NASA
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NASA
Astronaut Eileen Collins, NASA’s First Female Shuttle Commander
Astronaut Eileen Collins, STS-93 commander, looks through a checklist on the space shuttle Columbia’s middeck in this July 1999 image. Collins was the first female shuttle commander. Collins graduated in 1979 from Air Force Undergraduate Pilot Training at Vance AFB, Oklahoma, where she was a T-38 instructor pilot until 1982. She continued her career as an instructor pilot of different aircraft until 1989.…
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NASA
Boneyard Airplane Sees New Life as a NASA X-66 Simulator
NASA’s X-66 aircraft, the centerpiece of its Sustainable Flight Demonstrator project, is taking the term “sustainable” to heart by reusing an old MD-90 cockpit as a base for its new X-66 simulator. When airplanes are retired, they often wind up in “boneyards” — storage fields where they spend years being picked over for parts by manufacturers, researchers, engineers, and designers.…
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NASA
25 Years On, Chandra Highlights Legacy of NASA Engineering Ingenuity
By Rick Smith “The art of aerospace engineering is a matter of seeing around corners,” said NASA thermal analyst Jodi Turk. In the case of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, marking its 25th anniversary in space this year, some of those corners proved to be as far as 80,000 miles away and a quarter-century in the future. Turk is part of a…
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NASA
NASA Wallops to Support Sounding Rocket Launch for U.S. Navy Fleet Training
A rocket-propelled target is scheduled for launch July 27-28, 2024 from NASA’s launch range at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia in support of a U.S. Navy Fleet Training exercise. No real-time launch status updates will be available. The launch will not be livestreamed nor will launch status updates be provided during the countdown. The rocket launch may be visible…
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NASA
Watch Carbon Dioxide Move Through Earth’s Atmosphere
What we’re looking at This global map shows concentrations of carbon dioxide as the gas moved through Earth’s atmosphere from January through March 2020, driven by wind patterns and atmospheric circulation. Because of the model’s high resolution, you can zoom in and see carbon dioxide emissions rising from power plants, fires, and cities, then spreading across continents and oceans. Global…
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NASA
NASA’s 21st Northrop Grumman Mission Launches Scientific Studies to Station
NASA and its international partners are sending scientific investigations to the International Space Station on Northrop Grumman’s 21st commercial resupply services mission. Flying aboard the company’s Cygnus spacecraft are tests of water recovery technology and a process to produce stem cells in microgravity, studies of the effects of spaceflight on microorganism DNA and liver tissue growth, and live science demonstrations for students.…
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NASA
NASA Awards Launch Services Contract for NOAA’s JPSS-4 Mission
NASA, on behalf of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has selected SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies Corporation) to provide launch services for NOAA’s JPSS-4 mission. The spacecraft is part of the multi-satellite cooperative Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) program, a partnership between NASA and NOAA. This mission is the next satellite in the program, which began with the Suomi…
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NASA
NASA Rocket Discovers New Energization Process in Upper Atmosphere
When it comes to discoveries about our upper atmosphere, it pays to know your surroundings. Using data from the Twin Rockets to Investigate Cusp Electrodynamics (TRICE-2) rocket launch, NASA scientist Francesca Di Mare and Gregory Howes from the University of Iowa studied waves traveling down Earth’s magnetic field lines into the polar atmosphere. These waves were known to accelerate electrons,…
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NASA
Chandra Sees the Peacock’s Galaxy
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory launch, the Chandra team released this never-seen-before image of NGC 6872, a spiral galaxy in the Pavo (Peacock) constellation, on July 22, 2024. This image and 24 others, which all include data from Chandra, demonstrate how X-ray astronomy explores all corners of the universe. NGC 6872 is 522,000 light-years across, making it more…
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NASA
Seed Funding Proposals Due November 19 This Year!
Since it began in 2020, NASA’s Citizen Science Seed Funding Program (CSSFP) has helped twenty-four new NASA citizen science projects get off the ground. This one-year funding opportunity aims to expand the pool of professional scientists who use citizen science techniques in their science investigations. We’d like to remind you about two key changes to the CSSFP program this year! First, we heard…
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