SPACE: WHERE ARE WE GOING? : TWEETUP TO CELEBRATE 1ST AMERICAN TO ORBIT EARTH

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

FIRST AMERICAN IN ORBIT, JOHN GLENN, TO HOST 50TH ANNIVERSARY WITH A TWEETUP

“CLEVELAND -- NASA's Glenn Research Center (GRC) in Cleveland will host
a special event on March 2 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of John
Glenn's first orbital flight by an American. NASA also will invite
100 people for a behind-the-scenes Tweetup at GRC in advance of the
celebration event.

The Tweetup activities begin at 7:30 a.m. EST with a tour of Glenn's
world-class flight research and ground test facilities that support
aeronautics and space exploration. Participants will speak with
scientists and engineers about technologies being investigated and
developed.

Following the tours, the Tweetup will move to downtown Cleveland for
the Glenn tribute event. "Celebrating John Glenn's Legacy: 50 years
of Americans in Orbit," will be held at 1 p.m. at Cleveland State
University's Wolstein Center. The program will include a video
tribute and remarks by Glenn and agency and political officials.
Tweetup participants also will meet astronaut Greg "Box" Johnson and
other special guests.

On March 1, 1999, the Lewis Research Center was officially renamed the
NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field in recognition of
Glenn's contributions to science, space and the State of Ohio. As one
of the original seven Mercury astronauts, Glenn trained in 1960 at
Lewis in the Multiple Axis Space Test Inertia Facility.

Today, the center's research and technology development work focuses
on air-breathing propulsion; communications; in-space propulsion and
cryogenic fluids management; power, energy storage and conversion;
materials and structures for extreme environments; and physical
sciences and biomedical technologies in space.

Tweetup registration opens at noon on Friday, Feb. 3, and closes at
noon on Monday, Feb. 6. NASA will select 100 total participants,
including Twitter followers and their guests, by lottery from those
who register online. Because Glenn is a government facility with
restricted access, the event is open only to U.S. citizens and legal
permanent residents.

For more NASA Tweetup information and to sign up, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/tweetup"

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