OrbitalHub

NASA dicit:

In a generic brick building on the northwestern edge of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center campus in Greenbelt, Maryland, thousands of computers packed in racks the size of vending machines hum in a deafening chorus of data crunching. Day and night, they spit out five quadrillion calculations per second. Known collectively as the Discover supercomputer, these machines are tasked with running sophisticated climate models to predict Earth’s future climate.

But now, they’re also sussing out something much farther away: whether any of the more than 4,000 curiously weird planets beyond our solar system — or exoplanets — discovered in the past two decades could have the ingredients necessary to support life.

Video credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/LK Ward (USRA): Lead Producer/Claire Andreoli (NASA/GSFC): Lead Public Affairs Officer/Lonnie Shekhtman (ADNET): Lead Writer/Alex Kekesi (GST): Lead Visualizer/Anthony DelGenio (NASA/GSFC GISS): Lead Scientist/Avi Mandell (NASA/GSFC): Lead Scientist/Michael J. Way (NASA/GSFC GISS): Scientist/Chris Smith (USRA): Animator/Aaron E. Lepsch (ADNET): Technical Support/Music: “Machine Learning” by Jon Cotton and Ben Niblett; “No Wave” by Julien Vignon; “The Missing Star” by Matthew Charles Gilbert Davidson; all from Universal Production Music

Wikipedia dicit:

The Boeing Starliner (CST-100 – Crew Space Transportation-100) is a crew capsule manufactured by Boeing as its participation in NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. It is planned to transport crew to the International Space Station (ISS) and to private space stations such as the proposed Bigelow Aerospace Commercial Space Station.

The capsule has a diameter of 4.56 meters (15.0 ft), which is slightly larger than the Apollo command module and smaller than the Orion capsule. The Boeing Starliner holds a crew of up to seven people and is being designed to be able to remain in-orbit for up to seven months with reusability of up to ten missions. It is designed to be compatible with four launch vehicles: Atlas V, Delta IV, Falcon 9, and Vulcan.

In the first phase of its CCDev program NASA awarded Boeing US$18 million in 2010 for preliminary development of the spacecraft. In the second phase Boeing was awarded a $93 million contract in 2011 for further spacecraft development. On 3 August 2012, NASA announced the award of $460 million to Boeing to continue work on the CST-100 under the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) Program. On 16 September 2014, NASA selected the Boeing CST-100, along with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, for the Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) program, with an award of $4.2 billion. On 30 July 2019, NASA had no specific dates for Commercial Crew launches, stating that this was under review pending a leadership change.

The Boeing Starliner Orbital Flight Test (uncrewed test flight) launched with the Atlas V N22, on 20 December 2019 from SLC-41 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. During the test, the Starliner experienced a timing anomaly that precluded a docking with the International Space Station. Two days after launch, on 22 December 2019 at 07:58 EST (12:58 UTC), with the successful landing at White Sands, New Mexico, the Boeing Starliner Calypso became the first-ever crew-capable space capsule to make a land-based touchdown in the United States.

Video credit: United Launch Alliance

They will always be remembered…

Apollo 1 (January 27, 1967)

Virgil “Gus” Grissom – Commander, Edward White – Command Pilot, Roger Chaffee – Pilot

STS-51 L (January 28, 1986)

Francis R. Scobee – Commander, Michael J. Smith – Pilot, Judith A. Resnik – Mission Specialist 1, Ellison Onizuka – Mission Specialist 2, Ronald E. McNair – Mission Specialist 3, Gregory B. Jarvis – Payload Specialist 1, Sharon Christa McAuliffe – Payload Specialist 2

STS-107 (February 1, 2003)

Rick D. Husband – Commander, William C. McCool – Pilot, Michael P. Anderson – Payload Commander, David M. Brown – Mission Specialist 1, Kalpana Chawla – Mission Specialist 2, Laurel Clark – Mission Specialist 3, Ilan Ramon – Payload Specialist 1

Video credit: NASA

NASA dicit:

EVA Officer Sandy Fletcher narrates an animation showing Expedition 61 Flight Engineers Jessica Meir and Christina Koch of NASA teaming up for their second spacewalk together. They venture outside the Quest airlock of the International Space Station for a spacewalk to continue the replacement of aging nickel-hydrogen batteries with new lithium-ion batteries on the port truss of the orbital outpost. The spacewalk is the third in a series of four spacewalks to upgrade the station’s power systems on the port truss that began with two days of work outside the station last October. It is the 225th spacewalk in support of space station assembly and maintenance, the second spacewalk in Meir’s career and the fifth for Koch.

Video credit: NASA

NASA dicit:

Earth’s global surface temperatures in 2019 ranked second-warmest since 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Global temperatures in 2019 were 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer than the late 19th century, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. 2019’s temperatures were second only to those of 2016 and continued the planet’s long-term warming trend: the five warmest years on the instrumental record have been the five last years.

Video credit: NASA Goddard

NASA dicit:

The local impacts of the Australian bushfires have been devastating to property and life in Australia while producing extreme air quality impacts throughout the region. As smoke from the massive fires has interacted with the global weather, the transport of smoke plumes around the global have accelerated through deep vertical transport into the upper troposphere and even the lowermost stratosphere, leading to long-range transport around the globe. The smoke from these bushfires will travel across the Southern Ocean completing a global circumnavigation back around to Australia and is particularly pronounced across the southern Pacific Ocean out to South America.

Video credit: NASA