Heena Sharma Blog

NASA launched a satellite on Thursday night to explore the mysterious, dynamic region where air meets space. The satellite called Icon, short for Ionospheric Connection Explorer rocketed into orbit following a two-year delay. It was dropped from a plane flying over the Atlantic off the Florida coast. Five seconds after the satellite's release, the attached Pegasus rocket ignited, sending Icon on its way. The ionosphere is the charged part of the upper atmosphere extending several hundred miles (kilometers) up. It's in constant flux as space weather bombards it from above and Earth weather from below, sometimes disrupting radio communications. "This protected layer, it's the top of our atmosphere. It's our frontier with space," said NASA's heliophysics division director, Nicola Fox. Fox said there's too much going on in this region to be caused by just the sun. Hurricanes, tornadoes and other extreme weather conditions on Earth are al...

I still remember a cartoon in a newspaper in July 1969, just before the first Apollo moon landing. It showed the ground crew reminding the astronauts as they boarded their rocket, “Don’t forget to bring back some rock!” This was a nod to an old holiday cliché – people who went to the seaside were often asked to bring back some “rock”, referring to rock candy. It wasn’t very funny, but it does demonstrate that, once the race against the Soviets was won, the point of it all was to find out about the moon’s geology. The scientific value of landing on the moon would have been diminished without studies to establish the context of the landing sites. The primary consideration was to touch down somewhere safe, but rocks collected from these places would have conveyed much less information had effort not gone into working out the nature of, and more importantly the relationships between, the rock units from which the samples were collected. This was done by making detailed geological...

The first person to set foot on Mars is likely to be a woman, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has said. While Bridenstine did not identify a specific person, he said that women are at the forefront of the US space agency's upcoming plans. Asked if a woman will go to the Moon for the first time, Bridenstine said "The answer is absolutely. In fact, it is likely to be a woman, the first next person on the Moon." "It is also true that the first person on Mars is likely to be a woman," Bridenstine said during a recent interview on the science and technology radio talk show "Science Friday." NASA recently announced that it will have its first all-female spacewalk at the end of the month, when astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch will get to float around in space. "We have the first all-female spacewalk happening this month at the end of March, which is of course, National Women's Month. So NASA is committed to making sure t...

The Parker Solar Probe carries a lineup of instruments to study the Sun both remotely and in situ, or directly Current Affairs News : NASA 's Parker Solar Probe , mankind's first mission to 'touch' the Sun, has been moved to its launch pad and is on schedule take off next week, the US space agencies said. The car-sized spacecraft will travel directly into the Sun's atmosphere, about four million miles from its surface - and more than seven times closer than any spacecraft has come before, thanks to its innovative Thermal Protection System. The mission, targeted to launch on August 11, will perform the closest-ever observations of a star when it travels through the Sun's outer atmosphere, called the corona. It will rely on measurements and imaging to revolutionise our understanding of the corona and how processes there ultimately affect near-Earth space. The probe was moved on July 30 to Space the Launch Complex 37 on Cape Canaveral Ai...