The International Space Station is a microgravity laboratory in which an international crew of six people live and work while traveling at a speed of five miles per second (or 17,500 miles per hour), orbiting Earth every 90 minutes.
The space station has been in orbit for over 17 years, and during that time, over 1,922 research investigations have been performed. More than 1,200 scientific results publications have been produced as a result.
Important studies like the VEGGIE experiment, which is working to grow plants in microgravity, and the Twin’s Study, which is studying the impacts of microgravity on the human body, are helping us on our journey to Mars. Using this unique orbiting laboratory as a place to conduct research is helping us learn important things for future deep space missions.
There have even been 222 different people that have visited the space station. This includes the current crew that is working and living on orbit.
Did you know that the space station is the third brightest object in the sky? If you know when and where to look up, you can spot it on your own! Find out when and where to look up HERE.
On Snapchat? Watch today’s Live Story to discover more about the orbiting laboratory and get a tour of the station! You can also add ‘nasa’ on Snapchat to get a regular dose of space.
Clouds of dust drift through our galaxy. Telescopes can take pictures of these clouds when stars light them up. Who knew dust could be so beautiful? But it’s more than just pretty – we can learn a lot from it, too!
Stars like our Sun are born in dust clouds. Over time, leftover dust clumps together to help form planets. That makes it a little less dusty.
At certain times of the year, a band of sun-reflecting dust from the inner Solar System appears prominently just after sunset – or just before sunrise – and is called zodiacal light.
Credit: Ruslan Merzlyakov/astrorms
But later, objects like comets and asteroids can create new dust by breaking up into tiny rocks. In our solar system, these rocky grains are called zodiacal dust. That’s because it’s mostly visible near the constellations of the zodiac. We can see the hazy glow it creates just after sunset or shortly before dawn sometimes, like in the picture above.
Around other stars, it’s called exozodiacal dust. Try saying that five times fast! It makes it hazy there too, so it can be hard to see distant planets.
Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be really good at seeing how much of this dust is swirling around nearby stars. That will help future telescopes know the best places to look to find planets like Earth!
Roman will also see more distant objects. It will peer inside dust clouds where new stars are bursting into life. That will help our James Webb Space Telescope know where to look to find baby planets. Webb can zoom in for a more detailed look at these young worlds by seeing how they filter their host star’s light.
Roman will see huge patches of the sky – much bigger than our Hubble and Webb telescopes can see. These missions will team up to explore all kinds of cosmic mysteries!
Learn more about the exciting science Roman will investigate on Twitter and Facebook.
Do you dream of catching a short flight between cities or journeying across the globe? The aviation industry currently makes up 2-3% of all carbon emissions, but the shift toward electric and hybrid aircraft will help tackle climate change and minimize the environmental impacts of commercial aviation.
Sustainable flight will revolutionize the way we travel. From battery-powered aircraft that reduce fuel consumption, to new lightweight materials that can improve safety and efficiency during flight, here are a few important things to know about the world of sustainable aviation, and what it takes to make air travel cleaner and safer for our planet.
What is Electrified Aircraft Propulsion?
Similar to electric or hybrid-electric cars, sustainable aircraft designs feature electric powertrain systems – the system of components that help propel an aircraft during flight – to help reduce fuel use and emissions. Electrified Aircraft Propulsion (EAP) systems let aircraft work using electric motors, and alternative fuels, rather than relying solely on traditional jet engines burning fossil fuels. At NASA, we’re developing innovative EAP technologies ranging from advanced electric machines designed to increase power and performance to new aircraft materials developed to minimize weight and reduce fuel usage.
What are the challenges with electrifying flight?
Unlike electric vehicles on the ground, electrified aircraft face greater challenges when managing weight and heat while they’re running. In order to ensure maximum efficiency and safety, aircraft components must be designed with minimal weight to help reduce the amount of drag slowing the plane down and causing excess fuel burn. Electrified aircraft must also have advanced thermal management systems to help transfer heat effectively, and ensure onboard systems are kept cool to avoid damage.
Our research and development of EAP technologies offer innovative solutions to these challenges. Designed to keep weight at a minimum, aircraft components such as the High Efficiency Megawatt Motor feature advanced technology that enable increased power and efficiency with three times less heat loss and weight than traditional aircraft motors. New material technologies such as electrical insulation also help transport heat more effectively to minimize heat buildup and are made of lightweight materials to ensure efficiency at high altitudes.
What are the benefits of sustainable aviation?
From an environmental perspective, aircraft electrification offers unique opportunities to lower global emissions and minimize reliance on fossil fuels. The introduction of hybrid- or fully electric aircraft will significantly reduce overall fuel consumption by generating power and thrust via electricity and electric motors. Lightweight EAP systems and components can also help improve aircraft efficiency and reduce fuel burn, while using non-conventional, alternative fuels can help reduce harmful emissions. From an economic standpoint, EAP technologies could help strengthen commercial airliner markets with aircraft designed for around 180 passengers. Green technologies can also benefit both airline companies and you when you fly by potentially reducing aircraft maintenance and in-flight energy costs, making air travel more affordable.
When will sustainable flight take off?
To help turn visions of eco-friendly air travel into reality, we’re teaming up with industry to test EAP technologies on aircraft and introduce them to the U.S. commercial aviation fleet no later than 2035.
Under our Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration (EPFD) project, we will conduct ground and flight tests using existing aircraft modified with EAP systems to assist in transitioning these technologies into commercial products. Flight demonstrations will also enable us to identify key risks and barriers associated with integrating new EAP systems into commercial airliners and develop new standards for future EAP aircraft as they take to the skies within the next decade.
There you have it: a quick glimpse into the world of sustainable aviation, and the shift towards keeping our skies cleaner and safer. As we embark on this journey, climb aboard and stay up to date on our latest technology developments and future flight demonstrations.
In this image, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, Expedition 32 flight engineer, appears to touch the bright Sun during the mission’s third spacewalk outside the International Space Station. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Aki Hoshide is visible in the reflection of Williams’ helmet visor.
Today, April 12, is the International Day of Human Space Flight—marking Yuri Gagarin’s first flight in 1961, and the first space shuttle launch in 1981.
As we honor global collaboration in exploration, we’re moving forward to the Moon & Mars under the Artemis Accords.
Nicknamed “Earendel” (“morning star” in Old English), this star existed within the first billion years after the universe’s birth in the big bang. Earendel is so far away from Earth that its light has taken 12.9 billion years to reach us, far eclipsing the previous single-star record holder whose light took 9 billion years to reach us.
Though Earendel is at least 50 times the mass of our Sun and millions of times as bright, we’d normally be unable to see it from Earth. However, the mass of a huge galaxy cluster between us and Earendel has created a powerful natural magnifying glass. Astronomers expect that the star will be highly magnified for years.
Earendel will be observed by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s high sensitivity to infrared light is needed to learn more about this star, because its light is stretched to longer infrared wavelengths due to the universe’s expansion.
If you’ve spent much time stargazing, you may have noticed that while most stars look white, some are reddish or bluish. Their colors are more than just pretty – they tell us how hot the stars are. Studying their light in greater detail can tell us even more about what they’re like, including whether they have planets. Two women, Williamina Fleming and Annie Jump Cannon, created the system for classifying stars that we use today, and we’re building on their work to map out the universe.
By splitting starlight into spectra – detailed color patterns that often feature lots of dark lines – using a prism, astronomers can figure out a star’s temperature, how long it will burn, how massive it is, and even how big its habitable zone is. Our Sun’s spectrum looks like this:
Astronomers use spectra to categorize stars. Starting at the hottest and most massive, the star classes are O, B, A, F, G (like our Sun), K, M. Sounds like cosmic alphabet soup! But the letters aren’t just random – they largely stem from the work of two famous female astronomers.
Williamina Fleming, who worked as one of the famous “human computers” at the Harvard College Observatory starting in 1879, came up with a way to classify stars into 17 different types (categorized alphabetically A-Q) based on how strong the dark lines in their spectra were. She eventually classified more than 10,000 stars and discovered hundreds of cosmic objects!
That was back before they knew what caused the dark lines in spectra. Soon astronomers discovered that they’re linked to a star’s temperature. Using this newfound knowledge, Annie Jump Cannon – one of Fleming’s protégés – rearranged and simplified stellar classification to include just seven categories (O, B, A, F, G, K, M), ordered from highest to lowest temperature. She also classified more than 350,000 stars!
Type O stars are both the hottest and most massive in the new classification system. These giants can be a thousand times bigger than the Sun! Their lifespans are also around 1,000 times shorter than our Sun’s. They burn through their fuel so fast that they only live for around 10 million years. That’s part of the reason they only make up a tiny fraction of all the stars in the galaxy – they don’t stick around for very long.
As we move down the list from O to M, stars become progressively smaller, cooler, redder, and more common. Their habitable zones also shrink because the stars aren’t putting out as much energy. The plus side is that the tiniest stars can live for a really long time – around 100 billion years – because they burn through their fuel so slowly.
Astronomers can also learn about exoplanets – worlds that orbit other stars – by studying starlight. When a planet crosses in front of its host star, different kinds of molecules in the planet’s atmosphere absorb certain wavelengths of light.
By spreading the star’s light into a spectrum, astronomers can see which wavelengths have been absorbed to determine the exoplanet atmosphere’s chemical makeup. Our James Webb Space Telescope will use this method to try to find and study atmospheres around Earth-sized exoplanets – something that has never been done before.
Our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will study the spectra from entire galaxies to build a 3D map of the cosmos. As light travels through our expanding universe, it stretches and its spectral lines shift toward longer, redder wavelengths. The longer light travels before reaching us, the redder it becomes. Roman will be able to see so far back that we could glimpse some of the first stars and galaxies that ever formed.
Learn more about how Roman will study the cosmos in our other posts:
Telescopes located both on the ground and in space continue to dazzle us with incredible images of the universe. We owe these sharp vistas to a series of brilliant astronomers, including Andrea Ghez – an astrophysicist and professor at UCLA – and the “Mother of Hubble,” Nancy Grace Roman.
Did you know that stars don’t actually twinkle? They only look like they do because their light has to travel through our turbulent atmosphere to reach our eyes. As the atmosphere shifts and swirls around, the light from distant stars is slightly refracted, or bent, in different directions. Sometimes it’s directed right at us, but sometimes it’s directed a bit to the side.
It’s like someone’s shining a flashlight toward you but moving it around slightly. Sometimes the beam is pointed right at you and appears very bright, and sometimes it’s pointed a bit to either side of you and it appears dimmer. The amount of light isn’t really changing, but it looks like it is.
This effect creates a problem for ground-based telescopes. Instead of seeing sharp images, astronomers get fuzzy pictures. Special tech known as adaptive optics helps resolve pictures of space so astronomers can see things more clearly. It’s even useful for telescopes that are in space, above Earth’s atmosphere, because tiny imperfections in their optics can blur images, too.
In 2020, Andrea Ghez was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics for devising an experiment that proved there’s a supermassive black hole embedded in the heart of our galaxy – something Hubble has shown is true of almost every galaxy in the universe! She used the W. M. Keck Observatory’s adaptive optics to track stars orbiting the unseen black hole.
Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument will come equipped with deformable mirrors that will serve as a form of visual “autocorrect” by measuring and subtracting starlight in real time. The mirrors will bend and flex to help counteract effects like temperature changes, which can slightly alter the shape of the optics.
Other telescopes have taken pictures of enormous, young, bright planets orbiting far away from their host stars because they’re usually the easiest ones to see. Taking tech that’s worked well on ground-based telescopes to space will help Roman photograph dimmer, older, colder planets than any other observatory has been able to so far. The mission could even snap the first real photograph of a planet like Jupiter orbiting a Sun-like star!
Find out more about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Twitter and Facebook, and learn about the person from which the mission draws its name.
Nearly 100 years ago, astronomer Bernard Lyot invented the coronagraph – a device that made it possible to recreate a total solar eclipse by blocking the Sun’s light. That helped scientists study the Sun’s corona, which is the outermost part of our star’s atmosphere that’s usually hidden by bright light from its surface.
Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, now under construction, will test out a much more advanced version of the same thing. Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument will use special masks to block the glare from host stars but allow the light from dimmer, orbiting planets to filter through. It will also have self-flexing mirrors that will measure and subtract starlight automatically.
This glare-blocking prowess is important because planets can be billions of times dimmer than their host stars! Roman’s high-tech shades will help us take pictures of planets we wouldn’t be able to photograph using any other current telescopes.
Other observatories mainly use this planet-hunting method, called direct imaging, from the ground to photograph huge, bright planets called “super-Jupiters” in infrared light. These worlds can be dozens of times more massive than Jupiter, and they’re so young that they glow brightly thanks to heat left over from their formation. That glow makes them detectable in infrared light.
Roman will take advanced planet-imaging tech to space to get even higher-quality pictures. And while it’s known for being an infrared telescope, Roman will actually photograph planets in visible light, like our eyes can see. That means it will be able to see smaller, older, colder worlds orbiting close to their host stars. Roman could even snap the first-ever image of a planet like Jupiter orbiting a star like our Sun.
Astronomers would ultimately like to take pictures of planets like Earth as part of the search for potentially habitable worlds. Roman’s direct imaging efforts will move us a giant leap in that direction!
At the bottom of a very dark swimming pool, divers are getting ready for missions to the Moon. Take a look at this a recent test in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
NASA astronauts are no strangers to extreme environments. We best prepare our astronauts by exposing them to training environments here on Earth that simulate the 1/6th gravity, suit mobility, lighting and lunar terrain they’ll expect to see on a mission to the Moon. Practice makes perfect.
The Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center is where astronauts train for spacewalks, and soon, moonwalks.
When astronauts go to the Moon’s South Pole through NASA’s Artemis program, the Sun will only be a few degrees over the horizon, creating long, dark shadows. To recreate this environment, divers at the lab turned off the lights, put up black curtains on the pool walls to minimize reflection, and used powerful underwater lamps to simulate the environment astronauts might experience on lunar missions.
These conditions replicate the dark, long shadows astronauts could see and lets them evaluate the different lighting configurations. The sand at the bottom is common pool filter sand with some other specialized combinations in the mix.
This was a test with divers in SCUBA gear to get the lighting conditions right, but soon, NASA plans to conduct tests in this low-light environment using spacesuits.
Neutral buoyancy is the equal tendency of an object to sink or float. Through a combination of weights and flotation devices, an item is made to be neutrally buoyant and it will seem to “hover” under water. In such a state, even a heavy object can be easily manipulated, much as it is in the zero gravity of space, but will still be affected by factors such as water drag.
The Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory is 202 ft in length, 102 ft in width and 40 ft in depth (20 ft above ground level and 20 ft below) and holds 6.2 million gallons of water.
About 15 years ago, our Hubble Space Telescope captured this ultra-deep field image of space, revealing thousands of galaxies tucked away in a seemingly empty spot in the sky.
Now, imagine this view of the cosmos – and all the mysteries in it – at a scale300 times larger than Hubble’s.
Roman recently released this gorgeous simulated image that gives us a preview of what the telescope could see. Each tiny speck represents a galaxy filled with billions of stars. And it’s more than just a pretty picture – scientists could learn a lot from an observation like this!
Since Roman can see much more of the sky at a time, it could create an ultra-deep field image that’s far larger than Hubble’s. So instead of revealing thousands of galaxies, Roman would see millions!
Roman’s ability to look far out into space with such an expansive view would help us better understand what the universe was like when it was young. For example, scientists could study a lot of cosmic transitions, like how galaxies switch from star-making factories to a quieter stage when star formation is complete and how the universe went from being mainly opaque to the brilliant starscape we see today.
And these are just a few of the mysteries Roman could help us solve!
Did you know you are surrounded by NASA technology? From your apartment building to the doctor’s office, and even in your cellphone camera, there is more space in your life than you think!
In the latest edition of Spinoff, we are introducing dozens of new ways NASA technology could cross your path. Whether you need an extra “hand” on the production line or a weatherproof jacket, check out how to gear up with technology made for space.
Robots are crucial to exploring space and other planets – they could even support astronauts and form the advance party for places humans have yet to reach. But the human machine is hard to replicate.
A collaboration with General Motors helped us build Robonaut 2 – and the design for this robot’s hands has been adapted into a robotic glove that helps manufacturing employees, such as automobile workers, reduce injuries and improve quality control.
The Swedish company Bioservo used the Robo-Glove technology to create the world’s first industrial-strength robotic glove for factory workers who perform repetitive manual tasks.
The Ironhand glove adds force to the user’s grip with artificial tendons and pressure sensors on the palm and the fingers.
The result? Reduced strain on the user’s own tendons and muscles, meaning fewer workplace stress injuries and better comfort for workers.
Spacesuits need major insulation and temperature control to protect astronauts on extravehicular activities, aka spacewalks. To help solve this, we created a phase-change material with help from the Triangle Research and Development Corporation.
With funding from a NASA Small Business Innovation Research contract, Triangle incorporated the material into a fabric glove insert that could maintain a steady temperature by absorbing and releasing heat, ensuring it feels just right.
While the invention never made it to orbit, it did make it into the driver’s seat.
Outlast Technologies exclusively licensed the material from Triangle and has incorporated it into outdoor gear, bedding, and now – auto racing suits with help from Cambridge, England-based Walero.
Due to extreme temperatures in the cockpit, drivers in almost every major racing championship wear Walero for its cooling properties. Cristiana Oprea (pictured) wears it while driving for the European Rally Championship. Credit: Walero
The race undergarments, bonded with fire-retardant material for added protection, help drivers maintain a lower core temperature and heart rate, which means fewer mistakes and better lap times.
The suits have been sold to both amateur racers and professional NASCAR drivers.
The superinsulating material that makes up space blankets is one of our most ubiquitous spinoffs. Found everywhere from inside the walls and roofs of buildings to cryogenic tanks and MRI machines, radiant barrier technology was first created to insulate spacesuits and spacecraft. And now this NASA spinoff can be found in weatherproof jackets as well.
Inspired by her passion to run following a series of surgeries to help correct a life-threatening injury, Hema Nambiar launched her Larchmont, New York, start-up company 13-One. To create her jacket, she worked with Advanced Flexible Materials Inc.’s brand Heatsheets. The brand was already marketing products like the space blankets traditionally distributed after races to prevent dangerous drops in temperature.
The 13-One jackets are designed to be warm and weatherproof, but their thin, reflective lining lets them also be lightweight and easily portable. Credit: Lourenso Ramautar, Out of New York Studio
The resulting line of jackets has a black exterior and a lining to reflect body heat. They weigh less than a pound, are wind- and water-resistant, and easily pack into a small, built-in pouch.
Want to check out more NASA spinoffs? Be sure to find us on spinoff.nasa.gov and on Twitter.
Interested in licensing your own NASA technologies? Check out the NASA Technology Transfer program at technology.nasa.gov.
