Goddard

Two teams based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, are among the nine science groups selected to study Moon samples that has been sealed for half a century.

Using cutting-edge machines that can detect the chemical composition in grains of soil as small as a speck of dust, the two Goddard labs will study how the building blocks of life evolved in our solar system and how the Moon’s surface chemistry was shaped over eons by radiation from space and from the Sun.

“We are using instruments that did not exist during early analyses of Moon samples,” said Jamie Elsila, an astrochemist in the Astrobiology Analytical Laboratory at NASA Goddard.

"We don’t have any rocks on Earth that are older than about 4 billion years old, so we don’t know exactly how much volcanic activity there was or how heavily Earth was bombarded by asteroids” said Barbara Cohen, a planetary scientist who heads Goddard’s Mid-Atlantic Noble Gas Research Laboratory.

In a generic brick building on the northwestern edge of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center campus in Greenbelt, Maryland, thousands of computers packed in racks the size of vending machines hum in a deafening chorus of data crunching.

“The primary mirror is a technological marvel. The lightweight mirrors, coatings, actuators and mechanisms, electronics and thermal blankets when fully deployed form a single precise mirror that is truly remarkable,” said Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for Webb at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

“With this review complete, we enter the exciting phase where we will assemble and test the Roman hardware that we plan to fly,” said Jackie Townsend, deputy project manager for the Roman Space Telescope at Goddard.