Time is running out on the agency’s most ambitious science mission in generations, and that means no stopping for anything—not even a historic blizzard. On Friday, January 22, as the first snowflakes of a historic blizzard began piling atop America’s east coast, a team of more than twenty engineers and scientists hauled food, clothes, cots, and mattresses into a building at NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

A potentially crippling — possibly even historic — winter storm is likely to strike areas from Virginia northward to Maine late this week into the weekend, spreading a messy mix of snow, sleet and rain across the metropolitan corridor from Washington, D.C., to Boston. Areas to the north and west of these cities may pick up several feet of snow, with small shifts in the storm track capable of bringing such totals into the big cities themselves.