Discovery Nearing Launch Pad

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During space shuttle Discovery's final spaceflight, the STS-133 crew members will take important spare parts to the International Space Station along with the Express Logistics Carrier-4.

Steve Bowen replaced Tim Kopra as Mission Specialist 2 following a bicycle injury on Jan. 15 that prohibited Kopra from supporting the launch window. Bowen last flew on Atlantis in May 2010 as part of the STS-132 crew. Flying on the STS-133 mission will make Bowen the first astronaut ever to fly on consecutive missions.

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STS-134 Update:

Astronaut Rick Sturckow will serve as a backup commander for the STS-134 space shuttle mission to facilitate continued training for the crew and support teams during STS-134 Commander Mark Kelly's absence. Kelly's wife, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was critically wounded in a shooting on Jan. 8 in Tucson, Ariz. Kelly remains commander of the mission, which is targeted for launch on April 19 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

STS-135 Update:

The Space Shuttle Program baselined the STS-135 mission for a target launch date of June 28 at 3:48 p.m. EDT. It is NASA’s intent to fly the mission with orbiter Atlantis carrying the Raffaello multipurpose logistics module to deliver supplies, logistics and spare parts to the International Space Station. The mission also will fly a system to investigate the potential for robotically refueling existing spacecraft and return a failed ammonia pump module to help NASA better understand the failure mechanism and improve pump designs for future systems.

In late December, the agency’s Space Operations Mission Directorate requested the shuttle and International Space Station programs take the necessary steps to maintain the capability to fly Atlantis on the STS-135 mission. The Authorization Act of 2010 directs NASA to conduct the mission, and baselining the flight enables the program to begin preparations for the mission with a target launch date of June 28. The mission would be the 135th and final space shuttle flight.

NASA Administrator Speaks to Richmond Middle School Students

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Bolden Visit Follows President's Call to Make Education a National Priority

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden today visited the MathScience Innovation Center in Richmond, Va., to meet seventh and eighth-grade students from the city's Albert Hill Middle School. Bolden discussed his military and space career and the importance of science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, education for tomorrow's careers. In his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, President Obama emphasized the importance of STEM education for the U.S. to compete globally and create jobs.

U.S. Senator Mark Warner and U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott joined Bolden and science center executives for the event.
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"President Obama's call for us to win the future means we need to develop the skills and capabilities to stay competitive in the global economy," Administrator Bolden said. "Today's students have the opportunity to build and take part in tomorrow's big adventures and keep our country strong and competitive through science, technology, engineering and mathematics."

STEM education is the foundation of NASA's learning initiatives, such as the Summer of Innovation (SoI) project. Begun in 2010, the project engages middle school students in STEM studies and hands-on, or participatory, exploration during the summer hiatus, when many lose academic skills acquired during the school year. SoI also supports a continuum of coordinated services to engage students in meaningful ways through summer and extended learning during the school year. NASA will announce this year's Summer of Innovation plans in the spring.

"Americans have never been afraid of the future, and we shouldn't start now. We know what the challenges are, and we know that these new times demand new thinking and new skills, including advanced math and science," Sen. Warner said. "We need to face up to these challenges by working together to make sure that our young people get a fair chance to compete, and to win, in the race for the future."

The MathScience Innovation Center's goal is to be the innovator, incubator and advocate of 21st Century math and science programs for the Virginia capital region's kindergarten through 12th grade educators and students. It also houses the Challenger Learning Center for Space Science Education. Today marks the 25th anniversary of the loss of space shuttle Challenger and her crew of seven.

Before Bolden, Warner and Scott took the stage, students had an opportunity to engage in hands-on activities related to science and exploration, including a rocket-building exercise. Education staff from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., led the activities. Studies have shown that hands-on, experiential learning is a key factor in capturing students' interest in technical fields and inspiring the next generation to reach new heights.

External Tank Draws Facebook Questions

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Space shuttle Discovery's external fuel tank has taken on a bit of a starring role for the STS-133 mission because of the extra work needed to handle the unexpected challenges presented by the tank's stringers.
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Technicians have been working on the stringers as the shuttle stands inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. Some of the 108 stringers, which are support beams that make up the corrugated intertank portion of the external tank, developed small cracks during fueling for a Nov. 5, 2010, launch attempt. Examinations performed following a fueling test revealed cracks on other stringers.

In considering the challenges posed by the stringers after a few cracks were discovered, NASA fans and the general public found an appetite for more information about the largest single component of a space shuttle "stack."

As part of NASA's continuing social media interaction, Facebook users were given the chance to ask Kennedy's external tank expert about the modifications and the one-of-a-kind role the tank plays. Kennedy's Facebook page has drawn about 60,000 friends, with some 130,000 following the center on Twitter.

Alicia Mendoza is NASA's External Tank and Solid Rocket Booster vehicle manager at Kennedy and in between preparing the tank for Discovery's targeted launch on Feb. 24, she discussed some of the things that went into designing the tank, why it looks the way it does and why it is not recovered for re-use the way the rest of the stack is.

To save time, the two dozen questions posted to Kennedy's Facebook page were trimmed to six that covered the broadest areas. First, a few basics about the tank:

At 15 stories tall and sporting an outer shell of dark orange insulation but with no engines of its own, the tank serves the shuttle's three main engines. It is actually two tanks on top of each other, with a support ring -- including the stringers -- holding them together. The tank holds about 535,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Both propellants are cryogenic, which means they are super-cold. The oxygen is chilled and pressurized to minus 297 degrees F in its liquid form and the liquid hydrogen buries the temperature needle to minus 423 degrees F.
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A gallon of liquid oxygen weighs about 8.5 pounds while the hydrogen is much lighter, even in liquid form, at about half a pound per gallon. But even though the chemicals may not sound heavy by the gallon, the three main engines use so much propellant that carrying it all into orbit would make an impractically large and heavy orbiter.

Therefore, NASA designed the tank to be jettisoned just as the shuttle makes it into orbit. The tank descends through the atmosphere where some of it burns up and the rest crumples and falls harmlessly into the Indian Ocean.
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An Astronomer's Field of Dreams

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An innovative new radio telescope array under construction in central New Mexico will eventually harness the power of more than 13,000 antennas and provide a fresh eye to the sky. The antennas, which resemble droopy ceiling fans, form the Long Wavelength Array, designed to survey the sky from horizon to horizon over a wide range of frequencies.

The University of New Mexico leads the project, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provides the advanced digital electronic systems, which represent a major component of the observatory.
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The first station in the Long Wavelength Array, with 256 antennas, is scheduled to start surveying the sky by this summer. When complete, the Long Wavelength Array will consist of 53 stations, with a total of 13,000 antennas strategically placed in an area nearly 400 kilometers (248 miles) in diameter. The antennas will provide sensitive, high-resolution images of a region of the sky hundreds of times larger than the full moon. These images could reveal radio waves coming from planets outside our solar system, and thus would turn out to be a new way to detect these worlds. In addition to planets, the telescope will pick up a host of other cosmic phenomena.

"We'll be looking for the occasional celestial flash," said Joseph Lazio, a radio astronomer at JPL. "These flashes can be anything from explosions on surfaces of nearby stars, deaths of distant stars, exploding black holes, or even perhaps transmissions by other civilizations." JPL scientists are working with multi-institutional teams to explore this new area of astronomy. Lazio is lead author of an article reporting scientific results from the Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array, a precursor to the new array, in the December 2010 issue of Astronomical Journal.

The new Long Wavelength Array will operate in the radio-frequency range of 20 to 80 megahertz, corresponding to wavelengths of 15 meters to 3.8 meters (49.2 feet to 12.5 feet). These frequencies represent one of the last and most poorly explored regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

In recent years, a few factors have triggered revived interest in radio astronomy at these frequencies. The cost and technology required to build these low-frequency antennas has improved significantly. Also, advances in computing have made the demands of image processing more attainable. The combination of cost-effective hardware and technology gives scientists the ability to return to these wavelengths and obtain a much better view of the universe. The predecessor Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array was also in New Mexico. It was successful in identifying radio flashes, but all of them came from non-astronomy targets -- either the sun, or meteors reflecting TV signals high in Earth's atmosphere. Nonetheless, its findings indicate how future searches using the Long Wavelength Array technology might lead to new discoveries.

Radio astronomy was born at frequencies below 100 megahertz and developed from there. The discoveries and innovations at this frequency range helped pave the way for modern astronomy. Perhaps one of the most important contributions made in radio astronomy was by a young graduate student at New Hall (since renamed Murray Edwards College) of the University of Cambridge, U.K. Jocelyn Bell discovered the first hints of radio pulsars in 1967, a finding that was later awarded a Nobel Prize. Pulsars are neutron stars that beam radio waves in a manner similar to a lighthouse beacon.
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Long before Bell's discovery, astronomers believed that neutron stars, remnants of certain types of supernova explosions, might exist. At the time, however, the prediction was that these cosmic objects would be far too faint to be detected. When Bell went looking for something else, she stumbled upon neutron stars that were in fact pulsing with radio waves -- the pulsars. Today about 2,000 pulsars are known, but within the past decade, a number of discoveries have hinted that the radio sky might be far more dynamic than suggested by just pulsars.

"Because nature is more clever than we are, it's quite possible that we will discover something we haven't thought of," said Lazio.
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NASA Partners on NanoSail-D Amateur Astronomy Image Contest

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NASA has formed a partnership with Spaceweather.com to engage thhttp://nasa-spacestation-info.blogspot.com/e amateur astronomy community to submit the best images of the orbiting NanoSail-D solar sail. NanoSail-D unfurled the first ever 100-square-foot solar sail in low-Earth orbit on Jan. 20. To encourage observations of NanoSail-D, Spaceweather.com is offering prizes for the best images of this historic, pioneering spacecraft.

The contest is open to all types of images, including, but not limited to, telescopic captures of the sail to simple wide-field camera shots of solar sail flares. If NanoSail-D is in the field of view, the image is eligible for judging.

To learn more about the NanoSail-D imaging challenge and contest rules, satellite tracking predictions and sighting times,

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NASA's Hubble Finds Most Distant Galaxy Candidate Ever Seen in Universe

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Astronomers have pushed NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to its limits by finding what is likely to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe. The object's light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach Hubble, roughly 150 million years longer than the previous record holder. The age of the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years.

The tiny, dim object is a compact galaxy of blue stars that existed 480 million years after the big bang. More than 100 such mini-galaxies would be needed to make up our Milky Way. The new research offers surprising evidence that the rate of star birth in the early universe grew dramatically, increasing by about a factor of 10 from 480 million years to 650 million years after the big bang.

"NASA continues to reach for new heights, and this latest Hubble discovery will deepen our understanding of the universe and benefit generations to come,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, who was the pilot of the space shuttle mission that carried Hubble to orbit. “We could only dream when we launched Hubble more than 20 years ago that it would have the ability to make these types of groundbreaking discoveries and rewrite textbooks.”

Astronomers don't know exactly when the first stars appeared in the universe, but every step farther from Earth takes them deeper into the early formative years when stars and galaxies began to emerge in the aftermath of the big bang.

"These observations provide us with our best insights yet into the earlier primeval objects that have yet to be found," said Rychard Bouwens of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Bouwens and Illingworth report the discovery in the Jan. 27 issue of the British science journal Nature.

This observation was made with the Wide Field Camera 3 starting just a few months after it was installed in the observatory in May 2009, during the last NASA space shuttle servicing mission to Hubble. After more than a year of detailed observations and analysis, the object was positively identified in the camera's Hubble Ultra Deep Field-Infrared data taken in the late summers of 2009 and 2010.

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The object appears as a faint dot of starlight in the Hubble exposures. It is too young and too small to have the familiar spiral shape that is characteristic of galaxies in the local universe. Although its individual stars can't be resolved by Hubble, the evidence suggests this is a compact galaxy of hot stars formed more than 100-to-200 million years earlier from gas trapped in a pocket of dark matter.

"We're peering into an era where big changes are afoot," said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz. "The rapid rate at which the star birth is changing tells us if we go a little further back in time we're going to see even more dramatic changes, closer to when the first galaxies were just starting to form."

The proto-galaxy is only visible at the farthest infrared wavelengths observable by Hubble. Observations of earlier times, when the first stars and galaxies were forming, will require Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The hypothesized hierarchical growth of galaxies -- from stellar clumps to majestic spirals and ellipticals -- didn't become evident until the Hubble deep field exposures. The first 500 million years of the universe's existence, from a z of 1000 to 10, is the missing chapter in the hierarchical growth of galaxies. It's not clear how the universe assembled structure out of a darkening, cooling fireball of the big bang. As with a developing embryo, astronomers know there must have been an early period of rapid changes that would set the initial conditions to make the universe of galaxies what it is today.

"After 20 years of opening our eyes to the universe around us, Hubble continues to awe and surprise astronomers," said Jon Morse, NASA's Astrophysics Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "It now offers a tantalizing look at the very edge of the known universe -- a frontier NASA strives to explore."

Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington.

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Green Touches Energize Kennedy's Newest Facility

http://nasa-spacestation-info.blogspot.com/Kennedy Space Center rang in 2011 with the grand opening of NASA's "greenest" facility on Jan. 20. As the new hub for fueling spacecraft on journeys to unlock the mysteries of the universe, the Propellants North Administrative and Maintenance Facility will tap into Earth's most natural resources.

"This is our start. This is setting the standard," said Kennedy's Center Directhttp://nasa-spacestation-info.blogspot.com/or Bob Cabana. "How can you not be enthused about something that requires zero energy? It actually puts more energy out than it requires to run in a 24-hour period."

The facility qualifies for the U.S. Green Build¬ing Council’s Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design, or LEED, Platinum status, which is the highest of green building certifications. That certification system is based on the use of sustainable sites, materials and resources, water and energy efficiency, indoor environmental quality and design innovation.

"While our NASA primary mission is exploration, the agency also tends to another important mission -- protecting planet Earth," said Mike Benik, the director of Center Operations at Kennedy. "This facility behind me is a sterling, or should I say platinum, example of how NASA and KSC are leading the way."

To lead the way, the new facility will become a test bed for more environmentally friendly projects at NASA centers by making sure every aspect is truly green.

"I think it's the future for us here at the Kennedy Space Center," Cabana said. "I think we're going to add more facilities like this and eventually get to where some of our old 1960s infrastructure has been updated and brought to new standards."

The test bed begins with a parking lot of the future. For less than $1.50 a day, an electric or hybrid vehicle can plug into a nearby solar-powered charging canopy. The eight-car station was paid for by the Department of Energy's Transportation Electrification Grant Prhttp://nasa-spacestation-info.blogspot.com/ogram and can be used for government or privately owned vehicles to reduce dependency on gas.

"This will hopefully give folks an incentive to buy electric cars and have a place to plug in," said Frank Kline, the facility's project manager with NASA Construction of Facilities.

The sun's power doesn't stop there. More than 300 photovoltaic panels are expected to generate more energy than will be used at Propellants North, making it the space agency's first net-zero facility. Even the orientation of the facility maximizes sunlight, decreasing the demand for energy.

"We've had experts come in and give us kudos on how well the system is actually functioning," Kline said.

Water is a big part of the conservation effort, too. Toward the back of the facility is a 7,500-gallon rainwater harvesting system that consists of three storage tanks. Non-treated H2O from the system will be used for the facility's toilets and irrigation system, while treated water can be used for drinking and hand washing.

Revered as American icons, NASA’s spaceflight history adorns the walls. Other artwork brightly contrasts the power of spacecraft propellants and the peace of the raw nature and wildlife that exists in harmony at Kennedy.

While most of the facility's features are brand-new, Propellants North also is steeped in rich history.
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Crawlerway rocks that were crushed during space shuttle treks to Kennedy's launch pads are used as a substitute for mulch. In the lobby, windows and framing saved from Kennedy's Launch Control Center firing rooms are the focal point of the facility.

"To me, this is the million dollar view from this facility," Kline said. "You have the same view as you did, looking out in 1964 from the Launch Control Center, set at the same angle and orientation as in the firing rooms."

Kline and his team even insisted that the windows be left in their original state, with the salt air stains on the outside and a nicotine patina on the inside from when NASA allowed smoking in the firing rooms.

This clean, ‘green’ building puts emphasis on human and environmental health that is quite a contrast from the popularity of tobacco use back in the early days of the space program, and workers in Propellants North are guaranteed to reap the benefits from this uber-smart facility.

An automated light control system helps overhead LED lights and sunlight work in tandem to always give the facility's occupants peak lighting, which is thought to enhance work place morale and increase productivity.
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"We get a lot of daylight into this facility, especially the second floor," Kline said. "These adjust the power to the lights to keep a constant lighting level."

Even the air-conditioning system is pretty clever. Its efficiency comes from highly insulated roof and walls, as well as a thermostat that regulates the temperature and relative humidity up to 5 feet above the ground, which is where most people spend their time.

"This system works from the ground up. Hot air rises, so the air conditioning here starts from the floor and goes up," Kline said. "It's kind of the opposite from what a normal facility would be, pushing cold air down."

The system requires no duct work, because the air flows underneath the facility's sustainable bamboo flooring. Vents in each work station can even be relocated for the comfort of the occupants. The system also goes a step further and monitors the CO2 levels in the building. As the number of people in the facility increases, the system will detect whehttp://nasa-spacestation-info.blogspot.com/n more fresh air is required.

Propellants North also is using an energy-saving feature that could be added to existing Kennedy facilities in the near future. Called a controlled power station, when an occupant leaves their work area for an extended period of time, it will turn everything using electricity off except their computer. This small step could greatly reduce an existing facility's monthly power bill.

The design team's attention to detail didn't escape the restrooms, either. Hygienic hand dryers scrape water from hands in a matter of seconds, much like a power dryer at a car wash. And the showers and sinks are made to conserve as well.

"All the fixtures are high-efficiency fixtures and they're all automated," Kline said. "And they're super-low flow, so you use very little water."

While Propellants North will be working for its occupants, its occupants will need to develop a green thumb of their own to maintain the center's reuse, recycle and repurpose efforts.

"We have bins for plastic, aluminum cans, white paper, cardboard. The whole idea is to change people's habits to not throw things away," Kline said. "We can recycle most things nowadays. So, we try to reduce what ends up in the landfill."

The construction crew had the same concept in mind throughout the year-and-a-half building phase. To date, more than 98 percent of all waste, totaling 664 tons, was diverted from landfill disposal.

Cabana credited a diverse team of designers and builders with crafting a new approach to construction and facility usage that focused on environmental impacts and benefits.

"The integration of the team has just been outstanding," Cabana said.

Mars Sliding Behind Sun After Rover Anniversary

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Mars Exploration Rover Mission Status Report


PASADENA, Calif. -- The team operating NASA's Mars rover Opportunity will temporarily suspend commanding for 16 days after the rover's seventh anniversary next week, but the rover will stay busy.

For the fourth time since Opportunity landed on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004, Universal Time (Jan. 24, Pacific Time), the planets' orbits will put Mars almost directly behind the sun from Earth's perspective.
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During the days surrounding such an alignment, called a solar conjunction, the sun can disrupt radio transmissions between Earth and Mars. To avoid the chance of a command being corrupted by the sun and harming a spacecraft, NASA temporarily refrains from sending commands from Earth to Mars spacecraft in orbit and on the surface. This year, the commanding moratorium will be Jan. 27 to Feb. 11 for Opportunity, with similar periods for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey orbiter.

Downlinks from Mars spacecraft will continue during the conjunction period, though at a much reduced rate. Mars-to-Earth communication does not present risk to spacecraft safety, even if transmissions are corrupted by the sun.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will scale back its observations of Mars during the conjunction period due to reduced capability to download data to Earth and a limit on how much can be stored onboard.

Opportunity will continue sending data daily to the Odyssey orbiter for relay to Earth. "Overall, we expect to receive a smaller volume of daily data from Opportunity and none at all during the deepest four days of conjunction," said Alfonso Herrera, a rover mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The rover team has developed a set of commands to be sent to Opportunity in advance so that the rover can continue science activities during the command moratorium.
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"The goal is to characterize the materials in an area that shows up with a mineralogical signal, as seen from orbit, that's different from anywhere else Opportunity has been," said JPL's Bruce Banerdt, project scientist for Opportunity and its rover twin, Spirit. The area is at the southeastern edge of a crater called "Santa Maria," which Opportunity approached from the west last month.

Drives last week brought Opportunity to the position where it will spend the conjunction period. From that position, the rover's robotic arm can reach an outcrop target called "Luis de Torres." The rover's Moessbauer spectrometer will be placed onto the target for several days during the conjunction to assess the types of minerals present. The instrument uses a small amount of radioactive cobalt-57 to elicit information from the target. With a half-life of less than a year, the cobalt has substantially depleted during Opportunity's seven years on Mars, so readings lasting several days are necessary now to be equivalent to much shorter readings when the mission was newer.

Opportunity will also make atmospheric measurements during the conjunction period. After conjunction, it will spend several more days investigating Santa Maria crater before resuming a long-term trek toward Endurance crater, which is about 22 kilometers (14 miles) in diameter and, at its closest edge, about 6 kilometers (4 miles) from Santa Maria.

Opportunity's drives to the southeastern edge of Santa Maria brought the total distance driven by the rover during its seventh year on Mars to 7.4 kilometers (4.6 miles), which is more than in any previous year. The rover's total odometry for its seventh anniversary is 26.7 kilometers (16.6 miles).
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Opportunity and Spirit, which landed three weeks apart, successfully completed their three-month prime missions in April 2004, then began years of bonus extended missions. Both have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life. Spirit's most recent communication was on March 22, 2010. On the possibility that Spirit may yet awaken from a low-power hibernation status, NASA engineers continue to listen for a signal from that rover.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

NASA Chat: Taking the "Boom" Out of Booms

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Sonic booms usually mean something cool. The space shuttle is coming in for a landing or a jet fighter is flying overhead. We don't hear them very often, so when we do it's an event.

But imagine if aircraft manufacturers designed and built a vehicle that carried passengers or cargo at supersonic speeds over land. Sonic booms would be happening all the time; and they're loud and annoying. That's why the Concorde flew over the ocean. Noise regulations in most countries wouldn't allow it to fly over land because of the sonic booms it generated.
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Sonic booms are keeping a new era of supersonic cruise flight from happening.

For us to ever be able to enjoy the benefits of flying people or cargo over land at super-fast speeds, we have to figure out how to turn down the volume on sonic booms.

NASA has been doing flight tests and simulations and ground experiments -- with cool names like "Quiet Spike," "SonicBOBS," "SonicBREW," "LaNCETS," "House VIBES," "Low Boom/No Boom" – to help find answers.

What is a sonic boom? How is it created?
Do sonic booms cause damage? To people? Structures?
Does changing the noise level of a sonic boom affect aircraft speed?
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On Tuesday, January 25, at 3:00 p.m. ET, you can ask NASA aerospace engineer and "sonic boom guru" Ed Haering about what it's like to try to tame a sonic boom.

To join the chat, simply come back to this page on January 25. The chat window will open at the bottom of this page starting at 2:30 p.m. ET. You can log in and be ready to ask questions at 3:00 p.m.

See you in chat!

More About Ed Haering
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Ed is an aerospace engineer at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Ca. He really likes the variety of his work, which can involve starting up a new research program, doing computer simulations and analysis, troubleshooting instrumentation on exotic aircraft, and conducting field measurements in remote locations.

Resupply from Four Corners of Globe

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Resupply from Four Corners of Globe

A quick succession of international space supply trucks will arrive on the International Space Station’s loading docks early in 2011, dropping off more than 11 tons (10,000 kilograms) of food, computers, medical equipment and supplies, spare parts and experiment gear – not to mention the necessities of everyday human life in orbit.
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Demonstrating a multinational commitment to supporting life, work and research on the station at the start of its second decade, space trucks from Japan, Europe and Russia will launch to the station in January and February, followed quickly by the space shuttle Discovery.

Second Japanese Cargo Ship

The Kounotori2, or “white stork,” H-II Transfer Vehicle 2 (HTV2) developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), will make the system’s second delivery to the station after planned launch from Tanegashima, Japan, on Jan. 22. On its heels will be the 41st Russian Progress vehicle, set to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, on Jan. 28, and the second European Space Agency’s (ESA) Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), Johannes Kepler, set to launch from a launch pad near Kourou, French Guiana, on Feb. 15.

HTV2 is a 33-foot-long, 13-foot-diameter (10 meter by 4 meter) unmanned cargo transfer spacecraft capable of delivering both internal and external supplies and hardware to the station. The HTV will be launched from the Tanegashima Space Center aboard an H-IIB launch vehicle with 4.2 tons (3,814 kilograms) of supplies. When HTV2 approaches the station on Jan. 27, Expedition 26 astronauts Cady Coleman, Scott Kelly and Paolo Nespoli will use the station’s robotic arm, known as “Canadarm2,” to grapple and berth it to the Earth-facing port on the Harmony.

After equalizing pressures between the cargo craft and the station, the crew will open hatches and begin removing supplies ranging from food and clothing for the astronauts to new computers and research equipment and supplies. Among the new research equipment will be the Japanese Kobairo gradient hearing furnace for generating high-quality crystals from melting materials, an Amine Swingbed technology demonstration that will look at ways to revitalize the air on space vehicles, and the International Space Station Agricultural Camera, which will take frequent images, in visible and infrared light, of vegetated areas on the Earth.

Aside from the space shuttle, the HTV is the only vehicle capable of delivering external cargo to the station. The cargo is mounted to an exposed pallet that sits within the HTV’s unpressurized section.

Altogether, the HTV2 vehicle and cargo will weigh 35,408 pounds (16,061 kilograms). The total amount of external, unpressurized cargo being delivered is 2,043 pounds (927 kilograms). About 1,990 pounds (902 kilograms) of the external cargo is NASA cargo, and about 53 pounds (24 kilograms) is Canadian Space Agency cargo.

NASA Spacecraft Prepares for Valentine's Day Comet Rendezvous

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NASA's Stardust-NExT spacecraft is nearing a celestial date with comet Tempel 1 at approximately 8:37 p.m. PST (11:37 p.m. EST), on Feb. 14. The mission will allow scientists for the first time to look for changes on a comet's surface that occurred following an orbit around the sun.
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The Stardust-NExT, or New Exploration of Tempel, spacecraft will take high-resolution images during the encounter, and attempt to measure the composition, distribution, and flux of dust emitted into the coma, or material surrounding the comet's nucleus. Data from the mission will provide important new information on how Jupiter-family comets evolved and formed.

The mission will expand the investigation of the comet initiated by NASA's Deep Impact mission. In July 2005, the Deep Impact spacecraft delivered an impactor to the surface of Tempel 1 to study its composition. The Stardust spacecraft may capture an image of the crater created by the impactor. This would be an added bonus to the huge amount of data that mission scientists expect to obtain.

"Every day we are getting closer and closer and more and more excited about answering some fundamental questions about comets," said Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "Going back for another look at Tempel 1 will provide new insights on how comets work and how they were put together four-and-a-half billion years ago."

At approximately 336 million kilometers (209 million miles) away from Earth, Stardust-NExT will be almost on the exact opposite side of the solar system at the time of the encounter. During the flyby, the spacecraft will take 72 images and store them in an onboard computer.

Initial raw images from the flyby will be sent to Earth for processing that will begin at approximately midnight PST (3 a.m. EST) on Feb. 15. Images are expected to be available at approximately 1:30 a.m. PST (4:30 a.m. EST).

As of today, the spacecraft is approximately 24.6 million kilometers (15.3 million miles) away from its encounter. Since 2007, Stardust-NExT executed eight flight path correction maneuvers, logged four circuits around the sun and used one Earth gravity assist to meet up with Tempel 1.

Another three maneuvers are planned to refine the spacecraft's path to the comet. Tempel 1's orbit takes it as close in to the sun as the orbit of Mars and almost as far away as the orbit of Jupiter. The spacecraft is expected to fly past the nearly 6-kilometer-wide comet (3.7 miles) at a distance of approximately 200 kilometers (124 miles).

In 2004, the Stardust mission became the first to collect particles directly from comet Wild 2, as well as interstellar dust. Samples were returned in 2006 for study via a capsule that detached from the spacecraft and parachuted to the ground southwest of Salt Lake City. Mission controllers placed the still viable Stardust spacecraft on a trajectory that could potentially reuse the flight system if a target of opportunity presented itself.

In January 2007, NASA re-christened the mission Stardust-NExT and began a four-and-a-half year journey to comet Tempel 1.

"You could say our spacecraft is a seasoned veteran of cometary campaigns," said Tim Larson, project manager for Stardust-NExT at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's been half-way to Jupiter, executed picture-perfect flybys of an asteroid and a comet, collected cometary material for return to Earth, then headed back out into the void again, where we asked it to go head-to-head with a second comet nucleus."

The mission team expects this flyby to write the final chapter of the spacecraft's success-filled story. The spacecraft is nearly out of fuel as it approaches 12 years of space travel, logging almost 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) since launch in 1999. This flyby and planned post-encounter imaging are expected to consume the remaining fuel.

JPL manages the mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft and manages day-to-day mission operations. JPL is managed by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

NASA Chat: The Moon's Earth-like Core

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State-of-the-art seismological techniques applied to Apollo-era data suggest our moon has a core similar to Earth's. Uncovering details about the lunar core is critical for developing accurate models of the moon's formation. The data sheds light on the evolution of a lunar dynamo -- a natural process by which our moon may have generated and maintained its own strhttp://www.nasa-spacestation-info.blogspot.com/ong magnetic field.

The team's findings suggest the moon possesses a solid, iron-rich inner core with a radius of nearly 150 miles and a fluid, primarily liquid-iron outer core with a radius of roughly 205 miles. Where it differs from Earth is a partially molten boundary layer around the core estimated to have a radius of nearly 300 miles. The research indicates the core contains a small percentage of light elements such as sulfur, echoing new seismology research on Earth that suggests the presence of light elements -- such as sulfur and oxygen -- in a layer around our own core.

The researchers used extensive data gathered during the Apollo-era moon missions. The Apollo Passive Seismic Experiment consisted of four seismometers deployed between 1969 and 1972, which recorded continuous lunar seismic activity until late-1977.

Live Web Chathttp://www.nasa-spacestation-info.blogspot.com/

On Thursday, Jan. 20 from 3:00 to 4:00 EST, NASA planetary scientist Dr. Renee Weber will answer your questions about the inner workings of our nearest neighbor.

Joining the chat is easy! Simply return to this page http://www.nasa.gov/connect/chat/moon_core_chat.html a few minutes before 3:00 p.m. EST on Thursday, Jan. 20. The chat module will appear at the bottom of this page. After you log in, wait for the chat module to be activated, then ask your questions!

About Chat Expert Dr. Renee Weber
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Dr. Renee Weber is a planetary scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. She serves as the project scientist for the Lunar Mapping and Modeling Project, a software project designed to provide lunar maps and surface feature information to mission planners and other lunar researchers. Renee's scientific research focuses on planetary seismology, in particular the re-processing of seismic data from the Apollo missions. She is involved in several international efforts with goals of sending modern, broad-band seismometers to both the moon and Mars.

NASA Satellites Find High-Energy Surprises in 'Constant' Crab Nebula

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The combined data from several NASA satellites has astonished astronomers by revealing unexpected changes in X-ray emission from the Crab Nebula, once thought to be the steadiest high-energy source in the sky.

"For 40 years, most astronomers regarded the Crab as a standard candle," said Colleen Wilson-Hodge, an astrophysicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., who presented the findings today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle. "Now, for the first time, we're clearly seeing how much our candle flickers."

The Crab Nebula is the wreckage of an exploded star whose light reached Earth in 1054. It is one of the most studied objects in the sky. At the heart of an expanding gas cloud lies what's left of the original star's core, a superdense neutron star that spins 30 times a second. All of the Crab's high-energy emissions are thought to be the result of physical processes that tap into this rapid spin.
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For decades, astronomers have regarded the Crab's X-ray emissions as so stable that they've used it to calibrate space-borne instruments. They also customarily describe the emissions of other high-energy sources in "millicrabs," a unit derived from the nebula's output.

"The Crab Nebula is a cornerstone of high-energy astrophysics," said team member Mike Cherry at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, La. (LSU), "and this study shows us that our foundation is slightly askew." The story unfolded when Cherry and Gary Case, also at LSU, first noticed the Crab's dimming in observations by the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) aboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

The team then analyzed GBM observations of the object from August 2008 to July 2010 and found an unexpected but steady decline of several percent at four different "hard" X-ray energies, from 12,000 to 500,000 electron volts (eV). For comparison, visible light has energies between 2 and 3 eV.

With the Crab's apparent constancy well established, the scientists needed to prove that the fadeout was real and was not an instrumental problem associated with the GBM. "If only one satellite instrument had reported this, no one would have believed it," Wilson-Hodge said.

So the team amassed data from the fleet of sensitive X-ray observatories now in orbit: NASA's Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) and Swift satellites and the European Space Agency's International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL). The results confirm a real intensity decline of about 7 percent at energies between 15,000 to 50,000 eV over two years. They also show that the Crab has brightened and faded by as much as 3.5 percent a year since 1999.

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Thescientists say that astronomers will need to find new ways to calibrate instruments in flight and to explore the possible effects of the inconstant Crab on past findings. A paper on the results will appear in the Feb. 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Fermi's other instrument, the Large Area Telescope, has detected unprecedented gamma-ray flares from the Crab, showing that it is also surprisingly variable at much higher energies. A study of these events was published Thursday, Jan. 6, in Science Express.

The nebula's power comes from the central neutron star, which is also a pulsar that emits fast, regular radio and X-ray pulses. This pulsed emission exhibits no changes associated with the decline, so it cannot be the source. Instead, researchers suspect that the long-term changes probably occur in the nebula's central light-year, but observations with future telescopes will be needed to know for sure.

This region is dominated by four high-energy structures: an X-ray-emitting jet; an outflow of particles moving near the speed of light, called a "pulsar wind"; a disk of accumulating particles where the wind terminates; and a shock front where the wind abruptly slows.

"This environment is dominated by the pulsar's magnetic field, which we suspect is organized precariously," said Roger Blandford, who directs the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, jointly located at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University. "The X-ray changes may involve some rearrangement of the magnetic field, but just where this happens is a mystery."

The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.
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NASA's Fermi is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.

The GBM Instrument Operations Center is located at the National Space Science Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala. The team includes a collaboration of scientists from UAH, NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and other institutions.

NASA Goddard manages Swift, RXTE and a guest observer facility for U.S. participation in the European Space Agency's INTEGRAL mission.

Planck Mission Peels Back Layers of the Universe

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The Planck mission released a new data catalogue Tuesday from initial maps of the entire sky. The catalogue includes thousands of never-before-seen dusty cocoons where stars are forming, and some of the most massive clusters of galaxies ever observed. Planck is a European Space Agency mission with significant contributions from NASA.

"NASA is pleased to support this important mission, and we have eagerly awaited Planck's first discoveries," said Jon Morse, NASA's Astrophysics Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "We look forward to continued collaboration with ESA and more outstanding science to come."
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Planck launched in May 2009 on a mission to detect light from just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, an explosive event at the dawn of the universe approximately 13.7 billion years ago. The spacecraft's state-of-the-art detectors ultimately will survey the whole sky at least four times, measuring the cosmic microwave background, or radiation left over from the Big Bang. The data will help scientists decipher clues about the evolution, fate and fabric of our universe. While these cosmology results won't be ready for another two years or so, early observations of specific objects in our Milky Way galaxy, as well as more distant galaxies, are being released.

"The data we're releasing now are from what lies between us and the cosmic microwave background," said Charles Lawrence, the U.S. project scientist for Planck at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. We ultimately will subtract these data out to get at our cosmic microwave background signal. But by themselves, these early observations offer up new information about objects in our universe -- both close and far away, and everything in between."

Planck observes the sky at nine wavelengths of light, ranging from infrared to radio waves. Its technology has greatly improved sensitivity and resolution over its predecessor missions, NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

The result is a windfall of data on known and never-before-seen cosmic objects. Planck has catalogued approximately 10,000 star-forming "cold cores," thousands of which are newly discovered. The cores are dark and dusty nurseries where baby stars are just beginning to take shape. They also are some of the coldest places in the universe. Planck's new catalogue includes some of the coldest cores ever seen, with temperatures as low as seven degrees above absolute zero, or minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit. In order to see the coldest gas and dust in the Milky Way, Planck's detectors were chilled to only 0.1 Kelvin.

The new catalogue also contains some of the most massive clusters of galaxies known, including a handful of newfound ones. The most massive of these holds the equivalent of a million billion suns worth of mass, making it one of the most massive galaxy clusters known.

Galaxies in our universe are bound together into these larger clusters, forming a lumpy network across the cosmos. Scientists study the clusters to learn more about the evolution of galaxies and dark matter and dark energy -- the exotic substances that constitute the majority of our universe.

"Because Planck is observing the whole sky, it is giving us a comprehensive look at how all the smaller structures of the universe are connected to the whole," said Jim Bartlett, a U.S. Planck team member at JPL and the Astroparticule et Cosmologie-Universite Paris Diderot in France.

Planck's new catalogue also includes unique data on the pools of hot gas that permeate roughly 14,000 smaller clusters of galaxies; the best data yet on the cosmic infrared background, which is made up of light from stars evolving in the early universe; and new observations of extremely energetic galaxies spewing radio jets. The catalogue covers about one-and-a-half sky scans.