Tag: NASA

NASA has renamed its headquarters after Mary W. Jackson, the agency’s first Black female engineer

On Wednesday, NASA announced that the agency is renaming its headquarters in Washington, D.C. after Mary W. Jackson, a woman who stood against gender and racial discrimination to become NASA’s first Black female engineer. Jackson was an influential mathematician and aerospace engineer who become a program manager, a position she used to hire and promote NASA’s future female engineers.

“Mary W. Jackson was part of a group of very important women who helped NASA succeed in getting American astronauts into space,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a press release. “Mary never accepted the status quo, she helped break barriers and open opportunities for African Americans and women in the field of engineering and technology.”

Jackson was featured in Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race, a book about the team of women who worked in the segregated area of NASA’s Langley Research Center during the 1930s through 1960s. These highly educated women were employed as “human computers” who did mathematics and calculations by hand in an era when electronic computers weren’t commonly used. But despite the importance of their work, Black female mathematicians like Jackson were segregated in the workplace and blocked from obtaining promotions or stepping into certain fields. Continue reading.

Internal NASA memo warns of “significantly increasing” threats from coronavirus-related hacking

Coronavirus has millions of Americans working from home, including many staffers at NASA. As if the prospect of monitoring the entirety of space on a laptop in your apartment weren’t daunting enough, the agency’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) Renee Wynn is warning staffers that NASA has seen a significant increase in the number of cyber threats targeted at its employees and operations.

According to a memo circulated by Wynn’s office to the rest of the agency, attackers have started to set their sights on remote workers who may currently be less protected on their home networks than they would be inside NASA’s secured offices. The memo warns that in the last few days, the agency has identified a doubling in the number of email phishing attempts directed at NASA email accounts and an “exponential increase” in the number of malware attacks aimed at NASA systems.

NASA confirmed the authenticity of the memo to Mic. “The security of NASA’s information technology is a top agency priority,” a spokesperson for the agency said. ”During the COVID-19 pandemic, NASA has seen an increased number of cyber threats that include phishing attempts and malware attacks. NASA cybersecurity tools have mitigated the impact of these attacks. NASA’s Security Operations Center (SOC) continues to monitor and protect Agency systems, data and intellectual property 24×7.” Continue reading.