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NASA’s Giant Leaps: Past and Future – Celebrating Apollo 50th as we Go Forward to the Moon
On July 19, NASA will broadcast live from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the historic, newly-restored Apollo mission control room at Johnson Space Center in Houston and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. NASA will also be at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, with a special guest host. They will look in live on Neil Armstrong’s hometown of Wapakoneta, Ohio, see the Apollo 11 command module on display in Seattle, and see slices of Americana at other anniversary celebrations around the country. They will tell the story of how we got there, and how we’ll get there again, hearing directly from Apollo astronauts alongside current and future astronauts, scientists, engineers, and others sharing some untold stories, quirky facts, and personal reflections about journeying to the lunar surface. Watch it on the NASA Live page.

My name is Daleen M. Torres and I study Mechanical Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez Campus. NASA has always been one of those places where I never thought I would work. I originally wanted to work in the biomedical industry, but when I visited the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, a tiny spark lit up in me. My best friend who was with me at the time could tell that I was all starry-eyed and amazed when I saw the spacecraft and airplanes. This was where my initial interest for aerospace came.

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Dr. R. Aileen Yingst of the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona, and former Wisconsin Space Grant Director, has been selected by NASA to lead one of 12 new science and technology payloads that will help us study the Moon and explore more of its surface as part of the agency’s Artemis lunar program. These investigations and demonstrations will help the agency send astronauts to the Moon by 2024 as a way to prepare to send humans to Mars for the first time.

Dr. R. Aileen Yingst is the principal investigator of Hemidall, a flexible camera system for conducting lunar science on commercial vehicles. This innovation includes a single digital video recorder and four cameras: a wide-angle descent imager, a narrow-angle regolith imager, and two wide-angle panoramic imagers. This camera system is intended to model the properties of the Moon’s regolith – the soil and other material that makes up the top later of the lunar surface – and characterize and map geologic features, as well characterize potential landing or trafficability hazards, among other goals.

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Calling Citizen Scientists! Participate in the GLOBE Observer Citizen Science Challenge: GO on the Lewis and Clark Trail through September 2, 2019.

This year NASA and the National Park Service encourage the public to follow in these explorers’ footsteps through a new citizen science challenge from June 1 to Sept. 2. Use your smart phone and the NASA GLOBE Observer (GO) app to map land cover along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trailand elsewhere to assist scientists studying environmental changes.

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Colorado Space Grant Consortium students will work with the PUNCH team to design, build, and integrate an x-ray spectrometer that will compliment the overall science mission.  The PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission, is a landmark Small Explorers Program mission that will image beyond the Sun’s outer corona.

PUNCH will consist of a constellation of four suitcase-sized microsatellites or “microsats” that will launch as early as 2022. The microsats will orbit the Earth in formation to study how the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona, connects with the interplanetary medium. PUNCH will provide the first global images of how the solar corona infuses the solar wind with mass and energy.

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To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing, the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is placing 15 replica statues of Neil Armstrong’s iconic spacesuit in Major League Baseball stadiums across the U.S. Visit the site and follow @airandspace on Twitter for updates on where and when you can spot a statue. Fans will be able to unlock exclusive digital content when interacting with the suit. Follow along and share your pictures using #SnapTheSuit.

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Justin McElderry is a second-year student studying at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Justin is a second-time recipient of WSGC’s NASA Internship and Undergraduate Scholarship. He has been selected for this week’s#WSGCStudentSpotlight!

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NASA is highlighting the legacy of African American women who played a major role in the space race but are only recently getting widespread recognition.

This week, the space agency renamed the street in front of its headquarters Hidden Figures Way.

Hidden Figures is the name of a book and movie that celebrate the contributions of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson. Its author, Margot Lee Shetterly, was at the unveiling ceremony, along with members of the women’s families.

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Social media users are invited to register to attend the launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon spacecraft from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) in Florida. This launch, currently targeted for July, will be the next commercial cargo resupply services mission to the International Space Station.

If your passion is to communicate and engage the world via social media, then this is the event for you! Seize the opportunity to be on the front line to blog, tweet or Instagram everything about SpaceX’s 18^th resupply mission. In addition to supplies and equipment, the Dragon spacecraft will deliver several science investigations to the station.

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