NASA has announced plans to hold a Twitter-driven, live, interactive video event this Wednesday, featuring Mike Massimino, the astronaut who recently sprang to fame by regularly updating his Twitter followers (of which he now has over 370,000) on the training process for his Space Shuttle mission and subsequently--from orbit--on the mission itself (note: when he was in orbit, Astro_Mike, as he is known on Twitter, actually sent his updates by email to Houston, where they were then posted to his Twitter account).
From 3:00 to 4:00PM Central, Massimino--whose recently concluded 13-day mission centered around upgrading the Hubble Space Telescope and saw him performing two spacewalks--will appear live on NASA TV and on Internet broadcasting service Ustream (ustream.tv/NASA2Explore), and will take questions exclusively from Twitter users (who are invited to tweet their questions to him in advance of the live event).
Earlier this month, [itvt] reported that NASA astronaut, Mark Polansky, who will command the next space shuttle mission, is sharing the final weeks of his training via Twitter, and is inviting viewers to submit video questions to him on YouTube and to alert him via Twitter when they upload their videos. Polansky, whose Twitter handle is @Astro_127, plans to answer a selection of the viewer-submitted video questions (which must be no longer than 30 seconds) on NASA Television live from space, and says that, each week, he will announce on his Twitter feed which questions have been selected.
