NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month – Eric Vitug, Langley Research Center – Video

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NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month - Eric Vitug, Langley Research Center
Eric Vitug is the senior developer for office of strategic analysis, communications and business development at NASA Langley Research Center, which helps the...

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NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month - Eric Vitug, Langley Research Center - Video

NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month – Ngoc Phan Nguyen, Michoud Assembly Facility – Video

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NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month - Ngoc Phan Nguyen, Michoud Assembly Facility
Ngoc Phan Nguyen serves as the Operation and Maintenance Lead and Energy Manager at Michoud Assembly Facility. I am also an for NASA at MAF. He is responsibl...

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NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month - Ngoc Phan Nguyen, Michoud Assembly Facility - Video

NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month – Lein Moore, Kennedy Space Center – Video

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NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month - Lein Moore, Kennedy Space Center
Lein Moore is the project group lead for the simulation project group within the engineering and technology directorate, which provides mathematical models a...

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NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month - Lein Moore, Kennedy Space Center - Video

NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month – Pauline Hwang, Jet Propulsion Laboratory – Video

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NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month - Pauline Hwang, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Pauline Hwang, has been working on the Mars Science Laboratory project since 2010 starting at design and development into the operations phase of the mission...

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NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month - Pauline Hwang, Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Video

NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month – Wayne Wong, Glenn Research Center – Video

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NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month - Wayne Wong, Glenn Research Center
Wayne Wong is the Advanced Sterling Converter Lead Engineer at Glenn Research Center. That entails is I #39;ve been working on development of the advanced sterli...

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NASA Asian American Pacific Islander History Month - Wayne Wong, Glenn Research Center - Video

NASA Spacecraft Will Visit Asteroid With New Name

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An asteroid that will be explored by a NASA spacecraft has a new name, thanks to a third-grade student in North Carolina. NASA's Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft will visit the asteroid now called Bennu, named after an important ancient Egyptian avian deity. OSIRIS-Rex is scheduled to launch in 2016, rendezvous with Bennu in 2018 and return a sample of the asteroid to Earth in 2023.

The name for the carbon-rich asteroid, designated in the scientific community as (101955) 1999 RQ36, is the winning entry in an international student contest. Nine-year-old Michael Puzio suggested the name because he imagined the Touch-and-Go Sample Mechanism (TAGSAM) arm and solar panels on OSIRIS-REx look like the neck and wings in drawings of Bennu, which Egyptians usually depicted as a gray heron. Puzio wrote the name suits the asteroid because it means "the ascending one," or "to shine."

TAGSAM will collect a sample from Bennu and store it for return to Earth. The sample could hold clues to the origin of the solar system and the source of water and organic molecules that may have contributed to the development of life on Earth. The mission will be a vital part of NASA's plans to find, study, capture and relocate an asteroid for exploration by astronauts. NASA recently announced an asteroid initiative proposing a strategy to leverage human and robotic activities for the first human mission to an asteroid while also accelerating efforts to improve detection and characterization of asteroids.

"There were many excellent entries that would be fitting names and provide us an opportunity to educate the world about the exciting nature of our mission," said Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona in Tucson, a contest judge and the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission. "The information about the composition of Bennu and the nature of its orbit will enable us to explore our past and better understand our future."

More than 8,000 students, all younger than 18, from more than 25 countries worldwide entered the "Name that Asteroid!" contest last year. Each contestant submitted one name with a maximum of 16 characters and a short explanation for the name.

The contest was a partnership with The Planetary Society in Pasadena, CA; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA; and the University of Arizona. The partners assembled a panel to review the submissions and submit a top choice to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Committee for Small Body Nomenclature. The IAU is the governing body that officially names a celestial object. "Bennu struck a chord with many of us right away," said Bruce Betts, director of projects for the Planetary Society and a contest judge. "While there were many great entries, the similarity between the image of the heron and the TAGSAM arm of OSIRIS-REx was a clever choice. The parallel with asteroids as both bringers of life and as destructive forces in the solar system also created a great opportunity to teach."

The Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research Program survey team discovered the asteroid in 1999, early in NASA's Near-Earth Objects Observation Program, which detects and catalogs near-Earth asteroids and comets.

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NASA Spacecraft Will Visit Asteroid With New Name

NASA Opens New Era in Measuring Western US Snowpack

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A new NASA airborne mission has created the first maps of the entire snowpack of two major mountain watersheds in California and Colorado, producing the most accurate measurements to date of how much water they hold.

The data from NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory mission will be used to estimate how much water will flow out of the basins when the snow melts. The data-gathering technology could improve water management for 1.5 billion people worldwide who rely on snowmelt for their water supply.

"The Airborne Snow Observatory is on the cutting edge of snow remote-sensing science," said Jared Entin, a program manager in the Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Decision makers like power companies and water managers now are receiving these data, which may have immediate economic benefits."

The mission is a collaboration between NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and the California Department of Water Resources in Sacramento.

A Twin Otter aircraft carrying NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory began a three-year demonstration mission in April that includes weekly flights over the Tuolumne River Basin in California's Sierra Nevada and monthly flights over Colorado's Uncompahgre River Basin. The flights will run through the end of the snowmelt season, which typically occurs in July.

The Tuolumne watershed and its Hetch Hetchy Reservoir are the primary water supply for San Francisco. The Uncompahgre watershed is part of the Upper Colorado River Basin that supplies water to much of the western United States.

The mission's principal investigator, Tom Painter of JPL, said the mission fills a critical need in an increasingly thirsty world, initially focusing on the western United States, where snowmelt provides more than 75 percent of the total freshwater supply.

"Changes in and pressure on snowmelt-dependent water systems are motivating water managers, governments and others to improve understanding of snow and its melt," Painter said.

"The western United States and other regions face significant water resource challenges because of population growth and faster melt and runoff of snowpacks caused by climate change. NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory combines the best available technologies to provide precise, timely information for assessing snowpack volume and melt."

The observatory's two instruments measure two properties most critical to understanding snowmelt runoff and timing. Those two properties have been mostly unmeasured until now.

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NASA Opens New Era in Measuring Western US Snowpack

NASA smartphone satellites beam clear images of Earth

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The trio of Android smartphones NASA blasted into orbit recently have ended their journey by burning up in the atmosphere, but not before snapping shots of Earth -- and the pictures don't look too bad.

The "PhoneSats" were a NASA experiment to develop super-cheap satellites and to determine whether a consumer-grade smartphone can be used as the main flight avionics of a capable satellite, NASA said.

[ RELATED: 13 awesome and scary things in near Earth space

MORE: NASA identifies top 10 space junk missions ]

NASA says the three miniature satellites used their smartphone cameras to take pictures of Earth and transmitted these "image-data packets" to multiple ground stations. As part of their preparation for space, the smartphones were outfitted with a low-powered transmitter operating in the amateur radio band. Every packet held a small piece of the big picture. As the data became available, the PhoneSat Team and multiple amateur radio operators around the world collaborated to piece together photographs from the tiny data packets.

Piecing together the photo was a very successful collaboration between NASA's PhoneSat team and volunteer amateur ham radio operators around the world. NASA researchers and hams working together was an excellent example of Citizen Science, or crowd-sourced science, which is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur or nonprofessional scientists. On the second day of the mission, the Ames team had received more than 200 packets from amateur radio operators.

"Three days into the mission we already had received more than 300 data packets," said Alberto Guillen Salas, an engineer at Ames and a member of the PhoneSat team. "About 200 of the data packets were contributed by the global community and the remaining packets were received from members of our team with the help of the Ames Amateur Radio Club station, NA6MF."

The mission successfully ended Saturday, April 27, after predicted atmospheric drag caused the PhoneSats to re-enter Earth's atmosphere and burn up, NASA said.

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NASA smartphone satellites beam clear images of Earth