Posted on: 5:42 pm, March 4, 2014, by Matt Kroschel, updated on: 10:46pm, March 4, 2014

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (WHNT) Leaders at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center say President Obamas proposed 2015 budget will keep funding about the same as the previous year.

During a media briefing Tuesday Marshall Director Patrick Scheuermann said he was happy with the budget and what it means for the North Alabama NASA operation.

This is a good budget for Marshall Space Flight Center and it provides stability for our workforce, programs and projects, Scheuermann said.

Patrick Scheuermann (Photo: NASA)

Under the budget Marshall Space Flight Center will receive a$2.15 billion the share of the presidents $17.5 billion NASA budget.

BY THE NUMBERS:

$1.4 billion the amount the center will spend developing the heavy-lift rocket called the Space Launch System next year. Its also consistent with last year, Scheuermann said.

$193 million the amount budgeted for space operations at Marshall. The big item here is the Payload Operations Center where Marshall manages all science experiments aboard the International Space Station. Thats a 24/7/365 operation.

$41 million the amount budgeted for Marshalls technology work including its centennial challenges and similar programs.

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NASAs 2015 Budget Would Keep Staffing Levels Flat, Provide Stability

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

4-Mar-2014

Contact: Laura Niles Laura.E.Niles@nasa.gov 281-244-7069 NASA/Johnson Space Center

Keeping a spare on hand simply makes sense. Just as drivers keep spare tires on hand to replace a flat or blowout, NASA routinely maintains "spares," too. These flight hardware backups allow NASA to seamlessly continue work in the unlikely event something goes down for a repair. When projects end, these handy spares can sometimes find second lives in new areas for use.

Researchers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., developed a sophisticated piece of flight hardware called a Lightning Imaging Sensor (LIS) to detect and locate lightning over the tropical region of the globe. Launched into space in 1997 as part of NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), the sensor undertook a three-year baseline mission, delivering data used to improve weather forecasts. It continues to operate successfully aboard the TRMM satellite today.

The team that created this hardware in the mid-1990s built a spare -- and now that second unit is stepping up to contribute, as well. The sensor is scheduled to launch on a Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) rocket to the International Space Station in February 2016. Once mounted to the station, it will serve a two-year baseline mission as part of a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Space Test Program (STP)-H5 science and technology development payload. STP-H5 is integrated and flown under the management and direction of the DoD's STP.

NASA selected the LIS spare hardware to fly to the space station in order to take advantage of the orbiting laboratory's high inclination. This vantage point gives the sensor the ability to "look" farther towards Earth's poles than the original LIS can aboard the TRMM satellite. Once installed, the sensor will monitor global lightning for Earth science studies, provide cross-sensor calibration and validation with other space-borne instruments, and ground-based lightning networks. LIS will also supply real-time lightning data over data-sparse regions, such as oceans, to support operational weather forecasting and warning.

"Only LIS globally detects all in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning -- what we call total lightning -- during both day and night," said Richard Blakeslee, LIS project scientist at Marshall. "As previously demonstrated by the TRMM mission, better understanding lightning and its connections to weather and related phenomena can provide unique and affordable gap-filling information to a variety of science disciplines including weather, climate, atmospheric chemistry and lightning physics."

LIS measures the amount, rate and radiant energy of global lightning, providing storm-scale resolution, millisecond timing, and high, uniform-detection efficiency -- and it does this without land-ocean bias.

The sensor consists of an optical imager enhanced to locate and detect lightning from thunderstorms within its 400-by-400-mile field-of-view on the Earth's surface. The station travels more than 17,000 mph as it orbits our planet, allowing the LIS to observe a point on the Earth, or a cloud, for almost 90 seconds as it passes overhead. Despite this brief viewing duration, it is long enough to estimate the lightning-flashing rate of most storms.

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Space Station sensor to capture 'striking' lightning data