[Spacetalk] https://www.nasa.gov/index.html

Sun Mar 6 23:38:39 CST 2016

Good morning all,
 I hope you had a wonderful weekend…it has been an amazing weekend with the return of Scott Kelly after 340 days on the ISS…it has been an almost year long test of the human body’s ability it stay in micro gravity which will help for future long flights above low earth orbit and to Mars. It was very interesting as Scott came back 2 inches (5cm) taller since gravity did not compress his spine….it only took a couple of days and he was back to his previous height and he had no problem getting around as the 3 hours a day of exercise kept his muscles strong. There will be a solar Eclipse will be visible in certain areas on March 8 & 9. Check this link to see if it is visible in your area: http://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/solar/2016-march-9 If viewing it, be sure to have safety/sun glasses to protect your eyes. We have to remember to always do our best, enjoy everything we do, live in the present, let those we care about most know, be appreciative of the good in our lives, smile, and have fun :-) Gabe  

NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly Returns Safely to Earth after One-Year Mission
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NASA astronaut and Expedition 46 Commander Scott Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko enjoy the cold fresh air back on Earth after their historic 340-day mission aboard the International Space Station.
Credits: NASA TV
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NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Mikhail Kornienko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos review procedures aboard the International Space Station in September 2015.
Credits: NASANASA astronaut and Expedition 46 Commander Scott Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko returned to Earth Tuesday after a historic 340-day mission aboard the International Space Station. They landed in Kazakhstan at 11:26 p.m. EST (10:26 a.m. March 2 Kazakhstan time).
Joining their return trip aboard a Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft was Sergey Volkov, also of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, who arrived on the station Sept. 4, 2015. The crew touched down southeast of the remote town of Dzhezkazgan “Scott Kelly’s one-year mission aboard the International Space Station has helped to advance deep space exploration and America’s Journey to Mars,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “Scott has become the first American astronaut to spend a year in space, and in so doing, helped us take one giant leap toward putting boots on Mars.” During the record-setting One-Year mission <http://www.nasa.gov/1ym/>, the station crew conducted almost 400 investigations to advance NASA’s mission and benefit all of humanity <http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-book-shows-how-space-station-research-offers-benefits-for-humanity-0>. Kelly and Kornienko specifically participated in a number of studies to inform NASA’s Journey to Mars <http://www.nasa.gov/journeytomars/>, including research into how the human body adjusts to weightlessness, isolation, radiation and the stress of long-duration spaceflight. Kelly’s identical twin brother, former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, participated in parallel twin studies <http://www.nasa.gov/twins-study/> on Earth to help scientists compare the effects of space on the body and mind down to the cellular level. One particular research project examined fluid shifts <http://www.nasa.gov/content/fluid-shifts-study-advances-journey-to-mars> that occur when bodily fluids move into the upper body during weightlessness. These shifts may be associated with visual changes and a possible increase in intracranial pressure <http://www.nasa.gov/content/it-s-all-in-your-head-nasa-investigates-techniques-for-measuring-intracranial-pressure-u>, which are significant challenges that must be understood before humans expand exploration beyond Earth’s orbit. The study uses the Russian Chibis <http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/jsc2015e046469_alt.jpg> device to draw fluids back into the legs while the subject’s eyes are measured to track any changes. NASA and Roscosmos already are looking at continuing the Fluid Shifts investigation with future space station crews. The crew took advantage of the unique vantage point of the space station, with an orbital path that covers more than 90 percent of Earth’s population, to monitor and capture images <http://www.nasa.gov/content/one-year-crew-image-gallery> of our planet. They also welcomed the arrival of a new instrument to study the signature of dark matter <http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/calet> and conducted technology demonstrations that continue to drive innovation, including a test of network capabilities for operating swarms of spacecraft <http://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-small-satellites-to-demonstrate-swarm-communications-and-autonomy>. Kelly and Kornienko saw the arrival of six resupply spacecraft during their mission. Kelly was involved in the robotic capture of two NASA-contracted cargo flights -- SpaceX’s Dragon during the company’s sixth commercial resupply mission and Orbital ATK’s Cygnus during the company’s fourth commercial resupply mission. A Japanese cargo craft and three Russian resupply ships also delivered several tons of supplies to the station. Kelly ventured outside the confines of the space station for three spacewalks during his mission. The first included a variety of station upgrade and maintenance tasks, including routing cables to prepare for new docking ports for U.S. commercial crew spacecraft <http://www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew>. On a second spacewalk, he assisted in the successful reconfiguration of an ammonia cooling system and restoration of the station to full solar power-generating capability. The third spacewalk was to restore functionality to the station’s Mobile Transporter system. Including crewmate Gennady Padalka, with whom Kelly and Kornienko launched on March 27, 2015, 13 astronauts and cosmonauts representing seven different nations (the United States, Russia, Italy, Japan, Denmark, Kazakhstan and England) lived aboard the space station during the yearlong mission. With the end of this mission, Kelly now has spent 520 days in space, the most among U.S. astronauts. Kornienko has accumulated 516 days across two flights, and Volkov has 548 days on three flights. Expedition 47 continues operating the station, with NASA astronaut Tim Kopra in command. Kopra, Tim Peake of ESA (European Space Agency) and Yuri Malenchenko of Roscosmos will operate the station until the arrival of three new crew members in about two weeks. NASA astronaut Jeff Williams and Russian cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Oleg Skripochka are scheduled to launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on March 18. The International Space Station is a convergence of science, technology and human invation that enables us to demonstrate new technologies and make research breakthroughs not possible on Earth. It has been continuously occupied since November 2000 and, since then, has been visited by more than 200 people and a variety of international and commercial spacecraft. The space station remains the springboard to NASA's next giant leap in exploration, including future missions to an asteroid and Mars. For more information about the one-year mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/oneyear <http://www.nasa.gov/oneyear> For more information about the International Space Station and its crews, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station <http://www.nasa.gov/station>
Update on NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly’s Return to Houston
Update, March 3, 1:25 a.m. EST: Scott Kelly's plane is expected to land no earlier than 2:30 a.m. EST. NASA TV coverage will begin approximately 15 minutes earlier.

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Expedition 46 Commander Scott Kelly of NASA rests in a chair outside of the Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft just minutes after he and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos landed in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan late Tuesday, March 1 EST. Kelly and Kornienko completed a record year-long International Space Station mission to collect valuable data on the effects of long duration weightlessness on the human body that will be used to formulate a human mission to Mars.
Credits: NASA/Bill Ingalls
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly now is expected to return to Houston at about 12:55 a.m. EST Thursday (11:55 p.m. CST Wednesday, March 2), based on the current transportation plan. NASA Television will broadcast Kelly’s arrival back on U.S. soil after an agency record-setting stay in space <https://www.nasa.gov/content/one-year-crew/> aboard the International Space Station. Coverage begins at 12:40 a.m. Second Lady of the United States Dr. Jill Biden, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology Dr. John P. Holdren, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, and Kelly’s identical twin brother and former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly will be in Houston to welcome Kelly home. The event will be pooled press only. For more information about the International Space Station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/statio <http://www.nasa.gov/statio>n.  For NASA TV streaming video, schedule and downlink information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv <http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv>

NASA to Provide Live Coverage, Interviews, and Social Media for March 8 Solar Eclipse
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During total solar eclipses — such as this one seen from the northern tip of Australia on Nov. 13, 2012 — the light halo of the sun’s atmosphere, called the corona, can be seen. Not only are such eclipses beautiful, they also provide a unique opportunity for scientists to study the corona.
Credits: NASA/Romeo Durscher
NASA, in partnership with the Exploratorium Science Center in San Francisco, will host activities around the March 8 total solar eclipse, including opportunities to talk with solar scientists and live coverage of the eclipse originating from Woleai island in Micronesia. NASA will host a Facebook Q and A at 2 p.m. EST on Monday, March 7, with solar scientists from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, at: https://www.facebook.com/nasamarshallcenter <https://www.facebook.com/nasamarshallcenter> At 1 p.m. on Tuesday, March 8, solar scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, will participate in a Reddit Ask Me Anything. NASA Television <http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv> will begin coverage at 8 p.m. on March 8. The period of total eclipse, called totality, will occur from 8:38 to 8:42 p.m. Twitter, Google+ and Facebook users will be able to join the conversation and ask questions using the hashtag #eclipse2016. The NASA Twitter account for the eclipse is @NASASunEarth. The public will be able to tag and share their images of the solar eclipse on the NASA Flickr group at: https://www.flickr.com/groups/eclipse2016/ <https://www.flickr.com/groups/eclipse2016/>. The total eclipse will be visible in parts of South East Asia and a partial eclipse will be visible in parts of Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and America Samoa. An eclipse occurs when the moon passes directly between Earth and the sun. When the moon's shadow falls on Earth, observers within that shadow see the moon block a portion of the sun's light. Information about eclipses is available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/eclipse <http://www.nasa.gov/eclipse> For solar eclipse video resources, visit: http://go.nasa.gov/1VR3Fvk <http://go.nasa.gov/1VR3Fvk>
Solar Eclipse - Image Results <https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0LEVxQzEd1WmY4A1wdXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEyNTg5NnYzBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDQjE1OTFfMQRzZWMDc2M-?p=Solar+Eclipse&fr=aaplw>
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Hubble and a Stellar Fingerprint
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Showcased at the center of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is an emission-line star known as IRAS 12196-6300. Located just under 2,300 light-years from Earth, this star displays prominent emission lines, meaning that the star’s light, dispersed into a spectrum, shows up as a rainbow of colors marked with a characteristic pattern of dark and bright lines. The characteristics of these lines, when compared to the “fingerprints” left by particular atoms and molecules, can be used to reveal IRAS 12196-6300’s chemical composition. Under 10 million years old and not yet burning hydrogen at its core, unlike the sun, this star is still in its infancy. Further evidence of IRAS 12196-6300’s youth is provided by the presence of reflection nebulae. These hazy clouds, pictured floating above and below IRAS 12196-6300, are created when light from a star reflects off a high concentration of nearby dust, such as the dusty material still remaining from IRAS 12196-6300’s formation.

Hubble Team Breaks Cosmic Distance Record 
By pushing NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, an international team of astronomers has shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the farthest galaxy ever seen in the universe. This surprisingly bright infant galaxy, named GN-z11, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the Big Bang. GN-z11 is located in the direction of the constellation of Ursa Major.

This animation shows the location of galaxy GN-z11, which is the farthest galaxy ever seen. The video begins by locating the Big Dipper, then showing the constellation Ursa Major. It then zooms into the GOODS North field of galaxies, and ends with a Hubble image of the young galaxy. GN-z11 is shown as it existed 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the big bang, when the universe was only three percent of its present age.
Credits: Video - NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI); science - NASA, ESA, P. Oesch (Yale University), G. Brammer (STScI), P. van Dokkum (Yale University), and G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz)
“We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble. We see GN-z11 at a time when the universe was only three percent of its current age,” explained principal investigator Pascal Oesch of Yale University. The team includes scientists from Yale University, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and the University of California. Astronomers are closing in on the first galaxies that formed in the universe. The new Hubble observations take astronomers into a realm that was once thought to be only reachable with NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. This measurement provides strong evidence that some unusual and unexpectedly bright galaxies found earlier in Hubble images are really at extraordinary distances. Previously, the team had estimated GN-z11’s distance by determining its color through imaging with Hubble and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Now, for the first time for a galaxy at such an extreme distance, the team used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to precisely measure the distance to GN-z11 spectroscopically by splitting the light into its component colors.

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Hubble spectroscopically confirms farthest galaxy to date.
Credits: NASA, ESA, B. Robertson (University of California, Santa Cruz), A. Feild (STScI)
Astronomers measure large distances by determining the “redshift” of a galaxy. This phenomenon is a result of the expansion of the universe; every distant object in the universe appears to be receding from us because its light is stretched to longer, redder wavelengths as it travels through expanding space to reach our telescopes. The greater the redshift, the farther the galaxy.

"Our spectroscopic observations reveal the galaxy to be even farther away than we had originally thought, right at the distance limit of what Hubble can observe," said Gabriel Brammer of STScI, second author of the study. Before astronomers determined the distance for GN-z11, the most distant galaxy measured spectroscopically had a redshift of 8.68 (13.2 billion years in the past). Now, the team has confirmed GN-z11 to be at a redshift of 11.1, nearly 200 million years closer to the Big Bang. “This is an extraordinary accomplishment for Hubble. It managed to beat all the previous distance records held for years by much larger ground-based telescopes,” said investigator Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University. “This new record will likely stand until the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.” The combination of Hubble’s and Spitzer’s imaging reveals that GN-z11 is 25 times smaller than the Milky Way and has just one percent of our galaxy’s mass in stars. However, the newborn GN-z11 is growing fast, forming stars at a rate about 20 times greater than our galaxy does today. This makes an extremely remote galaxy bright enough for astronomers to find and perform detailed observations with both Hubble and Spitzer. The results reveal surprising new clues about the nature of the very early universe. “It’s amazing that a galaxy so massive existed only 200 million to 300 million years after the very first stars started to form. It takes really fast growth, producing stars at a huge rate, to have formed a galaxy that is a billion solar masses so soon,” explained investigator Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz. These findings provide a tantalizing preview of the observations that the James Webb Space Telescope will perform after it is launched into space in 2018. “Hubble and Spitzer are already reaching into Webb territory,” Oesch said. “This new discovery shows that the Webb telescope will surely find many such young galaxies reaching back to when the first galaxies were forming,” added Illingworth. This discovery also has important consequences for NASA’s planned Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope <http://www.nasa.gov/wfirst> (WFIRST), which will have the ability to find thousands of such bright, very distant galaxies. The team’s findings have been accepted for publication in an upcoming edition of the Astrophysical Journal. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington.For more information about previous times Hubble broke the distance record, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/distance-record.html <http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/distance-record.html>
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/sn-wilson.html <http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/sn-wilson.html>
https://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/july/hubble-shows-farthest-lensing-galaxy-yields-clues-to-early-universe/ <https://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/july/hubble-shows-farthest-lensing-galaxy-yields-clues-to-early-universe/> For images and more information about Hubble, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/hubble <http://www.nasa.gov/hubble>

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