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NASA Astronaut Reid Wiseman to Join NFL Fans in Baltimore
As part of NASA’s new Inspiration Tour, Reid Wiseman, NASA astronaut and commander of the agency’s Artemis II mission, will highlight America’s strengths in space exploration and aeronautics innovation at the Baltimore Ravens vs. New Orleans Saints game in Baltimore on Sunday, Sept. 20.
A Baltimore native, Wiseman is a 27-year Navy veteran and NASA astronaut who spent 175 days in space over two missions. On April 1, Wiseman launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SLS (Space Launch System) rocket as part of the Artemis II mission. Wiseman and his fellow Artemis II crew members completed a historic lunar flyby, marking humanity’s return to the vicinity of the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
Wiseman also will be available for media interviews inside the stadium at 12:20 p.m. To RSVP for the media availability, please contact Shaneequa Vereen at: shaneequa.y.vereen@nasa.gov.
NASA team members will engage with fans at the agency’s Experience Zone, located outside the stadium from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. before the game. Fans can learn more about NASA’s return to the Moon through the agency’s Artemis program, enjoy interactive games, and capture photos at a selfie station and with a large, inflatable NASA logo.
With stops across the nation, NASA’s Inspiration Tour convenes academic, industry, and public sector stakeholders to connect the agency with the people, technologies, and organizations that drive American leadership in space.
The tour will culminate in MAX POWER, a public exposition of American air and space innovation, Saturday, Nov. 7, and Sunday, Nov. 8, on and near the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Held in honor of America’s historic 250th anniversary, the multi-day, family-friendly event will showcase the next-generation aircraft, spacecraft, autonomous vehicles, and technologies that will help define the future of transportation in air and space.
For more information about MAX POWER and the agency’s missions, visit:
-end-
Camille Gallo / Jessica Taveau
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
camille.m.gallo@nasa.gov / jessica.c.taveau@nasa.gov
NASA’s Integrated Medical Model (IMM)
2 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Planning crewed missions to the Moon and Mars involves preparing for the medical realities of long-duration space travel. Factors like cosmic radiation, microgravity, and distance from Earth create unique health considerations for astronauts. To anticipate these needs ahead of time, NASA developed the Integrated Medical Model (IMM).
The IMM is a decision-support tool that uses medical evidence and computational modeling to forecast health risks before a mission launches.
How the Model Works
The IMM pulls from decades of flight records and clinical research compiled in NASA’s Integrated Medical Evidence Database (iMED).
Using Monte Carlo simulations, the tool models thousands of potential mission paths. Each run accounts for specific mission parameters, such as crew size, flight duration, planned spacewalks, and the spacecraft environment. This approach allows planners to evaluate risks for new mission profiles that lack historical precedents.
The model evaluates more than 100 medical conditions, ranging from common health concerns to hazards specific to spaceflight, like:
- Decompression sickness
- Radiation sickness
- Space motion sickness
- Smoke inhalation and barotrauma
- Routine conditions like infections and kidney stones
Practical Applications for Mission Planning
The model generates several quantitative metrics to help teams prepare:
- Total Medical Events (TME): The projected number of illnesses or injuries during the mission.
- Crew Health Index (CHI): An indicator of the crew’s overall functional capacity.
- Quality-Adjusted Time Lost (QTL): The estimated time spent diagnosing conditions, treating patients, and recovering.
- Probability of Evacuation and Loss of Crew Life (EVAC / LOCL): The likelihood of a medical emergency requiring a mission abort or resulting in a fatality.
- Resource Utilization: Projections of which medical consumables, medications, and tools the crew will need.
Because spacecraft carry strict mass and volume constraints, these outputs guide the composition of onboard medical kits (MedCap). Mission planners can balance necessary medical coverage against available cargo space with clear data in hand.
Planning for Greater Distances
On the International Space Station, emergency medical evacuation back to Earth can happen within hours. Deep-space exploration changes that timeline significantly, introducing communication delays and eliminating the option for a rapid return.
The IMM provides the data flight surgeons and engineers need to build resilient, self-sufficient medical systems for long journeys ahead.
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To dig deeper into how NASA prepares for the medical realities of space travel, explore the full IMM overview and supporting documentation:
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Newfound ‘Baby’ Planet Smashes Record for Youngest Known World
Newfound ‘Baby’ Planet Smashes Record for Youngest Known World
W. M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko
Astronomers have confirmed a world that’s less than a million years old as the youngest known planet, using data from NASA-funded archives. Called Elias 2-24 b, the baby planet is still whirling in its natal disk of dust and gas.
“Our planet-formation models already struggled to explain the previous record holders for the youngest known planet — a four-way tie between two planets orbiting the star PDS 70 and two planets orbiting the star WISPIT 2 — which are all more than 5 million years old,” said Lucas Cieza, a professor at the Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos in Chile and co-author of a paper detailing the results. “Elias 2-24 b shows us that even our best planet-formation models are still missing some important processes.”
In a study published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team led by Andrea Bernardi, a doctoral candidate at the Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, homed in on archival observations of seven stars that were observed using the coronagraph at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which partners with NASA under a cooperative agreement. Each of these stars hosts a debris disk chock-full of dust, gas, and chunks of ice and rock with structures and gaps in the disk hinting that planets may be forming around them.
With the coronagraph blocking light from the host stars, astronomers searched for fainter planets orbiting those stars that could be embedded in the dusty disks. Planets found outside our own solar system are called exoplanets.
“The planets should be found within the gaps, since they are carving them,” Bernardi said. “And that’s exactly where we found Elias 2-24 b.”
The planet orbiting the star Elias 2-24 is about as massive as Jupiter and the star is about 450 light-years from Earth. Studying this system offers a time machine of sorts for scientists to explore what our own planetary system may have been like billions of years ago.
Construction zone
Stars are born in swirling clouds of gas and dust, swaddled in haze. Orbiting planets form from leftover material that clumps up and gradually sculpts a path around the star. But it’s difficult to study an exoplanet’s newborn stage because of all the dust that shrouds them.
Most of the exoplanets we’ve discovered so far have been found using transits, which happen when a planet passes in front of its star and temporarily dims the amount of light we receive.
Those transits are hard to spot when the planets are still deeply buried in dust or orbiting far from the star. That’s why an overwhelming majority of the 6,000 currently confirmed exoplanets are billions of years old and very close to their stars. Current planet-formation models rely on a combination of complex theories and simulations, along with observations of young stars with disks where the presence of planets cannot yet be detected. Finding and studying more baby planets like Elias 2-24 b will help astronomers refine those models.
“The galaxy churns out new stars and planets continuously, so there are many in every stage of evolution,” Cieza said. “That means we can see the entire process in theory, but there is a large gap in what most telescopes can detect. We are mostly blind to these baby planets right now.”
Connecting dots
The confirmation using Keck data solves a mystery that has puzzled astronomers for a decade. About a decade ago, observations from ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) in Chile showed a gap in the young star’s dusty disk. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile then detected a faint point of light sitting in that gap.
Astronomers debated whether it could be a planet; according to planet formation theories, such gaps appear too early and too far from their stars for planets to have formed. Current models predict that it takes about 5 million years to form a Jupiter-size planet at Jupiter’s distance from the Sun (which is just over five times larger than the distance of Earth to the Sun), and even longer farther out. Yet the glowing dot they spotted was 55 times farther from its star than Earth is from the Sun and already behaving like a forming planet.
So Bernardi’s team searched the Keck Observatory Archive, a NASA-funded partnership between Keck Observatory and the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech/IPAC, for the same little point of light again and found it in observations from 2018 and 2020. They stitched the observations together to analyze its motion over time and found that it behaved more like a planet than an imaging defect or background star, ultimately confirming it as Elias 2-24 b.
“We usually hear about telescopes working separately, but this confirmation was possible only by using multiple telescopes together,” Bernardi said. “Elias 2-24 b is at the limit of what current telescopes can detect, but with new instruments like NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, such detections should become easier.”
Roman, which just launched Aug. 30, is equipped with an even more powerful coronagraph and is capable of spotting planets that are much harder for other telescopes to see. By employing the same technique, Roman could find planets in much smaller orbits, including true Jupiter analogs that are currently impossible to see through the glare. Elias 2-24 b is about 10 times farther out from its host star.
“This is just the beginning of a new era of discovery,” Cieza said. “It’s incredible that with modern technology, we are actually able to see planet formation in action, and Roman will take planet hunting to the next level.”
To learn more about NASA’s exploration of exoplanets, visit:
About the Author
Ashley Balzer
Ashley is the lead science writer for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
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Curiosity Blog, Sols 5002-5009: Tough Planning To Learn More About Wind-Blown Sediments
2 min read
Curiosity Blog, Sols 5002-5009: Tough Planning To Learn More About Wind-Blown Sediments
Written by Benjamin Tutolo, Professor, University of Calgary
Earth planning date: Friday, Sept. 4, 2026
Curiosity has marked several huge milestones (14 years on Mars; 5,000 sols on Mars; 1 kilometer of elevation gain since landing) over the past several weeks, and the team has duly celebrated these remarkable achievements. These celebrations punctuate the rover’s otherwise very busy and data-filled exploration of Mount Sharp, of which this week was another in a long succession of discoveries.
The team planned instrument activities that involved unstowing the arm on Sols 5003 and 5004 to continue investigations of the wind-formed long, narrow large ripple “Chocolatal” (see last week’s blog: “Curiosity Blog, Sols 4995-5001: 5,000 (Martian) Days on Mars”), followed by a short drive on sol 5004.
Planning for the arm activities on Monday was complex, with APXS chemical analyses and MAHLI imaging of targets within the wheel scuff and on top of the undisturbed ripple (seen in the image above), and a MAHLI “Dog’s Eye” image mosaic acquired on the way of the scuff. The team worked hard developing the plan for these arm activities this Monday due to the particular complexity of the MAHLI “Dog’s Eye” mosaic image. While the MAHLI instrument is frequently used to image features on the Martian surface from above, Dog’s Eye mosaics are reserved for targets we want to see edge-on, similar to how a dog close to ground may view a surface. In this instance, the team was interested in looking at potential layers visible on the sides of the sand scuff.
The end-of-week plan for activities over the Labor Day weekend in the United States and here in Canada includes APXS, MAHLI, and ChemCam analyses of the interesting gray stone that caught the team’s collective eye. Interestingly, the bedrock surrounding this stone appears to contain large nodules, which we have not seen for some time. The Mastcam instrument will be pointed back toward the Chocolatal area, and ChemCam will image and collect a couple of other LIBS observations on several interesting patches of the local geology.
