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NASA Scientific and Technical Information Program

NASA Research and its Unsung Heroes - Joel S. Levine

 Posted on Jan 28, 2011 11:44:11 AM | Gerald Steeman  0 Comments | Permalink |

STI Program Office Many NASA researchers are well known in their specific fields and have received numerous honors and distinctions, but they may not be a household name to you. Perhaps they have never flown a space shuttle, broken the sound barrier, or made headlines by diving deep into the ocean depths. Their NASA research and contributions, however, put them, in our minds, into the category of NASA’s unsung heroes. In this blog, we highlight Joel S. Levine of NASA Langley Research Center. Joel is a senior research scientist in Langley’s Science Directorate, and he has been the principal investigator and chief scientist of the proposed NASA Langley ARES Mars Airplane Mission. ARES (Aerial Regional-scale Environmental Surveyor) is Langley’s proposed robotic, rocket-powered Mars airplane designed to investigate the atmosphere, surface, and sub-surface of Mars. ARES was one of four finalists in the first Mars Scout Mission competition. See Joel’s talk on ARES for TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) below. In December 2010, Joel co-edited a 974-page book entitled, The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet (Cosmology Science Publishers, Cambridge, MA). Joel studies the atmospheres of Earth and Mars, and tracks their development and changes to learn how similar they are and what Earth can learn from Mars.

He also has worked at the request of the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., to lead a team of NASA scientists to solve the mystery of why tiny white spots were forming in the hermetically sealed encasements containing the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Why? As a science detective (is that similar to a “history detective”?) to find out why, the team used noninvasive techniques that were originally developed to measure trace gases in the Earth's atmosphere. To everyone’s great surprise, they measured very high concentrations of water vapor in the hermetically sealed encasements. It turned out that the high concentrations of water vapor chemically reacted with the glass encasements, thus causing the leaching out of alkaline material from the glass. This resulted in the formation of the mysterious white spots. Result? Joel and his NASA Team helped to preserve the founding documents of the United States of America! Now that is impressive! 

Search for Joel Levine's research on the STI Program's NASA Technical Reports Server. Check out the STI Program and CASI on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube:          

Wisdom from Geese…

 Posted on Jan 14, 2011 11:22:42 AM | Gerald Steeman  0 Comments | Permalink |

by Lynn Heimerl, NASA Agency Technical Publications Manager “People who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they are going more quickly and easily because they are traveling on the thrust of one another.” “It is sensible to take turns doing demanding jobs.” If we apply these words to organizing NASA’s information, our sense of “community” may be a bit disparate and diffused. Most NASA programs and projects have different architectures, metadata requirements, taxonomies, registries, and/or indexing tools. Perhaps, as an Agency, we can better learn to “travel on the trust of one another” by developing an information architecture so that our information will be more accessible. In STI (scientific and technical information), this will mean not only that STI will be more broadly visible, easily and quickly located, and widely used, but also that it can be combined with related data sets, video, and audio in mash-ups to visualize and understand the full range of supporting information. If NASA moves toward an information architecture, will we make some wrong “turns” in trying to move from many processes to a more reasonable number of processes (whatever that is defined to be)? Of course we will. If that happens, will we have to make a few correcting “turns” to improve our information architecture in the future? Yes, we will. Regardless, we need to begin this flight toward a coordinated information architecture that provides greater and faster accessibility to information for NASA, the public, commercial entities, and other Government organizations. We need to do this before the other “geese” (i.e., agencies and organizations) fly ahead, turn around, and shake their collective heads, saying: “better catch up with the flock!”

Check out the STI Program and CASI on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube:           Sometimes words of wisdom for our jobs come from unusual places. I recently picked up a copy of the newsletter, Virginia Society of Ornithology (VSO), Winter 2010-11 edition, and in it were two interesting quotes from Dr. Harry Clarke Noyes. Noyes is quoted in the President’s Message, called “Learning from Geese.”

STI Story Gets Told Through Social Media

 Posted on Dec 15, 2010 07:44:34 AM | Gerald Steeman  0 Comments | Permalink |

by Gerald Steeman, LaRC, STI Program Office The NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) program, established over 40 years ago, supports the objectives of NASA’s missions and research by acquiring, preserving, and disseminating NASA’s wide-ranging technical publications. The STI program is best known for the NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS), which boasts a collection of over a quarter of a million full-text technical reports, papers, and articles and attracts over 3.3 million visits a year from a worldwide audience. The STI Program Office is always looking for new ways to promote awareness of NASA STI and assist NASA researchers in discovering technical literature. Turning to social media seemed to be a low-cost, low-risk option. The STI Program Office looked to the Center for AeroSpace Information (CASI), the contractor-operated organization that supports the STI program, to make a claim on the social media cyberscape. Starting in late 2009, CASI began using Twitter and Facebook to highlight new STI additions to NTRS. Content was easy to come by because an RSS feed for new STI was already in place. Twitter followers have grown to over 1,000 individuals and institutions largely due to the continuous tweeting of this information. CASI then turned to YouTube in early 2010. “We requested a YouTube channel via apps. gov,” says Kim Lyall, a CASI outreach specialist. “After approval, we created the channel and prepopulated the site with some digitized National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) videos. The process was very easy.” YouTube Clip: Vintage Film on Apollo-Lunar Orbital Rendezvous Technique YouTube proved to be a great vehicle for providing awareness and training tips. Before long, several mini-tutorials on effectively searching NTRS and the NASA Aeronautics and Space Database (NA&SD) were available for broadcast. One does not just jump into making a tutorial blindly. Kim Lyall warns, “There is prep time deciding what the tutorial will cover, writing a script, wand practicing. We currently use a free screencasting tool called Screenr to record the content and then post the video directly to YouTube from our Screenr account.” The vintage NACA video and tutorial content have grown a respectable subscriber base. “We have over 3,000 subscribers. Many of our videos and tutorials have received the thumbs up from viewers,” says Lyall. This positive experience trumps conventional onsite training classes. It is far cheaper, reusable, and wider reaching, and it provides anytime/anywhere support to the Agency and the public. YouTube Clip: Tutorial on Linking to NTRS PDF Files via Handles   Using the different social media tools in concert is key to maximizing outreach. “All of our social media accounts are advertised on the STI home page at http://www.sti.nasa.gov/, and conversely we link to our home page from our social media accounts,” says Lyall. “There is an interplay between the accounts. For example, when we post a new YouTube video it automatically puts out a tweet on our Twitter account linking to the new video.” Social media tools have tremendously improved CASI’s outreach endeavors and assisted in achieving STI Program Office goals. The effort put into these activities pays out immediate dividends like thumbs-up content votes and positive comments from followers. “On Twitter, there is an active community of people interested in space sciences and NASA,” continues Lyall. “We have been able to tap into this community and bring more awareness to STI resources, especially the NASA Technical Reports Server. Reaching such a diverse audience would be impossible without social media.” Having someone tweet “Thanks for existing. NTRS is a fantastic resource!” is not bad either. Check out the STI Program and CASI’s use of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube:           Repost of a 2010 NASA IT Update article on using social media tools to promote STI

The Value of Information

 Posted on Dec 10, 2010 04:59:10 PM | Gerald Steeman  0 Comments | Permalink |

by Lynn Heimerl, NASA Agency Technical Publications Manager While I was driving home recently from a Charlottesville, Virginia, workshop, I gazed at the shimmering reds and golds of the tree leaves, but my mind was thinking about the perspective of the people in the workshop that I had just attended. These people were IT specialists, cyber-security personnel, physical security managers, government executives, and business and university personnel, who were technically oriented in nature and in interests. They had impressive backgrounds and educational training.

Fall red and gold tree leaves in Charlottesville, VA What had impressed me the most about the workshop and its participants? It was that when these individuals were faced with problems about how to shape their organizations in the face of cyber-security issues and other challenges and the day-to-day activities of doing so, they sought information from many external and internal sources, analyzed it, discussed it, plotted it, looked at its pros and cons, validated it, and determined its pedigree in order to help them solve the problems that they needed to solve. These were real problems. These were immediate and hard problems. These were problems that will impact not only their bottom line revenues but also their future business successes or failures. To the workshop participants, information is an active and essential part of their decision making. It is a critical tool in their future strategic direction and in solving problems they simply have to address…right now. Information is not a byproduct, or secondary consequence, of managing whatever they manage or of their technology. Information is a core value in their organizations. As my drive continued through the scenery that changed to the flatter landscape of the Virginia coast with less and less reds and golds in the leaves, I wondered: does NASA have the same approach to our information? Do we look for and use information to inform and solidify our decisions, and can we find the information that we need? Is information woven into our core business? Do we value information?

NASA funds a number of information programs and repositories. I know this because our program manages one of them (the NASA Technical Reports Server at http://ntrs.nasa.gov/). Is this information used? Absolutely! International organizations are clamoring at the door to get the information. National entities are scooping up the information as fast as we can get it ready. Is NASA using it as effectively as we can? Does each new NASA project or program determine if their proposed work has been done previously and if so, do they use the previous results to inform and guide their present work? After a NASA workshop, would another participant come away from it thinking what I thought of the Charlottesville workshop participants: that we in NASA seek, use, and benefit from the value of information?

“This Terra MISR image pair of northern N.E. (western Maine into New Hampshire and eastern Vermont) portrays almost true color views of foliage in late August 2000 when the forests were near their height of greeness (left) and past their peak (right) - most leaves are now dropped - in mid-October 2000.” From NASA http://rst.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sect3/Sect3_5.html. As I pull into my driveway, I wonder: do we, in NASA, need to have a discussion about the strategic value of information and refocus on its worth to the Agency? I believe the answer is yes. I suspect that our future as an Agency may depend on this discussion and its outcome. Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Information is the currency of democracy." Perhaps information should also be the currency of an aeronautics and space agency that needs to accomplish its strategic vision and goals. Leave a comment or send me your ideas about how we should start this discussion.