THIS WEEK @NASA: First Delivery Service Selected for Lunar Gateway, Astronaut Added to Future Commercial Crew Flight

By Space Coast Daily // April 4, 2020

Latest Happenings around NASA

ABOVE VIDEO: You, plus “NASA at Home” equals a universe of possibilities, the first delivery service selected for our lunar Gateway, and an astronaut added to a future Commercial Crew flight … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!

NASA at Home: A Universe of Possibilities

Thanks to your suggestions, our new NASA at Home online resource offers even more content and possibilities for you to stay engaged and explore the universe around us – all from home to facilitate social distancing. You asked us to add more student activities, do-it-yourself projects, virtual tours, and amazing space images to NASA at Home.

All of those things have indeed been added to the YouTube content, e-books, podcasts and other material already included as part of the resource. Check it out for yourself at nasa.gov/nasaathome.

NASA Awards Artemis Contract for Gateway Logistics Services

We’ve selected SpaceX to be the first U.S. commercial provider contracted to deliver critical pressurized and unpressurized cargo, experiments and other supplies to the agency’s Gateway in lunar orbit.

This is a significant step forward for NASA’s Artemis program that will land the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024.

NASA Adds Shannon Walker to First Operational Crewed SpaceX Mission

This past week, NASA astronaut Shannon Walker was assigned to the first operational crewed flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station.

She will join NASA’s Michael Hopkins and Victor Glover Jr., as well as Japan’s Soichi Noguchi on the mission. It will be the first in a series of regular, rotational flights to the station following the spacecraft’s successful Demo-2 test flight with astronauts, which is targeted for mid-to-late May, as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

NASA Selects Mission to Study Causes of Giant Solar Particle Storms

We selected a new mission, called the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment or SunRISE, to study giant space weather storms generated by our Sun.

The mission will improve our understanding of how our solar system works, and could also help protect astronauts from the effects of radiation while traveling on deep space missions to the Moon and Mars. SunRISE is being targeted for launch no earlier than July 2023.

10.9 Million Names Now Aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover

The 10,932,295 names submitted as part of our “Send Your Name to Mars” campaign are now aboard our Perseverance Mars rover and ready for the trip to the Red Planet. The names were stenciled by electron beam onto three fingernail-sized silicon chips, along with the essays of the 155 finalists in NASA’s “Name the Rover” contest. The chips were then attached to an aluminum plate on the rover.

Scheduled to launch this summer, Perseverance will land at Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.

That’s what’s up this week @NASA