NASA Explorers is a new digital series that takes you inside the space agency and follows the pioneers, risk-takers and experts at the front line of exploration. Season 1, “Cryosphere,” joins NASA scientists on their journey to the frozen ends of the Earth as they study our rapidly changing world from satellites, planes and boots on the ground. The Cryosphere is a place we all depend on, but many of us will never go to. As temperatures rise, the frozen regions of Earth are changing rapidly. NASA scientists are locked in a race against time to understand our shifting climate and how it affects life on Earth.
Snow is one part of the cryosphere that many of us have actually encountered, but it also plays a crucial role in regulating Earth’s climate. Through decades of remote sensing, NASA has kept a close eye on the ebb and flow of snow cover. #NASAExplorers also venture into the field at the far reaches of Earth to study snow, a critical resource for the millions of people who rely on it for drinking water.
To know the evolution of sea ice and how we observe it from space is to know Dr. Claire Parkinson. Meet the scientist who continues to have a profound effect on the study of climate change through her work monitoring the health of global sea ice.
You have to start somewhere when looking for life away from Earth. Many NASA Explorers look for places with water ice, including distant moons like Enceladus and Europa. This week, we’re traveling away from our home planet to investigate ice in the solar system.
They’re rivers of ice, slowly flowing down the sides of mountains, and they currently have an outsized role in sea level rise. NASA Explorers is taking us high into the mountains of Alaska, Patagonia, Asia and elsewhere for a closer look at mountain glaciers.
NASA Explorers head back in time…by going underground. In the Arctic, a frozen layer of soil – permafrost – trapped dead plants and animals for thousands of years. As the climate warms, that soil is beginning to thaw, releasing carbon dioxide and methane.
It’s 5 a.m. on a normal September day and NASA Explorers have gathered in a California field to watch a rocket launch light up the pre-dawn sky. On board the rocket is a satellite more than 10 years in the making, with one single instrument that will revolutionize the study of ice on Earth. Join the team in the excitement and stress of watching ICESat-2 launch into space and begin its work measuring our home planet.
In the pre-dawn hours of a late October day, a satellite and an airplane joined forces over the frigid Weddell Sea, taking simultaneous measurements of drifting sea ice. It was the culmination of more than a decade of planning, designing and building the best way to measure Earth’s changing ice.
Flying low over some of the most dramatic landscapes on the planet, a cadre of scientists and pilots have been measuring changes in Alaskan glaciers as part of NASA’s Operation IceBridge for almost a decade. The team has seen significant change in ice extent and thickness over that time. Data from the mission was used in a 2015 study that put numbers on the loss of Alaskan glaciers: 75 billion tons of ice every year from 1994 to 2013. Last summer, Chris Larsen and Martin Truffer, both of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, flew with University of Arizona’s Jack Holt and University of Texas student Michael Christoffersen.
NASA Explorers come in all ages! In this bonus episode, we headed back to Alaska to check in with some of our tiniest Explorers. They’re following in the scientists’ footsteps, working with NASA’s GLOBE program to measure when and where snow and ice are freezing. Plus, stick around for a thank you message from our scientists to the young Explorers collecting their data.
To understand fires on Earth, you need a broad view — spanning from the poles to the equator and looking from high above the planet to down deep under the soil. That’s where NASA Explorers come in! With satellites, with airplanes, with their own hands and with a data record spanning decades, Explorers are studying how our planet burns… and how that burning changes with the climate. This season, we’re headed to the western Pacific Ocean to the Northwest Territories and beyond to look fires on Earth.
Chasing smoke is a round-the-clock business. Wildfire smoke can travel long distances and over several days, so NASA Explorers with the Fire Influence on Regional to Global Environments and Air Quality (FIREX-AQ) mission took to the field to find where it goes. From a plane directly above the Shady Fire in the middle of the afternoon to a valley in the Sawtooth Mountains at 1 in the morning, explorers are gathering important data about how fire smoke affects communities near and far.
In the Arctic, fires are a natural part of the ecosystem. But as the climate changes, fires are burning longer and hotter, releasing long-buried carbon from the soil. NASA Explorers are looking from high in the sky to deep below the ground to better understand how a warming climate affects fires in the Arctic…and how fires in the region will contribute to climate change in the future.
“Earth science is a subject far too big for one country, one agency, to tackle all by itself.” So NASA Explorers team up with researchers from around the country and the planet to answer some big questions about fires, clouds and climate from the Western Pacific, where we still have a lot to learn about the interaction between fires and cloud formation.
As the planet warms, fire seasons burn year-round and more areas are becoming flammable. NASA Explorers are studying how fires are changing with the climate and tracking how landscapes change after fires. With satellite data, people on the ground, and partners with communities and agencies around the planet, NASA Explorers are helping prepare for the “new normal” of fires on Earth.
We live in a “new normal.” Large fires burn in the Arctic, sending carbon around the globe. Fire seasons in the American West burn longer and hotter. To put it simply, warming temperatures are altering our planet and how it burns. NASA Explorers have been traveling all around Earth, learning more about fires and how they’re changing with the climate.This week, we’re taking a look back at how fires burned in 2019, and what that tells us about the reality we’re experiencing and what we can expect to see in the future.
Things behave a bit differently aboard the International Space Station, thanks to microgravity. Sure, floating looks like fun, but it could also unlock new scientific discoveries. Microgravity makes the station the perfect place to perform research that is changing the lives of people on Earth, and preparing us to go deeper into space. This season on NASA Explorers, we are following science into low-Earth orbit and seeing what it takes to do research aboard the space station.
Putting your life’s work on top of a rocket may seem like a daunting task, but that’s exactly what scientists have been doing for decades as they launch their research to the International Space Station.
Astronauts train all over the world, including at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Here, they learn not just how to live in space, but also how to conduct science in microgravity. Astronauts serve as the eyes and hands of researchers while their experiments are aboard the space station, so they must be trained in everything from using a microscope, to maintaining the equipment for combustion experiments.
Our team of scientists is just days away from their research being loaded onto a SpaceX rocket that will carry their experiment to the International Space Station. This week on NASA Explorers, we are following along with them in the busy days leading up to launch at Kennedy Space Center, as they do all of the last-minute preparations to get their experiment ready for microgravity.
The day has finally arrived. After years of work, our team of scientists is at the Kennedy Space Center in the hopes of seeing their research liftoff to the International Space Station. Join us this week on NASA Explorers for the countdown, the emotion and, hopefully, the launch.
Now that our researchers’ experiment is on the International Space Station, it’s time to test how their samples behave in microgravity. This week on NASA Explorers, the astronauts conduct science in space, while a team back here on Earth runs their own piece of the project.
With the experiment’s journey complete, Elaine Horn-Ranney Ph.D. and Parastoo Khoshaklagh Ph.D. now join the thousands of scientists who’ve performed research aboard the International Space Station, making the most of what microgravity has to teach us. Although the thrill of the rocket launch may be over, our scientists still have one of the most exciting parts of their journey ahead: sharing their results with the world.
These are our explorers. They’re the people who will get us to the Moon, collect Moon rocks, deliver them to Earth safely, and ensure that we can study them for years to come. On episode one of “NASA Explorers: Artemis Generation,” meet astronaut Jessica Watkins, engineer Adam Naids, Moon rock curator Julie Mitchell, and astrobiologist Jose Aponte. They each had a different path to NASA, from conducting hazardous kitchen chemistry experiments in Lima, Peru, to exploring the Louisiana Bayou, to dissecting a cow’s eye in a science program in Colorado. Each person is a vital part of NASA’s goal to conduct science on the Moon’s surface.
Meet NASA’s rock detectives. Using tiny samples of lunar rock brought back by Apollo astronauts, these NASA Explorers are looking into the origins of our Moon, our planet, and ourselves. They might be among the first scientists to study samples from the Moon’s South Pole that will be delivered to Earth by Artemis astronauts. In episode 2 of “NASA Explorers: Artemis Generation,” we’re joining scientists like Natalie Curran and Jose Aponte, who are looking at clues buried in Moon rocks.
Before Jessica Watkins was an astronaut, she was a geologist. Now working on the International Space Station, Jessica and her fellow astronauts are preparing to explore the Moon and beyond. But collecting and investigating rocks on other worlds is very different from digging dirt here on Earth. That’s where tools engineer Adam Naids comes in. Tools designed for Earth geologists may not work in the lower gravity and extreme temperatures of the Moon, and that’s before you bring in the bulky spacesuits! NASA Explorers come together at space school to train astronauts to conduct science on the Moon.
When Artemis astronauts land on the Moon, they’ll travel to sites never before visited by humans. Namely, they’ll explore the South Pole region, home to the Moon’s largest crater, areas of near-constant light and deep shadows, and some of the coldest temperatures in the solar system.
It’s not rockets and satellites that make NASA soar. It’s people. Go inside the space agency and follow the pioneers, risk-takers and experts at the frontline of exploration. This season, follow along with the OSIRIS-REx team, as they launch a spacecraft to an asteroid, collect a sample of Bennu, and bring it home to Earth.
When it comes to space exploration, expect the unexpected. As OSIRIS-REx approached asteroid Bennu, scientists were surprised to find a loosely packed rubble pile. This episode, NASA Explorers get a closer look at Bennu and the surprises in store.
It was Touch-and-Go there for a few seconds…literally! OSIRIS-REx had only 6 seconds to collect a sample of asteroid Bennu – in a maneuver called TAG – while the NASA Explorers behind the mission waited anxiously 200 million miles away.
The lifetime of space missions can be measured in decades, not years. From designing, building, launching, sampling and finally returning home, follow the NASA Explorers of OSIRIS-REx as they enter the final stretch of their quest to sample asteroid Bennu.
How does it feel to watch your life’s work parachute through the atmosphere? Relive the joy and terror of the OSIRIS-REx sample return with NASA Explorers… but retrieving the sample of asteroid Bennu is just the beginning of this game-changing science.