[Spacetalk] https://www.nasa.gov/index.html; https://spaceflightnow.com

Mon Nov 12 08:30:28 CST 2018

Hi all,
 Good morning from Florida….getting ready to leave for Norway and Denmark this evening….still have to pack and get everything together to give to schools….last week I was at Waterleaf Elementary in Jacksonville….it was awesome, so much fun to visit kids in the US…I want to thank Stefanie for all her amazing effort in setting up the schedule so I could spend as much time as possible with the kids, eating lunch with them was very special…on the 20th of Nov at 6pm I will be at The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo, if any of you can make it, it will be awesome to see you…I will be in Kolding from Nov 22nd-24th and in Sonderborg November 26th-27th-28th...

For those of you who signed up to ride to Mars on the Insight Lander mission…we will be arriving this month, Nov 26th…NASA TV will cover the landing live…as well as continuous feeds …I hope you can share this with your students…

We have to remember to always do our best, enjoy everything we do, live in the present, make each day special, let those we care about most know, smile and have fun... J  J  love ya, Gabe

Five Things to Know About InSight's Mars Landing

This is an illustration showing a simulated view of NASA's InSight lander about to land on the surface of Mars. This view shows the underside of the spacecraft.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Every Mars landing is a knuckle-whitening feat of engineering. But each attempt has its own quirks based on where a spacecraft is going and what kind of science the mission intends to gather.  On Nov. 26, NASA will try to safely set a new spacecraft on Mars. InSight is a lander dedicated to studying the deep interior of the planet – the first mission ever to do so. Here are a few things to know about InSight's landing.

Landing on Mars is hard Only about 40 percent of the missions ever sent to Mars – by any space agency – have been successful. The U.S. is the only nation whose missions have survived a Mars landing. The thin atmosphere – just 1 percent of Earth's – means that there's little friction to slow down a spacecraft. Despite that, NASA has had a long and successful track record at Mars. Since 1965, it has flown by, orbited, landed on and roved across the surface of the Red Planet.
InSight uses tried-and-true technology In 2008, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, successfully landed the Phoenix spacecraft at Mars' North Pole. InSight is based on the Phoenix spacecraft, both of which were built by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver. Despite tweaks to its heat shield and parachute, the overall landing design is still very much the same: After separating from a cruise stage, an aeroshell descends through the atmosphere. The parachute and retrorockets slow the spacecraft down, and suspended legs absorb some shock from the touchdown.

InSight is landing on "the biggest parking lot on Mars” One of the benefits of InSight's science instruments is that they can record equally valuable data regardless of where they are on the planet. That frees the mission from needing anything more complicated than a flat, solid surface (ideally with few boulders and rocks). For the mission's team, the landing site at Elysium Planitia is sometimes thought as "the biggest parking lot on Mars."
InSight was built to land in a dust storm InSight’s engineers have built a tough spacecraft, able to touch down safely in a dust storm if it needs to. The spacecraft's heat shield is designed to be thick enough to withstand being "sandblasted" by dust. Its parachute has suspension lines that were tested to be stronger than Phoenix's, in case it faces more air resistance due to the atmospheric conditions expected during a dust storm. The entry, descent and landing sequence also has some flexibility to handle shifting weather. The mission team will be receiving daily weather updates from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in the days before landing so that they can tweak when InSight's parachute deploys and when it uses radar to find the Martian surface.
After landing, InSight will provide new science about rocky planets  InSight will teach us about the interior of planets like our own. The mission team hopes that by studying the deep interior of Mars, we can learn how other rocky worlds, including Earth and the Moon, formed. Our home planet and Mars were molded from the same primordial stuff more than 4.5 billion years ago but then became quite different. Why didn’t they share the same fate? When it comes to rocky planets, we’ve only studied one in detail: Earth. By comparing Earth's interior to that of Mars, InSight's team members hope to better understand our solar system. What they learn might even aid the search for Earth-like exoplanets, narrowing down which ones might be able to support life. So while InSight is a Mars mission, it’s also much more than a Mars mission. You can read more about how the science of the mission is unique here <https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7067>. A press kit <https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/press_kits/insight> released today includes additional information on the mission. JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supports spacecraft operations for the mission. A number of European partners, including France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS <https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/mission/instruments/seis/>) instrument, with significant contributions from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Switzerland, Imperial College and Oxford University in the United Kingdom, and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3 <https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/mission/instruments/hp3/>) instrument, with significant contributions from the Polish Space Agency (CBK) and Astronika in Poland. Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) supplied the wind sensors.
Read more about InSight here:

https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/ <https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/>

Aurora…still a goal to see….make sure you click on the link below to see more amazing pictures….
'Infinite Wonder': Photos from Scott Kelly's Year in Space Mission <http://click.emails.purch.com/?qs=15bc5e0f9f4f71a3a1f0d545aace239afcf1b19024ac006eabc8e87021f93df5370515b0d28be523517d3ce1d3ad95d371d9ed13ff854987b9c3cc80b5aa4a42>

Retired NASA astronaut Scott Kelly has released a photobook, "Infinite Wonder," chronicling his 340 days on the International Space Station. Here are some selections from Kelly's time there. [Read more about the book and Kelly's thoughts on spaceflight here <https://www.space.com/42374-scott-kelly-infinite-wonder-space-station-book.html>.]  In this image, Kelly pointed out how the aurora's vivid light reflects on the bottom of the International Space Station its robotic arm, Canadarm2.

Dreaming of Mars Since Age 13, Astronaut Abby Inspires Women in STEM <http://click.emails.purch.com/?qs=15bc5e0f9f4f71a3dcc3ae5d2f26f0733d68a4bdeefc46a394757def5a175c66a156e4ae87df78ccd80bdd76525bb1f2d1a810d262719e0785bb719ac00bc819>

Abigail Harrison, also known as Astronaut Abby, is a public speaker and undergraduate studying astrobiology with the hopes of someday traveling to space.
Credit: Abigail Harrison/Astronaut Abby <https://www.astronautabby.com/about/>/The Mars Generation
By aiming for Mars <https://www.space.com/47-mars-the-red-planet-fourth-planet-from-the-sun.html>, 21-year-old Abigail Harrison hopes to inspire young women on Earth to pursue their own dreams. Harrison, also known as Astronaut Abby, serves as an advocate for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and has been publicly aspiring to be the first person to visit Mars since she was 13 years old. Ahead of National STEM Day (Nov. 8), she talked with Space.com about college life, role models and, as she put it, dipping one's feet into the solar system. This week, Harrison registered for her final semester at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where she is set to graduate in 2019. Before discussing her impressive résumé, Harrison cited her earliest educational milestone: being a student of her "passionate" 5th-grade public school teacher in Minneapolis. ['Life-Changing Experience': Teacher-Astronaut Gives Students a Lesson About Space <https://www.space.com/41025-teacher-astronaut-inspires-nyc-students-from-space.html>]

NASA's Sun-Kissing Solar Probe Survives 1st Flyby of Our Star <http://click.emails.purch.com/?qs=1cdd031777482a7d035d062b3adb299a0f3328161ea7aefd19adb1cd865417418e695a92fecd4bc42df8de9093f900eb0c525a400539b110dd2dbba13613a017>

An artist's illustration showing NASA's Parker Solar Probe approaching the sun. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben
The spacecraft zoomed within 15 million miles (24 million kilometers) of the sun <https://www.space.com/15706-sun-quiz-solar-showdown.html> on Monday (Nov. 5) — far closer than any mission had ever gotten before. And on Wednesday afternoon (Nov. 7), the probe phoned home, telling its controllers that it's in good health and continuing to collect science data. "Parker Solar Probe was designed to take care of itself and its precious payload during this close approach, with no control from us on Earth — and now we know it succeeded," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate at agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. [The Parker Solar Probe's Mission to the Sun in Pictures <https://www.space.com/37037-nasa-parker-solar-probe-mission-pictures.html>]

Spectacular 'Dragon's Eye' on Jupiter Spotted by NASA's Juno <http://click.emails.purch.com/?qs=c058df9b7d94147aa8d4c87721da48e7cf9653b3e26e3d80c6a68c95e7a880a271d63787b269ffa26010fdeff43fa496a9d874ccad21a969a2670c35ad1976a1>

The Juno probe studying Jupiter snapped this image of the gas giant's clouds on Oct. 29, 2018.
Credit: Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran/NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS

NASA is back to one of its favorite hobbies — otherworldly cloud gazing <https://www.space.com/41236-high-altitude-clouds-jupiter-juno.html> — thanks to the Juno spacecraft <https://www.space.com/32742-juno-spacecraft.html> currently in orbit around Jupiter. The Juno probe <https://www.space.com/topics/nasa-juno-jupiter-mission-news>, which began orbiting our largest neighbor in July 2016, is laden with a host of scientific instruments designed to crack some of the gas giant's biggest secrets. But it also carries a camera, one that is directed based on public input. The community's votes have resulted in incredible photos <https://www.space.com/12495-jupiter-juno-mission-photos-gallery.html> like this one, taken on Oct. 29, at 4:58 p.m. EDT (2158 GMT). At the time, the spacecraft was conducting its 16th skim over Jupiter's surface, coming within just 4,400 miles (7,000 kilometers) of the top of Jupiter's cloud system. (The images are also processed by the community, not by NASA.)

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