Oct 13 2015
From The Space Library
Bay Area Girls Produce Career Videos of NASA Women Scientists
San Francisco Bay Area high school and middle school girls trained as videographers at a two-week workshop and produced the “Women In Science” video series, where they highlighted research performed by women scientists at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California.
Sponsored by Ames, the University Affiliated Research Center (UARC), and the Girl Scouts of Northern California (GSNorCal), the “Be a STEM Videographer” workshop was held July 20 – 31, 2015, and hosted by Ames and the GSNorCal in Alameda. The workshop’s objective was to provide an opportunity for girls between eighth and twelfth grade to learn various video production roles on set and develop interview questions, storyboards, and shot lists.
The “Women in Science" series includes eight short vignettes featuring NASA scientists Wenoneh Vercoutere and Diana Gentry, and UARC researchers Linda Timucin, Elysse Grossi-Soyster, and Kamalika Das and Ames research areas: Data Analysis, Space Science, and Synthetic Biology. To view the videos, go to: GSNorCal's YouTube page
“These girls did an amazing job; they were so professional. One of the girls has gone on to produce training videos for the Space Cookies VEX Robotics Team,” said Wendy Holforty, the Girl Scouts liaison and education specialist at Ames.
The crash course began with a workshop on pre-production that introduced the basics of lighting an interview and how to use the RED Epic Dragon digital cinema camera - the same camera used on such Hollywood films as The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings, Gone Girl, Pacific Rim, and others. The RED Epic Dragon camera is also used on board the International Space Station. The girls even learned some math, when converting shutter speed to shutter angle and vice versa.
After the production workshop, the three teams of 5-6 girls took their new cinematic skills into the field where they spent a day interviewing their researchers. Once on set, they discovered the excitement of video production as they moved into a “lights, camera, action” mode, setting up cameras, microphones and lighting to frame the shots they wanted to tell their stories. When not in production, they visited the Ames robotics laboratory, where they participated in hands-on activities building and programming robots.
After the production phase, the girls moved into a post-production workshop where they learned the basics of using Apple's Final Cut Pro X video-editing software. They edited and cut together their films for three and a half days.
On the last day of the workshop, the girls premiered their videos to a NASA audience of researchers, administrators, family and friends, and were awarded NASA certificates of completion.
Special thanks goes to Brett Casadonte, director of Creative Services of The Casadonte Group LLC, Santa Clara, California, and Jennifer Diaz, program coordinator of the STEM and environment program for the GSNorCal, for pursuing the idea of a girls’ STEM video production workshop.
In addition, special recognition goes to Maylene Duenas, UARC chief officer of technical research and assistant director for university research and development management; Angela Wray, director of UARC; Jean Fahy, GSNorCal program director of funded projects and partnerships; and Wendy Holforty, who were instrumental in designing, organizing and managing the girls’ video workshop.
“The girls learned about the valuable contributions women researchers are making at NASA. They [also] saw what a career in science and technology research is all about, and that these fields of research are very much open to women,” said Casadonte.
Release 15-208 Cassini Begins Series of Flybys with Close-up of Saturn Moon Enceladus
NASA's Cassini spacecraft will wrap up its time in the region of Saturn's large, icy moons with a series of three close encounters with Enceladus starting Wednesday, Oct. 14. Images are expected to begin arriving one to two days after the flyby, which will provide the first opportunity for a close-up look at the north polar region of Enceladus.
Wednesday’s flyby is considered a moderately close approach for Cassini, which will pass at an altitude of 1,142 miles (1,839 kilometers) above the moon's surface. Closest approach to Enceladus will occur at 6:41 a.m. EDT (3:41 a.m. PDT). The spacecraft’s final two approaches will take place in late October and mid-December.
During Cassini’s early-mission encounters with the moon, the northern terrain of Enceladus was masked by wintry darkness. Now that the summer sun is shining on the high northern latitudes, scientists will be looking for signs of ancient geological activity similar to the geyser-spouting, tiger-stripe fractures in the moon's south polar region. Features observed during the flyby could help them understand whether the north also was geologically active at some time in the past.
"We've been following a trail of clues on Enceladus for 10 years now," said Bonnie Buratti, a Cassini science team member and icy moons expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "The amount of activity on and beneath this moon's surface has been a huge surprise to us. We're still trying to figure out what its history has been, and how it came to be this way."
Since Cassini's 2005 discovery of continually-erupting fountains of icy material on Enceladus, the Saturn moon has become one of the most promising places in the solar system to search for present-day habitable environments. Mission scientists announced evidence in March that hydrothermal activity may be occurring on the seafloor of the moon's underground ocean. In September they broke news that its ocean -- previously thought to be only a regional sea -- was, in fact, global.
"The global nature of Enceladus' ocean and the inference that hydrothermal systems might exist at the ocean's base strengthen the case that this small moon of Saturn may have environments similar to those at the bottom of our own ocean," said Jonathan Lunine, an interdisciplinary scientist on the Cassini mission at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "It is therefore very tempting to imagine that life could exist in such a habitable realm, a billion miles from our home."
The Oct. 14 encounter will serve as a prelude to the main event, a flyby of Enceladus on Wednesday, Oct. 28, during which Cassini will come dizzyingly close to the icy moon, passing a mere 30 miles (49 kilometers) above the moon's south polar region. During this encounter, Cassini will make its deepest-ever dive through the moon's plume of icy spray, collecting images and valuable data about what's going on beneath the frozen surface. Cassini scientists are hopeful data from that flyby will provide evidence of how much hydrothermal activity is occurring in the moon's ocean, and how the amount of activity impacts the habitability of Enceladus’ ocean.
Cassini's final close flyby on Dec. 19 will examine how much heat is coming from the moon's interior from an altitude of 3,106 miles (4,999 kilometers).
Optical Communications and Sensor Demonstration (OCSD) Update
The Optical Communications and Sensor Demonstration (OCSD) satellite that launched Oct. 8 currently is experiencing a problem with its attitude control system, according to The Aerospace Corporation. Aerospace built the CubeSat and is operating it in orbit. The OCSD satellite is communicating by radio with the ground, but the attitude control system must function properly in order to demonstrate the optical communications system. NASA is discussing the issue with Aerospace as they investigate the problem.
Release 15-207 NASA Appoints Mark Kirasich to Serve as Orion Program Manager
NASA has appointed Mark Kirasich to be manager of the agency’s Orion Program. The Orion spacecraft is being developed to send astronauts to deep space destinations, such as an asteroid and ultimately to Mars, launching on the agency’s Space Launch System rocket.
Kirasich has been deputy Orion Program manager since 2006. He now will be responsible for oversight of design, development and testing of the Orion spacecraft, as well as spacecraft manufacturing already under way at locations across the country and in Europe for the ESA (European Space Agency).
“Mark brings a wealth of knowledge about NASA’s human spaceflight efforts to the Orion Program manager position,” said William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate in Washington. “By overseeing the team and the work needed to send Orion to deep space, and working directly with our international partner ESA to provide the spacecraft’s service module, his leadership will be essential to enabling humans to pioneer farther into the solar system and continue our journey to Mars.”
Kirasich began his NASA career in 1983 at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston as a member of the space shuttle flight operations team, quickly advancing to the position of lead space shuttle payload officer in mission control. In 1996, he was selected as a flight director in charge of planning and executing NASA human spaceflight missions, serving in that capacity for multiple space shuttle missions and International Space Station expeditions.
“I have seen first-hand Mark’s impact on the Orion Program, and previously in key operations leadership roles at Johnson, and I look forward to having him help us extend the success of Orion’s 2014 flight test forward,” said Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa.
Kirasich succeeds Mark Geyer, who became Johnson’s deputy director in August.
A native of Chicago, Kirasich received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1982 from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, and a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1983 from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. He is the recipient of numerous awards including NASA’s Outstanding Leadership Medal and Space Flight Awareness Award, and a Johnson Space Center Director’s Commendation.
Across the country, elements of the Orion spacecraft are coming together for the first integrated mission with the Space Launch System. At NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, welding began in September on the next Orion destined for space. Next month, NASA will see the arrival of a test version of Orion’s service module, provided by ESA, for testing and analysis at the agency’s Plum Brook Station, near Sandusky, Ohio.
Release 15-036 (Goddard) Hubble’s Planetary Portrait Captures New Changes in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot
Scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have produced new maps of Jupiter – the first in a series of annual portraits of the solar system’s outer planets.
Collecting these yearly images – essentially the planetary version of annual school picture days for children – will help current and future scientists see how these giant worlds change over time. The observations are designed to capture a broad range of features, including winds, clouds, storms and atmospheric chemistry.
Already, the Jupiter images have revealed a rare wave just north of the planet’s equator and a unique filamentary feature in the core of the Great Red Spot not seen previously.
“Every time we look at Jupiter, we get tantalizing hints that something really exciting is going on,” said Amy Simon, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This time is no exception.”
Simon and her colleagues produced two global maps of Jupiter from observations made using Hubble’s high-performance Wide Field Camera 3. The two maps represent nearly back-to-back rotations of the planet, making it possible to determine the speeds of Jupiter’s winds. The findings are described in an Astrophysical Journal paper, available online.
The new images confirm that the Great Red Spot continues to shrink and become more circular, as it has been doing for years. The long axis of this characteristic storm is about 150 miles (240 kilometers) shorter now than it was in 2014. Recently, the storm had been shrinking at a faster-than-usual rate, but the latest change is consistent with the long-term trend.
The Great Red Spot remains more orange than red these days, and its core, which typically has more intense color, is less distinct than it used to be. An unusual wispy filament is seen, spanning almost the entire width of the vortex. This filamentary streamer rotates and twists throughout the 10-hour span of the Great Red Spot image sequence, getting distorted by winds blowing at 330 miles per hour (150 meters per second) or even greater speeds.
In Jupiter’s North Equatorial Belt, the researchers found an elusive wave that had been spotted on the planet only once before, decades earlier, by Voyager 2. In those images, the wave is barely visible, and nothing like it was seen again, until the current wave was found traveling at about 16 degrees north latitude, in a region dotted with cyclones and anticyclones. Similar waves – called baroclinic waves – sometimes appear in Earth’s atmosphere where cyclones are forming.
“Until now, we thought the wave seen by Voyager 2 might have been a fluke,” said co-author Glenn Orton of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “As it turns out, it’s just rare!”
The wave may originate in a clear layer beneath the clouds, only becoming visible when it propagates up into the cloud deck, according to the researchers. That idea is supported by the spacing between the wave crests.
In addition to Jupiter, the researchers have observed Neptune and Uranus, and maps of those planets also will be placed in the public archive. Saturn will be added to the series later. Hubble will dedicate time each year to this special set of observations, called the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program.
“The long-term value of the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program is really exciting,” said co-author Michael H. Wong of the University of California, Berkeley. “The collection of maps that we will build up over time will not only help scientists understand the atmospheres of our giant planets, but also the atmospheres of planets being discovered around other stars, and Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, too.”
