Tag: General

ISS Expedition 24 Crew to Talk with NES Middle School Students


About 400 sixth- through eighth-grade students and their teachers at NASA Explorer School Conyers Middle School in Conyers, Ga., will participate in a live downlink with astronauts aboard the International Space Station, which is scheduled to take place on Wednesday at 12:20 p.m. EDT. Selected students will ask questions of astronauts Tracy Caldwell Dyson, Doug Wheelock and Shannon Walker, members of the 24th crew who live and work aboard the station. NASA Television will broadcast video from the space station during the event.


For NASA TV downlink, schedule and streaming video information visit: https://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Link to the NES Virtual Campus Home page.



Last Shuttle External Tank Rollout at Michoud Assembly Facility


External tank departs assembly building at MichoudThe last external tank (designated ET-138) scheduled to fly on a shuttle mission was completed on June 25 at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans. ET-138 will travel on a 900-mile sea journey to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where it will support shuttle Endeavour’s STS-134 launch.


Taller than a 15-story building and more than 27 feet in diameter, the external tank feeds 145,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and 390,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen to the main engines. The three main components of the external tank include a liquid oxygen tank, liquid hydrogen tank and a collar-like intertank. The intertank connects the two propellant tanks, houses instrumentation and processing equipment, and provides the attachment structure for the solid rocket boosters.


When ET-138 arrives at KSC, it will be mated to shuttle Endeavour and solid rocket boosters for the STS-134 mission, scheduled to launch no earlier than mid-November 2010.


To read more about the mission, visit the NASA website at https://www.nasa.gov/topics/shuttle_station/features/et138_rollout.html.


You and your students can read about NASA missions and what they do at https://www.nasa.gov/missions/index.html.



Women in Space Day!


Did you know that 53 different women including cosmonauts, astronauts, payload specialists and foreign nationals have flown in space? That six different female cosmonauts have flown with the Soviet/Russian program and 47 different women have flown with NASA?
In 1963, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space when she piloted the Vostok 6 spacecraft. Later, she married Andrian Nikolayev, another cosmonaut. Their child Yelena was the first child born to space-faring parents.
Sally Ride was the first American woman in space but the third woman in space overall after Tereshkova and Svetlana Savitskaya. Savitskaya flew on Soyuz T-7 on Aug. 19, 1982.

Peggy Whitson was the first woman to complete a six-month tour of duty aboard the International Space Station as the station commander for Expedition 16 in April 2008.


For more information on Inspirational Women of NASA, have yourstudents visit http://quest.nasa.gov/women/intro.html


Link to the NES Virtual Campus home page