T-38 ASTRONAUT TRAINING CRAFT FLIES OVER WASHINGTON

FROM NASA
A NASA T-38 training jet is seen as it flies over Washington, DC, Thursday, April 5, 2012. NASA, in cooperation with the Federal Aviation Administration, conducted training and photographic flights over the DC metropolitan area. T-38 aircraft have been used for astronaut training for more than 30 years as they allow pilots and mission specialists to think quickly in changing situations, mental experiences the astronauts say are critical to practicing for the rigors of spaceflight. Image Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi

REPORTERS INVITED TO TOUR NASA'S NEW ULTRAGREEN BUILDING APRIL 19-20

FROM NASA
MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. -- NASA's newest building also is one of the
nation's greenest. News media are invited to tour the facility,
called Sustainability Base, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. PDT on
Thursday, April 19, 2012, at the agency's Ames Research Center at
Moffett Field, Calif. Reporters also are invited to the dedication
and ribbon cutting ceremony from 10 to 11 a.m. the following day.

Sustainability Base is a highly intelligent and intuitive facility
designed to anticipate and react to changes in sunlight, temperature,
wind and occupancy. The building can optimize its performance
automatically, in real time, in response to internal and external
changes. It is designed to achieve, and is presently under
consideration for, the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in
Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum status, which is the
highest LEED rating.

Participants in the ceremony include:
-- Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
John Holdren (prerecorded message)
-- U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, Calif.
-- U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, Calif.
-- NASA Associate Administrator for Mission Support Woodrow Whitlow
(representing Administrator Charles Bolden)
-- Ames Center Director Pete Worden
-- Ames Associate Center Director for Research Steven Zornetzer
-- Architect William McDonough


Meeting the White House challenge to lead by example, NASA has
repurposed its technologies and incorporated them into the new
building. Sustainability Base features a Bloom Energy Box, for
example, that uses fuel cell technology in a clean
electrical-chemical process to produce electricity. The facility also
has a water recovery system, derived from one originally designed for
the International Space Station, which reduces unnecessary
consumption of potable water.

"NASA" FROM SPACE

FROM NASA
STS-116 astronaut Bob Curbeam met the NASA logo up close on his Dec. 14, 2006, spacewalk, during which he performed tasks to complete the International Space Station. During space shuttle Discovery’s mission to the station, the STS-116 crew added the P5 spacer truss segment and rewired the station’s power system, preparing it to support the station’s final configuration and the arrival of additional science modules. A fourth and final spacewalk was added to allow the crew to retract solar arrays that had folded improperly. Curbeam was selected as an astronaut in 1994 and subsequently flew on three space shuttle missions. During the STS-116 mission, he became the first shuttle astronaut to conduct four spacewalks in a single mission. Curbeam also flew on STS-85 in August 1997 and STS-98 in February 2001. He accumulated 45 hours and 34 minutes of spacewalking time and more than 900 hours in space. Image Credit: NASA

WHEN BUZZ CAME BACK FROM SPACE

The photo and excerpt are from the NASA website:
NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver addresses the audience with Buzz Lightyear, left, of the film "Toy Story" at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Moving Beyond Earth Gallery, Thursday, March 29, 2012, in Washington. Launched May 31, 2008 aboard the space shuttle Discovery (STS-124) and returned on Discovery 15 months later with STS-128, the 12-inch action figure is the longest serving toy in space and became part of the museum's popular culture collection. Image Credit: NASA/Paul E. Alers

GALAXY IC 342 (THE SPIDERWEB )

Looking like a spider's web swirled into a spiral, Galaxy IC 342 presents its delicate pattern of dust in this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Seen in infrared light, faint starlight gives way to the glowing bright patterns of dust found throughout the galaxy's disk. At a distance of about 10 million light-years, IC 342 is relatively close by galactic standards, however our vantage point places it directly behind the disk of our own Milky Way. The intervening dust makes it difficult to see in visible light, but infrared light penetrates this veil easily. IC 342 belongs to the same group as its even more obscured galactic neighbor, Maffei 2. IC 342 is nearly face-on to our view, giving a clear, top-down view of the structure of its disk. It has a low surface brightness compared to other spirals, indicating a lower density of stars (seen here as a blue haze). Its dust structures show up much more vividly (red). Blue dots are stars closer to us, in our own Milky Way. New stars are forming in the disk at a healthy rate. The very center glows especially brightly in the infrared, highlighting an enormous burst of star formation occurring in this tiny region. To either side of the center, a small bar of dust and gas is helping to fuel this central star formation. Data from Spitzer's infrared array camera are shown in blue (3.6 microns), green (4.5 microns) and red (5.8 and 8.0 microns). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The above photo and excerpt are from the NASA website:

NASA CAPTURES SOLAR FLARE PHOTO

The photo and excerpt are from the NASA website:
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured this image of an M7.9 class flare on March 13, 2012 at 1:29 p.m. EDT. It is shown here in the 131 Angstrom wavelength, a wavelength particularly good for seeing solar flares and a wavelength that is typically colorized in teal. The flare peaked at 1:41 p.m. EDT. It was from the same active region, No. 1429, that produced flares and coronal mass ejections the entire week. The region has been moving across the face of the sun since March 2, and will soon rotate out of Earth view. A solar flare is an intense burst of radiation coming from the release of magnetic energy associated with sunspots. Flares are our solar system’s largest explosive events. They are seen as bright areas on the sun and last from mere minutes to several hours. Scientists classify solar flares according to their x-ray brightness. There are 3 categories: X-, M- and C-class. X-class flares are the largest of these events. M-class flares are medium-sized; they can cause brief radio blackouts that affect Earth's polar regions. Compared to X- and M-class, C-class flares are small with few noticeable consequences on Earth. Image Credit: NASA/SDO

THE ORION NEBULA

The photo and excerpt below are from the NASA website:
This new view of the Orion Nebula highlights fledgling stars hidden in the gas and clouds. It shows infrared observations taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel mission, in which NASA plays an important role. Stars form as clumps of this gas and dust collapses, creating warm globs of material fed by an encircling disk. These dusty envelopes glow brightest at longer wavelengths, appearing as red dots in this image. In several hundred thousand years, some of the forming stars will accrete enough material to trigger nuclear fusion at their cores and then blaze into stardom. Spitzer is designed to see shorter infrared wavelengths than Herschel. By combining their observations, astronomers get a more complete picture of star formation. The colors in this image relate to the different wavelengths of light, and to the temperature of material, mostly dust, in this region of Orion. Data from Spitzer show warmer objects in blue, with progressively cooler dust appearing green and red in the Herschel datasets. The more evolved, hotter embryonic stars thus appear in blue. Infrared data at wavelengths of 8.0 and 24 microns from Spitzer are rendered in blue. Herschel data with wavelengths of 70 and 160 microns are represented in green and red, respectively. This image was released on Feb. 29, 2012. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/IRAM

WAITING FOR SUERNOVA

“NASA's Hubble Telescope captured an image of Eta Carinae. This image consists of ultraviolet and visible light images from the High Resolution Channel of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The field of view is approximately 30 arcseconds across. The larger of the two stars in the Eta Carinae system is a huge and unstable star that is nearing the end of its life, and the event that the 19th century astronomers observed was a stellar near-death experience. Scientists call these outbursts supernova impostor events, because they appear similar to supernovae but stop just short of destroying their star. Although 19th century astronomers did not have telescopes powerful enough to see the 1843 outburst in detail, its effects can be studied today. The huge clouds of matter thrown out a century and a half ago, known as the Homunculus Nebula, have been a regular target for Hubble since its launch in 1990. This image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys High Resolution Channel, is the most detailed yet, and shows how the material from the star was not thrown out in a uniform manner, but forms a huge dumbbell shape. Eta Carinae is one of the closest stars to Earth that is likely to explode in a supernova in the relatively near future (though in astronomical timescales the "near future" could still be a million years away). When it does, expect an impressive view from Earth, far brighter still than its last outburst: SN 2006gy, the brightest supernova ever observed, came from a star of the same type, though from a galaxy over 200 million light-years away. Image Credit: ESA/NASA”

The above picture and following excerpt is from the NASA website: