#wallops flight facility

[lonestarflight]

Crews preparing the Mercury Launch Escape System and Boilerplate Mercury Capsule for the LJ-1 mission, for stacking atop of the Little Joe rocket.

Date: August 20, 1959

NASA ID: link

[blueiscoool]

Rocket Lab Launches Electron Rocket from the US for the First Time

Rocket Lab, a prolific launch company that routinely blasts its towering Electron rockets out of New Zealand, conducted its first liftoff from US soil on Tuesday.

The mission, nicknamed “Virginia is for Launch Lovers,” took off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s northern coast at 6 p.m. ET. The launch of the 60-foot (18.3-meter) rocket delivered three small satellites to orbit for the Earth-imaging company HawkEye 360, which uses a network of spacecraft to pinpoint radio frequencies on Earth in support of military and business projects.

Rocket Lab is among the most successful aerospace start-ups of the modern era. Unlike Elon Musk’s even more prolific rocket company, SpaceX, which builds larger rockets capable of hauling tens of thousands of pounds to orbit, Rocket Lab builds lightweight launch vehicles designed solely to lift small satellites — as compact as a loaf of bread or a refrigerator — to space.

Though the company has been headquartered in the United States since its inception, all of its prior launches have taken place at a pad near Ahuriri Point, located on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

But Rocket Lab has sought for years to bring some of its launch operations stateside, in part so that it can provide services to the US government and military, which make up a lucrative slice of the global launch business customer base.

The NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island in Virginia’s Accomack County is one of the oldest launch sites in the world. The first rocket flight took off from the site in 1945, before the creation of the space agency. More recently, the facility has been home to Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, which launches cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station.

By Jackie Wattles.

[robpegoraro]

The D.C. area's no-flying-needed way to see a space launch

Tuesday night treated me to the first space launch I’d seen in person–meaning close enough to hear it–since 2018. And unlike the previous three launches that I have been privileged to experience from that close, this one did not require a flight to Florida. Instead, only a three-hour drive lay between my house and Virginia Space’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport, hosted at NASA’s Wallops Flight…

[michaelgabrill]

NASAs Wallops Flight Facility to Launch Student Experiments

More than 50 student and faculty teams are sending experiments into space as part of NASA’s RockOn and RockSat-C student flight programs. The annual student mission, “RockOn,” is scheduled to launch from Wallops Island, Virginia, on a Terrier-Improved Orion sounding rocket Thursday, June 20, with a launch window that opens at 5:30 a.m. EDT. An […] from NASA https://ift.tt/XUPOGWe

[nasa]

Tiny BurstCube's Tremendous Travelogue

Meet BurstCube! This shoebox-sized satellite is designed to study the most powerful explosions in the cosmos, called gamma-ray bursts. It detects gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light.

BurstCube may be small, but it had a huge journey to get to space.

First, BurstCube was designed and built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Here you can see Julie Cox, an early career engineer, working on BurstCube’s gamma-ray detecting instrument in the Small Satellite Lab at Goddard.

BurstCube is a type of spacecraft called a CubeSat. These tiny missions give early career engineers and scientists the chance to learn about mission development — as well as do cool science!

Then, after assembling the spacecraft, the BurstCube team took it on the road to conduct a bunch of tests to determine how it will operate in space. Here you can see another early career engineer, Kate Gasaway, working on BurstCube at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.

She and other members of the team used a special facility there to map BurstCube’s magnetic field. This will help them know where the instrument is pointing when it’s in space.

The next stop was back at Goddard, where the team put BurstCube in a vacuum chamber. You can see engineers Franklin Robinson, Elliot Schwartz, and Colton Cohill lowering the lid here. They changed the temperature inside so it was very hot and then very cold. This mimics the conditions BurstCube will experience in space as it orbits in and out of sunlight.

Then, up on a Goddard rooftop, the team — including early career engineer Justin Clavette — tested BurstCube’s GPS. This so-called open-sky test helps ensure the team can locate the satellite once it’s in orbit.

The next big step in BurstCube’s journey was a flight to Houston! The team packed it up in a special case and took it to the airport. Of course, BurstCube got the window seat!

Once in Texas, the BurstCube team joined their partners at Nanoracks (part of Voyager Space) to get their tiny spacecraft ready for launch. They loaded the satellite into a rectangular frame called a deployer, along with another small satellite called SNoOPI (Signals of Opportunity P-band Investigation). The deployer is used to push spacecraft into orbit from the International Space Station.

From Houston, BurstCube traveled to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, where it launched on SpaceX’s 30th commercial resupply servicing mission on March 21, 2024. BurstCube traveled to the station along with some other small satellites, science experiments, as well as a supply of fresh fruit and coffee for the astronauts.

A few days later, the mission docked at the space station, and the astronauts aboard began unloading all the supplies, including BurstCube!

And finally, on April 18, 2024, BurstCube was released into orbit. The team will spend a month getting the satellite ready to search the skies for gamma-ray bursts. Then finally, after a long journey, this tiny satellite can embark on its big mission!

BurstCube wouldn’t be the spacecraft it is today without the input of many early career engineers and scientists. Are you interested in learning more about how you can participate in a mission like this one? There are opportunities for students in middle and high school as well as college!

Keep up on BurstCube’s journey with NASA Universe on X and Facebook. And make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[spacefrontier]

Little Joe 1 on the launch pad at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. August 21, 1959.

Little Joe 1 was meant to test the launch escape system for the Mercury spacecraft during a Max Q abort, when the spacecraft would be encountering the most stress during a launch. The launch escape system fired prematurely, 30 minutes before the scheduled launch of Little Joe 1. The cause was linked to an electrical fault in a coil designed to protect biological specimens from a rapid abort.

NASA NASA SP-4201, p. 208

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

First results from 2021 rocket launch shed light on aurora’s birth

Newly published results from a 2021 experiment led by a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist have begun to reveal the particle-level processes that create the type of auroras that dance rapidly across the sky.

The Kinetic-scale Energy and momentum Transport experiment — KiNET-X — lifted off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on May 16, 2021, in the final minutes of the final night of the nine-day launch window.

UAF professor Peter Delamere’s analysis of the experiment’s results was published Nov. 19 in Physics of Plasmas.

“The dazzling lights are extremely complicated,” Delamere said. “There’s a lot happening in there, and there’s a lot happening in the Earth’s space environment that gives rise to what we observe.

“Understanding causality in the system is extremely difficult, because we don’t know exactly what’s happening in space that’s giving rise to the light that we observe in the aurora,” he said. “KiNET-X was a highly successful experiment that will reveal more of the aurora’s secrets.”

Want more? Read the dramatic story of the KiNET-X mission in 12 short installments that include videos, animations and additional photographs.

One of NASA’s largest sounding rockets soared over the Atlantic Ocean into the ionosphere and released two canisters of barium thermite. The canisters were then detonated, one at about 249 miles high and one 90 seconds later on the downward trajectory at about 186 miles, near Bermuda. The resulting clouds were monitored on the ground at Bermuda and by a NASA research aircraft.

The experiment aimed to replicate, on a minute scale, an environment in which the low energy of the solar wind becomes the high energy that creates the rapidly moving and shimmering curtains known as the discrete aurora. Through KiNET-X, Delamere and colleagues on the experiment are closer to understanding how electrons are accelerated.

“We generated energized electrons,” Delamere said. “We just didn’t generate enough of them to make an aurora, but the fundamental physics associated with electron energization was present in the experiment.”

The experiment aimed to create an Alfvén wave, a type of wave that exists in magnetized plasmas such as those found in the sun’s outer atmosphere, Earth’s magnetosphere and elsewhere in the solar system. Plasmas — a form of matter composed largely of charged particles — also can be created in laboratories and experiments such as KiNET-X.

Alfvén waves originate when disturbances in plasma affect the magnetic field. Plasma disturbances can be caused in a variety of ways, such as through the sudden injection of particles from solar flares or the interaction of two plasmas with different densities.

KiNET-X created an Alfvén wave by disturbing the ambient plasma with the injection of barium into the far upper atmosphere.

Sunlight converted the barium into an ionized plasma. The two plasma clouds interacted, creating the Alfvén wave.

That Alfvén wave instantly created electric field lines parallel to the planet’s magnetic field lines. And, as theorized, that electric field significantly accelerated the electrons on the magnetic field lines.

“It showed that the barium plasma cloud coupled with, and transferred energy and momentum to, the ambient plasma for a brief moment,” Delamere said. 

The transfer manifested as a small beam of accelerated barium electrons heading toward Earth along the magnetic field line. The beam is visible only in the experiment’s magnetic field line data.

“That’s analogous to an auroral beam of electrons,” Delamere said.

He calls it the experiment’s “golden data point.”

Analysis of the beam, visible only as a varying shades of green, blue and yellow pixels in Delamere’s data imagery, can help scientists learn what is happening to the particles to create the dancing northern lights.

The results so far show a successful project, one that can even allow more information to be gleaned from its predecessor experiments.

“It’s a question of trying to piece together the whole picture using all of the data products and numerical simulations,” Delamere said.

Three UAF students doing their doctoral research at the UAF Geophysical Institute also participated. Matthew Blandin supported optical operations at Wallops Flight Facility, Kylee Branning operated cameras on a NASA Gulfstream III aircraft out of Langley Research Center, also in Virginia, and Nathan Barnes assisted with computer modeling in Fairbanks..

The experiment also included researchers and equipment from Dartmouth College, the University of New Hampshire and Clemson University.

[spacenutspod]

The NASA Aircraft Management Advisory Board (AMAB), which manages the agency’s aircraft fleet, has decided to relocate the agency’s P-3 aircraft at Wallops to Langley Research Center. The decision is part of a long-running, NASA-wide aircraft enterprise-management activity to consolidate the aircraft fleet where feasible and achieve greater operational efficiencies while reducing our infrastructure footprint. We all recognize this is a tough decision impacting a stellar, mission-focused team that has achieved so much over the years. I myself started my career in the Wallops Aircraft Office some 38 years ago, and my time there was foundational for all I’ve done in my career. My top priority is to work with the Aircraft Office team on a transition plan, and importantly, to carry out an effective and safe transition of the aircraft to NASA Langley, and to ensure the long term sustainability of NASA’s P-3 capability in support of the airborne science community. The Wallops aircraft office transition may take 18 to 24 months or more to accomplish. A specialized team is forming to ensure a smooth transition, and in the meantime, we continue to support airborne science from the facility. With NASA’s flying mission at Wallops relocating to Langley, we recognize that the hangars and airfield at Wallops are true regional assets with great potential. NASA will issue a request for information (RFI) to identify potential customers/interest in assuming responsibility for Wallops’ airfield operations. It’s in the best interest of NASA and the region to explore other uses and opportunities for the Wallops airfield, and this RFI will help NASA evaluate future options. There is no timeline for the RFI at this time – we will provide updates as more information becomes available. What we do know – and are fully committed to – is ensuring the airfield remains an important resource for continued use by our customers, such as the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Force Command Field Carrier Landing Practice program. We’ve supported Navy flight operations at Wallops for more than 10 years and that support continues. I want to assure everyone that Wallops’ future is bright and secure – the facility has a diverse mission set of orbital and suborbital operations and a whole host of government and commercial customers expanding operations on-site. We expect Wallops’ launch cadence to increase to upward of 50 launches per year by 2030 as the facility takes on a growing portfolio of hypersonics work as well as support to commercial spaceflight. Without a doubt, the Wallops Aircraft Team is the best in the agency. They’ve had a massively successful run of operations recently with the ARCSIX missions in Greenland to supporting student research flights on both coasts and cargo transport missions all over the world to places such as Antarctica and India. I am committed to working with every member of the team on a way forward as we transition our flight operations and seek new opportunities. We will continue to communicate with you and provide information on the transition plans as they become available. All the best, Dave David L. PierceWallops Director

[cetaceous]

Launch of a Northrop Grumman Antares Rocket with a Cygnus Resupply Spacecraft Onboard Pad-0A, NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Virginia image credit: Aubrey Gemignani/NASA

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Passant Rabie

Published: April 11, 2023

When Dr. Makenzie Lystrup was sworn in as the new director of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center last week, she didn’t take her oath of office on the Bible or the U.S. Constitution, but rather on a tome revered by space enthusiasts everywhere: Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot.

The book, published in 1994, is named after an iconic image of Earth, snapped by the Voyager I probe, that depicts the planet as a small speck smothered by the emptiness of space. That photo inspired astronomer Carl Sagan to write: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” For many, the book serves as a reminder of humanity’s place in the universe and the need to preserve our home planet, which makes it similar to holy scripture for a newly appointed NASA director.

On Thursday, when Lystrup chose to place her left hand on a copy of Sagan’s book while being sworn in by NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a photographer captured the moment, and NASA Goddard’s social media shared the image.

The constitution does not require that government officials be sworn in using a particular text, just that they “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” Most U.S. politicians and officials end up using the Bible.

But over the years, many officeholders have improvised while taking their oath. In 2018, Mariah Parker was sworn in as a member of the Athens-Clarke County commissioners with her hand placed on a copy of “The Autobiography of Malcom X.” When former U.S. ambassador to Switzerland Suzi LeVine took her oath in 2014, she put a hand on her Kindle. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to be elected to Congress, took his oath in 2007 using the Quran.

Sagan is a revered figure in the space sciences community for his pioneering contributions to space exploration. “Like many astronomers and space scientists, my passion started with watching Carl Sagan’s ‘Cosmos’ on public television as a child,” Lystrup, who is a planetary scientist like Sagan, said in an emailed statement. “Sagan worked very hard to make science accessible and meaningful to everyone, and ‘Pale Blue Dot’ emphasizes the importance of exploring our universe and understanding our home planet.” 

“Given its personal significance to me and how its message resonates with the work we do at NASA Goddard on behalf of the world, it felt apropos to include it in the ceremony,” she added.

Lystrup will be the first female center director of the Goddard Space Flight Center, which includes a primary campus in Greenbelt, Maryland, as well as Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, the Katherine Johnson Independent Verification & Validation Facility in West Virginia, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the White Sands Complex in New Mexico, and the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Texas.

Goddard is home to the nation’s largest concentration of scientists, engineers and technologists dedicated to Earth and space science, according to NASA.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 10.28 (after 1920)

1922 – Italian fascists led by Benito Mussolini march on Rome and take over the Italian government. 1928 – Indonesia Raya, now the national anthem of Indonesia, is first played during the Second Indonesian Youth Congress. 1940 – World War II: Greece rejects Italy's ultimatum. Italy invades Greece through Albania a few hours later. 1942 – The Alaska Highway first connects Alaska to the North American railway network at Dawson Creek in Canada. 1948 – Paul Hermann Müller is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the insecticidal properties of DDT. 1948 – Ecological disaster in Donora, Pennsylvania. 1949 – An Air France Lockheed Constellation crashes in the Azores, killing all 48 people on board. 1956 – Hungarian Revolution: A de facto ceasefire comes into effect between armed revolutionaries and Soviet troops, who begin to withdraw from Budapest. Communist officials and facilities come under attack by revolutionaries. 1954 – Aeroflot Flight 136 crashes near Krasnoyarsk, killing 19. 1958 – John XXIII is elected Pope. 1962 – The Cuban Missile Crisis ends and Premier Nikita Khrushchev orders the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. 1965 – Pope Paul VI promulgates Nostra aetate, by which the Roman Catholic Church officially recognizes the legitimacy of non-Christian faiths. 1971 – Prospero becomes the only British satellite to be launched by a British rocket. 1982 – The Spanish general election begins fourteen years of rule by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party. 1990 – Georgia holds its only free election under Soviet rule. 1995 – The Baku Metro fire sees 289 people killed and 270 injured. 2006 – A funeral service takes place at the Bykivnia graves for Ukrainians who were killed by the Soviet secret police. 2007 – Cristina Fernández de Kirchner becomes the first directly elected female President of Argentina. 2009 – The 28 October 2009 Peshawar bombing kills 117 and wounds 213. 2009 – NASA successfully launches the Ares I-X mission, the only rocket launch for its short-lived Constellation program. 2009 – US President Barack Obama signs the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. 2013 – Five people are killed and 38 are injured after a car crashes into barriers at Tiananmen Square in China. 2014 – A rocket carrying NASA's Cygnus CRS Orb-3 resupply mission to the International Space Station explodes seconds after taking off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Wallops Island, Virginia. 2018 – Jair Bolsonaro is elected president of Brazil with 57 million votes, with Workers' Party candidate Fernando Haddad as the runner-up. It is the first time in 16 years that a Workers' Party candidate is not elected president.

[michaelgabrill]

NASA Salisbury U. Enact Agreement for Workforce Development

NASA and Salisbury University (SU) in Maryland signed a collaborative Space Act Agreement Thursday, March 28, 2024, opening new opportunities at the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia for students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. The agreement forges a formal partnership to identify research and engineering projects and activities at Wallops designed […] from NASA https://ift.tt/D3Z7IGB

[monterplant]

NASA Wallops to Support Sounding Rocket Launch for U.S. Navy Fleet Training

A rocket-propelled target is scheduled for launch July 27-28, 2024 from NASA’s launch range at the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia in support of a U.S. Navy Fleet Training exercise. No real-time launch status updates will be available. The launch will not be livestreamed nor will launch status updates be provided during the countdown. The […] Continue reading NASA Wallops to Support Sounding…

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

NASA scientific balloon flights to lift off from Antarctica

NASA's Scientific Balloon Program has returned to Antarctica's icy expanse to kick off the annual Antarctic Long-Duration Balloon Campaign, where two balloon flights will carry a total of nine missions to near space. Launch operations will begin mid-December from the agency's Long Duration Balloon camp located near the U.S. National Science Foundation's McMurdo Station on the Ross Ice Shelf.

"Antarctica is our cornerstone location for long-duration balloon missions, and we always look forward to heading back to 'the ice,'" said Andrew Hamilton, acting chief of NASA's Balloon Program Office at the agency's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. "It's a tremendous effort to stage a campaign like this in such a remote location, and we are grateful for the support provided to us by the U.S. National Science Foundation, New Zealand, and the U.S. Air Force."

This year's Antarctic campaign includes investigations in astrophysics, space biology, heliospheric research, and upper atmospheric research, along with technology demonstrations. The campaign's two primary missions include:

GAPS (General Anti-Particle Spectrometer), led by Columbia University in New York, is an experiment to detect anti-matter particles produced by dark matter interactions. The anti-particles stemming from these interactions in our galaxy can only be observed from a suborbital platform or in space, since Earth's atmosphere shields us from the cosmic radiation. GAPS aims to provide an unprecedented level of sensitivity to certain classes of anti-particles, allowing the exploration of a currently unexplored energy regime of the elusive dark matter.

Salter Test Flight Universal, led by NASA's Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, will test and validate long-duration balloon and subsystems, while supporting several piggyback missions on the flight.

Piggyback missions, or smaller payloads, riding along with the Salter Test Flight Universal mission include:

MARSBOx (Microbes in Atmosphere for Radiation, Survival, and Biological Outcomes Experiments), led by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, will expose melanized fungus, called Aspergillus niger, to the stratosphere's extreme radiation and temperature fluctuations, low atmospheric pressure, and absence of water—conditions much like the surface of Mars. Knowledge of how this fungus adapts to protect itself in this harsh environment could lead to the development of treatments to protect astronauts from high radiation exposure.

EMIDSS-6 (Experimental Module for Iterative Design of Satellite Subsystems 6), led by National Polytechnical Institute − Mexico, is a technological platform with experimental design and operational validation of instrumentation that will collect and store data from the stratospheric environment to contribute to the study of climate change.

SPARROW-6 (Sensor Package for Attitude, Rotation, and Relative Observable Winds—6), led by NASA's Balloon Program Office at NASA Wallops, will demonstrate relative wind measurements using an ultrasonic anemometer designed for the balloon float environment.

WALRUSS (Wallops Atmospheric Light Radiation and Ultraviolet Spectrum Sensor), led by the Balloon Program Office at NASA Wallops, is a technology demonstration of a sensor package capable of measuring the total ultraviolet wavelength spectrum and ozone concentration.

INDIGO (INterim Dynamics Instrumentation for Gondolas), led by the Balloon Program Office at NASA Wallops, is a data recorder meant to measure the shock, rotation, and attitude of the gondola during the launch, float, and landing phases of flight. Data will be used to improve understanding of the dynamics of flight and to inform the design of future components and hardware.

The remaining two piggyback missions are led by finalists of NASA's FLOATing DRAGON (Formulate, Lift, Observe, And Testing; Data Recovery And Guided On-board Node) Balloon Challenge, sponsored by the Balloon Program Office at NASA Wallops and managed by the National Institute of Aerospace.

The challenge was created for student teams to design, build, and fly an autonomous aerial vehicle, deployed from a gondola during a high-altitude balloon flight. The teams' student-built data vaults will be safely dropped from around 120,000 feet with the capability to target a specific landing point on the ground to manage risk. The missions participating in the Antarctic campaign are Purdue University's Purdue DRAGONfly, and University of Notre Dame's IRIS v3.

NASA's zero-pressure balloons, used in the Antarctic campaign, are made of a thin plastic film and are capable of lifting up to 8,000 pounds of payload and equipment to altitudes above 99.8% of Earth's atmosphere. Zero-pressure balloons, which typically have a shorter flight duration from the loss of gas during the day-to-night cycle, can support long-duration missions in polar regions during summer.

The constant daylight of Antarctica's austral summer and stable stratospheric wind conditions allow the balloon missions to remain in near space for days to weeks, gathering large amounts of scientific data as they circle the continent.

TOP IMAGE: A scientific balloon is inflated during NASA’s 2023 Antarctic campaign in McMurdo, Antarctica. Credit: NASA/Scott Battaion

LOWER IMAGE: NASA’s Long Duration Balloon camp is located about eight miles from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Station on Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf. Credit: NASA/Scott Battaion

[spacenutspod]

Wallops Island VA (SPX) Oct 18, 2024 NASA's globetrotting C-130 Hercules team is carrying out a cargo transport mission to Bengaluru, India, in support of the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) mission. The C-130 departed from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, Tuesday, Oct. 15, to embark on the multi-leg, multi-day journey. The flight path will take the aircraft coast to coast within the United States, acros