This Week At NASA….
Cheered on by hundreds of handkerchief-waving
employees to the strains of a traditional
New
Orleans brass band…
…the last external fuel tank scheduled to
fly on a space shuttle mission was rolled
away from
the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans
in preparation for its 900-mile sea journey
to the
Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The tank,
designated ET-138, was completed by Lockheed
Martin workers on June 28.
During a special ceremony Michoud employees
were honored by VIPs for building the final
external tank and were recognized for the
successful delivery over 37 years of 134 ETs
to the
Space Shuttle Program.
At Kennedy, ET-138 will be mated to the orbiter
Endeavour and two solid rocket boosters for
the STS-134 launch to the International Space
Station targeted for February 26.
A full house crowd at the Langley Research
Center’s Pearl Young Theater heard Jaiwon
Shin,
NASA’ s Associate Administrator for Aeronautics,
laud the quality and depth of work being done
at the Center. Shin noted the aeronautics
research conducted by and advancements made
at
Langley, including projects like the X-48
blended-wing body jet, largely developed there.
Later, during a special luncheon, Shin encouraged
a group of Langley interns to join the next
generation of aeronautical engineers.
“I’m learning everything that the researchers
are learning. I’m talking to a lot of the
managers around the center, and finding out
where the technology is, and where they think
it’s
going in the next fifty years. So, basically,
I’m learning every single area that they
are focusing
on.”
“I’m actually studying biomedical engineering,
so I get a lot of questions of why I’m here
at
Langley, but I ‘m very interested in aviation.
I’d like to merge the two fields, so I’m
learning a
lot more about helicopters cause, understandably,
I have not had that in biomed, but I would
like to combine those two and work with my
biomedical devices and help out pilots and
things
like that.”
A new NASA video game is offering some daunting
challenges to virtual space travelers. On
Moonbase Alpha, you and your friends can become
part of an exploration team in a futuristic
3-
D lunar settlement. After a nearby meteor
strike cripples your critical life support
systems, like
oxygen flow, your mission will be to repair
and restore those systems to working order.
Moonbase Alpha demonstrates how NASA content
combined with cutting-edge game
technology can offer an experience that inspires
interest in science, technology, engineering
and math -- skills critical to NASA's exploration
goals.
“Lectures, and writing on a chalk board,
and doing homework are amongst the least successful
ways to teach people. In games you fail, you
do it again; you fail, you do it again, and
sometimes you do it a lot of times, but you
can keep at it until you get it right. And
it doesn’t
use up anybody else’s time to do that.”
For more on this virtual lunar mission, visit:
www.nasa.gov/moonbasealpha
“It’ is rated “E” for everyone through
the Entertainment Software Review Board, so,
it’s safe
for everybody. For those parents who worried
about their kids playing games, this is not
one
they’ll have to worry about.”
“And lift off of shuttle Endeavour to with
NASA’s final space station crew compartment
that brings a
bay window view to our celestial backyard.
A little piece of the world's first national
park is home after a lengthy trip into space.
A banner with
patches featuring various aspects of operations
at Yellowstone National Park was aboard space
shuttle
Endeavour on the STS-130 mission to the International
Space Station last February. Yellowstone staff
members prepared the banner after 130 crew
member Bob Behnken offered to take a small
reminder
of Yellowstone with him on the flight. Behnken
visited the park to return the banner, which
circled
Earth 217 times, traveling 5.7 million miles.
For nearly 33 years, Voyager 2 has returned
data about the giant outer planets, making
important
discoveries like Neptune's Great Dark Spot
and its 1,000-mph winds. On June 28, Voyager
2 reached
an operations milestone – 12,000 days.
When Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977Jimmy
Carter was president. Its twin, Voyager 1,
launched about two weeks later on Sept. 5,
1977; it marks its 12,000th day of operation
this week. Built
and managed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
the Voyagers 1 and 2 are the most distant
human-
made objects, traveling the outer edges of
the heliosphere -- the bubble the sun creates
around the
solar system.
“It’s about 100 times the distance of
the earth from the sun, which we call, or
refer to as an
astronomical unit., so that’s about the
scale where the Voyagers are now. If you imagine
communicating with the Voyagers, it takes
about 12 to 16 hours one way to communicate.
So if you
talk to someone who gives you an answer after
32 hours, and you can imagine how hard it
is to keep a
conversation going, but that’s what our
scientists and engineers have done for the
last 33 years, or so,
with increasing time gaps between the answers
from the spacecraft, and maintaining that
is a major
achievement.”
Mission managers expect Voyager 1 to leave
our solar system and enter interstellar space
in
approximately five years, with Voyager 2 following
shortly thereafter.
“It reminds me of a Renaissance-style painting,
a woodcut actually. I think it was ordered
by some
French astronomer in 1888, where a missionary
breaks through and what is beyond the astrophysics
influence. So the Voyagers actually break
through the crystal spheres that have been
believed to exist
and look beyond. So the Voyagers, through
this sphere that exists between the solar
influence and
what is beyond the astrophysics influence,
and give us a first look into what happens
beyond.”
And that’s This Week at NASA!
For more on these and other stories log on
to: www.nasa.gov
