message from Kit, Glenn Research Center, Cleveland

Happy 70th Birthday, NASA Glenn Research Center. Of course, NASA is not that old. That’s because GRC was created as an aeronautic research facility during WWII, exactly 70 years ago today. When NASA was created, GRC became one of the founding centers. I thought it deserved an email from my NASA account.
Also, I attended one of the internship lectures on Wednesday. It was about the Colombia accident investigation and NASA’s return to flight. The man who gave the lecture also helped produce a video commemorating the Shuttle program, “Ascent”. It’s a 45 minute movie that shows all the engineering films used to evaluate the launch and make sure everything happened according to plan. Things happen very quickly at launch, so all of the cameras are state of the art high speed HD. Almost all of these cameras exist in response to the findings of the Colombia accident investigation. When played back at normal speeds, it could take an hour to just watch a few seconds of the launch. The video was originally produced with just some light background music, but commentary was later added because people were interested in the significance of many of the images, and there was also lots of confusion about the fact that many of the clips were extremely slow motion. We each received a copy of the DVD this week. The video was also added to YouTube where you can watch it. There is a voice recognition closed captioning option that works fairly well on the YouTube video, though it does mess up some of the technical terms. Also, unlike most YouTube videos, the entire 45 minutes is contained on one video. This may cause some problems if you have a slow Internet connection. Or not. Ascent can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2VygftZSCs

Enjoy.

-Kit

Note from the mom:
You can check out NASA Glenn Research Center at http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/index.html