Oct 17 2012
From The Space Library
RELEASE: 12-365 COMMUNITY COLLEGE SCHOLARS SELECTED TO DESIGN ROVERS AT NASA'S MARSHALL SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
WASHINGTON -- Forty community college students from across the United States have been selected to travel to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., to participate in the 2012 National Community College Aerospace Scholars (CCAS) project. The three-day event Oct. 23-25 will feature a rover-building experience. The students, representing 18 states, will form fictional companies pursuing Mars exploration. Each team will develop, design, and build a prototype rover, then use their prototypes to navigate a course, collect rocks and water, and return to a home base. The event includes a tour of Marshall and briefings from agency scientists and engineers. "The CCAS program allows students to take what they have learned in the classroom and augment it with realistic, hands-on experience," said Leland Melvin, associate administrator for education at NASA Headquarters. "They will tackle some of the same challenges faced by NASA scientists and engineers every day. By the end of their experience, they will have developed valuable skills for future high-tech careers." The program is based on the Texas Aerospace Scholars project, originally created in partnership with NASA and the Texas educational community. NASA Aerospace Scholars programs are designed to encourage students to consider careers in science and engineering and eventually join the nation's technical workforce. Participants in the national project were selected based on completion of interactive web-based assignments throughout the school year.
RELEASE: 12-366 NASA STATEMENT ON ALPHA CENTAURI PLANET DISCOVERY
WASHINGTON -- The following is a statement about the European Southern Observatory's latest exoplanet discovery from NASA's Science Mission Directorate Associate Administrator, Dr. John Grunsfeld. "We congratulate the European Southern Observatory team for making this exciting new exoplanet discovery. For astronomers, the search for exoplanets helps us understand our place in the universe and determine whether Earth is unique in supporting life or if it is just one member of a large community of habitable worlds. NASA has several current and future missions that will continue in this search. "An example is NASA's Kepler mission. It was specifically designed to survey a specific region of our Milky Way galaxy to detect Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone -- that region around a star where it is theoretically possible for a planet to maintain liquid water on its surface -- and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets. Kepler works very differently from HARPS. Rather than detecting the wobble in the host star, Kepler detects the slight dimming of a star when a planet passes in front of it. "NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have contributed to the study of exoplanets. Using their photometric and spectroscopic sensitivity, these space telescopes have made the first steps in characterizing the atmospheres of planets around other stars. They can only do this when the exoplanets pass serendipitously in front of its star, allowing the space telescope to study light that has filtered through the planet's atmosphere. "NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will provide a unique facility that will serve through the next decade as the mainstay for characterization of transiting exoplanets. The main transit studies JWST will be able to undertake are: discovery of unseen planets, determining exoplanet properties like mass, radius, and physical structure, and characterizing exoplanet atmospheres to determine things like their temperature and weather. If there are other planets in the Alpha Centauri system farther from the star, JWST may be able to detect them as well through imaging. "NASA is also studying two medium-class exoplanet missions in our Explorer program, and in the spring of 2013 will select one of them to enter development for flight later in the decade."
MEDIA ADVISORY: M12-204 COVERAGE SET FOR NEXT SOYUZ CREW LAUNCH TO SPACE STATION
HOUSTON -- NASA Television will provide live coverage of next week's launch and docking of the next trio of crew members who will fly to the International Space Station. Expedition 33/34 NASA Flight Engineer Kevin Ford, Soyuz Commander Oleg Novitskiy and Flight Engineer Evgeny Tarelkin are scheduled to launch in their Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft at 5:51 a.m. CDT (4:51 p.m. Baikonur time) Tuesday, Oct. 23, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. NASA TV launch coverage will begin at 4:30 a.m., and include video of activities leading to the crew boarding its spacecraft. Two days later, at 7:35 a.m., Thursday, Oct. 25, the trio will dock the Soyuz to the space-facing Poisk module of the orbiting laboratory. NASA TV docking coverage begins at 7 a.m. Approximately three hours later, hatches between the Soyuz and station will open and Ford, Novitskiy and Tarelkin will be greeted by Expedition 33 Commander Sunita Williams of NASA and Flight Engineers Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Russia's Yuri Malenchenko. Hatch opening coverage begins at 9:45 a.m. Ford, Novitskiy and Tarelkin will remain aboard the station until March 2013. Williams, Malenchenko and Hoshide, who arrived at the complex in July, will return to Earth Nov. 19.
