NASA Scientists Research Articles

Passage of Water: Artistic Exploration of Earth’s Freshwater with Google and NASA

Abstract Passage of Water is Yiyun Kang’s artwork in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and NASA to highlight the significance of freshwater. Kang uses the datasets and scientific expertise that NASA satellites and scientists provide, employing immersive storytelling and audio-visual techniques to address the climate crisis and its impact on freshwater. Passage of Water web artwork was launched on the Google Arts & Culture platform on 30 November 2023. Kang then adapted the online experiment into an in-person exhibition at the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28) Dubai, UAE from 30 November to 12 December 2023. This paper is co-written by Yiyun Kang (Kang), the artist of this project and Jeanyoon Choi (Choi), the web developer and data analyst of this project. This paper uses the designations Kang, Choi, and We as appropriate.

Can NASA uncover the scientific reality of UAPs? (Unidentified Aeronautical Phenomena)?

On September 14, 2023, an expert research group made up of a team of NASA scientists released their final report on "unidentified aeronautical phenomena (UAPs)," which include unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and natural phenomena. General impressions regarding this report are stated.

Time to pay the piper: Fossil fuel companies’ reparations for climate damages

Time to pay the piper: Fossil fuel companies’ reparations for climate damages

Black American History and Culture: Untold, Reframed, Stigmatized and Fetishized to the Point of Global Ethnocide

Purpose: A poetic work of fiction haunts the base of the Statue of Liberty. The act overshadowed the original tribute to the Civil War victory and the Emancipation Proclamation. Abraham Lincoln's praises of the Black American military fell silent. Eurocentrists shrouded centuries of genius and scaled-down Black American mastery. Sagas of barrier-breaking Olympians, military heroes, Wild West pioneers, and inventors ended as forgotten footnotes. Today, countries around the world fetishize Black American history and culture to the point of ethnocide. The real-time case study of Woni Spotts explores the phenomenon. Until ancient traditions evolve with authenticity, global cultures will wither and die. The presented research chronicles over half a millennium of archives. Lists with names, dates, and genealogies seal the Black American legacy in stone.
 Methodology: The presented research for case studies draws from archival data, dated events, news articles, and an interview with Woni Spotts. The case studies generated three lists. Fifty sports and competitions were dated and cataloged. The athletes were analyzed by a genealogist. Forty music and dance genres were cataloged by publishing or recording dates. The artists were analyzed by a genealogist. Copyright infringements were noted. Inventors were researched for U.S. patents. NASA astronauts and inventors were analyzed by a genealogist.
 Findings: The presented research showed centuries of untold, reframed, stigmatized, and fetishized Black American history and culture. In the case studies, foreigners of African descent (Africans, Caribbeans, Central Americans, and South Americans) practiced ethnocidal behavior in concert with European descendants. Prolific abolitionists, patriots, politicians, and inventors were written out of history. Superstar athletes were obstructed or outshined by fictional
 Recommendations: Case studies showed centuries of fragmented narratives created biases and distortions. Black Americans were written out of history, reframed as background characters, stigmatized with skewed statistics, and fetishized globally to the point of ethnocide. The presented research stands as a vital resource for preservationists. Music and dance genre architects were solidified by publishing and recording dates. Athletic events, inventions, and NASA scientists were recorded.

HF01-11 TRIALS OF VOIDING IN SPACE: HOW URINE SHAPED THE DEVELOPMENT OF SPACESUITS

You have accessJournal of UrologyCME1 Apr 2023HF01-11 TRIALS OF VOIDING IN SPACE: HOW URINE SHAPED THE DEVELOPMENT OF SPACESUITS Aaron Huang, Jacob Gaines, and Jason Kim Aaron HuangAaron Huang More articles by this author , Jacob GainesJacob Gaines More articles by this author , and Jason KimJason Kim More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000003243.11AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: The Space Race, a competition between the United States and the Soviet Union to send a man to the moon, captured the world’s attention in the 1960s. While tensions between the nations ran high, one main focus of NASA scientists was on how to design a spacesuit to handle this harsh, new environment. These suits were created in the most practical fashion – to preserve pressures at high altitudes and protect its wearer. However, they were not created to facilitate voiding as “the first space man is not expected to have ‘to go’,” said a NASA official at the time. METHODS: A review was conducted on the history of the development of space suits using Google and Google Scholar. RESULTS: When it came to the first American in space, Alan Shepard was ready for the mission, undergoing vigorous training, both physical and psychological. What he and the crew were not prepared for on that fateful day of May 5th, 1961 were delays that led to long times spent sitting in his spacesuit waiting for launch. Shepard, unable to hold back his urine much longer, got the approval from mission control to relieve himself in the suit, short-circuiting certain monitors for his vitals. Researchers looked into other approaches to collecting urine; suprapubic and indwelling catheters were swiftly rejected due to discomfort as well as the risk for infection. The second American in space, Gus Grissom, made his own urine reservoir with two pairs of rubber pants, containing the urine between the layers, a creative yet quite impractical method. NASA, seeking to improve the current suit in terms of a urinary collecting device, looked towards the real world for people that lived with impaired detrusor activity to the purchase of a rubber urinal. Engineers created a complex valve on this device that would allow the astronaut to raise the intra-suit pressure when urinating, thus forcing the urine into the storage container, to counteract zero gravity. CONCLUSIONS: Today, maximally absorbent fabrics are utilized by astronauts as their urinary collecting devices that wick off and recycle urine. It was through Shepard’s unplanned trial of voiding into his suit that led to NASA understanding the need for urinary collecting devices, which have come a long way over the past half century. Source of Funding: None © 2023 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 209Issue Supplement 4April 2023Page: e259 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2023 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Aaron Huang More articles by this author Jacob Gaines More articles by this author Jason Kim More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

Climate change shocks and socially responsible investments

AbstractClimate change's impact on investor behavior is a scantly investigated area in finance. This paper examines the performance of socially responsible exchange trade funds (ETFs) concerning conventional ETFs, in response to climate change events. We proxy climate change signals with a list of natural disaster events that NASA scientists relate to climate change. We contribute to existing literature, by using a very extensive information set of ETF strategies, not influenced by rating agencies' subjective evaluation policies, and covering almost 90% of the universe of worldwide sustainability thematic‐oriented ETFs. This sample allows us to identify the socially responsible investment behavior in response to unpredictable climate change shocks. Our identification strategy accounts for endogeneity concerns and relies on two‐stage least square (2SLS) approach finding that responsible investors react to climate change events by purchasing socially responsible investments. The relationship between climate change signals and return of investment in themes linked to the development of sustainability is positive. Interestingly enough, the sign of this relationship is different, when we disentangle the empirical results according to the asset type, confirming that investors shift their investments from equity funds to bond funds when market sentiment worsens. Our results indicate that policymakers should increase the support of firms adopting environmentally conscious business practices, while managers should boost a sustainable business strategy.

An Astro-Animation Class: Optimizing Artistic, Educational, and Outreach Outcomes

Abstract The authors investigate how teaching art and astronomy together has the potential to inspire new art forms, enhance scientific public outreach, and promote art and science education. The authors teach an astroanimation class at the Maryland Institute College of Art in partnership with NASA scientists. The animations explore science in creative ways. Astrophysicists, educators, students, and the general public were surveyed to evaluate the experiences and benefits from this project. The responses were very positive—the program is an effective way to stimulate art students to learn science, share an artist’s viewpoint beyond the classroom, and engage with the public.

Using Satellite Data to Map Air Pollution and Improve Health

NASA scientists will be teaming up with epidemiologists in the agency’s first health-focused mission. With satellite data, they’ll find out how air pollution affects health in cities around the world.

Effects of 16O charged-particle irradiation on cognition, hippocampal morphology and mutagenesis in female mice

The effects of radiation in space on human cognition are a growing concern for NASA scientists and astronauts as the possibility for long-duration missions to Mars becomes more tangible. Oxygen (16O) radiation is of utmost interest considering that astronauts will interact with this radiation frequently. 16O radiation is a class of galactic cosmic ray (GCR) radiation and also present within spacecrafts. Whole-body exposure to high linear energy transfer (LET) radiation has been shown to affect hippocampal-dependent cognition. To assess the effects of high-LET radiation, we gave 6-month-old female C57BL/6 mice whole-body exposure to 16O at 0.25 or 0.1 Gy at NASA’s Space Radiation Laboratory. Three months following irradiation, animals were tested for cognitive performance using the Y-maze and Novel Object Recognition paradigms. Our behavioral data shows that 16O radiation significantly impairs object memory but not spatial memory. Also, dendritic morphology characterized by the Sholl analysis showed that 16O radiation significantly decreased dendritic branch points, ends, length, and complexity in 0.1 Gy and 0.25 Gy dosages. Finally, we found no significant effect of radiation on single nucleotide polymorphisms in hippocampal genes related to oxidative stress, inflammation, and immediate early genes. Our data suggest exposure to heavy ion 16O radiation modulates hippocampal neurons and induces behavioral deficits at a time point of three months after exposure in female mice.

Astro-animation: A case study of art and science education

Art and science are different ways of exploring the world, but together they have the potential to be thought-provoking, facilitate a science–society dialogue, raise public awareness of science and develop an understanding of art. For several years, we have been teaching an astro-animation class at the Maryland Institute College of Art as a collaboration between students and NASA scientists. Working in small groups, the students create short animations based on the research of the scientists who are going to follow the projects as mentors. By creating these animations, students bring the power of their imagination to see the research of the scientists through a different lens. Astro-animation is an undergraduate-level course jointly taught by an astrophysicist and an animator. In this article, we present the motivation behind the class, describe the details of how it is carried out and discuss the interactions between artists and scientists. We describe how such a programme offers an effective way for art students, not only to learn about science but to have a glimpse of ‘science in action’. The students have the opportunity to become involved in the process of science as artists, as observers first and potentially through their own art research. Every year, one or more internships at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center have been available for our students in the summer. Two students describe their experiences undertaking these internships and how science affects their creation of animations for this programme and in general. We also explain the genesis of our astro-animation programme, how it is taught in our animation department and we present the highlights of an investigation of the effectiveness of this programme we carried out with the support of an NEA research grant. In conclusion, we discuss how the programme may grow in new directions, such as contributing to informal STE(A)M learning.

Distributed Architecture for Monitoring Urban Air Quality: A Systems Engineering Approach

AbstractThe United Nations’ environment program has selected the fight against air pollution as the topic for 2019's World Environment Day to raise the awareness of world's population for the fact that 7 million people worldwide die each year due to diseases associated to low air quality (UN Environment 2019) This paper summarizes the result of a project to support the development of a new architecture of global sensing devices for air quality and other earth science challenges. the project goal is to build a multi‐resolution unified picture of air quality using existing and potentially new technologies, allowing not only governments, but also scientists and regular citizens to contribute and have access to the information generated. This approach will potentially enhance real‐time monitoring and rapid reaction to degraded air quality events, or even better forecast events to take more efficient preventive actions. The project brought together NASA scientists and systems engineering students to conduct an initial system engineering analysis to build a high‐level system architecture. The effort helped to pave the way for further detailed engineering design and support the development of a testbed for early system verification and validation.

‘A little bit of everything is burning.’: A NASA scientist dissects Amazon fires

‘A little bit of everything is burning.’: A NASA scientist dissects Amazon fires

Using citizen science to expand the global map of landslides: Introducing the Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository (COOLR).

Robust inventories are vital for improving assessment of and response to deadly and costly landslide hazards. However, collecting landslide events in inventories is difficult at the global scale due to inconsistencies in or the absence of landslide reporting. Citizen science is a valuable opportunity for addressing some of these challenges. The new Cooperative Open Online Landslide Repository (COOLR) supplements data in a NASA-developed Global Landslide Catalog (GLC) with citizen science reports to build a more robust, publicly available global inventory. This manuscript introduces the COOLR project and its methods, evaluates the initial citizen science results from the first 13 months, and discusses future improvements to increase the global engagement with the project. The COOLR project (https://landslides.nasa.gov) contains Landslide Reporter, the first global citizen science project for landslides, and Landslide Viewer, a portal to visualize data from COOLR and other satellite and model products. From March 2018 to April 2019, 49 citizen scientists contributed 162 new landslide events to COOLR. These events spanned 37 countries in five continents. The initial results demonstrated that both expert and novice participants are contributing via Landslide Reporter. Citizen scientists are filling in data gaps through news sources in 11 different languages, in-person observations, and new landslide events occurring hundreds and thousands of kilometers away from any existing GLC data. The data is of sufficient accuracy to use in NASA susceptibility and hazard models. COOLR continues to expand as an open platform of landslide inventories with new data from citizen scientists, NASA scientists, and other landslide groups. Future work on the COOLR project will seek to increase participation and functionality of the platform as well as move towards collective post-disaster mapping.

Methane burst detected on Mars

Last week, NASA scientists reported that the Curiosity rover had detected methane levels higher than any previously seen on Mars’s surface. The signal returned to background levels within days. Various missions dating back to 2003 have reported methane on Mars, typically less than 1 ppb at the planet’s surface, with seasonal variations (Science 2018, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaq0131). The 21 ppb detected this month is about three times as high as a previous spike the rover observed starting in late 2013 (Science 2015, DOI: 10.1126/science.1261713). On Earth, methane is often produced by microbes or by geochemical processes that happen when water interacts with certain minerals at high pressure. NASA scientists say Curiosity does not have the instruments to determine the origin of the gas, and they are waiting for two European Mars orbiters to corroborate the spike. Fred Goesmann of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research thinks the recent measurements

The march of climate policy

The march of climate policy

“All these worlds are yours except …”: Science Fiction and Folk Fictions at NASA

Although they command real spacecraft exploring the solar system, NASA scientists refer frequently to science fiction in the course of their daily work. Fluency with the Star Trek series and other touchstone works demonstrates membership in broader geek culture. But references to Star Trek, movies like 2001 and 2010, and Dr. Strangelove also do the work of demarcating project team affiliation and position, theorizing social and political dynamics, and motivating individuals in a chosen course of action. As such, science fiction classics serve as local folk fictions that enable embedded commentary on the socio-political circumstances of technoscientific work: in essence, a form of lay social theorizing. Such fiction references therefore allow scientists and engineers to openly yet elliptically discuss their social, political, and interactional environment, all the while maintaining face as credible, impartial, technical experts.

NASA scientist unexpectedly released after almost 3 years in Turkish prison

NASA scientist unexpectedly released after almost 3 years in Turkish prison

New books & media

MarsSection:ChooseTop of pageMars <<Salam: The First ****** N...Baby Loves Gravity!CITING ARTICLES Mars, National Geographic Channel, Imagine Entertainment, RadicalMedia, and Zak Productions, 2018 (2nd season) Ron Howard (Apollo 13, From the Earth to the Moon) is back in the producer’s chair for the second season of Mars, an innovative combination of fiction and fact. The series tells the story of scientists sent to Mars in the 2030s with the goal of creating functioning human colonies. The second season opens with the arrival of the Lukrum Corporation, a mining company whose profit-first approach quickly aggravates the scientists. The fictional scenes are interspersed with real news footage and interviews in which figures such as NASA scientist Tom Wagner offer their perspectives on issues like the long-term effects of life in space. The documentary material is thought provoking and well edited, but it tends to disrupt the fictional narrative—and the story lines too often rely on miscommunications and quotidian personal drama rather than on more interesting challenges of life on Mars. However, science fiction fans interested in space colonization will find much to appreciate in this exploration of what the first Martian colony might be like. The second season premieres on 12 November 2018 at 9:00pm EST. —mb Salam: The First ****** Nobel LaureateSection:ChooseTop of pageMarsSalam: The First ****** N... <<Baby Loves Gravity!CITING ARTICLES Salam: The First ****** Nobel Laureate, Anand Kamalakar, Kailoola Productions, 2017 This new documentary from director Anand Kamalakar and producers Omar Vandal and Zakir Thaver tells the powerful story of Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam (1926–96), who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on electroweak unification. On his gravestone in Rabwah, Salam, a member of the minority Ahmadi sect, was initially honored as “the first Muslim Nobel laureate,” but a local magistrate had “Muslim” painted over—a stark reminder that a Pakistani law declared the Ahmadi heretical in 1974. Salam found that law personally devastating and spent the remainder of his life in exile in the UK. The film combines historical footage with recent interviews to tell Salam’s story. It honors his brilliant science and the struggles he faced as an Ahmadi, but it also does not shy away from his flaws, including his impatient personality. Salam promises to call more attention to a remarkable historical figure. For more information, visit www.salamthefilm.com. —mb BART MOLENDIJK, CC BY-SA 3.0 NLPPT|High resolution Baby Loves Gravity!Section:ChooseTop of pageMarsSalam: The First ****** N...Baby Loves Gravity! <<CITING ARTICLES Baby Loves Gravity!, Ruth Spiro, Irene Chan (illustrator), Charlesbridge Publishing, 2018, $8.99 This colorful board book, the latest in the Baby Loves Science series, opens with a baby dropping food from his tray. From there, author Ruth Spiro and illustrator Irene Chan show how gravity’s pull affects Earth’s movement around the Sun and a ride on a slide at the park. The simple text and engaging art are perfect for toddlers and early readers. —mb © 2018 American Institute of Physics.

How Can We Find Out How Much Snow Is in the World?

In Colorado forests, NASA scientists and a multinational team of researchers test the limits of satellite remote sensing for measuring the water content of snow.

Turkish-American NASA scientist sentenced to 7.5 years in prison

Turkish-American NASA scientist sentenced to 7.5 years in prison