Talk:Ames Research Center

History

Suggestion to add a history section. Here are some links I dug up NASA Ames History Office info from History of NASA's Ames Research Center. Here are some archive photos NASA Ames aerial archive photos. More photos on flickr and elsewhere. Some documentaries on Silicon Valley cover early Moffett Field as well. I believe that Moffett Field was originally built as a Naval Air Station (NAS) to support the Naval aircraft the Macon dirigible. (Cengelbart (talk) 17:16, 13 February 2018 (UTC))

Potential plagiarism

While reading the article on the Ames Research Center, I noticed there were some notices stating it needs citations. Since I have some time, I figured "Why not see what 'anyone can edit' means". But I digress.

Anyways, while googling the sentences, I came across https://www.nasa.gov/ames/arcjet-complex/

The following is from the Wikipedia article:

"""The Ames Arc Jet Complex is an advanced thermophysics facility where sustained hypersonic- and hyperthermal testing of vehicular thermoprotective systems takes place under a variety of simulated flight- and re-entry conditions. Of its seven available test bays, four currently contain Arc Jet units of differing configurations, serviced by common facility support equipment. These are the Aerodynamic Heating Facility (AHF), the Turbulent Flow Duct (TFD), the Panel Test Facility (PTF), and the Interaction Heating Facility (IHF). The support equipment includes two D.C. power supplies, a steam ejector-driven vacuum system, a water-cooling system, high-pressure gas systems, data acquisition system, and other auxiliary systems.

The magnitude and capacity of these systems makes the Ames Arc Jet Complex unique. The largest power supply can deliver 75 megawatts (MW) for a 30-minute duration or 150 MW for a 15-second duration. This power capacity, in combination with a high-volume 5-stage steam ejector vacuum-pumping system, enables facility operations to match high-altitude atmospheric flight conditions with samples of relatively large size. """

These are from NASA's site.

"The Ames Arc Jet Complex has seven available test bays. At the present time, four bays contain Arc Jet units of differing configurations, serviced by common facility support equipment. These are the Aerodynamic Heating Facility (AHF), the Turbulent Flow Duct (TFD), the Panel Test Facility (PTF and TPTF), and the Interactive Heating Facility (IHF). The support equipment includes two D.C. power supplies, a steam ejector-driven vacuum system, a water-cooling system, high-pressure gas systems, data acquisition system, and other auxiliary systems."

"The magnitude and capacity of these systems makes the Ames Arc Jet Complex unique in the world. The largest power supply can deliver 75 MW for a 30 minute duration or 150 MW for a 15 second duration. This power capacity, in combination with a high-volume 5-stage steam ejector vacuum-pumping system, enables facility operations to match high-altitude atmospheric flight conditions with samples of relatively large size."

Per @Jmcgnh's suggestion, I'm raising the issue here.

NASA's website does state "NASA content – images, audio, video, and media files used in the rendition of 3-dimensional models, such as texture maps and polygon data in any format – generally are not subject to copyright in the United States", but I cannot find an explicit mention of web page's themselves. If no one is able to find anything indicating the status of the content, I'll rewrite it. Light Curve (talk) 18:12, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Bumping. Anyone have any thoughts? If not, I'll go ahead tomorrow or the day after. Light Curve (talk) 04:30, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

May 2026 edits: infobox, History, Missions, Facilities

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I've made a substantial round of edits and wanted to note the main changes here.

Infobox and templates. The coordinates parameter in {{Infobox government agency}} is deprecated per its TemplateData — I moved {{coord}} to the article body with display=title. Corrected picture_alt to image_alt (the valid parameter name; picture_alt was silently ignored). Added agency_type = Research center, preceding1 = NACA Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, and map_alt for accessibility. Changed headquarters from "Moffett Field, California" to Moffett Federal Airfield, which is the correct current designation. Fixed the {{distinguish}} markup (positional params instead of text=). Changed |id=SP-XXXX to |series=NASA SP-XXXX in the body citation and all three Further reading entries.

History. The section was two paragraphs. I expanded it to include Smith J. DeFrance's role as Engineer-in-Charge from July 1940, the World War II aerodynamics program, and H. Julian Allen and Alfred J. Eggers Jr.'s blunt-body reentry theory from the early 1950s — that research became the design basis for the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules and is well sourced. Added the 1994 Navy-to-NASA transfer of Moffett Federal Airfield. On the historic district, the article now notes the airfield falls within the U.S. Naval Air Station, Sunnyvale, California Historic District (sourced to the NPS listing page at nps.gov), while the NFAC and Arc Jet Complex have separate individual NRHP listings from 2017.

IT section. The previous version described Code TI as "NASA's leading R&D Division" and listed CEV and Phoenix Lander as current/future work — all of it mid-2000s vintage and stale. I removed those claims and rewrote the section around what the division actually does: MAPGEN for the Mars Exploration Rover mission, autonomous systems for the ISS, and the Deep Space 1 navigation system (1998). Also fixed the quantum computing paragraph: "will house" changed to "housed" and a sentence fragment repaired. Deduplicated the nasa.gov/ames reference that appeared twice. Added a sentence on the Phoenix lander's aeroshell being tested at the Arc Jet Complex.

Missions. Several paragraphs were missing basic facts. Kepler's launch date (March 7, 2009), retirement date (October 30, 2018), and exoplanet count (2,600+) were absent. SOFIA was described as active; it retired September 29, 2022. LADEE's mission purpose and end date (April 18, 2014) weren't in the article. LCROSS had no outcome stated — the paragraph ended at launch; I added that it impacted a permanently shadowed crater and the debris plume confirmed water ice. Added wikilinks missing from the section: Charles F. Hall (NASA), Jupiter, Saturn, Pioneer Venus Multiprobe, Minotaur I, Wallops Flight Facility, Atlas V, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, exoplanet, Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory, L3 Technologies, lunar exosphere.

Facilities. Added wikilinks that were missing across multiple subsections: National Airspace System, Vertical Motion Simulator, full flight simulator, Boeing 747-400, air traffic control, Space Shuttle, helicopter, cloud computing, FISMA, Unitary Plan Act, Mach number, rotorcraft, computational fluid dynamics, thermocouple, laser Doppler velocimetry, shadowgraph, Apollo program, shock tube, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Shuttle, aerobraking, scramjet, Return to Flight (Space Shuttle). Added Space Shuttle and MSL testing examples to the UPWT paragraph. Added {{main}} to the Tenants section. Rewrote the Arc Jet second paragraph to address the close-paraphrase issue raised below, all technical facts preserved, prose made independent of the NASA source.

WP:OVERLINK. Removed a mid-article re-link of NASA, corrected the Lockheed Martin first-mention order, and moved the National Register of Historic Places first link to the History section (where it now appears earlier in reading order), de-linking it from the Aviation subsection.

— ~~~~ Sparks19923 (talk) 19:29, 23 May 2026 (UTC)