In an exciting opportunity for young minds, NASA is bringing the wonders of space exploration directly to a New Jersey classroom. Students from the Thomas Edison EnergySmart Charter School in Somerset, New Jersey, will have the unique chance to connect with NASA astronaut Nick Hague aboard the International Space Station (ISS). During a 20-minute space-to-Earth call, Hague will answer prerecorded questions from students, focusing on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) topics.

The event, scheduled for 11:10 a.m. EST on Tuesday, February 11, will be broadcast live on NASA+, NASA’s streaming platform. This interactive session promises to inspire the next generation of explorers and highlight the importance of STEM education in shaping the future of space exploration.

How to Watch

The live Q&A session will be available to the public, offering a rare glimpse into life aboard the ISS and the work being done to advance human knowledge and capabilities in space. Viewers can tune in via NASA+ or follow NASA’s social media channels for updates and streaming options. For those unable to watch live, the event will likely be archived for later viewing.

Media Coverage

Media representatives interested in covering this event must RSVP by 5 p.m. EST on Thursday, February 6, to Jeanette Allison at [email protected] or 732-412-7643. This is a fantastic opportunity to showcase how NASA is engaging with students and fostering interest in STEM fields.

The International Space Station: A Hub of Innovation

For over 24 years, astronauts have continuously lived and worked aboard the ISS, conducting groundbreaking research and testing technologies that benefit life on Earth and pave the way for future exploration. The station serves as a microgravity laboratory where astronauts perform experiments in fields such as biology, physics, and materials science, while also developing the skills needed for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

Communication between the ISS and Earth is made possible through NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) program, specifically the Near Space Network, which ensures 24/7 connectivity with Mission Control in Houston. This seamless communication allows astronauts like Nick Hague to share their experiences and insights with audiences worldwide, including students eager to learn about space.

Inspiring the Artemis Generation

This event is part of NASA’s broader efforts to inspire the Artemis Generation—the next wave of explorers who will carry humanity’s mission of discovery forward. Through the Artemis program, NASA aims to return astronauts to the Moon and prepare for future human exploration of Mars. By engaging with students and educators, the agency hopes to ignite curiosity and passion for STEM, ensuring the United States remains a leader in space exploration and innovation.

A Lifelong Impact

For the students at Thomas Edison EnergySmart Charter School, this Q&A session is more than just a chance to ask questions—it’s an opportunity to dream big and see themselves as part of humanity’s journey into the cosmos. By connecting with an astronaut in real-time, they’ll gain a deeper understanding of the challenges and rewards of space exploration, as well as the critical role STEM plays in solving the problems of tomorrow.

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Don’t miss this inspiring event! Tune in on February 11 to witness the magic of space come alive in a New Jersey classroom.

For more information about NASA’s missions, educational initiatives, and streaming options, visit NASA’s official website.

What are your thoughts on NASA’s efforts to engage students in STEM? Share your comments below!

Timothy J McCoy, Smithsonian Institution and Sara Russell, Natural History Museum

A bright fireball streaked across the sky above mountains, glaciers and spruce forest near the town of Revelstoke in British Columbia, Canada, on the evening of March 31, 1965. Fragments of this meteorite, discovered by beaver trappers, fell over a lake. A layer of ice saved them from the depths and allowed scientists a peek into the birth of the solar system.

Nearly 60 years later, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returned from space with a sample of an asteroid named Bennu, similar to the one that rained rocks over Revelstoke. Our research team has published a chemical analysis of those samples, providing insight into how some of the ingredients for life may have first arrived on Earth.

Born in the years bracketing the Revelstoke meteorite’s fall, the two of us have spent our careers in the meteorite collections of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Natural History Museum in London. We’ve dreamed of studying samples from a Revelstoke-like asteroid collected by a spacecraft.

Then, nearly two decades ago, we began turning those dreams into reality. We joined NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission team, which aimed to send a spacecraft to collect and return an asteroid sample to Earth. After those samples arrived on Sept. 24, 2023, we got to dive into a tale of rock, ice and water that hints at how life could have formed on Earth.

The CI chondrites and asteroid Bennu

To learn about an asteroid – a rocky or metallic object in orbit around the Sun – we started with a study of meteorites.

Asteroids like Bennu are rocky or metallic objects in orbit around the Sun. Meteorites are the pieces of asteroids and other natural extraterrestrial objects that survive the fiery plunge to the Earth’s surface.

We really wanted to study an asteroid similar to a set of meteorites called chondrites, whose components formed in a cloud of gas and dust at the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago.

The Revelstoke meteorite is in a group called CI chondrites. Laboratory-measured compositions of CI chondrites are essentially identical, minus hydrogen and helium, to the composition of elements carried by convection from the interior of the Sun and measured in the outermost layer of the Sun. Since their components formed billions of years ago, they’re like chemically unchanged time capsules for the early solar system.

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So, geologists use the chemical compositions of CI chondrites as the ultimate reference standard for geochemistry. They can compare the compositions of everything from other chondrites to Earth rocks. Any differences from the CI chondrite composition would have happened through the same processes that formed asteroids and planets.

CI chondrites are rich in clay and formed when ice melted in an ancient asteroid, altering the rock. They are also rich in prebiotic organic molecules. Some of these types of molecules are the building blocks for life.

This combination of rock, water and organics is one reason OSIRIS-REx chose to sample the organic-rich asteroid Bennu, where water and organic compounds essential to the origin of life could be found.

Evaporites − the legacy of an ancient brine

Ever since the Bennu samples returned to Earth on Sept. 24, 2023, we and our colleagues on four continents have spent hundreds of hours studying them.

The instruments on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made observations of reflected light that revealed the most abundant minerals and organics when it was near asteroid Bennu. Our analyses in the laboratory found that the compositions of these samples lined up with those observations.

The samples are mostly water-rich clay, with sulfide, carbonate and iron oxide minerals. These are the same minerals found in CI chondrites like Revelstoke. The discovery of rare minerals within the Bennu samples, however, surprised both of us. Despite our decades of experience studying meteorites, we have never seen many of these minerals.

We found minerals dominated by sodium, including carbonates, sulfates, chlorides and fluorides, as well as potassium chloride and magnesium phosphate. These minerals don’t form just when water and rock react. They form when water evaporates.

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We’ve never seen most of these sodium-rich minerals in meteorites, but they’re sometimes found in dried-up lake beds on Earth, like Searles Lake in California.

Bennu’s rocks formed 4.5 billion years ago on a larger parent asteroid. That asteroid was wet and muddy. Under the surface, pockets of water perhaps only a few feet across were evaporating, leaving the evaporite minerals we found in the sample. That same evaporation process also formed the ancient lake beds we’ve seen these minerals in on Earth.

Bennu’s parent asteroid likely broke apart 1 to 2 billion years ago, and some of the fragments came together to form the rubble pile we know as Bennu.

These minerals are also found on icy bodies in the outer solar system. Bright deposits on the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest body in the asteroid belt, contain sodium carbonate. The Cassini mission measured the same mineral in plumes on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

We also learned that these minerals, formed when water evaporates, disappear when exposed to water once again – even with the tiny amount of water found in air. After studying some of the Bennu samples and their minerals, researchers stored the samples in air. That’s what we do with meteorites.

Unfortunately, we lost these minerals as moisture in the air on Earth caused them to dissolve. But that explains why we can’t find these minerals in meteorites that have been on Earth for decades to centuries.

Fortunately, most of the samples have been stored and transported in nitrogen, protected from traces of water in the air.

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Until scientists were able to conduct a controlled sample return with a spacecraft and carefully curate and store the samples in nitrogen, we had never seen this set of minerals in a meteorite.

An unexpected discovery

Before returning the samples, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spent over two years making observations around Bennu. From that two years of work, researchers learned that the surface of the asteroid is covered in rocky boulders.

We could see that the asteroid is rich in carbon and water-bearing clays, and we saw veins of white carbonate a few feet long deposited by ancient liquid water. But what we couldn’t see from these observations were the rarer minerals.

We used an array of techniques to go through the returned sample one tiny grain at a time. These included CT scanning, electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction, each of which allowed us to look at the rock at a scale not possible on the asteroid.

Cooking up the ingredients for life

From the salts we identified, we could infer the composition of the briny water from which they formed and see how it changed over time, becoming more sodium-rich.

This briny water would have been an ideal place for new chemical reactions to take place and for organic molecules to form.

While our team characterized salts, our organic chemist colleagues were busy identifying the carbon-based molecules present in Bennu. They found unexpectedly high levels of ammonia, an essential building block of the amino acids that form proteins in living matter. They also found all five of the nucleobases that make up part of DNA and RNA.

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Based on these results, we’d venture to guess that these briny pods of fluid would have been the perfect environments for increasingly complicated organic molecules to form, such as the kinds that make up life on Earth.

When asteroids like Bennu hit the young Earth, they could have provided a complete package of complex molecules and the ingredients essential to life, such as water, phosphate and ammonia. Together, these components could have seeded Earth’s initially barren landscape to produce a habitable world.

Without this early bombardment, perhaps when the pieces of the Revelstoke meteorite landed several billion years later, these fragments from outer space would not have arrived into a landscape punctuated with glaciers and trees.

Timothy J McCoy, Supervisory Research Geologist, Smithsonian Institution and Sara Russell, Professor of Planetary Sciences, Natural History Museum

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Cape Canaveral, FL – January 16, 2025 – In a remarkable achievement for commercial spaceflight, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket successfully reached orbit during its inaugural NG-1 mission today, marking a significant milestone for the company and the industry. The rocket’s second stage performed flawlessly, completing two successful burns with the BE-3U engines, achieving its intended orbital parameters.

Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, expressed his pride in the team’s accomplishment, stating, “New Glenn achieved orbit on its first attempt! We set out with ambitious goals, and while we lost our booster during descent, we gained invaluable insights from today’s mission.” Limp highlighted the importance of New Glenn in supporting critical missions for customers, including NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to establish a sustained human presence on the Moon.

New Glenn

The New Glenn vehicle is pivotal for Blue Origin’s future launches, including the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander and the Mark 2 crewed lander, which will serve NASA’s lunar objectives. In addition, the company is seeing strong demand, with various vehicles in production and a growing list of customers like NASA, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, and AST SpaceMobile.

Jarrett Jones, Senior Vice President of New Glenn, remarked on the significance of the day, saying, “Today marks a new era for Blue Origin and for commercial space. We’re ramping our launch cadence and are incredibly grateful to everyone at Blue Origin, our customers, and the space community for their unwavering support.”

The launch, which took place at 2:03 a.m. EST from Launch Complex 36, signals the beginning of a formidable era in Blue Origin’s operations as it seeks to connect its missions with emerging national security objectives through certification from the U.S. Space Force.

Blue Origin plans to conduct further missions with New Glenn, expanding its role in the growing landscape of space exploration and resource utilization. The company is focused on learning from today’s endeavor and aims to return for another launch attempt this spring.

Stay tuned for more updates on Blue Origin’s ambitious journeys ahead!

Related Link:

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https://www.blueorigin.com/news/new-glenn-ng-1-mission

The science section of our news blog STM Daily News provides readers with captivating and up-to-date information on the latest scientific discoveries, breakthroughs, and innovations across various fields. We offer engaging and accessible content, ensuring that readers with different levels of scientific knowledge can stay informed. Whether it’s exploring advancements in medicine, astronomy, technology, or environmental sciences, our science section strives to shed light on the intriguing world of scientific exploration and its profound impact on our daily lives. From thought-provoking articles to informative interviews with experts in the field, STM Daily News Science offers a harmonious blend of factual reporting, analysis, and exploration, making it a go-to source for science enthusiasts and curious minds alike. https://stmdailynews.com/category/science/