NASA Hosts Social Media Event to Welcome Endeavour to California

John Yembrick/Jason Townsend

Headquarters, Washington                                        

202-358-1584/202-358-0359

john.yembrick@nasa.gov / jason.c.townsend@nasa.gov

WASHINGTON -- To welcome space shuttle Endeavour to Southern California, NASA is inviting 40 of its social media followers to a NASA Social Sept. 19-20 at the agency's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base. Parts of the social will be carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website.

Endeavour is expected to land at Dryden on Sept. 19 and depart Sept. 20 for Los Angeles International Airport, where it will remain in a hangar until its transfer in October to a permanent home at the California Science Center.

During the two-day event, people who engage with NASA through Twitter, Facebook and Google+ will have a rare opportunity to see the landing and departure of Endeavour as it rides piggyback on NASA's 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft. Participants also will speak with experts, tour shuttle support vehicles and other NASA aircraft, and interact with fellow NASA social media followers, space enthusiasts and members of NASA's social media team.

The NASA Social registration opens at noon EDT, Tuesday, Aug. 28, and closes at noon EDT, Thursday, Aug. 30. Forty participants will be selected randomly from online registrations. Because of space limitations, those selected to attend may not bring a guest. Each participant must be a U.S. citizen age 18 or older.

For more information on NASA Socials and to register, visit http://www.nasa.gov/social.

To join and track the conversation online during the NASA Socials, follow the hashtag #NASASocial. Use and reference the #OV105 hashtag to follow Endeavour's cross country journey.

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

For more about Dryden Flight Research Center, visit http://www.nasa.gov/dryden.

For information about Endeavour's arrival at the California Science Center, visit http://www.californiasciencecenter.org.

For information about connecting and collaborating with NASA, visit http://www.nasa.gov/connect.

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NASA Hosts First Social Media Event at Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex

John Yembrick / Jason Townsend

Headquarters, Washington

202-358-1584 / 202-358-0359

john.yembrick@nasa.gov / jason.c.townsend@nasa.gov

WASHINGTON -- Sixty-five of NASA's social media followers will have a rare opportunity to tour the agency's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California's Mojave Desert during a NASA Social on Monday, Oct. 15, 2012.

Goldstone is one of three NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) complexes strategically placed around the world. The complex provides the ability to communicate with spacecraft not only in orbit around Earth, but also in the farther reaches of our solar system.

People who engage with NASA through Twitter, Facebook and Google+ also will travel to Apollo Valley to see the historic Apollo antenna and 34-meter Beam Waveguide Cluster antennas; take a trip to Mars Valley, home of the large 70-meter Mars antenna (230-foot dish); the 34-meter Uranus antenna and Signal Processing Center 10; and the Spacecraft Operations Control Center. Participants will have an opportunity to speak with scientists, engineers and other team members from NASA and Goldstone. They also will interact with fellow NASA social media followers, space enthusiasts and members of NASA's social media team.

The 65 participants will be selected randomly from online registrations for this NASA Social. Registration opens at noon EDT, Wednesday, Aug. 29, and closes at noon Friday, Aug. 31. Because of space limitations, those selected to attend may not bring a guest. Each participant must be a U.S. citizen, age 18 or older. For more information on NASA Socials and to register, visit http://www.nasa.gov/social.

For information about the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex, visit http://www.gdscc.nasa.gov.

For more about NASA's Deep Space Network, visit http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn.

For information about connecting and collaborating with NASA, visit http://www.nasa.gov/connect.

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NASA to Hold News Conference on Asteroid Mission Results

Dwayne Brown

Headquarters, Washington     

202-358-1726

dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

 

Jia-Rui Cook

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-354-0850

jccook@jpl.nasa.gov

WASHINGTON -- NASA will host a news conference on Thursday, May 10, at 2 p.m. EDT to present a new analysis of the giant asteroid Vesta using data from the agency’s Dawn spacecraft.

The event will be held in the James E. Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters located at 300 E St. SW in Washington. The event will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency’s website. The journal Science has embargoed the findings prior to the news conference.

The panelists for the briefing are:

-- Carol Raymond, Dawn deputy principal investigator, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

-- Harry McSween, chair, Dawn surface composition working group, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

-- Vishnu Reddy, Dawn framing camera team member, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, and the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks

-- David O’Brien, Dawn participating scientist, Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz.

-- Maria Cristina De Sanctis, Dawn co-investigator and visible and infrared mapping spectrometer team lead, Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, Rome

     

Reporters unable to attend the briefing in-person can ask questions from other NASA centers, by telephone or via Twitter using the hashtag #asknasa. To obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov by noon on May 10.

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

The event will be streamed live on Ustream with a moderated chat available at http://www.ustream.com/nasajpl2.

For more information about Dawn, visit http://www.nasa.gov/dawn.

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NASA Holds News Conference with Station Crew Members

Michael Curie

Headquarters, Washington

202-358-1100

michael.curie@nasa.gov

 

Kylie Clem

Johnson Space Center, Houston

281-483-5111

kylie.s.clem@nasa.gov

HOUSTON -- Three of the six crew members living aboard the International Space Station will take questions from reporters during a news conference on Wednesday, April 11, at 9:15 a.m. CDT. The conference will air live on NASA Television and will be streamed on the agency's website.

The news conference will link up reporters with NASA Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank and Flight Engineers Don Pettit and European Space Agency astronaut Andre Kuipers.

The crew members will discuss research they are conducting, the myriad of cargo delivery vehicles visiting the station -- including SpaceX Dragon, the first American commercial vehicle -- and the return of Burbank and cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin in their Soyuz spacecraft later this month.

Media can ask questions from NASA's Johnson Space Center or by telephone. To participate in the news conference in person, U.S. journalists must call the Johnson Space Center newsroom by 4 p.m. on Tuesday, April 10. To participate in the briefing by phone, representatives from accredited media organizations must call the Johnson newsroom 15 minutes before the start of the conference at 281-483-5111. Journalists participating in person will be given priority; phone questions will be taken as time permits.

NASA also will include questions from the public via social media by using the hashtag #askStation on Twitter.

The exact time of the news conference is subject to change. For NASA TV streaming video, schedule and downlink information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.

For more information about the International Space Station and its crew, visit http://www.nasa.gov/station.

To follow Twitter updates from Burbank, Pettit and Kuipers, visit http://twitter.com/AstroCoastie , http://twitter.com/Astro_Pettit , http://twitter.com/astro_andre. 

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NASA's Hurricane Twitter Exceeds 200,000 Followers

Hurricanes aren't just a seasonal event for the U.S. space program. Since either the northern or southern hemisphere is always in "hurricane season," the demand is constant for updates on current storms and the latest information, images and videos are always available via NASA's hurricane website, Twitter and Facebook pages.

The value and popularity of this effort was validated recently when NASA's Hurricane Twitter, which posts the web site's updates, exceeded 200,000 followers - a landmark that just a few NASA Twitter accounts have reached.

By having NASA's hurricane web page tied into Facebook and Twitter, the agency has created a one-stop for anyone interested in hurricanes. The trio highlight NASA's hurricane research efforts in addition to providing the latest storm information.

"Social media like Twitter and Facebook have helped bring an awareness to NASA's hurricane efforts that wasn't there before," said Rob Gutro, manager of NASA's Hurricane Web Page, at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "That awareness became obvious through the worldwide contacts established through social media."

Tropical cyclones, the general name for a hurricane, typhoon, cyclone, tropical storm or tropical depression, form in different regions of the world at different times of the year. When the northern hemisphere hurricane season is active, the southern hemisphere is in winter-time, and vice-versa. So, when there's snow on the ground in the U.S., chances are the southern Indian Ocean or southern Pacific Ocean is dealing with a tropical cyclone.

NASA has a fleet of Earth observing satellites that continually provide data on various aspects of tropical cyclones. NASA's Aqua, Terra, Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, CloudSat, Landsat, and the NOAA GOES series of satellites that NASA creates data and animations from, are all represented on the NASA Hurricane page and social media. Each of these satellites has different instruments that provide different ways to look at tropical cyclones- from infrared to microwave, from visible to rainfall data.

The NASA Hurricane page, Twitter and Facebook pages offer daily storm updates and satellite images, latest research, stunning video animations, educational tools, scientist profiles and historic storm information, on all storms going back to 2005, including monsters like Katrina.

NASA's Facebook page was started in 2010, and currently has over 7,500 followers. The "NASAHurricane" Twitter account hit the 200,000 mark when Cyclone Irina was in the Mozambique Channel in early March, after causing damages in Madagascar. Between Facebook, Twitter and the NASA Hurricane Web page NASA strives to keep people around the world informed of tropical cyclones at any time of year.

Rob Gutro

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center