People, Businesses, Places & Events
Unsung heroes of the Apollo program
For years history has celebrated the crews of elite astronauts who rode fire to the Moon and the unique twelve who walked on its surface. To a lesser degree, the senior mission specialists working in Houston and in Florida were also lauded. But at its height during the Apollo program 400,000 people were involved in …
Learning celestial navigation at Morehead Planetarium
You might not think a visit to a planetarium could save your life, but that’s how at least seven astronauts see the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill, N.C. Nearly every astronaut in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab programs made multiple visits to Morehead to learn celestial navigation. Each spent at least …
HI-SEAS 2: Living on a simulated Mars
How will future astronauts live on Mars? This is the question asked by NASA and many of the organizations working toward the advancement of human spaceflight. The challenges of landing and living on another planet are difficult to recreate on Earth. In order to do this, NASA and other space organizations use analog studies to …
Meet the crew of HI-SEAS 2
Mission Psychologist: Dr. Ron Williams Dr. Williams was born and raised in Bloomington Indiana. He received his BA degrees in Psychology and Chemistry at Indiana University Bloomington in 1976. He received his MA degree in Experimental Psychology with a concentration in gerontological psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his PhD in Neuropsychology from …
Brian Greene and the challenges of physics
Have you ever stared up at the night sky contemplating how the universe works? Have your thoughts ever drifted off into the realm of the infinite? Theoretical physicist Brian Greene not only ponders these questions, but his research into String Theory could one day prove successful in answering them. Greene is an author, professor, creator …
Zooniverse enables anyone to participate in science
The advent of faster, digital data capture and processing has been a boon in astronomy but created a problem of too much data to analyse with too few professional astronomers. In July 2007 University of Oxford based astronomer and BBC Sky at Night presenter Chris Lintott and a team of astronomers from the University of …
Jim Adams: Keeping NASA’s technology on the right track
After sitting inside a Mercury capsule during a Family Day at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in the 1960s you would think that W. James (Jim) Adams was destined to seek out a career with the space agency. Turns out that Adams, now NASA’s Deputy Chief Technologist, originally had another career path in mind, one …
‘Smoke and fire’ rise over Utah Salt Flats as student rockets soar
The 2013-14 NASA Student Launch rocketry challenge has come to an end – and brought something new to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Tooele County, Utah, where car and motorcycle enthusiasts regularly watch cutting-edge vehicles put to the test, speeding across the vast, flat expanse. On May 17, all eyes there turned upward as 16 …
Bigelow’s promise: More space at less cost with inflatable space habitats
We’ve all seen or played in one of those inflatable bounce houses at a carnival or a friend’s birthday party. Now just imagine a bounce house that you can live inside of in outer space. While much more advanced than a bounce house, that’s what Bigelow Aerospace is pursuing. They are designing and building inflatable …
Kim Lichtenberg spends her days sampling Martian soil and rocks
RocketSTEM spoke with Dr. Kimberly Lichtenberg, a scientist and engineer who works on NASA’s Mars rover missions at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif., in conjunction with our “Women in Aerospace” series. We spoke about her career at NASA, role models, education and how she became interested in space exploration. Indeed she’s been in …