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944 Spec – 2014 NASA Eastern States Championship Race – Road Atlanta – Video

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944 Spec - 2014 NASA Eastern States Championship Race - Road Atlanta
45 minute scheduled 944 Spec Championship sprint race at the National Auto Sport Association Eastern States Championships hosted at Road Atlanta. Started on the pole in a 4 way tie from the...

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944 Spec - 2014 NASA Eastern States Championship Race - Road Atlanta - Video

What Do Astronauts Do Once They Leave NASA?

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Answer by Robert Frost, Trained NASA, ESA, JAXA, CSA, and RSA astronauts for the International Space Station program, on Quora,

The NASA astronaut corps is a mix of civilians and active duty military officers, so what happens when they leave first depends on which of those camps they fit into.

If they are active duty military, and do not retire from the military prior to leaving their astronaut position at NASA, they will go on to whatever assignment the military wishes to give them. For example, Susan Helms was a member of the Expedition 2 crew. She returned to Earth in August 2001. By 2002, she had completed her post-flight duties such as debriefs and PAO activities and she decided to leave the astronaut corps. At that time, she was a Colonel in the US Air Force. The Air Force assigned her to become a division chief at the US Space Command in Colorado. Since then, she has become a Lieutenant General and is commander, 14th Air Force.

English: Susan Helms is a United States Air Force Major General and a former NASA astronaut. This image is the most recent published by the U.S. Air Force, following her promotion to Major General (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Astronauts that are not active duty military at the time of retirement from the Astronaut office have a tendency to move on to executive positions in the aerospace industry. Commercial space companies often hire astronauts for the vast experience and network of contacts that they can provide. For example, Garrett Reisman left NASA and became the Program Manager for SpaceXs Dragon-Falcon 9 crew vehicle. His AsCan classmate Chris Ferguson left NASA and is now Garretts competitor, as he is the Director of Crew and Mission Operations for Boeing's Boeing's Commercial Crew Program.

English: NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, STS-132 mission specialist, is pictured in the Cupola of the International Space Station while space shuttle Atlantis remains docked with the station. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gregory H Johnson is an example of an astronaut that was active military, but retired from the military while still an astronaut. He retired from the Air Force in 2009, but stayed with NASA until this month. In September, he will become the Executive Director for the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS). CASIS is a nonprofit that is responsible for managing payload science utilization of the ISS ISS.

Some astronauts do indeed go into politics. The most famous is, of course, John Glenn. Glenn went on to be a senator for the state of Ohio for 25 years. He also ran for President in 1984. Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt became a senator for New Mexico. Most recently, Jose Hernandez left NASA in 2011 to run for a House of Representatives seat in his home state of California.

John Herschel Glenn Jr. (born July 18, 1921, in Cambridge, Ohio,) is a former American astronaut, Marine Corps fighter pilot, and United States Senator. He was the third American to fly in space and the first American to orbit the earth. This photo for his second space flight on October 29, 1998, on Space Shuttle Discoverys STS-95. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Astronauts are overachievers and some astronauts go on to very eclectic things. One of the most interesting astronauts is Story Musgrave. He was an active astronaut for over 30 years and holds the distinction of being the only astronaut to fly on all five space shuttles. While he was an astronaut, he obtained 7 graduate degrees math, computers, chemistry, medicine, physiology, literature, and psychology. In his spare time, he was a trauma surgeon, pilot, and parachutist. Today he operates a palm farm in Florida, a production company in Australia, and a sculpture company in California. He is a landscape architect. He has worked for Disneys Imagineering team as a concept artist. He teaches design at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. And hes a public speaker with 20 honorary doctorates.

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What Do Astronauts Do Once They Leave NASA?

NASA's Opportunity to Lose Total Recall, Gain Spotless Mind

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The United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration next month will reformat the flash memory of the Mars exploration rover Opportunity.

Opportunity's been undergoing computer resets with increasing frequency -- it had 12 in August alone.

Recovery from each of the resets takes one to two days, which means the rover was out of action for most of the month.

Reformatting clears the flash memory. It also helps identify bad cells and flag them to be avoided.

Prior to the reformat, NASA will download to Earth all useful data remaining in the flash memory.

It also plans to switch the rover to an operating mode that does not use flash memory. Plus, it will restructure the rover's communication sessions to use a slower data rate, which may add resilience in case the system resets during preparatory activities.

NASA last month activated a new communication table on Opportunity, ensuring practicable communications for the next few weeks.

The frequent resets caused problems with X-Band transmissions, so NASA last week sent a real-time command to convert the next several X-band passes to use the low-gain antenna.

NASA also sequenced a checksum test of the lower portion of flash to get data on the physical health of the flash memory chips in general.

The next step is to boot the rover into a mode that does not use the flash file system. That will let NASA confirm its health independently. The rover currently is power-positive with a healthy energy balance, and it is thermally stable and communicative -- both over X-Band with the Deep Space Network, and through UHF relays with the orbiters.

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NASA's Opportunity to Lose Total Recall, Gain Spotless Mind

NASA Planetary Senior Review Panel Report

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Original report

Director, Planetary Science Division

Science Mission Directorate

NASA Headquarters

300 E Street SW

Washington, DC 20546

Dear Dr. Green:

The NASA Planetary Senior Review panel met at the Sheraton Columbia Town Center Hotel in Maryland on 14-15 May 2014 to discuss extended missions for Cassini and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). A second panel of essentially different personnel (apart from the Chair and one other) met at the Embassy Suites Hotel Baltimore at BWI on 20-22 May 2014 to discuss five Mars missions: Mars Exploration Rover (MER - Opportunity), Mars Odyssey (ODY), Mars Express (MEX), Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL - Curiosity). All extended missions were rated higher than "Good", some after adjustments to scope, as it was recognized that they continue to add important new data and observations for our understanding of Solar System bodies and processes. The science value (or science per dollar) of the extended missions exceeds the science gain from any planned mission, and all have important strengths. That is, they all represent added value to the Planetary Science Division and the American taxpayer because they are essentially new missions without the development and launch costs. Therefore, this Senior Review examined each proposal with regard to the "new science" that was being proposed. In addition, we also examined previous productivity, the value of long-term observations, as well as how to improve efficiencies and identify the optimal use of limited funding because of the severe budgetary pressures over the years covering the extended missions. The hard task of achieving the best value for the funding available requires iteration with the projects, programmatic considerations, and input from the scientific community. The Senior Review represents the most effective and efficient way of providing scientific community input.

Each spacecraft contained formidable capabilities when they began their prime mission and this Senior Review commends the high quality of scientific work already achieved by all seven missions. The harsh environment of space, however, has produced a degradation of these capabilities as each mission proceeds. This makes enabling new science more difficult, but follow up observations on the discoveries that these missions have already made bring added value to planetary science. Therefore, every effort should be made to preserve at some level the capabilities that produce new and groundbreaking science.

The panel treated each mission in a similar way, voting on the extended mission as proposed for the Guideline budget. If there was discussion about other proposed budgets (Overguide, Optimal and Descope) and the panel felt that these were more appropriate, they were also voted upon. If the panel thought that a different descope plan was appropriate, this was also voted on. Each extended mission proposal was treated on its own merits and there was no comparison between the proposals the Senior Review panel was asked to examine.

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NASA Planetary Senior Review Panel Report

The story behind what could be NASA's space taxi

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By Diane Tennant The Virginian-Pilot September 3, 2014

HAMPTON

One of the crafts vying to be NASA's new commercial "space taxi" has a story that reads like a spy thriller - because it is.

The plot twists through Langley Research Center to Russia to Australia to the CIA, back to Langley and on to the Sierra Nevada Corp., a private company that hopes its Dream Chaser design will be the country's next manned spacecraft.

NASA will soon choose the design for the craft that will ferry astronauts to and from Earth orbit and the International Space Station, ending America's reliance on Russia for that service.

Three private companies are vying for it; more than one may be chosen to receive final development money. Two designs are capsules: Boeing's CST-100 and SpaceX's Dragon. Capsules have been used in the space program for decades.

Dream Chaser is different. It resembles a miniature space shuttle, but it's actually a lifting body, based on Langley's HL-20 design of the 1980s that relied on fuselage shape instead of wings to provide lift and keep the craft in the air.

That design has a long history.

At the beginning of the space race in the 1950s, a capsule was chosen to carry the Mercury astronauts into space and back. The capsule launched atop a rocket and dropped back to Earth, protected by a heat shield and slowed by a parachute before splashing down in the ocean.

Even then, some NASA engineers advocated for a lifting body design that could be flown like an airplane and landed on a runway. But the capsule was easier and cheaper, and America was in a hurry.

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The story behind what could be NASA's space taxi


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