It was a big week for space science and technology, and Alabama is in the middle of a lot of what made news.

To start, NASA closed a chapter in space history Friday at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. The space agency put the last piece of the first Space Launch System (SLS) rocket built at Marshall on a barge to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. To mark the milestone, Governor Kay Ivey declared July 17 Artemis Day in Alabama.

The part is called the Launch Vehicle Stage Adapter, and Teledyne Brown Engineering of Huntsville built it to connect the rockets core stage and one of its propulsion stages. The propulsion stage was built by Boeing and United Launch Alliance in Decatur. All of it is destined to ride atop the first SLS when it launches in November 2021.

The adapter was the final piece of Artemis I rocket hardware built exclusively at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center, said Marshall Director Jody Singer. Artemis 1 is the name of the first of three flights of SLS in NASA plan to return the next man and first woman to the Moons surface by 2024. The plan is called Artemis after the sister of Apollo.

The adapter is a good example of how conversations about space, getting there, and doing anything there frequently become conversations as much about engineering as science. It takes good engineering to build something that can withstand the freezing vacuum of space and still function.

The adapter was welded together as two separate cones that are then stacked on top of each other, hardware manager Keith Higginbotham said. Marshalls expertise with an innovative process called friction stir welding and the centers large robotic weld tools made it possible to build some pieces of the rocket at Marshall while the core stage was built at the same time by Boeing (near New Orleans).

Friction stir welding heats two pieces of metal to a point so hot they melt and then are stirred together rather than conventionally welded.

Elsewhere this week, a probe already in space made news as it passed close to the Sun. The craft is called Solar Orbiter, and it is a partnership of NASA and the European Space Agency. Dr. Gary Zank of the University of Alabama in Huntsville is a co-lead scientist for one of its instruments.

This weeks news came from another instrument, the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager. It photographed solar features no one had seen before. Principal scientist David Berghmans of Belgium called those features campfires dotting the Sun, little nephews of solar flares, at least a million, perhaps a billion times smaller.

Berghmans said they are literally everywhere we look in new high-resolution images from the Solar Orbiter. Scientists arent sure what the campfires are, much less how they correspond to solar brightenings observed by other spacecraft. Its possible they help heat the Suns outer atmosphere, or corona, but no one knows.

Another instrument aboard Solar Orbiter, the Solar and Heliospheric Imager, revealed what scientists called zodiacal light, light from the Sun reflecting off space dust. The pattern of these images was so clean scientists believe they will be able to see solar wind structures when the probe gets closer to the Sun.

Finally this week, scientists released a new image of light from the early Universe taken by a telescope in Chile. The news here was that the data from this oldest light indicates the Universe is about 13.8 billion years old, which is what earlier models had shown.

Mark Halpern, a professor on the team studying images from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile, told the science website phys.org that the significance of the new information is that our model of the universe is holding up well. And thats important because data is getting better and better as instruments improve 100,000 times better, in fact, according to Halpern. A model that can hold up to that kind of improvement gains some real credibility.

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Alabama was a big part of a big week for space science and tech - AL.com