NASA - NASA Announces 17th Screening of Space Program Artifacts

WASHINGTON -- NASA is inviting eligible educational institutions, museums and other organizations to screen and request historical space artifacts.

The artifacts represent significant human spaceflight technologies, processes and the accomplishments of NASA's many programs. NASA and the General Services Administration worked together to ensure broad access to space artifacts and to provide a web-based electronic artifacts viewing capability. This is the 17th time since 2009 NASA has made this opportunity available.

The web-based artifacts module is located at:

http://gsaxcess.gov/NASAWel.htm

Eligible participants may view the artifacts and request specific items at the website through May 6. Only schools and museums are eligible to receive artifacts. They must register online using an assigned Department of Education number or through the state agency responsible for surplus property.

The artifacts are free of charge. Eligible organizations must cover shipping costs and any special handling fees. Shipping fees on smaller items will be relatively inexpensive, while larger items may involve extensive disassembly, preparation, shipping and reassembly costs. NASA will work closely with eligible organizations, on a case-by-case basis, to address any unique special handling costs.

Special items, such as space shuttle thermal protective tiles and packages of three packets of astronaut food, also are offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Instructions for requesting artifacts and special items are linked on the website home page.

To date, more than 7,700 artifacts from programs, including the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, space shuttle and the Hubble Space Telescope, have been given to eligible museums, schools, universities, libraries and planetariums in all 50 U.S. states. Artifacts are on display for 42 days. NASA organizations must register their requests within the first 21 days. All other eligible organizations may register their requests after the first 21 days. After the viewing period ends, organizations will be notified about the status of their requests.

For more about NASA and agency programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

Hunting Massive Stars with Herschel

03.28.13

 

W3 is an enormous stellar nursery about 6,200 light-years away in the Perseus Arm, one of the Milky Way galaxy’s main spiral arms, which hosts both low- and high-mass star formation. Image credit: ESA/PACS & SPIRE consortia, A. Rivera-Ingraham & P.G. Martin, Univ. Toronto, HOBYS Key Programme (F. Motte) › Full image and caption

In this new view of a vast star-forming cloud called W3, the Herschel space observatory tells the story of how massive stars are born. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important NASA contributions. W3 is a giant gas cloud containing an enormous stellar nursery, some 6,200 light-years away in the Perseus Arm, one of our Milky Way galaxy's main spiral arms.

By studying regions of massive star formation in W3, scientists have made progress in solving one of the major conundrums in the birth of massive stars. That is, even during their formation, the radiation blasting away from these stars is so powerful that they should push away the very material from which they feed. If this is the case, how can massive stars form at all?

Observations of W3 point toward a possible solution: in these very dense regions, there appears to be a continuous process by which the raw material is moved around, compressed and confined, under the influence of clusters of young, massive stars called protostars.

Through their strong radiation and powerful winds, populations of young, high-mass stars may well be able to build and maintain localized clumps of material from which they can continue to feed during their earliest and most chaotic years, despite their incredible energy output.

The W3 star-formation complex is one of the largest in the outer Milky Way, hosting the formation of both low- and high-mass stars. The distinction between low- and high-mass stars is drawn at eight times the mass of our own sun: above this limit, stars end their lives as supernovas.

Dense, bright blue knots of hot dust marking massive star formation dominate the upper left of the image. Intense radiation streaming away from the stellar infants heats up the surrounding dust and gas, making it shine brightly in Herschel's infrared-sensitive eyes.

Older high-mass stars are also seen to be heating up dust in their environments, appearing as the blue regions, for example, lower down and to the left.

Extensive networks of much colder gas and dust weave through the scene in the form of red filaments and pillar-like structures. Several of these cold cores conceal low-mass star formation, hinted at by tiny yellow knots of emission.

Herschel is a European Space Agency mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

This study was led by Alana Rivera-Ingraham, a graduate student of Peter Martin at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, the University of Toronto, Canada.

More information is online at  

http://www.herschel.caltech.edu 

 http://www.nasa.gov/herschel 

and

 http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel .

 

 

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

NASA
Guillermo Gonzalo Sánchez Achutegui
ayabaca@gmail.com
ayabaca@hotmail.com
ayabaca@yahoo.com
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