The Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) Is One Of The Largest Buildings In The World (525 Ft 10 In Tall,

New NASA X-Plane Construction Begins Now

NASA’s aeronautical innovators are ready to take things supersonic, but with a quiet twist.

For the first time in decades, NASA aeronautics is moving forward with the construction of a piloted X-plane, designed from scratch to fly faster than sound with the latest in quiet supersonic technologies.

The new X-plane’s mission: provide crucial data that could enable commercial supersonic passenger air travel over land.

To that end, NASA on April 2 awarded a $247.5 million contract to Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company of Palmdale, Calif., to build the X-plane and deliver it to the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California by the end of 2021.

“It is super exciting to be back designing and flying X-planes at this scale,” said Jaiwon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics. “Our long tradition of solving the technical barriers of supersonic flight to benefit everyone continues.”

The key to success for this mission – known as the Low-Boom Flight Demonstrator – will be to demonstrate the ability to fly supersonic, yet generate sonic booms so quiet, people on the ground will hardly notice them, if they hear them at all.

Current regulations, which are based on aircraft speed, ban supersonic flight over land. With the low-boom flights, NASA intends to gather data on how effective the quiet supersonic technology is in terms of public acceptance by flying over a handful of U.S. cities, which have yet to be selected.

The complete set of community response data is targeted for delivery in 2025 to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) from which they can develop and adopt new rules based on perceived sound levels to allow commercial supersonic flight over land.

Years of sonic boom research, beginning with the X-1 first breaking the sound barrier in 1947 – when NASA was the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics – paved the way for the Low-Boom Flight Demonstration X-plane’s nearly silent treatment of supersonic flight.

The answer to how the X-plane's design makes a quiet sonic boom is in the way its uniquely-shaped hull generates supersonic shockwaves. Shockwaves from a conventional aircraft design coalesce as they expand away from the airplane’s nose and tail, resulting in two distinct and thunderous sonic booms.

But the design’s shape sends those shockwaves away from the aircraft in a way that prevents them from coming together in two loud booms. Instead, the much weaker shockwaves reach the ground still separated, which will be heard as a quick series of soft thumps – again, if anyone standing outside notices them at all.

It’s an idea first theorized during the 1960s and tested by NASA and others during the years since, including flying from 2003-2004 an F-5E Tiger fighter jetmodified with a uniquely-shaped nose, which proved the boom-reducing theory was sound.

NASA’s confidence in the Low-Boom Flight Demonstration design is buoyed by its more recent research using results from the latest in wind-tunnel testing, and advanced computer simulation tools, and actual flight testing.

Recent studies have investigated methods to improve the aerodynamic efficiency of supersonic aircraft wings, and sought to better understand sonic boom propagation through the atmosphere.

Even a 150-year-old photographic technique has helped unlock the modern mysteries of supersonic shockwave behavior during the past few years.

“We’ve reached this important milestone only because of the work NASA has led with its many partners from other government agencies, the aerospace industry and forward-thinking academic institutions everywhere,” said Peter Coen, NASA’s Commercial Supersonic Technology project manager.

So now it’s time to cut metal and begin construction.

The X-plane’s configuration will be based on a preliminary design developed by Lockheed Martin under a contract awarded in 2016. The proposed aircraft will be 94 feet long with a wingspan of 29.5 feet and have a fully-fueled takeoff weight of 32,300 pounds.

The design research speed of the X-plane at a cruising altitude of 55,000 feet is Mach 1.42, or 940 mph. Its top speed will be Mach 1.5, or 990 mph. The jet will be propelled by a single General Electric F414 engine, the powerplant used by F/A-18E/F fighters.

A single pilot will be in the cockpit, which will be based on the design of the rear cockpit seat of the T-38 training jet famously used for years by NASA’s astronauts to stay proficient in high-performance aircraft.

Jim Less is one of the two primary NASA pilots at Armstrong who will fly the X-plane after Lockheed Martin’s pilots have completed initial test flights to make sure the design is safe to fly.

“A supersonic manned X-plane!” Less said, already eager to get his hands on the controls. “This is probably going to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. We’re all pretty excited.”

Less is the deputy chief pilot for Low-Boom Flight Demonstration. He and his boss, chief pilot Nils Larson, have already provided some input into things like cockpit design and the development of the simulators they will use for flight training while the aircraft is under construction.

“It’s pretty rare in a test pilot’s career that he can be involved in everything from the design phase to the flight phase, and really the whole life of the program,” Less said.

The program is divided into three phases and the tentative schedule looks like this:

2019 – NASA conducts a critical design review of the low-boom X-plane configuration, which, if successful, allows final construction and assembly to be completed.

2021 – Construction of the aircraft at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale is completed, to be followed by a series of test flights to demonstrate the aircraft is safe to fly and meets all of NASA’s performance requirements. The aircraft is then officially delivered to NASA, completing Phase One.

2022 – Phase Two will see NASA fly the X-plane in the supersonic test range over Edwards to prove the quiet supersonic technology works as designed, its performance is robust, and it is safe for operations in the National Airspace System.

2023 to 2025 – Phase Three begins with the first community response test flights, which will be staged from Armstrong. Further community response activity will take place in four to six cities around the U.S.

All of NASA’s aeronautics research centers play a part in the Low-Boom Flight Demonstration mission, which includes construction of the demonstrator and the community overflight campaign. For the low-boom flight demonstrator itself, these are their roles:

Ames Research Center, California — configuration assessment and systems engineering.

Armstrong Flight Research Center, California — airworthiness, systems engineering, safety and mission assurance, flight/ground operations, flight systems, project management, and community response testing.

Glenn Research Center, Cleveland — configuration assessment and propulsion performance.

Langley Research Center, Virginia — systems engineering, configuration assessment and research data, flight systems, project management, and community response testing.

“There are so many people at NASA who have put in their very best efforts to get us to this point,” said Shin. “Thanks to their work so far and the work to come, we will be able to use this X-plane to generate the scientifically collected community response data critical to changing the current rules to transforming aviation!”

Jim Banke Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate

Katherine Johnson Biography

https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

Date of Birth: August 26, 1918 Hometown: White Sulphur Springs, WV Education: B.S., Mathematics and French, West Virginia State College, 1937 Hired by NACA: June 1953 Retired from NASA: 1986 Actress Playing Role in Hidden Figures: Taraji P. Henson

Being handpicked to be one of three black students to integrate West Virginia’s graduate schools is something that many people would consider one of their life’s most notable moments, but it’s just one of several breakthroughs that have marked Katherine Johnson’s long and remarkable life. Born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in 1918, Katherine Johnson’s intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers vaulted her ahead several grades in school. By thirteen, she was attending the high school on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College. At eighteen, she enrolled in the college itself, where she made quick work of the school’s math curriculum and found a mentor in math professor W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, the third African American to earn a PhD in Mathematics. Katherine graduated with highest honors in 1937 and took a job teaching at a black public school in Virginia.  

When West Virginia decided to quietly integrate its graduate schools in 1939, West Virginia State’s president Dr. John W. Davis selected Katherine and two male students as the first black students to be offered spots at the state’s flagship school, West Virginia University. Katherine left her teaching job, and enrolled in the graduate math program. At the end of the first session, however, she decided to leave school to start a family with her husband.  She returned to teaching when her three daughters got older, but it wasn’t until 1952 that a relative told her about open positions at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory, headed by fellow West Virginian Dorothy Vaughan. Katherine and her husband, James Goble, decided to move the family to Newport News to pursue the opportunity, and Katherine began work at Langley in the summer of 1953. Just two weeks into Katherine’s tenure in the office, Dorothy Vaughan assigned her to a project in the Maneuver Loads Branch of the Flight Research Division, and Katherine’s temporary position soon became permanent. She spent the next four years analyzing data from flight test, and worked on the investigation of a plane crash caused by wake turbulence. As she was wrapping up this work her husband died of cancer in December 1956.

The 1957 launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik changed history—and Katherine Johnson’s life. In 1957, Katherine provided some of the math for the 1958 document Notes on Space Technology, a compendium of a series of 1958 lectures given by engineers in the Flight Research Division and the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD). Engineers from those groups formed the core of the Space Task Group, the NACA’s first official foray into space travel, and Katherine, who had worked with many of them since coming to Langley, “came along with the program” as the NACA became NASA later that year. She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight. In 1960, she and engineer Ted Skopinski coauthored Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position, a report laying out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.

In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Katherine Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, DC, Cape Canaveral, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission, from blast off to splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine.  “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space.

When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Katherine Johnson talks about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite, and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. She retired in 1986, after thirty-three years at Langley. “I loved going to work every single day,” she says. In 2015, at age 97, Katherine Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.

Biography by Margot Lee Shetterly

https://www.nasa.gov/content/katherine-johnson-biography

Seven Reasons Why Rover Challenge is Serious Business

Prizes, awards and a year’s worth of bragging rights are at stake during our annual Human Exploration Rover Challenge. Year after year, student teams from across the world design, build and race rovers against the clock and each other.

With a space-themed obstacle course, unique rovers, competitive racing, our exhibits and dozens of international teams… it’s everything cool about STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and space exploration. 

Here are the “must-know” details for this year’s event:

1. Bumps, Bruises and Battle Scars

Our space-themed obstacle course often brings racers to their knees, literally. This daunting three-quarter-mile long course is difficult to traverse and isn’t for the faint of heart. It uses both lunar and Mars-themed obstacles to simulate the types of terrain found on distant planets, asteroids or moons.

Plus, teams must race their rovers in, on and around full-scale rockets and space vehicle exhibits on display at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center – the official visitor center for NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, both in Huntsville, Alabama. See just how difficult and wild the course can be in our Flickr gallery.

2. Homemade Wheels Only

Rover teams must design and fabricate their own original, or “homemade” wheels. In-Situ Resource Utilization is an important component for our future missions to Mars, asteroids or other planets.

Astronauts can never simply purchase wheels at the store… and neither can our rover teams. Teams must not use any “off-the-shelf” wheels on their rover. By wheels, this means any component used for contact, traction or mobility on the surface of the obstacle course, including, but not limited to wheels, tracks, treads or belts.

And, as in years past, teams are not allowed to incorporate inflated (or un-inflated) pneumatic tires. Inflated tires would be considered an off-the-shelf product, not eligible under the current rules.

3. New “Sample Retrieval” Component Added

Teams may choose to compete in this optional challenge, collecting four samples (liquid, small pebbles, large rocks and soil) using a mechanical arm or a grabber they design and build. Teams must collect a soil sample and liquid sample while driving their rover, as well as collect rock samples (both large and small) while off the rover, all within a 25-minute time limit.  The “Sample Retrieval” challenge highlights our deep-space exploration goals. Teams competing are eligible for the $250 prize awarded to the winner of each high school and college/university division.

4. Caution: Real STEM @work

The sights and sounds of welding, grinding and computer programming are prevalent in this hands-on, experiential activity where students solve similar problems faced by our workforce. Rover Challenge provides a unique test-bed to get students involved in real-world research and development. Their progress and success may glean potential technologies for future exploration of Mars and beyond.

5. Draws Inspiration from Apollo and Journey to Mars

Rover Challenge was inspired by the historic success of the lunar rovers from the Apollo missions, each one built by engineers and scientists at NASA Marshall. While we continue to honor our past achievements, we now highlight future accomplishments on deep-space exploration missions to Mars, asteroids or other planets. The addition of the “Sample Return” component and the Martian obstacles emphasize our commitment toward space exploration.

6. Our International Spirit is Alive and Well

Just like the International Space Station; we bring the best of several nations together to promote and celebrate space exploration. Nearly 80 teams are coming from as far away as Italy, Germany, India, Mexico, Columbia and Russia, as well as more “local” talent from the United States and Puerto Rico. View this year’s registered teams HERE.

7. Real-time Racing on Social Media

From start to finish, each racing rover team will be broadcast, live, on the Marshall Center’s Ustream channel. Plus, enjoy real-time race updates, results and awards by following Rover Challenge Twitter: @RoverChallenge

NASA’s Human Exploration Rover Challenge will take place at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, April 8-9. For event details, rules, course information and more, please visit: http://www.nasa.gov/roverchallenge

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Just me meeting my hero Katherine Johnson after interviewing her in the newsroom for another article I’m writing. nbd ((VERY BIG DEAL)) •🚀•🚀• Katherine G. Johnson is a pioneer in American space history. A NASA mathematician, Johnson’s computations have influenced every major space program from Mercury through the Shuttle. She even calculated the flight path for the first American mission space. In 1953, Johnson was contracted as a research mathematician at the Langley Research Center with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the agency that preceded NASA. She worked in a pool of women performing math calculations until she was temporarily assigned to help the all-male flight research team, and wound up staying there. Johnson’s specialty was calculating the trajectories for space shots which determined the timing for launches, including the Mercury mission and Apollo 11, the mission to the moon. (at NASA Langley Research Center)

The State of Our NASA is Strong

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“When you experience all of the work that is going on here at Langley today, tell people how you feel.” – Charles Bolden, Jr. (Maj. Gen. USMC-Ret), NASA Administrator

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On February 9, 2016 I was offered the opportunity to tour NASA’s Langley Research Center (LRC) facilities and attend the State of NASA Address as a social media press correspondent with NASA Social.

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Homeschool Day Brings STEM Activities to Virginia Air & Space Center

Jacob Earley, left, Frank Jones and his mother, Maria Jones, learned about the effects of gravity on other planets from NASA intern Jessica Hathaway during Homeschool Appreciation Day, which took place May 6 at the Virginia Air & Space Center (VASC) in Hampton, Virginia. Hathaway was one of several volunteers from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton who taught homeschooled children and their parents interactive lessons about everything from ultraviolet radiation to engineering satellites to navigating a rover on Mars. Approximately 300 people registered for the event, which has a focus on activities involving science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The VASC is the official visitor center for NASA Langley.

Joe Atkinson NASA Langley Research Center

Click on the link to the full article to see how NASA’s Langley Research Center is changing the way we conceptualize commercial flight!

NASA Aeronautics Budget Proposes Return of X-Planes

Edwards AFB CA (SPX) Feb 19, 2016 NASA is researching ideas that could lead to developing an electric propulsion-powered aircraft that would be quieter, more efficient and environmentally friendly than today’s commuter aircraft. The proposed piloted experimental airplane is called Sceptor, short for the Scalable Convergent Electric Propulsion Technology and Operations Research. The concept involves removing the wing from a Full article

Pluto ‘Paints’ its Largest Moon Red

In June 2015, when the cameras on NASA’s approaching New Horizons spacecraft first spotted the large reddish polar region on Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, mission scientists knew two things: they’d never seen anything like it elsewhere in our solar system, and they couldn’t wait to get the story behind it.

Over the past year, after analyzing the images and other data that New Horizons has sent back from its historic July 2015 flight through the Pluto system, the scientists think they’ve solved the mystery. As they detail this week in the international scientific journal Nature, Charon’s polar coloring comes from Pluto itself – as methane gas that escapes from Pluto’s atmosphere and becomes “trapped” by the moon’s gravity and freezes to the cold, icy surface at Charon’s pole. This is followed by chemical processing by ultraviolet light from the sun that transforms the methane into heavier hydrocarbons and eventually into reddish organic materials called tholins.

"Who would have thought that Pluto is a graffiti artist, spray-painting its companion with a reddish stain that covers an area the size of New Mexico?" asked Will Grundy, a New Horizons co-investigator from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and lead author of the paper. "Every time we explore, we find surprises. Nature is amazingly inventive in using the basic laws of physics and chemistry to create spectacular landscapes."

The team combined analyses from detailed Charon images obtained by New Horizons with computer models of how ice evolves on Charon’s poles. Mission scientists had previously speculated that methane from Pluto’s atmosphere was trapped in Charon’s north pole and slowly converted into the reddish material, but had no models to support that theory.

The New Horizons team dug into the data to determine whether conditions on the Texas-sized moon (with a diameter of 753 miles or 1,212 kilometers) could allow the capture and processing of methane gas. The models using Pluto and Charon’s 248-year orbit around the sun show some extreme weather at Charon’s poles, where 100 years of continuous sunlight alternate with another century of continuous darkness. Surface temperatures during these long winters dip to -430 Fahrenheit (-257 Celsius), cold enough to freeze methane gas into a solid.

“The methane molecules bounce around on Charon's surface until they either escape back into space or land on the cold pole, where they freeze solid, forming a thin coating of methane ice that lasts until sunlight comes back in the spring,” Grundy said. But while the methane ice quickly sublimates away, the heavier hydrocarbons created from it remain on the surface.

The models also suggested that in Charon’s springtime the returning sunlight triggers conversion of the frozen methane back into gas. But while the methane ice quickly sublimates away, the heavier hydrocarbons created from this evaporative process remain on the surface.

Sunlight further irradiates those leftovers into reddish material – called tholins – that has slowly accumulated on Charon’s poles over millions of years. New Horizons’ observations of Charon’s other pole, currently in winter darkness – and seen by New Horizons only by light reflecting from Pluto, or “Pluto-shine” – confirmed that the same activity was occurring at both poles.

“This study solves one of the greatest mysteries we found on Charon, Pluto’s giant moon,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute, and a study co-author. “And it opens up the possibility that other small planets in the Kuiper Belt with moons may create similar, or even more extensive ‘atmospheric transfer’ features on their moons.”

Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

See Mercury Race Across The Sun On Monday

Skywatchers in the western hemisphere will see a rare sight on Monday: over the course of several hours, the silhouette of the planet Mercury will appear to cross the face of the Sun. The “transit” of Mercury results from the precise alignment of the orbits of Mercury and Earth that only happens either 13 or 14 times per century; usually the orbital alignment is weak, and as seen from our planet Mercury “misses” the Sun’s disk as it orbits once every 88 days. But on Monday, the view through a properly-shielded telescope will reveal the innermost planet as a dark, perfectly circular spot that moves completely across the Sun in exactly seven and a half hours.

Because of the specifics of our respective orbits, Mercury transits only happen in either the months of May or November, with average dates of 8th May and 10th November. May transits happen less frequently than November transits because during May, Mercury is closer to its largest distance from the Sun, while in November the opposite is true. As a result, the range of possible angles between the Sun and Mercury, as seen from Earth, is smaller in November than May. While the interval between successive November transits can be either 7, 13 or 33 years, May transits are less common, with successive appearances in either 13- or 33-year intervals.

Observations of Mercury transits reach back to at least the seventeenth century. Observations from earlier than this are unlikely because the apparent size of Mercury’s silhouette against the Sun is too small for the unaided eye to resolve. This is why the first recorded Mercury transit — by the French astronomer Pierre Gassendi on 7 November 1631 — dates to after Galileo Galilei’s invention of the telescope in about 1609. Johannes Kepler earlier understood that Mercury’s orbit should periodically take it in front of the Sun, but he died in 1630 before being able to observe a predicted transit. 

While these events once had great scientific interest, they are now mainly curiosities that delight astronomy aficionados. Rarer still are transits of Venus across the Sun, the last of which took place in 2012. These events come in pairs separated by 113 years, meaning that most people alive now will not be around to see the next one in December 2117.

Who can see Monday’s event? That depends on the hour of day and which side of the Earth faces the Sun at the time. The map below indicates which parts of the world see either all, some, or none of the transit: 

You’ll need at least a good pair of binoculars or a telescope — properly shielded with a heavy filer to prevent eye damage — to even sense Mercury during the transit. It will look like a small, perfectly round and completely opaque black dot against the bright solar photosphere. Mercury is distinguishable in this sense from sunspots, which are irregular in shape, can be partially transparent, and of much larger sizes. This image compares Mercury during a transit (bottom-center) with a sunspot near the solar limb (upper right).

NOTE: DO NOT LOOK AT THE SUN THROUGH A TELESCOPE WITHOUT A FULL-APERTURE SOLAR FILTER! Doing so can cause permanent blindness! Instead, try projecting the image of the sun from a telescope or binoculars onto white paper. This method avoids bringing dangerous, strongly-focused sunlight anywhere near one’s eyes. 

Better still: Watch the transit live online! Find live streaming coverage from Slooh, NASA TV, Celestron telescopes, Sky and Telescope magazine, and  the Virtual Telescope.

(Top image credit: Sky & Telescope magazine; map and transit image: Fred Espenak)

Life at the Lab: Dummies Crash Planes!

Get a behind-the-scenes look at how test dummies at NASA's Langley Research Center contribute to making the planes we fly on safer and developing space exploration vehicles. Work ranges from next-generation aircraft to water-impact tests that evaluate the splashdown of Orion astronaut crew capsules returning from space. 

Credit: NASA/Videographer: Gary Banziger; Writer and Co-Producer: Lily Daniels; Editor and Co-Producer: Kevin Anderson