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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

THUNDER: A New Frontiers-Class Titan Orbiter Mission Concept From the NASA JPL Planetary Science Summer School

Titan is unique in our Solar System: an icy ocean world with an Earth-like, dynamic hydrocarbon reservoir cycling through its interior, surface, and atmosphere. Titan’s hazy atmosphere produces complex organic material, which has the potential to develop the necessary compounds for biologic activity if it moves through Titan’s water ice bedrock to encounter the subsurface ocean. Here, we propose Titan’s Hydrocarbons: Uncovering New Dimensions of Evolutionary pRocesses (THUNDER), a New Frontiers-class Titan orbiter mission concept. This mission responds directly to the Decadal Survey’s call for a Titan Orbiter and follows the guidelines of the New Frontiers 4 (NF4) Announcement of Opportunity (AO) and NF5 draft AO. THUNDER will provide high-resolution global mapping of Titan’s surface, exploring how Titan’s hydrocarbon cycle has shaped its evolution through time.

Rudi Lien↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

THUNDER: A New Frontiers-Class Titan Orbiter Mission Concept From the NASA JPL Planetary Science Summer School

Titan’s Hydrocarbons: Uncovering New Dimensions of Evolutionary pRocesses (THUNDER) is a dedicated geology and geophysics mission to trace Titan’s hydrocarbons from the inside out, assessing whether hydrocarbons move through Titan’s water ice bedrock to cycle from the subsurface ocean to the atmosphere. This Titan orbiter will use surface mapping (via radar and spectrometry) and gravity science to advance geophysical expertise for Saturn’s most Earth-like moon.

mission concept↗
NASA NTRS2011

The Ganymede Interior Structure, and Magnetosphere Observer (GISMO) Mission Concept

The NASA Planetary Science Summer School (PSSS) at JPL offers graduate students and young professionals a unique opportunity to learn about the mission design process. Program participants select and design a mission based on a recent NASA Science Mission Directorate Announcement of Opportunity (AO). Starting with the AO, in this case the 2009 New Frontiers AO, participants generate a set of science goals and develop a early mission concept to accomplish those goals within the constraints provided. As part of the 2010 NASA PSSS, the Ganymede Interior, Surface, and Magnetosphere Observer (GISMO) team developed a preliminary satellite design for a science mission to Jupiter's moon Ganymede. The science goals for this design focused on studying the icy moon's magnetosphere, internal structure, surface composition, geological processes, and atmosphere. By the completion of the summer school an instrument payload was selected and the necessary mission requirements were developed to deliver a spacecraft to Ganymede that would accomplish the defined science goals. This poster will discuss those science goals, the proposed spacecraft and the proposed mission design of this New Frontiers class Ganymede observer.

radar sounder↗
NASA NTRS2017

Training Early Career Scientists in Flight Instrument Design Through Experiential Learning: NASA Goddard's Planetary Science Winter School.

The NASA Goddard Planetary Science Winter School (PSWS) is a Goddard Space Flight Center-sponsored training program, managed by Goddard's Solar System Exploration Division (SSED), for Goddard-based postdoctoral fellows and early career planetary scientists. Currently in its third year, the PSWS is an experiential training program for scientists interested in participating on future planetary science instrument teams. Inspired by the NASA Planetary Science Summer School, Goddard's PSWS is unique in that participants learn the flight instrument lifecycle by designing a planetary flight instrument under actual consideration by Goddard for proposal and development. They work alongside the instrument Principal Investigator (PI) and engineers in Goddard's Instrument Design Laboratory (IDL; idc.nasa.gov), to develop a science traceability matrix and design the instrument, culminating in a conceptual design and presentation to the PI, the IDL team and Goddard management. By shadowing and working alongside IDL discipline engineers, participants experience firsthand the science and cost constraints, trade-offs, and teamwork that are required for optimal instrument design. Each PSWS is collaboratively designed with representatives from SSED, IDL, and the instrument PI, to ensure value added for all stakeholders. The pilot PSWS was held in early 2015, with a second implementation in early 2016. Feedback from past participants was used to design the 2017 PSWS, which is underway as of the writing of this abstract.

Flight↗
NASA NTRS2024

THUNDER: A Titan orbiter mission concept for the New Frontiers program designed at the JPL Planetary Science Summer School

Saturn’s moon Titan is an enigmatic icy world whose surface is constantly modified by its active, Earthlike precipitation system. Here, we propose the THUNDER (Titan’s Hydrocarbons: Uncovering New Dimensions of Evolutionary pRocesses) mission concept to investigate how Titan’s surface reflects the nature of its interior and its active hydrocarbon cycle. This mission will change our understanding of Titan’s surface through three science objectives: characterizing the heat and material transport properties of Titan’s icy outer layer, tracing surface liquid storage through and across the crust, and assessing the total hydrocarbon budget through time. This New Frontiers-class mission, designed as part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Planetary Science Summer School, responds directly to the call for a Titan orbiter in the NASA Planetary Science and Astrobiology Decadal Survey 2023-2032. THUNDER’s focused geology and geophysics mission could achieve full surface mapping to complement both the Cassini-Huygens and Dragonfly missions using gravity science, radar with three operational modes, and a visible-to-infrared spectrometer. These instruments together could give us the first look at Titan as a fully connected and geologically active world , revolutionizing our understanding of icy bodies, fluvial and atmospheric processes, and habitability across geologic time. Here, we summarize goals of the science mission and engineering approaches, as well as challenges and future directions to study before THUNDER can become a viable mission concept.

mission concept↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

NASA's Space Health Impacts for the NASA Experience (SHINE) Training Program – Space Radiation Curriculum

In February 2023, the Space Radiation Element of the NASA Human Research Program initiated a virtual, annual space radiation curriculum. The Space Health Impacts for the NASA Experience (SHINE) Space Radiation Didactic Curriculum aims to educate participants not only in the scientific aspects of space radiation but also in the agency’s risk management strategies. SHINE Space Radiation Didactic Curriculum combined weekly seminars by speakers from NASA, other government agencies, academia, and industry, with networking sessions designed to foster collaboration between the competitively selected participants as well as interactions with NASA scientists and HRP funded investigators. The inaugural course ran weekly from February 2023 to August 2023 and was comprised of lectures, less formal coffee hours, and office hours. Each two-hour seminar sessions hosted 1-3 presentations on topics which ranged from the space radiation environment to health effects and countermeasure to granting opportunities. All lectures were recorded and will be published on the THREE (The Health Risks of Extraterrestrial Environments) website for public access (https://three.jsc.nasa.gov/). As a course requirement, participants developed individual or collaborative beam time proposals for real, proposed, or potential experiments at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. For the 2023 course, 25 participants were selected from a total of 59 applicants. Selected participants were citizens from 8 countries and comprised 5 graduate students, 4 postdocs, 11 scientists and 5 professors/medical doctors. Participants had a wide range of expertise including molecular and cellular biology, microbiology, botany, physiology, engineering, physics, aerospace medicine, planetary science, biostatistics, and modeling. The second annual SHINE training program is scheduled from February to August 2024. In addition, a separate SHINE Space Radiation Practicum session will be held in Fall 2024 at the NSRL. The SHINE Space Radiation Practicum is a unique opportunity that has not been available to the public since the closure of the NASA Space Radiation Summer School in 2017 and will allow a small cohort of participants competitively selected in Fall 2023 to gain hands-on radiation experience.

SHINE↗
NASA NTRS1993

Spaceship Earth: A partnership in curriculum writing

As the Apollo astronauts left Earth to venture onto the surface of another planetary body, they saw their home planet in a new global perspective. Unmanned NASA missions have given us a closer look at all the other planets in our solar system and emphasized the uniqueness of Earth as the only place in our solar system that can sustain life as we know it. Spaceship Earth is a new science curriculum which was developed to help students and teachers to explore the Earth, to see it in the global perspective, and to understand the relationships among life, the planet, and the sun. Astronaut photographs, especially shuttle pictures, are used as groundbased studies to help students to understand global Earth Science and integrate various aspects of physical, life, and social science. The Spaceship Earth curriculum was developed at by a team of JSC scientists working in collaboration with teachers from local school districts. This project was done under the auspices of Partner-In-Space, a local non-profit organization dedicated to improving science education and our general knowledge of space. The team met once a month for a year then assembled the curriculum during the summer. The project is now in the testing stage as the teachers try it out in their classrooms. It was supported by the Texas Education Agency and will be offered by the State of Texas as a supplemental curriculum for statewide use. Because the curriculum was developed by teachers, it is self contained and the lessons are easy to implement and give students concrete experiences. The three sub-units follow in a logical order, but may be used independently. If they are used separately, they may be tied together by the teacher returning to the basic theme of the global Earth as each unit is completed.

Lindstrom, Marilyn M.↗
NASA NTRS2022

Thinking Inside the Box: A Hands-on Student Activity for Building a Contamination Containment Glovebox to Encourage Problem Solving in a Collaborative Environment

Engineers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and education experts from the Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC) partnered together to create a hands-on student activity to teach students about problem solving, working in a collaborative environment, and about the unique career fields of contamination control and planetary protection. The activity focuses on contamination containment gloveboxes, which are sealed containers where operators outside the glovebox can safely manipulate hazardous or contamination-sensitive materials inside the glovebox through glove ports on the container. The activity utilizes common household materials and teams of students work together to design and build a glovebox using the materials provided. Once the glovebox has been constructed, students perform a task under a time constraint by using their glovebox to assemble a puzzle “contaminated” with corn starch. In a post-activity debrief, teams discuss lessons learned such as how the actual built glovebox differed from the sketched design, the challenge of managing a budget for materials, how the team dealt with surprises, and if their glovebox allowed enough room for the operator to perform the task. This activity has been part of VSGC’s Virginia Earth System Science Scholars (VESSS) summer academy program for high school students since 2016, and has been an engaging method to teach students teamwork, creativity, hands-on experimentation, communication, and reasoning skills while also teaching them about unique engineering fields such as contamination control and planetary protection.

Student activity↗