Trending tickers: Hims & Hers, BlackRock, Shell and GSK  Yahoo Finance UK

Google: Trending Posts & Discussions Added To What People Are Saying  Seroundtable

Official Trending Chart: Harry Styles, Zara Larsson, Bebe Rexha, LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER and more  Official Charts

Trending stocks this week as Wall Street slips amid Middle East conflict  Seeking Alpha

LeBron James, Tom Brady Pose in Trending Photo During Las Vegas Hangout  Bleacher Report

1. Google rolls out new Gemini capabilities to Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive  TechCrunch
2. New ways to create faster with Gemini in Docs, Sheets, Slides and Drive  blog.google
3. Google's New AI Features Are Trying to Make Data Entry a Thing of the Past  CNET
4. Gemini burrows deeper into Google Workspace with revamped document creation and editing  Ars Technica
5. Google Docs upgrades now let you co-edit with Gemini  9to5Google

1. Sonos just launched Play, a new $299 portable speaker  The Verge
2. Sonos Unveils $299 Portable Play Speaker, Ending New Product Drought  Bloomberg.com
3. Sonos announces two new products, including $299 portable AirPlay 2 speaker  9to5Mac
4. A would-be Apple TV rival from Sonos never made it past development  AppleInsider
5. Sonos Returns to the System That Built the Brand with Two Essential Speakers That Deliver Effortless Sound Throughout the Home  Yahoo Finance

1. MacBook Neo Wallpapers Now Available for All Macs in macOS Tahoe 26.4 Beta  MacRumors
2. MacBook Neo  Apple
3. Apple just created a billion more Mac users  Macworld
4. Apple’s $599 MacBook Neo is the laptop I’m telling my dad to get  CNN
5. Inside MacBook Neo shows a little computer and a lot of battery, speakers, and trackpad  9to5Mac

1. Apple creates adorable little Finder guy to promote its adorable little Mac  9to5Mac
2. Meet 'Lil' Finder Guy', Apple's new character promoting the MacBook Neo  USA Today
3. Cool or cringe? Apple's unhinged TikTok videos are dividing fans  Creative Bloq
4. Apple’s adorable Finder guy has broken the internet  Macworld
5. Apple ci vuole incatenare al suo ecosistema  Collater.al Magazine

1. Apple’s new MacBooks have keyboard change you might notice instantly  9to5Mac
2. Apple’s new M5 Max feels like a huge upgrade if you bought your laptop three years ago  The Verge
3. Apple debuts M5 Pro and M5 Max to supercharge the most demanding pro workflows  Apple
4. M5 Max MacBook Pro Review: Preeminent Power In the Same Old Shell  Gizmodo
5. Testing Apple’s 2026 16-inch MacBook Pro, M5 Max, and its new “performance” cores  Ars Technica

The farther the destination, the more fuel a rocket needs. The more fuel the rocket carries, the heavier the spacecraft. The heavier the spacecraft, the more fuel it requires to launch. Experts at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland are testing technology that could solve this problem. 

The CryoFILL (Cryogenic Fluid In-Situ Liquefaction for Landers) project could transform the way NASA fuels future space exploration missions, reducing costs and extending the duration of planetary surface operations.  

“If you think about how much fuel your spacecraft would need to go to Mars and come home, it’s quite a lot,” said Evan Racine, CryoFILL project manager at NASA Glenn. “If we can produce and liquefy oxygen on the Moon or Mars, we can fuel landers on the surface where they land, reducing the amount of propellant needed to launch from Earth.” 

Through the Artemis program, NASA will send astronauts on increasingly ambitious missions to explore more of the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and to build a foundation for the first crewed missions to Mars.  

To sustain a long-term presence on the lunar surface, NASA aims to use the Moon’s resources to make products like propellant. Oxygen, a key ingredient of rocket fuel, can be extracted from water ice found in permanently shadowed regions of the Moon. This oxygen would be mined in a gas form, but to be used as a propellant, it must be cooled and condensed into liquid form.   

NASA Glenn experts are using a flight-like cryocooler, developed by Creare LLC through NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research program, to remove heat from the system that extracts the oxygen. This allows the oxygen to condense and remain at extremely cold temperatures below minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit. 

“We’re testing with flight-like hardware to see how oxygen liquefies and how the system responds to different scenarios,” said Wesley Johnson, CryoFILL lead engineer. “These are critical steps toward scaling up and automating future in-situ refueling.” 

Over the course of the next three months, NASA engineers will study how oxygen condenses under various conditions, use the data to validate temperature computer models, and demonstrate how NASA can scale the technology for larger applications. Once the test is complete, the data will inform designs of these technologies for use on the Moon, Mars, or other planetary surfaces. 

The Cryogenic Fluid Management Portfolio Project is a cross-agency team based at NASA Glenn and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The cryogenic portfolio’s work is part of NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate and is comprised of more than 20 individual technology development activities. 

This article is from the 2025 Technical Update.

The human factors TDT looks for and creates opportunities to influence design to leverage human strengths and to protect people and missions. The human factors team has experts with knowledge of human performance in all aspects of NASA missions as well as from other safety-critical industries. The goal is to ensure that science-based human factors knowledge and lessons learned are applied throughout the mission lifecycle. The strategy is to 1) modify existing and create new discipline tools that meet NASA’s needs and constraints, 2) build strategies to enhance the disciplines’ chances for success, 3) enhance simulation techniques to gain maximum information even when verification and validation  opportunities are limited, 4) develop new analysis methods for human performance in NASA mission contexts, and 5) reframe  understanding of human performance to emphasize the key role of human resilience in mission success. 

This article highlights a set of analytical models of crew workload, training, and expertise that can be used to aid decision makers in determining the size of a Mars crew adequate for crew safety and mission success. These tools are built on a Department of Defense (DoD) capability that has been used extensively to evaluate the success of specific designs. Unlike missions in low Earth orbit or even to the Moon, a crewed Mars mission will operate under extraordinary constraints, primarily a significant communication delay with Earth and prolonged communication blackout periods. This necessitates a radical rethinking of mission design, including the human elements of crew size, workload, expertise, and resilient performance.  

To address this gap, the NESC developed a systematic and quantitative methodology, along with an associated suite of modeling tools, to enable the development of an evidence-based trade space for guiding crew size decisions for human Mars missions. This work provides actionable analysis to programs and projects early in development, enabling simultaneous consideration of mission architecture, operational concepts, and the roles human will play throughout the mission. This analysis supports the development of mission designs that preserve and enable human resilient performance to ensure the success and safety of future Mars exploration. 

Historically, NASA’s human spaceflight programs have relied on real-time support from extensive ground control, composed of a collective intellect that acts as an extended crew to manage objectives and respond to anomalies. As depicted in Figure 1, the volume of ISS ground personnel highlights the vast support structure available for Earth-proximal missions. However, for Mars, communication delays of up to 22 minutes one-way and blackouts lasting up to three weeks during superior conjunctions will eliminate this real-time lifeline. This demands a new focus on the capabilities required of the onboard crew, who will face time-critical decisions and unforeseen failures with only their knowledge and onboard decision-support systems, often without pre-existing procedures. 

The NESC’s methodology fills a longstanding gap, as past Mars crew size determinations often lacked detailed quantitative analysis of crew tasking, workload, and expertise. Extending DoD methodologies for manpower determination, the NESC human factors trade space methodology offers a repeatable and data-driven means to assess whether a given crew complement possesses the capability to accomplish mission objectives and respond successfully to unforeseen failures that have potential loss of crew or loss of mission (LOC/LOM) consequences. The core process involves gathering Mars mission concepts and information, determining use cases to model, creating a trade space evaluation framework, conducting human performance modeling, and performing trade space analyses. This iterative approach, conceptually represented by the Mars Crew Size Decision Process (see Figure 2), allows for adaptation as technologies and mission assumptions evolve. 

Central to this methodology are four human performance models, each revealing critical insights into the human factors of Mars mission design. 

1. IV Operations for Planetary Surface EVA Model: This model examined the mental workload of intravehicular (IV) Mars crewmembers supporting a planetary surface extravehicular activity (EVA), simulating activities currently performed by Mission Control Center personnel for ISS EVAs. It predicted that during a Mars surface technical EVA conducted at the pace of an ISS EVA, the workload for an IV crewmember performing combined essential flight controller duties would be unacceptably high, indicating a severe negative impact on task performance. This finding underscores the necessity of reconsidering EVA pacing, task automation, or increasing IV support crew complement to ensure mission-critical EVAs are safely conducted independently of Earth-based support. 

2. Robotic Arm Assisted EVA Operator Model: This model assessed the mental workload of a crewmember operating a robotic arm (see Figure 3) in both manual and automated control modes on a Mars transit vehicle. The model results indicate that two crewmembers may be necessary to mitigate unacceptably high workload during manual robotic arm operations. Furthermore, consistent with the scientific literature, the model predicted that stressors like sleep debt increase mental workload and degrade performance, extending task completion times. This highlights the importance of accounting for crew well-being in crew-size determinations. 

3. Mars Transit Crew Model: This analysis focused on crew utilization and staffing requirements during a 9-month Mars transit mission, reallocating planned and unplanned tasks from ground control to the crew. The modeling, using ISS-equivalent task assumptions, predicted that more than six crewmembers (given average rates for unplanned events) would be needed to achieve the same number of work hours as a four-person ISS mission. This substantial increase emphasizes the critical impact of Earth-independence on daily crew workload and the imperative for adequate crew complement to manage ongoing responsibilities. 

4. Personnel, Expertise, and Training Model: Given the communication delay/blackout with Mars, paired with no rapid return-to-Earth options, NASA will need to rely on the expertise of the crew to respond to unforeseen failures. A custom model was developed to quantify the crew expertise required to meet mission objectives and respond to unforeseen events with LOC/LOM potential and short time-to-effect. Based on analysis of ISS historical data, the probability of at least one occurrence of such a failure during Mars transit is greater than 99%. A sensitivity analysis of the relationship between a successful crew response and LOC/LOM outcome was conducted for cases in which the crew gave a successful response 90%, 95%, 98%, and 99.985% of the time. The estimated likelihood of a LOC/LOM consequence for all but the most conservative of these cases is greater than 1%, which is considered in the “very high” (red) range, per the Human System Risk Board risk matrix. The likelihood of LOC/LOM consequences only drops below 0.1% (yellow) for a successful response rate of 99.985%. When unforeseen failures occur on a mission to Mars, it will be critical that the crew have the necessary level of expertise to accurately diagnose problems and restore critical functionality. The Personnel, Expertise, and Training model is designed to provide the agency with the capability to consider the trade space

Join us on Wednesday, March 25 at 2:00 p.m. EDT (-04:00 UTC) to learn more about NASA Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) program vendor Satellogic and how to discover, access, and work with their high-resolution commercial datasets.

NASA’s Earth Science Division (ESD) established the Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition (CSDA) program to explore the potential of commercial satellite data in advancing the agency’s Earth science research and application objectives. The program aims to identify, assess, and acquire data from commercial providers, which may offer a cost-effective means of supplementing Earth observations collected by NASA, other U.S. Government agencies, and international collaborators.

Satellogic delivers high-resolution Earth observation imagery at scale through its vertically integrated satellite constellation. During this NASA CSDA program webinar, speakers will introduce Satellogic and its constellation of commercial Earth Observation satellites. Representatives will highlight current and future capabilities, including service-level monitoring at scale, and plans for global daily remapping. They will also discuss how these data products complement NASA Earth science data holdings for research and applications. In addition, presenters will address the services and tools available to data users, including how they can get expert assistance when using Satellogic datasets.  

To Register

This article is from the 2025 Technical Update.

The NESC has invested significant time and resources to better understand composite overwrapped pressure vessels (COPV) performance and more importantly, how these complex, high-pressure storage systems can fail. These vessels, which store high pressure propulsion and life-support system fluids on launch vehicles and spacecraft, are ubiquitous at NASA, and failures have the potential to be catastrophic. 

This year the NESC finalized work on a set of guidelines intended for use by NASA civil servants and support contractors in their development or assessment of damage-tolerance demonstration data for COPVs. These guidelines are based on the NESC’s experience in assessing agency-wide COPV applications and compiling the best practices for complying with the damage-tolerance requirements of AIAA S-081, the standard for COPVs used in human and robotic spaceflight, and NASA-STD-5019, Fracture Control Requirements for Spaceflight Hardware.

Previously referred to as “safe-life,” damage tolerance life assumes detectable cracks exist before service and demonstrates that such cracks, in worst-case locations and orientations, will not grow to failure over the service life. A 4x life factor is applied, requiring that cracks do not reach failure (leakage or unstable growth) within four times the expected service cycles.  

These guidelines are meant to support NASA personnel in applying S-081 requirements and also to clarify areas that historically have had varied interpretation. And by leveraging NESC assessments where approaches to damage tolerance were found to be unconservative, the guidelines offer best practices for minimizing risk based on supporting data—and do so without introducing new standards. The guidelines touch on numerous aspects of damage tolerance life including:  

• COPV mechanics and model correlation, 

• Identifying worst case locations for damage tolerance,  

• Nondestructive evaluation (NDE), 

• Addressing crack aspect ratios, 

• Defining load spectra, 

• Addressing autofrettage crack growth, 

• Performing damage-tolerance life demonstration by analysis using a crack-growth analysis software like NASGRO, 

• Performing damage-tolerance life by coupon or vessel testing, and 

• Addressing sustained-load crack growth and environmentally assisted cracking. 

In determining the worst-case locations for damage tolerance evaluation, the guidelines offer a method for evaluating the contributing factors—stress/strain, material properties, thick-ness, and initial crack size. The identified regions show different liner material forms and welds, and within each form, the initial crack size based on the NDE method used, the minimum thickness, and the peak stress/strain level are determined for that form. The guidelines then provide best practices for addressing damage tolerance with each material form and worst-case location in the COPV.  

This article is from the 2025 Technical Update.

The NESC’s Thermal Control & Protection Technical Discipline Team (TDT) is a resource providing subject matter expertise in active and passive thermal control as well as ascent and entry thermal protection across the spectrum of agency needs. TDT members led or supported a variety of key activities including the ongoing Artemis I heat shield char loss investigation, assessing viable thermal control fluids as replacements for those being phased out due to Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), conducting Commercial Crew-related thermal control and thermal protection analysis peer reviews, and leading and providing expertise to the Dragonfly Thermal Advisory Board and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Standing Review Board. 

Enhancing the Thermal Community of Practice 

The TDT welcomed two new early-career engineers for a one-year rotation after the program’s successful inaugural year. This experience helps to train the next generation of engineers and leaders. Rotational engineers are responsible for formulating the TDT’s annual State of the Discipline presentation, an assessment of the overall health and needs of the thermal control and thermal protection disciplines. Additionally, the rotational engineers may be involved in a variety of other TDT activities including initial work on a thermal control standard and maintaining the thermal control and protection critical technologies list to broaden their experience and to become familiar with key thermal work across the agency.  

The TDT continued to embrace its responsibility to maintain and enhance the thermal control and protection community of practice through presentation of three webinars covering file plotting tools, two-phase flow, and Dragonfly thermal design. The TDT also developed a lesson on thermal louvers for inclusion into the NESC Academy.   

The TDT remains the lead cosponsor of the Thermal and Fluids Analysis Workshop (the other cosponsors are the Aerosciences and Cryogenics TDTs), an annual, longstanding NASA-owned event that provides training and is designed to encourage knowledge sharing, professional development, and networking throughout the NASA thermal and fluids engineering community and the aerospace community at large. The workshop features technical sessions and presentations, analysis software demonstrations and training, technical short courses, a student poster session, guest speakers, and speed mentoring. This year’s event was planned and presented by the Ames Research Center in partnership with San Jose State University and drew nearly 350 attendees. The NASA Technical Fellow for Thermal Control & Protection presented a theory-based short course titled “Introduction to Orbital Mechanics and Spacecraft Attitudes for Thermal Engineers.” The vision of TFAWS is to maintain continuity over time and between disciplines throughout the thermal and fluids engineering community. To inspire the next generation of engineers, the Technical Fellow also provided lectures and guidance to students at the Rice University Aerospace Academy reaching more than 300 students in the grades 9 through 12.  

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