just like the “great dark spot” that we saw with Voyager on Neptune. And we are trying to observe as many of these as possible, because we think they're kind of like the Great Red Spot that's on Jupiter, like a big storm system that creates lots of changes in the atmosphere, in all levels of the atmosphere. And it's still unknown as to how a dark spot changes the upper levels and, and changes the chemistry and the circulation going on.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: So that's a major thing that the JWST is going to be looking at, because we’re using the mid-infrared in with JWST. And the mid-infrared is really interesting because it senses a little bit higher up than those visible and near-infrared wavelengths in the stratosphere. And that's where all of that interesting chemistry is going on that I was talking about. And that we think is also being affected by these dark spots that might be these circular storms that are happening.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: And that's actually what my PhD was looking at with Spitzer. But the problem with Spitzer is that it's so small, it's only like naught-point eight five [0.85] meters in diameter, so less than, less than a meter and…

Jim Green: The telescope mirror itself.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yeah, exactly. And that's actually the same size as the secondary mirror of the JWST. So the mirror that is used to focus the big 6.5-meter mirror is the same size as the Spitzer's major mirror. So.

Jim Green: Wow. Yeah, that's a good metric. (laughs)

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yeah, right? That is a massive advantage. Because with Spitzer, we didn't have any images, because they're so far away, both Uranus and Neptune are so far. And they're also quite cold, it means that we only had like a point of light. So we can look at it like we look at a star in the night sky. That's how far away they are. And all we get is one spectrum. So one piece of light for just the whole planet.

Jim Green: So Hubble has been observing Uranus and Neptune. But there are specific proposals that come in and do that. Have you been involved in any of those?

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yes. So just recently, in fact, today, this morning, I found out that one of my proposals that I sent in to observe the ice giants is has been approved on HST 30. So cycle 30, which is really, really exciting, like Hubble Space Telescope is amazing. It was launched in 1990. And actually, that makes it the same age as me, which always makes me feel very, both old and also very young. (laughs)

Jim Green: Yes, indeed!

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yeah! So yeah, my project is going to be using Hubble to look at Uranus and Neptune to kind of increase the science that we have for, with the JWST. So it's going to be looking at them, hopefully as close as possible to the JWST observations. And that will mean that we are getting even more wavelengths in there because JWST is looking at the mid-infrared, and near-infrared, but Hubble has capabilities all the way down to the visible, which is really exciting because using visible and also some of the near-infrared. So we can expand that that window and also the depths that we're looking at in the atmosphere.

Jim Green: Wow, perfect.

Jim Green: You know, one of the things that really fascinated me about Uranus and Neptune is the heat that they produce. You know, all our planets are hot on the inside, they're still cooling off from when they were made 4.6 billion years ago. But Neptune, correct me if I'm not right, is producing more heat on the inside than Uranus is. Do we know what's happening?

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: That's true. So it's actually Uranus that's the weird one. Neptune is, is creating the amount of heat on the inside that we would expect a planet to make.

Jim Green: Ah, thank you for correcting me, yeah.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Just like on Earth, we have like things like the mantle happening inside. It's like the remnant of the, the creation of the planet is still hot on the inside and it's only very slowly cooling down. And that's what we expect to see with all of the other planets as well — a hot interior leftover from creation. And that's not what we see at Uranus. We see a negligible internal heat. So it looks like there's no internal heat really going on at all inside. And that's very strange. And one explanation is that Uranus was hit by something really big, and kind of turned inside out. And all of that internal heat got lost.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: And that would also explain why the planet is on its side, which is also another weird and very unique thing in the solar system. No other planet is just on its side spinning, like, on its axis in the wrong direction.

Jim Green: That's fantastic. Well, you know, we've been looking at planets beyond our own in our own solar system, and Kepler came out with some amazing results. And those results indicated the distribution of planets that we see in other solar systems. And I always thought, “Oh, well, we got to be seeing oh, you know, a bunch of Jupiter's.” but it turns out Jupiter's now you know, big Jupiter's are not one of the common planets. But indeed, more of what we call Super Earths, but also mini-Neptune. And so the ice giants Uranus, and Neptune hold a really special place in terms of how important that might be for other solar systems. What can you tell me about those kinds of capabilities?

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yeah, so that's a major motivation behind looking at our own ice giants and why the entire planetary science community and science community is so interested in both of these planets now, it's because we found so many of these Neptune-sized or Uranus-sized, just ice giant sized planets in other solar systems. And we can look at our own ice giants and try and understand a little bit more about how they're formed, and their place in our solar system and how they got there. And that will give us a massive insight into these other solar systems that we're seeing.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Wrzesień 10, 2023, 07:46
Gravity Assist: It’s Raining Diamonds on These Planets (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/headshot2021.jpg)
Naomi Rowe-Gurney is a postdoctoral research associate at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center through Howard University. Credits: Lydia Neary

Jim Green: You know, right after Webb’s launch on December 25, man, you must have been busy!

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yeah, so straight off the launch, I didn't have too much to do with launch. That was all the engineers and ESA doing all of that. But then after that first stage, we did deployment. That was like the first phase of commissioning is what we call it. This phase, this six-month phase, getting the telescope ready for science is called commissioning. And so that first stage was deployment, getting the telescope through to the L2 Lagrange point, which is where it all bits, which is 1.5 million kilometers away from here to make sure that the telescope’s nice and cold, so they can see everything that it's looking at in its infrared images.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: And then after that, when it reached there and deployed successfully, then after phase two, is the telescope alignment. So where it made all of these 18 separate movable segments into one seamless, like, giant 6.5-meter mirror. And then the third stage is the stage that I've been involved in, which is the science instrument commissioning. And I've been involved in a team called the Moving Target Vommissioning Team. And that means that we have been looking at asteroids. So asteroids that are in that asteroid belt mostly, and making sure that the telescope is able to track things that are moving, because everything in the solar system compared to distant objects is a moving target. And it means that the telescope actually has to move physically as it is looking at these objects. And that is definitely needed for everything in the solar system. So that's what we've been testing in this last phase, and then that will be over soon. And then those first images come out on the 12th of July, which is very exciting.

Jim Green: So the first light science from JWST is going to be shown July 12. And then from then on, we're going to see all kinds of fantastic stuff coming out in this regular schedule that it has. So when will Webb start looking at solar system objects?

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: So it won't be part of those first images that come out on the 12th of July. But we will actually start to look at solar system objects. It's just those images won't be released to scientists until after that 12th of July date, and then they won't be released as, kind of, science or anything until our scientists have done their analysis and calibration and everything. So probably, we'll see those first things come out at the end of the summer, I would say, is optimistic.

Jim Green: Now, one of your jobs is, you’re a JWST Solar System ambassador.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yes.

Jim Green: So tell me what that's all about? And what are you doing?

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: So I help everybody who has guaranteed time observations, which means observations in this first year of the James Webb's lifetime. And so everybody who is using JWST to look at solar system objects, or at planetary systems. So all four giant planets, Mars, also the rings, and all of the moons as well. So those ocean worlds and Titan and icy moons, and smaller moons as well of Saturn we're going to be looking at. And I am there to kind of assist people in going from data all the way through to getting their science published. 

Jim Green: Well, so you'll be right on top of some of the latest discoveries.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yeah, I hope so.

Jim Green: Wow, that's fantastic. I know this is going to be such an exciting time for our scientists, and for NASA with a telescope so large, looking at wavelengths that we cannot see from the ground. Well, Naomi, I always like to ask my guests to tell me the person, place or event that propelled them to become the scientists they are today. And I call that event a Gravity Assist. So Naomi, what was your Gravity Assist?

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: My gravity assist was an event-slash-place. It was when I was about five years old, I went to the planetarium in London. And I hadn't really thought about Earth or space or anything like that before then. And it just completely opened my mind. And I was just obsessed with space ever since then. And I loved cosmology, and astrophysics and planetary science and even Earth science. I was just obsessed with it. And I went through my entire school life, loving science, being terrible at math, but going through it just because I really wanted to do science. And obviously getting to where I am today, because of that first, yeah, gravity assist from the planetarium in London. So, love them.

Jim Green: Wow, that's, that's really neat. And I have to comment on your math mention, because there's so much different types of math. You know, not all math is created equal, so to speak.

Jim Green: I was horrible in geometry. I just did not like it. But I mean, give me a differential equation, and I'll solve it.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: I’m the same. I hate numbers. I still count on my fingers because numbers just don't make sense to me. So I'm great at algebra, though. So yeah…it’s all different types of math, so...

Jim Green: It is, it is. So I always encourage, kids in school to look past that not to be discouraged, because they have trouble in one area of math, because they'll find out that in the end, the kind of math that they can really get into will help them be the scientists that they are, or the engineer that they are, in their future life.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Definitely.

Jim Green: So, so those challenges are important to overcome.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Yeah, I would say my advice would be: Don't listen to people when they say that you can't do something. I had so many teachers and tutors, and just people in my life that said, “Maybe you should do something a bit easier. Maybe you should, I don’t know, like, pick a different subject. Maybe maths isn't for you, you know, maybe science is a little bit hard, like try doing something else. And I'm really glad that I didn't listen to them. And I let my heart decide that even if it was hard, I was going to try. And I thankfully have a very supportive family that were always very supportive of me.

Jim Green: Well, Naomi, thanks so much for telling us about that fantastic science of these gas giants. And the JWST is going to give us so much more information about them.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney: Thank you so much for having me. This has been great.

Jim Green: Well join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Jul 1, 2022
Editor: Michael Bock

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-it-s-raining-diamonds-on-these-planets
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Wrzesień 17, 2023, 08:55
O sztuce transformacji surowych danych zebranych przez instrumenty teleskopu na postać wizualnie fascynującą.
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Joe DePasquale: And for the 28th anniversary, we looked at the Lagoon Nebula (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/lagoon-nebula-visible-light-view) and produce this like beautiful multicolor image in narrowband wavelengths.

Joe DePasquale: So what I was saying before about red, green, and blue, those are sort of wide bands. Hubble has filters that look in like wide swaths of the spectrum. But it also has these filters that are attuned to very specific wavelengths and very narrow regions within those wavelengths. And so that image is actually a combination of three narrowband wavelengths in red, green and blue, that just produce this amazingly detailed tapestry of gas and dust and star formation.

Gravity Assist: How We Make Webb (and Hubble) Images (1)
Jul 8, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/stsci-h-p1821a-m-1699x20001a.png)
This colorful image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, gives us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary stellar tapestry of birth and destruction. At the center of this image is a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun that is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust. Credits: NASA, ESA, and STScI

The world will get a first glimpse of the universe as never before when the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope come out on July 12. And this is only the beginning — the telescope will deliver all kinds of insights about galaxies, planets, and more, for years to come. But someone has to translate that data into beautiful imagery, especially since Webb collects light that falls outside of human vision. That’s where Joe DePasquale of the Space Telescope Science Institute comes in. Learn how he makes choices about color and other aspects of space images in this week’s Gravity Assist podcast.

Jim Green: In just a few days, we're going to see the first images that came from the James Webb Space Telescope. Let's talk to somebody that's worked to make these beautiful images come to life.

Joe DePasquale: The images are spectacular. They're gonna blow people away.

Joe DePasquale: There's sort of like a universal appeal to these images. They touch on a collective need or want to understand the deeper questions of the universe that we all have, in ways that connect us all together.

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green, and this Gravity Assist, NASA’s interplanetary talk show. We’re going to explore the inside workings of NASA and meet fascinating people who make space missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Joseph DePasquale and he is the senior data image developer in the Office of Public Outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Joe has worked on bringing spectacular space images to life from missions like Hubble (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/main/index.html) and Chandra (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/main/index.html). But now he's working with the James Webb Space Telescope group, which will be unveiling its first images on July 12th. So welcome, Joe to Gravity Assist.


(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/joedp.jpg)
Joe DePasquale is a senior data image developer in the Office of Public Outreach at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. Credits: STScI

Joe DePasquale: Hi, Jim, thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here.

Jim Green: Well, you know, a lot of people probably don't realize that when we look at a Hubble image, that it's not exactly what the spacecraft sees. You know, someone such as you has to serve as that intermediate process between the data and the final image and make decisions on how to make that image pop. So how would you describe what you do?

Joe DePasquale: Well, like you said, Jim, it's, the telescope is not really a point and shoot camera. So it's not like we can just take a picture and there we have it, right? It's a scientific instrument. So it was designed first and foremost, to produce scientific results. It just so happens with Hubble, and with Webb, that these instruments are exquisitely sensitive, and they create beautiful images of the universe. But it's scientific data first, so we have to take that data and convert it into an image. And that's, that's where I come in, myself and my colleague, Alyssa Pagan.

Jim Green: All right, well, what kind of training do you have, that really has enabled you to take these images and make them shine?

Joe DePasquale: Yeah, that's an interesting question. My, my career path has kind of meandered through my life. But, I started out with a degree in astronomy and astrophysics. And I worked for eight years for the Chandra mission as a data analyst, in calibration for the telescope, one of its detectors.

Joe DePasquale: And during that time, I learned a lot about how the images from Chandra were made, and how to create color images from the data. And it was sort of a natural transition from that position into public outreach for Chandra, creating, like press imagery from the data. So my background was really in astronomy, but also, I've had a lot of interest in like arts, painting, you know, photography, color theory, and like all of these interests sort of come together to be able to allow me to, you know, have the skill set needed to make these images.

Jim Green: Yeah, I think you point out a really an important aspect about it. And that is, having that science background already gives you the intuition as to what that image is all about. As you say, you paint?

Joe DePasquale: Right.

Jim Green: So in addition to having that science background, you have that artistic flair, now I don't have much of an artistic flair. (laughs) So it takes a really unique individuals to do that. But that science background is really key, I think. So when you get that image from a spacecraft, what does it look like? Is just a bunch of ones and zeros? And how do you turn them into the beautiful things they are?

Joe DePasquale: (laughs) Yeah, so the data do come down in a digital format of ones and zeros, although the raw data that we get from the archive is, you know, it's a black and white image, essentially. It's basically just the brightness levels of the pixels that the detector saw. So it was sitting in one spot looking at some object in space collecting light. And the image that we get is, sort of, that raw image from the detector. And it needs a lot of work to be able to even see what's in the image. We have to do something called stretch the data, and that is to take the pixel values and sort of reposition them, basically, so that you can see all the detail that's there.

Joe DePasquale: If you don't do that, it basically looks like a black image with some white specks in it, because there's such a huge dynamic range. And what I mean by dynamic range is just the darkest darks and the brightest whites in the image. The whites are super bright and they stand out as these white specks, but all of the other material and interesting stuff is sort of buried in the dark regions of the image. And you have to bring it out without oversaturating it.

Jim Green: Got it.

Joe DePasquale: So if you bring everything up equally, then you're, you're bringing up all that dark information, but you're also over saturating the bright. And so there's a compression that happens, that allows you to retain the information that's bright, but also bring up the dark parts of the image.

Jim Green: Well, you know, our eye has is so fantastic, a tool for us to see a very broad range of wavelengths. And, and our eye is sensitive more in certain colors than in others. Does that affect how you actually end up picking the colors and repainting the image?

Joe DePasquale: Yeah, that's very true. So our eyes, you know, they have cone cells that are sensitive to colors of light, and nominally, red, green, and blue. And so we use that that sort of biology of the eye as a framework within which to apply color to the images.

Joe DePasquale: When we're working with Hubble, and Webb, or even Chandra, even wavelengths that are beyond what we can see with our eyes, we use a technique called chromatic ordering to the data. And what that means is that, for Hubble, it looks in very specific wavelength ranges. So we have these filters that filter out light, and allow you to see like, if you were taking an image in red light, the filter filters out everything but red, and allows you to see an image in just red light. Of course, it comes down to us black and white, and we have to later apply that color red to it.

Joe DePasquale: But our color images are made up this way by taking red filters and coloring them red, green to green and blue to blue. When you move away from red, green and blue, like visually, we use this same approach. So for example with Webb, if we take short-wavelength infrared light and assign blue to that, and then as you move into the longer wavelengths, you go from blue to green to red, that's what I mean by chromatic ordering.

Jim Green: Yeah, so you, you actually use as your color palette the spectrum of light, as we break it up in a prism. So it has that specific ordering associated with it.

Joe DePasquale: Yeah, that's right. The red, green, and blue primary colors, you know, within those, you can have all the colors of the rainbow.

Jim Green: Yeah, to me that's really important to understand. So it's not like, “Oh, I'm gonna take this and make it purple. And then right next to that, we're going to make this yellow.”

Joe DePasquale: That's right, yeah, you're absolutely right, that we're not going in there and applying like painting color on to the image. We are respecting the data from beginning to end. And we're allowing the data to show through with color. So if you look at a galaxy, for example, in optical light, the regions of the galaxy where there's active star formation, we expect those to be sort of glowing in hydrogen, which would be red.

Joe DePasquale: And so we know that when we use that red filter, and it's colored red, you apply red, green, and blue together, you're going to see like a highlight in red where there are star forming regions. So there's actually a lot of science that you can learn just by looking at the color image.

Jim Green: So Joe, after you get that initial image that you feel just is right, and it has the, the look and feel about it that really makes the observations in the data pop, is there an interaction period with the scientists about that? And do you then go back and modify that?

Joe DePasquale: Yeah, Jim, it's very much an iterative process. But I do feel like over the years, I've sort of honed my intuition into what looks good. So you know, the initial starting point is always like the springboard for the discussion.

Joe DePasquale: But we do have a lot of back and forth with the scientists that we work with on these images, specifically, to help really bring out the details that they want to specifically bring out for their particular results, their science results. You know, that may require a little extra work here or there, just to get that thing to pop a little more.

Jim Green: Well, what's been some of your favorite images to work on from Hubble?

Joe DePasquale: So every year we do an anniversary image, right, where we pick an object that we know is going to be pretty spectacular when viewed with Hubble. And we'll do an anniversary image release to celebrate the launch of Hubble.

Jim Green: Cool!

Joe DePasquale: And for the 28th anniversary, we looked at the Lagoon Nebula (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/lagoon-nebula-visible-light-view) and produce this like beautiful multicolor image in narrowband wavelengths.

Joe DePasquale: So what I was saying before about red, green, and blue, those are sort of wide bands. Hubble has filters that look in like wide swaths of the spectrum. But it also has these filters that are attuned to very specific wavelengths and very narrow regions within those wavelengths. And so that image is actually a combination of three narrowband wavelengths in red, green and blue, that just produce this amazingly detailed tapestry of gas and dust and star formation.

Jim Green: Well, you've also worked on Chandra.

Joe DePasquale: That’s right.

You know, and although Hubble does observe in the visible light in the light that we can see, and a little bit into the infrared in the light, we can't see, Chandra, we can't see any of that data from the ground and from our eye.

Jim Green: Right.

Joe DePasquale: So what do you do with that data in tell us about your favorite image?

Joe DePasquale: Yeah, so that's a really interesting challenge when you're talking about X-ray light, because it is beyond human vision, right? So we like to in the, you know, imaging community in astrophotography like to refer to this process as “representative color,” instead of what it used to be called, are still many people call “false color images.” I dislike the term “false color,” because it has this connotation that we're faking it, or it's, you know, this isn't really what it looks like, the data is the data. That's, that's exactly what it looks like.

Jim Green: Yeah. And as you said, you're keeping true to that data from a scientific perspective by connecting the colors in the right way.

Joe DePasquale: Right.

Jim Green: …with the wavelengths.

Joe DePasquale: Yeah, so and a good example of, you know, working with multi-wavelength imagery, combining Hubble and Chandra, one of my favorite images that we worked on was the Antennae Galaxies (https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2010/antennae/), where we have these two interacting galaxies, they're sort of playing, dancing around each other, and merging together. And that image actually also included infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope (https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/main/index.html). And in order to keep everything sort of very cleanly separated, I chose very specific colors for the different wavelengths in that image.

Joe DePasquale: And you know, that there's a Hubble image there of the Antennae galaxies that on its own is a beautiful, like, very detailed color image, I felt a little bad about the fact that I had to reduce its color from, you know, the beautiful three color image all the way down to just one color, which I colored gold in that version. And then I pulled the Chandra data in, in blue, and the infrared in red. And although each one of those on their own, it's, it's kind of like missing something, when you pull them all together, and they each have their own color, there's actually a wealth of information that you can pull out of that, that you wouldn't get from any one of them alone.

Jim Green: So what was it like working on this Webb data? Because it's now taking this data, it's now coming in, you're now having your hands on it. You're the one that knows what's being done, right?

Joe DePasquale: Yeah, that's right. (laughs) I can't speak in detail about it. But I can say that the images are spectacular, they're gonna blow people away.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Wrzesień 17, 2023, 08:55
Gravity Assist: How We Make Webb (and Hubble) Images (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/antennae1.png)
The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light years from Earth, are shown in this composite image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope (gold and brown), and the Spitzer Space Telescope (red). The Antennae galaxies take their name from the long antenna-like "arms," seen in wide-angle views of the system. These features were produced by tidal forces generated in the collision. Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Optical: NASA/STScI

Jim Green: Good.

Joe DePasquale: Being among the first people to work on, it has been such a privilege. I feel like I have to pinch myself. Like, I can't believe that. I'm here at this moment in time, working at Space Telescope, working on the Webb project, pulling together the first data that Webb has taken and turning it into these beautiful color images, is just the highlight of my career right now.

Jim Green: When scientists look at their archive and get the data, you know, how important are these beautiful images that you create to them?

Joe DePasquale: I'd say it has grown in importance over the years. I believe that, know, scientists have their own ways and preferred ways of processing the data to pull out the details that they want to see. But ultimately, when they want to win, if they have newsworthy results, they want to present that in the best way possible. And that's where, you know, the work that I do comes in, where I can take something that they may have made, and you know, clean it up and turn it into something that's just a beautiful image, but also tells the story of their science and their results, as well as, you know, presenting a beautiful image.

Jim Green: Well, you know, space images are not only great for scientists. They're wonderful for the public. And I see Hubble images on all kinds of stuff, T-shirts, lunch box[es], posters, all kinds of other places. I mean, you know, in this area [near Washington, DC], you can go to the Dulles Airport, and if you take the underground walk from the parking lot, one and two, over to the airport, you see the beautiful wall of Hubble images, I don't know if you have done that. But but you know, millions of people have probably made that walk. So what does that feel like to see those images that you've worked on being displayed all over the world?

Joe DePasquale: It feels humbling, I will say, to know, that, like, work that I have done has been seen by millions of people, and is hopefully inspiring people to be like the next generation of scientists and engineers and maybe image processors. (laughs)

Jim Green: Sure.

Joe DePasquale: There's sort of like a universal appeal to these images. They touch on a collective sort of need or want to understand the deeper questions of the universe that we all have, in ways that connect us all together. You know, Carl Sagan was always a fan of saying that we are star stuff. And I always like to extend that to the fact that like, when we're observing the universe, when we're looking at these images, we are the universe thinking about itself. Right? So we're all connected. And this brings us all together.

Jim Green: So Joe, do you own any clothing with the images that you've made on it?

Joe DePasquale: (laughs) I personally don't own any clothing with my images on it. But my wife has a dress with one of my images on it, or actually the way it was put together. It's like sort of a mishmash of a couple different images. But something that I worked on is in there. I do have a pair of socks with the Webb telescope on them. So I frequently wear those for good luck.

Joe DePasquale: I remember when I was in college, sitting in class looking at we had a poster of the Pillars of Creation image, the famous Hubble image, right?

Jim Green: Yeah.

Joe DePasquale: And yeah, that was like hugely inspiring for me just sitting there wondering about like, even just how was this image made? Like, how was that actually there? How can we get a picture in such detail and clarity of this object? So that was a huge inspiration for me. And, you know, this is a bit of an aside. But when I started at Space Telescope, I actually worked with Zolt Levay for the first year that I was here, he was the original image processor for Hubble, you know, worked on many of these images that, you know, inspired me to get into astronomy in the first place. And I got to share an office with him for a year. So that was really special time. Yeah.

Jim Green: Well, you're really touching on the next thing I want to talk about. And that is, I always like to ask my guests to tell me, you know, the person, place or event that propelled them forward to become the scientists they are today. And I call that a gravity assist. So Joe, what was your gravity assist?

Joe DePasquale: Ah, that's a great question. So I think I have to go all the way back to high school. And, you know, knowing that I always was interested in astronomy and space and just looking up, and look at the stars and wonder what was up there. But I kind of lost a little bit of that through high school. And then I saw the movie “Contact” the summer before I started college. Right?

Jim Green: Ah, interesting! Uh huh!

Joe DePasquale: And I read the book, Carl Sagan’s book, and it just opened my eyes to the possibility of, like, pursuing a career in astronomy, and seeing what that could be like. And I switched my major that summer, right before I started school, I switched into astronomy. I went to Villanova University, which has a wonderful undergraduate astronomy program school.

Jim Green: Yeah. Good school.

Joe DePasquale: Yeah. And, you know, the rest is history. That was sort of the thing that got me going. I would call that my gravity assist.

Jim Green: Yeah, yeah, I would too, I would too. Well, for me in high school, I had the privilege of working on a 12-inch Alvan Clark refractor that was associated with the high school, and it was part of what was called the Witte observatory. So I caught the bug like you did early on in my career, and that really set the tone to move forward.

Joe DePasquale: That’s great.

Jim Green: Well, Joe, thanks so much for telling us about the process of making these fabulous images from the NASA telescopes.

Joe DePasquale: Thank you, Jim. Glad to talk about anytime. (laughs)

Jim Green: Well join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your Gravity Assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Jul 8, 2022
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-how-we-make-webb-and-hubble-images
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Wrzesień 24, 2023, 14:23
Dla przypomnienia, dlaczego JWST ma tak duże znaczenie.
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John Mather: Kiedy mówiliśmy o zdjęciu Hubble'a, Głębokie Pole Hubble'a było świetne, ale niewystarczająco. Spodziewaliśmy się, że rzeczy znajdujące się najdalej będą najtrudniejsze do zobaczenia. Będą to po prostu najmniejsze plamki w podczerwieni . A teraz teleskop Webba może je zobaczyć i powiedzieć, co w nich jest? Jakie są składniki chemiczne tych małych plamek? Oraz jak daleko sięgają w czasie? Maleńkie czerwone plamki – cóż, nawet teleskop Webba nie jest w stanie zbyt dobrze dostrzec ich kształtów. Ale możemy zobaczyć, że tam są i zobaczyć, z czego są zrobione. Możemy je policzyć i zobaczyć, ile.

Gravity Assist: Meet a Webb Scientist Who Looks Back in Time (1)
Jul 29, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/mather-cgunn.jpg)
Dr. John Mather, the senior project scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope, has been working on the observatory for more than 25 years. Credits: NASA/Chris Gunn

The James Webb Space Telescope awed the world on July 12 with its first images and data. And it’s just getting started with its exploration of the cosmos. Dr. John Mather, the observatory’s senior project scientist, has been working toward this milestone for more than 25 years. Before Webb, he worked on a spacecraft that delivered a groundbreaking baby picture of the universe and offered the best evidence yet that the universe began with a rapid expansion we call the big bang. Dr. Mather describes some of the first images and explains the mysteries that Webb will tackle.

Jim Green: We just saw spectacular images from the James Webb Space Telescope. Let's talk to an expert and find out all the other things that it can do.

John Mather: Everything from here in the solar system all the way out as far back as you can possibly go in time to tell the story of the universe, how did it go from the big bang to people?

Jim Green: Hi, I'm Jim Green, and this Gravity Assist, NASA’s interplanetary talk show. We’re going to explore the inside workings of NASA and meet fascinating people who make space missions happen.

Jim Green: I'm here with Dr. John Mather, and he is the senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, which of course, just released its first spectacular images earlier this month. John is based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Welcome, John, to Gravity Assist.

John Mather: Thank you, Jim.

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/cobe.jpeg)
Dr. John Mather, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, won a Nobel Prize for his work on the COBE satellite. COBE measured the light left over from the big bang, shown in this map. These minute temperature variations (depicted here as varying shades of blue and purple) are linked to slight density variations in the early universe. Credits: NASA

Jim Green: It's really an honor to have you here. And I know you've had a long career at NASA much like I have, and experienced so many fantastic things. And so I'd like to talk about a couple of them. One of which, of course, is COBE. This was one of your first major missions, and of course, in a wonderful way that led to your Nobel Prize. So can you give me a little background about COBE?

John Mather: Sure, well COBE was the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, and it was proposed back in 1974, to measure the big bang . So what's it mean to measure the big bang? It means measure the cosmic microwave background radiation, which fills the entire universe now. And is evidence of the conditions at the very earliest moments, whatever they were. So task number one, see, is it the right color? Is it colorless in the sense of matching up a theoretical curve called a black body spectrum? And, and it is. Number two, is it the same in every direction? And the answer is almost, but not quite. And that's really important because we interpret the hot and cold spots that we saw on the map, to say those come from the big bang itself, whatever the big bang really was. And they made the universe not exactly smooth and not exactly uniform, and because of that we are here.

John Mather: So when we showed the map to the to the world, Stephen Hawking said “Well, that's the most important scientific discovery of the century, if not of all time!”

Jim Green: (laughs)

John Mather: Oh, okay, Stephen, why is that so important? Well, number one, we think that gravity acting on those primordial spots was able to turn around the expanding universe in places and cause the formation of galaxies and stars and eventually leading to planets and people. So we're here because of that. Number two, most of those spots are coming from something astronomers had recognized, but nobody can see. It's called cosmic dark matter. And so, okay, so we now are able to measure the cosmic dark matter by its effects on that map. And, number three, the pattern is affected somewhat by the cosmic dark energy, which also astronomers can detect but cannot see. So that tells us the expansion history of the universe. That's pretty important to our story. And finally, if we ever could figure out what made this spots, we would be thrilled because it would tell us something about quantum gravity, which is one of the biggest open questions of physics today.

Jim Green: Did COBE prove the big bang happened? Or were there some sort of indications prior to that?

John Mather: Nothing can actually prove the big bang, we can always disprove something. So there was one major alternative theory to the we call the big bang the expanding universe, and it was called the steady state theory. And it had some very strange and interesting predictions, but it was definitely not in agreement with observations after we got them with the COBE satellite. So the big bang or the expanding universe, as I call it, is the remaining theory. What's interesting is what was it like in the very earliest moments? So we can still argue a lot about what happened when the temperature was incredibly high, and the density was incredibly high. But there was something extreme in those first sub-microseconds, and that's what I call the big bang

Jim Green: Well, what is happening in the early part of the universe that James Webb is going to be able to tease out? You know, it looks in the infrared and also looks back in time!

John Mather: Well, the Webb telescope does look back in time by looking at things that are far away. Light takes a long time to get here from there. So we can look back on not quite all the way towards the beginning. But if nature gave us an object to look at, then we should be able to see it as soon as 50 or 100 million years after the expansion started up. So those primordial objects are purely predicted at the moment. Nobody's ever seen them. But we built the Webb telescope so that we could if they are there.

John Mather: By the way, when we’re talking about the size of the universe, the universe as a whole is probably infinite, so it doesn't really have a size. The part that we can see is 13.7 or 13 point 8 billion light-years in dimension at the moment, or it was when the light was sent to us. So that's a little tricky bit too, because of course, everything's been moving and changing ever since the light came.

John Mather: But in any rate, our job with the Webb telescope is looking as far back towards that moment to into what we call the Cosmic Dark Ages, to see the first luminous objects that grew out of that primordial material. So they could have been stars, they could have been galaxies that came together, before the stars grew, they could have been black holes, there even are stories about how black holes could grow out of that primordial material. It's even logically possible that there are some left from the big bang itself. Although nobody has figured that one out, we've never seen a real signs of them. But what about that? So that's sort of number one cosmological objective is to see back as far as possible in time.


(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/main_image_galaxies_stephans_quintet_sq_nircam_miri_final-5mb.jpg)
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope revealed never-before-seen details of galaxy group “Stephan’s Quintet” in this image. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

Jim Green: It really sounds to me, like you as cosmologists are following a series of missions that then build on one another. How did you personally go from working on COBE to then getting involved in the James Webb Space Telescope?

John Mather: Well, it was not my plan, actually. Somebody else was already working on this new telescope concept. And COBE was more or less done. And I think, “what am I going to do next that’s as good as that?” And I got a phone message from NASA Headquarters, from Ed Weiler and “we're going to start a study of this new telescope, do you want to work on it? And if we do, then I need a proposal from you tomorrow.”

Jim Green: (laughs)

John Mather: So he knew that he had something to push and that it was time to start. So of course, I called up the people they told me to talk to and we sent in the proposal, and we got rolling. So I had no idea how hard this mission would be, or how long it would take. But I just could tell this was the most important thing I could possibly be working on, as a follow up to the COBE satellite.

Jim Green: What was the original questions that you were scientifically trying to answer with this new telescope that you were conceptually working on?

John Mather: Well, right away, we knew there were many questions it could answer because it would be doing something no one ever could ever possibly do in any other way. We knew we needed an infrared telescope. So why infrared? Well, number one, it's now technically possible. And it's never been possible before. Because we have the in the capability of cooling things down, we have the capable amount ability of launching a telescope into space that would be much larger than ever we tried before. And the Hubble can't do it. Because the Hubble emits infrared light. The ground telescopes can't do it because they emit infrared and the sky is kind of dark or bright or opaque one way or the other. So you can't do it from here. So this is all going to be a big mystery until we can get telescopes into space to do this work.

John Mather: So what are you going to be able to do not only look back and farther in time, but also look inside and dust clouds where stars are being born today. We didn't even know yet there would be so many planets at the time. In 1995, just we were just discovering the very, very first planets around other stars. So now we know most stars have planets and we did make a few adjustments to the mission concept so we could study them too.

John Mather: So anyway, basically everything from here in the solar system all the way out as far back as you can possibly go in time to tell the story of the universe, how did it go from the big bang to people?

Jim Green: It's going to be an amazing story as we put in more of the puzzle pieces, and figure out what's happening. Well, did Webb originally have these big mirrors that were segmented? Or was it you know, what, what was the original thought? How do you compare those early concepts with what we have today?

John Mather: Early concepts actually resemble the one we have today very closely.

Jim Green: Really? Wow!

John Mather: There were different ways you can fold up the segmented telescope. But we knew right away, we had to have a big sunshade because the telescope has to be cold. We knew we couldn't keep the telescope near Earth. Because the Earth is always warm, and it's always getting in the way. So you couldn't keep the telescope cool near Earth. Okay, push it far away, where's the next place to go? It's called the Lagrange point 2, it's a million miles out there. But it's a great place if you can get there. On the other hand, “if you can get there” means “use a rocket you can get.” And that means the telescope is going to be pretty different. It's going to be ultra-light, the mass of the telescope is half of what the Hubble was, is.

Jim Green: Wow.

John Mather: It's a huge challenge. But the basic sketch that we drew is pretty similar to what we actually flew.

Jim Green: So John, as you're going along, helping put this telescope together, when did it happen that you thought, “hey, we've turned the corner, and this is gonna work!” Did that ever occur?

John Mather: I think I always knew this was going to work.

Jim Green: (laughs)

Jim Green: And the reason for that is, we have a brilliant engineering system for keeping track of everything that might go wrong. And if anybody has a worry about it, they speak up. And we talk about it and make sure we fix whatever that was. And so from the beginning to the end, we've had project managers and support from NASA Headquarters that said, “Yeah, that's the right thing to do.” We're not cutting corners on this, we're going to do it right. So, on the other hand, I was just sitting there quite calmly at launch, and I was just happy to watch it go up. Now, when we finally got to the image release, oh, my gosh, all the things that could go wrong, suddenly, they come flooding into my mind and this is like, I've been walking along the edge of a cliff for 25 years, and I didn't fall off.

Jim Green: I mean, we were all waiting in bated breaths for July 12 to come around. And, and I have to tell you, I was just blown away. And I'm sure you felt that, too. So what were some of your impressions when you first saw this data coming in?

John Mather: Well, my goodness, I was like, almost everybody else. I had not seen them until they were polished. And so we went from, more than two decades of “is it really going to work?” to “it is so spectacular.” And the pictures are so beautiful. And everything we said we were going to do that seemed impossible, we're doing it.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Wrzesień 24, 2023, 14:23
Gravity Assist: Meet a Webb Scientist Who Looks Back in Time (2)
Jul 29, 2022

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/main_image_deep_field_smacs0723-5mb.jpg)
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope delivered the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe so far. Webb’s First Deep Field is galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, and it is teeming with thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
https://www.nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

Jim Green: Yeah, I know!

John Mather: So there we are. The Stephan’s Quintet showed yes, yes, you can see, as much far back towards the beginning of time, as we said. There's a black hole in one of them. And you can study the black hole, called an active galactic nucleus. There's a galaxy that's closer than the others in the picture. And we can see that it's all sort of pimply because you're seeing individual stars.

Jim Green: I know, that just blew me away when I saw that, yeah.

John Mather: That's a category of stars that jumps out because they're red. And so the infrared telescope picks them up very well. Then we got the picture of the Carina Nebula, where stars are being born as we speak, and there are hundreds of them being born inside that cloud. And so you need a tour guide to be able to find all the cool things in that one. And so anyway, we are so thrilled that it's not only working on doing the science, but it's pretty to look at.

Jim Green: It is. You know, to me, the beauty in the images, in all of them are in the details, the ability to then zoom in, I mean, the deep field image, where the distant galaxies are just popping out all over the place, is really startling. Now, what surprised me about that, in these early galaxies, is many of them have already evolved into a spiral- like or flat, flattened, wheel-like surface, as it is rotating around their center. What were your thoughts about the deep field?

John Mather: Oh, well, number one, it's what we said it would be. There are galaxies everywhere.

Jim Green: (laughs) There are galaxies everywhere. (laughs)

John Mather: When we said the Hubble picture, the Hubble Deep Field was great, but not far enough, what we expected was the things that are the farthest away the hardest to see, they're just going to be the tiniest little infrared specks. And now the Webb telescope can see them and say what's in them? What are the chemical constituents of those little specks? As well as how far back are they in time? The tiny red specks -- well, even the Webb telescope can't see their shapes very much. But we can see that they're there and see what they're made of. We can count them, and see how many.

John Mather: So our current story is that our Milky Way galaxy, with its beautiful spiral shape is probably made of maybe 1,000 little bits that were pulled together over time. And we've still got two that are falling in, the Magellanic Clouds, right. But it's really hard to work out the archaeology of the galaxy that we live in. So sometimes you can learn things by looking at other people's galaxies, other people…. Really, we don't really know that there's anybody out there.

Jim Green: (laughs)

John Mather: But why wouldn't there be?

Jim Green: (laughs) Yeah, right! Of course, of course.

Jim Green: Are you on some teams right now studying certain aspects of what JWST is doing?

John Mather: Actually, I'm not I did not propose to observe with the telescope. You know, what I'd love to do is imagine new ways to build equipment. And so I'm onto what's the next kind of equipment to build?

Jim Green: Wow, I did not know that. (laughs)

John Mather: Yeah, so I’ve got a couple of things in mind, started off about four years ago with an idea to make an orbiting starshade. So a starshade is conceived so you can see planets around other stars. And the problem that's to solve is that the stars are incredibly bright compared to the planets. So there's a huge amount of glare, so you can't do it. So what do you do, you either have to build a perfect telescope and put a coronagraph in it in space, or put up a starshade with a less perfect telescope and cast a shadow of the star onto the telescope without blocking the planets.

John Mather: So this is a good hard problem. And I thought, when I heard about it, well, first, can we do it with the Webb telescope? And the answer was, well, that's too hard right now. But what about the telescope on the ground? We have enormous telescopes coming on the ground, the biggest one is 39 meters across.

Jim Green: Wow.

John Mather: it’s six times as big as the Webb.

Jim Green: Wow.

John Mather: So we got to find a way to use it for that. So the upshot is, you could do this, if you could do a starshade 100 meters in diameter, and put it 170,000 kilometers away from Earth, so it can cast a shadow of the star onto the telescope. And then you have to line it up and keep it there for a while. So this is a good hard engineering problem, and it is not impossible. I am working on that. In fact, I got a nice support from Headquarters through the NIAC, this NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts,

Jim Green: Right.

John Mather: …to study what I'm calling the “hybrid observatory of Earth like exoplanets.” So we currently have a design challenge open on GrabCAD, GrabCAD.com. You can sign up and send us a drawing of how you think you could solve our problem.

Jim Green: That sounds fantastic, John. Yeah, those next new steps are really critical. And I find that the engineering community working with a scientific community are coming up with some really spectacular concepts. In fact as you say, that starshade has a very specific shape. And, it had to be determined by I guess, supercomputers or other methods of computation to determine that shape. Were you involved in some of that activity then, too?

John Mather: That initial work was a long time ago. We know what shape we need to build, but it's just really hard to build it because it is so immense. 100 meters is bigger than the whole lot my house is on.

Jim Green: (laughs)

John Mather: So that's hard, and it has to be pretty lightweight, which makes a good challenge. So that’s pretty cool.

John Mather: So that's what I like to do. I love inventing things.

Jim Green: Well, that sounds fantastic. And as we can do these next generation telescopes, the ability to get to smaller planets is going to enable us to perhaps find something that's more like Earth than we've ever seen before. So I'm tremendously excited about that.

Jim Green: And of course, what James Webb Space Telescope is going to be doing is helping us understand what that next generation telescopes will be, because it's gonna be taking spectra of planets. And in fact, one of those first images was a spectrum of a Jupiter sized planet. That really got me excited.

Jim Green: I mean, this was just an exciting opportunity to then really tease out what the chemical composition is of an atmosphere.

Jim Green: The concept of being able to look at those exoplanets is critical, and also compare them with our own planets here in our solar system. So one of the first images in the solar system that have been released, of course, was of Jupiter, and its moon, actually several moons, but the one that was really exciting with a shad ow cast on the planet was Europa.

Jim Green: How'd you like that one, wasn't it fantastic?

John Mather: Well it was lovely. It was, you know, we took that picture to just make sure the telescope would do that kind of picture. Because Jupiter's incredibly bright, how are we going to know that we can see faint things next to bright things that the guide star system is going to work and all that. So that was a really important thing to prove that we could even make those observations. And then it's so beautiful, because you see Europa you see Metis and other little satellites out there. So Europa is especially important for people because as you especially know, we're sending a probe out there to pay more attention because it could have life in the ocean under the ice. So we're going to be watching that one, especially from here. And you could even see with the telescope, it has a shape, it's not just a little dot. And so we'll be watching the places where the water comes spitting out of the cracks between the ice blocks to see is there anything interesting in the molecules coming out, and then it'll be even better to fly through the plumes with a probe. But this is pretty cool.

John Mather: We'll be looking at Titan too, I guess. Titan is an exciting thing to me. Because you know, people are always asking me, Are you sure the kind of life that we're looking for is the right kind to look for? And so here on Earth, it's all carbon based in liquid water solvent? Well, on Titan, there are an awful lot of geological or, Titanological things that are similar to here on Earth. They've got rain, and clouds and weather and rivers and lakes, and, but they're made out of hydrocarbons, ethane, and methane, especially. So if it's geologically possible for life to exist in a circumstance like that, well, that's a pretty good place to look. So we'll be watching that one to do the chemistry from a distance with our infrared spectroscopy. And the surface may have different chemistry in different places. And as we are really thrilled to do NASA is going to send a probe out there to land on this lovely satellite in a helicopter.

Jim Green: Yeah, in addition to that, all those other missions that we talked about, like the Europa Clipper, that'll be launched in a few years, make it to Europa and do these fabulous studies up close and personal, while JWST is looking at the context. And also for Dragonfly, which will be launched at the end of this decade and make it to Titan, a moon of Saturn, that will also be observing and running around on Titan at the same time JWST will be observing it. So the overlap of these missions to me is just excitingly important, and in it really enables Webb to be so versatile. But are you excited more about one set of science than any other on Webb?

John Mather: I'm excited about two things that I think we really could get surprises from one is the very early universe because we've never seen that stuff at all. Something could be going on that just doesn't fit the standard story. And we would never know if we don't look. So the Webb telescope is going to look, is looking. And the other place we could get a big surprise is about all those planets. It could be an interesting surprise or a disappointment either way, what we have in the catalog, several dozen planets to observe through the transit technique to get their atmospheric characteristics. Well, the big ones are guaranteed to have atmospheres because that's what they are. The little ones little rocky bodies size of Earth and the temperature of Earth -- well, maybe they're they're rocks, and maybe they have atmosphere. And that's a big number one question.

Jim Green: Yeah.

John Mather: And it tells us something about whether there could be life out there, we have a hope of seeing the signs of water on some little rocky planet. And on the other hand, it could be that, nah, nothing there. We have to build a different telescope to find out.

Jim Green: Right!

John Mather: Because Earth is actually a very special place. In our solar system, it's the only place which we like. You couldn't possibly live on Venus. Mars would require engineering support from home forever.

Jim Green: (laughs)

John Mather: And so what else you're going to do? Earth is special. And we're kind of disappointed and surprised that no other solar system like ours has turned up yet.

John Mather: Now it's hard to find them anyway. But here we have in the solar system four little rocky planets near the sun and one of them's the nice place for us. One of them might have been in the past, maybe the other one was too, Venus and Mars might have been habitable before. But then we got a gap and then we got four gaseous planets that are all chilly. So nothing like that’s turned up in the rest of the planetary systems we’ve found. So how come? So maybe Earth really is more special than we ever thought.

Jim Green: So John, I always like to ask my guests to tell me, you know, that person place or event that happened to them that really propelled them forward to become the scientist they are today. And I call that event a gravity assist. So John, what was your gravity assist?

John Mather: Well, I think back on my trajectory, of bouncing off various gravitational forces, and as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a scientist. Even in third grade, I knew of scientists. I knew about Darwin and Galileo and I thought they did heroic things. People didn't always like what they said. But that just proved to be how important it was. So my parents and my school system gave me many opportunities to try and expand my interests. So I grew up in the countryside, on an experimental farm, actually, of a university in New Jersey, Rutgers University. So I was a little bit exposed to science because my dad was a scientist, but he didn't understand the physics part. He was studying dairy cows. So that was pretty remarkable. At any rate, I had many opportunities from family, from school, to try hard things.

John Mather: So sometimes I tried them and I succeeded. And that gave me a little bit of a boost to say, okay, maybe Galileo and Darwin could do great things. Maybe I could do something too. So somehow I got enough encouragement to think well, maybe you can't do it, maybe you can, but why not try. So I put my heart into becoming a scientist all along, starting quite young.

John Mather: Quite a lot of the time of a scientist is thinking about things that are not working, we have to be very tolerant of, “gee, I haven't solved this problem yet.” And, gee, somebody else might be ahead of me. And a lot of other things like that, that seem intimidating. But it is part of being in the process of organized curiosity. So in the end, you get to see huge results. When you look at the house that you might live in, you say, “where did this all come from?” This is based on scientific principles, implemented by engineers and society. So but it's still nice to be able to say, you know, that paint on the wall, those elements came from stars. The wall itself came from inside stars. The chemical elements in my body came from inside stars. And how did that all work? Well, let's find out.

Jim Green: Thanks, John, for joining me and discussing how you got involved in this fabulous JWST. It was really quite an honor to have this opportunity to chat with you today.

John Mather: Thank you, Jim. I never could have imagined this whole trajectory, no matter how many gravity assists there are. It was fun talking with you.

Jim Green: Well, join me next time as we continue our journey to look under the hood at NASA and see how we do what we do. I'm Jim Green, and this is your gravity assist.


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper
Last Updated: Jul 29, 2022
Editor: Gary Daines

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/gravity-assist-meet-a-webb-scientist-who-looks-back-in-time
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Październik 01, 2023, 12:00
W weekend nie bede sie nudzil  8) Dlugasne te arty  ;D
Dla ułatwienia spis treści dla wszystkich artykułów z tego podcastu:
https://www.forum.kosmonauta.net/index.php?topic=5163.msg180047#msg180047
NASA ostatnio unowocześniła swoje strony, ale np. kosztem dezaktywacji zdjęć zamieszczonych na stronach PFA.
Portal NSF także miał podobny przypadek (istnieje możliwość korekty).

Season 5, Episode 32: Finale: Thanks for All the Gravity Assists (1)
GRAVITY ASSIST SEASON 5EPISODE 32 AUG 12, 2022

On the Gravity Assist podcast we have interviewed dozens of scientists, engineers, and others dedicated to the mission of NASA space exploration. After five years, the show is coming to a close. Here are some final thoughts and episode highlights from the podcast team.

In the space exploration world, we talk about a “gravity assist” as a maneuver past a planet that increases a spacecraft’s speed. The spacecraft steals a tiny bit of energy from the planet, which is much more massive and has a lot more gravity than the spacecraft. Through the magic of physics, the spacecraft speeds up and the planet slows down by an imperceptible amount. In order to get to Pluto, for example, the New Horizons spacecraft flew by Jupiter and got a gravity assist to slingshot outward toward the distant dwarf planet.

Dr. Jim Green, who has held roles at NASA that included Director of Planetary Science and agency Chief Scientist, has taught us that a “gravity assist” is a way to talk about the person, place, thing, or event that propels people in their career paths. After all, no one is born as an astrophysicist or a rocket engineer. Everyone gets boosts of support or inspiration along the way, whether it be from parents, mentors, books, movies, museums, or even the sight of rockets launching in the distance.

Each journey is different. Some people working with NASA missions or projects have overcome tremendous obstacles and followed their passion to get involved in the space program. Other scientists and engineers have known since childhood that they wanted to study space, and pursued a standard educational path in physics or astronomy. Some did not always get good grades in school, and persevered despite the voices that recommended giving up.

We’ve also met amazing space science leaders who did not immediately have a clear idea of what they wanted to do with their lives, and never seriously studied their fields until later in adulthood. They are evidence that there are no time limits on learning a new skill or becoming an expert in something you’ve never tried before.

We hope that this podcast has made you think about the gravity assists in your own life, or even how to be a gravity assist to another person.

–Liz Landau,
Gravity Assist lead producer


(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/microsoftteams-image_1_6.png)
Manny Cooper, Jim Green, and Elizabeth Landau in the audiovisual studio at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Audio Episode Transcript:

Lyndsey McMillon-Brown (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-solar-power-for-the-moon-with-lyndsey-mcmillon-brown/): My gravity assist was my village.

Heather Graham (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-life-on-the-rocks-with-heather-graham/): The place that immediately pops to mind is the community college that I went to, Santa Monica College in LA.

Darlene Lim (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-before-you-launch-practice-practice-practice/): There are my parents who have showed me what hard work is, gave me an appreciation for the natural world.

Jim Green: A gravity assist is when a spacecraft gets a boost of speed as it flies by a an object like Earth or Jupiter. But I like to talk about gravity assists as an inspirational boost. It’s that person, place, thing, or event that propels people into the careers that they have today.

Dave Draper (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-fire-fountains-on-the-moon-with-dave-draper/): I was nine years old when Apollo 11 landed, and I’ll never, ever forget watching.

Naomi Rowe-Gurney (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-its-raining-diamonds-on-these-planets/): It was when I was about five years old, I went to the planetarium in London. And I hadn’t really thought about Earth or space or anything like that before then. And, it just completely opened my mind.

Jim Green: Hi, I’m Jim Green. And after five fantastic years, as I have retired from the role of the NASA Chief Scientist, NASA’s Gravity Assist podcast is coming to a close. I’m so grateful to you, the listeners for coming on this journey with me to tour the solar system and beyond, to investigate the Moon, to search for life beyond Earth. And of course, to interview those that are doing the discoveries that we are, every day.

Jim Green: You know, for this special final episode, we’re going to talk about some of the highlights of gravity assist and some of our NASA memories of how we pulled these off. Now, it’s not only me that made these things happen, and as you know, it takes a team. And that team is Liz Landau and Manny Cooper. So welcome, Liz and Manny.

Liz Landau: Thanks Jim!

Manny Cooper: Thanks Jim, glad to be here.

Jim Green: Well, Liz, tell us a little about your role here at NASA and how you got involved in podcasting?

Liz Landau: Well, Jim, as a public affairs officer here at NASA Headquarters, I do a wide variety of activities, including writing for the NASA website, editing, doing some podcast production. I really got into all of this a long, long time ago, when I took a class at Princeton about science communication, which was a field that I had no idea existed. It was taught by my Mike Lemonick and Ed Turner. And it really put me on this path to communicate to the public my enthusiasm for science and all of the amazing activities that are going on in space exploration.

Liz Landau: In terms of podcasting in particular, I always thought I wanted to be a writer. And it wasn’t until I started listening to “This American Life” and Radiolab in about 2007, or [200]8, that I realized, wow, audio storytelling is really exciting also, but it seemed like it was completely inaccessible to me. I had no idea how a podcast was produced.

Liz Landau: But as it happened, after I had worked at CNN, I came to NASA JPL, and then to Headquarters, and there became an opportunity for me to work on podcasts. Gravity Assist was actually the first one that I started working on regularly. And really, it has been an amazing journey to help develop this show.

Jim Green: Well, how you and I do this, of course, is we talk about who we want to interview. And then you make that happen in terms of lining up the right times and the people. And then you draft our first set of questions. Now, I dearly love that idea. Because, you know, from that point of view, what do you want to know?

Jim Green: I mean, I, I’m up on a lot of the science, not all of it. But you know, I have a hard time making those questions work initially, because I don’t know what maybe the general public knows. So your effort in getting those draft set of questions is really critical, I think, to really create the right tone, and the right opportunity for me to dig into that and go deeper into Gravity Assist. So thanks so much for that role.

Jim Green: And, of course, we can’t make this show happen without our audio engineer, Manny Cooper, you know. I mean, Manny just puts it all together so seamlessly. And so Manny, what did you really like about doing this? And how did you get into the audio engineer business?

Manny Cooper: Well, what I really like about the Gravity Assist podcast is getting to learn things that I wouldn’t necessarily learn in my field. Being exposed to, you know, the science behind, you know, growing food and, and space. What, what does another planet sound like?

Manny Cooper: What are some of the things that astronauts think about when, you know, launching, what you know, they’re thinking about when they’re on the ISS? It’s all interesting things. So, getting to learn stuff like that is, is really, really amazing.

Manny Cooper: And being at NASA is also pretty phenomenal in itself. So I say, where I got my audio engineering background from, pretty much started in high school at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, focusing on technical theater. Got love for audio doing technical theater, so live shows, concerts, things like that went to school for it down in Florida. So got my college degree, moved back here to DC, where I went to American University for my masters got my masters in audio technology. So it’s in my blood now. (laughs)

Jim Green: And of course, it’s that behind the scenes activity and work that you and Liz do that really, to me make it, so tremendously successful.

Jim Green: Well, you know, and in 2017, the Office of Communication came to me and said, they’d like to do a podcast, and would like to know if I would be the host. And I said, “Yeah, I’d love to be the host!” Not only that, I know what to call it. Let’s call it gravity assist. And, of course, initially, from the Office Communication, they were puzzled by that name, but it really has its roots in an experience that I had the year before. In fact, the name comes from my interaction with people in a town called Mars, Pennsylvania, the mayor of Mars was putting on this big huge parade celebrating the planet Mars as a theme for his parade.

Jim Green: And so he had asked me what the celebration could be about. And I said, let’s make it you know, the Mars New Year. And this is when the year on Mars starts. It’s a perfect timing for it, with the Mars calendar.

Jim Green: And he had this fabulous parade, ] kids were dressed up as Martians. And I said, “Well, can I bring some NASA employees up and we’ll be there and enjoy the celebration too, and talk about what we know about Mars?” Well, he loved that idea. And so I brought about 100 NASA people up. It was great. We had displays and rovers and everything. And I had a little boy in the, in the town, follow me around all day. In fact, I had him hand out stuff and we chit-chatted all kinds of things that he wanted to know.

Jim Green: And we just had a really wonderful time. I even ran rovers over on top of him, you know.

Manny: (laughs)

Jim Green: Which was fun to do. And he enjoyed it. Well, about nine months later, I received an email from his father. And I had given the little boy my card. And so it wasn’t hard for his father to get a hold of me. And he said that his son was really blossoming in school. He was getting great grades in math and science and building the Juno spacecraft out of Legos. His son was really getting into space. And so his father said, he wanted to thank me for giving his son a gravity assist.

Jim Green: And I got it immediately. I thought, “wow, who would have thought that, you know, Jim Green, scientist, could really inspire or get people motivated, to be more involved in space to understand how they might fit into the future? I’m not Carl Sagan, you know, I’m not people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and, and really put it out there on a regular basis. But I did love the name. And I really wanted to know how other scientists get involved in the business we’re in. And that’s really where the name comes from, that one event that happened to me.

Jim Green: Well, imagine, you know, the fantastic stories that came out as we went interviewing people from all over the place, and it’s really hard to choose a favorite episodes or even favorite gravity assists. But what I thought I’d do is, is have a chat with with Liz and Manny about what our favorites are. So without further ado, Liz, what are your favorite episodes in gravity assist?

Liz Landau: Oh my gosh, Jim, it’s so hard to choose. I mean, it’s been such an incredible journey to learn about the solar system and beyond. But especially some of the episodes in the astrobiology season were really compelling to me, you know, people going out to learn about Antarctica, finding out that there is life everywhere you look, even in the most extreme conditions on Earth, as well as people looking at exoplanets for signs of life and how we might do that.

Liz Landau: Ravi Kopparapu at Goddard, I really enjoyed that episode, he talked about the possibility of could we even find pollution on an exoplanet? That’s just so wild. And the idea that scientists are even thinking about that is incredible.

Ravi Kopparapu: I was like, “This can’t be possible. I’m standing in front of history that’s happening right now that we, for the first time in our life, we know, how common are Earth-like planets.”

Ravi Koppaparu: OK, if they’re so common, where can we find this life?

Liz Landau: I also really liked the episode with Kelsey Young (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-astronauts-go-back-to-moon-school-with-kelsey-young/), who actually trains astronauts here on Earth for when they go to the Moon, and they have to do geology.

Liz Landau: I also really found it interesting that we have a bunch of people that we’ve interviewed over the years, when we ask them, “What is your gravity assist?” They actually talk about watching Star Trek, or reading science fiction novels. And I’ve given talks where people have asked me, “Liz, do you think it’s a problem that there’s all this sci-fi out there? Does that confuse people?” But actually, I think that it really inspires people and that we really need those amazing television shows, movies and books, to inspire people to want to explore the universe.

Jim Green: Yeah, that’s fantastic. All those I remember really well. Well, Manny, what are some of the episodes that really stand out for you?

Manny Cooper: Okay, so the first one was, What Does Mars Sound Like? with Nina Lanza (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-this-is-what-mars-sounds-like-with-nina-lanza/). The fact that we’re now, you know, integrating microphones in rovers and things like that, is really cool. We get to hear what it sounds like on different planets. We caught the descent, you know, when the rover was landing, and we can, you know, hear what the helicopter sounds like on Mars. So, you know, things like that are really innovative. And as being, again, an audio engineer, it’s really cool to, you know, think that, hey, maybe one day something that I could do with audio engineering, could, you know, be incorporated, you know, in further studies in science with NASA.

Manny Cooper: Let me play you a clip of the Nina Lanza episode.

Jim Green: indeed, can we hear the wind on Mars?

Nina Lanza: We can. And you know, in many ways, it sounds like the wind on Earth, but in other ways it doesn’t. So maybe we can take a listen.

Jim Green: Yeah, let’s do that.

(sound of wind on Mars)

Manny Cooper: The second one, listening to the universe, the Kim Arcand episode (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-listening-to-the-universe-with-kim-arcand/), where she had worked with an audio engineer, with an audio engineer to work with infrared images and created composition, musical pieces.

Liz Landau: Yeah, Kim’s data sonification are amazing. Let me play you a clip from one of those.

(sound of galactic center)

Kim Arcand: We’re looking at the inner about 400 light-year region around the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A star at the very core of the Milky Way. And again, we have incredible bits of information from various NASA observatories, we’ve got the X-ray light from Chandra, of course, we also have the infrared light from Spitzer and additional information from the Hubble Space Telescope. And they look very different when you’re looking at these different kinds of light.

Manny Cooper: And then the last one would be Joe DePasquale (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-how-we-make-webb-and-hubble-images/), the images of NASA, how do we make Webb and Hubble images? That one to me was amazing. listening to him talk about, you know, the numerical number of, you know, for gases, and it got me thinking about, you know, it’s theoretically like painting by numbers, you know, so that’s a, that was also kind of, kind of cool for me, just seeing and hearing about things like that.

Joe DePasquale: There’s sort of like a universal appeal to these images. They touch on a collective need or wants to understand the deeper questions of the universe that we all have, in ways that connect us all together.

Jim Green: Well, I have to tell you, as I mentioned before, episodes that I really like, are those that come with a surprise, okay. When Catherine Walker (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-walking-on-broken-ice-with-catherine-walker/) talked about how she almost fell through a glacier, I mean, my heart stopped.

Catherine Walker: I was like, “Oh, my God, what happened?” and I looked back down, to where I had popped out of, and there was this giant opening. There was about a 20-meter drop down into the ocean from there, and so survived that.
Tytuł: Odp: [NASA Gravity Assist] : Season 5
Wiadomość wysłana przez: Orionid w Październik 01, 2023, 12:01
Season 5, Episode 32: Finale: Thanks for All the Gravity Assists (2)

(https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/gateam.jpeg)
Jim Green, Manny Cooper, and Elizabeth Landau in the audiovisual production studio at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Jim Green: You know, another one that I really liked was Sunny Panjwani (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-in-case-of-space-station-emergency-with-sunny-panjwani/). He was in the JSC control room when the Russian module called Science was just connected to the International Space Station, and one of the rockets turned on. And that started the entire space station to spin.

Sunny Panjwani: It was just surreal being there my first day and feeling like I was still stuck in a simulation. It really taught me that our training is there, to push us to our limits again, and, and sometimes, you know, you just you’re sitting there and you can’t believe what’s happening, but you’re calm, and you’re collected, and you’re ready to work the problem.

Jim Green: And then many gravity assists that I really enjoy. And they range from teachers, you know, high school teachers, and that, that really got me started, I resonated with that. There’s no substitute from having a really dedicated teacher.

Jim Green: A couple of the ones I also liked were surprising to me as gravity assists, and one in particular was in first in the first season where David Grinspoon talked about his environment.

David Grinspoon: It turns out one of my dad’s best friends was Carl Sagan when I was little. They were both Harvard professors. You know, this was before he was famous. He was just this cool guy we knew, who would lead these public observing nights at the Harvard Observatory and, you know, let us go run the controls at the planetarium and, you know. So, that was certainly an influence.

Jim Green: And so his end result is, yeah, I’m going to be a planetary scientist isn’t everybody? That, to me, really, really talks about, you know, how our environment is so important for us to shape our young minds into thinking they can fit in, in knowing that they can use their abilities, and build on the knowledge that we have to continue this grand adventure of really uncovering the nature of things. And that’s what science is all about. We need science now more than ever before.

Lori Glaze (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-onward-to-venus-with-lori-glaze/): I would say that my gravity assist was the day that Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington State.

Faith Vilas (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-podcast-mercury-with-faith-vilas/) : When I was in the second grade, somebody gave me a copy of a book called “The Golden Book of Astronomy.”

David Smith (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-life-in-the-clouds-with-david-j-smith/): I would love to give thanks to, back in my public school system in Colorado, some great science teachers.

Knicole Colon (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-puffy-planets-powerful-telescopes-with-knicole-colon/): Really it boils down to being a young teenager, and I fell in love with science fiction at the same time that my dad started encouraging me to have an interest in astronomy.

Jim Green: So, Liz and Manny, you’ve heard all these gravity assists. So Liz, let’s start with you. What’s your favorite gravity assists beyond the science fiction realm? Were there others?

Liz Landau: Oh, yes. And some of that really resonated with me as well. I mean, you really get a sense for how things that happen during childhood can really spark somebody to be a lifelong science aficionado, and even become a scientist or engineer themselves. You know, people talk about going to science museums, going to launches, all kinds of things that happened to them, actually, Kelsey Young talks about going on a hike with her father.

Kelsey Young: My dad demanded that we try one hike and I was not into it, and he said, “Fine, you can wait in the car,” and I was so indignant that he was going to leave us in the car that, out of spite, I agreed to do the hike. I was hooked from then on out.

Liz Landau: The experience of going on a hike made her want to go into geology. And I thought that was really amazing. So, you know, for those of you who have children out there, you know, they are so impressionable, and there’s so many things that can excite them and it just takes that one exposure to really set somebody on this path.

Jim Green: Indeed.

Manny Cooper: I would go as far as to say that this entire process has been like my gravity assist, actually editing and listening to all of these scientists. It’s helped me to you know, understand my science a little, you know, further, you know, and given me some ideas on where I actually want to take it. So, again, gravity assist has been my gravity assist.

Liz LandauYeah, I really feel the same way, Manny, like, it’s really one of my favorite things that I’ve ever worked on, certainly at NASA, but in general as well, to be able to be a fly on the wall and listen to Jim Green talk to such an amazing range of people and to learn about the possibilities of what is out there. How does our planet work? How does our universe work? Are we alone? The scientists that are taking these questions outside the realm of fiction and bringing them into our reality — it’s really helped me to not only understand our place in the universe, but really grow as an audio storyteller as well.

Jim Green: Yeah, that’s fantastic. And thanks so much for, you know, participating in this grand adventure that we’ve had together.

Jim Green: So I want to thank you, Liz, and Manny, so very much for making this such a successful endeavor. Thank you very much.

Manny Cooper: Thank you, Jim.

Liz Landau: Jim, you’ve been such an amazing gravity assist to us. And for so many people out there. Thank you for all that you do!

Manny: Ditto.

Jim Green: Well, it’s been my pleasure. Well, you know, we do hope that all of our audience out there has been inspired by this show in some way, shape, or form.

Jim Green: Well, you can get Gravity Assist in many venues. But of course, the one here at NASA has been put online by Gary Daines. So Gary, thanks so much for the support of getting these posted.

Jim Green: You can also find out so many other great NASA podcasts by going to nasa.gov/podcasts (https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/). And in particular, check out things like the Curious Universe (https://www.nasa.gov/curiousuniverse/), you know, for which more great stories about the agency are being discussed. I’m Jim Green, and this has been your gravity assist.

Jim Green: Let me read a couple the reviews that I really appreciated. So here’s one, this podcast makes astronomy very accessible to all, very informative and entertaining. That was nice.

Jim Green: Now, another one I really like was from a woman, and she wrote “My 10 year old son and I listen to this podcast, on our half-hour commute to school in the mornings. I love watching him get excited about space, and learning about all that awesome things that NASA is up to. I especially love hearing about what inspired all these great scientists to get where they are today.” Wow, I mean, to me, that’s what Gravity Assist was really all about.

Jim Green: Now, of course, we also had some comments about how to improve what we were doing. One comment was, “please remove the annoying background audio music.”

Liz Landau and Manny Cooper:(laughs)

Jim Green: Otherwise, it’s a great show, right?

Jim Green: So, so there were a few episodes where we perhaps overdid it, but we adjusted that that’s really important input to us. Another one is from a listener who said, “This is an informative podcast, but the host speaks like talking to an audience from Sesame Street.

Manny Cooper: (laughs)

Jim Green: The way he speaks, literally is the way an adult would speak to a child. And that’s very annoying. We should get a new host that understands the audience is not children, but mostly adults.,

Liz Landau: Oh, my gosh, what?

Jim Green: Now, in reality, I’m okay with that. Because I get excited about what we talked about. It’s just what happens to me! There’s great explanations for the science that’s been uncovered. But, sorry about that. Being associated with, you know, Bert, and Ernie and the others, is okay with me.

Manny Cooper: (laughs)


Credits
Lead producer: Elizabeth Landau
Audio engineer: Manny Cooper

Source: https://www.nasa.gov/podcasts/gravity-assist/gravity-assist-finale-thanks-for-all-the-gravity-assists/