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

Mon Apr 23 05:42:53 CDT 2018

Hi all…
 I’ve just arrived in England to spend a week at schools and visiting family & friends….it is strange to think at this time last week I was in Brazil…saw an amazing, beautiful launch just before I left Florida with the Planet  hunting mission…also a great article on how NASA is inspiring not only scientist but artists as well in the development of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, ARTS, and Mathematics). For those of you who signed up on the InSight Mission to Mars, the launch is scheduled for May 5th…https://www.nasa.gov/insight <https://www.nasa.gov/insight> you might want to get the kids psyched for their launch…also, please remember you have to register by the 27th of this month to catch a ride to the sun…http://go.nasa.gov/HotTicket <http://go.nasa.gov/HotTicket>...wishing you a wonderful day...we have to always remember to do our best, enjoy everything we do, live in the present, be appreciative of the good in our lives, let those we care about most know, make each day special, smile & have fun! hugs & love ya, Gabe

 Public Invited to Come Aboard NASA’s First Mission to Touch the Sun

Want to get the hottest ticket this summer without standing in line? NASA is inviting people around the world to submit their names online to be placed on a microchip aboard NASA’s historic Parker Solar Probe mission launching in summer 2018. The mission will travel through the Sun’s atmosphere, facing brutal heat and radiation conditions — and your name will go along for the ride.

 <https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/psp-swingbysuncloseupsun_1024_0.jpg>

 <https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/public-invited-to-come-aboard-nasa-s-first-mission-to-touch-the-sun/#> <https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/public-invited-to-come-aboard-nasa-s-first-mission-to-touch-the-sun/#> <https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/public-invited-to-come-aboard-nasa-s-first-mission-to-touch-the-sun/#> <https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/public-invited-to-come-aboard-nasa-s-first-mission-to-touch-the-sun/#> <https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/public-invited-to-come-aboard-nasa-s-first-mission-to-touch-the-sun/#>

Virginia Middle-Schooler Takes Grand Prize at NASA Langley Student Art Contest

 <https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/winner_fox_39158814551_f3a54b0e9e_o.jpg>
Anna Fox, a seventh-grader from Virginia Beach Middle School in Virginia Beach, Virginia, was named as the grand prize winner of Langley Research Center’s Student Art Contest <https://artcontest.larc.nasa.gov/>.

“I was very excited when I heard that I won first place for my grade,” Anna said. “But when I heard that I won grand prize, I was speechless.”

A record 831 entries were submitted from hundreds of children in 39 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, with 13 students earning first-place honors in grade levels K-12 and the opportunity to be considered for the grand prize, said Kristina Cors, Langley Student Art Contest coordinator.

 <https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/anna_fox.jpg>
“I was very excited when I heard that I won first place for my grade,” Anna Fox said. “But when I heard that I won grand prize, I was speechless.”
Credits: Courtesy of Anne Baker
“We hope this contest continues to grow and provide a place for students to explore science and technology through creativity,” she said. The art contest theme, “The Next 100 Years,” was intended to illustrate how NASA research and innovation propels science to new discoveries.

“This year’s artwork was particularly remarkable, and represented the theme ‘The Next 100 Years’ with imagination and immense talent,” Cors said.

Anna’s winning piece shows a deep-space scene with an astronaut planting a flag on a planet’s mountain while watching a rocket fly off in the distance in a sky populated by stars, galaxies and a moon.

“When I started drawing, I had no idea what to do, so I had looked at a bunch of videos on how to do galaxies for inspiration,” Anna said. “After that I randomly placed colors together until I found something I liked. It all started coming together from there.”

Once she got an idea in motion, Anna did her work using old and new techniques.

“I created my artwork digitally on Photoshop,” Anna said. “I had started with basic colors for the background, including the explosion behind the rocks. Then, on another layer I created the rocks, planet, astronaut and rocket ship taking off. Later I added detail on all the layers to look more realistic. The last step was to add all of the stars and galaxies, which I did with a special brush.”

Anna, who has been an artist for as long as she could pick up a pencil, said she started drawing digitally when she was 11, inspired by her father’s work on a computer. “I think the best part of creating art is having fun with it and inspiring others to do art as well,” she said. Anna said she always had an interest in space and the art contest was a perfect vehicle to express that.

“I think that the coolest thing about NASA is that they help so many people achieve their dreams, and send people to do what not a lot of people get to do,” Anna said. For her grand-prize victory, Anna received a certificate, and a NASA Exploration Package of posters, pens, stickers, patches and lapel pins. Her artwork will be displayed at the Virginia Air & Space Center in Hampton, Virginia.

The 13 grade-level winners were selected by a panel of five judges from the Hampton Roads art community, and the grand champion was picked by Langley employees. Each piece was evaluated on originality, interpretation of subject matter/theme, creative techniques, composition and overall art appearance.

 <https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-planet-hunter-on-its-way-to-orbit/#> <https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-planet-hunter-on-its-way-to-orbit/#> <https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-planet-hunter-on-its-way-to-orbit/#> <https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-planet-hunter-on-its-way-to-orbit/#> <https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-planet-hunter-on-its-way-to-orbit/#>
NASA Planet Hunter on Its Way to Orbit

 <https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/40837911204_20f2172930_o1.jpg>
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket soars upward after lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, carrying NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Liftoff was at 6:51 p.m. EDT. TESS will search for planets outside of our solar system. The mission will find exoplanets that periodically block part of the light from their host stars, events called transits. The satellite will survey the nearest and brightest stars for two years to search for transiting exoplanets.
Credits: NASA/Kim Shiflett
NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched on the first-of-its-kind mission to find worlds beyond our solar system, including some that could support life.

TESS, which is expected to find thousands of new exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, lifted off at 6:51 p.m. EDT Wednesday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. At 7:53 p.m., the twin solar arrays that will power the spacecraft successfully deployed.

“We are thrilled TESS is on its way to help us discover worlds we have yet to imagine, worlds that could possibly be habitable, or harbor life,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “With missions like the James Webb Space Telescope to help us study the details of these planets, we are ever the closer to discovering whether we are alone in the universe.”

 <https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/spacex_tess_launch_co.jpg>
NASA’s next planet-hunter, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), successfully launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 on April 18, 2018. TESS will search for new worlds outside our solar system for further study.
Credits: NASA Television
Over the course of several weeks, TESS will use six thruster burns to travel in a series of progressively elongated orbits to reach the Moon, which will provide a gravitational assist so that TESS can transfer into its 13.7-day final science orbit around Earth. After approximately 60 days of check-out and instrument testing, the spacecraft will begin its work.

“One critical piece for the science return of TESS is the high data rate associated with its orbit,” said George Ricker, TESS principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research in Cambridge. “Each time the spacecraft passes close to Earth, it will transmit full-frame images taken with the cameras. That’s one of the unique things TESS brings that was not possible before.” For this two-year survey mission, scientists divided the sky into 26 sectors. TESS will use four unique wide-field cameras to map 13 sectors encompassing the southern sky during its first year of observations and 13 sectors of the northern sky during the second year, altogether covering 85 percent of the sky. 
TESS will be watching for phenomena called transits <https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/transiting-exoplanet-with-brightness-graph-anim.gif>. A transit occurs when a planet passes in front of its star from the observer’s perspective, causing a periodic and regular dip in the star’s brightness. More than 78 percent of the approximately 3,700 confirmed exoplanets have been found using transits. NASA’s Kepler <https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/kepler/main/index.html> spacecraft found more than 2,600 exoplanets, most orbiting faint stars between 300 and 3,000 light-years from Earth, using this same method of watching for transits. TESS will focus on stars between 30 and 300 light-years away and 30 to 100 times brighter than Kepler’s targets.
The brightness of these target stars will allow researchers to use spectroscopy <https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/educators/hera/spectroscopy/what_is_spectroscopy.html>, the study of the absorption and emission of light, to determine a planet’s mass, density and atmospheric composition. Water, and other key molecules, in its atmosphere can give us hints about a planets’ capacity to harbor life.
“The targets TESS finds are going to be fantastic subjects for research for decades to come,” said Stephen Rinehart, TESS project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s the beginning of a new era of exoplanet research.”
Through the TESS Guest Investigator Program <https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/tess/proposing-investigations.html>, the worldwide scientific community will be able to conduct research beyond TESS’s core mission in areas ranging from exoplanet characterization to stellar astrophysics, distant galaxies and solar system science.
TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer <https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/programs/astrophysics-explorers> mission led and operated by MIT and managed by Goddard. George Ricker, of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, serves as principal investigator for the mission. TESS’s four wide-field cameras were developed by MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. Additional partners include Orbital ATK, NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the Space Telescope Science Institute. More than a dozen universities, research institutes and observatories worldwide are participants <https://tess.gsfc.nasa.gov/meettheteam.html> in the mission. https://www.nasa.gov/tess <https://www.nasa.gov/tess>

The Aurora and the Sunrise…from the ISS

 I love the Auroras

Auroras are one of the many Earthly phenomena the crew of the International Space Station observe from their perch high above the planet.

Auroras are one of the many Earthly phenomena the crew of the International Space Station observe from their perch high above the planet.
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