Mississippi Native Cindy Stemple Helps Guide Next Generation Robotic Lander to Testing Success at NASA’s Marshall Center

08.01.11

In North Alabama in mid-July, as the heat index soars well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the air itself seems to sweat, you'd think it would be a relief to conduct complex hardware tests in a cool indoor laboratory. But NASA engineer Cindy Stemple is ready to move things outdoors, regardless of the sweltering temperatures. She's ready to see her latest project fly.

Stemple is flight control commander -- and wears other hats as needed -- for the Robotic Lander Development Project at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Her team has spent the past 22 months designing and testing a sophisticated, next-generation robotic lander prototype the team has dubbed "MightyEagle." The project will help NASA devise a small, smart, low-cost lander that uses pulsed thrusters to gently ease itself onto the surface of the moon, near-Earth asteroids or other airless bodies -- leading to a new generation of robust, versatile, automated spacecraft that will explore and conduct science across the solar system.

The lander team includes Marshall Center engineers and their partners at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and the Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation in Huntsville. The latter includes two Huntsville-based contributors: Teledyne Brown Engineering and Dynetics Corp. The Planetary Science Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington directs the project.

Stemple and the team spent the first half of the summer testing the prototype in a U.S. Army propulsion test facility on Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, home to the Marshall Center. The prototype is a tripod-like construct that is 4 feet tall and 8 feet in diameter. It weighs about 700 pounds when fueled, but you'd never suspect the weight as it smoothly lifts off the cement floor of the test chamber, hovering between 6 feet and 16 feet in the air.

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NASA's Marshall Center, U.S. Space & Rocket Center Invite Huntsville

What: The space shuttle "rocketed" our world -- and NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., invites everyone in the Huntsville area to help celebrate the ride. The Marshall Center will host a celebration of NASA's Space Shuttle Program Aug. 20 at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville. To honor this remarkable, 30-year chapter in America’s saga of space exploration, the Marshall workforce and their families will join with the public to salute the thousands of men and women who sent America's flagship aloft, creating a fascinating and rewarding era of research and discovery.

The event will be held from 6-10 p.m. CDT. It will include rides, live music, games, large-screen shuttle videos, Oscar the interactive robot, an inflatable space shuttle slide and other activities for children, plus opportunities to mingle with shuttle astronauts and NASA program veterans. Tickets are $5 per person, which includes a meal of hot dog, chips and soft drink for each guest and access to the entire museum and to all rides (IMAX movie presentations are an additional $5, and other meals, drinks and refreshments will be available for purchase). Admittance is free for children 3 or younger. All visitors must preregister for the event, and bring a printout of their online registration to be admitted to the event. Individuals and groups may register at:

The shuttle celebration is cosponsored by the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. Special Marshall Center exhibits and presentations will showcase the center's historic role in the shuttle program and its many accomplishments throughout the life of the program. In the early 1970s, Marshall was assigned responsibility for developing the shuttle's powerful propulsion elements, including the external tank, solid rocket boosters and the space shuttle main engines. Marshall engineers conducted orbiter vibration testing in 1978, and the center has continued to manage shuttle propulsion elements throughout its three decades of flight.

NASA's Chandra Observatory Images Gas Flowing Toward Black Hole

07.27.11

The flow of hot gas toward a black hole has been clearly imaged for the first time in X-rays. The observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will help tackle two of the most fundamental problems in modern astrophysics: understanding how black holes grow and how matter behaves in their intense gravity.

The black hole is at the center of a large galaxy known as NGC 3115, which is located about 32 million light years from Earth. A large amount of previous data has shown material falling toward and onto black holes, but none with this clear a signature of hot gas.

By imaging the hot gas at different distances from this supermassive black hole, astronomers have observed a critical threshold where the motion of gas first becomes dominated by the black hole's gravity and falls inward. This distance from the black hole is known as the "Bondi radius."

"It's exciting to find such clear evidence for gas in the grip of a massive black hole," said Ka-Wah Wong of the University of Alabama, who led the study that appears in the July 20th issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Chandra's resolving power provides a unique opportunity to understand more about how black holes capture material by studying this nearby object."

As gas flows toward a black hole, it becomes squeezed, making it hotter and brighter, a signature now confirmed by the X-ray observations. The researchers found the rise in gas temperature begins about 700 light years from the black hole, giving the location of the Bondi radius. This suggests the black hole in the center of NGC 3115 has a mass about two billion times that of the sun, making it the closest black hole of that size to Earth.

 ScienceDaily (July 18, 2011) —

 NASA's Dawn spacecraft on July 16, 2011 became the first probe ever to enter orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Dawn will study the asteroid, named Vesta, for a year before departing for a second destination, a dwarf planet named Ceres, in July 2012. Observations will provide unprecedented data to help scientists understand the earliest chapter of our solar system. The data also will help pave the way for future human space missions.

NASA conducted a combined chill test and 1.9-second ignition test July 14 of the next-generation J-2X rocket engine that could help carry humans beyond low-Earth orbit to deep space.

The test at John C. Stennis Space Center is the first in a series of tests that will be conducted on the J-2X engine, which is being developed for NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne. The ignition test on the A-2 Test Stand is the first of a series of firings over the next several months. Collected data will verify the engine functions as designed.

Posted: Jul 13, 2011 3:23 PM CDT Updated: Jul 13, 2011 6:14 PM CDT

By Tricia Forbes Huntsville, AL (WAFF) -

Two astronauts who made the final flight aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour make a stop in rocket city.

"The last flight of Endeavour I think was a great tribute to all the hard work that was done here in Huntsville Alabama," said Col. Mike Fincke, STS-134 Mission Specialist.

Marshall Space Flight Center had a hand in everything from the solid rocket boosters that got Endeavour off the ground, to the science experiments it brought to the international space station. And with the shuttle program drawing to a close, NASA astronauts are looking to the future.

"We've got 3-6 people living on the space station for the next decade or more and so we have a lot of things going on in space. There's a center of expertise for propulsion and new rockets, that's here at MSFC. So as we go forward with all of our new rockets and go back to the moon and asteroids and beyond, I really think that Marshall is going to play a critical role," said Col. Finicke

A Pulsar and Its Mysterious Tail

A spinning neutron star is tied to a mysterious tail -- or so it seems. Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found that this pulsar, known as PSR J0357+3205 (or PSR J0357 for short), apparently has a long, X-ray bright tail streaming away from it.

This composite image shows Chandra data in blue and Digitized Sky Survey data in yellow. The position of the pulsar at the upper right end of the tail is seen by mousing over the image. The two bright sources lying near the lower left end of the tail are both thought to be unrelated background objects located outside our galaxy.

PSR J0357 was originally discovered by the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope in 2009. Astronomers calculate that the pulsar lies about 1,600 light years from Earth and is about half a million years old, which makes it roughly middle-aged for this type of object.

Citrus College's GraviTeam Touches Down

By Zach Stoloff | June 30, 2011

The GraviTeam has landed. After ten days at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, the eight members comprising a hand-picked group of science and math students returned to Earth and Citrus College on Sunday.

Citrus College student Craig Stremel formed the GraviTeam back in October 2010, after learning about the Reduced Gravity Education Flight Program through another NASA experience—the National Community College Aerospace Scholars Program in Huntsville, Alabama—he had previously gone through. Since that time, the Team had been scrambling to fundraise for its trip and prepare its experiment.