NASA’s Stennis Space Center equips green facility with Carmanah solar-LED lighting

VICTORIA, USA: NASA’s Stennis Space Center Mississippi is lighting a new onsite parking facility with solar-LED technology.

As part of the Stennis Space Center’s new Cryogenics Control Center facility, the car park will be equipped with bright and efficient EverGEN 1520 solar-LED parking lot lights from Carmanah Technologies.

Recently showcased at the LIGHTFAIR International tradeshow and conference in New York City, Carmanah’s EverGEN 1500-series lights represent the company’s most powerful solar-LED area lights to date.

Designed as a practical alternative to traditional HID (high intensity discharge) lights, the powerful new design combines the performance of a hard-wired streetlight with the convenience and versatility of a stand-alone solution. AMA Lighting, Carmanah’s authorized lighting representative for the region, will work closely with NASA throughout the installation process.

As part of a LEED green-building project, NASA needed a lighting system that was both powerful and energy efficient. Traditional hard-wired lighting options would have exceeded the Center’s total allowable energy consumption and affected the facility’s LEED rating, so to meet the facility’s stringent lighting requirements without increasing overall electricity usage, NASA engineers identified Carmanah’s solar-powered LED lights as the perfect solution.

An installation of EverGEN 1520 lights would provide a reliable source of bright, uniform light while consuming no additional electricity.

As a standalone alternative to traditional hard-wired streetlights, Carmanah solar-powered lights deliver effective outdoor illumination without trenching, cabling or grid access.

Featuring custom fixtures by leading LED-lighting designer Beta Lighting, Carmanah solar-powered lights offer superior output and performance in accordance with IESNA (Illuminating Engineering Society of North America) guidelines.

A full-cutoff “Dark Sky”-friendly design directs light only where needed (preventing glare or spillover of light onto neighboring properties or into the night sky), while integrated energy management capabilities ensure optimal lighting performance year round.

Carmanah solar LED lights are available now from Carmanah Technologies.

NASA awards total and spectral solar irradiance sensor contract

WASHINGTON, USA: NASA has awarded a contract to the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics for the development of the Total and Spectral Solar Irradiance Sensor, or TSIS, a key instrument for the future National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, known as NPOESS.

The total estimated value of the cost, no-fee contract is approximately $42 million.

The contractor will be responsible for the design, engineering analyses, hardware and software development, fabrication, integration, algorithm development, test, evaluation and support for integration of the instrument with the NPOESS spacecraft.

The sensor will continue key climate measurements of solar irradiance that contribute to determining the Earth's energy balance and understanding how Earth's climate responds to solar variability. The sensor will fly on the NPOESS, C1 mission.

NASA is developing the TSIS Flight Model 1 under a reimbursable agreement with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

NPOESS is a joint program to develop the next generation of polar-orbiting operational environmental satellites that form the basis for weather forecasting, and is co-funded by NOAA and the Department of Defense, with NASA as a technology provider. The NPOESS program is managed by the interagency Integrated Program Office.

NOAA funds the instrument while NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the acquisition of the instrument for NOAA.