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NASA Transfers Shuttle Discovery to National Air and Space Museum

Focuses on Bold New Era of Space Exploration

Space Shuttle Rides a Jet to the Air and Space Museum

WASHINGTON, D.C. — NASA transferred space shuttle Discovery to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum during a ceremony Thursday, April 19, at the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, VA.

“Today, while we look back at Discovery’s amazing legacy, I also want to look forward to what she and the shuttle fleet helped to make possible,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “As NASA transfers the shuttle orbiters to museums across the country, we are embarked on an exciting new space exploration journey. Relying on American ingenuity and know-how, NASA is partnering with private industry to provide crew and cargo transportation to the International Space Station, while developing the most powerful rocket ever built to take the nation farther than ever before into the solar system.”

National Air and Space Museum Director, General John “Jack” Dailey said, “Discovery has distinguished itself as the champion of America’s shuttle fleet. In its new home, it will shine as an American icon, educating and inspiring people of all ages for generations to come. The Museum is committed to teaching and inspiring youngsters, so that they will climb the ladder of academic success and choose professions that will help America be competitive and successful in the world of tomorrow.”

In this new era of exploration, NASA will build the capabilities to send humans deeper into space than ever before. NASA is using the space station as a test bed and stepping stone for the journey ahead. The agency is changing the way it does business and fostering a commercial industry that will safely service low Earth orbit, so NASA can focus its energy and resources on sending astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and eventually to Mars in the 2030s.

The space station is the centerpiece of NASA’s human spaceflight activities in low Earth orbit. It is fully staffed with an international crew of six, and American astronauts will continue to live and work there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, as they have for more than 11 years. Part of the U.S. portion of the station has been designated as a national laboratory, and NASA is committed to using this unique resource for scientific research.

The station is testing exploration technologies such as autonomous refueling of spacecraft, advanced life support systems and human/robotic interfaces. Commercial companies are well on their way to providing cargo and crew flights to the station, allowing NASA to focus its attention on the next steps into our solar system.

For more information about NASA, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

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Special Picture Of Earth

Information:

Go here to view an image that explains how composite images like these are created: www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/6803619953

Responding to public demand, NASA scientists created a companion image to the wildly popular ‘Blue Marble’ released last week (January 25, 2012). www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/6760135001

The new image is a composite of six separate orbits taken on January 23, 2012 by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite. Both of these new ‘Blue Marble’ images are images taken by a new instrument flying aboard Suomi NPP, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS).

Compiled by NASA Goddard scientist Norman Kuring, this image has the perspective of a viewer looking down from 7,918 miles (about 12,742 kilometers) above the Earth’s surface from a viewpoint of 10 degrees South by 45 degrees East. The four vertical lines of ‘haze’ visible in this image shows the reflection of sunlight off the ocean, or ‘glint,’ that VIIRS captured as it orbited the globe. Suomi NPP is the result of a partnership between NASA, NOAA and the Department of Defense.

Credit: NASA/NOAA

For more information about Suomi NPP go to: www.nasa.gov/npp

NASA image use policy.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.

This infrared image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, showcases the Tadpole Nebula, a star-forming hub in the Auriga constellation about 12,000 light-years from Earth. As WISE scanned the sky, capturing this mosaic of stitched-together frames, it happened to catch an asteroid in our solar system passing by. The asteroid, called 1719 Jens, left tracks across the image. A second asteroid was also observed cruising by.

But that’s not all that WISE caught in this busy image — two natural satellites orbiting above WISE streak through the image, appearing as faint green trails. This Tadpole region is chock full of stars as young as only a million years old — infants in stellar terms — and masses over 10 times that of our sun. It is called the Tadpole nebula because the masses of hot, young stars are blasting out ultraviolet radiation that has etched the gas into two tadpole-shaped pillars, called Sim 129 and Sim 130. These “tadpoles” appear as the yellow squiggles near the center of the frame. The knotted regions at their heads are likely to contain new young stars. WISE’s infrared vision is helping to ferret out hidden stars such as these.

The 1719 Jens asteroid, discovered in 1950, orbits in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The space rock, which has a diameter of 19 kilometers (12 miles), rotates every 5.9 hours and orbits the sun every 4.3 years.

Twenty-five frames of the region, taken at all four of the wavelengths detected by WISE, were combined into this one image. The space telescope caught 1719 Jens in 11 successive frames. Infrared light of 3.4 microns is color-coded blue: 4.6-micron light is cyan; 12-micron-light is green; and 22-micron light is red.

WISE is an all-sky survey, snapping pictures of the whole sky, including everything from asteroids to stars to powerful, distant galaxies.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Astroid Traveling Through Space

WASHINGTON, DC — Recent research aboard the space shuttle is giving scientists a better understanding of how infectious disease occurs in space and could someday improve astronaut health and provide novel treatments for people on Earth.

“With our space-based research efforts, including the International Space Station, we are not only continuing our human presence in space, but we are engaged in science that can make a real difference in people’s lives here on Earth,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “NASA’s leadership in human spaceflight allows us to conduct innovative and ground-breaking science that reveals the unknown and unlocks the mysteries of how disease-causing agents work.”

The research involves an opportunistic pathogen known as Pseudomonas aeruginosa, the same bacterium that caused astronaut Fred Haise to become sick during the Apollo 13 mission to the moon in 1970.

Scientists studying the bacterium aboard the shuttle hope to unlock the mysteries of how disease-causing agents work. They believe the research can lead to advanced vaccines and therapies to better fight infections. The findings are based on flight experiments with microbial pathogens on NASA shuttle missions to the International Space Station and appear in a recent edition of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

“For the first time, we’re able to see that two very different species of bacteria – Salmonella and Pseudomonas – share the same basic regulating mechanism, or master control switch, that micro-manages many of the microbes’ responses to the spaceflight environment,” said Cheryl Nickerson, associate professor at the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology, the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University (ASU) in Tempe. “We have shown that spaceflight affects common regulators in both bacteria that invariably cause disease in healthy individuals [Salmonella] and those that cause disease only in people with compromised immune systems [Pseudomonas].”

By studying the global gene expression patterns in bacterial pathogens like Pseudomonas and Salmonella, Nickerson’s team learned more about how they react to reduced gravity.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa can coexist as a benign microbe in healthy individuals, but poses a serious threat to people with compromised immune systems. It is the leading cause of death for those suffering from cystic fibrosis and is a serious risk to burn victims. However, a high enough dosage of Salmonella typhimurium always will cause disease, even in healthy individuals.

During the initial study in 2006, two bacterial pathogens, Salmonella typhimurium and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and one fungal pathogen, Candida albicans, were launched to the station aboard shuttles. They were allowed to grow in appropriately contained vessels for several days. Nickerson’s team was the first to evaluate global gene and protein expression (how the bacteria react at the molecular level) and virulence changes in microbes in response to reduced gravity.

“We discovered that aspects of the environment that microbes encountered during spaceflight appeared to mimic key conditions that pathogens normally encounter in our bodies during the natural course of infection, particularly in the respiratory system, gastrointestinal system and urogenital tract,” Nickerson said. NASA’s Advanced Capabilities Division Director, Benjamin Neumann added that, “This means that in addition to safeguarding future space travelers, such research may aid the quest for better therapeutics against pathogens here on Earth.”

The initial study and follow-on space experiments show that spaceflight creates a low fluid shear environment, where liquids exert little force as they flow over the surface of cells. The low fluid shear environment of spaceflight affects the molecular genetic regulators that can make microbes more infectious. These same regulators might function in a similar way to regulate microbial virulence during the course of infection in the human body.

“We have now shown that spaceflight conditions modified molecular pathways that are known to be involved in the virulence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa,” said Aurelie Crabbe, a researcher in Dr. Nickerson’s lab at ASU and the lead author of the paper. “Future work will establish whether Pseudomonas also exhibits increased virulence following spaceflight as did Salmonella.”

NASA’s Fundamental Space Biology Program sponsored and funded the research conducted by Crabbe and Nickerson along with their colleagues at the Biodesign Institute at ASU. They collaborated with the University of Colorado School of Medicine, University of Arizona, Belgian Nuclear Research Center, Villanova University, Tulane University, Affymetrix Inc, and NASA scientists.

For an abstract of the journal article on this research, visit:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21169425

For more information about NASA programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

The full moon is seen as it rises near the Lincoln Memorial

The full moon is called a super perigee moon since it is at its closest to Earth in 2011. The last full moon so big and close to Earth occurred in March 1993.