In Case You Missed It: A Weekly Summary of Top Content from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center
|
A Year of Surprising Science From NASA's InSight Mars Mission
A new understanding of Mars is beginning to emerge, thanks to the first year of NASA's InSight lander mission. Findings described in a set of six papers published Feb. 24 reveal a planet alive with quakes, dust devils and strange magnetic pulses. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
|
A Cosmic Jekyll and Hyde
Using nearly a decade and a half worth’s of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, researchers noticed a stellar duo that behaved like one type of object before switching its identity, and then returning to its original state after a few years. Marshall manages the Chandra program.
|
Fired Up! Final Test of Orion Motor a Spectacular Success
On Feb. 25, NASA successfully tested Orion’s attitude control motor, which provides steering for the spacecraft’s launch abort system, at Northrop Grumman’s facility in Elkton, Maryland. The 30-second hot fire was the third and final test to qualify the motor for human missions, beginning with Artemis II.
|
NASA CubeSats Play Big Role in Lunar Exploration
Very small and innovative spacecraft called CubeSats are poised to play a role in NASA’s Artemis Program, which will return humans to the Moon by 2024. Among the CubeSat missions is Lunar Flashlight, developed by Marshall and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Lunar Flashlight uses an optical receiver aligned with four lasers that sequentially pulse the lunar landscape to look for water ice and other volatiles associated with the Moon’s permanently shadowed craters.
|
NASA Introduces Mission Support Updates at Marshall Small Business Meeting
As NASA prepares to send astronauts to explore the Moon and Mars, working hand-in-hand with the agency’s mission support contracts will be essential. At Marshall, a strong, skilled workforce of contractors and small businesses has always worked in tandem with the agency to push the bounds of exploration. At Marshall’s 29th Small Business Alliance Meeting on Feb. 20, nearly 900 industry leaders gathered to learn about the Artemis Program and a new contracting operating model.
For more information or to learn about other happenings at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, visit NASA Marshall. For past issues of the ICYMI newsletter, click here.
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center news releases and other information are available automatically by sending an e-mail message with the subject line subscribe to msfc-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
To unsubscribe, send an e-mail message with the subject line unsubscribe to msfc-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.
