In Case You Missed It: A Weekly Summary of Top Content from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center
Week of August 28 - September 1, 2023.
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Super Blue Moons: Your Questions Answered
A trifecta of labels is being applied to the Moon of Aug. 30-31, 2023. It’s a full moon, a supermoon, and finally a blue moon. You may hear it referred to as a super blue moon as a result. It sounds exciting, but what does that really mean? We’ve got you covered. The Moon travels around our planet in an elliptical orbit, or an elongated circle, with Earth closer to one side of the ellipse. Each month, the Moon passes through the point closest to Earth (perigee) and the point farthest from Earth (apogee). When the Moon is at or near its closest point to Earth at the same time as it is full, it is called a “supermoon.” During this event, because the full moon is a little bit closer to us than usual, it appears especially large and bright in the sky.
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Station Hosts 11 Crewmates from Five Countries
Eleven astronauts and cosmonauts are living together aboard the International Space Station following the arrival of the SpaceX Crew-7 mission on Sunday. While the new crewmates get adapted to life in microgravity another crew is preparing for its departure this weekend. The orbital outpost’s newest crew of four, representing the U.S., Denmark, Japan, and Russia, arrived on Sunday aboard the SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft. NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov are familiarizing themselves with station safety procedures and getting used to life on orbit. The Crew-7 crew was now Expedition 69 Flight Engineers and will live and work 260 miles above the Earth for the next six months. During Monday afternoon, the new crew members were joined by station commander Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos and Flight Engineer Sultan Alneyadi of (UAE) United Arab Emirates) and reviewed the location of emergency hardware throughout the orbital lab.
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Scientific Work on the Space Station by NASA’s Space-X Crew-6
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-6 soon wraps up its mission aboard the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev spent their months on the orbiting lab conducting scientific investigations and technology demonstrations that help prepare humans for future space missions and benefit people back on Earth. Here’s a recap of the Crew-6 scientific journey aboard the space station.
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The SLS RS-25 Engine: Eight Minutes of Pure Power
When NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) rocket roars to life on the launch pad, NASA’s Artemis astronauts inside the Orion spacecraft will feel the power of the rocket’s four RS-25 engines for eight minutes. The four RS-25 engines on SLS are some of the most efficient engines ever built. Two giant propellant tanks on the SLS core stage provide the fuel to power the engines that, together, provide more than 2 million pounds of thrust to help launch NASA’s Artemis missions to the Moon. The RS-25 engines are produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3Harris Technologies Company. Watch this video to learn more about how these engines have been adapted from the Space Shuttle Program for the SLS rocket’s bold missions into deep space. For more information about SLS, visit https://www.nasa.gov/sls
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Hubble Sees a Sparkling Neighbor Galaxy
The galaxy ESO 300-16 looms over this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy, which lies 28.7 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, is a ghostly assemblage of stars which resembles a sparkling cloud. Other distant galaxies and foreground stars complete this astronomical portrait, which was captured by the Advanced Camera for Surveys. This observation is one of a series which aims to get to know our galactic neighbors. Hubble has observed around three quarters of known galaxies within about 10 megaparsecs of Earth in enough detail to resolve their brightest stars and establish distances to these galaxies. A team of astronomers proposed using small gaps in Hubble’s observing schedule to acquaint ourselves with the remaining quarter of these nearby galaxies.
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