TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Mar 7, 2024
The Crew-8 Nebula
Not the James Webb Space Telescope's latest view of a distant galactic nebula, this cloud of gas and dust dazzled spacecoast skygazers on March 3. The telephoto snapshot was taken minutes after the launch of a Falcon 9 rocket on the SpaceX Crew-8 mission, to the International Space Station. It captures plumes and exhaust from the separated first and second stage, a drifting Rorschach pattern in dark evening skies. The bright spot near bottom center within the stunning terrestrial nebulosity is the second stage engine firing to carry 4 humans to space in the Crew Dragon spacecraft Endeavour. In sharp silhouette just above it is the Falcon 9 first stage booster orienting itself for return to a landing zone at Cape Canaveral, planet Earth. This reuseable first stage booster was making its first flight. But the Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule has flown humans to low Earth orbit and back again 4 times before. Endeavour, as a name for a spacecraft, has also seen reuse, christening retired Space Shuttle Endeavour and the Apollo 15 command module.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html?
The Marshall Star for March 6, 2024
CONTENTS
Marshall Supports NASA’s SpaceX Crew-8 Launch
Huntsville Operations Support Center Raises Flag for Crew-8 Mission
BEAM Celebrates Black History Month with ‘The Color of Space’ Screening
NASA Collects First Surface Science in Decades via Commercial Moon Mission
NASA, SpaceX Test Starship Lunar Lander Docking System
Agency Opens Astronaut Applications as Newest Class Graduates
NASA Signs Agreement with Nikon to Develop Lunar Artemis Camera
Agency Awards Contracts for Flight, Payload Integration Services
OSIRIS-APEX Journey Highlighted on ‘This Week at NASA’
Juno Mission Measures Oxygen Production at Europa
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/marshall/the-marshall-star-for-march-6-2024/
NASA’s Newest Astronauts
MAR 06, 2024
The most recent astronaut candidates wave to the crowd in this image from their March 5, 2024, graduation ceremony at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Nicknamed “The Flies,” this cohort is now eligible for spaceflight assignments to the International Space Station, future orbiting destinations, the Moon, and beyond.
Selected for training in 2021, the astronaut graduates were chosen from a pool of more than 12,000 applicants and successfully completed more than two years of required basic training, including spacewalking, robotics, space station systems, and more.
The graduating NASA astronauts are Nichole Ayers of Colorado Springs, Colorado; Marcos Berríos of Guaynabo, Puerto Rico; Chris Birch of Gilbert, Arizona; Deniz Bunham of Wasilla, Alaska; Luke Delaney of Debary, Florida; Andre Douglas of Chesapeake, Virginia; Jack Hathaway of South Windsor, Connecticut; Anil Menon of Minneapolis; Chris Williams of Potomac, Maryland, and Jessica Wittner of Clovis, California. UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronauts Mohammad AlMulla and Nora AlMatrooshi trained alongside the NASA astronaut candidates for the past two years and took part in the graduation ceremony.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-newest-astronauts/
New congressional caucus seeks to build support for NASA’s planetary science programs
March 6, 2024
As NASA’s planetary science programs face reduced budgets this year and uncertain prospects for next year, advocates in Congress are banding together to build up support for them.
Reps. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.) announced March 6 that they were restarting a Planetary Science Caucus in Congress, serving as its co-chairs, with more than a dozen other members. The goal of the caucus is to educate other members and the public on the benefits of space exploration, in particular planetary science missions and related research, including studies of exoplanets and the search for life.
“We are launching this caucus at a critical moment for the future of American planetary science,” Chu said at a March 5 event organized by The Planetary Society about the caucus, noting the cuts in NASA’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) program proposed by Senate appropriators in their fiscal year 2024 spending bill. That started a chain of events that led to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Chu’s district, laying off 8% of its workforce in February.
A final 2024 spending bill, expected to be approved by the House and Senate by March 8, gives NASA some flexibility in determining funding for MSR between the Senate bill’s $300 million and the House version’s $949.3 million, also the amount NASA requested, pending the results of an ongoing reassessment of MSR’s architecture.
“I am so thankful that we made tremendous progress in the bipartisan, bicameral appropriations legislation,” Chu said, citing provisions that reiterated the importance of MSR as a top priority in planetary science decadal surveys, as well as prohibiting NASA from laying off other people working on MSR without congressional notification.
“However, the fight isn’t over, and we must work together to fund Mars Sample Return at the necessary level to rehire workers and promote the kind of discoveries that JPL has been on the frontline for decades,” she said. “So that’s one big reason why it’s so important to relaunch the Planetary Science Caucus.”
Bacon, in a statement, offered a more general endorsement of space exploration as a reason for starting the caucus. “As the future continues to unfold before us, we owe a duty to our children, our grandchildren and their descendants to drive our innovation by prioritizing exploration,” he said. “There is no greater exploration than the final frontier.”
The restart of the caucus, which had been idle in the previous congress, comes as NASA grapples not just with the uncertain future of MSR but also cuts in its overall planetary science program. The 2024 spending bill provides $2.717 billion for planetary science, nearly half a billion dollars less than what NASA received in 2023. The agency had requested more than $3.38 billion for planetary science in its 2024 proposal.
“The best case that we had is that we’d hold flat” at 2023 levels, said Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division, at a March 4 meeting of the Planetary Science Advisory Committee. “This is going to be a challenge.” She suggested later in the meeting that it meant NASA was unlikely to be able to fund MSR above the $300 million minimum in the appropriations bill.
She said it was too soon to see how the reduced spending would affect programs other than MSR. Once the bill is enacted, NASA will start work on an operating plan that will outline how it plans to allocate funding beyond the direction given in the bill, which will then require both White House and congressional approval. She said she hoped that plan would be complete by July.
The budget pressure is unlikely to let up in fiscal year 2025, the second year of a two-year agreement on the debt ceiling approved in June 2023 that caps non-defense discretionary spending. The administration’s 2025 budget proposal is slated for release March 11.
“The repercussions of tight budgets are real and we are already starting to feel the effects,” Glaze said. She said she is prioritizing missions in later phases of development, having passed their confirmation reviews, as well as research funding.
“We’re trying to honor the commitments that we have to the best of our ability,” she said. “In some cases we may need to put some delays in the system here for some of the things we already have in work.”
https://spacenews.com/new-congressional-caucus-seeks-to-build-support-for-nasas-planetary-science-programs/
California Flooding Revealed in NASA Before and After Satellite Images
Mar 06, 2024 at 10:13 AM EST
The scale of flooding across California in the wake of several intense atmospheric river storms has been captured by NASA satellites.
The images show California on January 15 before the major storms arrived, then again on February 4, after the first set of storms battered the state.
Parts of Los Angeles County saw over 13 inches of rain across the four days before February 6, according to National Weather Service data, with over 7 inches on February 5 and 6 alone, saturating the ground and leading to flash flooding across the city. Usually, there is only about 3.64 inches of rain in LA across the entire month of February, with the city seeing only 14.25 inches yearly.
The satellite images show the degree of flooding across Mendocino County in Northern California, about 100 miles north of San Francisco. Higher water heights relative to sea level are shown as lighter shades in the images, revealing the extent of the flooding. Each pixel in the image represents an area of 330 feet by 330 feet.
The images were captured by the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission, which is a collaboration between NASA and the French space agency, CNES (Centre National d'Études Spatiales).
SWOT has been measuring the levels of water across the entire globe since late 2022, allowing researchers to create an extremely detailed view of how the levels of the rivers and lakes around the world are changing. It measures these water levels using an instrument called the Ka-band Radar Interferometer, which uses two antennae 33 feet apart to bounce radar off water surfaces and measure their height.
"SWOT gives us information about flooding that we've never had before," Ben Hamlington, lead researcher for NASA's sea level change team at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. "Data from the SWOT satellite, combined with other information, is filling in this picture."
In the weeks since the February 4 picture was taken, several more powerful atmospheric rivers have inundated California with wind and rain, causing widespread flooding and mudslides. This has led to San Diego, Los Angeles, and Riverside all exceeding a year's worth of rainfall since October, with Los Angeles seeing 18.2 inches, San Diego seeing 9.82 inches, and Riverside seeing 9.68 inches. These cities usually see 14 inches, 9.79 inches, and 9.37 inches of rainfall in a whole year on average, respectively.
"Ever wonder how much rain falls in your area each year? San Diego and Riverside have seen their annual average rainfall since the start of the water year on October 1st," the National Weather Service (NWS) office in San Diego posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday.
Another storm is on its way to California later this week.
"Ready for more rain? Maybe not but precipitation is expected with a new Pacific storm Wednesday afternoon through Thursday," NWS San Diego said on X on Monday.
https://www.newsweek.com/california-flooding-atmopsheric-rivers-storms-nasa-images-1876474
Iceye launches radar satellite service to monitor the high seas
March 7, 2024
Iceye, a company that builds and operates a constellation of microsatellites equipped with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensors, has launched a new maritime surveillance product called Ocean Vision.
The service, announced March 7, aims to provide comprehensive monitoring of the world’s oceans.
Nearly 75% of international trade occurs over water, John Cartwright, Iceye’s senior vice president said. Nations increasingly need better intelligence about activities at sea, he added. “However, the maritime environment presents a significant challenge, with vast expanses of ocean to search and monitor.”
SAR satellites detect the signatures of vessels that stand out against the dark background of the ocean’s surface, he noted, and can render vessels visible to SAR sensors at night and in bad weather.
Iceye is based in Finland and operates a U.S. subsidiary called Iceye U.S., based in Irvine, California, where it designs and manufactures satellites.
The company said the Ocean Vision service allows the integration of SAR imagery with complementary data sources such as Automatic Identification System (AIS) or radio frequency (RF) data.
Growing number of use cases
There is a growing number of use cases for maritime surveillance, said Cartwright, including identifying vessels engaged in illicit trade and smuggling, and those that conduct illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing.
Iceye has previously introduced other maritime surveillance services in partnerships with Windward AI and with the satellite operator Spire.
Unlike previous offerings, Ocean Vision has a “detect” feature that combines SAR data with machine-learning workflows to deliver specialized information layers, the company said.
“Past activity focused more on the utility and application of our SAR data in support of maritime surveillance needs,” said Iceye. Ocean Vision “enables more rapid integration with other relevant geospatial data sources and supports wider exploitation by lowering the need for internal SAR expertise and processing workflows.”
Iceye on March 4 launched three new SAR satellites on the SpaceX Transporter-10 rideshare mission, including a technology demonstrator with an upgraded X-band antenna.
The company has launched a total of 34 spacecraft since 2018, and plans to launch up to 15 satellites in 2024.
https://spacenews.com/iceye-launches-radar-satellite-service-to-monitor-the-high-seas/