The magic of working at NASA

From the preparation and management of launches to the manufacture of telescopes or the study of asteroids: at the Goddard Space Flight Center of the POT The real magic of space exploration milestones happens.

Less than twenty kilometers from Washington is this enormous facility, the largest of the ten that NASA has in the country, which hosts all kinds of programs -and adventures- of the scientists who work for the US agency.

And it happens here, for example, “what you normally see on the news when there is a big launch” and the team celebrates it among cheers, says the Spanish Víctor Ruiz, who has been working for NASA for more than a decade, during a press visit to Goddard.

This aerospace engineer is part of the PACE mission team, which will be launched on January 9.

If all goes well, the team will celebrate the success of the launch in a “control room” from this center, where cameras are prohibited to protect the data and from which they are currently studying how to control this spacecraft in orbit.

“We are carrying out all the maneuvers and collecting the data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I don’t like it because I have to stay to work at night.” explains the aerospace engineer between laughs.

PACE will look at the color of the oceans, something that “can give a lot of information” about what kind of plants there are in the sea, explained the expert, who recalled that the color is given by the interaction of sunlight with particles such as chlorophyll, a green pigment present in most phytoplankton species.

PACE recently passed a sound check that takes place in a “vibration chamber” in the same building, where ships are tested to withstand launch noise before being sent into space.

In fact, the US Marine Band was invited this July by the Goddard Center to see if they could match the volume of a ship at launch and “they fell short”, says the director of marine and Puerto Rican ecology, Carlos del Castillo.

The good thing is that the musicians composed a fanfare for PACE’s launch into space this January.

This center is also building the parts of the Nancy Grace Roman telescope, the first named after a woman and named after NASA’s first female chief astronomer.

The Roman, which is expected to be launched in 2026, can take a photo one hundred times larger than other telescopes such as Hubble or James Webb, Galician Begoña Vila, whose work as a systems engineer has been essential both for this device and for the Webb, assures EFE.

This new telescope -which lives up to its name by having a notable number of women on its team- will allow “find more planets, more galaxies and provide data on what dark matter may be”Villa said.

A couple of buildings from where the Roman is built, works the Peruvian astrochemist José Aponte, who has spent more than ten years at NASA studying samples of asteroids older than Earth itself.

Aponte is especially “excited” for the arrival of the OSIRIS-REx space probe on September 24, because it will bring fragments of an asteroid that will help understand the origin of life on the planet, something unprecedented for the United States.

“We have been developing this mission for more than 14 years so that is a very important motivation,” jokes Aponte while showing some “alien samples.” in the same laboratory you go to every day.

The truth is that the operations of this center are characterized by the fact that scientists and engineers work hand in hand, something that does not happen in any other NASA center. “Here the mission is thought and built”describes Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla about the place she set foot on for the first time 17 years ago.

This Spaniard directs the Solar Orbiter project, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency. The mission right now “it is getting very close to the Sun”, still 30% of the distance between the Earth and the star. With Solar Orbiter it will be possible to see the poles of the Sun for the first time, in order to better predict solar cycles.

For all of them, the real “mission” already achieved has been to get a job for NASA.

The Peruvian engineer Rosa Ávalos-Warren remembers that when she was little she really liked mathematics and science, and she already wanted to be part of this space agency.

Now, he leads the communications and navigations of the Artemis project – which will once again send man to the Moon – and assures that he loves to give talks to “promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics” and “Thus empowering generations of Hispanics” they will come after her.

Let’s see if some of them want to follow his example and also live the experience of working at NASA.

Source: EFE