Jurczyk Retires as NASA Associate Administrator
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WASHINGTON, May 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ Steve Jurczyk, who served as acting NASA administrator from Jan. 20 to May 3, 2021, announced Monday he will retire on Friday, May 14, after more than three decades of service at NASA.
Jurczyk has served as associate administrator, the agency s highest-ranking civil servant, since May 2018. He was the highest-ranking career civil servant leading NASA throughout the pandemic and most recently oversaw the successful landing of the Perseverance rover on Mars, a successful Green Run test of the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket, the naming of the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters building, the launch of NASA s SpaceX Crew-2 to the International Space Station, and the return of Crew-1 back to Earth.
Lunar telescope could reveal the Dark Ages of the universe
Vladimir Vustyansky/JPL/NASA
This illustration shows the proposed Lunar Crater Radio Telescope on the far side of the moon.
Scientists want to build a radio telescope on the far side of the moon to help pull back the curtain on the mysteries surrounding the beginning of the universe.
While not an official full-fledged NASA mission, the concept of the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope, or LCRT, has been in development for years. The project recently received a $500,000 boost upon entering the second phase of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program.
Illuminates the dark cosmic ages by Jake Pearson
In the first stage NASA The idea was to see robots fix wire nets in a crater far from the moon and create a radio telescope to explore the rise of the universe.
After years of development, the Lunar Crater Radio Telescope (LCRT) project received $ 500,000 to support overtime as it entered the second phase of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIIC) program. Although not yet a NASA mission, the LCRT describes a mission concept that could change mankind’s view of the universe.
The main purpose of the LCRT is to measure the long-wave radio waves produced by the cosmic dark ages – hundreds of millions of years later. The Big BangBut before the first stars began to exist. Cosmologists knew very little about this period, but at the time they answered some of the greatest mysteries in science that could be limited to long-wave radio radiation from the gas that could fill the universe.
In a first, NASA extracts oxygen from the Red Planet
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Perseverance, NASA’s new robot on the Red Planet, was successfully able to extract oxygen from the Martian atmosphere in its early attempts. The test was conducted on April 20th, using a small equipment aboard the Perseverance called Moxie which stands for Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment.
Mars’ atmosphere constitutes primarily of 96% carbon dioxide and has a minuscule presence of 0.13% oxygen. The mission aims to extract oxygen from the planet itself to meet the demands of any future missions on Mars, instead of stocking oxygen from Earth to sustain the mission. Moxie functions to disintegrate oxygen molecules from carbon dioxide which is made of one carbon and two oxygen atoms to produce breathable oxygen. Carbon monoxide is the by-product that is released back into the Martian atmosphere.