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This Week at NASA | This Week @ NASA: A Festival of “First Lights”

Uploaded 09/24/2018

This Week @ NASA: A Festival of “First Lights”

Several NASA instruments see their first light … Another active week for our administrator … And discover just how much space is in our daily lives … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!

Festival of “First Lights” 

Instruments on three spacecraft recently captured their first imagery or scientific data – a milestone known as “first light”. The data include this image captured on Aug. 7 by our Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. It shows a wealth of stars and other objects in the southern sky, including systems previously known to have exoplanets.

This ultraviolet image of the Western Hemisphere was taken Sept. 11 by our Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, or GOLD instrument, onboard the SES-14 satellite. GOLD studies the Sun’s impact on our upper atmosphere, as well as the effects from terrestrial weather below.

And just over a month into its mission, our Parker Solar Probe has returned first-light data from each of its four instrument suites. The mission’s first close approach to the Sun will be in November 2018, but even now, the instruments are able to gather measurements of what is happening in the solar wind closer to Earth.

Administrator Bridenstine’s Activities

It was another busy week for our administrator, Jim Bridenstine. On Sept. 20, he accompanied First Daughter, Ivanka Trump on a visit to our Johnson Space Center in Houston. Along with center management and other dignitaries, they toured the International Space Station Flight Control Room, and the facility that houses mock-ups of our Orion spacecraft and other hardware used to help train astronauts for exploration missions to deep space destinations – including the Moon and Mars.

On Sept. 17, the administrator delivered a keynote address during the 2018 AIAA Space Forum in Orlando. He also joined five former NASA administrators on a panel to discuss the agency’s accomplishments in its first 60 years, and its goals for the immediate future and beyond.

NASA Administrator, Jim Bridenstine:
“We’re going forward to the Moon. We’re doing it in a way that’s never been done before. The key word being – ‘sustainably’. And Space Policy Directive-1 is absolutely clear on that.”

And on Sept. 18 and 19, Bridenstine visited our Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. While there, he met with employees and toured Glenn’s world-class facilities – including nearby Plum Brook Station, which houses the world’s largest and most powerful space environment simulation facilities.

New Interactive Website Traces Space Back to You

NASA Home & City is our new interactive website that lets you explore just how much NASA there is in your everyday life. The site features a virtual space in which users can discover NASA spinoffs. These spinoffs are common items and commercial products inspired by or improved by NASA technology originally developed for studying and exploring space. To explore the NASA Home & City site, go to homeandcity.nasa.gov.

That’s what’s up this week @NASA …

(c)2018 NASA | SCVTV
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