SPACE: WHERE ARE WE GOING? : NASA PARTNERS WITH INDUSTRY TO FURTHER COMPOSITE MATERIALS RESEARCH

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

NASA PARTNERS WITH INDUSTRY TO FURTHER COMPOSITE MATERIALS RESEARCH

FROM: NASA

NASA Announces Advanced Composite Research Partnership
NASA has selected six companies from five U.S. states to participate in a government-and-industry partnership to advance composite materials research and certification.

The companies are:
• Bell Helicopter Textron Inc. of Fort Worth, Texas
• GE Aviation of Cincinnati
• Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company of Palmdale, Calif.
• Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems of Redondo Beach, Calif.
• Boeing Research & Technology of St. Louis
• United Technologies Corporation and subsidiary Pratt & Whitney of Hartford, Conn.

They were selected from 20 proposals submitted by teams from industry and academia in response to a call from the Advanced Composites Project, which is part of NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate's Integrated Systems Research Program. The project sought proposals to reduce the time for development, verification and regulatory acceptance of new composite materials and structures.

A panel of experts from NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory reviewed the submissions and assessed them according to specific criteria. The six firms were chosen for their technical expertise, willingness and ability to share in costs, certification experience with government agencies, focused technology areas and partnership histories.
The first task for the partners is to develop articles of collaboration and establish how the alliance will work and how companies may be added in the future.

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STAR FLASH

What caused this outburst of V838 Mon? For reasons unknown, star V838 Mon's outer surface suddenly greatly expanded with the result that it became the brightest star in the entire Milky Way Galaxy in January 2002. Then, just as suddenly, it faded. A stellar flash like this had never been seen before -- supernovas and novas expel matter out into space. Although the V838 Mon flash appears to expel material into space, what is seen in the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope is actually an outwardly moving light echo of the bright flash. In a light echo, light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant rings in the complex array of ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of the unicorn (Monoceros), while the light echo above spans about six light years in diameter. Image Credit: NASA, ESA

THE SPIDERWEB GALAXY

Looking like a spider's web swirled into a spiral, Galaxy IC 342 presents its delicate pattern of dust in this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Seen in infrared light, faint starlight gives way to the glowing bright patterns of dust found throughout the galaxy's disk. At a distance of about 10 million light-years, IC 342 is relatively close by galactic standards, however our vantage point places it directly behind the disk of our own Milky Way. The intervening dust makes it difficult to see in visible light, but infrared light penetrates this veil easily. IC 342 belongs to the same group as its even more obscured galactic neighbor, Maffei 2. IC 342 is nearly face-on to our view, giving a clear, top-down view of the structure of its disk. It has a low surface brightness compared to other spirals, indicating a lower density of stars (seen here as a blue haze). Its dust structures show up much more vividly (red). Blue dots are stars closer to us, in our own Milky Way. New stars are forming in the disk at a healthy rate. The very center glows especially brightly in the infrared, highlighting an enormous burst of star formation occurring in this tiny region. To either side of the center, a small bar of dust and gas is helping to fuel this central star formation. Data from Spitzer's infrared array camera are shown in blue (3.6 microns), green (4.5 microns) and red (5.8 and 8.0 microns). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

JUMPING TO WARP SPEED

This cockpit view of a hypothetical spacecraft traveling at eight-tenths the speed of light shows the visual distortions that would be experienced at such high speeds. The star field is actually being wrapped toward the front of the craft in addition to being significantly blue-shifted. NASA Glenn leads the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, NASA's primary effort to produce near-term, credible, and measurable progress toward the technology breakthroughs needed to revolutionize space travel and enable interstellar voyages. NASA Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio.

OBSERVATION FROM THE SPACE STATION