Newton's first law describes how, once in motion, planets remain in motion. What it does not do is explain how the planets are observed to move in nearly circular orbits rather than straight lines. Enter the second law. To move in a curved path, a planet must have an acceleration toward the center of the circle. This is called centripetal acceleration and is supplied by the mutual gravitational…
This e-book explores some of the contributions of psychology to yesterday’s great space race, today’s orbiter and International Space Station missions, and tomorrow’s journeys beyond Earth’s orbit. Early missions into space were typically brief, and crews were small, often drawn from a single nation. As an intensely competitive space race has given way to international cooperation over …
During World War II, advances in aviation became unmistakable. Many nations’ air forces entered the war flying biplane aircraft that were not much different from their predecessors of the previous world war. They were soon eclipsed by aircraft that took advantage of new designs that utilized many aeronautical advances of the interwar period such as new powerplants, stressed-skin aluminum stru…
NASA engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center, along with their partners at other NASA centers and in private industry, are designing and building the next generation of rockets and spacecraft to transport cargo, equipment, and human explorers to space. Known collectively as Deep Space Exploration Systems, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, the Orion spacecraft, and ground systems at Kenned…
In 1960, the United States put its first Earth-observing environmental satellite into orbit around the planet. Over the decades, these satellites have provided invaluable information, and the vantage point of space has provided new perspectives on Earth. This book celebrates Earth’s aesthetic beauty in the patterns, shapes, colors, and textures of the land, oceans, ice, and atmosphere. The bo…
NASA initiated GeneLab—a multiyear, multiphase project—on the premise that mining of omics data from spaceflight experiments offers an immense opportunity to understand the effects of spaceflight on biological systems. That progress can best be accomplished by ensuring access to these data to as many researchers as possible. GeneLab captures vast amounts of data from spaceflight and gro…
Advances made during decades of spaceflight experimentation have identified critical gaps in our understanding of the role of gravity and the spaceflight environment on plant biology at the cellular, tissue, whole plant, and community levels. The International Space Station is a unique platform where reduced gravity can be used to probe and dissect biological mechanisms in plants for underst…
Addressing a field that has been dominated by astronomers, physicists, engineers, and computer scientists, the contributors to this collection raise questions that may have been overlooked by physical scientists about the ease of establishing meaningful communication with an extraterrestrial intelligence. These scholars are grappling with some of the enormous challenges that will face humanity …
It is a basic premise of the Wind and Beyond series that nothing about the historical development of aircraft has ever been linear. On the way to aeronautical “progress”—however one chooses to define the term—there has always been, and always will be, countless twists and turns. And in the end, the entire story could have turned out differently—and still may. It is hoped that not only…
The first two volumes in the Wind and Beyond series and the succeeding four now in preparation all cover the impact of aerodynamic development on the evolution of the airplane in America. As the six-volume series will ultimately demonstrate, just as the airplane is a defining technology of the twentieth century, aerodynamics has been the defining element of the airplane.The forthcoming volumes …
The airplane ranks as one of history’s most ingenious and phenomenal inventions. It has surely been one of the most world-changing. How ideas about aerodynamics first came together and how the science and technology evolved to forge the airplane into the revolutionary machine that it became is the epic story told in this multivolume work, The Wind and Beyond: A Documentary Journey into the Hi…
The International Space Station offers a valuable platform and environment for cell biology investigations, novel discoveries and innovation in a microgravity environment. Areas of opportunity include tissue culture studies, tissue engineering research using 3-D tissue models, biopharmaceutical production, host microbe interactions, host-toxicology interactions, and host-drug sensitivity and re…
For decades, researchers have used the fruit fly Drosophila to probe the combined effects of microgravity and other conditions of spaceflight with exposure to ionizing radiation. Drosophila melanogaster provides a well-characterized model organism that is both genetically complex and relatively modest in its habitat and life support requirements. Microgravity exposure, a unique biological chall…
Dazzling photographs and images from space of our planet’s nightlights have captivated public attention for decades. In such images, patterns are immediately seen based on the presence or absence of light: a distinct coastline, bodies of water recognizable by their dark silhouettes, and the faint tendrils of roads and highways emanating from the brilliant blobs of light that are our modern, w…
NASA’s first successful mission to another planet, Mariner 2 to Venus in 1962, marked the beginning of what NASA Chief Scientist Jim Green describes in this volume as “a spectacular era” of solar system exploration. In its first 50 years of planetary exploration, NASA sent spacecraft to fly by, orbit, land on, or rove on every planet in our solar system, as well as Earth’s Moon and seve…
Sending human explorers 250,000 miles to the Moon, then 140 million miles to Mars, requires a bold vision, effective program management, funding for modern systems development and mission operations, and support from all corners of our great nation as well as our partners across the globe. NASA has been fine-tuning the plan to achieve that bold vision since the president called on the agency in…
The NASA App Development Challenge (ADC) is a coding challenge in which NASA presents technical problems to middle and high school students seeking student contributions to deep space exploration missions. The App Development Challenge is one of NASA’s Artemis Student Challenges, whose mission is to build foundational knowledge and introduce students to topics, techniques, and technologies cr…
WaveFront Sciences incorporated some of the algorithms it developed for the Webb mirrors into a commercial product it called the Complete Ophthalmic Analysis System, which could diagnose eye conditions by mapping the eye. The technology changed hands several times and was rolled into the iDesign system before J&J Vision, which is headquartered in Santa Ana, California, acquired it in 2017. The…
The system consists of a pair of satellites, which ensures that every part of the Earth is regularly observed at least twice every 12 hours. The satellites provide global coverage of numerous atmospheric and surface parameters, furnishing quantitative measurements for input to global atmospheric and surface forecast models. As users around the world have learned how to exploit this quantitative…
Welcome to the exciting world of aeronautics. The term aeronautics originated in France, and was derived from the Greek words for “air” and “to sail.” It is the study of flight and the operation of aircraft. This educator guide explains basic aeronautical concepts, provides a background in the history of aviation, and sets them within the context of the flight environment (atmosphere, a…