Sep 10 2015
From The Space Library
Release M15-139 NASA Invites Media to Explore Mars Science Fiction and Fact in Cinema
Media are invited to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Tuesday, Sept. 15 for a fresh perspective on the journey to Mars. Cast members from the soon-to-be-released 20th Century Fox movie “The Martian” will meet with NASA scientists and engineers to see the real technology and spacecraft being developed for future Mars exploration.
At 10:30 a.m. EDT, NASA Television will broadcast an employee technology roundtable with “The Martian” cast members Sebastian Stan, Mackenzie Davis, Johnson Center Director Ellen Ochoa and NASA scientists, engineers and astronauts.
NASA Television also will provide live coverage as the cast members visit the Mission Control Center from 3:30 to 3:45 p.m., and talk with astronauts living on the International Space Station. Participating media may follow along during briefings at the International Space Station training facility, planetary rovers and the Orion spacecraft, and visit the control center where flight controllers provide support for space station research and operations.
Also in the afternoon, Ochoa, NASA personnel and “The Martian” cast members will be available to answer in-person media questions about the movie and how the space station, Orion and technology development efforts in Houston are paving the way for human space exploration beyond low-Earth orbit. Media must be at Johnson to participate. The day will conclude with a full-length screening of “The Martian” at a nearby theater.
Release M15-137 NASA Astronauts, Events Mark Halfway Point of One-Year Space Station Mission
Tuesday, Sept. 15, is the midpoint for NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko of their one-year mission aboard the International Space Station. To mark the occasion, the National Press Club in Washington will host an event from 8:30 to 10 a.m. EDT on Monday, Sept. 14, to discuss the first ever one-year space mission.
Kelly will participate live from the space station. His identical twin, retired NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, and NASA astronaut Terry Virts, who returned in June from his mission aboard the space station, will participate in the conversation from the press club. The televised portion of the event will air on NASA Television and the agency's website from 9 to 10 a.m.
From midnight to 1 a.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 16, NASA partner Slooh will broadcast live views of the space station as it passes over a network of ground-based telescopes. The program, which also will air on NASA TV and the agency's website, will include participation by NASA astronaut Cady Coleman and other agency experts who will discuss the future of space exploration.
The average International Space Station expedition lasts four to six months. Research enabled by the one-year mission will help scientists better understand how the human body reacts and adapts to long-duration spaceflight. This knowledge is critical as NASA looks toward human missions deeper into the solar system, including to and from Mars, which could last 500 days or longer. It also carries potential benefits for humans on Earth, from helping patients recover after long periods of bed rest to improved monitoring for people whose bodies are unable to fight infections.
The International Space Station is a convergence of science, technology and human innovation that enables us to demonstrate new technologies and make research breakthroughs not possible on Earth. It has been continuously occupied since November 2000 and, since then, has been visited by more than 200 people and a variety of international and commercial spacecraft. The space station remains the springboard to NASA's next giant leap in exploration, including future missions to an asteroid and Mars.
New Pluto Images from NASA’s New Horizons: It’s Complicated
New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.
“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”
New Horizons began its yearlong download of new images and other data over the Labor Day weekend. Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 meters (440 yards) per pixel. They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.
“The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum.”
New images also show the most heavily cratered -- and thus oldest -- terrain yet seen by New Horizons on Pluto next to the youngest, most crater-free icy plains. There might even be a field of dark wind-blown dunes, among other possibilities.
“Seeing dunes on Pluto -- if that is what they are -- would be completely wild, because Pluto’s atmosphere today is so thin,” said William B. McKinnon, a GGI deputy lead from Washington University, St. Louis. “Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven’t figured out is at work. It’s a head-scratcher.”
Discoveries being made from the new imagery are not limited to Pluto’s surface. Better images of Pluto’s moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra will be released Friday at the raw images site for New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), revealing that each moon is unique and that big moon Charon’s geological past was a tortured one.
Images returned in the past days have also revealed that Pluto’s global atmospheric haze has many more layers than scientists realized, and that the haze actually creates a twilight effect that softly illuminates nightside terrain near sunset, making them visible to the cameras aboard New Horizons.
“This bonus twilight view is a wonderful gift that Pluto has handed to us,” said John Spencer, a GGI deputy lead from SwRI. “Now we can study geology in terrain that we never expected to see.”
The New Horizons spacecraft is now more than 3 billion miles (about 5 billion kilometers) from Earth, and more than 43 million miles (69 million kilometers) beyond Pluto. The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally.
New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science mission, payload operations, and encounter science planning.
