A safe splashdown for an historic test flight
…
A major milestone for a future mission …
And remembering a champion for Earth Science
… a few of the stories to tell you about
– This Week at NASA!
“Splashdown!
As you can see on your screen, we have visual
confirmation for splashdown!”
On Aug. 2, the SpaceX Endeavour Crew Dragon
spacecraft splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico,
safely returning our Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken
from an historic test mission to the International
Space Station, and marking a new era in human
spaceflight.
“This is really an amazing day, but we also
need to remember that this is just the beginning.
The future is very bright, but it’s going
to require these public/private partnerships
which we have now proven can be very, very
successful.”
“We are starting the journey of bringing
people regularly to and from low-Earth orbit
and on to the Moon and then ultimately on
to Mars.”
Behnken and Hurley’s 62-day stay onboard
the space station was very busy.
They spent more than 100 hours working with
science investigations, and participated in
four spacewalks, which saw Behnken and fellow
NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy tie the record
for most spacewalks by a U.S. astronaut.
“To see those two work out on the International
Space Station, you’re not going to see anything
like that again.
It was just amazing to be part of that.”
The splashdown of NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission
was the first with American astronauts since
the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project 45 years ago.
Review of the mission and spacecraft could
pave the way for NASA to certify SpaceX’s
systems for regular crewed flights to the
space station, including Crew-1, the first
rotational mission later this year.
“I think this kind of comes full circle.
It took years to get here; we brought the
capability back to America, and we came home
safely to our families.
And it took a lot of people a lot of time
to make that happen.”
Our Lucy mission has been cleared to proceed
with assembly and testing in preparation for
its targeted launch in 2021.
Lucy will be the first mission to study Jupiter’s
Trojan asteroids.
For more, go to: nasa.gov/lucy.
NASA joins the entire science community in
mourning the loss of Mike Freilich, former
director of the agency’s Earth Science Division.
In a statement, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine
noted that Freilich’s deep expertise and
innate love of science helped us expand the
ways we observe our home planet.
Earlier this year NASA joined several agencies
and international partners to rename a mission
after him.
The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich mission will
gather critical information about the oceans
for which he had such an abiding passion.
This image was taken by our Terra satellite
on Aug. 3, about 9 hours and 40 minutes before
the eye of Hurricane Isaias made landfall
in southern North Carolina, packing maximum
sustained winds of 85 mph.
NASA satellites provided forecasters with
rainfall rates, cloud top temperatures, and
other data as the huge storm made its way
up the U.S. East Coast.
An instrument aboard the International Space
Station that measures the temperature of plants
as they run out of water, produced this temperature
map showing the Apple wildfire burning just
east of Los Angeles.
The fire had consumed about 4,000 acres at
the time the image was captured.
In just two days, that number grew to more
than 26,000 acres.
That’s what’s up this week @NASA …
For more on these and other stories, follow
us on the web at nasa.gov/twan.
