Exploring Deep Space: NASA Announces 2025 RASC-AL Competition 

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3 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA has officially announced the 2025 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition. Credit: National Institute of Aerospace NASA has officially announced the 2025 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts – Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) competition, an initiative to fuel innovation for aerospace systems concepts, analogs, and technology prototyping through university engagement. RASC-AL, one of NASA’s longest-running student competitions, solicits concepts from the next generation of engineers and scientists to explore the future of deep space exploration. RASC-AL is seeking…

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‘Cosmic dawn:’ NASA’s Roman Space Telescope will get baby pictures of our universe

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When it opens its eye to the cosmos, NASA‘s next big off-Earth observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, will peer back to a distant period in the universe’s history called “cosmic dawn.” Though Roman’s predecessor telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), take full advantage of the fact that the cosmos is now transparent to light, the universe wasn’t always this way. Up to around 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the cosmos was opaque, full of an obscuring “fog” of particles absorbing photons,…

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Telfer Mine, Western Australia

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NASA/Michala Garrison, USGS Landsat 9’s Operational Land Imager-2 captured this image of the open pits and ponds of Telfer Mine and the surrounding rust-colored soil on Dec. 15, 2023. The soils have a reddish tint from the iron oxides that have accumulated from millions of years of weathering. This part of Western Australia is known for being rich in natural resources, including petroleum, iron ore, copper, and certain precious metals. Beneath the soils, veins of gold and silver run through sedimentary rocks, such as quartz sandstone and siltstone, that formed about 600 million years ago,…

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Magnetic fields on the sun could solve longstanding solar heating mystery

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Scientists have long wondered why the hot soup of charged particles in our sun’s atmosphere gets hotter moving away from the surface of the sun. New research may have the answer, finding the super-hot nature of the sun’s outer atmosphere or “corona” could be due to the intriguing behavior of small-scale waves in this nebulous plasma. These waves, known to scientists as “kinetic Alfvén waves” or “KAWs,” are wave-like vibrations of magnetic fields manifested by motions in the sun’s photosphere. The findings could provide an important clue to decoding the…

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2024 Software of the Year Co-Winner – Orbital Debris Engineering Model (ORDEM)

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3 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA Johnson Space Center: ORDEM represents the state of the art in orbital debris models intended for engineering analysis. It is a data-driven model, relying on large quantities of radar, optical, in situ, and laboratory measurement data. When released, it was the first software code to include a model for different orbital debris material densities, population models from low Earth orbit (LEO) all the way to Geosynchronous orbit (GEO), and uncertainties in each debris population.  ORDEM allows users to compute…

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2024 Software of the Year Award Co-Winner -Prognostics Python Packages (ProgPy)

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4 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA Ames Research Center: ProgPy is an open-source Python package supporting research and development of prognostics, health management, and predictive maintenance tools.   Prognostics is the science of prediction, and the field of Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) aims at estimating the current physical health of a system (e.g., motor, battery, etc.) and predicting how the system will degrade with use. The results of prognostics are used across industries to prevent failure, preserve safety, and reduce maintenance costs.   Prognostics,…

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Can the moon help preserve Earth’s endangered species?

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Could the moon soon be home to frozen biological samples of Earth’s endangered creatures? New research suggests scientists could use naturally occurring lunar cold spots, some of which haven’t seen sunlight for billions of years, to do just this. Recent studies have shown that as many as 8 million species exist on Earth, and over 1 million of these are under threat of extinction. Worryingly, this estimate could be the tip of the iceberg, as there could be many species that could become extinct before they have even been identified.…

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2024 Invention of the Year Winner – Thrust Chamber Liner and Fabrication Method

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4 min read Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater) NASA Marshall Space Flight Center: A thrust chamber assembly (TCA) is the critical and central component in a rocket engine that provides thrust to propel a launch vehicle into space. Since the 1960s, while small improvements in TCA performance have been made, little has been done to reduce weight, improve development timelines, and reduce manufacturing cost. This invention makes dramatic improvements in all three areas.  This Thrust Chamber Liner and Fabrication Method technology eliminates complex, bolted joints by using 3D…

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Moon robots could build stone walls to protect lunar bases from rocket exhaust

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An autonomous, robotic hydraulic excavator could build a dry stone wall to act as a blast shield around a launch pad on the moon, propose a team of Swiss researchers. The excavator would make use of in situ materials (rather than the costly practice of transporting building material from Earth to the moon), collecting rocks on the lunar surface for use in a ringed wall with a radius of between 50 and 100 meters (164 to 328 feet). “The robot would be used to both collect the boulders as well…

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