An American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut are preparing to blast off from their home planet Sunday to fly to the International Space Station next week.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is honoring the University Affiliated Research Center, a partnership managed by UC Santa Cruz, with an achivement award.

[Editor’s Note: a much shorter version of this article was published as “U.S. Satellite Shootdown: The Inside Story” on the IEEE Spectrum Online site, August 6.]

This summer, Julianna Plumb of Redlands will get a firsthand look at what it's like to be an aerospace engineer. Julianna, 17, is an intern at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base.

The entire event will be streamed into a number of Second Life locations with opportunities for avatars to submit questions to the Panelists throughout the day; the topics for Panel discussion are listed below.