Curious About NASA’s Next Mission To The Red Planet – The Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover? Here’s

What is it Like to be a NASA Intern?

We asked prospective interns that follow us on social media what questions they had for our current interns. 

You asked…they answered! Let’s take a look:

Answer: “Yes, sometimes astronauts request to run through the International Space Station simulation that we have using the hyper-reality lab.”

Answer: “Persistence is the key to getting your first NASA internship. Work hard, study hard, keep applying and persevere.”

Answer: “NASA is looking for passionate, smart and curious, full-time students, who are U.S. citizens, at least 16 years of age and have a minimum 3.0 GPA.”

Answer: “In addition to STEM majors, NASA has many opportunities for students studying business, photography, English, graphics and public relations.”

Answer: “The highlight has been the chance to learn a lot more about embedded systems and coding for them, and just seeing how everyone’s efforts in lab come together for our small part in the AVIRIS-NG project.”

Answer: Yes! Here at the Kennedy Space Center is where all the action takes place. Check out the schedule on our website!”

Answer:  “There are 10 NASA field centers and they all accept interns.”

Answer: "Yes, we do! I am currently working in tech development for an X-ray telescope that is launched into space to take pictures of our galaxy.”

Answer: “The greatest thing I’ve learned as a NASA intern is to not be afraid of failing and to get involved in any way you can. NASA is a very welcoming environment that offers a lot of opportunities for its interns to learn.”

Answer: My favorite experience from being a NASA intern is meeting people from all around the world and being exposed to the different cultures.”

Want to become a NASA intern? Visit intern.nasa.gov to learn about the open opportunities and follow @NASAInterns on Twitter and Facebook for regular updates!

Watch the full story on NASA Snapchat or Instagram until it expires on April 6.

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It's almost launch day! On Monday, June 24, the launch window opens for the Department of Defense's Space Test Program-2 launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. Among the two dozen satellites on board are four NASA payloads whose data will help us improve satellite design and performance.

Our experts will be live talking about the launch and NASA's missions starting this weekend.

🛰 Tune in on Sunday, June 23, at 12 p.m. EDT (9 a.m. PDT) for a live show diving into the technology behind our projects.

🚀 Watch coverage of the launch starting at 11 p.m. EDT (8 p.m. PDT) on Monday, June 24

Join us at nasa.gov/live, and get updates on the launch at blogs.nasa.gov/spacex.

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What You Need to Know About Our Space Launch System (SLS) Rocket’s Green Run Test

The comprehensive test series called Green Run for our Space Launch System (SLS) rocket is underway at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. 

During Green Run, the rocket’s massive, 212-foot-tall core stage — the same flight hardware that will help launch Artemis I to the Moon – will operate together for the first time. 

Here’s what you need to know about this top-to-bottom test series of our megarocket’s huge core:

The Meaning Behind the Name 

Why is it called Green Run? “Green” refers to the new, untested hardware (AKA the core stage), and “run” represents the succession of tests the core stage paces through. One by one, this series will bring together several “firsts” for the rocket stage as the flight hardware undergoes eight different tests. Each test is designed to gradually bring our rocket’s core stage and all its systems to life for the first time. 

So far, engineers have completed three of the series: the modal test, the avionics power-on, and the safety systems checkout. The safety systems are designed to end the test and shutdown systems automatically under undesirable conditions.

You can follow the progress of Green Run with this Green Run checklist infographic. Our team will be updating in real time as each Green Run test is completed.

Setting the Stage

The world’s tallest rocket stage is tested in an equally giant test stand.  We upgraded the B-2 Test Stand used for the Saturn V rocket stages during the Apollo Program and, later, for the Space Shuttle Program. Now, the B-2 Test Stand is customized for testing our SLS core stage. When all four core stage engines fire up, they can generate some serious heat. So, the B-2 Test Stand will use roughly 100,000 gallons of water every 18 seconds to protect the stand and the hardware.

Hot fire in 3, 2, 1…

Speaking of engines firing up, the core stage will really show what it is capable of during the grand finale of Green Run. The goal is for the entire core stage to operate as one for up to 8.5 minutes — and that includes an impressive firing of all four RS-25 engines simultaneously. Just like at launch, more than 733,000 gallons of liquid propellant will flow from the two propellant tanks through the fuel lines to feed the RS-25 engines.  When operating at sea level on the test stand, the cluster of four RS-25 engines will produce just over 1.6 million pounds of thrust – the same amount it will produce during the early phase of launch. During ascent, the core stage will produce a maximum thrust of over 2 million pounds.

Data, data, data

All the Green Run tests, check outs and the 100 terabytes of collected data certify the core stage design and help verify the stage is ready for launch. To put the sheer amount of data collected during Green Run into perspective, just one terabyte is the equivalent of roughly 500 hours of movies. Even the Library of Congress’s collection only amounts to a total of 15 terabytes!

Next stop: Kennedy

The next time our SLS rocket’s core stage fires up will be on the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center for the debut of the Artemis program. This inaugural SLS flight will be just the beginning of increasingly complex missions that will enable human exploration to the Moon and, ultimately, Mars.

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Splish, Splash, Orion Takes a Bath

The Orion spacecraft is a capsule built to take humans farther than they’ve ever gone before, to deep space and eventually Mars. But before astronauts travel inside this new vehicle, we have to perform tests to ensure their safety.

One of these tests that we’ll talk about today simulates an ocean splashdown. Water impact testing helps us evaluate how Orion may behave when landing under its parachutes in different wind conditions and wave heights. The spacecraft has been undergoing a series of these tests at our Langley Research Center’s Hydro Impact Basin…which is our fancy way of saying pool.

The test capsule, coupled with the heat shield from Orion’s first spaceflight, swung like a pendulum into Langley’s 20-foot-deep basin on Aug. 25.

Inside the capsule were two test dummies – one representing a 105-pound woman and the other, a 220-pound man — each wearing spacesuits equipped with sensors. These sensors will provide critical data that will help us understand the forces crew members could experience when they splash down in the ocean.

This specific drop was the ninth in a series of 10 tests taking place at Langley’s Landing and Impact Research Facility. It was designed to simulate one of the Orion spacecraft’s most stressful landing scenarios, a case where one of the capsule’s three main parachutes fails to deploy. That would cause Orion to approach its planned water landing faster than normal and at an undesirable angle.

Under ideal conditions, the Orion capsule would slice into the water of the Pacific Ocean traveling about 17 miles per hour. This test had it hitting the pool at about 20 mph, and in a lateral orientation. Instead of being pushed down into their seats, astronauts in this scenario would splashdown to the side.

With this test’s success and one final drop in this series scheduled for mid-September, researchers have accumulated a lot of important information.

To find out more, visit nasa.gov or follow @nasaorion​ on Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook.

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What specific area of space research most excites you? Could be something being explored currently, or something you would like to see work done on in the future.

My twin sister worked on genetics in graduate school, and she continues to research ideas in genetics. She comes up with a lot of great ideas for what we can study in space, especially now since genetics is a focus on the space station. I’m looking forward to continuing with the genetics experiments and seeing what we learn.

7 Things to Know about the Perseverance Mars Rover

We’re set to launch the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on July 30. The rover is loaded with scientific instruments and advanced technology, making it the largest, heaviest and most sophisticated vehicle ever sent to the Red Planet.

What is Perseverance’s mission and what will it do on Mars? Here are seven things to know:

1. Perseverance draws on the NASA – and scientific – spirit of overcoming challenges

Not only does it have to launch during a pandemic and land on a treacherous planet, it has to carry out its science goals:

Searching for signs of past microbial life

Mapping out the planet’s geology and climate

Collecting rock and other samples for future return to Earth

Paving the way for human exploration

We chose the name Perseverance from among the 28,000 essays submitted during the "Name the Rover" contest. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the months leading up to the launch in particular have required creative problem solving, teamwork and determination.

2. Perseverance builds on the lessons from other Mars rovers

In 1997, our first Mars rover – Sojourner – showed that a robot could rove on the Red Planet. Spirit and Opportunity, which both landed in 2004, found evidence that Mars once had water before becoming a frozen desert.

Curiosity found evidence that Mars’ Gale Crater was home to a lake billions of years ago and that there was an environment that may have sustained microbial life. Perseverance aims to answer the age-old question – are there any signs that life once existed on Mars?

3. Perseverance will land in a place with high potential to find signs of ancient life

The rover will land in Jezero Crater, a 28-mile wide basin north of the Martian equator. A space rock hit the surface long ago, creating the large hole. Between 3 and 4 billion years ago, a river flowed into a body of water in Jezero the size of Lake Tahoe.

4. Perseverance will also collect important data about Mars’ geology and climate

Mars orbiters have collected images and other data about Jezero Crater from about 200 miles above, but finding signs of past life will need much closer inspection. A rover like Perseverance can look for those signs that may be related to ancient life and analyze the context in which they were found to see if the origins were biological.

5. Perseverance is the first leg of a round trip to Mars

This is the first rover to bring a sample-gathering system to Mars that will package promising samples of rocks and other materials for future return to Earth. NASA and ESA are working on the Mars Sample Return campaign, so we can analyze the rocks and sediment with tools too large and complex to send to space.

6. Perseverance will pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet

Two packages -- one that helps the rover autonomously avoid hazards during landing (TRN) and another that gathers crucial data during the trip through Mars’ atmosphere (MEDLI2) – will help future human missions land safely and with larger payloads on other worlds.

There are two instruments that will specifically help astronauts on the Red Planet. One (MEDA) will provide key information about the planet’s weather, climate and dust activity, while a technology demonstration (MOXIE) aims to extract oxygen from Mars’ mostly carbon-dioxide atmosphere.

7. You get to ride along

Perseverance and other parts of the Mars 2020 spacecraft feature 23 cameras, which is more than any other interplanetary mission in history. Raw images from the camera are set to be released on the mission website.

There are also three silicon chips with the names of nearly 11 million people who signed up to send their names to Mars.

And you can continue to follow the mission on Twitter and Facebook. 

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Solar System 10 Things: Looking Back at Pluto

In July 2015, we saw Pluto up close for the first time and—after three years of intense study—the surprises keep coming. “It’s clear,” says Jeffery Moore, New Horizons’ geology team lead, “Pluto is one of the most amazing and complex objects in our solar system.”

1. An Improving View

These are combined observations of Pluto over the course of several decades. The first frame is a digital zoom-in on Pluto as it appeared upon its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930. More frames show of Pluto as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. The final sequence zooms in to a close-up frame of Pluto taken by our New Horizons spacecraft on July 14, 2015.

2. The Heart

Pluto’s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors are enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story that scientists have only just begun to decode. The image resolves details and colors on scales as small as 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers). Zoom in on the full resolution image on a larger screen to fully appreciate the complexity of Pluto’s surface features.

3. The Smiles

July 14, 2015: New Horizons team members Cristina Dalle Ore, Alissa Earle and Rick Binzel react to seeing the spacecraft's last and sharpest image of Pluto before closest approach.

4. Majestic Mountains

Just 15 minutes after its closest approach to Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft captured this near-sunset view of the rugged, icy mountains and flat ice plains extending to Pluto's horizon. The backlighting highlights more than a dozen layers of haze in Pluto's tenuous atmosphere. The image was taken from a distance of 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) to Pluto; the scene is 780 miles (1,250 kilometers) wide.

5. Icy Dunes

Found near the mountains that encircle Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia plain, newly discovered ridges appear to have formed out of particles of methane ice as small as grains of sand, arranged into dunes by wind from the nearby mountains.

6. Glacial Plains

The vast nitrogen ice plains of Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia – the western half of Pluto’s “heart”—continue to give up secrets. Scientists processed images of Sputnik Planitia to bring out intricate, never-before-seen patterns in the surface textures of these glacial plains.

7. Colorful and Violent Charon

High resolution images of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, show a surprisingly complex and violent history. Scientists expected Charon to be a monotonous, crater-battered world; instead, they found a landscape covered with mountains, canyons, landslides, surface-color variations and more.

8. Ice Volcanoes

One of two potential cryovolcanoes spotted on the surface of Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft. This feature, known as Wright Mons, was informally named by the New Horizons team in honor of the Wright brothers. At about 90 miles (150 kilometers) across and 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) high, this feature is enormous. If it is in fact an ice volcano, as suspected, it would be the largest such feature discovered in the outer solar system.

9. Blue Rays

Pluto's receding crescent as seen by New Horizons at a distance of 120,000 miles (200,000 kilometers). Scientists believe the spectacular blue haze is a photochemical smog resulting from the action of sunlight on methane and other molecules in Pluto's atmosphere. These hydrocarbons accumulate into small haze particles, which scatter blue sunlight—the same process that can make haze appear bluish on Earth.

10. Encore

On Jan. 1, 2019, New Horizons will fly past a small Kuiper Belt Object named MU69 (nicknamed Ultima Thule)—a billion miles (1.5 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto and more than four billion miles (6.5 billion kilometers) from Earth. It will be the most distant encounter of an object in history—so far—and the second time New Horizons has revealed never-before-seen landscapes.

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Thank you for joining! It’s time to find out how YOU can get involved with NASA as a student or send your experiments to the International Space Station.

One of our experts today is Hannah Johnson, the team lead of a student group sending their experiment to the space station! She is joined by Becky Kamas, our lead for STEM on Station activities for students.

Between 12-1 p.m. EDT today, our experts will talk about about designing an experiment for microgravity, working with NASA to launch it to space, how you can join this initiative, and more!

View all answers HERE.

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Why Do X-Ray Mirrors Look So Unusual?

Does the object in this image look like a mirror? Maybe not, but that’s exactly what it is! To be more precise, it’s a set of mirrors that will be used on an X-ray telescope. But why does it look nothing like the mirrors you’re familiar with? To answer that, let’s first take a step back. Let’s talk telescopes.

How does a telescope work?

The basic function of a telescope is to gather and focus light to amplify the light’s source. Astronomers have used telescopes for centuries, and there are a few different designs. Today, most telescopes use curved mirrors that magnify and focus light from distant objects onto your eye, a camera, or some other instrument. The mirrors can be made from a variety of materials, including glass or metal.

Space telescopes like the James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes use large mirrors to focus light from some of the most distant objects in the sky. However, the mirrors must be tailored for the type and range of light the telescope is going to capture—and X-rays are especially hard to catch.

X-rays versus mirrors

X-rays tend to zip through most things. This is because X-rays have much smaller wavelengths than most other types of light. In fact, X-rays can be smaller than a single atom of almost every element. When an X-ray encounters some surfaces, it can pass right between the atoms!

Doctors use this property of X-rays to take pictures of what’s inside you. They use a beam of X-rays that mostly passes through skin and muscle but is largely blocked by denser materials, like bone. The shadow of what was blocked shows up on the film.

This tendency to pass through things includes most mirrors. If you shoot a beam of X-rays into a standard telescope, most of the light would go right through or be absorbed. The X-rays wouldn’t be focused by the mirror, and we wouldn’t be able to study them.

X-rays can bounce off a specially designed mirror, one turned on its side so that the incoming X-rays arrive almost parallel to the surface and glance off it. At this shallow angle, the space between atoms in the mirror's surface shrinks so much that X-rays can't sneak through. The light bounces off the mirror like a stone skipping on water. This type of mirror is called a grazing incidence mirror.

A metallic onion

Telescope mirrors curve so that all of the incoming light comes to the same place. Mirrors for most telescopes are based on the same 3D shape — a paraboloid. You might remember the parabola from your math classes as the cup-shaped curve. A paraboloid is a 3D version of that, spinning it around the axis, a little like the nose cone of a rocket. This turns out to be a great shape for focusing light at a point.

Mirrors for visible and infrared light and dishes for radio light use the “cup” portion of that paraboloid. For X-ray astronomy, we cut it a little differently to use the wall. Same shape, different piece. The mirrors for visible, infrared, ultraviolet, and radio telescopes look like a gently-curving cup. The X-ray mirror looks like a cylinder with very slightly angled walls.

The image below shows how different the mirrors look. On the left is one of the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s cylindrical mirrors. On the right you can see the gently curved round primary mirror for the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy telescope.

If we use just one grazing incidence mirror in an X-ray telescope, there would be a big hole, as shown above (left). We’d miss a lot of X-rays! Instead, our mirror makers fill in that cylinder with layers and layers of mirrors, like an onion. Then we can collect more of the X-rays that enter the telescope, giving us more light to study.

Nested mirrors like this have been used in many X-ray telescopes. Above is a close-up of the mirrors for an upcoming observatory called the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM, pronounced “crism”), which is a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)-led international collaboration between JAXA, NASA, and the European Space Agency (ESA).

The XRISM mirror assembly uses thin, gold-coated mirrors to make them super reflective to X-rays. Each of the two assemblies has 1,624 of these layers packed in them. And each layer is so smooth that the roughest spots rise no more than one millionth of a millimeter.

Why go to all this trouble to collect this elusive light? X-rays are a great way to study the hottest and most energetic areas of the universe! For example, at the centers of certain galaxies, there are black holes that heat up gas, producing all kinds of light. The X-rays can show us light emitted by material just before it falls in.

Stay tuned to NASA Universe on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with the latest on XRISM and other X-ray observatories.

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in a male dominated profession, what were some obstacles you faced as the first Hispanic female flight director and how did you overcome them? what would be your advice to young women interested in the space program?