NASA Small Satellites Set to Take a Fresh Look at Earth

Beginning this month, NASA is launching a suite of six next-generation, Earth-observing small satellite missions to demonstrate innovative new approaches for studying our changing planet.

These small satellites range in size from a loaf of bread to a small washing machine and weigh from a few to 400 pounds. Their small size keeps development and launch costs down as they often hitch a ride to space as a “secondary payload” on another mission’s rocket – providing an economical avenue for testing new technologies and conducting science.

“NASA is increasingly using small satellites to tackle important science problems across our mission portfolio,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “They also give us the opportunity to test new technological innovations in space and broaden the involvement of students and researchers to get hands-on experience with space systems.”

Small-satellite technology has led to innovations in how scientists approach Earth observations from space. These new missions, five of which are scheduled to launch during the next several months, will debut new methods to measure hurricanes, Earth’s energy budget, aerosols, and weather.

“NASA is expanding small satellite technologies and using low-cost, small satellites, miniaturized instruments, and robust constellations to advance Earth science and provide societal benefit through applications,” said Michael Freilich, director of NASA’s Earth Science Division in Washington.

A Box of ‘Black Magic’ to Study Earth from Space

That’s what radiofrequency engineers call the mysterious forces guiding communications over the air. These forces involve complex physics and are difficult enough to master on Earth. They only get more baffling when you’re beaming signals into space.

Until now, the shape of choice for casting this “magic” has been the parabolic dish. The bigger the antenna dish, the better it is at “catching” or transmitting signals from far away.

But CubeSats are changing that. These spacecraft are meant to be light, cheap and extremely small: most aren’t much bigger than a cereal box. Suddenly, antenna designers have to pack their “black magic” into a device where there’s no room for a dish -- let alone much else.

“It’s like pulling a rabbit out of a hat,” said Nacer Chahat, a specialist in antenna design at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. “Shrinking the size of the radar is a challenge for NASA. As space engineers, we usually have lots of volume, so building antennas packed into a small volume isn’t something we’re trained to do.”

Taking Measure of a Remote Slice of Alaskan Forest

Kate Legner points out the next tree in the survey site as other crew members measure key information about the vegetation in a 53-foot diamter plot.

In a birch forest in interior Alaska’s Tanana Valley, there’s a stake with pink plastic tape attached. More than three decades ago, a plane flew over it to take stereoscopic pictures of the surrounding plot, and scientists trekked out to survey the trees and vegetation. Now, scientists are re-flying and re-surveying the site, using advanced airborne instruments and satellite images to track changes in interior Alaska.

“This is going to be 10.3,” called out Sean Cahoon, a scientist with the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He was standing at the end of a tape measure radiating out from the stake, using another tape measure to check the diameter of the base of a birch tree.

Kate Legner, with the University of Washington in Seattle, recorded the number as well as the diameter at breast height, the distance from the stake, and the azimuth (angle from due north) of the tree’s location.

“That’s all you need to recreate this whole area,” Legner said. The area in question is a circle with a 53-foot radius out from the stake. Mostly birch, with a few aspen and white spruce trees, just sparse enough to let some sun filter through to shrubs, seedlings, moss and lichens thick on the ground.

Burrowing into the Arctic’s Carbon Past and Future

The Permafrost Tunnel provides a look back in time, allowing for research into the frozen ground of interior Alaska.

“What we’re going to do is walk back in time,” said Matthew Sturm, standing in front of a doorway that led into a hillside north of Fairbanks, Alaska. Through the doors was a tunnel that provides access to the Alaska of 40,000 years ago, when bison and mammoths foraged in grassy valleys. Now, however, the grasses and the animal bones are frozen in the ground in the Permafrost Tunnel.

The tunnel, run by the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, was dug in the 1960s and is the site of much research into permafrost—ground that stays frozen throughout the year, for multiple years. Sturm, a professor and snow researcher at the University of Alaska, recently led a group with NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) to the site. The walls of the tunnel expose the silt, ice, and carbon-rich plant and animal matter that has been frozen for tens of thousands of years. “It’s a legacy of the Ice Age,” Sturm said. Roots of long-buried grasses hang from the ceiling, in a few places bones of Pleistocene mammals are embedded in the wall.

Home is Where the Astronaut Is

The Expedition 43 crew gathers aboard the International Space Station to affix their mission patch to the vehicle. Commander Terry Virts (center left), Scott Kelly (top left), Gennady Padalka (top center), Anton Shkaplerov (top right), Mikhail Kornienko (bottom right), Samantha Cristoforetti (bottom center).

The International Space Station serves as home, office and recreation room for astronauts. They share this confined space far above the Earth with crew members from different countries and cultures for as long as six months or more. At the same time, maintaining individual well-being and crew harmony is important for the crew and mission success.

The Culture, Values, and Environmental Adaptation in Space (At Home In Space) investigation, sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency, looks at changes in perceptions about home in space and the ways a unique culture may develop aboard the station during a mission. Participants answer a series of questionnaires before, during and after flight, enabling researchers to see whether perceptions and the relative importance of values change over the course of a mission. Questions explore individual and culturally related differences, family functioning and relationships, personal values and coping with stress. 

“This is the first study to look at the extent to which a unique, shared space culture develops, whether crews develop customs and celebrations that are part of being on the station and different from what they would do on Earth,” explains Phyllis Johnson, principal investigator, Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Gemini XII Crew Masters the Challenges of Spacewalks

Gemini XII pilot Buzz Aldrin, left, and command pilot Jim Lovell stand in a Gemini mockup during training at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (now Johnson Space Center) in Houston.

In the 20 months following the first piloted Gemini mission, NASA astronauts demonstrated the ability to change orbits, perform rendezvous and docking, along with spending up to two weeks in space. Spacewalking, on the other hand, remained an enigma. With only one more Gemini flight on the schedule, solving the problems of working outside a spacecraft would be the primary goal for Gemini XII.

As was the case on the previous four missions, the Gemini XII flight plan called for rendezvous and docking with a target vehicle. But, according to Dr. George Mueller, NASA’s associate administrator for Manned Spaceflight, mastering what NASA called an extravehicular activity (EVA) or spacewalk would be crucial in proving the agency was ready to move ahead with Apollo and achieving the goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the decade.

“I feel that we must devote the last EVA period in the Gemini Program to a basic investigation of EVA fundamentals,” he said. To take on the challenges of this crucial flight, NASA assigned a veteran of the longest spaceflight to date and the astronaut who helped “write the book” on orbital rendezvous. The command pilot was Jim Lovell who served on the 14-day Gemini VII mission in December 1965. A Naval aviator, he went on to be a member of the Apollo 8 crew, the first mission to orbit astronauts around the moon in 1968. As commander of Apollo 13 in 1970, Lovell became the first person to travel in space four times.

New, Space-Based View of Human-Made Carbon Dioxide

Human carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning and other sources have been mapped from OCO-2's global dataset.

Scientists have produced the first global maps of human emissions of carbon dioxide ever made solely from satellite observations of the greenhouse gas. The maps, based on data from NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite and generated with a new data-processing technique, agree well with inventories of known carbon dioxide emissions.

No satellite before OCO-2 was capable of measuring carbon dioxide in fine enough detail to allow researchers to create maps of human emissions from the satellite data alone. Instead, earlier maps also incorporated estimates from economic data and modeling results.

The team of scientists from the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, produced three main maps from OCO-2 data, each centered on one of Earth's highest-emitting regions: the eastern United States, central Europe and East Asia. The maps show widespread carbon dioxide across major urban areas and smaller pockets of high emissions.

NASA Seeks Student Experiments for 2017 Edge-of-Space Balloon Flight

Students attending the 2016 High-Altitude Student Platform launch in Fort Sumner, N.M., pose in front of the fully inflated scientific balloon just prior to lift-off.

NASA is accepting applications now through Dec. 16 from graduate and undergraduate university students to fly experiments to the edge of space on a scientific balloon. Students and professors interested in applying are invited to participate in a Nov. 11 teleconference. Up to 12 student teams will build and fly their experiments as part of the High Altitude Student Platform program, a joint project between NASA and the Louisiana State University’s Louisiana Space Consortium (LaSPACE) in Baton Rouge.

“Our scientific balloons have long been a brilliant training ground for the next generation of scientists and engineers,” said Debbie Fairbrother, NASA’s Balloon Program Office chief. “From astronauts and Noble-prize winning scientists, to engineers and technicians among the best in the business—balloons have been a starting point for so many, and I think that’s the true value of HASP.” 

A panel of experts from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Texas and LaSPACE will review the applications and select the finalists for the next flight opportunity, scheduled for fall 2017.

Business Innovation Key to Commercial Crew Program’s Success

NASA spacecraft have long pushed the envelope on technological achievement, whether they carried astronauts into the vacuum of space the first time or tailored a robotic rover to explore a distant world. The Commercial Crew Program maintains those traits while helping to produce a sustainable model for spaceflight that serves NASA's needs while including elements such as production efficiency, reusability and life-cycle costs.

NASA's Commercial Crew Program tailored requirements for a new generation of human-rated spacecraft to allow industry to create innovative design solutions, manufacturing processes, operational methods and engineering techniques. The result has been a series of components, systems and now spacecraft and rockets that will soon take astronauts to and from the International Space Station in a manner that is both cost-effective and reliable.

The work began in 2010 when NASA created initial developmental agreements with several companies to begin the design and testing of subsystems, such as life support equipment, launch abort systems and spacecraft. This was followed by a progressive series of Space Act Agreements and later contracts that became more detailed for larger and more complex spacecraft and launch vehicle systems. Today, NASA has contracts with Boeing and SpaceX to build and operate systems to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

Launch Abort Engines Tested in California

Recently, Aerojet Rocketdyne conducted a series of hot-fire tests with two launch abort engines in the Mojave Desert in California. The launch abort engines will be part of Boeing’s Starliner service module propulsion system, which provides launch abort capability on the pad and during ascent. Starliner’s four 40,000-pound thrust launch abort engines will only be used.

Support Stoked Stroke Victim’s Rehabilitation

A woman who had to relearn everything about daily life following a nearly fatal stroke when she was 12 revealed to an audience at Kennedy some of the keys to her recovery and how she synthesized her own strengths with help from family and friends to graduate high school and then get into college.

As the keynote speaker for the event sponsored by Kennedy’s Disability Awareness and Action Working Group, or DAAWG, Alex and her mother, Juli Dixon, detailed Alex’s journey from age 4 – when she wanted to be a farmer so she could help animals – to pneumonia that struck her at age 10. The illness went away, but had set the stage for a stroke and coma that followed two years later. Since that occurrence, the pace of her learning slowed significantly and Alex had to re-learn everything from speech to how to work around paralysis in her right hand and other significant disabilities.

“I was determined that I would get better,” Alex Dixon said. “It’s slow, but you can do it. Failure isn’t just failure, there’s always something that improved. I just had to do it better next time.” “We couldn’t give up,” Juli said of her family’s own determination to work with Alex. “We had to be satisfied with baby steps.”

NASA’s SDO Catches a Lunar Transit

On Oct. 30, 2016, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, experienced a partial solar eclipse in space when it caught the moon passing in front of the sun. The lunar transit lasted one hour, between 3:56 p.m. and 4:56 p.m. EDT, with the moon covering about 59 percent of the sun at the peak of its journey across the face of the sun.

On Oct. 30, 2016, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, experienced a partial solar eclipse in space when it caught the moon passing in front of the sun. The lunar transit lasted one hour, between 3:56 p.m. and 4:56 p.m. EDT, with the moon covering about 59 percent of the sun at the peak of its journey across the face of the sun. The moon’s shadow obstructs SDO’s otherwise constant view of the sun, and the shadow’s edge is sharp and distinct, since the moon has no atmosphere which would distort sunlight.

From SDO’s point of view, the sun appears to be shaking slightly – but not because the solar observatory was spooked by this near-Halloween sight. Instead, the shaking results from slight adjustments in SDO’s guidance system, which normally relies upon viewing the entire sun to center the images between exposures. SDO captured these images in extreme ultraviolet light, a type of light invisible to human eyes. The imagery here is colorized in red.

NASA Aircraft Arrival Technology Gets Big Test in 2017

At NASA’s Langley Research Center, retired airline pilots test procedures that will be used during upcoming flight tests of a new aircraft spacing tool. The simulator is set up like a 757 jet, similar to one of the aircraft in the ATD-1 flight tests.

Commercial airline pilots who as children played “Follow the Leader” will have no problem with a new air traffic control innovation NASA and its partners are working on that also will make passengers happier. It’s called Flight Deck Interval Management, or FIM, and it promises to safely increase the number of airplanes that can land on the same runway at busy airports by more precisely managing the time, or interval, between each aircraft arrival.

Less time in the air also means additional savings in expensive jet fuel and reduced aircraft emissions. Even better: passengers would enjoy an increased chance their flights – connecting or otherwise – will arrive on time. FIM is part of NASA’s Air Traffic Management Technology Demonstration-1– or ATD-1 – a coordinated effort involving NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and industry to develop and evaluate new technologies and procedures related to aircraft scheduling and airport arrivals. A complex field demonstration of FIM involving NASA, the FAA and industry will be conducted in early 2017 over Washington State.

Today, current air traffic control technology and procedures can predict arrival times to within a minute or so. But FIM is expected to enable controllers and the airport to count on aircraft arriving within five to ten seconds of a predicted time. The cockpit-based prototype FIM system combines NASA-developed software with commercially available off-the-shelf hardware and connects the system to the aircraft’s onboard information and navigation systems.

Final Sunshield Layer Completed for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope

James Webb Space Telescope’s sunshield at Northrop Grumman’s Space Park facility in Redondo Beach, California. The sunshield is the size of a tennis court and will make it possible for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to image the formation of stars and galaxies created more than 13.5 billion years ago.

The last of the five sunshield layers responsible for protecting the optics and instruments of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is now complete.

Designed by Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California, the Webb telescope’s sunshield will prevent the background heat from the sun from interfering with the telescope’s infrared sensors. The five sunshield membrane layers, designed and manufactured by the NeXolve Corporation in Huntsville, Alabama, are each as thin as a human hair. The layers work together to reduce the temperatures between the hot and cold sides of the observatory by approximately 570 degrees Fahrenheit. Each successive layer of the sunshield, made of kapton, is cooler than the one below. The fifth and final layer was delivered on Sept. 29, 2016 to Northrop Grumman Corporation’s Space Park facility in Redondo Beach.

“The completed sunshield membranes are the culmination of years of collaborative effort by the NeXolve, Northrop Grumman and NASA team," said James Cooper, Webb telescope Sunshield manager at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "All five layers are beautifully executed and exceed their requirements. This is another big milestone for the Webb telescope project.” Northrop Grumman, who also designed the Webb telescope’s optics and spacecraft bus for NASA Goddard will integrate the final flight layers into the sunshield subsystem to conduct folding and deployment testing as part of the final system validation process.

NASA Sets GOES-R/Atlas V Launch Events Coverage

GOES-R, the first in a series of NASA-built advanced geostationary weather satellites, is seen here during an optics test held on August 31, 2016, inside the Astrotech payload processing facility in Titusville, Florida. The satellite is scheduled to launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on November 16.

The first spacecraft in a new series of NASA-built advanced geostationary weather satellites is set to launch into orbit aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket Wednesday, Nov. 16. The two-hour launch window opens at 4:42 p.m. EST. Liftoff will occur from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Once in geostationary orbit, GOES-R will be known as GOES-16 and will provide images of weather patterns and severe storms as regularly as every five minutes or as frequently as every 30 seconds. These images can be used to aid in weather forecasts, severe weather outlooks, watches and warnings, lightning conditions, maritime forecasts and aviation forecasts. It also will assist in longer term forecasting, such as in seasonal predictions and drought outlooks. In addition, space weather conditions will be monitored constantly, including the effects of solar flares to provide advance notice of potential communication and navigation disruptions. It also will assist researchers in understanding the interactions between land, oceans, the atmosphere and climate.

Soyuz Packed for Return While Cygnus Unloaded After Capture

The six-member Expedition 49 crew poses for a portrait in the Destiny lab module. (Front row, from left) Kate Rubins, Anatoly Ivanishin and Takuya Onishi. (Back row) Shane Kimbrough, Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko.

One spacecraft is being packed and readied for the return of three humans to Earth while a cargo craft is being unloaded and settling in for a one-month stay. The Expedition 49 trio of Commander Anatoly Ivanishin and Flight Engineers Kate Rubins and Takuya Onishi are packing gear and preparing for their return to Earth Saturday night. The veteran cosmonaut and two first-time astronauts will wrap up their mission after 115 days in space.

They will parachute to a landing in Kazakhstan inside the Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft. The ride back to Earth takes about 3-1/2 hours after undocking from the International Space Station. The Orbital ATK Cygnus is the latest cargo ship to arrive at the International Space Station. It was captured and installed to the Harmony module on Sunday Oct. 23 after a six-day flight that began in Virginia.

The hatches were opened the day it arrived and the crew began unloading over 5,100 pounds of crew supplies and science gear. Cygnus is scheduled to depart in mid-November and release a set of nanosatellites before scientists remotely set fire inside the spacecraft for the Saffire-II experiment.

Watch Station Crew Swap Command Friday Afternoon

The Expedition 49-50 trio of (from left) Sergey Ryzhikov, Shane Kimbrough and Borisenko will stay on board the station after the Expedition 48-49 trio with Kate Rubins, Anatoly Ivanishin and Takuya Onishi undock and return to Earth Saturday night.

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and her crewmates, Anatoly Ivanishin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency are scheduled to return to Earth on Saturday, Oct. 29 at 11:59 p.m. EDT (9:59 a.m. Oct. 30, Kazakhstan time).

NASA Television will air coverage of the departure and landing activities, beginning with a change of command ceremony at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 28. Expedition 49 Commander Ivanishin will hand over station command to NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough.

Expedition 49 Departs Station, Begins Ride Home

The Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft departs the International Space Station on time carrying three Expedition 49 crew members back to Earth.

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins of NASA, Anatoly Ivanishin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency undocked from the International Space Station at 8:35 p.m. EDT to begin their journey home. Ivanishin, the Soyuz commander, is at the controls of the MS-01 spacecraft. The trio’s spacecraft completed the first flight to station for the upgraded Soyuz MS-01 when it launched in July.

The crew is scheduled to land at 11:59 p.m. southeast of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan.

As the Soyuz MS-01 undocked, Expedition 50 officially began on the station under the command of NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough. He and Flight Engineers Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko of Roscosmos, will operate the station for three weeks until the arrival of three new crew members next month.

Now on NASA TV Live Launch Coverage of New Crew

The next three crew members bound for the International Space Station are on schedule to launch this morning from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Live launch coverage will begin at 3:15 a.m. EDT on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos will launch at 4:05 a.m. EDT (2:05 p.m. Baikonur time). The trio will spend a little more than four months together aboard the space station, returning to Earth in late February. The crew will lift off in a Soyuz MS-02 spacecraft and over two days will orbit the Earth 34 times before docking to the space station’s Poisk module at 5:59 a.m. Friday, Oct. 21. NASA TV coverage of the docking will begin at 5:15 a.m. The original launch date of Sept. 23 was postponed due to a technical issue with the Soyuz spacecraft, which Roscosmos repaired.

New Crew Launches on Two-Day Trip to Station

The Soyuz MS-02 launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the International Space Station at 4:05 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Oct. 19 (2:05 p.m. Baikonur time). At the time of launch, the space station was flying 252 statute miles over the south Atlantic, east of Brazil. NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos are now safely in orbit.

Over the next two days, the trio will orbit the Earth 34 times before docking to the space station’s Poisk module at 5:59 a.m. Friday, Oct. 21. NASA TV coverage of the docking will begin at 5:15 a.m.