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Five Things to Know about George Mason’s First Space Mission

Colleen Rich — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 18:11:44 +0000

Five Things to Know about George Mason’s First Space Mission Colleen Rich Thu, 08/29/2024 - 14:11

Scientists know the universe is expanding, which is measured by calculating the brightness of numerous stars and by the number of photons-per-second they emit. But the next breakthroughs will require more accurate measurements, and that’s where George Mason is stepping in. The university is leading Landolt, a $19.5 million NASA space mission that will put an artificial “star” in orbit around Earth.

Here’s what’s to come:

Led by astronomy professor Peter Plavchan, faculty members and students from the College of Science and the College of Engineering and Computing will work together with staff from NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and nine other organizations on a first-of-its-kind project for a university in the Washington, D.C., area.
The artificial star will allow scientists to calibrate telescopes and more accurately measure the brightness of a wide range of stars—from those nearby to the distant explosions of supernovae in far-off galaxies. By establishing absolute flux calibration, the mission will begin to address several open challenges in astrophysics including the speed and acceleration of the universe’s expansion.
The mission is named for late astronomer Arlo Landolt, who compiled the widely used catalogs of stellar brightness through the 1990s.
The payload, which is the size of a proverbial bread box, will be built in partnership with NIST, a world leader in measuring photon emissions. “This calibration under known laser wavelength and power will remove effects of atmosphere filtration of light and allow scientists to significantly improve measurements,” says electrical engineering professor Piotr Pachowicz, who is leading this component of the mission.
The artificial star, expected to launch in 2029, will orbit 22,236 miles above Earth, far enough away to look like a real star to telescopes back on the ground. This orbit also allows the star to move at the same speed as the Earth’s rotation, keeping it in place over the United States during its first year in space. “This is what is considered an infrastructure mission for NASA, supporting the science in a way that we’ve known we needed to do but with a transformative change in how we do it,” says Plavchan.

"This mission marks another first for George Mason, a milestone that proves our impact as a major public research university that truly knows no bounds,” says President Gregory Washington.

Visit the mission's website

Space experiment could teach us how aerosols move in the atmosphere

Teresa Donnellan — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 19:45:22 +0000

Space experiment could teach us how aerosols move in the atmosphere Teresa Donnellan Mon, 08/05/2024 - 15:45

As a child, Jeffrey Moran was fascinated by outer space. Now, he is designing an experiment to be carried out on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2025.

"I was obsessed with space as a kid,” said the mechanical engineering assistant professor. “The house I grew up in is still filled with drawings of Space Shuttles. Airplanes and spacecraft were a major reason I chose engineering when I got to college."

Jeffrey Moran. Photo by Office of University Branding

When the National Science Foundation issued a call for proposals to conduct research projects on the ISS to benefit life on earth, Moran jumped at the chance and wrote a proposal that was successfully funded. His grant-winning experiment will examine the extent to which aerosols (small particles suspended in air) move through air in response to a temperature difference (meaning the air on one side is hotter than on the other). This phenomenon—migration of particles in response to temperature gradients—is known as thermophoresis.

“It all started with a brainstorming session I had with a collaborator,” said Moran, describing the conversation he had with Purdue University colleague David Warsinger, who is a co-investigator on the NSF-funded project. “In contrast to most of my projects, which consider particles that move through liquids, we considered a simple question: what mechanisms could we use propel small particles through air?”

“My lab focuses on developing self-propelled particles for applications like water treatment or drug delivery," said Moran. "It’s a new and exciting field, but it’s so far been restricted entirely to water environments. No one has tried to develop a swimmer that moves in air. That ties into climate change, because aerosols are everywhere in the atmosphere—both because of human activity, like burning fossil fuels, and because of natural events like volcanic eruptions—and we don’t have a solid understanding of the net effect aerosols will have on the climate.”

Thermophoresis occurs in both liquids and gases, but it’s difficult to study in gases on earth because of the influence of gravity. Another challenge with studying particle migration in temperature gradients on earth is that the heated air tends to rise (for the same reason that hot air balloons rise), making it difficult to know exactly why the particles are moving. Doing the experiment in space allows scientists to run their tests with a minimal influence of gravity, to purely examine the effect of temperature on aerosols without creating air currents, which inevitably form when one tries to create a temperature difference in air because hot air tends to rise (which is the reason hot air balloons rise).

“We’re going to send various aerosol samples into space, each in a specially designed cuvette, for the astronauts to test,” Moran explained. “There’s a microscope on the ISS, and the astronauts will place our cuvettes into an apparatus we’ve designed that applies heat and cold to opposite walls of the cuvette. The astronauts will then use the microscope to determine how fast the particles move towards hot or towards cold. We expect that aerosols made from different materials will respond differently to the temperature gradient, but nobody knows how. That’s what’s exciting about this experiment – no one has made these types of measurements before.”

“For the last part of the project, we’re going to see whether some particles with asymmetric properties might generate the propulsive temperature difference on their own,” Moran continued. “These particles will have half of their surface coated in a metal. The other side is an insulating material,” Moran explained. “When we shine a light on them, the metal side efficiently absorbs the light and heats up relative to the insulating side. The hot hemisphere heats the air near it, and that creates a temperature difference in the surrounding air. This could help us understand whether odd-shaped aerosols in the atmosphere move on their own, without the need for a temperature difference.”

Before the experiment can be carried out, Moran and his team need to determine the experiment’s parameters as well as the materials required.

“This is very much a work in progress,” said Moran. “We're figuring out exactly which particles we want to send to the space station [based on] which materials matter the most to climate scientists [and] what the biggest question marks are.”

He mentioned, among other examples, the possibility of experimenting with carbon soot.

“Carbon soot is produced by burning fossil fuels, and it’s known to be harmful to the environment because it absorbs sunlight efficiently,” he said. “Another source of carbon soot, increasingly common in this era, is from rocket launches.”
“It’s pretty well established that carbon soot overall intensifies warming,” he said. “It's black, so it tends to absorb sunlight efficiently. This leads to a net warming effect on the atmosphere, but it's not clear how much it moves in thermophoresis (how much it moves in temperature differences).”

Moran looks forward to working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to refine the plan. An early step in this project will be for Moran and his team to travel to Texas to examine a replica of the equipment available to scientists on the International Space Station.

The College of Engineering and Computing will cover Moran’s progress as the project moves forward.

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Partners weigh in on the magnitude and opportunity with the critical Landolt Mission

Colleen Rich — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 16:12:10 +0000

Partners weigh in on the magnitude and opportunity with the critical Landolt Mission Colleen Rich Mon, 06/10/2024 - 12:12

��AV will be the home of the $19.5 million recently approved Landolt NASA Space Mission that will put an artificial “star” in orbit around the Earth. George Mason faculty and students will work together with the NASA and NIST and nine other organizations for a first-of-its-kind project for a university in the Washington, D.C., area.

With mission control based at George Mason on its Fairfax Campus, the team also includes Blue Canyon Technologies; California Institute of Technology; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Mississippi State University; Montreal Planetarium and iREx/University of Montreal; the University of Florida; the University of Hawaiʻi; the University of Minnesota, Duluth; and the University of Victoria.

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) scientists S. Deustua, J. Rice, and B. Alberding will apply their expertise to the calibration of Landolt-emitted light. This will be critical, as precise calibration enables astronomers to better answer pressing questions like: “Are there other Earths? What is the history of the universe?"

"Major new telescopes—like NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory—intend to measure the expansion history of the universe using the brightnesses of supernovae. However, errors in brightness calibration across wavelengths could lead to incorrect measurements. Landolt will solve this problem by providing telescopes with light of known brightness," said Greg Aldering of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Physics Division, who will serve on the Landolt science team to ensure that it is designed and performs as needed for precision cosmology measurements.

Once the Landolt satellite is in orbit, Aldering and his team plan to observe the calibrated light from Landolt with ground-based instruments, including the SuperNova Integral Field Spectrograph (SNIFS) in Hawaii, built in part by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, equipped with a 3.2 billion pixel camera built by DOE.

“Being a part of this space mission along with brilliant experts by contributing to target selection and data analysis is an exciting prospect,” said Canada’s Jonathan Gagné, scientific advisor at the Planétarium | Montréal Space for Life, adjunct professor at Université de Montréal, and member of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iRex). “The impact that the Landolt mission will have in different areas of astrophysics, notably in exoplanet characterization and in measuring the accelerating expansion of the universe, will be particularly important,” Gagné explained.

"The measurements by Landolt will enable tremendous progress for a wide range of ground-based astronomical observations,” said Daniel Huber, associate professor at the University of Hawaiʻiʻs Institute for Astronomy. The University of Hawaiʻi will provide access to the UH88 telescope located atop of Maunakea, Hawaiʻi, one of the ground stations that will observe Landolt during its mission. Maunakea is one of the best sites for ground-based astronomy in the world.

“The University of Victoria is excited to be an institutional collaborator on the NASA Landolt mission. We will leverage what we've learned from the CSA-funded, UVic-led ORCASat CubeSat satellite mission and are greatly looking forward to contributing to the success of this new mission,” said Justin Albert, professor of physics and astronomy at University of Victoria.

“This project is tackling a truly fundamental problem in astronomy in a very novel way,” said Dan Stevens, PhD, an assistant professor of Astronomy at the University of Minnesota Duluth. “By creating an "artificial star,” measuring its brightness in the lab, and launching it into space, our team will then be able to take lab-calibrated measurements of real stars' actual, absolute brightnesses. This level of accuracy wasn’t possible before, and it will allow us to overcome decades-long sources of uncertainty in how well we measure the fundamental properties of stars and the planets they host.”

“Landolt is an exciting opportunity to enable absolute calibration in astronomy at an unprecedented level,” said David Ciardi, Chief Scientist for NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) at Caltech/IPAC. “For as long as people have looked up at the night sky, a fundamental question has always been: ‘What is the true brightness of that star?’ Landolt has the opportunity to change astronomy for the relatively minimal cost of a NASA Astrophysics Pioneer program,” Ciardi explained.

NExScI, responsible for the Landolt data archiving and contributing to the ground support through Palomar Observatory suggests, “Even with today’s modern instruments, true brightness calibration has only been good to a few percent, and Landolt will enable an improvement by more than a factor of 10. Understanding the true brightness of stars allows to understand the stars better—and, perhaps more importantly, understand the planets that orbit the stars better.

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��AV announces its first NASA Space Mission, which seeks to uncover the secrets of dark energy

Jeannine Harvey — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 13:34:19 +0000

��AV announces its first NASA Space Mission, which seeks to uncover the secrets of dark energy Jeannine Harvey Mon, 06/10/2024 - 09:34

��AV will be the home of the $19.5 million recently approved Landolt NASA Space Mission that will put an artificial “star” in orbit around the Earth. This artificial star will allow scientists to calibrate telescopes and more accurately measure the brightness of stars ranging from those nearby to the distant explosions of supernova in far-off galaxies. By establishing absolute flux calibration, the mission will begin to address several open challenges in astrophysics including the speed and acceleration of the universe expansion.

"This mission marks another first for ��AV, a milestone that proves our impact as a major public research university truly knows no bounds,” ��AV President Gregory Washington said. “It's an honor for George Mason to lead this unique team seeking to expand the boundaries of knowledge through College of Science associate professor Peter Plavchan’s collaboration with NASA, one of George Mason's most prestigious research partners.”

Scientists know the universe is expanding, which is measured by calculating the brightness of numerous stars and by the number of photons-per-second they emit. According to Plavchan, a George Mason associate professor of physics and astronomy and the Landolt Mission primary investigator, more accurate measurements are needed for the next breakthroughs.

Landolt Mission Principal Investigator Peter Plavchan, associate professor of physics and astronomy at ��AV's College of Science. Photo by Ron Aira/Office of University Branding

Named for late astronomer Arlo Landolt, who put together widely used catalogs of stellar brightness throughout the 1970s through the 1990s, this mission will launch a light into the sky in 2029 with a known emission rate of photons, and the team will observe it next to real stars to make new stellar brightness catalogs. The satellite (artificial star) will have eight lasers shining at ground optical telescopes in order to calibrate them for observations. The effort will not make the artificial stars so brightly to see with the naked eye, but one can see it with a personal telescope at home.

“This mission is focused on measuring fundamental properties that are used daily in astronomical observations,” said Eliad Peretz, NASA Goddard mission and instrument scientist and Landolt’s deputy principal investigator. “It might impact and change the way we measure or understand the properties of stars, surface temperatures, and the habitability of exoplanets.”

The artificial star will orbit earth 22,236 miles up, far enough away to look like a star to telescopes back on Earth. This orbit also allows it to move at the same speed of the Earth’s rotation, keeping it in place over the United States during its first year in space. “This is what is considered an infrastructure mission for NASA, supporting the science in a way that we’ve known we needed to do, but with a transformative change in how we do it,” Plavchan explained.

Landolt Mission contributor Peter Pachowicz, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in George Mason's College of Engineering and Computing. Photo by Ron Aira/Office of University Branding

The payload, which is the size of the proverbial bread box, will be built in partnership with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a world leader in measuring photon emissions. “This calibration under known laser wavelength and power will remove effects of atmosphere filtration of light and allow scientists to significantly improve measurements,” said Piotr Pachowicz, associate professor in Mason’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who is leading this component of the mission.

George Mason faculty and students from Mason’s College of Science and College of Engineering and Computing will work together with the NASA and NIST and nine other organizations for a first-of-its-kind project for a university in the Washington, D.C., area.

“This is an incredibly exciting opportunity for George Mason and our students," said Pachowicz. "Our team will design, build, and integrate the payload, which—because it’s going very high into geostationary orbit—must handle incredible challenges.”

With more accurate measurements, experts will use the improved data from the project to enhance understanding of stellar evolution, habitable zones or exoplanets in proximity to Earth, and refine dark energy parameters, setting a foundation for the next great leaps in scientific discovery. “When we look at a star with a telescope, no one can tell you today the rate of photons or brightness coming from it with the desired level of accuracy,” Plavchan, who is also the director of Mason’s Observatories in Fairfax, said. “We will now know exactly how many photons-per-second come out of this source to .25 percent accuracy.”

"Flux calibration is essential for astronomical research.” explained NIST’s Susana Deustua, a physical scientist in the NIST Remote Sensing Group. “We constantly ask: ‘How big? How bright? How far?’ and then ponder: ‘What is the universe made of? Are we alone?’ Accurate answers require precise measurements and excellent instrument characterization,” Deustua said.

Learn more at landolt.gmu.edu

Learn more about the mission

Landolt partners weigh in on importance of this mission

Did You Know

The Landolt Space Mission is named for the late astronomer Arlo Landolt, one of the most recognizable American astronomers. Renowned throughout the astronomical community for his discoveries, astronomers and physicists worldwide continue to use his series of papers, which established the “Landolt Photometric Standard Star Catalog,” and his standard stars are among the most heavily used photometric standards throughout the globe.

Find out more >>

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Communication major looks to the stars with NASA internship

Sarah Holland — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 20:45:14 +0000

Communication major looks to the stars with NASA internship Sarah Holland Thu, 08/31/2023 - 16:45

Ever since sixth grade, Ricky Chang looked up at the stars and wondered what could be out there in the vastness of unexplored space.

Photo provided by NASA

Now, he has a front row seat to interstellar research.

The brand-new ��AV alum spent the summer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center as a Commercialization, Innovation and Synergies Office (CIS) intern. “I’ve always admired NASA, so it’s kind of like a fever dream” said Chang, who graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in communication. “It’s really cool seeing all these knowledgeable and passionate people working on amazing projects. I haven’t met a single person who isn’t excited to be here.”

The CIS Office finds government and industry partners to work with on space research and exploration. “NASA sets the policy, while private industry advances the technology,” Chang explained. “CIS helps the aerospace community to understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and—hopefully—want to be a part of it.”

His work was predominantly content marketing: creating video scripts, developing communications plans for university outreach to partner on the upcoming Artemis II launch, and writing employee spotlights.

“You don’t usually associate communications with NASA. Everything thinks, ‘oh, engineers, scientists, telescopes,’ things like that,” Chang said. “So to get the internship with my background in media production and communications was so exciting. There’s a chance for me to work in this field I’ve always admired, after all.”

Like his interest in the great mysteries of the galaxies, Chang’s interest in media production started in his youth, filming and editing videos of himself and his friends as they rode their BMX bikes. At Mason, Chang further developed his skills through a concentration in media production and criticism and working on podcasts for WGMU.

At his internship, Chang was encouraged to utilize those skills through media production projects: He scripted, produced, and recorded voice-overs for a series of short videos that will be embedded on NASA’s website. “I’m working my way up to be the voice of the countdown,” he joked.

“My communication degree has helped a lot in navigating this internship,” he said. “In this program I do a lot of communicating, and I’m seeing the theories I learned play out in the workplace. I’ve taken writing classes where I learned how to write across media, which helps when writing pieces for NASA that need to be concise yet persuasive. All the media production courses I’ve taken led to me creating and doing voiceovers the NASA videos. My professors gave me a really solid foundation.”

Ricky Chang, left, sits in the control room at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Photo provided by NASA.

This internship is the first foot in the door for Chang, who is seizing every opportunity he can to secure a future career at NASA. “I tried to meet with every multimedia person I could, so that if one day I apply for a full-time position they’ll remember me,” he said.

It seems his work has paid off. While Chang’s time at Mason concludes with the completion of this internship, his time at NASA is just beginning: He’s accepted another internship for the fall, where he’ll be working directly with NASA engineers in the Engineering and Technology Directorate (ETD).

“I want to work somewhere that lets me feel creative and supports my multimedia background, where I can really contribute and make an impact,” he said. “NASA gives me those opportunities and so much more.”

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Berea serves on NASA's UAP panel

Colleen Rich — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 20:37:13 +0000

Berea serves on NASA's UAP panel Colleen Rich Tue, 06/20/2023 - 16:37

Last fall NASA selected ��AV’s Anamaria Berea to participate in its independent study team on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). The 16-person panel was asked to “identify how data gathered by civilian government entities, commercial data, and data from other sources can potentially be analyzed to shed light on UAPs” and recommend a roadmap for future analysis.

Mason researcher Anamaria Berea at the NASA UAP panel on May 31, 2023. Photo by NASA

An expert in data and computational science, Berea has been working closely with the panel to carefully express the possibilities—as well as the limits—to open-source data from NASA, FAA, NOAA, and other government agencies, when studying this phenomena. While she has aspirations that this could spur a new field of study with standardized data collection, she appreciate the value of scientific rigor and has cautioned against rushing to conclusions with a high standard of evidence. The team expects to release its final report by the end of July.

Working with NASA

This is not the first time Berea has shared her computational and data science skills with NASA. After being the first woman to earn a PhD in computation social sciences at Mason, Berea saw an ad where Frontier Development Lab (FDL), an artificial intelligence (AI) research accelerator partnered with NASA and the SETI Institute, was looking for data scientists. She applied and got selected.

Her first project with NASA was within the eight-week summer challenges of FDL. The lab brings together data scientists and subject matter experts in space and earth sciences to focus on major challenges by applying data sciences, particularly machine learning and deep learning methods, to space science problems, such as the shape of asteroids, finding exoplanets, and astronaut health, among others.

“The idea is—can we come up with some artificial intelligence algorithms that can solve a big problem,” said Berea, who is an associate professor in Computational and Data Sciences Department in the College of Science.

Berea’s first challenge with the lab focused on forecasting solar flares and solar winds, which can impact the lives of the astronauts in space, as well as electronics and power grids on Earth. Then she became a mentor to an astrobiology challenge that was simulating the exoplanetary atmospheres based on metabolic networks.

Berea, who is currently affiliate faculty member with the FDL lab, was also a mentor for a challenge that designed a semi-supervised algorithm for unlabeled Earth Observation images, to automatically identify major atmospheric events in satellite imagery.

“The satellites are taking lots of pictures, but they are not labeled. We don't know what those images are without human input,” she said. “We are talking about petabytes of data that are basically impossible for the human researchers to search manually. The challenge for us was to create an algorithm that will automatically identify types of phenomena—such as a hurricane or sandstorm—in these satellite pictures.”

Another challenge she mentored last year was to create a knowledge graph, using natural language processing algorithms, to discover scientific datasets across all NASA SMD (Science Mission Directorate) fields, as well as in European Space Agency (ESA) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) repositories. For example, a scientist looking for a dataset on a specific star can find these datasets not only in astrophysics tagged data, but also heliophysics or planetary sciences.

The Science Behind the Search of Extraterrestrial Life

Berea is also an affiliate of the SETI Institute. For the uninitiated, SETI is an acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Berea said, when it comes to searching for life on other planets, there are two signatures of potential life to look for: one is using biosignatures (present or past signatures of microbial or cellular life), the other is technosignatures (present or past signatures of life that developed technology in some form).

“Finding a biosignature means that you’ve found biological evidence of some sort that you can say ‘it's life,’” she said. “It can be microbial, it can be vegetation, or it can be nothing like we are used to seeing on Earth.”

“Looking for a technosignature means that we are searching for evidence of technology that might have been developed by a potentially intelligent species that is or was at some point out there,” she said. “And the technosignature can be the imprint of the satellites that are orbiting a planet, or a radio or optical wave that is out of the normal natural spectrum. Another technosignature might be an artifact from a dead civilization somewhere. The difference is that a technosignature means that there is some technology that has been developed, present or in the past, by another civilization.”

Berea said one of the big misconceptions is that if there is a discovery, it's going a specific point in time. But the truth is it will take years. “First you get the data, then you need to analyze the data, and then of course you need to have conversations and debate the discovery with so many scientists from so many fields.”

As an example, she uses a meteorite discovered during the Clinton administration that some scientists believe shows traces of past microbial life on Mars. It's been two decades, she said, and they are still debating the data and analysis from that meteorite. “The whole scientific process of validation, verification…you need to be sure when you make such a big announcement. It is a long process.”

Berea acknowledges that many scientists and much of the general public are inclined toward believing there is life is out there.

“If you're thinking just in probabilistic terms, the probability should be really high,” she said. “But the question becomes—how do you identify ‘life’?”

Berea said the search comes down to two issues. The chances of having two civilizations that are comparable in terms of technological development at the same time is one problem. The second problem is just how big the universe is.

“It's so big that any signal that we are sending now can take between hundreds and thousands of years to reach other parts of the galaxy and vice versa. The sheer vastness of the universe is the biggest barrier to actually finding something.”