Sep. 26, 2015
Since it last opened its gates to the public in 2011, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has seen rapid growth and discovery in its four science disciplines: astrophysics, Earth science, heliophysics and planetary science. AtExplore@NASAGoddard on Saturday, Sept. 26, 2015, the public will have an opportunity to learn about the center’s most recent scientific missions and findings.
In an organization of about 1,000 scientists working on advanced research, in addition to numerous technologists and engineers, Goddard chief scientist Jim Garvin said it’s impossible to choose a top achievement. “It’s like trying to rank quarterbacks in college football,” he said. “Who knows? They all play better than I could ever walk.”
Science missions at Goddard serve both as a magnifying glass on our own planet and as a telescope to the rest of the universe. Much of the center’s effort currently balances the two, focused on finding and exploring worlds like our own, as well as studying the world we live on to improve our lives here.
Hubble and Beyond
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, operated and serviced by Goddard and celebrating its 25th launch anniversary this year, and NASA’s Kepler mission began a study of planets outside our solar system – collectively called exoplanets – in the mid-1990s. The Kepler mission specifically searches the Milky Way for Earth-sized and larger planets in stars’ habitable zones, or the areas around stars where planets offer environmental conditions that can support liquid water on their surfaces.
Two astrophysics missions under construction at Goddard, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, will take exoplanet exploration one step further.
“If TESS works the way the folks building it think it will, we’ll have a thousand exoplanets discovered and classified,” Garvin said. “In a sense, it’s a recon mission. They will be used as targets for Webb telescope and beyond.”
Goddard employees will provide Explore@NASAGoddard visitors a closer look at TESS, the Webb telescope and some of the other missions associated with exoplanet exploration. There will be opportunities to learn about Hubble from the experts as well as a chance to see where engineers are building the Webb telescope and other spacecraft.
Goddard’s Role in the Journey to Mars
As exploration of these outer planets begins, Goddard scientists have definitively found signs of what scientists would call the building blocks of life on other planets in our own solar system.
NASA launched the Mars Science Lab Curiosity rover in November 2011 to determine Mars’ potential habitability. Sample Analysis at Mars, a suite of instruments on Curiosity built by Goddard scientists and engineers with colleagues in France and at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, discovered evidence of organic molecules on the Red Planet in December 2014.
“The discovery gives us hope that we could find a record of ancient life on Mars,” Garvin said. “Ten or 15 years ago, when we started what became Curiosity, a lot of people said we couldn’t do this. But we did it, thanks to Paul Mahaffy’s team. We found something this cool that’ll shape how we explore Mars for the next 50 years.”
Visitors can see a full-scale model of the Curiosity rover and chat with scientists who use its data, as well as explore other Goddard Mars missions during the open house. Garvin himself will speak about Goddard’s work on Mars.
Understanding Magnetic Reconnection
Newer missions are no less important to Goddard scientists’ current studies. The Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission, launched in early 2015 to study magnetic interaction between Earth and the sun, has sent back its earliest glimmers of data about solar phenomena that can disrupt life on Earth.
MMS consists of four honeycomb-shaped spacecraft that fly in a tetrahedral formation to observe magnetic reconnection. A full model of one of the spacecraft will be on display at the open house.
“We’ve flown funny-looking satellites that look at the Earth or that look out, but doing so with four big smart satellites, all inter-cooperating, as we study something really complicated, is amazing,” said Garvin.
Magnetic reconnection can cause solar storms, flares and other violent space events, which can cause beautiful effects on Earth such as aurorae as well as adverse reactions like power blackouts. Explore@NASAGoddard will feature a game through which visitors can understand how solar storms create aurorae.
Circling Back to Earth
While it is easy to see how the study of solar events might help protect Earth’s inhabitants, they also affect, to some extent, the ability of scientists to understand of our home planet.
“I don’t see space as a final frontier,” Garvin said. “It’s the forever frontier because we live in space. Earth is our lifeboat in the universe.”
The Goddard Earth Sciences Division currently focuses on understanding the changes – such as sea level rise and ice melt – that the planet undergoes as a result of climate variation. Visitors will have the chance to handle a Greenland ice core, or piece of ice drilled from Earth, and use it as a tool to determine how climate events occurred in the past. Scientists will also speak about Landsat, Terra and other Earth-observing missions throughout the day.
The science at Goddard comes full circle as the understanding of regulating factors on Earth aids in the development of missions that reach out to other parts of the universe.
“The work our science and engineering people do here is amazing,” Garvin added. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
Image:
(Left) Curiosity's "selfie" on Mars.
(Right) Laurence Smith, chair of geography at University of California, Los Angeles, deploys an autonomous drift boat equipped with several sensors in a meltwater river on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet on July 19, 2015.