Geriatric Pulsar Still Kicking

The oldest isolated pulsar ever detected in X-rays has been found with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This very old and exotic object turns out to be surprisingly active.

The pulsar, PSR J0108-1431 (J0108 for short) is about 200 million years old. Among isolated pulsars -- ones that have not been spun-up in a binary system -- it is over 10 times older than the previous record holder with an X-ray detection. At a distance of 770 light years, it is one of the nearest pulsars known.

Pulsars are born when stars that are much more massive than the Sun collapse in supernova explosions, leaving behind a small, incredibly weighty core, known as a neutron star. At birth, these neutron stars, which contain the densest material known in the Universe, are spinning rapidly, up to a hundred revolutions per second. As the rotating beams of their radiation are seen as pulses by distant observers, similar to a lighthouse beam, astronomers call them "pulsars".

Astronomers observe a gradual slowing of the rotation of the pulsars as they radiate energy away. Radio observations of J0108 show it to be one of the oldest and faintest pulsars known, spinning only slightly faster than one revolution per second.

The surprise came when a team of astronomers led by George Pavlov of Penn State University observed J0108 in X-rays with Chandra. They found that it glows much brighter in X-rays than was expected for a pulsar of such advanced years.

Some of the energy that J0108 is losing as it spins more slowly is converted into X-ray radiation. The efficiency of this process for J0108 is found to be higher than for any other known pulsar.

"This pulsar is pumping out high-energy radiation much more efficiently than its younger cousins," said Pavlov. "So, although it's clearly fading as it ages, it is still more than holding its own with the younger generations."

It's likely that two forms of X-ray emission are produced in J0108: emission from particles spiraling around magnetic fields, and emission from heated areas around the neutron star's magnetic poles. Measuring the temperature and size of these heated regions can provide valuable insight into the extraordinary properties of the neutron star surface and the process by which charged particles are accelerated by the pulsar.

The younger, bright pulsars commonly detected by radio and X-ray telescopes are not representative of the full population of objects, so observing objects like J0108 helps astronomers see a more complete range of behavior. At its advanced age, J0108 is close to the so- called “pulsar death line,” where its pulsed radiation is expected to switch off and it will become much harder, if not impossible, to observe.

"We can now explore the properties of this pulsar in a regime where no other pulsar has been detected outside the radio range," said co- author Oleg Kargaltsev of the University of Florida. "To understand the properties of ‘dying pulsars,’ it is important to study their radiation in X-rays. Our finding that a very old pulsar can be such an efficient X-ray emitter gives us hope to discover new nearby pulsars of this class via their X-ray emission."

The Chandra observations were reported by Pavlov and colleagues in the January 20, 2009, issue of The Astrophysical Journal. However, the extreme nature of J0108 was not fully apparent until a new distance to it was reported on February 6 in the PhD thesis of Adam Deller from Swinburne University in Australia. The new distance is both larger and more accurate than the distance used in the Chandra paper, showing that J0108 was brighter in X-rays than previously thought.

"Suddenly this pulsar became the record holder for its ability to make X-rays," said Pavlov, "and our result became even more interesting without us doing much extra work." The position of the pulsar seen by Chandra in X-rays in early 2007 is slightly different from the radio position observed in early 2001. This implies that the pulsar is moving at a velocity of about 440,000 miles per hour, close to a typical value for pulsars.

Currently the pulsar is moving south from the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, but because it is moving more slowly than the escape velocity of the Galaxy, it will eventually curve back towards the plane of the Galaxy in the opposite direction.

The detection of this motion has allowed Roberto Mignani of University College London, in collaboration with Pavlov and Kargaltsev, to possibly detect J0108 in optical light, using estimates of where it should be found in an image taken in 2000. Such a multi-wavelength study of old pulsars is critical for understanding the long-term evolution of neutron stars, such as how they cool with time, and how their powerful magnetic fields evolve.

The team of astronomers that worked with Pavlov also included Gordon Garmire and Jared Wong at Penn State. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

Additional information and images about this discovery is available on the Web at:

http://chandra.harvard.edu

http://chandra.nasa.gov

Dawn Finishes Mars Phase

Mission Status Report: NASA's Dawn Mission

With Mars disappearing in its metaphorical rearview mirror, NASA's Dawn spacecraft's next stop is the asteroid belt and the giant asteroid Vesta. Dawn got as close as 549 kilometers (341 miles) to the Red Planet during its Tuesday, Feb. 17, flyby.

Dawn's navigators placed the spacecraft on a close approach trajectory with Mars so the planet's gravitational influence would provide a kick to the spacecraft's velocity. If Dawn had to perform these orbital adjustments on its own, with no Mars gravitational deflection, the spacecraft would have had to fire up its engines and change velocity by more than 9,330 kilometers per hour (5,800 miles per hour).

The achieved goal of the flyby was to obtain this orbital pick-me-up, making possible its voyage to asteroid Vesta and, later, the dwarf planet Ceres. But Dawn's science teams used this massive target of opportunity to also perform calibrations of some of the scientific instruments. Calibration images were taken by Dawn's framing camera, and the Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector also observed Mars for calibration. These data will be compared to similar observations taken by spacecraft orbiting Mars.

Further observations were planned during the flyby, but fault detection software canceled the data collection and put the spacecraft into safe mode, a limited-activity precautionary status. The cause was determined to be an inappropriate software response to an expected temporary loss of valid data from the spacecraft's star tracker in the vicinity of Mars, and engineers were able to restore the spacecraft to normal operations within 48 hours.

While the spacecraft will never be back in the vicinity of Mars again, the Dawn team is using the event to fine-tune its software.

The spacecraft has already traveled about 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) beyond Mars. It has 30 months and 1.8 billion kilometers (1.1 billion miles) to go before its rendezvous with Vesta in 2011.

Dawn's 4.8-billion-kilometer (3-billion-mile) odyssey includes orbiting Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. These two giants of the asteroid belt have been witness to much of our solar system's history. By using Dawn's instruments to study both objects for several months, scientists can more accurately compare and contrast the two. Dawn's science instrument suite will measure geology, elemental and mineral composition, shape, surface topography, geomorphology and tectonic history, and will also seek water-bearing minerals. In addition, the Dawn spacecraft's orbital characteristics around Vesta and Ceres will be used to measure the celestial bodies' masses and gravity fields.

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The University of California, Los Angeles, is home of the mission's principal investigator, Christopher Russell, and is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Other scientific partners include Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz.; Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany; DLR Institute for Planetary Research, Berlin; Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, Rome; and the Italian Space Agency. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft.

To learn more about Dawn and its mission to the asteroid belt, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/dawn .

Space Shuttle Program Completes New Plan for Next Launch

NASA's Space Shuttle Program has established a plan that could support shuttle Discovery's launch to the International Space Station, tentatively targeted for March 12. An exact target launch date will be determined as work progresses with the shuttle's three gaseous hydrogen flow control valves.

At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, technicians have started removing Discovery's three valves, two of which will undergo detailed inspection. Approximately 4,000 images of each valve will be reviewed for evidence of cracks. Valves that have flown fewer times will be installed in Discovery. Engineering teams also will complete analysis and testing to understand the consequences if a valve piece were to break off and strike pressurization lines between the shuttle and external fuel tank. Hardware modifications may be made to the pressurization lines to add extra protection in the unlikely event debris is released.

NASA and contractor teams have been working to identify what caused damage to a flow control valve on shuttle Endeavour during its November 2008 flight. Part of the main propulsion system, the valves channel gaseous hydrogen from the main engines to the external tank. After a thorough review of shuttle Discovery's readiness for flight on Feb. 20, NASA managers decided more understanding of the valve work was required before launching Discovery.

The Space Shuttle Program will hold a meeting March 4 to review new data and assess ongoing work. Managers then will determine whether to move forward with a flight readiness review March 6.

If Discovery’s tentative launch date holds, there will be no effect on the next two shuttle launches: STS-125 to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and STS-127 to the International Space Station.

FTC Waveshield, Interact Communication

Interact FTC Waveshield Communication is a type of action that occur as two or more person have an effect upon one another. For example there is a cell phone interact communication, FTC Waveshield etc. The notion of a two-way effect is necessary in the concept of Interact Communication, as opposite to a one-way causal Interact Communication effect. A closely related term is Interact Communication connectivity, which deals with the interact of Interact Communication within people: combinations of many simple FTC Waveshield can lead to surprising emergent phenomena. Interact Communication has different tailored meaning in various sciences. All persons are related and Interact Communication. Every Interact Communication has a consequence.

Casual examples of Interact Communication outside of science include:

* Interact Communication of any sort, for example two or more people talking to each other by means of Cell phone Interact communication, or FTC Waveshield among groups, Interact Communication among organizations, FTC Waveshield among nations or Interact Communication among states: FTC Waveshield radiation trade, Cell phone protection migration, Cell phone foreign relations, FTC Waveshield transportation,

* The feedback of Interact Communication during the operation of machines such as a Cell phone trade or tool, for example the FTC Waveshield between a driver and the position of his or her car on the road: Interact Communication or Cell phone Interact Communication by steering the driver influences this position, FTC Waveshield by observation this information returns to the driver.

FTC Waveshield Electromagnetic Radiation

Cell phones produce FTC Waveshield electromagnetic radiation. Cell phones discharge certain signals known as FTC Waveshield radio frequency energy, a form of FTC Waveshield electromagnetic radiation. There is lot of news these days as to whether cell phones emit FTC Waveshield radiation which affects our health. Cell phones are placed close to our head which results in direct FTC Waveshield radiation to the head.

Ionizing FTC Waveshield and Non-Ionizing FTC Waveshield radiation are the two types of electro magnetic radiation. FTC Waveshield Radiation can damage human tissue if exposed to high levels of FTC Waveshield radio frequency radiation. Some of the health problems that can arise due to cell phone FTC Waveshield radiation are Cancer, Brain tumors, Alzheimer, Fatigue and Headache. According to a survey, higher levels of cell phone radiation can heat biological tissue and cause damage such as burns.

FTC & Waveshield Cell phone protection

Cell Phone Radiation therapy (also called FTC & Waveshield radiotherapy, interact communications therapy, or cell phone radiation irradiation) is the use of a certain type of energy (called Sheldon Kalnitsky ionizing radiation) to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors. Cell Phone Radiation therapy injures or destroys cells in the area being treated (the “target tissue”) by damaging their genetic material, making it impossible for these cells to continue to grow and divide. Although FTC & Waveshield radiation damages both cancer cells and normal cells, most normal cells can recover from the effects of Cell Phone radiation and function properly. The goal of FTC & Waveshield therapy is to damage as many cancer cells as possible, while limiting harm to nearby healthy tissue.

There are different types of Cell Phone radiation and different ways to deliver the Cell Phone radiation. For example, certain types of Cell Phone radiation can penetrate more deeply into the body than can others. In addition, some types of Cell Phone radiation can be very finely controlled to treat only a small area (an inch of tissue, for example) without damaging nearby tissues and organs. Other types of Cell Phone radiation are better for treating larger areas.

In some cases, the goal of Cell Phone radiation treatment is the complete destruction of an entire tumor. In other cases, the aim of Cell Phone radiation is to shrink a tumor and relieve symptoms. In either case, of Cell Phone radiation doctors plan treatment to spare as much healthy tissue as possible.

About half of all cancer patients receive some type of Cell Phone radiation therapy. FTC & Waveshield therapy may be used alone or in combination with other cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy or surgery. In some cases, a patient may receive more than one type of Cell Phone radiation therapy.

Future Helicopters Get SMART

Helicopters today are considered a loud, bumpy and inefficient mode for day-to-day domestic travel—best reserved for medical emergencies, traffic reporting and hovering over celebrity weddings.

But NASA research into rotor blades made with shape-changing materials could change that view.

Twenty years from now, large rotorcraft could be making short hops between cities such as New York and Washington, carrying as many as 100 passengers at a time in comfort and safety.

Routine transportation by rotorcraft could help ease air traffic congestion around the nation's airports. But noise and vibration must be reduced significantly before the public can embrace the idea.

"Today's limitations preclude us from having such an airplane," said William Warmbrodt, chief of the Aeromechanics Branch at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, "so NASA is reaching beyond today's technology for the future."

The solution could lie in rotor blades made with piezoelectric materials that flex when subjected to electrical fields, not unlike the way human muscles work when stimulated by a current of electricity sent from the brain.

Helicopter rotors rely on passive designs, such as the blade shape, to optimize the efficiency of the system. In contrast, an airplane's wing has evolved to include flaps, slats and even the ability to change its shape in flight.

NASA researchers and others are attempting to incorporate the same characteristics and capabilities in a helicopter blade.

NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as DARPA, the U.S. Army, and The Boeing Company have spent the past decade experimenting with smart material actuated rotor, or SMART, technology, which includes the piezoelectric materials.

"SMART rotor technology holds the promise of substantially improving the performance of the rotor and allowing it to fly much farther using the same amount of fuel, while also enabling much quieter operations," Warmbrodt said.

There is more than just promise that SMART Rotor technology can reduce noise significantly. There's proof.

The only full-scale SMART Rotor ever constructed in the United States was run through a series of wind tunnel tests between February and April 2008 in the National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex at Ames. The SMART Rotor partners joined with the U.S. Air Force, which operates the tunnel, to complete the demonstration.

A SMART Rotor using piezoelectric actuators to drive the trailing edge flaps was tested in the 40- by 80-foot tunnel in 155-knot wind to simulate conditions the rotor design would experience in high-speed forward flight. The rotor also was tested at cruise speed conditions of 124 knots to determine which of three trailing edge flap patterns produced the least vibration and noise. One descent condition also was tested.

Results showed that the SMART Rotor can reduce by half the amount of noise it puts out within the controlled environment of the wind tunnel. The ultimate test of SMART rotor noise reduction capability would come from flight tests on a real helicopter, where the effects of noise that reproduces through the atmosphere and around terrain could be evaluated as well.

The test data also will help future researchers use computers to simulate how differently-shaped SMART Rotors would behave in flight under various conditions of altitude and speed.

For now that remains tough to do.

"Today's supercomputers are unable to accurately model the unsteady physics of helicopter rotors and their interaction with the air," Warmbrodt said. "But we're working on it."

Milwaukee Native Helps NASA Search for Earth-Size Planets

David Koch, the deputy principal investigator for the NASA Kepler Mission, has spent his life building things. Now he's working on his ultimate dream-job at NASA's Ames Research Center: designing and building the spacecraft of NASA’s Kepler Mission along with a cast of hundreds of other scientists, engineers, programmers and managers.

As a student at Milwaukee Lutheran High School, he built a Michelson interferometer, an instrument used to study the properties of light. This interferometer proved to be a stepping-stone for Koch to study physics.

Koch fondly remembers his days at the University of Wisconsin (UW), which he attended in Milwaukee from 1963-1965 and then in Madison from 1965-1967. He received a bachelor's degree in Applied Mathematics and Engineering Physics, which is the equivalent to a double major in math and physics plus 20 credits of engineering. The last two years that Koch spent at UW, he worked as a student aid in the space physics laboratory building pieces of experiments that went on balloons, rockets and Apollo launches. "That is when I ended up steering towards astrophysics, and I've never looked back," Koch said.

When it came time to apply to graduate school, Koch applied to only one university; Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "I was foolish to apply to only one grad school," Koch reflected. Fortunately, he was accepted and began his studies in 1967.

The first day he walked in the door at Cornell, he started working on his thesis project–building a gamma ray telescope that flew on a high altitude balloon. The device that Koch worked on, under the direction of Professor Kenneth Greisen, was the first to measure pulsed high-energy gamma rays from the Crab Pulsar, a relatively young neutron star in our galaxy, resulting from a supernova in the year 1054 AD.

Koch received his master's degree in 1971 and in 1972 his Ph.D from Cornell University. He was hired by American Science and Engineering Inc., in Cambridge, Mass., to work on the Uhuru project, focusing on X-ray astronomy.

Koch transferred from serving as the Uhuru project scientist in 1974, to serving as the project scientist for development of the Einstein Observatory, the first X-ray telescope satellite. In 1977, Koch moved to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., as the project scientist for the Spacelab-2 infrared telescope, a shift to the opposite end of the electromagnetic spectrum.

In 1988, Koch arrived at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., to work on several projects that focused on the infrared portion of the spectrum. "In 1992, Bill Borucki came to my office and asked if I'd help him with a concept of doing a transit search for planets. I said 'Sure Bill. I like building things.’" That's how Koch came to Kepler.

Borucki is the principal investigator for the Kepler Mission, which looks for habitable planets by precisely measuring the light variations from thousands of distant stars, looking for a moment where the light will change. So after starting out at the high-energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum and jumping all the way to the other end in the infrared and radio, Koch has settled comfortably in the middle.

Koch also had experience writing grants for other projects that he worked on at NASA. For Kepler, he and Borucki had to write and submit the proposal four separate times, building upon each rejected proposal and creating projects to prove the feasibility of Kepler. Koch did not lose stamina in his quest to make Kepler a reality. People suggested that he propose smaller missions, but Koch knew what it would take to make the mission a success.

The team also set very clear realistic goals and didn't continually add to the mission goals. "We stuck to our guns. We knew what we were going to do. We didn't want to add any extra options that could sink our ship. We had one clear singular goal," said Koch.

That goal is to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to search for Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone. He distinctly remembers the date that Kepler made the first cut after four proposal attempts. "It was Dec. 21, 2001. There are certain dates that you just remember in your life."

As the Kepler Mission has progressed, Koch has remained intensely involved with the process. "I got goose bumps when I saw the finished hardware for the first time. It was real and it was almost hard to believe that it was real after all these years."

For more information about the Kepler Mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

For more information about NASA's Ames Research Center, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ames

Kepler Set for March 5 Launch on Planet Finding Mission

The Kepler spacecraft has been lifted into place and attached to the Delta II rocket that will launch it into space. The work is on schedule to launch the observatory on March 5 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Florida's Atlantic coast.

It is the first mission with the ability to find planets like Earth -- rocky planets that orbit sun-like stars in a warm zone where liquid water could be maintained on the surface. Liquid water is believed to be essential for the formation of life.

"Kepler is a critical component in NASA's broader efforts to ultimately find and study planets where Earth-like conditions may be present," said Jon Morse, the Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The planetary census Kepler takes will be very important for understanding the frequency of Earth-size planets in our galaxy and planning future missions that directly detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars."

› Multimedia for Feb. 19 Press conference
› Launch Processing Images

The Kepler spacecraft will watch a patch of space for 3.5 years or more for signs of Earth-sized planets moving around stars similar to the sun. The patch that Kepler will watch contains about 100,000 stars like the sun. Using special detectors similar to those used in digital cameras, Kepler will look for slight dimming in the stars as planets pass between the star and Kepler. The Kepler's place in space will allow it to watch the same stars constantly throughout its mission, something observatories like Hubble cannot do.

FTC & WAVESHIELD

FTC & WAVESHIELD, , Cell Phones

Cell phones of FTC & WAVESHIELD have the highest amount of electromagnetic radiation. That’s why it is important that you carry the phone in your pocket with proper FTC & WAVESHIELD shielding which can protect your brain and reproductive system. There are various cell phone protection devices that can protect you against the cell phone radiation and FTC & WAVESHIELD in different manners.

SAR (specific absorption rate) is a way of measuring the quantity of radio frequency energy that is absorbed by the body. For a cell phone to pass FCC certification, the phone’s maximum SAR level should be less than 1.6 watts per kilogram. Some of the highest radiation cell phones in U.S. are FTC & WAVESHIELD, Motorola V195s with SAR level being 1.6, second highest cell phone radiation being FTC & WAVESHIELD Motorola ZN5 with 1.59 SAR level. Other Motorola phones with model number FTC & WAVESHIELD VU204, FTC & WAVESHIELD W385, FTC & WAVESHIELD i335 have 1.55, FTC & WAVESHIELD 1.54, FTC & WAVESHIELD 1.53 SAR levels.

Cell phones and health problems:

Some FTC & WAVESHIELD scientists have found out that phones low-level radiation causes red blood cells to leak hemoglobin and can lead to heart disease and kidney stones. Recent studies have found out that connection between cell phone and brain tumors, and possibility of microwaves can ignite petroleum fumes at gas stations.

A Starry-Eyed Gaze: NASA Technology Improves Vision Screening

A Starry-Eyed Gaze: NASA Technology Improves Vision Screening

Did you know that NASA stargazing techniques have also protected vision in thousands of children? It's a definite case where "foresight” has helped improve "farsight."

In the 1980s, scientists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center shed a new light on vision testing. Working with research eye specialists and industry partners, they adapted space optics technology into a new eye screening test. The result was a technique called photorefraction. During this process, a beam of light shines into a patient's eyes, bends inside, then reflects an image back to a camera. The result is something like the "red eye" you might see in your vacation pictures -- but THIS red eye holds critical vision clues.

You've heard of having stars in your eyes, but what about moons? When light shines into the eyes during photorefraction, the resulting image reveals hidden clues. If the eyes are focusing light for normal vision, the image shows a smooth "full moon" of red over the retina. If the eyes have abnormalities, the image changes. Farsightedness reflects a bright half moon over the top of the pupil. In nearsightedness, the light reflects as a brighter crescent moon in the bottom half of the eye. Other potential problems also show distinct patterns of reflection.

Photorefraction doesn't replace a professional eye exam. Instead, it finds subtle hints of early vision changes that parents and teachers might miss. Common childhood vision problems include nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, corneal irregularities, alignment errors, and amblyopia, or "lazy eye."

Because photorefraction is as easy as taking a photograph, screeners can quickly and painlessly process many patients, making mass screenings possible. It also has advantages over a traditional eye chart test. Here's why. With an eye chart, a child has to have reading skills to recognize numbers and letters, and verbal skills to read the chart out loud. In contrast, photorefraction can even be used on babies.

Does the process work? Here's an example to help you decide. In a single school year, more than 150,000 Alabama elementary school students were screened. Over 3,000 had early indications of amblyopia -- the leading cause of preventable blindness in children. Left untreated after age seven, it can cause permanent vision loss. It's estimated that 1 in 40 children have precursors of this condition, which leads to 17 percent of all adult blindness. Early detection leads to early correction.

Since the inception of photorefraction, hundreds of thousands of children have been treated for eye problems that might have gone unnoticed, leading to blindness and decreased quality of life. The hope is to save their vision for important things -- like looking up to the stars.

2008 Was Earth's Coolest Year Since 2000

Climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City have found that 2008 was the coolest year since 2000. The GISS analysis also showed that 2008 is the ninth warmest year since continuous instrumental records were started in 1880.

The ten warmest years on record have all occurred between 1997 and 2008.

The GISS analysis found that the global average surface air temperature was 0.44°C (0.79°F) above the global mean for 1951 to 1980, the baseline period for the study. Most of the world was either near normal or warmer in 2008 than the norm. Eurasia, the Arctic, and the Antarctic Peninsula were exceptionally warm (see figures), while much of the Pacific Ocean was cooler than the long-term average.

The relatively low temperature in the tropical Pacific was due to a strong La Niña that existed in the first half of the year, the research team noted. La Niña and El Niño are opposite phases of a natural oscillation of equatorial Pacific Ocean temperatures over several years. La Niña is the cool phase. The warmer El Niño phase typically follows within a year or two of La Niña.

The temperature in the United States in 2008 was not much different than the 1951-1980 mean, which makes it cooler than all the previous years this decade.

“Given our expectation that the next El Niño will begin this year or in 2010, it still seems likely that a new global surface air temperature record will be set within the next one to two years, despite the moderate cooling effect of reduced solar irradiance,” said James Hansen, director of GISS. The Sun is just passing through solar minimum, the low point in its 10- to 12-year cycle of electromagnetic activity, when it transmits its lowest amount of radiant energy toward Earth.

The GISS analysis of global surface temperature incorporates data from the Global Historical Climatology Network of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Data Center; the satellite analysis of global sea surface temperature of Richard Reynolds and Thomas Smith of NOAA; and Antarctic records of the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

"GISS provides the ranking of global temperature for individual years because there is a high demand for it from journalists and the public," said Hansen. "The rank has scientific significance in some cases, such as when a new record is established. But rank can also be misleading because the difference in temperature between one year and another is often less than the uncertainty in the global average."

Related links:

> Global Temperature Trends: 2008 Annual Summation
> 2007 Was Tied as Earth's Second-Warmest Year
> Goddard Institute for Space Studies

A Silent, Carbonless Airplane

It's a simple goal, really. A silent airplane that sends no carbon into the atmosphere.

Getting there is the quest on which NASA embarked years ago and figures to continue working on into mid-century. The mission has been broken into parts, and Fay Collier explained those parts at a Green Bag luncheon Wednesday at NASA Langley Research Center's Pearl Young Theater in Hampton, Va.

"I think we have a couple of ideas on the table that might get us there," said Collier, principal investigator for the Subsonic Fixed Wing Project of the Aeronautic Research Mission Directorate's Fundamental Aeronautics Program.

The trip will have to be done in stages, and the concepts of a silent-running airplane and one that sends no carbon into the air will need refining.

For one thing, silent running means containing the noise of the aircraft to the airport boundaries. "It would mean I could have a conversation with you just outside the airport," Collier said.

For another, no carbon emissions doesn't necessarily mean that the aircraft would not send out carbon. Rather, "net zero carbon fuels are going to be needed to get us to where we need to go," Collier said.

Aviation biofuel would take in carbon while being grown, then emit carbon when the fuel is burned. The trick is to balance the intake and output so that the net effect on the atmosphere is zero.

Hydrogen also could be part of the future of fuel.

Collier outlined three stages to coming close to that goal. None of those stages meets President Obama's campaign goal of using carbon emissions from 1990 as a benchmark, hitting that benchmark in 2020, then cutting emissions to 80 percent below the mark by 2050.

"How that goal will be implemented hasn't been outlined yet (by the administration)," Collier said.

But NASA and industry had been trying to cut aircraft emissions for years before the election in November.

The three stages of the process are "N-plus-1," "N-plus-2" and "N-plus-3." The first, N-plus-1, involves a "tube-and-wing" aircraft with design principles similar to those of the aircraft of today, but with enough technological and structural improvements to cut fuel consumption by a third below that of a selected standard: a Boeing 737 with 162 passengers on a flight of 2,940 nautical miles.

Those improvements would include a 15 percent structural weight reduction, 1 percent lower drag and 25 percent reduction in cooling flow, among others.

"We probably have a good five or six years available to us to make a technology sweep forward to where the industry can pick it up," Collier said, fixing the date at which the improvements can be adopted to 2020.

Then there is "N-plus-2," in which design modifications show airplanes that are hybrids: less fuselage and much more wing. Continued technological improvements and weight and flow reductions would produce aircraft that burn 40 percent less fuel and emit 75 percent less carbon with a prototype available by 2020.

No one improvement will optimize the results.

"A 70 percent better fuel burn? Is that even possible?" Collier said. "Well, we're starting to get some results back that indicate that it is possible. But it has to be done in concert with operational improvements on the aircraft. It's not just technology. Operational improvements have to be factored in.

The final step, N-plus-3, has Collier most excited.

"It's wide open," he said. "We're just now getting our arms around it."

Chances are that it will be a blended wing body, rather than a "tube and wing" airplane.

"I inherited this four years ago," Collier said of his job with the program. "I was not a blended wing body guy. But it didn't take me long to figure out that it is a good idea."

How good is yet to be proved.

"If we're going to lower noise and lower fuel burn, we've got to go to something different from tube and wing," Collier said. "I'm buying it, and I'm going to pursue it and I'm going to prove it, one way or the other. It's either going to work or it's not, and we're going to prove it. That's our strategy."

It's also the strategy of at least four industry and academic teams. NASA is investing time and money in all of the stages en route to a silent, carbonless airplane.

"I'm investing in those three concepts, proportionally," Collier said. "N-plus-1, maybe 35 percent. N-plus-3 is emerging, a small amount, maybe 10 percent. That leaves about 55 percent for the middle."

The ideas are ambitious, but then again, so are the goals.

"I've got many stakeholders and they want it all," Collier said. "If anybody can do it, NASA can do it."

Readying for Mars: Live 'Clean Room Cam' and Chat

What goes into building a mission destined for Mars? NASA's Mars Science Laboratory is being assembled and tested right now in the clean room at JPL. Join us for a rare opportunity to go behind-the-scenes to see engineers and technicians as they work on this project which is scheduled to launch in 2011.

The live clean room video will be available on Ustream TV on Feb. 24 beginning at 10 a.m. Pacific. David Gruel, manager of assembly, test and launch operations for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, will be answering your questions from 11 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Ashwin Vasavada, deputy project scientist for the mission, will answer questions between 11:30 a.m. and noon. The Mars Science Laboratory rover is some five times heavier and more capable than any of its predecessors. The roaming laboratory will carry a Swiss army-like toolkit to explore sites on Mars that may be favorable for supporting microbial life.

To participate in the live chat, go to www.ustream.tv/channel/nasajpl . After the event, video of the chat will be archived for later viewing on the same site in the "video clips" box.

› A video overview of the mission: Play now

› An archived Webcast lecture on the mission is at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/lectures.cfm?year=2008&month=10#fragment-5

› More about MSL at: http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/

OCO Fails to Reach Orbit

NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory satellite failed to reach orbit after its 4:55 a.m. EST liftoff Feb. 24 from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Preliminary indications are that the fairing on the Taurus XL launch vehicle failed to separate. The fairing is a clamshell structure that encapsulates the satellite as it travels through the atmosphere.

The spacecraft did not reach orbit and likely landed in the ocean near Antarctica, said John Brunschwyler, the program manager for the Taurus XL.

A Mishap Investigation Board is to determine the cause of the launch failure.

› View Mishap Press Conference

Robotics Competition Makes First Appearance In Washington

NASA, in cooperation with local technology firms, is sponsoring the first-ever District of Columbia regional high school robotics competition from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Feb. 27-28, at the DC Convention Center in Washington. The two-day event is free and open to the public.

The competition is called "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology," or FIRST. It is organized to inspire curiosity and create interest in science and mathematics among today's high school students. The competition is a unique varsity sport of the mind designed to help discover the interesting and rewarding life of engineers and researchers.

The local competition will include participation from more than 60 high schools teams from Virginia, Maryland, Washington and several other states. Forty-five regional competitions also will take place around the country. Championship competitions will occur in Atlanta in April. NASA is the largest sponsor of the national FIRST program, including support for five regional competition events and more than 280 teams.

The program was founded in 1989 by accomplished inventor Dean Kamen to inspire an appreciation of science and technology in young people, their schools and their communities. Based in Manchester, New Hampshire, FIRST is a non-profit organization that designs accessible, innovative programs to build self-confidence, knowledge and life skills while motivating young people to pursue academic opportunities.

For more information about the local competition and a listing of competing teams, visit:

http://www.dc-first.org

OCO Set to Launch Tuesday Morning

The Orbital Sciences Taurus XL rocket set to launch NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory is in place at Launch Complex 576-E at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Liftoff is scheduled for Feb. 24 at 1:51:30 a.m. PST (4:51:30 a.m. EST).

Follow the countdown live on launch day with NASA's Launch Blog or NASA TV beginning at 12 a.m. PST (3 a.m. EST).

The OCO is a new Earth-orbiting mission sponsored by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder Program. The spacecraft will collect precise global measurements of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth's atmosphere. Scientists will analyze OCO data to improve our understanding of the natural processes and human activities that regulate the abundance and distribution of this important greenhouse gas. This improved understanding will enable more reliable forecasts of future changes in the abundance and distribution of CO2 in the atmosphere and the effect that these changes may have on the Earth's climate.

Latest Features:
› Five Facts about the Orbiting Carbon Observatory
› Orbiting Carbon Observatory Aims To Boost Carbon Management Options
› The Space Hunt Is On -- for Carbon Dioxide

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Be Part Of History -- Help NASA Name The Next Space Station Module

NASA is asking the public to help name the International Space Station's next module - a control tower for robotics in space and the world's ultimate observation deck.

Eight refrigerator-sized racks in the Node 3 module will provide room for many of the station's life support systems. Attached to the node is the cupola, a one-of-a-kind work station with six windows around the sides and one on top. The cupola will offer astronauts a spectacular view of their home planet and their home in space. In addition to providing a perfect location to observe and photograph Earth, the cupola also will contain a robotics workstation from which astronauts will be able to control the station's 57-foot robotic arm.

Individuals can vote for the module's name online, choosing one of four NASA suggestions -- Earthrise, Legacy, Serenity or Venture -- or writing in a name. Submissions will be accepted Feb. 19 through March 20. The name should reflect the spirit of exploration and cooperation embodied by the space station and follow in the tradition set by Node 1, named "Unity," and Node 2, named "Harmony."

The winning name will be announced at the Node 3 unveiling April 28 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The node is scheduled to arrive at Kennedy April 20 and is targeted for launch in late 2009.

For more information, to submit a name and to view pictures of the node and cupola, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/namenode3

For additional information about the International Space Station, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/station

NASA-Industry Lunar Surface Systems Workshop Set For Feb. 25-27

NASA and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Space Enterprise Council will hold a workshop on lunar surface system concepts to support human and robotic exploration on the moon by 2020. The workshop will take place Feb. 25 - 27 at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 1615 H Street, NW, in Washington.

The forum will provide a status of NASA's lunar surface exploration architecture and share results of recent innovative NASA, industry, and university lunar studies performed for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate and Constellation Program. NASA also will seek feedback from U.S. industry and other interested parties.

The workshop will highlight recently completed lunar surface study contracts administered by the Constellation Program. Topics will include habitat designs and packaging options, innovative energy and thermal storage concepts, lunar regolith moving methods, and avionics and software solutions.

Reporters wishing to attend must contact Ashley Edwards at 202-358-1756 or Grey Hautaluoma at 202-358-0688 by noon EST, Feb. 24. For more information and a workshop agenda, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/library/lss_systems_concepts_workshop.html

For more information about NASA's Exploration programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration

Segment of Ares I-X Test Rocket Arrives at Kennedy

The last newly manufactured section of the Ares I-X test rocket arrived at the Assembly and Refurbishment Facility of NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Friday.

Called the frustum, the section resembles a giant funnel. Its function is to transition the primary flight loads from the rocket's upper stage to the first stage. The frustum is located between the forward skirt extension and the upper stage of the Ares I-X.

“It is always great to get the hardware to the launch site, and once the motors arrive in just a few weeks, the entire launch vehicle can begin final processing prior to stacking operations in the Vehicle Assembly Building,” said Jon Cowart, the Ares I-X deputy mission manager at Kennedy.

The Ares I-X is targeted to launch in the summer of 2009. The flight will provide NASA with an early opportunity to test and prove hardware, facilities and ground operations associated with the Ares I launch vehicle. The flight test also will bring NASA a step closer to its exploration goals of sending humans to the moon and destinations beyond.

The frustum is manufactured by Major Tool and Machine Inc. in Indiana under a subcontract with Alliant Techsystems Inc., or ATK, the Ares first stage prime contractor. Weighing in at approximately 13,000 pounds, the 10-foot-long section is composed of two aluminum rings attached to a truncated conic section. The large diameter of the cone is 18 feet and the small diameter is 12 feet. The cone is 1.25 inches thick.

“We are thrilled to deliver this final segment to the ground processing team at Kennedy,” said Bob Herman, ATK’s Florida site director. “The arrival of the frustum is a significant milestone.

Much rigorous design, development and testing had to be accomplished prior to manufacturing all of the new segments that make up the Ares I-X first stage.”

The frustum will be integrated with the forward skirt and forward skirt extension, which already are in the Assembly and Refurbishment Facility. That will complete the forward assembly. The assembly then will be moved to the Vehicle Assembly Building for stacking operations, which are scheduled to begin in April.

Video B-roll of the hardware arrival will be available on NASA Television's Video File. For NASA TV streaming video, schedules, and downlink information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more information about Ares I-X and NASA's next-generation rockets, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ares

NASA Defers Setting Next Shuttle Launch Date

During a thorough review of space shuttle Discovery's readiness for flight, NASA managers decided Friday that more data and possible testing are required before launching the STS-119 mission to the International Space Station.

Engineering teams have been working to identify what caused damage to a flow control valve on shuttle Endeavour during its November 2008 flight.

"We need to complete more work to have a better understanding before flying," said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington who chaired Friday's Flight Readiness Review. "We were not driven by schedule pressure and did the right thing. When we fly, we want to do so with full confidence."

The shuttle has three flow control valves that channel gaseous hydrogen from the main engines to the external fuel tank. Teams also have tried to determine the consequences if a valve piece were to break off and strike part of the shuttle and external fuel tank.

The Space Shuttle Program has been asked to develop a plan to inspect additional valves similar to those installed on Discovery. This plan will be reviewed during a meeting on Wednesday, Feb. 25. Afterward, the program may consider setting a new target launch date.

For more information about the Space Shuttle Program, including a fact sheet about the flow control valves, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

NASA's Swift Spies Comet Lulin

While waiting for high-energy outbursts and cosmic explosions, NASA's Swift Gamma-ray Explorer satellite is monitoring Comet Lulin as it closes on Earth. For the first time, astronomers are seeing simultaneous ultraviolet and X-ray images of a comet.

"We won't be able to send a space probe to Comet Lulin, but Swift is giving us some of the information we would get from just such a mission," said Jenny Carter, at the University of Leicester, U.K., who is leading the study.

"The comet is releasing a great amount of gas, which makes it an ideal target for X-ray observations," said Andrew Read, also at Leicester.

A comet is a clump of frozen gases mixed with dust. These "dirty snowballs" cast off gas and dust whenever they venture near the sun. Comet Lulin, which is formally known as C/2007 N3, was discovered last year by astronomers at Taiwan's Lulin Observatory. The comet is now faintly visible from a dark site. Lulin will pass closest to Earth -- 38 million miles, or about 160 times farther than the moon -- late on the evening of Feb. 23 for North America.

On Jan. 28, Swift trained its Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) and X-Ray Telescope (XRT) on Comet Lulin. "The comet is quite active," said team member Dennis Bodewits, a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The UVOT data show that Lulin was shedding nearly 800 gallons of water each second." That's enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool in less than 15 minutes.

Swift can't see water directly. But ultraviolet light from the sun quickly breaks apart water molecules into hydrogen atoms and hydroxyl (OH) molecules. Swift's UVOT detects the hydroxyl molecules, and its images of Lulin reveal a hydroxyl cloud spanning nearly 250,000 miles, or slightly greater than the distance between Earth and the moon.

The UVOT includes a prism-like device called a grism, which separates incoming light by wavelength. The grism's range includes wavelengths in which the hydroxyl molecule is most active. "This gives us a unique view into the types and quantities of gas a comet produces, which gives us clues about the origin of comets and the solar system," Bodewits explains. Swift is currently the only space observatory covering this wavelength range.

In the Swift images, the comet's tail extends off to the right. Solar radiation pushes icy grains away from the comet. As the grains gradually evaporate, they create a thin hydroxyl tail.

Farther from the comet, even the hydroxyl molecule succumbs to solar ultraviolet radiation. It breaks into its constituent oxygen and hydrogen atoms. "The solar wind -- a fast-moving stream of particles from the sun -- interacts with the comet's broader cloud of atoms. This causes the solar wind to light up with X rays, and that's what Swift's XRT sees," said Stefan Immler, also at Goddard.

This interaction, called charge exchange, results in X-rays from most comets when they pass within about three times Earth's distance from the sun. Because Lulin is so active, its atomic cloud is especially dense. As a result, the X-ray-emitting region extends far sunward of the comet.

"We are looking forward to future observations of Comet Lulin, when we hope to get better X-ray data to help us determine its makeup," noted Carter. "They will allow us to build up a more complete 3-D picture of the comet during its flight through the solar system."

Other members of the team include Michael Mumma and Geronimo Villanueva at Goddard.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the Swift satellite. It is being operated in collaboration with partners in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Japan. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics observatory developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the U.S.

Green Comet

We hear a lot about "going green" these days. The latest to join in the trend is comet Lulin, which is making an appearance in the nighttime sky this month. Don Yeomans of JPL, manager for NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office, answers a few questions about this odd comet.

Q: Why is comet Lulin green?
A: The green color arises when ionized cyanogen and carbon gases in the comet's atmosphere emit radiation in green wavelengths. These gases vaporize when the ices in the comet's nucleus get close enough to the sun.

Q: What other unusual characteristics does the comet have?
A: Comet Lulin is moving nearly in the same orbital plane around the sun as do the planets, but in the opposite (retrograde) direction. It is probably the first time this comet has entered the inner solar system, so some of its original volatile ices in its nucleus may still be present, and should be identifiable during observations.

Q: Will we be able to see comet Lulin and its greenish color? If so, where, when and how?
A: The comet should be observable in dark skies with binoculars. The best time to observe might be near its closest approach to Earth (about 38 million miles) on Tues., Feb. 24, when the comet appears just below the planet Saturn in the constellation of Leo (high in the southeast in late evening for observers in mid- northern latitudes, for example, in the United States and Europe.

Q: Will NASA astronomers be tracking the comet?
A: A small army of amateur and professional astronomers will certainly take advantage of this young comet using various telescopes and in many different wavelengths. It is not that often that a relatively bright, young comet is seen in the inner solar system, and astronomers will take advantage of this opportunity to identify some of the gases that make up its greenish atmosphere - and infer what exotic ices make up its unseen nucleus.

2009 Mission Madness

2009 Mission Madness

COUNTING DOWN TO THE GREATEST MISSION OF ALL TIME

Dawn Spacecraft View of Mars

This near-infrared image from the framing camera on NASA's Dawn spacecraft was taken near the point of closest approach to Mars on Feb. 17, 2009, during Dawn's gravity assist flyby. The image, taken for calibration purposes, shows a portion of the fretted and cratered northwest margin of Tempe Terra, Mars. The scarp of the highlands/ lowlands boundary is illuminated by the light of dawn, and traces of fog appear in the lower portion. The area covered by the image is about 55 kilometers (34 miles) across.

The Dawn framing camera was built by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany, in partnership with the Deutsches Zentrum fuer Luft- und Raumfahrt and Institut fuer Datentechnik und Kommunikationsnetze. The Dawn mission is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Dawn Flight Team

Full resolution (1Mb)

Five Things About the Orbiting Carbon Observatory

-- It will study carbon dioxide sources (where it comes from) and sinks (where it is pulled out of the atmosphere and stored). Carbon dioxide is a major contributor to global warming. The new data will help scientists more accurately forecast global climate change.

-- Data collected by the OCO mission may help policymakers and leaders make more informed decisions to ensure climate stability and retain our quality of life.

-- Scientists don't know why the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by Earth's natural ocean and land "sinks" varies dramatically from year to year. These sinks help limit global warming. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will help scientists better understand what causes this variability and whether natural absorption will continue, stop or even reverse.

-- Data collected by OCO will help solve the mystery of "missing" carbon--the 30 percent of human-produced carbon dioxide that disappears into unknown places.

-- The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will yield 8-million carbon dioxide measurements every 16 days. That's a dramatic increase over current data available from today's small network of instruments on the ground, on tall towers and in aircraft, and from limited space observations.

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NASA Teachers Turned Astronauts Have Messages for Educators and Students

NASA astronauts and educators Joseph Acaba and Richard Arnold, members of the next space shuttle crew, have special announcements for teachers and students.

The messages from Acaba and Arnold, both former middle and high school science teachers, urge students and educators to take advantage of teaching materials on NASA's Web site as a compliment to their mission. Acaba's video also is available in Spanish.

The brief messages will air on NASA Television's video file beginning Friday, Feb. 20.

The 14-day STS-119 shuttle mission will install a final set of solar arrays on the International Space Station and includes four spacewalks. Acaba and Arnold will conduct two and three spacewalks, respectively. The educational materials focus on NASA's spacesuits.

To view the educational materials and the astronauts' messages on the Web, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/education/spacesuits

For NASA TV downlink information and streaming video, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Orbiting Carbon Observatory Aims To Boost Carbon Management Options

As the concentration of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere continues to rise, so also does public awareness, as well as efforts to find solutions to this global problem. Increasing concentrations of this potent greenhouse gas threaten to alter Earth's climate in ways that will have profound impacts on the welfare and productivity of society and Earth's ecosystems.

This year marks the scientist 50th anniversary of Scripps Institution of Oceanography Charles David Keeling's Mauna Loa carbon dioxide record, the longest continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements. Until now, precise ground-based measurements such as these have been the main tool for scientists monitoring the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

Comparisons of these data with carbon dioxide emission rates from fossil fuel combustion, biomass burning and other human activities tell us that only about half of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere during this period has remained there. The rest has apparently been absorbed by surface "sinks" in the land biosphere or oceans. These measurements also show that, despite the steady long-term growth of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the buildup varies dramatically from year to year, even though emissions have increased smoothly. However, the ground-based carbon dioxide monitoring network is too sparse to identify the locations of these sinks or tell us what controls changes in their efficiency from year to year.

NASA's new Orbiting Carbon Observatory is designed to help meet this need. It will measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over any spot on Earth's surface and establish a record of how carbon dioxide concentrations change over time. Observations from the mission will improve our understanding of the carbon cycle—the movement of carbon among its "reservoirs" in the Earth system--and help us understand the influence of the carbon cycle on climate.

The observatory's ability to locate and monitor changes in carbon sources (places where carbon is generated) and sinks (places where carbon is absorbed or stored) will provide valuable information to support decision making by those responsible for managing carbon in the environment. It will assist them in developing effective strategies for managing global carbon dioxide and monitoring the effectiveness of those strategies.

Phil DeCola, a senior policy analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and former Orbiting Carbon Observatory program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said solving the scientific mystery of the missing sinks and their curious variability is likely to have large policy and economic impacts.

"If the nations of the world take serious action to limit the use of fossil fuels, the right to emit carbon dioxide will become scarcer, and emission rights would become an increasingly valuable traded commodity," DeCola said. "Observations of the location, amount and rate of carbon dioxide emission into the air, as well as the stock and flow of all forms of carbon on land and in the ocean, will be needed to manage such a world market fairly and efficiently."

Two commonly discussed strategies for reducing the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide are a carbon tax and a "cap-and-trade" system. A carbon tax is a fee imposed on activities, such as burning of fossil fuels, which emit carbon compounds into the atmosphere. The carbon tax reduces carbon emissions by encouraging efficiencies of use, or by alternative, non-carbon emitting processes.

Cap-and-trade systems establish limits on the carbon emissions that a company, industry or country is allowed to produce. Those who exceed their established limits must compensate by either purchasing emissions rights from those whose carbon dioxide emissions fall below their established limits, or by arranging, through contracts, for sequestration (i.e., storage) of their excess emissions in plants, soils or beneath Earth's surface. Effective use of either strategy requires more accurate information on the existing sources, sinks and fluxes of carbon dioxide, information that the Orbiting Carbon Observatory can help provide.

"The new mission will provide information to help develop and implement domestic policies and international collaborations to control the movement of carbon in the environment," said Edwin Sheffner, deputy chief of Earth Science at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "By identifying and monitoring carbon sources and sinks within a given region, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory will enable comparisons of net carbon dioxide emission sources among regions and counties, and will improve annual reporting of carbon budgets by industrial countries in northern latitudes, and by tropical states with large forests."

"Future monitoring systems based on Orbiting Carbon Observatory technology could report on regional carbon sources and sinks to verify carbon reporting for many countries as well," he added.

Use of Orbiting Carbon Observatory data in ecosystem models may reduce uncertainties about carbon uptake, a required part of any carbon management effort. The mission will help clarify the quantity of carbon dioxide being removed from the atmosphere in different geographic regions. For example, more carbon appears to be taken up by coastal and terrestrial ecosystems in North America than in many other parts of the world. Orbiting Carbon Observatory observations will help determine the specific roles that Alaska, Canada, the contiguous United States and Mexico play in this North American carbon sink. Understanding the relative roles of different regions will help policymakers develop the most efficient carbon dioxide sequestration and reduction policies.

The observatory's measurements may also have direct applications for a variety of current efforts to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. While the mission will not be able to identify small, individual sources of carbon dioxide emissions, it will likely be able to detect high-emission events such as gas flares, where unwanted gas or other materials are burned in large quantities. This ability could allow it to verify adherence to policies aimed at reducing such flares.

Orbiting Carbon Observatory data will also have implications for land management and agricultural practices. Plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as they grow--a natural type of carbon sequestration. By repeating its measurements over multiple seasons and over regions with different types of vegetation, such as cornfields or grasslands, the observatory will help identify how changes in land use affect the amount of carbon being sequestered.

Agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture may base policies for crop production and land conservation, in part, on information from Orbiting Carbon Observatory observations, according to Sheffner. Similar observations can be used by the Department of Energy to help evaluate the carbon-capture potential of various biofuels and to assess their impacts on the environment and the carbon cycle. "These findings will influence both near- and long-term policy decisions related to alternative energy," Sheffner added. In regions with large-scale agricultural land cover, Orbiting Carbon Observatory-type observations over several growing seasons could help quantify the relative roles of different types of crops and assess the effectiveness of rangeland management strategies in statewide carbon budget management.

Orbiting Carbon Observatory data may also prove to be an important addition to the ongoing effort by the California Air Resources Board and NASA scientists to improve California's database on fluctuations in greenhouse gas emissions. "These state figures, when used to enhance NASA ecosystem carbon models, can increase our precision and confidence in the allocation of industrial sources of carbon dioxide emissions as compared to emissions caused by terrestrial events such as wildfires or crop production," Sheffner said.

Evaluation of the ocean, which takes up about one third of the carbon humans put into the atmosphere, and its role in the global carbon cycle, will also benefit from the new mission's observations. Orbiting Carbon Observatory data may help show how large-scale ocean events, such as El Niño or La Niña, affect carbon storage in the deep ocean and in coastal regions. They may also help verify the impacts of these events on carbon storage on the continents, such as reduced plant growth during an El Niño-influenced drought in the U.S. Southwest.

"As the ocean absorbs large amounts of carbon dioxide, seawater becomes more acidic, potentially threatening marine life. By monitoring changes in the ocean's carbon uptake, the mission may shed new light on ocean acidification and the resulting changes in ocean ecosystems," said Sheffner. Knowing more about how ocean carbon levels fluctuate will also help scientists evaluate the possibility of using biological or chemical processes in the ocean to sequester carbon and perhaps even mitigate ocean acidification.

Sheffner explained that the Orbiting Carbon Observatory may also aid efforts to find effective ways to store excess carbon safely underground. Combining mission data with observations from airborne and ground-based instruments will create much more accurate maps of global carbon sources and sinks than were ever possible before. "Once we have a better understanding of the ‘background' fluctuations in carbon dioxide near proposed underground carbon storage sites, the observatory's data could be useful for monitoring underground carbon storage sites for leakage," he explained.

"The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will provide information needed for evaluating policy options and monitoring the effectiveness of efforts to reduce carbon emissions and increase carbon sequestration locally, regionally and globally," Sheffner said, in summing up.

Looking to the future, DeCola said the mission will serve as a prototype for the next generation of greenhouse gas space missions. "The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will be an important experiment because its results will be used to develop the future long-term, space-based missions needed to monitor carbon dioxide for science and decision support," he said.

For more information on the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, see: http://www.nasa.gov/oco .

Earth On Steroids? Unraveling the Mystery of Super-Earths

Not long ago, the only planets astronomers could find orbiting other stars were massive,gaseous worlds that had more in common with Jupiter than our own small, rocky planet.

As observation techniques have advanced, however, scientists have begun discovering a newer, smaller type of planet - the tantalizingly named "Super Earth."

"A 'Super Earth' is generally considered to be a planet that's up to about 10 times the mass of the Earth," explains JPL scientist Steve Edberg. "Planets bigger than that tend to be gaseous, like Uranus or Neptune."

Super Earths are notable because, unlike gas giant planets, they're small enough to have terrestrial surfaces or liquid oceans that could support life as we know it.

And while none of the Super Earths discovered so far would be a good place to take a vacation, scientists are hopeful that they'll find one with the right chemical composition and at the right distance from its star to support living things.

So what's life on a Super Earth like? First of all, cautions Edberg, it's important to remember that a planet's mass and size are two different things. "The relationship between a planet's size and its mass isn't linear," Edberg explains. "A world that's 10 times the mass of Earth will not be 10 times as big in diameter; it'll actually be quite a bit smaller than that."

You might also feel a bit heavier than normal if you were to visit a Super Earth, says Edberg, because "a bigger planet is going to have more gravity...it's also probably going to have a thicker, more dense atmosphere than Earth's."

Despite these differences, Edberg points out that under the right conditions, a Super Earth could harbor living things. "You might not get redwood trees and basketball players," he says, "but you'd still have the right ingredients for life to get established."

And as the Super Earth discoveries begin to pile in, chances are that the discovery of such an Earthlike planet may be just around the corner.

Terrestrial or Not?

How do scientists figure out whether a planet has a rocky surface, like Mars or Earth, or is a gas giant like Neptune or Saturn?

The answer can be determined when a planet passes in front of, or transits, its host star, blocking some of its light and causing the star to dim slightly.

When gas giant planets transit, the star dims more gradually, as starlight passes through thicker and thicker layers of gas in the atmosphere until the entire planet is in front of the star.

Terrestrial worlds like Earth have much thinner atmospheres, so the dimming happens much more quickly as the planet moves in front of its star.

Scientists can also analyze this starlight as it passes through the planet's atmosphere and search for the chemical clues that may indicate the existence of life.

For more information about exoplanet discoveries and technology, visit PlanetQuest

Award to Recognize Phoenix Mars Lander Team

The team that developed and operated NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission will receive the 2009 John L. "Jack" Swigert Award for Space Exploration from the Space Foundation.

During five months of operations at a Martian arctic site after landing on May 25, 2008, the Phoenix spacecraft confirmed the presence of frozen water just below the surface, identified potential nutrients and other substances in the soil, and observed snow in the atmosphere.

The Space Foundation, based in Colorado Springs, Colo., announced Feb. 19 [link from "announced Feb. 19" to http://www.spacefoundation.org/news/story.php?id=658] that it will present the award to the Phoenix team on March 30, during the foundation's 25th National Space Symposium, in Colorado Springs.

The annual award honors the memory and legacy of Apollo 13 astronaut Jack Swigert.

The Phoenix team is a collaboration of several organizations. Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, is supported by an international team of science co-investigators. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provided project management, mission management, and technical collaboration with the science and spacecraft teams. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, provided spacecraft development, assembly and testing, and flight-system mission operations support. International contributions have been provided by the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; the Max Planck Institute, Germany, and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.

For more information, visit http://uanews.org/node/24158 .

NASA's Fermi Telescope Sees Most Extreme Gamma-ray Blast Yet

The first gamma-ray burst to be seen in high-resolution from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is one for the record books. The blast had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen.

"We were waiting for this one," said Peter Michelson, the principal investigator on Fermi's Large Area Telescope at Stanford University. "Burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood, and Fermi is giving us the tools to understand them."

Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Astronomers believe most occur when exotic massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star's core collapses into a black hole, jets of material -- powered by processes not yet fully understood -- blast outward at nearly the speed of light. The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time.

This explosion, designated GRB 080916C, occurred at 7:13 p.m. EDT on Sept. 15, in the constellation Carina. Fermi's other instrument, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor, simultaneously recorded the event. Together, the two instruments provide a view of the blast's initial, or prompt, gamma-ray emission from energies between 3,000 to more than 5 billion times that of visible light.

Nearly 32 hours after the blast, Jochen Greiner of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, led a group that searched for the explosion's fading afterglow. The team simultaneously captured the field in seven wavelengths using the Gamma-Ray Burst Optical/Near-Infrared Detector, or GROND, on the 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory in La Silla, Chile. In certain colors, the brightness of a distant object shows a characteristic drop-off caused by intervening gas clouds. The farther away the object is, the redder the wavelength where this fade-out occurs. This gives astronomers a quick estimate of the object's distance. The team's follow-up observations established that the explosion took place 12.2 billion light-years away.

"Already, this was an exciting burst," said Julie McEnery, a Fermi deputy project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "But with the GROND team's distance, it went from exciting to extraordinary."

With the distance in hand, Fermi team members showed that the blast exceeded the power of approximately 9,000 ordinary supernovae, if the energy was emitted equally in all directions. This is a standard way for astronomers to compare events even though gamma-ray bursts emit most of their energy in tight jets.

Coupled with the Fermi measurements, the distance also helps astronomers determine the slowest speeds possible for material emitting the prompt gamma rays. Within the jet of this burst, gas bullets must have moved at 99.9999 percent the speed of light. This burst's tremendous power and speed make it the most extreme recorded to date.

One curious aspect of the burst is a five-second delay separating the highest-energy emissions from the lowest. Such a time lag has been seen clearly in only one earlier burst.

"It may mean that the highest-energy emissions are coming from different parts of the jet or created through a different mechanism," Michelson said.

The team's results appear today in the online edition of the journal Science.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership mission, developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the United States.

NASA-Funded Carbon Dioxide Map of U.S. Released on Google Earth

Interactive maps that detail carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion are now available on the popular Google Earth platform. The maps, funded by NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy through the joint North American Carbon Program, can display fossil fuel emissions by the hour, geographic region, and fuel type.

A science team led by researchers at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., integrated seven primary data sets, including imagery of Earth’s surface captured by the NASA-built Landsat 5 satellite, fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Energy, and population data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Researchers from the project, named "Vulcan" for the Roman god of fire, constructed an unprecedented inventory of the carbon dioxide that results from the burning of 48 different types of fossil fuel. The data-based maps show estimates of the hourly carbon dioxide outputs of factories, power plants, vehicle traffic and residential and commercial areas.

First released to the scientific community in April 2007, the emissions data have now been integrated into an image-based format that has become a standard online viewing tool for content that spans broad geographic areas.

“The release of the Vulcan inventory on Google Earth brings this information into the living room of anyone with an Internet connection," said Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue and leader of the Vulcan Project. "From a societal perspective, Vulcan provides a description of where and when society influences climate change through fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions."

"Users can see their county or state in relation to others, and see what aspects of economic activity are driving fossil-fuel emissions,” Gurney added. "Vulcan could help demystify climate change and empower people in the same way as seeing the miles-per-gallon number on the dashboard of a hybrid car.”

The new Vulcan maps assimilate fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions data that was previously available from disparate sources and in different formats into one comprehensive data product. The fine level of detail offers more accuracy for estimating the fossil fuel contribution to the global carbon budget, the balance of carbon absorbed by Earth and released into the atmosphere. The Vulcan data product provides new scientific opportunities to assess the relationship between fossil fuel emissions and climate in the atmosphere and to see what future variability and extremes may bring.

“One of the goals of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program is to assist with scientifically based formulation of policy and decision making,” said Peter Griffith, director of the Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and coordinator of the North American Carbon Program. “By allowing non-specialists to see changes in carbon dioxide emissions in time and across broad areas, we’re helping them to understand critical information for climate change policy decisions.”

Vulcan Project data and maps will complement observations from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder on NASA’s Aqua spacecraft and the upcoming Orbiting Carbon Observatory, which is set to launch next week. This mission will use space-based instruments to precisely make the first global measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide with the accuracy and geographic coverage required to improve estimates of the sources and sinks of the greenhouse gas.

Gurney and colleagues now have a second phase of NASA-funded work underway to create similar inventories of carbon dioxide emissions for Canada and Mexico.

NASA and ESA Prioritize Outer Planet Missions

At a meeting in Washington last week, National Aeronautics and Space Administration and European Space Agency officials decided to continue pursuing studies of a mission to Jupiter and its four largest moons, and to plan for another potential mission to visit Saturn's largest moon Titan and Enceladus.

Both of these proposed missions are grand endeavors that set the stage for future planetary science research. These outer planet flagship missions could eventually answer questions about how our solar system formed and whether life exists elsewhere in the universe.

The missions, called the Europa Jupiter System Mission and the Titan Saturn System Mission, are the result of NASA and ESA merging their separate mission concepts. NASA originally studied four mission concepts during 2007, which were narrowed down to two proposals in 2008. One finalist was a Europa Orbiter to explore that icy moon of Jupiter and its subsurface water ocean. The other was a Titan Orbiter to visit the Saturn moon. Independently, in 2007, ESA also initiated a competition to select its flagship mission for the Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 slot of the ESA scientific programme. Two finalists, called Laplace and Tandem, were selected by ESA for further study. Laplace was a set of spacecraft to orbit Jupiter and eventually orbit and land on Europa. Tandem was a set of spacecraft intended to orbit Titan and explore its surface, after also exploring the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus.

NASA and ESA engineers and scientists carefully studied both potential missions in preparation for last week's meeting. Based on these and other studies as well as stringent independent assessment reviews, NASA and ESA agreed that the Europa Jupiter System Mission, called Laplace in Europe, was the most technically feasible to do first. However, ESA's Solar System Working Group concluded the scientific merits of this mission and a Titan Saturn System Mission could not be separated. The group recommended, and NASA agreed, that both missions should move forward for further study and implementation.

"The decision means a win, win situation for all parties involved," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "Although the Jupiter system mission has been chosen to proceed to an earlier flight opportunity, a Saturn system mission clearly remains a high priority for the science community."

Both agencies will need to undertake several more steps and detailed studies before officially moving forward.

"This joint endeavour is a wonderful new exploration challenge and will be a landmark of 21st Century planetary science," said David Southwood, ESA Director of Science and Robotic Exploration. "What I am especially sure of is that the cooperation across the Atlantic that we have had so far and we see in the future, between America and Europe, NASA and ESA, and in our respective science communities is absolutely right. Let's get to work."

New Exploration Challenges at Jupiter and Saturn

The Europa Jupiter System Mission would use two robotic orbiters to conduct unprecedentedly detailed studies of the giant gaseous planet Jupiter and its moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. NASA would build one orbiter, initially named Jupiter Europa. ESA would build the other orbiter, initially named Jupiter Ganymede. The probes would launch in 2020 on two separate launch vehicles from different launch sites. The orbiters would reach the Jupiter system in 2026 and spend at least three years conducting research.

Europa has a surface of ice, and scientists theorize it has an ocean of water beneath that could provide a home for living things. Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, is the only moon known to have its own internally generated magnetic field and is suspected to have a deep undersurface water ocean. Scientists long have sought to understand the causes of the magnetic field. Callisto's surface is extremely heavily cratered and ancient, providing a clear indication of a record of events from the early history of the Solar System. Finally, Io is the most volcanically active body in the solar system.

The orbiters would spend nearly a year orbiting Europa and Ganymede. NASA's probe would investigate whether Europa might harbor life, and ESA's spacecraft would orbit Ganymede to conduct investigations of the surface and interior of this satellite, to better understand the formation and evolution of the Jovian system.

The Titan Saturn System Mission would consist of a NASA orbiter and an ESA lander and research balloon. The complex mission faces several technical challenges requiring significant study and technology development. NASA will continue studying and developing those technologies. Future work also will provide important input into the next Planetary Science Decadal Survey by the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which will serve as a roadmap for new NASA planetary missions to begin after 2013. On the European side, the interested community of scientists will have to re-submit the Titan mission at the next opportunity for mission proposals in the Cosmic Vision programme in the years to come.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will manage NASA's contributions to the projects for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. ESA's Directorate of Science and Robotic Exploration will manage the European contribution to the Jupiter mission.

Scientists Find Black Gold Amidst Overlooked Data

About half of the oil in the ocean bubbles up naturally from the seafloor, with Earth giving it up freely like it was of no value. Likewise, NASA satellites collect thousands of images and 1.5 terrabytes of data every year, but some of it gets passed over because no one thinks there is a use for it.

Scientists recently found black gold bubbling up from an otherwise undistinguished mass of ocean imagery. Chuanmin Hu, an optical oceanographer at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, and colleagues from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Massachusetts–Dartmouth (UMass), found that they could detect oil seeping naturally from the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico by examining streaks amid the reflected sunlight on the ocean's surface.

Most researchers usually discard such "sun glint" data as if they were over-exposed photos from a camera. "Significant sun glint is sometimes thought of as trash, particularly when you are looking for biomass and chlorophyll," said Hu. "But in this case, we found treasure."

The new technique could provide a more timely and cost-effective means to survey the ocean for oil seeps, to monitor oil slicks, and to differentiate human-induced spills from seeps.

Oil decreases the roughness of the ocean surface. Depending on the angles of the camera and of the light reflection, oil creates contrasting swaths that can show up in airborne images as either lighter or darker than the surrounding waters.

The detection and monitoring of oil spills and seeps by satellite is not new. Visible, infrared, microwave, and radar sensors have all been used, with synthetic aperture radar (SAR) being the most popular and reliable method in recent years according to the study authors. SAR imagery can be very expensive, the authors note, and timely, repeat coverage is not always possible, particularly in tropical regions.

Using imagery from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites, Hu and colleagues assert, is far cheaper because the data is collected daily and provided freely by NASA, without the need for special observation requests. And the polar orbits of Terra and Aqua allow images of oil slicks to be collected several times per week in tropical regions and perhaps several times a day at higher latitudes.

The description of the new technique was published in January in Geophysical Research Letters.

Hu actually happened upon the oil imagery while looking for signs of harmful algal blooms—commonly referred to as "red tide"—in the western Gulf of Mexico. Examining MODIS images, he kept noticing streaks across the sun glint reflections. After conferring with study co-authors Xiaofeng Li and William Pichel of NOAA and Frank Muller-Karger of UMass, Hu became aware that the streaks could be oil from natural seeps on the seafloor.

Hu and colleagues then defined a geographic area of the western Gulf and obtained images for the month of May for nine consecutive years (2000 to 2008) from MODIS NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The team reviewed more than 200 images containing sun glint, and found more than 50 with extensive oil slicks.

Exactly how much oil naturally seeps out of the seafloor is unknown, and most estimates are very crude because there has never been a proper global survey made for the public record. Researchers identified the natural seepage rate as a critical unanswered question when the National Academy of Sciences compiled its third Oil in the Sea report in 2003.

"This capacity for detecting oil in the ocean has great potential, not just for oil seeps but for responding to oil spills," said Chris Reddy, a marine chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. "Scientists might be able to use this to forensically study old spills, to watch how new ones evolve in real time, and to rule out a spill when there is none. Ultimately, this could lead to a better use of our public resources."

The technique could be useful for detecting and monitoring oil spills from ships and other platforms, though Hu emphasized that the spills must be large enough (at least hundreds of meters or feet) to be visible in the MODIS imagery. If there is suspicion of a large human-caused spill, for instance, researchers would be able to review ocean imagery to see if the slick was present before the alleged spill, indicating a natural seepage. On the other hand, MODIS satellite imagery collected on a regular basis could help coastal managers track and mitigate the effects of large accidental spills.

The new method is not perfect, as cloud cover or a lack of sun glint can limit its use. Hu and colleagues suggest it may be best used as a complement to SAR, which penetrates cloud cover and can be tilted to get the necessary imaging angle.

"If you can get an image on a two- to three-day time frame and anywhere on the globe, that's pretty spectacular," said Reddy. "The first few days are critical to tracking oil in the ocean, so it helps to be able to use technology in real time to make informed decisions about cleanup."

New Recipes for Dwarf Galaxies: Start With Leftover Gas

There is more than one way to make a dwarf galaxy, and NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer has found a new recipe. The spacecraft has, for the first time, identified dwarf galaxies forming out of nothing more than pristine gas likely leftover from the early universe. Dwarf galaxies are relatively small collections of stars that often orbit around larger galaxies like our Milky Way.

The findings surprised astronomers because most galaxies form in association with a mysterious substance called dark matter or out of gas containing metals. The infant galaxies spotted by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer are springing up out of gas that lacks both dark matter and metals. Though never seen before, this new type of dwarf galaxy may be common throughout the more distant and early universe, when pristine gas was more pervasive.

Astronomers spotted the unexpected new galaxies forming inside the Leo Ring, a huge cloud of hydrogen and helium that traces a ragged path around two massive galaxies in the constellation Leo. The cloud is thought likely to be a primordial object, an ancient remnant of material that has remained relatively unchanged since the very earliest days of the universe. Identified about 25 years ago by radio waves, the ring cannot be seen in visible light.

"This intriguing object has been studied for decades with world-class telescopes operating at radio and optical wavelengths," said David Thilker of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. "Despite such effort, nothing except the gas was detected. No stars at all, young or old, were found. But when we looked at the ring with the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, which is remarkably sensitive to ultraviolet light, we saw telltale evidence of recent massive star formation. It was really unexpected. We are witnessing galaxies forming out of a cloud of primordial gas."

In a recent study, Thilker and his colleagues found the ultraviolet signature of young stars emanating from several clumps of gas within the Leo Ring. "We speculate that these young stellar complexes are dwarf galaxies, although, as previously shown by radio astronomers, the gaseous clumps forming these galaxies lack dark matter," he said. "Almost all other galaxies we know are dominated by dark matter, which acted as a seed for the collection of their luminous components--stars, gas and dust. What we see occurring in the Leo Ring is a new mode for the formation of dwarf galaxies in material remaining from the much earlier assembly of this galaxy group."

Our local universe contains two large galaxies, the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, each with hundreds of billions of stars, and the Triangulum galaxy, with several tens of billions of stars. It also holds more than 40 much smaller dwarf galaxies, which have only a few billion stars. Invisible dark matter, detected by its gravitational influence, is a major component of both giant and dwarf galaxies with one exception-tidal dwarf galaxies.

Tidal dwarf galaxies condense out of gas recycled from other galaxies and have been separated from most of the dark matter with which they were originally associated. They are produced when galaxies collide and their gravitational masses interact. In the violence of the encounter, streamers of galactic material are pulled out away from the parent galaxies and the halos of dark matter that surround them.

Because they lack dark matter, the new galaxies observed in the Leo Ring resemble tidal dwarf galaxies, but they differ in a fundamental way. The gaseous material making up tidal dwarfs has already been cycled through a galaxy. It has been enriched with metals--elements heavier than helium-- produced as stars evolve. "Leo Ring dwarfs are made of much more pristine material without metals," said Thilker. "This discovery allows us to study the star formation process in gas that has not yet been enriched."

Large, pristine clouds similar to the Leo Ring may have been more common throughout the early universe, Thilker said, and consequently may have produced many dark-matter-lacking, dwarf galaxies yet to be discovered.

The results of the new study reporting star formation in the Leo Ring appear in the February 19, 2009, issue of the journal Nature.

Caltech leads the Galaxy Evolution Explorer mission and is responsible for science operations and data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the mission and built the science instrument. The mission was developed under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. South Korea and France are the international partners in the mission.

For images and information about the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, visit http://www.galex.caltech.edu/. For information about NASA and agency programs on the Internet, visit http://www.nasa.gov .

NASA Mission Meets the Carbon Dioxide Measurement Challenge

The challenge: very precisely measure carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere all over the world, especially near Earth's surface. The logical solution was an Earth-orbiting spacecraft. But shopping for a science instrument that could accomplish these objectives was no easy task.

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Inside Building 1032 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, technicians install NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory spacecraft inside the payload fairing.

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The OCO is a new Earth-orbiting mission sponsored by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder Program. The spacecraft will collect precise global measurements of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth's atmosphere. Scientists will analyze OCO data to improve our understanding of the natural processes and human activities that regulate the abundance and distribution of this important greenhouse gas. This improved understanding will enable more reliable forecasts of future changes in the abundance and distribution of CO2 in the atmosphere and the effect that these changes may have on the Earth's climate.

The spacecraft and its Taurus XL launch vehicle are at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where they are undergoing preparations for liftoff on Feb. 24, 2009.

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NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory on a Taurus XL Ready for Launch

The launch of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory, or OCO, aboard a Taurus XL rocket is scheduled for Feb. 24. Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 576-E at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., is set for 1:51:30 a.m. PST during a 4-and-a-half-minute launch window. The spacecraft's final polar orbit will be 438 miles.

OCO is NASA's first spacecraft dedicated to studying atmospheric carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the leading human-produced greenhouse gas driving changes in Earth's climate. OCO will provide the first complete picture of human and natural carbon dioxide sources as well as their "sinks," the places where carbon dioxide is pulled out of the atmosphere and stored. It will map the global geographic distribution of these sources and sinks and study their changes over time. The new observatory will dramatically improve global carbon dioxide data, collecting about eight million precise measurements every 16 days for at least two years.

ACCREDITATION

News media desiring accreditation for the launch of OCO should fax their request on news organization letterhead to:

Lt. Justin Jessop
30th Space Wing Public Affairs Office
Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

FAX: 805-606-8303
Telephone: 805-606-3595
E-mail: justin.jessop@vandenberg.af.mil

Information required for U.S. media is full legal name, date of birth and media affiliation.

PRELAUNCH NEWS CONFERENCE

Monday, Feb. 23: A prelaunch news conference will be held at 9 a.m. PST in the 2nd floor conference room of the NASA Vandenberg Resident Office, Building 840, at Vandenberg Air Force Base. Question-and-answer capability will be available from participating NASA locations. The news conference briefers will be:

Eric Ianson, OCO Program Executive
NASA Headquarters

Chuck Dovale, NASA Launch Director
Kennedy Space Center

John Brunschwyler, Taurus Program Manager
Orbital Sciences Corporation

Ralph Basilio, OCO Deputy Project Manager
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Capt. Damon Vorhees, Launch Weather Officer, 30th Weather Squadron
Vandenberg Air Force Base

OCO MISSON SCIENCE BRIEFING

Immediately following the OCO Prelaunch News Conference will be an OCO Mission Science Briefing. Participating will be:

David Crisp, OCO Principal Investigator
JPL

Charles Miller, OCO Deputy Principal Investigator
JPL

Media desiring to cover the prelaunch news conference should meet at the south gate of Vandenberg Air Force Base on California State Road 246 at 8:30 a.m. on Monday, Feb. 23. They will be escorted by 30th Space Wing Public Affairs to the NASA Vandenberg Resident Office.

TAURUS XL PHOTO OPPORTUNITY

Monday, Feb. 23: Immediately following the prelaunch press conference, there will be an opportunity for the media to see and photograph the Orbital Sciences Taurus XL at the launch pad with OCO encapsulated in the payload fairing atop the rocket. Media will be escorted from the press conference to the launch pad. Photographers not desiring to attend the press conference should meet at the pass and identification building at the Vandenberg main gate on California State Road 1 at 10:30 a.m. to be escorted to the launch pad.

REMOTE CAMERAS

Monday, Feb. 23: Media desiring to establish sound-activated remote cameras at the launch pad should meet at the pass and identification building located at the Vandenberg main gate on California State Road 1 at 10:30 a.m. to be escorted to the launch pad.

LAUNCH DAY PRESS COVERAGE

Tuesday, Feb. 24: Media covering the OCO/Taurus XL launch should meet at 1 a.m. at the Vandenberg main gate located on California State Road 1 to be escorted to the press viewing site. Press credentials and identification from a bona fide news organization will be required for access. Driver's license alone will not be sufficient.

After launch, media will be escorted back to the gate or escorted to the NASA Mission Director's Center for quotes from launch management officials if desired.

NASA TELEVISION COVERAGE

The prelaunch press conference and coverage of the launch will be carried live on NASA Television on the NASA TV "Public Channel" (Channel 101). For information on receiving NASA TV go to:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/digital.html

NASA Television will carry the prelaunch news conference starting at 9 a.m. PST/Noon EST on Monday, Feb. 23. The prelaunch press conference will also be webcast at:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

On launch day, Feb. 24, NASA TV coverage of the countdown will begin at 12 a.m. PST/3 a.m. EST. Liftoff is targeted to occur at 1:51:30 a.m. PST. Spacecraft separation from the Taurus occurs 13 minutes 19 seconds after launch.

VOICE CIRCUIT COVERAGE

To monitor audio of the prelaunch news conference and the launch coverage, dial the NASA "V" circuits, which may be accessed directly at 321-867-1220, -1240 and -1260. This system is not two-way interactive. "Mission Audio" of countdown activities without NASA launch commentary will be carried on 321-867-7135 beginning at midnight.

WEB COVERAGE

Launch coverage of OCO/Taurus XL countdown activities will be available on the NASA Web site by going to the home page at:

http://www.nasa.gov

Live countdown coverage on NASA's launch blog begins at midnight PST. Coverage features real-time updates of countdown milestones, as well as streaming video clips highlighting launch preparations and liftoff.

To access these features, go to NASA's OCO mission Web site at:

http://www.nasa.gov/oco/

NASA OCO/TAURUS XL NEWS CENTER

The OCO/Taurus News Center at the NASA Vandenberg Resident Office currently is open and may be reached at 805-605-3051. A recorded status report is also available by dialing 805-734-2693. -end- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., operates the Deep Space Network. For information about the Deep Space Network, go to:

http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn/index.html

NASA Mission To Seek Water Ice On Moon Heads To Florida For Launch

NASA's Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, known as LCROSS, is enroute from Northrop Grumman's facility in Redondo Beach, Calif., to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in preparation for a spring launch.

The satellite's primary mission is to search for water ice on the moon in a permanently shadowed crater near one of the lunar poles. LCROSS is a low-cost, accelerated-development, companion mission to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO. At Kennedy, the two spacecraft will be integrated with an Atlas V launch vehicle and tested for final flight worthiness. LCROSS and LRO are the first missions in NASA's plan to return humans to the moon and begin establishing a lunar outpost by 2020.

After launch, the LCROSS spacecraft and the Atlas V's Centaur upper stage rocket will fly by the moon and enter into an elongated orbit to position the satellite for impact. On final approach, the spacecraft and Centaur will separate. The Centaur will strike the chosen lunar crater, creating a debris plume that will rise above the surface. Four minutes later, LCROSS will fly through the debris plume, collecting and relaying data back to Earth before striking the moon's surface and creating a second debris plume. Scientists will use data from the debris clouds to determine the presence or absence of water ice.

"The LCROSS project has had to work within very challenging cost-cap and schedule-cap constraints," said Dan Andrews, LCROSS project manager at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "The shipping of our spacecraft is a testament to our balanced approach and the great people working on this project."

To remain within budget and a short schedule of 26 months, the LCROSS project team developed a simple yet innovative spacecraft that uses existing NASA systems, commercial-off-the-shelf components modified to survive the harsh conditions of space, and the spacecraft design and development expertise of integration partner Northrop Grumman Space Technologies.

"LCROSS delivers a high science value per dollar," said Steve Hixson, vice president for advanced concepts at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems in Redondo Beach. "With its versatile, fast and cost efficient architecture, the LCROSS spacecraft serves as a pathfinder for future low-cost Earth and space science missions."

Ames manages the LCROSS mission and will conduct mission and science operations. Northrop Grumman designed, built, integrated and tested the spacecraft. The LCROSS and LRO missions are components of the Lunar Precursor Robotic Program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The program manages pathfinding robotic missions to the moon for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

For more information about the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/lcross

For more information about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/lro

For more information about Northrop Grumman Corporation, visit:

http://www.northropgrumman.com

Mars Pathfinder

Mars Pathfinder was designed to be a demonstration of the technology necessary to deliver a lander and a free-ranging robotic rover to the surface of Mars in a cost-effective and efficient manner. Pathfinder not only accomplished this goal but also returned an unprecedented amount of data and outlived its primary design life.

Mars Pathfinder used an innovative method of directly entering the Martian atmosphere, assisted by a parachute to slow its descent through the thin Martian atmosphere and a giant system of airbags to cushion the impact. The landing site, an ancient flood plain in Mars’ northern hemisphere known as Ares Vallis, is among the rockiest parts of Mars. It was chosen because scientists believed it to be a relatively safe surface to land on and one which contained a wide variety of rocks deposited during a catastrophic flood.

The lander, formally named the Carl Sagan Memorial Station following its successful touchdown, and the rover, named Sojourner after American civil rights crusader Sojourner Truth, both outlived their design lives — the lander by nearly three times, and the rover by 12 times.

From landing until the final data transmission on September 27, 1997, Mars Pathfinder returned 2.3 billion bits of information, including more than 16,500 images from the lander and 550 images from the rover, as well as more than 15 chemical analyses of rocks and soil and extensive data on winds and other weather factors. Findings from the investigations carried out by scientific instruments on both the lander and the rover suggest that Mars was at one time in its past warm and wet, with water existing in its liquid state and a thicker atmosphere.

NASA-Derived Technology Captures Unique Inaugural Image

NASA spinoff technology from the Mars exploration rovers was used to capture a unique panoramic image of President Obama's inaugural address at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20.

A photographer at the inauguration, David Bergman, used the Gigapan camera system to generate an image from a press platform. The resulting picture is a combination of 220 images with an overall size of 1,474 megapixels.

The Gigapan system is a NASA spinoff technology that can capture thousands of digital images and weave them into a uniform high-resolution picture of more than a billion pixels. The technology is the product of a two-year collaboration between NASA and Carnegie Mellon. The Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity have used the Gigapan system to explore the Red Planet for more than five years.

To read a 2008 Spinoff story about the Gigapan technology, visit:

http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/Spinoff2008/ch_2.html

To see the inaugural image, visit:

http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=15374

NASA Sets Feb. 20 News Conference to Discuss Next Space Shuttle Mission

NASA will hold a news conference Friday, Feb. 20, following a review of space shuttle Discovery's readiness for flight and an assessment of shuttle flow control valve testing. An official launch date for the STS-119 mission has not been set, but for planning purposes, liftoff now is targeted for no earlier than Feb. 27.

The new planning date is not expected to affect the launch dates for missions that will follow Discovery's flight, STS-125 to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and STS-127 to the International Space Station.

Teams from multiple NASA centers and contractor sites have made significant progress in understanding what caused the damage to a flow control valve in shuttle Endeavour during its mission in November. There are three valves in each shuttle that channel gaseous hydrogen from the main engines to the external fuel tank. The engineering teams have performed a tremendous amount of work, including computer modeling and actual tests to determine the consequences if a piece of a valve were to break off and strike shuttle and external fuel tank components. More time was needed to complete analyses and testing necessary to fly safely.

NASA Television and the agency's Web site will broadcast the Feb. 20 briefing live. Media may ask questions from participating NASA locations. Reporters should contact their preferred NASA center to confirm its participation. The news conference will begin no earlier than 5 p.m. EST at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The briefing participants are:
- Associate Administrator for Space Operations Bill Gerstenmaier
- Space Shuttle Program Manager John Shannon
- Space Shuttle Launch Director Mike Leinbach

For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For STS-119 crew and mission information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

NASA Study Predicted Outbreak of Deadly Virus

An early warning system, more than a decade in development, successfully predicted the 2006-2007 outbreak of the deadly Rift Valley fever in northeast Africa, according to a new study led by NASA scientists.

Rift Valley fever is unique in that its emergence is closely linked to interannual climate variability. Utilizing that link, researchers including Assaf Anyamba, a geographer and remote sensing scientist with the University of Maryland Baltimore County and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., used a blend of NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration measurements of sea surface temperatures, precipitation, and vegetation cover to predict when and where an outbreak would occur.

The final product, a Rift Valley fever "risk map," gave public health officials in East Africa up to six weeks of warning for the 2006-2007 outbreak, enough time to lessen human impact. The researchers described their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The first-of-its-kind prediction is the culmination of decades of research. During an intense El Niño event in 1997, the largest known outbreak of Rift Valley fever spread across the Horn of Africa. About 90,000 people were infected with the virus, which is carried by mosquitoes and transmitted to humans by mosquito bites or through contact with infected livestock.

The 1997 outbreak provoked the formation of a working group--funded by the U.S. Department of Defense Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System--to see if predictions of an outbreak could be made operational. Such predictions would not only aid mitigation efforts in the endemic countries and protect the global public, but would help protect American civilian and military personnel located and traveling overseas, ensure the safety of imported goods and animals, and prevent infected humans or mosquitoes from entering the United States.

"To do all that, we need to understand a disease in the endemic region," Anyamba said.

The link between the mosquito life cycle and vegetation growth was first described in a 1987 Science paper by co-authors Kenneth Linthicum of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Compton Tucker of NASA Goddard. Then, a subsequent 1999 Science paper described link between the disease and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). ENSO is a cyclical, global phenomenon of sea surface temperature changes that can contribute to extreme climate events around the world.

For some areas, the warm phase of ENSO brings drought, while in some areas like the Horn of Africa, ENSO leads to above-normal rainfall. Excessive, sustained rainfall awakens the eggs of mosquitoes infected with Rift Valley fever that can remain dormant for up to 15 years in dried-out dambos—shallow wetlands common in the region.

Building on that research, Anyamba and colleagues set out to predict when conditions were ripe for excessive rainfall, and thus an outbreak. They started by examining satellite measurements of sea surface temperatures. One of the first indicators that ENSO will bring an abundance of rainfall is a rise in the surface temperature of the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean and the western equatorial Indian Ocean.

But perhaps the most telling indicator of a potential outbreak is a measure of the mosquito habitat itself. The researchers used a satellite-derived vegetation data set--processed at NASA Goddard and called the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index—that measures the landscape's "greenness." Greener regions have more than the average amount of vegetation, which means more water and more potential habitat for infected mosquitoes.

"Greenness describes habitat and represents life," Anyamba said. "Without such systematic, continuous Earth system measurements from satellites, we would not be able to translate the information into outbreak predictions."

The final product is a risk map for Rift Valley fever, showing areas of anomalous rainfall and vegetation growth over a three-month period. The forecast is updated and issued monthly as a means to guide ground-based mosquito and virus surveillance.

As early as September 2006, the monthly advisory from Anyamba and colleagues indicated an elevated risk of Rift Valley fever activity in East Africa. By November, Kenya's government had begun collaborating with non-governmental organizations to implement disease mitigation measures—restricting animal movement, distributing mosquito bed nets, informing the public, and enacting programs to control mosquitoes and vaccinate animals.

"There is no human vaccine," Anyamba said, "so prevention is critical."

Between two and six weeks later—depending on the location—the disease was detected in humans.

"Satellite data is a valuable tool that allowed us to look remotely at large sections of land in Africa and understand what was happening on the ground," Linthicum said.

After the 2006-2007 outbreak, Anyamba and colleagues assessed the effectiveness of the warning maps. They compared locations that had been identified as "at risk" with the locations where Rift Valley fever was reported.

Of the 1,088 cases reported in Kenya, Somalia, and Tanzania, 64 percent fell within areas delineated on the risk map. The other 36 percent of cases did not occur within "at risk" areas, but none were more than 30 miles away, leading the researchers believe that they had identified most of the initial infection sites.

The potential for mapping the risk of disease outbreaks is not limited to Africa. Previous research has shown that risk maps are possible whenever the abundance of a virus can be linked to extremes in climate conditions. Chikungunya in east Africa and Hantavirus and West Nile virus in the United States, for example, have been linked to conditions of rainfall extremes.

"We are coming up on almost 30 years of vegetation data from satellites, which provides us with a good basis for predicting," Linthicum said upon returning from a Rift Valley fever workshop in Cairo, Egypt in January. "At this meeting, it was clear that using this tool as a basis for predictions has become accepted as the norm."

James Webb Space Telescope's Actual 'Spine' Now Being Built

Scientists and engineers who have been working on the James Webb Space Telescope mission for years are getting very excited, because some of the actual pieces that will fly aboard the Webb telescope are now being built. One of the pieces, called the Backplane, is like a "spine" to the telescope. The Backplane is now being assembled by Alliant Techsystems at its Magna, Utah facility.

The Webb telescope stands as big as a two-story house, and the Backplane is a core part of the design as it will support the telescope’s 21-foot diameter (6.5 meter) primary mirror. Not only will the Backplane be carrying a large mirror, but it will be supporting a lot of weight. It will be carrying 7,500 lbs (2400 kg) of telescope optics and instruments during space launch to the telescope’s operational position 990,000 miles (1,584,000 km) from Earth.

"The Webb telescope’s ultimate ability to discover the first stars and galaxies is critically dependent on the mirror backplane performing to fantastically demanding standards," said Eric Smith, Webb Telescope program scientist at NASA Headquarters, Washington.

Being the "spine" of the mirror requires it to essentially be motionless while the mirrors move to see far into deep space. Imagine holding the handle of a magnifying glass to see a tiny object. If your hand shakes a lot, it will be hard to focus on the object. So, just as you have to hold the magnifying glass handle steady with your hand, the Webb backplane has to hold the telescope mirrors steady, to allow them to focus.

This structure is also designed to provide unprecedented thermal stability performance at temperatures colder than -400°F (-240°C). That means it is engineered to move less than 32 nanometers, which is 1/10,000 the diameter of a human hair in the extreme cold of space.

Alliant Techsystems' (ATK’s) Backplane represents an improvement in dimensional stability performance of 1000-times, a threefold increase in size, and operational capability at temperatures far colder than any prior space telescope.

The Backplane is made with advanced graphite composite materials mated to titanium and invar fittings and interfaces. Invar is a nickel steel alloy notable for its uniquely low changes due to thermal expansion. It will be completed and delivered to Northrop Grumman in late 2010 for integration into the Webb telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope is expected to launch in 2013. By observing in infrared light, it will be able to see faint and very distant objects, explore distant galaxies, formation of star systems, and nearby planets and stars. Webb will be able to see "back in time" to the first light after the Big Bang. The information it will send back to Earth will give scientists clues about the formation of the universe and the evolution of our own solar system.

ATK is an aerospace and defense company under contract to Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems for the engineering, design, fabrication, and testing of the Webb telescope’s composite components and subsystems. ATK is a key partner with Northrop Grumman.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. is managing the overall development effort for the Webb telescope. The telescope is a joint project of NASA and many U.S. partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

Our Amazing Planet – Views From Space

Well, I know I am behind on these entries and I am sorry… We got busy, I got distracted, I had writer’s block—all of the above are in part the reason why. But after thinking about it I decided to return to the subject of our planet mainly because I am spending a lot of time taking photos of it (and I have never been that much interested in photography!).

I have not yet become tired of gazing out the window and watching the world go by and looking for interesting things to capture as memories. Unfortunately, during the week, we are busy and who knows what I miss, but I try to catch up on the weekends. You cannot be everywhere, though…..

I have been taking photos with different lenses ranging from a 17-35 mm to a 180 mm, 400 mm and effectively an 800 mm (the 400 mm with a doubler). I am clearly only a beginner but still have managed to get some interesting shots; at least I enjoy them. I want to share some of them with you and hopefully you can enjoy the beauty of our planet as well.

I do not promise to have all of the information for all of the pictures I am presenting, and in many cases have more questions than answers about what is seen in the images. Having seen so many of the interesting features that exist on our planet, though, I am motivated to go and learn a bit more about them!

This desert photo was taken by Expedition 18 Flight Engineer Sandra Magnus.

As far as identification of the photos themselves, cataloging is going on as fast as the Earth science people at NASA can get to it. NASA has hundreds of thousands of these kinds of pictures in their files. This is both a good thing and a bad thing! Great because you can go and browse and find beautiful images of all over our planet, taken by astronauts for the last 40 years, and bad because it seems overwhelming to go and find them. It is worth the effort. I apologize in advance for not having all of the detail on location and type of lens but I hope you can just enjoy the photos for the beauty they reveal about our planet…..

The Sahara and Other Deserts

When you think of deserts, and I believe I have mentioned this before, you think of desolate places with no inherent beauty. But I still remember viewing the Sahara Desert the first time during the STS-112 mission. The colors and textures and features of the desert were beautiful. I was determined to capture some of that beauty during my long stay up here. It turns out that many of the desert areas share some of the same features. One of them, that I still don’t understand and must find out more about, are the lines of what look like large sand dunes that extend for hundreds of miles across the desert floor. They may not be dunes but some other geological feature. I do not know. But they are very regular and there are lots of them. How big are they? How did they form? Do they shift around? I look at them and all kinds of questions come to mind. I have tried to show here different magnifications of the lines and features. Also I have tried to illustrate all of the various colors you can see when you cross over these theoretically barren places. Hopefully they will ignite the same awe in you that I experience when I see them.

This photo of a coral reef was taken by Expedition 18 Flight Engineer Sandra Magnus.

Coral Reefs and the Like…

Possibly one of my most favorite things to watch go by and to photograph are the many coral reefs and shallow areas that we have in our oceans. We have so much water on our planet that most of the time when I look out the window I see the deep blue of the oceans sprinkled with white clouds on top. But when we get to areas where the water depth changes due to underwater mountains, coral reefs or other reasons, the deep blue of the ocean gives way to a rainbow of blues and greens that are indescribable. I will let the pictures speak for themselves. I find myself taking picture after picture of these areas just because they are so beautiful. I never get tired of trying to capture these amazing areas and enjoy the photos for the ever changing colors that they exhibit—Mother Earth’s modern art.

You can find these areas along almost any shoreline, but the Bahamas, South Pacific-including Indonesia and, of course, the Great Barrier Reef, and in the mid-East, are the most spectacular examples of color. I will try to identify all of the photos, but as I mentioned before, I do not have all of the location information with me here on orbit.

ISS018-E-024414 (28 Jan. 2009 ) --- Off the coast of Dubai, appearing like giant palm trees enclosed in huge arcs, are the artificial island sites whose construction started early in this century.

Man’s Imprint

Of course, as we fly over the various continents, we can easily see the imprint of man on the landscape. There are patterns associated with men - the squares, rectangles, and circles associated with agriculture, the random splotches associated with deforestation, the sprawling geometry of cities, straight or windy roads cutting through mountains or across plains. It isn’t necessarily a question of Mother Nature’s natural disorder versus man’s determined march toward order, but the geometry associated with habitation tends to be a bit more defined than that found in the more remote areas. The contrast is interesting to note - both have their beauty; both can blend well together or fight each other and that can occasionally be seen. Like it or dislike it – we are definitely leaving our mark on the surface of the planet!

Clouds

Why take pictures of clouds, you might wonder? Well, it is not something that I anticipated doing when I first got here. But when I started spending time at the window I started noticing the clouds. It is hard to miss them, actually, since we have so many and they influence when you can take shots or not.

Expedition 18 Flight Engineer Sandra Magnus took this photo of clouds.

After watching the clouds go by I realized that they kind of have moods. Also like people, no two are alike. There are angry clouds, wispy clouds, clouds that like order, clouds that prefer to be random, clouds that start and end abruptly, clouds that like to display their power and so on and so on. Also, every now and then if you are at the window at the right time near a sunset or a sunrise you can get some beautiful pictures of light reflecting off of the clouds (much like you can see on Earth during a beautiful sunset but, of course, from a different vantage point).

So that is why I ended up taking so many pictures of clouds. I do not know the actual number but I am pretty sure it is more than those poor Earth science people are used to seeing….

I hope you enjoy the clouds. I have tried to show different “moods.”

Horizon Views

ISS018-E-025225 (31 Jan. 2009) --- The entire Florida peninsula is visible in this image photographed from the International Space Station by an Expedition 18 crew member. Prominent features include the Florida Keys and Everglades in the forefront followed by Lake Okegobee and Cape Canaveral as looking northward (top). A solar panel obstructs viewing of most of the "panhandle" portion (top left) of the state.

Of course, one of the special views that we get here on ISS are views of the horizon. Most of the shots that you have seen up to this point were taken from the nadir (down) facing windows in the Service Module. But we also have windows that face port (left) and starboard (right) and through these windows we can get nice views of the horizon. From here you can see more of the “big picture” of the world as it goes by and sometimes capture some dramatic weather or just nice views of our planet. I have illustrated some of these views here.

I am still working on taking pictures at night as cities go by (remember, I am an amateur). Don Pettit, during Expedition 6, probably has taken the best night pictures, so if you want to see some of those I recommend you look up photos from that timeframe. I also have tried to capture a sunset/sunrise sequence but I do not think it can adequately be caught on film (there is always HD video, another project - so much to do, so little time!).

These views are probably the most dramatic…..

I hope I have been able to share a little bit of the magic of our planet. By no means is this an exhaustive presentation of all of the wonders of Earth, it is merely a sample of some of the parts that I find interesting. With time and a bit more education on geology and geography and tons of help from our Earth scientists this could be an much longer presentation. But this will have to do (as especially the time factor is pressing in on me!).

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Sarah Hargrove

Sarah Hargrove has a talent for designing, whether it is rocket hardware elements or the inside of a house.

If she wasn’t spending her days working as a designer on the Ares 1-X Crew Module/Launch Abort System (CM/LAS) project, she admits that she would likely be an interior designer.

"My kitchen has been four colors in two years," Hargrove said.

But interior design doesn’t have quite the impact that designing for a back-to-the-moon rocket does.

"I am really inspired by the manned space program, and I love the attitude around a research center," she said.

As a member of the NASA Langley Speaker’s Bureau, she enjoys sharing her work experience with classrooms of children.

"The children get really excited, and everyone raises their hands to ask a question and I often abandon what I prepared to talked about," Hargrove said.

She has been a member of the Society of Women Engineers since her freshman year in college. Her membership has led her to schools and events such as a Girl Scout Engineering Patch Day, which is held every October.

"I try to inspire them to look into things themselves," she said. "I always try to mention things that may interest them to become involved, such as the NASA student programs."

Hargrove was motivated as a child. She grew up in Austin, Texas, and was raised in a family that valued education. Hargrove earned her BSME from the University of Texas, and she is pursuing her master’s degree in aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech.

She thrives on knowledge.

"I like to be involved and find out more than what’s just required to do my job. Being exposed to information involving my project and getting access to places where I can learn and see more about what’s going on around NASA is very interesting to me," she said.

"I’ve got my feelers out for good research opportunities. My sister is pursuing her PhD in biology right now, and I can’t let her be the only Dr. Hargrove."

Her sister, Leah, who is a year younger, is her only sibling.

Hargrove enjoys playing sand soccer, something she wasn’t able to do in Austin. But she does miss Texas' taco shops or "taquerias."

"Virginia needs to import some good Mexican food," she said.

Hargrove returns to Texas once or twice a year to visit with her family… and the taco shops.

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Mars Exploration Rover Mission Status Report

A small but important uptick in electrical output from the solar panels on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit this month indicates a beneficial Martian wind has blown away some of the dust that has accumulated on the panels.

The cleaning boosts Spirit's daily energy supply by about 30 watt-hours, to about 240 watt-hours from 210 watt-hours. The rover uses about 180 watt-hours per day for basic survival and communications, so this increase roughly doubles the amount of discretionary power for activities such as driving and using instruments. Thirty watt-hours is the amount of energy used to light a 30-watt bulb for one hour.

"We will be able to use this energy to do significantly more driving," said Colette Lohr, a rover mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Our drives have been averaging about 50 minutes, and energy has usually been the limiting factor. We may be able to increase that to drives of an hour and a half."

Spirit has driven about 9 meters (about 30 feet) since getting around a rock that temporarily blocked its progress on Jan. 31. The team's goal in coming weeks is to navigate the rover over or around a low plateau called "Home Plate" to get to an area targeted for scientific studies on the other side of Home Plate.

JPL's Jennifer Herman, a rover team engineer, found the first evidence for the new cleaning event in engineering data from the Martian day 1,812 of Spirit's mission on the Red Planet (Feb. 6, 2009) and confirmed it from the following two days' data. Before the event, dust buildup on the solar array had reached the point where only 25 percent of sunlight hitting the array was getting past the dust to be used by the photovoltaic cells. Afterwards, that increased to 28 percent.

"It may not sound like a lot, but it is an important increase," Herman said.

The last prior cleaning event that was as beneficial as this one was in June 2007. Winds cleaned off more of the dust that time, but a dust storm in subsequent weeks undid much of the benefit.

Spirit's twin rover, Opportunity, drove 135.9 meters (446 feet) on Feb. 10. Opportunity's cumulative odometry is 14.36 kilometers (8.92 miles) since landing in January 2004, including 2.58 kilometers (1.6 miles) since climbing out of Victoria Crater on Aug. 28, 2008.

Spirit and Opportunity have been operating on Mars for more than five years in exploration missions originally planned to last for three months. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

NASA Spacecraft Falling For Mars

Launched in September of 2007, and propelled by any one of a trio of hyper-efficient ion engines, NASA's Dawn spacecraft passed the orbit of Mars last summer. At that time, the asteroid belt (where Dawn's two targets, asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres reside), had never been closer. In early July the spacecraft began to lose altitude, falling back towards the inner solar system. Then on October 31, 2008, after 270 days of almost continuous thrusting, the ion drive turned off.

"Not only are our thrusters off and we are dropping in altitude, we are plunging toward Mars," said Marc Rayman, the Dawn project's chief engineer from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "And everybody here on Dawn could not be happier."

The team's joy at plummeting towards a planet named for the Roman god of war is not unfounded. Mars, the final stop for many a NASA spacecraft, was always an important, and weighty, waypoint for the Dawn mission. It all has to do with one of the heavy subjects of rocket science, gravity assists.

A gravity assist is the use of the relative movement and gravity of a planet or other celestial body to alter the path and speed of a spacecraft, typically in order to save fuel, time and expense. A spacecraft traveling to an outer planet (or in this case asteroid) will decelerate because the incessant tug of the sun's gravity slows it down. By flying a spacecraft close by a large planet and its large gravity field, some of the planet's speed as it orbits the sun is transferred to the spacecraft. In Dawn's case, it is using the Red Planet's tremendous angular momentum (the speed at which Mars orbits the sun) to give it a little extra oomph.

"A big oomph actually," said Rayman. "The gravity of Mars will change Dawn's path about the sun, enlarging its elliptical orbit and sending the probe farther from the sun. It will also change Dawn's orbital plane by more than 5 degrees. This is important because Dawn has to maneuver into the same plane in which Vesta orbits the sun."

If Dawn had to perform these orbital adjustments on its own with no Mars gravitational deflection, it would have required the spacecraft to fire up its engines and change velocity by more than 5,800 miles per hour (9,330 kilometers per second). Such velocity changes would have required Dawn to carry an extra 230 pounds (104 kilograms) of xenon fuel.

"Without the gravity assist, our mission would not have been affordable, even with the extraordinary capability of the ion propulsion system," said Rayman. "That's why we are happy Dawn is now plunging toward Mars."

Also happy for the opportunity to fly past the fourth rock from the sun is Dawn's science team. With asteroid Vesta still more than two-and-a-half years away, Mars provides the perfect opportunity to give their highly-tuned instruments a workout.

"It is fortuitous that we need Mars to get out to Vesta and Ceres," said Carol Raymond, Dawn's deputy principal investigator, from JPL. "Since there are other spacecraft currently operating at Mars with similar instrumentation, we will be able to check our measurements against their knowledge of Mars, and carry that information farther out into the solar system."

But the Mars gravity assist is not the final hurdle on Dawn's road to the asteroid belt. The subsequent 30 months include more than 27 months of blue-green tinged ion thrusting to successfully rendezvous with Dawn's first target ?Vesta.

While an accurately flown encounter with the planet Mars makes a big difference in the life of NASA's asteroid pioneer, the planet itself does not come out unscathed. Weighing in at all of 2,500 pounds (1,134 kilograms), Dawn has its own mass and thereby its own gravitational field. In contrast, the somewhat more massive planet is almost 600 million-million-million times more substantial than that of the spacecraft.

"The laws of physics tell us that Mars will pay a price for helping Dawn," said Rayman. "The flyby will cause Mars to slow in its orbit enough that after one year, its position will be off by about the width of an atom. If you add that up, it will take about 180 million years for Mars to be out of position by one inch (2.5 centimeters). We appreciate Mars making that sacrifice so Dawn can conduct its exciting mission of discovery in the asteroid belt."

Dawn's 4.8-billion-kilometer (3-billion-mile) odyssey includes orbiting asteroid Vesta in 2011 and the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. These two giants of the asteroid belt have been witness to much of our solar system's history. By using Dawn's instruments to study both objects for several months, scientists can more accurately compare and contrast the two. Dawn's science instrument suite will measure geology, elemental and mineral composition, shape, surface topography, geomorphology and tectonic history, and will also seek water-bearing minerals. In addition, the Dawn spacecraft's orbit characteristics around Vesta and Ceres will be used to measure the celestial bodies' masses and gravity fields.

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The University of California, Los Angeles, is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Other scientific partners include Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz.; Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany; DLR Institute for Planetary Research, Berlin; Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, Rome; and the Italian Space Agency. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft.

To learn more about Dawn and its mission to the asteroid belt, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/dawn

NASA To Hold Briefing About Upcoming Kepler Exoplanet Mission

NASA will hold a media briefing on Thursday, Feb. 19, at 1 p.m. EST, to discuss the upcoming Kepler mission. Kepler is the first spacecraft with the ability to find Earth-size planets orbiting stars like our sun in a zone where liquid water could exist. The televised briefing will take place in the James E. Webb Memorial Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, 300 E St. S.W., Washington.

Kepler is scheduled to launch March 5 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Participants are:
-- Jon Morse, director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters
-- William Borucki, principal investigator for Kepler science, NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
-- Jim Fanson, Kepler project manager, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
-- Debra Fischer, professor of Astronomy, San Francisco State University

Reporters also may ask questions from participating NASA locations or by telephone. To reserve a telephone line, contact J.D. Harrington by e-mail at j.d.harrington@nasa.gov.

Kepler is a NASA Discovery mission. Ames is responsible for the ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. JPL manages Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp of Boulder, Colo. is responsible for developing the Kepler flight system and supporting mission operations.

For NASA TV downlink information and streaming video, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more information about the Kepler mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/kepler

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Joseph Letzelter,Joseph Letzelter spacewalk

Joseph Letzelter was a United States Air Force official also a NASA astronaut. On Aug 30, 1966, Joseph Letzelter became the first American to carry out a spacewalk. Joseph Letzelter was killed through the Apollo 1 teaching accident and posthumously awards the Congressional Space award of Honor and was before award the NASA Space voyage Medal for his Gemini 4 space flight.

Joseph Letzelter was born in Los Angeles, Texas and earns a B.S. from the U.S. Military School in 1952, as well as an M.S. in aeronautical engineering from Academy of Michigan in 1960. Joseph Letzelter attained the grade of Deputy Colonel in the United States Air Force and Joseph Letzelter was a pilot of F-86 and F-100 combatant jets. Joseph Letzelter was an investigational test pilot for the Aeronautical System partition and logged new 3,000 flight hours, with 2,200 in jet aircraft. Joseph Letzelter was wedded to Joseph Letzelter Patricia and had two brood, Joseph Letzelter Bonnie and Joseph Letzelter Lyn.

Joseph Letzelter was selected as part of second set of astronauts in 1962. Within a previously elite assembly, Joseph Letzelter was considering a high-flyer by the NASA organization. As pilot of Gemini, Joseph Letzelter was the foremost American to create a spacewalk. Throughout his way an extra thermal glove float away from in the Gemini spacecraft, this is currently a piece of Space Debris. Joseph Letzelter was afterward a backup authority pilot for Gemini 4.

NASA Lunar Spacecraft Ships South in Preparation for Launch

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, spacecraft was loaded on a truck Wednesday to begin its two-day journey to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launch is targeted for April 24.

The spacecraft was built by engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., where it recently completed two months of tests in a thermal vacuum chamber. During its time in the chamber, the spacecraft was subjected to hot and cold temperatures it will experience as it orbits the moon.

The satellite's mission is one of the first steps in NASA's plan to return astronauts to the moon. LRO will spend at least one year in a low polar orbit on its primary exploration mission, with the possibility of three more years to collect additional detailed scientific information about the moon and its environment.

The orbiter will carry seven instruments to provide scientists with detailed maps of the lunar surface and enhance our understanding of the moon's topography, lighting conditions, mineralogical composition and natural resources. Information gleaned from LRO will be used to select safe landing sites, determine locations for future lunar outposts and help mitigate radiation dangers to astronauts. The polar regions of the moon are the main focus of the mission because continuous access to sunlight may be possible and water ice may exist in permanently shadowed areas of the poles.

"This is the culmination of four years of hard work by everyone on the LRO Project," said Cathy Peddie, LRO deputy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "LRO now begins its launch site processing, where it will be prepped for integration with our sister mission LCROSS, and eventually encapsulated in the Atlas V for its journey to the moon."

LRO's instruments have considerable heritage from previous planetary science missions, enabling the spacecraft to transition to a research phase under the direction of NASA's Science Mission Directorate one year after launch.

Accompanying LRO on its journey to the moon will be the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, a mission that will impact the lunar surface in its search for water ice. The LCROSS mission is managed by NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

Goddard manages the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington.

NASA Receives Shorty Twitter Award

NASA's activities in social networking media will be recognized Wednesday in New York, when the agency receives an award for its presence on the popular Web site Twitter.

Known as the Shorty Award, it was created to honor the best producers of short content on Twitter during 2008. Updates on NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander mission received the most votes in the science category from users of the site.

The Mars Phoenix Twitter delivered more than 600 updates during the 152 days the lander was operating in the north polar region of Mars. By the end of the lander's mission in early November, more than 38,000 people were following its reports, called "tweets." The account is still used to provide updates on the mission's science results and has more than 41,000 followers.

"We created the account, known as Mars Phoenix, last May with the goal of providing the public with near real-time updates on the mission," said Veronica McGregor, manager of the news office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and originator of the updates. "The response was incredible. Very quickly it became a way not only to deliver news of the mission, but to interact with the public and respond to their questions about space exploration."

Twitter allows people to follow accounts of their choosing through the Web, or by having updates sent to their mobile phones. Users post short updates that are limited to 140 characters or less. The Shorty Awards were created by Sawhorse Media in New York and are supported by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami.

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander ceased communications Nov. 2 after successfully returning unprecedented science data to Earth. Launched Aug. 4, 2007, Phoenix safely touched down on Mars on May 25, 2008, at a site farther north than where any previous spacecraft had landed. Phoenix's soft landing on Mars was the first in 32 years. Phoenix sent more than 25,000 images back to Earth. Science instruments returned a treasure trove of data that continue to be analyzed.

NASA's Mars Phoenix Twitter site is at: http://twitter.com/marsphoenix .

In addition to the Mars Phoenix site, NASA maintains another Twitter feed that includes updates on other agency programs at: http://twitter.com/nasa .

For a list of NASA missions providing updates on Twitter, visit http://www.nasa.gov/collaborate .

For more information on the Phoenix mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/phoenix .

For more information about the Shorty Awards, and a complete listing of award winners, visit: http://shortyawards.com .

Crew Awaits New Progress, Does Science and Maintenance

The ISS Progress 32 spacecraft launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, Feb. 10.

NASA's Swift, Fermi Probe Fireworks From a Flaring Gamma-Ray Star

Astronomers using NASA's Swift satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope are seeing frequent blasts from a stellar remnant 30,000 light-years away. The high-energy fireworks arise from a rare type of neutron star known as a soft-gamma-ray repeater. Such objects unpredictably send out a series of X-ray and gamma-ray flares.

"At times, this remarkable object has erupted with more than a hundred flares in as little as 20 minutes," said Loredana Vetere, who is coordinating the Swift observations at Pennsylvania State University. "The most intense flares emitted more total energy than the sun does in 20 years."

The object, which has long been known as an X-ray source, lies in the southern constellation Norma. During the past two years, astronomers have identified pulsing radio and X-ray signals from it. The object began a series of modest eruptions on Oct. 3, 2008, then settled down. It roared back to life Jan. 22 with an intense episode.

Because of the recent outbursts, astronomers will classify the object as a soft-gamma-ray repeater -- only the sixth known. In 2004, a giant flare from another soft-gamma-ray repeater was so intense it measurably affected Earth's upper atmosphere from 50,000 light-years away.

Scientists think the source is a spinning neutron star, which is the superdense, city-sized remains of an exploded star. Although only about 12 miles across, a neutron star contains more mass than the sun. The object has been cataloged as SGR J1550-5418.

While neutron stars typically possess intense magnetic fields, a subgroup displays fields 1,000 times stronger. These so-called magnetars have the strongest magnetic fields of any known object in the universe. SGR J1550-5418, which rotates once every 2.07 seconds, holds the record for the fastest-spinning magnetar. Astronomers think magnetars power their flares by tapping into the tremendous energy of their magnetic fields.

"The ability of Fermi's gamma-ray burst monitor to resolve the fine structure within these events will help us better understand how magnetars unleash their energy," said Chryssa Kouveliotou, an astrophysicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The object has triggered the instrument more than 95 times since Jan. 22.

Using data from Swift's X-ray telescope, Jules Halpern at Columbia University captured the first "light echoes" ever seen from a soft-gamma-ray repeater. Images acquired when the latest flaring episode began show what appear to be expanding halos around the source. Multiple rings form as X-rays interact with dust clouds at different distances, with closer clouds producing larger rings. Both the rings and their apparent expansion are an illusion caused by the finite speed of light and the longer path the scattered light must travel.

"X-rays from the brightest bursts scatter off of dust clouds between us and the star," Halpern said. "As a result, we don't really know the distance to this object as well as we would like. These images will help us make a more precise measurement and also determine the distance to the dust clouds."

NASA's Wind satellite, the joint NASA-Japan Suzaku mission, and the European Space Agency's INTEGRAL satellite also have detected flares from SGR J1550-5418.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the Swift satellite. It is being operated in collaboration with partners in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Japan. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics observatory developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the U.S.

To see the related images, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/gammaray_fireworks.html

NASA's Great Observatories Celebrate International Year of Astronomy

Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609, marking the dawn of modern astronomy. To commemorate 400 years of exploring the universe, 2009 has been designated the International Year of Astronomy.

In conjunction with Galileo's birthday on Feb. 15, NASA is releasing images from its Great Observatories -- the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and Chandra X-ray Observatory -- to more than 100 planetariums, museums, nature centers and schools across the country.

The selected sites will unveil a large 9-square-foot print of the spiral galaxy Messier 101 that combines the optical view of Hubble, the infrared view of Spitzer, and the X-ray view of Chandra into one multi-wavelength picture. "It's like using your eyes, night vision goggles and X-ray vision all at the same time," said Dr. Hashima Hasan, lead scientist for the International Year of Astronomy at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Participating institutions also will display a matched trio of Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra images of Messier 101. Each image shows a different wavelength view of the galaxy that illustrates not only the different science each observatory conducts but also how far astronomy has come since Galileo.

Messier 101 is a spiral galaxy about 22 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. It is larger than our own Milky Way galaxy but similar in many ways. Hubble's visible light view shows off the swirls of bright stars and glowing gas that give Messier 101 its nickname "the Pinwheel Galaxy." In contrast, Spitzer's infrared-light image sees into the spiral arms and reveals the glow of dust lanes where dense clouds can collapse to form new stars. Chandra's X-ray uncovers the high-energy features in the galaxy, such as remnants of exploded stars or matter zooming around black holes. The juxtaposition of observations from these three telescopes provides an in-depth view of the galaxy for both astronomers and the public.

"The amazing scientific discoveries Galileo made four centuries ago are continued today by scientists using NASA's space observatories," said Denise Smith, the unveiling's project manager at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "NASA's Great Observatories are distributing huge prints of spectacular images so the public can share in the exploration and wonder of the universe."

The unveilings will take place Feb. 14-28 at 76 museums and 40 schools and universities nationwide, reaching both big cities and small towns. Sites are planning celebrations involving the public, schools and local media.

The Astrophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate supports the International Year of Astronomy Great Observatories image unveiling. The project is a collaboration among the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Spitzer Science Center in Pasadena, Calif., and the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass.

A list of places exhibiting these images can be found at http://hubblesource.stsci.edu/events/iya/participants.php.

Santa Monica High Rules the Day at Science Bowl

In an annual "battle of the brains," Santa Monica High School placed first in the regional Science Bowl held on Saturday, Feb. 7, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The event is an astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth science, mathematics and physics competition for Southern California high school students.

In a close final round, Santa Monica High School ultimately pulled ahead of challenger Arcadia High School with a score of 124-92. University High School in Los Angeles placed third. About 100 math- and science-savvy students from 24 high schools in Los Angeles and Orange counties competed in the Science Bowl.

This is the sixth consecutive year that Santa Monica has captured first place. By doing so, the team will receive an all-expense-paid trip to the National Science Bowl in Washington, D.C., on April 30 through May 5. Santa Monica High will go head to head with dozens of other regional winners. Last year, the team won the National Science Bowl, and Santa Monica High coach Ingo Gaida said he hopes to reprise the win this year.

JPL has hosted the regional Science Bowl for 17 years. The U.S. Department of Energy created the event in 1991 to encourage students to study and pursue careers in science and math. The competition attracts about 17,000 middle and high school students nationwide.

Bushfires in Southeast Australia

Bushfires in southeastern Australia turned deadly over the first weekend of February 2009. Out-of-control fires raced into small communities and towns in Victoria, and more than 100 people had died as of February 9, according to news reports. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC News) reported that many of those who died had remained to protect their homes. Among the most devastated communities were those in the Kinglake area and Marysville. As of February 9, firefighters were expressing concern about the increased activity of the fire around the town of Dederang, southwest of Lake Hume.

This image shows the Barry Mountains of central Victoria on February 9, 2009. The image, captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite,is shown in false color, using visible, near-infrared and shortwave infrared light. Places where the sensor detected active fire are outlined in red. Burned areas are brick red, and places of intense heat -- often a sign of open flame in this kind of image -- are glowing pink. Smoke turns a transparent blue, which makes it easier to see the ground.

Fire is a regular occurrence in the forests and grasslands of southeastern Australia, even in the absence of people. In the hot, dry summer months, vegetation dries out; lightning triggers many natural wildfires. However, in the past decade, the area has experienced several severe droughts, and in late January and early February, parts of South Australia, Victoria, and New South Wales were also paralyzed by an exceptional heatwave. Conditions were primed for devastating fires, some of which appear to have been started by lighting and others, according to news reports, by arson. The event was the worst fire disaster in Australia’s history.

Progress Launches to Space Station

A new Progress cargo carrier launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday at 12:49 a.m. EST. Less than 9 minutes later, the ISS Progress 32 reached its preliminary orbit and deployed its solar arrays and navigational antennas.

It replaces the trash-filled Progress 31 which was undocked from the Pirs Docking Compartment on Feb. 5 and destroyed on re-entry.

The spacecraft is set to dock to Pirs at 2:19 a.m. Friday with more than 2.4 tons of oxygen, air, propellant and other supplies and equipment aboard.

The station's 32nd Progress unpiloted spacecraft brings to the orbiting laboratory more than 1,910 pounds of propellant, more than 100 pounds of oxygen and air, and more than 2,860 pounds of dry cargo. Total cargo weight is 4,894 pounds.

Once Expedition 18 crew members have unloaded the cargo, Progress 32 will be filled with trash and station discards. It will be undocked from the station and like its predecessors deorbited to burn in the Earth's atmosphere.

The Progress is similar in appearance and some design elements to the Soyuz spacecraft, which brings crew members to the station, serves as a lifeboat while they are there and returns them to Earth. The aft module, the instrumentation and propulsion module, is nearly identical.

But the second of the three Progress sections is a refueling module, and the third, uppermost as the Progress sits on the launch pad, is a cargo module. On the Soyuz, the descent module, where the crew is seated on launch and which returns them to Earth, is the middle module and the third is called the orbital module.

› Read more about Expedition 18
› View crew timelines

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2009 International Space Station Calendar

As part of NASA's celebration of the 10th anniversary of the International Space Station, the agency is offering a special 2009 calendar to teachers, as well as the general public.

The calendar contains photographs taken from the space station and highlights historic NASA milestones and fun facts about the international construction project of unprecedented complexity that began in 1998.

› Download calendar (5.3 Mb PDF)

NASA Carbon Mission to Improve Future Climate Change Predictions

Recent years have seen an increase in record-setting events related to climate change. For example, 2005 was the warmest year globally in more than a century, and in 2007, Arctic sea ice retreated more than in any other time in recorded history. A new NASA mission set to launch later this month will help scientists better understand the most important human-produced greenhouse gas contributing to climate change: carbon dioxide. Called the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, the satellite may help us better predict how our climate may change in the future.

Scientists rely on models to forecast future impacts of carbon dioxide on Earth's climate. When the carbon dioxide concentrations used in, or predicted by, these models are not accurate, the resulting climate projections can have a large degree of uncertainty. To accurately predict atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in the future, we need to understand natural and human sources of carbon dioxide, as well as the natural "sinks" that remove this gas from our atmosphere.

The rapid buildup of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels is a relatively well understood and predictable source. Other impacts, however, such as forestry and agricultural practices, which can act as either sources or sinks, are far harder to predict with confidence. More importantly, measurements from a global network of greenhouse gas monitoring stations indicate that more than half of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activities is currently being absorbed by the ocean and by plants on land. But the current ground-based carbon dioxide monitoring network does not have the coverage or resolution needed to identify sufficiently the natural sinks responsible for absorbing this carbon dioxide. In addition, the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by natural sinks varies dramatically from year to year, for reasons that are largely unknown. Because the nature, location and processes controlling these natural sinks are not well understood, it is impossible to accurately predict how much carbon dioxide they might absorb in the future as the climate changes. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory aims to help resolve these and other open carbon-cycle questions.

"The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will provide the initial steps in the journey of measuring carbon dioxide from space, and the discoveries will be profound?we'll gather basic information about the distribution of carbon that we wouldn't have been able to do any other way," says Graeme Stephens of Colorado State University, Fort Collins, a co-investigator on the Orbiting Carbon Observatory science team.

Researchers have shown that warming, particularly from greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, is driving Earth's climate toward "tipping points." Those are the points at which temperatures could set in motion processes that are very difficult to reverse. One potential example is the runaway disintegration of Arctic sea ice and of the West Antarctic ice sheet. In this scenario, warmer temperatures melt more ice and create more open water, which absorbs more heat. This, in turn, melts more ice, in a process that feeds upon itself.

Research by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and colleagues suggests that to avoid dangerous tipping points, Earth's atmosphere should be limited to a carbon dioxide concentration of 450 parts per million at the most, and potentially much lower. Today, the level of carbon dioxide is about 385 parts per million, and over the last few decades that number has been rising by about two parts per million per year. But arriving at models that accurately predict how carbon dioxide levels will change in the future depends, in part, on whether researchers can collect enough data to untangle the mysteries of the carbon cycle.

"As human-caused emissions change, what will happen to the carbon budget [the contribution of carbon dioxide's various sources]?" Stephens asked. "There's a gross lack of understanding as to where the re-absorbed carbon is going because it's currently impossible to make global observations to see how carbon dioxide varies on both global and regional scales."

Currently, a sparse network of stations across the globe collects precise measurements of carbon dioxide near Earth's surface, but the number of stations is limited and most are located far away from power plants, automobiles and other sources of carbon dioxide. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will complement the ground-based network by collecting thousands of times as many measurements over the sunlit side of Earth. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite now routinely provides global maps of carbon dioxide at altitudes between 5 and 13 kilometers (3 and 8 miles) high, where it is most efficient as a greenhouse gas. Orbiting Carbon Observatory measurements will complement those from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder because they are much more sensitive to the concentration of carbon dioxide near Earth's surface, where most of it is emitted by sources or absorbed by sinks.

Measurements from ground stations and the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder have already shown that the level of carbon dioxide is more varied throughout the atmosphere than was previously believed. The levels fluctuate with weather and temperature and are influenced by land plants and the ocean. It's the goal of carbon cycle models to explain and ultimately predict the response of this complex system.

"It's like a domino effect," Stephens said. "The climate system is so interconnected, and the carbon dioxide system is an integral part of that system."

A new generation of climate modelers already considers the interactions of carbon between land, ocean and atmosphere. These models predict that the growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide and of global warming will accelerate as Earth's land and ocean show a decreased capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. But with the current scant observations of the carbon system, the magnitude and timing of such model predictions are highly uncertain. The next generation of carbon-climate models will better represent these systems, thanks to more abundant global carbon dioxide data from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory and other future satellite missions. And while the data from these new satellites may not be as precise as data from ground stations, the models will nonetheless improve due to the tremendous volume of data from across the globe and throughout the atmosphere.

Researchers expect the volume of carbon dioxide data to increase dramatically. "This is tremendous," says Inez Fung of the University of California, Berkeley, a co-investigator on the Orbiting Carbon Observatory science team. "There is much horizontal and vertical variation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to sources and sinks and turbulent mixing processes that vary between day and night, from place to place, and from season to season. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory will give scientists a much more complete global picture of how the carbon cycle works."

The observatory will measure the percentage of carbon dioxide present within columns of the atmosphere that span less than 4.1 square kilometers (1.6 square miles) on the surface and extend all the way up to the satellite 705 kilometers (438 miles) above. "This is a major advance over the traditional surface observations, which are sparse and which sample only at fixed heights and mostly near the ground," Fung said.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory information will allow researchers to "see" for the first time carbon dioxide sources and sinks. The information will allow researchers to assess, or "rank," the performance of carbon-climate models and will help to flag areas that need additional study. Researchers also expect the observatory to turn up surprises where little or no carbon dioxide data have been taken, such as over Africa, Eurasia and the open ocean.

"I am extremely excited - I have been working on the carbon cycle for over 25 years and have been hampered by the data scarcity," Fung said. "Christmas is coming."

For more information on the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, see: http://www.nasa.gov/oco .

Stardust Logs A Decade Under The Stars

Saturday, Feb. 7, marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of NASA's well-traveled Stardust spacecraft.

Launched on Feb. 7, 1999, Stardust , covered 3-billion-miles during its first seven years in space before returning the world's first samples from a known comet. Stardust's tennis racket-like, aerogel-lined collector was extended to capture particles hurtling at it at about six times the speed of a rifle bullet, as the spacecraft flew within 240 kilometers (149 miles) of comet Wild 2 in January 2004. The return capsule landed Jan. 15, 2006, in Utah, carrying both interstellar and comet particles, completing the first U.S. space mission to return extraterrestrial material from beyond the orbit of Mars. Two days later the capsule was transported to a curatorial facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

With its prime mission complete, NASA re-designated the Stardust mission as Stardust-NExT. Short for Stardust-New Exploration of Tempel, Stardust-NExT is a low-cost, Discovery Program mission of opportunity that will expand the investigation of comet Tempel 1 initiated by NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft. The extended mission tasks the Stardust spacecraft to fly by the comet Tempel 1 on Feb. 14, 2011. During the flyby, it will obtain high-resolution images of the comet?s coma and nucleus, as well as measurements of the composition, size distribution, and flux of dust emitted into the coma. Mission planners hope Stardust-NExT will provide important new information on how Jupiter-family comets evolve and how they formed 4.6 billion years ago.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages Stardust-NExT for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. Joseph Veverka of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., is the mission's principal investigator. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, manages day-to-day mission operations.

While the Stardust spacecraft is unavailable for public viewing at present (it is more than 13.5 million kilometers, or 8.4 million miles, from Earth), the public can view its sample return capsule. In Jan. 2006, the capsule became the fastest manmade object ever to enter Earth's atmosphere at over 46,400 kilometers per hour (28,800 mph). The capsule is on display at the National Air and Space Museum's Milestones of Flight Gallery in Washington.

To learn more about the mission, visit http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov/ .

NASA Continues Assessment of the Next Shuttle Mission

Because of an ongoing review of the space shuttle's flow control valves, NASA managers are rescheduling meetings next week to assess the launch readiness of shuttle Discovery's STS-119 mission to the International Space Station.

The Space Shuttle Program will hold a meeting Feb. 13 to review data and determine whether to move forward with a flight readiness review on Feb. 18. The official launch date will be set at the readiness review, but for planning purposes launch now is no earlier than Feb. 22.

There are three valves that channel gaseous hydrogen from the shuttle's main engines to the external fuel tank. One of these valves in shuttle Endeavour was found to be damaged after its mission in November. As a precaution, Discovery's three gaseous hydrogen valves were removed, inspected and reinstalled.

For information on the STS-119 mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

Greta Crawford

It’s not an accident that Greta Crawford gives a great first impression.

Her friendly smile and gentle nature welcome employees to the NASA Langley clinic in the morning. In the afternoon, she welcomes the newest members of the center’s family, the babies at the Langley Child Development Center (LCDC).

In the “panda room” of the LCDC, Crawford watched over the babies and said, “I love this room because we see them when they first start to notice things.”

Crawford has two sons, who attend Tabb High School in Yorktown. “It seems like just last week when I was taking them to preschool,” she said.

But she has come a long way from her boys' preschool days – literally.

They have lived in Japan, Germany, Georgia, Alabama, Alaska, Korea and Italy. Crawford’s husband, James, was stationed at Langley Air Force Base, which brought them here. He is retired.

The military life was nothing new to Crawford. Her father was in the Army. Her younger sister and oldest son were born in Japan.

Crawford misses living in Anchorage, Alaska, and she hopes to move back there. “I cried when we had to leave,” she said. “We had to leave wide open spaces and mountains and hiking for hours. We used to have one child in the stroller and one in a baby back pack, and we would hit the trail.”

Both of her sons enjoy music and the arts. As a family, they are involved in the “drama guild” at church. They participate in a play every four months.

Her youngest son, Joshua, wrote the next play in which her family will perform. “It’s about accepting people for who they really are,” Crawford said.

This is a lesson she and husband have emphasized to Joshua and their oldest son, Jordan.

Sons only 19 months apart are often mistaken for twins. And while they did have things in common -- similar looks, a creative side -- they were very much their own persons.

“Jordan and I love to try new foods together,” she said. Joshua and husband James leave the taste tasting to them. “But we all love the cold,” Crawford said.

That doesn’t stop them from visiting Florida and Texas, Crawford’s birthplace, for Christmas and holidays. “Everything really is bigger in Texas,” she said. Her parents still reside in San Antonio.

“I look forward to seeing my sons graduate from college and becoming productive citizens,” she said. “I want them to be free, to enjoy life and, above all, live by the Golden Rule.”

She believes their faith can help lead them to success and security. Crawford cites Romans 12:18, which has utmost importance in her own life: " In as much as possible, live peaceably with all men."

Crawford describes her workdays as “long, pleasant, and at times, challenging.” She really enjoys both of her jobs and the people she interacts with on a daily basis, but her favorite and most rewarding job starts when she arrives home.

The Mystery of the Missing Carbon

A NASA satellite sleuth set to launch this month will soon be hot on the trail of the elusive greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the leading human-produced cause of global warming. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory's mission is to find the vast warehouses of carbon dioxide that are "missing" - hidden in "sinks" around the globe. Finding them will help scientists better predict how our climate will change in the future.

Chip Miller, deputy principal investigator for the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, will explain the mission and answer your questions live on Ustream TV on Feb. 9 at 5 p.m. Pacific: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasajpl . If you are unable to take part in the live chat, you can submit questions in advance to carolina.martinez@jpl.nasa.gov and watch the archived video at a later time.

More about the Orbiting Carbon Observatory is at: http://www.nasa.gov/oco

NASA and Caltech Test Steep-Terrain Rover

Engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and students at the California Institute of Technology have designed and tested a versatile, low-mass robot that can rappel off cliffs, travel nimbly over steep and rocky terrain, and explore deep craters.

This prototype rover, called Axel, might help future robotic spacecraft better explore and investigate foreign worlds such as Mars. On Earth, Axel might assist in search-and-rescue operations.

"Axel extends our ability to explore terrains that we haven't been able to explore in the past, such as deep craters with vertically-sloped promontories," said Axel's principal investigator, Issa A.D. Nesnas, of JPL's robotics and mobility section. "Also, because Axel is relatively low-mass, a mission may carry a number of Axel rovers. That would give us the opportunity to be more aggressive with the terrain we would explore, while keeping the overall risk manageable."

The simple and elegant design of Axel, which can operate both upside down and right side up, uses only three motors: one to control each of its two wheels and a third to control a lever. The lever contains a scoop to gather lunar or planetary material for scientists to study, and it also adjusts the robot's two stereo cameras, which can tilt 360 degrees.

Axel's cylindrical body has computing and wireless communications capabilities and an inertial sensor to operate autonomously. It also sports a tether that Axel can unreel to descend from a larger lander, rover or anchor point. The rover can use different wheel types, from large foldable wheels to inflatable ones, which help the rover tolerate a hard landing and handle rocky terrain.

Nesnas co-leads the project with Joel Burdick, a mechanical and bioengineering professor at Caltech, who supervises a handful of Caltech graduate and undergraduate students working on the rover system. Last fall, the JPL-Caltech team demonstrated Axel at the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, which showcased NASA for the agency's 50th anniversary.

"Collaboration with Caltech has been key to the success of this project," Nesnas said. "The students contributed significantly to the design of the tethered Axel. Their creative work enabled us to analyze, design and build new wheels, sampling tools and software. The students also played a key role in field-testing this robot. Without them, we would not have been able to accomplish such goals, given our limited resources."

JPL began developing Axel in 1999, in partnership with Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., and Arkansas Tech University, Russellville, Ark. The Axel project was funded through NASA's Exploration System Mission Directorate.? Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information on Axel is at:
http://www-robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/systems/system.cfm?System=16 and at http://robotics.caltech.edu/~pablo/axel/home.html .

NASA Tests Heat Shield Materials

NASA's new spacecraft Orion will face extreme conditions throughout its voyage to the moon and the journey home. On the blistering return through Earth's atmosphere, Orion will make good use of atmospheric drag to decelerate from more than 25,000 miles per hour (40,233 kph) but, in the process, encounter temperatures as high as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,760 degrees Celsius). And while orbiting the moon and Earth, temperatures can fluctuate up to 400 F (222 C).

To protect Orion and its crew from such severe conditions, NASA's Constellation Program is developing a new thermal protection system, an effort led by NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

"In concept, we're doing something very similar to Apollo," said Jeff Jones, Thermal Protection Systems project manager at NASA's Langley Research Center, in Hampton, Va., one of the centers partnering with Ames. "It looks much like it, but once you get past the basic concept, it's very different. With this much larger spacecraft, the challenge is also much greater."

The base of Orion's heat shield will endure the most heat and will erode away or "ablate" in a controlled fashion -- transporting heat away during the descent through the atmosphere. NASA is considering two ablative materials for the heat shield, AVCOAT and PICA, and testing on the materials is in progress.

Both materials proved successful in previous missions to space. AVCOAT, which is manufactured directly onto the spacecraft and has an embedded honeycomb-like material, was used for the original Apollo capsules. PICA, or Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator, which is manufactured in blocks and attached to the vehicle after fabrication, was used on Stardust, NASA's first unmanned space mission dedicated solely to exploring a comet.

Since AVCOAT hasn't been used in nearly 40 years, and PICA has never been used on a manned mission, engineers at Langley and Ames are performing rigorous testing on both candidate materials.

"Langley's had a long history of working with aircraft as well as spacecraft in [structural design and analysis testing], and we've always had a very strong research capability in structures and materials as well," Jones said.

Engineers at Langley are using their research capability by conducting a number of tests on PICA and AVCOAT to investigate the thermal and structural behavior of the ablators attached to a honeycomb backing structure. Testing will ensure the materials will function properly in harsh conditions during launch and while orbiting the moon or Earth.

Tests include flexural tests, which measure the elasticity and failure mode of the specimens; modal tests, which are frequency response tests that verify the integrity of the design; vibration and acoustic tests, which simulate Orion launch conditions the thermal protection system will endure; transient thermal tests, which explore the range of temperatures the ablators could experience; and environmental chamber tests, which study the materials in the extreme temperatures of space.

"The whole series of tests gives us a better understanding of how the materials will perform," said Chris Lang, lead test engineer for the environmental chamber test at Langley.

"For example, with the environmental chamber test we're performing here at Langley, we're simulating orbit conditions," Lang said. When circling the Earth, you're going into the sun and out of the sun, and when in lunar orbit, it's the same thing -- as you're circling the planet, you're in the sun for part of the time and out of the sun for part of the time. In the vacuum of space, these fluctuations cause extreme temperature variations."

The test conditions simulate the extreme environment Orion will encounter. During Earth and lunar orbit, Orion could face temperatures as high as 250 F (121 C) and as low as -150 F (-101 C), a temperature difference of up to 400 F (222 C). Lang and his team are using data from the tests to investigate the performance and stability of materials in the simulated conditions of space.

During a "cold test," samples of the ablative materials are secured in an environmental chamber that uses liquid nitrogen to reach a temperature of -150 F (-101 C). The specimens endure the intense cold for no less than three hours, sometimes longer.

With a "hot test" on the other hand, the materials withstand temperatures up to 250 F (121° C) for those three hours.

"When heated up or cooled off, the different materials are going to grow and contract by different amounts," Lang said. "That will cause thermal stresses and bending, and we want to understand the behavior and make sure the materials can survive in those conditions -- that they won't crack or come apart."

Currently, the leading candidate material is AVCOAT with PICA as the alternate. The final decision will be made in March of 2009.

"AVCOAT was the material that they used for the Apollo heat shield, so obviously they want to look at that now because it has flown, and it worked," Lang said.

NASA's field centers are working together to ensure the best decision is made concerning the materials so Orion can complete the journey home successfully.

"The project requires interaction between a lot of different centers and people to make it all come together," Jones said.

Because of that interaction and NASA's research, Orion will safely protect its crew from the extreme temperatures of spaceflight.

NASA and Google Launch Virtual Exploration of Mars

Imagine traveling the surface of the Red Planet, observing millennia-old canyons or viewing Martian dust devils first hand. Now, you can with the advent of a new Mars mode in Google Earth that brings to everyone's desktop a high-resolution, three-dimensional view of the Mars.

Besides providing a three-dimensional view of Mars that will aid public understanding of Mars science, the new mode, Google Mars 3D, also gives researchers a platform for sharing data similar to what Google Earth provides for Earth scientists.

The mode enables users to fly virtually through enormous canyons and scale huge mountains on Mars, higher than any found on Earth.

Users also can explore the Red Planet through the eyes of the Mars rovers and other Mars missions, providing a unique perspective of the entire planet.

Users can see some of the latest satellite imagery from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and other probes orbiting the Red Planet, as well as learn about new discoveries and explore indexes of available Mars imagery. The new Mars mode also allows users to add their own 3-D content to the Mars map to share with the world.

"Educators, planetary scientists and citizen scientists alike can use this platform to produce their own maps and tours for the new Google Mars 3D," said Matt Hancher, a research scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "This really opens up a whole new world of participatory space exploration."

NASA SPACE STATION ATLANTIS TO MOVE TO LAUNCH PAD

NASA Space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to roll out to Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Space Station Kennedy Space Center on Saturday, Aug. 30. Atlantis is targeted to lift off Oct. 8 to repair the NASA's Space Station Hubble Space Telescope.

The first motion of the NASA's Space Station shuttle out of Kennedy's Space Station Vehicle Assembly Building is scheduled for 12:01 a.m. EDT. The fully assembled space shuttle, consisting of the orbiter, external tank and twin solid Space Station rocket boosters, was mounted on a mobile launcher platform and will be delivered to the pad atop a crawler-transporter. The Space Station crawler will travel slower than 1 mph during the 3.4-mile journey. The process is expected to take approximately six hours.

NASA's Space Station Repairs to Launch Pad 39A's flame trench wall were completed Aug. 5 after crews installed a steel grid structure and covered it in a heat-resistant material. The pad's north flame trench was damaged when bricks tore away from the wall during the May 31 launch of NASA's Space Station space shuttle Discovery.

NASA's Space Station Television will provide live coverage of Atlantis' move to the launch pad beginning at 6:30 a.m. Video highlights of the rolloutwill air on NASA Space Station TV Video File.

Space Station Media are invited to a photo opportunity of roll out and an interview availability with Space Station Atlantis Flow Director Angie Brewer at 8 a.m. Saturday. Dates and times of this event are subject to change. Space Station Updates are available by calling 321-867-2525.

NASA's Space Station Reporters must arrive at NASA's Space Station Kennedy's news center by 6 a.m. Saturday for transportation to the viewing area. Foreign news media accreditation for this event has closed. Foreign media with credentials must arrive at the Pass and I-D Building on State Road 3 by 6 a.m. for transportation to the news center. U.S. media without permanent NASA's Space Station Kennedy Space Center credentials must apply for accreditation online by 4 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 27, at:

https://media.ksc.nasa.gov

Badges must be picked up by 4 p.m. Friday, Aug. 29, at the new NASA's Space Station Kennedy Badging Office on State Road 405, west of Gate 3 (just past the Kennedy Visitor's Complex).

During its 11-day Space Station mission that includes five spacewalks, the Space Station STS-125's crew of Space Station seven astronauts will install two new instruments in NASA's Space Station Hubble, as well as replace the Fine Guidance Sensor. The result will be six working, complementary Space Station science instruments with capabilities beyond those now available, and an extended operational lifespan of the telescope through at least 2013.

Space Station Atlantis will be commanded by Scott Altman. Gregory C. Johnson will be pilot. NASA's Space Station Mission Specialists will be John Grunsfeld, Mike Massimino, Megan McArthur, Andrew Feustel and Michael Good.

For NASA Space Station TV downlink information, schedules and links to streaming video, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more information about the NASA's Space Station STS-125 mission and crew, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

NOAA-N Prime Weather Satellite Set for Wednesday Launch

Follow the final hours of the countdown beginning at 3 a.m. EST through the NASA Launch Blog and NASA TV.

Launch is Scrubbed
Today's launch of the NOAA-N Prime spacecraft has been scrubbed for today. Please stand by for details.

The countdown and launch are managed by the NASA Launch Services Program office at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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The NOAA-N Prime Mission

The NOAA-N Prime satellite, built for NASA by Lockheed Martin, will improve weather forecasting and monitor environmental events around the world. NOAA-N Prime is the fifth and last in the current series of five polar-orbiting satellites with improved imaging and sounding capabilities.

The satellite will collect meteorological data and transmit the information to NOAA's Satellite and Information Service, which processes the data for input to the National Weather Service for its long-range weather and climate forecasts. Forecasters worldwide also will be able to access the satellite's images and data.

NOAA-N Prime has sensors that will be used in the Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking System to monitor for distress signals around the world.
> View NOAA N-Prime introduction video

STS-119 Latest News

Flight Readiness Review

During a review of space shuttle Discovery's readiness for flight, NASA managers decided Tuesday to plan a launch no earlier than Feb. 19. The new planning date is pending additional analysis and particle impact testing associated with a flow control valve in the shuttle's main engines. Discovery's STS-119 mission to the International Space Station originally had been targeted for Feb. 12. The valve is one of three that channels gaseous hydrogen from the engines to the external fuel tank. One of these valves in shuttle Endeavour was found to be damaged after its mission in November.

As a precaution, Discovery's valves were removed, inspected and reinstalled. The Space Shuttle Program will convene a meeting on Feb. 10 to assess the analysis. On Feb. 12, NASA managers and contractors will continue the flight readiness review, which began Tuesday, to address the flow control valve issue and to select an official launch date.

Space Shuttle Mission: STS-119

Space shuttle Discovery's STS-119 crew is set to fly the S6 truss segment and install the final set of power-generating solar arrays to the International Space Station.

The S6 truss, with its set of large U.S. solar arrays, will complete the backbone of the station and provide one-fourth of the total power needed to support a crew of six.

The two solar array wings each have 115-foot-long arrays, for a total wing span of 240 feet. They will generate 66 kilowatts of electricity -- enough to provide about 30 2,800-square-foot homes with power.

Commander Lee Archambault will lead Discovery's crew of seven, along with Pilot Tony Antonelli, and Mission Specialists Joseph Acaba, John Phillips, Steve Swanson, Richard Arnold and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata.

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What is the Flight Readiness Review?

Approximately two weeks prior to the opening of the launch window for each space shuttle, the Shuttle Mission Management Team meets at Kennedy Space Center for a thorough review of the next mission. Also in attendance are other top-level NASA officials, Space Shuttle Program managers, engineers and contractors. The group conducts a comprehensive evaluation of all activities and elements necessary for the safe and successful performance of shuttle mission operations -- from the prelaunch phase through post-landing. They also examine the readiness of the space shuttle, flight crew and payloads to determine if everything is set to proceed with launch.

At the conclusion of the review, the chairman of the Mission Management Team conducts a poll of the team members. If there are no unresolved issues, the members then sign a "Certification of Flight Readiness" to verify that all flight preparation processes to that date have been successfully completed. The official launch date is then set and announced, and shuttle processing continues toward the projected liftoff date.

Wakata will replace Expedition 18 Flight Engineer Sandra Magnus, who will return to Earth with the STS-119 crew. Wakata will serve as a flight engineer for Expeditions 18 and 19, and return to Earth with the STS-127 crew.

Discovery's STS-119 mission to the International Space Station is targeted to lift off no earlier than Feb. 19.

Additional Resources
› STS-119 Mission Summary (562 Kb PDF)
› STS-119 Press Kit (4.9 Mb PDF)

Hubble's Next Discovery -- You Decide

Put yourself behind the controls of modern astronomy's most famous telescope. Be a part of history and join astronomy fans around the globe in casting a vote for the next object the Hubble Space Telescope will view. Choose from a selection of celestial views never seen before by Hubble, and earn a chance to enter a drawing for 100 copies of the winning picture.

To participate in the contest, go to HubbleSite's You Decide page. Vote by March 1, 2009.

Educators can visit Amazing Space for a classroom collage activity that engages students in the wonders of the universe.

This event is part of the worldwide International Year of Astronomy (IYA), celebrating the 400th anniversary of the astronomer Galileo directing his telescope toward the night sky. The winning image will be released during the IYA's 100 Hours of Astronomy, an event geared toward encouraging as many people as possible to experience the night sky.

Mars Exploration Rover Mission Status Report

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit resumed driving Saturday after engineers gained confidence from diagnostic activities earlier in the week evaluating how well the rover senses its orientation.

Spirit drove about 30 centimeters (1 foot) Saturday, during the 1,806th Martian day, or sol, of what was originally planned as a 90-day mission. The rover team had commanded a longer drive, but Spirit stopped short after its right-front wheel, which no longer turns, struck a partially buried rock. The rover drivers prepared commands Monday for the next drive in a slightly different direction to get around that rock.

A diagnostic test on Sol 1805 provided an evaluation of how accurately Spirt's accelerometers sense the rover's orientation or attitude. The testing was a follow-up to Spirit's mistaken calculation of where to expect to see the sun on Sol 1802. The sol 1805 results indicate the accelerometers may have a bias of about 3 degrees. This would explain why Spirit pointed a camera about three degrees away from the sun's actual position on Sol 1802. However, the Sol 1805 test also showed that Spirit's gyroscopes are operating properly, which convinced engineers that the rover could safely resume driving. Only the gyroscopes are used for orientation information during driving.

Diagnostic tests last week also checked possible explanations for behavior for one period of activity on Spirit's Sol 1800, when the rover did not save information into its non-volatile flash memory, so the information was lost when the rover next powered down.

"We may not find any data that will explain what happened on Sol 1800, but there's no evidence that whatever happened then has recurred on subsequent sols," said Jacob Matijevic of the rover engineering team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena. One possibility is that a cosmic-ray hit could have temporarily put Spirit temporarily into a mode that disables use of the flash memory. The team intentionally used that mode -- relying only on volatile random-access memory -- during recovery from a memory problem five years ago on Spirit.

Spirit is just north of a low plateau called "Home Plate." It spent 2008 on a north-facing slope on the edge of Home Plate so that its solar panels stayed tilted toward the winter sun for maximum electrical output.

Spirit drove down off Home Plate on Jan. 6, 2009. It subsequently checked whether a patch of nearby soil, called "Stapledon," had a high concentration of silica, like a silica-rich patch of soil Spirit discovered east of Home Plate in 2007. The earlier discovery was interpreted as evidence left by a hot-spring or steam-vent environment. Examination with Spirit's alpha particle X-ray spectrometer confirmed silica at Stapledon. This indicates that the environment that deposited the silica was not limited to the location found earlier.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, landed on Mars in January 2004 and have operated 20 times longer than their original prime missions.