Caitlin Milera

NASA astronaut Christina Koch has just set a new record for the longest spaceflight by a woman! On December 28, Koch officially exceeded fellow NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson’s 2017 record of 289 days and 5 hours. Koch’s original flight was supposed to be only 6 months long, but NASA extended her stay on the International Space Station (ISS) – in part to collect more data about how human bodies function after long periods in space. “It is a wonderful thing for science,” Koch said in an interview this week from the ISS. “We see another aspect of how the human body is affected by microgravity for the long term. That is really important for our future spaceflight plans, going forward to the moon and Mars…. Having the opportunity to be up here for so long is truly an honor.”

Read more about Astronaut Christina Koch and her mission here.

📸: @NASA

With a goal of better preparing a growing commercial space workforce, the LSU National Center for Biomedical Research and Training/Academy of Counter Terrorist Education, or NCBRT/ACE, is affiliating with the Louisiana Space Grant Consortium, or LaSpace.

The partnership aims to leverage the strengths of both LSU organizations as they collaborate and explore new training frontiers for Louisiana students and the workforce for the university’s role in aerospace research, education, technology and economic development in the aerospace field.

Read more about this partnership

With plans to establish a permanent base on the moon’s surface in the next decade or so, NASA is one step closer to sending humans to Mars. But a mission to the red planet will likely take years to complete, begging the question: What will astronauts eat during their interplanetary voyage?

The answer: Vegetables, according to Joseph Taylor, a senior at NC State’s College of Natural Resources and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Taylor, who is double majoring in environmental science and plant biology, recently spent the summer interning at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. As one of nine students selected to assist the agency’s food production team, Taylor’s main task was to identify candidate crops for missions to the moon and Mars.

Read more about Joseph Taylor’s biology work for NASA.

Read more about Cardman’s accomplishments and journey at NASA.

Freshman chemical engineering major Jacob Hewes describes himself as a self-starter.

“I’m always challenging myself to work harder and be the best at what I do,” he says. “When all my friends were looking for jobs in retail or customer service, I wanted to do something that I knew would be valuable to my development as a chemical engineer.”

During the summer entering his senior year of high school, Hewes was accepted into the UD-K12 Engineering Internship Program, which paired students with 10-week research projects.

Read more about Jacob Hewes’ journey here.

Physicist Keith Goetz developing instruments for new lunar investigations

MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL (07/17/2019) — The University of Minnesota will contribute instruments to a series of 12 new NASA investigations on the moon in preparation for landing astronauts there in 2024. The payloads will be delivered aboard three landers as part of NASA’s Artemis lunar program. Seven will be devoted to planetary science and heliophysics, five to demonstrating new technologies. Launches are tentatively set to begin in 2021.

The U of M project, led by physicist Keith Goetz, will be part of the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment (LuSEE), which will carry out extensive measurements of electromagnetic phenomena on the lunar surface. The principal investigator for LuSEE is U of M College of Science and Engineering alumnus Stuart Bale (M.S. Physics ’92, Ph.D. ’94), now a professor at the University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory.

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A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft is on its way to the International Space Station after launching at 12:29 p.m. EST today (Dec. 5). Dragon will deliver more than 5,700 pounds of NASA cargo and science investigations, including studies of malting barley in microgravity, the spread of fire, and bone and muscle loss.

The spacecraft launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and is scheduled to arrive at the orbital outpost on Sunday, Dec. 8. Coverage of the spacecraft’s approach and arrival at the space station will begin at 4:30 a.m. EST on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

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📸: NASA TV

Nearly 100 scientists and staff from around the world, including CIRES scientist Ted Scambos, departed last month to conduct fieldwork in one of the most remote and inhospitable areas on Earth: Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica. Their aim? To investigate how and when climate change might affect the glacier, including a possible runaway collapse, which would raise global sea levels by up to two feet over the next century and put coastal cities and communities around the world at risk.

“We have been studying this area for many years, but mostly through satellites because it is so difficult to get to,” said Scambos, lead American scientific coordinator for the mission. “This is the biggest effort by far where we’ve actually placed scientists on the ground to study Thwaites Glacier.”

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