Marshall at 65: The Transformative 1990s - NASA

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Dec. 2, 1990:

The Huntsville Operations Support Center (HOSC) at Marshall receives a call from STS-35 mission specialist Robert Parker, in orbit aboard space shuttle Columbia, marking the first ever direct communication between the HOSC and astronauts on orbit. The exchange signaled the start of NASA’s first Astro Observatory mission: multiple anchored, high-powered telescopes, mounted on a Spacelab pallet in the shuttle’s payload bay. Astro-1 consisted of three ultraviolet telescopes and an X-ray telescope. During that initial mission alone, the telescopes enabled 231 observations of 130 unique astronomical targets. In 2021, a team of Marshall engineers and retirees collected and refurbished the groundbreaking hardware for the Smithsonian Institution to grant Astro a distinguished place in its National Air & Space Museum annex at Dulles International Airport in Washington, where some 60,000 daily travelers can see it on display next to space shuttle Discovery.

This week in 1995, the ASTRO-2 Spacelab was launched aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, mission STS-67.

The Astro-2 Spacelab mission, underway in 1995 aboard the space shuttle Endeavour during mission STS-67.

NASA

Jan. 1, 1991:

After NASA created its Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) program in 1990, weather and climate research begins in earnest at Marshall with the establishment of the Distributed Active Archive Center, better known to weather forecasters and researchers today as the Global Hydrometeorology Resource Center (GHRC). A comprehensive, living data archive focusing on hazardous weather, the GHRC contributes to NASA, NOAA, and international research on lightning, tropical cyclones, hurricanes, and other storm hazards by compiling and integrating collections of satellite, airborne, and in-situ datasets. The GHRC is maintained by Earth scientists and climatologists at NASA and the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), working in the National Space Science and Technology Center on the UAH campus.

Clouds of smoke cascade off the west coast of the United States

Clouds of smoke billow and cascade off the edge of the west coast as fires rage through many western states in the U.S.

NASA

April 5, 1991:

The launch on this date of NASA’s Compton Gamma-ray Observatory includes the Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) designed, developed, and built in-house at Marshall. BATSE studied some of the most energetic phenomena in the cosmos, primarily the random, daily, titanic gamma-ray bursts which BATSE proved were occurring in the most distant parts of the observable universe – the nearest on record taking place more than 100 million light years from Earth. BATSE remained in operation until June 2000.

This photograph shows the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory (GRO) being deployed by the Remote Manipulator System (RMS) arm aboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis during the STS-37 mission in April 1991. The GRO reentered Earth atmosphere and ended its successful mission in June 2000. For nearly 9 years, the GRO Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE), designed and built by the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), kept an unblinking watch on the universe to alert scientists to the invisible, mysterious gamma-ray bursts that had puzzled them for decades. By studying gamma-rays from objects like black holes, pulsars, quasars, neutron stars, and other exotic objects, scientists could discover clues to the birth, evolution, and death of stars, galaxies, and the universe. The gamma-ray instrument was one of four major science instruments aboard the Compton. It consisted of eight detectors, or modules, located at each corner of the rectangular satellite to simultaneously scan the entire universe for bursts of gamma-rays ranging in duration from fractions of a second to minutes. In January 1999, the instrument, via the Internet, cued a computer-controlled telescope at Las Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, within 20 seconds of registering a burst. With this capability, the gamma-ray experiment came to serve as a gamma-ray burst alert for the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and major gound-based observatories around the world. Thirty-seven universities, observatories, and NASA centers in 19 states, and 11 more institutions in Europe and Russia, participated in the BATSE science program.

NASA

Jan. 22, 1992:

The first International Microgravity Laboratory (IML), managed for NASA by Marshall, launches aboard space shuttle Discovery during the STS-42 mission. Dedicated to the microgravity study of fundamental materials science and life sciences, IML-1 was a joint endeavor involving more than 200 scientists from 16 countries, including Canada, Japan, France, Germany, and other European Space Agency partners, and helped paved the way for the international coalition that made the International Space Station a shared scientific success.

STS-42 / International Microgravity Lab-1 (IML-1) insignia

The NASA mission patch identifying the astronauts who flew on STS-42, the first International Microgravity Laboratory mission.

NASA

Feb. 3, 1994:

The Shuttle-Mir program officially begins with the launch of space shuttle Discovery on STS-60, carrying among its eight-person crew Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev. Marshall was involved in the program every step of the way, managing the Mir Operations Support Team, which included a payload engineer, biomedical engineer, flight surgeon, crew interface personnel and science coordinator. The program, designed to foster a new era of international partnership in space nearly four decades after the start of the “Space Race” between the United States and Russia, included joint Spacelab experiments, regular video linkups between the space shuttle and crews in the Russian space station Mir, and routine crew exchanges with that orbital research platform as well. By the time the program ended in 1998 – making way for construction of the International Space Station – American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts had shared 11 shuttle missions, one joint Soyuz flight, and nearly 1,000 days of living and working together in space.

Space shuttle Atlantis docks with Russia’s Mir space station, as photographed by the Mir-19 crew from their Soyuz spacecraft on July 4, 1995. The Shuttle-Mir program continued through 1998, when work began in earnest to jointly build the International Space Station.

NASA

July 16, 1994:

Marshall hosts the first NASA Great Moonbuggy Race, which 20 years later would evolve into the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge. Just eight college teams competed in the first race, driving lightweight “moonbuggies” of their own design around the same dirt course at Marshall where engineers tested the Apollo-era Lunar Roving Vehicles. The University of New Hampshire won the inaugural challenge with a course-completion time of 18 minutes and 55 seconds, for which they received a trip to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to see a space shuttle launch. Today, as many as 100 teams of high school, college, and university students from all over the world participate annually, designing and building their own human-powered rovers to negotiate a course at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center that simulates the geographical and technological challenges of exploring the Moon, Mars, and other worlds.

This photograph of the University of Alabama at Huntsville’s “moonbuggy” team was taken during the first running of the event in 1994 over the actual course where the original Apollo lunar roving vehicles were tested.

NASA

April 3, 1995:

The Optical Transient Detector, a cutting-edge optical and electronic global lightning mapper developed at Marshall and built in partnership with the University of Alabama in Huntsville, is launched to geostationary orbit aboard the MicroLab-1 satellite. The instrument remained in operation through March 2000, offering unprecedented insight into lightning activity and its relationship with tornados, hurricanes, and other severe weather. The detector identified differences between cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, verified that lightning occurs over land 10 times more often than it does over water, and revealed that lightning strikes somewhere on Earth approximately 1.4 billion times each year. It helped set the stage for more sophisticated lightning and severe weather monitoring flight instruments, many of them built and flown by Marshall investigators.

Lightning Over the Historic Test Stand

During a thunderstorm on August 29, 1990, multiple lightning bolts struck an historic test stand used for the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle, and current propulsion systems development.

NASA

Nov. 27, 1997:

Continuing Marshall’s successful lightning studies, NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite is launched on this date from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. It carries the Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS), a space-based instrument developed at Marshall to further clarify the relationship between lightning and severe weather and to enable real-time updates to forecasters, significantly improving severe weather “nowcasting” to protect lives, property, and resources. The LIS instrument flew as part of the TRMM mission until 2015. A second Lightning Imaging Sensor was launched to the International Space Station in 2017 and remains active today.

When it rains it pours, goes the saying, and for the last 15 years, the data on tropical rainfall have poured in. NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) was launched on Nov. 27, 1997, and for the last decade and a half has enabled precipitation science that has had far reaching applications across the globe. Rain is one of the most important natural processes on Earth, and nowhere does it rain more than across the tropics. Orbiting at an angle to the equator that covers 35 degrees north to 35 degrees south of the equator, TRMM carries five instruments that collectively measure the intensity of rainfall, characteristics of the water vapor and clouds, and lightning associated with the rain events. One of the instruments, the Precipitation Radar, built by NASA's mission partner the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), is the first precipitation radar flown in space. It returns images of storms that for the first time have revealed close up three-dimensional views of how rainbands in tropical cyclones develop, potentially indicating how strong the storms might become. less

NASA

Dec. 4, 1998:

Unity Node 1 module – the first U.S. component of the International Space Station – is launched aboard space shuttle Endeavour as part of the STS-88 mission, set to be mated with the Russian Zarya Control Module, launched two weeks earlier on Nov. 20. The Unity and Zarya modules were officially mated in orbit on Dec. 6, marking the official beginning of station assembly, which would continue through 2011 and require more than 50 flights to deliver living modules, laboratories, and hardware to orbit and resupply the rotating crews. The Boeing Co. of Huntsville built Node 1, the Destiny laboratory module, and the 6-ton Joint Quest Airlock at Marshall. The critical Unity module functioned as a central junction and anchor point for the station, featuring six berthing ports to connect adjoining modules as assembly progressed. Marshall and its Boeing contractors also designed the Common Berthing Mechanism, the innovative linkage that physically connects all station elements, including the Japanese and European modules and visiting commercial spacecraft.

On Dec. 6, 1998, the crew of space shuttle mission STS-88 began construction of the International Space Station, attaching the U.S.-built Unity node and the Russian-built Zarya module together in orbit. The crew carried a large-format IMAX® camera, used to take this image of Unity lifted out of Endeavour's payload bay to position it upright for connection to Zarya. Zarya, launched on Nov. 20, 1998, was the first piece of the International Space Station. Also known as the Functional Cargo Block (FGB), it would provide a nucleus of orientation control, communications and electrical power while the station waited for its other elements. Two weeks later, on Dec. 4, 1998, NASA's space shuttle Endeavour launched Unity, the first U.S. piece of the complex, during the STS-88 mission.

The Unity module is lifted from the payload bay of space shuttle Endeavour on Dec. 6, 1998, and positioned for connection to the Russian Zarya module.

NASA

July 23, 1999:

After two decades of telescope optics, mirror, and spacecraft development and testing at Marshall, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is lifted to orbit aboard space shuttle Columbia’s STS-93 mission. Its “first light” images were obtained a little over a month later, on Aug. 26, revealing previously unseen features of Cassiopeia A, a supernova remnant some 11,000 light-years from Earth. Twenty-five years later, Chandra has delivered nearly 25,000 detailed observations of neutron stars, quasars, supernova remnants, black holes, galaxy clusters, and other highly energetic objects, some as far as 13 billion light-years distant. It has provided tangible evidence of dark matter and dark energy, documented the first electromagnetic events tied to gravitational waves in space, and aided the search for habitable exoplanets. Over the years, Chandra has delivered more than 70 trillion bytes of raw data, with its findings in astronomy and astrophysics documented in more than 11,000 published papers. Marshall has managed the program continuously for NASA, working closely with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which conducts day-to-day Chandra operations and science activities.

This is an artist’s concept of the Chandra X-Ray Observatory (CXO), formerly Advanced X-Ray Astrophysics Facility (AXAF), fully developed in orbit in a star field with Earth. In 1999, the AXAF was renamed the CXO in honor of the late Indian-American Novel Laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. The CXO is the most sophisticated and the world’s most powerful x-ray telescope ever built. It is designed to observe x-rays from high energy regions of the Universe, such as hot gas in the renmants of exploded stars. It produces picture-like images of x-ray emissions analogous to those made in visible light, as well as gathers data on the chemical composition of x-ray radiating objects. The CXO helps astronomers world-wide better understand the structure and evolution of the universe by studying powerful sources of x-ray such as exploding stars, matter falling into black holes, and other exotic celestial objects. The Observatory has three major parts: (1) the x-ray telescope, whose mirrors will focus x-rays from celestial objects; (2) the science instruments that record the x-rays so that x-ray images can be produced and analyzed; and (3) the spacecraft, which provides the environment necessary for the telescope and the instruments to work. TRW, Inc. was the prime contractor for the development the CXO and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center was responsible for its project management. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations of the CXO for NASA from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Observatory was launched July 22, 1999 aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, STS-93 mission. (Image courtesy of TRW).

NASA

More Marshall Decades

Launch of the uncrewed Apollo 6 mission in April 1968

60s

From its auspicious start as NASA’s lead center for propulsion systems and launch vehicle development, Marshall begins carving a 65-year legacy of ingenuity and dedicated service to the U.S. space program.

Skylab as it appeared to the final crew upon its departure

70s

The 1970s are a period of transition, expanded scientific study, and engineering innovation at Marshall, as NASA concludes the Apollo Program and the next great era of space exploration takes shape.

With Marshall’s administrative headquarters in the background, the Space Shuttle Enterprise heads south on Rideout Road.

80s

Space shuttle propulsion and Spacelab program science drive much of Marshall’s pioneering work in the 1980s, ushering in three decades of science operations in low Earth orbit.

Lightning Over the Historic Test Stand

90s

The 1990s prove busier than ever, with Marshall supporting a host of NASA missions, refining space shuttle propulsion systems, and delivering the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

00s

The 2000s usher in Marshall’s most diverse portfolio yet, including work on the International Space Station’s Destiny laboratory, its “backbone” truss, multipurpose science racks, and the Microgravity Science Glovebox.

10s

Marshall concludes its 40-year propulsion oversight for the Space Shuttle Program and takes on oversight of the Space Launch System, NASA’s mightiest launch vehicle to date

An orange rocket lifts off from a launchpad. The sky is black, but the fire coming from the engines lights up the surrounding area, highlighting clouds of white vapor spreading across the ground.

20s and Beyond

Marshall meets the 2020s with enthusiasm and expertise, overseeing the Space Launch System rocket booster test-firing in the Utah desert and the maiden voyage of the uncrewed SLS rocket during Artemis I.

Marshall 65

For 65 years, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center has shaped or supported nearly every facet of the nation’s ongoing mission of space exploration and discovery, solving the most complex, technical flight challenges and contributing to science to improve life and protect resources around the world.