This Week @NASA
NASA has officially transferred title of the
Space Shuttle Enterprise to New York City's
Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.
The contract was signed by Lori Garver,
NASA Deputy Administrator, and Susan Marenoff-Zausner,
the museum's president, in a public ceremony hosted by the museum.
The Enterprise is set to be moved from its current
location outside Washington, D.C. at the Smithsonian
National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center,
to Intrepid next summer.
"We are very pleased that as the space shuttle program
draws to a close, we are able to continue to share the
excitement of the program with the public, the students
around the world and then right here at the intrepid."
The Enterprise was the first shuttle built and,
while it never flew in space, its series of approach
and landing tests in 1977 proved the orbiter could fly
in the atmosphere and land like an airplane,
except without power -- like a glider.
Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX,
will launch its Dragon spacecraft on its second
Commercial Orbital Transportation Services
demonstration flight on Feb. 7, 2012.
Pending completion of final safety reviews, testing
and verification, SpaceX might also send Dragon
to rendezvous with the International Space Station.
The announcement was made by NASA
Deputy Administrator Lori Garver.
"So it is the opening of that new commercial cargo
delivery era for ISS and it's great
news for nasa and spacex together."
"3-2-1 ... we have liftoff ..."
On its first demonstration flight a year ago,
Dragon was launched from the Kennedy Space Center,
then splashed down in the Pacific after
successfully completing two orbits of Earth.
Garver made the SpaceX announcement during her opening
remarks to NASA's Future Forum
at The Museum of Flight in Seattle.
Since 2008, Future Forums have brought together technologists,
scientists, and engineers with local business, science,
technology, and education leaders to discuss the importance
of innovation, discovery, commercial partnerships
and Education to the success of America's space program -
and the nation, as a whole.
"Together we're truly developing an industry that until
recently had been largely science fiction but now
it stands poised to open the new frontier -
that next chapter in human space development."
At a press conference held at NASA Ames Research Center,
the Kepler team announced the discovery of its first confirmed
planet in the "habitable zone" or the region around a star
where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface.
Named Kepler-22b, the planet is about 2.4 times the radius
of the Earth and orbits a sun-like star about 600 light years
away between the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra.
"Well, certainly the thing that's most exciting
to me is the fact, that finally after looking at all
these candidates, spending all this effort, that we can
confirm a planet, in the habitable zone that's nearly Earth size."
Scientists don't know yet if Kepler-22b
has a predominantly rocky, gaseous or liquid composition,
but its discovery is a step closer to finding Earth-like planets.
"The Kepler team announced today 1,094 new planet candidates,
bring the total roster up to 2,326.
Of those, 207 are Earth-size So, it's an exciting milestone
because we're really honing in on truly Earth-sized habitable planets."
The announcement helped to kick off the beginning
of the first-ever Kepler Science Conference.
Just days earlier, the Kepler mission celebrated 1,000 days
of conducting science operations in space.
Famed astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson
also came to the event to help the team celebrate the milestone.
It's great to see the energy and enthusiasm of the workforce
for Kepler matching the magnitude of the science
that is coming out from the telescope itself."
Kepler is NASA¹s three-and-a-half year mission to search
for Earth-size, potentially habitable planets in our galaxy.
Just up the highway from Ames, in San Francisco -
the announcement of another exciting scientific finding
at the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting.
Researchers from NASA and The Ohio State University confirmed
that the major tsunami caused by the March 2011 Tohoku-Oki
earthquake in Japan was, in fact, a "merging tsunami" caused
by two wave fronts. The forming of a single, double-high wave
increased its intensity and ability
to travel long distances without losing power.
The odds against the NASA and European radar satellites
observing and capturing the data they did of this "merging tsunami"
are said to be "10 million to one."
More than 34 years after its launch, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft
has entered a new region between
our solar system and interstellar space.
Data it's obtained over the last year suggest this new region
is a kind of cosmic purgatory, where the solar wind is calm,
our solar system's magnetic field piles up,
and higher-energy particles appear to leak from our
solar system into interstellar space.
Although Voyager 1 is about 11 billion miles from the sun,
it has yet to cross one major, space-faring threshold.
We're very close to the edge of interstellar space now.
Unfortunately, our models are not
accurate enough to tell us how close.
So, it could be a few more months or it could be a few more years.
But Voyager One is moving out a billion miles every three years,
so we shouldn't have too long to wait to find out what's outside."
Expedition 30 Soyuz Commander Oleg Kononenko,
NASA Flight Engineer Don Pettit and European Space Agency
Flight Engineer Andre Kuipers, have left the Gagarin Training
Center in Star City Russia for the Baikonour
Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where they'll complete training
for their launch to the International
Space Station later this month. Liftoff is slated for Dec.21.
Astronaut Chris Ferguson, the last person to serve
as commander of a space shuttle mission,
has retired from NASA.
He plans to take a new job in the private sector.
And liftoff. The final liftoff of Atlantis.
On the shoulders of the space shuttle,
America will continue the dream.
On STS-135 - in July 2011, the retired U.S. Navy captain,
was the commander for the final flight of space shuttle Atlantis --
the 135th and final mission of America's
30-year Space Shuttle Program.
A milestone for engineers in the J2X program
at The Stennis Space Center. They recently installed
the upgraded J-2X powerpack on the A-1 Test Stand
and are a step closer to starting new tests.
The powerpack is a critical component of the J-2X,
the engine that'll produce the 294,000 pounds of thrust
needed for NASA's new Space Launch System to carry
astronauts to destinations beyond low-Earth orbit.
The Microgravity Science Glovebox team has reason to celebrate.
Their science facility onboard the International
Space Station has passed 10,000 hours of operation.
The glovebox, developed by the European Space Agency
and managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center,
launched to the station during Expedition 5 in 2002.
Over the past nine years, the glovebox has been used
to conduct a wide range of microgravity research,
including fluid physics, combustion science, materials science,
biotechnology, fundamental physics, and other investigations
seeking to understand the role of gravity
in basic physical and chemical interactions.
The big thing about MSG is containment, so it allows
us to do all of these types of experiments that may have
some impact to crew safety or to crew health or whatever.
And they're able to do it in a confined enivironment."
So that gives the experimenters on Earth a chance
to do something in space and use the microgravity
environment to do it to get results
that they couldn't get on Earth.
The Hubble Space Telescope has passed another
milestone in its 21 years of exploration: the 10,000th
refereed science paper based on data
captured by Hubble has been published.
This makes the telescope one of the most prolific
astronomical endeavors in history.
For the past 21 years thousands of astronomers around
the world in over 35 countries have been
engaged in Hubble research
300 teenagers spent their Saturday evening getting
connected during TEDxYouth@NASA. The event, sponsored
by NASA Langley, the National Institute of Aerospace
and Virginia Air and Space Center, offered 13 to 18-year-olds
an evening of motivating speakers, interactive exhibits
and messages about creativity, risk-taking and becoming a leader.
It's not about who never makes mistakes.
It's not about who never falls down. It's about who builds
the skill of getting up faster in today's
world to really be a superstar.
At TEDxYouth@NASA, the goal was to get liberal-arts minded
students thinking about how they can play a role
in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math.
I really liked the speakers. They are very inspirational.
I liked Simon Nance - I believe his name was.
He kind of put calculus into life and kind of explained
a couple things that like didn't really occur to me,
so that was interesting.
We've got some really tough problems in this world
that we need you to solve and they require
an understanding of science, technology,
engineering and mathematics. And that's what this
conference is about. Getting you excited,
getting you motivated about those subjects.
NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden and Deputy Administrator
Lori Garver were on hand at the 2011 Combined Federal
Campaign (CFC) Carnival and Silent Auction
at NASA Headquarters. CFC, the world's largest and most
successful annual workplace charity campaign, raises millions
of dollars every year to support community organizations
and provide aid to survivors of natural disasters.
The Combined Federal Campaign is here to support families
and folks in need and we here at NASA headquarters
are hoping to raise 300-thousand dollars toward that goal.
And that's This Week @NASA.
For more on these and other stories, log onto: www.nasa.gov.