Small Missions

Around a different star, Earth may never have developed life at all. So what makes a star friendly to life? We joined two rocket teams as they traveled to the remote Northern Territory of Australia to capture light from our closest stellar neighbors to help reveal the answer. Follow their journey in the 6-part video series High Above Down Under. Episodes released weekly starting June 27, 2023. || High Above Down Under Series TrailerWatch this video on the NASA Goddard YouTube channel.Complete transcript available.There are likely billions of planets in our galaxy. With over 5,000 already confirmed, how do we know which ones might hold life?Two NASA sounding rockets are launching from Australia to find out which stars make for habitable hosts. We’re following those rocket teams Down Under to show you what it takes to launch a rocket and make groundbreaking scientific measurements. Hang on tight – we’re going on an adventure High Above Down Under!Music Credit: "Epic Earth" by Andy Hopkins (PRS), Dean Mahoney (PRS), Jacob Nicholas Stonewall Jackson (PRS) via Universal Production Music ||

On Sept. 9, 2021, a sounding rocket launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, carrying a copy of the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment, or EVE. This flight was used to calibrate the identical version of EVE that has flown in space since 2010 aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). Over the years, the space-based EVE has become degraded by intense sunlight, so scientists fly periodic calibration missions to keep EVE’s measurements sharp. || Short version:This highlight reel shows a selection of footage from the EVE sounding rocket flight and payload recovery, played at different speeds to highlight different parts of the flight. See the same footage in real-time on NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio. 00:00 - 00:02 Real-time footage. 00:03 - 00:12 Slowed down to quarter speed (0.25x) to show the launch. The shadow of the rocket and the exhaust plume behind it are visible. 00:12 - 00:28 Sped up twenty times faster (20x). Data is not taken during this time while the rocket flies towards space. The white patch visible on the ground is White Sands National Park. Why is the rocket spinning? These rockets use solid fuel. That means that any irregularities in the density cause the rocket to have a little more thrust in one direction. If nothing was done, this would mean the rocket would start veering off course. By spinning it the rocket, any bit of thrust that isn’t perfectly aligned with the long axis of the rocket gets averaged out: There’s a little too much thrust to the front, then to the left, then to the back, then to the right, over and over. The team uses controllable fins and sensors and software that can guide the rocket to go north along the range, rather than some other direction. 00:27 Two thin lines pop out in the aft view. Those are cables with weights on the end. Just like a spinning ice skater moving their arms out, they slow the spin. 00:28 - 00:49 Sped up to 2x. The second stage motor (Black Brant) gets ejected and falls back to the missile range. It’s the black thing tumbling below in the aft view. 00:49 - 01:03 Sped up to 30x. The rocket orients itself so that the instruments are pointing at the Sun and the shutter door is opened. This is when measurements are taken. Pointing control here is extremely good: about one arcsecond pointing accuracy, which is like being in LA and landing a laser on the Washington Monument. 01:03 - 01:11 Sped up to 20x. The shutter door is closed, and the rocket is intentionally tumbled. The rocket is re-entering the atmosphere, so if any one spot of the rocket was constantly taking the brunt of the friction from air, it would do serious damage. Tumbling spreads out that heat load. 01:11 - 01:25 Real-time, and then sped up to 4x. The drogue, and then the parachute, are deployed. 01:25 - 01:33 Real-time. In the aft view, you can see the shadow of the rocket and the parachute. 01:33 - 01:34 Sped up to 8x. Coming down. 01:34. Landing! 01:40 - 02:16 Footage is played at various speeds while the team recovers the payload. 02:16 - end: This is what some of the data looked like. The yellow-tinted movie of the Sun is from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly instrument on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, and shows what the Sun looked like during the flight at one of the wavelengths measured (17.1 nm). This rocket flight was to calibrate a different instrument – EVE – on SDO, which is then also used to calibrate the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly. Video and annotation credit: NASA/University of Colorado Boulder, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics/James Mason ||

AZURE MissionColorful clouds formed by the release of vapors from the two AZURE rockets allow scientist to measure auroral winds.Credit: NASA/Lee Wingfield || AZURE MissionOne of two Black Brant XI rockets leaves the launch pad at the Andøya Space Center in Norway for the AZURE mission. Credit: NASA/Lee Wingfield || G-CHASER MissionG-CHASER launches from the Andøya Space Center in Norway.Credit: NASA/Chris Perry || CAPER-2 MissionCAPER-2 launches from the Andøya Space Center.Credit: NASA/Chris Perry ||

NASA Launches Sounding Rockets to Study AuroraMusic credit: Trial by Gresby Race Nash [PRS] from Killer Tracks. ||

For over 40 years, NASA's Sounding Rocket Program has provided critical scientific, technical, and educational contributions to the nation's space program and is one of the most robust, versatile, and cost-effective flight programs at NASA. Sounding rockets carry scientific instruments into space along a parabolic trajectory. Their overall time in space is brief, typically 5-20 minutes, and at lower vehicle speeds for a well-placed scientific experiment. The short time and low vehicle speeds are more than adequate (in some cases they are ideal) to carry out a successful scientific experiments. Furthermore, there are some important regions of space that are too low for satellites and thus sounding rockets provide the only platforms that can carry out measurements in these regions. Go to NASA.gov for the latest sounding rocket news.

Explore this infographic to learn more about ComPair and scientific ballooning.Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight CenterMachine-readable PDF copy || ComPair is a balloon-borne science instrument designed to detect gamma rays with energies between 200,000 and 20 million electron volts. Visible light’s energy falls between 2 and 3 electron volts, for comparison.Supernovae and powerful explosions called gamma-ray bursts shine the brightest in this energy range. It’s also where astronomers expect to see the strongest glow from the most massive and distant active galaxies, which are powered by monster black holes. Current missions don’t cover this range well, however, so future ComPair-inspired instruments could fill in important gaps in astronomers' knowledge.Earth’s atmosphere filters out most of the high-energy radiation coming from space – which is good for humans but makes testing new gamma-ray technologies challenging. ComPair's solution is to fly to about 133,000 feet (40,000 meters) on a scientific balloon, which brings it above 99.5% of the atmosphere.ComPair gets its name from two methods it uses to study gamma rays: Compton scattering and pair production. In Compton scattering, light hits a particle, such as an electron, and transfers some energy to it. Pair production occurs when a gamma ray grazes the nucleus of an atom and converts into a pair of particles – an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron. The instrument has four major components:1. A tracker containing 10 layers of silicon detectors that determines the position of incoming gamma rays.2. A high-resolution calorimeter made of cadmium, zinc, and telluride that precisely measures lower-energy Compton-scattered gamma rays and some converted into electron-positron pairs.3. A high-energy calorimeter made of cesium iodide that mostly measures electron-positron pairs as well as some Compton-scattered gamma rays.4. An anticoincidence detector that notes the entry of high-energy charged particles called cosmic rays.ComPair is a collaboration among Goddard, NRL, Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. ||

Video compiliations of NASA scientists and partners working in the field. Available to download. || Researchers in volcanic regions. Footage from GIFT in Hawaii. || Researchers in volcanic regions. Footage from GIFT in Hawaii. || Ocean researchers. || Planetary researchers in arid regions. Footage from GIFT in Hawaii, Desert RATS in Arizona || Planetary science researchers in caves. Footage from GIFT campaign in Mauna Loa, Hawaii. || Researchers in snowy regions. Footage from GRIPS balloon launch in Antarctica (provided by Hazel Bain); SnowEx in Colorado. ||

NASA and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, or KASI, are getting ready to test a new way to see the Sun, high over the New Mexico desert. A pearlescent balloon — large enough to hug a football field — is scheduled to take flight no earlier than Aug. 26, 2019, carrying beneath it a solar scope called BITSE. BITSE is a coronagraph, a kind of telescope that blocks the Sun’s bright face in order to reveal its dimmer atmosphere, called the corona. Short for Balloon-borne Investigation of Temperature and Speed of Electrons in the corona, BITSE seeks to explain how the Sun spits out the solar wind. ||

The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER) is a NASA scientific balloon mission that will fly to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere to study twisty patterns of light in the universe’s “baby picture.” This infographic highlights some facts about PIPER’s instruments, capabilities and goals.Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight CenterMachine-readable PDF copy || The Primordial Inflation Polarization Explorer (PIPER) is a NASA scientific balloon mission that will fly to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere to study the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The CMB is a faint glow permeating the universe in all directions with an average temperature of 455 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (minus 270 degrees Celsius). It formed 380,000 years after the big bang, so scientists sometimes refer to it as the universe’s “baby picture.” PIPER will search for patterns in the light of the CMB called E-mode and B-mode polarization. E-mode patterns show exactly the same properties if reflected in a mirror, but B-mode patterns don’t. Scientists say they have “handedness,” which means B-modes twist either right or left and a mirror reflection changes one to the other. B-mode patterns result from gravitational waves in the universe’s first moments, when it expanded a trillion trillion times after the big bang. PIPER will look for B-mode patterns in order to find these space-time ripples and will help scientists learn about the early days of the universe. ||

NASA successfully launched a super pressure balloon (SPB) from Wanaka Airport, New Zealand, at 11:35 a.m. Tuesday, May 17, (7:35 p.m. EDT Monday, May 16) on a potentially record-breaking, around-the-world test flight.The balloon flies at an altitude of about 110,000 feet, in a layer of Earth's atmosphere known as the stratosphere.The purpose of the flight is to test and validate the SPB technology with the goal of long-duration flight (100+ days) at mid-latitudes. In addition, the gondola is carrying the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) gamma-ray telescope as a mission of opportunity.Another mission of opportunity is the Carolina Infrasound instrument, a small, 3-kilogram payload with infrasound microphones designed to record acoustic wave field activity in the stratosphere. Developed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, previous balloon flights of the instrument have recorded low-frequency sounds in the stratosphere, some of which are believed to be new to science.As the balloon travels around the Earth, it may be visible from the ground, particularly at sunrise and sunset, to those who live in the southern hemisphere’s mid-latitudes, such as Argentina and South Africa.NASA’s scientific balloons offer low-cost, near-space access for conducting scientific investigations in fields such as astrophysics, heliophysics and atmospheric research.NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia manages the agency’s scientific balloon flight program with 10 to 15 flights each year from launch sites worldwide. Orbital ATK, which operates NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, provides mission planning, engineering services and field operations for NASA’s scientific balloon program. The CSBF team has launched more than 1,700 scientific balloons in the over 35 years of operation.Track the flight's progress in real-time here. ||

Since its establishment more than 30 years ago, the NASA Balloon Program has provided high-altitude scientific balloon platforms for scientific and technological investigations, including fundamental scientific discoveries that contribute to our understanding of the Earth, the solar system, and the universe. Balloons have been used for decades to conduct scientific studies. They can be launched from locations across the globe and are a low-cost method to carry payloads with instruments that conduct scientific observations. The primary objective of the NASA Balloon Program is to provide high altitude scientific balloon platforms for scientific and technological investigations. These investigations include fundamental scientific discoveries that contribute to our understanding of the Earth, the solar system, and the universe. Scientific balloons also provide a platform for the demonstration of promising new instrument and spacecraft technologies that enable or enhance the objectives for the Science Mission Directorate Strategic Plan.

BurstCube is a mission under development at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. This CubeSat will detect short gamma-ray bursts, which are important sources for gravitational wave discoveries and multimessenger astronomy. The satellite is expected to launch in 2023. || This animation spins BurstCube to reveal the widest sides of the spacecraft. Solar panels appear at left, seen nearly edge on. The side bearing a large, circular hole is the one that will face the sky. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab ||

NASA’s Artemis missions are returning humanity to the Moon and beginning a new era of lunar exploration. This year, the agency plans to launch the Artemis I mission, an uncrewed test flight that will take a human-rated spacecraft farther than any before. || NASA’s Artemis I mission will need communications and navigation services during its journey to the lunar region. NASA’s Deep Space Network and Near Space Network will be there to support all phases of the mission, using direct-to-Earth and space relay capabilities. Music is from Epidemic Sound via iStockComplete transcript available. ||

A coronal mass ejection (CME) erupts from the Sun and sends Type II radio bursts ahead of it. SunRISE measures the radio bursts and transmits the data to NASA’s Deep Space Network. Type II radio bursts are the earliest indicators of shocks from a solar eruption and can provide information on solar energetic particle (SEP) events. || The mission called the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment, or SunRISE, is an array of six CubeSats operating as one very large radio telescope. The mission design relies on six solar-powered CubeSats – each about the size of a toaster oven – to simultaneously observe radio images of low-frequency emission from solar activity and transmit data to NASA’s Deep Space Network. The constellation of CubeSats would fly within 6 miles of each other, above Earth's atmosphere, which otherwise blocks the radio signals SunRISE will observe. Together, the six CubeSats will create 3D maps to pinpoint where giant particle bursts originate on the Sun and how they evolve as they expand outward into space. This, in turn, will help determine what initiates and accelerates these giant jets of radiation. The six individual spacecraft will also work together to map, for the first time, the pattern of magnetic field lines reaching from the Sun out into interplanetary space. SunRISE is scheduled to launch no earlier than July 2023. ||

Music: Charming Noise by Adrien Sahuc [SACEM], Benjamin Sahuc [SACEM]Complete transcript available. || Although it was only designed to last three months, the tiny CubeSat known as IceCube has been orbiting Earth for a full year, collecting data on a hard-to-study type of cloud. In that time, IceCube has created a global map of these ice clouds around the planet, which could someday help improve models and forecasts. ||

CubeSats are a class of nanosatellites that use a standard size and form factor. The standard CubeSat size uses a "one unit" or "1U" measuring 10x10x10 cms and is extendable to larger sizes; 1.5, 2, 3, 6, and even 12U. Originally developed in 1999 by California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) and Stanford University to provide a platform for education and space exploration. The development of CubeSats has advanced into it's own industry with government, industry and academia collaborating for ever increasing capabilities. CubeSats now provide a cost effective platform for science investigations, new technology demonstrations and advanced mission concepts using constellations, swarms disaggregated systems.