Year: 2021

I recently celebrated my five-year anniversary at NASA. Over these past 5 years, we have seen great success with NASA’s Science missions. From landing on Mars to learning more about our home planet than ever before, teams across the agency are making the impossible possible. Without the incredible individuals that make up the excellent teams at NASA and its partners, none of this would be possible. So, thank you to all the people and teams that have worked with us over these 5 years to make new discoveries and push the boundaries of exploration.

With this 5-year milestone, I have been reflecting on a few of my biggest mistakes. I also hope this motivates others because it models a key truth of leadership that took me a long time to learn: “excellence is not the absence of mistakes, but a focus on constant improvement and learning”.

One thing that comes to the top of my mind is my failure early on to broaden my message regarding diversity and inclusion at NASA. This resulted in inadvertently putting up walls that kept some valuable communities out in ways I never intended. Let me explain.

When I joined NASA over 5 years ago, I was asked many times about the goals that I wanted to achieve here. I gave many answers, but none of them included the words “diversity” or “inclusion”.

But that changed based on three distinct experiences. First, we had an alarming lack of diversity in teams leading our mission proposals. With a couple of exceptions in planetary science, we did not have a single mission proposal in the rest of the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) led by a female scientist, and that had been going on for several years. Additionally, mission teams were a lot less diverse than our community, perpetuating a lack of diversity even further.

Second, I witnessed instances in our own SMD leadership team that made me believe that we were caught in a situation that often leads to utter mediocracy – something known as “group-think”. I observed that important discussions did not happen and that diverse viewpoints were not heard. Even if there was some diversity in the room in terms of gender, race, etc. – these voices were not included in many of the discussions generally.

Third, roundtable discussions were implemented with early career scientists in all disciplinary communities and I was shocked by the prevalence of problems surrounding sexual harassment and just horrible experiences of biases many of our female colleagues were experiencing. There were stories I heard that literally took my sleep. It is tough to hear these stories as a father of a daughter interested in science.

We had some major problems that were holding us back from being a welcoming community, but equally importantly problems that prohibited us from getting to a standard of excellence that was otherwise possible.

It was important and urgent to embark on a journey of change. But the first challenge on this journey was one that led to one of my biggest mistakes: We needed to convince members of our team and the entire science community that we had this big problem. And I needed to do that the way scientists do – by using data!

Even though I was convinced from the beginning that we needed to focus on diversity in all dimensions, I focused my “proof of problem” and overall narrative on only one aspect of diversity – a focus on our female colleagues. Frankly, we did not have any data in NASA Science programs and competitions focused on this broader issue and the only thing we could do on the short time-scale required by the urgency of this challenge was to infer gender from names.

It was straight-forward to demonstrate the devastating impact of our implicit and explicit biases if 50% of the US was not represented in many teams, or if not one female principal investigator (PI) could be found in a research community consisting of 25-35%+ female colleagues.

I started talking about this and we started to make changes. But, I missed the importance of good language as we moved forward and fell into the trap of over-focusing on gender diversity problems in all my talks and writings. There is an important truth for all leaders: Our words matter. My failure to broaden both narratives and actions resulted in a sense in our community of color that we did not care about them in NASA’s Science Program. Similarly, our LGBTQ+ colleagues also did not see themselves in our narratives and neither did other communities. I had tidally missed the boat despite good intentions.

It took lots of engagement, mentorship and help from some of our team members as well as from trusted community members to actively and consistently helped address and mitigate my mistake. Thank you to each person who pushed to get us on the track we are on today in improving the way we welcome and include individuals from all communities into NASA Science.

We are still on this journey today. We have changed policies about how we handle harassment – we did so as an agency. We have added training, new policies and are having discussions and have made changes across our programs – from science proposals to standing review boards – to flatten the playing fields and make better decisions. We have experimented with new ways of selecting worthwhile proposals, including dual-anonymous peer reviews that have identified and removed or eliminated a number of biases. We keep experimenting and learning.

For example, No Due-Date (NDD) programs in Planetary Science launched with the release of ROSES 2021 resulted from researcher input into challenges faced during the COVID pandemic. NDD seeks to allow individual PIs the opportunity to better achieve work-life balance and to give smaller institutions with a less-robust proposal support system greater flexibility in submitting proposals. Noting the huge importance of our funding programs for the entire science community, we are also experimenting also with Inclusion Plans to put focus on these important issues. Furthermore, we are making an effort to increase partnerships across institutions to provide additional opportunities for engagement and increasing diversity of thought. Listening sessions at Minority-Serving Institutions and targeted activities in partnership with affinity groups help broaden our footprint across the research and academic landscape.

Although we have made some significant progress in parts of our ecosystem, we cannot be happy with where we are. We will continue to lend our voice and focus actions towards building a better science and technology community around NASA. For that, we need amazing vision, incredible perseverance, and follow-through, but – most importantly – the best and most capable teams we can build in all of that. And I already observe today, and I believe we will see even more clearly as we go forward, that some of the best teams are composed of wonderful individuals who never had a place in them in the past.

I’m happy to announce today that for the first time ever, a spacecraft has “touched” the Sun. Three years after launch, our Parker Solar Probe has now flown within the Sun’s inner corona, sampling particles and fields still bound to the Sun’s atmosphere.

This monumental achievement is more than 60 years in the making, the goal of a mission concept and dreams of scientists that predate NASA itself. Just as the Moon landings revolutionized our ability to study the Moon and our solar system, our first close encounter with our star marks the beginning of a new phase in solar science, one where we can ask and answer questions that had previously been out of reach.

This milestone is even more meaningful considering that this technologically-advanced spacecraft was named in honor of astrophysicist Dr. Eugene Parker. It is the first and only time a NASA spacecraft has a living individual as its namesake. I chose to advocate for naming this spacecraft after Dr. Parker as a testament to the importance of his entire body of work, work that I felt had been overlooked by many – even though it’s hard to find a scientist with a bigger or broader impact on space science.

At the heart of this work is a story of pioneering science with much perseverance: In 1958, Dr. Parker, a humble but somewhat stubborn mid-westerner, published an article sharing his theory that high-speed matter and magnetic fields were constantly – and supersonically – escaping the Sun.  He predicted that this constant torrent of what came to be known as solar wind affected all the planets and space throughout our solar system. This important prediction, and eventual confirmation, ultimately informed our understanding about how stars and other astrophysical objects throughout the whole universe interact with the worlds and space around them. Not only did Dr. Parker’s work introduce a new field of science, he inspired my own research as well as crucial science questions that NASA continues to study to this day. More than 20 missions in heliophysics, planetary sciences, and astrophysics currently focus on scientific fields he significantly affected. Adding Parker Solar Probe to Dr. Parker’s legacy is among my proudest accomplishments and one that is meaningful to me even today.

What it means to “touch” the Sun requires some defining, since the Sun doesn’t have a solid crust like Earth. But it does have an invisible boundary where solar material stops being “stuck” to the Sun, and instead is free to decouple from its source and escape outward as the constantly streaming solar wind. We call this boundary the Alfvén critical surface, named after the Swedish scientist and Nobel Prize winner who made many notable contributions to plasma physics. At the Alfven surface, the solar wind begins to travel faster than the speed of the waves that can couple the wind to the surface of the Sun – which implies a speed where the solar material is traveling fast enough that it can decouple from its source in the solar atmosphere. Freed, the solar wind can now escape into space.

We have long known the Alfvén critical surface exists, but not exactly where it was located or what was within it. Based on remote images of the corona, as well as solar wind measurements in space, estimates had put the boundary somewhere between 10 to 20 solar radii (4.3 to 8.6 million miles) from the photosphere, or solar surface. But we’ve never had a spacecraft close enough to confirm those estimates and we have never gotten close enough to see what’s on the other side.

Until now.

During Parker’s eighth flyby of the Sun on April 28, 2021, the spacecraft passed within 18.8 solar radii (8.127 million miles) of the photosphere when it detected the conditions scientists had long awaited. Parker was passing through what’s known as a pseudostreamer, a giant magnetic loop that extended from the corona, when the magnetic field intensified and particle speeds slowed. A combination of measurements from multiple sensors revealed that Parker had indeed crossed the Alfvén critical surface and was sampling particles that were not part of the supersonic solar wind, but the slower-moving solar atmosphere itself.

So what are we seeing on the other side? For one thing, an answer to a question that Parker Solar Probe identified soon after it launched: What is causing mysterious hairpin bends in the solar wind called “switchbacks”?  We have known about switchbacks since the NASA/ESA Ulysses mission in the mid-90s, which observed S-shaped kinks in the solar wind where the Sun’s magnetic field abruptly reversed direction like a magnetic zig-zag. Due to assumptions that the solar wind was fairly stationary, we had suspected these switchbacks were relatively rare phenomena restricted to the Sun’s polar regions.

In 2019, Parker upended those assumptions when it revealed that switchbacks were plentiful in the solar wind, even in regions far from the solar poles. The new observations suggested that switchbacks would tell us more about the Sun than we had expected – but how and where they formed remained unknown.

Parker’s close pass within the solar atmosphere got us close enough to find out. On its sixth flyby, Parker measured clusters of switchbacks and found that the percentage of helium in them matched the composition of solar material at the photosphere, the solar surface. During the same flyby, a different analysis showed that the switchbacks were aligned with magnetic “funnels” in the photosphere. Together, these facts suggest that the switchbacks start near the solar surface, a dynamic, roiling region of solar material and magnetic field that looks somewhat like a searing frying pan of oil at home.

Parker will continue orbiting even closer to the Sun on upcoming flybys, reaching as close as 8.86 solar radii (3.83 million miles) from the surface at its closest approach. The next perihelion in January 2022 will likely pass through the solar atmosphere, the corona once more – meaning we are now in a very exciting time for solar science, a time when we can directly sample the Sun itself. This opens a whole new realm of solar and heliospheric science!

Finally, I want to thank Dr. Eugene Parker for the time he took with me and so many other early career scientists over 20 years ago. May we all take his intellectual courage and steadfast perseverance as an example for us as we move into the new era of science enabled by these new data. And let’s also learn from Parker’s senior colleagues who were less than welcoming of new thought when as an early career scientist, Parker brought forward his novel ideas about the solar wind and its embedded magnetic field.  Instead, let’s celebrate new thought and insights, especially if they come from new community members!

It’s not a Hollywood movie, but it could be: The mathematical probabilities align such that an object in the main asteroid belt from the swarm that orbits our Sun intersects with Earth’s orbit, resulting in an asteroid impacting our planet.

On a small scale this happens all the time—causing the mesmerizing shooting stars we see in our night sky, as these objects disintegrate in Earth’s atmosphere—and of the over one million known asteroids, we know that none are coming anywhere near us for at least 100 years. However, ancient craters in the Southwest United States and elsewhere serve as a reminder of large objects that have hit our planet in the past, and if one were ever to find itself headed our way again, we want to be prepared. Thus, one of NASA’s jobs is to find, track, and monitor these near-Earth objects (NEOs) and, if necessary, protect Earth should one and our planet ever find themselves on a course to be in the same place at the same time.

While it is true that some asteroids could pose a potential impact hazard to Earth, we also study them because they are mysterious relics that have existed and persevered through the solar system’s formation and evolution. They are ancient time capsules that bore witness to the formation of our cosmic neighborhood, and they are pieces of the material that formed the many bodies in our solar system—some of which coalesced into planets and stars, and others that remain orbiting the Sun, flung out as remnants of dust and rock.

Studying near-Earth objects and understanding Earth’s relationship to them is a cornerstone of our science. A sample of asteroid Bennu is currently speeding toward Earth aboard OSIRIS-REx for a Sept. 2023 delivery of what will be one of the most precious 60 grams (or possibly more!) of substance on the planet. Last month, the Lucy mission launched to study eight asteroids—the most ever visited by a single spacecraft—and will visit the Trojan asteroids that swarm Jupiter in front of and behind the gas giant’s orbit far out into our solar system. Next summer we launch Psyche to analyze a unique and metal-rich asteroid by the same name that could be the exposed core of an early planet that lost its rocky outer layers due to a number of violent collisions billions of years ago. And now, we have the Double Asteroid Redirect Test, or DART, which will be humanity’s first test for planetary defense — to see if we could change the course of an asteroid should we ever discover one headed toward Earth. DART is scheduled for launch no earlier than 1:20 a.m. EST Wednesday, Nov. 24 (the day before Thanksgiving on the East Coast; 10:20 p.m. PST Tuesday, Nov. 23), on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

When DART arrives at the Didymos binary asteroid system next fall (currently scheduled to arrive between Sept. 26 and Oct. 1), it will need to differentiate between its impact target Dimorphos and the larger parent asteroid that Dimorphos orbits, Didymos — all while millions of miles away from Earth. It will do this with the help of its single instrument, the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation (DRACO) camera and a sophisticated suite of algorithms called SMART Nav. Once DART identifies and locks onto Dimorphos, it will kinetically impact the asteroid moonlet at a speed of 15,000 miles per hour—for reference, this means DART will cover its last four miles in one single second—which will change the amount of time it takes Dimorphos to orbit Didymos. This change in time will be measured through an international observation campaign and will be key to proving that asteroid deflection though kinetic impact is possible.

Ten days prior to impact, DART will release the LICIA CubeSat provided by our partners at ASI, the Italian Space Agency, to observe the entire operation from afar and gather further data about DART’s kinetic impact test. ESA, the European Space Agency, will also be watching closely as they look to visit the two asteroids with the HERA mission in 2026 to further examine DART’s impact site.

To be clear: The Didymos system is not a threat to Earth, nor could we nudge it and cause it to come toward Earth. This is simply a test to determine if pushing an asteroid is a repeatable, viable technique we could use in the future. If detected at a far enough distance from Earth, even a minute change that alters an asteroid’s trajectory could make the difference between an asteroid impacting our planet and avoiding it altogether.

DART is part of a new concept in spacecraft that are much smaller, more focused, and quicker to realize. Our use of CubeSats is another welcome trend that is helping us to conduct great science both near and far from our planet. We look forward to working with our Italian partners to reap all the benefit of our traveling partner LICIACube. The DART satellite also carries innovative roll-out solar arrays, a cutting-edge propulsion system, and navigation that enables it to pinpoint a small object in space and hit it even though it is moving at thousands of miles per hour. No small feat!

Yes, we need to be prepared should we ever be threatened by one of these enormous bodies emerging from the void of space, but we will remain fascinated by asteroids because of all we can learn from them. Our observation efforts are increasing, our study of these amazing relics of ancient history is unfolding their secrets, and the story of asteroids is a growing part of our scientific inquiry.

I hope you will join our planetary defense efforts by signing up to become a Planetary Defender, and by watching the DART launch on Nov. 23 from wherever you live for the start of this next chapter.

We’re exploring the solar system and the universe together – as a NASA Family and an international community who depend on the space agencies and space programs of nations of all sizes around the world to keep us safe and uncover the secrets of the cosmos for the benefit of all.

Every planet changes. To document these changes and what we know about them across millennia is the goal of some of our flagship missions at Mars, Jupiter and elsewhere through our solar system.

Our own planet is another story. Because we live here, those changes in our landscape take on a more urgent, vital concern. Documenting our home from many angles and wavelengths are a fleet of Earth observation satellites operated by many nations as well as commercial entities. NASA and its agency partners help manage an incredible array of these assets.

Now we are targeting Landsat 9 for launch Sept. 27. It carries on a grand tradition that for nearly 50 years has generated a data record of our planet and its changing land, and the imprints that natural disasters and climate change have made visible from space. The world has never seen anything like the Landsat missions before. The continuity of measurements they have provided is an invaluable global asset free to all that helps us understand the very place we live – not just our continent or our nation, but our region and our city and local environment.

Begun in the early days of the 1970s during a time of heightened awareness of threats to our environment, Landsat has continued to remain relevant today. These missions help us see where the place we live – the land we depend on for survival on this ocean world – continues to evolve. We can see the decades of recovery from the Mt. St. Helens eruption, or the effects of fires that raged across the Amazon recently.

Thanks to Landsat we can see how urbanization has changed over two generations. How crops have shifted and where they are grown and how well they’re doing. And how much of our precious water there is to grow them. Wildfires. Hurricanes. Extreme weather of all sorts. We can help see what’s happened and how the environment recovers.

The Landsat missions have had perhaps more impact on peoples’ daily lives than any other Earth observation mission. They’ve had huge economic impact and are the crown jewels in our Earth fleet.

Together with our Landsat partners at the U.S. Geological Survey, we have surveyed our planet rigorously and continuously and stored and shared that information. The earliest geological surveyors plodded across massive landscapes barely scraped by human eyes and now we image the entire Earth in around two days by teaming up with the Landsat 8 satellite we’ll be working with on orbit, and a Sentinel satellite from ESA. Scientists who were not born when Landsat first began to study our planet now look forward to carrying its tradition forward.

Just imagine — at every point in our planet’s life over the past 50 years, Landsat was working hard to help us see our world. Through wars and famines and droughts and storms and manmade events. The data Landsat provides helps us understand how to live better together on the ground. End users of its data are people like farmers and disaster preparedness staff, urban planners, crop managers and food sustainability professionals. And the artists and creative among us who see how an image of a river delta can also be a tree, and about the beauty in the processes constantly shaping our changing planet. #LandsatArt

So join us Sept. 27 at 11:12a.m. PT for the launch of Landsat 9 on nasa.gov/live. Or join our Facebook event page for behind the scenes tours. And please join the global #Landsat conversation about how we study our planet and how that matters to us all.

I visited Europe this past week, from France, to Switzerland and then Spain. It was my first international trip across the Atlantic since the beginning of COVID, the longest time I have ever been away from Europe and Switzerland since I left in 1996 to build a new life on the other side of the Atlantic.

I really missed traveling. No, I do not particularly like sleeping on planes – I am too tall for the seats they build. Sitting there with a mask makes it less comfortable still. And I feel like a small part of my brain was pulled out on numerous swabs used for COVID tests. But it remains important to travel safely and I will do what it takes to protect me and others.

I still admire those flying machines that lift us above the clouds into the sky, and toward distant shores. I recall how long a boat trip would have taken in ancient times for the same trip. And, I think of the interplay of the incredible technologies associated with the first A in NASA – aeronautics.

There are few technologies and industries that bring people together more, and create understanding or even friendships where they seemed elusive at first. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness”, said Mark Twain, and that still holds true today.

There were many highlights on this trip – here are just a few.

I enjoyed visiting my friend and colleague, European Space Agency Science Director, Günther Hasinger. This was my first trip to Madrid and I loved it. We spent a day and aligned our programs in ways many phone and Zoom calls cannot. I will never forget our dinner together with wine, cheese and Spanish charcuterie under the Spanish night sky.

I gave a talk at the Swiss Economic Forum aligned with thier conference theme “New Horizons”. It allowed me to spread what we do at NASA to a broad audience. This mission is still the stuff of dreams. One cannot give a talk about new horizons, without talking about Pluto.

My talk was focused on the new horizons we have when exploring the universe – moving the boundary of ignorance back as fast as we know how. And it is about the important of new horizons and unprecedented and urgent collaborations as we focus on our own planet, the Earth, the most beautiful planet we have ever known. The talk was given in (somewhat broken) German. Check it out at this link.

This long awaited trip reminded me of the international and worldwide character NASA Science really does have. Whether it is visiting the company, Maxon, that built electric motors for the Ingenuity helicopter and that enable Perseverance’s sample acquisition, or the international partners in France who helped build the seismology instrument on Mars now, the best science is done when we do it together, with transparency and trust. I am proud of NASA for its aspirational goal to be the favorite and most reliable collaborator to countries around the globe seeking to explore space. For us at NASA, leadership and partnership is and remains linked, as we have a critical role in efforts of US diplomacy worldwide. We have trusted friends in so many countries, friends we look forward to seeing in person as soon as it is feasible and safe!

As the COVID-19 pandemic began to rage last year, I thought about how NASA could marshal its resources to help benefit people worldwide. We know that Earth observations provide us with a satellite view of our home planet and offer a unique perspective on any number of macro changes happening here on Earth. So together with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), we combined resources to strengthen our understanding of the effects of the global pandemic. As a result, we unveiled the Earth Observing Dashboard in June 2020. I am really proud of this effort because the dashboard offers the public access to an array of COVID-related Earth observation data captured by the three space agencies. It allows anyone to see, from a satellite-view, the effects that COVID-19 is having on our economies, our environment, shipping patterns and more around the globe.

June 2021 marks the one-year anniversary of the dashboard’s creation. We thought a great way to commemorate the occasion would be to host a global hackathon and invite participants to tackle challenges related to the intriguing data contained in the dashboard. If you’ve ever been curious about how people’s shopping behaviors changed during COVID, or how the lockdown orders affected carbon dioxide levels or water quality, check out the dashboard. If you’re interested in solving challenges using this data or helping to improve the dashboard itself, we would welcome your participation in the Earth Observation Dashboard Hackathon from June 23-29, 2021.

To give you some examples, the dashboard includes a nighttime lights indicator derived from the Suomi-NPP Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), which shows how the pandemic lockdown measures affected businesses, highways, and nightlife by revealing changes in light activity at night by tracking changes in energy use, migration and transportation activity patterns.

Second, when the pandemic impacted the ability of governments to perform in-person field surveys to monitor the progress of food crops, Earth observation-based data used for the Global Agricultural Monitoring Initiative (GEOGLAM) Global Crop Monitor provided evidence and reassurance that the food supply was adequate from afar.

Also, some parts of the world are currently experiencing lockdowns due to the second wave of COVID-19. The dashboard shows human activity slowdown (SAR Proxy maps) and a similar environmental response (NO2) to the second lockdown as the first one. Data collected and carefully curated for these waves of COVID-19 periods could provide further insights into environmental responses and economic impacts.

As countries continue to battle COVID-19, I am proud that the dashboard can be a tool that enables people and governments to better understand how the pandemic is affecting our world. I hope that seeing the impacts of COVID from such a vantage point can help spur innovation and spark new ideas. I hope you will join us for the hackathon!

More so than ever, our Science Mission Directorate (SMD) websites are the front-door to our worldwide community of enthusiasts and learners. Upon an in-depth analysis of our web presence, I believe it is time for us to elevate the way we communicate and enhance the breadth of our audiences using a focused approach on great content, and best-in-class optimization techniques. As will all of our communication activities, we will do this as one team, and driven by the desire to enhance the impact and inspiration of our science throughout. This is a core-element of our NASA Science strategy, which focuses deliberately on inspiration and communication.

Soon after being established, NASA was directed by the U.S. Congress to “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof.” NASA’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) has an extensive public web presence, from the flagship website https://science.nasa.gov to mission-specific sites to topic-based websites. As sources from which people get their information change, NASA Science must continue to ensure its message is easy to find, available to all, leveraged, and managed per federal and Agency policies and procedures.

For NASA Science, we deeply care about communicating in audience-appropriate language and enabling science enthusiasts and learners of all ages to actively participate in science. Among the several types of opportunities for such engagements are exciting research, student collaborations, challenges, citizen science, science activation projects, and others. Disseminating such information is key and with the expectations for digital content being raised every more, NASA Science must embrace these changes and modernize our web presence to reach the widest possible audience and share our message.

Recently, our social media presence went through a major refresh, with a more focused and aligned effort that resulted in higher followership for these accounts and broader engagement. It has been a great success thus far with enhanced visibility for our project, new audiences we gained as a result of it, and larger user engagements per post than before. And we are still learning to improve and elevate the game. Now, we plan to do the same for our web presence.

As part of an agency-wide modernization and consolidation of NASA websites, SMD will unify its public engagement websites under a newly designed and freshly built https://science.nasa.gov, consistent with social themes. Sites in scope of this effort include those with the extension *.nasa.gov in their URL which are mostly funded by SMD. Types of websites include public engagement deep dive sites, programmatic sites, and science sites for kids.  Websites that are not part of this current consolidation include those sites whose main purpose is to serve data to the science community (we will address these at a later date), sites that are hosted at partner institutions (i.e. hubblesite.org), and sites where SMD is just one of the funding sources. This strategic approach will enhance user experience and allow NASA Science and its broad impact on society to be seen and appreciated by more. The main goals will be to:

• be an example of excellence in public trust in science exploration, discovery, and knowledge
• timely, secure, accurate, and audience-focused dissemination of NASA Science content
• ensure that top entities – person, place, thing – never compete with each other, but instead enhance each other
• ensure site owners have a robust platform and tools they need to innovate and share development using a “One Team” approach
• improve search rankings and search engine optimization (SEO)
• build a robust multimedia database capable of housing all the media NASA Science produces, including spacecraft raw images, data-driven interactives and large-file videos.
• ensure the site is responsive and functions well on devices of varying sizes (i.e. cell phone, tablet, laptops, desktop, and what may show up next as technology changes)
• design a site that exceeds the Section 508 requirements and provides a truly accessible experience for the widest audience possible

Rest assured, there will be flexibility built into this process. In particular, we want to encourage content owners to pitch new tools, content, etc., and build them out on science.nasa.gov, as appropriate. We need all of our experts and our engaged champions to help shape the end state.

Soon, you will see these efforts taking shape across our websites – we do not want to drag this out. We recognize, of course, that this process will take significant effort and will take many months to complete. As we proceed, remember that having great content is an important starting point of a great site. However, equally important is ensuring people can find our content.

As mentioned before, this SMD-wide effort has one sole purpose – we all deeply care about communicating the value and excitement of science, and to do so by setting a new standard of excellence for science websites. And we can only be successful achieving this audacious goal by working together as one team!

Thanks for being part of this worthwhile effort!