Prepare to Fly with a NASA Pilot

Get ready with Kurt Blankenship, a pilot at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, as he prepares for a research mission high above the clouds. Check out how the crew plan the route and goals, what it takes to get NASA’s Pilatus PC-12 aircraft in tip-top shape, and even what type of flight suits our pilots are rocking.  

These missions are integral to advancing communications technology and supporting NASA’s efforts to map out a safe, accessible, and affordable new air transportation system. Learn more.   

Credit: NASA/Steven Logan 

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Kelly M. Matter

Hubble Captures a Cluster in the Cloud

This striking Hubble Space Telescope image shows the densely packed globular cluster known as NGC 2210, which is situated in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC lies about 157,000 light-years from Earth and is a so-called satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, meaning that the two galaxies are gravitationally bound. Globular clusters are very stable, tightly bound clusters of thousands or even millions of stars. Their stability means that they can last a long time, and therefore globular clusters are often studied to investigate potentially very old stellar populations. 

In fact, 2017 research using some of the data that were also used to build this image revealed that a sample of LMC globular clusters were incredibly close in age to some of the oldest stellar clusters found in the Milky Way’s halo. They found that NGC 2210 specifically probably clocks in at around 11.6 billion years old. Even though this is only a couple of billion years younger than the universe itself, it made NGC 2210 by far the youngest globular cluster in their sample. All other LMC globular clusters studied in the same work were found to be even older, with four of them over 13 billion years old. This tells astronomers that the oldest globular clusters in the LMC formed contemporaneously with the oldest clusters in the Milky Way, even though the two galaxies formed independently. 

As well as being a source of interesting research, this old-but-relatively-young cluster is also extremely beautiful, with its highly concentrated population of stars. The night sky would look very different from the perspective of an inhabitant of a planet orbiting one of the stars in a globular cluster’s center: the sky would appear to be stuffed full of stars, in a stellar environment that is thousands of times more crowded than our own.

LEARN MORE:

Text credit: European Space Agency

Media Contact:

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

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MAF Status 2022-07-07 08:54

2022-07-07 08:54

Current Status: Open – HURCON V

The Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) is open.

For more information about the NASA Framework for Return to On-Site Work visit nasapeople.nasa.gov.

MAF urges it’s employees to be safe at all times. 

MAF is currently in Hurricane Condition V (Tropical Storm Readiness)

Hurricane Season is in effect from June 1st to November 30th. Please make sure that you have work and personal plan.

GET A GAME PLAN AND BE PREPARED

For more planning information, please refer to http://getagameplan.org for information and sign up for the MAF Alert system for up to date MAF emergency information. Visit member.everbridge.net/index/892807736729046#/event or text MAFALERT to 888777 to register for alerts.

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Marcelo Dasilva

NASA Selects Contractors for Ground Support Equipment Fabrication

NASA has selected the following companies for a multiple award, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to fabricate ground support equipment at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida:

• Engraver Metal Fabricators Inc., Merritt Island, Florida
• J.P. Donovan Construction Inc., Rockledge, Florida
• Precision Fabricating and Cleaning Co. Inc., Cocoa, Florida

The work will support Artemis, including missions to land the first woman and person of color on the Moon. The contractors will provide management, labor, facilities, materials, equipment, and other incidental support to fabricate, mark, package, deliver, clean, assemble, and test ground support equipment, ground systems and other hardware.

Work will be performed at the contractors’ facilities with delivery of most end items to NASA Kennedy. Each contract will have a three-year ordering period for the issuance of delivery orders. The maximum aggregate contract value is $100 million.

For more information about Kennedy Space Center, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/kennedy

-end-

Roxana Bardan
Headquarters, Washington
202-385-1600
roxana.bardan@nasa.gov

Patti Bielling
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
321-501-7575
patricia.a.bielling@nasa.gov

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