For Malcom Phelps, his experience with NASA led to Baghdad. There, in the war-torn capital of Iraq, he is part of a team involved in improving education infrastructure.

Specifically, Phelps is working with the Baghdad Provincial Reconstruction Team, or PRT. The team is a project of the United States government to work with Iraqi leaders to help rebuild the infrastructure in Iraq. Provincial Reconstruction Teams include members of the U.S. military and civilian specialists from the U.S. government who offer their expertise to assist local leaders. These teams have been key to improvements in security and governance in Iraq, and their success is now being replicated in Afghanistan.

Phelps, a NASA education official, is the senior education advisor for the Baghdad team. He joined NASA as the chief of education technology in 1991; he was promoted to associate director of the education division in 1995. He joined the Provincial Reconstruction Team in April 2008 and accepted a request to extend his tour for one year.

"I became interested in the team's work because of a desire to contribute to our country's effort to rebuild Iraq," Phelps said. "So many Americans made sacrifices, and I thought I could help. Many of our young soldiers have endured multiple combat tours, so the separation from family, the risk and the austerity have seemed like a relatively small sacrifice for me in comparison."

To join the team, Phelps contacted the U.S. Department of State, which accepted him as a member of the Provincial Reconstruction Team education team. When he was accepted, NASA, and its Office of Education, agreed to assign Phelps to work with the team in Iraq.

He said that he was proud to be representing the agency as a part of the PRT. "The NASA Education Office is therefore making a significant contribution to the U.S. reconstruction mission in Iraq," Phelps said. Education is an important focus for NASA, and domestically the agency works to attract and retain students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines and to strengthen its and the nation's future workforce.

When Phelps arrived in Iraq, the emphasis was on school reconstruction and supplies. Working with the Iraqi Ministry of Education, he supervised more than $20 million worth of school refurbishments. More than 200 schools were returned to service after they had been damaged in combat. Schools were the favored bases for the violent insurgency. Restoring them has provided the population with a tangible sign of progress while engaging young people in productive activity where they are less susceptible to propaganda. Phelps is especially proud of the reopening of a girls' school in rural Tarmiya. When he arrived in 2008, it had just been cleared of explosives, and there was a 4-foot hole in the wall of the principal's office made by an artillery round. The school now educates 500 girls and is the pride of the town.

Since being asked to lead the education effort in Baghdad, where four of Iraq's major universities are located, Phelps' focus has been on higher education. The team has worked to support a laboratory at Iraq's major engineering school that was the scene of destruction and looting only two years ago. He also has arranged for the U.S. engineering accreditation board to travel to Baghdad for an assessment to guide further progress. While numerous other projects are underway, such as training for English teachers, he is especially proud of being asked by the U.S. Embassy to plan and implement a program for Iraqi faculty that is preparing 200 of them to advise students about how to study in the U.S. "The students who are educated in the U.S. will return to Iraq and contribute to economic development and a hopeful future," Phelps said. With the improved security, collaborations with U.S. universities are now possible, and it's even conceivable that some can be facilitated through NASA programs such as the Space Grant consortium, he said.

When people think about NASA, places like the moon and Mars come to mind far more commonly than Baghdad. But Malcom Phelps' contribution in education to the reconstruction team is just one more way that the agency is improving life here on Earth and helping people to reach for the stars.

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Expedition 22 Crew Members Salute the Troops ?
NASA Education

DIME and WING challenge students to design and build a microgravity science experiment that is tested in a 2.2 second drop tower at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. While in free fall, the students' experiments will experience microgravity conditions, as if they were on the International Space Station.

Four high school student teams were selected in the nationwide DIME competition. NASA will provide funding for up to four students and one adult advisor from each team to come to Glenn in April 2010 to conduct its experiment and review the results with Glenn engineers and scientists. While at the center, they will tour Glenn facilities and participate in workshops. Teams were selected from the following high schools:

- Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Ill.
- Plattsburgh High School in Plattsburgh, N.Y.
- St. Ursula Academy in Toledo, Ohio
- Tualatin High School in Tualatin, Ore.

Additional high school student teams selected in the DIME competition will ship their science experiments to NASA to be tested in the drop tower. The experiments and the resulting data will be returned to the teams so they can prepare reports about their findings. Additional DIME teams were selected from the following high schools:

Columbus High School in Columbus, Ga.
Emerson Preparatory School in Washington
Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Ill.
Northbrook High School in Houston
Troy Athens High School in Troy, Mich. (4 teams)

Student teams in sixth through ninth grades were selected for the WING competition. Each team will ship its experiment to Glenn for testing. The experiments and the resulting data will be returned to the teams so they can analyze the experiment results and submit a written report back to NASA. One student team not affiliated with a school was selected from within the community of Basking Ridge, N.J. Additional teams were selected from the following schools:

Crestwood Middle School in Mountaintop, Pa. (2 teams)
Dunstan Middle School in Littleton, Colo.
Gate of Heaven School in Dallas, Pa. (2 teams)
Good Shepherd Academy from the Diocese of Scranton in Kingston, Pa.
Hanover Area School District in Hanover Township., Pa. (2 teams)
Hazleton Area School District in Drums, Pa. (2 teams)
Lake-Lehman School District in Lehman, Pa.
Northwood Elementary School in Mooresville, Ind.
Smith Middle School in Troy, Mich.
Tunkhannock Area Middle School in Tunkhannock, Pa.
Wyoming Area Secondary Center in Exeter, Pa.
Wyoming Valley West School District in Kingston, Pa. (2 teams)

These and other NASA educational programs help the agency attract and retain students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, disciplines critical to space exploration. The Teaching from Space Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston funds the DIME and WING competitions.

For information about NASA's DIME and WING student competitions, visit:

Commander Charlie Hobaugh, Pilot Barry Wilmore, Mission Specialists Leland Melvin, Randy Bresnik, Mike Foreman and Bobby Satcher will share mission highlights with NASA employees, school children, college students and the general public while in the nation's capital. Reporters interested in covering the events or interviewing a crew member should contact NASA Public Affairs at 202-358-1100.

To kick off their visit, the crew will give a postflight presentation to NASA employees, their families and reporters at 10 a.m. EST, Monday, at NASA Headquarters' James E. Webb Auditorium, 300 E. Street, S.W. The crew's presentation will air live on NASA Television's education channel.

On Tuesday, Melvin and Satcher will present mission highlights from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. at the Howard University School of Science and Mathematics on campus. For more information, please contact 2nd Lt. Janay Wilson at 202-806-6789.

The crew also will attend the Washington Wizards game against the Detroit Pistons on Tuesday at the Verizon Center. They will participate in pregame activities and view the game, which is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. The astronauts will bring with them an NBA jersey that was flown on their shuttle flight. The jersey is expected to be returned to the NBA during the All-Star game in Dallas.

Wilmore, Foreman, Bresnik and Melvin will give a public presentation about their spaceflight from 10:30 a.m. to noon on Thursday at the National Air and Space Museum's new "Moving Beyond Earth" exhibit. The audience will consist of 250 students (grades 6th through 12th), visitors, employees and invited guests.

The STS-129 shuttle mission included three spacewalks and the installation of two platforms to the International Space Station's truss, or backbone. The platforms hold large spare parts to sustain station operations after the shuttles are retired. The shuttle crew delivered about 30,000 pounds of replacement parts for systems that provide power to the station, keep it from overheating, and maintain a proper orientation in space.

For NASA TV schedule information and links to streaming video, visit:

Io is notable for its active volcanism, which New Horizons studied extensively. On the other hand, Europa's smooth, icy surface likely conceals an ocean of liquid water. New Horizons obtained data on Europa's surface composition and imaged subtle surface features, and analysis of these data may provide new information about the ocean and the icy shell that covers it.

New Horizons spied Ganymede from 2.2 million miles away. Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, has a dirty ice surface cut by fractures and peppered by impact craters. New Horizons' infrared observations may provide insight into the composition of the moon's surface and interior.

Scientists are using the infrared spectra New Horizons gathered of Callisto's ancient, cratered surface to calibrate spectral analysis techniques that will help them to understand the surfaces of Pluto and its moon Charon when New Horizons passes them in 2015.

The Summer of Innovation program will work with thousands of middle school teachers and students during multi-week programs in the summer of 2010 to engage students in stimulating math and science-based education programs. NASA's goal is to increase the number of future scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, with an emphasis on broadening participation of low-income, minority students.

"This is an incredible opportunity for our administration to come together to address our nation's critical science, technology, engineering and math education needs," said NASA Administrator and former astronaut Charles F. Bolden. "Through Summer of Innovation, NASA is calling on our financial and human resources to align with federal, state, and local governments, nonprofit partners, universities and teachers to expand the opportunity for more of our young people to aspire to and engage in the future prosperity of our nation."

Through competitive cooperative agreements to states, and partnerships with companies and nonprofits, NASA will use its substantial STEM assets -- including the agency's scientists and engineers -- to create multi-week summer learning programs.

"NASA's Summer of Innovation will increase the scope and scale of the agency's commitment to a robust program of STEM education opportunities," said Joyce Winterton, assistant administrator for education at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The Summer of Innovation pilot will infuse NASA content and products into existing, evidence-based summer learning programs at the state level coupled with design competitions and events open to students and teachers nationwide. The program will culminate in a national event, in partnership with other departments and agencies.

NASA will use the Summer of Innovation as a catalyst to expand, align, and strengthen existing state-based networks. Awardees will be expected to implement the Summer of Innovation program and services during 2010 through the strategic infusion of NASA content and products into existing, evidence-based summer learning programs. The pilot program will seek to improve STEM performance for a diverse population of students, placing them on a trajectory to pursue further studies in STEM fields throughout their education.

Contingent upon the availability of funding, NASA intends to competitively select district partnerships in up to seven states to pilot the Summer of Innovation during 2010. Awards will have a period of performance of 36 months. Local programs will be required to develop ways to keep students and teachers engaged during the school year and to track student participants' performance through 2012. Awardees will be encouraged to leverage the unique capabilities and resources of program partners to ensure a sustainable effort following the period of performance.

NASA will use the agency's National Space Grant College and Fellowship Program to implement the Summer of Innovation pilot. The Space Grant national network includes more than 850 affiliates from universities, colleges, industry, museums, science centers, and state and local agencies supporting and enhancing science and engineering education, research and public outreach efforts for NASA's aeronautics and space projects. These affiliates belong to one of 52 consortia in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Space Grant applications will be selected based on alignment with Summer of Innovation goals and objectives. Accordingly, NASA has determined that submitters for this opportunity must be Space Grant Lead Institutions, and only one proposal per state will be accepted.

The Summer of Innovation Notice of Intent will be available online at 3 p.m. EST at http://nspires.nasaprs.com and http://www.grants.gov.

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Endeavour arrived at Launch Pad 39A at 8:45 a.m. EST Wednesday on top of a giant crawler-transporter. The crawler-transporter left Kennedy's Vehicle Assembly Building at 4:13 a.m., traveling less than 1 mph during the 3.4-mile journey. The shuttle was secured on the pad at 10:37 a.m.

With Endeavour on the pad, the STS-130 astronauts and ground crews can participate in the practice countdown and related training starting Jan. 19. The rehearsal provides each shuttle

Journalists must apply for credentials by noon Friday, Jan. 8, to cover the TCDT.

Reporters requesting accreditation must apply online at:

- Jan. 19: STS-130 crew arrival. The astronauts will arrive in the Shuttle Training Aircraft and T-38 jets at Kennedy's Shuttle Landing Facility. Crew arrival will be broadcast live on NASA Television.

- Jan. 20: Crew media availability. The crew will take questions from reporters at Launch Pad 39A. The session will be carried live on NASA TV.

- Jan. 21: Crew walkout photo opportunity. The astronauts will depart from the Operations and Checkout Building in their flight entry suits in preparation for the countdown demonstration test at the launch pad. The walkout will not be broadcast live, but will air on NASA TV's Video File.

Updates with times for all events will be available by calling 321-867-2525.

The six astronauts for Endeavour's STS-130 mission will deliver a third connecting module, the Tranquility node, to the International Space Station. Endeavour's Feb. 7 target liftoff is at 4:39 a.m., making it the final scheduled space shuttle night launch.

NASA TV downlink information, schedules and links to streaming video, visit:

The briefing participants are:
- Pete Hasbrook, Expedition 22 increment manager, Johnson Space Center
- David Korth, Expedition 22 lead flight director, Johnson Space Center

On Thursday, Jan. 14, Expedition 22 cosmonauts Oleg Kotov and Max Suraev will don Russian spacesuits for a six-hour spacewalk. They will prepare a new docking port and airlock named Poisk for use. NASA TV coverage of the spacewalk will begin at 3:30 a.m. Kotov and Suraev are expected to exit the Pirs airlock to begin their work at 4:10 a.m.

On Thursday, Jan. 21, Suraev and Expedition 22 Commander Jeff Williams will move their Soyuz TMA-16 spacecraft from the Zvezda Service Module port to the new Poisk module port. NASA TV coverage of the Soyuz undocking and redocking will begin at 3:45 a.m.

Briefers also will discuss the relocation of a spare parts platform on the outside of the station and the move from the Unity node to the Harmony node of the Pressurized Mating Adapter-3. The adapter is used to interconnect spacecraft and modules with different docking mechanisms. Hasbrook and Korth also will discuss the first use of the Poisk module.

For NASA TV downlink information, schedule information and streaming video, visit:

These sun glints are like sunshine glancing off the hood of a car. We can see them reflecting off a smooth surface when we are positioned in just the right way with respect to the sun and the smooth surface. On a planetary scale, only liquids and ice can form a surface smooth enough to produce the effect—land masses are too rough—and the surface must be very large. To stand out against a background of other radiation from a planet, the reflected light must be very bright. We won’t necessarily see glints from every distant planet that has liquids or ice.

“But these sun glints are important because, if we saw an extrasolar planet which had glints that popped up periodically, we would know that we were seeing lakes, oceans or other large bodies of liquid, such as water,” says Drake Deming, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Deming is the deputy principal investigator who leads the team that works on the Extrasolar Planet Observations and Characterization (EPOCh) part of Deep Impact’s extended mission, called EPOXI. “And if we found large bodies of water on a distant planet, we would become much more optimistic about finding life.”

One of EPOCh’s goals is to observe the Earth from far away—in this case, about 11 million miles away—so that we know what an Earth-like planet would look like when viewed from our spacecraft. The images in these videos were collected when the spacecraft was close enough to resolve some of Earth’s features, but at the same time, Earth could be treated as a very distant, single point. “This allows us to properly simulate what we would have observed if Earth were an extrasolar planet,” says Michael A’Hearn, principal investigator for EPOXI.

The researchers expected to see the sun glints but were surprised by the intensity and small focus of some, says Goddard’s Richard K. Barry. Glints appeared over oceans, most likely in relatively calm patches, and over a few land masses, probably caused by large inland lakes. Barry, who is leading the Earth-glint research effort, is putting together a catalog that will relate each glint to an exact location on Earth.

Together, the new videos provide the first view of Earth for a full rotation from the north pole (shown in one video) and south pole (the second video). The resolution is high enough to distinguish land masses, bodies of water and clouds. Each 16-second video is a compilation of a series of green, blue and near-infrared images taken every 15 minutes on a single day. Each is also the end product of months of planning, sophisticated data processing and analysis by the team.

The choice of infrared light, which is beyond the range of human sight, instead of visible red produces a better contrast between land and water. “People think of land as being greenish, but that’s because our eyes aren’t sensitive in the infrared,” Deming explains. “Vegetation actually shows up better in the infrared.”

Seen from very far away, Earth looks like a blue dot. “But the blue comes from Rayleigh scattering in our atmosphere rather than from the oceans,” says Nicolas Cowan, an EPOCh team member at the University of Washington. “That means that our planet appears blue even to an observer located above the North Pole, despite the fact that there isn’t always much ocean in sight. As Earth spins, different surface features rotate in and out of view, causing the color of the blue dot to change slightly from one hour to the next.”

For an observer above the pole, most of the visible part of Earth is covered in snow, ice and clouds. From far away, these appear grayish and are hard to tell apart because they are all basically water molecules in different forms. “But when a large expanse of bare land, like the Sahara Desert, rotates into view, Earth gets a bit redder because continents reflect near infrared light relatively well,” Cowan explains.

Given just this limited amount of information, the researchers could begin to describe an extrasolar planet’s surface—perhaps even infer the existence of oceans and continents.

Of course, gathering this type of information about an exoplanet is a big undertaking. Once gathered, though, such data could point scientists toward the best targets to investigate first. “This is just the first step in trying to understand the nature of the surfaces of extrasolar planets,” says A’Hearn.

The University of Maryland is the Principal Investigator institution, leading the overall EPOXI mission. NASA Goddard leads the extrasolar planet observations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages EPOXI for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The spacecraft was built for NASA by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo.

From Spitzer's perch up in space, the galaxy's clouds of dust and stars come into clear view. The telescope's infrared vision reveals choppy piles of recycled stardust -- dust that is being soaked up by new star systems and blown out by old ones.

To some people, the new view might resemble a sea creature, or even a Rorschach inkblot test. But to astronomers, it offers a unique opportunity to study the whole life cycle of stars close-up. The image is available online at http://www.nasa.gov/AAS and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/aas .

"It's quite the treasure trove," said Karl Gordon, the principal investigator of the latest Spitzer observations at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. "Because this galaxy is so close and relatively large, we can study all the various stages and facets of how stars form in one environment."

The Small Magellanic Cloud, and its larger sister galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, are named after the seafaring explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who documented them while circling the globe nearly 500 years ago. From Earth's southern hemisphere, they can appear as wispy clouds. The Small Magellanic Cloud is the farther of the pair, at 200,000 light-years away.

Recent research has shown that the galaxies may not, as previously suspected, orbit around the Milky Way. Instead, they are thought to be merely sailing by, destined to go their own way. Astronomers say the two galaxies, which are both less evolved than a galaxy like ours, were triggered to create bursts of new stars by gravitational interactions with the Milky Way and with each other. In fact, the Large Magellanic Cloud may eventually consume its smaller companion.

Gordon and his team are interested in the Small Magellanic Cloud not only because it is so close and compact, but also because it is very similar to young galaxies thought to populate the universe billions of years ago. The Small Magellanic Cloud has only one-fifth the amount of heavier elements, such as carbon, contained in the Milky Way, which means that its stars haven't been around long enough to pump large amounts of these elements back into their environment. Such elements were necessary for life to form in our solar system.

Studies of the Small Magellanic Cloud therefore offer a glimpse into the different types of environments in which stars form.

The new Spitzer observations were presented today at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington. They reveal the galaxy's youngest stars embedded in thick dust, in addition to the older stars, which spit the dust out. Taken together with visible-light observations, these Spitzer data help provide a census of the whole stellar population.

"With Spitzer, we are pinpointing how to best calculate the numbers of new stars that are forming right now," said Gordon. "Observations in the infrared give us a view into the birthplace of stars, unveiling the dust-enshrouded locations where stars have just formed."

Infrared light is color-coded in the new picture, so that blue shows older stars, green shows organic dust and red highlights dust-enshrouded star formation. Light encoded in blue has a wavelength of 3.6 microns; green is 8.0 microns; and red is 24 microns. This image was taken before Spitzer ran out of its liquid coolant in May 2009 and began its "warm" mission.

Other collaborators include: M. Meixner, M, Sewilo and B. Shiao of the Space Telescope Science Institute; M. Meade, B. Babler, S. Bracker of the University of Wisconsin at Madison; C. Engelbracht, M. Block, K. Misselt of the University of Arizona, Tucson; R. Indebetouw of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; and J. Hora and T. Robitaille of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.

The image includes Spitzer observations taken previously by a team led by Alberto Bolatto of the University of Maryland, College Park.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

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Allen was born Dec. 30, 1925, in Miami. He studied at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and had a distinguished career in the U.S. Army and the Air Force, where he remained until 1982, achieving the rank of four-star general and serving as Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

In 1954, while still an Air Force officer assigned to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Allen completed his doctorate in nuclear physics. He specialized in the potentially damaging effects of high-altitude nuclear explosions on the ground and on

After leaving Los Alamos in 1961, Allen served in various scientific posts within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force. Allen became director of the

Burial is planned for Arlington National Cemetery, but funeral arrangements have not been made yet.

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ASRC Primus will develop, integrate, sustain, and manage the information technology infrastructure and systems for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., in the areas of information systems management, business infrastructure and application development, system administration, and network design.

The contract encompasses all phases of information technology project implementation, design and development, integration, operations, maintenance, sustaining engineering, data administration, system administration and management.

For information about NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, visit: