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2021

The Marshall Star Archive

The Marshall Star is published online every Wednesday by the Office of Communications at the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration. For earlier editions, please send email to: Marshall.Star@msfc.nasa.gov.

2020 Marshall Star Year-In-Review

January 6, 2021

Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s launch vehicle stage adapter is loaded on the Pegasus barge

January 2021

neutron stars collide

January 13

An internal view of the subscale, 3D-printed lunar launch and landing pad shows the carefully designed central cone.v

January 20

Marshall researcher Africa Flores, who in October 2020 was named Geospatial Woman Champion of the Year.

January 27

February 2021

NASA conducts the first hot fire test in a new RS-25 engine test series.

February 3

Two students on a human-powered rover on simulated Martian terrain

February 10

A fully functional Launch Abort System (LAS) with a test version of Orion attached, launches on NASA’s Ascent Abort-2 (AA-2) atop a Northrop Grumman provided booster on July 2, 2019, at 7 a.m. EDT, from Launch Pad 46 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. During AA-2, the booster will send the LAS and Orion to an altitude of 31,000 feet, traveling at Mach 1.15 (more than 1,000 mph). The LAS’ three motors will work together to pull the crew module away from the booster and prepare it for splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean. The flight test will prove that the abort system can pull crew to safety in the unlikely event of an emergency during ascent.

February 17

Marshall intern Nathaniel Lazard contributes to NASA's mission virtually in the spring 2021 term.

February 24

March 2021

Bryan Jackson, grandson of Mary W. Jackson, left, and Raymond Lewis, son-in-law of Mary W. Jackson, right, unveil the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters sign during a ceremony officially naming the building, Friday, Feb. 26, 2021, at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.

March 3

The Payload Operations Integration Center, or POIC, at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

March 10

Astronaut Peggy Whitson working on the OsteoOmics bone cell study

March 17

Chandra data may have revealed the most distant known supermassive black hole with an X-ray jet.

March 24

David Voracek will deliver a virtual Tech Talk at 1 p.m. March 25.

March 31

April 2021

Uranus

April 7

The Soyuz MS-18 rocket carrying NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Oleg Novitskiy launches April 9 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

April 14

Illustration of SpaceX Starship.

April 21

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft is launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Thomas Pesquet, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Akihiko Hoshide onboard, Friday, April 23, 2021, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA’s SpaceX Crew-2 mission is the second crew rotation mission of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. Kimbrough, McArthur, Pesquet, and Hoshide launched at 5:49 a.m. EDT from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center to begin a six month mission onboard the orbital outpost.

April 28

May 2021

NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, left, Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, right are seen inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience spacecraft onboard the SpaceX GO Navigator recovery ship shortly after having landed in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Panama City, Florida, Sunday, May 2, 2021.

May 5

Astronaut Victor Glover working on Plant Water Management

May 12

The International Space Station photographed by Expedition 56 crew members from a Soyuz spacecraft after undocking on Oct. 4, 2018.

May 19

NASA conducted its fourth RS-25 single-engine hot fire of the year May 20, a continuation of its seven-part test series to support development and production of engines for the agency’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on future missions to the Moon.

May 26

June 2021

June 2

A panorama of the Galactic Center builds on previous surveys from Chandra and other telescopes.

June 9

Sally Ride on the flight deck of Challenger.

June 16

Pam Melroy is ceremonially sworn-in as the 15th NASA Deputy Administrator by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, as her husband Doug Hollett, holds their family Bible, Monday, June 21, 2021, at the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters building in Washington.

June 23

A Gulf fritillary butterfly lands on a Mexican sunflower in the pollinator habitat at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center during Pollinator Week, held June 21-27.

June 30

July 2021

astronaut stepping from capsule on moon

July 7

Construction teams erect Building 4200 on Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, the future site of administrative offices for NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

July 14

The NASA Test & Integration Team successfully installed the NEA Spacecraft into the launch canister. It is staged for shipping to Cape Canaveral to be installed on SLS Artemis 1.

July 21

Team Miles works in a clean room at Kennedy to prepare their CubeSat to be launched on the Artemis I mission.

July 28

August 2021

In this 30 second exposure taken with a circular fish-eye lens, a meteor streaks across the sky during the annual Perseid meteor shower on Friday, Aug. 12, 2016 in Spruce Knob, West Virginia. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)

August 4

Retired NASA engineer Mike Haddad inspects the Astro cruciform during refurbishment efforts at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center.

August 11

North side of Building 4221 on the campus of Marshall Space Flight Center.

August 18

The Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage for the second flight of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket

August 25

September 2021

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft is in the midst of system integration and test at JPL

September 1

Hurricane Ida is pictured as a category 4 storm

September 8

September 15

Astronaut Thomas Pesquet of the European Space Agency works on the ring-sheared drop experiment.

September 22

September 29

October 2021

A drop of insulin solution is contained by surface tension in the ring-sheared drop device.

October 6

High school and university students competed in the 2018 Human Exploration Rover Challenge event at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Students came from across the U.S. as well as several foreign countries such as Brazil, Germany, India, and Mexico. This event, which is normally a 2 day event, was shortened to 1 day in 2018 due to adverse weather conditions.

October 13

Jim Reuter presents the opening keynote address Oct. 12 at the Wernher von Braun Symposium.

October 20

NASA astronaut Megan McArthur enjoys fresh food on the International Space Station.

October 27

November 2021

RS-25 engines

November 3

Left: Jody Singer at the kickoff of Artemis on the Square; right, more than 150 attendees don astronaut attire.

November 10

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Crew Dragon atop, soars upward after liftoff from Kennedy’s Launch Pad 39A on Nov. 10.

November 17

Photo Illustration of the LCRD communicating data from the space station to Earth.

November 24

December 2021

Erika Alvarez, Systems Engineering & Integration Manager, Advanced Exploration Systems, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center

December 1

NASA’s Martin Weisskopf and colleagues from Columbia University in 1971.

December 8

A man in a white suit stands in front of the James Webb Space Telescope mirrors

December 15

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