Posts in tag

Issue #6 (March 2014)


In a 1.3 million cubic-foot cleanroom at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md., 18 gold-coated primary mirror segments await installation on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Those mirrors and the telescope’s four science instruments just steps away, will become the most powerful space telescope ever built. “The Hubble Space Telescope has already rewritten the …

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 …

Vocabulary • BA-2100: A Bigelow module. Volume: 2,100 m3. Weight: 100 mT. Crew: 16, Cost: $500M. • BA-330: A Bigelow module. Volume: 330 m3. Weight: 25 mT. Crew: 6. Cost: $125M. • Falcon Heavy: An expendable launch vehicle from SpaceX. Payload: 53 mT. Cost: $150M. • Propulsion Bus/Docking Node (PB/DN):  A unit used to reboost the space station due …

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 …

More than ten years have now passed since NASA’s fourth “Great Observatory” – the Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRFT) – was boosted into orbit from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., atop a Delta II rocket. It was intended to complement is three older siblings, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and …

Passing its 10th anniversary, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has evolved into a premier observatory for an endeavor not envisioned in its original design: the study of worlds around other stars, called exoplanets. While the engineers and scientists who built Spitzer did not have this goal in mind, their visionary work made this unexpected capability possible. …