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Discovery goes north
Discovery's rollout enters the early evening as the shuttle heads north toward launch pad 39B. (6min 15sec file)
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Past one pad
As viewed from the Vehicle Assembly Building, space shuttle Discovery rolls northward and past launch pad 39A in the background. (4min 23sec file)
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Crawlerway split
The transporter reaches the point where the crawlerway splits into two paths to the Complex 39 pads and makes the turn for pad 39B. (7min 11sec file)
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Down the crawlerway
Shuttle Discovery makes its way down the crawlerway under beautiful Florida skies. (5min 00sec file)
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Rollout of Discovery
Space shuttle Discovery begins its 4.2-mile journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to launch pad 39B atop the Apollo-era crawler-transporter. (10min 30sec file)
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Discovery's mission
A preview of Discovery's STS-114 flight is presented in this narrated movie about the shuttle return to flight mission. (10min 15sec file)

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Station's past 2 years
The impact to the International Space Station by this two-year grounding of the space shuttle fleet in the wake of Columbia is examined in this narrated movie. (6min 46sec file)

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Discovery's astronauts
Take a behind-the-scenes look at the seven astronauts who will fly aboard the space shuttle return-to-flight mission in this movie that profiles the lives of the STS-114 crew. (10min 04sec file)

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Walking with Discovery
Walk alongside space shuttle Discovery as the motorized transporter hauls the ship a quarter-mile from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle Assembly Building. (3min 21sec QuickTime file)
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Discovery leaves hangar
This time-lapse movie captured from an overhead camera shows space shuttle Discovery's middle-of-the-night departure from its processing hangar at Kennedy Space Center to the roll to the Vehicle Assembly Building. (4min 30sec file)
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Rolling into VAB
Discovery arrives in the Vehicle Assembly Building as viewed in this time-lapse movie. The shuttle will be mated to the redesigned external fuel tank and twin solid rocket boosters in the VAB before rolling to the launch pad for the first post-Columbia mission. (5min 00sec file)
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Nanosat toss overboard
A foot-long Russian nanosatellite is flung overboard by the spacewalking International Space Station Expedition 10 crew. Station cameras watched the hand-launched deployment and the nanosat as it floated away. (4min 52sec file)
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Era of galaxy and black hole growth spurt discovered
NASA NEWS RELEASE
Posted: April 6, 2005

Distant galaxies undergoing intense bursts of star formation have been shown by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to be fertile growing grounds for the largest black holes in the Universe. Collisions between galaxies in the early Universe may be the ultimate cause for both the accelerated star formation and black hole growth.


This illustration shows two young galaxies in the process of merging. The merger has triggered a prodigious burst of star formation and is providing fuel for the growth of the galaxies' central supermassive black holes. The inset shows an image from the Chandra Deep Field-North of two central black holes in merging galaxies (known as SMG 123616.1+621513). Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/IoA/D.Alexander et al.; Illustration: CXC/M.Weiss
 
By combining the deepest X-ray image ever obtained with submillimeter and optical observations, an international team of scientists has found evidence that some extremely luminous adolescent galaxies and their central black holes underwent a phenomenal spurt of growth more than 10 billion years ago. This concurrent black hole and galaxy growth spurt is only seen in these galaxies and may have set the stage for the birth of quasars - distant galaxies that contain the largest and most active black holes in the Universe.

"The extreme distances of these galaxies allow us to look back in time, and take a snapshot of how today's largest galaxies looked when they were producing most of their stars and growing black holes," said David Alexander of the University of Cambridge, UK. Alexander is lead author of a paper appearing in the April 7, 2005 issue of Nature that describes this work.

The galaxies studied by Alexander and his colleagues are known as submillimeter galaxies, so-called because they were originally identified by the James Clerk Maxwell submillimeter telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea, Kailua, Hawaii.

The submillimeter observations along with optical data from the Keck observatory, also on Mauna Kea, indicate these galaxies had an unusually large amount of gas. The gas in each galaxy was forming into stars at a rate of about one per day, or 100 times the present rate in the Milky Way galaxy. The Chandra X-ray data show that the supermassive black holes in the galaxies were also growing at the same time.

These galaxies are very faint and it is only with the deepest observations of the Universe that they can be detected at all. "The deeper we look into the Universe with Chandra, the more fascinating things we find. Who knows what nature has in store for us as we push the boundaries even further," says Niel Brandt of Penn State University, University Park.

The X-ray observations also showed that the black holes are surrounded by a dense shroud of gas and dust. This is probably the material that will be consumed by the growing black holes.

Hubble Space Telescope observations indicate that most of the submillimeter galaxies are actually two galaxies that are colliding and merging. Recent sophisticated computer simulations performed by Tiziana Di Matteo of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn., and her collaborators have shown that such mergers drive gas toward the central regions of galaxies, triggering a burst of star formation and providing fuel for the growth of a central black hole.

"It is exciting that these recent observations are in good agreement with our simulation. We seem to be converging on a consistent picture of galaxy formation with both observations and theory." said Di Matteo, In particular, this work will help scientists to understand the observed link in the present epoch between the total mass of stars in the central bulges of large galaxies and the size of their central, supermassive black holes.

The JCMT is operated on behalf of the United Kingdom, Canada and Netherlands by the Joint Astronomy Centre, Hilo, Hawaii. With its 15-meter (50-foot) diameter dish the JCMT detects light with "submillimeter" wavelengths, between infrared light and radio waves on the wavelength scale. The W. M. Keck Observatory is operated by the California Association for Research in Astronomy, Kamuela, Hawaii.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Northrop Grumman of Redondo Beach, Calif., was the prime development contractor for the observatory. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass.