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This Week at NASA…
The Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying Expedition 31 Soyuz Commander
Gennady Padalka, NASA Flight Engineer Joe Acaba and Flight Engineer
Sergei Revin is shown launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in
Kazakhstan to the International Space Station.
There, Padalka, Acaba and Revin are joining up with their Expedition 31
crewmates already aboard the ISS, Commander Oleg Kononenko, NASA Flight
Engineer Don Pettit and European Space Agency Flight Engineer Andre Kuipers;
they’ve been on the outpost since December.
SpaceX continues its preparations for the launch of Falcon 9 at
Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The Falcon 9 rocket
will send aloft the unmanned Dragon spacecraft to the International
Space Station, where it will be grappled remotely by the Expedition
31 crew. The SpaceX mission, now scheduled to launch on the morning
of May 19, will be the first commercial venture to the ISS.
Administrator Charlie Bolden headed a delegation of senior NASA
leadership that met with Japanese Prime Minister
Yoshihiko Noda to discuss international cooperation in space.
Presented by Bolden with a montage of mementos flown on STS-135,
the final space shuttle mission, Prime Minister Noda said he
wants to excite young people about careers exploring space,
noting his envy of five meeting attendees who’d actually done that.
“Which is also telling us something fundamental…”
The first global analysis by the Dawn spacecraft of Vesta has
uncovered some interesting new findings about the giant asteroid.
“We now know that Vesta is the only intact layered planetary
building block surviving from the very earliest days of the solar
system. Vesta exhibits many characteristics that define it more as
a body that is transitional between asteroids and planets than
being more like your garden variety asteroid. Vesta is special
because it survived the intense collisional environment of the main
asteroid belt for billions of years allowing us to interrogate a key
witness to the events at the very beginning of the solar system.”
Dawn has also confirmed that a certain class of meteorites found here
on Earth originally came from Vesta, making Dawn the first "reverse"
sample return mission in space exploration history.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured these photos of a
powerfully active region of the Sun called 1476 that’s more than
60,000 miles across. This so-called Monster sunspot has released
multiple large flares. Sunspots occur where the magnetic field lines
emerge from the inside of the Sun to form expanding loops above its
surface. They appear dark because temperatures are considerably lower
than in surrounding areas. SDO is the first launched mission in NASA's
Living With a Star Program designed to understand the
causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth.
“Save at the innovative process and government’s role in it.”
“That’s a great way to frame the problem because
I think that’s exactly the question.”
NASA Chief Technologist Mason Peck offered his take on the role
of research and development in revitalizing the nation’s economic
future in a special innovation summit held at Washington’s Reagan
National Airport. Sponsored by the Atlantic Monthly magazine, Peck’s panel
discussed how investment in American R&D and manufacturing benefits our economy.
“When you pose difficult problems such as sending humans to Mars,
which is on NASA’s plate right now – when you pose those kinds of
problems and you put American industry to work and
academia to work on those problems, you get innovation.”
Researchers with the Mars Science Laboratory Project at the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently took science journalists
on a two-day field trip and workshop to California’s Mojave
Desert. The journalists were shown sedimentary rock exposures
that, like those the Curiosity rover will study on Mars,
reveal to scientists the history of their environment.
The hard part is how to extract the information in the rock, so
that’s what everybody is learning to do here, is how to make
measurements. We measure the thickness of the beds, we measure
the grain size, we look at the mineralogy as best as we can understand
it and we record all of this information and then from that, it will
eventually allow us to reconstruct what kind of environment was here.”
“Liftoff of the Atlas V with Curiosity – seeking clues
to the planetary puzzle about life on Mars.”
The MSL spacecraft, carrying Curiosity, was launched Nov. 26, 2011
and is scheduled for an August 2012 landing on Mars at a site known as Gale Crater.
A full-scale test version of NASA’s Orion spacecraft has arrived at
the Virginia Air & Space Center in Hampton, where it will be on display
through the summer. The 18-thousand pound test vehicle, built at the
nearby Langley Research Center, was used in the successful Pad Abort
test of Orion’s launch abort system in May 2010.
NASA’s first space-bound Orion capsule will undergo an un-crewed
Exploration Flight Test-1 planned for 2014. EFT-1 will see Orion travel
farther into space than any human-rated spacecraft has gone in more than 40 years.
Recently, a team of scientists and volunteers from NASA Ames Research
Center searched for debris left in the wake of a large meteor that
plummeted into Northern California on April 22, 2012.
To expedite their search, researchers enlisted the services of an
airship called “Eureka” for an airborne survey of the debris field.
During a five hour flight, they searched a 300-square mile area.
They used a sophisticated video camera system that
is commonly used to cover sporting events.
Researcher were also conducting ground surveys to look for fragments.
Within days, a NASA team was able to find and identify a fragment as a
type of meteorite known as a carbonaceous chondrite.
“It is a really special meteorite because this particular one contains
the goodies that scientists are interested in – the amino acids – all
of the compounds that could have made life possible on our planet.”
Because meteorite fragments will quickly degrade when exposed to the
elements, the rush to find them as soon as possible began. One of the
larger fragments was discovered in the de Hass family pasture.
“I’m glad you found it there and I’m glad it’s a piece that’s going to be
valuable to science and I’m looking forward to hearing some of the results from it.”
Along with the de Haas fragment, over 20 specimens have been recovered.
Some of the largest are now undergoing tests in a lab at Ames Research
Center. This discovery could provide clues as to what our planet may have
been made from and how life could have begun on Earth.
About 50 followers of NASA's social media websites got an up-close-and-personal,
behind-the-scenes look at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center during
a "NASA Social" on May 4. The social media visitors, along with several
news media representatives, were briefed on what Dryden is and does by
center management, project engineers and technicians.
“We’re responsible for that collision avoidance stewardship throughout aviation.”
They also toured various facilities, viewed research and support aircraft,
had their photos taken in the cockpit of a NASA F/A-18,
and were even regaled by a low-level flyover…
and a sonic boom…
during the day-long event. The NASA Social attendees responded
by posting hundreds of "tweets" and comments about their experience
on their Twitter, Facebook and Google-Plus accounts.
National Take Our Children to Work Day was upbeat and full of energy
for students and children of Marshall Space Flight Center employees.
“Alright now as you can see filling the rocket with air pressure – and
that’s the action – all of the pressure builds (launch sound)
– there it goes! Liftoff is the reaction.”
Performers in the educational show FMA Live! brought Sir Isaac Newton's
laws of motion to life for the potential future scientists and engineers!
FMA Live! -- created by NASA and Honeywell International -- is an award-winning,
traveling hip-hop science program designed to inspire elementary and middle
school students to pursue studies in science, technology, engineering and math
by using interactive demonstrations in an entertaining way.
“I’m Allen Chen; I’m the operations lead on the Entry, Descent and
Landing team for the Mars Science Laboratory project.
“Right now I’m coordinating our preparations for entry, descent and landing.
We land in August, a few months from now and we’re still hurrying to get all
our stuff ready to make sure that we’re ready to take the plunge. I’ll be
telling people exactly what the spacecraft is doing, you know roughly
where it is and what it’s telling us is going on during EDL.
“My parents always displayed an example that education never stops.
You always want to learn as much as you can and it doesn’t stop when
you leave the classroom. My parents added new skills while I was still
in high school and you know they got other
degrees and a lot of the times it was just for fun.
We have essentially a copy of the spacecraft over in a different building
here where we can try to get this virtual spacecraft to run through the
motions that we’ll go through during EDL. We run trajectory simulations
to understand its performance, we probably literally run millions of simulated
cases from pre-stage separation all the way to the ground to make sure we get
where we’re going. You’ve gotta work hard. There’s a lot of academics that you
need to get to this point in your career. Beyond that I would also emphasize that
it’s not just about science and math, per se. If you can’t talk about what
you’re doing, you’re not going to get very far in this.
You’re going to have to convince people.
“This is a type of mission and type of project and type of thing
that we do here that no one person can do by themselves. So you got to
work with a lot people and learning how to work with those people is just as
important as learning those basics in science and math.
That’s kind of the starting point but to grow
beyond that you need to be able to work with people.
“There’s a kind of exploration that we do here that can’t be done
anywhere else. There’s certainly other places where you’re doing
things to make money or you’re doing things related to exploration,
but here the entire point of the place is about exploration. So
I think I finally came to that realization sometime in late high
school or early college that this is the type of place I want to be at.”
Fifteen years ago, on May 15, 1997, Space Shuttle Atlantis launched
from the Kennedy Space Center on STS-84. The mission was the sixth
shuttle docking to the Russian Mir space station, exchanging
astronaut Mike Foale for U.S. crew member Jerry Linenger, who’d spent
123 days there. Rounding out the Atlantis crew were commander Charlie
Precourt, a 2012 inductee into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame, Pilot
Eileen Collins and Mission Specialists Carlos Noriega, Ed Lu, Jean-Francois
Clervoy of the European Space Agency and Elena Kondakova of Russia.
And, May 16 marks the one-year anniversary of the launch of STS-134 – the
final spaceflight of Space Shuttle Endeavour. NASA’s youngest orbiter
lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center at 8:56 a.m. EDT to the
International Space Station, carrying with it the six-person crew of
Commander Mark Kelly, Pilot Greg Johnson, and Mission Specialists
Mike Fincke, Drew Feustel, Greg Chamitoff and Roberto Vittori.
The 16-day mission delivered the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS),
the Express Logistics Carrier-3, a high-pressure gas tank and spare
parts for other station hardware. STS-134 was the 36th, and next-to-last
shuttle mission to the International Space Station.
And that’s This Week @ NASA!
For more on these and other stories, or to follow us on Facebook,
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