Help wanted: Big brains and lots of travel required
NASA is recruiting its next astronaut class, but the space agency warns the competition will be tough.
Administrator Charles F. Bolden said Tuesday that despite the deep-sixing of the shuttle program, NASA is setting its sites on “more distant horizons.”
Bolden told students in the audience for Tuesday’s briefing that they are the keys to NASA’s future. He also encouraged teachers to apply.
NASA and petroleum industry to share Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory
A facility that trains astronauts for space will soon train oil and gas workers for water safety.
On Tuesday, NASA announced that Raytheon Technical Services Co., which runs the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, or NBL, will partner with Petrofac Training Services to offer the training.
The NBL, at Johnson Space Center, outside Houston, is a facility centered on a deep pool used to train astronauts for space shuttle and International Space Station missions. The agreement makes use of the excess training capacity at the NBL since the end of the space shuttle program.
Petrofac will initially use the facility to train offshore oil and gas workers in classes on escaping from a helicopter that is underwater, basic offshore safety and offshore emergency techniques.
The NBL's pool, at 202 feet long, 102 feet wide and 40 feet deep, provides a realistic environment for underwater survival training for oil and gas workers. Training is expected to begin in December.
Astronauts training for missions to the International Space Station will also continue their training in the NBL.
Montage
"This montage of New Horizons images shows Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io, and were taken during the spacecraft's Jupiter flyby in early 2007. The image of Jupiter is an infrared color composite taken by the spacecraft's near-infrared imaging spectrometer, the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array. The infrared wavelengths used highlight variations in the altitude of the Jovian cloud tops, with blue denoting high-altitude clouds and hazes, and red indicating deeper clouds. The prominent bluish-white oval is the Great Red Spot. The observation was made at a solar phase angle of 75 degrees but has been projected onto a crescent to remove distortion caused by Jupiter's rotation during the scan. The image of Io is an approximately true-color composite taken by the panchromatic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager with color information provided by the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera. The image shows a major eruption in progress on Io's night side, at the northern volcano Tvashtar. Incandescent lava glows red beneath a volcanic plume, whose uppermost portions are illuminated by sunlight. The plume appears blue due to scattering of light by small particles within it.
This montage originally appeared on the cover of the Oct. 12, 2007, issue of Science magazine."
Source: NASA
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