National Space Society adds four to leadership team

April 24, 2013 TopSpacer

An announcement from the National Space Society:

National Space Society Adds to its Leadership Team

Washington, DC — April 24, 2013 — The National Space Society announces the selection of four new additions to its leadership team: Dr. Stanley G. Rosen to the newly created position of Vice Chairman of the Society’s Board of Directors, Bruce Pittman as Senior Vice President and Senior Operating Officer, Dr. Paul Werbos as Executive Vice President and Chair of the Policy Committee, and Craig Andrew Max IV as Assistant Secretary.

In announcing the appointments, Kirby Ikin, Chairman of the Board welcomed the experience these officers will bring to the Society, stating “The appointments will enable NSS to operate more efficiently and be better able to carry out its mission of providing grass roots support for space exploration, space settlement, and utilization of space resources down on Earth.”

Dr. Rosen, whose special role will be to coordinate the efforts of NSS senior leaders, is currently a Professor at the Department of Defense’s Defense Acquisition University. Formerly be was a consultant with Toffler Associates, Director of Strategic Development and Integration for Boeing Satellite Systems, and Strategic Planning Director for the Hughes Defense Systems and Hughes Space and Communications organizations. His previous work included scientific, engineering, program management, and strategy and policy development positions with the U.S. Air Force, and time on the staff of the Committee on Science and Astronautics of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Bruce Pittman currently serves as Director of Flight Projects and Chief System Engineer at the Space Portal at NASA Ames Research Center. In 2011, NASA awarded him the Exceptional Public Service Medal for “exceptional leadership in pioneering the development of commercial space for public benefit.” He was a founder and member of the startup team in a number of early growth companies including Space Hab, Kistler Aerospace, New Focus, Product Factory, Prometheus II Ltd., and Industrial Sound and Motion. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Space Investment Summit Coalition.

Dr. Werbos is the Program Director in the Office of Emerging Frontiers in Research & Innovation at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Since 1988, he has also led research in a variety of other NSF areas, including fuel cell and electric vehicles, emerging technologies, cyber systems, and the sustainability part of NSF Interdisciplinary Research. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE), and the International Neural Network Society (INNS). He is a winner of the IEEE’s Neural Networks Pioneer Award and of the INNS’s 2011 Hebb Award. He is also serving on boards of NSS, Millennium Project, Lifeboat Foundation, and IEEE Energy Policy Committee.

Craig Max is an attorney with the law firm of Vanderpool, Frostick & Nishanian, P.C., with offices in Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Woodbridge,Virginia. Specializing in tax planning, including working with nonprofits, he also is a Certified Public Accountant and Board-certified as a Trust and Estate Practitioner by the International Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners. He has been designated a Fellow of the American Academy of Financial Management and named a Top Attorney by Northern Virginia magazine; a SmartCPA and a LegalElite by SmartCEO magazine; and a SmartCPA and a Legal Elite by Virginia Business magazine. He is the author of numerous legal and accounting publications and holds an appointment as an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland.

Fuller biographies of these and other NSS officers may be found on the NSS website www.nss.org/about/leadership.html.

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About the National Space Society:
NSS is an independent, educational, membership, non-profit organization dedicated to the creation of a spacefaring civilization. NSS is widely acknowledged as the preeminent citizen’s voice on space, with over 8,000 members and supporters, and over 50 chapters in the United States and around the world. The Society publishes Ad Astra magazine, an award-winning periodical chronicling the most important developments in space. To learn more, visit www.nss.org.

Multiple media, Solar Science

Three years of the Sun in four minutes

April 24, 2013 TopSpacer

NASA releases a video showing a time lapse sequence of solar images taken over three years by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). There are 2 images per day:

Three Years of SDO Images

NASA 04.22.13: In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun’s rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle. This video shows those three years of the sun at a pace of two images per day.

SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. The images shown here are based on a wavelength of 171 angstroms, which is in the extreme ultraviolet range and shows solar material at around 600,000 kelvins (about 1.08 million F). In this wavelength it is easy to see the sun’s 25-day rotation as well as how solar activity has increased over three years.

During the course of the video, the sun subtly increases and decreases in apparent size. This is because the distance between the SDO spacecraft and the sun varies over time. The image is, however, remarkably consistent and stable despite the fact that SDO orbits Earth at 6,876 mph and Earth orbits the sun at 67,062 mph.

Such stability is crucial for scientists, who use SDO to learn more about our closest star. These images have regularly caught solar flares and coronal mass ejections in the act, types of space weather that can send radiation and solar material toward Earth and interfere with satellites in space. SDO’s glimpses into the violent dance on the sun help scientists understand what causes these giant explosions — with the hopes of some day improving our ability to predict this space weather.

composite SDO image of sun from April 2012-April 2013

This image is a composite of 25 separate images spanning the period of April 16, 2012, to April 15, 2013. It uses the SDO AIA wavelength of 171 angstroms and reveals the zones on the sun where active regions are most common during this part of the solar cycle.

Space Music, Space Radio, Space Science

OK Go go after the music in the Aurora Borealis

April 24, 2013 TopSpacer

The band OK Go and a group of other artists went to northern Sweden to observe and incorporate the Aurora Borealis into a music video: OK Go and Collaborators Capture the ‘Sound’ of the Northern Lights – Wired Design/Wired.com.

This included radio sounds created by the Aurora. For more about such “natural radio music”, see the HobbySpace Natural Space Radio and Natural Space Music sections, which include links to Stephen McGreevy (mentioned in the article) and others involved in such activities.