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NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland Ohio is closed to all but essential personnel today due to the major power outage that struck parts of the eastern United States and Canada, SPACE.com has learned.
The blackout caused no other known major effects to the space agency's ongoing operations, a spokesperson at NASA Headquarters in Washington D.C. told SPACE.com.
The Glenn operation, which focuses on space propulsion and power systems, satellite communications research and aeronautics, was out of power yesterday, the official said. The center was renamed, in 1999, for astronaut and Senator John Glenn.
The center's web site appeared to be down this morning, too, while the sites of other NASA centers were functioning. No operations at Glenn are crucial to the safety or smooth conduct of missions currently underway.
ISS A-Okay
The International Space Station has experience no known effects from the blackout, and ground-to-space communications are normal, according to the headquarters official.
Another official with the international project echoed that good news:
"Electricity supply to the Mission Control Center in Houston was not interrupted," Sergei Puzanov, a NASA public relations officer in Russia, told the Itar-Tass news agency today. That is no surprise, of course, since Houston and much of the rest of the United States is supplied electricity from different sources compared with the cities that lost power, which included New York, Detroit, and Toronto, Canada.
Likewise, NASA's Deep Space Network has not been affected, so communications with other spacecraft -- including two probes en route to Mars -- continues.
In a separate development, a new crew slated to fly to the space station in October aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft has no idea how they'll get home. They're scheduled to return next April but, with NASA's shuttle fleet grounded it's not know how that will be accomplished.
More Stars Above New York
In New York City, the power blackout allowed residents a chance to see more stars than normal. With almost no city lights to drown out the heavenly variety, a SPACE.com employee said Vega was clearly visible, as were many fainter stars that normally grace only rural skies.
SPACE.com Managing Editor Anthony Duignan-Cabrera enjoyed a star-spangled view of Mars, which is on the verge of its brightest appearance in recorded history. "By midnight, the Moon had risen in the East and Mars was amazing," he said.
This is not the first blackout in New York. During a midsummer night in 1977, a blackout allowed folks to see the diffuse overhead glow created by the central disk of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. On a normal night, though, city lights can reduce the number of visible stars above Manhattan to just 15 or so.
New Yorkers awoke to sunny skies today. But on the ground only limited electricity was flowing.
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