Mar 29 2011

From The Space Library

MEDIA ADVISORY: M11-068 NASA OPENS VOTING FOR ORIGINAL SONGS TO AWAKEN NEXT SHUTTLE CREW

HOUSTON --NASA is inviting the public to vote for its favorite original song to wake up space shuttle Commander Mark Kelly and his five crewmates during their STS-134 mission to the International Space Station. Voting runs from Tuesday, March 29 through launch day, which currently is targeted for April 19. Songwriters and performers from around the world submitted 1,350 songs, including 693 from 47 states, 105 from Canada, and 552 from 61 other countries. The song contest began Aug. 20, 2010 and ended Jan. 31. The finalists were notified on Feb. 18. Below are the original song finalists (alphabetical by song title): "Boogie Woogie Shuttle," by Ryan McCullough (Savannah, Ga.) "Dreams You Give," by Brian Plunkett (Halfway, Mo.) "Endeavour, It's a Brand New Day," by Susan Rose Simonetti (Cocoa Beach, Fla.) "I Need My Space," by Stan Clardy (Statesville, N.C.) "I Want to Be an Astronaut," by Michael J. Kunes (Phoenix) "Just Another Day in Space," by Kurt Lanham (Jacksonville, Fla.) "Rocket Scientist," by Tray Eppes (Cullen, Va.) "Spacing Out," by Jeremy Parsons (Nashville, Tenn.) "Sunrise Number 1," by Jorge Otero (Ovideo, Spain) "The Countdown Blues (Hymn for Tim)," by Sharon Riddell (Nashville, Tenn.) The two songs with the most votes will be the first original songs chosen by the public to be played as wakeup music for a shuttle crew. The STS-134 Original Song Contest ran concurrently with the Top 40 Song Contest for shuttle Discovery's STS-133 mission. The Top 40 Song Contest ended earlier this month. The song contests join the ongoing "Face in Space" project offering the opportunity to send a picture to space via an electronic transfer. During Discovery's mission, more than 194,000 images flew in space. So far, almost 117,000 images have been submitted to fly aboard shuttle Endeavour's STS-134 flight. The 14-day mission will be the 36th flight to the space station and the 25th, and final, flight for Endeavour. Pilot Greg H. Johnson and mission specialists Mike Fincke, Drew Feustel, Greg Chamitoff and Roberto Vittori of the European Space Agency will join Kelly. They will deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle physics detector designed to search for various types of unusual matter by measuring cosmic rays. The crew also will deliver the Express Logistics Carrier-3, a platform that carries spare parts to sustain station operations once the shuttles are retired later this year.

RELEASE: 11-090 NASA SATELLITES DETECT EXTENSIVE DROUGHT IMPACT ON AMAZON FORESTS

WASHINGTON -- A new NASA-funded study has revealed widespread reductions in the greenness of Amazon forests caused by last year's record-breaking drought. "The greenness levels of Amazonian vegetation -- a measure of its health -- decreased dramatically over an area more than three and one-half times the size of Texas," said Liang Xu, the study's lead author from Boston University. "It did not recover to normal levels, even after the drought ended in late October 2010." The drought sensitivity of Amazon rainforests is a subject of intense study. Computer models predict a changing climate with warmer temperatures and altered rainfall patterns could cause moisture stress leading to rainforests being replaced by grasslands or woody savannas. This would release the carbon stored in rotting wood into the atmosphere, which could accelerate global warming. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned similar droughts could be more frequent in the Amazon region in the future. The comprehensive study was prepared by an international team of scientists using more than a decade's worth of satellite data from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). Analysis of these data produced detailed maps of vegetation greenness declines from the 2010 drought. The study has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. The authors first developed maps of drought-affected areas using thresholds of below-average rainfall as a guide. Next, they identified affected vegetation using two different greenness indexes as surrogates for green leaf area and physiological functioning. The maps show the 2010 drought reduced the greenness of approximately 965,000 square miles of vegetation in the Amazon -- more than four times the area affected by the last severe drought in 2005. "The MODIS vegetation greenness data suggest a more widespread, severe and long-lasting impact to Amazonian vegetation than what can be inferred based solely on rainfall data," said Arindam Samanta, a co-lead author from Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc. in Lexington, Mass. The severity of the 2010 drought also was seen in records of water levels in rivers across the Amazon basin, including the Rio Negro which represents rainfall levels over the entire western Amazon. Water levels started to fall in August 2010, reaching record low levels in late October. Water levels only began to rise with the arrival of rains later that winter. "Last year was the driest year on record based on 109 years of Rio Negro water level data at the Manaus harbor," said Marcos Costa, co-author from the Federal University in Vicosa, Brazil. "For comparison, the lowest level during the so-called once-in-a-century drought in 2005 was only eighth lowest." As anecdotal reports of a severe drought began to appear in the news media last summer, the authors started near-real time processing of massive amounts of satellite data. They used a new capability, the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), built for the NASA Advanced Supercomputer facility at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. NEX is a collaborative supercomputing environment that brings together data, models and computing resources. With NEX, the study's authors quickly obtained a large-scale view of the impact of the drought on the Amazon forests and were able to complete the analysis by January 2011. Similar reports about the impact of the 2005 drought were published about two years after the fact. "Timely monitoring of our planet's vegetation with satellites is critical, and with NEX it can be done efficiently to deliver near-real time information, as this study demonstrates," said study co-author Ramakrishna Nemani, a research scientist at Ames. An article about the NEX project appears in this week's issue of Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union.

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