Hubble makes an exoplanet discovery …
The next space station crew gets ready to
launch …
And back to work in Florida after weathering
the storm … a few of the stories to tell
you about – This Week at NASA!
Researchers using data from our Hubble Space
Telescope have, for the first time, detected
water vapor signatures in the atmosphere of
a planet outside our solar system that resides
in the "habitable zone."
This is the region around a star in which
liquid water could potentially pool on the
surface of a rocky planet.
The planet – known as K2-18b, orbits a small
red dwarf star about 110 light-years from
us, in the constellation Leo.
If confirmed by further studies, this will
be the only exoplanet known to have both water
in its atmosphere and temperatures that could
sustain liquid water on a rocky surface.
The next crew headed to the International
Space Station, including our Jessica Meir,
wrapped up activities at the Gagarin Cosmonaut
Training Center outside Moscow on Sept. 10.
Meir and her crewmates – Oleg Skripochka
of Roscosmos, and Spaceflight Participant
Hazzaa Ali Almansoori – then departed for
the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch site in Kazakhstan
to complete their training.
The trio is scheduled to launch to the station
on Sept. 25.
On Sept. 10 at our Kennedy Space Center in
Florida, the mobile launcher for our Artemis
missions to the Moon began the 4-mile ride
atop crawler-transporter 2 back to Launch
Pad 39B – after being housed for more than
a week inside the Vehicle Assembly Building
due to Hurricane Dorian.
With the mobile launcher back in place at
the pad, teams can resume validation and verification
testing for our Artemis I mission – which
they plan to complete in the coming weeks.
Artemis I will be the first integrated uncrewed
test flight of our Orion spacecraft, Space
Launch System or SLS rocket and the ground
systems at Kennedy Space Center.
Meanwhile, progress toward the launch pad
for Artemis I continues for our SLS rocket
and Orion spacecraft.
SLS and Orion have moved from design and manufacturing,
to testing and assembly and integration – some
of the hardware has even been delivered to
the launch pad at Kennedy.
A new online animated video shows a breakdown
of the parts that will make up the completed
flight hardware for the mission.
Check it out at go.nasa.gov/artemis1progress.
Along with the Gateway in lunar orbit and
a new human landing system, SLS and Orion
create the backbone for our Artemis missions
that will land astronauts on the Moon by 2024.
Radar data from our Cassini spacecraft were
used in recently published research that suggests
explosions of warming liquid nitrogen are
responsible for the steep-rimmed craters encircling
some of the methane-filled lakes on Saturn’s
moon Titan.
Most existing models that lay out the origin
of Titan's lakes point to a process that does
not produce steep rims.
Titan and Earth are the only planetary bodies
in our solar system known to have stable surface
liquids – water on Earth and methane and
ethane on Titan — hydrocarbons that we think
of as gases, but that behave as liquids in
Titan's frigid climate.
The radar data were gathered during Cassini’s
last close flyby of Titan, as the spacecraft
prepared for its final plunge into Saturn's
atmosphere two years ago.
That’s what’s up this week @NASA …
For more on these and other stories follow
us on the web at nasa.gov/twan.
