May 9 (UPI) — NASA Administrator Bill Nelson on Thursday will begin a tour of Italy, Vatican City and Saudi Arabia to speak with officials in each country about the collaborative use of space.
Nelson is scheduled to meet with Italian Space Agency President Teodoro Valente and other officials to discuss partnerships on the Artemis campaign to return to the moon, the International Space Station, the exploration of Mars and Venus, and Earth science missions.
Following the trip to Italy and the Vatican, Nelson will meet with officials at the Saudi Space Agency to discuss future collaboration between the United States and Saudi Arabia.
Nelson also will meet with Saudi students to discuss their roles as members of the “Artemis Generation.”
Italy has been a longstanding partner with the United States on space travel and Earth science. The Italian Space Agency and NASA in 2021 launched the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer telescope in 2021, which gave scientists a better look at interstellar objects such as quasars, pulsars and black holes.
The High Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society awarded the 2024 Bruno Rossi Prize to the NASA team behind the project, along with retired NASA astrophysicist Martin Weisskopf and Italian Space Agency principal investigator Paolo Soffitta.
The European Space Agency in 2021 tapped Italian spaceflight services company Telespazio to design a potential network of satellites around the moon to aid in future missions, including NASA’s planned Artemis mission.
Collaboration on space travel between the United States and Saudi Arabia began in November 2023. Officials from both countries at the time had begun negotiating a framework for cooperating on fields such as aeronautics, Earth and space science, space operations and the use of outer space “for peaceful purposes.”
The agreement was an extension of the Jeddah Communique, a document signed in 2022 by President Joe Biden and King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, which details a strategic partnership with the goal of “advancing a common vision for a more peaceful, secure, prosperous and stable Middle East.”
NASA also has past experience collaborating with the epicenter of the Roman Catholic faith. Since declaring in 1984 that an Inquisition court wrongfully condemned astronomer Galileo Galilei of heresy in 1633, the Vatican has worked to smooth over the friction between science and religion.
NASA in 2023 tapped Jesuit Brother Bob Macke, a Vatican astronomer and meteorite expert, to build a special device called a pycnometer that could analyze the density and porosity of a sample taken from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu.
Researchers were trying to find whether the asteroid is made of more than one type of rock, which will help inform the selection of specimens for more complex scientific research.
Macke said he built the pycnometer in five weeks with help from students at the University of Arizona, which collaborates with the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope in Tucson.
