Asteroids, asteroids, asteroids!

NASA’s Perseverance rover is all buttoned up inside the nose cone of the Atlas V rocket that will blast it towards Mars next month. Launch is scheduled for 22 July. The rocket, without Perseverance on top, also completed a propellant filling test known as a “wet dress rehearsal.†The Planetary Society has a comprehensive, continually updated guide to all 3 Mars missions launching next month at planetary.org/mars2020. Pictured: Perseverance being loaded into the nose cone. Image credit: NASA/Christian Mangano.

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Wednesday that the agency’s headquarters building in Washington, D.C., will be named after Mary W. Jackson, the first African American female engineer at NASA. The building sits on “Hidden Figures Way,†which Bridenstine says is a reminder that Jackson is one of many incredible and talented professionals in NASA’s history who contributed to this agency’s success. “Hidden no more, we will continue to recognize the contributions of women, African Americans, and people of all backgrounds who have helped construct NASA’s successful history to explore.â€

As The Downlink publishes, 2 NASA astronauts are conducting a spacewalk to replace aging batteries on the outside of the International Space Station (ISS). One of the spacewalkers is Bob Behnken, who launched on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in May. Another spacewalk is scheduled for 1 July. Learn how the ISS helps prepare humans for deep space missions.

A group of scientists at Harvard and other universities has received NASA’s first-ever funding to search for technosignatures—artificial signs of intelligent life—around other stars. The scientists will look for signs of industrial pollutants in other planets’ atmospheres, as well as light reflected from solar panels—both of which could indicate a civilization technologically similar to our own. Learn how and why we study exoplanets, planets around other stars.

Asteroid Didymos’ small moon, which was previously nicknamed Didymoon, has a new name: Dimorphos. Dimorphos is the target of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART), a mission that will slam a spacecraft into the moon and change its orbit around Didymos. The mission will verify one possible method of deflecting an asteroid on course to hit Earth. Learn more about DART here.

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