Sep 30 2010
From The Space Library
MEDIA ADVISORY: M10-169
NASA SCHEDULES NEWS CONFERENCE ABOUT NEXT SPACE SHUTTLE LAUNCH
HOUSTON -- NASA managers will hold a news conference at 11 a.m. CST today at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston to discuss the next space shuttle mission, STS-133, and the progress of repairs since Discovery's original launch delay Nov. 5. The news conference follows Thursday's Space Shuttle Program Requirements Control Board meeting. Program officials reviewed repairs and engineering evaluations associated with cracks on two 21-foot-long, U-shaped aluminum brackets called stringers on the shuttle's external tank. The briefing participants are: -- Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations -- John Shannon, Space Shuttle Program manager -- Mike Suffredini, International Space Station Program manager The news conference will air live on NASA Television and the agency's website. Reporters may ask questions from participating NASA centers or by calling into a phone bridge. To use the phone bridge, reporters must have valid media credentials issued by a NASA center or issued specifically for the STS-133 mission. Journalists planning to use the phone bridge must contact the Johnson newsroom at 281-483-5111 no later than 10:45 a.m. Newsroom personnel will verify credentials and transfer reporters to the phone bridge. Capacity is limited and available on a first-come, first-serve basis. For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv For STS-133 crew and mission information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle
-end-
RELEASE: 10-160
NASA TO FLY INTO HURRICANE RESEARCH THIS SUMMER
WASHINGTON -- Three NASA aircraft will begin flights to study tropical cyclones on Aug. 15 during the agency's first major U.S.-based hurricane field campaign since 2001. The Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes mission, or GRIP, will study the creation and rapid intensification of hurricanes. One of the major challenges in tropical cyclone forecasting is knowing when a tropical cyclone is going to form. Scientists will use the data from this six-week field mission to better understand how tropical storms form and develop into major hurricanes. Mission scientists will also be looking at how storms strengthen, weaken and die. "This is really going to be a game-changing hurricane experiment, said Ramesh Kakar, GRIP program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. For the first time, scientists will be able to study these storms and the conditions that produce them for up to 20 hours straight. GRIP will provide a sustained, continuous look at hurricane behavior at critical times during their formation and evolution. GRIP is being led by Kakar and three project scientists: Scott Braun and Gerry Heymsfield of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Edward Zipser of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Three NASA satellites will play a key role in supplying data about tropical cyclones during the field mission. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, or TRMM, managed by both NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, will provide rainfall estimates and help pinpoint the locations of hot towers or powerhouse thunderstorms in tropical cyclones. The CloudSat spacecraft will provide cloud profiles of storms, which include altitude, temperatures and rainfall intensity. Several instruments onboard NASA's Aqua satellite will provide infrared, visible and microwave data that reveal such factors as temperature, air pressure, precipitation, cloud ice content, convection and sea surface temperatures. The three NASA aircraft taking part in the mission are a DC-8, WB-57 and a remotely piloted Global Hawk. The DC-8 will fly out of the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida. The WB-57 will be based at the NASA Johnson Space Center's Ellington Field in Houston. The Global Hawk will be piloted and based from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, in Palmdale, Calif., while flying for up to 20 hours in the vicinity of hurricanes in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. The aircraft will carry a total of 15 instruments, ranging from an advanced microwave sounder to dropsondes that take measurements as they fall through the atmosphere to the ocean surface. In order to determine how a tropical cyclone will behave, the instruments will analyze many factors including: cloud droplet and aerosol concentrations, air temperature, wind speed and direction in storms and on the ocean's surface, air pressure, humidity, lightning, aerosols and water vapor. The data also will validate the observations from space. "It was a lot of hard work to assemble the science team and the payload for the three aircraft for GRIP, Kakar said. But now that the start of the field experiment is almost here, we can hardly contain our excitement. Several NASA field centers are involved in the mission including Goddard, Johnson, Dryden, the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Centers provide scientists, instrument teams, project management or aircraft operations. GRIP mission planning is being coordinated with two separate hurricane airborne research campaigns that will be in the field at the same time. The National Science Foundation is sponsoring the PRE-Depression Investigation of Cloud-systems in the Tropics mission. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is conducting the Intensity Forecast Experiment 2010. These flights will be based in St. Croix in the Virgin Islands and Tampa, Fla.
-end-
RELEASE: 10-303
NASA ADMINISTRATOR BOLDEN'S STATEMENT ON TODAY'S INTERNATIONAL SPACE SUMMIT
WASHINGTON -- NASA Administrator Charles Bolden issued the following statement after participating in today's Head of Space Agencies Summit in Washington: "This year, the International Academy of Astronautics is marking the 50th anniversary of its founding in Stockholm, Sweden. I congratulate the academy for its dedication during the past five decades in bringing the world's experts together to discuss and promote space research and exploration. I also want to congratulate the academy on supporting today's Heads of Space Agencies Summit. "More than two dozen leaders attended this meeting to discuss issues almost all countries are grappling with, such as changing national priorities and stagnant budgets. NASA has been actively working with many of the space agencies attending the summit to further our common understanding of exploration and establish global partnerships. "NASA recognizes that exploration beyond low-Earth orbit will involve the coordination, cooperation and support of other countries. This theme of international coordination has been the purpose of developing a global exploration strategy, which many of the countries represented at the summit actively support. It is my hope that more countries will become supportive of this cooperative dialogue and adopt a global exploration roadmap. With a roadmap in place, the participating agencies and their countries will benefit enormously from a comprehensive, global approach to space exploration. "I can assure you that as we look to the future, international cooperation will continue to be a cornerstone of NASA's exploration activities.
-end-
CONTRACT RELEASE: C10-064
NASA AWARDS SHUTTLE AND SPACE STATION SPACESUIT CONTRACT
HOUSTON -- NASA has awarded a contract to Hamilton Sundstrand Space Systems International of Houston for spacesuit support used on the space shuttle and the International Space Station. The cost-plus-award-fee contract, known as the Extravehicular Space Operations Contract, has a maximum value of $728.9 million. Under the contract, Hamilton Sundstrand and its subcontractors perform engineering management for hardware systems used in spacewalks, supporting enhancements, ensuring flight and spacewalk readiness, providing safety and mission assurance, meeting flight milestones and achieving mission goals. This action exercises the base contract, valued at $315.5 million, for work performed Oct. 1, 2010, through Sept. 30, 2015, and a one-year option of $8.6 million specifically for shuttle mission support beginning Oct. 1, 2010. In all, there are two, one-year options for space shuttle extravehicular activity support Oct. 1, 2010, through Sept. 30, 2012. There are five, one-year options available for space station work Oct. 1, 2015, through Sept. 30, 2020. This action also includes an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity portion that is not to exceed $90 million and a $140,000 fixed-price, 30-day phase-in period.
-end-
RELEASE: 10-068
NASA CHOOSES STUDENT TEAMS TO TEST EXPERIMENTS ON BALLOONSAT
CLEVELAND -- NASA selected four high school teams as finalists in the Balloonsat High Altitude Flight competition. Their experiments will be the payload aboard a NASA weather balloon that will launch May 25-27. The balloon will be sent to the near space environment of the stratosphere, an altitude of approximately 100,000 feet. The competition is hosted by NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. The high school teams and the names of their experiments are: Charlottesville High School, Charlottesville, Va. -- The Effects of Near-Space Conditions on Escherichia Coli Bacteria Upper St. Clair High School, Upper St. Clair, Pa. -- The Effect of Near-Space Conditions on Microbial Life Forms Stansbury High School, Stansbury, Utah -- Thermal Moisture Penetration North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Durham, N.C. -- "Variations on Polyethylene Hard Disk Radiation Shields During flight days, the teams will release, track and recover their experiments. They also will present a report on their findings at Glenn's Balloonsat Symposium. One team's experiment will be judged the best, and Glenn representatives will present an award to them at their school next fall. These four finalists were selected from 10 teams of students in grades nine through 12 from around the country that submitted proposals. They each received funding for development of their experiment and travel expenses for four students and an advisor to attend flight days at Glenn. The Balloonsat High Altitude Flight program is one of many educational outreach programs to stimulate interest in science, technology, engineering and math disciplines critical to NASA's future missions. The competition is sponsored by the Educational Programs Office at Glenn; Teaching from Space, a NASA education office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston; and the Ohio Space Grant Consortium, Cleveland. For additional information about Balloonsat, visit: http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/balloonsat
-end-
RELEASE: 10-109
NASA SUCCESSFULLY TESTS ORION LAUNCH ABORT SYSTEM
WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M. -- NASA's Pad Abort 1 flight test, a launch of the abort system designed for the Orion crew vehicle, lifted off at 7 a.m. MDT Thursday at the U.S. Army's White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) near Las Cruces, N.M. The flight lasted about 135 seconds from launch until the crew module touchdown about a mile north of the launch pad. The flight was the first fully-integrated test of this launch abort system design. The information gathered from the test will help refine design and analysis for future launch abort systems, resulting in safer and more reliable crew escape capability during rocket launch emergencies. "Through hard work and incredible dedication over the past several years, the Orion Pad Abort 1 team has successfully tested the first U.S. designed abort system since Apollo, said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. This system is much more advanced in capability and technology than any abort system designed in the past. NASA strives to make human spaceflight as safe as possible, and what we learned here today will greatly contribute to that goal. The test involved three motors. An abort motor produced a momentary half-million pounds of thrust to propel the crew module away from the pad. It burned for approximately six seconds, with the highest impulse in the first 2.5 seconds. The crew module reached a speed of approximately 445 mph in the first three seconds, with a maximum velocity of 539 mph, in its upward trajectory to about 1.2 miles high. The attitude control motor fired simultaneously with the abort motor and steered the vehicle using eight thrusters producing up to 7,000 pounds of thrust. It provided adjustable thrust to keep the crew module on a controlled flight path and reorient the vehicle as the abort system burned out. The jettison motor, the only motor of the three that would be used in all nominal rocket launches, pulled the entire launch abort system away from the crew module and cleared the way for parachute deployment and landing. After explosive bolts fired and the jettison motor separated the system from the crew module, the recovery parachute system deployed. The parachutes guided the crew module to touchdown at 16.2 mph (24 feet per second), about one mile from the launch pad. The Orion Project has begun the process of recovering all of the test articles from the WSMR range and will be evaluating all of the data over the coming weeks. The Orion Project office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston led the launch abort system test team. System development is led by NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., in partnership with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Langley designed and produced the boilerplate crew module for the flight test. NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., prepared the crew module for integration and led the flight test vehicle integration at WSMR with Lockheed Martin Corp. of Denver, the prime contractor to NASA for Orion. The nearby NASA White Sands Test Facility provided design, construction and management for the launch and ground facilities at WSMR, as well as personnel on the integration and launch preparation team. Lockheed led the industry team development efforts for the launch abort system. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., provided design, development and support of the system; Alliant Techsystems, or ATK, of Magna, Utah, developed the abort and the attitude control motors; Aerojet of Sacramento, Calif., developed the jettison motor; and Honeywell of Morristown, N.J., provided the avionics for onboard control of abort sequencing and inertial navigation.
-end-
