Like Birds in the Sky: Green Flight Challenge Competition, Day Two

On the second day of the CAFE Green Flight Challenge, sponsored by Google, planes competing in the challenge flew like birds in the sky to test the fuel efficiency of their aircraft.

Day Two of the competition was another fine day in Santa Rosa, Calif., for the Green Flight Challenge, one event in NASA's Centennial Challenges program. Weather was cool in the morning but quickly warmed into the mid 80s with clear blue skies and a few wispy clouds floating in a slight breeze.

The morning kicked off at 11 a.m. EDT with the daily briefing for the competitors, CAFE volunteers and journalists. Today the teams would be flying the fuel efficiency phase of the competition. Teams were required to fly four cycles of the closed loop course with an average speed of at least 100 mph, all while using the energy equivalent of less than one gallon of gasoline per passenger. Total miles to be covered would be about 200 miles.

During the daily briefing there were many technical questions from the team pilots regarding the flight path requirements. CAFE reiterated the minimum 4,000 feet and maximum 6,500 feet altitude requirements, staying within two miles of the course flightline and making course turns at the pylons within one-quarter mile. The concern and attention to these details said a lot about the seriousness of the teams to have a clean flight and score points toward the $1.6M prize purse, provided by NASA.

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NASA’s Next Generation Spacecraft Brought to Life by a New Generation of Students

Recent Cleveland State University graduates Adina Feigenbaum and Nick Matej were tapped by NASA’s Glenn Research Center to design an exciting new look into the Orion spacecraft, the agency’s deep space exploration vehicle.

During an 11-week intern program, Adina and Nick focused on the difficult task of translating extensive technical information and acronyms into entertaining and educational animations that can be easily understood by a new generation of space explorers. These new designs will give an engaging look at NASA’s new focus on deep space exploration following the retirement of the historic Space Shuttle Program.

Possessing a variety of different skills, each student chose a different product in which to focus their efforts. Adina worked to render short animations to explain the Orion spacecraft and future missions. She also developed a piece supporting Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) careers, the cornerstone on which NASA’s workforce is built.

Nick, who specializes in illustrations and print material, produced an Orion overview piece and illustrations that were later animated by Adina. He also developed a series of postcards describing Orion’s future missions from the viewpoint of a teenager on a vacation with his parents.

“I did not go to school for engineering or science of any kind, yet here I am creating animations that explain the new space program at NASA,” Adina said. “I found that I really enjoyed taking complex information and creating a way to make it fun for kids to look at and understand. This summer internship has reassured me that design is what I love doing.” She will continue her education with graduate studies at Kent State University, working on her Master of Fine Arts degree in visual communication design.

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Venus Weather Not Boring After All, NASA/International Study Shows

At first glance, a weather forecaster for Venus would have either a really easy or a really boring job, depending on your point of view. The climate on Venus is widely known to be unpleasant at the surface, the planet roasts at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit under a suffocating blanket of sulfuric acid clouds and a crushing atmosphere more than 90 times the pressure of Earth's. Intrepid future explorers should abandon any hope for better days, however, because it won't change much.

"Any variability in the weather on Venus is noteworthy, because the planet has so many features to keep atmospheric conditions the same," says Dr. Tim Livengood, a researcher with the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education, Capitol Heights, Md., and now with the University of Maryland, College Park, Md.

"Earth has seasons because its rotation axis is tilted by about 23 degrees, which changes the intensity of sunlight and the length of the day in each hemisphere throughout the year. However, Venus has been tilted so much, it's almost completely upside down, leaving it with a net tilt of less than three degrees from the sun, so the seasonal effect is negligible," explains Livengood, who is stationed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

"Also, its orbit is even more circular than Earth's, which prevents it from getting significantly hotter or cooler by moving closer to or further away from the sun. And while you might expect things to cool down at night especially since Venus rotates so slowly that its night lasts almost two Earth months the thick atmosphere and sulfuric acid clouds act like a blanket while winds move heat around, keeping temperatures pretty even. Finally, almost all the planet's water has escaped to space, so you don't get any storms or precipitation like on Earth where water evaporates and condenses as clouds."

However, higher up, the weather gets more interesting, according to a new study of old data by NASA and international scientists. The team detected strange things going on in data from telescopic observations of Venus in infrared light at about 68 miles (110 kilometers) above the planet's surface, in cold, clear air above the acid clouds, in two layers called the mesosphere and the thermosphere.

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Aquarius Yields NASA's First Global Map of Ocean Salinity

PASADENA, Calif. NASA's new Aquarius instrument has produced its first global map of the salinity of the ocean surface, providing an early glimpse of the mission's anticipated discoveries.

Aquarius, which is aboard the Aquarius/SAC-D (Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas) observatory, is making NASA's first space observations of ocean surface salinity variations a key component of Earth's climate. Salinity changes are linked to the cycling of freshwater around the planet and influence ocean circulation.

"Aquarius' salinity data are showing much higher quality than we expected to see this early in the mission," said Aquarius Principal Investigator Gary Lagerloef of Earth & Space Research in Seattle. "Aquarius soon will allow scientists to explore the connections between global rainfall, ocean currents and climate variations."

The new map, which shows a tapestry of salinity patterns, demonstrates Aquarius' ability to detect large-scale salinity distribution features clearly and with sharp contrast. The map is a composite of the data since Aquarius became operational on Aug. 25. The mission was launched June 10 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Aquarius/SAC-D is a collaboration between NASA and Argentina's space agency, Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE).

"Aquarius/SAC-D already is advancing our understanding of ocean surface salinity and Earth's water cycle," said Michael Freilich, director of NASA's Earth Science Division at agency headquarters in Washington. "Aquarius is making continuous, consistent, global measurements of ocean salinity, including measurements from places we have never sampled before."

To produce the map, Aquarius scientists compared the early data with ocean surface salinity reference data. Although the early data contain some uncertainties, and months of additional calibration and validation work remain, scientists are impressed by the data's quality.

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MAVEN Mission Primary Structure Complete

NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission has reached a new milestone. Lockheed Martin has completed building the primary structure of the MAVEN spacecraft at its Space Systems Company facility near Denver. The MAVEN spacecraft is scheduled to launch in November 2013 and will be the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The mission's principal investigator is Bruce Jakosky from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado.

In the photo taken on Sept. 8, technicians from Lockheed Martin are inspecting the MAVEN primary structure following its recent completion at the company’s Composites Lab. The primary structure is cube shaped at 7.5 feet x 7.5 feet x 6.5 feet high (2.3 meters x 2.3 meters x 2 meters high). Built out of composite panels comprised of aluminum honeycomb sandwiched between graphite composite face sheets and attached to one another with metal fittings, the entire structure only weighs 275 pounds (125 kilograms).

At the center of the structure is the 4.25 feet (1.3 meters) diameter core cylinder that encloses the hydrazine propellant tank and serves as the primary vertical load-bearing structure. The large tank will hold approximately 3,615 pounds (1640 kilograms) of fuel.

“It’s always a significant milestone when the project moves from a paper design to real hardware and software,” said Guy Beutelschies, MAVEN program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company. “Seeing the core structure really reinforces the fact that MAVEN is no longer just a set of ideas that scientists and engineers have come up with, it is starting to become a spacecraft.”

In mid October, the structure will be moved to Lockheed Martin’s Structures Test Lab and undergo static load testing, which simulates and tests the many dynamic loads the spacecraft will experience during launch.

Despite the primary structure’s light weight, it’s designed to support the entire spacecraft mass during the launch, which applies an equivalent axial force at the launch vehicle interface of approximately 61,000 pounds when including accelerations up to 6 Gs. After completion of the static tests, the structure will be moved into a clean room to start propulsion subsystem integration. The Assembly, Test and Launch Operations (ATLO) phase begins July 2012.


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NASA to Host News Conference on Asteroid Search Findings

WASHINGTON NASA will hold a news conference at 1 p.m. EDT (10 a.m. PDT) on Thurs., Sept. 29, to reveal near-Earth asteroid findings and implications for future research. The briefing will take place at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, launched in December 2009, captured millions of images of galaxies and objects in space. During the news conference, panelists will discuss results from an enhancement of WISE called Near-Earth Object WISE (NEOWISE) that hunted for asteroids.

The panelists are:

--Lindley Johnson, Near-Earth Object program executive, NASA Headquarters, Washington.

--Amy Mainzer, NEOWISE principal investigator, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

--Tim Spahr, director, Minor Planet Center, Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Cambridge, Mass.

--Lucy McFadden, scientist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

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Sunspot 1302 Continues to Turn Toward Earth

Behemoth sunspot 1302 unleashed another strong flare on Saturday morning--an X1.9-category blast at 5:40 am EDT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash.

The movie (above) also shows a shadowy shock wave racing away from the blast site. This is a sign that the blast produced a coronal mass ejection (CME) that could deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field on Sept. 26.

Since the X1.9-flare, active region (AR) 1302 has unleashed M8.6 and M7.4 flares on Sept. 24 and an M8.8 flare early on Sept. 25. None of the blasts have been squarely Earth-directed, but this could change as the sunspot turns toward our planet in the days ahead. AR1302 is growing and shows no immediate signs of quieting down.

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NASA is testing an element of the sunshield that will protect the James Webb Space Telescope's mirrors and instruments during its mission to observe the most distant objects in the universe.

The sunshield will consist of five tennis court-sized layers to allow the Webb telescope to cool to its cryogenic operating temperature of minus 387.7 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Kelvin).

Testing began early this month at ManTech International Corp.'s Nexolve facility in Huntsville, Ala., using flight-like material for the sunshield, a full-scale test frame and hardware attachments. The test sunshield layer is made of Kapton, a very thin, high-performance plastic with a reflective metallic coating, similar to a Mylar balloon. Each sunshield layer is less than half the thickness of a sheet of paper. It is stitched together like a quilt from more than 52 individual pieces because manufacturers do not make Kapton sheets as big as a tennis court.

The tests are expected to be completed in two weeks.

"The conclusion of testing on this full size layer will be the final step of the sunshield's development program and provides the confidence and experience to manufacture the five flight layers," said Keith Parrish, Webb Sunshield manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

During testing, engineers use a high-precision laser radar to measure the layer every few inches at room temperature and pressure, creating a 3D map of the material surface, which is curved in multiple directions. The map will be compared to computer models to see if the material behaved as predicted, and whether critical clearances with adjacent hardware are achieved.

The test will be done on all five layers to give engineers a precise idea of how the entire sunshield will behave once in orbit. Last year, a one-third-scale model of the sunshield was tested in a chamber that simulated the extreme temperatures it will experience in space. The test confirmed the sunshield will allow the telescope to cool to its operating temperature.

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Saturn's Moon Enceladus Spreads its Influence

The world's eyes are on the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) headed toward re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. The satellite is currently predicted to re-enter sometime on the afternoon of Friday, September 23, 2011, but it hasn't been easy to precisely determine the path and pace of UARS despite the fact that scientists well understand how satellites move through space. The problem lies in the fact that space itself changes over time -- the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere can warm up and, more importantly, puff up in response to incoming energy and particles from the sun.

Satellites experience drag as they move through the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere, a large region of hot gas known as the thermosphere. Like a marshmallow held over a campfire, the thermosphere puffs up when heated by solar ultraviolet and x-radiation.

The more the thermosphere swells, the more drag satellite experience. For satellites at lower inclinations and at low latitudes near the equator, this increase in energy mostly comes from the bright area surrounding sunspots and solar flares. The number of photons at the higher energies can increase by up to 100 times or more within a few minutes due to a single flare, and can then last up to a day before returning to pre-flare levels.

Over the last few weeks a variety of solar events have affected the density of the thermosphere. With an increase in solar activity, there's been a sharp uptick in extreme ultraviolet photons being deposited into Earth's upper atmosphere. In addition, a large flare, categorized as an X1.4 class flare, peaked on September 22 at 7:01 AM ET.

The output of this particular flare could increase the drag on satellites at heights of 300 miles by up to about 50%, but at UARS' current altitude of about 110 miles, it will only experience a change in drag of under 1%, but it nevertheless represents the varying solar activities that make for an environment that is difficult to categorize one moment to the next. And that environment has everything to do with the amount of atmospheric drag on UARS and, consequently, its re-entry time. New events occurring on the currently very active Sun might affect the re-entry of UARS even more.

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NASA to Demonstrate Communications Via Laser Beam

It currently takes 90 minutes to transmit high-resolution images from Mars, but NASA would like to dramatically reduce that time to just minutes. A new optical communications system that NASA plans to demonstrate in 2016 will lead the way and even allow the streaming of high-definition video from distances beyond the Moon.

This dramatically enhanced transmission speed will be demonstrated by the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD), one of three projects selected by NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist (OCT) for a trial run. To be developed by a team led by engineers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., LCRD is expected to fly as a hosted payload on a commercial communications satellite developed by Space Systems/Loral, of Palo Alto, Calif.

"We want to take NASA's communications capabilities to the next level," said LCRD Principal Investigator Dave Israel, who is leading a multi-organizational team that includes NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. and Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass. Although NASA has developed higher data-rate radio frequency systems, data-compression, and other techniques to boost the amount of data that its current systems can handle, the Agency's capabilities will not keep pace with the projected data needs of advanced instruments and future human exploration, Israel added.

"Just as the home Internet user hit the wall with dial-up, NASA is approaching the limit of what its existing communications network can handle," he said.

The solution is to augment NASA's legacy radio-based network, which includes a fleet of tracking and data relay satellites and a network of ground stations, with optical systems, which could increase data rates by anywhere from 10 to 100 times. "This transition will take several years to complete, but the eventual payback will be very large increases in the amount of data we can transmit, both downlink and uplink, especially to distant destinations in the solar system and beyond," said James Reuther, director of OCT's Crosscutting Technology Demonstrations Division.

First Step

The LCRD is the next step in that direction, Israel said, likening the emerging capability to land-based fiber-optic systems, such as Verizon's FiOS network. "In a sense, we're moving FiOS to space."

To demonstrate the new capability, the Goddard team will encode digital data and transmit the information via laser light from specially equipped ground stations to an experimental payload hosted on the commercial communications satellite.

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NPP Satellite Prevents Gap in Critical Climate Data

The consequences of global warming are not only challenging, but they are far-reaching, which is why NASA maintains a strong scientific focus on climatic and global change research. As the growing human population continues to burn fossil fuels and release carbon into the atmosphere at an accelerated rate, we are faced with a complex problem: a warming Earth.

A warmer Earth leads to warmer oceans that expand and rise from melting ice, potentially forcing millions of coastal residents to move inland. A warmer climate, even by just a few degrees, also means we could expect more extreme and erratic weather, from heavier blizzards to stronger hurricanes.

Measuring climate is not as easy as popping a thermometer in Earth's mouth every day. The crux of climate change is energy. In 1984, NASA began measuring and keeping a record of changes in Earth's energy with a satellite instrument known as ERBE (Earth Radiation Budget Experiment) and then its successor, CERES (Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System).

Five satellites and 27 years later, not a single year has passed without a record of Earth's energy budget. This year, the climate-monitoring torch is being passed to the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP), a satellite carrying the fifth edition of CERES.

Norman Loeb, a climate scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center and the principal investigator for CERES, gave us some insight into what he and other scientists have been able to discern from our current record of Earth's climate and why a long-term, continuous record is so important.

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Harnessing the Potential of a Good Run Backpack technology gains traction with astronauts

After years of chaffing, bruising, and discomfort in some astronauts, running in space just got easier. Whether it's a two-mile jog or a half-marathon, many astronauts on the International Space Station find their stride and enjoy a relatively pain-free run thanks to the custom-fit, backpack-inspired Glenn Harness.

Because their bones are not under stress or heavy loads in space, astronauts on orbit can suffer a rapid loss of bone mineral density. Without exercise the average monthly loss in astronauts during a six-month stay on the space station is approximately equivalent to the average annual loss that is suffered by post-menopausal women on Earth.

In response, astronauts follow a bone-strengthening routine that includes treadmill running. While the space station has two treadmills, just having the machines available isn't enough. The microgravity environment of space means astronauts cannot simply step onto a treadmill and jog through a twenty-minute run.

"The only way you can run on a treadmill in space is to have a harness that pulls you back toward the treadmill surface," said Peter Cavanagh, University of Washington professor and former Director of the Cleveland Clinic's Center for Space Medicine that developed the new harness design. "What you want ideally is a harness that will apply a force exactly equal to your body weight."

To provide the mechanical stimulus for healthy bones, the runner needs an impact that represents their full body weight as it is on Earth. Depending on the astronaut, that could be 220 pounds, up to 110 pounds provided by the harness on each side of the body. Compared to the 80- to 90-pound backpack that is considered a heavy load on earth, full body loading is an "extraordinarily difficult loading situation," according to Gail Perusek, NASA's Glenn Research Center, Principal Investigator and Project Manager for the Glenn Harness flight studies.

"The torso is basically a cylinder. To get traction you need to apply a downward force. All you have to work with are the shoulders and the hips," said Perusek. "The original treadmill harness was mostly just Nomex fabric and webbing with minimal padding (Aramid felt). The harness was one-size-fits-all and cumbersome to adjust. It was also inadequate to transfer loads to the hips, where 70-80% of the load should be going."

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Saturn's Moon Enceladus Spreads its Influence

Chalk up one more feat for Saturn's intriguing moon Enceladus. The small, dynamic moon spews out dramatic plumes of water vapor and ice first seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2005. It possesses simple organic particles and may house liquid water beneath its surface. Its geyser-like jets create a gigantic halo of ice, dust and gas around Enceladus that helps feed Saturn's E ring. Now, thanks again to those icy jets, Enceladus is the only moon in our solar system known to influence substantially the chemical composition of its parent planet.

In June, the European Space Agency announced that its Herschel Space Observatory, which has important NASA contributions, had found a huge donut-shaped cloud, or torus, of water vapor created by Enceladus encircling Saturn. The torus is more than 373,000 miles (600,000 kilometers) across and about 37,000 miles (60,000 kilometers) thick. It appears to be the source of water in Saturn's upper atmosphere.

Though it is enormous, the cloud had not been seen before because water vapor is transparent at most visible wavelengths of light. But Herschel could see the cloud with its infrared detectors. "Herschel is providing dramatic new information about everything from planets in our own solar system to galaxies billions of light-years away," said Paul Goldsmith, the NASA Herschel project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The discovery of the torus around Saturn did not come as a complete surprise. NASA's Voyager and Hubble missions had given scientists hints of the existence of water-bearing clouds around Saturn. Then in 1997, the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory confirmed the presence of water in Saturn's upper atmosphere. NASA's Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite also observed water emission from Saturn at far-infrared wavelengths in 1999.

While a small amount of gaseous water is locked in the warm, lower layers of Saturn's atmosphere, it can't rise to the colder, higher levels. To get to the upper atmosphere, water molecules must be entering Saturn's atmosphere from somewhere in space. But from where and how? Those were mysteries until now.

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NASA is Painting the Skies Green Over Santa Rosa

NASA and Centennial Challenge partner organization, the Comparative Aircraft Flight Efficiency, or CAFE, Foundation of Santa Rosa, Calif., are encouraging aerospace enthusiasts to attend the Green Flight Centennial Challenge, set to be held at the Sonoma County Airport in Santa Rosa from Sept. 25 to Oct. 1.

Teams from across the United States will test electric, biofueled and hybrid-powered aircraft, vying to be the most fuel-efficient small aircraft in the world. They're competing for a competition purse of $1.65 million -- the largest aviation prize ever offered.

Competitors will tackle a fuel efficiency competition Sept. 27 and a speed competition Sept. 29. To win the fuel competition, an aircraft must fly 200 miles in less than two hours, using less than one gallon of fuel per occupant, or an equivalent amount of electricity. If more than one aircraft meets that criteria, the competitor whose aircraft delivers the best combination of speed and efficiency will take home the prize, according to the competition guidelines.

The Green Flight Challenge's winning aircraft must exceed a fuel efficiency equivalent to 200 passenger miles per gallon (pax mpge). In comparison, typical general aviation aircraft have fuel efficiencies in the range of 5-50 pax mpge. Large passenger aircraft are in the 50-100 pax mpge range.

The winning aircraft also must achieve an average speed of at least 100 mph over a 200-mile race circuit; take off from a distance of less than 2,000 feet to clear a 50-foot obstacle; and deliver a decibel level below 78 dBA at full power takeoff, as measured from a 250-foot sideline.

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NASA's WISE Mission Captures Black Hole's Wildly Flaring Jet

PASADENA, Calif. Astronomers using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have captured rare data of a flaring black hole, revealing new details about these powerful objects and their blazing jets.

Scientists study jets to learn more about the extreme environments around black holes. Much has been learned about the material feeding black holes, called accretion disks, and the jets themselves, through studies using X-rays, gamma rays and radio waves. But key measurements of the brightest part of the jets, located at their bases, have been difficult despite decades of work. WISE is offering a new window into this missing link through its infrared observations.

"Imagine what it would be like if our sun were to undergo sudden, random bursts, becoming three times brighter in a matter of hours and then fading back again. That's the kind of fury we observed in this jet," said Poshak Gandhi, a scientist with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). He is the lead author of a new study on the results appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "With WISE's infrared vision, we were able to zoom in on the inner regions near the base of the stellar-mass black hole's jet for the first time and observe the physics of jets in action."

The black hole, called GX 339-4, had been observed previously. It lies more than 20,000 light-years away from Earth near the center of our galaxy. It has a mass at least six times greater than the sun. Like other black holes, it is an ultra-dense collection of matter, with gravity that is so great even light cannot escape. In this case, the black hole is orbited by a companion star that feeds it. Most of the material from the companion star is pulled into the black hole, but some of it is blasted away as a jet flowing at nearly the speed of light.

"To see bright flaring activity from a black hole, you need to be looking at the right place at the right time," said Peter Eisenhardt, the project scientist for WISE at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "WISE snapped sensitive infrared pictures every 11 seconds for a year, covering the whole sky, allowing it to catch this rare event."

Observing the jet's variability was possible because of images taken of the same patch of sky over time, a feature of NEOWISE, the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE mission. WISE data enabled the team to zoom in on the very compact region around the base of the jet streaming from the black hole. The size of the region is equivalent to the width of a dime seen at the distance of our sun.

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Origin of Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Remains a Mystery

PASADENA, Calif. Observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission indicate the family of asteroids some believed was responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs is not likely the culprit, keeping open the case on one of Earth's greatest mysteries.

While scientists are confident a large asteroid crashed into Earth approximately 65 million years ago, leading to the extinction of dinosaurs and some other life forms on our planet, they do not know exactly where the asteroid came from or how it made its way to Earth. A 2007 study using visible-light data from ground-based telescopes first suggested the remnant of a huge asteroid, known as Baptistina, as a possible suspect.

According to that theory, Baptistina crashed into another asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter about 160 million years ago. The collision sent shattered pieces as big as mountains flying. One of those pieces was believed to have impacted Earth, causing the dinosaurs' extinction.

Since this scenario was first proposed, evidence developed that the so-called Baptistina family of asteroids was not the responsible party. With the new infrared observations from WISE, astronomers say Baptistina may finally be ruled out.

"As a result of the WISE science team's investigation, the demise of the dinosaurs remains in the cold case files," said Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near Earth Object (NEO) Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The original calculations with visible light estimated the size and reflectivity of the Baptistina family members, leading to estimates of their age, but we now know those estimates were off. With infrared light, WISE was able to get a more accurate estimate, which throws the timing of the Baptistina theory into question."

WISE surveyed the entire celestial sky twice in infrared light from January 2010 to February 2011. The asteroid-hunting portion of the mission, called NEOWISE, used the data to catalogue more than 157,000 asteroids in the main belt and discovered more than 33,000 new ones.

Visible light reflects off an asteroid. Without knowing how reflective the surface of the asteroid is, it's hard to accurately establish size. Infrared observations allow a more accurate size estimate. They detect infrared light coming from the asteroid itself, which is related to the body's temperature and size. Once the size is known, the object's reflectivity can be re-calculated by combining infrared with visible-light data.

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Herschel Mission Finds Galactic Growth Slow and Steady

The Herschel infrared space observatory has discovered that galaxies do not always need to collide with each other to drive vigorous star birth. The finding overturns a long-held assumption and paints a more stately picture of how galaxies evolve.

Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important contributions from NASA and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"Galaxy mergers play an important role in producing the most powerful starbursts today," said Lee Armus, a co-author of the new study from NASA's Herschel Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "But in the early universe, when most galaxies contained a lot more gas, mergers were not the only way, or even the most common way, to make lots of stars at a rapid rate."

The new results are based on Herschel's observations of two patches of sky, each about one-third the size of the full moon.

It's like looking through a keyhole across the universe. Herschel has seen more than a thousand galaxies at a variety of distances from Earth, spanning 80 percent of the age of the cosmos.

These observations are unique because Herschel can obtain data at a wide range of infrared light and reveal a more complete picture of star birth than ever seen before.

The results appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

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Expedition 28 Crew Lands Safely

Expedition 28 Commander Andrey Borisenko and Flight Engineers Alexander Samokutyaev and Ron Garan landed their Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft in Kazakhstan a few seconds before midnight EDT Friday, with an official landing time of 11:59:39 p.m. Thursday. Russian recovery teams were on hand to help the crew exit the Soyuz vehicle and adjust to gravity after 164 days in space.

The trio launched aboard the Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in April and spent 162 days living and working aboard the International Space Station.

Samokutyaev was at the controls of the spacecraft as it undocked at 8:38 p.m. Thursday from the Poisk docking port on the station's Zvezda service module.

The undocking marked the end of Expedition 28 and the start of Expedition 29 under the command of NASA astronaut Mike Fossum, who is scheduled to remain on the station with Flight Engineers Sergei Volkov and Satoshi Furukawa until November. Borisenko ceremonially handed command of the station over to Fossum on Wednesday. Fossum, Volkov and Furukawa arrived at the station aboard the Soyuz TMA-02M spacecraft in June.

NASA and its international partners have agreed to a tentative launch schedule with crew flights to the International Space Station resuming on Nov. 14. The Space Station Control Board, with representation from all partner agencies, set the schedule after hearing the Russian Federal Space Agency’s findings on the Aug. 24 loss of the Progress 44 cargo craft. The dates may be adjusted to reflect minor changes in vehicle processing timelines.

NASA Mars Research Helps Find Buried Water on Earth

PASADENA, Calif. A NASA-led team has used radar sounding technology developed to explore the subsurface of Mars to create high-resolution maps of freshwater aquifers buried deep beneath an Earth desert, in the first use of airborne sounding radar for aquifer mapping.

The research may help scientists better locate and map Earth's desert aquifers, understand current and past hydrological conditions in Earth's deserts and assess how climate change is impacting them. Deserts cover roughly 20 percent of Earth's land surface, including highly populated regions in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, west and central Asia and the southwestern United States.

An international team led by research scientist Essam Heggy of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., recently traveled to northern Kuwait to map the depth and extent of aquifers in arid environments using an airborne sounding radar prototype. The 40-megahertz, low-frequency sounding radar was provided by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena; and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, France. Heggy's team was joined by personnel from the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR), Kuwait City.

For two weeks, the team flew a helicopter equipped with the radar on 12 low-altitude passes (1,000 feet, or 305 meters) over two well-known freshwater aquifers, probing the desert subsurface down to the water table at depths ranging from 66 to 213 feet (20 to 65 meters). The researchers successfully demonstrated that the radar could locate subsurface aquifers, probe variations in the depth of the water table, and identify locations where water flowed into and out of the aquifers.

"This demonstration is a critical first step that will hopefully lead to large-scale mapping of aquifers, not only improving our ability to quantify groundwater processes, but also helping water managers drill more accurately," said Muhammad Al-Rashed, director of KISR's Division of Water Resources.

The radar is sensitive to changes in electrical characteristics of subsurface rock, sediments and water- saturated soils. Water-saturated zones are highly reflective and mirror the low-frequency radar signal. The returned radar echoes explored the thick mixture of gravel, sand and silt that covers most of Kuwait's northern desert and lies above its water table.

NASA's Dawn Collects a Bounty of Beauty From Vesta

PASADENA, Calif. A new video from NASA's Dawn spacecraft takes us on a flyover journey above the surface of the giant asteroid Vesta.

The data obtained by Dawn's framing camera, used to produce the visualizations, will help scientists determine the processes that formed Vesta's striking features. It will also help Dawn mission fans all over the world visualize this mysterious world, which is the second most massive object in the main asteroid belt.

You'll notice in the video that Vesta is not entirely lit up. There is no light in the high northern latitudes because, like Earth, Vesta has seasons. Currently it is northern winter on Vesta, and the northern polar region is in perpetual darkness. When we view Vesta's rotation from above the south pole, half is in darkness simply because half of Vesta is in daylight and half is in the darkness of night .

Another distinct feature seen in the video is a massive circular structure in the south pole region. Scientists were particularly eager to see this area close-up, since NASA's Hubble Space Telescope first detected it years ago. The circular structure, or depression, is several hundreds of miles, or kilometers, wide, with cliffs that are also several miles high. One impressive mountain in the center of the depression rises approximately 9 miles (15 kilometers) above the base of this depression, making it one of the highest elevations on all known bodies with solid surfaces in the solar system.

The collection of images, obtained when Dawn was about 1,700 miles (2,700 kilometers) above Vesta's surface, was used to determine its rotational axis and a system of latitude and longitude coordinates. One of the first tasks tackled by the Dawn science team was to determine the precise orientation of Vesta's rotation axis relative to the celestial sphere.

The zero-longitude, or prime meridian, of Vesta was defined by the science team using a tiny crater about 1,640 feet (500 meters) in diameter, which they named "Claudia," after a Roman woman during the second century B.C. Dawn's craters will be named after the vestal virgins—the priestesses of the goddess Vesta, and famous Roman women, while other features will be named for festivals and towns of that era.

Cassini Presents Saturn Moon Quintet

With the artistry of a magazine cover shoot, NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this portrait of five of Saturn's moons poised along the planet's rings.

From left to right are Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas and finally Rhea, bisected by the right side of the frame. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 684,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from Rhea and 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from Enceladus.

The image was taken in visible green light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 29, 2011. Image scale is about 4 miles (7 kilometers) per pixel on Rhea and 7 miles (11 kilometers) per pixel on Enceladus.

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

NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers a World Orbiting Two Stars

The existence of a world with a double sunset, as portrayed in the film Star Wars more than 30 years ago, is now scientific fact. NASA's Kepler mission has made the first unambiguous detection of a circumbinary planet a planet orbiting two stars 200 light-years from Earth.

Unlike Star Wars’ Tatooine, the planet is cold, gaseous and not thought to harbor life, but its discovery demonstrates the diversity of planets in our galaxy. Previous research has hinted at the existence of circumbinary planets, but clear confirmation proved elusive. Kepler detected such a planet, known as Kepler-16b, by observing transits, where the brightness of a parent star dims from the planet crossing in front of it.

"This discovery confirms a new class of planetary systems that could harbor life," Kepler principal investigator William Borucki said. "Given that most stars in our galaxy are part of a binary system, this means the opportunities for life are much broader than if planets form only around single stars. This milestone discovery confirms a theory that scientists have had for decades but could not prove until now."

A research team led by Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., used data from the Kepler space telescope, which measures dips in the brightness of more than 150,000 stars, to search for transiting planets. Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the surface of the orbiting planet.

Scientists detected the new planet in the Kepler-16 system, a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other from our vantage point on Earth. When the smaller star partially blocks the larger star, a primary eclipse occurs, and a secondary eclipse occurs when the smaller star is occulted, or completely blocked, by the larger star.

Meteor Likely Cause of Southwest U.S. Light Show

PASADENA, Calif. A meteor is the most probable cause of a bright, colorful fireball witnessed by people in a wide swath of the southwestern United States, according to Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL.

Residents from Southern California to Arizona to Las Vegas reported seeing a streak of light move rapidly from west to east around 7:45 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, Sept. 14.

"We're virtually certain this bright display was caused by a meteor, probably the size of a baseball or basketball, that burned up in Earth's atmosphere. It appeared much larger because of the heated and glowing atmosphere along its path," said Yeomans.

Many eyewitnesses described seeing brilliant colors of blue, green and orange. Yeomans said the blue or green colors indicate the meteor contained nickel or magnesium, while orange would mean the object was traveling relatively slowly for a meteor, but still moving a few miles per second.

A meteor is a small fragment of an asteroid. Yeomans said that similar fireballs from asteroids enter Earth's atmosphere every week or so, but they usually take place over the ocean or in a sparsely populated area.

This time, Yeomans says, "The fireball was very bright and provided a harmless but memorable light show for people in numerous cities and towns in the southwestern states."

Star Blasts Planet With X-rays

A nearby star is pummeling a companion planet with a barrage of X-rays 100,000 times more intense than the Earth receives from the sun.

New data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope suggest that high-energy radiation is evaporating about 5 million tons of matter from the planet every second. This result gives insight into the difficult survival path for some planets.

The planet, known as CoRoT-2b, has a mass about three times that of Jupiter 1,000 times that of Earth -- and orbits its parent star, CoRoT-2a at a distance roughly 10 times the distance between Earth and the moon.

The CoRoT-2 star and planet so named because the French Space Agency’s Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits, or CoRoT, satellite discovered them in 2008 is a relatively nearby neighbor of the solar system at a distance of 880 light years.

"This planet is being absolutely fried by its star," said Sebastian Schroeter of the University of Hamburg in Germany. "What may be even stranger is that this planet may be affecting the behavior of the star that is blasting it."

According to optical and X-ray data, the CoRoT-2 system is estimated to be between about 100 million and 300 million years old, meaning that the star is fully formed. The Chandra observations show that CoRoT-2a is a very active star, with bright X-ray emission produced by powerful, turbulent magnetic fields. Such strong activity is usually found in much younger stars.

"Because this planet is so close to the star, it may be speeding up the star's rotation and that could be keeping its magnetic fields active," said co-author Stefan Czesla, also from the University of Hamburg. "If it wasn't for the planet, this star might have left behind the volatility of its youth millions of years ago." Support for this idea come from observations of a likely companion star that orbits CoRoT-2a at a distance about a thousand times greater than the separation between the Earth and our sun. This star is not detected in X-rays, perhaps because it does not have a close-in planet like CoRoT-2b to cause it to stay active.

Another intriguing aspect of CoRoT-2b is that it appears to be unusually inflated for a planet in its position.

NASA Rover Inspects Next Rock at Endeavour

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is using instruments on its robotic arm to inspect targets on a rock called "Chester Lake."

This is the second rock the rover has examined with a microscopic imager and a spectrometer since reaching its long-term destination, the rim of vast Endeavour crater, in August. Unlike the first rock, which was a boulder tossed by excavation of a small crater on Endeavour's rim, Chester Lake is an outcrop of bedrock.

The rocks at Endeavour apparently come from an earlier period of Martian history than the rocks that Opportunity examined during its first seven-and-a-half years on Mars. More information about the ongoing exploration of Endeavour.

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. Both have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life. Spirit stopped communicating in 2010. NASA will launch the next-generation Mars rover, car-size Curiosity, this autumn for arrival at Mars' Gale crater in August 2012.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

NASA Announces Design for New Deep Space Exploration System

NASA is ready to move forward with the development of the Space Launch System an advanced heavy-lift launch vehicle that will provide an entirely new national capability for human exploration beyond Earth's orbit. The Space Launch System will give the nation a safe, affordable and sustainable means of reaching beyond our current limits and opening up new discoveries from the unique vantage point of space. The Space Launch System, or SLS, will be designed to carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, as well as important cargo, equipment and science experiments to Earth's orbit and destinations beyond. Additionally, the SLS will serve as a back up for commercial and international partner transportation services to the International Space Station.

"This launch system will create good-paying American jobs, ensure continued U.S. leadership in space, and inspire millions around the world," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "President Obama challenged us to be bold and dream big, and that's exactly what we are doing at NASA. While I was proud to fly on the space shuttle, kids today can now dream of one day walking on Mars."

The SLS rocket will incorporate technological investments from the Space Shuttle program and the Constellation program in order to take advantage of proven hardware and cutting-edge tooling and manufacturing technology that will significantly reduce development and operations costs. It will use a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propulsion system, which will include the RS-25D/E from the Space Shuttle program for the core stage and the J-2X engine for the upper stage.

SLS will also use solid rocket boosters for the initial development flights, while follow-on boosters will be competed based on performance requirements and affordability considerations. The SLS will have an initial lift capacity of 70 metric tons (mT) and will be evolvable to 130 mT. The first developmental flight, or mission, is targeted for the end of 2017.

This specific architecture was selected, largely because it utilizes an evolvable development approach, which allows NASA to address high-cost development activities early on in the program and take advantage of higher buying power before inflation erodes the available funding of a fixed budget. This architecture also enables NASA to leverage existing capabilities and lower development costs by using liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for both the core and upper stages.

Additionally, this architecture provides a modular launch vehicle that can be configured for specific mission needs using a variation of common elements. NASA may not need to lift 130 mT for each mission and the flexibility of this modular architecture allows the agency to use different core stage, upper stage, and first-stage booster combinations to achieve the most efficient launch vehicle for the desired mission.

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NASA's Webb Telescope Completes Mirror-Coating Milestone

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has reached a major milestone in its development. The mirrors that will fly aboard the telescope have completed the coating process at Quantum Coating Inc. in Moorestown, N.J.

The telescope's mirrors have been coated with a microscopically thin layer of gold, selected for its ability to properly reflect infrared light from the mirrors into the observatory’s science instruments. The coating allows the Webb telescope's "infrared eyes" to observe extremely faint objects in infrared light. Webb’s mission is to observe the most distant objects in the universe.

"Finishing all mirror coatings on schedule is another major success story for the Webb telescope mirrors," said Lee Feinberg, NASA Optical Telescope Element manager for the Webb telescope at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "These coatings easily meet their specifications, ensuring even more scientific discovery potential for the Webb telescope."

The Webb telescope has 21 mirrors, with 18 mirror segments working together as one large 21.3-foot (6.5-meter) primary mirror. The mirror segments are made of beryllium, which was selected for its stiffness, light weight and stability at cryogenic temperatures. Bare beryllium is not very reflective of near-infrared light, so each mirror is coated with about 0.12 ounce of gold.

The last full size (4.9-foot /1.5-meter) hexagonal beryllium primary mirror segment that will fly aboard the observatory recently was coated, completing this stage of mirror production.

The Webb telescope is the world’s next-generation space observatory and successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The most powerful space telescope ever built, the Webb telescope will provide images of the first galaxies ever formed, and explore planets around distant stars. It is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

Mirror manufacturing began eight years ago with blanks made out of beryllium, an extremely hard metal that holds its shape in the extreme cold of space where the telescope will orbit. Mirror coating began in June 2010. Several of the smaller mirrors in the telescope, the tertiary mirror and the fine steering mirror, were coated in 2010. The secondary mirror was finished earlier this year.

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Memorial Image Taken on Mars on September 11, 2011

PASADENA, Calif. A view of a memorial to victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center towers was taken on Mars yesterday, on the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

The memorial, made from aluminum recovered from the site of the twin towers in weeks following the attacks, serves as a cable guard on a tool on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity and bears an image of the American flag.

The view combining exposures from two cameras on the rover is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/multimedia/pia14750.html .

The memorial is on the rover's rock abrasion tool, which was being made in September 2001 by workers at Honeybee Robotics in lower Manhattan, less than a mile from the World Trade Center.

Opportunity's panoramic camera and navigation camera photographed the tool on Sept. 11, 2011, during the 2,713th Martian day of the rover's work on Mars. Opportunity completed its three-month prime mission on Mars in April 2004 and has worked for more than seven years since then in bonus extended missions.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Additional information about Opportunity and its rover twin, Spirit, is online.