NASA’s 60th Anniversary: How It All Began

Can we hear mars from this rover?

Solar System: 10 Ways Interns Are Exploring Space With Us

Simulating alien worlds, designing spacecraft with origami and using tiny fossils to understand the lives of ancient organisms are all in a day’s work for interns at NASA.

Here’s how interns are taking our missions and science farther.

1. Connecting Satellites in Space

Becca Foust looks as if she’s literally in space – or, at least, on a sci-fi movie set. She’s surrounded by black, except for the brilliant white comet model suspended behind her. Beneath the socks she donned just for this purpose, the black floor reflects the scene like perfectly still water across a lake as she describes what happens here: “We have five spacecraft simulators that ‘fly’ in a specially designed flat-floor facility,” she says. “The spacecraft simulators use air bearings to lift the robots off the floor, kind of like a reverse air hockey table. The top part of the spacecraft simulators can move up and down and rotate all around in a similar way to real satellites.” It’s here, in this test bed on the Caltech campus, that Foust is testing an algorithm she’s developing to autonomously assemble and disassemble satellites in space. “I like to call it space K’nex, like the toys. We're using a bunch of component satellites and trying to figure out how to bring all of the pieces together and make them fit together in orbit,” she says. A NASA Space Technology Research Fellow, who splits her time between Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), working with Soon-Jo Chung and Fred Hadaegh, respectively, Foust is currently earning her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She says of her fellowship, “I hope my research leads to smarter, more efficient satellite systems for in-space construction and assembly.”

2. Diving Deep on the Science of Alien Oceans

Three years ago, math and science were just subjects Kathy Vega taught her students as part of Teach for America. Vega, whose family emigrated from El Salvador, was the first in her family to go to college. She had always been interested in space and even dreamed about being an astronaut one day, but earned a degree in political science so she could get involved in issues affecting her community. But between teaching and encouraging her family to go into science, It was only a matter of time before she realized just how much she wanted to be in the STEM world herself. Now an intern at NASA JPL and in the middle of earning a second degree, this time in engineering physics, Vega is working on an experiment that will help scientists search for life beyond Earth. 

“My project is setting up an experiment to simulate possible ocean compositions that would exist on other worlds,” says Vega. Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus, for example, are key targets in the search for life beyond Earth because they show evidence of global oceans and geologic activity. Those factors could allow life to thrive. JPL is already building a spacecraft designed to orbit Europa and planning for another to land on the icy moon’s surface. “Eventually, [this experiment] will help us prepare for the development of landers to go to Europa, Enceladus and another one of Saturn’s moons, Titan, to collect seismic measurements that we can compare to our simulated ones,” says Vega. “I feel as though I'm laying the foundation for these missions.”

3. Unfolding Views on Planets Beyond Our Solar System

“Origami is going to space now? This is amazing!” Chris Esquer-Rosas had been folding – and unfolding – origami since the fourth grade, carefully measuring the intricate patterns and angles produced by the folds and then creating new forms from what he’d learned. “Origami involves a lot of math. A lot of people don't realize that. But what actually goes into it is lots of geometric shapes and angles that you have to account for,” says Esquer-Rosas. Until three years ago, the computer engineering student at San Bernardino College had no idea that his origami hobby would turn into an internship opportunity at NASA JPL. That is, until his long-time friend, fellow origami artist and JPL intern Robert Salazar connected him with the Starshade project. Starshade has been proposed as a way to suppress starlight that would otherwise drown out the light from planets outside our solar system so we can characterize them and even find out if they’re likely to support life. Making that happen requires some heavy origami – unfurling a precisely-designed, sunflower-shaped structure the size of a baseball diamond from a package about half the size of a pitcher’s mound. It’s Esquer-Rosas’ project this summer to make sure Starshade’s “petals” unfurl without a hitch. Says Esquer-Rosas, “[The interns] are on the front lines of testing out the hardware and making sure everything works. I feel as though we're contributing a lot to how this thing is eventually going to deploy in space.”

4. Making Leaps in Extreme Robotics

Wheeled rovers may be the norm on Mars, but Sawyer Elliott thinks a different kind of rolling robot could be the Red Planet explorer of the future. This is Elliott’s second year as a fellow at NASA JPL, researching the use of a cube-shaped robot for maneuvering around extreme environments, like rocky slopes on Mars or places with very little gravity, like asteroids. A graduate student in aerospace engineering at Cornell University, Elliott spent his last stint at JPL developing and testing the feasibility of such a rover. “I started off working solely on the rover and looking at can we make this work in a real-world environment with actual gravity,” says Elliott. “It turns out we could.” So this summer, he’s been improving the controls that get it rolling or even hopping on command. In the future, Elliott hopes to keep his research rolling along as a fellow at JPL or another NASA center. “I'm only getting more and more interested as I go, so I guess that's a good sign,” he says.

5. Starting from the Ground Up

Before the countdown to launch or the assembling of parts or the gathering of mission scientists and engineers, there are people like Joshua Gaston who are helping turn what’s little more than an idea into something more. As an intern with NASA JPL’s project formulation team, Gaston is helping pave the way for a mission concept that aims to send dozens of tiny satellites, called CubeSats, beyond Earth’s gravity to other bodies in the solar system. “This is sort of like step one,” says Gaston. “We have this idea and we need to figure out how to make it happen.” Gaston’s role is to analyze whether various CubeSat models can be outfitted with the needed science instruments and still make weight. Mass is an important consideration in mission planning because it affects everything from the cost to the launch vehicle to the ability to launch at all. Gaston, an aerospace engineering student at Tuskegee University, says of his project, “It seems like a small role, but at the same time, it's kind of big. If you don't know where things are going to go on your spacecraft or you don't know how the spacecraft is going to look, it's hard to even get the proposal selected.”

6. Finding Life on the Rocks

By putting tiny samples of fossils barely visible to the human eye through a chemical process, a team of NASA JPL scientists is revealing details about organisms that left their mark on Earth billions of years ago. Now, they have set their sights on studying the first samples returned from Mars in the future. But searching for signatures of life in such a rare and limited resource means the team will have to get the most science they can out of the smallest sample possible. That’s where Amanda Allen, an intern working with the team in JPL’s Astrobiogeochemistry, or abcLab, comes in. “Using the current, state-of-the-art method, you need a sample that’s 10 times larger than we’re aiming for,” says Allen, an Earth science undergraduate at the University of California, San Diego, who is doing her fifth internship at JPL. “I’m trying to get a different method to work.” Allen, who was involved in theater and costume design before deciding to pursue Earth science, says her “superpower” has always been her ability to find things. “If there’s something cool to find on Mars related to astrobiology, I think I can help with that,” she says.

7. Taking Space Flight Farther

If everything goes as planned and a thruster like the one Camille V. Yoke is working on eventually helps send astronauts to Mars, she’ll probably be first in line to play the Mark Watney role. “I'm a fan of the Mark Watney style of life [in “The Martian”], where you're stranded on a planet somewhere and the only thing between you and death is your own ability to work through problems and engineer things on a shoestring,” says Yoke. A physics major at the University of South Carolina, Yoke is interning with a team that’s developing a next-generation electric thruster designed to accelerate spacecraft more efficiently through the solar system. “Today there was a brief period in which I knew something that nobody else on the planet knew – for 20 minutes before I went and told my boss,” says Yoke. “You feel like you're contributing when you know that you have discovered something new.”

8. Searching for Life Beyond Our Solar System

Without the option to travel thousands or even tens of light-years from Earth in a single lifetime, scientists hoping to discover signs of life on planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets, are instead creating their own right here on Earth. This is Tre’Shunda James’ second summer simulating alien worlds as an intern at NASA JPL. Using an algorithm developed by her mentor, Renyu Hu, James makes small changes to the atmospheric makeup of theoretical worlds and analyzes whether the combination creates a habitable environment. “This model is a theoretical basis that we can apply to many exoplanets that are discovered,” says James, a chemistry and physics major at Occidental College in Los Angeles. “In that way, it's really pushing the field forward in terms of finding out if life could exist on these planets.” James, who recently became a first-time co-author on a scientific paper about the team’s findings, says she feels as though she’s contributing to furthering the search for life beyond Earth while also bringing diversity to her field. “I feel like just being here, exploring this field, is pushing the boundaries, and I'm excited about that.”

9. Spinning Up a Mars Helicopter

Chloeleen Mena’s role on the Mars Helicopter project may be small, but so is the helicopter designed to make the first flight on the Red Planet. Mena, an electrical engineering student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, started her NASA JPL internship just days after NASA announced that the helicopter, which had been in development at JPL for nearly five years, would be going to the Red Planet aboard the Mars 2020 rover. This summer, Mena is helping test a part needed to deploy the helicopter from the rover once it lands on Mars, as well as writing procedures for future tests. “Even though my tasks are relatively small, it's part of a bigger whole,” she says.

10. Preparing to See the Unseen on Jupiter's Moon Europa

In the 2020s, we’re planning to send a spacecraft to the next frontier in the search for life beyond Earth: Jupiter’s moon Europa. Swathed in ice that’s intersected by deep reddish gashes, Europa has unveiled intriguing clues about what might lie beneath its surface – including a global ocean that could be hospitable to life. Knowing for sure hinges on a radar instrument that will fly aboard the Europa Clipper orbiter to peer below the ice with a sort of X-ray vision and scout locations to set down a potential future lander. To make sure everything works as planned, NASA JPL intern Zachary Luppen is creating software to test key components of the radar instrument. “Whatever we need to do to make sure it operates perfectly during the mission,” says Luppen. In addition to helping things run smoothly, the astronomy and physics major says he hopes to play a role in answering one of humanity’s biggest questions. “Contributing to the mission is great in itself,” says Luppen. “But also just trying to make as many people aware as possible that this science is going on, that it's worth doing and worth finding out, especially if we were to eventually find life on Europa. That changes humanity forever!”

Read the full web version of this week’s ‘Solar System: 10 Things to Know” article HERE. 

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This Monday, Aug. 17, marks the final targeted flyby of Dione, one of Saturn’s many moons, in Cassini’s long mission. During this flyby, the science team will conduct a gravity experiment that will contribute to our knowledge of the internal structure of Dione. We will also learn more about its outer ice shell, and will be able to compare this with Saturn’s other icy moons.

Beyond the icy moons, Saturn is adorned with thousands of beautiful ringlets, While all four gas giant planets in our solar system have rings -- made of chunks of ice and rock -- none are as spectacular or as complicated as Saturn's. Like the other gas giants, Saturn is mostly a massive ball of hydrogen and helium.

This image of Saturn was taken using an infrared filter. Using this type of filter can help scientists determine the location of clouds in the planet’s atmosphere. The darker areas reveal clouds that are lower in the atmosphere, while the bright areas are higher altitude clouds. 

Since Cassini reached Saturn in 2004, it has captured important data and images. This spacecraft has the ability to “see” in wavelengths that the human eye cannot, and it can “feel” things about magnetic fields and tiny dust particles that no human hand could detect. These heightened “senses” have allowed us to have a better understanding of Saturn, its moons and the solar system.

Learn more about Cassini & Saturn: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/

Allow us to reintroduce someone ... the name’s Perseverance. 

With this new name, our Mars 2020 rover has now come to life! Chosen by middle school student Alex Mather, Perseverance helps to remind ourselves that no matter what obstacles we face, whether it's on the way to reaching our goals or on the way to Mars, we will push through. In Alex’s own words, ⁣⁣

“We are a species of explorers, and we will meet many setbacks on the way to Mars. However, we can persevere. We, not as a nation but as humans, will not give up. The human race will always persevere into the future.” ⁣

Welcome to the family.⁣ ❤️

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

Hello again👋

Welcome back to week number FIVE of Mindful Monday. It’s our FINAL week and we are here for a last little slice of quiet time🧘

We are back with some meditative space in space. Where else? This week, we delight in the wonders of the universe observed by the Hubble Space Telescope as you turn on, tune in, and space out to relaxing music and stunning ultra-high-definition visuals of our cosmic neighborhood 🌌

Mysterious and magical, and it’s here for you. You can even watch even more Space Out episodes on NASA+, a new no-cost, ad-free streaming service.

Why not give it a try? Because just a few minutes this Monday morning can make all the difference to your entire week, as @nasa helps to bring mindfulness from the stars and straight to you. 

🧘WATCH: Space Out with NASA: Wonders of the Universe. 12/25 at 1pm EST🧘

YouTube

Space Out with NASA: Wonders of the Universe

Delight in the wonders of the universe observed by the Hubble Space Telescope as you turn on, tune in, and space out to relaxing music and s

Dolphins x Astronauts: The collab we didn't know we needed 

A pod of curious dolphins added extra meaning and porpoise to the recovery of Crew-9′s SpaceX Dragon capsule and its four explorers shortly after splashdown. Inside the capsule were astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, Butch Wilmore, and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who splashed down off the coast of Florida at 5:57pm ET (2127 UTC) on March 18, 2025, concluding their scientific mission to the International Space Station. See Crew-9 return from deorbit to splashdown in this video. (The dolphins appear at 1:33:56.)

#InternationalCatDay? Try #IntergalacticCatDay. 

Check out features of our feline friends that have come to life as interstellar phenomena! 

Pictured first, the Cat’s Paw Nebula is located about 4,200-5,500 light-years from Earth – situated in our very own Milky Way Galaxy. It was named for the large, round features that create the impression of a feline footprint and was captured by our Spitzer Space Telescope. After gas and dust inside the nebula collapse to form stars, the stars may in turn heat up the pressurized gas surrounding them. This process causes the gas to expand into space and form the bright red bubbles you see. The green areas show places where radiation from hot stars collided with large molecules called "polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons," causing them to fluoresce.

Next, you’ll find the Cat’s Eye Nebula. Residing 3,000 light-years from Earth, the Cat’s Eye represents a brief, yet glorious, phase in the life of a sun-like star. This nebula's dying central star may have produced the simple, outer pattern of dusty concentric shells by shrugging off outer layers in a series of regular convulsions. To create this view, Hubble Space Telescope archival image data have been reprocessed. Compared to well-known Hubble pictures, the alternative processing strives to sharpen and improve the visibility of details in light and dark areas of the nebula and also applies a more complex color palette. Gazing into the Cat's Eye, astronomers may well be seeing the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of evolution ... in about 5 billion years.

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

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Special Edition: Viking 40th Anniversary

Mars is hard. Forty years ago this week, our Viking mission found a place in history when it became the first U.S. mission to land a spacecraft safely on the surface of Mars and return images of the surface. This is astonishing considering that many of the spacecraft destined for Mars failed before completing their missions and some failed before their observations could begin.

Here’s a few things to know about the Viking missions that ushered in a new era of Mars explorations 40 years ago:

1. Multi Mission

The Viking mission consisted of four spacecraft – two orbiters and two landers. All four made significant science discoveries.

2. Last Minute Switch

The spacecraft eventually named Viking 2 was supposed to launch first, but a battery problem prompted us to send the second spacecraft first. Batteries recharged, Viking 2 was then sent to rendezvous with the Red Planet.

3. Not Quite the First

Viking 1 was the first to send back science from the surface of Mars, but the honor of the first Mars landing goes to the Soviet Union’s Mars 3. The Soviet spacecraft landed on Mars in December 1970, but sent back only 20 seconds of video data before going silent.

4. Viking 1 Quick Stats

Viking 1 was launched Aug. 20 1975, and arrived at Mars on June 19, 1976. On July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 lander separated from the orbiter and touched down at Chryse Planitia.

5. Viking 2 Quick Stats

Viking 2 was launched Sept. 9, 1975, and entered Mars orbit Aug. 7, 1976. The Viking 2 lander touched down at Utopia Planitia on Sept. 3, 1976.

For more information about the Viking missions, and to celebrate the 40th anniversary, check out our list of events HERE.

Discover the full list of 10 things to know about our solar system this week HERE. 

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

Dreaming of going to space? – Astronaut Victor Glover has you covered. 

In his first video from space, take a look at our home through the window of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon “Resilience” spacecraft. Victor arrived to the International Space Station alongside his fellow Crew-1 astronauts on Nov. 16, 2020. 

This is his first trip to space and his first mission on the orbital lab! 

Follow his Instagram account HERE to stay up-to-date on station life and for more behind-the-scenes content like this. 

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

❤️🧡💛 Color the Cosmos 💚💙💜

📣 Attention, space explorers! Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope presents: two new coloring pages! Unleash your creativity to bring these celestial scenes to life.

Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, smiles out at us from our first coloring page. She’s considered the mother of our Hubble Space Telescope because she helped everyone understand why it was important to have observatories in space – not just on the ground. If it weren’t for her, Hubble may have never become a reality.

The Roman Space Telescope is named after her to honor the legacy she left behind when she died in 2018. Thanks to Nancy Grace Roman, we’ve taken countless pictures of space from orbiting telescopes and learned so much more about the universe than we could have possibly known otherwise!

The second coloring page illustrates some of the exciting science topics the Roman Space Telescope will explore. Set to launch in the mid-2020s, the mission will view the universe in infrared light, which is like using heat vision. We’ll be able to peer through clouds of dust and see things that are much farther away.

We anticipate all kinds of discoveries from the edge of our solar system to the farthest reaches of space. This coloring page highlights a few of the things the Roman Space Telescope will help us learn more about. The mission will find thousands of planets beyond our solar system and hundreds of millions of galaxies. It will also help us unravel the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, represented by the gray web-like pattern in the background. With so much exciting new data, who knows what else we may learn?

Download the coloring pages here!

Learn more about the Roman Space Telescope at: https://roman.gsfc.nasa.gov/

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