By Sara Soteras and Acosta |
Washington (EFE)
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 is that here happens, for example, “what is normally seen in the news when there is a great 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.
PACE, a commitment to the planet
If all goes well, the team will celebrate the successful launch in a “control room” at this center, where cameras are prohibited to protect the data and from which they are currently studying how to control this orbiting spacecraft.
“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 with a laugh.
PACE will observe the color of the oceans, something that “can give a lot of information” about what kind of plants 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 test in a “shake chamber” in the same building, where spacecraft 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 the time of its launch and “they fell way 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.
A telescope marked by the feminine influence
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 make it possible to “find more planets, more galaxies and provide data on what dark matter may be,” Vila 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” by the arrival of the OSIRIS-REx space probe on September 24, because it will bring fragments of an asteroid that will help to 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 where he goes every day.
The mission of working at NASA
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 of and built,” describes Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla of the place where she set foot 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 at the moment “is getting very close to the Sun”, at 30% of the distance between 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 accomplished 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, she leads the communications and navigations of the Artemis project – which will send man to the Moon again – and assures that she loves to give talks to “promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics” and “thus empower the generations of Hispanics” that 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.