Before any NASA mission is launched, the spacecraft goes through weeks of harsh treatment. It's strapped to a big table that shakes as hard as the pounding of a rocket launch. It's bombarded with louder noise than a stadium rock concert. It's frozen, baked, and irradiated in a vacuum chamber that simulates the extremes of space. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission (SWOT), a collaborative U.S.-French mission to monitor all the water on Earth's surface, has passed these major tests. Now, except for a few final checks, SWOT is ready for its December launch.

Some of SWOT's engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California have invested almost a decade in designing, building, and assembling this complex mission. Watching the instruments they've labored over go through the latest round of tests has been stressful, but the team has taken the process in stride.

Billy Keim, a NASA technician, removes a 16-megapixel detector from its shipping container internal fixture as engineer Stephanie Cheung coordinates the activity. NASA's future Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be fitted with 18 of these infrared detectors, which have now been flight-approved.

The Roman team possesses extra detectors that will be used for other purposes. The team reserved six of the surplus detectors to serve as flight-quality backups and several more for testing. Additional spare detectors may serve as the eyes of other telescopes with more lenient quality requirements.

Roman has delivered four detectors to be used in the 64-megapixel camera in Japan's Prime-focus Infrared Microlensing Experiment (PRIME) telescope, located in the South African Astronomical Observatory in Sutherland. The detectors are contributed as part of an international agreement between NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

This telescope, which will be commissioned this fall, will hunt for exoplanets—worlds beyond our solar system—using the microlensing method. Roman scientists will use the results of this precursor survey to inform their observing strategy, maximizing the number of planets the mission will find.

Nuclear fusion reactions in the sun are the source of heat and light we receive on Earth. These reactions release a massive amount of cosmic radiation—including X-rays and gamma rays—and charged particles that can be harmful for any living organisms.

Life on Earth has been protected thanks to a magnetic field that forces charged particles to bounce from pole to pole as well as an atmosphere that filters harmful radiation.

During space travel, however, it is a different situation. To find out what happens in a cell when traveling in outer space, scientists are sending baker's yeast to the moon as part of NASA's Artemis 1 mission.

Cosmic damage

Cosmic radiation can damage cell DNA, significantly increasing human risk of neurodegenerative disorders and fatal diseases, like cancer.

NASA's Mars Sample Return Mission is inching closer and closer. The overall mission architecture just hit a new milestone when Perseverance collected the first sample that will be sent back. But what happens once that sample actually gets here? NASA and its partner, ESA, are still working on that, but recently they released a fact sheet that covers what will happen during the first stage of that process—returning to the ground.

That return will take place in the middle of the desert in the western U.S., in an area called the Utah Test and Training Range (UTTR). While this may seem like an obscure place to land such an important mission, it does have several things going for it.