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| Welcome, Rochelle Ford! | USRA’s new Vice President, Corporate Affairs and Governance, Rochelle Ford, is a proud Duke alumna, attorney, and a mother to two teenagers. In her current role, Rochelle will have executive responsibility for corporate legal matters, congressional advocacy, external communications, and management of corporate governance. She also serves as the Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer. You might not be surprised to learn that she’s passionate about education but you might be surprised to learn that she’s also a former high school teacher. Let’s take a moment to get to know Rochelle as she starts a new chapter at USRA.
Learn More about Rochelle Ford | | |
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| | Juneteenth Recognized as National Independence Day | A personal story by Eric Weaver, USRA VP, Human Resources, with portions from Sharon Pruitt-Young, NPRThis month, after Congressional approval, President Biden signed a bill establishing Juneteenth as a Federal holiday. USRA elected to recognize this newly established Federal holiday on 18 June 2021 as the holiday fell on a Saturday this year. Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. As a Black man with roots in Texas, I thought it particularly important to recognize this historic date in our country’s history.
Learn More About Juneteenth with Eric Weaver | |
| | Senator Hickenlooper Addressed USRA's Council of Institutions | On Friday, 18 June 2021, U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper (D-CO) addressed USRA’s 114-member council of institutions. Senator Hickenlooper, a former geologist, serves as chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Space and Science, which oversees NASA.
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| | New Machine Learning Model Doubles Accuracy of Global Landslide “Nowcasts” | Every year, landslides – the movement of rock, soil and debris down a slope – cause thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damages. Because terrain, characteristics of the rocks and soil, weather and climate all contribute to landslide activity, accurately identifying the areas most at risk at any given time can be an uphill battle. Early warning systems are generally regional – based on region-specific data provided by ground-based sensors, field observations, and rainfall totals. But what if we could identify at-risk areas anywhere in the world at any time using the combined power of space-based observations and models?
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USRA Scientists to Explore Venus with NASA’s DAVINCI Mission | NASA recently announced the selection of Goddard Space Flight Center’s DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) mission as part of its Discovery Program. Universities Space Research Association’s (USRA’s) Drs. Justin Filiberto and Walter Kiefer at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) are science co-investigators on the team that will analyze Venus' atmosphere to understand how it formed, evolved, and determine whether Venus ever had an ocean.
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| | New X-ray Map Reveals the Growing Supermassive Black Holes in Next-Generation Survey Fields | For the first time, one of the largest X-ray surveys using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space observatory has captured the growth of supermassive black holes at the core of more than ten thousand galaxies.
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| | New Research Suggests Jets and Coronal Mass Ejections May be the Beginning and End of a Solar Eruption Continuum | A new study suggests that all solar eruptions may share the same physical characteristics, differing mainly by the size and scale at which they occur.
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| | Young Nebula Hints at Formation of Stars in Early Universe | Astronomers are still trying to understand how stars and galaxies formed in the early universe. Now, scientists, using the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, (SOFIA), have new clues from a glowing nebula filled with clouds of hot gas and dust known as RCW 120. Data from SOFIA suggest that this nebula may be representative of how stars formed in the early universe.
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| | Universities Space Research Association's Miguel Román interviewed on NPR's Program "1 A" | USRA's Miguel Román, Founding Director of the Earth from Space Institute, was invited to speak at NPR’s Program "1 A" to discuss NASA’s Black Marble rapid response efforts and the impending 2021 Atlantic Hurricane Season.
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| | Satellite Data Products and Modelling Approaches Reveal Hazardous Particulate Matter in Air Quality | Universities Space Research Association’s Andrew Sayer co-authored an article published in the journal Science Advances on the effects of COVID-19 related lockdowns in early 2020 on air quality in North America, Europe, and China. The focus is on particulate matter (PM), small particles which are the leading environmental cause of mortality. In particular, PM exposure can exacerbate cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, and there is evidence that this includes the severity of COVID-19 infections.
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| | SOFIA Probes the Heart of Hot Core Chemistry | High-resolution molecular line surveys provide a chemical inventory for star forming regions — essential for establishing the relative importance of potential chemical networks, understanding organic chemistry associated with star formation, and providing constraints on the supply pathways of key organic molecules in Earth-like planet formation.
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| | Quantum Team Awarded 2020 Best Paper Award in Algorithms Journal | The Algorithms Award Committee recently announced the winner of the 2020 Best Paper Award. The award was given for a quantum research article written by a team of authors: Stuart Hadfield, Ph.D. (USRA), Zhihui Wang, Ph.D. (USRA), Bryan O’Gorman, Ph.D. (NASA), Eleanor G. Rieffel, Ph.D., (NASA), Davide Venturelli, Ph.D. (USRA) and Rupak Biswas, Ph.D. (NASA).
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| | USRA’s Leslie Proudfit’s Artwork Featured on Nature Astronomy’s Cover | Congratulations to USRA's extraordinarily talented graphic artist, Leslie Proudfit, whose artistic rendering of SOFIA's Magnetic Fields of Centaurus A was selected for the cover of the June issue of Nature Astronomy. The image accompanied the paper entitled "The Warped Magnetic Field of Centarus A" by Enrique Lopez Rodrigues and Joan Schmelz.
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| | USRA’s Ludovic Brucker and Team Win IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Transactions Prize Paper Award | The Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS)--a technical Society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)—announced the winner of the IEEE GRSS Transactions Prize paper. The award was given to a team of authors that includes Universities Space Research Association’s Ludovic Brucker and S.J. Munchak from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
More on newsroom.usra.edu |
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| Coming Soon |
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5 July | | USRA Holiday - Fourth of July Observed | |
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25 July | | National Intern Day |
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