Neil Armstrong At The Lunar Landing Research Facility At NASA’s Langley Research Center In Hampton,

NASA Langley researchers are experts in modeling and simulations for entry, descent and landing, working on missions since the Viking lander in 1976. In this episode, we explore the challenges of guiding landers like Mars InSight through the Martian atmosphere for a safe landing. 

NASA InSight launched on March 5, 2018.

For more, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/

Virginia Middle-Schooler Takes Grand Prize at NASA Langley Student Art Contest

Anna Fox, a seventh-grader from Virginia Beach Middle School in Virginia Beach, Virginia, was named as the grand prize winner of Langley Research Center’s Student Art Contest.

“I was very excited when I heard that I won first place for my grade,” Anna said. “But when I heard that I won grand prize, I was speechless.”

A record 831 entries were submitted from hundreds of children in 39 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, with 13 students earning first-place honors in grade levels K-12 and the opportunity to be considered for the grand prize, said Kristina Cors, Langley Student Art Contest coordinator.

“We hope this contest continues to grow and provide a place for students to explore science and technology through creativity,” she said.

“I was very excited when I heard that I won first place for my grade,” Anna Fox said. “But when I heard that I won grand prize, I was speechless.”

Credits: Courtesy of Anne Baker

The art contest theme, “The Next 100 Years,” was intended to illustrate how NASA research and innovation propels science to new discoveries.

“This year’s artwork was particularly remarkable, and represented the theme ‘The Next 100 Years’ with imagination and immense talent,” Cors said.

Anna’s winning piece shows a deep-space scene with an astronaut planting a flag on a planet’s mountain while watching a rocket fly off in the distance in a sky populated by stars, galaxies and a moon.

“When I started drawing, I had no idea what to do, so I had looked at a bunch of videos on how to do galaxies for inspiration,” Anna said. “After that I randomly placed colors together until I found something I liked. It all started coming together from there.”

Once she got an idea in motion, Anna did her work using old and new techniques.

“I created my artwork digitally on Photoshop,” Anna said. “I had started with basic colors for the background, including the explosion behind the rocks. Then, on another layer I created the rocks, planet, astronaut and rocket ship taking off. Later I added detail on all the layers to look more realistic. The last step was to add all of the stars and galaxies, which I did with a special brush.”

Anna, who has been an artist for as long as she could pick up a pencil, said she started drawing digitally when she was 11, inspired by her father’s work on a computer.

“I think the best part of creating art is having fun with it and inspiring others to do art as well,” she said.

Anna said she always had an interest in space and the art contest was a perfect vehicle to express that.

“I think that the coolest thing about NASA is that they help so many people achieve their dreams, and send people to do what not a lot of people get to do,” Anna said.

For her grand-prize victory, Anna received a certificate, and a NASA Exploration Package of posters, pens, stickers, patches and lapel pins. Her artwork will be displayed at the Virginia Air & Space Center in Hampton, Virginia.

The 13 grade-level winners were selected by a panel of five judges from the Hampton Roads art community, and the grand champion was picked by Langley employees. Each piece was evaluated on originality, interpretation of subject matter/theme, creative techniques, composition and overall art appearance.

Eric Gillard NASA Langley Research Center

The James Webb Space Telescope

Like your backyard telescope, just MUCH more powerful

In 2018, we’re launching the world’s biggest space telescope ever - the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb will look back in time, studying the very first galaxies ever formed. While Webb doesn’t have a tube like your typical backyard telescope, because it’s also a reflector telescope it has many of the same parts! Webb has mirrors (including a primary and a secondary) just like a small reflector telescope, only its mirrors are massive (6.5 meters across) and coated in gold (which helps us reflect infrared light).

How does a reflector telescope work? Light is bounced from the primary to the smaller secondary mirror, and then directed to your eye:

Webb works pretty much the same way!

Taking the place of your eye to the eyepiece is a package of science instruments, including cameras and spectrographs, which will capture the light directed into them by the telescope’s mirrors.    

In order to install these instruments, we had to move the telescope structure upside down… an impressive sight!

Once Webb was in place on the assembly stand in the cleanroom, the team at Goddard Space Flight Center installed the instrument module (which we call the ISIM, or Integrated Science Instrument Module), with surgical precision. ISIM has four instruments, three of which were contributed by our partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. 

All four will detect infrared light from stars and galaxies as far away as 13.6 billion light years. In addition to seeing these first sources of light in the early Universe, Webb will look at stars and planetary systems being formed in clouds of dust and gas. It will also examine the atmospheres of planets around other stars – perhaps we will find an atmosphere similar to Earth’s!

Here is an image with the science instruments being lowered into their spot behind the primary mirror. You can see the golden mirror is face-down.

Here’s another perspective of the instruments being fit into the telescope. 

What you’ve seen come together above is just the telescope part of the James Webb Space Telescope mission – next comes putting together the rest of the observatory. This includes our massive tennis court-sized sunshield (which acts like the tube-part of your backyard telescope, protecting the mirrors from stray light and heat), as well as the parts that do things like power the telescope and let us communicate with it.

It actually takes several weeks for Webb to completely unfold into its full deployment!

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for updates on our progress. You can also visit our site for more information: http://jwst.nasa.gov

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Photo Credit #1: NASA/Chris Gunn. Photo Credit #2: NASA/Desiree Stover

NASA Begins Work to Build a Quieter Supersonic Passenger Jet

The return of supersonic passenger air travel is one step closer to reality with NASA's award of a contract for the preliminary design of a "low boom" flight demonstration aircraft. This is the first in a series of 'X-planes' in NASA's New Aviation Horizons initiative, introduced in the agency's Fiscal Year 2017 budget.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced the award at an event Monday at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Arlington, Virginia.

The return of supersonic passenger travel is one step closer to reality with NASA's award of a contract for the preliminary design of a low boom flight demonstrator aircraft. This is the first in a series of X-planes in NASA's New Aviation Horizons initiative, introduced in the agency’s Fiscal Year 2017 budget.Credits: NASA

"NASA is working hard to make flight cleaner, greener, safer and quieter – all while developing aircraft that travel faster, and building an aviation system that operates more efficiently," said Bolden. "To that end, it's worth noting that it's been almost 70 years since Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 as part of our predecessor agency's high speed research. Now we're continuing that supersonic X-plane legacy with this preliminary design award for a quieter jet that may break the barrier to accessible, affordable supersonic passenger flight."

This is an artist’s concept of a possible Low Boom Flight Demonstration Quiet Supersonic Transport (QueSST) X-plane design. The award of a preliminary design contract is the first step towards the possible return of supersonic passenger travel – but this time quieter and more affordable.Credits: Lockheed Martin

NASA selected a team led by Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company of Palmdale, California, to complete a preliminary design for Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST). The work will be conducted under a task order against the Basic and Applied Aerospace Research and Technology (BAART) contract at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

After conducting feasibility studies and working to better understand acceptable sound levels across the country, NASA's Commercial Supersonic Technology Project asked industry teams to submit design concepts for a piloted test aircraft that can fly at supersonic speeds, creating a supersonic "heartbeat" – a soft thump rather than the disruptive boom currently associated with supersonic flight.

"Developing, building and flight testing a quiet supersonic X-plane is the next logical step in our path to enabling the industry's decision to open supersonic travel for the flying public," said Jaiwon Shin, associate administrator for NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission.

Lockheed Martin will receive about $20 million over 17 months for QueSST preliminary design work. The Lockheed Martin team includes subcontractors GE Aviation of Cincinnati and Tri Models Inc. of Huntington Beach, California.

The company will develop baseline aircraft requirements and a preliminary aircraft design with specifications, and provide supporting documentation for concept formulation and planning. This documentation would be used to prepare for the detailed design, building and testing of the QueSST jet. Performance of this preliminary design also must undergo analytical and wind tunnel validation.

The detailed design and building of the QueSST aircraft, conducted under the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate's Integrated Aviation Systems Program, will fall under a future contract competition. In addition to design and building, this Low Boom Flight Demonstration (LBFD) phase of the project also will include validation of community response to the new, quieter supersonic design.

NASA's 10-year New Aviation Horizons initiative has the ambitious goals of reducing fuel use, emissions and noise through innovations in aircraft design, ground operations and the national air transportation system.

The New Aviation Horizons X-planes will typically be about half-scale of a production aircraft and likely are to be piloted. Design-and-build will take several years with aircraft starting their flight campaign around 2020, depending on funding.

For more information about NASA's aeronautics research, visit:

www.nasa.gov/aero

New Gravity Map Gives Best View Yet Inside Mars

A new map of Mars' gravity made with three NASA spacecraft is the most detailed to date, providing a revealing glimpse into the hidden interior of the Red Planet.

"Gravity maps allow us to see inside a planet, just as a doctor uses an X-ray to see inside a patient," said Antonio Genova of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts. "The new gravity map will be helpful for future Mars exploration, because better knowledge of the planet's gravity anomalies helps mission controllers insert spacecraft more precisely into orbit about Mars. Furthermore, the improved resolution of our gravity map will help us understand the still-mysterious formation of specific regions of the planet." Genova, who is affiliated with MIT but is located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, is the lead author of a paper on this research published online March 5 in the journal Icarus.

The improved resolution of the new gravity map suggests a new explanation for how some features formed across the boundary that divides the relatively smooth northern lowlands from heavily cratered southern highlands. Also, the team confirmed that Mars has a liquid outer core of molten rock by analyzing tides in the Martian crust and mantle caused by the gravitational pull of the sun and the two moons of Mars. Finally, by observing how Mars' gravity changed over 11 years – the period of an entire cycle of solar activity -- the team inferred the massive amount of carbon dioxide that freezes out of the atmosphere onto a Martian polar ice cap when it experiences winter. They also observed how that mass moves between the south pole and the north pole with the change of season in each hemisphere.

The map was derived using Doppler and range tracking data collected by NASA's Deep Space Network from three NASA spacecraft in orbit around Mars: Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), Mars Odyssey (ODY), and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Like all planets, Mars is lumpy, which causes the gravitational pull felt by spacecraft in orbit around it to change. For example, the pull will be a bit stronger over a mountain, and slightly weaker over a canyon.

Slight differences in Mars' gravity changed the trajectory of the NASA spacecraft orbiting the planet, which altered the signal being sent from the spacecraft to the Deep Space Network. These small fluctuations in the orbital data were used to build a map of the Martian gravity field.

The gravity field was recovered using about 16 years of data that were continuously collected in orbit around Mars. However, orbital changes from uneven gravity are tiny, and other forces that can perturb the motion of the spacecraft had to be carefully accounted for, such as the force of sunlight on the spacecraft's solar panels and drag from the Red Planet's thin upper atmosphere. It took two years of analysis and computer modeling to remove the motion not caused by gravity.

"With this new map, we've been able to see gravity anomalies as small as about 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) across, and we've determined the crustal thickness of Mars with a resolution of around 120 kilometers (almost 75 miles)," said Genova. "The better resolution of the new map helps interpret how the crust of the planet changed over Mars' history in many regions."

For example, an area of lower gravity between Acidalia Planitia and Tempe Terra was interpreted before as a system of buried channels that delivered water and sediments from Mars' southern highlands into the northern lowlands billions of years ago when the Martian climate was wetter than it is today. The new map reveals that this low gravity anomaly is definitely larger and follows the boundary between the highlands and the lowlands. This system of gravity troughs is unlikely to be only due to buried channels because in places the region is elevated above the surrounding plains. The new gravity map shows that some of these features run perpendicular to the local topography slope, against what would have been the natural downhill flow of water.

An alternative explanation is that this anomaly may be a consequence of a flexure or bending of the lithosphere -- the strong, outermost layer of the planet -- due to the formation of the Tharsis region. Tharsis is a volcanic plateau on Mars thousands of miles across with the largest volcanoes in the solar system. As the Tharsis volcanoes grew, the surrounding lithosphere buckled under their immense weight.

The new gravity field also allowed the team to confirm indications from previous gravity solutions that Mars has a liquid outer core of molten rock. The new gravity solution improved the measurement of the Martian tides, which will be used by geophysicists to improve the model of Mars' interior.

Changes in Martian gravity over time have been previously measured using the MGS and ODY missions to monitor the polar ice caps. For the first time, the team used MRO data to continue monitoring their mass. The team has determined that when one hemisphere experiences winter, approximately 3 trillion to 4 trillion tons of carbon dioxide freezes out of the atmosphere onto the northern and southern polar caps, respectively. This is about 12 to 16 percent of the mass of the entire Martian atmosphere. NASA's Viking missions first observed this massive seasonal precipitation of carbon dioxide. The new observation confirms numerical predictions from the Mars Global Reference Atmospheric Model – 2010.

The research was funded by grants from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission and NASA's Mars Data Analysis Program.

Bill Steigerwald

Feb. 12 'State of NASA' Events Highlight Agency Goals for Space Exploration

NASA centers across the country, including the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, are opening their doors Monday, Feb. 12, to media and social media for 'State of NASA' events.

Activities include a speech from acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot, and unique opportunities for a behind-the-scenes look at the agency's work. These events follow President Trump's Fiscal Year 2019 budget proposal delivery to the U.S. Congress.

Events at NASA centers will include media tours and presentations on the agency's exploration goals for the Moon, Mars and worlds beyond, the innovative technologies developed and under development, as well as the scientific discoveries made as NASA explores and studies Earth and our universe, and advancements toward next-generation air travel.

Lightfoot will provide a 'State of NASA' address to the agency's workforce at 1 p.m. EST from Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. His remarks will air live on NASA Television and the agency's website, https://www.nasa.gov/live. Following the presentation, NASA centers will host tours of their facilities for media and social media guests.

At Langley, the news and social media event will run from 1 to 5 p.m. and include:

A look at the SAGE III flight control center. SAGE III is the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment III studying Earth's atmosphere from the International Space Station.

A visit to the research aircraft hangar to see aircraft that are used in support of airborne research campaigns, as well as an inflatable heat shield that will enable landing on distant worlds.

A view of the labs where sonic-boom testing is being done to lower their impact so that commercial aircraft can be developed to fly supersonically over land.

A tour in a lab where inflatable space structures are being developed.

Follow the hashtag #StateOfNASA for more!

Pluto ‘Paints’ its Largest Moon Red

In June 2015, when the cameras on NASA’s approaching New Horizons spacecraft first spotted the large reddish polar region on Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, mission scientists knew two things: they’d never seen anything like it elsewhere in our solar system, and they couldn’t wait to get the story behind it.

Over the past year, after analyzing the images and other data that New Horizons has sent back from its historic July 2015 flight through the Pluto system, the scientists think they’ve solved the mystery. As they detail this week in the international scientific journal Nature, Charon’s polar coloring comes from Pluto itself – as methane gas that escapes from Pluto’s atmosphere and becomes “trapped” by the moon’s gravity and freezes to the cold, icy surface at Charon’s pole. This is followed by chemical processing by ultraviolet light from the sun that transforms the methane into heavier hydrocarbons and eventually into reddish organic materials called tholins.

"Who would have thought that Pluto is a graffiti artist, spray-painting its companion with a reddish stain that covers an area the size of New Mexico?" asked Will Grundy, a New Horizons co-investigator from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and lead author of the paper. "Every time we explore, we find surprises. Nature is amazingly inventive in using the basic laws of physics and chemistry to create spectacular landscapes."

The team combined analyses from detailed Charon images obtained by New Horizons with computer models of how ice evolves on Charon’s poles. Mission scientists had previously speculated that methane from Pluto’s atmosphere was trapped in Charon’s north pole and slowly converted into the reddish material, but had no models to support that theory.

The New Horizons team dug into the data to determine whether conditions on the Texas-sized moon (with a diameter of 753 miles or 1,212 kilometers) could allow the capture and processing of methane gas. The models using Pluto and Charon’s 248-year orbit around the sun show some extreme weather at Charon’s poles, where 100 years of continuous sunlight alternate with another century of continuous darkness. Surface temperatures during these long winters dip to -430 Fahrenheit (-257 Celsius), cold enough to freeze methane gas into a solid.

“The methane molecules bounce around on Charon's surface until they either escape back into space or land on the cold pole, where they freeze solid, forming a thin coating of methane ice that lasts until sunlight comes back in the spring,” Grundy said. But while the methane ice quickly sublimates away, the heavier hydrocarbons created from it remain on the surface.

The models also suggested that in Charon’s springtime the returning sunlight triggers conversion of the frozen methane back into gas. But while the methane ice quickly sublimates away, the heavier hydrocarbons created from this evaporative process remain on the surface.

Sunlight further irradiates those leftovers into reddish material – called tholins – that has slowly accumulated on Charon’s poles over millions of years. New Horizons’ observations of Charon’s other pole, currently in winter darkness – and seen by New Horizons only by light reflecting from Pluto, or “Pluto-shine” – confirmed that the same activity was occurring at both poles.

“This study solves one of the greatest mysteries we found on Charon, Pluto’s giant moon,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, and a study co-author. “And it opens up the possibility that other small planets in the Kuiper Belt with moons may create similar, or even more extensive ‘atmospheric transfer’ features on their moons.”

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Get the latest on women making history at NASA, our Juno mission, the Curiosity rover and move!

1. Women at NASA Making History, Creating the Future

Throughout Women’s History Month, we’ve been presenting profiles of the women who are leading the way in deep space exploration.

+ Meet some of them

2. Juno and the Giant

Our Juno spacecraft made its fifth close flyby over giant Jupiter’s mysterious cloud tops.

+ See the latest from the King of Planets

3. When the Road Gets Rough, the Tough Keep Rolling

A routine check of the aluminum wheels on our Curiosity Mars rover has found two small breaks on the rover’s left middle wheel tread–the latest sign of wear and tear as the rover continues its journey, now approaching the 10-mile (16 kilometer) mark. But there’s no sign the robotic geologist won’t keep roving right through its ongoing mission.

+ Get the full report

4. What Do Mars and Dinosaurs Have in Common?

Our research reveals that volcanic activity at the giant Martian volcano Arsia Mons ceased about 50 million years ago, around the time of Earth’s Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction, when large numbers of plant and animal species (including dinosaurs) went extinct. However, there’s no reason to think the two events were more than a cosmic coincidence.

+ Learn how scientists pieced together the past

5. A Comet in Commotion

Images returned from the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission indicate that during its most recent trip through the inner solar system, the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was a very active place – full of growing fractures, collapsing cliffs and massive rolling boulders.

+ See the many faces of Comet #67P

6. Next Generation Space Robot is Ingenious, Versatile–and Cute

The next rovers to explore another planet might bring along a scout. The Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot (PUFFER) in development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was inspired by origami. Its lightweight design is capable of flattening itself, tucking in its wheels and crawling into places rovers can’t fit.

+ Meet PUFFER

7. Shadowy Dawn

According to data from our Dawn mission to Ceres, shadowed craters on the dwarf planet may be linked to the history of how the small world has been tilted over time by the gravity of planets like Jupiter.

+ Find out how understanding “cycles of obliquity” might solve solar system mysteries

8. On Orbit and Online

We’re developing a  long-term technology demonstration project of what could become the high-speed internet of the sky. The Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD) will help engineers understand the best ways to operate laser communications systems, which could enable much higher data rates for connections between spacecraft and Earth, such as scientific data downlink and astronaut communications.

+ See how it will work

9. A Big Role for Small Sats in Deep Space Exploration

We selected 10 studies to develop mission concepts using CubeSats and other kinds of very small satellites to investigate Venus, Earth’s moon, asteroids, Mars and the outer planets. “These small but mighty satellites have the potential to enable transformational science,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division.

+ Get the small details

10. Rings Around the Red Planet?

It’s possible that one of our closest neighbors had rings at one point – and may have them again someday. At least, that’s the theory put forth by NASA-funded scientists at Purdue University.

+ See more details about the once and future rings of Mars

Discover more lists of 10 things to know about our solar system HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

This Day in NASA History: February 10, 1959

On this day, 1959, wind tunnel tests of Project Mercury configuration models were started.

By the end of the year, over 70 different models had been tested by facilities at the Air Force's Arnold Engineering Development Center and the NASA Langley, Ames, and Lewis Research Centers.

Here at NASA Langley Research Center, a lot of those tests took place in our 7 X 10-Foot High Speed Tunnel (pictured above).

Some tests also took place in our 20-Foot Vertical Spin Tunnel.

For the first time, Kepler measured the “shock breakout” of a star, the early flash from the shockwave of a dying red supergiant. The flash comes from a type II supernova, KSN 2011d. Read more