A power spacewalk outside the space station
…
Honoring a former ‘Hidden Figure’ …
And a “way cool” find of a hot Jupiter
… a few of the stories to tell you about
– This Week at NASA!
“I am clear, tether’s clear.
Bob can you double check me?
I can verify you’re clear.”
On June 26, our Chris Cassidy and Bob Behnken
worked outside the International Space Station
to replace aging nickel-hydrogen batteries
in one of the station’s power channels with
new lithium-ion batteries.
“Alright Bob – finally heading your way.
Sounds good!”
The battery replacement work is the culmination
of power upgrade spacewalks that began in
January 2017.
On June 24, our Administrator Jim Bridenstine
announced that our headquarters building in
Washington, D.C., will be named after Mary
W. Jackson, the first African American female
engineer at NASA.
Jackson was part of a group of very important
women whose math and scientific acumen helped
to safely get American astronauts to space
and back.
These women were portrayed in the book “Hidden
Figures” and popular movie of the same name.
Our planet-hunting TESS spacecraft and data
from our recently retired Spitzer Space Telescope,
helped identify the youngest known hot Jupiter
– a type of gas-dominated exoplanet that
orbits extremely close to its parent star.
The planet, located about 490 light-years
from Earth, is believed to be less than 17
million years old and could teach us more
about how planets form throughout the universe.
The moon in the binary near-Earth asteroid
system, Didymos that was previously known
as Didymos B, has been officially named Dimorphos.
In 2022, it will be the target of our Double
Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), the first
full-scale demonstration of an asteroid deflection
technology for planetary defense.
We’ve started a new effort to enable astronauts,
principal investigators and other NASA personnel
to fly on future commercial suborbital spaceflights.
These flights are anticipated to be more accessible,
affordable, and available than missions to
the International Space Station and could
provide additional commercial human spaceflights
for research, training, and testing activities.
Our Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has been
watching the Sun for over a decade.
This 10-year timelapse compresses each day
into a second, showing the rise and fall in
solar activity and notable events like transiting
planets and eruptions.
That’s what’s up this week @NASA …
For more on these and other stories, follow
us on the web at nasa.gov/twan.
