The NASA First Nations Launch (FNL) competition, an Artemis Student Challenge, offers students from Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs), Native American Serving Nontribal Institutions (NASNTIs), and schools with American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) chapters the opportunity to demonstrate engineering and design skills through high-powered rocketry.
Read the full article on nasa.gov here.
Author Credit: Danielle Sempsrott
Image Credit: nasa.gov
Throwback Thursday to a Spring 2022 Student Research Trip!
JACKSON, Wyo. — Central Wyoming College is sending indigenous students to Mount Everest base camp to conduct climate research.
Students, Jada Antelope, Aidan Darissa Hereford, Red Thunder Spoonhunter,
Antoine Day, and one non-Indigenous student Ryan Town, along with professor Jacki Klancher set off on their trip today, April 26.
Read the full Buckrail article online here.
Author Credit: Lindsay Vallen
Image Credit: Photos used in design from Central Wyoming College
“NASA released the first batch of images from the James Webb telescope this week, wowing the world with never-before-seen views of ancient and distant galaxies.
The approximately $10 billion telescope was decades in the making, a partnership with the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency that involved some 20,000 collaborators across 29 countries and 14 U.S. states. It finally launched in December 2021 after a long string of setbacks and delays that led some astronomers to fear it might never get off the ground.”
Read the full article on NPR News here.
Author Credit: Rachel Treisman
Image Credit: NASA via Getty Images
This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.
Called the Cosmic Cliffs, Webb’s seemingly three-dimensional picture looks like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening. In reality, it is the edge of the giant, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, and the tallest “peaks” in this image are about 7 light-years high. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble, above the area shown in this image.
Read the full NASA article online here.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
Editor: Rob Garner
The Office of Human Resources & Payroll Services is pleased to recognize Michaela L. Neal, a STEM Ambassador for the North Dakota Space Grant Consortium (NDSGC), as the 2022 Student Employee of the Year.
This recognition highlights the outstanding students employed part-time at UND. Michaela was selected as this year’s honoree, out of a total of eighteen nominations, by the Student Employee of the Year Committee. Michaela was recognized at the university level and was also chosen as the North Dakota Student Employee of the year by the Midwest Association of Student Employment Administrators (MASEA). MASEA selected Michaela as one of the regional runners-up, and her nomination was reviewed and recognized on the national level.
Image Credit: M. Neal
The John Mather Nobel Scholarship Program was established in 2008 by the John and Jane Mather Foundation for Science and the Arts. The program is open to current NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center based undergraduate and graduate student interns. Each year the program awards travel allowances towards the cost of presenting research papers at professional conferences. Applicants must have demonstrated high academic achievement, have a strong interest in space and Goddard Space Flight Center, be a rising undergraduate junior, senior or graduate student, and be currently holding a Goddard-based research internship.
Selected students will be recognized as John Mather Nobel Scholars and receive a $3,000 travel allowance towards the cost of presenting research papers at professional conferences. Recipients will meet with Dr John C Mather, Senior Astrophysicist and Goddard Fellow and Nobel Prize recipient, and other distinguished individuals.
“Joann Blumenfeld wants to help her high-school students learn the basics of science and math, but she also wants to set them up for long-term success. “I can teach them all the science I want,” says Blumenfeld, a special-education teacher in Raleigh, N.C. “But if I don’t set them up with workforce readiness skills, I’m not really helping them totally.”
There are more than 7 million students with disabilities enrolled in K-12 public schools across the country. But just 19% of adults with disabilities in the U.S. are employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. About 80% of people with disabilities aren’t in the labor force, compared to about 30% of people without disabilities — a statistic that startled Blumenfeld when she first learned it.”
Learn more about the NC Space Education Ambassadors Program here.
Author credit: Katie Reilly
Image Credit: Courtesy Photo
A project to develop an innovative solar sail has advanced to the final leg of a NASA research program. Phase three of the Innovative Advanced Concepts program (NIAC) will allow researchers to continue exploring and developing a diffractive solar sail for two years with a funding award of $2 million, reports George Dvorsky for Gizmodo. This award could push the solar sail concept, a long-simmering field of research for space exploration only used a handful of times, towards far wider use.
Read the full article on SmithsonianMag.com here.
Author: Elizabeth Gamillo
Image Credit: MacKenzi Martin
Sierra Space says it is making good progress on its first Dream Chaser spaceplane as the company looks ahead to versions of the vehicle that can carry crews and perform national security missions.
The company provided SpaceNews with images of the first Dream Chaser, named Tenacity, being assembled at its Colorado headquarters. The vehicle’s structure is now largely complete, but there is still more work to install its thermal protection system and other components.
Author Credit: Jeff Foust, Space News
Image Credit: Sierra Space
Two Russian cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut landed in a remote area of Kazakhstan on Wednesday after undocking from the International Space Station and flying back to Earth in a historic mission that came amid mounting tensions over the war in Ukraine.
Read the full article online here.
Author credit: Christian Davenport
Image credit: The Times