Meet the people behind our next Mars rover – Perseverance.

Sending a rover to the Red Planet is more than just 3…2…1… Liftoff 🚀 

It takes thousands of people and years of hard work to get a spacecraft from Earth to Mars. So when our Perseverance (Percy) rover touches down on the Martian surface, it will be because of the talented minds that helped to make it happen. 

The team is on track to launch Perseverance on July 20 and land in Mars’ Jezero Crater in February 2021. Each week leading up to launch, learn not only what it’s like to work on this mission but also about the diverse background and career trajectories of the team members at our Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

Want to stay up to date on Percy’s mission? Follow her on Twitter and Facebook. For more information, visit the official mission site, HERE. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Happy Halloween From The Space Place!

In a dark conference room, a pumpkin gently landed on the Moon, its retrorockets smoldering, while across the room, a flying saucer pumpkin hovered above Area 51 as a pumpkin alien wreaked havoc.

Suffice to say that when the scientists and engineers at our Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, compete in a pumpkin-carving contest, the solar system’s the limit. Now in its ninth year, the contest gives teams only one hour to carve (off the clock, on their lunch break), though they can prepare non-pumpkin materials — like backgrounds, sound effects and motorized parts — ahead of time. 

Enjoy! 

Looking for more pumpkin fun? Check out the full gallery, here. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Our future Mars 2020 rover, seen here as imagined through the eyes of an artist, will search for signs of past microbial life. The mission will take the next step in exploring the Red Planet by not only seeking signs of habitable conditions on Mars in the ancient past, but also searching for signs of past microbial life itself. 

The Mars 2020 rover introduces a drill that can collect core samples of the most promising rocks and soils and set them aside on the surface of Mars. A future mission could potentially return these samples to Earth. Mars 2020 is targeted for launch in July/August 2020, aboard an Atlas V 541 rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Learn more.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

IN CASE ANYONE WAS WONDERING WHAT I DO AT WORK ALL DAY:

that.

I’m building that.

NASA created retro travel posters for different locations in our solar system in hopes of inspiring young people to imagine a future where common space travel is a possibility. 

Source

these are really important to me

behind this 100% where do I buy prints

These are free for download and print! The files are 20x30 inches. I plan on emailing this one to my local print shop.

Originally posted by thatjoeyfella

i have these on my wall, and i guarantee, they are SPECTACULAR (and yep, CC-licensed, so you’re good to print them locally)

We have these framed in our aerospace senior design lounge!

@dancingloki

yeah these were actually made at JPL, where I work, and I have a wall calendar made of them that was handed out to employees last year

Today’s political post

thank you

FLAWLESS VICTORY

Getting to Mars: 4 Things We’re Doing Now

We’re working hard to send humans to Mars in the 2030s. Here are just a few of the things we’re doing now that are helping us prepare for the journey:

1. Research on the International Space Station

The International Space Station is the only microgravity platform for the long-term testing of new life support and crew health systems, advanced habitat modules and other technologies needed to decrease reliance on Earth.

When future explorers travel to the Red Planet, they will need to be able to grow plants for food, atmosphere recycling and physiological benefits. The Veggie experiment on space station is validating this technology right now! Astronauts have grown lettuce and Zinnia flowers in space so far.

The space station is also a perfect place to study the impacts of microgravity on the human body. One of the biggest hurdles of getting to Mars in ensuring that humans are “go” for a long-duration mission. Making sure that crew members will maintain their health and full capabilities for the duration of a Mars mission and after their return to Earth is extremely important. 

Scientists have solid data about how bodies respond to living in microgravity for six months, but significant data beyond that timeframe had not been collected…until now! Former astronaut Scott Kelly recently completed his Year in Space mission, where he spent a year aboard the space station to learn the impacts of microgravity on the human body.

A mission to Mars will likely last about three years, about half the time coming and going to Mars and about half the time on the Red Planet. We need to understand how human systems like vision and bone health are affected and what countermeasures can be taken to reduce or mitigate risks to crew members.

2. Utilizing Rovers & Tech to Gather Data

Through our robotic missions, we have already been on and around Mars for 40 years! Before we send humans to the Red Planet, it’s important that we have a thorough understanding of the Martian environment. Our landers and rovers are paving the way for human exploration. For example, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has helped us map the surface of Mars, which will be critical in selecting a future human landing site on the planet.

Our Mars 2020 rover will look for signs of past life, collect samples for possible future return to Earth and demonstrate technology for future human exploration of the Red Planet. These include testing a method for producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, identifying other resources (such as subsurface water), improving landing techniques and characterizing weather, dust and other potential environmental conditions that could affect future astronauts living and working on Mars.

We’re also developing a first-ever robotic mission to visit a large near-Earth asteroid, collect a multi-ton boulder from its surface and redirect it into a stable orbit around the moon. Once it’s there, astronauts will explore it and return with samples in the 2020s. This Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) is part of our plan to advance new technologies and spaceflight experience needed for a human mission to the Martian system in the 2030s.

3. Building the Ride

Okay, so we’ve talked about how we’re preparing for a journey to Mars…but what about the ride? Our Space Launch System, or SLS, is an advanced launch vehicle that will help us explore beyond Earth’s orbit into deep space. SLS will be the world’s most powerful rocket and will launch astronauts in our Orion spacecraft on missions to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

In the rocket’s initial configuration it will be able to take 154,000 pounds of payload to space, which is equivalent to 12 fully grown elephants! It will be taller than the Statue of Liberty and it’s liftoff weight will be comparable to 8 fully-loaded 747 jets. At liftoff, it will have 8.8 million pounds of thrust, which is more than 31 times the total thrust of a 747 jet. One more fun fact for you…it will produce horsepower equivalent to 160,000 Corvette engines!

Sitting atop the SLS rocket will be our Orion spacecraft. Orion will be the safest most advanced spacecraft ever built, and will be flexible and capable enough to carry humans to a variety of destinations. Orion will serve as the exploration vehicle that will carry the crew to space, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during space travel and provide safe re-entry from deep space return velocities.

4. Making it Sustainable

When humans get to Mars, where will they live? Where will they work? These are questions we’ve already thought about and are working toward solving. Six partners were recently selected to develop ground prototypes and/or conduct concept studies for deep space habitats.

These NextSTEP habitats will focus on creating prototypes of deep space habitats where humans can live and work independently for months or years at a time, without cargo supply deliveries from Earth.

Another way that we are studying habitats for space is on the space station. In June, the first human-rated expandable module deployed in space was used. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) is a technology demonstration to investigate the potential challenges and benefits of expandable habitats for deep space exploration and commercial low-Earth orbit applications.

Our journey to Mars requires preparation and research in many areas. The powerful new Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft will travel into deep space, building on our decades of robotic Mars explorations, lessons learned on the International Space Station and groundbreaking new technologies.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

#2 IS ME

THAT’S WHAT I DO

Watch: The trailer for ‘Hidden Figures’ is here — and it looks incredible.

follow @the-movemnt

on a related note, there’s a book called Rise of the Rocket Girls that talks specifically about the all-female team of computers that worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from its inception, handling all the (extremely complicated) math involved in making rockets fly! It only briefly touches on the racial issues involved, but it’s a very moving personal history of the team and the women who explored the universe

Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th

No guys you don’t understand.

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing

I’m sorry, this is really sweet and great, but like...I work with these people???? I see them every day and hearing them described as “some of the finest minds currently alive” is absolutely surreal to me

NASA and especially JPL is comprised entirely of Mega Nerds okay we threw a happy birthday party for Curiosity for much the same reason people buy costumes for their pets, “some of the finest minds currently alive” are also playing dumb goofy pranks on each other in the lab and one time a guy in my office who has I think 3 doctorates couldn’t figure out how to open a door because he was turning the handle the wrong way

please just remember that scientists and engineers do shit like this because we are real people I guess

It wrinkles my brain that Jupiter’s moon Europa has oceans that are sixty miles deep, while Earth’s oceans only reach seven miles deep at most. I’m willing to bet good money that there’s life in Europa’s oceans. Like five bucks. You hear me, NASA? I bet you five bucks that there’s life on Europa… Now that there’s money and reputation on the line, I bet they send a mission there real quick.

hey there you may be interested to learn that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California already has a mission planned to do exactly that! It’s gonna be pretty darn cool--several of my good friends are actually working on it already. You can find more details right here, on our website!

This is Kjell Lindgren. He’s a NASA astronaut who just got back from 5 months on the International Space Station. There are two reasons why this picture is hilarious:

 tl;dr NASA employs a bunch of fucking nerds

It gets better.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, here’s the poster NASA released for his mission to the ISS:

NASA confirmed for a bunch of fucking nerds

*wipes single tear*

They’re just too beautiful.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. 

NASA personnel are, like, the top nerds. The alpha nerds. The absolute nerdiest nerds. The nerds other nerds look to for nerdspiration. 

U are all correct, I can confirm, NASA is an organization comprised exclusively of meganerds

I can’t tell you why NASA has been making retro tourism ads for local haunts, but I can’t complain either.

We’ve been making them to fire the imagination, to get people motivated to care about the future of space exploration!