NASA is challenging college students to design concepts for inflatable habitat lofts for the next generation of space explorers. The winning concepts may be applied to the exploration habitats of the future.

The X-Hab Academic Innovation Competition is a university-level challenge designed to encourage further studies in spaceflight-related engineering and architecture disciplines. This design competition requires undergraduate students to explore NASA’s work to develop space habitats, while also helping the agency gather new and innovative ideas to complement its current research and development.

Students will design, manufacture and assemble an inflatable loft that will be integrated into NASA’s operational hard-shell prototype lab unit.

The competition winner will participate in a demonstration of the submitted design during the 2011 Desert Research and Technology Studies, or a similar field test next summer.

NASA’s Exploration Mission Directorate and the Office of the Chief Technologist’s Innovative Partnerships Program are sponsoring this new technology challenge. NASA is dedicated to supporting research that enables sustained and affordable human and robotic exploration. This educational competition contributes to the agency’s efforts to train and develop a highly skilled scientific, engineering and technical workforce for the future. For information about competition registration and requirements, visit http://www.spacegrant.org/xhab/

STAR TREK LIVE, a new interactive stage show based on the popular science-fiction franchise, debuted to hundreds of guests at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on June 11, 2010, kicking off a summer of fun.  The show takes audiences on an exhilarating 30-minute journey offering an unforgettable live theatrical experience for fans of all ages. The show combines fun special effects, audience interaction and an exploration of real space-age technology.

Produced by Mad Science Productions, under a license from CBS Consumer Products, STAR TREK LIVE introduces a world of discovery by combining science with entertainment to teach and encourage scientific literacy. In the show, the audience portrays new Starfleet cadets assembled for the first day at the Starfleet Academy led by its best and brightest. The new cadets will have to learn quickly the intricacies of living and working in space, modern space travel and the latest in communication and technology.  

“We are thrilled to present the worldwide debut of STAR TREK LIVE at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex – only a few miles away from where history was made and mankind’s greatest adventure began,” said Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex Chief Operating Officer Bill Moore. “NASA and Star Trek have a long, parallel history together, and we hope to inspire visiting families with the fun and educational story of space exploration through this engaging stage show. A sense of science has been given to science-fiction through Star Trek, and NASA transforms this incredible journey into reality.”

STAR TREK LIVE is presented a minimum of three times daily at the 300-seat Astronaut Encounter Theater. For more information about the live action show, call Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex at 877-313-2610 or visit www.KennedySpaceCenter.com.

Without warning, a mystery object struck Jupiter on July 19, 2009, leaving a dark bruise the size of the Pacific Ocean. The spot first caught the eye of an amateur astronomer in Australia, and soon, observatories around the world, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, were zeroing in on the unexpected blemish.

Astronomers had witnessed this kind of cosmic event before. Similar scars had been left behind during the course of a week in July 1994, when more than 20 pieces of Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) plunged into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The 2009 impact occurred during the same week, 15 years later.

Astronomers who compared Hubble images of both collisions say the culprit may have been an asteroid about 1,600 feet (500 meters) wide. The images, therefore, may show for the first time the immediate aftermath of an asteroid, rather than a comet, striking another planet.

The Jupiter bombardments reveal that the solar system is a rambunctious place, where unpredictable events may occur more frequently than first thought. Jupiter impacts were expected to occur every few hundred to few thousand years. Although there are surveys to catalogue asteroids, many small bodies may still go unnoticed and show up anytime to wreak havoc.

“This solitary event caught us by surprise, and we can only see the aftermath of the impact, but fortunately we do have the 1994 Hubble observations that captured the full range of impact phenomena, including the nature of the objects from pre-impact observations” says astronomer Heidi Hammel of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., leader of the Jupiter impact study.

In 2009 Hammel’s team snapped images of the debris field with Hubble’s recently installed Wide Field Camera 3 and newly repaired Advanced Camera for Surveys.

The analysis revealed key differences between the two collisions (in 1994 and 2009), providing clues to the 2009 event. Astronomers saw a distinct halo around the 1994 impact sites in Hubble ultraviolet (UV) images, evidence of fine dust arising from a comet-fragment strike. The UV images also showed a strong contrast between impact-generated debris and Jupiter’s clouds.

Hubble ultraviolet images of the 2009 impact showed no halo and also revealed that the site’s contrast faded rapidly. Both clues suggest a lack of lightweight particles, providing circumstantial evidence for an impact by a solid asteroid rather than a dusty comet.

The elongated shape of the recent impact site also differs from the 1994 strike, indicating that the 2009 object descended from a shallower angle than the SL9 fragments. The 2009 body also came from a different direction than the SL9 pieces.

Team member Agustin Sanchez-Lavega of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, and colleagues performed an analysis of possible orbits that the 2009 impacting body could have taken to collide with Jupiter. Their work indicates the object probably came from the Hilda family of bodies, a secondary asteroid belt consisting of more than 1,100 asteroids orbiting near Jupiter.

The 2009 strike was equal to a few thousand standard nuclear bombs exploding, comparable to the blasts from the medium-sized fragments of SL9. The largest of those fragments created explosions that were many times more powerful than the world’s entire nuclear arsenal blowing up at once.

The recent impact underscores the important work performed by amateur astronomers. “This event beautifully illustrates how amateur and professional astronomers can work together,” notes Hammel.

Occasional dark spots have appeared on Jupiter throughout the history of sky watching. Observing records of the planet are filled with references to spots, including “white spots,” “peculiar spots,” and “well-defined spots.” Only a handful may have described possible Jupiter strikes.

In 1686, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Cassini reported a dark spot on Jupiter that was roughly the size of the largest SL9 impact. Nearly 150 years later, in 1834, British astronomer George Airy independently reported a dark feature in Jupiter’s southern belts that looked nearly four times as large as shadows cast on the planet by the Galilean moons. Crude telescopes prevented sky watchers from probing the nature of those spots.

The study by Hammel’s team appeared in the June 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

On June 3, a six-man international crew entered an isolation chamber in Moscow for a simulated 520-day Mars mission conducted by the State Scientific Center of the Russian Federation – Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The crew has a mission schedule full of more than 90 experiments and realistic scenarios, including emergency situations, 20-minute communications delays and a trip to the Martian surface.

The specialized IBMP facility consists of interconnected modules serving as the mock interplanetary spaceship, including medical and scientific research areas, living quarters, a kitchen, greenhouse and exercise area. The chamber also contains a Mars landing vehicle module and a Martian landscape module for simulated extravehicular activities.

Supported by National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI), the U.S. scientific team participating in the study is monitoring the six crew members’ rest-activity cycles, performance and psychological responses to determine the extent to which sleep loss, fatigue, stress, mood changes and conflicts occur during the mission.

“Extensive data from the Russian Mir Space Station, International Space Station and Apollo missions suggest that psychological and behavioral issues will be perhaps the greatest challenge humans will face when they embark on years-long missions to Mars and other locations,” said David F. Dinges, Ph.D., leader of the NSBRI-funded group and a professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

The 520-day Mars Mission, conducted by IMBP under the auspices of the Russian Space Agency (Roscosmos), the Russian Academy of Sciences, and in cooperation with the European Space Agency, is the final phase of the Russian Mars 500 program. Previous phases included a 14-day test of the facility and a 105-day isolation study involving a six-man international crew in 2009. The 520-day mission is broken into 250 days for the trip to Mars, 30 days on the surface, and 240 days for the return to Earth.

During the simulation, Dinges and his colleagues are using miniaturized wristwatch-like devices to measure crew members’ sleep-wake patterns and specially programmed computers with brief assessment tests to gather information throughout the mission on crew members’ performance and emotions. Dinges is working in collaboration with Matthias Basner, M.D., from Penn, Dimitris Metaxas, Ph.D., of Rutgers University, and Daniel Mollicone, Ph.D., of Pulsar Informatics, Inc. Igor Savelev, Ph.D., NSBRI’s International Liaison, oversees the onsite implementation of the study and works in coordination with the Dinges team.

A key component of the computer-based assessment is the Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT) Self Test. This three-minute test measures the stability of sustained attention, psychomotor speed and impulsivity. PVT Self Test is also undergoing evaluation on the space station, where it is known as the Reaction Self Test.

“We’ve learned from laboratory experiments, other mission analogs and the Russian’s 105-day isolation study that the PVT is sensitive to fatigue and other factors that degrade the ability to pay attention and respond quickly,” said Dinges, who leads NSBRI’s Neurobehavioral and Psychosocial Factors Team.

PVT Self Test was developed through Dinges’ work with NSBRI, NASA, the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health. The user watches for a signal and responds when it appears, allowing the measurement of reaction times at a high degree of precision. Dinges also implemented PVT in studies involving astronauts in other space analog environments, such as on the ocean floor in NASA’s Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) program.

“As soon as he completes the PVT Self Test, the crew member receives an assessment of how well the task was performed relative to someone who is fully alert and capable. The report also indicates how many times responses were too slow and how many times responses occurred before the signal came on,” Dinges said. “So, there is a measure of impulsivity as well as fatigue.”

Crew members do the assessment tests on their own specialized laptops programmed by Pulsar Informatics with built-in cameras to record facial expressions during testing. Facial video data will be evaluated off-line by computer algorithms developed in the Metaxas laboratory, where an optical computer recognition system is being created and validated in collaboration with Dinges for use in space to unobtrusively detect signs of sleepiness, negative moods and stress.

Every seventh day of the Mars 520-day mission simulation, the assessment tests are completed in the morning and before sleep. The tests take 10 minutes, requiring only 20 minutes of the crew member’s time on testing day, and include PVT Self Test and other measures of sleep quality/quantity, fatigue, stress, moods, conflict and depression.

“The crew is on a six-day work week. Because they take the test every seven days, we will get data from every day of their work cycle 14 times throughout the mission,” Dinges said.

For Dinges, the need to obtain data in this type of environment is essential.

“This simulated Mars mission is by far the longest-duration study of crew confinement under operating conditions attempted to date. It will have an impact on planning for exploration missions,” Dinges said. “It provides something we can’t learn from much shorter-duration simulations or from the 180-day stays on the space station: namely, what is the effect on crews of living and working for 520 days in continuous confinement?”

Mars 500 will allow Dinges and others to find out whether the ability to sleep well, attend to tasks, react quickly, maintain positive moods, and feel alert is sustainable across such a long mission, and whether there is evidence of negative moods, depression and an increase in conflicts.

The lessons learned extend to life on Earth.

“These tests and interventions have an impact beyond the space program,” said Dinges, a 2007 recipient of the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal. “Many people, including those in military operations and many first responders, work night shifts and in high-stress, often confined environments that require alertness. The things we are learning about how to objectively and unobtrusively measure changes in performance and psychological status will be useful in many environments, such as power plant control rooms, railroad systems, emergency operations, hospitals, and police, fire and rescue situations.”

Tickets go on sale June 6 for Mummies of the World, the largest exhibition of mummies ever assembled, which makes its world premiere July 1 at the California Science Center in Los Angeles for a limited time only.

Mummies of the World is an astounding collection of both naturally and intentionally preserved human and animal mummies, as well as related artifacts from all over the globe, presented together for the very first time. Its treasures include one of the oldest mummified infants ever discovered; the presentation of a complete mummified family; a German nobleman discovered by his own descendants; and Egyptian animal mummies, ritually preserved to accompany royals for eternity.

This unique exhibition offers a compelling blend of history and science – an opportunity to study real mummies up close, and to learn more about who they were and how they lived through hands-on science exhibits, multimedia 3D animations and current science tools.

This traveling exhibition featuring mummies and objects from South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and Egypt, combines science and history to provide new insights into past peoples, civilizations and environments.

Mummies of the World is a ticketed event and requires a timed-entry.  Advance reservations are highly recommended. Tickets can be purchased online beginning June 6 at www.californiasciencecenter.org or by calling 323-SCIENCE (323-724-3623).  Group reservations are available at 888-MUMMY TIX (888-686-6984)