THIS WEEK @NASA: Crew-4 Astronauts Make Post-Flight Visit to D.C. Area, NASA Prepares for Historic Asteroid Sample Delivery
By Space Coast Daily // April 2, 2023
latest happenings around NASA
ABOVE VIDEO: NASA astronauts share their space station experience, our heavy-duty hauler crawls into the history books, and preparing for the return of some historic samples … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!
Crew-4 Astronauts Make Post-Flight Visit to D.C. Area
During the week of March 27, NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins, Robert Hines, and Kjell Lindgren visited the Washington, D.C. area to share the experience of their SpaceX Crew-4 mission to the International Space Station.
The visit included an employee event at NASA Headquarters, as well as an event at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library to help students learn about our Artemis missions to the Moon.
Crawling Into the History Books
The next time our Crawler Transporter 2, or CT-2 carries the mobile launcher and Artemis Moon rocket to the launch pad, the heavy-duty hauler will also carry the official Guinness World Records designation recently bestowed upon it as “the heaviest self-powered vehicle.” The CT-2 weighs about 6.65 million pounds – the equivalent of about 1,000 pickup trucks.
NASA Prepares for Historic Asteroid Sample Delivery
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx team is preparing for the spacecraft to return the sample material it collected from asteroid Bennu. The O-REx sample capsule is expected to touchdown in the Utah desert on Sept. 24 – becoming the first-ever U.S. mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth.
Dragonfly Could Reveal Chemistry That Leads to Life
Our Dragonfly mission, scheduled to launch to Saturn’s giant moon, Titan, in 2027, recently passed all the technical requirements and standards of its Preliminary Design Review. Dragonfly will study the chemistry at work on Titan – which could help us better understand the kinds of chemical steps that ultimately led to life here on Earth.
That’s what’s up this week @NASA
