Tag: NASA

A NASA scientist’s incredible animation shows how dinosaurs roamed the Earth on the other side of the Milky Way galaxy

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by Morgan McFall-Johnsen

The NASA scientist Jessie Christiansen made a video that traces our solar system’s movement through the Milky Way as dinosaurs emerged, went extinct, and were replaced by mammals on Earth.

Our sun orbits the galaxy’s center, so many dinosaurs roamed the Earth while the planet was on the other side of the Milky Way.

Our solar system’s orbit keeps us just the right distance from the galaxy’s chaotic center for life to exist.

When dinosaurs ruled the Earth, the planet was on a completely different side of the galaxy.

A new animation by the NASA scientist Jessie Christiansen shows just how long the dinosaurs’ reign lasted — and how short the era of humans has been in comparison — by tracing our solar system’s movement through the Milky Way.

Our sun orbits the galaxy’s center, completing its rotation every 250 million years or so. So Christiansen’s animation shows that the last time our solar system was at its current point in the galaxy, the Triassic period was in full swing and dinosaurs were just emerging. Many of the most iconic dinosaurs roamed the Earth when the planet was in a very different part of the Milky Way.

Christiansen got the idea to illustrate this history when she was leading a stargazing party at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Attendees were astonished when she mentioned that our solar system was across the galaxy when dinosaurs roamed.

“That was the first time I realized that those time scales — archaeological, fossil-record time scales and astronomical time scales — actually kind of match along together,” Christiansen told Business Insider. “Then I had this idea that I could map out dinosaur evolution through the galaxy’s rotation.”

Christiansen said it took her about four hours to make the film using timed animations in PowerPoint. She also noted a couple of minor corrections to the text in her video: Plesiosaurs are not dinosaurs, and we complete a galactic orbit every 250 million years, not 200 million years.

‘A spiral through space’

But galactic movement is more complicated than the video shows. The other stars and planetary systems in the galaxy are also moving, at different speeds and in different orbits. The inner portions spin faster than the outer regions.

What’s more, the galaxy itself is moving through space, slowly approaching the nearby Andromeda galaxy.

“The animation kind of makes it seem like we’ve come back to the same spot, but in reality the whole galaxy has moved a very long way,” Christiansen said. “It’s more like we’re doing a spiral through space. As the whole galaxy’s moving and we’re rotating around the center, it kind of creates this spiral.”

So in the solar system’s rotation around the galactic center, we’re not returning to a fixed point. The neighborhood is different from the last time we were here.

Earth, however, is not drastically different; it still supports complex life. That’s partially thanks to the path of our sun’s galactic orbit.

“Our solar system doesn’t travel to the center of the galaxy and then back again,” Christiansen said. “We always stay about this distance away.”

In other words, even as our solar system travels through the Milky Way, it doesn’t approach the inhospitable center, where life probably wouldn’t survive.

“There’s a lot of stars, it’s dynamically unstable, there’s a lot of radiation,” Christiansen said. “Our solar system certainly doesn’t pass through that.”

That’s a huge part of why dinosaurs, mammals, or any other form of life can exist on Earth.

https://www.businessinsider.com/video-nasa-scientist-dinosaurs-milky-way-2019-10

NASA honors Katherine Johnson, 99 year old African American woman who plotted key space missions, by opening new research facility bearing her name

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Research center named after Katherine Johnson, 99, whose story was told in the film Hidden Figures: ‘I liked work. I liked the stars and the stories we were telling.’

Katherine Johnson, the mathematician whose calculations influenced some of the most important missions of the space age, on Friday helped Nasa open a new research and development facility that bears her name.

The 99-year-old cut the ribbon for the Katherine G Johnson Computational Research Facility at the Langley research center in Hampton, Virginia, where she was honored as a trailblazing “human computer”.

In a pre-taped video message, Johnson laughed when asked how she felt about a building being named in her honor.

“You want my honest answer? I think they’re crazy,” she said. “I was excited at something new, always liked something new, but give credit to everybody who helped. I didn’t do anything alone but try to go to the root of the question and succeeded there.”

In an extraordinary career, Johnson defied racial and gender constraints and was involved with many of the greatest achievements in space.

“Today all of these things seem inevitable,” said Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of Hidden Figures, which profiles Johnson and her fellow “human computers” and was made into a film last year. “But without her past full of diverging roads and choices that made all the difference we would not be standing on the brink of this future.”

Johnson was born in 1918 in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, the youngest child of farmer and a teacher. From an early age, she showed signs of prodigious ability.

“I counted the steps,” she said in an oral history archived by the National Visionary Leadership Project. “I counted the plates that I washed. And I knew how many steps there were from our house to church.”

Her county did not offer public schooling for black students after the eighth grade, so she had to relocate to Institute, West Virginia, to continue her education through high school. She graduated West Virginia State College at 14, the age at which most students begin.

She whipped through every math course her college had to offer and graduated, still a teenager, with degrees in mathematics and French. In 1939, she was one of three black students – and the only woman – to integrate the state’s graduate schools, enrolling in a math program at West Virginia University.

For more than a decade, Johnson taught in segregated schools. Then a relative told her about a job opening at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or Naca, a precursor of Nasa.

In 1953, Johnson joined an all-black team of “human computers”, her mathematical acuity earning her a place on the main research team, where she would produce calculations for the 1961 flight trajectory of Alan Shepard, the first American in space. She also verified the calculation produced by a computer for John Glenn’s 1962 orbit, and for the 1969 Apollo 11 trajectory to the moon.

“That’s the way it was,” she said in the oral history. “They just said, ‘If she says it’s right, it’s right’ because the guys didn’t do the work. I did it.”

In 2015, Barack Obama awarded Johnson the presidential medal of freedom, the highest US civilian honor, calling her a “pioneer who broke the barriers of race and gender, showing generations of young people that everyone can excel at math and science and reach for the stars”.

Obama joked: “If you think your job is pressure-packed, hers meant that forgetting to carry the one might send somebody floating off into the solar system.”

On Friday, Shetterly said: “We are living in a present that they willed into existence with their pencils, their slide rules, their mechanical calculating machines and, of course, their brilliant minds.”

Johnson’s story – and the largely untold history of contributions by black women during the space race – was told on the big screen last year. Hidden Figures stars among others Taraji P Henson (who plays Johnson), Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe.

The movie, mostly set in 1961 and 1962, highlights the indignities endured by black Nasa employees despite the agency’s reliance on them. In the movie, after Johnson joins the main research team, she is forced to drink coffee from a pot labeled “colored” and walk half a mile to use a restroom for “colored” women.

In the video played at Friday’s ceremony, Johnson advised aspiring scientists and mathematicians to find a career that they enjoy and credited her success simply to an enthusiasm for solving complex equations.

“I liked work,” Johnson said. “I liked the stars and the stories we were telling. And it was a joy to contribute to the literature that was going to be coming out. But little did I think it would go this far.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/22/hidden-figures-mathematician-katherine-johnson-nasa-facility-open#img-1

Nasa partner Robert Bigelow says he is ‘absolutely convinced’ aliens are currently living on Earth

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One of Nasa’s partners has said that he is “absolutely convinced” aliens exist – and that they are living on Earth right now.

Robert Bigelow, an entrepreneur who is working closely with Nasa on future space missions, has suggested that he knows that our planet has an alien presence that is “right under our noses”.

Mr Bigelow made the announcement during an episode of the show 60 Minutes that focused on his work with the space agency.

His company, Bigelow Aerospace, is developing an expendable craft for humans that can inflate and might provide the space habitats of the future.

They have already been tested out in journeys to the International Space Station. And the two organisations are working on further co-operation.

But during that episode Mr Bigelow began to talk about his belief in aliens – and his claim that UFOs have come to Earth and extraterrestrials have an “existing presence” here.

“I’m absolutely convinced [that aliens exist],” he told reporter Lara Logan. “That’s all there is to it.”

Asked by Ms Logan whether he also thought that UFOs had come to Earth, he said he did.

“There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence,” Mr Bigelow said. “And I spent millions and millions and millions – I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.”

Ms Logan then asked if Mr Bigelow thought it was “risky” to say that he believes such things. He said that he doesn’t care what people think because it wouldn’t “change the reality of what I know”.

Mr Bigelow didn’t give any details about whether the research and private space travel that he is funding had revealed anything about aliens to him.

But he said that the hugely expensive work his company and Nasa are doing won’t be required to meet them – he said that people “don’t have to go anywhere”, because the aliens are “right under people’s noses”.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/nasa-robert-bigelow-aliens-extraterrestrials-earth-aerospace-space-international-station-a7763441.html

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the It’s Interesting community.

50,000 year old strange life found trapped inside giant cave crystals, now woken up by NASA

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by Bec Crew

Strange microbes have been found inside the massive, subterranean crystals of Mexico’s Naica Mine, and researchers suspect they’ve been living there for up to 50,000 years.

The ancient creatures appear to have been dormant for thousands of years, surviving in tiny pockets of liquid within the crystal structures. Now, scientists have managed to extract them – and wake them up.

“These organisms are so extraordinary,” astrobiologist Penelope Boston, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, said on Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston.

The Cave of Crystals in Mexico’s Naica Mine might look incredibly beautiful, but it’s one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, with temperatures ranging from 45 to 65°C (113 to 149°F), and humidity levels hitting more than 99 percent.

Not only are temperatures hellishly high, but the environment is also oppressively acidic, and confined to pitch-black darkness some 300 metres (1,000 feet) below the surface.

In lieu of any sunlight, microbes inside the cave can’t photosynthesise – instead, they perform chemosynthesis using minerals like iron and sulphur in the giant gypsum crystals, some of which stretch 11 metres (36 feet) long, and have been dated to half a million years old.

Researchers have previously found life living inside the walls of the cavern and nearby the crystals – a 2013 expedition to Naica reported the discovery of creatures thriving in the hot, saline springs of the complex cave system.

But when Boston and her team extracted liquid from the tiny gaps inside the crystals and sent them off to be analysed, they realised that not only was there life inside, but it was unlike anything they’d seen in the scientific record.

They suspect the creatures had been living inside their crystal castles for somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 years, and while their bodies had mostly shut down, they were still very much alive.

“Other people have made longer-term claims for the antiquity of organisms that were still alive, but in this case these organisms are all very extraordinary – they are not very closely related to anything in the known genetic databases,” Boston told Jonathan Amos at BBC News.

What’s perhaps most extraordinary about the find is that the researchers were able to ‘revive’ some of the microbes, and grow cultures from them in the lab.

“Much to my surprise we got things to grow,” Boston told Sarah Knapton at The Telegraph. “It was laborious. We lost some of them – that’s just the game. They’ve got needs we can’t fulfil.”

At this point, we should be clear that the discovery has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, so until other scientists have had a chance to examine the methodology and findings, we can’t consider the discovery be definitive just yet.

The team will also need to convince the scientific community that the findings aren’t the result of contamination – these microbes are invisible to the naked eye, which means it’s possible that they attached themselves to the drilling equipment and made it look like they came from inside the crystals.

“I think that the presence of microbes trapped within fluid inclusions in Naica crystals is in principle possible,” Purificación López-García from the French National Centre for Scientific Research, who was part of the 2013 study that found life in the cave springs, told National Geographic.

“[But] contamination during drilling with microorganisms attached to the surface of these crystals or living in tiny fractures constitutes a very serious risk,” she says. I am very skeptical about the veracity of this finding until I see the evidence.”

That said, microbiologist Brent Christner from the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was also not involved in the research, thinks the claim isn’t as far-fetched as López-García is making it out to be, based on what previous studies have managed with similarly ancient microbes.

“[R]eviving microbes from samples of 10,000 to 50,000 years is not that outlandish based on previous reports of microbial resuscitations in geological materials hundreds of thousands to millions of years old,” he told National Geographic.

For their part, Boston and her team say they took every precaution to make sure their gear was sterilised, and cite the fact that the creatures they found inside the crystals were similar, but not identical to those living elsewhere in the cave as evidence to support their claims.

“We have also done genetic work and cultured the cave organisms that are alive now and exposed, and we see that some of those microbes are similar but not identical to those in the fluid inclusions,” she said.

Only time will tell if the results will bear out once they’re published for all to see, but if they are confirmed, it’s just further proof of the incredible hardiness of life on Earth, and points to what’s possible out there in the extreme conditions of space.

http://www.sciencealert.com/ancient-life-has-been-found-trapped-inside-these-giant-cave-crystals

Deep-space photo reveals thousands of supermassive black holes

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A new deep-space study by NASA shows the vast void beyond our home is dotted not only with countless galaxies and stars, but also a stunning number of supermassive black holes.

Using data collected over 80 days of observations by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory spacecraft, the agency released an image that shows the largest concentration of black holes ever seen. According to scientists, the density as viewed from Earth would be equivalent to about 5,000 objects that would fit into the area of the sky covered by the full moon.

“With this one amazing picture, we can explore the earliest days of black holes in the Universe and see how they change over billions of years,” study leader Niel Brandt of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, said in a statement.

The image above shows black holes emitting x-ray energy at a variety of intensities. Red indicates low energy, medium is green, and the highest-energy x-rays observed by Chandra are blue. About 70 percent of the objects in the image are supermassive black holes, with masses estimated to range anywhere from 100,000 to 10 billion times the mass of our sun. Many date back billions of years, forming just after the Big Bang.

While invisible to the naked eye, black holes emit x-rays due to captured matter heating up as it spins faster and faster towards the object’s all-consuming center or event horizon.

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/space/blogs/deep-space-photo-reveals-thousands-supermassive-black-holes

Science Keeps Not Debunking the Alien Dyson Sphere Idea

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by Robby Berman

All the scientific studies in the world of this one mysterious star have so far ruled out every theory except one, and it’s the wildest one. The whole thing started when Yale astronomer Tabetha Boyajian located star KIC 8462852, unofficially known as “Tabby’s star,” after Boyajian. Tabby’s star is doing something very strange.

In 2009, NASA launched its Kepler probe to keep a close watch on a small section of the sky — the idea was to learn more about a smaller area than less about a larger one. The probe tracks how light reflected from stars dims and grows brighter. Generally, when a star dims, a planet has passed in front of it, and will again and again as it travels its orbital path.

Kepler’s found some 2,000+ planets orbiting stars and published its data to allow citizen scientists to confirm their findings. A group of people affiliated with Yale called Planet Finders started going over the data, and Boyajian found her star.

To start with, it’s unexpectedly dim for a star of its its size and age. But what really got her attention was this chart.

Each vertical dip represents a holy-cow reduction in the star’s brightness, more than 10 times the dimming that astronomers would expect from a planet even as big as Jupiter crossing in front of the star. So it appears it’s not a planet causing Tabby’s star to dim, which is why it’s also called the “WTF star,” after the paper they published about it titled “Where’s the Flux?”

The data suggests something huge is orbiting the star, but what?

The reason the WTF star is famous is the hypothesis put forward to explain the dimming by Penn State astronomer Jason Wright: That what’s orbiting the star could be a “swarm of megastructures,” alien-built energy collectors, much like terrestrial solar panels. Wright told The Atlantic, “When Boyajian showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked. Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.” He was imagining something like a Dyson sphere.

Crazy, right? Well, since then scientists have been frantically pushing out other hypotheses to explain the anomaly.

Here are some of the more normal theories, and why they’re probably wrong:
•Kepler was malfunctioning — Nope.
•It’s a cloud of dust from star formation — But the star isn’t young. It shows no sign of the infrared light that indicates a new star.
•It’s a swarm of comets — But the dimming is too extreme to be caused by comets.
•It’s debris from colliding planets — But that matter would get sucked into the star so quickly it would be unlikely to linger long enough for us to see it.

http://bigthink.com/robby-berman/science-keeps-not-debunking-the-alien-dyson-sphere-idea?utm_source=Big+Think+Weekly+Newsletter+Subscribers&utm_campaign=344e51650c-Newsletter_081716&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_6d098f42ff-344e51650c-41106061

Scientists find ‘closest ever’ second Earth outside our solar system – but won’t talk about it until the end of the month.

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An image from Hubble of Proxima Centauri, which is our nearest neighbour and could be the home of another Earth ESA/Hubble & NASA

Scientists might have found the closest ever candidate for another Earth that could support life, according to reports. But nobody will say whether it’s true.

The new-found planet orbits around a now well-investigated star in Proxima Centauri, near us, according to reports. It is similar to Earth and could support life, it is claimed.

The researchers that found the planet are expected to show it off at the end of this month. But until then they are saying nothing.

One report said the planet will be the closest ‘second Earth’ ever found. The Proxima Centauri star is part of the Alpha Centauri system, which includes our solar system.

“The still nameless planet is believed to be Earth-like and orbits at a distance to Proxima Centauri that could allow it to have liquid water on its surface — an important requirement for the emergence of life,” German newspaper Der Spiegel reported.

The report didn’t give any more details on the planet itself.

A spokesperson for the European Southern Observatory has refused to comment on the report, but said that he was aware of it.

Nasa revealed a second Earth to much fanfare last year. That planet was called Kepler 452b, and is just 60 per cent larger than Earth and in many other ways is almost identical to our planet.

But since it is so far away – 1,400 light years – the chance of ever getting there or learning much more about it is limited. The new discovery is far, far nearer, at just 4.24 light years from us.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/second-earth-discovery-nasa-esa-space-solar-system-scientists-a7192341.html

Lost Tapes Reveal Apollo Astronauts Heard Unexplained ‘Music’ On Far Side Of The Moon

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The crew of an Apollo mission to the moon were so startled when they encountered strange music-like radio transmissions coming through their headsets, they didn’t know whether or not to report it to NASA, it’s been revealed.

It was 1969, two months before Apollo 11’s historic first manned landing on the moon, when Apollo 10 entered lunar orbit, which included traversing the far side of the moon when all spacecraft are out of radio contact with Earth for about an hour and nobody on Earth can see or hear them.

As far as the public knew, everything about the mission went smoothly.

Almost four decades went by before lost recordings emerged that revealed something unsettling that the three Apollo astronauts had experienced while flying above the far side of the moon.

The taped recordings contained “strange, otherworldly music coming through the Apollo module’s radio,” according to the upcoming Science Channel series, “NASA’s Unexplained Files.”

The conversation between the three astronauts indicated they heard sounds like they had never heard before:

“It sounds like, you know, outer space-type music.”

“You hear that? That whistling sound? Whooooooooo!”

“Well, that sure is weird music!”
The unexplained “music” transmission lasted almost an hour, and just before the astronauts regained radio contact with Earth, they discussed whether or not to tell Mission Control what they had experienced:

“It’s unbelievable! You know?”

“Shall we tell them about it?”

“I don’t know. We ought to think about it.”

“The Apollo 10 crew was very used to the kind of noise that they should be hearing. Logic tells me that if there was something recorded on there, then there was something there,” Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden says on the Science Channel program. “NASA would withhold information from the public if they thought it was in the public’s best interest.”

The transcripts of the Apollo 10 mission were classified and untouched in NASA’s archives until 2008, producing an ongoing debate as to the nature and origin of the strange sounds heard by the astronauts.

“You don’t hear about anything like that until years after the incident occurs, and then you kind of wonder, because it’s such an old memory of those things that you get concerned about if they were making something up or was there something really there? Because you never really know,” Worden told The Huffington Post.

“If you’re behind the moon and hear some weird noise on your radio, and you know you’re blocked from the Earth, then what could you possibly think?” Worden said.

“We’d had a lot of incidents where guys who flew in space saw and heard things that they didn’t recognize, and you wonder about all of that. I have a very open mind about what could’ve happened. It’s somebody’s hearsay evidence — it’s only a visual or audio event, which is hard to pin down. Recollection is one thing, but actual proof is something entirely different.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/apollo-10-astronauts-reported-unexplained-music-at-moon_us_56c80662e4b0928f5a6c0679

The Opportunity Rover Was Supposed To Last 90 Days. It Recently Celebrated Twelve Years On Mars

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by Alfredo Carpineti

On Sunday, January 24, NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity reached 12 Earth years on the surface of Mars, having landed on the same day in 2004.

It was budgeted to last 90 days, with a lifespan of a few months, before it was thought its solar panel would be covered in dust and stop working. But thanks to a number of factors, including wind on Mars, the tenacious rover has been able to endure the harsh Martian environment for much, much longer.

The rover has begun to show its age, becoming more difficult to maneuver and having memory storage problems. Also, two of its scientific instruments have now stopped functioning completely. Problems aside, though, Opportunity continues to produce an abundance of science.

Opportunity is currently exploring a region rich in clay minerals that would have formed in wet conditions. The area is called Marathon Valley, since it’s 42 kilometers (26 miles) – the Olympic marathon distance – from Opportunity’s landing site in Eagle Crater.

“With healthy power levels, we are looking forward to completing the work in Marathon Valley this year and continuing onward with Opportunity,” Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas said in a statement.

The rover is currently removing surface crust from rocks in the valley, and the texture and composition are being examined with the use of its robotic arm.

The Martian winter started in January, so the solar energy that the rover is currently receiving is significantly lower than usual. The team positioned the rover in a more favorable sun-facing orientation, which has increased the amount of power the solar panels are generating, allowing for power-consuming operations like drilling and rock-grinding.

“Opportunity has stayed very active this winter, in part because the solar arrays have been much cleaner than in the past few winters,” said Callas.

The rover is fully funded until the end of 2016, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is currently working on the next extension proposal. In the last review, Opportunity received the highest rating of any ongoing Mars mission.

http://www.iflscience.com/opportunity-s-twelve-years-red-planet

30 years later, NASA engineer speaks about Challenger explosion

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Thirty years ago, as the nation mourned the loss of seven astronauts on the space shuttle Challenger, Bob Ebeling was steeped in his own deep grief.

The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them.

That night, he told his wife, Darlene, “It’s going to blow up.”

When Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff, Ebeling and his colleagues sat stunned in a conference room at Thiokol’s headquarters outside Brigham City, Utah. They watched the spacecraft explode on a giant television screen and they knew exactly what had happened.

Three weeks later, Ebeling and another engineer separately and anonymously detailed to NPR the first account of that contentious pre-launch meeting. Both were despondent and in tears as they described hours of data review and arguments. The data showed that the rubber seals on the shuttle’s booster rockets wouldn’t seal properly in cold temperatures and this would be the coldest launch ever.

Ebeling, now 89, decided to let NPR identify him this time, on the 30th anniversary of the Challenger explosion.

“I was one of the few that was really close to the situation,” Ebeling recalls. “Had they listened to me and wait[ed] for a weather change, it might have been a completely different outcome.”

We spoke in the same house, kitchen and living room that we spoke in 30 years ago, when Ebeling didn’t want his name used or his voice recorded. He was afraid he would lose his job.

“I think the truth has to come out,” he says about the decision to speak privately then.

“NASA ruled the launch,” he explains. “They had their mind set on going up and proving to the world they were right and they knew what they were doing. But they didn’t.”

A presidential commission found flaws in the space agency’s decision-making process. But it’s still not clear why NASA was so anxious to launch without delay.

The space shuttle program had an ambitious launch schedule that year and NASA wanted to show it could launch regularly and reliably. President Ronald Reagan was also set to deliver the State of the Union address that evening and reportedly planned to tout the Challenger launch.

Whatever the reason, Ebeling says it didn’t justify the risk.

“There was more than enough [NASA officials and Thiokol managers] there to say, ‘Hey, let’s give it another day or two,’ ” Ebeling recalls. “But no one did.”

Ebeling retired soon after Challenger. He suffered deep depression and has never been able to lift the burden of guilt. In 1986, as he watched that haunting image again on a television screen, he said, “I could have done more. I should have done more.”

He says the same thing today, sitting in a big easy chair in the same living room, his eyes watery and his face grave. The data he and his fellow engineers presented, and their persistent and sometimes angry arguments, weren’t enough to sway Thiokol managers and NASA officials. Ebeling concludes he was inadequate. He didn’t argue the data well enough.

A religious man, this is something he has prayed about for the past 30 years.

“I think that was one of the mistakes that God made,” Ebeling says softly. “He shouldn’t have picked me for the job. But next time I talk to him, I’m gonna ask him, ‘Why me. You picked a loser.’ ”

I reminded him of something his late colleague and friend Roger Boisjoly once told me. Boisjoly was the other Thiokol engineer who spoke anonymously with NPR 30 years ago. He came to believe that he and Ebeling and their colleagues did all they could.

“We were talking to the right people,” Boisjoly told me. “We were talking to the people who had the power to stop that launch.”

“Maybe,” Ebeling says with a weak wave as I leave. “Maybe Roger’s right.”

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/28/464744781/30-years-after-disaster-challenger-engineer-still-blames-himself