Nov 26 2012

From The Space Library

RELEASE: 12-406 NASA, ROSCOSMOS ASSIGN VETERAN CREW TO YEARLONG SPACE STATION MISSION

WASHINGTON -- NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), and their international partners have selected two veteran spacefarers for a one-year mission aboard the International Space Station in 2015. This mission will include collecting scientific data important to future human exploration of our solar system. NASA has selected Scott Kelly and Roscosmos has chosen Mikhail Kornienko. Kelly and Kornienko will launch aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in spring 2015 and will land in Kazakhstan in spring 2016. Kelly and Kornienko already have a connection; Kelly was a backup crew member for the station's Expedition 23/24 crews, where Kornienko served as a flight engineer. The goal of their yearlong expedition aboard the orbiting laboratory is to understand better how the human body reacts and adapts to the harsh environment of space. Data from the 12-month expedition will help inform current assessments of crew performance and health and will determine better and validate countermeasures to reduce the risks associated with future exploration as NASA plans for missions around the moon, an asteroid and ultimately Mars. "Congratulations to Scott and Mikhail on their selection for this important mission," said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Human Exploration and Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Their skills and previous experience aboard the space station align with the mission's requirements. The one-year increment will expand the bounds of how we live and work in space and will increase our knowledge regarding the effects of microgravity on humans as we prepare for future missions beyond low-Earth orbit." "Selection of the candidate for the one year mission was thorough and difficult due to the number of suitable candidates from the Cosmonaut corps," said head of Russian Federal Space Agency, Vladimir Popovkin. "We have chosen the most responsible, skilled and enthusiastic crew members to expand space exploration, and we have full confidence in them." Kelly, a retired captain in the U.S. Navy, is from West Orange, N.J. He has degrees from the State University of New York Maritime College and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He served as a pilot on space shuttle mission STS-103 in 1999, commander on STS-118 in 2007, flight engineer on the International Space Station Expedition 25 in 2010 and commander of Expedition 26 in 2011. Kelly has logged more than 180 days in space. Kornienko is from the Syzran, Kuibyshev region of Russia. He is a former paratrooper officer and graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute as a specialist in airborne systems. He has worked in the space industry since 1986 when he worked at Rocket and Space Corporation-Energia as a spacewalk handbook specialist. He was selected as an Energia test cosmonaut candidate in 1998 and trained as an International Space Station Expedition 8 backup crew member. Kornienko served as a flight engineer on the station's Expedition 23/24 crews in 2010 and has logged more than 176 days in space. During the 12 years of permanent human presence aboard the International Space Station, scientists and researchers have gained valuable, and often surprising, data on the effects of microgravity on bone density, muscle mass, strength, vision and other aspects of human physiology. This yearlong stay will allow for greater analysis of these effects and trends. Kelly and Kornienko will begin a two-year training program in the United States, Russia and other partner nations starting early next year.

RELEASE: 12-407 NASA SEEKS PUBLIC'S INPUT ON IMPROVING DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS

WASHINGTON -- As its digital-communications team prepares for the next redesign of NASA.gov, NASA is asking the public for thoughts on what the agency should be doing on its website. NASA has set up a forum on Ideascale to allow users to submit, comment on and vote on ideas. Opened Nov. 19, the forum already has received 228 ideas from 970 users, who also have posted 269 comments and cast nearly 7,000 up-or-down votes. "The digital universe has changed significantly since we overhauled www.NASA.gov in 2007," said David Weaver, NASA's associate administrator for the Office of Communications. "Our focus now is to better integrate our web and social media efforts, while continuing to improve the site's overall look and feel and navigation capabilities. We welcome the public's input on how best to do this." NASA is among a few government agencies making the most effective use of the Internet and social media to communicate directly with the public. The landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars in August was the biggest event in the history of the NASA website. There were more than 15 million visits to the site during the event, and the peak of 1.2 million simultaneous webcast streams for the landing was more than double the previous record. On social media, NASA has 1.3 million Facebook likes, 3.1 million Twitter followers and more than 280,000 people in its circle on Google+. NASA's challenge now is to ensure its social media audience knows it can find more information on the website, and make the web audience aware there is a broader conversation going on via social media. Any new design features also need to recognize the public's adoption of smart phones to access online content. Visits to the site via mobile devices have increased tenfold from 2011 to 2012 and now account for 10 percent of all site visits.

MEDIA ADVISORY: M12-219 NASA HOSTS NOV. 29 NEWS CONFERENCE ABOUT MERCURY POLAR REGIONS

WASHINGTON -- NASA will host a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Nov, 29, to reveal new observations from the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury. The briefing will be held in the NASA Headquarters auditorium, located at 300 E St. SW in Washington. Science Journal has embargoed details until 2 p.m. on Nov. 29. The news conference will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website. NASA's Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging, or MESSENGER spacecraft has been studying Mercury in unprecedented detail since its historic arrival there in March 2011. The news conference participants are: - Jim Green, director, Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters, Washington - Sean Solomon, MESSENGER Principal Investigator, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, Palisades, N.Y. - David Lawrence, MESSENGER Participating Scientist, The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md. - Gregory Neumann, Mercury Laser Altimeter Instrument Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. - David Paige, MESSENGER Participating Scientist, University of California, Los Angeles