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NASA Ames Astrogram – December 2019

The headshot image of Astrid Albaugh

Astrid Albaugh

Dec 20, 2019
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From Take Off to Landing, NASA and Boeing Work Together to Launch Commercial Crew

by Gianine Figliozzi

When Boeing launches its uncrewed maiden voyage of the CST-100 Starliner to the International Space Station this week, it will mark a critical milestone toward NASA’s return of launching American astronauts to space using American spacecraft from American soil.  

Private companies already play an instrumental role in the U.S. space program by ferrying critical research, supplies and other cargo to the space station through commercial resupply services contracts. In this next phase, commercial crew partners Boeing and SpaceX will carry humans, like a taxi or a city bus shuttling people to their destination and home again. NASA’s goal is to become one customer of many customers in a robust low-Earth orbit economy, enabling the agency to realize the next generation of human space exploration through the Artemis program to the Moon and on to Mars. 

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with Boeings CST-100 Starliner spacecraft onboard
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft onboard is seen as it is rollout out of the Vertical Integration Facility to the launch pad at Space Launch Complex 41 ahead of the Orbital Flight Test mission, Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2019, at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Orbital Flight Test with be Starliner’s maiden mission to the International Space Station for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The mission, which launched at 6:26 a.m. EST on Dec. 20, 2019, serves as an end-to-end test of the system’s capabilities.
Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

For full story, see: NASABoeing

Ames Celebrates 80th Anniversary with Cake and Opportunity to Submit Time Capsule Letters

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Dec. 20, 2019 marked NASA Ames Research Center’s 80th Anniversary. Ames employees were invited for a slice of cake, cut by Ames Center Director Eugene Tu, photo left, at Mega Bites Café and also invited to submit a letter for inclusion in the center’s latest time capsule. Ames Historian James Anderson, photo right, is seen explaining to employees how the collection box in Mega Bites will be accepting letters up to March 8, 2020. The Center was established in 1939 as the second laboratory of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and was named for the chair of the NACA, Joseph S. Ames. It was located at Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, California, now at the heart of Silicon Valley. The Laboratory was renamed the NASA Ames Research Center with the formation of NASA in 1958. For an overview of the history of Ames, visit the Ames historical collections archives at: https://history.arc.nasa.gov/
Credit: NASA Ames/Don Richey

Testing Air Taxis, Drones and More with NASA’s Multirotor Test Bed

by Abigail Tabor

City dwellers’ daily commutes may soon take flight, the rotors of their air taxis spinning as they lift off from the rooftops. In anticipation of this coming era of air travel, called Urban Air Mobility – and many other applications – NASA has developed a flexible way to test new designs for aircraft that use multiple rotors to fly. The Multirotor Test Bed, or MTB, will let researchers study a wide variety of rotor configurations for different vehicles, including tiltrotor aircraft, mid-sized drones and those future air taxis.

The Multirotor Test Bed.
The Multirotor Test Bed, which provides a flexible way to test designs for multirotor aircraft, is seen during a demonstration in the U.S. Army’s 7- by 10-foot wind tunnel at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. To highlight its range of motion, the video is shown at eight times normal speed starting at 0:38.
Credit: NASA Ames

For full story, see: Multirotor

Ames Highlights Partnership Opportunities, Shares Moon-to-Mars Campaign Exhibit

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NASA Ames participated in this year’s 100th American Geophysical Union AGU 2020 Convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Dec. 9 – 13, 2019. Exhibitors from Ames included the Technology Transfer Division highlighting spinoff and partnership opportunities and the Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) who shared a hands-on exhibit featuring many meteorites, including touchstones displays of both Moon and Mars meteorite specimens to inspire our Moon to Mars campaign. This year, NASA science experts highlight the latest exciting discoveries from Earth and planetary science, heliophysics and astrophysics on the Hyperwall — a life-sized, hyper-realistic data visualization tool. The AGU Fall meeting is the largest international Earth and space science meeting in the world.
Credit: NASA Ames/Dominic Hart

Clues to Mars’ Lost Water

by Kassandra Bell

Mars may be a rocky planet, but it is not a hospitable world like Earth. It’s cold and dry with a thin atmosphere that has significantly less oxygen than Earth’s. But Mars likely once had liquid water, a key ingredient for life. Studying the history of water can help uncover how the Red Planet lost water and how much water it once had.

“We already knew that Mars was once a wet place,” said Curtis DeWitt, scientist at the Universities Space Research Association’s SOFIA Science Center. “But only by studying how present-day water is lost can we understand just how much existed in the deep past.”

Image of a sloping hillside from the Mars Curiosity rover and an illustration of deuterated water molecules
Image of a sloping hillside from the Mars Curiosity rover and an illustration of deuterated water molecules, called HDO instead of H2O because one of its hydrogen atoms has an extra neutrally charged particle. Infrared observations can study these particles that retrace the history of liquid water because the heavier molecules are more likely to remain even after liquid water has evaporated. SOFIA’s observations reveal this tracer of liquid water does not vary between Martian seasons, bringing scientists closer to understanding just how much liquid water Mars once had.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/SOFIA

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/SOFIA

For full story, see: MarsWater

How to Shape a Spiral Galaxy

by Kassandra Bell

Our Milky Way galaxy has an elegant spiral shape with long arms filled with stars, but exactly how it took this form has long puzzled scientists. New observations of another galaxy are shedding light on how spiral-shaped galaxies like our own get their iconic shape.

Magnetic fields play a strong role in shaping these galaxies, according to research from the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA. Scientists measured magnetic fields along the spiral arms of the galaxy called NGC 1068, or M77. The fields are shown as streamlines that closely follow the circling arms.

Magnetic fields in NGC 1086, or M77, are shown as streamlines over an image of the galaxy from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Magnetic fields in NGC 1086, or M77, are shown as streamlines over a visible light and X-ray composite image of the galaxy from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Array, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The magnetic fields align along the entire length of the massive spiral arms — 24,000 light years across (0.8 kiloparsecs) — implying that the gravitational forces that created the galaxy’s shape are also compressing the its magnetic field. This supports the leading theory of how the spiral arms are forced into their iconic shape known as “density wave theory.” SOFIA studied the galaxy using far-infrared light (89 microns) to reveal facets of its magnetic fields that previous observations using visible and radio telescopes could not detect.
Credit: NASA/SOFIA; NASA/JPL-Caltech/Roma Tre Univ.

For full story, see: spiralgalaxy

Experts on Earth Could Support Astronaut-Scientists on Mars, if They Team Up from the Start

by Abigail Tabor

Science experts on this planet will be able to guide astronauts’ scientific exploration on Mars while it’s happening, despite a sometimes 40-minute round-trip lag in communications with Earth, NASA’s BASALT project finds.

A scene that first played out on the Moon in 1972 happened again, years later, in Hawaii. While exploring the lunar surface, Apollo 17 astronaut and geologist Harrison Schmitt spotted some bright orange soil – an important clue about the Moon’s volcanic history. You can hear the excitement in his voice in recordings, but mission control in Houston couldn’t see what was so remarkable in the video beamed back to Earth.

In 2016, on the lava fields of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, a project called BASALT, short for Biologic Analog Science Associated with Lava Terrains, was getting under way. The “astronauts” here were researchers simulating a Mars mission, complete with a scientific support team “back on Earth” – a meeting room a few miles away. Building on the work of Apollo, they were studying how human missions to the Moon and Mars could combine scientific research with exploration.

Two people wearing backpacks and other gear in the middle of a barren landscape
Two BASALT project researchers take on the role of astronauts exploring Mars to collect scientific samples, during a simulated human space mission in 2016. Conducted on Hawaii’s volcanic terrain, which bears similarities to landscapes on Mars, this research is designing and developing elements of future missions.
Credit: NASA

For full story, see: BASALT

Fall Students Present Their Innovative Ideas at Poster Session

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On Dec. 11, 2019, employees had the opportunity to learn about the great variety of student projects at Ames and show support of their commitment to excellence and innovation. Exit posters and presentations provide these future scientists and engineers the opportunity to hone their STEM literacy and science communication skills.
Credit: NASA Ames/Dominic Hart

Miwa Hayashi Discusses How to Improve the Efficiency of Aircraft Metering Practices

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On Dec. 12, 2019, Miwa Hayashi presented the 2019 Code AF Best Paper Award Seminar “Evaluation of a Dynamic Weather-Avoidance Rerouting Tool in Adjacent-Center Arrival Metering.” Convective weather is the leading cause of air traffic delay. Rerouting requires more fuel and is time consuming to both air traffic controllers and customers. This issue is often compounded by overly conservative weather forecasting. NASA, in collaboration with the FAA, is developing and optimizing tools to lessen the impact of unpredictable weather events and effectively manage air traffic. Hayashi presented her work on one such method to improve the efficiency of aircraft metering practices. Hayashi is a human-factors researcher at NASA Ames, in the Aviation Systems Division. She joined the division in 2008, and has conducted more than 20 human-in-the-loop simulation evaluation studies of NASA’s various future air traffic management technologies and tools, working closely with the FAA and aviation industry
Credit: NASA Ames/Dominic Hart

Ames Families & Friends Enjoy Holiday Event, “Back to the Moon & the North Pole”

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The Ames Exchange hosted “Back to the Moon and to the North Pole,’ an employee holiday event on Dec. 7, 2019. Three astronauts, Bo Bobko, Yvonne Cagle and Dan Bursch signed autographs and Bursch debuted his book, “Up to the Moon.” There was international entertainment, holiday music, a magic show and “Insights into Science” demonstrations by Peter Graube. Kids participated in an International Space Station virtual reality experience, and also saw how they appeared on an infrared screen. An invited balloon twister made balloon animals, candy canes and snowmen for the kids. Santa Clause made a grand entrance on a fire truck and kids got to meet and take photos with him.
Credit: photos by Astrid Albaugh

Ken Wright Presents All Hands on Enhancing Innovation at NASA

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Agency Innovation Lead, Ken Wright provided information regarding OCT’s activities to enable and enhance innovation at the agency. This included an executive summary of the “Continuous Improvement of NASA’s Innovation Ecosystem Workshop” held at the National Academies as well as the current activities associated with the development of the Agency Innovation Framework.
Credit: NASA Ames/Don Richey

Associate Administrator Stephen Shih Conducts Anti-Harassment Training

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All SES, supervisors and managers were required to attend anti-harassment training on Dec. 10, 2019 at Ames. The training was sponsored by the Headquarters Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity and was conducted by Stephen Shih, Esq., Associate Administrator. Ames Research Center is committed to a workplace free of all forms of harassment and discrimination. Harassment is employee misconduct which undermines the integrity of the employment relationship, and it will not be tolerated.
Credit: NASA Ames/Don Richey

Statistical Summary of Activities of the Protective Service Division’s Security/Law Enforcement and Fire Protection Services Units for Period Ending November 2019

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