MAVEN Mission Completes Major Milestone

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission reached a major milestone last week when it successfully completed its Mission Critical Design Review (CDR).

MAVEN, scheduled for launch in late 2013, will be the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The goal of MAVEN is to determine the history of the loss of atmospheric gases to space through time, providing answers about Mars climate evolution. It will accomplish this by measuring the current rate of escape to space and gathering enough information about the relevant processes to allow extrapolation backward in time.

Noting this milestone, Michael Meyer, Lead Scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters said. "It is a real pleasure to see the MAVEN team is doing an exemplary job on this important mission, which was identified as a top priority mission in the 2002 National Research Council Decadal Survey and addresses high-priority goals of two Divisions—Planetary Sciences and Heliophysics."

"Understanding how and why the atmosphere changed through time is an important scientific objective for Mars," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN Principal Investigator from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado (CU/LASP) at Boulder. "MAVEN will make the right measurements to allow us to answer this question. We’re in the middle of the hard work right now—building the instruments and spacecraft—and we’re incredibly excited about the science results we’re going to get from the mission."

From July 11 – 15, 2011, the MAVEN Critical Design Review was held at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. An independent review board, comprised of reviewers from NASA and several external organizations, met to validate the system design.

Critical Design Reviews are one-time programmatic events that bridge the design and manufacturing stages of a project. A successful review means that the design is validated and will meet its requirements, is backed up with solid analysis and documentation, and has been proven to be safe. MAVEN's CDR completion grants permission to the mission team to begin manufacturing hardware.

Spitzer Sees Spider Web of Stars

Those aren't insects trapped in a spider's web they're stars in our own Milky Way galaxy, lying between us and another spiral galaxy called IC 342. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope captured this picture in infrared light, revealing the galaxy's bright patterns of dust.

At a distance of about 10 million light years from Earth, IC 342 is relatively close by galaxy standards. However, our vantage point places it directly behind the disk of our own Milky Way. The intervening dust makes it difficult to see in visible light, but infrared light penetrates this veil easily. While stars in our own galaxy appear as blue/white dots, the blue haze is from IC 342's collective starlight. Red shows the dust structures, which contain clumps of new stars.

The center of the galaxy, where one might look for a spider, is actually home to an enormous burst of star formation. To either side of the center, a small bar of dust and gas is helping to fuel the new stars.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

NASA's Hubble Discovers Another Moon Around Pluto

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite – temporarily designated P4 -- was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet.

The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles (1,043 km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km).

"I find it remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km)," said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who led this observing program with Hubble.

The finding is a result of ongoing work to support NASA's New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015. The mission is designed to provide new insights about worlds at the edge of our solar system. Hubble's mapping of Pluto's surface and discovery of its satellites have been invaluable to planning for New Horizons' close encounter.

"This is a fantastic discovery," said New Horizons’ principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "Now that we know there's another moon in the Pluto system, we can plan close-up observations of it during our flyby."

The new moon is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, which Hubble discovered in 2005. Charon was discovered in 1978 at the U.S. Naval Observatory and first resolved using Hubble in 1990 as a separate body from Pluto.

NASA's Opportunity Tops 20 Miles of Mars Driving

More than seven years into what was planned as a three-month mission on Mars, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has driven more than 20 miles, which is more than 50 times the mission's original distance goal.

A drive of 407 feet (124 meters) completed on July 17 took Opportunity past the 20-mile mark (32.2 kilometers). It brought the rover to within a few drives of reaching the rim of Endeavour crater, the rover's team's long-term destination since mid-2008. Endeavour is about 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter, and its western rim exposes outcrops that record information older than any Opportunity has examined so far.

The rover is now about eight-tenths of a mile (about 1.3 kilometers) from the site chosen for arriving at the rim.

"The numbers aren't really as important as the fact that driving so much farther than expected during this mission has put a series of exciting destinations within Opportunity's reach," said Alfonso Herrera, a rover mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. who has worked on the rover missions since before launch in 2003.

The latest drive included an autonomous hazard detection portion during which the rover paused at intervals to check for obstacles before proceeding.

Herrera said, "Autonomous hazard detection has added a significant portion of the driving distance over the past few months. It lets us squeeze 10 to 15 percent more distance into each drive."

The milestone-setting drive was on the 2,658th Martian day, or "sol," of the rover's exploration of Mars. Opportunity drove backward. Backward driving is a technique to extend the life of a motor in the right-front wheel that sometimes draws more current than the other five wheels' drive motors.

JPL's Bill Nelson, chief of the mission's engineering team, said, "Opportunity has an arthritic shoulder joint on her robotic arm and is a little lame in the right front wheel, but she is otherwise doing remarkably well after seven years on Mars more like 70 in 'rover years.' The elevated right front wheel current is a concern, but a combination of heating and backwards driving has kept it in check over the past 2,000-plus sols."

Opportunity and its rover twin, Spirit, completed their three-month prime missions on Mars in April 2004. Both rovers continued for years of bonus, extended missions. Spirit finished communicating with Earth in March 2010. Both rovers have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life.

NASA's Hubble Makes One Millionth Science Observation

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope crossed another milestone in its space odyssey of exploration and discovery. On Monday, July 4, the Earth-orbiting observatory logged its one millionth science observation during a search for water in an exoplanet's atmosphere 1,000 light-years away.

"For 21 years Hubble has been the premier space science observatory, astounding us with deeply beautiful imagery and enabling ground-breaking science across a wide spectrum of astronomical disciplines," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. He piloted the space shuttle mission that carried Hubble to orbit. "The fact that Hubble met this milestone while studying a faraway planet is a remarkable reminder of its strength and legacy."

Although Hubble is best known for its stunning imagery of the cosmos, the millionth observation is a spectroscopic measurement, where light is divided into its component colors. These color patterns can reveal the chemical composition of cosmic sources.

Hubble's millionth exposure is of the planet HAT-P-7b, a gas giant planet larger than Jupiter orbiting a star hotter than our sun. HAT-P-7b, also known as Kepler 2b, has been studied by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler observatory after it was discovered by ground-based observations. Hubble now is being used to analyze the chemical composition of the planet’s atmosphere.

"We are looking for the spectral signature of water vapor. This is an extremely precise observation and it will take months of analysis before we have an answer," said Drake Deming of the University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Hubble demonstrated it is ideally suited for characterizing the atmospheres of exoplanets, and we are excited to see what this latest targeted world will reveal."

Hubble was launched April 24, 1990, aboard space shuttle's Discovery's STS-31 mission. Its discoveries revolutionized nearly all areas of astronomical research from planetary science to cosmology. The observatory has collected more than 50 terabytes of data to-date.

Twisted Tale of our Galaxy's Ring

New observations from the Herschel Space Observatory show a bizarre, twisted ring of dense gas at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Only a few portions of the ring, which stretches across more than 600 light-years, were known before. Herschel's view reveals the entire ring for the first time, and a strange kink that has astronomers scratching their heads.

"We have looked at this region at the center of the Milky Way many times before in the infrared," said Alberto Noriega-Crespo of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "But when we looked at the high-resolution images using Herschel’s sub millimeter wavelengths, the presence of a ring is quite clear." Noriega Crespo is co-author of a new paper on the ring published in a recent issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The Herschel Space Observatory is a European Space Agency led mission with important NASA contributions. It sees infrared and sub-millimeter light, which can readily penetrate through the dust hovering between the bustling center of our galaxy and us. Herschel's detectors are also suited to see the coldest stuff in our galaxy.

When astronomers turned the giant telescope to look at the center of our galaxy, it captured unprecedented views of its inner ring a dense tube of cold gas mixed with dust, where new stars are forming.

Astronomers were shocked by what they saw the ring, which is in the plane of our galaxy, looked more like an infinity symbol with two lobes pointing to the side. In fact, they later determined the ring was torqued in the middle, so it only appears to have two lobes. To picture the structure, imagine holding a stiff, elliptical band and twisting the ends in opposite directions, so that one side comes up a bit.

"This is what is so exciting about launching a new space telescope like Herschel," said Sergio Molinari of the Institute of Space Physics in Rome, Italy, lead author of the new paper. "We have a new and exciting mystery on our hands, right at the center of our own galaxy."

Observations with the ground based Nobeyama Radio Observatory in Japan complemented the Herschel results by determining the velocity of the denser gas in the ring. The radio results demonstrate that the ring is moving together as a unit, at the same speed relative to the rest of the galaxy.

NASA Dawn Spacecraft Returns Close-Up Image of Asteroid Vesta

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Dawn spacecraft has returned the first close-up image after beginning its orbit around the giant asteroid Vesta. On Friday, July 15, Dawn became the first probe to enter orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The image taken for navigation purposes shows Vesta in greater detail than ever before. When Vesta captured Dawn into its orbit, there were approximately 9,900 miles (16,000 kilometers) between the spacecraft and asteroid. Engineers estimate the orbit capture took place at 10 p.m. PDT Friday, July 15 (1 a.m. EDT Saturday, July 16).

Vesta is 330 miles (530 kilometers) in diameter and the second most massive object in the asteroid belt. Ground- and space-based telescopes have obtained images of Vesta for about two centuries, but they have not been able to see much detail on its surface. "We are beginning the study of arguably the oldest extant primordial surface in the solar system," said Dawn principal investigator Christopher Russell from the University of California, Los Angeles. "This region of space has been ignored for far too long. So far, the images received to date reveal a complex surface that seems to have preserved some of the earliest events in Vesta's history, as well as logging the onslaught that Vesta has suffered in the intervening eons."

Vesta is thought to be the source of a large number of meteorites that fall to Earth. Vesta and its new NASA neighbor, Dawn, are currently approximately 117 million miles (188 million kilometers) away from Earth. The Dawn team will begin gathering science data in August. Observations will provide unprecedented data to help scientists understand the earliest chapter of our solar system. The data also will help pave the way for future human space missions.

After traveling nearly four years and 1.7 billion miles (2.8 billion kilometers), Dawn also accomplished the largest propulsive acceleration of any spacecraft, with a change in velocity of more than 4.2 miles per second (6.7 kilometers per second), due to its ion engines. The engines expel ions to create thrust and provide higher spacecraft speeds than any other technology currently available.

"Dawn slipped gently into orbit with the same grace it has displayed during its years of ion thrusting through interplanetary space," said Marc Rayman, Dawn chief engineer and mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It is fantastically exciting that we will begin providing humankind its first detailed views of one of the last unexplored worlds in the inner solar system."

Punching Holes in the Sky

Scientists, photographers and amateur cloud watchers have been looking up with wonderment and puzzlement at "hole punch" clouds for decades. Giant, open spaces appear in otherwise continuous cloud cover, presenting beautiful shapes but also an opportunity for scientific investigation. A new paper published last week in Science inquires into how the holes get punched airplanes are the culprit and into the potential for the phenomenon's link to increased precipitation around major airports.

"It appears to be a rather widespread effect for aircraft to inadvertently cause some measureable amount of rain or snow as they fly through certain clouds," said lead author Andrew Heymsfield of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Co. "This is not necessarily enough precipitation to affect global climate, but it is likely to be noticeable around major airports in the midlatitudes."

NASA Langley Research Center cloud specialist Patrick Minnis was one of the co-authors on the paper. NASA satellites Aqua, Terra, CALIPSO and CloudSat were used in the analysis. The research was also partly funded by NASA grants.

Picture a layer of supercooled liquid water clouds stretching across the sky, like a sheet, in subfreezing temperatures. An airliner gaining altitude punches through the cloud layer, and leaves behind a void as if by a circular cookie cutter. In some cases, the shape left behind is more ragged, or even more rectangular or canal like.

But the nearly perfect circle often makes for the most compelling sight in the sky. The ice particles grow at the expense of the supercooled water droplets and fall out of the cloud as snow. If the cloud layer is thin or if the water is not replenished the snow leaves a hole in the cloud.

"In other conditions, it may produce a somewhat continuous snow line," Minnis said, as has been observed around the Denver airport.

'Odd Couple' Binary Makes Dual Gamma-ray Flares

In December 2010, a pair of mismatched stars in the southern constellation Crux whisked past each other at a distance closer than Venus orbits the sun. The system possesses a so-far unique blend of a hot and massive star with a compact fast-spinning pulsar. The pair's closest encounters occur every 3.4 years and each is marked by a sharp increase in gamma rays, the most extreme form of light.

The unique combination of stars, the long wait between close approaches, and periods of intense gamma-ray emission make this system irresistible to astrophysicists. Now, a team using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to observe the 2010 encounter reports that the system displayed fascinating and unanticipated activity.

"Even though we were waiting for this event, it still surprised us," said Aous Abdo, a Research Assistant Professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and a leader of the research team.

Few pairings in astronomy are as peculiar as high-mass binaries, where a hot blue-white star many times the sun's mass and temperature is joined by a compact companion no bigger than Earth -- and likely much smaller. Depending on the system, this companion may be a burned-out star known as a white dwarf, a city-sized remnant called a neutron star (also known as a pulsar) or, most exotically, a black hole.

Just four of these "odd couple" binaries were known to produce gamma rays, but in only one of them did astronomers know the nature of the compact object. That binary consists of a pulsar designated PSR B1259-63 and a 10th-magnitude Be-type star known as LS 2883. The pair lies 8,000 light-years away.

The pulsar is a fast-spinning neutron star with a strong magnetic field. This combination powers a lighthouse-like beam of energy, which astronomers can easily locate if the beam happens to sweep toward Earth. The beam from PSR B1259-63 was discovered in 1989 by the Parkes radio telescope in Australia. The neutron star is about the size of Washington, D.C., weighs about twice the sun's mass, and spins almost 21 times a second.

Yeast Rising to the Space Station

Chefs across the globe may not know it yet, but their baker's yeast just left the kitchen and blasted off into low Earth orbit. Hitching a ride on the space shuttle Atlantis on July 8, 2011, the samples will be grown on the International Space Station as part of the Genotypic and Phenotypic Changes in Yeast Related to Selective Growth Pressures Unique to Microgravity or Micro-4 investigation. Capable of raising more than just breads, this useful organism will help researchers better understand the impact of the space environment on live cells in humans.

This yeast S.cerevisiae has been of use since the ancient Egyptians first figured out how to harness it for wine and bread making. In modern times it is still used for baking and was the first organism to have its genome fully sequenced. Scientists hope that by studying the changes of yeast in microgravity, they will better understand the changes human cells may experience during long-duration spaceflight.

Gaining better knowledge of genetic alterations by studying yeast growth during this microgravity research may also help in understanding how these changes could manifest in human disease here on Earth.

This investigation is a collaboration with BioServe Space Technologies, Durham Veterans Affairs Medical Center, and the University of Toronto. According to Michael Costanzo, Ph.D. and one of the co-investigators for Micro-4 at the University of Toronto, the similarities between human cells and the yeast's genetic makeup makes it ideal for study in space. "We are examining which genes are important for cell growth and survival in a zero gravity environment.

The results of our 'yeastnaut' experiments may provide insight into which set of human genes are important and how these genes work together to help organisms/humans deal with extreme environments associated with space travel such as zero-gravity and elevated radiation."

Two different sets of experiments will take place as part this study. The first will grow yeast cells in petri dishes using temperature-controlled chambers. On July 12, scientists on the ground remotely changed the temperature from 4° C to 30° C the optimal temperature for yeast cell growth to activate the on orbit samples. The cells continue to grow for 48 hours before the temperature is cooled again and the samples are stowed for return to Earth for analysis.

The second experiment includes the use of a liquid media to grow the yeast. During the mission, astronauts will transfer the samples to fresh liquid media twice before stowing them, as well.

Herschel Helps Solve Mystery of Cosmic Dust Origins

PASADENA, CALIF. New observations from the infrared Herschel Space Observatory reveal that an exploding star expelled the equivalent of between 160,000 and 230,000 Earth masses of fresh dust. This enormous quantity suggests that exploding stars, called supernovae, are the answer to the long-standing puzzle of what supplied our early universe with dust.

"This discovery illustrates the power of tackling a problem in astronomy with different wavelengths of light," said Paul Goldsmith, the NASA Herschel project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who is not a part of the current study. "Herschel's eye for longer-wavelength infrared light has given us new tools for addressing a profound cosmic mystery."

Herschel is led by the European Space Agency with important contributions from NASA.

Cosmic dust is made of various elements, such as carbon, oxygen, iron and other atoms heavier than hydrogen and helium. It is the stuff of which planets and people are made, and it is essential for star formation. Stars like our sun churn out flecks of dust as they age, spawning new generations of stars and their orbiting planets.

Astronomers have for decades wondered how dust was made in our early universe. Back then, sun-like stars had not been around long enough to produce the enormous amounts of dust observed in distant, early galaxies. Supernovae, on the other hand, are the explosions of massive stars that do not live long.

The new Herschel observations are the best evidence yet that supernovae are, in fact, the dust-making machines of the early cosmos.

"The Earth on which we stand is made almost entirely of material created inside a star," explained the principal investigator of the survey project, Margaret Meixner of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. "Now we have a direct measurement of how supernovae enrich space with the elements that condense into the dust that is needed for stars, planets and life."

Comet Hartley 2 Leaves a Bumpy Trail

New findings from NEOWISE, the asteroid- and comet-hunting portion of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, show that comet Hartley 2 leaves a pebbly trail as it laps the sun, dotted with grains as big as golf balls.

Previously, NASA's EPOXI mission, which flew by the comet on Nov. 4, 2010, found golf ball- to basketball-sized fluffy ice particles streaming off comet Hartley 2. NEOWISE data show that the golf ball-sized chunks survive farther away from the comet than previously known, winding up in Hartley 2's trail of debris. The NEOWISE team determined the size of these particles by looking at how far they deviated from the trail. Larger particles are less likely to be pushed away from the trail by radiation pressure from the sun.

The observations also show that the comet is still actively ejecting carbon dioxide gas at a distance of 2.3 astronomical units from the sun, which is farther away from the sun than where EPOXI detected carbon dioxide jets streaming from the comet. An astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the sun.

"We were surprised that carbon dioxide plays a significant role in comet Hartley 2's activity when it's farther away from the sun," said James Bauer, the lead author of a new paper on the result in the Astrophysical Journal.

JPL manages and operates the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

New Ways to Measure Magnetism Around the Sun

Those who study the sun face an unavoidable hurdle in their research – their observations must be done from afar. Relying on images and data collected from 90 million miles away, however, makes it tough to measure the invisible magnetic fields sweeping around the sun.

Scientists must learn more about these fields because they are crucial to understanding how coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, travel through space sometimes toward Earth where they can damage satellites. Now NASA researchers have made use of old mathematical techniques and new insights on how CMEs travel to devise a fresh way to measure this magnetic environment in the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona.

"The magnetic field is the skeleton of the entire heliosphere, guiding how particles and CMEs move toward Earth," says solar physicist Nat Gopalswamy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. He says researchers routinely measure the fields near the sun's surface, but haven't been able to do as well further out in the sun's atmosphere. "Before, we've only been able to measure it in the upper corona with a technique that required exact conditions. Our new method can be used more consistently."

Indeed, this new method can be used any time there's a good side view of a CME, Gopalswamy explains in a new paper that will appear in the July 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The mathematical relationship between how an object moves through gas and the bow shock it creates – that's the region of compressed and distorted gas that flows around a fast-moving object, much like the shock created by a supersonic jet -- has been understood since the 1960s. When an object moves through gas that is electrically charged, known as "plasma," that movement also corresponds to the strength of the magnetic field.

The problem in the solar environment was spotting a CME's bow shock as it traveled through the upper corona. In that part of the sun's atmosphere, scientists weren't finding the signature ring around a CME that signified a bow shock in images closer to the sun.

But on March 25, 2008, the sun provided a perfect test case: a CME traveling at three million miles per hour and reported by several NASA spacecraft including the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the two Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft. From the perspective of both SOHO and STEREO-A, the CME appeared to be bursting off the horizon, or limb, of the sun. Limb events like this offer the side-view needed to best watch how a CME develops over time.

Flying the STA: Landing Like the Shuttle

A Shuttle Training Aircraft plunges 28,000 feet in a little more than a minute when astronauts use it to practice a space shuttle approach. It’s as close as anyone can get to experiencing a shuttle landing without becoming an astronaut. And what a ride it is.

It takes nine minutes for the STA, a modified Gulfstream II business jet, to reach the altitude for the first run, a little lower than airlines typically cruise. STS-135 Commander Chris Ferguson is at the shuttle-like controls in the left-hand seat, ready to begin his simulated landing as soon as shuttle veteran Ken Cockrell, flying as the instructor pilot in the right seat, gives him the plane.

This mission is expected to be the last flight of its kind during the shuttle era to host media representatives. From the beginning of the program, journalists of all stripes have ridden with shuttle crews to see what a landing entails. We board at dusk and as we climb up to altitude, the horizon is still lit to the west, with a glow of yellow and orange on top of a blue haze.

There are a few clouds higher than us, but nothing below except air and the lighted outlines of NASA's Kennedy Space Center, the Vehicle Assembly Building rising majestically. The south end of the shuttle runway is lit with xenon spotlights. That's our target on this first of 10 dives this evening.

Cockrell flips a few switches and the STA's engines go into reverse, the main gear lowers, and flaps on the wings open. A computer in the aircraft is setting the rules now, making the sleek jet fly like a 110-ton shuttle.

"It's a fairly clean airplane and it likes to glide and it's got good thrust," Cockrell told us before the flight. "So we have to ruin all that to make it fly like a shuttle."

All systems "go," the plane feels like it has leveled off. That doesn't last.

"You've got it," Cockrell tells Ferguson. "I got it," comes the response before the nose points down.

Gravity reduces, grows, settles and then pulls down again in a matter of seconds. Your head feels light for a moment, then blood rushes up to it. You feel your blood sink down to your feet with the next change. Looking out the windows, your eyes show you scenes they've never seen before, such as a horizon tilted more than seems reasonable. The aircraft is diving at 18 to 21 degrees now, seven times steeper than an airliner's approach.

Hubble's Neptune Anniversary Pictures

Today, Neptune has arrived at the same location in space where it was discovered nearly 165 years ago. To commemorate the event, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken these "anniversary pictures" of the blue-green giant planet.

Neptune is the most distant major planet in our solar system. German astronomer Johann Galle discovered the planet on September 23, 1846. At the time, the discovery doubled the size of the known solar system. The planet is 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers) from the Sun, 30 times farther than Earth. Under the Sun's weak pull at that distance, Neptune plods along in its huge orbit, slowly completing one revolution approximately every 165 years.

These four Hubble images of Neptune were taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on June 25-26, during the planet's 16-hour rotation. The snapshots were taken at roughly four-hour intervals, offering a full view of the planet. The images reveal high-altitude clouds in the northern and southern hemispheres. The clouds are composed of methane ice crystals.

The giant planet experiences seasons just as Earth does, because it is tilted 29 degrees, similar to Earth's 23-degree-tilt. Instead of lasting a few months, each of Neptune's seasons continues for about 40 years.

The snapshots show that Neptune has more clouds than a few years ago, when most of the clouds were in the southern hemisphere. These Hubble views reveal that the cloud activity is shifting to the northern hemisphere. It is early summer in the southern hemisphere and winter in the northern hemisphere.

In the Hubble images, absorption of red light by methane in Neptune's atmosphere gives the planet its distinctive aqua color. The clouds are tinted pink because they are reflecting near-infrared light.

A faint, dark band near the bottom of the southern hemisphere is probably caused by a decrease in the hazes in the atmosphere that scatter blue light. The band was imaged by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989, and may be tied to circumpolar circulation created by high-velocity winds in that region.

Dawn Team Members Check Out Spacecraft

Mission managers for NASA's Dawn spacecraft are studying the spacecraft's ion propulsion system after Dawn experienced a loss of thrust on June 27. Dawn team members were able to trace the episode to an electronic circuit in the spacecraft's digital control and interface unit, a subsystem that houses the circuit and a computer that provides the "brains" to Dawn's ion propulsion system.

That circuit appeared to lose an electronic signal. As a result, the valves controlling the flow of xenon fuel did not open properly. Dawn automatically put itself into a more basic configuration known as "safe-communications" mode, where the spacecraft stopped some activities and turned its high-gain antenna to Earth.

Engineers were able to return the spacecraft to a normal configuration and restart the spacecraft's thrusting on June 30 by switching to a second digital control and interface unit with equivalent capabilities. One set of images for navigation purposes was not obtained on June 28 because the spacecraft was in safe communications mode, and one other set, on July 6, was not obtained to allow the spacecraft to spend the time thrusting. Other sets of navigation images have been and will be acquired as expected. The ion propulsion system is now functioning normally.

"Dawn is still on track to get into orbit around Vesta, and thanks to the flexibility provided by our use of ion propulsion, the time of orbit capture actually will move earlier by a little less than a day," said Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission manager. "More importantly, the rest of Dawn's schedule is unaffected, and science collection is expected to begin as scheduled in early August."

In an unrelated event, the visible and infrared mapping spectrometer on Dawn reset itself on June 29. At the time of the reset, the instrument was gathering calibration data during the spacecraft's approach to the giant asteroid Vesta. Some of its planned observations were completed successfully before automatic sensors turned the instrument off.

On June 30, Dawn team members were able to trace the reset to an internal error in the instrument's central processing unit, though they don't yet know why the internal error occurred. By temporarily turning the instrument back on, the Dawn team confirmed that the instrument is otherwise in a normal configuration. They powered the instrument back off, as originally planned for this time. Team members are working to determine when they will turn it back on again.

After arriving at Vesta, Dawn will spend about one year orbiting the asteroid, which is also known as a protoplanet because it is a large body that almost became a planet. Data collected at Vesta will help scientists understand the earliest chapter of our solar system's history.

Cassini Spacecraft Captures Images and Sounds of Big Saturn Storm

PASADENA, Calif. – Scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft now have the first-ever, up-close details of a Saturn storm that is eight times the surface area of Earth.

On Dec. 5, 2010, Cassini first detected the storm that has been raging ever since. It appears at approximately 35 degrees north latitude on Saturn. Pictures from Cassini's imaging cameras show the storm wrapping around the entire planet covering approximately 1.5 billion square miles (4 billion square kilometers).

The storm is about 500 times larger than the biggest storm previously seen by Cassini during several months from 2009 to 2010. Scientists studied the sounds of the new storm's lightning strikes and analyzed images taken between December 2010 and February 2011. Data from Cassini's radio and plasma wave science instrument showed the lightning flash rate as much as 10 times more frequent than during other storms monitored since Cassini's arrival to Saturn in 2004. The data appear in a paper published this week in the journal Nature.

"Cassini shows us that Saturn is bipolar," said Andrew Ingersoll, an author of the study and a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "Saturn is not like Earth and Jupiter, where storms are fairly frequent. Weather on Saturn appears to hum along placidly for years and then erupt violently. I'm excited we saw weather so spectacular on our watch."

At its most intense, the storm generated more than 10 lightning flashes per second. Even with millisecond resolution, the spacecraft's radio and plasma wave instrument had difficulty separating individual signals during the most intense period. Scientists created a sound file from data obtained on March 15 at a slightly lower intensity period.

Cassini has detected 10 lightning storms on Saturn since the spacecraft entered the planet's orbit and its southern hemisphere was experiencing summer, with full solar illumination not shadowed by the rings. Those storms rolled through an area in the southern hemisphere dubbed "Storm Alley." But the sun's illumination on the hemispheres flipped around August 2009, when the northern hemisphere began experiencing spring.

"This storm is thrilling because it shows how shifting seasons and solar illumination can dramatically stir up the weather on Saturn," said Georg Fischer, the paper's lead author and a radio and plasma wave science team member at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Graz. "We have been observing storms on Saturn for almost seven years, so tracking a storm so different from the others has put us at the edge of our seats."

Dark Fireworks on the Sun

On June 7, 2011, Earth-orbiting satellites detected a flash of X-rays coming from the western edge of the solar disk. Registering only "M" (for medium) on the Richter scale of solar flares, the blast at first appeared to be a run-of-the-mill eruption--that is, until researchers looked at the movies.

"We'd never seen anything like it," says Alex Young, a solar physicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Half of the sun appeared to be blowing itself to bits."

"In terms of raw power, this really was just a medium-sized eruption," says Young, "but it had a uniquely dramatic appearance caused by all the inky-dark material. We don't usually see that."

Solar physicist Angelos Vourlidas of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC calls it a case of "dark fireworks."

"The blast was triggered by an unstable magnetic filament near the sun's surface," he explains. "That filament was loaded down with cool plasma, which exploded in a spray of dark blobs and streamers. "Cool" has a special meaning on the sun: The plasma blobs registered a temperature of 20,000 Kelvin or less. That is relatively cool. Most of the surrounding gas had temperatures between 40,000 K and 1,000,000 K.

The plasma blobs were as big as planets, many larger than Earth. They rose and fell ballistically, moving under the influence of the sun's gravity like balls tossed in the air, exploding "like bombs" when they hit the stellar surface.

Some blobs, however, were more like guided missiles. "In the movies we can see material 'grabbed' by magnetic fields and funneled toward sunspot groups hundreds of thousands of kilometers away," notes Young.

MILA Tracks its Last Launch and Landing

With its beginnings rooted deeply in the historic days of Apollo, the MILA Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network Station has played a key role throughout the 30 years of the Space Shuttle Program. But just as the shuttle program is drawing to a close, so is the long history of MILA.

"The end of MILA is officially six weeks from wheelstop. That's it. We hand the keys back to Kennedy Space Center and we walk away," says MILA Station Manager Martyn Thomas. "The MILA mission ends."

The Merritt Island Launch Annex, simply known to most as MILA, sits in an area somewhat remote from the main hub of processing and launch facilities at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Located west of Kennedy's Visitor Complex and about a mile south of NASA Causeway, the small building is surrounded by a field of complex antennas, dishes and arrays used to perform its vital role: Tracking the space shuttle during launch and landing.

But MILA's work begins before liftoff as the countdown clock ticks down and continues as the shuttle climbs into the sky.

"It's a combined effort between the Mission Control Center and the Launch Control Center getting together. The interface to those facilities is MILA, because it gets them their data they need to make those decisions," says Gary Morse, station director for MILA. "We're getting command to the space shuttle, we're getting telemetry from the space shuttle, were getting TV from the external tank, which is looking down at the leading edges of the wing surfaces to see if any foam or ice comes off. We are getting tracking data as soon as we lift off from our signal and sharing that with the flight dynamics facility at Goddard as well as the Mission Control Center in Houston."

The tracking station serves as the primary voice, data and telemetry communications link between the shuttle and the ground from launch until seven and a half minutes into the flight. Millions of clues about the performance of the space shuttle's main engines and other components are communicated to launch managers, technicians and engineers on the ground, who must keep their fingers on the pulse of the space shuttle during the critical ascent.

Beginning with the first space shuttle launch on the STS-1 mission in 1981, the Ponce DeLeon Inlet Tracking Annex at New Smyrna Beach, Fla., was added to MILA's support capability. Located 30 miles north of Kennedy, the station was needed to track the space shuttle during the second and third minutes of flight when the highly reflective plume of the shuttle's solid rocket boosters impede S-band radio transmissions to MILA.

MILA also provides communications during space shuttle landings, beginning about 13 minutes before touchdown on Kennedy's Shuttle Landing Facility runway.

The Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests

The space shuttle orbiter was the first spacecraft designed with the aerodynamic characteristics and in-atmosphere handling qualities of a conventional airplane. In order to evaluate the orbiter’s aerodynamic flight control systems and subsonic handling characteristics, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center undertook a series of flight tests, known as the Approach and Landing Test program, at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., in 1977.

A full-scale orbiter prototype, named Enterprise, was built for the program. Because the vehicle would not be subjected to re-entry heating, Enterprise had no need for a thermal protection system. It was not covered with the space shuttle’s reusable surface insulation, but with substitute materials, primarily polyurethane foam and fiberglass. The flight deck had two crew stations for the commander and pilot.

Aerodynamic controls included a body flap at the aft end, elevons and a split rudder that doubled as a speed brake. Reaction control systems, unnecessary at low altitude, were not installed. For the captive flights and the first three free flights, an aerodynamic fairing covered the orbiter’s aft end. Three dummy main engines were installed for the final two flights to simulate weight and aerodynamic characteristics of an operational orbiter.

Space shuttle prototype Enterprise rises from NASA's 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft.Without the aerodynamic tailcone over its dummy engine nozzles, the space shuttle prototype Enterprise rises from NASA's 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft to begin a powerless glide on its fourth of the five free flights in the Approach and Landing Tests on Oct. 12, 1977.

The Enterprise was to be carried aloft by, and eventually released for flight from, a modified Boeing 747. This Shuttle Carrier Aircraft or SCA, as it came to be known, had a fuselage strengthened at key stress points, two vertical fins attached to the horizontal stabilizers, and three attach points on top of the fuselage to anchor the orbiter. All original seating and interior trim except that of the first class section of the main deck was removed to reduce weight.

NASA selected two two-man orbiter crews for the flight tests of the Enterprise: Fred W. Haise Jr. (commander) and C. Gordon Fullerton (pilot), and Joe H. Engle (commander) and Richard H. Truly (pilot). Crewmembers for the 747 SCA included pilots Fitzhugh L. Fulton Jr. and Thomas C. McMurtry and flight engineers Victor W. Horton, Thomas E. Guidry Jr., William R. Young and Vincent A. Alvarez.

Wind-tunnel-model tests allayed concerns over the separation characteristics of the two vehicles in flight. Because of the orbiter’s positive angle of attack while mated to the 747, the Enterprise tended to lift or climb relative to the SCA. Meanwhile, the 747 began to descend as the crew idled the engines and deployed lift spoilers, allowing the orbiter to clear the SCA’s tail in about 1.5 seconds.

Payload Changeout Room Supports Last Shuttle Cargo

After 29 years of supporting space shuttle missions, the payload changeout room, or PCR, at NASA Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A has been used for the last time to install cargo into a shuttle's payload bay.

The canister containing the Raffaello multi-purpose logistics module, or MPLM, was hoisted into the PCR on June 17 and the MPLM transferred into space shuttle Atlantis on June 20.

As part of the rotating service structure, or RSS, the PCR is an enclosed, environmentally controlled area that supports payload delivery and servicing at the pad and mates to the shuttle's cargo bay for vertical payload installation. Clean-air purges help ensure that payloads being transferred from a payload canister into the PCR are not exposed to the open air.

Although there was a PCR on both Launch Complex 39 pads, the first 24 shuttle missions lifted off from pad A while pad B was being transitioned from an Apollo to a shuttle pad.

The payload for the STS-4 mission was the first shuttle cargo to be installed from a PCR, arriving at the pad May 22, 1982, a few days before shuttle Columbia's rollout on May 26.

Greg Henry, United Space Alliance, or USA, deputy director of solid rocket booster manufacturing operations, was the pad's first payload move director and supported the first payload transfer from the PCR, which was for the STS-4 mission.

"STS-4 carried a primary Department of Defense payload, DoD 82-1," Henry recalled, "which was a classified instrumentation pallet."

The STS-4 cargo manifest also included the first university student experiments, known as Get Away Specials, and the first commercial experiment, which utilized the Continuous Flow Electrophoresis System, or CFES.

"At the pad, the payload canister is lifted and mated to the PCR," Henry explained. "The PCR and canister doors then are opened and the payload is transferred to the payload ground-handling mechanism, or PGHM, a movable payload handling mechanism that is supported by overhead rails in the PCR."

NASA Depends on Freedom and Liberty

When most people think of the ships in NASA's fleet, they think of the space shuttles that pierce the sky as they carry astronauts toward space. But NASA has two seagoing ships, Liberty Star and Freedom Star, which also stand ready on shuttle launch day. Their crews' mission is heading to sea to retrieve the two solid rocket boosters that power the shuttle's ascent.

"A typical crew that we carry is 24 people. We've got ten crew, ten diver specialists, and retrieval operations personnel," says Freedom Star Captain Mike Nicholas, a 24-year booster retrieval veteran who works for United Space Alliance. "We depart the port 24 hours in advance. It takes us roughly 12 to 15 hours to get offshore to our SRB impact area.

Then we'll stand by, and do surveillance work to keep other vessels out of the area so that when the launch goes, we have a window that the boosters can come in safely without any traffic being around."

The crews, divers and ships are prepared long before the solid boosters ignite at the launch pad.

"We're ready to go before launch," says Larry Collins, Manager of Dive Operations for United Space Alliance. "We'll have all the diver gear ready, all of our camera gear ready, all the retrieval equipment ready to go. The reels will have all the lines on them, everything that we use for retrieval will be ready."

But diving isn't their only function during their mission at sea.

"The divers are also the retrieval team," explains Collins, "so the divers operate the cranes, they operate the small boats, they operate the reels. They are multi- functional. They're the diver medics that operate the recompression chambers, they fill the tanks, they lead the dives, they do the diving. Everybody is doing everything."

While most eyes are still glued to the shuttle's climb, the crews and divers aboard these two vessels are on alert, ready to power toward the boosters' impact zone in the Atlantic Ocean to begin their work. When the boosters are spent, they are jettisoned and fall to the sea as the shuttle's main engines finish the job of lifting the spacecraft out of Earth's atmosphere and into orbit.

Orbiter Processing Facilities and High-Tech Shuttle Garages

If home is where the heart is, then the heart and soul of NASA's space shuttle fleet reside in three custom-built, 29,000 square foot buildings at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. They're formally called orbiter processing facilities, but routinely go by the names OPFs, bays, or hangars, and inside highly experienced technicians perform two-thirds of the work to prepare a shuttle for space.

The bays may be the highest-tech garages on the planet, where workers ready a spaceship for flight without scuffing it and huge cranes move tons of cargo into place. But it's also a place where staples are prohibited from the paperwork technicians work off of so the little pieces of metal don't accidentally become embedded in the shuttle's critical systems.

Fresh off Kennedy's Shuttle Landing Facility and back from a mission, shuttles are towed to their individual processing bays. In recent years, OPF-1 and OPF-2, which are connected by a 233-foot-long low bay, have been the residence of Atlantis and Endeavour, respectively. Across the street is OPF-3, the home base of Discovery. Once inside, technicians jack-and-level the shuttle to maintenance height where platforms and a main access bridge surround the spacecraft like a glove.

"Each high bay has a footprint of the orbiter, and when it rolls in, it has to fit to that footprint," said Wayne Bingham, a United Space Alliance, or USA, flow manager. "We try to keep the platforms within a maximum distance of 6 to 8 inches, but a minimum of 4 inches."

Bingham began working at Kennedy in the late 1970s to prepare shuttle Columbia for its first flight, STS-1, and said the day-to-day operations in an OPF are like working in a garage.

During the first couple of days after a shuttle returns from a spaceflight, technicians remove hazardous chemicals like fuel, dry the engines and open the door panels to gain access. Then, they remove the previous mission's payload. Next, it's on to about three month's worth of work to check the heat shield tiles, swap out the space shuttle main engines, or SSMEs, and assess the vehicle's structural, mechanical and electrical integrity.

NASA Dryden and the Space Shuttles

NASA research pilot John Manke worked through his prelaunch checklist while the X-24B lifting body hung beneath the wing of a modified B-52 cruising at an altitude of 45,000 feet over California’s Mojave Desert. When the countdown reached zero, the X-24B – its narrow delta shape and flat belly had earned it the nickname the “flying flatiron” dropped away.

Seconds later, Manke ignited the vehicle’s four chamber XLR11 rocket engine and climbed to a peak altitude of 60,000 feet. As the craft nosed over, he scanned the desert below looking for a narrow gray strip of concrete near the edge of Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base.

Because lifting bodies have a very low lift-to-drag ratio some pilots felt the experience was akin to flying a brick all previous landings had been made on the 44 square mile lakebed expanse where there was significant margin for error. But this flight on Aug. 5, 1975 would be different and for the first time, a lifting body would touch down on Edwards' 15,000-foot-long, 300 foot wide concrete runway. Manke was aiming to make a precise landing on a spot about a mile down the airstrip.

Seven minutes after launch from the B-52, the X-24B was lined up for final approach. Manke touched down precisely on target moments after lowering the landing gear. The demonstration proved that a low lift-to-drag vehicle like the lifting bodies or the coming space shuttle could approach from high altitude or low-Earth orbit and land like a conventional airplane.

Early manned spacecraft designs enabled ballistic entry into the atmosphere, similar to that of a missile warhead. This type of entry resulted in high G-loads and intense heating due to atmospheric friction. Hence, Mercury, the first U.S. manned space vehicle and the only one to use a strictly ballistic entry trajectory, was designed so a single crewmember could lie on his back facing away from the direction of flight. Final deceleration was achieved through use of a parachute, and the capsule landed in the ocean.

Though a capsule could carry a human into space, it had to return to Earth beneath a parachute for an ocean splashdown; a lifting body allowed a pilot to fly home and land on a runway. Advantages of the lifting-body design included reduced mission costs (because the expense of an ocean recovery was eliminated) and greater cross-range maneuvering capability.

Chicken Fat Biofuel and Eco-friendly Jet Fuel Alternative?

In an RV nicknamed after an urban assault vehicle, scientists from NASA's Langley Research Center traveled cross country this month for an experiment with eco-friendly jet fuel.

The Langley team drove 2,600 miles (4,184 km) from Hampton, Va., to meet up with other researchers at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California.

Researchers are testing the biofuel on a NASA DC-8 to measure its performance and emissions as part of the Alternative Aviation Fuel Experiment II, or AAFEX II. The fuel is called Hydrotreated Renewable Jet Fuel.

"It's made out of chicken fat, actually," said Langley's Bruce Anderson, AAFEX II project scientist. "The Air Force bought many thousands of gallons of this to burn in some of their jets and provided about 8,000 gallons (30,283 liters) to NASA for this experiment."

Anderson and his team will test a 50-50 mix of biofuel and regular jet fuel, biofuel only, and jet fuel only. The jet fuel is Jet Propellant 8, or JP-8, a kerosene-like mix of hydrocarbons.

Two of the team members headed west in a specially equipped 32-foot (9.75 m) van on loan from Langley's Aviation Safety Program. It's dubbed "EM-50" by researchers after the urban assault vehicle used in the 1981 comedy "Stripes" with Bill Murray, and carried heavy equipment needed for the campaign. The van, by the way, uses regular gas, not biofuel.

A First Look at Flight in 2025

In late 2010, NASA awarded contracts to three teams Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, The Boeing Company to study advanced concept designs for aircraft that could take to the skies in the year 2025.

At the time of the award, the team gave NASA a sneak peek of the particular design they plan to pursue.

Each design looks very different, but all final designs have to meet NASA's goals for less noise, cleaner exhaust and lower fuel consumption. Each aircraft has to be able to do all of those things at the same time, which requires a complex dance of tradeoffs between all of the new advanced technologies that will be on these vehicles.

The proposed aircraft will also have to operate safely in a more modernized air traffic management system and each design has to fly up to 85 percent of the speed of sound cover a range of approximately 7,000 miles and carry between 50,000 and 100,000 pounds of payload, either passengers or cargo.

For the rest of this year, each team will be exploring, testing, simulating, keeping and discarding innovations and technologies to make their design a winner.

Keeping Cool With Heat Pipes on the Space Station

What happens when electronics overheat? The short answer is: nothing good! In microgravity, natural convection does not occur, which makes cooling equipment a challenge. So how do you keep electronic and computer components from overheating in space?

In satellites used for communications, global positioning systems, and defense purposes, a heat pipe is the device used to regulate temperature and keep the overall systems operating reliably. A heat pipe is a simple device that can efficiently transfer heat from a hot spot to a cooler remote location without the use of a mechanical pump.

To further insights into the operation of a heat pipe in space, scientists launched an investigation called the Constrained Vapor Bubble, or CVB, to the International Space Station. The Constrained Vapor Bubble is the prototype for a wickless heat pipe and is the first full-scale fluids study in the Fluids Integrated Rack or FIR facility flown on the U.S. module of the space station. The experiment completed on March 1, 2011, when the crew removed the fourth module for return on STS-135.

A heat pipe is usually a sealed tube in which all the air is removed and a small amount of liquid is introduced under a partial vacuum. A portion of the liquid in contact with a hot surface evaporates into a vapor as it absorbs heat from the hot surface.

The vapor condenses back to a liquid when the vapor comes in contact with a cool surface, thus releasing its stored or latent heat to the cold surface. The liquid then draws back toward the hot surface, due to the interaction of the individual liquid molecules and their attraction to the surface of the container -- a process called capillary action. The whole liquid and vapor cycle requires no moving parts and the heat transfer process can repeat indefinitely.

Nearly all heat pipes contain wicks or grooves that enhance capillary action and promote the pumping of the working liquid from the cool liquid pool back to the hot surface where the liquid can evaporate again. "The wicks or grooves are complex to fabricate inside the tube and add weight to the heat pipe. Heat pipes built without wicks hold open the possibility of significant weight savings for space flight," says Constrained Vapor Bubble Project Manager Ronald Sicker, NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

From Backpacking to Space Trekking

Water -- it's essential for life. When future space explorers venture beyond low Earth orbit, their only water supply will be on board their spacecraft. During the final space shuttle flight, NASA scientists plan to have astronauts test in microgravity a new method for recycling "used" water.

The idea is to make a fortified drink that provides hydration and nutrients from all sources available aboard a spacecraft, such as wastewater and even urine. The method set for testing uses a process known as forward osmosis.

"Forward osmosis is the natural diffusion of water through a semi-permeable membrane," explains Michael Flynn, research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center. "The membrane acts as a barrier that allows small molecules, such as water, to pass through while blocking larger molecules like salts, sugars, starches, proteins, viruses, bacteria and parasites."

The forward osmosis method already is used for earthbound applications, allowing water of unknown purity to be changed into drinkable water in six to eight hours using a bag containing two chambers separated by a membrane. The commercial technology aids in diverse settings, from outdoor sports like hiking, to the military, to natural disasters where water purification is essential for survival.

The membrane alone can work for most water, but a two-stage system is necessary when recycling urine. It must first be filtered using an activated carbon bed, which removes urea and alcohol that would pass through the membrane alone.

Scientists from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida plan to test a space-adapted version of the bag aboard space shuttle Atlantis during the STS-135 mission this summer. The group at Kennedy, led by NASA Project Manager Spencer Woodward, will include in the shuttle's cargo six forward osmosis bag kits for the astronauts to test. The bags' manufacturer, Hydration Technology Innovations of Albany, Ore., made a few adaptations to their commercial product for spaceflight and the same membrane, but the bag was remanufactured out of plastic that doesn't 'off gas' or burn," says Woodward, explaining that the fittings were also changed to a quick- release version already used in space to make it easier for the astronauts to work with in weightlessness.

The testing will come toward the end of the STS-135 mission, after undocking from the International Space Station. A shuttle astronaut will inject a prepared mixture of a lower concentration liquid containing dye into the outer chamber of the apparatus, which will represent the "dirty" water. He will then inject a higher concentrated "draw" solution into the bag's inner chamber, repeating the process for a total of six bags.