Sep 26 2000
From The Space Library
Administrator Daniel S. Goldin presented awards to three minority contractors at NASA's annual Minority Business and Advocates Awards Ceremony. RS Information Services (RSIS), based in McLean, Virginia, won Minority Contractor of the Year; Rigging and Welding Specialists Inc., a Native American-owned business, won Minority Subcontractor of the Year; and Pace and Waite Inc. won Women-Owned Business of the Year. In addition, NASA recognized advocates for innovative approaches to using minority- and women-owned businesses, awarding NASA's Exceptional Achievement Medal to Kenneth Martindale and Rodney J. Etchberger of Johnson Space Center and to Shantaram S. Pai of Glenn Research Center. Furthermore, NASA recognized five individuals for outstanding achievements and three NASA field centers for meeting or exceeding all socioeconomic business goals for FY 1999.
NASA named award-winning broadcast journalist Bob Jacobs as Chief of News and Information at NASA Headquarters. Before joining NASA, Jacobs had served for four years as Projects Manager for the Washington-based Broadcast Technology Division of the Associated Press, where he helped to develop and implement newsroom management technology. Clients had included the British Broadcasting Corporation, ESPN, National Public Radio, and CBS News. Jacobs had won an Emmy award and other regional honors for excellence in journalism.
Sally K. Ride, the first female astronaut from the United States to travel into space, resigned her position as President of Space.com to concentrate on her education career. She had worked with Space.com founder Lou Dobbs, former host of CNN's Moneyline, since the company's start-up in June 1999 and had been the company's president for the past year. Ride would continue her leave of absence from the University of California at San Diego where she is a physics professor throughout the remainder of the fall academic term.
NASA announced that a team of Lockheed Martin scientists using NASA's Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) spacecraft to observe coronal loops-coils of hot, electrified gas-believed they had located the source of the heating mechanism that makes the Sun's corona 300 times hotter than its visible surface. A thirty-year-old theory had assumed that the coronal loops heated evenly, but the TRACE observations had indicated that most of the heating occurs at the base of the loops, near the point from which they emerge and return to the solar surface. The team had observed 41 loops extending from 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) to more than 180,000 miles (290,000 kilometers) from the solar surface and had found that, although threads within shorter loops heat more evenly, longer threads cool noticeably as they attain height. The team had calculated the loops' energy levels and estimated that "heating typically occurs in the first 6,000 miles of a loop's length." Richard Fisher, head of the Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics at NASA's GSFC, remarked that understanding how the coronal loops function could shed light on coronal-mass ejections (CMEs). CMEs can disrupt or destroy satellite components orbiting Earth and prompt surges in electrical transmission lines, causing blackouts on Earth.
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