NASA Adds Unique Touch to Transformers

NASA's historic adventures and cutting-edge technology provide some of the underpinnings for "Transformers Dark of the Moon," and there are also some star turns of a different sort for some of the workers who appeared as extras in the film.

Director Michael Bay and his production team all but moved in to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a week in October 2010. There were casting calls, costuming and catering tents, and of course a flotilla of high-performance cars and trucks.

Employees at the center were able to see the outcome of all the effort during a sneak preview of the movie Tuesday at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex's IMAX theater.

"I thought they did a great job," said Mike Cianelli, a NASA Test Director (NTD) at Kennedy who appears in the movie. "It was fun to see the production and then to see the end product."

The cast and crew filmed at Launch Pad 39A where Discovery stood ahead of its STS-133 mission, inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and an Orbiter Processing Facility and at the Space Station Processing Facility.

Bill Heidtman, also an NTD, said NASA shined in the feature.

"It was kind of an homage to the space program," Heidtman said.

The feature film is the third installment of the Transformers franchise, covering the life-and-death battles of a species of robots that bring their war to Earth.

For Bay, the science fiction elements bring out the most in what audiences go to movies to see.

"The highest grossing films of all time are science fiction movies and things that are in space. I think it's something we still have to discover," Bay said.

Minotaur Rocket Launch Completed from NASA Wallops

WALLOPS ISLAND, VA – An U.S. Air Force Minotaur 1 rocket carrying the Department of Defense Operationally Responsive Space office’s ORS-1 satellite was successfully launched at 11:09 p.m. EDT today from NASA’s Launch Range at a Wallops Flight Facility and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in the Virginia.

“We are very pleased to continue our support to a U.S. Air Force and the Operationally Responsive Space Office (ORS) with today’s successful launch,” said Bill Wrobel, director of NASA’s Wallops flight Facility. “This is the fourth Minotaur 1 launch from Wallops since December 2006 and we look forward to collaborating and the Air Force and ORS on future projects.”

“Today’s launch continues the Wallops legacy of providing efficient and cost effective support to our launch customers that include government and commercial organizations,” Wrobel said.

ORS-1 is the Operationally Responsive Space Office’s first operational satellite and they are Launch information also is available on the Wallops launch status line at 757-824-2050.

The next mission scheduled from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility is two series of two suborbital rockets. Both series include a Terrier-Improved Orion and a Black Brant V between 9:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. July 5 through 25.

College Students Study The Earth From NASA's Flying Laboratory

PALMDALE, Calif. -- Twenty-nine undergraduate and graduate students are participating in a six-week NASA Airborne Science Program field experience designed to immerse them in the agency's Earth Science research. The students represent 28 colleges and universities from across the United States. NASA's Student Airborne Research Program provides a unique opportunity for undergraduates and early graduate students majoring in the sciences, mathematics and engineering to participate in all aspects of a NASA airborne research campaign.

Students fly aboard NASA’s DC-8 aircraft, assisting in the operation of instruments on board the aircraft to sample atmospheric gases, image land and water surfaces and take measurements at field sites.

The program began June 19 at the University of California, Irvine, with lectures by university faculty members, NASA scientists and NASA program managers. Students are divided into three groups to study air pollution in the Los Angeles basin, orchards in California's Central Valley, and the distribution and abundance of giant kelp in the Santa Barbara Channel.

Aboard the DC-8 flying laboratory, which is based at NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif., students in the program are given a rare behind-the-scenes look at the instrument integration, flight planning and payload testing that is the basis of every successful Earth Science airborne campaign carried out by NASA. These campaigns play a pivotal role in the calibration and validation of NASA's space-borne Earth observations, remote sensing measurements and high-resolution imagery for Earth system science.

Juno Blanket Check

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

PASADENA, Calif. – As the Juno spacecraft is elevated by a rotation fixture, a technician at Astrotech's payload processing facility in Titusville, Fla., examines the installation of blankets on the aft deck. The image was taken on June 16, 2011.

Juno is scheduled to launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. on Aug. 5. The solar-powered spacecraft will orbit Jupiter's poles 33 times to find out more about the gas giant's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere and investigate the existence of a solid planetary core.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California, United States and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Launch management for the mission is the responsibility of NASA's Launch Services Program at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Dawn Nears Start of Year-Long Stay at Giant Asteroid

NASA's Dawn spacecraft obtained this image on its approach to the protoplanet Vesta, the second-most massive object in the main asteroid belt.

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's Dawn spacecraft is on track to begin the first extended visit to a large asteroid. The mission expects to go into orbit around Vesta on July 16 and begin gathering science data in early August. Vesta resides in the main asteroid belt and is thought to be the source of a large number of meteorites that fall to Earth.

"The spacecraft is right on target," said Robert Mase, Dawn project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We look forward to exploring this unknown world during Dawn's one-year stay in Vesta's orbit."

After traveling nearly four years and 1.7 billion miles (2.7 billion kilometers), Dawn is approximately 96,000 miles (155,000 kilometers) away from Vesta. When Vesta captures Dawn into its orbit on July 16, there will be approximately 9,900 miles (16,000 kilometers) between them. When orbit is achieved, they will be approximately 117 million miles (188 million kilometers) away from Earth.
These views of the protoplanet Vesta were obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

After Dawn enters Vesta's orbit, engineers will need a few days to determine the exact time of capture. Unlike other missions where a dramatic, nail-biting propulsive burn results in orbit insertion around a planet, Dawn has been using its placid ion propulsion system to subtly shape its path for years to match Vesta's orbit around the sun.

Images from Dawn's framing camera, taken for navigation purposes, show the slow progress toward Vesta. They also show Vesta rotating about 65 degrees in the field of view. The images are about twice as sharp as the best images of Vesta from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, but the surface details Dawn will obtain are still a mystery.

"Navigation images from Dawn's framing camera have given us intriguing hints of Vesta, but we're looking forward to the heart of Vesta operations, when we begin officially collecting science data," said Christopher Russell, Dawn principal investigator, at UCLA. "We can't wait for Dawn to peel back the layers of time and reveal the early history of our solar system."

Modified GT Sets World Speed Record at SLF

A modified Ford GT set a world record during testing June 16 and 17 when Johnny Bohmer reached 223 mph on the runway of NASA Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility. A Guinness World Records judge authenticated the accomplishment, confirming Bohmer's place in automotive history, along with Kennedy's role in the achievement.

Bohmer's Performance Power Racing modified the car and was testing the suspension and aerodynamic coatings at the runway. The record is the first in the new Guinness category of standing mile for a street-legal car. That means Bohmer began from a standstill and revved up to speeds faster than the space shuttle's average touchdown speed.

"This is probably the best place on the Earth," Bohmer said before the run. "It's very nice, I'm very happy with it. I took it up to 210 (June 16) without trying."

Built for spacecraft returning from orbit at high speeds, the three-mile long concrete runway is becoming a preferred testing ground for drivers and racing teams. Joe Gibbs racing, which competes in NASCAR events, has used the runway for evaluations, as have Indy Car teams.
All pay rent on the facility for each day they use it and the companies sign Space Act Agreements to use it for at least eight days a year, said NASA's David Cox, Partnership Development manager at Kennedy.

"They're learning us, we're learning them," Cox said.

The world record came as a bit of surprise for Bohmer and his team because it came during some of the hottest times of the day, conditions that are not typically kind to supercharged engines.

"The hotter the ground gets, the slower your car will go," Bohmer said.

NASA Will Host 150 People for Tweetup at Launch of Jupiter-Bound Mission

The Juno spacecraft passes in front of Jupiter in this artist's depiction. Juno, the second mission in NASA's New Frontiers program, will improve our understanding of the solar system by advancing studies of the origin and evolution of Jupiter.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA will host a two-day launch Tweetup for 150 of its Twitter followers on Aug. 4-5 at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Tweetup is expected to culminate in the launch of the Jupiter-bound Juno spacecraft aboard an Atlas V rocket.

The launch window opens at 8:39 a.m. PDT (11:39 a.m. EDT) on Aug. 5. The spacecraft is expected to arrive at Jupiter in 2016. The mission will investigate the gas giant's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere. Juno's color camera will provide close-up images of Jupiter, including the first detailed glimpse of the planet's poles.

The Tweetup will provide @NASA Twitter followers with the opportunity to tour the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex; speak with scientists and engineers from the Juno and other upcoming missions; and, if all goes as scheduled, view the spacecraft launch. The event also will provide participants the opportunity to meet fellow tweeps and members of NASA's social media team.

Juno is the second of four space missions launching this year, making 2011 one of the busiest ever in planetary exploration. Aquarius was launched June 10 to study ocean salinity; Grail will launch Sept. 8 to study the moon's gravity field; and the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity rover will head to the Red Planet no earlier than Nov. 25.

The International Space Station and the Docked Space Shuttle Endeavour

ISS027-E-036638 (23 May 2011) --- This image of the International Space Station and the docked space shuttle Endeavour, flying at an altitude of approximately 220 miles, was taken by Expedition 27 crew member Paolo Nespoli from the Soyuz TMA-20 following its undocking on May 23, 2011 (USA time). The pictures taken by Nespoli are the first taken of a shuttle docked to the International Space Station from the perspective of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

The board the Soyuz were Russian cosmonaut and Expedition 27 commander Dmitry Kondratyev; Nespoli, a European Space Agency astronaut; and NASA astronaut Cady Coleman. Coleman and Nespoli were both flight engineers. The three landed in Kazakhstan later that day, completing 159 days in space.

Small Asteroid to Whip Past Earth on June 27, 2011

Near-Earth asteroid 2011 MD will pass only 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) above the Earth's surface on Monday June 27 at about 9:30 EDT. The asteroid was discovered by the LINEAR near-Earth object discovery team observing from Socorro, New Mexico.

This small asteroid, only 5-20 meters in diameter, is in a very Earth-like orbit about the Sun, but an orbital analysis indicates there is no chance it will actually strike Earth on Monday. If a rocky asteroid the size of 2011 MD were to enter Earth's atmosphere, it would be expected to burn up high in the atmosphere and cause no damage to Earth's surface.

The accompanying diagram gives a view of the asteroid's trajectory from the general direction of the Sun. This view indicates that 2011 MD will reach its closest Earth approach point in extreme southern latitudes (in fact over the southern Atlantic Ocean).

The incoming trajectory leg passes several thousand kilometers outside the geosynchronous ring of satellites and the outgoing leg passes well inside the ring. One would expect an object of this size to come this close to Earth about every 6 years on average. For a brief time, it may be bright enough to be seen even with a modest-sized telescope.

Improving Slumber on the Space Station With Sleep-Long

It is difficult to sleep in a strange place, especially when you are far from home. Just imagine if you were approximately 210 miles from home and free floating in a spacecraft orbiting the Earth, like the crew members aboard the International Space Station. Whether on Earth or in orbit, sleep is essential to human well-being. In space, getting enough rest is also vital for the safe completion of critical operations, as the crew may be one alarm bell away from a life-and-death situation.

To develop measures to improve the quality and duration of sleep in space, scientists are conducting the Sleep -- Wake Actigraphy and Light Exposure During Spaceflight -- Long investigation or Sleep-Long. This study examines the sleep -- wake patterns of the crew members while they are aboard the space station.

The quality and duration of slumber impact human health, attitude, and ability to focus. The Institute of Medicine released a report in 2006 stating that chronic sleep loss could lead to hypertension, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, stroke and multiple psychiatric disorders. Crew members spend years training for missions on strenuous schedules and then, when they finally reach the space station, their coordinated timetable does not allow for hitting the snooze button.

The manager of the Behavioral Health and Performance Element Human Research Program Space Medicine Division at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Lauren Leveton, Ph.D., points out the importance of the impact of sleep loss to the crew. "When you consider the risky business of spaceflight," said Leveton, "We want to reduce the risk of performance decrements and optimize people's performance capabilities."

Paving the Way for Space-Based Air Pollution Sensors

Although the nation’s air has grown significantly cleaner in recent decades, about 40 percent of Americans – 127 million people – live in counties where pollution levels still regularly exceed national air quality standards established by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Most of the areas with the heaviest pollution are in California, but other parts of the country are anything but immune. On the drive down I-95 between Baltimore and Washington D.C., for example, sweltering summer heat and relentless traffic often leave plumes of polluted air stewing over the highway making the area one of the top 20 smoggiest metro areas in the country.

Come July, all that health-sapping pollution will have company: a 117-foot P-3B NASA research aircraft flying spirals over six ground stations in Maryland. The aircraft is part of a month-long field campaign designed to improve satellite measurements of air pollution.

The name of the experiment -- Deriving Information on Surface conditions from Column and Vertically Resolved Observations Relevant to Air Quality (DISCOVER -- AQ) -- is a mouthful, but its purpose is simple.

“We’re trying fill the knowledge gap that severely limits our ability to monitor air pollution with satellites,” said James Crawford, the campaign’s principal investigator and a scientist based at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

The fundamental challenge for satellites measuring air quality is to distinguish between pollution near the surface and pollution higher in the atmosphere. Measurements from aircraft, in combination with ground-based measurements, offer a key perspective that makes such distinctions easier to make.

Twelve to fourteen flights are planned throughout July using two primary planes. The P-3B, a four-engine turboprop that returned recently from a deployment to the Arctic, will carry a suite of nine instruments, while a smaller two-engine UC-12 will carry two instruments.

NASA Mission Suggests Sun and Planets Constructed Differently

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's next Mars rover has completed the journey from its California birthplace to Florida in preparation for launch this fall.

The Mars Science Laboratory rover, also known as Curiosity, arrived late Wednesday night at NASA's Kennedy Space Center aboard an Air Force C-17 transport plane. It was accompanied by the rocket-powered descent stage that will fly the rover during the final moments before landing on Mars. The C-17 flight began at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, Calif., where the boxed hardware had been trucked from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The rover's aeroshell -- the protective covering for the trip to the Red Planet -- and the cruise stage, which will guide it to Mars, arrived at Kennedy last month. The mission is targeted to launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18. The car-size rover will land on Mars in August 2012.

"The design and building part of the mission is nearly behind us now," said JPL's David Gruel, who has managed Mars Science Laboratory assembly, test and launch operations since 2007. "We're getting to final checkouts before sending the rover on its way to Mars."

The rover and other spacecraft components will undergo more testing before mission staff stack them and fuel the on board propulsion systems. Curiosity should be enclosed in its aeroshell for the final time in September and delivered to Kennedy's Launch Complex 41 in early November for integration with a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

Curiosity is about twice as long and more than five times as heavy as any previous Mars rover. Its 10 science instruments include two for ingesting and analyzing samples of powdered rock delivered by the rover's robotic arm. During a prime mission lasting one Martian year -- nearly two Earth years -- researchers will use the rover's tools to study whether the landing region has had environmental conditions favorable for supporting microbial life and favorable for preserving clues about whether life existed.

Cassini Captures Ocean-Like Spray at Saturn Moon

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered the best evidence yet for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn's moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft's direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon.

Data from Cassini's cosmic dust analyzer show the grains expelled from fissures, known as tiger stripes, are relatively small and predominantly low in salt far away from the moon. But closer to the moon's surface, Cassini found that relatively large grains rich with sodium and potassium dominate the plumes. The salt-rich particles have an "ocean-like" composition and indicate that most, if not all, of the expelled ice and water vapor comes from the evaporation of liquid salt water. The findings appear in this week's issue of the journal Nature.
"There currently is no plausible way to produce a steady outflow of salt-rich grains from solid ice across all the tiger stripes other than salt water under Enceladus's icy surface," said Frank Postberg, a Cassini team scientist at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and the lead author on the paper. When water freezes, the salt is squeezed out, leaving pure water ice behind. If the plumes emanated from ice, they should have very little salt in them.

The Cassini mission discovered Enceladus' water-vapor and ice jets in 2005. In 2009, scientists working with the cosmic dust analyzer examined some sodium salts found in ice grains of Saturn's E ring, the outermost ring that gets its material primarily from Enceladean jets. But the link to subsurface salt water was not definitive.

The new paper analyzes three Enceladus flybys in 2008 and 2009 with the same instrument, focusing on the composition of freshly ejected plume grains. The icy particles hit the detector target at speeds between 15,000 and 39,000 mph (23,000 and 63,000 kilometers per hour), vaporizing instantly. Electrical fields inside the cosmic dust analyzer separated the various constituents of the impact cloud.

The data suggest a layer of water between the moon's rocky core and its icy mantle, possibly as deep as about 50 miles (80 kilometers) beneath the surface. As this water washes against the rocks, it dissolves salt compounds and rises through fractures in the overlying ice to form reserves nearer the surface. If the outermost layer cracks open, the decrease in pressure from these reserves to space causes a plume to shoot out. Roughly 400 pounds (200 kilograms) of water vapor is lost every second in the plumes, with smaller amounts being lost as ice grains. The team calculates the water reserves must have large evaporating surfaces, or they would freeze easily and stop the plumes.

Getting Ready for the Next Big Solar Storm

In Sept. 1859, on the eve of a below-average solar cycle, the sun unleashed one of the most powerful storms in centuries. The underlying flare was so unusual, researchers still aren't sure how to categorize it. The blast peppered Earth with the most energetic protons in half-a-millennium, induced electrical currents that set telegraph offices on fire, and sparked Northern Lights over Cuba and Hawaii.

This week, officials have gathered at the National Press Club in Washington DC to ask themselves a simple question: What if it happens again?

"A similar storm today might knock us for a loop," says Lika Guhathakurta, a solar physicist at NASA headquarters. "Modern society depends on high-tech systems such as smart power grids, GPS, and satellite communications--all of which are vulnerable to solar storms."

She and more than a hundred others are attending the fifth annual Space Weather Enterprise Forum—"SWEF" for short. The purpose of SWEF is to raise awareness of space weather and its effects on society especially among policy makers and emergency responders. Attendees come from the US Congress, FEMA, power companies, the United Nations, NASA, NOAA and more.

As 2011 unfolds, the sun is once again on the eve of a below-average solar cycle—at least that’s what forecasters are saying. The "Carrington event" of 1859 (named after astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed the instigating flare) reminds us that strong storms can occur even when the underlying cycle is nominally weak.

In 1859 the worst-case scenario was a day or two without telegraph messages and a lot of puzzled sky watchers on tropical islands.

In 2011 the situation would be more serious. An avalanche of blackouts carried across continents by long-distance power lines could last for weeks to months as engineers struggle to repair damaged transformers. Planes and ships couldn’t trust GPS units for navigation. Banking and financial networks might go offline, disrupting commerce in a way unique to the Information Age. According to a 2008 report from the National Academy of Sciences, a century-class solar storm could have the economic impact of 20 hurricane Katrinas.

Flight Testing for Mars for Dryden F-18 Flying MSL Radar

Southern California’s high desert has been a stand-in for Mars for NASA technology testing many times over the years. So it was again as NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory flight-tested the next Mars rover’s landing radar, using an F/A-18 aircraft.

The Mars Science Laboratory, or MSL mission, is following up the grand success of the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which tirelessly explored Mars for the last seven years. The MSL mission is part of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, a long-term robotic exploration effort of the red planet. The mission is managed by JPL in Pasadena, Calif.

NASA Dryden’s F/A-18 carried a Quick Test Experimental Pod, or QTEP, that housed the MSL test radar, attached underneath the aircraft’s left wing. The flight profile was designed to have the F/A-18 climb to 40,000 feet, then make a series of subsonic, stair-step dives over Rogers Dry Lake at angles of 40 to 90 degrees in order to simulate what the MSL’s radar will see during entry into the Martian atmosphere. The F/A-18 pulled out of each dive at 5,000 feet.

“Not only has the working relationship between Dryden and JPL been exemplary, but we're proving the viability of suborbital flight testing of critical space hardware,” says Mike Holtz, Dryden’s MSL project lead and F/A-18 backseat flight test engineer. “This has been a unique opportunity to test equipment in a representative environment prior to the space flight hardware blasting off to Mars,” Holtz says.

Striking Up a Conversation About Lightning

June is Lightning Safety Awareness Month. Lightning is the number two killer of severe weather. Flooding is number one. A lot of people think if it is sunny or maybe just a few clouds around and you hear thunder, it is okay to stay outside until you actually see the lightning. That is not true. If you hear thunder when you are outside, that means that lightning is close enough to strike you.

On Thursday, June 23, from 7-8 p.m. EDT, Dr. Richard Blakeslee, atmospheric research scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., will answer your questions about lightning safety, the global distribution and frequency of lightning occurrence as well as some of its physical characteristic, the relationship of lightning to severe storms and weather (e.g., lightning rate changes may serve as a "pre-cursor" or advanced indicator to later severe weather at the ground such as tornadoes), and other lightning research topics such as lightning-hurricane relationships and terrestrial gamma ray burst.

Joining the chat is easy. Simply visit this page on Thursday, June 23 a few minutes before the start of the chat. The chat window will be open at the bottom of this page. Simply log in and be ready to ask questions at 7 p.m. EDT.

Getting Loud Now Enjoy Peace and Quiet Then

In an ironic twist, NASA is using supersonic aircraft to produce amped-up, super-loud sonic booms in an effort to understand how to minimize their startling impact and thereby be able to design future quiet supersonic aircraft.

"The ultimate goal is to allow supersonic transportation over land," said Edward Haering, principal investigator for the Superboom Caustic Analysis and Measurement Program, or SCAMP, at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California.

Researchers recently employed a two-mile long string of microphones to record the thunder of an accelerating F/A-18 jet for the SCAMP project.

"When a supersonic aircraft accelerates to its cruise speed, a focusing effect occurs that makes the sonic boom five to 10 times louder than its normal cruise sonic boom over a small region,” said Haering. "This effect is similar to how light rays are focused by a lens."

SCAMP measured these focused booms to help ensure that tomorrow's supersonic jets are quiet in all phases of flight, including acceleration.

The measurements will be used to validate computer prediction tools that will be used in the design of future quiet supersonic aircraft. If the predictive tools can accurately mirror the louder-than-normal booms that were generated through SCAMP, then researchers will have confidence that they are capturing the right acoustics and aerodynamics effects, and they can then be used with confidence to guide the design of supersonic aircraft whose sonic booms are quieter than have ever been achieved before.

The primary ground microphone array was nearly two miles long and consisted of a straight row of 81 microphones set 125 feet apart along an east-west dirt road. An Edwards Air Force Base staff biologist experienced with desert environments helped keep the project’s sensor locations away from sensitive species.

Cassini Captures Ice Queen Helene

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has successfully completed its second-closest encounter with Saturn's icy moon Helene, beaming down raw images of the small moon. At closest approach, on June 18, Cassini flew within 4,330 miles (6,968 kilometers) of Helene's surface. It was the second closest approach to Helene of the entire mission.

Cassini passed from Helene's night side to the moon's sunlit side. It also captured images of the Saturn-facing side of the moon in sunlight, a region that was only illuminated by sunlight reflected off Saturn the last time Cassini was close, in March 2010. This flyby will enable scientists to finish creating a global map of Helene, so they can better understand the history of impacts to the moon and gully-like features seen on previous flybys.

The closest Helene encounter of the mission took place on March 10, 2010, when Cassini flew within 1,131 miles (1,820 kilometers) of the moon.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Science Paper Details NASA EPOXI Flyby of Hyper Comet

PASADENA, Calif. – Comet Hartley 2's hyperactive state, as studied by NASA's EPOXI mission, is detailed in a new paper published in this week's issue of the journal Science.

After visiting a comet and imaging distant stars for hints of extrasolar planets, you could say the spacecraft used for EPOXI had seen its fair share of celestial wonders. But after about 3.2 billion miles (5.1 billion kilometers) of deep space travel, one final wonder awaited the mission's project and science teams. On Nov. 4, 2010, the EPOXI mission spacecraft flew past a weird little comet called Hartley 2.

"From all the imaging we took during approach, we knew the comet was a little skittish even before flyby," said EPOXI Project Manager Tim Larson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It was moving around the sky like a knuckleball and gave my navigators fits, and these new results show this little comet is downright hyperactive."

The EPOXI mission found that the strong activity in water release and carbon dioxide-powered jets did not occur equally in the different regions of the comet. During the spacecraft's flyby of the comet – with closest approach of 431 miles (694 kilometers) – carbon-dioxide-driven jets were seen at the ends of the comet, with most occurring at the small end. In the middle region, or waist of the comet, water was released as vapor with very little carbon dioxide or ice. The latter findings indicate that material in the waist likely came off the ends of the comet and was redeposited.

"Hartley 2 is a hyperactive little comet, spewing out more water than most other comets its size," said Mike A'Hearn, principal investigator of EPOXI from the University of Maryland, College Park. "When warmed by the sun, dry ice -- frozen carbon dioxide -- deep in the comet's body turns to gas jetting off the comet and dragging water ice with it."

Although Hartley 2 is the only such hyperactive comet visited by a spacecraft, scientists know of at least a dozen other comets that also are relatively high in activity for their size and which are probably driven by carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide.

A Green Ring Fit for a Superhero

This glowing emerald nebula seen by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is reminiscent of the glowing ring wielded by the superhero Green Lantern. In the comic books, the diminutive Guardians of the Planet "Oa" forged his power ring, but astronomers believe rings like this are actually sculpted by the powerful light of giant "O" stars. O stars are the most massive type of star known to exist.

Named RCW 120 by astronomers, this region of hot gas and glowing dust can be found in the murky clouds encircled by the tail of the constellation Scorpius. The green ring of dust is actually glowing in infrared colors that our eyes cannot see, but show up brightly when viewed by Spitzer's infrared detectors. At the center of this ring are a couple of giant stars whose intense ultraviolet light carved out the bubble, though they blend in with the other stars when viewed in infrared.

Rings like this are so common in Spitzer's observations that astronomers have even enlisted the help of the public to help find and catalog them all. Anyone interested in joining the search as a citizen scientist can visit "The Milky Way Project," part of the "Zooniverse" of public astronomy projects.

The flat plane of our galaxy is located toward the bottom of the picture, and the ring is slightly above the plane. The green haze seen at the bottom of the image is the diffuse glow of dust from the galactic plane.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

NASA's Chandra Finds Massive Black Holes Common in Early Universe

Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, astronomers found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies.

By pointing Chandra at a patch of sky for more than six weeks, astronomers obtained what is known as the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS). When combined with very deep optical and infrared images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the new Chandra data allowed astronomers to search for black holes in 200 distant galaxies, from when the universe was between about 800 million to 950 million years old.

"Until now, we had no idea what the black holes in these early galaxies were doing, or if they even existed,” said Ezequiel Treister of the University of Hawaii, lead author of the study appearing in the June 16 issue of the journal Nature. “Now we know they are there, and they are growing like gangbusters."

The super-sized growth means that the black holes in the CDFS are less extreme versions of quasars -- very luminous, rare objects powered by material falling onto supermassive black holes. However, the sources in the CDFS are about a hundred times fainter and the black holes are about a thousand times less massive than the ones in quasars.

NASA Releases New Lunar Eclipse

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) team will release another video next week focusing on the role of LRO during the eclipse. LRO has been providing the most detailed imagery of the moon since it launched in 2009.

On June 15 2011, viewers outside of North America will be able to see the lunar eclipse. From beginning to end, the eclipse will last from 17:24 UTC (1:24 p.m. EDT) to 23:00 UTC (7:00 p.m. EDT). Totality, the time when Earth's shadow completely covers the moon, will last about an hour and 41 minutes.

A lunar eclipse occurs when Earth lines up directly between the sun and the moon, blocking the sun's rays and casting a shadow on the moon. As the moon moves deeper and deeper into Earth's shadow, the moon changes color before your very eyes, turning from gray to an orange or deep shade of red.

The moon takes on this new color because indirect sunlight is still able to pass through Earth's atmosphere and cast a glow on the moon. Our atmosphere filters out most of the blue colored light, leaving the red and orange hues that we see during a lunar eclipse. Extra particles in the atmosphere, from say a recent volcanic eruption, will cause the moon to appear a darker shade of red.

Unlike solar eclipses, lunar eclipses are perfectly safe to view without any special glasses or equipment. All you need is your own two eyes. And while we won't be able to catch this particular eclipse in the continental U.S., we will get our next opportunity on April 15, 2014, so mark your calendars.

NASA Chat: Giant Black Holes in the Early Universe

Portrayed in movies and on television most often as gateways to another dimension or cosmic vacuum cleaners sucking up everything in sight, the misconceptions surrounding black holes are many and varied. In reality, black holes form when, at the end of their life cycle, heavy stars collapse into a supernova. These relatively puny black holes may provide a "seed" for the development of the giant black holes -- called supermassive -- found at the center of galaxies, which grow by absorbing gas, stars and other black holes.

On Wednesday, June 15, NASA will announce a new discovery about giant black holes in the early universe. This discovery was made using the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Chandra gives astronomers a powerful tool to investigate the universe, especially those hot spots where black holes, exploding stars and colliding galaxies are most likely to live.

Since the Earth's atmosphere absorbs the vast majority of X-rays, they are not detectable from Earth-based telescopes, requiring a space-based telescope to make these observations. Chandra launched in 1999 aboard the Columbia during the STS-93 mission.

Astrophysicists Ezequiel Treister and Kevin Schawinski will be online at 3:00 p.m. EDT on June 15 to answer your questions about the announcement and about black holes in general.

Joining the chat is easy. Simply visit this page on Wednesday, June 15, from 3 to 4 p.m. EDT. The chat window will open at the bottom of this page starting about 30 minutes before the chat. You can log in and be ready to ask questions at 3 p.m.

Starfighters Ready to Launch Research, Satellites

F-104 jet fighters just like the ones astronauts trained in for decades will become a more regular part of the skyscape above NASA's Kennedy Space Center as a private company expands its fleet of jets with plans to conduct more research flights, launch very small satellites into space and even take paying passengers into the stratosphere.

The developments come four years after the company made its first flight from the Shuttle Landing Facility, or SLF, at Kennedy in April 2007.

Starfighters pilot and owner Rick Svetkoff is one of the new generation of entrepreneurs working to open different aspects of the aerospace world to a broader group of developers, researchers and people.

"We're breaking the mold," Svetkoff said recently inside the hangar at the SLF the company leased from Space Florida.

Boasting speeds faster than Mach 2, extreme acceleration and the ability to pull 7 g's or more, the F-104 provides a platform to test rocket components, tracking sensors and space-bound equipment, Svetkoff said. The aircraft also can push over to create microgravity conditions for a short time.

"We can go from ground to 23,000 feet as fast as some of the rockets launched here," Svetkoff said.

Probes Suggest Magnetic Bubbles at Solar System Edge

PASADENA, Calif. -- Observations from NASA's Voyager spacecraft, humanity's farthest deep space sentinels, suggest the edge of our solar system may not be smooth, but filled with a turbulent sea of magnetic bubbles.

While using a new computer model to analyze Voyager data, scientists found the sun's distant magnetic field is made up of bubbles approximately 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) wide. The bubbles are created when magnetic field lines reorganize. The new model suggests the field lines are broken up into self-contained structures disconnected from the solar magnetic field. The findings are described in the June 9 edition of the Astrophysical Journal.

Like Earth, our sun has a magnetic field with a north pole and a south pole. The field lines are stretched outward by the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emanating from the star that interacts with material expelled from others in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy. The Voyager spacecraft, more than 9 billion miles (14 billion kilometers) away from Earth, are traveling in a boundary region. In that area, the solar wind and magnetic field are affected by material expelled from other stars in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy.

"The sun's magnetic field extends all the way to the edge of the solar system," said astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University. "Because the sun spins, its magnetic field becomes twisted and wrinkled, a bit like a ballerina's skirt. Far, far away from the sun, where the Voyagers are, the folds of the skirt bunch up."

Understanding the structure of the sun's magnetic field will allow scientists to explain how galactic cosmic rays enter our solar system and help define how the star interacts with the rest of the galaxy.

So far, much of the evidence for the existence of the bubbles originates from an instrument aboard the spacecraft that measures energetic particles. Investigators are studying more information and hoping to find signatures of the bubbles in the Voyager magnetic field data.

Station Crew Launches Aboard Soyuz

Three new Expedition 28 flight engineers -- NASA astronaut Mike Fossum, Russian cosmonaut Sergei Volkov and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Satoshi Furukawa -- launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard the Soyuz TMA-02M spacecraft at 4:12 p.m. EDT on June 7 (2:12 a.m. July 8, Baikonur time) to begin a two-day journey to the International Space Station.

The Soyuz spacecraft, under the command of Volkov, will dock to the Rassvet module on the Earth-facing side of the station at 5:22 p.m. on Thursday, July 9. After hatch opening, the trio will be welcomed aboard by their Expedition 28 crewmates, Commander Andrey Borisenko and Flight Engineers Alexander Samokutyaev and Ron Garan.

The six-person crew will continue the uninterrupted presence of humans on the station since Nov. 2, 2000, conducting expanded scientific research and station maintenance activities.

The station residents also will welcome the crew of the last space shuttle flight, Atlantis' STS-135 mission, targeted to launch July 8. The shuttle will deliver critical supplies in the Italian-built Raffaello multi-purpose logistics module and support spacewalks by Fossum and Garan to retrieve a failed cooling system pump module, which Atlantis will return to Earth for analysis.

Garan, Borisenko and Samokutyaev, who launched to the station April 4, will return to Earth in September. Before departing, Borisenko will hand over command of the station to Fossum for Expedition 29, which begins when the Soyuz TMA-21 undocks.

STEREO Sees Complete Far Side

The far side unveiled! This is the first complete image of the solar far side, the half of the sun invisible from Earth. Captured on June 1, 2011, the composite image was assembled from NASA's two Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft. STEREO-Ahead's data is shown on the left half of image and STEREO-Behind's data on the right.

The STEREO spacecraft reached opposition (180° separation) on February 6 but part of the sun was inaccessible to their combined view until June 1. This image represents the first day when the entire far side could be seen.

The image is aligned so that solar north is directly up. The seam between the two images is inclined because the plane of Earth’s -- and STEREO's -- orbit, known as the "ecliptic", is inclined with respect to the sun's axis of rotation. The data was collected by STEREO's Extreme Ultraviolet Imagers in the SECCHI instrument suites.

STEREO was built and is operated for NASA by the Applied Physical Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University; the spacecraft were launched on October 25, 2006 aboard a Delta II. The SECCHI instrument suite is a collaboration led by the Naval Research Laboratory, and the EUVI instruments were built by the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory.

Atlantis' External Tank to Feature Commemorative Logo

When space shuttle Atlantis launches on the last shuttle mission in July, the external tank, designated ET-138, will be adorned with a colorful design painted on its side.

It is only the second time in 135 missions that an external tank will feature artwork, following ET-122, which flew with shuttle Endeavour in May.

ET-138’s ‘nose art’ is the winning design from the NASA Space Shuttle Program Commemorative Patch contest. The commemorative emblem is painted on a three-foot high by five-foot wide intertank access door near the top of the tank. It is a logo of the space shuttle surrounded by panels depicting the U.S. flag, 14 stars to commemorate the astronauts lost aboard shuttles Challenger and Columbia, and five panels symbolizing the entire shuttle fleet, including Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis. It is surrounded by a blue circle and contains the inscription, “Space Shuttle Program, 1981-2011,” the years the shuttles flew.

The logo was designed by Blake Dumesnil, an engineer at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and was painted on the door by Lockheed Martin graphic artist Jon Irving, who works at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, where the tanks are built.

Irving hand painted the design on the door at Michoud and it was shipped to Kennedy Space Center, Fla., where it will be installed on the tank before the launch of shuttle Atlantis on the STS-135 mission, scheduled for July 8.

A Big Surprise From Voyager at the Edge of the Solar System!

NASA's Voyager probes are truly going where no one has gone before. Gliding silently toward the stars, 9 billion miles from Earth, they are beaming back news from the most distant, unexplored reaches of the solar system.

The structure of the sun's distant magnetic field—foam vs. no-foam—is of acute scientific importance because it defines how we interact with the rest of the galaxy. Researchers call the region where the Voyagers are now "the heliosheath." It is essentially the border crossing between the Solar System and the rest of the Milky Way. Lots of things try to get across—interstellar clouds, knots of galactic magnetism, cosmic rays and so on. Will these intruders encounter a riot of bubbly magnetism (the new view) or graceful lines of magnetic force leading back to the sun (the old view)?

The case of cosmic rays is illustrative. Galactic cosmic rays are subatomic particles accelerated to near-light speed by distant black holes and supernova explosions. When these microscopic cannonballs try to enter the solar system, they have to fight through the sun's magnetic field to reach the inner planets.

"The magnetic bubbles appear to be our first line of defense against cosmic rays," points out Opher. "We haven't figured out yet if this is a good thing or not."

On one hand, the bubbles would seem to be a very porous shield, allowing many cosmic rays through the gaps. On the other hand, cosmic rays could get trapped inside the bubbles, which would make the froth a very good shield indeed.

"We'll probably discover which is correct as the Voyagers proceed deeper into the froth and learn more about its organization," says Opher. "This is just the beginning, and I predict more surprises ahead."

Having a Solar Blast

The Sun unleashed an M-2 (medium-sized) solar flare, an S1-class (minor) radiation storm and a spectacular coronal mass ejection (CME) on June 7, 2011 from sunspot complex 1226-1227. The large cloud of particles mushroomed up and fell back down looking as if it covered an area of almost half the solar surface.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observed the flare's peak at 1:41a.m. ET (0641 UT). SDO recorded these images (above) in extreme ultraviolet light that show a very large eruption of cool gas. It is somewhat unique because at many places in the eruption there seems to be even cooler material -- at temperatures less than 80,000 K.

All of the solar Heliophysics System Observatory missions captured the event.

When viewed in Solar and Heliospheric Observatory's (SOHO) coronagraphs (top right), the event shows bright plasma and high-energy particles roaring from the Sun.

Also to the right are links to the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) Ahead and Behind coronograph videos showing the CME expansion as viewed from each side of the sun. The STEREO Ahead satellite precedes the Earth as it circles the Sun. The STEREO Behind satellite follows behind the Earth in it's orbit of the Sun. (NOTE: Both STEREO videos will be replaced by better quality version when they become available in 48 hours.)

This not-squarely Earth-directed CME is moving at 1400 km/s according to NASA models. The CME should deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field during the late hours of June 8th or June 9th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras when the CME arrives.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory Catches “Surfer” Waves on the Sun

Cue the surfing music. Scientists have spotted the iconic surfer's wave rolling through the atmosphere of the sun. This makes for more than just a nice photo-op: the waves hold clues as to how energy moves through that atmosphere, known as the corona.

Since scientists know how these kinds of waves -- initiated by a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability if you're being technical -- disperse energy in the water, they can use this information to better understand the corona. This in turn, may help solve an enduring mystery of why the corona is thousands of times hotter than originally expected.

"One of the biggest questions about the solar corona is the heating mechanism," says solar physicist Leon Ofman of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. and Catholic University, Washington. "The corona is a thousand times hotter than the sun's visible surface, but what heats it up is not well-understood. People have suggested that waves like this might cause turbulence which cause heating, but now we have direct evidence of Kelvin-Helmholtz waves."

Ofman and his Goddard colleague, Barbara Thompson, spotted these waves in images taken on April 8, 2010. These were some of the first images caught on camera by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a solar telescope with outstanding resolution that launched on February 11, 2010 and began capturing data on March 24 of that year. The team's results appeared online in Astrophysical Journal Letters on May 19, 2011 and will be published in the journal on June 10.

NASA Helps Create a More Silent Night

The holidays are here and the nation's airports are busier than ever –thousands of airplanes taking off and landing. Passengers and people living around airports are reminded that the airplane is not the quietest mode of transportation; certainly not as quiet as a sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer.

Fear not, because even while travelers are heading home, NASA continues working with others in industry and academia on technologies that will create a more silent night (and day) around airports.

One of the most recent noise-reducing technologies shepherded through the research process by NASA and now making a difference on commercial jet engines is chevrons.

Chevrons are the sawtooth pattern seen on the trailing edges of some jet engine nozzles. As hot air from the engine core mixes with cooler air blowing through the engine fan, the shaped edges serve to smooth the mixing, which reduces turbulence that creates noise.

"Successes like chevrons are the result of a lot of different, hard-working people and are the result of a lot of very small efforts that all come together, often across many scientific disciplines," said James Bridges, the associate principal investigator responsible for coordinating aircraft noise research at NASA.

The new Boeing 787 is among the most modern jets relying on chevrons to reduce engine noise levels. It sports chevrons on the nacelles, or fan housings. The Boeing 747-8 has chevrons on both the nacelles and inner core engine nozzles.