An interesting discussion of combustion research in microgravity:
Caption:
Public Affairs Officer Lori Meggs at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama talks about a “cool” flames experiment in space. Meggs speaks to Vedha Nayagam, co-investigator for the FLEX-2 combustion experiment.
You never want to hear about a fire in space, but for this experiment, that’s exactly what had to happen. The FLEX-2 experiment burned different types of fuel droplets and showed us how flames behave without gravity, so that we may learn better ways to extinguish flames in space — information that could lead to improved environmentally friendly fuels on Earth.
NASA will participate in the fifth annual Zero Robotics SPHERES Challenge Friday, Jan. 17, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus in Cambridge, Mass.
The event will be broadcast live on NASA Television beginning at 7:30 a.m. EST.
The agency will join in the event with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, MIT, the European Space Agency, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, IT consulting firm Appirio, and high school student teams from the United States and abroad.
For the competition, NASA will upload software developed by high school students onto bowling ball-sized spherical satellites called Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES, which are currently aboard the International Space Station. From there, space station Expedition 38 Commander Oleg Kotov and Flight Engineer Richard Mastracchio will command the satellites to execute the teams’ flight program.
During a simulated mission, the teams will complete a special challenge called CosmoSPHERES, a competition in which students must program their satellites to alter a fictional comet’s earthbound trajectory.
A video of two SPHERES docking
Student finalists will be able to see their flight program live on the televised finals, where NASA’s Associate Administrator for Science, John Grunsfeld, and retired NASA astronauts Gregory Chamitoff, Gregory Johnson and Barbara Morgan will make a special appearance. The team with the best software performance over several rounds of the competition will win the challenge. The winning team will receive certificates and a SPHERES flight patch flown aboard the space station.
In addition to their use in this competition, SPHERES satellites are used on the space station to conduct formation flight maneuvers for spacecraft guidance navigation, control and docking. The three satellites that make up SPHERES fly in formation inside the space station’s cabin. The satellites provide opportunities to affordably test a wide range of hardware and software.
NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., operates and maintains the SPHERES National Laboratory Facility aboard the space station.
Do you love art? Love the reefs? Then please read on.
For this year’s Science without Borders® Challenge, we are asking high school students around the world to use their creativity and inspiration to design poster art following the theme ‘Protect Our Coral Reefs.’ The student’s artwork will portray an action that slows down the degradation of coral reefs.
The Challenge was created to get students and teachers more involved and interested in ocean conservation through various forms of art. Last year’s contest was a video competition themed ‘How are we connected to the oceans?’ It was the first Challenge held by the Foundation.
The Foundation hopes that this contest will continue to inspire youth to become stewards of the environment in order to preserve, protect, and restore the world’s oceans, and aquatic resources – the overarching theme of the Foundation.
Here is a video made by last year’s winner of the competition, which asked high school students to create a video to answer “the question, how are we all connected to the oceans? ” :
The BBC Two Stargazing LIVE program has been urging its viewers to participate in the project SpaceWarps, which is one of several citizen science projects sponsored by the Zooniverse organization. In SpaceWarps participants examine celestial images in search of the very rare cases where the gravitational effects of a distant galaxy can magnify the image of an even more distant galaxy directly behind it. This lensing effect was predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
BBC Stargazing Live 2014 has been asking people to visit the Zooniverse’s Space Warps site to identify gravitational lenses: extremely rare events caused by one galaxy passing in front of another (very distant) galaxy. Tens of thousands of you have taken part and classified more than 6.5 million images.
Your classifications have already led to the discovery of more than 50 potential gravitational lenses! Amongst them are several beautiful and interesting discoveries. You can see a few of our favourite candidates above. For Stargazing Live’s third and final show we have focussed on the spectacular red arc/ring shown below, it has been nicknamed 9io9 by the team right now, because of it’s Zooniverse ID. You can see more of what our volunteers are saying about it here on Talk.
