Image (Credit): India’s Vikram lander on the Moon’s surface. (India Space Research Organization)
A U.S. official speaking in India promised that an Indian astronaut would be on the International Space Station (ISS) soon, maybe by year end. The Hindustan Times reports that the comments were made by U.S. Envoy Eric Garcetti at the US-India Commercial Space Conference: Unlocking Opportunities for US & Indian Space Startups.
Mr. Garcetti was quoted as stating:
NASA will soon provide advanced training to Indian astronauts, with the goal of mounting a joint effort to the International Space Station, hopefully, this year or shortly thereafter, which was one of the promises of our leaders’ visit together.
India already has a growing space program, including last year’s rover mission on the Moon, yet this is a smart move by the U.S. It is similar to Russian efforts to expand the list of visitors to the ISS.
Even with the recent budget-related stress, NASA continues to be a happy place for its workers. The agency was rated by its employees as the best place work for the 12th straight year in the 2023 Best Places to Work in the Federal Government survey, issued by the Partnership for Public Service and Boston Consulting Group. This top ranking was among the larger agencies. A more complete listing based on agency size is shown in the graphic below.
In a press release regarding the survey results, NASA’s Administrator Bill Nelson stated:
Once again, NASA has shown that with the world’s finest workforce, we can reach the stars…Through space exploration, advances in aviation, groundbreaking science, new technologies, and more, the team of wizards at NASA do what is hard to achieve what is great. That’s the pioneer spirit that makes NASA the best place to work in the federal government. With this ingenuity and passion, we will continue to innovate for the benefit of all and inspire the world.
Congrats to the team at NASA that has kept the agency in the lead through interesting work and positive management. A big mission needs an ambitious and happy staff to keep the dream alive.
Image (Credit): Hubble image of a triple-star system. (NASA, ESA, G. Duchene (Universite de Grenoble I); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))
This week’s image is from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It shows a triple-star system that consists of the variable star HP Tau, HP Tau G2, and HP Tau G3.
HP Tau is known as a T Tauri star, a type of young variable star that hasn’t begun nuclear fusion yet but is beginning to evolve into a hydrogen-fueled star similar to our Sun. T Tauri stars tend to be younger than 10 million years old ― in comparison, our Sun is around 4.6 billion years old ― and are often found still swaddled in the clouds of dust and gas from which they formed.
Take a look at the image above. Can you determine where this image originated? Take a guess and then check your answer by going to the “Where is This? The Answer Sheet” page.
The world’s first winged commercial spaceplane has arrived at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, its final destination before its first mission to the International Space Station (ISS) later this year.Following rigorous testing at Ohio’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility, the Dream Chaser DC-100 spaceplane named Tenacity got the green light to commence final pre-launch preparations, such as finishing its thermal protection system and payload integration, before it hitches a ride on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan rocket to deliver 7,800 pounds (3,540 kg) of food, water and science experiments to the ISS.
In deserts across Australia and South Africa, astronomers are planting forests of metallic detectors that will together scour the cosmos for radio signals. When it boots up in five years or so, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory will look for new information about the universe’s first stars and the different stages of galactic evolution. But after syncing hundreds of thousands of dishes and antennas, astronomers will quickly face a new challenge: combing through some 300 petabytes of cosmological data a year—enough to fill a million laptops…In preparation for the information deluge, astronomers are turning to AI for assistance, optimizing algorithms to pick out patterns in large and notoriously finicky data sets. Some are now working to establish institutes dedicated to marrying the fields of computer science and astronomy—and grappling with the terms of the new partnership.
How old is Earth’s water? Could it be older even than the planet itself? A team of astronomers say they’ve found the “missing link” that shows how water is delivered from gaseous star-forming regions in space to planets like Earth. The research suggests that Earth’s water is even older than the Sun. The news comes as a result of studies of a dusty planet-forming disc surrounding a star 1,300 lightyears from Earth
