StarSeekers

Our Webb Space Telescope captures a cosmic ring, the team behind our upcoming Psyche mission, and the unique thing about a star that was ripped apart by a black hole … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!

We know the Moon contains water, but, could future astronauts access and make use of it? That’s the goal. At NASA, we’re actively trying to answer that question. Once it lands at the lunar south pole, our PRIME-1 — Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1 – will robotically sample and analyze ice from beneath the lunar surface, contributing to our search for water on the Moon

After launching to the International Space Station on March 2, 2023, NASA's SpaceX Crew-6 mission is wrapping up its time in orbit, with a return to Earth in early September 2023. NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg, UAE (United Arab Emirates) astronaut Sultan Alneyadi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev spent their months on the orbiting lab conducting scientific investigations and technology demonstrations, including running a student robotic challenge, studying plant genetic adaptations to space, and monitoring human health in microgravity to prepare for exploration beyond low Earth orbit and to benefit life on Earth. The astronauts also released Saskatchewan's first satellite, which tests a new radiation detection and protection system derived from melanin.

Join the journey as NASA’s Psyche mission team prepares for a targeted Oct. 5, 2023, launch to explore a unique metallic asteroid orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter. The asteroid, likely made largely of nickel-iron metal mixed with rock, could contain metal from the core of a planetesimal (the building block of an early rocky planet) and may offer a unique window into the violent history of collisions and accretion that created the terrestrial planets like Earth. Arizona State University leads the Psyche mission. JPL, which is managed by Caltech for NASA, is responsible for the mission’s overall management, system engineering, integration and test, and mission operations. Maxar Technologies in Palo Alto, California, provided the high-power solar electric propulsion spacecraft chassis.

The first mission to the Trojan asteroids, a prelaunch milestone for our Artemis I mission, and highlighting a few of our NASA centers … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!

Astronaut Loral O’Hara is making her first spaceflight after selection as part of the 2017 NASA astronaut class. The Texas native earned a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, and a Master of Science degree in aeronautics and astronautics from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Prior to joining NASA, her work focused on the engineering and operations of deep-ocean research submersibles and robots. At the time of her selection in June 2017, O’Hara was a research engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where she spent eight years working on the engineering and operations of underwater vehicles such as the human-occupied research submersible Alvin and the remotely operated vehicle Jason. O’Hara will launch to the space station on Sept. 15 for a mission with Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub. She will join Expedition 69/70 as a flight engineer aboard the space station.