NASA News: NASA Honors Human Spaceflight Achievements At Kennedy Center Concert
WASHINGTON -- NASA is inviting the general public and journalists to aspecial concert at 7 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, May 25, at the John F.
Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington to honor
American achievements in human spaceflight. The event, "Human
Spaceflight: the Kennedy Legacy" is a musical celebration on the 50th
anniversary of President Kennedy's speech to Congress when he
challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth.
The one-hour concert will feature the Space Philharmonic under the
baton of Emil de Cou. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, astronauts
and special, surprise guests will participate in the event along with
local high school musical groups and the Soldier's Chorus of the U.S.
Army Field Band.
A limited number of tickets is available for the general public on a
first-come, first-served basis. To attend the free event, please
contact NASA Guest Operations at 202-358-1750. Tickets for those who
RSVP will be available at NASA's Will Call tables, which will be
staffed in front of the Concert Hall (in the Grand Foyer) from 5-6:45
p.m. Wednesday.
Reporters, who would like to cover the event, must contact Katherine
Trinidad at 202-358-3749 or katherine.trinidad@nasa.gov by 12 p.m. on
Tuesday, May 24.
To see video, audio and a transcript of President Kennedy's 1961
speech and learn about NASA's plans for future human space
exploration, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/
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NASA Announces Milestone For Future Human Spaceflight
WASHINGTON -- NASA will host a media teleconference at 3:30 p.m. EDTon Tuesday, May 24, to discuss an agency decision that will define
the next transportation system to carry humans into deep space.
Douglas Cooke, associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems
Mission Directorate in Washington, will take reporters' questions
during the teleconference.
To participate, reporters must e-mail their name, media affiliation
and telephone number to J.D. Harrington at j.d.harrington@nasa.gov by
2:30 p.m. EDT Tuesday.
Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live at:
http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio
For more information about NASA's plans for future human space
exploration, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/
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NASA Announces STS-134 Wakeup Song Winners; Face In Space Totals
HOUSTON -- NASA announced the winners of its "Original Song Contest"after six weeks of public voting. The songs will awaken the STS-134
astronauts aboard space shuttle Endeavour during their ongoing mission.
"Sunrise Number 1" by Jorge Otero and the band Stormy Mondays from
Oviedo, Spain, earned first place. Shuttle Commander Mark Kelly,
Pilot Greg H. Johnson, Mission Specialists Mike Fincke, Drew Feustel,
Greg Chamitoff and Roberto Vittori of the European Space Agency will
hear the song at 5:56 p.m. EDT on May 31 - the day before the crew
returns to Earth. "Sunrise Number 1" received 787,725 votes, or 49.8
percent of the total ballots.
"Dreams You Give" by Brian Plunkett from Halfway, Mo., earned second
place with 612,959 votes, or 38.8 percent. It will wake the crew at
6:56 p.m. on May 30.
The Original Song Contest received 1,350 entries for consideration,
and NASA selected 10 songs as finalists. The public cast 1,581,531
votes for their favorite song from March 29 through May 16. To listen
to the songs and see the all the results, visit:
https://songcontest.nasa.gov/
The winning songs also have videos. To view the video for "Sunrise
Number 1," visit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
To view the video for "Dreams you Give," visit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
NASA also released the final tally of submissions to the Space Shuttle
Program's "Face in Space" campaign for the STS-134 mission.
Participants submitted 128,940 photos for uplink to Endeavour via the
Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The
images will return to Earth through a data transmission, and
contributors will be able to print certificates verifying their
photos flew aboard Endeavour.
More than 7,550 other photos already have been submitted to fly aboard
the last shuttle mission targeted to launch July 8. Submissions will
be accepted through the liftoff date. To take part in the STS-135
Face in Space campaign, visit:
http://faceinspace.nasa.gov
For more information about the Space Shuttle Program and the STS-134
mission to the International Space Station, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle
For more information about the space station, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/station
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Radio Telescopes Capture Best-Ever Snapshot Of Black Hole Jets
WASHINGTON -- An international team, including NASA-fundedresearchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern
Hemisphere has produced the most detailed image of particle jets
erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy.
"These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but
we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain
themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a
doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.
The new image shows a region less than 4.2 light-years across -- less
than the distance between our sun and the nearest star.
Radio-emitting features as small as 15 light-days can be seen, making
this the highest-resolution view of galactic jets ever made. The
study will appear in the June issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics and
is available online.
Mueller and her team targeted Centaurus A (Cen A), a nearby galaxy
with a supermassive black hole weighing 55 million times the sun's
mass. Also known as NGC 5128, Cen A is located about 12 million
light-years away in the constellation Centaurus and is one of the
first celestial radio sources identified with a galaxy.
Seen in radio waves, Cen A is one of the biggest and brightest objects
in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. This is
because the visible galaxy lies nestled between a pair of giant
radio-emitting lobes, each nearly a million light-years long.
These lobes are filled with matter streaming from particle jets near
the galaxy's central black hole. Astronomers estimate that matter
near the base of these jets races outward at about one-third the speed of light.
Using an intercontinental array of nine radio telescopes, researchers
for the TANAMI (Tracking Active Galactic Nuclei with Austral
Milliarcsecond Interferometry) project were able to effectively zoom
into the galaxy's innermost realm.
"Advanced computer techniques allow us to combine data from the
individual telescopes to yield images with the sharpness of a single
giant telescope, one nearly as large as Earth itself," said Roopesh
Ojha at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The enormous energy output of galaxies like Cen A comes from gas
falling toward a black hole weighing millions of times the sun's
mass. Through processes not fully understood, some of this infalling
matter is ejected in opposing jets at a substantial fraction of the
speed of light. Detailed views of the jet's structure will help
astronomers determine how they form.
The jets strongly interact with surrounding gas, at times possibly
changing a galaxy's rate of star formation. Jets play an important
but poorly understood role in the formation and evolution of
galaxies. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected much
higher-energy radiation from Cen A's central region.
"This radiation is billions of times more energetic than the radio
waves we detect, and exactly where it originates remains a mystery,"
said Matthias Kadler at the University of Wuerzburg in Germany and a
collaborator of Ojha. "With TANAMI, we hope to probe the galaxy's
innermost depths to find out."
Ojha is funded through a Fermi investigation on multiwavelength
studies of Active Galactic Nuclei.
The astronomers credit continuing improvements in the Australian Long
Baseline Array (LBA) with TANAMI's enormously increased image quality
and resolution. The project augments the LBA with telescopes in South
Africa, Chile and Antarctica to explore the brightest galactic jets
in the southern sky.
NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle
physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the U.S.
Department of Energy, along with important contributions from
academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan,
Sweden and the U.S. The Australia Long Baseline Array is part of the
Australia Telescope National Facility, which is funded by the
Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility
managed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.
For more information and images, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/
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Student Experiment Microgravity Kit Wins NASA-Make Tech Contest
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. -- "Bring It Back," a small and inexpensivemicrogravity spaceflight kit, has won the do-it-yourself technology
and education space competition sponsored by NASA and MAKE Magazine.
The competition challenged participants to design experiments that
could be built for under $200 by high school students to eventually
fly on a suborbital flight. In addition to being low cost, the
winning entry also had to illustrate sound science, technology,
engineering and math (STEM) principles. The competition was designed
to inspire curiosity and create interest in STEM among classroom
teachers and students.
The "Bring It Back" concept, created by Houston engineers Prashant Rao
and Subra Sankaran, outlines three experiments using molten wax to
demonstrate important principles of science and engineering. Each
experiment can be performed using the same equipment, making the kit
versatile. The students will use wax to understand the dominance of
surface tension, wetting effects and the impact of a lack of buoyancy
in the absence of gravity. Other science concepts include simulated
boiling, fluid flow behavior and bubble movements induced by
temperature changes, natural convection, and wake flow.
"It is a challenge to create an affordable and achievable method for
microgravity experiments, but the Houston team came up with three
innovative options, using materials easily found in most
communities," said Bobby Braun, Chief Technologist at NASA
Headquarters in Washington. "As a result, students across the country
will have the opportunity to gain first-hand experience with some of
the principles required in a career in science and engineering."
Sponsored by Teachers in Space, a project of the Space Frontier
Foundation in Nyack, N.Y, the first "Bring It Back" kits will fly
aboard the Excelsior STEM mission scheduled to fly on a Masten
Aerospace unmanned suborbital mission later this year. Teachers and
students will assemble the experiment kits at a Suborbital Flight
Experiment Workshop at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center's AERO
Institute in Palmdale, Calif., in early August.
"At this stage of their lives, we think it is particularly important
to provide an experience that will get students excited about science
and engineering in general, and space in particular, all in an
artistic and imaginative way," Sankaran said. He is a senior thermal
specialist at MEI Technologies and Jacobs/ESCG in Houston. Rao is a
principal engineer at Barrios Technology and Jacobs/ESCG in Houston.
Their kit was selected as the winner by NASA's Ames Research Center in
Moffett Field, Calif., MAKE Magazine and Teachers in Space. Sankaran
and Rao will be honored May 21 and 22 at the Bay Area Maker Faire in
San Mateo, Calif.
"I believe that makers are inspired by the emerging opportunities for
'do-it-yourself' space exploration," said Dale Dougherty, founder and
publisher of MAKE Magazine, a do-it-yourself publication for
technology. "We are proud to partner with Teachers in Space and NASA
to encourage makers to develop space science kits that high school
teachers can build and fly on suborbital flights. The project's
ultimate goal is to open the door for the next generation of makers
to gain real-world experience in space science. "
For more information about the NASA MAKE Challenge, visit:
http://makezine.com/space
For more information about Teachers in Space, visit:
http://www.teachersinspace.
For more information about NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/oct
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