The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the federal government founded by Dwight D. Eisenhower and is responsible for aeronautics and aerospace research. This event means they conduct missions and create modules/equipment used to explore space and understand it. Before the creation of NASA, another federal agency already existed, called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), founded on March 3, 1915 by Woodrow Wilson. This was the first agency to represent serious space exploration and sky exploration. After the launch of Sputnik, the NACA was shocked and this led to Dwight Eisenhower's idea to improve the committee if they wanted to compete with the Soviet Union, in 1958 congress passed legislation to establish NASA which was created because of the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, which sparked the space race. The NACA only had 12 employees and they were successful in airplanes, but later they were successful in rocket planes as well and they also made a lot of progress after World War II, they became more serious with space vehicles. The space race began in 1955 when the United States and the Soviet Union announced the launch of a satellite into orbit. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2, the United States launched its own called Explorer 1 which was successful. On December 18, 1958, the Air Force booster was sent into orbit, it was a communications satellite to stay in contact with the earth. The next day President Eisenhower's Christmas message was sent and it was the first voice sent from space. In 1972-73 Pioneer 10 and 11 were launched and Pioneer 10 was the first to travel through the asteroid belt of the solar system and also captured stunning images of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. A year later, Pioneer 11 was launched and flew close to Jupiter and then moved to Saturn and that's where we discovered many small moons around the planet. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay Today NASA has many departments and has continued with more missions that have given us what we have today, with 17,219 employees focusing on different aspects of space exploration to give the nation the new discoveries and better understanding of the universe. The engineering department works on designing rockets intended for deep space exploration and also building instruments that help them analyze what they have found on a planet or in space. They also have a space bioscience research branch that focuses on biological research and technology development to handle the extreme environments of space exploration. Since there is no air, food and water, and there are high levels of radiation in space, this branch will find new and safer ways to explore space that will not affect our body and health in a negative way. NASA's astrophysics branch focuses on discovering how the universe works. This is done by studying the physical and chemical properties of objects by observing their infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. The branch of Exobiology carries out research on the origin, evolution and life in the universe. They work on instruments designed to measure whether something is habitable and which also detect biosignatures. The last branch I will mention is the Planetary Systems Branch. In this branch, a group of NASA workers gather to observe, create theories, and experiment with research into the origins of planetary systems. NASA has conducted many missions and created equipment and has learned from previous missions mentioned,I want to talk about the successful missions they carried out. The first will be about an instrument created by NASA and it is called the Hubble Space Telescope, this telescope was launched into earth orbit and reveals stars, planets, nebulae and galaxies, this telescope has really changed the way people look at the world cosmos. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is a space probe that has measured temperature differences in the cosmic microwave background, which is the radiation left over from the Big Bang. What this space probe revealed was that the universe was 13.7 billion years old, and it also confirmed that the majority of the universe, about 95%, is made up of dark matter and dark energy. One very important mission I will mention is Apollo 11, a mission mentioned by John F Kennedy to achieve an objective. This was a mission to the moon and was a major turning point in human history, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Micheal Collins were the three to participate in this mission, Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon. When the astronauts returned, they obtained rock samples that allowed us to obtain data and it was the first time we had researched samples from another planetary body. This mission changed space exploration by allowing us to have stations in Earth orbit, for example, Skylab 4 was an artificial space station launched in May 1973 by the United States, its parts come from the Saturn V launch vehicle. This mission and many others have demonstrated that humans could perform numerous experiments and have also demonstrated that humans can live and work in space for long periods. This also led to the creation of the ISS, which took NASA about 10 years and 30 missions to assemble and succeed. The Soviet Union launches the first segment of the ISS on November 20, 1998, called the Zarya Module also known as the Functional Payload Block, funded by the United States. The United States subsequently launched a shuttle on December 4 called Unity to begin assembling the ISS. This shuttle contains "50,000 mechanical items, 216 lines to carry fluids and gases, and 121 internal and external electrical cables using six miles of wire." After that, the first crew to enter the ISS was launched on November 2, 2000, astronauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, and stayed for several months, exactly 136 days. The Destiny Module was added in 2001 and is a research laboratory that is still used today as the years pass, Europe and Japan join the ISS Columbus and Kibo. In 2013 the ISS research laboratory discovered that “Proteins can grow like crystals in space with almost perfect three-dimensional structures useful for the development of new drugs” this allows them to use the different environments of the ISS. Remember: This is just one example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay The next creation of NASA is Spirit and Opportunity, which are the rovers that were placed on Mars and collected data, from that data we discovered interesting data. The spirit lasted 20 times longer than the original design, it lasted 2,226 Earth days but sadly stopped communicating because it got stuck in the sand. In its time the spirit helps us discover that Mars was wet and that conditions on Mars could have supported microbial life. But before finding out, NASA sent the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) in 1996 to discover possible water sites, and also sent the Mars Pathfinder mission and Sojourner rover to Mars in 1997, these two found rocks that very they were probably shaped by water..