Transcript: This Week at NASA, March 11 - 17
03.22.06
PLAN AHEAD - JSC
Space Shuttle Discovery's next mission has a new launch planning window. STS-121 is now targeted to launch between July first and 19th. The new window gives the agency time to do additional engineering work and analysis to ensure a safe flight for Discovery and its crew.
Wayne Hale, Space Shuttle Program Manager SOT: "...The decision to target July followed a two-day meeting on the external fuel tank's engine cutoff, or ECO, sensors. The sensors indicate whether the tank still has fuel during liftoff. During testing, one of the four ECO sensors had a slightly different reading than is expected. Shuttle officials have decided they will remove and replace all four liquid hydrogen sensors."
FIRE AND ICE - JSC
Comet particles captured by the Stardust spacecraft have provided NASA scientists with some real surprises.
Stardust principal investigator, Donald Brownlee, SOT : “…Remarkably enough we have found fire and ice. We have found samples in the coldest part of the solar system, we’ve found samples that formed in extremely high temperatures; so the hottest samples in the coldest place.
The samples taken from comet Wild 2 in January of 2004 and returned to Earth last January are a mixture of materials formed not only at places in the coldest part of our solar system, as expected, but also at high temperatures very near the early sun.
Comets, scientists now say, may not be as simple as the clouds of ice, dust and gases they were thought to comprise; rather, they may be diverse with complex and varied histories. Samples from Stardust have been distributed to about 150 scientists around the world for study.
DOUBLE HELIX – JPL
Using observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers report an unprecedented elongated double helix nebula near the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The part of the nebula the astronomers observed in the infrared stretches 80 light years in length. The double helix nebula is approximately 300 light years from the enormous black hole at the Milky Way's center.
BABY PICTURE – GSFC
Scientists peering back to the oldest light in the universe have new evidence of what happened within its first trillionth of a second, when the universe suddenly grew from submicroscopic to astronomical size in far less than a wink of the eye. The W-MAP spacecraft, or Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, spins like a top to capture light from every part of the sky. It produced this picture of the earliest light in the universe. Encoded in these patterns is information about the fundamental properties of the early Universe. Included is new evidence to support the concept of inflation, which suggests the universe expanded many trillion times its size in a small fraction of a second.
STELLAR SMOKE - JPL
Where there's smoke, there's fire – even in outer space. This movie compares a visible-light view of the "Cigar" galaxy to a new infrared image captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. In the infrared, the fiery hot stars of Cigar, also known as Messier 82, appear to be blowing out giant billows of smoky dust.
GRANDEST CANYON – JPL
A new view of the biggest canyon in the solar system offers scientists and the public an online resource for exploring it in detail. This canyon system on Mars, named Valles Marineris, or Mariner Valley, stretches as far as the distance from California to New York, about 25-hundred miles. Steep walls nearly as high as Mount Everest, about 25,000 feet, give way to numerous side canyons, possibly carved by water. In some places, walls have shed massive landslides spilling far out onto the canyon floor. This new view of our grandest canyon was developed by merging hundreds of photos from NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter.
For a virtual flight through Mariner Valley, log onto www.nasa.gov/mars
STENNIS DAY - SSC
SOT: "...Today is really all about getting up here in the Capital and thanking our state legislatures for all the support we've had at Stennis."
Stennis Space Center representatives and Astronaut Steve Frick met with members of Mississippi's legislature in Jackson as part of NASA Stennis Space Center Day. Exhibits highlighting Stennis's role in support of the Vision for Space Exploration were on display in the New Capitol Rotunda. Legislators were thanked for their support during the area's difficult recovery following Hurricane Katrina. Just two months after the deadly storm slammed the Gulf Coast and cost 25 percent of Stennis employees their homes, the center resumed its mission as America's largest rocket engine test complex.
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