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Earth’s cosmic neighborhood encompasses eight planets, more than 150 moons, and countless dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets. With such fascinating places to explore, who wouldn’t be curious about what’s around the next corner? NASA’s mission is to explore what’s beyond our planet. Michelle Thaller, a scientist and communicator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, says this includes finding out whether we have any “neighbors.” If so, finding them will not be easy. “One of the basic, major scientific priorities of NASA is the search for life elsewhere,” she says. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe. Satisfying natural curiosity is one motivation for this search, but there are practical reasons too, even if we don’t find life. “The better we understand our larger environment in the solar system, the better we will understand our planet, our own biology,” says Thaller. “The Earth is constantly ...

Many of the NASA scientists and engineers focused on sending humans to Mars in the 2030s, the Red Planet is just a step on a bigger journey to places like Jupiter, Neptune, and even interstellar space. Sending humans much farther than Mars will require scientific breakthroughs we cannot anticipate, but it is still worth researching right now, argues Ron Litchford, who oversees NASA’s propulsion portfolio as a technologist in the Space Technology Mission Directorate. “It’s not just dreaming,” he says. “Having a vision gives you some guidance and helps inform how to invest today. 🤗 While the technical challenges of a human Mars mission are real, there is nevertheless a clarity to what it will require. For example, we do not know yet what type of propulsion we will actually use, but that is partly because we can probably do it with a number of technologies the space agency is already working on. “Between chemical, nuclear thermal, solar electric, and maybe even nuclear electr...

🌍 Earth is a biological life raft thatsustains human life in the inhospitable environment of the cosmos. This planetary closed-loop system provides oxygen, water and essential nutrients while recycling waste, purifying contaminants and renewing resources. It does all of this using only the things that already exist in the biosphere. And NASA is learning just how this life raft functions in order to create a portable replica of the biological system we call home. A closed-loop system only uses the resources on hand. In other words, no resupply shipments make it necessary to reuse and recycle everything. On Earth, biology takes care of these processes naturally and efficiently, according to Jitendra Joshi, an engineer based at NASA Headquarters. Joshi studies the systems that sustain human life in space, such as microbiological systems for waste treatment for long duration space missions.   A closed-loop system only uses the resources on hand.   “The water we drank this morning...

In the future, machines everywhere will monitor their own health and request help when something’s wrong, according to the engineers at CEMSol LLC, a young technical services company that is developing such a system with NASA technology. “There’s going to be an integrated system-health engine as part of every system out there, and it will be able to interface with other systems and components,” says David Cirulli, engineering vice president of the Phoenix-based company he cofounded. “That’s what’s missing today.” CEMSol’s software is rooted in a system developed in 2003 by a computer engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center to monitor an experimental hybrid rocket engine test bed that used both gas and solid fuel. During a test launch of the Orion Crew Vehicle in December 2014, the Inductive Monitoring System (IMS) that CEMSol later licensed was used to monitor electrical systems on the space capsule. PreviousNext Traditionally, this task would have been accomplished by buil...

Before NASA can put astronauts on Mars, the space agency will have to get them there and have a plan for getting them back. No current in-space transportation system can do this, but in the race to develop one that can, nuclear thermal propulsion appears to have some clear advantages. The first human mission to Mars will probably be fueled either with a more advanced version of the traditional chemical propulsion we have been using for decades—perhaps coupled with a solar electric system—or else with nuclear thermal propulsion. The latter, which works by passing hydrogen gas through the engine’s nuclear reactor to create hot exhaust, was tested and demonstrated in the 1960s and 1970s but never actually flown.   Nuclear thermal heavily leverages existing chemical propulsion systems.   The technology owes a lot to traditional chemical propulsion. “While it hasn’t been done yet, nuclear thermal heavily leverages existing chemical propulsion systems that you see, for e...

🌚Space exploration used to be an extremely exclusive activity and understandably so. It costs a lot of money to put traditional spacecraft on rockets, explains Robbie Schingler, who worked as part of the Office of the Chief Technologist at NASA before cofounding an Earth-imaging company called Planet. “And if you’re going to put something like that on a rocket, you want to make sure that it works. It needs to be designed and built perfectly. There is no room for risk because there is only one shot. And then, before you know it, the satellite has a lot of redundancy,” he says. “You only use components that have flown in space before, so you know they’ll actually work, and then you end up with a satellite that’s actually quite large and therefore quite expensive—and complex. The situation has evolved dramatically over the last 15 years, as small spacecraft and the science experiments they carry have become smaller, cheaper, and easier to get into space. First, academia stand...

NASA spends a lot of time creating technology to accelerate spacecraft, but it also thinks about ways to accelerate technology itself — to bring futuristic concepts into reality. With the Space Technology Research Grants (STRG) program, NASA is engaging academia in the pursuit of exciting, early-stage space technology research through the next generation of space scientists and engineers. The program’s investments take the form of four types of grants that are announced in annual or biennial solicitations: NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship grants, Early Career Faculty grants, Early Stage Innovations, and the Space Technology Research Institutes. Recipients are selected on the merits and relevance of their projects. “The objective of the program is to engage the entire spectrum of academic researchers, from graduate students and early-career faculty members to fully tenured faculty,” says STRG program executive Claudia Meyer. “As an organization, we want to tap into ...

It may be that crewmembers aboard the International Space Station (ISS) will one day—while inhaling the luxurious, comforting scent of freshly baked bread—mark April 22, 2012, as a turning point in the effort to make life in space more like life at home. That Sunday, in Oxford, England, NASA project manager Nick Skytland bumped into a young man named Sam Wilkinson. “Do I have time to tackle another challenge?” Wilkinson asked. Skytland checked the time. It was the second and final day of the International Space Apps Challenge—a unique, globe-spanning collaboration bringing together teams of programmers, engineers, students and just about anyone else interested in joining with NASA for 48 hours to tackle some of the important problems in space exploration. At that moment, linked via the Internet and a shared belief in the power of small contributions to create big outcomes, citizen innovators in 25 locations scattered across all seven continents were toiling feverishly to de...