Are We Alone? How NASA Is Trying To Answer This Question.

Your Gut in Space

Finding the Right Balance for the Microbiota

Trillions of microorganisms live on and in the human body, many of them essential to its function and health. These organisms, collectively known as the microbiota, outnumber cells in the body by at least five times. 

Microorganisms in the intestinal tract, the gut microbiota, play an especially important role in human health. An investigation on the International Space Station, Rodent Research-7 (RR-7), studies how the gut microbiota changes in response to spaceflight, and how that change in turn affects the immune system, metabolic system, and circadian or daily rhythms. 

Research shows that the microbiota in the mammalian digestive tract has a major impact on an individual’s physiology and behavior. In humans, disruption of microbial communities has been linked to multiple health problems affecting intestinal, immune, mental and metabolic systems.

The investigation compares two different genetic strains of mice and two different durations of spaceflight. Twenty mice, ten of each strain, launch to the space station, and another 20 remain on the ground in identical conditions (except, of course, for the absence of gravity). Mice are a model organism that often serves as a scientific stand-in for other mammals and humans. 

Fecal material collected from the mice every two weeks will be examined for changes in the gut microbiota. Researchers plan to analyze fecal and tissue samples after 30 and 90 days of flight to compare the effects of different durations of time in space. 

With a better understanding of relationships between changes such as disruption in sleep and an imbalance of microbial populations, researchers can identify specific factors that contribute to changes in the microbiota. Further studies then can determine proactive measures and countermeasures to protect astronaut health during long-term missions. 

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Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky. 🌟 The final stages of a star’s life allow us a glimpse into the future of our own solar system. This image from our Hubble Space Telescope shows what’s left of a star 10,000 light-years from Earth.

A star like our Sun will, at the end of its life, transform into a red giant. The core of the star will eventually collapse in on itself, ejecting the surface layers outward. After that, all that remains of the star is what we see here: glowing outer layers surrounding a white dwarf star. In just a few thousand years they will have dissipated, and all that will be left to see is the dimly glowing white dwarf. More on this image, here. 

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Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Here are a few things you should know about our solar system this week:

1. The Bright and the Beautiful

In its lowest-altitude mapping orbit, at a distance of 240 miles (385 kilometers) from Ceres, Dawn has provided scientists with spectacular views of the dwarf planet, especially of its bright, young, hexagonal craters like Haulani.

2. Mars Needs Brains

NASA is soliciting ideas from U.S. industry for designs of a Mars orbiter for potential launch in the 2020s. The satellite would provide advanced communications and imaging, as well as robotic science exploration, in support of NASA's Journey to Mars. This effort seeks to take advantage of industry capabilities to improve deep space, solar electric propulsion-enabled orbiters.

3. Seeing Double

NASA measured a solar flare from two different spots in space, using three solar observatories. During a December 2013 solar flare, three sun-observing spacecraft captured the most comprehensive observations ever of an electromagnetic phenomenon called a current sheet.

4. Set a Course for Europa

This artist's rendering shows NASA's Europa mission spacecraft, which is being developed for a launch in the 2020s. The mission would place a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter in order to perform a detailed investigation of the giant planet's moon Europa—a world that shows strong evidence for an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy crust and which could host conditions favorable for life.

5. Go Deep

Jupiter is huge, powerful and spectacular. But what lies hidden inside the giant planet? The Juno mission arrives at Jupiter in July to help us find out. Join Dr. Fran Bagenal to learn more about the mission and how it plans to delve deep into Jupiter's secrets this year.

Want to learn more? Read our full list of things to know this week about the solar system HERE.

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Do you believe in magic? ✨ ⁣ While appearing as a delicate and light veil draped across the sky, this @NASAHubble image reminds us of the power of imagination. What does this look like to you?⁣ ⁣ In reality, it's a small section of a Cygnus supernova blast wave, located around 2,400 light-years away. The original supernova explosion blasted apart a dying star about 20 times more massive than our Sun between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. Since then, the remnant has expanded 60 light-years from its center. ⁣ ⁣ Credit: @ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Blair; acknowledgment: Leo Shatz⁣ ⁣

10 Questions for Our New Head of Science

Guess what?! We have a new lead for our science missions, and we’re excited to introduce him to you. Recently, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden has named Thomas Zurbuchen as the new head of our organization for science missions. Let’s get to know him...

Zurbuchen was most recently a professor of space science and aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He was also the university’s founding director of the Center for Entrepreneurship in the College of Engineering.

Zurbuchen’s experience includes research in solar and heliospheric physics, experimental space research, space systems and innovation and entrepreneurship.

We asked him a few questions to see what he has in store for science at NASA…let’s take a look:

1. What is your vision for science at NASA?

Right now, I am focusing on my team and I am learning how I can help them achieve the goals we have; to design and build the missions we are currently working on. Once the presidential transition is complete, we will engage in strategic activity with that team. It has been my experience that the best ideas always come from great and diverse teams working together. I intend to do that here as well.

2. What solar system destination are you most eager for NASA to explore?

Tough question to answer. Basically, I want to go where there are answers to the most important questions. One question on my mind is the origin of extraterrestrial life. Some parts of the answer to this question can be answered at Mars, some at Europa or other moons in the outer solar system like Enceladus. Other parts of the answer is around other stars, where we have found thousands of planets…some of which are amazingly similar to Earth!

3. With raw images posted to several websites from our missions, what’s one thing you hope members of the public can help NASA do with that powerful data?

I hope that people all over the world play with the data and find new ways to explore. It’s almost like hanging out in the most amazing libraries talking about nature. Many of the books in this library have never been opened and curious minds can find true treasures in there. I know that there are over a billion data-products NASA is making available about the Earth – it’s a treasure chest!

4. In your opinion, what big science breakthrough from the past informs missions of today?

In science, everything we do builds on successes and also failures of the past. Sometimes we forget our failures or near-failures, which tend to teach us a lot about what to do and what not to do. One of my favorite stories is about the Explorer 1 mission: first they observed almost nothing, until they realized that there was so much radiation that the detectors were chocking. The Van Allen Probes is a mission that are conducting the best exploration today of these radiation belts, discovered by Explorer 1. Our exploration history is full of stories like that.

5. Behind every pretty space image is a team of scientists who analyze all the data to make the discovery happen. What do you wish the public knew about the people and work that goes into each of those pretty pictures?

I wish people knew that every picture they see, every data-set they use, is a product of a team. One of the most exhilarating facts of working in space is to be able to work in teams composed of some of the nicest and most interesting people I have ever met. There are some super-famous people I run with every time we are in the same town, others who like to play music and listen to it, and some who have been in space or climbed mountains.

6. If you were a member of the public, what mission events in the next year would you be most excited about?

The public’s lives will be directly affected by our missions in our Earth Science portfolio. Some of them are done together with NOAA, our sister agency responsible for forecasts. For example, GOES will feature a lightning detector that will enable better predictions of storms. We are also launching CYGNSS in December. This NASA mission, composed of 8 spacecraft will provide unique and high-resolution data designed to provide a deeper understanding and better prediction for hurricanes globally.

7. NASA science rewrites textbooks all the time. What do you hope the kids of tomorrow will know as facts that are merely hypothesis today?

I hope they will know about life elsewhere. They will learn how life evolves, and where there is life today.

8. NASA has explored planets within our solar system. With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2020, what do you hope we learn about distant worlds?

James Webb is going to allow us to go back in time and look at the first stars and first galaxies. This is something we have never seen – we can only guess what will happen. James Webb is going to allow us to look at many, many more planets around other stars and will allow us to start doing the kind of research that links to the question about how habitable life is there.

9. What sort of elements make for an exciting new science discovery? What do you hope is the next big discovery?

Almost always, an exciting discovery is a surprise. Sometimes, discoveries happen because we are looking for something totally different. The biggest discoveries are the ones that change everything we thought before. All of a sudden, nature wags the finger at us and says “you are wrong!” That is how you know you are up to something new.

I hope the next big discovery tells us about the origin of the 95% of the universe we don’t know enough about. We call these 95% “Dark Energy” and “Dark Matter”, but – to be honest – we really don’t know. So, we are today living in a time where we know with 100% certainty that we don’t know what makes up 95% of our universe.

10. In your opinion, why should people care about the science at NASA?

They should care because we improve and protect lives on Earth. They should also care because we make the world we live in bigger. This is because we find things out we never knew, which creates new opportunities for humankind. Some of these opportunities are near-term – they are patents, innovations, companies or great educations. But, some of them are long-term – they change how we think about life itself.

Stay updated on science at NASA and Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen by following him on Twitter: @Dr_ThomasZ

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Hello! When preparing for a mission what are your primary concerns for the astronauts safety- what do you focus on with the most intensity to feel confident in sending a crew up?

Looking 50 Years in the Future with NASA Earth Scientists

In the 50 years since the first Earth Day, the view from space has revolutionized our understanding of Earth’s interconnected atmosphere, oceans, freshwater, ice, land, ecosystems and climate that have helped find solutions to environmental challenges.

If NASA’s Earth science has changed this much in 50 years, what will it look like in 50 more years?

We asked some researchers what they thought. Here are their answers, in their own words.

Mahta Moghaddam is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Southern California. She’s building a system that helps sensors sync their measurements.

I am interested in creating new ways to observe the Earth. In particular, my team and I are building and expanding a system that will allow scientists to better study soil moisture. Soil moisture plays a vital role in the water and energy cycle and drives climate and weather patterns. When soil is wet and there is enough solar radiation, water can evaporate and form clouds, which precipitate back to Earth. Soil also feeds us – it nourishes our crops and sustains life on Earth. It’s one of the foundations of life! We need to characterize and study soil in order to feed billions of people now and in the future.

Our novel tool aims to observe changes in soil moisture using sensors that talk to each other and make decisions in real time. For instance, if one sensor in a crop field notes that soil is dry in a plot, it could corroborate it with other sensors in the area and then notify a resource manager or decision maker that an area needs water. Or if a sensor in another location senses that soil moisture is changing quickly due to rain or freeze/thaw activity, it could send a command to launch a drone or even to notify satellites to start observing a larger region. We live in one big, connected world, and can and will use many different scales of observations – local to global – from point-scale in-situ sensors to the scales that can be covered by drones, airplanes, and satellites. In just a few years from now, we might see much more vastly automated systems, with some touching not only Earth observations, but other parts of our lives, like drone deliveries of medical tests and supplies.

Odele Coddington is a scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She’s building an instrument to measure how much solar energy Earth reflects back into space.

My research is focused on the Earth system response to the Sun’s energy. I spend half of my time thinking about the amount and variability of the Sun’s energy, also known as the solar irradiance. I’m particularly interested in the solar spectral irradiance, which is the study of the individual wavelengths of the Sun’s energy, like infrared and ultraviolet. On a bright, clear day, we feel the Sun’s warmth because the visible and infrared radiation penetrate Earth’s atmosphere to reach the surface. Without the Sun, we would not be able to survive. Although we’ve been monitoring solar irradiance for over 40 years, there is still much to learn about the Sun’s variability. Continuing to measure the solar irradiance 50 years from now will be as important as it is today.

I spend the other half of my time thinking about the many processes driven by the Sun’s energy both within the atmosphere and at the surface. I’m excited to build an instrument that will measure the integrated signal of these processes in the reflected solar and the emitted thermal radiation. This is my first foray into designing instrumentation and it has been so invigorating scientifically. My team is developing advanced technology that will measure Earth’s outgoing radiation at high spatial resolution and accuracy. Our instrument will be small from the onset, as opposed to reducing the size and mass of existing technology. In the future, a constellation of these instruments, launched on miniaturized spacecraft that are more flexible to implement in space, will give us more eyes in the sky for a better understanding of how processes such as clouds, wildfires and ice sheet melting, for instance, alter Earth’s outgoing energy.

Sujay Kumar is a research physical scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He works on the Land Information System.

Broadly, I study the water cycle, and specifically the variability of its components. I lead the development of a modeling system called the Land Information System that isolates the land and tries to understand all the processes that move water through the landscape. We have conceptual models of land surface processes, and then we try to constrain them with satellite data to improve our understanding. The outputs are used for weather and climate modeling, water management, agricultural management and some hazard applications.

I think non-traditional and distributed platforms will become more the norm in the future. So that could be things like CubeSats and small sats that are relatively cheaper and quicker than large satellites in terms of how much time it takes to design and launch. One of the advantages is that because they are distributed, you’re not relying on a single satellite and there will be more coverage. I also think we’ll be using data from other “signals of opportunity” such as mobile phones and crowd-sourced platforms. People have figured out ways to, for example, retrieve Earth science measurements from GPS signals.

I feel like in the future we will be designing our sensors and satellites to be adaptive in terms of what the observational needs on the ground are. Say a fire or flood happens, then we will tell the satellite to look over there more intensely, more frequently so that we can benefit. Big data is a buzzword, but it’s becoming a reality. We are going to have a new mission call NISAR that’s going to collect so much data that we really have to rethink how traditional modeling systems will work. The analogy I think of is the development of a self-driving car, which is purely data driven, using tons and tons of data to train the model that drives the car. We could possibly see similar things in Earth science.

Hear from more NASA scientists on what they think the future will bring for Earth science: 

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Meet Fermi: Our Eyes on the Gamma-Ray Sky

Black holes, cosmic rays, neutron stars and even new kinds of physics — for 10 years, data from our Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have helped unravel some of the biggest mysteries of the cosmos. And Fermi is far from finished!

On June 11, 2008, at Cape Canaveral in Florida, the countdown started for Fermi, which was called the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) at the time. 

The telescope was renamed after launch to honor Enrico Fermi, an Italian-American pioneer in high-energy physics who also helped develop the first nuclear reactor. 

Fermi has had many other things named after him, like Fermi’s Paradox, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the synthetic element fermium.

Photo courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory

The Fermi telescope measures some of the highest energy bursts of light in the universe; watching the sky to help scientists answer all sorts of questions about some of the most powerful objects in the universe. 

Its main instrument is the Large Area Telescope (LAT), which can view 20% of the sky at a time and makes a new image of the whole gamma-ray sky every three hours. Fermi’s other instrument is the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor. It sees even more of the sky at lower energies and is designed to detect brief flashes of gamma-rays from the cosmos and Earth.

This sky map below is from 2013 and shows all of the high energy gamma rays observed by the LAT during Fermi’s first five years in space.  The bright glowing band along the map’s center is our own Milky Way galaxy!

So what are gamma rays? 

Well, they’re a form of light. But light with so much energy and with such short wavelengths that we can’t see them with the naked eye. Gamma rays require a ton of energy to produce — from things like subatomic particles (such as protons) smashing into each other. 

Here on Earth, you can get them in nuclear reactors and lightning strikes. Here’s a glimpse of the Seattle skyline if you could pop on a pair of gamma-ray goggles. That purple streak? That’s still the Milky Way, which is consistently the brightest source of gamma rays in our sky.

In space, you find that kind of energy in places like black holes and neutron stars. The raindrop-looking animation below shows a big flare of gamma rays that Fermi spotted coming from something called a blazar, which is a kind of quasar, which is different from a pulsar... actually, let’s back this up a little bit.

One of the sources of gamma rays that Fermi spots are pulsars. Pulsars are a kind of neutron star, which is a kind of star that used to be a lot bigger, but collapsed into something that’s smaller and a lot denser. Pulsars send out beams of gamma rays. But the thing about pulsars is that they rotate. 

So Fermi only sees a beam of gamma rays from a pulsar when it’s pointed towards Earth. Kind of like how you only periodically see the beam from a lighthouse. These flashes of light are very regular. You could almost set your watch by them!

Quasars are supermassive black holes surrounded by disks of gas. As the gas falls into the black hole, it releases massive amount of energy, including — you guessed it — gamma rays. Blazars are quasars that send out beams of gamma rays and other forms of light — right in our direction. 

When Fermi sees them, it’s basically looking straight down this tunnel of light, almost all the way back to the black hole. This means we can learn about the kinds of conditions in that environment when the rays were emitted. Fermi has found about 5,500 individual sources of gamma rays, and the bulk of them have been blazars, which is pretty nifty.

But gamma rays also have many other sources. We’ve seen them coming from supernovas where stars die and from star factories where stars are born. They’re created in lightning storms here on Earth, and our own Sun can toss them out in solar flares. 

Gamma rays were in the news last year because of something Fermi spotted at almost the same time as the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and European Gravitational Observatory’s Virgo on August 17, 2017. Fermi, LIGO, Virgo, and numerous other observatories spotted the merger of two neutron stars. It was the first time that gravitational waves and light were confirmed to come from the same source.

Fermi has been looking at the sky for almost 10 years now, and it’s helped scientists advance our understanding of the universe in many ways. And the longer it looks, the more we’ll learn. Discover more about how we’ll be celebrating Fermi’s achievements all year.

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10 Steps to Confirm a Planet Around Another Star

So you think you found an exoplanet -- a planet around another star? It’s not as simple as pointing a telescope to the sky and looking for a planet that waves back. Scientists gather many observations and carefully analyze their data before they can be even somewhat sure that they’ve discovered new worlds.

Here are 10 things to know about finding and confirming exoplanets.

This is an illustration of the different elements in our exoplanet program, including ground-based observatories, like the W. M. Keck Observatory, and space-based observatories like Hubble, Spitzer, Kepler, TESS, James Webb Space Telescope, WFIRST and future missions.

1. Pick your tool to take a look.

The vast majority of planets around other stars have been found through the transit method so far. This technique involves monitoring the amount of light that a star gives off over time, and looking for dips in brightness that may indicate an orbiting planet passing in front of the star.

We have two specialized exoplanet-hunting telescopes scanning the sky for new planets right now -- Kepler and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) -- and they both work this way. Other methods of finding exoplanets include radial velocity (looking for a “wobble” in a star's position caused by a planet’s gravity), direct imaging (blocking the light of the star to see the planet) and microlensing (watching for events where a star passes in front of another star, and the gravity of the first star acts as a lens).

Here’s more about finding exoplanets.

2. Get the data.

To find a planet, scientists need to get data from telescopes, whether those telescopes are in space or on the ground. But telescopes don’t capture photos of planets with nametags. Instead, telescopes designed for the transit method show us how brightly thousands of stars are shining over time. TESS, which launched in April and just began collecting science data, beams its stellar observations back to Earth through our Deep Space Network, and then scientists get to work.

3. Scan the data for planets.

Researchers combing through TESS data are looking for those transit events that could indicate planets around other stars. If the star’s light lessens by the same amount on a regular basis -- for example, every 10 days -- this may indicate a planet with an orbital period (or “year”) of 10 days. The standard requirement for planet candidates from TESS is at least two transits -- that is, two equal dips in brightness from the same star.

4. Make sure the planet signature couldn’t be something else.

Not all dips in a star's brightness are caused by transiting planets. There may be another object -- such as a companion star, a group of asteroids, a cloud of dust or a failed star called a brown dwarf, that makes a regular trip around the target star. There could also be something funky going on with the telescope’s behavior, how it delivered the data, or other “artifacts” in data that just aren’t planets. Scientists must rule out all non-planet options to the best of their ability before moving forward.

5. Follow up with a second detection method.

Finding the same planet candidate using two different techniques is a strong sign that the planet exists, and is the standard for “confirming” a planet. That’s why a vast network of ground-based telescopes will be looking for the same planet candidates that TESS discovers. It is also possible that TESS will spot a planet candidate already detected by another telescope in the past. With these combined observations, the planet could then be confirmed. The first planet TESS discovered, Pi Mensae c, orbits a star previously observed with the radial-velocity method on the ground. Scientists compared the TESS data and the radial-velocity data from that star to confirm the presence of planet “c.”

Scientists using the radial-velocity detection method see a star’s wobble caused by a planet’s gravity, and can rule out other kinds of objects such as companion stars. Radial-velocity detection also allows scientists to calculate the mass of the planet.

6. …or at least another telescope.

Other space telescopes may also be used to help confirm exoplanets, characterize them and even discover additional planets around the same stars. If the planet is detected by the same method, but by two different telescopes, and has received enough scrutiny that the scientists are more than 99 percent sure it’s a planet, it is said to be “validated” instead of “confirmed.”

7. Write a paper.

After thoroughly analyzing the data, and running tests to make sure that their result still looks like the signature of a planet, scientists write a formal paper describing their findings. Using the transit method, they can also report the size of the planet. The planet’s radius is related to how much light it blocks from the star, as well as the size of the star itself. The scientists then submit the study to a journal.

8. Wait for peer review.

Scientific journals have a rigorous peer review process. This means scientific experts not involved in the study review it and make sure the findings look sound. The peer-reviewers may have questions or suggestions for the scientists. When everyone agrees on a version of the study, it gets published.

9. Publish the study.

When the study is published, scientists can officially say they have found a new planet. This may still not be the end of the story, however. For example, the TRAPPIST telescope in Chile first thought they had discovered three Earth-size planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system. When our Spitzer Space Telescope and other ground-based telescopes followed up, they found that one of the original reported planets (the original TRAPPIST-1d) did not exist, but they discovered five others --bringing the total up to seven wondrous rocky worlds.

10. Catalog and celebrate -- and look closer if you can!

Confirmed planets get added to our official catalog. So far, Kepler has sent back the biggest bounty of confirmed exoplanets of any telescope -- more than 2,600 to date. TESS, which just began its planet search, is expected to discover many thousands more. Ground-based follow-up will help determine if these planets are gaseous or rocky, and possibly more about their atmospheres. The forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope will be able to take a deeper look at the atmospheres of the most interesting TESS discoveries.

Scientists sometimes even uncover planets with the help of people like you: exoplanet K2-138 was discovered through citizen scientists in Kepler’s K2 mission data. Based on surveys so far, scientists calculate that almost every star in the Milky Way should have at least one planet. That makes billions more, waiting to be found! Stay up to date with our latest discoveries using this exoplanet counter.

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“I felt I was an accepted team member. It was a great experience and a unique opportunity.”

Ruth Ann Strunk, a math major, was hired in 1968 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center as an acceptance checkout equipment software engineer. She monitored the work of contractors who wrote the computer programs designed to check out the command module, lunar module and the Apollo J mission experiments. These experiments were conducted aboard the service modules on Apollo 15, 16 and 17 by the command module pilots. 

“I am proud of the advancement and the number of women who are working and enjoy working here,” Strunk said. “It was a wonderful opportunity NASA afforded me during Apollo that I have been able to use ever since.”

Remember the women who made #Apollo50th possible.

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