Vice President Mike Pence Visited Our Kennedy Space Center In Florida Today. While There, He Delivered

Clay, Clouds and Curiosity

Our Curiosity Mars rover recently drilled into the Martian bedrock on Mount Sharp and uncovered the highest amounts of clay minerals ever seen during the mission. The two pieces of rock that the rover targeted are nicknamed "Aberlady" and "Kilmarie" and they appear in a new selfie taken by the rover on May 12, 2019, the 2,405th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

On April 6, 2019, Curiosity drilled the first piece of bedrock called Aberlady, revealing the clay cache. So, what’s so interesting about clay? Clay minerals usually form in water, an ingredient essential to life. All along its 7-year journey, Curiosity has discovered clay minerals in mudstones that formed as river sediment settled within ancient lakes nearly 3.5 billion years ago. As with all water on Mars, the lakes eventually dried up.

But Curiosity does more than just look at the ground. Even with all the drilling and analyzing, Curiosity took time on May 7, 2019 and May 12, 2019 to gaze at the clouds drifting over the Martian surface. Observing clouds can help scientists calculate wind speeds on the Red Planet.

For more on Curiosity and our other Mars missions like InSight, visit: https://mars.nasa.gov.

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This composite image shows a coronal mass ejection, a type of space weather linked to solar energetic particles, as seen from two space-based solar observatories and one ground-based instrument. The image in gold is from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, the image in blue is from the Manua Loa Solar Observatory’s K-Cor coronagraph, and the image in red is from ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

Our constantly-changing sun sometimes erupts with bursts of light, solar material, or ultra-fast energized particles — collectively, these events contribute to space weather. A new study shows that the warning signs of one type of space weather event can be detected tens of minutes earlier than with current forecasting techniques – critical extra time that could help protect astronauts in space. 

Credits: NASA/ESA/SOHO/SDO/Joy Ng and MLSO/K-Cor

Sing About NASA with Our Interns

Each semester, interns at Johnson Space Center (JSC) have the opportunity to contribute to our agency’s missions and help us lead the frontier of human space exploration. Interns at JSC also have the opportunity to enhance their experience through weekly meetings to discuss social and professional development topics, and can also get involved in many different committees.

The intern video committee from each semester comes up with ideas and carries out the entire process of creating a video that puts a creative, youthful spin on spreading NASA messages.

Here are a few highlights from some of the great intern videos that have been created:

Welcome to NASA

“Welcome to NASA” is based off of Flo Rida’s “My House” and was created to raise interest for our Journey to Mars. The lyrics and scenes in the video have been re-imagined in order to inform the public about the amazing work going on at NASA and the Johnson Space Center. 

Created in 2016

NASA is Good

This latest intern video is based off of Andy Grammer’s “Honey, I’m Good”. This video is designed as an outreach video to raise interest around the One-Year Mission aboard the International Space Station and the Pathways and Student Intern opportunities. 

Created in 2015

NASA Johnson Style

NASA Johnson Style was created as an educational parody of Psy’s "Gangnam Style". The intent of the video is to inform the public about the work being done at Johnson Space Center and throughout the agency. 

Created in 2012

I.S.S. Baby

A group of NASA interns collaborated to create the I.S.S Baby video based off of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice, Baby”. The video was designed as an outreach video to raise interest around the International Space Station. 

Created in 2008

There are plenty more JSC intern videos. You can watch more and learn about the work done at JSC and throughout the agency HERE.

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5 Out of this World Experiments Awaiting Crew-1 Space Scientists

NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, and Mike Hopkins, and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Soichi Noguchi embark on a historic mission on November 14, 2020 aboard the Crew Dragon. NASA’s Crew-1 mission marks the first certified crew rotation flight to the International Space Station. During their 6-month stay on orbit, these crew members will don their science caps and complete experiments in microgravity.  Check out five out of this world experiments you can expect to see these space scientists working on during Expedition 64.

1. Space Gardening

The Crew-1 astronauts will become space farmers with the responsibility of tending to the rad(ish) garden located in a facility known as the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH). Researchers are investigating radishes in the Plant Habitat-02 experiment as a candidate crop for spaceflight applications to supplement food sources for astronauts. Radishes have the benefits of high nutritional content and quick growth rates, making these veggies an intriguing option for future space farmers on longer missions to the Moon or Mars.

2. Micro Miners

Microbes can seemingly do it all, including digging up the dirt (so to speak).  The BioAsteroid investigation looks at the ability of bacteria to break down rock.  Future space explorers could use this process for extracting elements from planetary surfaces and refining regolith, the type of soil found on the moon, into usable compounds.  To sum it up, these microbial miners rock.

3. Cooler Exploration Spacesuits

The iconic spacesuits used to walk on the moon and perform spacewalks on orbit are getting an upgrade. The next generation spacesuit, the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit (xEMU), will be even cooler than before, both in looks and in terms of ability to regulate astronaut body temperature.  The Spacesuit Evaporation Rejection Flight Experiment (SERFE) experiment is a technology demonstration being performed on station to look at the efficiency of multiple components in the xEMU responsible for thermal regulation, evaporation processes, and preventing corrosion of the spacesuits.

4. Chips in Space

Crew-1 can expect to get a delivery of many types of chips during their mission.  We aren’t referring to the chips you would find in your pantry.  Rather, Tissue Chips in Space is an initiative sponsored by the National Institutes of Health to study 3D organ-like constructs on a small, compact devices in microgravity. Organ on a chip technology allows for the study of disease processes and potential therapeutics in a rapid manner. During Expedition 64, investigations utilizing organ on a chip technology will include studies on muscle loss, lung function, and the blood brain barrier – all on devices the size of a USB flashdrive.

5. The Rhythm of Life

Circadian rhythm, otherwise known as our "internal clock," dictates our sleep-wake cycles and influences cognition. Fruit flies are hitching a ride to the space station as the subjects of the Genes in Space-7 experiment, created by a team of high school students.  These flies, more formally known as the Drosophila melanogaster, are a model organism, meaning that they are common subjects of scientific study. Understanding changes in the genetic material that influences circadian rhythm in microgravity can shed light on processes relevant to an astronaut’s brain function.

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For updates on other platforms, follow @ISS_Research, Space Station Research and Technology News, or our Facebook to keep up with the science happening aboard your orbiting laboratory, and step outside to see the space station passing over your town using Spot the Station.

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

It’s the time of year for summer break, swimming, and oh, yes storms. June 1 marks the beginning of hurricane season on the Atlantic coast, but we’re not alone. Our neighboring planets have seen their fair share of volatile weather, too (like the Cassini spacecraft’s view of the unique six-sided jet stream at Saturn’s north pole known as “the hexagon”). 

This week, we present 10 of the solar system’s greatest storms.

1. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

With tumultuous winds peaking at 400 mph, the Great Red Spot has been swirling wildly over Jupiter’s skies for at least 150 years and possibly much longer. People saw a big spot on Jupiter as early as the 1600s when they started stargazing through telescopes, though it’s unclear whether they were looking at a different storm. Today, scientists know the Great Red Spot has been there for a while, but what causes its swirl of reddish hues remains to be discovered. More >

2. Jupiter’s Little Red Spot

Despite its unofficial name, the Little Red Spot is about as wide as Earth. The storm reached its current size when three smaller spots collided and merged in the year 2000. More >

3. Saturn’s Hexagon

The planet’s rings might get most of the glory, but another shape’s been competing for attention: the hexagon. This jet stream is home to a massive hurricane tightly centered on the north pole, with an eye about 50 times larger than the average hurricane eye on Earth. Numerous small vortices spin clockwise while the hexagon and hurricane spin counterclockwise. The biggest of these vortices, seen near the lower right corner of the hexagon and appearing whitish, spans about 2,200 miles, approximately twice the size of the largest hurricane on Earth. More>

4. Monster Storm on Saturn 

A tempest erupted in 2010, extending approximately 9,000 miles north-south large enough to eventually eat its own tail before petering out. The storm raged for 200 days, making it the longest-lasting, planet-encircling storm ever seen on Saturn. More >

5. Mars’ Dust Storm 

Better cover your eyes. Dust storms are a frequent guest on the Red Planet, but one dust storm in 2001 larger by far than any seen on Earth raised a cloud of dust that engulfed the entire planet for three months. As the Sun warmed the airborne dust, the upper atmospheric temperature rose by about 80 degrees Fahrenheit. More >

6. Neptune’s Great Dark Spot

Several large, dark spots on Neptune are similar to Jupiter’s hurricane-like storms. The largest spot, named the “Great Dark Spot” by its discoverers, contains a storm big enough for Earth to fit neatly inside. And, it looks to be an anticyclone similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. More >

7. Sun Twister 

Not to be confused with Earth’s tornadoes, a stalk-like prominence rose up above the Sun, then split into about four strands that twisted themselves into a knot and dispersed over a two-hour period. This close-up shows the effect is one of airy gracefulness. More >

8. Titan’s Arrow-shaped Storm 

The storm blew across the equatorial region of Titan, creating large effects in the form of dark and likely “wet” from liquid hydrocarbons areas on the surface of the moon. The part of the storm visible here measures 750 miles in length east-to-west. The wings of the storm that trail off to the northwest and southwest from the easternmost point of the storm are each 930 miles long. More >

9. Geomagnetic Storms

On March 9, 1989, a huge cloud of solar material exploded from the sun, twisting toward Earth. When this cloud of magnetized solar material called a coronal mass ejection reached our planet, it set off a chain of events in near-Earth space that ultimately knocked out an entire power grid area to the Canadian province Quebec for nine hours. More >

10. Super Typhoon Tip

Back on Earth, Typhoon Tip of 1979 remains the biggest storm to ever hit our planet, making landfall in Japan. The tropical cyclone saw sustained winds peak at 190 mph and the diameter of circulation spanned approximately 1,380 miles. Fortunately, we now have plans to better predict future storms on Earth. NASA recently launched a new fleet of hurricane-tracking satellites, known as the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), which will use the same GPS technology you and I use in our cars to measure wind speed and ultimately improve how to track and forecast hurricanes. More >

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

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Take a moment, look outside your window. 🌷🌼

Today is the #FirstDayOfSpring in the Northern Hemisphere, also known as the vernal equinox.

#DYK Earth’s tilted axis causes the season? Throughout the year, different parts of Earth receive the Sun’s most direct rays. So, when the North Pole tilts toward the Sun, it’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere. And when the South Pole tilts toward the Sun, it’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere.

These images are of Zinnias. They are part of the flowering crop experiment that began aboard the International Space Station on Nov. 16, 2015, when NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren activated the Veggie system and its rooting "pillows" containing zinnia seeds.

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Say hello to the Saturn Nebula 👋

Garden-variety stars like the Sun live fairly placid lives in their galactic neighborhoods, casually churning out heat and light for billions of years. When these stars reach retirement age, however, they transform into unique and often psychedelic works of art. This Hubble Space Telescope image of the Saturn Nebula shows the result, called a planetary nebula. While it looks like a piece of wrapped cosmic candy, what we see is actually the outer layers of a dying star.

Stars are powered by nuclear fusion, but each one comes with a limited supply of fuel. When a medium-mass star exhausts its nuclear fuel, it will swell up and shrug off its outer layers until only a small, hot core remains. The leftover core, called a white dwarf, is a lot like a hot coal that glows after a barbecue — eventually it will fade out. Until then, the gaseous debris fluoresces as it expands out into the cosmos, possibly destined to be recycled into later generations of stars and planets.

Using Hubble’s observations, scientists have characterized the nebula’s composition, structure, temperature and the way it interacts with surrounding material. Studying planetary nebulas is particularly interesting since our Sun will experience a similar fate around five billion years down the road.

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Sample Return Robot Challenge

It’s been a long, technical journey for the seven teams competing this week in Level 2 of our Sample Return Robot Challenge. Over the past five years, more than 50 teams have attempted the $1.5 million competition, which is looking to develop autonomous capabilities in robotics. Basically, we want robots that can think and act on their own, so they can travel to far off places – like Mars – and we can rely on them to work on their own when a time delay or unknown conditions could be factors.

This challenge has two levels, both requiring robots to navigate without human control and Earth-based tools (like GPS or magnetic compassing). The robot has to find samples, pick them up and deliver them to home base. Each of the final seven teams succeeded at Level 1, where they had to find one sample, during previous competition years. Now, they have a shot at the much more difficult Level 2, where they have a two-hour window to locate up to 10 samples of varying point values, but they don’t know where to look or what exactly they’re looking for.

Get to know the final seven, and be sure to cheer them on as we live-stream the competition all day Sept. 4 and 5.

West Virginia University Mountaineers Hailing from: Morgantown, West Virginia # of Team Members:  12

Behind the Name: In West Virginia, we call ourselves mountaineers. We like to explore unknown places and be inspired by nature.

Motivation: To challenge ourselves. Through this venture, we are also hoping to create research and career opportunities for everyone on the team.

Strategy: Keeping things simple. Through participating in SRR challenge during the last three years, we have gone a long way in streamlining our system.

Obstacles: One of the biggest challenges was finding and nurturing the talent of individual team members and coordinating the team in making real progress on time.

Prize Plans: We donated 50 percent of our 2015 Level 2 prize money to create an undergraduate “Robotics Achievement Fellowship” at WVU. The rest of the funding was allocated to support team member professional development, such as traveling to conferences. A similar model will be used if we win in 2016.

Extra Credit:  We did an Easter egg hunt with our robot, Cataglyphis (named after a desert ant with extraordinary navigation capabilities), last year.

Survey Hailing from: Los Angeles, California # of Team Members: Jascha Little

Behind the Name: It's short, simple, and what the robot spends a lot of its time doing.

Team History: We work together, and we all thought the challenge sounded like an excellent way to solve the problem of what to do with all our free time.

Motivation: We are all engineers and software developers that already work on robotics projects. Reading too much sci-fi when we were kids probably got us to this point.

Strategy: We are trying to solve the search-and-return problem primarily with computer vision. This is mostly to reduce cost. Our budget can't handle high quality IMUs or LIDAR.

Prize Plans: Probably build more robots.

Extra Credit: Favorite pop culture robot is Bender (Futurama). Alcoholic robots are the best.

Alabama Astrobotics (The University of Alabama) Hailing from: Tuscaloosa, Alabama # of Team Members: 33

Behind the Name: “Alabama Astrobotics” was chosen to reflect our school affiliation and our mission to design robotics for various space applications.

Team History: Alabama Astrobotics has been involved with other NASA robotics competitions in the past.  So, the team is accustomed to the competition environment.  

Motivation: We are pleased to have advanced to Level 2 in our first year in the competition (the first team to do so), but we are also not satisfied with just advancing.  Our goal is to try to solve Level 2.

Strategy: Our strategy is similar to that used in Level 1.  Our Level 1 approach was chosen so that it would translate to Level 2 as well, thus requiring fewer customizations from Level 1 to Level 2.

Obstacles: As a university team, the biggest challenge was not having all our team members available to work on the robot during the time since Level 1 completed in June. Most of my team members have either graduated or have summer internships, which took them away from campus after Level 1.  Thus, we didn’t have the manpower to address the additional Level 2 technical challenges.

Prize Plans: Any prize money would be donated to the University of Alabama College of Engineering.

Extra Credit: Alabama Astrobotics also competes in the annual NASA Robotic Mining Competition held at the Kennedy Space Center each May.  We have been fortunate enough to win that competition three times in its seven year history, and we are the only team to win it more than once.

MAXed-Out Hailing From: Santa Clara, California # of Team Members: 4

Behind the Name: Several reasons: Team leader is Greg Maxwell, and his school nick name was Max. Our robot’s name is Max, which is one of the most common name for a dog, and it is a retriever. Our efforts on this has been too the max…. i.e. MAXed-Out. Our technology requirements have been pushed to their limits - Maxed-Out.

Team History: Greg Maxwell started a Meet-up “Silicon-Valley Robot Operating System” SV-ROS that was to help teach hobbyists how to use ROS on their robots. We needed a project to help implement and make real what we were teaching. This is the third contest we have participated in.

Motivation: There is still such a long way to go to make robots practical. Every little bit we can contribute makes them a little bit better and smarter. Strategy: Level 1 was a test, as a minimum viable product to prove the tech worked. For Level 2, we had to test and add obstacle avoidance to be able to cover the larger area with trees and slopes, plus add internal guidance to allow for Max to be out of the home base camera tracking system.

Obstacles: Lack of a cost effective robot platform that met all the requirements; we had to build our own. Also time and money. The two months (between Level 1 and 2) went really fast, and we had to abandon lots of cool ideas and focus on the basics.

Prize Plans: Not sure, but pay off the credit cards comes to mind. We might open-source the platform since it works pretty well. Or we will see if it works as expected. We may also take a break / vacation away from robots for a while.

Extra Credit: My nephew, Max Hieges, did our logo, based on the 1960-era Rat Fink sticker.

Mind & Iron Hailing From: Seattle, Washington # of Team Members: 5

Behind the Name: It was the original title for Isaac Asimov’s “I Robot,” and we thought it was a good combination of what a robot actually is – mechanical and brains.

Team History: Three of us were WPI undergrads and met at school; two of us did our master’s degrees at the University of Washington, where we met another member, and then another of us brought on a family member.

Motivation: We saw that there was an opportunity to compete in a challenge that seemed like there was a reasonable solution that we could tackle with a limited budget. We saw three years of competition and thought that we had some better ideas and a pretty good shot at it. Strategy: The samples and the terrain are much more complex in Level 2, and we have to be more careful about our navigation. We are using the same tools, just expanding their capability and scope.

Obstacles: The team being spread over three different time zones has been the biggest challenge. We are all doing this in our free time after work. The internet has been really handy to get things done.

Prize Plans: Probably invest in more robot stuff! And look for other cool projects we can work on, whether it’s another NASA challenge or other projects.

Extra Credit: We are hoping to collaborate with NASA on the professional side with surgical robots to exoskeletons. Challenge-related, our robot is mostly made of plywood – it is a composite fiber material that works well for fast development using cheap materials.

Sirius Hailing From: South Hadley, Massachusetts # of Team Members: 4

Team History: We are a family. Our kids are both robot builders who work for Boston Dynamics, and they have a lot of robot expertise. Both of our kids are robotics engineers, and my wife is intrinsically brilliant, so the combination of that makes for a good team.

Motivation: Because it’s a really hard challenge. It’s one thing to drive a robot with a remote control; it’s another to do the whole thing autonomously. If you make a single change in a robot, it could throw everything off. You have to think through every step for the robot. On a basic level, to learn more about robotics and to win the prize. Strategy: Very similar to Level 1. We approached Level 1 knowing Level 2 was there, so our strategy was no different.

Obstacles: It is very difficult to do object recognition under unpredictable conditions – sun, clouds, weather, sample location. The biggest challenge was trying to recognize known and unknown objects under such a wide variety of environmental possibilities. And the terrain is very different – you don’t know what you’re going to find out there.

Prize Plans: We haven’t really thought about it, but we will give some away, and we’ll invest the rest in our robotics company.

Extra Credit: The first robot we had was called Robo-Dad. Dan was training to be an astronaut in the 1990s, so we built a toy remote-controlled truck that Dan - in Texas - could control via the internet in the house. Robo-Dad had a camera that Dan could see the house with. It had two-way communication; it was a little before it’s time – the internet was very slow.

Team AL Hailing From: Ontario, Canada # of Team Members: 1

Team History: I was looking for competitions that were open, and my dad had followed the Centennial Challenges for a while, so he alerted me to this one. I was already doing rover projects, and it was appropriate and awesome and interesting. I felt like I could do it as a team of one.

Motivation: Difficult challenges. I’m definitely inspired seeing really cool robots that other people are building. New emerging tech really motives me to create new things.

Strategy: I showed up with another robot to Level 2. I built three, but ran with only two. It did make it more complicated, but the strategy was to send them to different areas and have them be able to communicate with each other. Everything physically was the same from Level 1.  The idea is that they would all go out with different missions and I would maximize field coverage.

Obstacles: Time. More time would always be nice. Being able to make something like this happen under a timeline is really difficult. I feel like I accomplished a lot for a year. Also, manpower – being a team of 1, I have to do all of the paperwork and other related stuff, but also carry the hardware and do the programming. You have to multitask a lot.

Prize Plans: I’d like to start a robotics company, and be able to expand some of the things I’ve been working on associated with technology and maker education.

Extra Credit: My story is not linear. A lot of people are surprised to hear that my background is in molecular biology and  research. I once lived in a tent in Madagascar for a few months to do a biodiversity study, and I have multiple publications from that side of my life. I am in a whole different place now.

The competition is one of many run by our Centennial Challenges program, which looks to the public – citizen inventors, academics, makers, artists, YOU – to help us advance technology and bring a different perspective to obstacles that gets us outside of our traditional solving community. See what else we’re working on here.

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Take a dive between Saturn and its rings to see what our Cassini spacecraft saw during its first daring plunge on April 26! 

As Cassini made its first-ever dive through the gap between Saturn and its rings on April 26, 2017, one of its imaging cameras took a series of rapid-fire images that were used to make this movie sequence. The video begins with a view of the vortex at Saturn's north pole, then heads past the outer boundary of the planet's hexagon-shaped jet stream and continues further southward. 

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Space Missions Come Together in Colorado

Our leadership hit the road to visit our commercial partners Lockheed Martin, Sierra Nevada Corp. and Ball Aerospace in Colorado. They were able to check the status of flight hardware, mission operations and even test virtual reality simulations that help these companies build spacecraft parts.

Let’s take a look at all the cool technology they got to see…

Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor building our Orion crew vehicle, the only spacecraft designed to take humans into deep space farther than they’ve ever gone before.

Acting NASA Deputy Administrator Lesa Roe and Acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot are seen inside the CHIL…the Collaborative Human Immersive Laboratory at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton, Colo. Lockheed Martin’s CHIL enables collaboration between spacecraft design and manufacturing teams before physically producing hardware.

Cool shades! The ability to visualize engineering designs in virtual reality offers tremendous savings in time and money compared to using physical prototypes. Technicians can practice how to assemble and install components, the shop floor can validate tooling and work platform designs, and engineers can visualize performance characteristics like thermal, stress and aerodynamics, just like they are looking at the real thing.

This heat shield, which was used as a test article for the Mars Curiosity Rover, will now be used as the flight heat shield for the Mars 2020 rover mission.

Fun fact: Lockheed Martin has built every Mars heat shield and aeroshell for us since the Viking missions in 1976.

Here you can see Lockheed Martin’s Mission Support Area. Engineers in this room support six of our robotic planetary spacecraft: Mars Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MAVEN, Juno, OSIRIS-REx and Spitzer, which recently revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star, TRAPPIST-1. They work with NASA centers and the mission science teams to develop and send commands and monitor the health of the spacecraft.

See all the pictures from the Lockheed Martin visit HERE. 

Sierra Nevada Corporation

Next, Lightfoot and Roe went to Sierra Nevada Corporation in Louisville, Colo. to get an update about its Dream Chaser vehicle. This spacecraft will take cargo to and from the International Space Station as part of our commercial cargo program.

Here, Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Vice President of Space Exploration Systems Steve Lindsey (who is also a former test pilot and astronaut!) speaks with Lightfoot and Roe about the Dream Chaser Space System simulator.

Lightfoot climbed inside the Dream Chaser simulator where he “flew” the crew version of the spacecraft to a safe landing. This mock-up facility enables approach-and-landing simulations as well as other real-life situations. 

See all the images from the Sierra Nevada visit HERE.

Ball Aerospace

Lightfoot and Roe went over to Ball Aerospace to tour its facility. Ball is another one of our commercial aerospace partners and helps builds instruments that are on NASA spacecraft throughout the universe, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Ball designed and built the advanced optical technology and lightweight mirror system that will enable the James Webb Space Telescope to look 13.5 billion years back in time. 

Looking into the clean room at Ball Aerospace’s facility in Boulder, Colo., the team can see the Ozone Mapping Profiler Suite. These sensors are used on spacecraft to track ozone measurements.

Here, the group stands in front of a thermal vacuum chamber used to test satellite optics. The Operation Land Imager-2 is being built for Landsat 9, a collaboration between NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey that will continue the Landsat Program’s 40-year data record monitoring the Earth’s landscapes from space.

See all the pictures from the Ball Aerospace visit HERE. 

We recently marked a decade since a new era began in commercial spaceflight development for low-Earth orbit transportation. We inked agreements in 2006 to develop rockets and spacecraft capable of carrying cargo such as experiments and supplies to and from the International Space Station. Learn more about commercial space HERE.

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