Jupiter-Bound Space Probe Captures Earth and Moon

PASADENA, Calif.On its way to the biggest planet in the solar system Jupiter, NASA's Juno spacecraft took time to capture its home planet and its natural satellite the moon.

"This is a remarkable sight people get to see all too rarely," said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "This view of our planet shows how Earth looks from the outside, illustrating a special perspective of our role and place in the universe. We see a humbling yet beautiful view of ourselves."

The image was taken by the spacecraft’s camera, JunoCam, on Aug. 26 when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (9.66 million kilometers) away. The image was taken as part of the mission team’s checkout of the Juno spacecraft. The team is conducting its initial detailed checks on the spacecraft’s instruments and subsystems after its launch on Aug. 5.

Juno covered the distance from Earth to the moon (about 250,000 miles or 402,000 kilometers) in less than one day's time. It will take the spacecraft another five years and 1,740 million miles (2,800 million kilometers) to complete the journey to Jupiter. The spacecraft will orbit the planet's poles 33 times and use its eight science instruments to probe beneath the gas giant's obscuring cloud cover to learn more about its origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere, and look for a potential solid planetary core.

The solar-powered Juno spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 9:25 a.m. PDT (12:25 p.m. EDT) on Aug. 5 to begin its five-year journey to Jupiter.

JPL 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. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Socializing Science With Smartphones in Space

One may think that participation with the International Space Station would be restricted to an exclusive club of high ranking officials and agencies. In actuality, students, teachers and commercial companies have also been taking advantage of the station's unique environment for years. One of those commercial companies, Houston-based Odyssey Space Research, plans to bring the experience to the rest of us via our mobile devices!

International Space Station National Laboratory partner NanoRacks LLC has a collaboration with Odyssey and Apple. This relationship enabled Odyssey to send two iPhone 4's to the space station as part of the STS-135 mission on July 8, 2011. These phones are just like the ones you can find at the store, but with certain alterations to meet NASA flight certification standards. It took less than a year to make the necessary changes and launch the devices to the station.

The iPhone 4 was selected for its mix of features, according to Odyssey CEO Brian Rishikof. "It had a three-axis gyro, and accelerometer, a high resolution camera and screen, and the means to manipulate the image. We had done some projects in the past that used all those features, but of course it was big, dedicated equipment and suddenly here it is in this small little package," said Rishikof.

The smartphones use the same software as their Earth counterparts and Odyssey used standard tools to develop a new app called SpaceLab for iOS, which will enable the planned research aboard the station. The app is also available for people to download to their own devices.

These devices are part of an investigation called NanoRacks Smartphone, which looks at how the phones will operate in space. The hope is to use the compact hardware in future research studies and to augment crew performance and productivity in operational activities. Currently there are four separate experiments that will run on the smartphones via SpaceLab for iOS.

The first study is Limb Tracker, a navigation experiment using photos of the Earth and image overlay manipulation to match the horizon to an arc to give an estimate of altitude and off-axis angles. Next is the Sensor Calibration or Sensor Cal experiment, which uses reference photos and the three-axis gyro and accelerometer for calibration to improve measurement accuracy.

The State Acquisition or State Acq experiment also uses photos, but this time to estimate spacecraft orbital parameters. After the first three investigations are complete, the Lifecycle Flight Instrumentation or LFI experiment will operate to track the impact of radiation on the phones. To do this, the devices will monitor radiation-induced single bit upsets, which are unintended changes in memory location values.

NASA Continues Tracking Soaking Remnants of Hurricane Irene into Canada

Hurricane Irene left a trail of devastation and heavy rainfall in its wake from the Caribbean to the U.S. east coast and is now a depression dumping heavy rains in eastern Canada before it heads into the Atlantic. Satellite imagery from NASA and NOAA continue to show the progression of Irene's remnants today and her massive size and the TRMM satellite gave insight into her weakening condition.

From Puerto Rico to the Bahamas, and in the U.S. from North Carolina to Vermont Hurricane Irene was a huge rainmaker, dropping about 16 inches of rain in N.C., Va. and lesser (but large) amounts all the way up to Vermont, where the effect of Irene moving against the Green mountains brought the worst flooding seen there in 75 years.

On Monday, August 29, Vermont's Governor Shumlin told the Weather Channel that as many as 250 Vermont roads were closed from flooding. It is the worst flooding in Vermont since 1927, according to CNN. New Hampshire dealt with the same issues also because of the White Mountains. Whenever a tropical storm or hurricane push up against higher terrain, such as mountains it creates what is called orographic uplift, where air is forced to rise against the mountains and creating more storms, bringing more rain.

On Monday, August 29, 2011 at 5 a.m. EDT, tropical depression Irene were moving into Quebec and Newfoundland, Canada and causing major flooding in New Hampshire and Vermont. Irene's maximum sustained winds were around 35 mph (55 kmh). It was centered about 100 miles (165 km) northwest of Houlton, Maine near 47.4 North and 68.8 West.

It was moving to the north-northeast near 25 mph (40 kmh) and had a minimum central pressure of 981 millibars. Flood warnings and high wind warnings remain in effect for parts of the northern Mid-Atlantic into New England as rivers continue to move floodwaters downstream.

NOAA's GOES-13 satellite captured an image of Irene's huge area of remnant clouds and rainfall over northern New England and eastern Canada today at 7:45 a.m. EDT. Her remnants were bringing gusty winds and heavy rainfall on parts of Quebec and in the Maritime provinces. Just as she did in the Caribbean and eastern U.S. Irene is causing a lot of downed trees and power outages. Montreal has reported thousands of outages according to Hydro-Québec.

CBC News reported at 8 a.m. EDT today that Irene was centered about 34 miles (55 kilometers) south-southeast of Baie Comeau, Quebec. Irene is moving toward Labrador. Currently there are wind warnings in effect for Prince Edward Island and portions of Quebec. CBC reported that almost 2 inches (50 millimeters) of rain had fallen in southern New Brunswick by Sunday afternoon and there were over 50,000 residents without electricity there.

NPP Runs the Gauntlet of Environmental Testing

The NPP satellite sits surrounded by 144 rock concert speakers. They're stacked in a circle 16 feet high in a testing room at Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado.

As engineers set up for the environmental test, Pink Floyd's song "Money" plays gently in the background. The music stops. The room clears. Then the sound engineer wearing earplugs and headphones in the control room next door flips a switch.

Slowly, the noise of thousands of pounds of exploding rocket fuel builds louder and louder until it blasts the satellite at a deafening 143.6 decibels loud enough to cause serious damage and pain to unprotected ears. "I was outside the building when they did the full level acoustics," says Glenn Iona, NPP Chief Engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "and I could feel the ground shaking."

The acoustic test is one of a gauntlet of environmental tests a satellite must pass to prove that it can survive launch and life in space. For Large Class Observatory mission NPP, this process took years to plan, 15 months to execute and was fraught with as many engineering challenges as building the satellite itself.

The NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) is the prototype for the next generation of Earth-observing satellites that will monitor daily weather and long-term ozone levels and climate change.

NPP's five instruments will continue data collection now done by an aging fleet of satellites. NASA's oldest Earth Observing System (EOS) satellites are more than 10 years old, with instrument designs and technology dating back to the early 1990s. NPP is the bridge between the original EOS missions and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). JPSS, previously called the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS), will be developed by NASA for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Testing to evaluate whether a satellite is ready for space occurs at several levels. Some individual parts and each individual instrument from the satellite go through three types of testing: dynamic, electromagnetic compatibility, and thermal vacuum.

Then the parts are integrated onto the main satellite bus, a wedge-shaped block the size of a four-door sedan. The bus has propulsion systems, a flight computer, a data processing computer, data storage and a solar panel wing that powers it all. Engineers then put the spacecraft and instruments through their paces to get a performance baseline before the whole satellite is run through the suite of environmental tests again.

NASA Lands in the Heart of New York City

NEW YORK Among the everyday sounds of traffic and the chaotic rush of the city, a piece of Manhattan's Chelsea District grew still and focused at 10:15 a.m. Wednesday.

Hundreds of eyes in Eventi's "Big Screen Plaza" redirected from soaring architectural silhouettes, including that of the Empire State Building, to a stage where the four-person STS-135 astronaut crew emerged to kick off "What's Your Favorite Space?" presented by NASA and Eventi.

Between 29th and 30th streets, and parallel to Avenue of the Americas, Sesame Street's Elmo joined them on the stage with giggles, wit and questions for the crew.

Elmo and the Atlantis crew were meeting for the first time, although Elmo witnessed their launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on July 8. He asked how they slept, how long it took them to train, even how they brushed their teeth.

"Are you sad that the shuttle program has ended?" Elmo asked.

"It was sad. The space shuttle may be gone, but its mission is complete," said Cmdr. Chris Ferguson. "Sometimes you have to stop building rockets for today to build one for tomorrow."

Though NASA closed a chapter in America's history in space with the end of the shuttle program, the agency is already working on the next installment of the story of exploration. That was part of the story Wednesday in New York.

It was told at dozens of interactive spaces that outlined the plaza from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m., while NASA video played on a 35-foot (10.7 m) high-definition LED screen.

Samuel and Hannah Foster from Hacketts Town, N.J., tried on space gloves and attempted tooling tasks that astronauts do in space.

Their older brother, Benjamin, was there with his FIRST robotics team. He later was one of many to demonstrate a robot on stage. His father, Bryan, was pleased to be at the event with his children, who have all taken a special interest in science.

Many children discovered their "favorite space" in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) exhibit. There, the engineering challenge involved picking up a potato and dressing it with bubble wrap, rubber bands, aluminum foil and strings to secure it from damage. A tool was dropped onto the potato inside a bucket, and an unharmed potato earned them a cape, a bag and a solar-powered safety light.

Students from the City College of New York ASME student chapter hosted a "balloon blaster" challenge. Rowan, a third-grader, and Grier, an upcoming kindergartner, discovered this to be a "favorite space."

Critical Milestone Reached for 2012 Landsat Mission

GREENBELT, Md.The Operational Land Imager (OLI), built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo., has been approved by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for shipment to Orbital Sciences Corporation, Gilbert, Ariz. for integration onto the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) spacecraft.

"OLI will be more sensitive to land cover changes and characteristics across the landscape and over time than previous Landsat instruments," said James Irons, LDCM Project Scientist at NASA Goddard. "Analysts will be better able to identify and characterize land cover while also being better able to detect and monitor change."

A multitude of scientific, commercial and governmental users rely on Landsat as their primary source of moderate-resolution, multispectral, image data. OLI will measure Earth’s reflectance in nine portions of the spectrum, including visible light, near infrared, and shortwave infrared, providing data that scientists and others use to quantify changes in Earth’s landscapes.

OLI images will cover wide areas of the Earth's landscape while providing sufficient resolution to distinguish features like urban centers, farms, forests and other land uses. The OLI will provide Earth-imaging at 15-meter (49 ft.) panchromatic and 30-meter multispectral spatial resolutions along a 185 km (115 miles)-wide swath. The entire Earth will fall within view of the OLI once every 16 days from the near-polar LDCM orbit.

OLI represents advancement in Landsat sensor technology. Instruments on earlier Landsat satellites employed scan mirrors to sweep the instrument fields of view across the surface swath width and transmit light to a few detectors. The OLI will instead use long detector arrays, with over 7000 detectors per spectral band, aligned across its focal plane to view across the swath. The OLI design results in a more sensitive instrument providing improved land surface information with fewer moving parts. Engineers expect this new design to be more reliable while providing improved performance.

"OLI provides the key sensor technology to allow continuation of Landsat Earth observations into a fourth decade," said Ball Aerospace president and CEO, David L. Taylor. "This continuation is essential to maintain seamless acquisition of Earth-from-space images not captured by any other private or public source."

The Landsat program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). For nearly 40 years, Landsat satellites have continuously and consistently collected images of Earth, creating a historical archive unmatched in quality, detail, coverage and value. Freely available Landsat data provide a unique resource for people who work in agriculture, geology, forestry, regional planning, education, mapping and global change research.

NASA Exercises Ames Intelligent Systems Research Contract Option

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. NASA has exercised Option Period #2 on the Intelligent Systems Research and Development Support (ISRDS) contract. Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies Inc., (SGT, Inc.), Greenbelt, Md., received the option award to continue to support intelligent systems research at the agency's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

The option period has a maximum value of $60 million. This is a cost plus fixed fee contract. The exercised option will continue performance from Sept. 29, 2011, to Sept. 28, 2012. The contract consists of a three-year base period and three, one-year options.

The company will provide all resources, other than those identified as provided by the government, as necessary to support scientific research, develop technologies, build applications, infuse and deploy advanced information systems technology at Ames.

The company also will provide research support in artificial intelligence, knowledge-based systems, knowledge discovery, data mining, soft computing (including neural networks and fuzzy control methods), nanotechnology information processing and sensors.

The contractor will provide research support for biologically inspired computer systems and human extensions; prognostic signal analysis; model-based diagnostic reasoning; software fault diagnostic and automated software methodologies; fault-tolerant computing hardware and networking.

In addition it will provide tele-presence/control of remote, mobile platforms; autonomous and adaptive control; integrated design; human-centered computing; system design of a distributed heterogeneous network of workstations; distribution of research information in various formats and forums.

NASA Sets Space Station Status Update Briefing For Monday


HOUSTON NASA Television will broadcast an International Space Station status update briefing at 9 a.m. CDT on Monday, Aug. 29.

Michael Suffredini, space station program manager, will provide the latest information on the status of the station following the Aug. 24 failure of the Russian Progress 44 resupply vehicle to reach orbit.

The Russian Federal Space Agency has established a commission to assess the root cause of the failure, to develop a plan of corrective action, and determine any implications for the launch of crews to the station on similar Soyuz rockets. Suffredini also will discuss the status of the commission’s investigation and preliminary plans by NASA and its international partners to resume crew and cargo launches.

NASA TV and the agency's website will broadcast the briefing live from the Johnson Space Center. Reporters may ask questions from participating NASA locations, and should contact their preferred NASA center to confirm participation. The phone bridge at Johnson will be available for reporters to participate by calling the newsroom at 281-483-5111 by 8:45 a.m

NASA Moon Mission in Final Preparations for September Launch

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. NASA's Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission to study the moon is in final launch preparations for a scheduled Sept. 8 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

GRAIL's twin spacecraft are tasked for a nine-month mission to explore Earth's nearest neighbor in unprecedented detail. They will determine the structure of the lunar interior from crust to core and advance our understanding of the thermal evolution of the moon.

"Yesterday's final encapsulation of the spacecraft is an important mission milestone," said David Lehman, GRAIL project manager for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Our two spacecraft are now sitting comfortably inside the payload fairing which will protect them during ascent. Next time the GRAIL twins will see the light of day, they will be about 95 miles up and accelerating."

The spacecraft twins, GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B, will fly aboard a Delta II rocket launched from Florida. The twins' circuitous route to lunar orbit will take 3.5 months and cover approximately 2.6 million miles (4.2 million kilometers) for GRAIL-A, and 2.7 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) for GRAIL-B.

In lunar orbit, the spacecraft will transmit radio signals precisely defining the distance between them. Regional gravitational differences on the moon are expected to expand and contract that distance.

GRAIL scientists will use these accurate measurements to define the moon's gravity field. The data will allow mission scientists to understand what goes on below the surface of our natural satellite.

"GRAIL will unlock lunar mysteries and help us understand how the moon, Earth and other rocky planets evolved as well," said Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

GRAIL's launch period opens Sept. 8 and extends through Oct. 19. On each day, there are two separate launch opportunities separated by approximately 39 minutes. On Sept. 8, the first launch opportunity is 8:37 a.m. EDT (5:37 a.m. PDT); the second is 9:16 a.m. EDT (6:16 a.m. PDT).

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the GRAIL mission. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, is home to the mission's principal investigator, Maria Zuber. The GRAIL mission is part of the Discovery 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.

Sunspot Breakthrough

Imagine forecasting a hurricane in Miami weeks before the storm was even a swirl of clouds off the coast of Africa—or predicting a tornado in Kansas from the flutter of a butterfly's wing in Texas. These are the kind of forecasts meteorologists can only dream about.

Could the dream come true? A new study by Stanford researchers suggests that such forecasts may one day be possible—not on Earth, but on the sun.

"We have learned to detect sunspots before they are visible to the human eye," says Stathis Ilonidis, a PhD student at Stanford University. "This could lead to significant advances in space weather forecasting."

Sunspots are the "butterfly's wings" of solar storms. Visible to the human eye as dark blemishes on the solar disk, sunspots are the starting points of explosive flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) that sometimes hit our planet 93 million miles away. Consequences range from Northern Lights to radio blackouts to power outages.

Astronomers have been studying sunspots for more than 400 years, and they have pieced together their basic characteristics: Sunspots are planet-sized islands of magnetism that float in solar plasma. Although the details are still debated, researchers generally agree that sunspots are born deep inside the sun via the action of the sun’s inner magnetic dynamo. From there they bob to the top, carried upward by magnetic buoyancy; a sunspot emerging at the stellar surface is a bit like a submarine emerging from the ocean depths.

In the August 19th issue of Science, Ilonidis and co-workers Junwei Zhao and Alexander Kosovichev announced that they can see some sunspots while they are still submerged.

Their analysis technique is called "time-distance helioseismology," and it is similar to an approach widely used in earthquake studies. Just as seismic waves traveling through the body of Earth reveal what is inside the planet, acoustic waves traveling through the body of the sun can reveal what is inside the star. Fortunately for helioseismologists, the sun has acoustic waves in abundance. The body of the sun is literally roaring with turbulent boiling motions. This sets the stage for early detection of sunspots.

"We can't actually hear these sounds across the gulf of space," explains Ilonidis, "but we can see the vibrations they make on the sun's surface." Instruments onboard two spacecraft, the venerable Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the newer Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) constantly monitor the sun for acoustic activity.

Researchers Detail How A Distant Black Hole Devoured A Star

WASHINGTON Two studies appearing in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature provide new insights into a cosmic accident that has been streaming X-rays toward Earth since late March. NASA's Swift satellite first alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from the new source in the constellation Draco.

"Incredibly, this source is still producing X-rays and may remain bright enough for Swift to observe into next year," said David Burrows, professor of astronomy at Penn State University and lead scientist for the mission's X-Ray Telescope instrument. "It behaves unlike anything we've seen before."

Astronomers soon realized the source, known as Swift J1644+57, was the result of a truly extraordinary event the awakening of a distant galaxy's dormant black hole as it shredded and consumed a star. The galaxy is so far away, it took the light from the event approximately 3.9 billion years to reach Earth.

Burrows' study included NASA scientists. It highlights the X- and gamma-ray observations from Swift and other detectors, including the Japan-led Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) instrument aboard the International Space Station.

The second study was led by Ashley Zauderer, a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. It examines the unprecedented outburst through observations from numerous ground-based radio observatories, including the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) near Socorro, N.M.

Most galaxies, including our own, possess a central supersized black hole weighing millions of times the sun's mass. According to the new studies, the black hole in the galaxy hosting Swift J1644+57 may be twice the mass of the four-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. As a star falls toward a black hole, it is ripped apart by intense tides. The gas is corralled into a disk that swirls around the black hole and becomes rapidly heated to temperatures of millions of degrees.

NASA'S Wise Mission Discovers Coolest Class of Stars

PASADENA, Calif. Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered the coldest class of star-like bodies, with temperatures as cool as the human body.

Astronomers hunted these dark orbs, termed Y dwarfs, for more than a decade without success. When viewed with a visible-light telescope, they are nearly impossible to see. WISE's infrared vision allowed the telescope to finally spot the faint glow of six Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years.

"WISE scanned the entire sky for these and other objects, and was able to spot their feeble light with its highly sensitive infrared vision," said Jon Morse, Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "They are 5,000 times brighter at the longer infrared wavelengths WISE observed from space than those observable from the ground."

The Y's are the coldest members of the brown dwarf family. Brown dwarfs are sometimes referred to as "failed" stars. They are too low in mass to fuse atoms at their cores and thus don't burn with the fires that keep stars like our sun shining steadily for billions of years. Instead, these objects cool and fade with time, until what little light they do emit is at infrared wavelengths.

Astronomers study brown dwarfs to better understand how stars form, and to understand the atmospheres of planets beyond our solar system. The atmospheres of brown dwarfs are similar to those of gas-giant planets like Jupiter, but they are easier to observe because they are alone in space, away from the blinding light of a parent star.

So far, WISE data have revealed 100 new brown dwarfs. More discoveries are expected as scientists continue to examine the enormous quantity of data from WISE. The telescope performed the most advanced survey of the sky at infrared wavelengths to date, from Jan. 2010 to Feb. 2011, scanning the entire sky about 1.5 times.

Of the 100 brown dwarfs, six are classified as cool Y's. One of the Y dwarfs, called WISE 1828+2650, is the record holder for the coldest brown dwarf, with an estimated atmospheric temperature cooler than room temperature, or less than about 80 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius).

"The brown dwarfs we were turning up before this discovery were more like the temperature of your oven," said Davy Kirkpatrick, a WISE science team member at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "With the discovery of Y dwarfs, we've moved out of the kitchen and into the cooler parts of the house."

Kirkpatrick is lead author of a paper appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, describing the 100 confirmed brown dwarfs. Michael Cushing, a WISE team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is lead author of a paper describing the Y dwarfs in the Astrophysical Journal.

NASA Satellites Measure a Large Hurricane Irene

NASA satellites have been gathering data on Hurricane Irene as she heads the Bahamas today and tomorrow and observed that she is a large hurricane.

Irene's hurricane force winds extend outward up to 50 miles (85 km) from the center and tropical storm force winds extend outward up to 205 miles (335 km). That means that Irene is about 410 miles in diameter. That's just shy of the distance from Washington, D.C. to Boston, Mass.

NASA's Terra satellite captured an image of Hurricane Irene when the storm's center had passed Puerto Rico at 15:20 UTC (11:20 a.m. EDT) on August 22, 2011. The southern quadrant of Irene's clouds were still over the island bringing heavy rainfall. There is no eye visible in the image.

The next day, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite called GOES-13 saw Hurricane Irene approaching the Bahamas on August 23, 2011 at 1932 UTC (3:32 p.m. EDT). No eye was visible in the image, but the extent of Irene's large cloud cover is seen from eastern Cuba over Hispaniola. NOAA operates the GOES satellites, and the NASA GOES Project at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. creates images and animations using that satellite data.

At 2 p.m. EDT on August 23, the center of large Hurricane Irene was 55 miles south of Grand Turk Island. That means that the island was on the fringes of hurricane-force winds as Irene continues to move west-northwest at 10 mph (17 kmh). Maximum sustained winds are near 100 mph (160 kmh). Irene is located near 20.7 North and 71.2 West. Minimum central pressure was near 977 millibars.

The Watches and Warnings cover a number of islands. On the forecast track the center of Irene will move near or over the Turks and Caicos Islands this evening and near or over the southeastern and central Bahamas tonight and Wednesday. Irene is expected to be near or over the northwestern Bahamas on Thursday.

The National Hurricane Center noted that "Irene could become a major hurricane by Wednesday."

Webb Telescope's MIRI Flight Instrument Completes Cryogenic Testing in the U.K.

A pioneering camera and spectrometer that will fly aboard NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has completed cryogenic testing designed to mimic the harsh conditions it will experience in space. The Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) underwent testing inside the thermal space test chamber at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) Space in Oxfordshire, U.K. The sophisticated instrument is designed to examine the first light in the universe and the formation of planets around other stars.

A team of more than 50 scientists from 11 countries tested MIRI for 86 days, representing the longest and most exhaustive testing at cryogenic temperatures of an astronomy instrument in Europe prior to delivery for its integration into a spacecraft.

"The successful completion of the test program, involving more than 2,000 individual tests, marks a major milestone for the Webb telescope mission," said Matthew Greenhouse, Webb telescope project scientist for the Science Instrument Payload, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Along with the Webb telescope's other instruments, MIRI will help scientists better understand how the universe formed following the Big Bang and ultimately developed star systems that may be capable of supporting life. In particular, scientists hope to explore young planets around distant stars that are shrouded by gas and dust when viewed in visible light.

Because infrared light penetrates these obstructions, MIRI can acquire images of planetary nurseries sharper than ever before possible. With its spectrometer, MIRI could potentially reveal the existence of water on these planets as well, informing future investigations into their habitability for humans.

To capture some of the earliest, infrared light in the cosmos, MIRI has to be cooled to 7 Kelvin (-266 Celsius/-447 Fahrenheit), which brings tough challenges for testing the instrument. Inside the RAL Space thermal space test chamber, specially constructed shrouds, cooled to 40K (-233C/-388F), surround MIRI while scientists observe simulated background stars. The tests were designed to ensure that MIRI can operate successfully in the cold vacuum of space and allow scientists to gather vital calibration and baseline data.

Discovering New Orbits with Kids in Micro-g

Even simple scientific experiments can yield amazing results and add to the collective knowledge of the research community. Take the winning proposal for the most recent round of the Kids in Micro-g competition, for example, which was designed by two 5th grade girls from Chabad Hebrew Academy in San Diego. Conducted in April 2011 on the International Space Station, this study, called "Attracting Water Drops," looked at static attraction in microgravity to reveal an exciting new understanding of physics in space.

Kids in Micro-g was a hands-on design challenge and part of NASA's Teaching from Space education program. Six finalists were selected in the 2011 Kids in Micro-g competition, earning the chance to have their proposed studies performed on the space station.

The Attracting Water Drops experiment involved rubbing a piece of rubber tubing with a pair of nylon shorts to create a static charge. Then astronauts released a droplet of water close by and watched to see what happened.

Marilyn Sniffen, advanced placement science coordinator with Chabad Hebrew Academy, found out about the Kids in Micro-g competition while researching new challenges for her students online. Having previously participated with her classes in other NASA education challenges, she was aware of NASA as a resource to help foster a love of science in students.

"I asked my current students if they would like to participate," said Sniffen. "There was no hesitation, as they immediately wanted to check out the list of supplies available for the physics tests that could be done aboard the space station."

Students did their own companion study in the classroom to gain results for the investigation under the force of gravity here on Earth. They observed that a piece of charged rubber tubing held near a stream of running water caused the flow of water to bend toward the tubing. Students learned that the action of rubbing the tubing with nylon transferred negatively charged electrons to the tubing, creating a negative static charge.

Since opposite charges attract to each other, and water molecules have a polarity with a positive end, the negatively charged tubing held near the water caused the positive end of the water to draw towards the tubing.

NASA's GRAIL Moon Twins are Joined to Their Booster

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. NASA's lunar-bound GRAIL twins were mated to their Delta II launch vehicle at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 17 at 8:45 a.m. EDT (5:45 a.m. PDT) today. The 15-mile (25-kilometer) trip from Astrotech Space Operations in Titusville, Fla., is the last move for GRAIL before it begins its journey to the moon. NASA's dynamic duo will orbit the moon to determine the structure of the lunar interior from crust to core and to advance understanding of the thermal evolution of the moon.

"We are about to finish one chapter in the GRAIL story and open another," said Maria Zuber, GRAIL's principal investigator, based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "Let me assure you this one is a real page-turner. GRAIL will rewrite the book on the formation of the moon and the beginning of us."

Now that the GRAIL spacecraft are atop their rocket, a final flurry of checks and tests can begin to confirm that all is go for launch. The final series of checks begins tomorrow, Aug. 19, with an on-pad functional test. The test is designed to confirm that the spacecraft is healthy after the fueling and transport operations. Next week, among all the upcoming final tests, reviews and closeout operations leading up to liftoff, the GRAIL team will install the launch vehicle fairing around the spacecraft.

GRAIL's launch period opens Sept. 8 and extends through Oct. 19. On each day, there are two separate instantaneous launch opportunities separated in time by approximately 39 minutes. On Sept. 8, the first launch opportunity is at 8:37 a.m. EDT (5:37 a.m. PDT). The second launch opportunity is 9:16 a.m. EDT (6:16 a.m. PDT).

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the GRAIL mission. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, is home to the mission's principal investigator, Maria Zuber. The GRAIL mission is part of the Discovery 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.

Unusual Fault Pattern Surfaces in Earthquake Study


PASADENA, Calif. Like scars that remain on the skin long after a wound has healed, earthquake fault lines can be traced on Earth's surface long after their initial rupture. Typically, this line of intersection is more complicated at the surface than at depth. But a new study of the April 4, 2010, El Mayor–Cucapah earthquake in Baja California, Mexico, reveals a reversal of this trend. Superficially, the fault involved in the magnitude 7.2 earthquake appeared to be straight, but at depth, it’s warped and complicated.

The study, which was led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory geophysicist Eric Fielding serving as a coauthor, is available online in the journal Nature Geoscience.

In a standard model, transform plate boundary structures where two plates slide past one another tend to be vertically oriented, which allows for lateral side-by-side shear fault motion. However, as the study found, the 75 mile (120 kilometer) long El Mayor–Cucapah rupture involved angled, non-vertical faults and the event began on a connecting extension fault between the two segments.

The new analysis indicates the responsible fault is more segmented deep down than its straight surface trace suggests. This means the evolution and extent of this earthquake's rupture could not have been accurately anticipated from the surface geology alone, says the study’s lead author Shengji Wei. Anticipating the characteristics of earthquakes that would likely happen on young fault systems (like the event in the study) is a challenge, since the geologic structures involved in the new fault systems are not clear enough.

Jean-Philippe Avouac, director of Caltech's Tectonics Observatory and principal investigator on the study, says the data can be used to illustrate the process by which the plate boundary which separates the Pacific Plate from North America evolves and starts connecting the Gulf of California to the Elsinore fault in Southern California.

NASA’s DC-8 Flying Lab Validates Laser Instruments

Twenty scientists went aloft aboard NASA’s DC-8 flying laboratory in late July to conduct an airborne test of four very different laser techniques for remotely measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide and two laser instruments that remotely measured oxygen. The DC-8 also carried two “truth” instruments – devices that are known to produce accurate data – that took air samples to be compared with the laser measurements.

As part of a research campaign dubbed Active Sensing of CO2 Emissions over Night, Days and Seasons II, or ASCENDS II, the aircraft flew over central California July 28.

The focus of this mission, which is funded by the Earth Science division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, is the further development of laser-based Earth-observing satellite instruments designed to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide.

"Satellite instruments start in a laboratory and mature to a point where they need to be used in the atmosphere," said DC-8 project manager Frank Cutler at NASA’s Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif. "The cheapest way to test is first on the ground and then to get the instruments into the air for in-flight analysis.

"The DC-8 flying laboratory is often used to facilitate these assessments," Cutler added. "It is interesting to observe what an instrument that will fly on a satellite goes through to be certified for operational use."

During an instrument-validation flight over central California, the DC-8 first flew descending and ascending spiral patterns above the Castle Airport area near Merced to take sample gas measurements with the truth instruments. The laser instruments were then flown over the airport at various altitudes up to 40,000 feet so that their data could be compared with that of the truth instruments.

The aircraft flies the instruments over different land surfaces, from snow and ice to oceans, forests and deserts, to test the surface reflectance effects on each instrument's performance. These are the same types of surfaces that a laser instrument would find when studying components of the Earth’s atmosphere from space.

NASA Research Leads to First Complete Map of Antarctic Ice Flow

PASADENA, Calif. NASA funded researchers have created the first complete map of the speed and direction of ice flow in Antarctica. The map, which shows glaciers flowing thousands of miles from the continent's deep interior to its coast, will be critical for tracking future sea-level increases from climate change. The team created the map using integrated radar observations from a consortium of international satellites.

"This is like seeing a map of all the oceans' currents for the first time. It's a game changer for glaciology," said Eric Rignot of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California (UC), Irvine. Rignot is lead author of a paper about the ice flow published online Thursday in Science Express. "We are seeing amazing flows from the heart of the continent that had never been described before."

Rignot and UC Irvine scientists Jeremie Mouginot and Bernd Scheuchl used billions of data points captured by European, Japanese and Canadian satellites to weed out cloud cover, solar glare and land features masking the glaciers. With the aid of NASA technology, the team painstakingly pieced together the shape and velocity of glacial formations, including the previously uncharted East Antarctica, which comprises 77 percent of the continent.

Like viewers of a completed jigsaw puzzle, the scientists were surprised when they stood back and took in the full picture. They discovered a new ridge splitting the 5.4 million-square-mile (14 million-square-kilometer) landmass from east to west.

The team also found unnamed formations moving up to 800 feet (244 meters) annually across immense plains sloping toward the Antarctic Ocean and in a different manner than past models of ice migration.

"The map points out something fundamentally new: that ice moves by slipping along the ground it rests on," said Thomas Wagner, NASA's cryospheric program scientist in Washington. "That's critical knowledge for predicting future sea level rise. It means that if we lose ice at the coasts from the warming ocean, we open the tap to massive amounts of ice in the interior."

Space Storm Tracked from Sun to Earth

For the first time, a spacecraft far from Earth has turned and watched a solar storm engulf our planet. The movie, released today during a NASA press conference, has galvanized solar physicists, who say it could lead to important advances in space weather forecasting.

"The movie sent chills down my spine," says Craig DeForest of the Southwest Researcher Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "It shows a CME swelling into an enormous wall of plasma and then washing over the tiny blue speck of Earth where we live. I felt very small."

CMEs are billion-ton clouds of solar plasma launched by the same explosions that spark solar flares. When they sweep past our planet, they can cause auroras, radiation storms, and in extreme cases power outages. Tracking these clouds and predicting their arrival is an important part of space weather forecasting.

"We have seen CMEs before, but never quite like this," says Lika Guhathakurta, program scientist for the STEREO mission at NASA headquarters. "STEREO-A has given us a new view of solar storms."

STEREO-A is one of two spacecraft launched in 2006 to observe solar activity from widely-spaced locations. At the time of the storm, STEREO-A was more than 65 million miles from Earth, giving it the "big picture" view other spacecraft in Earth orbit lack.

When CMEs first leave the sun, they are bright and easy to see. Visibility is quickly reduced, however, as the clouds expand into the void. By the time a typical CME crosses the orbit of Venus, it is a billion times fainter than the surface of the full Moon, and more than a thousand times fainter than the Milky Way. CMEs that reach Earth are almost as gossamer as vacuum itself and correspondingly transparent.

"Pulling these faint clouds out of the confusion of starlight and interplanetary dust has been an enormous challenge," says DeForest.

Airplane Plus Heat Plus Ice Equals Mystery

It's difficult to believe that an airplane flying in the tropics in the summer could have an engine fill up with ice, freeze, and shut down. But the phenomenon, known as engine core ice accretion, has happened more than 150 times since 1988 frequently enough to attract the attention of NASA aviation safety experts, who are preparing a flight campaign in northern Australia to learn more about this occasional hazard and what can be done to prevent it.

"It's not happening in one particular type of engine and it's not happening on one particular type of airframe," said Tom Ratvasky, an icing flight research engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. "The problem can be found on aircraft as big as large commercial airliners, all the way down to business sized jet aircraft." And it has happened at altitudes up to 41,000 feet.

No accident has been attributed to the phenomenon in the 23 years since it was identified, but there have been some harrowing moments in the air. In most of the known cases, pilots have managed to restore engine power and reach their destinations without further problems. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, there have been two forced landings. For example, in 2005, both engines of a Beechcraft business jet failed at 38,000 feet above Jacksonville, Fla. The pilot glided the aircraft to an airport, dodging thunderstorms and ominous clouds on the way down. Engine core ice accretion was to blame.

The FAA has proposed new certification standards for engines that will be operated in atmospheric conditions that generate ice crystals. The rules will take effect next year, just as the NASA team heads to Darwin, Australia, aboard an aircraft specially equipped with instruments to study cloud physics during the Southern Hemisphere summer. Analyses of the Darwin flight tests and additional tests in ground-based facilities in the United States and Canada will provide the FAA the means for ensuring compliance with the new standards.

"We need to understand what that environment is out there and, even though it may be a rare case, be able to fly through those icing conditions unscathed. Or if we can find ways of detecting this condition and keep aircraft out of it, that's something we're interested in doing," Ratvasky said.

Researchers explain the phenomenon this way: Small ice crystals found in storm clouds get sucked into the core of an aircraft engine, where the pressure is high and the temperature is warm. Some of the ice melts and covers the warm engine parts with a thin film of water that traps additional ice crystals. The super cooled water chills the engine components enough that ice can accumulate on them. If the built-up ice breaks away in chunks it can damage compressor blades, reduce the power level, or snuff out the engine altogether.

GRAIL Launch Less Than One Month Away

NASA's twin lunar probes GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B completed their final inspections and were weighed one final time at the Astrotech Space Operations facility in Titusville, Fla., on Tuesday. The two Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft will orbit the moon in formation to determine the structure of the lunar interior from crust to core and to advance understanding of the thermal evolution of the moon. GRAIL's launch period opens Sept. 8, 2011, and extends through Oct. 19. For a Sept. 8 liftoff, the launch window opens at 5:37 a.m. PDT (8:37 a.m. EDT) and remains open through 6:16 a.m. PDT (9:16 a.m. EDT).

Later this week, the two spacecraft will be loaded side-by-side on a special adapter and packaged inside a payload fairing that will protect them during their launch into space. Next week, GRAIL is expected to make the trip from Astrotech to Launch Complex 17 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station where it will be mated with its United Launch Alliance Delta II Heavy rocket.

GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B will fly in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field in unprecedented detail. The mission will answer longstanding questions about Earth's moon, and provide scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the GRAIL mission. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, is home to the mission's principal investigator, Maria Zuber. The GRAIL mission is part of the Discovery 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.

Robotic Refueling Module, Soon To Be Relocated to Permanent Space Station Position

NASA’s groundbreaking Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM) will reach a key milestone in September when the International Space Station (ISS) robots transfer the module to its permanent home on space station’s ExPRESS Logistics Carrier-4. Robotic operations for the technology demonstration are currently slated to begin soon afterwards.

A joint effort between NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, RRM is designed to demonstrate the technologies, tools, and techniques needed to robotically service satellites, especially those not built with servicing in mind.

The results of this two-year technology test bed are expected to the reduce risks associated with satellite servicing as well as lay the foundation and encourage future robotic servicing missions. Such future missions could include the repair and repositioning of orbiting satellites.

President Obama called the RRM demonstration “innovative” during a July 15 phone call to STS-135 astronauts onboard the ISS noting its potential future benefits to the commercial satellite industry. “It’s a good reminder of how NASA technology and research often times has huge spillover effects into the commercial sector, and makes it all that much more important in terms of peoples’ day to day lives.”

Launched to the ISS in July onboard the last shuttle mission, RRM marks the first use of the space station’s Dextre robot beyond robotic station maintenance for technology research and development. It is also the first on-orbit demonstration to test, prove and advance the technology needed to perform robotic servicing on spacecraft not designed for refueling and repair.

"Robotic refueling and satellite servicing could extend the lifetimes of satellites, offering significant savings in delayed replacement costs," said Frank Cepollina, Associate Director of the Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office (SSCO) at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "Such servicing has the potential to allow human and robotic explorers to reach distant destinations more efficiently and effectively."

The RRM module is about the size of a washing machine and weighs approximately 550 pounds, with dimensions of 33" by 43" by 45.” RRM includes 0.45 gallon (1.7 liters) of ethanol that will be used to demonstrate fluid transfer on orbit.

On July 12, space station astronauts Mike Fossum and Ron Garan removed the RRM module from the cargo bay of shuttle Atlantis and placed the module onto a temporary platform on the Dextre robot. In September, the Canadarm2 robot will permanently secure RRM on the ExPRESS Logistics Carrier-4 (ELC-4), an external platform also built at Goddard. The ISS will provide command, telemetry and power support for the module through ELC-4 during the experiment’s two-year window of operations.

Space Station Crew Enjoys Eye-Level View of Perseid Meteor Shower

With the bright moon that was out on the evening of August 13, many astronomy buffs were not able to fully appreciate the spectacular Perseid meteor shower going on in the night sky. From the International Space Station, however, astronaut Ron Garan had a front seat view as part of the Crew Earth Observations, or CEO, investigation.

Using a Nikon D3S digital camera with a 22 mm lens, Garan captured a stunning photo of one of the Perseid meteors streaking through Earth's atmosphere. You can see part of the space station's solar array in the image, allowing the viewer to share in the unique perspective of the crew from low Earth orbit. This photograph will add to the CEO investigation's collection of hundreds of thousands of Earth images.

The astronaut photography for CEO supports global research, according to William Stefanov, chief scientist for the Engineering and Science Group Contract supporting the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate at NASA's Johnson Space Center. "The inclined equatorial orbit of the station, and having 'humans in the loop,' makes it a useful and unique platform in comparison to unmanned polar-orbiting sensor systems.

From the space station, data can be collected on Earth processes at different times of day, with different image resolutions, illumination conditions and viewing angles, than is possible from the majority of robotic sensor systems," said Stefanov.

One of the upcoming developments for CEO includes camera updates to enable images in near-infrared wavelengths. This will make it possible to better map vegetation conditions using crew photography. According to Stefanov, this is just one of the advantages to a station-based perception of our planet. "The orbital perspective allows us to view and record Earth processes that would be difficult, if not impossible, to measure from the ground at scales that provide local, regional, and global perspectives.

Atmospheric and oceanic processes, patterns of vegetation change and urbanization, changes to Earth's snow and ice cover and glaciers, and detection of erupting volcanoes, are all examples of Earth processes of interest to our societies that we can only efficiently monitor, in a global sense and on repeatable time intervals, from space," said Stefanov.

NASA Research Confirms it’s a Small World, After All

A NASA-led research team has confirmed what Walt Disney told us all along: Earth really is a small world, after all.

Since Charles Darwin's time, scientists have speculated that the solid Earth might be expanding or contracting. That was the prevailing belief, until scientists developed the theory of plate tectonics, which explained the large-scale motions of Earth's lithosphere, or outermost shell. Even with the acceptance of plate tectonics half a century ago, some Earth and space scientists have continued to speculate on Earth's possible expansion or contraction on various scientific grounds.

Now a new NASA study, published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, has essentially laid those speculations to rest. Using a cadre of space measurement tools and a new data calculation technique, the team detected no statistically significant expansion of the solid Earth.

So why should we care if Mother Nature is growing? After all, Earth's shape is constantly changing. Tectonic forces such as earthquakes and volcanoes push mountains higher, while erosion and landslides wear them down. In addition, large-scale climate events like El Nino and La Nina redistribute vast water masses among Earth's ocean, atmosphere and land.

Scientists care because, to put movements of Earth's crust into proper context, they need a frame of reference to evaluate them against. Any significant change in Earth's radius will alter our understanding of our planet's physical processes and is fundamental to the branch of science called geodesy, which seeks to measure Earth's shape and gravity field, and how they change over time.

To make these measurements, the global science community established the International Terrestrial Reference Frame. This reference frame is used for ground navigation and for tracking spacecraft in Earth orbit. It is also used to monitor many aspects of global climate change, including sea level rise and its sources; imbalances in ice mass at Earth's poles; and the continuing rebound of Earth's surface following the retreat of the massive ice sheets that blanketed much of Earth during the last Ice Age.