sophia dengosenior visual & interactive designer
journalist & space blogger
amateur jeweler & maker of awesomeness
We recently had the pleasure of chatting with Miguel San Martin, chief engineer for Guidance, Navigation, and Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he has worked on four Mars spacecraft. On Twitter he’s @MigOnMars.
Here’s the short version of today’s Mars news: Curiosity has, in fact, detected simple organics in Martian soil, but that detection is not definitive evidence of Mars-native organic compounds. Scientists first need to make sure that the compounds detected by the Mars Science Laboratory aren’t actually stowaways from Earth.
Ice and organics could have hitched a ride to Earth on comets and asteroids, where they could have formed the building blocks of life as we know it.
When you look up basic information on Mars on NASA’s website, in the field for the name of the discoverer, it says “known by the ancients.” Unlike Neptune, and the no-longer-a-planet Pluto, Mars has always figured in to the way we understand our solar system.
Have you ever taken a tour at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center? Perhaps you heard fascinating stories about the artifacts on display…
Let me tell you about an ambitious rubber chicken. Her name is Camilla Corona SDO, and she’s the official mascot for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. You may be most familiar with her as the bird that a group of high school students sent to the edge of space in March.
Steve Gauvain is an instructor and flight controller for NASA’s space shuttle. He’s down in Florida for the final launch of Atlantis, whose crew he helped to train for rendezvous. He has worked for NASA for 14 years, and has worked in Mission Control for the last year and a half.
A facility that trains astronauts for space will soon train oil and gas workers for water safety.
On Tuesday, NASA announced that Raytheon Technical Services Co., which runs the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, or NBL, will partner with Petrofac Training Services to offer the training.
At a ceremony in Washington on Wednesday, John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins were awarded Congressional Gold Medals for their work advancing human spaceflight.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) is on a mission to study our sun and how its activity might affect Earth. We’ve heard about solar flares and the way solar activity can disrupt life on Earth, but have you ever just looked at a sunspot?