Oct 25 2018

From The Space Library

MEDIA ADVISORY M18-158 NASA Invites Media to Learn About Urban Air Mobility

NASA is inviting media to attend a two-day Urban Air Mobility Grand Challenge Industry Day beginning at 8 a.m. PDT Thursday, Nov. 1, at the Seattle Marriott Waterfront. The event is sponsored by NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate’s (ARMD).

Urban Air Mobility (UAM) is defined as a safe and efficient system for passenger and cargo air transportation in and around an urban area. Several companies currently are working to develop vehicles and the infrastructure necessary to make UAM a reality.

Building on its decades of successful research improving the aviation sector, NASA is partnering with industry, academia and the Federal Aviation Administration to test the concepts and technologies necessary to help move this industry forward. Among other things, new standards are needed to ensure concepts such as autonomous vehicles, electric propulsion, and high density airspace operations in and around the urban environment can be implemented safely and efficiently.

During the event, media will hear about NASA’s UAM vision and how it will revolutionize mobility within metropolitan areas, followed by a discussion of several ecosystem-wide grand challenges that ARMD will sponsor in the coming years to promote public confidence in UAM safety and facilitate community-wide learning. Reporters also will have the opportunity to talk with NASA’s UAM project team. To attend, reporters should send their name, media affiliation and telephone number to Kevin Rohrer at kevin.j.rohrer@nasa.govby 3 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 31.

Urban Air Mobility is emerging as one of the most exciting frontiers in aviation history, and the UAM ecosystem and its associated technologies are likely to be the most complex aviation has ever seen. NASA is committed to working with the UAM community to identify and address the key challenges ahead.

MEDIA ADVISORY M18-159 NASA to Host Briefing on November Mars InSight Landing

NASA's upcoming landing of the first-ever mission to study the heart of Mars will be the topic of a media briefing at 1:30 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Oct. 31 at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The briefing will air live on NASA Television, the agency's website and the NASA InSight Facebook page.

NASA's InSight Mars Lander (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) will land on the Red Planet at approximately 3 p.m. EST (noon PST) Monday, Nov. 26. InSight will study the deep interior of Mars to learn how all celestial bodies with rocky surfaces, including Earth and the Moon, formed. The lander’s instruments include a seismometer to detect marsquakes and a probe to monitor the flow of heat in the planet's subsurface.

Briefing participants include:

• Lori Glaze, acting director of the Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters
• Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager at JPL
• Sue Smrekar, InSight deputy principal investigator at JPL
• Jaime Singer, InSight instrument deployment lead at JPL

Media not attending who would like to ask questions via phone during the event must provide their name and affiliation by noon EDT on Oct. 31, to JoAnna Wendel by email at joanna.r.wendel@nasa.gov.

The public can ask questions on Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA or by leaving a comment on the stream of the event on the NASA InSight Facebook page.

For more information about InSight, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/insight

Follow the mission on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/nasainsight