NASA Earth Science Technology Demonstratinos on CubeSats

the USSR launched Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, and with it the Space Age itself.In February 2023, China's National Museum put on a grand exhibition marking thirty years since the start of the Chinese human space program. 1The environment in space is very different from that of Earth.The extremes in temperatures, from less than -150 degrees Celcius to more than 150 degrees, the lack of atmospheric pressure, and other issues mean that the margin for error to achieve success is zero.Even the most experienced space powers, the United States and Russia, can fail.Luna 25, Russia's first probe to the Moon in nearly fifty years, crashed there in August 2023.The difficulties of space travel are challenging for countries and companies relatively new to the space race.China, during a period of about thirty years, has not just overcome these hurdles but also surpassed many other countries, including Russia, to become the world's number 2 space power. Launching rocketsOne way to measure the progress China has made is by the number of rocket launches.The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which put the first people on the Moon, now primarily relies on private companies to launch its spacecraft, including crewed missions.SpaceX is one of the companies doing most of this work for NASA.SpaceX can launch multiple rockets per week, sometimes every day, while having the rocket boosters return to Earth to be refuelled and reused.In 2022, the United States achieved a total of seventy-four orbital launches, sixty-one by SpaceX; China boasted sixty-four.Far behind was Russia at twenty-one, and fourth was New Zealand's RocketLab at nine. 2 SpaceX rockets often take multiple, and in some cases, nearly a hundred satellites into space whereas Chinese rockets usually only carry one or two.This is not because China lacks the capability but because it is sending larger satellites and only one or two can fit.However, China is rapidly developing the capability to do these missions that take multiple satellites, called ride-share.

Public communication strategy for NASA’s planetary protection program: Expanding the dialogue

Recent history has not been kind to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Problems with many major missions – Galileo's stuck antenna, Hubble's aberrant mirror, and incessant problems with the space shuttle – continue to embarrass the agency. The space station, which has had the distinction of being ridiculed by the leaders of almost every US professional science organisation, has mutated from a shining centrepiece to a $30bn albatross. There are signs, however, that NASA may be facing up to the draw-backs of investing in so much megascience.

Space travel: medicine in extremes

President's interview Behrooz Fattahi is coordinator, Heavy Oil Development, Aera Energy, a California E&P company jointly owned by affiliates of Shell and ExxonMobil. He began his industry career in 1977 and subsequently worked as a reservoir engineer, reservoir-engineering manager, and team leader for Osco/Shell International, Shell Western E&P, Shell Offshore, and Shell affiliate CalResources. Before joining the petroleum industry, Fattahi conducted research for the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the US National Science Foundation and taught courses in fluid dynamics and solid mechanics at Iowa State University. He is a past member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the American Association of University Professors. Fattahi has served on the SPE Board as director of the Western North America Region, and as vice president, Finance. Additionally, he has been chairman of the SPE Continuing Education Committee, a member of the SPE President's Learning Initiatives Task Force, and executive editor of SPE Reservoir Evaluation & Engineering, and was chairman of the San Joaquin Valley Section. Fattahi holds PhD degrees in aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering from Iowa State University. How did you get involved with SPE? I joined the oil industry in 1977, working in Iran for Osco/Shell Company. There was an interruption in my SPE membership because of all the events in Iran at the time, but when I came back to the US in 1985 to work for Shell in New Orleans, I became a member again. At the time, I had a passion to work on behalf of SPE but I did not really know how to, and I suspect that there are a lot of people today who have that problem—they want to get involved but they do not know the avenues to take and where to start. It was not until I began working in Bakersfield, California, in the early 1990s that I really got involved with SPE. One day I received a call from a friend at Chevron who was on the board of the SPE local section and he asked me if I could help him with the continuing education program because he was going to move the next year. And that turned out to be the opportunity that I was looking for. I got involved in that program and, after he left, I was able to become the section's Continuing Education director and significantly increase the size of the continuing education program.

Owing to its temporal resolution of 10-day and its polar orbit allowing several crossings over large lakes, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the French Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) missions including Topex/Poseidon, Jason-1/2/3 demonstrated strong capabilities for the continuous and long-term monitoring (starting in 1992) of large and medium-sized water bodies. However, the presence of heterogeneous targets in the altimeter footprint, such as ice cover in boreal areas, remains a major issue to obtain estimates of water level over subarctic lakes of similar accuracy as over other inland water bodies using satellite altimetry (i.e., R ≥ 0.9 and RMSE ≤ 10 to 20 cm when compared to in-situ water stages). In this study, we aim to automatically identify the Jason-2 altimetry measurements corresponding to open water, ice and transition (water-ice) to improve the estimations of water level during freeze and thaw periods using only the point measurements of open water. Four Canadian lakes were selected to analyze active (waveform parameters) and passive (brightness temperature) microwave data acquired by the Jason-2 radar altimetry mission: Great Slave Lake, Lake Athabasca, Lake Winnipeg, and Lake of the Woods. To determine lake surface states, backscattering coefficient and peakiness at Ku-band derived from the radar altimeter waveform and brightness temperature at 18.7 and 37 GHz measured by the microwave radiometer contained in the geophysical data records (GDR) of Jason-2 were used in two different unsupervised classification techniques to define the thresholds of discrimination between open water and ice measurements. K-means technique provided better results than hierarchical clustering based upon silhouette criteria and the Calinski-Harabz index. Thresholds of discrimination between ice and water were validated with the Normalized Difference Snow Index (NDSI) snow cover products of the MODIS satellite. The use of open water threshold resulted in improved water level estimation compared to in situ water stages, especially in the presence of ice. For the four lakes, the Pearson coefficient (r) increased on average from about 0.8 without the use of the thresholds to more than 0.90. The unbiased RMSE were generally lower than 20 cm when the threshold of open water was used and more than 22 cm over smaller lakes, without using the thresholds.

The paraglider was conceived during the 1950s as a lightweight hybrid of parachute and inflated wing that might allow astronauts to pilot spacecraft to airfield landings. From 1961 to 1964, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sought to convert the idea into a practical landing system for the Gemini spacecraft. The spacecraft would carry the paraglider safely tucked away through most of a mission. Only after re-entering the atmosphere from orbit would the crew deploy the wing. Having now converted their spacecraft into a makeshift glider, they could fly to an airfield landing. How and why this ingenious scheme failed is the subject of this paper.

Orbit determination and gravity field recovery from Doppler tracking data to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Humans have committed themselves to the exploration of space and the quest for a habitable planet. Central to the development of a sustainable ecosystem that can provide essential resources like food and water is the implementation of space plant cultivation systems. In the pursuit of bio-regenerative life support systems for human space exploration, the inclusion of plants is imperative. This study focuses on assessing potential challenges associated with cultivating Potatoes (Solanum tuberosum) under simulated Martian conditions. Potatoes exhibit adaptability to extremely cold and dry environments, making them a promising candidate for extraterrestrial agriculture. The advantages of potatoes include their high yield, rich content of easily digestible carbohydrates, elevated protein levels, and simplicity of propagation. When induced to tuberize, potatoes can achieve a harvest index exceeding 80%, approximately double that of traditional grain crops. Notably, unlike certain crops such as soybeans and certain grains, potatoes do not necessitate elaborate processing procedures before consumption. The Potato, specifically varieties like Norland, Denali, and Russet Burbank, has garnered attention in research funded by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Tests have revealed that these cultivars can successfully undergo tuberization even under constant bright light conditions, emphasizing their potential suitability for life support functions in space exploration contexts

The role of laser determined orbits in geodesy and geophysics

Personal computers of the past were limited to running computational fluid dynamics codes in serial mode. With the advent of multicore technology and suitable compilers, personal computers nowadays can execute codes in a parallel fashion similar to that of supercomputers and cluster computer systems. This article investigated what performance can be achieved when executing an aerodynamic code on an Intel quad core based personal computer with an OpenMP compiler in a Windows environment. The code solved the Euler equations to find the flowfield around a NACA0012 aerofoil on an O-type boundary fitted structured grid system. A speedup of up to 350% was obtainable in double precision accuracy. The reduced computation time means that, for small scale problems, more accurate Euler codes can replace commonly used transonic small disturbance codes. For larger problems, this information serves as a reference for developers of hybrid MPI/OpenMP algorithms for cluster computer systems. 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The airborne lunar spectral irradiance (air-LUSI) mission is an inter-agency partnership between the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. Air-LUSI aims to make SI-traceable measurements of lunar spectral irradiance at visible to near-infrared wavelengths with unprecedented accuracy. To minimize uncertainty, lunar spectra are acquired above 90 % of the Earth’s atmosphere aboard NASA’s Earth Resources aircraft, a civilian descendant of the U-2 spy plane. The data collected by the air-LUSI instrument is poised to improve upon current lunar calibrations of Earth observing satellites. The air-LUSI team recently completed their Operational Flight Campaign in Palmdale, California in March 2022. In addition to the Engineering Flight Campaign of August 2018 and the Demonstration Flight Campaign of November 2019, the air-LUSI instrument has been successfully deployed on over ten lunar spectral measurement flights at altitudes of roughly 21 km. This paper presents the simplified double gimbal design that was capable of recently tracking the Moon with a root mean square tracking error of less than 0.1°.

Research on alien life began as ‘exobiology’, a term first introduced in 1960 by Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg to describe the study of life beyond Earth. This was then absorbed by astrobiology, a broader multidisciplinary field that, in addition to its extraterrestrial perspective, has some very Earth‐bound objectives, including extremophile biology, molecular evolution, prebiotic chemistry, the origin of life on Earth, and the effect of gravity on organisms. According to Steven Dick, chief historian of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA; Washington, DC, USA), “exobiology and astrobiology share the core concerns of origin‐of‐life research and the search for life beyond Earth. But astrobiology placed life in the context of its planetary history, encompassing the search for planetary systems, the study of biosignatures on other planets, and the past, present and future of life” (Dick, 2006). > Shortly after its foundation in 1958, NASA inaugurated a robust research programme in the field, and money has generously flooded in ever since Despite its distant focus, astrobiology is by no means neglected. Shortly after its foundation in 1958, NASA inaugurated a robust research programme in the field, and money has generously flooded in ever since. Further augmenting the status of the discipline, NASA founded its Astrobiology Institute in 1997—with its headquarters at the Ames Research Center (Moffett Field, CA, USA) and nodes based at universities and research institutions around the USA—which is funded with a five‐year budget. Europe has also jumped on the astrobiology bandwagon—albeit with an obvious delay. The European Space Agency (ESA; Paris, France) is working on life‐seeking planetary missions, and the international Centro de Astrobiologia, based in Madrid, Spain—the first non‐US research centre to be associated with the NASA Astrobiology Institute—coordinates much of these research activities in Europe. Signs are accumulating, however, that astrobiology has finally reached the …

As the cost of satellite missions grow, government agencies are working to increase the relevance and usefulness of the Earth science data that they produce. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) early adopter program seeks to formalize partnerships with users of data early within the satellite planning process to ensure the greatest value of the mission. Scientists who are designing the satellite observing system, those who are developing mission data products, and the community who will use them need to work together to determine how satellite data can better inform decision making. NASA is working to initiate engagement with data users much earlier in the satellite program life so that the user needs can be prioritized, continue to engage with users throughout the development cycle, and then include analysis on societal impact after nominal mission life. The Early Adopter Program allows for broad and early engagement with decision makers by encouraging individuals and institutions with clear uses of data to engage with the mission. Early adopters facilitate feedback on mission products during pre-launch and accelerate the utilization of these products post-launch. This paper provides background and detail on how NASA is working to engage with early adopters, describes the partnership between early adopters and NASA missions, and connects the program to improved societal impacts of its satellite missions.

The paper describes how "smaller, faster, cheaper" were the watchwords in 1995 as aerospace and military program managers tried to cut the cost of doing business-without cutting the missions or goals of their programs. One of the most ambitious of these efforts took place at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington, DC, which moved to slash its workforce and to develop new lines of spacecraft that would be smaller and more autonomous than the Galileo vehicle, which limped to Jupiter with the assistance of a legion of ground controllers. Civilian aircraft companies expected to sell more commuter aircraft than jumbo jets. And the military found that defending itself against battlefield missiles is still as difficult as it was in Desert Storm.