May 6 2010
From The Space Library
RELEASE: 10-199
U2 AND NASA CREATE VIDEO TO CELEBRATE COLLABORATION
WASHINGTON -- NASA and U2 released a commemorative video highlighting a year's worth of collaboration in space and on the Irish rock band's 360 Degree tour. U2 approached NASA in 2009 with an idea to include a dialogue between the band and the crew of the International Space Station during U2's world tour. The astronauts of Expedition 20, the crew then living aboard the space station, agreed to participate and spoke with U2 several times before recording a video segment the band incorporated into its concerts. The space station crew members were Michael Barratt of NASA, Frank De Winne of the European Space Agency, Bob Thirsk of the Canadian Space Agency, Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and Gennady Padalka and Roman Romanenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency. "Working with U2 is atypical for NASA, said Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for Space Operations. By combining their world tour with the space station's out-of-this-world mission, more people -- and different people than our normal target audiences -- learned about the International Space Station and the important work we are doing in orbit. Speaking onstage in Houston last year, Bono said, These are the very best people in the world -- dedicated to figuring how our little planet exists in this cosmos we call home. De Winne, and Romanenko attended U2's performance in Moscow on Wednesday and met with the band before the show. U2.com created the video and presented it to NASA to document the collaboration between the band and the space agency. To view the video, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciHVOGCHpNE or http://www.u2.com
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RELEASE: 10-281
NASA HOSTS TWEETUP DURING UPCOMING SPACE SHUTTLE MISSION
HOUSTON -- NASA will give 50 Twitter followers the opportunity to go inside the heart of a space shuttle mission during a Tweetup Tuesday, Nov. 9, at the agency's Johnson Space Center. Space shuttle Discovery is scheduled to launch on an 11-day mission to the International Space Station on Nov. 1 at 4:40 p.m. EDT. Tweetup participants will tour the center; view mission control and astronauts' training facilities; and speak with managers, flight directors, trainers and astronauts. The participants also will meet the team behind the tweets on @NASA and @NASA_Johnson. "The Tweetup attendees will get to visit the home of mission control during one of the last two scheduled shuttle flights, said Stephanie Schierholz, social media manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "In addition, they will get to share their experience of the excitement of human spaceflight with their followers around the world. Registration opens at 10 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, Oct. 26, and closes at 10 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 28. NASA will select participants randomly from those who register online.
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RELEASE: 10-025
NEWBORN BLACK HOLES MAY ADD POWER TO MANY EXPLODING STARS
WASHINGTON -- Astronomers studying two exploding stars, or supernovae, have found evidence the blasts received an extra boost from newborn black holes. The supernovae were found to emit jets of particles traveling at more than half the speed of light. Previously, the only catastrophic events known to produce such high-speed jets were gamma-ray bursts, the universe's most luminous explosions. Supernovae and the most common type of gamma-ray bursts occur when massive stars run out of nuclear fuel and collapse. A neutron star or black hole forms at the star's core, triggering a massive explosion that destroys the rest of the star. "The explosion dynamics in typical supernovae limit the speed of the expanding matter to about three percent the speed of light, explained Chryssa Kouveliotou, an astrophysicst at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., co-author of one of the new studies. Yet, in these new objects, we're tracking gas moving some 20 times faster than this. The new results, published in this week's edition of the journal Nature, used observations from several space and ground-based observatories, including NASA's SWIFT satellite. The astronomers discovered the ultrafast debris by studying two supernovae at radio wavelengths using numerous facilities, including the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array in Socorro, N.M., and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. One team used the real-time operating mode of the European Very Long Baseline Interferometry Network, an international collaboration of radio telescopes, to rapidly analyze data. "In every respect, these objects look like gamma-ray bursts -- except that they produced no gamma rays, said Alicia Soderberg at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Soderberg led a team that studied SN 2009bb, a supernova discovered in March 2009. It exploded in the spiral galaxy NGC 3278, located about 130 million light-years away. The other object is SN 2007gr, which was first detected in August 2007 in the spiral galaxy NGC 1058, some 35 million light-years away. The study team, which included Kouveliotou and Alexander van der Horst, a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow in Huntsville, was led by Zsolt Paragi at the Netherlands-based Joint Institute for Very Long Baseline Interferometry in Europe. The researchers searched for gamma-ray signals associated with the supernovae using archived records in the Gamma-Ray Burst Coordination Network located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The project distributes and archives observations of gamma-ray bursts by NASA's SWIFT spacecraft, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and many others. However, no bursts coincided with the supernovae. Unlike typical core-collapse supernovae, the stars that produce gamma-ray bursts possess what astronomers call a central engine -- likely a nascent black hole -- that drives particle jets clocked at more than 99 percent the speed of light. By contrast, the fastest outflows detected from SN 2009bb reached 85 percent of the speed of light and SN 2007gr reached more than 60 percent of light speed. "These observations are the first to show some supernovae are powered by a central engine, Soderberg said. These new radio techniques now give us a way to find explosions that resemble gamma-ray bursts without relying on detections from gamma-ray satellites. Perhaps as few as one out of every 10,000 supernovae produce gamma rays that we detect as a gamma-ray burst. In some cases, the star's jets may not be angled in a way to produce a detectable burst. In others, the energy of the jets may not be enough to allow them to overcome the overlying bulk of the star. "We've now found evidence for the unsung crowd of supernovae -- those with relatively dim and mildly relativistic jets that only can be detected nearby, Kouveliotou said. These likely represent most of the population.
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