Aug 24 2016
From The Space Library
MEDIA ADVISORY M16-101 NASA Opens Media Accreditation for NOAA’s GOES-R November Launch
Media accreditation now is open for the launch of NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R (GOES-R) weather and environmental satellite, currently planned for Nov. 4.
GOES-R will launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The two-hour launch window opens at 5:40 p.m. EDT.
Media prelaunch and launch activities will take place at Cape Canaveral and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, adjacent to Cape Canaveral. Credentialing deadlines are as follows:
International media without U.S. citizenship must apply by 4:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 30, for access to Cape Canaveral and Kennedy. International media without U.S. citizenship must apply by 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 19, for access only to Kennedy. U.S. media must apply by 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 25.
All media accreditation requests should be submitted online at: https://media.ksc.nasa.gov
International media are required to upload a scanned copy of their I (media) visa and passport or green card with their accreditation requests. Media must present two forms of unexpired, government identification to enter Kennedy. One form must include a photo, such as a passport or driver’s license.
Questions about accreditation may be addressed to Jennifer Horner at jennifer.p.horner@nasa.gov or 321-867-6598. For other questions, or additional information, contact Kennedy’s newsroom at 321-867-2468.
GOES-R is the first of four satellites to be launched for NOAA in a new and advanced series of spacecraft. Once in geostationary orbit, it will be known as GOES-16 and will provide images of weather patterns and severe storms across the continental U.S. as regularly as every five minutes, with smaller, more detailed images of areas where storm activity is present as frequently as every 30 seconds. These images can be used to aid in formulating regular forecasts, severe weather outlooks, and watches and warnings, assessing lightning conditions, and improving maritime and aviation forecasts. It also will assist in long-term forecasting, such as seasonal predictions and drought outlooks. In addition, the satellite constantly will monitor space weather conditions, such as solar flares, to provide advance notice of potential communication and navigation disruptions. The satellite also will assist researchers in understanding the interactions between land, oceans, the atmosphere and climate.
For more information about the GOES-R Program, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/goes
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides spacecraft project management, systems engineering, and safety and mission assurance for GOES-R. Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft for NASA, who will turn it over to NOAA for operational use after on-orbit checkout. Launch management is the responsibility of NASA’s Launch Services Program at Kennedy, with United Launch Alliance of Centennial, Colorado, providing the Atlas V launch service.
RELEASE 16-088 NASA Flies to Africa to Study Climate Effects of Smoke on Clouds
NASA scientists and two research aircraft are on their way to a unique natural laboratory off the Atlantic coast of southwest Africa to study a major unknown in future climate prediction.
The coast of Namibia is one of three places on Earth with persistent low-level clouds, and the only such location with a steady supply of tiny aerosol particles in the form of smoke from inland fires that mix with the clouds. NASA's Observations of Aerosols Above Clouds and their Interactions (ORACLES) mission will observe and measure how these particles interact with clouds and change their ability to warm or cool the planet.
"This is the perfect natural laboratory to study aerosol-cloud interactions, which are some of the largest uncertainties in the prediction of future climate," said Jens Redemann, ORACLES principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
Some aerosols, such as dust and sea salt, have a natural origin. But others, such as soot and smoke released by fires and industry, are the result of human activities. Once aerosols enter the atmosphere, they can cause either a warming or cooling effect.
"Human activities currently are estimated to be responsible for perhaps half of all the aerosol particles in the atmosphere," said Robert Wood, a cloud scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle and ORACLES deputy principal investigator. "Smoke particles both reflect sunlight back to space, thus cooling the Earth, and absorb sunlight, which has the opposite effect of warming the Earth. When aerosols encounter clouds, they also change the properties of the clouds they are ingested into."
Understanding which effect is dominant, and under what conditions, is essential for improving the regional and global computer models that predict what may occur with future climate change. Changes in the properties of the cloud layer caused by aerosols could also have an effect on regional coastal fisheries by altering the amount of sunlight reaching the ocean surface that drives currents and ocean upwelling.
The initially separate cloud and aerosol layers off the Namibian coast are relatively stable. As the cloud layers thicken away from shore like a wedge, it gradually mixes with the aerosol layer. The result is a range of steadily changing conditions that allow the ORACLES science team to probe several different types of cloud-aerosol interactions.
The ORACLES field campaign is based out of Walvis Bay in Namibia, where faculty and students from Namibian universities will be working alongside the ORACLES team. The project team has built new relationships with African colleagues, in particular, the Namibia University of Science and Technology in Windhoek. University personnel support logistics for ORACLES field work and will collaborate in data analysis and modeling. The Gobabeb Research and Training Centre in the Namib Desert, which previously has worked with NASA using the desert as an analog for the surface of other planets, is providing ground-based remote sensing of the atmosphere.
"Science is a great unifier," said Bernadette Squire Luna, ORACLES project manager at Ames. "We are building relationships with Namibian scientists that will outlast this project and will lead to yet more science and more interactions. We're connecting our countries in a very grassroots way."
NASA's P-3 aircraft, managed by the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Virginia, carries five remote sensing instruments and flies through the cloud and aerosol layers at up to 20,000 feet to gather direct measurements from more than a dozen cloud and aerosol probes attached to the wings and inlets on the windows. NASA's ER-2 aircraft, managed by the agency’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, will fly at 65,000 feet with instruments that make measurements similar to those acquired from satellites.
ORACLES flights will complement and validate current satellite observations of aerosols and clouds, and test instruments that may fly on future satellites, by making detailed observations that are impossible to make from space with current capabilities.
Unlike a satellite, which generally gets one pass per day over a certain location, both aircraft will be able to sample clouds and aerosols throughout the day over the entire study area to see how they evolve. Together, data from the two aircraft will provide a comprehensive picture of how aerosols behave in the presence of clouds – and how aerosols directly or indirectly change how clouds behave.
ORACLES is a collaborative research effort that involves more than a hundred scientists from five NASA centers, two national laboratories, 10 U.S. universities, and five African research institutions. It’s a multi-year NASA Earth Venture suborbital investigation to probe Earth system processes that are not completely understood. These flights from Namibia are the first of several planned field seasons for the mission. Earth Venture investigations are part of NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder program managed at the agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.
MEDIA ADVISORY M16-102 NASA Astronaut Shane Kimbrough Available for Interviews Before Space Station Mission
NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough, who is making final preparations for a September launch to the International Space Station, is available for live satellite interviews from 7 to 8 a.m. EDT Tuesday, Sept. 6. The interviews will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.
Kimbrough will participate in the interviews live from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. The interviews will be preceded at 6:30 a.m. by a video highlighting his mission training.
To participate, media should contact Thomas Gerczak at 281-792-7515 or thomas.j.gerczak@nasa.gov no later than 3 p.m. Friday, Sept. 2. Media participating in the live shots must tune to NASA Television’s NTV-3 channel. Satellite tuning information is available at: http://go.nasa.gov/1pOWUhR
Kimbrough and his crewmates, cosmonauts Andrey Borisenko and Sergey Ryzhikov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, will launch aboard a Soyuz spacecraft at 2:17 p.m. Sept. 23 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This will be the second flight of the upgraded Soyuz MS spacecraft, and the crew will spend two days testing the modified systems before docking to the station at 5:05 p.m. Sept. 25.
At the space station, they will join Expedition 49 members NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, Roscosmos cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Takuya Onishi. Together, the six crew members will continue the several hundred experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science currently under way and scheduled to take place aboard humanity’s only orbiting lab.
A retired Army colonel and native of Killeen, Texas, Kimbrough completed his first spaceflight in 2008 on space shuttle mission STS-126. During this mission, he worked to expand the living quarters of the space station to accommodate a six-member crew – an effort that included two spacewalks, during which he logged 12 hours and 52 minutes outside the orbiting laboratory.
Kimbrough is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He began his NASA career at the agency’s Johnson Space Center as a flight simulation engineer on the Shuttle Training Aircraft before being selected as an astronaut in 2004. This will be Kimbrough’s first long-duration stay on the space station. He is scheduled to return to Earth with crew members Borisenko and Ryzhikov in February 2017.
