Learn More About The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) At: Http://tess.gsfc.nasa.gov/ 

NASA Langley researchers are experts in modeling and simulations for entry, descent and landing, working on missions since the Viking lander in 1976. In this episode, we explore the challenges of guiding landers like Mars InSight through the Martian atmosphere for a safe landing. 

NASA InSight launched on March 5, 2018.

For more, visit https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) 

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is the next step in the search for planets outside of our solar system, including those that could support life. The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits. 

 TESS will survey 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun to search for transiting exoplanets. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2018.  

The TESS launch date is NLT June 2018 (the current working launch date is April 2018).

Music: "Prototype" and "Trial" both from Killer Tracks. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

NASA Crash-Test Dummies Make A Splash Landing

Engineers drop a NASA’s Orion Spacecraft test capsule with crash-test dummies inside into 20-foot-deep Hydro Impact Basin to simulate what the spacecraft may experience when splashing down in the Pacific Ocean after deep-space missions.

More: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/nasa-crash-test-dummies-suit-up-for-action

Katherine Johnson Biography

https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

Date of Birth: August 26, 1918 Hometown: White Sulphur Springs, WV Education: B.S., Mathematics and French, West Virginia State College, 1937 Hired by NACA: June 1953 Retired from NASA: 1986 Actress Playing Role in Hidden Figures: Taraji P. Henson

Being handpicked to be one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools is something that many people would consider one of their life’s most notable moments, but it’s just one of several breakthroughs that have marked Katherine Johnson’s long and remarkable life. Born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in 1918, Katherine Johnson’s intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers vaulted her ahead several grades in school. By thirteen, she was attending the high school on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College. At eighteen, she enrolled in the college itself, where she made quick work of the school’s math curriculum and found a mentor in math professor W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a PhD in Mathematics. Katherine graduated with highest honors in 1937 and took a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia.  

When West Virginia decided to quietly integrate its graduate schools in 1939, West Virginia State’s president Dr. John W. Davis selected Katherine and two male students as the first black students to be offered spots at the state’s flagship school, West Virginia University. Katherine left her teaching job, and enrolled in the graduate math program. At the end of the first session, however, she decided to leave school to start a family with her husband.  She returned to teaching when her three daughters got older, but it wasn’t until 1952 that a relative told her about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory, headed by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan. Katherine and her husband, James Goble, decided to move the family to Newport News to pursue the opportunity, and Katherine began work at Langley in the summer of 1953. Just two weeks into Katherine’s tenure in the office, Dorothy Vaughan assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division, and Katherine’s temporary position soon became permanent. She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight test, and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. As she was wrapping up this work her husband died of cancer in December 1956.

The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history—and Katherine Johnson’s life. In 1957, Katherine provided some of the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology, a compendium of a series of 1958 lectures given by engineers in the Flight Research Division and the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). Engineers from those groups formed the core of the Space Task Group, the NACA’s first official foray into space travel, and Katherine, who had worked with many of them since coming to Langley, “came along with the program” as the NACA became NASA later that year. She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight. In 1960, she and engineer Ted Skopinski coauthored Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position, a report laying out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.

In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Katherine Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, DC, Cape Canaveral, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission, from blast off to splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine.  “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space.

When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Katherine Johnson talks about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite, and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. She retired in 1986, after thirty-three years at Langley. “I loved going to work every single day,” she says. In 2015, at age 97, Katherine Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.

Biography by Margot Lee Shetterly

https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

NASA Camera Shows Moon Crossing Face of Earth for 2nd Time in a Year

For only the second time in a year, a NASA camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured a view of the moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth. 

The images were captured by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), a four-megapixel CCD camera and telescope on the DSCOVR satellite orbiting 1 million miles from Earth. From its position between the sun and Earth, DSCOVR conducts its primary mission of real-time solar wind monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The first image is from July 2016 and the second image (moon traveling diagonally Northeast in the image) is from July 2015

Credits: NASA

The Hunt for New Worlds Continues with TESS

We’re getting ready to start our next mission to find new worlds! The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will find thousands of planets beyond our solar system for us to study in more detail. It’s preparing to launch from our Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Once it launches, TESS will look for new planets that orbit bright stars relatively close to Earth. We’re expecting to find giant planets, like Jupiter, but we’re also predicting we’ll find Earth-sized planets. Most of those planets will be within 300 light-years of Earth, which will make follow-up studies easier for other observatories.

TESS will find these new exoplanets by looking for their transits. A transit is a temporary dip in a star’s brightness that happens with predictable timing when a planet crosses between us and the star. The information we get from transits can tell us about the size of the planet relative to the size of its star. We’ve found nearly 3,000 planets using the transit method, many with our Kepler space telescope. That’s over 75% of all the exoplanets we’ve found so far!

TESS will look at nearly the entire sky (about 85%) over two years. The mission divides the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will look at 13 of them in the southern sky during its first year before scanning the northern sky the year after.

What makes TESS different from the other planet-hunting missions that have come before it? The Kepler mission (yellow) looked continually at one small patch of sky, spotting dim stars and their planets that are between 300 and 3,000 light-years away. TESS (blue) will look at almost the whole sky in sections, finding bright stars and their planets that are between 30 and 300 light-years away.

TESS will also have a brand new kind of orbit (visualized below). Once it reaches its final trajectory, TESS will finish one pass around Earth every 13.7 days (blue), which is half the time it takes for the Moon (gray) to orbit. This position maximizes the amount of time TESS can stare at each sector, and the satellite will transmit its data back to us each time its orbit takes it closest to Earth (orange).

Kepler’s goal was to figure out how common Earth-size planets might be. TESS’s mission is to find exoplanets around bright, nearby stars so future missions, like our James Webb Space Telescope, and ground-based observatories can learn what they’re made of and potentially even study their atmospheres. TESS will provide a catalog of thousands of new subjects for us to learn about and explore.

The TESS mission is led by MIT and came together with the help of many different partners. Learn more about TESS and how it will further our knowledge of exoplanets, or check out some more awesome images and videos of the spacecraft. And stay tuned for more exciting TESS news as the spacecraft launches!

Watch the Launch + More!

Sunday, April 15 11 a.m. EDT - NASA Social Mission Overview

Join mission experts to learn more about TESS, how it will search for worlds beyond our solar system and what scientists hope to find! Have questions? Use #askNASA to have them answered live during the broadcast.

Watch HERE. 

1 p.m. EDT - Prelaunch News Conference

Get an update on the spacecraft, the rocket and the liftoff operations ahead of the April 16 launch! Have questions? Use #askNASA to have them answered live during the broadcast.

Watch HERE.

3 p.m. EDT - Science News Conference

Hear from mission scientists and experts about the science behind the TESS mission. Have questions? Use #askNASA to have them answered live during the broadcast. 

Watch HERE.

4 p.m. EDT - TESS Facebook Live

This live show will dive into the science behind the TESS spacecraft, explain how we search for planets outside our solar system and will allow you to ask your questions to members of the TESS team. 

Watch HERE. 

Monday, April 16 10 a.m. EDT - NASA EDGE: TESS Facebook Live

This half-hour live show will discuss the TESS spacecraft, the science of searching for planets outside our solar system, and the launch from Cape Canaveral.

Watch HERE.

1 p.m. EDT - Reddit AMA

Join us live on Reddit for a Science AMA to discuss the hunt for exoplanets and the upcoming launch of TESS!

Join in HERE.

6 p.m. EDT - Launch Coverage!

TESS is slated to launch at 6:32 p.m. EDT on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from our Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Watch HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

NASA Touches Down in Virginia to Tout Missions at AeroSpace Days

Leaders from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, described their accomplishments and future missions at NASA’s AeroSpace Days on Feb. 6 and 7 in Richmond.

NASA Langley Director Dave Bowles, left, meets with Virginia Secretary of Education Atif Qarni at NASA AeroSpace Days Feb. 6 in Richmond, Virginia.Credits: NASA/David C. Bowman

NASA officials and representatives from the aerospace industry met with all 140 members of the General Assembly or their staffs, as well as Gov. Ralph Northam, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, and  cabinet members.

One of those lawmakers was newly elected Del. Kathy Convirs-Fowler. When she finished getting autographed pictures of Lindgren for her two children, she asked officials how aerospace initiatives can be advanced to students.

“As a former teacher, I’m very big on the programs we can implement,” she said, adding that a goal of hers is to increase the number of women and girls in science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) public school programs.

It’s not every day you get to shake hands with an astronaut. Kjell Lindgren, who flew on the International Space Station, was a popular face in the group of NASA representatives on an annual journey to bring the agency’s message to Virginia lawmakers.

Sen. John Consgrove was so fired up to talk with Lindgren that he apologized for it.

“I’m sorry I’m ignoring everybody else, but I don’t get to speak to an astronaut every day,” he said.

Lindgren is used to the outsized attention, and welcomed it as an opportunity to talk about NASA’s contributions to Virginia.

“It’s one of my favorite parts of the job,” he said. “You can see that they’re very enthusiastic, very interested and excited.”

Leaders from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, described their accomplishments and future missions at NASA’s AeroSpace Days on Feb. 6 and 7 in Richmond.

NASA officials and representatives from the aerospace industry met with all 140 members of the General Assembly or their staffs, as well as Gov. Ralph Northam, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, and  cabinet members.

One of those lawmakers was newly elected Del. Kathy Convirs-Fowler. When she finished getting autographed pictures of Lindgren for her two children, she asked officials how aerospace initiatives can be advanced to students.

“As a former teacher, I’m very big on the programs we can implement,” she said, adding that a goal of hers is to increase the number of women and girls in science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) public school programs.

“We want to excite the next generation,” Langley Deputy Director Clayton Turner told her. “That’s part of what we do.”

NASA Langley and Wallops have strong partnerships with private industry, including numerous technology transfer, commercialization and licensing success stories. In 2017, the two NASA centers brought a combined economic impact of $1.3 billion to Virginia and supported more than 10,000 jobs, according to an analysis by a private-sector company contracted by Langley.

“The collaboration has been really helpful,” Turner said.

Also, the state has assets that offer potential for growing the aerospace sector, including multiple universities, more than 285 aerospace firms, 66 public-use airports and a spaceport with access to orbit – one of only four in the U.S.

“By having two NASA centers here in Virginia, it also gives our students something to aim for,” Lindgren said. “The state is very fortunate and unique in that respect to have all those resources.”

AeroSpace Days, held for the past 13 years, aims to leverage those resources to recruit the next generation of explorers. That imperative drives Del. Marcia Price.

“If there’s anything I can do to help, especially in my community, to help with the outreach efforts so that they know about programs so my kids can be a part of the excellent things that are going on, let me know,” she said.

Those thoughts were echoed by Secretary of Education Atif Qarni, who offered to sponsor field trips to Langley and Wallops, speaking engagements, and support of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)-related legislation.

“We’re here to help any way we can,” he said.

In addition to meeting lawmakers and their staffs, NASA was formally recognized on the floor of the Virginia Senate by Sen. Mamie Locke during session. Locke praised Langley’s contributions over the last 100 years and asked the group of NASA employees participating in AeroSpace Days to stand up and be recognized.

“That was a cool moment,” said Langley spokesman Michael Finneran.” It’s very satisfying to realize that we’re helping improve people’s lives through what we and our partners do. We felt like rock stars for a few minutes.”

To view a photo gallery of 2018 AeroSpace Days, click here.

Eric Gillard NASA Langley Research Center

The Symbols of NASA

NASA also uses symbols for specific projects within the agency. Each space shuttle crew designs a patch that represents what it will do during the mission. Some robotic probes sent to explore space have had mission patches. From the wing of the space shuttle to the top of the NASA homepage, the agency's official insignia is probably its best-known symbol.

The round red, white and blue insignia, nicknamed the "meatball," was designed by employee James Modarelli in 1959, NASA's second year. The design incorporates references to different aspects of the mission of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The round shape of the insignia represents a planet. The stars represent space. The red v-shaped vector represents aeronautics. The circular orbit around the agency's name represents space travel. 

After it was introduced, the "meatball" was the most common symbol of NASA for 16 years, but in 1975 NASA decided to create a more "modern" logo. That logo, which consisted of the word "NASA" in a unique type style, was nicknamed the "worm." That logo was retired in 1992, and the classic meatball insignia has been the most common agency symbol since. 

In addition to the insignia, NASA has another official symbol. If the meatball is the everyday face of NASA, the NASA seal is the dressed-up version. The NASA administrator uses the seal for formal purposes such as award presentations and ceremonies. Like the meatball insignia, the seal also includes planet, stars, orbit and vector elements

NASA also uses symbols for specific projects within the agency. Each space shuttle crew designed a patch that represents what they were going to do during the mission. Some robotic probes sent to explore space have had mission patches. 

Image Credits: NASA