Vinny's Breaking News Blog » Space

Smithsonian Folklife Festival NASA 50 Years Celebration

Vinny — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:05:28 +0000

For more details about this years Smithonian Folklife Festival use the source link at the bottom to visit the Nasa website where you will find links to more information.

Smithsonian’s Folklife Festival Celebrates NASA’s 50 Years

Moon buggies, stardust and space food are a few of the things visitors will learn about at the “NASA: 50 Years and Beyond” program during this summer’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The program will showcase the role men and women of NASA have played in broadening the horizons of American science and culture, and the role they will continue to play in shaping the future through exploration and stirring the public imagination.

The festival will be held outdoors on the National Mall between 7th and 14th streets from Wednesday, June 25, through Sunday, June 29, and Wednesday, July 2, through Sunday, July 6. Admission is free. Festival hours are from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. EDT each day, with special 6 p.m. evening events that include concerts and dance parties. The festival is co-sponsored by the National Park Service.

“The Folklife Festival will be a unique way for more than a million people to learn more about the history and heritage of our nation’s exploration of space and cutting-edge aeronautics research,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Shana Dale. “With this festival, NASA celebrates its 50th anniversary, and in the forty-two years of the annual Folklife Festival, NASA is only the second federal agency invited to participate. NASA is in the inspiration business, and my hope is that visitors to our nation’s capital will take the opportunity to learn more about our scientific discoveries of Earth and space, and the future of exploration with our talented engineers, scientists and astronauts.”

Through hands-on educational activities, demonstrations, narrative sessions and exhibits, the program will highlight the skills and specialized knowledge that are uniquely NASA. About 200 NASA astronomers, astronauts, astrophysicists, educators, engineers and other experts will engage with visitors to represent a cross-section of NASA’s 80,000 employees, contractors and grantees. The popular, Web-based “NASA Edge” podcast, as well as NASA TV will be on hand to report from the festival and conduct live interviews with participants.

NASA PROGRAMS
The festival program will illustrate the geographic and occupational diversity of NASA’s 10 field centers and inform visitors of the agency’s many past, present and future projects. The topics of space science, Earth science, aeronautics, human spaceflight and future projects will be represented at the festival. Space science participants will be on hand to discuss the collection and analysis of interstellar dust, robotic missions to Mars and planetary exploration. Earth science participants will share recent findings about climate change, weather patterns and satellite imagery.

Since NASA’s inception, the agency’s employees have conducted cutting-edge research in traditional aeronautical disciplines and new, emerging fields to support future air and space vehicles. At the festival, aeronautics engineers and technicians will share with visitors the work they are doing on wind tunnel testing and improving air traffic control.

NASA’s most visible mission is human spaceflight. Both current and former astronauts will share their adventures and experience with festival visitors. Also on hand will be NASA engineers and scientists who are building new spaceships that will enable astronauts to return to the moon by 2020.

BENEFITS TO SOCIETY
Society often benefits from the technological advances of NASA. While, contrary to popular belief, Tang and Velcro are not NASA inventions, visitors will learn that many other commercial products and services in the fields of health, medicine, industry and consumer goods came from NASA-derived technologies.

Society also has its imaginations stirred by the exploration of space. Countless painters, sculptors, poets, writers, filmmakers and musicians have used NASA’s work as the basis for their art. Several of these people who have documented or interpreted NASA’s missions through their art will demonstrate their work at the festival.

FAMILY ACTIVITIES
Younger festival visitors can participate in a variety of hands-on activities that will illustrate the many different facets of NASA. Using their “Mission Guide” activities booklet, children can try such activities as comparing satellite images and studying the impact of comets. After completing the tasks and determining if they have “the right stuff,” kids will earn a reward.

Visitors to the festival also will have the opportunity to leave record their memories of and thoughts about NASA, including where they were during important NASA moments.

FOODWAYS
Daily discussions on creating menus for space, packaging food for space, and planning for long term missions beyond Earth will showcase the design of nutritious and appetizing meals for space travelers. NASA staff also will discuss the challenges and rewards that come with feeding a multicultural crew on the International Space Station.

NARRATIVE STAGES
Participants from all areas of the program, as well as NASA alumni and other special guests, will share stories, traditions and memories of 50 years of NASA on the program’s two narrative stages, Exploration and Galaxy.

ALSO AT THE SMITHSONIAN
During the evenings of the festival’s first week, the National Museum of Natural History’s Baird Auditorium will feature films relating to NASA, including “Apollo 13,” “In the Shadow of the Moon” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Also on the National Mall, the National Air and Space Museum’s exhibition “Space: A Journey to Our Future” opened June 14. This exhibition highlights current achievements in space exploration — satellites, space telescopes, people living in space — and provides a glimpse into future human space travel.

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL
The 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival will feature three programs. In addition to “NASA: 50 Years and Beyond,” the other programs are “Bhutan: Land of the Thunder Dragon” and “Texas: A Celebration of Music, Food and Wine.”

The Folklife Festival, inaugurated in 1967, honors people from across the United States and around the world. With about 1 million visitors each year, the festival unites presenters and performers in the nation’s capital to celebrate the diversity of cultural traditions. It is produced by the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Source:Nasa

NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander Inspects Delivered Soil Samples

Vinny — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 23:17:48 +0000

New observations from Phoenix provide the most magnified view ever seen of Martian soil, showing particles clumping together even at the smallest visible scale.
Read More From The Source: NASA

For more breaking space news see the left side bar of this page where you will find many real-time news feeds.

Photo: Discovery Astronaut Mike Fossum Spacewalk

Vinny — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 01:31:28 +0000

Discovery Astronaut Mike Fossum Spacewalk, originally uploaded by vinny12.

Image Credit: NASA

Astronaut Mike Fossum continues his duties during this the second of the STS-124mission’s three scheduled spacewalk. During the seven-hour, 11-minute spacewalk, Fossum and fellow astronaut Ron Garan installed television cameras on the front and rear of the Kibo Japanese Pressurized Module (JPM) to assist Kibo robotic arm operations, removed thermal covers from the Kibo robotic arm, prepared an upper JPM docking port for flight day seven’s attachment of the Kibo logistics module.

They also readied a spare nitrogen tank assembly for its installation during the third spacewalk, retrieved a failed television camera from the Port 1 truss and inspected the port Solar Alpha Rotary Joint.

Source: NASA

Latest Space News Real-Time Updates

Vinny — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 01:01:05 +0000

Below is the latest space and space exploration news updated in real-time by RSS news feeds.

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NASA Phoenix Mars Ice or Salt Photo

Vinny — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:58:36 +0000

NASA Phoenix Mars Ice or Salt Photo, originally uploaded by vinny12.

The Robotic Arm on the Phoenix Mars Lander took a second scoop full of soil and revealed whitish material at the bottom of the dig area. Scientists are debating whether this is a salt layer or the top of an ice table.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

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Video: Discovery Astronauts Spacewalk, International Space Station 06/03/08

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Vinny — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:58:20 +0000

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Science Latest News Real-Time Updates RSS Feeds

Vinny — Fri, 30 May 2008 11:14:32 +0000

Below is the latest science news updated in real-time by RSS news feeds.

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Capital News 9
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Video: Michio Kaku Physics of the Impossible (Riz Khan Aljazeera Youtube)

Vinny — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:36:51 +0000

Time travel, death stars and invisibility cloaks - writer and noted scientist, Michio Kaku, believes they could all be possible in the not to distant future.

To the skeptics he points out that aeroplanes, lasers, televisions and atomic bombs were all considered impossible by scientists in the past.

On Wednesday’s Riz Khan we speak with noted scientist Michio Kaku author of Physics of the Impossible.

The book explores the technologies and devices of science fiction that are deemed impossible today but that might become commonplace in the future. Source: AlJazeera Youtube.

Photo: Mars Phoenix NASA Image

Vinny — Wed, 28 May 2008 20:40:21 +0000

mars, originally uploaded by vinny12.

This raw, or unprocessed, image was taken by Phoenix on its second sol, or Mars day, May 27, 2008.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Calech/University of Arizona

NASA French Satellite (OSTM/Jason 2) to Track Trends in Sea Level, Climate Change

Vinny — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:57:36 +0000

Below is the news release from JPL/NASA:

Joint NASA-French Satellite to Track Trends in Sea Level, Climate

PASADENA, Calif. – A satellite that will help scientists better monitor and understand rises in global sea level, study the world’s ocean circulation and its links to Earth’s climate, and improve weather and climate forecasts is undergoing final preparations for a June 15 launch from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason 2 is a partnership of NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the French Space Agency Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). The mission will extend into the next decade the continuous record of sea-surface height measurements started in 1992 by the NASA-French Space Agency’s TOPEX/Poseidon mission and extended by the NASA-French Space Agency Jason 1 mission in 2001.

The satellite will continue monitoring trends in sea-level rise, one of the most important consequences and indicators of global climate change. Measurements from TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason 1 have shown that mean sea level has risen by about three millimeters (0.12 inches) a year since 1993, twice the rate estimated from tide gauges in the past century. But 15 years of data are not sufficient to determine long-term trends.

“OSTM/Jason 2 will help create the first multi-decadal global record for understanding the vital roles of the ocean in climate change,” said OSTM/Jason 2 project scientist Lee-Lueng Fu of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Data from the new mission will allow us to continue monitoring global sea-level change, a field of study where current predictive models have a large degree of uncertainty.”

Developed and proven through the joint efforts of NASA and the French Space Agency, high-precision ocean altimetry measures the height of the sea surface relative to Earth’s center to within about 3.3 centimeters (1.3 inches). These measurements, also known as ocean surface topography, provide information on the speed and direction of ocean currents. Because sea surface height is strongly influenced by the amount of heat in the ocean, it also is an indicator of ocean heat storage in most places. Combining ocean current and heat storage data is key to understanding global climate variations.

OSTM/Jason 2 marks the transition of high-precision altimetry data collection to the world’s weather and climate forecasting agencies. Scientists soon will be able to forecast how ocean circulation will change from one season to the next and how that circulation is linked to climate change and weather patterns.

“What began as an investment by NASA and CNES in research tools for studying the ocean has matured into a proven technique that will now be routinely used by the world’s weather and climate agencies to make better forecasts,” said Michael Freilich, director of the Earth Science Division in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “People in coastal areas will benefit from improved near-real-time data on ocean conditions, while people everywhere will benefit from better seasonal predictions resulting from the increased understanding of Earth system processes enabled by these measurements.”

OSTM/Jason 2 will ride to space aboard a NASA-provided United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket, entering orbit about 10 to 15 kilometers (six to nine miles) below the 1,336-kilometer-high (830-mile-high) orbit of Jason 1. OSTM/Jason 2 will use its thrusters to raise itself into the same orbital altitude as Jason 1 and move in close behind its predecessor.

The two spacecraft will fly in formation, making nearly simultaneous measurements. For six to nine months after launch, scientists will verify the instruments are calibrated precisely. OSTM/Jason 2 then will continue Jason 1’s former flight path, and Jason 1 will move into a parallel ground track midway between two of the OSTM/Jason 2 ground tracks. This tandem mission will double the amount of data collected, further improving tide models in coastal and shallow seas and helping researchers better understand ocean currents and eddies. OSTM/Jason 2’s mission is designed to last at least three years.

The OSTM/Jason 2 spacecraft, provided by the French Space Agency, carries five primary instruments similar to those on Jason 1. Its main instrument is the Poseidon 3 altimeter, also provided by the French Space Agency. NASA’s Advanced Microwave Radiometer measures atmospheric water vapor, which can distort the altimeter measurements. Three location systems combine to precisely measure the satellite’s position in orbit: NASA’s Laser Retroreflector Array and Global Positioning System Payload, and the French Space Agency’s Doppler Orbitography and Radio-positioning Integrated by Satellite instrument. Instrument improvements since Jason 1 will allow scientists to monitor ocean coastal regions with increased accuracy, nearly 50 percent closer than in the past. Three experimental instruments round out the payload: the French Space Agency’s Environment Characterization and Modelisation-2 and Time Transfer by Laser Link, and Japan’s Light Particle Telescope.

JPL manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. After on-orbit spacecraft commissioning, CNES will hand over mission operations and control to NOAA. NOAA and EUMETSAT will generate, archive and distribute data products.

For more on OSTM/Jason 2 on the Web, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ostm . Source: JPL/NASA