Fwd: NASA news - my version

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: July 29, 2013 6:47:12 AM GMT-06:00
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: NASA news - my version

I am shocked that Kyle's version has not shown up yet today …so here ya go with my brief version again.  

 

Hope you can join us at our monthly Retirees luncheon this Thursday at Hibachi Grill at 11:30!

 

 

 

LEADING THE NEWS

ISS Astronaut Takes The Wheel For Rover Test

By Todd Halvorson

Florida Today, July 28, 2013

An Italian astronaut on the International Space Station drove a planetary rover across a California field Friday, simulating the remote-control deployment of a radio telescope on the far side of moon.

Flying 250 miles above Earth, European Space Agency flight engineer Luca Parmitano took NASA's K10 rover out for a test drive on a "Roverscape" at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

The rover "is about four-and-a-half feet tall, weighs 220 pounds, and drives and steers with its four wheels, at a speed of about three feet per second, which is just a little slower than the average person walks," said mission commentator Pat Ryan of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Equipped with cameras and a 3-D scanning laser system, the K10 rover rolled over the outdoor test area, about the size of two football fields.

Parmitano sent computer commands, and K10 deployed a radio telescope antenna. The test simulated a mission scenario in which astronauts would operate a radio telescope on the far side of the moon.

An observatory there would be shielded from radio noise emanating from the Earth. It would operate well above Earth's ionosphere, which can distort and refract incoming radio signals. Faint signals from faraway regions could yield evidence about the evolution of the early universe, when the first stars and galaxies were formed.

The test was the second in a series of three being conducted by researchers at Ames and the crew of the 36th expedition to the International Space Station. U.S. astronaut Chris Cassidy drove the rover during an initial test in June.

The object of the tests is to see how advanced robots can work with astronauts, improving crew safety and enhancing science research activities.

"The future of space exploration is going to depend on humans and robots working together, very closely, side-by-side, hand-in-hand," said Terry Fong, director of the Intelligent Robotics Group at Ames. "And it's very important for us to understand how to make this possible."

NASA Tests Remotely Powered Robot

Controlled from International Space Station

By Scott Budman

KNTV-TV San Jose (CA), July 27, 2013

You've probably seen the Google driverless cars on the road in the Bay Area. Now, Google's neighbor is testing a somewhat autonomous robot.

NASA Ames in Mountain View put the K10 robot through its paces, rolling it along a lunar scape the size of two football fields in the middle of the Ames campus. The robot was being controlled by an astronaut, on board the International Space Station.

Mind-blowing, yes, but also productive.

Eventually, NASA hopes to be able to put such a Rover on the surface of the Moon, or even Mars. Controlling it remotely (say, from the ISS) cuts down on costs, and risk.

And those Google cars? They share something with the Rover – LIDAR, it's like Radar, but with lasers, helping it quickly scan its surroundings. "The robot," says Robotics Group Director Terry Fong, "is smart enough to know how do I get there, and how do I avoid mistakes."

The kind of smarts we all seek in life, controlled hundreds of miles away.

 

 

Cargo Freighter Takes 4-orbit Sprint To Space Station

Spaceflight Now, July 28, 2013

Launching at the precise moment to satisfy orbital mechanics, a Russian resupply ship took just four orbits from liftoff to docking Saturday for a linkup on autopilot with the International Space Station.

The sprint began at 2045:08 GMT (4:45:08 p.m. EDT) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, as the three-stage, unmanned Soyuz booster rocket lit its engines and roared away from the Central Asian steppes.

The single-day trek for docking was enabled by launching the cargo craft into a narrow corridor to catch the orbiting outpost. The space station flew directly over Baikonur four minutes before launch at an altitude of 259 miles.

It was the first launch from Baikonur since the disastrous Proton rocket malfunction July 2, which went out of control and crashed into the ground next to the pad.

The Soyuz appeared to perform nominally Saturday, successfully achieving orbit in 9 minutes and releasing the Progress M-20M freighter to start the six-hour pursuit of the station.

The power-generating solar panels unfolded and the assortment of communications and navigational antennas deployed as commanded. The last Progress in April experienced a stuck antenna.

A series of precise engine firings, compacted into just a few hours instead spread out over two days, guided the Progress toward an automated rendezvous with the station.

After performing a flyaround to align with the docking port, the craft commenced the final approach the close the remaining distance for a successful contact and capture at 10:26 p.m. EDT (0226 GMT), shortly after an orbital sunset over the South Pacific.

The 24-foot long ship attached itself to the open port on the Pirs compartment on the underside of the station, which became available Thursday when the previous Progress flew away to fly solo for deorbiting into the ocean.

Saturday's launch was known in the station's assembly matrix as Progress mission 52P and was the 51st to dock with the outpost since 2000.

The craft ferried nearly three tons of supplies to the station. The "dry" cargo tucked aboard the Progress amounts to 3,395 pounds in the form of food, spare parts, life support gear and experiment hardware. Items for troubleshooting the spacewalking spacesuit that sprung a mysterious water leak during the recent EVA was shipped from Houston to Baikonur for this launch.

The refueling module carries 1,212 pounds of propellant for transfer into the Russian segment of the complex to feed the station's maneuvering thrusters. The vessel also has 926 pounds of water and 104 pounds of oxygen and air.

The space station is staffed by the Expedition 36 crew of commander Pavel Vinogradov, cosmonauts Alexander Misurkin and Fyodor Yurchikhin, NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Karen Nyberg, and European Space Agency flight engineer Luca Parmitano.

The cosmonauts were ready to take over manual control of the approaching Progress spacecraft if the autopilot experienced a problem, but the ship docked in automatic mode without incident.

Hatch opening between the station and Progress is planned for Sunday.

 

 

NASA NEWS

NASA Flooded With Asteroid Exploration Ideas

By Tariq Malik

SPACE.com, July 27, 2013

A NASA call for novel ideas on how to tackle its ambitious mission to capture an asteroid and park it near the moon has paid off in spades, with the agency receiving hundreds of proposals from potential partners.

NASA has received more than 400 proposals from private companies, non-profit groups and international organizations in response to a call for asteroid-retrieval mission suggestions released last month, agency officials announced Friday (July 26). The space agency will review the submissions over the next month and plan to discuss the most promising ideas in a public workshop in September.

"We are really excited about the overwhelming response," NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver told reporters here at the NewSpace 2013 conference, adding that the ideas were "overwhelmingly positive."

NASA put out an official request for information on June 18 to seek input on how to achieve its asteroid retrieval mission. That asteroid capture plan, which NASA unveiled in April, is known as the agency's Asteroid Initiative.

The NASA asteroid retrieval mission aims to send a robotic spacecraft out to a near-Earth asteroid, snare it with a "space lasso" and tow it back to a parking orbit near the moon so it can be explored by astronauts. The asteroid mission is NASA's way of pursuing the goal set by President Barack Obama that called on NASA to send a manned mission to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025, and then aim for a Mars flight in the 2030s.

On June 18, NASA also unveiled its Asteroid Grand Challenge, an effort to find and identify all of the asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth, as well as develop ideas to defend the planet against potential impacts. The effort is one of several national "grand challenges" announced by the Obama Administration and other government agencies in recent weeks to spur scientific progress and innovation.

"Under our plan, we're increasing the identification, tracking and exploration of asteroids, and the response to this initiative has been gratifying," Garver told an audience of private spaceflight experts and enthusiasts at the NewSpace conference here. "The aerospace industry, innovative small businesses and citizen scientists have many creative ideas and strategies for carrying out our asteroid exploration mission and helping us to protect our home planet from dangerous near-Earth objects."

About one-third of the 400 proposals were concepts tied to NASA's Asteroid Grand Challenge, while the rest dealt directly with components of the asteroid-retrieval mission.

NASA's asteroid retrieval mission has sparked intense debate among members of Congress over whether the space agency should maintain its focus on manned asteroid exploration or shift instead to a moon-oriented goal.

Garver said today that asteroid exploration and lunar exploration should not be viewed as an either/or choice, but as complementary targets for future human and robotic spaceflight. But new lunar exploration missions should aim for a sustained presence on the moon, and not just be a repeat of NASA's Apollo lunar landings, she added.

"We truly have an increased focus on sustainable lunar activity," Garver said.

NASA's request for information on its asteroid plans is one of three calls for input by the agency on several space exploration efforts. On July 2, NASA launched a call for ideas from private space industry to learn more about how the agency might work with commercial moon lander missions. On July 17, NASA released a call for proposals from private spaceflight companies for unfunded partnerships with the space agency that could take advantage of the agency's expertise.

 

New NASA CIO Faces A Slate Of Tough Challenges

By Frank Konkel

Federal Computer Week, July 27, 2013

Taking the helm as NASA's CIO is not rocket science – it might be harder.

On June 30, 26-year NASA veteran Larry Sweet officially replaced former NASA CIO Linda Cureton, inheriting one of the most challenging CIO gigs in the federal government. Sweet's appointment came after an exhaustive search that took longer than expected. Cureton left in April, but NASA had good reasons for not wanting to settle quickly on a CIO.

During its search process, with Associate Deputy Administrator Richard Keegan installed as acting CIO, NASA's Office of Inspector General began an audit of the agency's IT governance. The results, published in June, criticized NASA's decentralized approach and made eight major recommendations for whomever the agency selected as CIO.

With that knowledge in hand, the agency cast a wide net, seeking candidates who had demonstrated strong governance throughout their careers.

At the time, Sweet had been Johnson Space Center's CIO for six years, one of the longest-tenured CIOs in NASA's 10 centers across the country. Having overseen 100 civil servants and 500 contractors at JSC, the Houston-based home of the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs, Sweet figured his lengthy background and expertise might at least put him on the short list.

His awareness of NASA's IT problems – the OIG sought his input during its audit – may have helped put him at the top of the heap. Now he and his wife, Cheryl, are looking for real estate in the Washington area – a challenge in itself, he added – and selling the family home in Houston, where they raised four children to adulthood.

"I applied knowing it would take somebody who understood NASA, the federal government and IT trends, and somebody who has managed a large organization," Sweet said. "There was nothing in the [IG] report I was surprised to hear about, and anybody in [this space] for more than three years would make the same comment. We – the CIOs and NASA headquarters – have been trying to improve IT governance for years. I'm very excited."

So is his predecessor.

"NASA made a great selection in picking Larry," said Cureton, now CEO of an IT consulting company she founded, Muse Technologies Inc. "I'm pleased, and it signals continuing collaboration among centers. It also signals continued improvements in enterprise service delivery."

Sweet's challenges are legion.

For starters, while NASA HQ is based in the nation's capital, its 10 centers are dispersed across the country, each with their own programs, objectives, cultures and funding profiles. In recent years, the NASA CIO has had the clout that comes with the title as the agency's IT chief in name only.

The IG audit puts a dollar sign in front of NASA's decentralized IT operations: Of approximately $1.5 billion allocated for IT spending in fiscal 2012, the agency CIO had direct control of $159 million. For every dollar spent by NASA on IT, its CIO had control of about a dime.

The IG audit estimated that NASA spent $400 million more than necessary on its IT budget in fiscal 2010 because of the lack of centralized decision-making.

"You have multiple programs across multiple centers, it's a complex environment from an IT perspective, and more complex to get your arms around the governance of IT spending," Sweet said. "I would say that most centers and center CIOs managing IT spend significantly better than what was done a few years ago, but I admit from an agency perspective, we have to do a better job."

As the new CIO, Sweet is charged with carrying out the recommendations made by the IG. Most come with a completion deadline of six months or less, so Sweet wasted little time getting started. He has already completed one: Instead of reporting to department administrators, the NASA CIO now reports directly to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.

Other recommendations include having the CIO approve IT procurement expenditures over a certain threshold and consolidating IT governance within NASA's Office of the CIO. Each proposal requires Sweet to create a plan he'll have to adhere to. But the efforts are a clear signal that IT decision making is changing at NASA. Sweet will be the agency's first CIO with some semblance of full authority.

Sweet is aware his new position will put him in the public eye to a greater degree than he was at JSC – he'll be a sought-after speaker in the federal IT community like Cureton before him –but he said he plans to put work before any of the potentially distracting stuff.

"You have to find the right balance," Sweet said. "You don't meet challenges well by speaking out in the public for conferences."

And though his position isn't a political one, office politics within an agency the size of NASA are a given.

If NASA's IT Infrastructure Integration Program (I3P) – probably the most important current IT initiative at the agency – runs into problems in its second year, people will talk. It is designed to reduce agency costs through the consolidation and integration of NASA's IT contracts. Even after year one, Sweet said, some aspects are still "proving to be a challenge," but issues that arise have been taken on "very aggressively." At the same time, NASA's IT budget isn't likely to grow much. Sweet has worked in tight budget environments – he once faced a 12-percent cut at JSC– and he will actually have a smaller staff at NASA's D.C. headquarters than he had in Houston.

"The staff is smaller up here, but the responsibility is much bigger," he said.

Yet Sweet is genuinely excited to take on the challenges. After 26 years at NASA, and nearly a decade working as a contractor in the field prior to becoming a civil servant, getting the IT ship steadied at NASA may well be the toughest challenge he has faced in his career. But he's ready.

"I love this work, I'm excited about it, and I want to make the commitment to do this job well," Sweet said. "I want to stay here as long as I can – as long as NASA would like me to."

 

Garver On NASA's Opportunities And Challenges

By Jeff Foust

Space Politics, July 28, 2013

NASA has a number of opportunities for the future, including ways to partner with the private sector, but those effort face challenges that are often in the form of opposition from Congress, NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver said Friday.

Garver, giving a keynote speech Friday at the NewSpace 2013 conference—an event with a particular focus on commercial space—in San Jose, California, outlined what she saw as some opportunities for the agency to work with the private sector, including the agency's asteroid initiative. She said the recent request for information (RFI) for the program had generated more than 400 responses, and the agency was just beginning to review them. "We could not be more excited about this opportunity," she said.

The challenge, though, is that the agency's asteroid initiative has run into opposition from some in Congress. "There are a few people—you can argue staff or members—on the Hill in a few key places who think that this is going to keep us from going back to the Moon," she said. "Our challenge is to help people understand that not at all what this mission will do. This doesn't sidetrack anything."

Later, talking with reporters, Garver said she was uncertain if the RFI responses and NASA's analysis of them would help build a stronger case for the asteroid initiative for those in the House in particular who have opposed it. "We'll see if they'll be more supportive as we address the actual criticisms they have had," she said, "or if it really is just something that we're not going to be able to get consensus on because of the partisan nature of Washington right now."

Garver saw similar challenges with NASA's commercial crew program. "We have bipartisan support, but it still seems to be something that a few key folks on the Hill… seem to want to cut this budget," she said in her conference speech. "Why is it that this program doesn't have broader support?"

"To keep competition as long as possible, and to accelerate the time when we are no longer sending money to Russia but spending those dollars with US companies, we need the full funding. We need as close to the full funding as we can get," she told reporters later. She said the Senate appropriations bill, which offers $775 million for the commercial crew program—a little less than the $821 million requested by the administration—would be good. The House version of that bill, however, only offers $500 million for the program. Garver didn't explicitly say, though, whether the lower House funding would cause NASA to slip the planned 2017 date for beginning commercial crew flights to the ISS.

Garver also mentioned in her speech a couple less controversial initiatives. One is an RFI released in early July regarding commercial lunar landers. "This will be our first step in assessing interest in public-private partnerships to jointly develop a robotic lander that could demonstrate technologies that enable research for government and commercial customers," she said of the new RFI.

That, she said, is part of a broader suite of efforts, ranging from NASA's LADEE lunar mission slated for launch later this year to a study by Bigelow Aerospace under a NASA Space Act Agreement on commercial lunar exploration architectures. "Does it sound like we're not going back to the Moon?" she said. "Our lunar strategy would open up the Moon for a truly sustained lunar presence, and one that would extend our economic sphere of influence."

She also mentioned the Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities synopsis released by NASA earlier this month to identify potential ways NASA could support commercial space ventures through unfunded Space Act Agreements, in a manner analogous to the COTS and CCDev efforts. "This is an exciting development," she said, stating there was interest in this new effort not just from outside organizations, but from within NASA itself. "We're energized by this," she said. "It really is a sea change."