Caitlin Milera

A Delta flight operated exclusively by women, and carrying 120 young females as passengers, took off this week to inspire more women to become aviators and advocate for equality in a “male-dominated industry.”

The Delta “WING” flight — Women Inspiring our Next Generation — took girls between the ages of 12 to 18 from Salt Lake City to NASA headquarters in Houston to draw attention to the need to close the gender gap in aviation and promote STEM careers, according to a press release from the airline on Sunday.

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This year marks 50 years since NASA’s Apollo 11 landed on the moon. In 1969, the world watched in amazement as astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong took the first lunar steps while Michael Collins orbited the moon. 

July 20 was the official anniversary, and to celebrate this unprecedented historical event, local students took to their STEM inventions to recreate the Apollo 11 mission in the form of a lunar module replica — a drone to carry it and a LEGO robot called Mindstorms EV3. 

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1. LT. CLANCY HATLEBERG

When the first men to walk on the moon splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969 – 50 years ago this month – the first human being they encountered was Lt. Clancy Hatleberg, a 25-year-old Navy SEAL from Chippewa Falls. As the capsule bobbed on the choppy, shark-infested waters, Hatleberg opened the hatch, handed biological isolation suits to the astronauts, sprayed them with disinfectant to kill any “moon germs,” and helped get them hoisted into a waiting helicopter. “Being given a chance to participate in the first mission where men would actually walk on another planet … it was like a dream come true,” he said in an interview published in 2005. Hatleberg – whose wife, Sue, grew up in Eau Claire – went on to a two-decade career in the Navy.

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We won’t have to wait quite as long as we’d thought for the first all-female spacewalk, if all goes according to plan.

NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir had been scheduled to venture outside the International Space Station (ISS) together next Monday (Oct. 21), as part of a series of excursions to install new batteries. But they’ve been retasked and fast-tracked, thanks to the failure of one of the orbiting lab’s power controllers over the weekend, NASA officials announced today (Oct. 15).

“@Space_Station update: our first all-female spacewalk with @Astro_Christina and @Astro_Jessica will be Thursday or Friday to replace a faulty battery charge-discharge unit,” NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said via Twitter. More details will be relayed during a press conference later today, he added.

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Autonomous robots will assist future astronauts during long-duration missions to other worlds by performing tedious, repetitive and even strenuous tasks. These robotic helpers will let crews focus on the more meticulous areas of exploring. To help achieve this, NASA’s Centennial Challenges program, along with Space Center Houston of Texas, opened the second phase of the NASA Space Robotics Challenge. This virtual challenge aims to advance autonomous robotic operations for missions on the surface of distant planets or moons.

“We believe the public has ideas that can help us advance the state-of-the-art in autonomous robotic operations on planetary surfaces,” said Jim Reuter, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. “The first phase of this competition demonstrated teams could create sophisticated autonomous software, and this second phase will push teams to pair those capabilities with tasks that will be critical to exploring the Moon and Mars.”

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The National Space Grant Foundation (NSGF) (www.SpaceGrant.org) is pleased to announce the Grand Opening of  our Space Grant Store at www.SpaceGrantStore.com, which has been carefully created to share and sell fun and educational STEM and Space Related merchandise.  Visitors supporting  www.SpaceGrantStore.com help fund our programming needs to reach more students to become involved in STEM and space related education and careers.  NSGF intends for the SpaceGrantStore.com to be the Ultimate STEM and Space related merchandise Super Store for STEM and space enthusiasts around the world in the months and years ahead.

More products are arriving weekly at www.SpaceGrantStore.com so check back often, especially during holiday gift giving time and birthdays! Your generous donation at www.SpaceGrantStore.com helps NSGF fund our ability and programming to reach more students, with our goal to impact a million more STEM and Space Explorers by 2025, so please consider a donation to support our cause today!

Standing only a foot tall, the cubed shaped, shiny satellite could be the future to understanding temperature and climate on earth.

All of it is made possible by a group of inspiring Arizona State University students.

“To finally see everyone’s work over three years just represented as one system,” said student researcher Sarah Rodgers. “It’s more than I can describe.”

The device is called the “Phoenix,” a perfect name given the machine’s purpose.

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Engineers took NASA’s Mars 2020 for a spin on Aug. 29, 2019. The 2,300-pound (1,040-kilogram) Martian vehicle was rotated clockwise and counterclockwise at about 1 revolution per minute on what is called a spin table in the clean room of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. (The rotation was speeded up in the video above.) The engineers were looking for the rover’s center of gravity, or the point at which weight is evenly dispersed on all sides.

Establishing the rover’s center of gravity is a key part of the assembly process and helps ensure that the spacecraft travels smoothly from launch to entry, descent and landing on Mars as calculated. Engineers can add weights in order to help balance out the vehicle. In the end, they affixed nine tungsten weights totaling 44 pounds (20 kilograms) to the rover chassis at predetermined attachment points to get the center of gravity just right.

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Amateur astronomers in the Northern Hemisphere may be able to currently see Saturn, but NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken a series of images of the ringed planet that give new details about its rings, as well as its ever-changing weather.

In a blog post, NASA said the images snapped by the telescope “are more than just beauty shots,” adding that they shed new light on a planet that has “a turbulent, dynamic atmosphere.”

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