Homeschool Day Brings STEM Activities To Virginia Air & Space Center

NASA Invites Public to Send Artwork to an Asteroid

NASA is calling all space enthusiasts to send their artistic endeavors on a journey aboard NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft. This will be the first U.S. mission to collect a sample of an asteroid and return it to Earth for study.

OSIRIS-REx is scheduled to launch in September and travel to the asteroid Bennu. The #WeTheExplorers campaign invites the public to take part in this mission by expressing, through art, how the mission’s spirit of exploration is reflected in their own lives. Submitted works of art will be saved on a chip on the spacecraft. The spacecraft already carries a chip with more than 442,000 names submitted through the 2014 “Messages to Bennu” campaign.

“The development of the spacecraft and instruments has been a hugely creative process, where ultimately the canvas is the machined metal and composites preparing for launch in September,” said Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It is fitting that this endeavor can inspire the public to express their creativity to be carried by OSIRIS-REx into space.”

A submission may take the form of a sketch, photograph, graphic, poem, song, short video or other creative or artistic expression that reflects what it means to be an explorer. Submissions will be accepted via Twitter and Instagram until March 20. For details on how to include your submission on the mission to Bennu, go to:

http://www.asteroidmission.org/WeTheExplorers

“Space exploration is an inherently creative activity,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “We are inviting the world to join us on this great adventure by placing their art work on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, where it will stay in space for millennia.”

The spacecraft will voyage to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu to collect a sample of at least 60 grams (2.1 ounces) and return it to Earth for study. Scientists expect Bennu may hold clues to the origin of the solar system and the source of the water and organic molecules that may have made their way to Earth.

Goddard provides overall mission management, systems engineering and safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. The University of Arizona, Tucson leads the science team and observation planning and processing. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver is building the spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program.  NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages New Frontiers for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information on OSIRIS-Rex, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/osiris-rex

The NASA Aeronautics team is working to transform aviation by enabling a new commercial market for supersonic travel over land. The centerpiece of this effort is the X-59 QueSST (short for Quiet SuperSonic Technology), a new X-plane designed to produce sonic "thumps" that could open the door to new certification standards for commercial supersonic service. NASA and Lockheed Martin are working together to design and build the X-59. Beginning in 2023, NASA will use this X-plane to measure public response to sonic thumps. 

More at www.nasa.gov/lowboom

Nine Notable Facts About the NACA

The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) reached a major milestone in 2015.

On March 3, the agency that in 1958 would dissolve and reform as NASA celebrated its centennial.

NASA Langley, established in 1917 as the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, was the NACA's first field center.

During the March 24 talk, Tom Crouch, senior curator of aeronautics; John Anderson, curator of aerodynamics; and Roger Launius, associate director for collections and curatorial affairs discussed the formation of the NACA, the technological breakthroughs it generated, and the evolution of its research and development model.

Here are nine of the more interesting things they shared:

1. Charles Doolittle Walcott, a self-trained scientist and the man whose efforts led to the formation of the NACA, was best known not as an aeronautics expert, but as a paleontologist. "Throughout his long career," Crouch said, "he was really one of the most effective spokesmen for science and technology in the federal government."

2. Walcott was a good friend of aviation pioneer and Wright brothers rival Samuel Pierpont Langley, who was devastated in 1903 when his Aerodrome flying machine twice failed to take flight over the Potomoc River. Langley died in 1906. "One of Charles Doolittle Walcott's aims in life was to resurrect and honor the memory of his old friend Samuel Pierpont Langley," Crouch said — so much so that he once suggested naming all airplanes Langleys. Eventually, Walcott named the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory after his friend.

3. Prior to World War I, aeronautics was not a high priority for the U.S. government. On a list of the aeronautics appropriations for 14 countries in the period from 1908 to 1913, the United States was dead last with $435,000. That put the U.S. behind Brazil, Chile, Bulgaria, Spain and Greece. Topping the list: Germany, with $28 million.

4. In the late 1920s, Fred Weick, a Langley engineer, developed what became known as the NACA cowling, a type of fairing or cover used to reduce drag on aircraft engines. The cowling also improved engine cooling. In 1929, Weick won the Collier Trophy, U.S. aviation's more prestigious award, for this innovation.

5. By the 1930s, the world had entered a golden era of aeronautics — largely due to the NACA. "The NACA was aeronautical engineering," said Anderson. And some of the most important aeronautical innovations were taking place right here at Langley Research Center. It was during the 1930s that Langley aerodynamicist Eastman Jacobs developed a systematic way of designing an airfoil. That systematic design became known as the NACA airfoil, and aircraft makers worldwide began using it.

In 1934, during a high-speed wind tunnel test at Langley, a researcher named John Stack captured the first ever photograph of a shockwave on an airfoil. Credits: NASA

6. Aeronautics researchers in the 1930s were struggling to determine the cause of a peculiar phenomenon — as an object approached the speed of sound, drag greatly increased and lift drastically reduced. In 1934, a young Langley researcher named John Stack figured out why by photographing a high-speed wind tunnel test of an airfoil. The photo captured the culprit — a shockwave. It was the first time a shockwave had ever been photographed on an airfoil. "This was a dramatic intellectual contribution of the NACA that a lot of people don't really appreciate," said Anderson.

7. The woman who developed the format and style guide for the NACA's technical reports was a physicist from North Dakota named Pearl Young. She came to Langley in 1922, the first professional woman employed at the center, and was appointed Langley's first Chief Technical Editor in 1929. "The technical memorandums … became the model worldwide for how to increase knowledge and make it available to the broadest base of people that can use it," said Launius.

8. The NACA used to host an annual Aircraft Engineering Research Conference at Langley. The conferences were "a who's who of anybody involved in aeronautics in the United States," said Launius. "This interchange of information, of ideas, of concerns, becomes the critical component to fueling the research processes that led to some of the great breakthroughs of the early period before World War II." Among the notable attendees at the 1934 conference were Orville Wright, Charles Lindbergh and Howard Hughes.

A photo taken in Langley's Full Scale Tunnel during the 1934 Aircraft Engineering Research Conference at Langley. Orville Wright, Charles Lindbergh and Howard Hughes were in attendance. Credits: NASA

9. Following World War II, according to Launius, the NACA began to change its "model ever so slightly," making its first forays into public-private partnerships. Perhaps the earliest example of these partnerships was the Bell X-1, a joint project between the NACA, the U.S. Air Force and Bell Aircraft Company. The Bell X-1 became the first manned aircraft to break the sound barrier.

Thanks for the shoutout!

I will be taking a short photography break to attend to a few long-neglected projects. I’ll be back with bone-yard pictures in time for Halloween, or sooner if something interesting crops up first.

Until then, here’s a completely irrelevant parting shot of the vacuum chambers on a hypersonic aeroelasticity wind tunnel at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. Later, y'all. 

Space Launch System (SLS) Core Stage 101

We need the biggest rocket stage ever built for the bold missions in deep space that NASA's Space Launch System rocket will give us the capability to achieve. This infographic sums up everything you need to know about the SLS core stage, the 212-foot-tall stage that serves as the backbone of the most powerful rocket in the world. The core stage includes the liquid hydrogen tank and liquid oxygen tank that hold 733,000 gallons of propellant to power the stage’s four RS-25 engines needed for liftoff and the journey to Mars. 

Image Credit: NASA/MSFC

Engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, kicked off a series of nine drop tests of a representative Orion crew capsule withcrash test dummies inside to understand what the spacecraft and astronauts may experience when landing in the Pacific Ocean after deep-space missions. The high-fidelity capsule, coupled with the heat shield from Orion’s first flight in space, was hoisted approximately 16 feet above the water and vertically dropped into Langley’s 20-foot-deep Hydro Impact Basin. The crash test dummies were instrumented to provide data and secured inside the capsule to help provide information engineers need to ensure astronauts will be protected from injury during splashdown. Each test in the series simulates different scenarios for Orion’s parachute-assisted landings, wind conditions, velocities and wave heights the spacecraft may experience when touching down in the ocean.

The Future of Monitoring Air Quality from Space

TEMPO’s measurements from geostationary orbit (GEO) will create a revolutionary dataset that provides understanding and improves prediction of air quality (AQ) and climate forcing.

The KORUS-AQ airborne science experiment taking to the field in South Korea this spring is part of a long-term, international project to take air quality observations from space to the next level and better inform decisions on how to protect the air we breathe.

Before a new generation of satellite sensors settle into orbit, field missions like KORUS-AQ provide opportunities to test and improve the instruments using simulators that measure above and below aircraft, while helping to infer what people breathe at the surface.

These geostationary instruments will make up a northern hemisphere air quality constellation to analyze their respective regions.Credits: Image Courtesy of Andreas Richter (University of Bremen) and Jhoon Kim (Yonsei University)

“We want to move beyond forecasting air pollution, we want to influence strategies to improve it,” said Jim Crawford, a lead scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “This is where satellite observations can play an important role.”

Existing low Earth orbit (LEO) instruments have established the benefit of space-based views of air pollution. From space, large areas can be viewed consistently, whereas from the ground only discrete (often single) points can be measured. As Dave Flittner, TEMPO project scientist, explains, a geostationary (GEO) air-quality constellation can accurately track the import and export of air pollution as it is transported by large-scale weather patterns.

TEMPO, or Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, is one instrument on the road to improving air quality from space. According to Flittner, hardware has recently begun development and TEMPO is on track to be finished no later than fall of 2017, and available for launch on a to be selected commercial communications satellite.

For the first time, TEMPO will make accurate hourly daytime measurements of tropospheric pollutants (specifically ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, formaldehyde, and aerosols) with high resolution over the U.S., Canada and Mexico. With help from related international missions, these observations provide a complete picture of pollution sources in the northern hemisphere and how they influence air quality from local to global scales.

These geostationary instruments will make up a northern hemisphere air quality constellation to analyze their respective regions.

Credits: Image Courtesy of Andreas Richter (University of Bremen) and Jhoon Kim (Yonsei University)

About 22,000 miles above the equator, the Korean Aerospace Research Institute’s GEMS (The Geostationary Environmental Monitoring Spectrometer), the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-4/UVN, and NASA’s TEMPO, will maintain their positions in orbit as the Earth rotates, covering a majority of the area from East Asia through greater North America and Europe. Together, these instruments will make up a northern hemisphere air quality constellation.. All three of these instruments analyze the same pollutant concentrations in their respective region, from the morning to evening.

Another critical part of the global air quality constellation are the LEO instruments, such as TROPOMI (a.k.a. Sentinel-5P), which will launch in late 2016 and provide a common reference for the three GEO sensors, allowing for a more accurate assessment of air quality within each region. 

Denise Lineberry

NASA Langley Research Center

Neil Armstrong at the Lunar Landing Research Facility at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA

February 12, 1969 (5 months, 4 days before the launch of the Apollo 11 Spacecraft)

@nasa @nasahistory

NASA Crash-Test Dummies Make A Splash Landing

Engineers drop a NASA’s Orion Spacecraft test capsule with crash-test dummies inside into 20-foot-deep Hydro Impact Basin to simulate what the spacecraft may experience when splashing down in the Pacific Ocean after deep-space missions.

More: http://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/nasa-crash-test-dummies-suit-up-for-action

This is where they 3D print cool pieces that are needed for the ISS! They use cool carbon fiber materials to make the final product look smooth and flawless. They are also 3D printing that payload attachment fitting for the SLS Block 1B rocket!! I took a video of it actually printing so be on the lookout for that!