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Taxpayers in Nine States and the District of Columbia File with Different Centers this Year



IR-2010-16, Jan. 29, 2010

Washington — The Internal Revenue Service announced today that some taxpayers who file paper income tax returns will send them to different processing centers this year.

Taxpayers in Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Virginia and the District of Columbia will now send their tax returns to the IRS Kansas City Service Center in Kansas City, Mo. Taxpayers in Indiana and Michigan will send their tax returns to the IRS Fresno Service Center, in Fresno, Calif. Taxpayers in Alabama will send their tax returns to the IRS Austin Service Center in Austin, Texas.

The IRS continuously monitors work flow at its centers and makes appropriate adjustments by altering the volume of returns to be sent to each. Taxpayers who use the envelope provided with the income tax instructions do not have to be concerned with the address change; their returns automatically will go to the correct center.

Taxpayers who e-file will not be affected by the address changes. Two out of three filers choose IRS e-file; it’s faster, easier, more accurate and more convenient than filing a paper tax return.

For taxpayers who file paper returns, the correct center addresses are on labels inside the tax packages they receive in the mail. Taxpayers who do not receive a package and need the service center address should refer to the back cover of the instructions to Form 1040, Form 1040A and Form 1040EZ.

USCIS and Los Angeles Announce Immigrant Integration Partnership

WASHINGTON - U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Alejandro Mayorkas and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced today a new partnership to strengthen immigrant integration efforts in Los Angeles through proactive citizenship awareness, education, and outreach activities. The initiative kicks off with a free citizenship information session and naturalization workshop on Saturday, Jan. 30, 2010, at Felicitas and Gonzalo Mendez Learning Center in Northeast Los Angeles. USCIS Los Angeles District Director Jane Arellano will be on hand to answer questions.

“Citizenship creates opportunities, strengthens communities, and allows immigrants to become fully vested members of this great nation,” said Mayorkas. “In serving the public, it is our duty to provide aspiring citizens with the tools they need to pursue the path to citizenship. We are proud to partner with Mayor Villaraigosa and the City of Los Angeles on this important initiative.”

Saturday’s event is the first in a series of planned citizenship information sessions for Los Angeles residents. Other activities under the agreement include the dissemination of USCIS educational materials highlighting U.S. citizenship and the naturalization process at city facilities along with targeted outreach to increase awareness of citizenship rights, responsibilities, and the naturalization process among eligible residents. As the second largest, and one of the most diverse cities in the country, Los Angeles is home to immigrants coming from more than 140 countries and speaking 224 languages. California is home to nearly 3.5 million legal permanent residents, 2.5 million of whom are eligible to naturalize.

“By partnering with USCIS to educate and encourage Angelenos to become American citizens, the City of Los Angeles is helping to open the doors of greater economic opportunity for thousands of hard-working immigrants and their families,” Mayor Villaraigosa said. “This outreach campaign is a model of cooperation and civic empowerment that will help enrich America's continued success as a nation of immigrants.”

Los Angeles is the first city to enter into an agreement with USCIS to strengthen and enhance local immigant integration efforts. USCIS will regularly evaluate the program’s effectiveness to determine whether a similar agreement may be replicated in other locations. Launched as a pilot, the partnership between USCIS and Los Angeles will remain in effect for two years.

To learn more about USCIS and its programs, visit our homepage or call the National Customer Service Center at (800) 375-5283.

For more information on the City of Los Angeles, visit www.lacity.org.

NASA Announces Tuesday News Teleconferences with Directorate Leaders


WASHINGTON -- NASA Administrator Charles Bolden announced the administration's fiscal year 2011 budget request Monday by calling for change and a new era of innovation in America's approach to science and space exploration. On Tuesday, Feb. 2, the associate administrators of the mission directorates will hold teleconferences to discuss the budget's impact on their specific areas.

The teleconference schedule is (all times Eastern):

11:30 a.m. -- Science (phone 888-972-9928 or 415-228-4737, pass code: science)
12:15 p.m. -- Space Operations (phone: 800-369-6087 or 773-756-0843, pass code: spaceflight)
1 p.m. -- Exploration Systems (phone: 888-469-0980 or 630-395-0021, pass code: exploration)
1:45 p.m. -- Aeronautics (phone: 888-809-8972 or 212-287-1847, pass code: aeronautics)

Each teleconference is scheduled to last 30 minutes. Reporters may join the teleconference of their choice by dialing the telephone number and using the pass code listed above. The number of available telephone lines is limited.

Live audio of the budget teleconferences will stream online at:

http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

Replays of each mission directorate's teleconference will be available until Feb. 16. The replay numbers are:

Science: 888-403-4667 or 203-369-3149, pass code 78543
Space Operations: 800-944-3336 or 203-369-3426, pass code 12536
Exploration Systems: 800-262-5125 or 402-220-9716, pass code 55693
Aeronautics: 800-925-5459 or 203-369-3851, pass code 452361

The NASA budget and supporting information is available at:

http://www.nasa.gov/budget

NASA Selects Commercial Firms to Begin Development of Crew Transportation Concepts and Technology Demonstrations for Human Spaceflight Using Recovery Act Funds

Source: NASA

WASHINGTON -- NASA has awarded $50 million through funded agreements to further the commercial sector's capability to support transport of crew to and from low Earth orbit. This step is the first taken by NASA consistent with the president's direction to foster commercial human spaceflight capabilities.

"The president has asked NASA to partner with the aerospace industry in a fundamentally new way, making commercially provided services the primary mode of astronaut transportation to the International Space Station," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "We are pleased to be able to quickly move forward to advance this exciting plan for NASA."

Through an open competition for funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, NASA has awarded Space Act Agreements to Blue Origin of Kent, Wash.; The Boeing Company of Houston; Paragon Space Development Corporation of Tucson, Ariz.; Sierra Nevada Corporation of Louisville, Colo.; and United Launch Alliance of Centennial, Colo. The agreements are for the development of crew concepts and technology demonstrations and investigations for future commercial support of human spaceflight.

The Space Act Agreements are designed to foster entrepreneurial activity leading to high-tech job growth in engineering, analysis, design and research, and to promote economic growth as capabilities for new markets are created. Funding for these Space Act Agreements will stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate human spaceflight capabilities.

"These selections represent a critical step to enable future commercial human spaceflight," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for Exploration Systems at NASA. "These impressive proposals will advance NASA significantly along the path to using commercial services to ferry astronauts to and from low Earth orbit, and we look forward to working with the selected teams," Cooke said.

All Space Act Agreements are designed to partially fund the development of system concepts, key technologies, and capabilities that could ultimately be used in commercial crew human space transportation systems. The selected teams also proposed matching funds from other sources that would leverage the taxpayer investment. The selected teams and awards are:

* Blue Origin will receive $3.7 million
* The Boeing Company will receive $18 million
* Paragon Space Development Corporation will receive $1.4 million
* Sierra Nevada Corporation will receive $20 million
* United Launch Alliance will receive $6.7 million

The signed Space Act Agreements will fund performance milestones beginning in February 2010. The aggregate value of all of the Space Act Agreements is approximately $50 million.

The Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston is managing this effort.
For more information about NASA's Commercial Crew and Cargo Program, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/c3po/home

Suspected Asteroid Collision Leaves Trailing Debris

Source NASA

WASHINGTON -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

Asteroid collisions are energetic, with an average impact speed of more than 11,000 miles per hour, or five times faster than a rifle bullet. The comet-like object imaged by Hubble, called P/2010 A2, was first discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research, or LINEAR, program sky survey on Jan. 6. New Hubble images taken on Jan. 25 and 29 show a complex X-pattern of filamentary structures near the nucleus.

"This is quite different from the smooth dust envelopes of normal comets," said principal investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. "The filaments are made of dust and gravel, presumably recently thrown out of the nucleus. Some are swept back by radiation pressure from sunlight to create straight dust streaks. Embedded in the filaments are co-moving blobs of dust that likely originated from tiny unseen parent bodies."

Hubble shows the main nucleus of P/2010 A2 lies outside its own halo of dust. This has never been seen before in a comet-like object. The nucleus is estimated to be 460 feet in diameter.

Normal comets fall into the inner regions of the solar system from icy reservoirs in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. As comets near the sun and warm up, ice near the surface vaporizes and ejects material from the solid comet nucleus via jets. But P/2010 A2 may have a different origin. It orbits in the warm, inner regions of the asteroid belt where its nearest neighbors are dry rocky bodies lacking volatile materials.

This leaves open the possibility that the complex debris tail is the result of an impact between two bodies, rather than ice simply melting from a parent body.

"If this interpretation is correct, two small and previously unknown asteroids recently collided, creating a shower of debris that is being swept back into a tail from the collision site by the pressure of sunlight," Jewitt said.

The main nucleus of P/2010 A2 would be the surviving remnant of this so-called hypervelocity collision.

"The filamentary appearance of P/2010 A2 is different from anything seen in Hubble images of normal comets, consistent with the action of a different process," Jewitt said. An impact origin also would be consistent with the absence of gas in spectra recorded using ground-based telescopes.

The asteroid belt contains abundant evidence of ancient collisions that have shattered precursor bodies into fragments. The orbit of P/2010 A2 is consistent with membership in the Flora asteroid family, produced by collisional shattering more than 100 million years ago. One fragment of that ancient smashup may have struck Earth 65 million years ago, triggering a mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs. But, until now, no such asteroid-asteroid collision has been caught "in the act."

At the time of the Hubble observations, the object was approximately 180 million miles from the sun and 90 million miles from Earth. The Hubble images were recorded with the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which is capable of detecting house-sized fragments at the distance of the asteroid belt.

For Hubble images and more information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/hubble