Johnson Space Center closed through Labor Day to evaluate safety after Harvey

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Johnson Space Center closed through Labor Day to evaluate safety after Harvey

Johnson Space Center closed through Labor Day to evaluate safety after Harvey:

Tropical Storm Harvey as seen by the crew of the International Space Station on Aug. 29, 2017. Photo Credit: Randy Bresnik / NASA

Hurricane Harvey, now a tropical storm, has prompted NASA to cancel an in-flight question and answer session with Expedition 52 astronaut Peggy Whitson, who is currently aboard the International Space Station. Additionally, the Johnson Space Center will remain closed until Sept. 5, 2017, to all but mission mission-essential personnel while officials evaluate the safety of the center.

A 30-minute news conference with Whitson, who has been residing at the outpost since November 2016 and will return to Earth this weekend, was planned for Aug. 30. However, because of the Johnson Space Center’s closure, mission-essential staff will not be able to support the in-flight event.

Moreover, live satellite interviews with NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Joe Acaba, who are in Russia, have also been canceled. The U.S. space agency originally cited a change in the crew’s training schedule for the cancellation, but because the event was planned for Sept. 1, there will also be no staff to support the event.

Vande Hei and Acaba will launch to the space station with cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin on Sept. 12 inside their Soyuz MS-06 spacecraft. Liftoff is scheduled for 5:17 p.m. EDT (21:17 GMT). They will remain at the outpost until February 2018.

Harvey made its first landfall near Corpus Christi, Texas, on Aug. 26 with maximum sustained winds of 130 mph (210 km/h): a Category 4 hurricane. The 280-mile (450-kilometer) wide storm soon stalled over the state before moving back out into the Gulf of Mexico. It made a second landfall on Aug. 30 near the Texas-Louisiana border, this time as a tropical storm with sustained winds of 45 mph (73 km/h).

So far, the storm has dropped more than 50 inches of rain, including in Houston where Johnson Space Center is located, resulting in floods impacting hundreds of thousands of homes and displacing more than 30,000 people. Harvey has caused at least 21 deaths in the United States. Preliminary economic losses are estimated to be between $10 billion to $160 billion.

While the Johnson Space Center originally closed on Aug. 25, sheltering in place were mission-essential personnel. This included flight controllers who maintain constant contact with the International Space Station.

Johnson Space Center’s leadership is continuing to monitor weather conditions as well as the overall situation in Houston. Teams will prepare a full assessment of the center’s status after the storm fully passes.

“Our primary concern is the safety of our employees and all our fellow Houstonians,” said Johnson Director Ellen Ochoa in a statement on NASA’s website. “We’re taking these measures to ensure the members of our team and their families can take care of themselves and their neighbors.”

According to NASA, closing the center will allow employees to avoid flooded roads and attend to the needs of their families. Additionally, it allows for essential employees to focus on the highest-priority missions, including the landing of three ISS crew members over the Labor Day weekend. The trio – Whitson, NASA astronaut Jack Fischer, and cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin – will land in their Soyuz MS-04 spacecraft at 9:22 p.m. EDT Sept. 2 (01:22 GMT Sept. 3), 2017, in Kazakhstan.

Video courtesy of NOAA

The post Johnson Space Center closed through Labor Day to evaluate safety after Harvey appeared first on SpaceFlight Insider.

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the United States government agency responsible for the civilian space program as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines a UFO as "An unidentified flying object; a 'flying saucer'." The first published book to use the word was authored by Donald E. Keyhoe. The acronym "UFO" was coined by Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, who headed Project Blue Book, then the USAF's official investigation of UFOs. He wrote, "Obviously the term 'flying saucer' is misleading when applied to objects of every conceivable shape and performance. For this reason the military prefers the more general, if less colorful, name: unidentified flying objects. UFO (pronounced Yoo-foe) for short." Other phrases that were used officially and that predate the UFO acronym include "flying flapjack", "flying disc", "unexplained flying discs", "unidentifiable object", and "flying saucer". The phrase "flying saucer" had gained widespread attention after the summer of 1947. On June 24, a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold reported seeing nine objects flying in formation near Mount Rainier. Arnold timed the sighting and estimated the speed of discs to be over 1,200 mph (1,931 km/h). At the time, he described the objects' shape as being somewhat disc-like or saucer-like, leading to newspaper accounts of "flying saucers" and "flying discs". In popular usage the term UFO came to be used to refer to claims of alien spacecraft. and because of the public and media ridicule associated with the topic, some investigators prefer to use such terms as unidentified aerial phenomenon (or UAP) or anomalous phenomena, as in the title of the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena (NARCAP).

UFO PHOTO PHOTOGRAPHY

UFO - Unidentified Flying Object An unidentified flying object, or UFO, in its most general definition, is any apparent anomaly in the sky that is not identifiable as a known object or phenomenon. Culturally, UFOs are associated with claims of visitation by extraterrestrial life or government-related conspiracy theories, and have become popular subjects in fiction. While UFOs are often later identified, sometimes identification may not be possible owing to the usually low quality of evidence related to UFO sightings (generally anecdotal evidence and eyewitness accounts). Stories of fantastical celestial apparitions have been told since antiquity, but the term "UFO" (or "UFOB") was officially created in 1953 by the United States Air Force (USAF) to serve as a catch-all for all such reports. In its initial definition, the USAF stated that a "UFOB" was "any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object." Accordingly, the term was initially restricted to that fraction of cases which remained unidentified after investigation, as the USAF was interested in potential national security reasons and/or "technical aspects" (see Air Force Regulation 200-2). During the late 1940s and through the 1950s, UFOs were often referred to popularly as "flying saucers" or "flying discs". The term UFO became more widespread during the 1950s, at first in technical literature, but later in popular use. UFOs garnered considerable interest during the Cold War, an era associated with a heightened concern for national security. Various studies have concluded that the phenomenon does not represent a threat to national security nor does it contain anything worthy of scientific pursuit (e.g., 1951 Flying Saucer Working Party, 1953 CIA Robertson Panel, USAF Project Blue Book, Condon Committee).

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Tuesday, September 12, 2017