When You First Saw Earth From All The Way Up In Space, What Were Your First Thoughts? Did It Change The

10 Questions for Our Chief Scientist

NASA Chief Scientist…pretty cool title, right? The office represents all the scientific endeavors at NASA, ensuring they’re aligned with and fulfilling the administration’s science goals.  

After more than three years as Chief Scientist, Ellen Stofan is departing for new adventures. We caught up with her to ask 10 questions about her role and what she will miss most after she leaves the agency. Take a look…

1) What were some of your expectations coming in as NASA’s chief scientist?

When I started as Chief Scientist, all I knew is that I would be science advisor to the Administrator, Charlie Bolden, overseeing the agency’s science portfolio. What I did not realize at the time was the degree that I would be impressed by him. 

Charlie is an amazing leader who deeply cares about each and every person at this agency. He makes everyone feel valued. That is why NASA has just been voted by our employees for the fifth straight year as the Best Place to Work in the federal government!

2) What do you think it the next big thing for NASA science?

Looking across our science portfolio, I think the most exciting area, which actually connects everything we do, is the search for life beyond Earth. People have long wondered if we are alone, and we are now actually going to answer that question in the next few decades. We are exploring Mars, where it is very likely that life evolved at around the same time life evolved here on Earth. Conditions on Mars deteriorated after about a billion years, so life either went underground, or became extinct. It will likely take future Mars astronauts to find the best evidence of Mars life.

We also are planning to explore the ocean worlds of the outer solar system, like Europa, where we might find life in subsurface oceans. Beyond our solar system, the thousands of planets discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope have made me very optimistic that we are close to finding an Earth 2.0—though that will take us a little longer.

3) NASA science rewrites textbooks all the time. What is something you've seen here that has the potential to occur in the future that will change the textbooks for kids of tomorrow?

For kids 16 and under today, for every day of their life, we have been living and working in space on board the International Space Station. Now we are ready to take that next step in the coming decade, to move humans beyond low-Earth orbit where we have been for such a long time, out to the vicinity of the moon and then on to Mars. 

These kids are the “Mars generation,” and the exploration of Mars will change our outlook in profound ways, from looking back at Earth -- that will just look like another star -- to finding evidence of life beyond Earth. So it will not just change science textbooks, it will change how we look at ourselves when we become a multi-planetary species.

4) 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?

It really does take a team.  When I go out and talk to school kids, I tell them learning how to be a good member of a team is so important in life. You need to learn to be a leader and a follower, and above all a listener. Our teams at NASA are becoming more and more diverse, which is incredibly important. If everyone looks the same and comes from the same background, they are likely to approach problems the same way. And when you are trying to do tough things -- from addressing climate change to sending humans to Mars -- you need the best team, which means a diverse team.

5) We have a lot of opportunities for citizen science. What’s one opportunity you wish everyone knew about that they could get involved with at NASA?

Go to www.nasa.gov/solve where you can find all kinds of great opportunities to join us at NASA in searching for planets around other stars, exploring Mars, helping us gather data about this planet, and tackling technology challenges. We really are stronger together, and getting the public involved in what we do is helping us get more good science every day. Even more importantly, it lets people know that science is fun!

6) What changes did you make at the agency while you were there?

As Chief Scientist, I got to work on a lot of fun challenges, from our strategy on how to get humans to Mars, to learning about and promoting the research we do every day on the International Space Station. But one of the things that I am most proud of is that, working with my team, NASA now collects voluntary demographic data on all of our grant proposals. Implicit or unconscious bias is all around us; we may act on deep-seated biases that we don’t even know we have. The first step in dealing with bias is seeing if you have a problem, and that is what the data collection will tell us.

7) You worked a lot with kids as the agency’s Chief Scientist. How important do you feel STEM education is for NASA?

We need the next generation of scientists, doctors, computer programmers, technologists and engineers, and NASA provides the inspiration and hands-on activities that help get kids interested in science. Because of climate change, we are facing rising sea levels, changing patterns of agriculture, and changing weather. We need good engineers and scientists to help us mitigate the effects of climate change and reduce carbon emissions.

On top of that, we live in a society that is dependent on technology; I don’t think most of us can go very long without checking our smartphones. But as technology becomes more complex, we need everyone in society to have at least a basic understanding of it, and that’s where the importance of STEM education comes in. We are ALL consumers of science and technology. We all need to be informed consumers.

8) What solar system destination are you still most excited/eager for NASA to still go explore?

As a planetary geologist, I am most excited by one of the ocean worlds of the outer solar system. Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, is an amazing little world where it rains, and the liquid forms rivers, lakes and seas. But this liquid is actually liquid methane and ethane --basically gasoline, rather than water -- due to the extremely cold temperatures out by Saturn. 

Titan is an excellent place to explore to help us better understand how oceans and atmospheres interact, and maybe even understand more about the limits of life. We think water is critical to the evolution of life, but Titan may tell us that having a liquid is the most important factor.

9) What will you miss most?

It’s the people of NASA whom I will miss the most. Everyone I work with is so committed to the mission of this agency—pushing back the frontiers of science and technology to accomplish great things for the nation. NASA represents the best of this country. We demonstrate that with hard work and determination, we can explore the universe, our galaxy, our solar system and our home planet. 

Our partnerships with other space agencies from around the world and with the private sector here have shown me that great teams accomplish great things. I like to say that NASA is the keeper of the future—we don’t just wait for the future to happen. We work to create it every day.

10) In your opinion, after seeing everything you've seen here, why should people care about the science at NASA?

At NASA, we gather the data to help answer the most fundamental and profound questions: Where did we come from? How does our planet and our universe work? What is the fate of our planet? It is only by exploring, by making measurements, by answering scientific questions that we can move forward as a society. And in doing so, we push technology and engineering in ways that benefit us every day right here on Earth. 

NASA makes measurements that show how the sea level is rising, how Arctic ice is melting, and how weather patterns are changing. We also gather data to help farmers grow more crops using less water, help understand our water resources, and do the research to improve forecasting. These data keep us secure and improve the quality of life on Earth every day.

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INCOMING! Roving scientist to arrive on Mars. 

Save the date! One year from today, Feb. 18, 2021, our next rover is set to land on Mars. Get to know #Mars2020 now! Click here. 

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

Voyager: The Golden Record

It’s the 1970s, and we’re about to send two spacecraft (Voyager 1 & 2) into space. These two spacecraft will eventually leave our solar system and become the most distant man-made objects…ever. How can we leave our mark on them in the case that other spacefarers find them in the distant future?

The Golden Record.

We placed an ambitious message aboard Voyager 1 and 2, a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

The Golden Record Cover

The outward facing cover of the golden record carries instructions in case it is ever found. Detailing to its discoverers how to decipher its meaning.

In the upper left-hand corner is an easily recognized drawing of the phonograph record and the stylus carried with it. The stylus is in the correct position to play the record from the beginning. Written around it in binary arithmetic is the correct time of one rotation of the record. The drawing indicates that the record should be played from the outside in.

The information in the upper right-hand portion of the cover is designed to show how the pictures contained on the record are to be constructed from the recorded signals. The top drawing shows the typical signal that occurs at the start of the picture. The picture is made from this signal, which traces the picture as a series of vertical lines, similar to ordinary television. Immediately below shows how these lines are to be drawn vertically, with staggered “interlace” to give the correct picture rendition. Below that is a drawing of an entire picture raster, showing that there are 52 vertical lines in a complete picture.

Immediately below this is a replica of the first picture on the record to permit the recipients to verify that they are decoding the signals correctly. A circle was used in this picture to ensure that the recipients use the correct ratio of horizontal to vertical height in picture reconstruction.

The drawing in the lower left-hand corner of the cover is the pulsar map previously sent as part of the plaques on Pioneers 10 and 11. It shows the location of the solar system with respect to 14 pulsars, whose precise periods are given.

The drawing containing two circles in the lower right-hand corner is a drawing of the hydrogen atom in its two lowest states, with a connecting line and digit 1 to indicate that the time interval associated with the transition from one state to the other is to be used as the fundamental time scale, both for the time given on the cover and in the decoded pictures.

The Contents

The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University and his associates. 

They assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales and other animals. To this, they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.

Listen to some of the sounds of the Golden Record on our Soundcloud page:

Golden Record: Greetings to the Universe

Golden Record: Sounds of Earth

Songs from Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are included on the golden record. For a complete list of songs, visit: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/music/

The 115 images included on the record, encoded in analog form, range from mathematical definitions to humans from around the globe. See the images here: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/images/

Making the Golden Record

Many people were instrumental in the design, development and manufacturing of the golden record. 

Blank records were provided by the Pyral S.A. of Creteil, France. CBS Records contracted the JVC Cutting Center in Boulder, CO to cut the lacquer masters which were then sent to the James G. Lee Record Processing center in Gardena, CA to cut and gold plate eight Voyager records.

The record is constructed of gold-plated copper and is 12 inches in diameter. The record’s cover is aluminum and electroplated upon it is an ultra-pure sample of the isotope uranium-238. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.468 billion years.

Learn more about the golden record HERE.

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Ever want to ask a real life astronaut a question? Here’s your chance! 

We are kicking off Hispanic Heritage Month a little early this year, and astronaut Serena M. Auñón-Chancellor will be taking your questions in an Answer Time session on Thursday, September 12 from 12pm - 1pm ET here on NASA’s Tumblr! Find out what it’s like to be a NASA astronaut and learn more about her Cuban-American heritage. Make sure to ask your question now by visiting http://nasa.tumblr.com/ask!

Dr. Serena M. Auñón-Chancellor began working with NASA as a Flight Surgeon in 2006 and was later selected as a NASA astronaut in 2009. Her first flight was from Jun 6- Dec. 20, 2018 where she served as Flight Engineer on the International Space Station as a member of Expeditions 56 and 57. During these missions, the crew contributed to hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science – including investigations into a new cancer treatment!

She has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from The George Washington University, Washington, D.C and a Doctorate of Medicine from The University of Texas - Health Science Center at Houston. 

Dr. Auñón-Chancellor Fun Facts:

She spent 2 months in Antarctica from 2010 to 2011 searching for meteorites as part of the ANSMET expedition.

She served as an Aquanaut on the NEEMO 20 mission in the Aquarius underwater laboratory, which is used to prepare for living and working in space. 

She logged 197 days in space during Expeditions 56 and 57.

Follow Serena on Twitter at @AstroSerena and follow NASA on Tumblr for your regular dose of space. 

Bringing The Space Station Perspective to Earth in VR!

Only a few humans ever get to experience the awe-inspiring vantage point provided by the space station, but a new virtual reality (VR) experience, Space Explorers: The ISS Experience (ISS Experience), attempts to bring this perspective back to Earth for the rest of us.

Partnering with the ISS National Lab and Time, a team from Felix and Paul Studios launched a high quality 360 degree camera to space to help tell the story of science and life aboard the orbiting laboratory.

The project, currently in the process of being filmed by the station astronauts themselves, serves as an outreach project as well a technology demonstration, testing the limits of filming in the harsh environment of space.

The camera flew to the station on 16th SpaceX commercial resupply services mission in December 2018 along with a number of other scientific experiments.

Since then, the team has recorded many moments, including the SPHERES robots flying around the station (see below) , the growing and harvesting of vegetables, jam session among the astronauts, crew meals and the arrival of new astronauts.

So far, the footage coming back seems to be achieving the goal of immersing audiences in science and life aboard the space station. NASA astronaut Sunita Williams got the chance to watch some of the initial footage and says it was like I was back on the station.

While most of the filming has been completed, the biggest technical challenge is yet to come: capturing a spacewalk in virtual reality. The team expects to launch a new camera for spacewalk filming and begin production of spacewalk filming in 2020.

Learn more about ISS Experience here.

For daily updates, follow @ISS_Research on Twitter, Space Station Research and Technology News or our Facebook. Follow the ISS National Lab for information on its sponsored investigations. For opportunities to see the space station pass over your town, check out Spot the Station.

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

Moving at the Speed of Arctic Ice

Time-lapses taken from space can help track how Earth’s polar regions are changing, watching as glaciers retreat and accelerate, and ice sheets melt over decades.

Using our long data record and a new computer program, we can watch Alaskan glaciers shift and flow every year since 1972. Columbia Glacier, which was relatively stable in the 1970s, has since retreated rapidly as the climate continues to warm.

The Malaspina Glacier has pulsed and spread and pulsed again. The flashes and imperfect frames in these time-lapses result from the need for cloud-free images from each year, and the technology limitations of the early generation satellites.

In Greenland, glaciers are also reacting to the warming climate. Glaciers are essentially frozen rivers, flowing across land. As they get warmer, they flow faster and lose more ice to the ocean. On average, glaciers in Greenland have retreated about 3 miles between 1985 and 2018. The amount of ice loss was fairly consistent for the first 15 years of the record, but started increasing around 2000.

Warmer temperatures also affect Greenland farther inland, where the surface of ice sheets and glaciers melts, forming lakes that can be up to 3 miles across. Over the last 20 years, the number of meltwater lakes forming in Greenland increased 27% and appeared at higher elevations, where temperatures were previously too cold for melt.

Whether they're studying how ice flows into the water, or how water pools atop ice, scientists are investigating some of the many aspects of how climate affects Earth's polar regions. 

For more information, visit climate.nasa.gov.

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Why does it take so long for the rover to reach Mars?

Do you listen to music in space? If so, what are you jamming to?

The total solar eclipse is coming! Here’s your chance to ask an eclipse scientist your questions! Have questions about the upcoming total solar eclipse on August 21? Join our Tumblr Answer Time session on Thursday, August 17 from 3:00 – 4:00 p.m. EDT/12:00 - 1:00 p.m. PDT. here on NASA’s Tumblr, where space physics researcher Alexa Halford will answer them. Make sure to ask your questions now by visiting: https://nasa.tumblr.com/ask!

See all the #AnswerTime questions here: https://nasa.tumblr.com/tagged/answertime

Alexa Halford is a space physics researcher at our Goddard Space Flight Center and Dartmouth College. She started researching waves in Earth's magnetosphere as an undergraduate at Augsburg College with Mark Engebretson using ground based magnetometers in the Arctic and Antarctic. She moved away from waves to focus on geomagnetic storms and substorms during her masters at the University of Colorado Boulder with Dan Baker but returned once more to waves with her PhD at University of Newcastle NSW Australia. Her PhD thesis was on Electromagnetic Ion Cyclotron (EMIC) waves during the CRRES mission and their relationship to the plasmasphere and radiation belts.

She is member of the scientific team for a NASA-funded scientific balloon experiment project called BARREL (Balloon Array for RBSP Relativistic Electron Losses) where she looks at the population of particles lost due to these interactions. She is now currently a contractor at NASA Goddard continuing work the BARREL and NASA Van Allen Probes satellite missions.

To get more information about the eclipse, visit: https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/

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

Solar System: 10 Things to Know This Week

January 8: Images for Your Computer or Phone Wallpaper

Need some fresh perspective? Here are 10 vision-stretching images for your computer desktop or phone wallpaper. These are all real pictures, sent recently by our planetary missions throughout the solar system. You'll find more of our images at solarsystem.nasa.gov/galleries, images.nasa.gov and www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages.

Applying Wallpaper: 1. Click on the screen resolution you would like to use. 2. Right-click on the image (control-click on a Mac) and select the option 'Set the Background' or 'Set as Wallpaper' (or similar).

1. The Fault in Our Mars

This image from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of northern Meridiani Planum shows faults that have disrupted layered deposits. Some of the faults produced a clean break along the layers, displacing and offsetting individual beds.

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2. Jupiter Blues

Our Juno spacecraft captured this image when the spacecraft was only 11,747 miles (18,906 kilometers) from the tops of Jupiter's clouds -- that's roughly as far as the distance between New York City and Perth, Australia. The color-enhanced image, which captures a cloud system in Jupiter's northern hemisphere, was taken on Oct. 24, 2017, when Juno was at a latitude of 57.57 degrees (nearly three-fifths of the way from Jupiter's equator to its north pole) and performing its ninth close flyby of the gas giant planet.

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3. A Farewell to Saturn

After more than 13 years at Saturn, and with its fate sealed, our Cassini spacecraft bid farewell to the Saturnian system by firing the shutters of its wide-angle camera and capturing this last, full mosaic of Saturn and its rings two days before the spacecraft's dramatic plunge into the planet's atmosphere on Sept. 15, 2017.

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4. All Aglow

Saturn's moon Enceladus drifts before the rings, which glow brightly in the sunlight. Beneath its icy exterior shell, Enceladus hides a global ocean of liquid water. Just visible at the moon's south pole (at bottom here) is the plume of water ice particles and other material that constantly spews from that ocean via fractures in the ice. The bright speck to the right of Enceladus is a distant star. This image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 6, 2011.

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5. Rare Encircling Filament

Our Solar Dynamics Observatory came across an oddity this week that the spacecraft has rarely observed before: a dark filament encircling an active region (Oct. 29-31, 2017). Solar filaments are clouds of charged particles that float above the Sun, tethered to it by magnetic forces. They are usually elongated and uneven strands. Only a handful of times before have we seen one shaped like a circle. (The black area to the left of the brighter active region is a coronal hole, a magnetically open region of the Sun).

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6. Jupiter's Stunning Southern Hemisphere

See Jupiter's southern hemisphere in beautiful detail in this image taken by our Juno spacecraft. The color-enhanced view captures one of the white ovals in the "String of Pearls," one of eight massive rotating storms at 40 degrees south latitude on the gas giant planet. The image was taken on Oct. 24, 2017, as Juno performed its ninth close flyby of Jupiter. At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was 20,577 miles (33,115 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of the planet.

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7. Saturn's Rings: View from Beneath

Our Cassini spacecraft obtained this panoramic view of Saturn's rings on Sept. 9, 2017, just minutes after it passed through the ring plane. The view looks upward at the southern face of the rings from a vantage point above Saturn's southern hemisphere.

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8. From Hot to Hottest

This sequence of images from our Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the Sun from its surface to its upper atmosphere all taken at about the same time (Oct. 27, 2017). The first shows the surface of the sun in filtered white light; the other seven images were taken in different wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light. Note that each wavelength reveals somewhat different features. They are shown in order of temperature, from the first one at about 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit (6,000 degrees Celsius) on the surface, out to about 10 million degrees in the upper atmosphere. Yes, the sun's outer atmosphere is much, much hotter than the surface. Scientists are getting closer to solving the processes that generate this phenomenon.

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9. High Resolution View of Ceres

This orthographic projection shows dwarf planet Ceres as seen by our Dawn spacecraft. The projection is centered on Occator Crater, home to the brightest area on Ceres. Occator is centered at 20 degrees north latitude, 239 degrees east longitude.

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10. In the Chasm

This image from our Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a small portion of the floor of Coprates Chasma, a large trough within the Valles Marineris system of canyons. Although the exact sequence of events that formed Coprates Chasma is unknown, the ripples, mesas, and craters visible throughout the terrain point to a complex history involving multiple mechanisms of erosion and deposition. The main trough of Coprates Chasma ranges from 37 miles (60 kilometers) to 62 miles (100 kilometers) in width.

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Explore and learn more about our solar system at: solarsystem.nasa.gov/. 

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