The Cave: NASA

Showing posts with label NASA. Show all posts

Saturday, September 10, 2011

NASA - Construction begins on first spacecraft to take humans to orbit since 1991

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2056.html

First Space Bound Orion Comes Alive

NEW ORLEANS -- Construction began this week on the first new NASA spacecraft built to take humans to orbit since space shuttle Endeavour left the factory in 1991, and marked a significant milestone in carrying out the ambitious exploration vision President Obama and Congress have laid out for the nation.

Engineers at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans started welding together the first space-bound Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle. "The Orion team has maintained a steady focus on progress, and we now are beginning to build hardware for spaceflight," said Orion Program Manager Mark Geyer, NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston.

"This marks a major milestone in NASA's ambitious plans to send humans farther into space than the nation has ever been before," said NASA spokesman David Weaver, Headquarters, Washington. "We're not only working to send people into deep space, we are putting people to work right here in America."

The first welds were completed Friday using an innovative new friction stir welding process, developed especially for Orion construction. The process creates a seamless, leak-proof bond that has proven stronger and higher in quality than can be achieved with conventional welding.

After welding is completed at Michoud, the Orion spacecraft orbital test article will be shipped to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the heat shield will be installed. At Kennedy, it will undergo final assembly and checkout operations for flight.

A picture of Friday's work is available at:
http://go.nasa.gov/OrionWeld
To learn more about the development of Orion, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/systems/mpcv
Credit: NASA

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

NASA.gov | First Light for the Solar Dynamics Observatory

April 21, 2010: Warning, the images you are about to see could take your breath away.

At a press conference today in Washington DC, researchers unveiled "First Light" images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope designed to study the sun.

"SDO is working beautifully," reports project scientist Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "This is even better than we could have dreamed."

Launched on February 11th from Cape Canaveral, the observatory has spent the past two months moving into a geosynchronous orbit and activating its instruments. As soon as SDO's telescope doors opened, the spacecraft began beaming back scenes so beautiful and puzzlingly complex that even seasoned observers were stunned.

For instance, here is one of the first things SDO saw:

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/21apr_firstlight/

Friday, January 15, 2010

NASA Investigates Cocaine Found In Shuttle Hangar

NASA officials have launched an investigation after finding cocaine in a processing hangar for a space shuttle at Kennedy Space Center in Florida — a violation of the zero-tolerance policy on drugs for all NASA employees.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1810022/nasa_investigates_cocaine_found_in_shuttle_hangar/index.html

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Reuters | Florida's space economy threatened by shuttle's end

MIAMI (Reuters) December 8, 2009 - At El Leoncita Cuban & Mexican Restaurant near the Kennedy Space Center on Florida's "space" coast, a bar sign says it all: "No happy hour on launch days."

Business from tourists is so strong that when a U.S. space shuttle blasts off a drinks promotion is never needed. Throngs waiting for their margaritas snake out into the Titusville eatery's parking lot, according to owner Miguel Sanchez.

"It's the busiest day of the year -- crowded, crowded," Sanchez said.

But like other local business operators, as well as policymakers, Sanchez worries sales will drop and jobs will be lost as Florida's signature, half-century-old space economy risks being eclipsed by the end of the space shuttle program.

The federal government's space shuttle program, which is so much part of state lore that Floridians voted to depict the winged space vehicle on a 2004 commemorative quarter coin, now has just a few missions left before winding down in 2010 after 29 years of flights.

And there is no clear replacement for what is an important driver of the fourth most-populous U.S. state's economy, as the Obama administration is debating a new U.S. manned-space program that would at best be many years away from new launches.

Florida's economy has been especially hard hit by recession. U.S. state and local governments are sapped by budget deficits, while fledgling private-sector efforts to carry Americans into space for fat fees appear to be nowhere near getting traction.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5B73MR20091208

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

RMN.com | RICHARD HOAGLAND (ENTERPRISE MISSION): THE REAL MISSION OF LCROS OR WHY NASA BOMBED ANCIENT MOON RUINS

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Guardian.co.uk | NASA Unveils First New Rocket In 30 Years amid doubts over future funding - Ares 1-X rocket

NASA.gov | Operation Ice Bridge researchers and crew completed the first flight of the Antarctic campaign - Photo Getz Ice Shelf

Getz Ice Shelf

On Oct. 16, Operation Ice Bridge researchers and crew completed the first flight of the Antarctic campaign. The flight was made from the southern tip of South America and its primary target was the Getz Ice Shelf along Antarctica's Amundsen Coast. During the flight along Amundsen Coast, the aircraft's downward-looking Digital Mapping System camera captured this image of sea ice from an altitude of at least 20,000 feet.

The DC-8 aircraft flew two parallel tracks along the coast, one just offshore over the floating ice shelf, and one just inland. By measuring on either side of the "grounding line" between the floating ice and the ice on land, scientists can determine the rate at which this near-shore part of the ice shelf is melting.

Image Credit: NASA

Sunday, October 11, 2009

SantiagoTimes.cl | NASA’s “OPERATION ICE BRIDGE” - Investigations Provide Important Clues Regarding The Advance Of Climate Change

NASA’s “OPERATION ICE BRIDGE” TAKES OFF IN PUNTA ARENAS

Monday, 12 October 2009
Investigations Provide Important Clues Regarding The Advance Of Climate Change

Surveillance flights by NASA’s “Operation Ice Bridge” began this week from the southern Chilean city of Punta Arenas in a quest to measure the impact climate change is having on the Antarctica’s sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers.

Aerial view of the city of Punta Arenas where NASA researchers will travel to seek
evidence of climate change.

The Ice Bridge team will traverse the Southern Ocean with up to 17 flights over West Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula, and coastal areas where sea ice is prevalent. Each round-trip flight lasts about 11 hours, two-thirds of that time devoted to getting to and from Antarctica. The DC-8 airplane is equipped with a 157-foot-long laboratory to carry out measurement and surveillance duties.

Operation Ice Bridge is a six-year campaign of annual flights to each of Earth's polar regions. Earlier flights this year in March and April carried researchers over Greenland and the Arctic Ocean.

This Antarctic campaign, led by principal investigator Seelye Martin of the University of Washington, will begin the first sustained airborne research effort of its kind over the continent. Data collected by researchers will help scientists bridge the gap between NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) - which is operating the last of its three lasers - and ICESat-II, scheduled to launch in 2014.

The Ice Bridge flights will help scientists maintain the record of changes to sea ice and ice sheets that have been collected since 2003 by ICESat. The flights lack the continent-wide coverage that can be achieved by satellite, so researchers carefully select key target locations. But the flights will also turn up new information not possible from orbit, such as the shape of the terrain below the ice.

“Space-based instruments like the ICESat lasers are the only way to find out where change is occurring in remote, continent-sized ice sheets like Antarctica,” said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. “But aircraft missions like Ice Bridge allow us to follow up with more detailed studies and make other measurements critical to modeling sea level rise.”

ICESat launched in January 2003 and since then, its sole instrument - a precise laser altimeter - has helped scientists map ice sheet elevation, calculate sea ice thickness, and monitor how both have changed.

"With ICESat, we have seen significant changes, things we wouldn't otherwise know were taking place," said Jay Zwally of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and ICESat investigator on the mission. “For example, shifts in surface elevation have previously revealed the draining and filling of lakes below Antarctica's ice.”

Compared to the Arctic, where sea ice has long been on the decline, sea ice in Antarctica is growing in some coastal areas. Snow and ice have been accumulating in some land regions in the east.

West Antarctica and the Peninsula, however, have experienced dramatic warming and rapid ice loss.

“We don't see the same sea ice changes in Antarctica that we see in the Arctic, and the reason is that the system is more complex,” said Thorsten Markus of NASA Goddard, the principal sea ice investigator for the mission. “But the fact that we don't see the same changes in Antarctica that we see in the Arctic doesn’t make it less important to study those changes. It's really important for us to understand the global climate system.”

With the DC-8 limited to just a few hours over Antarctica on each flight, mission planners have carefully selected targets of current and potential rapid change.

One such target is West Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier. “That glacier is one of the great unknowns because its bed – where the glacier contacts rock – is below sea level,” Martin said. “So if there's a surge or dramatic change, seawater could get under the glacier and we could be looking at very rapid change.”

Other proposed targets along the Amundsen coast include the Thwaites, Smith, and Kohler glaciers and the Getz Ice Shelf. Researchers also intend to study the myriad glaciers and ice shelves on the Peninsula, which has been undergoing dramatic changes.

“A remarkable change is happening on the Earth, truly one of the biggest changes in environmental conditions on Earth since the end of the ice age,” Wagner said. “It's not an easy thing to observe, let alone predict what might happen next. Studies like this one are keys.”

RELATED

NASA Ice Satellite Maps Profound Polar Thinning
Greenbelt MD (SPX) Oct 09, 2009 - Researchers have used NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) to compose the most comprehensive picture of changing glaciers along the coast of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. The new elevation maps show that all latitudes of the Greenland ice sheet are affected by dynamic thinning - the loss of ice due to accelerated ice flow to the ocean. The maps also show ... more

NASA to begin massive climate survey of Antarctica
Washington (AFP) Oct 8, 2009 - NASA next week begins the most extensive aerial survey of Earth's surface to chart the impact of global warming, with six years of flights over Antarctica to understand the frozen continent's glaciers and ice sheets. The US space agency said the massive aerial survey, part of a program dubbed Operation Ice Bridge, will get underway on October 15. Data gathered during the mission will ... more

Saturday, October 10, 2009

UFO World News | UFOs on the Moon

James Lovell Statement:

We must also consider a statement by James Lovell on Apollo 8. He was on the command module, and after coming around the far side of the Moon, he made the statement, “PLEASE BE INFORMED THAT THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS.” Many people dismissed this statement because it occurred on Christmas Day, 1968, but many of those who are leery of NASA, read much more into his statement.

Military Security Regulations:

Although NASA is officially a civilian institute, much of its monetary support comes from the defense budget, and therefore astronauts are required to follow military security regulations. All imagery, and probably audio transmissions, are screened by the National Security Agency, supposedly for the sake of national security. There is also a rumored discussion between a professor and Neil Armstrong about the astronauts and UFOs. I have included this question and answer session below.

Warned off by Aliens:

Professor: What REALLY happened out there with Apollo 11?

Armstrong: It was incredible, of course we had always known there was a possibility, the fact is, we were warned off! (by the aliens). There was never any question then of a space station or a moon city. Professor: How do you mean “warned off”?
Armstrong: I can’t go into details, except to say that their ships were far superior to ours both in size and technology-Boy, were they big!… and menacing! No, there is no question of a space station.

A CIA Cover-up:

Professor: But NASA had other missions after Apollo 11? Armstrong: Naturally-NASA was committed at that time, and couldn’t risk panic on Earth. But it really was a quick scoop and back again. Armstrong confirmed that the story was true but refused to go into further detail, beyond admitting that the CIA was behind the cover-up.

“Gordo” Cooper:

One of the most outspoken astronauts was Gordon “Gordo” Cooper, one of the original Mercury astronauts. His discussions with other astronauts, along with his own UFO sighting experiences, caused him to see a need for more discussion and disclosure about the subject of UFOs. In 1985, he appeared before a United Nations panel discussion on UFOs. Here is the statement he made.

Top Level Program Needed:

“I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which are a little more technically advanced than we are on Earth. I feel that we need to have a top level, coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over the Earth concerning any type of encounter, and to determine how best to interfere with these visitors in a friendly fashion.”

FULL STORY

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Examiner.com | Bombing the Moon schedule right here , get out your cameras tonight

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

This image released by NASA in Washington on September 9, 2009 shows Planetary Nebula NGC 6302 (Butterfly Nebula). What resemble butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour - fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in 24 minutes. The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), a new camera aboard NASAÕs Hubble Space Telescope, snapped this image of the planetary nebula, catalogued as NGC 6302, but more popularly called the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula. WFC3 was installed by NASA astronauts in May 2009, during the servicing mission to upgrade and repair the 19-year-old Hubble telescope.
UPI/NASA, ESA, Hubble SM4 ERO Team

Friday, September 4, 2009

Space.com | Obama Administration Mulls U.S. Human Spaceflight Future

NASA.gov | Twin NASA Commanders Twitter about Possible Space Meeting

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Science.NASA.gov | Are Sunspots Disappearing?

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

NASA.gov | Map Characterizes Active Lakes Below Antarctic Ice

Dots represent the locations where scientists have identified 124 active lakes below the ice sheet in Antarctica. Warmer colors (orange and red) depict lakes with larger water volumes while cooler colors (green and blue) depict lakes with smaller volumes. Purple areas show the locations of previously known inactive lakes. Credit: Ben Smith, University of Washington

Sunday, August 23, 2009

NASA considers out-sourcing more work

http://www.space-travel.com/reports/NASA_considers_out-sourcing_more_work_999.html

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

EarthObservatory.NASA.gov | The latest from NASA's Earth Observatory (18 August 2009)

Monday, August 17, 2009

apod.nasa.gov - Astronomy Picture of the Day | Laser Strike at the Galactic Center to measure the distortions of Earth's ever changing atmosphere

Explanation: Why are these people shooting a powerful laser into the center of our Galaxy? Fortunately, this is not meant to be the first step in a Galactic war. Rather, astronomers at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) site in Chile are trying to measure the distortions of Earth's ever changing atmosphere. Constant imaging of high-altitude atoms excited by the laser -- which appear like an artificial star -- allow astronomers to instantly measure atmospheric blurring. This information is fed back to a VLT telescope mirror which is then slightly deformed to minimize this blurring. In this case, a VLT was observing our Galaxy's center, and so Earth's atmospheric blurring in that direction was needed. As for inter-galaxy warfare, when viewed from our Galaxy's center, no casualties are expected. In fact, the light from this powerful laser would combine with light from our Sun to together appear only as bright as a faint and distant star.