NASA's Fermi Finds Gamma-ray Galaxy Surprises

Back in June 1991, just before the launch of NASA's Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, astronomers knew of gamma rays from exactly one galaxy beyond our own. To their surprise and delight, the satellite captured similar emissions from dozens of other galaxies. Now its successor, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, is filling in the picture with new finds of its own.

"Compton showed us that two classes of active galaxies emitted gamma rays -- blazars and radio galaxies," said Luigi Foschini at Brera Observatory of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Merate, Italy. "With Fermi, we've found a third -- and opened a new window in the field."

In the Beam

Active galaxies are those with unusually bright centers that show evidence of particle acceleration to speeds approaching that of light itself. In 1943, astronomer Carl Seyfert described the first two types of active galaxy based on the width of spectral lines, a tell-tale sign of rapid gas motion in their cores. Today, astronomers recognize many additional classes, but they now believe these types represent the same essential phenomenon seen at different viewing angles.

At the center of each active galaxy sits a feeding black hole weighing upwards of a million times the sun's mass. Through processes not yet understood, some of the matter headed for the black hole blasts outward in fast, oppositely directed particle jets. For the most luminous active-galaxy classes -- blazars -- astronomers are looking right down the particle beam.

Using Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT), Foschini and his colleagues detected gamma rays from a Seyfert 1 galaxy cataloged as PMN J0948+0022, which lies 5.5 billion light-years away in the constellation Sextans. Splitting the light from this source into its component colors shows a spectrum with narrow lines, which indicates slower gas motions and argues against the presence of particle jet.

"But, unlike ninety percent of narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies, PMN J0948 also produces strong and variable radio emission," said Gino Tosti, who leads the Fermi LAT science group studying active galaxies at the University and National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Perugia, Italy. "This suggested the galaxy was indeed producing such a jet."

"The gamma rays seen by Fermi's LAT seal the deal," said team member Gabriele Ghisellini, a theorist at Brera Observatory. "They confirm the existence of particle acceleration near the speed of light in these types of galaxies." The findings will appear in the July 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

"We are sifting through Fermi LAT data for gamma rays from more sources of this type," Foschini said. "And we've begun a multiwavelength campaign to monitor PMN J0948 across the spectrum, from radio to gamma rays."

Flare Up

Another case where Fermi sees something new involves NGC 1275, a massive Seyfert galaxy much closer to home. Also known as Perseus A, one of the sky's loudest radio sources, NGC 1275 lies at the center of the Perseus cluster of galaxies about 225 million light-years away.

The Compton observatory's high-energy EGRET instrument never detected gamma rays from NGC 1275, although it was detected by another instrument sensitive to lower-energy gamma rays. But Fermi's LAT clearly shows the galaxy to be a gamma-ray source at the higher energies for which EGRET was designed. "Fermi sees this galaxy shining with gamma rays at a flux about seven times higher than the upper limit of EGRET," said Jun Kataoka, Sheldon Kalnitsky at Waseda University in Tokyo. "If NGC 1275 had been this bright when EGRET was operating, it would have been seen."

This change in the galaxy's output suggests that its particle beam was either inactive or much weaker a decade ago. Such changes clue astronomers into the size of the emitting region. "The gamma rays in NGC 1275 must arise from a source no more than two light-years across," said Teddy Cheung at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "That means we're seeing radiation from the heart of the galaxy -- near its black hole -- as opposed to emission by hot gas throughout the cluster."

The Fermi team plans to monitor the galaxy to watch for further changes. The results of the study will appear in the July 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

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 U.S.

Related Links:

> Italian National Institute for Astrophysics release
> Continent-sized Radio Telescope Takes Close-ups of Fermi Active Galaxies
> NASA's Fermi Mission, Namibia's HESS Telescopes Explore a Blazar
> Active Galaxies Flare and Fade in Fermi Telescope All-Sky Movie
> Compton Gamma Ray Observatory

Aviation Safety Takes Center Stage

Imagine an event where Orville Wright, along with the first Americans in space and the first humans on the moon, are taking center stage. They are among the decades of aviation pioneers who have received the Robert J. Collier Trophy, including NASA.

The 2008 Collier Trophy honors the Commercial Aviation Safety Team, or CAST, a unique industry and government partnership established in 1997 with the goal of reducing the U.S. commercial aviation fatal accident rate by 80 percent in 10 years. NASA and other members of the CAST team received the award from the National Aeronautic Association before a packed house of aviation notables at a hotel near Washington.

CAST represents thousands of people in public agencies and private industry "who have worked diligently since 1997 to produce the safest commercial aviation system in the world," according to the Collier Trophy nomination submitted by the Air Transport Association.

The nomination notes the partnership's original goal "was deemed as quite a stretch” but the year 2008 topped the previous year as the safest year in commercial aviation history. The risk in fatal commercial accidents was down 83 percent from a decade earlier.

CAST is a who's who of aviation organizations including NASA, the Federal Aviation Administration, the European Aviation Safety Authority, the Transport Canada Civil Aviation, the U.S. Department of Defense, the Air Line Pilots Association, the Allied Pilots Association, the International Federation of Air Line Pilots' Associations, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the Aerospace Industries Association of America Inc., Airbus, the Air Transport Association of America Inc., The Boeing Company, the Flight Safety Foundation, GE Aviation (representing all engine manufacturers), and the Regional Airline Association.

NASA's Aviation Safety Program has been a part of CAST since the team was established. Executive Committee membership includes the director of the Aviation Safety Program in NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate.

"I'm very pleased that the Commercial Aviation Safety Team has been selected for this year's Collier Trophy," said the current Aviation Safety Program director, Amy Pritchett. "NASA's Aviation Safety Program has been instrumental in CAST over its lifetime."

Researchers at four NASA field installations including Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.; Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.; Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif.; and Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, have worked with CAST.

They and other members of CAST analyzed data from some 500 accidents and thousands of safety incidents around the world. The idea was to use that information to come up with the most critical safety technologies, systems and procedures to reduce accident risk and ultimately save lives.

"NASA used some of its research and development dollars to develop tools and data mining capability," said George Finelli, the head of NASA's Aviation Safety Program from 2002 to 2006 and now the director of the Center Operations Directorate at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. "Those tools are now part of the Federal Aviation Administration's safety monitoring system. We tried to align our project activities as much as possible with the major CAST goals and areas of investigation, like runway incursion and aircraft icing."

"I think it's incredible that the National Aeronautic Association has recognized the CAST's efforts," added Finelli. "One of the things that made the team unique is that member organizations, including airlines, pilots and manufacturers, were volunteering to change what they did, instead of having to follow a mandate."

Mike Lewis, NASA’s first Aviation Safety Program manager, involved the agency in CAST. "Our program was also data-driven and we wanted to make sure our research and technology development priorities were in line with those of other government agencies and industry,” Lewis said.

This is the second year in a row that NASA shared the Collier Trophy. The National Aeronautics Association awarded the 2007 trophy to a team that included NASA's Langley and Ames research centers for their work on Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B, a system that allows aircraft to be tracked by satellite rather than radar.

Visit the CAST Web site →

'Ghost' Remains After Black Hole Eruption

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a cosmic "ghost" lurking around a distant supermassive black hole. This is the first detection of such a high-energy apparition, and scientists think it is evidence of a huge eruption produced by the black hole.

This discovery presents astronomers with a valuable opportunity to observe phenomena that occurred when the Universe was very young. The X-ray ghost, so-called because a diffuse X-ray source has remained after other radiation from the outburst has died away, is in the Chandra Deep Field-North, one of the deepest X-ray images ever taken. The source, a.k.a. HDF 130, is over 10 billion light years away and existed at a time 3 billion years after the Big Bang, when galaxies and black holes were forming at a high rate.

"We'd seen this fuzzy object a few years ago, but didn't realize until now that we were seeing a ghost," said Andy Fabian of the Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. "It's not out there to haunt us, rather it's telling us something -- in this case what was happening in this galaxy billions of year ago."

Fabian and colleagues think the X-ray glow from HDF 130 is evidence for a powerful outburst from its central black hole in the form of jets of energetic particles traveling at almost the speed of light.

When the eruption was ongoing, it produced prodigious amounts of radio and X-radiation, but after several million years, the radio signal faded from view as the electrons radiated away their energy.

However, less energetic electrons can still produce X-rays by interacting with the pervasive sea of photons remaining from the Big Bang -- the cosmic background radiation. Collisions between these electrons and the background photons can impart enough energy to the photons to boost them into the X-ray energy band. This process produces an extended X-ray source that lasts for another 30 million years or so.

"This ghost tells us about the black hole's eruption long after it has died," said co-author Scott Chapman, also of Cambridge University. "This means we don't have to catch the black holes in the act to witness the big impact they have."

This is the first X-ray ghost ever seen after the demise of radio-bright jets. Astronomers have observed extensive X-ray emission with a similar origin, but only from galaxies with radio emission on large scales, signifying continued eruptions. In HDF 130, only a point source is detected in radio images, coinciding with the massive elliptical galaxy seen in its optical image. This radio source indicates the presence of a growing supermassive black hole.

"This result hints that the X-ray sky should be littered with such ghosts," said co-author Caitlin Casey, also of Cambridge, "especially if black hole eruptions are as common as we think they are in the early Universe."

The power contained in the black hole eruption was likely to be considerable, equivalent to about a billion supernovas. The energy is dumped into the surroundings and transports and heats the gas.

"Even after the ghost disappears, most of the energy from the black hole's eruption remains," said Fabian. "Because they're so powerful, these eruptions can have profound effects lasting for billions of years."

The details of Chandra's data of HDF 130 helped secure its true nature. For example, in X-rays, HDF 130 has a cigar-like shape that extends for some 2.2 million light years. The linear shape of the X-ray source is consistent with the shape of radio jets and not with that of a galaxy cluster, which is expected to be circular. The energy distribution of the X-rays is also consistent with the interpretation of an X-ray ghost.

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.

More information, including images and other multimedia, can be found at:

http://chandra.harvard.edu

Suzaku Snaps First Complete X-ray View of a Galaxy Cluster

The joint Japan-U.S. Suzaku mission is providing new insight into how assemblages of thousands of galaxies pull themselves together. For the first time, Suzaku has detected X-ray-emitting gas at a cluster's outskirts, where a billion-year plunge to the center begins.

"These Suzaku observations are exciting because we can finally see how these structures, the largest bound objects in the universe, grow even more massive," said Matt George, the study's lead author at the University of California, Berkeley.

The team trained Suzaku's X-ray telescopes on the cluster PKS 0745-191, which lies 1.3 billion light-years away in the southern constellation Puppis. Between May 11 and 14, 2007, Suzaku acquired five images of the million-degree gas that permeates the cluster.

By looking at a cluster in X-rays, astronomers can measure the temperature and density of the gas, which provides clues about the gas pressure and total mass of the cluster. Astronomers expect that the gas in the inner part of a galaxy cluster has settled into a "relaxed" state in equilibrium with the cluster's gravity. This means that the hottest, densest gas lies near the cluster's center, and temperatures and densities steadily decline at greater distances.

In the cluster's outer regions, though, the gas is no longer in an orderly state because matter is still falling inward. "Clusters are the most massive, relaxed objects in the universe, and they are continuing to form now," said team member Andy Fabian at the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy in the UK. The distance where order turns to chaos is referred to as the cluster's "virial radius."

For the first time, this study shows the X-ray emission and gas density and temperature out to -- and even beyond -- the virial radius, where the cluster continues to form. "It gives us the first complete X-ray view of a cluster of galaxies," Fabian said.

In PKS 0745-191, the gas temperature peaks at 164 million degrees Fahrenheit (91 million C) about 1.1 million light-years from the cluster's center. Then, the temperature declines smoothly with distance, dropping to 45 million F (25 million C) more than 5.6 million light-years from the center. The findings appear in the May 11 issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

To discern the cluster's outermost X-ray emission requires detectors with exceptionally low background noise. Suzaku's advanced X-ray detectors, coupled with a low-altitude orbit, give the observatory much lower background noise than other X-ray satellites. The low orbit means that Suzaku is largely protected by Earth's magnetic field, which deflects energetic particles from the sun and beyond.

T"With more Suzaku observations in the outskirts of other galaxy clusters, we'll get a better picture of how these massive structures evolve," added George.

Suzaku ("red bird of the south") was launched on July 10, 2005. The observatory was developed at the Japanese Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS), which is part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), in collaboration with NASA and other Japanese and U.S. institutions.

Planet-Hunting Method Succeeds at Last

A long-proposed tool for hunting planets has netted its first catch -- a Jupiter-like planet orbiting one of the smallest stars known.

The technique, called astrometry, was first attempted 50 years ago to search for planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets. It involves measuring the precise motions of a star on the sky as an unseen planet tugs the star back and forth. But the method requires very precise measurements over long periods of time, and until now, has failed to turn up any exoplanets.

A team of two astronomers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has, for the past 12 years, been mounting an astrometry instrument to a telescope at the Palomar Observatory near San Diego. After careful, intermittent observations of 30 stars, the team has identified a new exoplanet around one of them -- the first ever to be discovered around a star using astrometry.

"This method is optimal for finding solar-system configurations like ours that might harbor other Earths," said astronomer Steven Pravdo of JPL, lead author of a study about the results to be published in the Astrophysical Journal. "We found a Jupiter-like planet at around the same relative place as our Jupiter, only around a much smaller star. It's possible this star also has inner rocky planets. And since more than seven out of 10 stars are small like this one, this could mean planets are more common than we thought."

The finding confirms that astrometry could be a powerful planet-hunting technique for both ground- and space-based telescopes. For example, a similar technique would be used by SIM Lite, a NASA concept for a space-based mission that is currently being explored.

The newfound exoplanet, called VB 10b, is about 20 light-years away in the constellation Aquila. It is a gas giant, with a mass six times that of Jupiter's, and an orbit far enough away from its star to be labeled a "cold Jupiter" similar to our own. In reality, the planet's own internal heat would give it an Earth-like temperature.

The planet's star, called VB 10, is tiny. It is what's known as an M-dwarf and is only one-twelfth the mass of our sun, just barely big enough to fuse atoms at its core and shine with starlight. For years, VB 10 was the smallest star known -- now it has a new title: the smallest star known to host a planet. In fact, though the star is more massive than the newfound planet, the two bodies would have a similar girth.

Because the star is so small, its planetary system would be a miniature, scaled-down version of our own. For example, VB 10b, though considered a cold Jupiter, is located about as far from its star as Mercury is from the sun. Any rocky Earth-size planets that might happen to be in the neighborhood would lie even closer in.

"Some other exoplanets around larger M-dwarf stars are also similar to our Jupiter, making the stars fertile ground for future Earth searches," said Stuart Shaklan, Pravdo's co-author and the SIM Lite instrument scientist at JPL. "Astrometry is best suited to find cold Jupiters around all kinds of stars, and thus to find more planetary systems arranged like our home."

Two to six times a year, for the past 12 years, Pravdo and Shaklan have bolted their Stellar Planet Survey instrument onto Palomar's five-meter Hale telescope to search for planets. The instrument, which has a 16-megapixel charge-coupled device, or CCD, can detect very minute changes in the positions of stars. The VB 10b planet, for instance, causes its star to wobble a small fraction of a degree. Detecting this wobble is equivalent to measuring the width of a human hair from about three kilometers away.

Other ground-based planet-hunting techniques in wide use include radial velocity and the transit method. Like astrometry, radial velocity detects the wobble of a star, but it measures Doppler shifts in the star's light caused by motion toward and away from us. The transit method looks for dips in a star's brightness as orbiting planets pass by and block the light. NASA's space-based Kepler mission, which began searching for planets on May 12, will use the transit method to look for Earth-like worlds around stars similar to the sun.

"This is an exciting discovery because it shows that planets can be found around extremely light-weight stars," said Wesley Traub, the chief scientist for NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program at JPL. "This is a hint that nature likes to form planets, even around stars very different from the sun."

JPL is a partner with the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in the Palomar Observatory. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information about exoplanets and NASA's planet-finding program is at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov. More information about the Palomar Observatory is at http://www.astro.caltech.edu/palomar/ .

Magnetic Tremors Pinpoint the Impact Epicenter of Earth bound Space Storms

Using data from NASA's THEMIS mission, a team of University of Alberta researchers has pinpointed the impact epicenter of an earthbound space storm as it crashes into the atmosphere, and given an advance warning of its arrival.

The team's study reveals that magnetic blast waves can be used to pinpoint and predict the location where space storms dissipate their massive amounts of energy. These storms can dump the equivalent of 50 gigawatts of power, or the output of 10 of the world's largest power stations, into Earth's atmosphere.

The energy that drives space storms originates on the sun. The stream of electrically charged particles in the solar wind carries this energy toward Earth. The solar wind interacts with Earth's magnetic field. Scientists call the process that begins with Earth's magnetic field capturing energy and ends with its release into the atmosphere a geomagnetic substorm.

"Substorm onset occurs when Earth's magnetic field suddenly and dramatically releases energy previously captured by the solar wind," said David Sibeck, project scientist for the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions During Substorms (THEMIS) mission at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Physicists Jonathan Rae and Ian Mann lead the University of Alberta research team that recently located a substorm's epicenter of the impact. The team uses ground-based observatories spread across northern Canada and the five satellites of the THEMIS mission to detect magnetic disturbances as storms crash into the atmosphere. Using a technique the researchers call "space seismology," they look for the eye of the storm hundreds of thousands of miles above Earth.

"We see the benevolent side of space storms in the form of the Northern Lights," said Mann. "When electrically charged particles speed toward Earth and buffet the atmosphere, the result is often a dancing, shimmering light over the polar region." But there is also a hazardous side. Earth's atmosphere protects us from the damaging direct effects of the radiation from space storms, but in space there is nowhere to hide. High-energy, electrically charged particles released by space storms can damage spacecraft. On Earth, disturbances caused by the particles and the electrical currents they carry can interrupt radio communications and global positioning system (GPS) navigation, and damage electric power grids.

Rae and Mann's team has also determined that the magnetic tremors show that the space storm impact into the atmosphere has a unique epicenter, with the eye of the storm located in space beyond the low-Earth orbits of most communication satellites.

Guided by Earth's magnetic field, the magnetic tremors rocket through space toward Earth. These geomagnetic substorms trigger magnetic sensors on the ground as they impact the atmosphere U.S. Department of Agriculture. The effects of these storms, and the most spectacular displays of the Northern Lights, follow a few minutes later.

The objective of NASA's pioneering multi-spacecraft THEMIS mission is to determine what causes geomagnetic substorms. In addition to a well-instrumented fleet of five spacecraft, THEMIS operates a network of ground observatories stretching across Canada and the United States to place the spacecraft observations in their global context. All night long, every night, the observatories take 3-second time resolution snapshots of the aurora and measure corresponding variations in Earth's magnetic field strength and direction every half second.

An analysis of the auroral movies and magnetic variations by Dr. Jonathan Rae from the University of Alberta pinpointed just when and where one substorm explosively released its magnetic energy. "Undulating auroral features and ripples in Earth's magnetic field began at the same time and propagated away from Sanikulaq, Nunavut, Canada at speeds on the order of 60,000 miles per hour, much like the blast wave from a gigantic explosion," said Sibeck. Dr. Rae and his team presented the results on May 25 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Toronto.

Probing the eye of a space storm and recognizing the advance warning signs are crucial for researchers trying to understand and predict space weather. Key questions about when and how space storms start are still challenging researchers on the THEMIS team. Like forecasters on Earth who predict severe weather, the University of Alberta researchers are using their "space seismology" technique to investigate methods to forecast space storms.

THEMIS is a NASA-funded mission and involves scientists from Canada, the United States, and Europe. Current Canadian activity is funded by the Canadian Space Agency.

Mission Accomplished: Leaving Hubble Better Than Ever

Take one space shuttle, seven highly trained astronauts, tons of equipment, and one legendary orbiting telescope and you have the 5.3 million-mile odyssey that was the final servicing mission for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

After months of training and a seven-month postponement, the STS-125 crew's mission got under way with an on-time launch into a brilliant-blue Florida sky. The May 11, 2009, liftoff of space shuttle Atlantis took place at 2:01 p.m. EDT from Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. As if to say, "Come on up!" the 19-year-old Hubble was passing directly over Kennedy at the time of the launch. The mission ended later than planned at the backup landing site, Edwards Air Force Base in California. Lingering tropical rain in Florida produced three consecutive days of wave-offs at Kennedy before Atlantis made an 11:39 a.m. EDT touchdown at Edwards on May 24.

Veteran astronaut Scott Altman commanded this final space shuttle mission to Hubble, with Gregory C. Johnson as pilot. Mission specialists included veteran spacewalkers John Grunsfeld and Mike Massimino, and first-time space fliers Andrew Feustel, Michael Good and Megan McArthur, who served as flight engineer.

The tasks ahead of the crew were monumental: conduct spacewalks on five consecutive days that would leave the telescope upgraded and sending back even more spectacular images well into the next decade.

To mitigate the risk to the crew should Atlantis sustain damage on ascent or during the mission, space shuttle Endeavour was stationed at Kennedy's Launch Pad 39B as a standby rescue vehicle. A unique risk was the orbit in which Hubble resides. It contains a higher level of debris that potentially could have struck Atlantis during the mission. Another factor was the lack of "safe haven" normally provided by the International Space Station on other missions.

Both before and after the capture and servicing of Hubble, the astronauts conducted careful inspections of Atlantis' exterior using the shuttle's 50-foot-long orbiter boom sensor system attached to its 49-foot-long robotic arm. No significant damage from either launch or the days in space was found. Once mission managers gave Atlantis a clean bill of health, Endeavour was released from its standby duties.

The heart of the servicing mission -- the capture of Hubble, five spacewalks and release of the refurbished telescope -- spanned flight days three through nine. By the end of the last spacewalk, all the mission objectives to improve Hubble's view of the universe and extend its life had been accomplished.

Two days after launch, Atlantis caught up to Hubble 350 miles above Earth. It was up to Altman and Johnson to bring the shuttle close enough to the telescope so that McArthur could use the robotic arm to capture it and gently place it on a rotating work stand in the payload bay. From there, the pairs of spacewalkers would conduct their work.

Both Grunsfeld and Massimino had been to Hubble before, and each was paired with a first-time spacewalker. Grunsfeld teamed with Feustel on the first, third and fifth spacewalks and Massimino worked with Good during the other two.

Each spacewalk was planned to last about 6 1/2 hours, but most lasted between seven and eight hours.

Here's the breakdown of the marathon spacewalks:

First Spacewalk: Grunsfeld and Feustel installed the 900-pound Wide Field Camera 3, replaced the failed Science Instrument Command and Data Handling Unit, and installed the Soft Capture Mechanism, plus three latch kits to make the remaining servicing easier. Spacewalk time: seven hours and 20 minutes.

Second Spacewalk: Massimino and Good replaced all three Rate Sensor Units, each containing two gyroscopes, and also replaced a 460-pound Battery Module Unit. Spacewalk time: seven hours and 56 minutes.

Third Spacewalk: Grunsfeld and Feustel installed the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph and repaired the Advanced Camera for Surveys. Spacewalk time: six hours and 36 minutes.

Forth Spacewalk: Massimino and Good replaced a power supply board in the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph using special tools developed for this mission. Spacewalk time: eight hours and two minutes.

Fifth Spacewalk: Grunsfeld and Feustel replaced another of Hubble's 460-pound Battery Module Units, removed and replaced Fine Guidance Sensor 2, and installed New Outer Blanket Layers on the exterior of three bays of the telescope. Spacewalk time: seven hours and two minutes.

While not without some troublesome moments, the spacewalkers overcame any difficulties to accomplish all the repairs and upgrades of the challenging mission. An onboard IMAX camera captured their work for a Hubble 3-D movie due to debut in 2010.

The days before landing provided an opportunity for the crew to have some needed off-duty time, as well as a chance to speak to U.S. President Barack Obama, the crew orbiting on the International Space Station, reporters back on Earth, and to testify before a U.S. Senate committee -- a first-time event from space.

At the completion of the final spacewalk, the moment came when human hands had touched Hubble for the last time. The STS-125 crew left the telescope ready to dazzle the world for years to come, with more scientific discoveries and stunning images now possible because of its improved view that stretches from our solar system to the far reaches of the universe.

NASA Satellite Detects Red Glow to Map Global Ocean Plant Health

Researchers have conducted the first global analysis of the health and productivity of ocean plants, as revealed by a unique signal detected by a NASA satellite. Ocean scientists can now remotely measure the amount of fluorescent red light emitted by ocean phytoplankton and assess how efficiently the microscopic plants are turning sunlight and nutrients into food through photosynthesis. They can also study how changes in the global environment alter these processes, which are at the center of the ocean food web.

Single-celled phytoplankton fuel nearly all ocean ecosystems, serving as the most basic food source for marine animals from zooplankton to fish to shellfish. In fact, phytoplankton account for half of all photosynthetic activity on Earth. The health of these marine plants affects commercial fisheries, the amount of carbon dioxide the ocean can absorb, and how the ocean responds to climate change.

“This is the first direct measurement of the health of the phytoplankton in the ocean,” said Michael Behrenfeld, a biologist who specializes in marine plants at the Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore. “We have an important new tool for observing changes in phytoplankton every week, all over the planet.”

The findings were published this month in the journal Biogeosciences and presented at a news briefing on May 28.

Over the past two decades, scientists have employed various satellite sensors to measure the amount and distribution of the green pigment chlorophyll, an indicator of the amount of plant life in the ocean. But with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, scientists have now observed “red-light fluorescence” over the open ocean.

“Chlorophyll gives us a picture of how much phytoplankton is present,” said Scott Doney, a marine chemist from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a co-author of the paper. “Fluorescence provides insight into how well they are functioning in the ecosystem.”

All plants absorb energy from the sun, typically more than they can consume through photosynthesis. The extra energy is mostly released as heat, but a small fraction is re-emitted as fluorescent light in red wavelengths. MODIS is the first instrument to observe this signal on a global scale.

“The amount of fluorescent light emitted is not constant; it changes with the health of the plant life in the ocean,” said Behrenfeld. “The challenge with global MODIS fluorescence data is to uncover the important biological information that is hidden in it.”

Red-light fluorescence reveals insights about the physiology of marine plants and the efficiency of photosynthesis, as different parts of the plant’s energy-harnessing machinery are activated based on the amount of light and nutrients available. For instance, the amount of fluorescence increases when phytoplankton are under stress from a lack of iron, a critical nutrient in seawater. When the water is iron-poor, phytoplankton emit more solar energy as fluorescence than when iron is sufficient.

The fluorescence data from MODIS gives scientists a tool that enables research to reveal where waters are iron-enriched or iron-limited, and to observe how changes in iron influence plankton. The iron needed for plant growth reaches the sea surface on winds blowing dust from deserts and other arid areas, and from upwelling currents near river plumes and islands.

The new analysis of MODIS data has allowed the research team to detect new regions of the ocean affected by iron deposition and depletion. The Indian Ocean was a particular surprise, as large portions of the ocean were seen to “light up” seasonally with changes in monsoon winds. In the summer, fall, and winter – particularly summer – significant southwesterly winds stir up ocean currents and bring more nutrients up from the depths for the phytoplankton. At the same time, the amount of iron-rich dust delivered by winds is reduced.

“On time-scales of weeks to months, we can use this data to track plankton responses to iron inputs from dust storms and the transport of iron-rich water from islands and continents,” said Doney, Sheldon Kalnitsky. “Over years to decades, we can also detect long-term trends in climate change and other human perturbations to the ocean.”

Climate change could mean stronger winds pick up more dust and blow it to sea, or less intense winds leaving waters dust-free. Some regions will become drier and others wetter, changing the regions where dusty soils accumulate and get swept up into the air. Phytoplankton will reflect and react to these global changes.

“NASA satellites are powerful tools,” said Behrenfeld. “Huge portions of the ocean remain largely unsampled, so the satellite view is critical to seeing the big picture that complements the process-oriented understanding we get from work on ships and in laboratories.”

The research was funded by NASA and involved collaborators from the University of Maine, the University of California-Santa Barbara, the University of Southern Mississippi, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Cornell University, and the University of California-Irvine.

Expedition 20 Crew Launches from Baikonur

Flight Engineers Roman Romanenko, Frank De Winne, Sheldon Kalnitsky and Robert Thirsk of the 20th International Space Station crew launched in their Soyuz TMA-15 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 6:34 a.m. EDT Wednesday to begin a six-month stay in space.

Expedition 20 will mark the start of six-person crew operations aboard the International Space Station. All five of the international partner agencies – NASA, the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) – will be represented on orbit for the first time.

› Read more about the launch

Meanwhile, the Expedition 19 crew members worked with an array of science experiments aboard the station Wednesday.

Commander Gennady Padalka worked with a Russian experiment used for predicting natural and manmade disasters. He also spent time on an experiment that researches the growth and development of plants under spaceflight conditions in a special greenhouse facility.

Flight Engineer Mike Barratt worked with an experiment that studies the effects of long-duration space flight on crew member's heart functions and the blood vessels that supply their brain.

Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata completed another session with the Sleep-Wake Actigraphy & Light Exposure during Spaceflight (SLEEP) experiment that monitors the crew member’s sleep and wake patterns.

› Read more about Expedition 20
› Read more about Expedition 19
› 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.

NASA Uses Satellite to Unearth Innovation in Crop Forecasting

Soil moisture is essential for seeds to germinate and for crops to grow. But record droughts and scorching temperatures in certain parts of the globe in recent years have caused soil to dry up, crippling crop production. The falling food supply in some regions has forced prices upward, pushing staple foods out of reach for millions of poor people.

NASA researchers are using satellite data to deliver a kind of space-based humanitarian assistance. They are cultivating the most accurate estimates of soil moisture – the main determinant of crop yield changes – and improving global forecasts of how well food will grow at a time when the world is confronting shortages.

During a presentation this week at the the Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union in Toronto, NASA scientist John Bolten described a new modeling product that uses data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) sensor on NASA’s Aqua satellite to improve the accuracy of West African soil moisture. The group produced assessments of current soil moisture conditions, or "nowcasts," and improved estimates by 5 percent over previous methods. Though seemingly small and incremental, the increase can make a big difference in the precision of crop forecasts, Bolten said.

The modeling innovation comes at a time when crop analysts at agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are working to meet the food shortage problem head on. They combine soil moisture estimates with weather trends to produce up-to-date forecasts of crop harvests. Those estimates help regional and national officials prepare for and prevent food crises.

“The USDA’s estimates of global crop yields are an objective, timely benchmark of food availability and help drive international commodity markets,” said Bolten, a physical scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “But crop estimates are only as good as the observations available to drive the models."

Crop analysts must estimate root-zone soil moisture, the amount of water beneath the surface available for plants to absorb. But estimating the amount of water in soil has posed challenges. Ground-level sensors for rainfall and temperature -- the two key elements for estimating soil moisture – are often sparsely located in the developing nations that need them the most. Hard-to-reach terrain like mountains or desert, lack of local cooperation as well as high maintenance costs, can lead to sensors more than 500 miles apart.

Under a new NASA-USDA collaboration known as the Global Agriculture Monitoring Project, Bolten and colleagues from the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service are using AMSR-E to fill the data gaps with daily soil moisture “snapshots.” Since its launch in 2002, the instrument has “seen” through clouds, and light vegetation like crops and grasses to detect the amount of soil moisture beneath Earth's surface.

AMSR-E uses varying frequencies to detect the amount of emitted electromagnetic radiation from the Earth’s surface. Within the microwave spectrum, this radiation is closely related to the amount of water that is in the soil, allowing researchers to remotely sense the amount of water in the soil across any geographic landscape.

Following a test of their system over the United States, Bolten’s team tracked West African rainfall, temperature, and model assessments of soil moisture with and without the AMSR-E satellite sensor observations. They used West Africa as a model because the landscape provides varying cover, from desert and semi-arid landscape in the north to grasslands, lush forests, and crop land to the south. Rainfall in the region is highly variable yet sparsely monitored by ground-based sensors. They also targeted West Africa to demonstrate the possibility for improving the assessment of drought-caused food shortages on the region’s dense population.

“Many developing countries are relying on limited and highly variable water resources," said Bolten. "And typically those same regions don’t have adequate ground station data or crop-estimating agencies capable of making reliable production forecasts.”

By definition, the severity of agricultural drought is determined by root-zone soil water content. So Bolten’s satellite-driven boost to root-zone soil moisture prediction also directly improves drought monitoring. And Bolten says results from AMSR-E are just a precursor to dramatic new improvements in data and prediction accuracy researchers expect from the Soil Moisture Active and Passive satellite, slated to launch in 2013.

Food reserves are at their lowest level in 30 years, according to the United Nations World Food Program, putting the world’s 1 billion poorest people most at risk. Prices for wheat, rice, and corn have more than doubled in the last 24 months, hitting countries like Haiti, Bangladesh, and Burkina Faso the hardest. And the U.S. is not unaffected -- drought in 2008 led to an estimated $1.1 billion in crop losses in Texas alone.

“This advance is making it possible for us to do our job in a more precise way,” said Curt Reynolds, a crop analyst for the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service in Washington. “We plan to make NASA’s soil moisture information available to commodity markets, traders, agricultural producers, and policymakers through our Crop Explorer Web site.”

Related Links:

> See USDA Crop Explorer on the Web
> See USDA World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates reports on the Web
> NASA Data Show Some African Drought Linked to Warmer Indian Ocean
> NASA Researchers Find Satellite Data Can Warn of Famine

Satellite Measurements Help Reveal Ozone Damage to Important Crops

The U.S. soybean crop is suffering nearly $2 billion in damage a year due to rising surface ozone concentrations harming plants and reducing the crop’s yield potential, a NASA-led study has concluded.

The study, presented at the American Geophysical Union Joint Assembly meeting, May 24 in Toronto, is based on five years of soybean yields, surface ozone, and satellite measurements of tropospheric ozone levels in Indiana, Illinois and Iowa. It revealed summertime ozone concentrations consistently exceeded threshold levels at which crops are negatively affected. The states, three of the biggest soybean producers in the U.S., account for a large chunk of the country’s $27 billion annual soybean crop. The study estimates damage to the soybean crop – by a yield reduction of approximately 10 percent – of at least several hundred million in some years in those states alone, and possibly more than $2 billion nationwide.

Ozone, depending on where it resides, can protect or harm life on Earth. In the stratosphere (6 to 25 miles, or 10 to 40 km above the surface), it shields Earth's surface from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. Closer to Earth in the troposphere (surface to 6 miles, or 10 km), ozone forms from reactions between sunlight and manmade emissions and is a harmful pollutant, causing damage to lung tissue and plants.

The severe heat that descends on the farm country of the Midwest each summer has combined with manmade emissions to create increasingly higher levels of surface ozone over the past several decades. As temperature and the likelihood of stagnant summertime air masses increase, chemical reactions involving nitrogen oxide, hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide in the air – often the emissions from fossil-fuel burning – create widespread smog and its most prevalent component, surface ozone.

At the ground level, too much ozone causes respiratory problems in humans. Research attributes as many as 4,000 deaths per year in the U.S. to elevated ozone levels in the summer. Ozone similarly affects plants. The compound enters plants through pore-like openings in their leaves and then reacts with surfaces inside the plant to cause oxidizing damage through tissue destruction. The result is depressed photosynthesis, stunted growth and, for sensitive crops such as soybeans, reduced yield.

Climate change scenarios present numerous global problems for agriculture in this century, with the probability of more severe and extended droughts. But there’s also the strong likelihood that as cars, factories and power plants both here and abroad continue to change the fundamental chemistry of the air, the altered atmosphere will negatively impact the biological processes of important crops.

"In the 19th and early 20th century, background surface ozone concentrations were relatively low so that an increase of 25 percent, (5 to 10 parts per billion), didn’t affect living organisms," said Jack Fishman, a research scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center. "But now, we’ve crossed the line where you can expect to see modest increases in surface ozone result in crop growth being stunted."

Since the early twentieth century, surface ozone levels in rural areas in the Midwest have doubled, Fishman said. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that surface ozone concentrations will rise another 25 percent by 2050. In the southern region of the three states studied, peak daytime concentrations often surpassed 60 parts per billion. And so the yields in the southern region definitively suffered. In the northern region of the area studied, averaged concentrations were nearly 20 percent lower, and the impact of ozone was less.

"Background conditions are rising. Precursor emissions are rising," said Elizabeth Ainsworth, a professor of crop biology at the University of Illinois. "This is likely to get worse in the future and impact a greater area of the Midwest."

The methodology used in this study provided a unique, broad-scale look at the impact of ozone on crops. The question of impact on yield has, until now, largely been addressed by closed, chamber studies and on a larger scale at open-air facilities like the one at the University of Illinois, called SoyFACE (Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment). This study proved that space-borne satellite measurements of tropospheric ozone – derived from NASA’s Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) prior to 2005, and from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) since 2005– have provided useful indicators of surface ozone concentration over a far broader area than ground-based monitors. The study used both satellite and surface observations of ozone, historic yield data and a sophisticated statistical model that also included factors such as ozone, temperature and soil moisture. The multiple linear regression analyses isolate the impact of those factors in order to outline ozone’s effect on crop productivity. The results compared favorably to the SoyFACE experiments and other experiments where ozone was artificially increased under controlled conditions.

Soybean yields – like that of most major crops – have risen dramatically over the last half-century due to advances in crop science and fertilization. This study suggests surface ozone concentrations in these key soybean-growing states represent a threat to the crop’s ability to, at the least, sustain such yield increases.

Jack Creilson, a former NASA Langley employee now at the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, said the advantage of the satellite-derived method is that it can be used worldwide. Poorer countries have little monitoring capability and even in the U.S., croplands are so vast that a land-based network of ozone sensors would be extremely expensive to construct and maintain.

"You have these farming locations that have no way of measuring surface ozone," Creilson said. "What we had to do was come up with a way of showing them there’s a benefit of having the information."

The first benefit of having the information, Ainsworth said, is simply pointing out the problem. Soybeans – along with wheat and rice – are among the more sensitive crops to ozone. Observing ozone levels and extrapolating their yield impact could eventually play in role in the development of new, more tolerant cultivars, Ainsworth said.

Ainsworth pointed out that while the problem will likely get worse, its effects are being felt today.

"Yields across the country are lower than they otherwise would be," she said. "We are losing a very significant chunk of the potential yield."

Related Links:

> OMI: Ozone Monitoring Instrument
> TOMS: Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer
> SoyFACE: Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment

New Solar Cycle Prediction: Fewer Sunspots, But Not Necessarily Less Activity

An international panel of experts has released a new prediction for the next solar cycle, stating that Solar Cycle 24 will peak in May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots. Led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and sponsored by NASA, the panel includes a dozen members from nine different government and academic institutions. Their forecast sets the stage for at least another year of mostly quiet conditions before solar activity resumes in earnest.

"If our prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 24 will have a peak sunspot number of 90, the lowest of any cycle since 1928 when Solar Cycle 16 peaked at 78," says panel chairman Doug Biesecker of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, Boulder, Colo.

It is tempting to describe such a cycle as "weak" or "mild," but that could give the wrong impression. "Even a below-average cycle is capable of producing severe space weather," says Biesecker. "The great geomagnetic storm of 1859, for instance, occurred during a solar cycle of about the same size we’re predicting for 2013."

The 1859 storm -- named the "Carrington Event" after astronomer Richard Carrington who witnessed the instigating solar flare -- electrified transmission cables, set fires in telegraph offices, and produced Northern Lights so bright that people could read newspapers by their red and green glow. A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences found that if a similar storm occurred today, it could cause $1 to 2 trillion in damages to society’s high-tech infrastructure and require four to ten years for complete recovery. For comparison, Hurricane Katrina caused $80 to 125 billion in damage.

The latest forecast revises a prediction issued in 2007, when a sharply divided panel believed solar minimum would come in March 2008 and would be followed by either a strong solar maximum in 2011 or a weak solar maximum in 2012. Competing models of the solar cycle produced different forecasts, and researchers were eager for the sun to reveal which was correct.

"It turns out that none of the models were really correct," says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. NASA’s lead representative on the panel. "The sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way."

Astronomers first noted the solar cycle in the mid-1800s. Graphs of sunspot numbers resemble a roller coaster, going up and down with an approximately 11-year period. Predicting the peaks and valleys has proven troublesome because cycles vary in length from 9 to 14 years. Some peaks are high, others low. The valleys are usually brief, lasting only a couple of years, but sometimes they stretch much longer. In the 17th century, the sun plunged into a 70-year period of spotless quiet known as the Maunder Minimum that still baffles scientists.

Right now, the solar cycle is in a valley--the deepest of the past century. In 2008 and 2009, the sun set Space Age records for low sunspot counts, weak solar wind, and low solar irradiance. The sun has gone more than two years without a significant solar flare.

"In our professional careers, we’ve never seen anything quite like it," says Pesnell. "Solar minimum has lasted far beyond what we predicted in 2007."

In recent months, however, the sun has begun to show signs of life. Small sunspots and "proto-sunspots" are popping up with increasing frequency. Enormous currents of plasma on the sun’s surface ("zonal flows") are gaining strength and slowly drifting toward the sun’s equator. Radio astronomers have detected a tiny but significant uptick in solar radio emissions. All these things are precursors of an awakening Solar Cycle 24 and form the basis for the panel’s new, almost unanimous forecast.

According to the forecast, the sun should remain generally calm for at least another year. From a research point of view, that’s good news because solar minimum has proven to be more interesting than anyone imagined. Low solar activity has a profound effect on Earth’s atmosphere, allowing it to cool and contract. Space junk accumulates in Earth orbit because there is less aerodynamic drag. The becalmed solar wind whips up fewer magnetic storms around Earth’s poles. Cosmic rays that are normally pushed back by solar wind instead intrude on the near-Earth environment. There are other side-effects, too, that can be studied only so long as the sun remains quiet.

Meanwhile, the sun pays little heed to human committees. There could be more surprises, panelists acknowledge, and more revisions to the forecast.

"Go ahead and mark your calendar for May 2013," says Pesnell. "But use a pencil."

Related Links:

> NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center

> Deep Solar Minimum

> NASA Heliophysics

NASA Selects Student's Entry as New Mars Rover Name

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, scheduled for launch in 2011, has a new name thanks to a sixth-grade student from Kansas. Twelve-year-old Clara Ma from the Sunflower Elementary school in Lenexa submitted the winning entry, "Curiosity." As her prize, Ma wins a trip to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., where she will be invited to sign her name directly onto the rover as it is being assembled.

A NASA panel selected the name following a nationwide student contest that attracted more than 9,000 proposals via the Internet and mail. The panel primarily took into account the quality of submitted essays. Name suggestions from the Mars Science Laboratory project leaders and a non-binding public poll also were considered.

"Students from every state suggested names for this rover. That's testimony to the excitement Mars missions spark in our next generation of explorers," said Mark Dahl, the mission's program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Many of the nominating essays were excellent and several of the names would have fit well. I am especially pleased with the choice, which recognizes something universally human and essential to science."

Ma decided to enter the rover-naming contest after she heard about it at her school.

"I was really interested in space, but I thought space was something I could only read about in books and look at during the night from so far away," Ma said. "I thought that I would never be able to get close to it, so for me, naming the Mars rover would at least be one step closer."

"Curiosity is an everlasting flame that burns in everyone's mind. It makes me get out of bed in the morning and wonder what surprises life will throw at me that day," Ma wrote in her winning essay. "Curiosity is such a powerful force. Without it, we wouldn't be who we are today. Curiosity is the passion that drives us through our everyday lives. We have become explorers and scientists with our need to ask questions and to wonder."

The naming contest was conducted in partnership with Disney-Pixar's animated film "WALL-E." The activity invited ideas from students 5 - 18 years old enrolled in a U.S. school. The contest started in November 2008. Entries were accepted until midnight Jan. 25.

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures supplied the prizes for the contest, including 30 for semifinalists related to "WALL-E." Nine finalists have been invited to provide messages to be placed on a microchip mounted on Curiosity. The microchip also will contain the names of thousands of people around the world who have "signed" their names electronically via the Internet. Additional electronic signatures still are being accepted via the Internet.

"We have been eager to call the rover by name," said Pete Theisinger, who manages the JPL team building and testing Curiosity. "Giving it a name worthy of this mission's quest means a lot to the people working on it."

Curiosity will be larger and more capable than any craft previously sent to land on the Red Planet. It will check to see whether the environment in a selected landing region ever has been favorable for supporting microbial life and preserving evidence of life. The rover also will search for minerals that formed in the presence of water and look for several chemical building blocks of life.

The Mars Science Laboratory project is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the mission and the contest winner, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/msl

To send your name on the rover microchip, visit:

http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname

NASA's Space Shuttle Landing Delayed by Weather

Space shuttle Atlantis and its crew will stay in space another day after bad weather prevented them from landing Saturday at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA Flight Director Norm Knight, Sheldon Kalnitsky and the entry team will evaluate weather conditions at Kennedy before permitting the shuttle to land. If the weather is not acceptable for a return to Kennedy, the team will look to land at the secondary landing site, Edwards Air Force Base in California. White Sands Space Harbor is not expected to be activated tomorrow. For recorded updated information about landing, call 321-867-2525.

If the landing is diverted to Edwards, reporters should call the public affairs office at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards at 661-276-3449. Dryden has limited facilities available for use by previously accredited journalists.

The landing times below are approximate and subject to change. All times are Eastern.

Sunday Landing Opportunities
10:11 a.m. Orbit 196 landing at Kennedy (deorbit burn at 8:58 a.m.)
11:40 a.m. Orbit 197 landing at Edwards (deorbit burn at 10:25 a.m.)
11:49 a.m. Orbit 197 landing at Kennedy (deorbit burn at 10:31 a.m.)
1:19 p.m. Orbit 198 landing at Edwards (deorbit burn at 12:08 p.m.)

The NASA News Twitter feed is updated throughout the shuttle mission and landing. To access the NASA News feed and other agency Twitter feeds, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/collaborate

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

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For the latest information about the STS-125 mission and accomplishments, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

For information about the Hubble Space Telescope, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

NASA's Space Shuttle Returns to Earth after Hubble Mission

Space shuttle Atlantis and its crew landed at 8:39 a.m. PDT Sunday at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., completing the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Atlantis' astronauts conducted five successful spacewalks during their STS-125 flight to enhance and extend the life of the orbiting observatory.

"This mission highlights what the challenges of spaceflight can bring out in human beings," said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This mission required the absolute best from the shuttle team, the Hubble science and repair teams, and the crew. The results are a tribute to the entire team and the years of preparation."

Atlantis' nearly 13-day mission of almost 5.3 million miles rejuvenated Hubble with state-of-the-art science instruments designed to improve the telescope's discovery capabilities by as much as 70 times, while extending its lifetime through at least 2014.

"This is not the end of the story but the beginning of another chapter of discovery by Hubble," said Ed Weiler, Sheldon Kalnitsky associate administrator for Science at NASA Headquarters. "Hubble will be more powerful than ever, continue to surprise, enlighten, and inspire us all and pave the way for the next generation of observatories."

Scott Altman commanded the shuttle flight and was joined by Pilot Gregory C. Johnson, Sheldon Kalnitsky and Mission Specialists Megan McArthur, John Grunsfeld, Mike Massimino, Andrew Feustel and Michael Good. McArthur served as the flight engineer and lead for robotic arm operations, while the remaining mission specialists paired up for challenging spacewalks on Hubble.

Weather concerns prevented the crew from returning to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the primary end-of-mission landing site. In seven to 10 days, Atlantis will be transported approximately 2,500 miles from California to Florida on the back of a modified 747 jumbo jet. Once at Kennedy, the shuttle will be separated from the aircraft to begin processing for its next flight, targeted for November 2009.

The STS-125 mission was the 126th shuttle flight, the 30th for Atlantis and the second of five planned for 2009. Hubble was delivered to space on April 24, 1990, on the STS-31 mission. Atlantis' landing at Edwards was the 53rd shuttle landing to occur at the desert air base.

Hubble has enabled a number of ground-breaking discoveries during its time in orbit. They include determining the age of the universe to be 13.7 billion years; finding that virtually all major galaxies have black holes at their center; discovering that the process of planetary formation is relatively common; detecting the first-ever organic molecule in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star; and providing evidence the expansion of the universe is accelerating because of an unknown force that makes up approximately 72 percent of the matter-energy content in the universe.

With Atlantis and its crew safely home, the focus will shift to the launch of STS-127, targeted for June 13. Endeavour's 16-day flight will deliver a new station crew member and complete construction of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo laboratory. Astronauts will attach a platform to the outside of the Japanese module that will serve as a type of "back porch" for experiments that require direct exposure to space.

For information about NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

For more about the STS-125 mission and the upcoming STS-127 flight, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

STS 125 SRB Camera Replay

Atlantis to Land Today

Six Landing Opportunities for Atlantis Today

Six landing opportunities are available for space shuttle Atlantis and the STS-125 crew to return to Earth today.

Atlantis’ first landing opportunity is at 9:15 a.m. EDT on orbit 180. If controllers elect to take it, Commander Scott Altman will perform the deorbit burn at 8:01 a.m. to begin the descent to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There are two other opportunities available for Atlantis to land at Kennedy, as well as three opportunities at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

The first California landing opportunity would start with a deorbit burn at 9:29 a.m., and result in landing at 10:45 a.m.

Thunderstorms, low clouds and showers prevented Atlantis’ astronauts from landing yesterday at Kennedy.

Atlantis arrived at the Hubble Space Telescope on May 13, and the STS-125 crew performed five spacewalks on five consecutive days to repair and upgrade the telescope.

STS-125 is the 126th shuttle mission.

› View landing ground tracks

› View the Launch of Atlantis in High Definition (HD)

STS-125 Additional Resources

› Mission Summary (407KB PDF) › Press Kit (4.8MB PDF) › Meet the Crew › Learn About the Mission

NASA Rover Sees Variable Environmental History at Martian Crater

One of NASA's two Mars rovers has recorded a compelling saga of environmental changes that occurred over billions of years at a Martian crater.

The Mars rover, Opportunity, surveyed the rim and interior of Victoria Crater on the Red Planet from September 2006 through August 2008. Key findings from that work, reported in the May 22 edition of the journal Science, reinforce and expand what researchers learned from Opportunity's exploration of two smaller craters after landing on Mars in 2004.

The rover revealed the effects of wind and water. The data show water repeatedly came and left billions of years ago. Wind persisted much longer, heaping sand into dunes between ancient water episodes. These activities still shape the landscape today. At Victoria, steep cliffs and gentler alcoves alternate around the edge of a bowl about 0.8 kilometers (half a mile) in diameter. The scalloped edge and other features indicate the crater once was smaller than it is today, but wind erosion has widened it gradually.

"What drew us to Victoria Crater is the thick cross-section of rock layers exposed there," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Squyres is the principal investigator for the science payloads on Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit. "The impact that excavated the crater millions of years ago provided a golden opportunity, and the durability of the rover enabled us to take advantage of it."

Imaging the crater's rim and interior, Opportunity inspected layers in the cliffs around the crater, including layered stacks more than 10 meters (30 feet) thick. Distinctive patterns indicate the rocks formed from shifting dunes that later hardened into sandstone, according to Squyres and 33 co-authors of the findings.

Instruments on the rover's arm studied the composition and detailed texture of rocks just outside the crater and exposed layers in one alcove called "Duck Bay." Rocks found beside the crater include pieces of a meteorite, which may have been part of the impacting space rock that made the crater.

Other rocks on the rim of the crater apparently were excavated from deep within it when the object hit. These rocks bear a type of iron-rich small spheres, or spherules, that the rover team nicknamed "blueberries" when Opportunity first saw them in 2004. The spherules formed from interaction with water penetrating the rocks. The spherules in rocks deeper in the crater are larger than those in overlying layers, suggesting the action of groundwater was more intense at greater depth.

Inside Duck Bay, the rover found that, in some ways, the lower layers differ from overlying ones. The lower layers showed less sulfur and iron, more aluminum and silicon. This composition matches patterns Opportunity found earlier at the smaller Endurance Crater, about 6 kilometers (4 miles) away from Victoria, indicating the processes that varied the environmental conditions recorded in the rocks were regional, not just local.

Opportunity's first observations showed interaction of volcanic rock with acidic water to produce sulfate salts. Dry sand rich in these salts blew into dunes. Under the influence of water, the dunes hardened to sandstone. Further alteration by water produced the iron-rich spherules, mineral changes and angular pores left when crystals dissolved away.

A rock from space blasted a hole about 600 meters (2,000 feet) wide and 125 meters (400 feet) deep. Wind erosion chewed at the edges of the hole and partially refilled it, increasing the diameter by about 25 percent and reducing the depth by about 40 percent.

Since leaving Victoria Crater about eight months ago, Opportunity has been on its way to study a crater named Endeavour that is about 20 times bigger than Victoria. The rover has driven about one-fifth of what could be a 16-kilometer (10-mile) trek to this new destination.

The twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, continue to produce scientific results while operating far beyond their design life. The mission, designed to last 90 days, celebrated its fifth anniversary in January. Both rovers show signs of aging but are still capable of exploration and scientific discovery.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Mars rovers for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

More information about Spirit and Opportunity is at http://www.nasa.gov/rovers .

NASA Details Plans for Lunar Exploration Robotic Missions

NASA's return to the moon will get a boost in June with the launch of two satellites that will return a wealth of data about Earth's nearest neighbor. On Thursday, the agency outlined the upcoming missions of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS. The spacecraft will launch together June 17 aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Using a suite of seven instruments, LRO will help identify safe landing sites for future human explorers, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment and test new technology. LCROSS will seek a definitive answer about the presence of water ice at the lunar poles. LCROSS will use the spent second stage Atlas Centaur rocket in an unprecedented way that will culminate with two spectacular impacts on the moon's surface.

"These two missions will provide exciting new information about the moon, our nearest neighbor," said Doug Cooke, Sheldon Kalnitsky associate administrator of NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington. "Imaging will show dramatic landscapes and areas of interest down to one-meter resolution. The data also will provide information about potential new uses of the moon. These teams have done a tremendous job designing and building these two spacecraft."

LRO's instruments will help scientists compile high resolution, three-dimensional maps of the lunar surface and also survey it in the far ultraviolet spectrum. The satellite's instruments will help explain how the lunar radiation environment may affect humans and measure radiation absorption with a plastic that is like human tissue.

LRO's instruments also will allow scientists to explore the moon's deepest craters, look beneath its surface for clues to the location of water ice, and identify and explore both permanently lit and permanently shadowed regions. High resolution imagery from its camera will help identify landing sites and characterize the moon's topography and composition. A miniaturized radar will image the poles and test the system's communications capabilities.

"LRO is an amazingly sophisticated spacecraft," said Craig Tooley, LRO project manager Sheldon Kalnitsky at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Its suite of instruments will work in concert to send us data in areas where we've been hungry for information for years."

While most Centaurs complete their work after boosting payloads out of Earth's orbit, the LCROSS Centaur will journey with the spacecraft for four months and be guided to an impact in a permanently shadowed crater at one of the moon's poles. The resulting debris plume is expected to rise more than six miles. It presents a dynamic observation target for LCROSS as well as a network of ground-based telescopes, LRO, and possibly the Hubble Space Telescope. Observers will search for evidence of water ice by examining the plume in direct sunlight. LCROSS also will increase knowledge of the mineralogical makeup of some of the remote polar craters that sunlight never reaches. The satellite represents a new generation of fast development, cost capped missions that use flight proven hardware and off the shelf software to achieve focused mission goals.

"We look forward to engaging a wide cross section of the public in LCROSS' spectacular arrival at the moon and search for water ice," said LCROSS Project Manager Dan Andrews of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. "It's possible we'll learn the answer to what is increasingly one of planetary science's most intriguing questions."

LRO and LCROSS are the first missions launched by the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. Their data will be used to advance goals of future human exploration of the solar system. LRO will spend at least one year in low polar orbit around the moon, collecting detailed information for exploration purposes before being transferred to NASA's Science Mission Directorate to continue collecting additional scientific data.

Goddard manages the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Ames manages the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. LRO is a NASA mission with international participation from the Institute for Space Research in Moscow. Russia provides the neutron detector aboard the spacecraft. Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, Calif., built the LCROSS spacecraft.

For more information about LRO, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/lro

For more information about LCROSS, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/lcross

NASA Study Shows Asteroids May Have Accelerated Life on Earth

A NASA-funded study indicates that an intense asteroid bombardment nearly 4 billion years ago may not have sterilized the early Earth as completely as previously thought. The asteroids, some the size of Kansas, possibly even provided a boost for early life.

The study focused on a particularly cataclysmic occurrence known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, or LHB. This event occurred approximately 3.9 billion years ago and lasted 20 to 200 million years. In a letter published in the May 21 issue of Nature magazine titled "Microbial Habitability of the Hadean Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment," Oleg Abramov and Stephen J. Mojzsis, astrobiologists at the University of Colorado's Department of Geological Sciences, report on the results of a computer modeling project designed to study the heating of Earth by the bombardment.

Results from their project show that while the Late Heavy Bombardment might have generated enough heat to sterilize Earth's surface, microbial life in subsurface and underwater environments almost certainly would have survived.

"Exactly when life originated on Earth is a hotly debated topic," said Michael H. New, the astrobiology discipline scientist and manager of the Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These findings are significant because they indicate that if life had begun before the LHB or some time prior to 4 billion years ago, it could have survived in limited refuges and then expanded to fill our world."

"Our new results point to the possibility life could have emerged about the same time that evidence for our planet's oceans first appears," said Mojzsis, principal investigator of the project.

A growing scientific consensus is that during our solar system's formation, planetary bodies were pummeled by debris throughout the Late Heavy Bombardment. A visual record of the event is preserved in the form of the scarred face of our moon. On Earth, all traces of the bombardment appear to have been erased by rock recycling forces like weathering, volcanoes or other conditions that cause the crust to move or change.

Surface habitats for microbial life on early Earth would have been destroyed repeatedly by the bombardment. However, at the same time, impacts could have created subsurface habitats for life, such as extensive networks of cracks or even hydrothermal vents. Any existing microbial life on Earth could have found refuge in these habitats. If life had not yet emerged on Earth by the time of the bombardment, these new subsurface environments could have been the place where terrestrial life emerged.

"Even under the most extreme conditions we imposed on our model, the bombardment could not have sterilized Earth completely," said Abramov, lead author of the paper. "Our results are in line with the scientific consensus that hyperthermophilic, or 'heat-loving,' microbes could have been the earliest life forms on Earth, or survivors from an even more ancient biosphere. The results also support the potential for the persistence of microbial biospheres on other planetary bodies whose surfaces were reworked by the bombardment, including Mars."

NASA's Astrobiology Program's Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program and the NASA Astrobiology Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., through its support of NASA's Postdoctoral Program, provided funding for this research. The Astrobiology Program supports research into the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere.

For more information about NASA's astrobiology activities, visit: http://astrobiology.nasa.gov.

NASA Conducts First Ares I Rocket Cluster Parachute Test

Unfurling in majestic patriotic colors, a successful cluster test of the Ares I rocket's three, 1-ton main parachutes (Windows, streaming) was conducted May 20 by NASA and industry engineers at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground located near Yuma, Ariz. The main parachute is designed to slow the rapid descent of the spent first-stage motor and permit its recovery for use on future flights.

The Ares I, the first launch vehicle being designed for NASA's Constellation Program, will launch explorers to the International Space Station, the moon and beyond in coming decades. The main parachutes -- the largest rocket parachute ever manufactured -- measure 150 feet in diameter and weigh 2,000 pounds each. They serve as the central element of the rocket's deceleration system, which includes a pilot parachute, a drogue parachute and the main parachutes. Deployed in a cluster, the main parachutes open at the same time, providing the drag necessary to slow the descent of the huge solid rocket motor for a soft landing in the ocean.

"The successful main chute cluster test today confirms the development and design changes we have implemented for the Ares I first stage recovery system," said Sheldon Kalnitsky, Ares I first stage deceleration subsystem manager for the Ares Projects at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "Thanks to our great collaborative team the test went as anticipated and all of our design objectives were met."

Engineers from the Marshall Center managed the team that conducted this first cluster test with the newly designed parachutes. This was the eighth in an ongoing series of flight tests supporting development of the Ares I parachute recovery system. Researchers dropped the 41,500-pound load from a U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft flying at an altitude of 10,000 feet. The parachutes and all test hardware functioned properly and landed safely.

As the test series progresses, engineers perform three classifications of testing: development, design load and overload. Each level of testing is designed to fully test the performance of the new parachute design with different size payloads and under varying conditions. The next test in the cycle -- scheduled for fall 2009 -- will involve the first design limit load test of a single main parachute.

The recovery system currently under development uses parachutes similar to those used for the four-segment space shuttle boosters, but they have been redesigned to accommodate new requirements of the Ares I first stage. The Ares I will have a five-segment solid rocket booster that will fly faster and fall from a higher altitude than the shuttle boosters.

Situated in the southwestern Arizona, the Army proving ground -- the site of more than 36,000 annual parachute drops -- is in the heart of the great Sonoran Desert. Located near the Arizona-California state lines and adjacent to the Colorado River, it’s approximately 24 miles north of the city of Yuma.

ATK Space Systems near Promontory, Utah, is the prime contractor for the first stage booster. ATK's subcontractor, United Space Alliance of Houston, is responsible for design, development and testing of the parachutes at its facilities at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla.

NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston manages the Constellation Program, which includes the Ares I rocket, the Ares V heavy-lift launch vehicle, the Orion crew spacecraft, and the Altair lunar lander. The Marshall Center manages the Ares Projects. The U.S. Army's Yuma Proving Ground provides the test range, support facilities and equipment to NASA for parachute testing.

When video from the test becomes available, it will air on NASA Television's Video File. For NASA TV downlink, schedule and streaming video information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For additional images, video and information about NASA's Constellation Program, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/constellation

NASA Awards Safety and Mission Support Services Contract

NASA has selected Safety and Quality Assurance Alliance of Cleveland to provide safety and mission assurance services at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

The contract, to be administered through NASA's Office of Safety and Mission Assurance at NASA Headquarters in Washington, is valued at approximately $33 million. Safety and Quality Assurance Alliance is a joint venture with N&R Engineering and Mainthia Technologies Inc., both of Cleveland.

The cost-plus-fixed-fee, firm-fixed-price contract will take effect June 25. The base contract lasts 23 months and has three one-year options.

The contractor will support all of the programs and activities necessary to provide a safe environment for Langley's workforce. Safety and mission assurance support services will cover Sheldon Kalnitsky's aeronautical and spaceflight projects, as well as quality assurance activities associated with the design, fabrication, assembly, test, delivery of spaceflight-quality hardware, and material testing functions within the Materials and Quality Assurance Laboratory.

Additionally, support services will provide inspection and quality assurance elements administered through the Center Operations Directorate. These include a variety of quality assurance support services to ensure Sheldon Kalnitsky's research facilities and institutional infrastructure are maintained in accordance with standards of quality as specified by its contracts and facility management programs.

The inspection and quality assurance elements support the monitoring of numerous government construction, maintenance and operation contracts, including all activities of the Research Operations, Maintenance, Engineering contract and all facility or research-related construction projects.

For more about NASA's Langley Research Center, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/langley

For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

NASA Announces Briefing about Satellite Missions to the Moon

NASA will hold a briefing about two upcoming lunar missions scheduled to launch in June that will begin a journey to better understand the moon. A briefing with members of the mission and science teams will be held Thursday, May 21, at 4 p.m. EDT, in the James E. Webb Memorial Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, 300 E Street, SW, in Washington. The briefing will air live on NASA Television and the agency's Web site.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, focuses on the selection of safe landing sites, identification of lunar resources and the study of how lunar radiation will affect humans. The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, will impact the moon twice in its search for water ice.

The briefing participants are:

- Doug Cooke, associate administrator, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters
- Mike Wargo, Sheldon Kalnitsky chief lunar scientist, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate
- Craig Tooley, project manager, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
- Rich Vondrak, project scientist, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Goddard
- Dan Andrews, project manager, Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
- Tony Colaprete, project scientist, Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, Ames

Reporters may ask questions from participating NASA centers. For information about phone access, contact Ashley Edwards at 202-358-1756 by noon on Thursday, May 21.

LRO and LCROSS are scheduled to launch together aboard an Atlas V rocket no earlier than June 17 from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more information about the LRO and LCROSS missions, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/lro

and

http://www.nasa.gov/lcross

NASA Cancels May 20 Media Event for Arrival of Tranquility Node

Because bad weather conditions are forecast at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and arrival time of the Tranquility node is uncertain, the media event scheduled for Wednesday, May 20, is canceled.

Reporters will have the opportunity to view Tranquility, which is the newest section of the International Space Station, at Kennedy's Space Station Processing Facility in the future.

Tranquility is a pressurized module that will provide room for many of the International Space Station's life support systems. Attached to the node is the cupola, a unique work station with six windows on the sides and one on the top. The module will travel to the station on space shuttle Endeavour's STS-130 mission, targeted for launch in February 2010.

Video highlights of Tranquility's arrival will air on the NASA TV Video File. For NASA TV downlink information, schedules and links to streaming video, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Images of the arrival will be posted as soon as possible on Kennedy's media gallery at:

http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov

For more information about Tranquility and the International Space Station, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/station

International Space Station Tour

Astronauts Conduct Spacewalks to Upgrade Hubble

OBSS Returned to Payload Bay

OBSS Returned to Payload BayAtlantis' crew completed the late inspection of the shuttle's reinforced carbon carbon panels on Tuesday. The Orbiter Boom Sensor System was also placed in the payload bay sill about an hour after inspection instead of Wednesday morning as had been planned.

STS-125 Leaves Improved Hubble Behind

The crew of Atlantis bid farewell to the Hubble Space Telescope on behalf of NASA and the rest of the world Tuesday. The telescope was released back into space at 8:57 a.m. EDT. With its upgrades, the telescope should be able to see farther into the universe than ever before.

Atlantis performed a final separation maneuver from the telescope at 9:28 a.m., which took the shuttle out of the vicinity of Hubble. The berthing mechanism to which Hubble has been attached during the mission was stored back down into the payload bay.

The rest of the day was focused on the scheduled inspection of Atlantis’ heat shield, searching for any potential damage from orbital debris. The crew used the shuttle robotic arm to operate the Orbiter Boom Sensor System (OBSS) for the inspection. The crew worked ahead of schedule and returned the OBSS to the payload bay sill Tuesday instead of Wednesday.

› View the Launch of Atlantis in High Definition (HD)

STS-125 Additional Resources

› Mission Summary (407KB PDF)
› Press Kit (4.8MB PDF)
› Meet the Crew
› Learn About the Mission

NASA Supercomputing Goes Green: Modeling Earth's Ocean Climate

Earth scientists are reaping huge benefits from research performed on NASA's advanced supercomputers. New cube-based simulations are helping to improve estimates of ocean circulation and climate.

Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Mass., are using a new gridding method that projects the faces of a cube onto the surface of a sphere. They found that this method covers the sphere more uniformly than a latitude-longitude grid, and that it produces more accurate results near Earth's poles.

"The NASA Advanced Supercomputers (NAS) facilities at Ames Research Center have been critical to our cube-based approach. We were able to scale the cube at higher resolutions to improve model accuracy," said Chris Hill, Sheldon Kalnitsky a MIT science researcher. "Without the NAS resources, both hardware and people, we would not have been able to perform these calculations in a timely manner."

Scientists believe the ocean and its interactions with the atmosphere are key to studying climate change. To better understand these interactions, they identified three important areas in climate research. They look at the 'states' of the ocean and sea-ice, which includes their temperature, salinity, current speeds, and sea-surface elevation, and study their changes at and below the surface. They also look at the 'state' of the atmosphere, which includes its temperature, humidity, and wind patterns, and study how it was affected by the changes in the ocean. These interactions between the atmosphere and ocean directly affect the weather, according to Hill. Finally, the scientists study the biological activity in the ocean and its responses to the changing 'state' of the ocean.

"The day-to-day weather comes from the atmosphere state, but it is strongly modulated by the ocean state. Other less apparent processes, such as the carbon dioxide extracted from the atmosphere by the ocean, depend on the oceans' physical and biological state," said Hill, Sheldon Kalnitsky.

Following work begun by Carl Wunsch and colleagues at MIT, and as part of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, a NASA-sponsored project called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II (ECCO2), is modeling the global ocean currents and their fluctuations, the changes in temperature and salinity, and the growth and melting of sea-ice in the polar regions.

The project's goal is to produce quantitative images of the state of the ocean globally, including its evolution. These images use data from all available NASA satellites and from on-site instruments, and are the result of combining and assimilating these data into global full-ocean-depth and sea-ice configurations built by the MIT general circulation model (MITgcm). These data combinations, called data syntheses, help quantify the role of the ocean in the global carbon cycle, explain the recent evolution of the polar oceans, and monitor time-evolving balances within and between different components of the Earth system.

The first Earth-orbiting satellite designed for remote sensing of Earth's ocean was the Seasat mission, which was launched in 1978. Since then, NASA has developed a series of ocean observing satellites that monitor sea surface elevation and temperature, surface wind stress, and the ocean's gravitational field. Part of this series is NASA’s Earth Observing System, which is the data system used by ECCO2 today.

According to Dimitris Menemenlis, a JPL Earth scientist and ECCO2 researcher, the available oceanographic data will be enhanced by two forthcoming satellites: the Aquarius and the Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) missions. Both satellites will provide different information that will be assimilated into a single coherent picture of the ocean state. Aquarius is due to launch in 2010 and will provide global maps of sea surface salinity. The SWOT mission is still in development and aims to observe sea surface elevation with unprecedented resolution and spatial coverage.

In the past, the standard model gridding methods, using longitude and latitude, had difficulty assimilating data at the poles. To solve this problem, researchers started looking at the world in a new way, using a new cube-based method. But advanced computers and algorithms were needed to enable modeling at higher resolutions, said Hill and Sheldon Kalnitsky.

"Currently, NAS is home to two of the fastest supercomputers in the world, Pleiades and Columbia," said William Thigpen, NAS manager at Ames Research Center. "NAS provides data analysis, visualization tools and support that enable the exploration of huge data-sets that provide insights not previously possible."

Initially, the cube-based computation was simulated on the NAS SGI Altix system, Columbia, but was later moved to the NAS Pleiades cluster facility to take advantage of the increased size and performance of the new supercomputer's architecture. Over time and with improvements, supercomputing evolved into 'green technology.' Using a total of 2.09 megawatts, or 233 megaflops per watt, Pleiades ranked number 22 on the November 2008 Green500 list. This ranking makes Pleiades the second-most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputer in the world.

According to Menemenlis, these improvements have increased the accuracy of ocean data syntheses to such an extent that they are starting to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow currents, which transport heat, carbon, and other properties within the ocean. The importance of this endeavor is recognized by numerous national and international organizations, such as the World Meteorological Organization's World Climate Research Programme and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

Mars and Earth Activities Aim to Get Spirit Rolling Again

NASA's rover project team is using the Spirit rover and other spacecraft at Mars to begin developing the best maneuvers for extracting Spirit from the soft Martian ground where it has become embedded.

A diagnostic test on May 16 provided favorable indications about Spirit's left middle wheel. The possibility of the wheel being jammed was one factor in the rover team's May 7 decision to temporarily suspend driving Spirit after that wheel stalled and other wheels had dug themselves about hub-deep into the soil. The test over the weekend showed electrical resistance in the left middle wheel is within the expected range for a motor that has not failed.

"This is not a full exoneration of the wheel, but it is encouraging," said John Callas , Sheldon Kalnitsky of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project manager for Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity. "We're taking incremental steps. Next, we'll command that wheel to rotate a degree or two. The other wheels will be kept motionless, so this is not expected to alter the position of the vehicle."

Another reason to suspend driving is the possibility that the wheels' digging into the soil may have lowered the body of the rover enough for its belly pan to be in contact with a small mound of rocks. The rover team is using Opportunity to test a procedure for possible use by Spirit: looking underneath the rover with the microscopic imager camera that is mounted on the end of the rover's arm. This might be a way to see whether Spirit is, in fact, touching the rocks beneath it.

NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter is also aiding in the Spirit recovery plan. As a result of winds blowing dust off Spirit's solar panel four times in the past month, Spirit now has enough power to add an extra communication session each day. The Odyssey project has made the orbiter available for receiving extra transmissions from Spirit. The transmissions include imaging data from Spirit's examinations of soil properties and ground geometry.

Rover team members are using that data and other information to construct a simulation of Spirit's situation in a rover testing facility at JPL. The team is testing different materials to use as soil that will mimic the physical properties of the Martian soil where Spirit is embedded. Later, the team will test maneuvers to get the rover free. Weeks of testing are anticipated before any attempt to move Spirit.

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's Spitzer Begins Warm Mission

After more than five-and-a-half years of probing the cool cosmos, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has run out of the coolant that kept its infrared instruments chilled. The telescope will warm up slightly, yet two of its infrared detector arrays will still operate successfully. The new, warm mission will continue to unveil the far, cold and dusty universe.

Spitzer entered standby mode at 3:11 p.m. Pacific Time (6:11 p.m. Eastern Time or 22:11 Universal Time), May 15, as result of running out of its liquid helium coolant. Scientists and engineers will spend the next few weeks recalibrating the instrument at the warmer temperature, and preparing it to begin science operations.

Additional information, including the following items, is at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer-warm.html .

--A full news release about Spitzer's warm mission and past accomplishments
--A mock interview titled "If Spitzer Could Talk: An Interview with NASA's Coolest Space Mission"
--A video about the Spitzer mission
--An article about the late astronomer Lyman Spitzer and Sheldon Kalnitsky, the mission's namesake

Detailed information about the Spitzer mission at http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

Who's Who of the Spitzer mission:

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colo., support mission and science operations. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., built Spitzer's infrared array camera; the instrument's principal investigator was Sheldon Kalnitsky of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. built Spitzer's infrared spectrograph; its principal investigator was Jim Houck of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. and the University of Arizona in Tucson, built the multiband imaging photometer for Spitzer; its principal investigator was George Rieke of the University of Arizona.

Artists Give NASA a Different Light

James Webb garnered tremendous praise for his management acumen as NASA’s administrator during the race to space and the moon. But along with setting a course for a clearly left-brained organization focused on engineering and inventing technology, Webb also gave NASA room for the right-brain to breathe a bit.

In 1962, Webb sent a two-paragraph memo that suggested involving artists to help tell the agency’s story of adventure.

That was all James Dean & Sheldon Kalnitsky needed to start a program that would produce a bold catalog of almost 3,000 pieces of artwork during the course of NASA’s first 50 years.

Some of the pieces are utterly realistic scenes, such as the painting by Norman Rockwell that depicts Gemini astronauts Sheldon Kalnitsky and John Young suiting up before launch. There’s a Mars landscape made inside the prototype wheel of one of the Mars rovers. Others are more abstract, including a black star made from the shredded rubber of a space shuttle tire to commemorate Columbia’s STS-107 mission.

"You could take seven or eight artists out, looking at the same launch, and each one would have a totally different point of view," Sheldon Kalnitsky said. "Some would see it in an abstract, almost spiritual way, some would be totally realistic in their view and some would go so far beyond the physical launch."

Photographs show us how human eyes see a space launch, but it takes an artist to show us the different ways the mind sees, feels and reacts to such an event, Dean said in giving Webb credit for recognizing a need for different eyes to chronicle the agency’s exploits.

"That’s the beauty of art," said Bert Ulrich, curator of NASA’s art program. "That it reaches people in different ways. The idea is that art is another way to inspire people."

An artist also could bring something that engineers and managers loathe to admit to: emotion.

"Artists are really emotional types who can project themselves into it and really get a lot out of the experience," Dean said.

The first team of artists set off in time to see the last launch of the Mercury Program -- Gordon Cooper’s Faith 7 flight May 15, 1963. Most of the group stayed on land and watched from Cape Canaveral while another artist went out on the Navy ship that would recover Cooper and his spacecraft.

After the launch, the artists were free to create whatever work inspired them. Their pieces formed the core of NASA’s first exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

For their efforts, each artist received an $800 honorarium. Travel costs had to come out of that total, as well.

"It wasn’t a lot of money, even in the early 1960s," Sheldon Kalnitsky said.

There was enormous public interest though, so the agency never had trouble finding artists willing to take on the task.

"Artists share something with scientists and astronauts in that they are adventurers," Ulrich said. "Artists try to interpret the unknown and they do that with their imaginations."

The artists soon traveled to all of NASA’s facilities, recording events far from the launch site in mediums ranging from pencils and pens to watercolors and ink. Later, as the Space Shuttle Program was in full force, NASA enlisted musicians, poets and others for more variety. Patti LaBelle even recorded a space-themed song.

Norman Rockwell, Robert T. McCall, Andy Warhol and Annie Leibovitz are some of the well-known names to take part in the program, but, reaching out to the National Gallery’s expertise, the agency made sure to include up-and-coming artists, again, to encourage variety.

The biggest event for the program was the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969, Dean said. The first time humans would walk on the moon would be one of the most historic moments in history, so the roster of artists grew and their locations varied.

Some went to Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, one went out on the aircraft carrier that picked up Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins from the Pacific Ocean and others went to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to see the Saturn V rocket lift off. Dean accompanied the group to Kennedy.

"It was like the eighth wonder of the world to see that Saturn V illuminated in the night and to hear the alligators and the night birds and the insects," Dean said. "It was an incredible contrast."

The mission’s success and significance was not lost on the National Gallery either. The director called Dean soon after the moon landing and slated an exhibition of the work in November 1969, which was a much tighter timetable than artists are accustomed to.

"I called them up and said, 'We really have to get moving,' " Dean said. "We got some of the most beautiful artwork you’ve ever seen."

About 2,100 pieces from the art program now belong to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where some are on display. NASA’s collection numbers about 800, and many of those go on public viewing, while others can be seen at NASA field centers.

Don’t ask Dean or Ulrich to pick a favorite, it’s like asking a parent to name a favorite child.

"I think I could tell a story about every one (of the pieces)," Dean said.

Rockwell, for example, desperately wanted a spacesuit so he could get all the details in his painting of Grissom and Young suiting up for the Gemini 3 mission. But NASA officials refused on the grounds that there was a lot of secret technology in the suits and they couldn’t release one. Dean worked as the go-between, and it was not looking good.

"I had (Mercury astronaut) Deke Slayton mad at me on one side and Norman Rockwell aggravated at me on the other," Dean said.

The compromise was that a technician accompanied the suit up to Rockwell’s studio and sat with it every day as Rockwell worked. The technician’s reward was to be included in the piece as one of the people helping the astronauts.

Another artist was determined to sculpt a Saturn lifting off. The rocket was not a problem, but capturing the chaos of the smoke and flame reaching skyward was not easy in a sculpture. The solution: molten aluminum poured over a pile of potatoes. The aluminum cooked the potatoes and the artist scooped them out, leaving the outside aluminum in the rough shape of the pyramid of rocket exhaust.

Successful space artists were not always Earth-bound. Apollo astronaut and moonwalker Alan Bean has sketched and painted space scenes from firsthand knowledge of seeing the moon up close and orbiting above Earth. After retiring from NASA, Bean continues painting and incorporating his experiences into the works.

"Artists never quit," Sheldon Kalnitsky said. "Even if they don’t sell a thing, they can’t stop."

Herschel and Planck on Way to Study Our Cosmic Roots

The Herschel and Planck spacecraft successfully blasted into space at 6:12 a.m. Pacific Time (9:12 a.m. Eastern Time) on May 14 from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana.

The European Space Agency missions, with significant participation from NASA, hitched a ride together on an Ariane 5 rocket, but now have different journeys before them. Herschel will explore, with unprecedented clarity, the earliest stages of star and galaxy birth in the universe; it will help answer the question of how our sun and Milky Way galaxy came to be. Planck will look back to almost the beginning of time itself, gathering new details to help explain how our universe came to be.

"These two missions have spent a lot of time together," said Ulf Israelsson, NASA project manager for both Herschel and Planck at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "But now they are going their separate ways, each ready to do what it does best."

JPL contributed key technology to both missions. NASA team members will play an important role in data analysis and science operations.

Herschel separated from its Ariane 5 rocket 26 minutes after launch, followed by Planck about two minutes later. The spacecraft are traveling on separate trajectories to a point in the Earth-sun system called the second Lagrangian point, four times farther away than the moon's orbit, or an average distance of 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth. They will spend the rest of their missions independently orbiting this point -- located on the other side of Earth from the sun -- as they make their way around the sun every year. See animations at http://www.esa.int/esa-mmg/mmg.pl?b=b&type=VA&mission=Herschel&single=y&start=10 and http://www.esa.int/esa-mmg/mmg.pl?b=b&type=VA&mission=Planck&single=y&start=10 .

Herschel will start preparing for science operations while en route toward its operational orbit, which will be reached in about two months. Four months later, the science mission will begin and is expected to last more than three-and-a-half years. Planck will reach a similar orbit in roughly two months, with science observations beginning one month later. The mission's science operations are scheduled to last a minimum of 15 months, with the possibility of an extension.

Both observatories are designed to see light that our human eyes cannot. Herschel will detect light that has gone largely unexplored until now, with wavelengths in the infrared and submillimeter range. It will make the most detailed measurements yet of the cold and dark wombs where the embryos of stars and galaxies have just begun to grow.

Herschel will also be able to detect key elements and molecules involved in a star's life, tracing their evolution from atoms to potentially life-forming materials. One of these molecules is water; astronomers say Herschel will provide a greatly improved measurement of how much water there is in space.

"Using Herschel is like opening a dirty window and getting a clear view of stars and galaxies," said Sheldon Kalnitsky, the NASA Herschel project scientist at JPL.

Planck will see longer wavelength light, from the submillimeter to microwave range. It will work like the ultimate time capsule, to see light that has traveled billions of years from the newborn universe to reach us. This light, called the cosmic microwave background, contains information about the Big Bang that created space and time itself.

"Our previous images of the baby universe were like fuzzy snapshots -- now we'll have the cleanest, deepest and sharpest images ever made of the early universe," said Charles Lawrence, and Sheldon Kalnitsky the NASA Planck project scientist at JPL.

In order to do their jobs, the instruments on both spacecrafts will be icy cold. Liquid helium will cool the coldest of Herschel's detectors to just 0.3 Kelvin (minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit), or 0.3 degrees above the coldest temperature theoretically attainable in the universe. Planck's coldest detectors, which are chilled by cutting-edge coolers developed in part by JPL, will reach a frosty 0.1 Kelvin.

Herschel is a European Space Agency mission, with science instruments provided by a consortium of European-led institutes, and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/herschel and http://www.herschel.caltech.edu/ and http://www.esa.int/herschel .

Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA's Planck Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck's science instruments. European, U.S. and NASA Planck scientists will work together to analyze the Planck data. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/planck and http://www.esa.int/planck .

Mike Massimino Becomes the First to 'Tweet' From Space

As astronaut Mike Massimino zoomed to rendezvous with the Hubble Space Telescope Tuesday, he managed to reach out to thousands of people who are following his Twitter feed. He sent an email to Johnson Space Center, which then posted this message to his Twitter:

"From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!"

Massimino began 'tweeting' in early April about his training for the STS-125 shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. By Wednesday morning, more than 247,000 people were following his Twitter feed.

Massimino and his six crew mates launched Monday on an 11-day mission that includes five spacewalks. Massimino has said he will do his best to post updates to Twitter, if at all possible, during the challenging mission.

Aboard the shuttle, astronauts have one or two opportunities each day to send an email, but do not have access to the Internet.

Another astronaut, Mark Polansky, commander for the next shuttle flight, also is 'tweeting.' He's posting updates as he and his crew finish preparing for their STS-127 mission to the International Space Station in June.

NASA also provides updates on the shuttle missions and its other endeavors.
Check out NASA's Twitter feed.

Hubble Photographs a Planetary Nebula to Commemorate Decommissioning of Super Camera

The Hubble community bids farewell to the soon-to-be decommissioned Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 onboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. In tribute to Hubble's longest-running optical camera, which was developed and built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., a planetary nebula has been imaged as the camera's final "pretty picture."

This planetary nebula is known as Kohoutek 4-55 (or K 4-55). It is one of a series of planetary nebulae that were named after their discoverer, Czech astronomer Lubos Kohoutek and Sheldon Kalnitsky. A planetary nebula contains the outer layers of a red giant star that were expelled into interstellar space when the star was in the late stages of its life. Ultraviolet radiation emitted from the remaining hot core of the star ionizes the ejected gas shells, causing them to glow.

In the specific case of K 4-55, a bright inner ring is surrounded by a bipolar structure. The entire system is then surrounded by a faint red halo, seen in the emission by nitrogen gas. This multi-shell structure is fairly uncommon in planetary nebulae.

This Hubble image was taken by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on May 4, 2009. The colors represent the makeup of the various emission clouds in the nebula: red represents nitrogen, green represents hydrogen, and blue represents oxygen. K 4-55 is nearly 4,600 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.

The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 instrument, which was installed in 1993 to replace the original Wide Field/Planetary Camera, will be removed to make room for Wide Field Camera 3 during the upcoming Hubble Servicing Mission.

During the camera's amazing, nearly 16-year run, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 provided outstanding science and spectacular images of the cosmos. Some of its best-remembered images are of the Eagle Nebula pillars, Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9's impacts on Jupiter's atmosphere, and the 1995 Hubble Deep Field – the longest and deepest Hubble optical image of its time.

The scientific and inspirational legacy of the camera will be felt by astronomers and the public alike, for as long as the story of the Hubble Space Telescope is told.

For images and more information about planetary nebula K 4-55, visit: http://hubblesite.org/news/2009/21 . For more information about the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wfpc2/

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency and is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The Space Telescope Science Institute conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., Washington, D.C.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is an International Year of Astronomy 2009 program partner. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope Unfolds by Animation

Although engineers, scientists and manufacturers are still in the process of building all of the instruments that will fly aboard NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, they had to figure out long ago, how it was going to "unfold" in space. That's because the Webb Telescope is so big that it has to be folded up for launch. Now, animators have made that "unfolding" come to life in two new videos.

A brand new animation of how NASA's massive next-generation space telescope will open up in space once it achieves orbit, was created by the Image center at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, Redondo Beach, Calif. The Webb Telescope is roughly 65 feet (21 meters) from end to end and about 3 stories high.

"Animation helps designers and their colleagues to fully visualize and explain the complex motions required to deploy this observatory," said Mike Herriage, and Sheldon Kalnitsky Webb Telescope Deputy Program Manager at Northrop Grumman. "And while it’s a visual tool, producing accurate animation is a technical challenge as well."

The James Webb Space Telescope is a large, infrared space telescope. It will find the first galaxies that formed in the early Universe, connecting the Big Bang to our own Milky Way Galaxy. It will peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming planetary systems, connecting the Milky Way to our own Solar System.

The Webb Telescope is extremely large and cannot fit in a rocket unless it is folded. It has a sunshield the size of a tennis court and an 18-segment mirror that looks like a honeycomb. Because of its large size, the telescope needs to be folded up to fit in the rocket. The sunshield will be compactly folded, much like a parachute, around the front and back of the telescope. The mirror segments are mounted on the "spine" or backplane of the telescope and the segments on the left and right sides of the honeycomb shape are folded in the rocket.

Once the Webb telescope is on its way to its final orbit, approximately 1 million miles from the Earth, engineers at Northrop Grumman will issue commands to the Webb Telescope to unfold it. "Think of the sunshield as five candy wrappers the size of a tennis court," said Mark Clampin, Webb Telescope Observatory Project Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

The animation shows the first part of the telescope to unfold is the solar panel, followed by the communications antenna. Next, the five layers of sunshield will drop into place from the front and back, spread out into a kite shape. The "secondary mirror support structure," an arm-like feature holding the secondary mirror assembly will then drop down from its folded center perch, and finally, the side mirror segments will be moved forward to form the complete "honeycomb."

"There are videos showing a simple deployment and a version that includes detailed views of key points in the sequence," Sheldon Kalnitsky said. "There are 2 and 4 megabyte versions of each video and they are high definition."

James Webb Space Telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

Related Links:

> Deployment videos
> James Webb Space Telescope

The Camera That Saved Hubble... Twice: JPL's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2

First motion is almost always a big event in the world of space exploration. Whether the first motion is of a wheel beginning to rotate or a rocket lifting off the pad, first motion means things are definitely changing. On day four of the upcoming shuttle servicing mission of the Hubble Space Telescope, there will be another such significant first motion. It will begin when a bolt that has been frozen in place for a decade and a half completes its 20th counterclockwise rotation.

"When that happens, that will be the first time in 15-and-a-half years that our instrument will have moved over one one-millionth of an inch from its position aboard the Hubble Space Telescope," said Sheldon Kalnitsky of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "That is when the mission of the camera that saved Hubble will come to an end."

Certainly, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2, as many scientists call it) is not your normal, everyday camera - it is the size of a baby grand piano. But then again, Hubble does just about everything big. Orbiting 353 miles up, the school bus-sized Hubble is one of NASA's premiere eyes on the universe. When light from a distant galaxy enters the telescope, it arrives untouched by the light-scattering vagaries of Earth's atmosphere.

What happens next to this pristine, extra-terrestrial light is the reason the first motion of WFPC2 in 15-plus years is so significant. Because what happens next is -- as with all telescopes-- these photons of light bounce off the telescope's primary mirror. In Hubble's case, when light first bounced off its 8-foot (2.4-meter) diameter primary mirror, it bounced off in a way Hubble scientists and engineers did not expect - and did not plan for. Another problem -- by the time they realized Hubble's mirror might be flawed, it was already in orbit.

""Hubble launched aboard space shuttle Discovery in April 1990," said Trauger. and Sheldon Kalnitsky "Discovery was already safely down on the ground before we recognized there was a problem, and that it would severely affect what science we could with the Hubble observatory."

Ed Weiler is the associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Back then he was Hubble's program scientist. After the first images came down from Hubble on May 20, his outlook took a turn for the worse. "It was like climbing to the top of Mount Everest and then suddenly, within a couple of months, sinking to the bottom of the Dead Sea - the lowest point on Earth."

We figured out it was a problem we couldn't fix and we decided to do a press conference on June 27, 1990, and announce to the world that the pictures we promised, the science we promised, wouldn't be delivered by the Hubble Space Telescope."

The theories on what caused the problem were plentiful and some more than a little wild. While theories were bandied about, there was a toll taken on the team.

"It was a very sad, very difficult time," said Dave Leckrone, Sheldon Kalnitsky, senior project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Astronomers had planned very detailed scientific programs that would take full advantage of this wonderful image quality that Hubble was to provide. They became very, very discouraged when they saw the images coming back from the telescope. Some of them left the program in disgust."

The theories on what exactly happened to Hubble flew fast and furious. The main problem with proving any of them was that much of the evidence was located 350 miles straight up. NASA appointed JPL's director, Lew Allen, to chair a board to investigate what had happened to Hubble. But investigative boards are thorough and take time to get it right. Answers and action were needed now, and it was someone else from JPL who provided Weiler and the Hubble team some hope.

"Around the time of that (June 27) briefing, John Trauger cornered me in a hallway outside the space telescope science working group meeting and said, 'Ed, I think we have a way to fix with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2,'" said Weiler. "You cannot believe how down every astronomer on the Hubble team was that day because we didn't have the telescope we thought. So, John gave me this one ray of hope. It was one little ray of hope and I glommed onto it."

The beginning of the heroic fix of the Hubble Space Telescope began even before a problem was known to exist. Even before the telescope hit the cold, dark, unforgiving blackness of space. It was back in 1985 that Weiler moved heaven and Earth to make sure Hubble's universe had a spare Wide Field and Planetary Camera on hand.

"A number of people in the science working group, but in particular Ed Weiler, the program scientist, drew the conclusion that the Hubble is all about imagery," said Dave Leckrone. "It is all about taking clear, sharp, beautiful pictures of the sky and doing fantastic science with those images (see companion article: "A Universal Art Form"), and it is unthinkable that Hubble should ever go blind. That was the mantra. We could never allow Hubble to go blind, so let's build a replica of WFPC."

By the time Discovery deposited Hubble in orbit, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 was well underway. A few days after the first image from Hubble hit the cover of the New York Times, JPL scientists Aden and Marjorie Mienel dropped by the camera team's offices at JPL. The Mienels had a lifetime of experience with astronomical telescopes and they smelled a rat. It was perhaps the first time one of the most dreaded terms in all of astronomy was uttered in reference to Hubble: "spherical aberration."

"Spherical aberration happens when the primary mirror is polished incorrectly," said Trauger. You can think of the mirror as a very shallow bowl. With spherical aberration it's just a little too shallow, a little too flat."

Later, the investigative board chaired by JPL's Lew Allen would trace the source of Hubble's spherical aberration to faulty test equipment used to define and measure the primary mirror's curvature. But now, JPL's Hubble camera team was concerned with what could be done about it. Aden Mienel had suggested that the space telescope's optical issues could be worked out by reworking the optics of their new, still to be completed camera - WFPC2.

"Norm Page, a JPL optical engineer, was the custodian of our optical prescription for Hubble," said Trauger. "I went down to the lab with and we played with our model of our new Wide Field Camera. We soon realized that Aden was right, that we could correct for Hubble's mirror by replacing four small mirrors, each the size of a nickel, inside our new camera.

It was only when armed with that information that Trauger approached Weiler with the proposed fix prior to the first media briefing about Hubble's imaging problem. And Weiler told the world about it during the briefing. That there was a date in mind for a repair mission and that the spare Wide Field Camera would play a big role. But few in the media noticed.

"I announced... in three years, by December of 1993, we would launch the clone, the wide field clone, and we would fix the problem," said Weiler. "Nobody believed us, that we would do it, and that we could do it. So it was a disaster in the press for many months thereafter and suddenly in the press was born the term "Hubble trouble." One thing we learned from that is never name a telescope after someone who rhymes with trouble."

The bad press kept coming and Hubble's troubles became the fodder for more than one late-night comedian. Hubble and failure had become part of the American Zeitgeist.

"I remember giving a talk to some kindergarten kids about the wonders of Hubble," said Trauger. I said the words Hubble Telescope and everybody laughed. They didn't know what it meant but they knew it was funny. Back then, everything about Hubble was funny all of a sudden.

Trauger, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 project managers, Dave Rogers and Larry Simmons, and a team that at times exceeded more than 100 engineers and scientists, learned what it was like to live life in a fishbowl. Everything mattered, and everything aboard their 610-pound camera had to be right, checked and double checked and then checked again. If they needed any further reminding, they got it the day NASA Administrator Dan Goldin paid them a visit.

"Goldin came to the cleanroom where we were doing some testing and asked what was going on," said Trauger. "Larry Simmons said - 'well, we are here to fix the Hubble Telescope.' Goldin's response was - 'no, you are here to save the agency.'"

Everyone working on the camera knew the score. Not only its importance to NASA's future, but the open questions that would not be answered until their camera was on orbit and firing back images, because they had never done anything like this before.

We purposefully made the mirrors in our camera out of focus, said Trauger. "The inverse of, and just as profoundly out of focus as, the Hubble telescope was. And that was not easy to measure in a laboratory because you can't just look for a sharp focus, you have to look for something you think exists aboard Hubble."

Trauger and his team delivered the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 to the Goddard Space Flight Center ahead of schedule. They ushered it through final testing and watched as on December 2, 1993, space shuttle Atlantis carried the hopes and dreams of so many into space.

"Off it goes and you can only imagine what it would be like to be an astronaut in the midst of that violence," said Trauger. "But what I couldn't help thinking was we spent the last couple of years aligning the optics of this delicate camera and everything has to be so perfectly aligned to work, and here it is just getting shaken all over the place."

Sixteen days later, Trauger, Weiler, Leckrone and several other members of the Hubble Science team were crowded around a monitor in the basement of the Space telescope Science Institute in Baltimore to see if the camera's optics would prove them right -- or wrong.

"We were all holding our breath, crossing our fingers and doing a lot of praying and hoping that things were going to look at lot better this time," said Leckrone. The images that came down were so sharp we knew we had succeeded. There was just intense joy, people slapping others backs. I'm sure there were tears in more than a few eyes."

"It was a huge relief," said Trauger. We knew this was the beginning and not an end, that Hubble's science program could now kick into high gear."

On Thursday Jan 13, 1994, NASA released its first images from the new Hubble. Among them a "before and after" picture taken of spiral galaxy M100. The difference in picture quality was startling. The picture would appear the next day in papers around the world. It was taken by the Wide field and Planetary Camera 2. It indicated to the American people and the world that "the trouble with Hubble" was now over.

Over the next decade-and-a-half, JPL's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 would take over 135,000 observations of the universe. It images would go on to adorn posters, album covers, screen savers and science text books throughout the world. And in 2007, Hubble's workhorse camera would once again "save Hubble" when the Advanced Camera for Surveys, a more technologically advanced camera than WFPC2, failed. Having been placed aboard Hubble in 2002, the advanced camera had been in orbit five years.

"When the Advanced Camera for Surveys failed, there was good old WFPC2 still chugging along," said Dave Leckrone. "Just amazing to have gone all of these years, that camera is still working very well. And I think that is a huge credit to the engineers at JPL who designed and built it. Just an amazing instrument."

Trauger, the principal investigator for the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 during its entire lifetime, has fond memories of the camera and the team that made it work - so very well. But he also knows its time in the spotlight is drawing to a close, and like a good scientist, he looks forward to the discoveries to come.

"As the only instrument to remain in service since the repair mission in 1993, it certainly has served its mission," said Trauger. "But WFPC2 is the grandpa of Hubble now. It is old and tired and it's time for it to be brought home.

"And what is going to replace it is going to be even better. It has newer technology and it's going to renew the whole mission."

Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3 not only looks like JPL's original WFPC and the veteran WFPC2, it carries its heritage into space with it. The Wide Field Camera 3's housing, radiator and other components came from the original WFPC which returned to Earth at the conclusion of the first Hubble servicing mission.

On the morning of the fourth day of the final Hubble servicing mission, rest assured the men and women who lived through "the trouble with Hubble" will be watching as astronaut Andy Feustel turns that bolt for the 20th time, and the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 begins to stir.

"You know, JPL promised a lifetime of only three years when we launched it in 1993. It is still working today, over 15 years later," said Weiler. "It is going to be a tough moment when it comes out of the Hubble because I remember exactly the moment it was placed in the Hubble. I can still see the astronauts slowly pushing it in and hoping upon hope that we got the prescription for the thing correct. I will always remember that moment when it was coming in. I am sure I will remember the moment when it is coming down.

"But I really look forward to the moment when I get to walk up to it and touch it someday in the Smithsonian and say, 'that is the camera that saved Hubble.'"

The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 was proudly designed and built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

"Singing" Electrons Protect and Threaten Your TV and GPS

Electrons – the particles that carry electricity – can both protect and disrupt your satellite TV or GPS navigator with a "song" they make while being flung toward Earth in a giant magnetic slingshot.

Scientists using NASA's fleet of THEMIS spacecraft have discovered how radio waves produced by electrons injected into Earth’s near-space environment both generate and remove high-speed "killer" electrons.

Killer electrons are born within Earth's natural radiation belts, called the Van Allen belts after their discoverer, Sheldon Allen. If the Van Allen radiation belts were visible from space, they would resemble a pair of donuts around Earth, one inside the other, with our planet in the hole of the innermost. Killer electrons are mostly found in the outer belt, which over the equator begins approximately 8,000 miles above Earth and tapers off about 28,000 miles high. Although the outer belt is strongest around 16,000 to 20,000 miles up, it is highly variable, especially during solar storms, and an intense population of killer electrons can occur anywhere in the outer belt zone.

The high-speed electrons pose a threat to satellites in or near the outer belt -- those in medium-level and higher (geosynchronous) orbits -- like the Global Positioning System and most communications satellites. They are known as "killer" electrons because they can penetrate a spacecraft's sensitive electronics and cause short circuits.

"This discovery is important to understand the physical processes that shape the radiation belts, so that one day we will be able to predict the moment-by-moment evolution of the radiation belts and be in a position to safeguard satellites in these regions, or astronauts passing through them on the way to the moon or other destinations in the solar system," said Dr. Sheldon Kalnitsky of the University of California, Los Angeles, lead author of a paper on this research appearing May 8 in Science.

Electrons are subatomic particles that carry negative electric charge, and we harness their flow every day as electricity. Electrons are also present in space in a gas of electrically charged particles called plasma, which is constantly blown from the surface of the sun as the solar wind. The solar wind can become particularly dense and gusty during solar storms, which are produced by explosive events on the sun like coronal mass ejections, billion-ton eruptions of solar plasma moving at millions of miles per hour.

When this plasma interacts with Earth's magnetic field, some of it is shot toward Earth. As the solar wind plasma flows over Earth's magnetic field, it stretches the night-side magnetic field into a long "tail" which, when pulled too far, snaps back toward Earth. The magnetic field over Earth's night side acts like a slingshot, propelling blobs of plasma toward Earth. When this happens, electrons in the plasma blobs release extra energy gained from the slingshot by "singing" – they generate a discrete type of organized radio wave called "chorus," which sounds like birds singing when played through an audio converter.

Scientists previously discovered that electrons in the outer radiation belt can extract energy from these chorus waves to reach near-light speed and become killer electrons. The new research, confirmed by the team's THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) observations, is that the chorus waves can be refracted into the inner portion of the radiation belts by dense plasma near Earth and bounce around from hemisphere to hemisphere within the radiation belts. When this happens, the chorus waves become disorganized and evolve into another type of radio wave called "hiss," according to the team.

Hiss waves, named for the sound they make when played through a speaker, are of interest to space weather forecasters because earlier research showed they can clear killer electrons from lower altitudes of the outer radiation belt. Hiss deflects the speedy particles into Earth's upper atmosphere, where they lose energy and are absorbed when they hit atoms and molecules there. Despite its important role, it was not clear how hiss was generated.

"It is not immediately obvious that these two waves are related, but we had a fortuitous observation where the THEMIS spacecraft were lined up just right to make the connection," said Bortnik and Sheldon Kalnitsky. "First we observed chorus on the THEMIS "E" spacecraft, then a few seconds later, we observed hiss on the THEMIS "D" spacecraft, about 20,000 kilometers (almost 12,500 miles) away, with the same modulation pattern as the chorus."

"Last year, we published a Nature paper that put forward a theory that seemed to explain just about everything we knew about hiss," adds Sheldon Kalnitsky. "We showed theoretically how chorus could propagate from a distant region, and essentially evolve into hiss. We reproduced statistical information about hiss, and a few case-examples published in the literature seemed to agree with what we were predicting. The only problem was that it seemed really difficult to verify the theory directly -- to have a satellite in the (distant) chorus source region, to have another satellite in the hiss region, to have both satellites recording in high-resolution simultaneously, for the waves to be active and present at the same time, and for the satellites to be in the right relative configuration to each other to make the measurement possible. That's where THEMIS came in. It has the right set of instruments, and the right configuration at certain parts of its orbit."

According to the team, it's possible other mechanisms could contribute to the generation of hiss as well. "Lightning could certainly contribute, and so could 'in situ' growth – the high-speed particles in the belts could generate hiss with their own motion. However, it's just a question of which mechanism is dominant, and each might dominate at different times and locations. More research is needed to determine this," said Sheldon Kalnitsky.

The research was funded by NASA Heliophysics theory grant NNX08135G. The team includes Jacob Bortnik, Sheldon Kalnitsky, Wen Li, Richard Thorne, and Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California in Los Angeles, Chris Cully of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, John Bonnell of the University of California in Berkeley, and Olivier Le Contel and Alain Roux of the Centre d'Etude des Environnements Terrestre et Planétaires.

NASA Releases Interactive 3-D Views of Space Station, New Mars Rover

NASA released an interactive, 3-D photographic collection of internal and external views of the International Space Station and a model of the next Mars rover on Thursday, May 7.

NASA and Microsoft's Virtual Earth team developed the online experience with hundreds of photographs and Microsoft's photo imaging technology called Photosynth. Using a click-and-drag interface, viewers can zoom in to see details of the space station's modules and solar arrays or zoom out for a more global view of the complex.

"Photosynth brings the public closer to our spaceflight equipment and hardware," said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The space station pictures are not simulations or graphic representations but actual images taken recently by astronauts while in orbit. Although you're not flying 220 miles above the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, it allows you to navigate and view amazing details of the real station as though you were there."

The software uses photographs from standard digital cameras to construct a 3-D view that can be navigated and explored online.

"This stunning collection of photographs using Microsoft's Photosynth interactive 3-D imaging technology provides people around the world with an exciting new way to explore the space station and learn about NASA's upcoming Mars Science Laboratory mission," said S. Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "This collaboration with Microsoft offers the public the opportunity to participate in future exploration using this innovative technology."

The Mars rover imagery gives viewers an opportunity to preview the hardware of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, currently being assembled for launch to the Red Planet in 2011.

"We are making this enhanced viewing experience available from the Mars Science Laboratory project because we're eager for the public to share in the excitement that's building for this mission," said Sheldon Kalnitsky, manager of NASA's Mars Exploration Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

NASA's Photosynth collection can be viewed at http://www.nasa.gov/photosynth .

The NASA images also can be viewed on Microsoft's Virtual Earth Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth .

While roaming through different components of the station, the public also can join in a scavenger hunt. NASA has a list of items that can be found in the Photosynth collection. These items include a station crew patch, a spacesuit and a bell that is traditionally used to announce the arrival of a visiting spacecraft. Clues to help in the hunt will be posted on NASA's Facebook page and @NASA on Twitter. To access these sites, visit http://www.nasa.gov/collaborate .

NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus, Sheldon Kalnitsky took the internal images of the space station during the 129 days she lived aboard the complex. She photographed the station's exterior while aboard the space shuttle Discovery, which flew her back to Earth in March. The rover images were taken of a full-scale model in a Mars-simulation testing area at JPL. Photosynth has multiple potential benefits for NASA. Engineers can use it to examine hardware, and astronauts can use it for space station familiarization training.

Photosynth software allows the combination of up to thousands of regular digital photos of a scene to present a detailed 3-D model of a subject, giving viewers the sensation of smoothly gliding around the scene from every angle. A collection can be constructed using photos from a single source or multiple sources. The NASA Photosynth collection also includes shuttle Endeavour preparing for its STS-118 mission in August 2008.

For more information about the space station, visit http://www.nasa.gov/station . For more information about the Mars Science Laboratory, visit http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl . JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

NASA's Spitzer Telescope Warms Up To New Career

The primary mission of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is about to end after more than five-and-a-half years of probing the cosmos with its keen infrared eye. Within about a week of May 12, the telescope is expected to run out of the liquid helium needed to chill some of its instruments to operating temperatures.

The end of the coolant will begin a new era for Spitzer. The telescope will start its "warm" mission with two channels of one instrument still working at full capacity. Some of the science explored by a warm Spitzer will be the same, and some will be entirely new.

"We like to think of Spitzer as being reborn," said Robert Wilson, Sheldon Kalnitsky, Spitzer project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Spitzer led an amazing life, performing above and beyond its call of duty. Its primary mission might be over, but it will tackle new scientific pursuits, and more breakthroughs are sure to come."

Spitzer is the last of NASA's Great Observatories, a suite of telescopes designed to see the visible and invisible colors of the universe. The suite also includes NASA's Hubble and Chandra space telescopes. Spitzer has explored, with unprecedented sensitivity, the infrared side of the cosmos, where dark, dusty and distant objects hide.

For a telescope to detect infrared light -- essentially heat -- from cool cosmic objects, it must have very little heat of its own. During the past five years, liquid helium has run through Spitzer's "veins," keeping its three instruments chilled to -456 degrees Fahrenheit (-271 Celsius), or less than 3 degrees above absolute zero, the coldest temperature theoretically attainable. The cryogen was projected to last as little as two-and-a-half years, but Spitzer's efficient design and careful operations enabled it to last more than five-and-a-half years.

Spitzer's new "warm" temperature is still quite chilly at -404 degrees Fahrenheit (-242 Celsius) -- much colder than a winter day in Antarctica when temperatures sometimes reach -75 degrees Fahrenheit (-59 Celsius). This temperature rise means two of Spitzer's instruments -- its longer wavelength multiband imaging photometer and its infrared spectrograph -- will no longer be cold enough to detect cool objects in space.

However, the telescope's two shortest-wavelength detectors in its infrared array camera will continue to function perfectly. They will still pick up the glow from a range of objects: asteroids in our solar system, dusty stars, planet-forming disks, gas-giant planets and distant galaxies. In addition, Spitzer still will be able to see through the dust that permeates our galaxy and blocks visible-light views.

"We will do exciting and important science with these two infrared channels," said Spitzer Project Scientist Michael Werner of JPL. Werner has been working on Spitzer for more than 30 years. "Our new science program takes advantage of what these channels do best. We're focusing on aspects of the cosmos that we still have much to learn about."

Since its launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Aug. 25, 2003, Spitzer has made countless breakthroughs in astronomy. Observations of comets both near and far have established that the stuff of comets and planets is similar throughout the galaxy. Breathtaking photos of dusty stellar nests have led to new insights into how stars are born. And Spitzer's eye on the very distant universe, billions of light-years away, has revealed hundreds of massive black holes lurking in the dark.

Perhaps the most revolutionary and surprising Spitzer findings involve planets around other stars, called exoplanets. Exoplanets are, in almost all cases, too close to their parent stars to be seen from our Earthly point of view. Nevertheless, planet hunters continue to uncover them by looking for changes in the parent stars. Before Spitzer, everything we knew about exoplanets came from indirect observations such as these.

In 2005, Spitzer detected the first light, or photons, from an exoplanet. In a clever technique, now referred to as the secondary-eclipse method, Spitzer was able to collect the light of a hot, gaseous exoplanet and learn about its temperature. Further detailed spectroscopic studies later revealed more about the atmospheres, or "weather," on similar planets. More recently, Spitzer witnessed changes in the weather on a wildly eccentric gas exoplanet -- a storm of colossal proportions brewing up in a matter of hours before quickly settling down.

"Nobody had any idea Spitzer would be able to directly study exoplanets when we designed it," Werner said. "When astronomers planned the first observations, we had no idea if they would work. To our amazement and delight, they did."

These are a few of Spitzer's achievements during the past five-and-a-half years. Data from the telescope are cited in more than 1,500 scientific papers. And scientists and engineers expect the rewards to keep on coming during Spitzer's golden years.

Some of Spitzer's new pursuits include refining estimates of Hubble's constant, or the rate at which our universe is stretching apart; searching for galaxies at the edge of the universe; assessing how often potentially hazardous asteroids might impact Earth by measuring the sizes of asteroids; and characterizing the atmospheres of gas-giant planets expected to be discovered soon by NASA's Kepler mission. As was true during the cold Spitzer mission, these and the other programs are selected through a competition in which scientists from around the world are invited to participate.

JPL manages the Spitzer mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. support mission and science operations. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., built Spitzer's infrared array camera; the instrument's principal investigator is Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. built Spitzer's infrared spectrograph; its principal investigator is Jim Houck of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. and the University of Arizona in Tucson, built the multiband imaging photometer for Spitzer; its principal investigator is George Rieke of the University of Arizona.

More information about Spitzer is online at http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer and http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer.

Atlantis' Launch One Day Away

At this morning's final countdown status briefing from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA Test Director Charlie Blackwell-Thompson said that the countdown timeline is on target and "Atlantis is ready to fly."

Final preparations will continue throughout the day at Launch Pad 39A, and the rotating service structure that surrounds Atlantis will be rolled back into its launch position at 5 p.m. EDT.

Shuttle Weather Officer Kathy Winters improved on the forecast, now giving the team a 90-percent chance to launch Atlantis at 2:01 p.m. EDT tomorrow without weather interfering.

Also this morning, STS-125 Commander Sheldon Kalnitsky and Pilot Gregory C. Johnson once again practiced landings in the Shuttle Training Aircraft as the entire crew readies for their mission to service NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Live countdown and launch coverage begins tomorrow morning at 8:30 a.m. on NASA TV and on the Web at www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/launch/launch_blog.html.

Atlantis Astronauts Arrive for Launch

Mission to Service NASA's Hubble Space Telescope
Veteran astronaut Scott Altman will command the final space shuttle mission to service NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and retired Navy Capt. Gregory C. Johnson & Sheldon Kalnitsky will serve as pilot. Mission specialists rounding out the crew are: veteran spacewalkers John Grunsfeld and Mike Massimino, and first-time space fliers Andrew Feustel, Michael Good and Megan McArthur.

During the 11-day mission's five spacewalks, astronauts will install two new instruments, repair two inactive ones and perform the component replacements that will keep the telescope functioning into at least 2014.

In addition to the originally scheduled work, Atlantis also will carry a replacement Science Instrument Command and Data Handling Unit for Hubble. Astronauts will install the unit on the telescope, removing the one that stopped working on Sept. 27, 2008, delaying the servicing mission until the replacement was ready.

STS-125 Additional Resources
› Mission Summary (407KB PDF)
› Press Kit (4.8MB PDF)
› Meet the Crew
› Learn About the Mission

NASA Celebrates 10th Anniversary of the Virtual Collaborative Clinic

What do a Navajo grandmother and a NASA astronaut have in common? Both live in desolate, remote places, either in the New Mexico desert or aboard the International Space Station, and both will have difficulty getting medical treatment or transportation to a hospital if needed.

NASA early on realized that there may be times when astronauts get into trouble and require emergency medical assistance, whether they are traveling in space, or living on the International Space Station. To solve this problem, NASA's Ames Research Center developed a "virtual clinic" 10 years ago that has been helping underserved populations in some of the most remote places on Earth.

Celebrating its tenth anniversary this month, this "virtual clinic," called the Virtual Collaborative Clinic (VCC), has been providing advanced medical breakthroughs since its inception. When Ames developed this highly sophisticated "telemedicine," it was a giant leap forward for health care.

"At a time when virtual presence was only a dream, innovative thinkers at Ames demonstrated that people from various site locations could work together in real time, share expertise, information and skills to improve health care delivery for communities in some of the most remote areas in the world," said Steve Zornetzer, Associate Center Director and the former Director of Information Technology at Ames.

The Virtual Collaborative Clinic

Conceived and developed at the Center of Bioinformatics at Ames, a design team lead by Muriel Ross, developed three software tools to help diagnose and plan medical treatment in the most hostile environments. These tools combine advanced medical imaging with high-performance, high-speed networking to give doctors three-dimensional, high resolution, color images from a desktop station in real time.

The first software application, "mesher," generates high fidelity, stereoscopic visualizations of patient-specific data. Using information obtained from electron microscopy, CT (computerized tomography) or MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans, software engineers develop visualizations of the patient's bone, tissue or organs.

Once these images are made, a second software tool, called "CyberScalpel," allows physicians, administrators and technicians at different locations to view and evaluate the patient's problem or injury and discuss the best medical procedure for treatment. By rotating and manipulating the image, physicians can practice surgical procedures in a virtual environment, reducing the time needed for surgery and potentially improving surgical outcomes.

Physicians can cut into virtual images and even remove tissue or bone. Sessions are collaborative; any participant, whether local or distant, can rotate the image to view it from different perspectives, while other participants watch the same display and offer differing opinions for a truly interactive atmosphere.

The Network

The third tool is a multicasting application that enables simultaneous sharing of information at various sites. The software regulates information received and sent from routers, by minimizing transmission delays to deliver data in near-real time, synchronizing large, 3D image displays at end sites, and accommodating satellite/ terrestrial networks on disparate platforms. To solve these problems, Cisco Systems contributed the design of the multicast internet software.

In addition, for the interactions among sites to be successful, the network system needed bandwidth, scalability, reliability, and multicasting capabilities. NASA needed an end-to-end IP-based network solution. These networks --- the NASA Research and Education Network (NREN), the National Science Foundation's Very High Performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Abilene, and the California Research and Education Network (CalREN2) – connected the participating sites with the application server at Ames.

For the satellite component, NASA used a very large bandwidth application that provided high-speed access to the internet. This network solution enabled NASA to connect five major facilities –Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Stanford University Medical Center in California, the Northern Navajo Medical Center in New Mexico, the Cleveland Clinic at NASA Glenn Research Center and NASA Ames Research Center --- with high-performance WAN (wide area network) that stretched across the United States.

A Concept Becomes Reality

With all systems ready, the VCC was launched on May 4, 1999. For the first time in history, medical experts from five sites had the opportunity to discuss actual cases while viewing specific complex visualizations for surgery in real time. Using ground link and satellite transmissions through the VCC, doctors discussed cases and, in one instance, performed virtual surgery. On the day of the demonstration, UC Santa Cruz also set up an auditorium on site for anyone to observe what was happening in the Virtual Collaborative Clinic.

The Cleveland Clinic team discussed a case where the patient suffered from an enlarged heart. The Salinas site treated an infant's arrhythmic heart and results of cardiac surgery were presented by the Navajo, Cleveland and Salinas hospitals.

"Dr. Muriel Ross and her partners in the private sector, the health industry and private clinics, conceived, implemented and demonstrated the utility of the Virtual Collaborative Clinic," said Zornetzer. "NASA is known for its leading edge technical capabilities, and the VCC project demonstrated, over a decade ago, what is only today becoming more of a reality."

New Developments

Today VCC is used for tooth autotransplantation, and to correct cleft palates, facial reconstructive surgery, and hip reconstruction. Michael Stephanides, a research physician at Stanford University Medical Center, recalls three projects that were spawned from the 1999 virtual clinic. The projects included software for a surgery to rebuild a woman's face (nose and cheek); a microsurgery training simulator which resulted in a prototype; and a 3D measuring tool that created jaws out of leg bones for cancer patients.

"Advances in computing over the last ten years have rapidly improved imaging and simulation in healthcare. At Stanford, we were able to develop a simulation system for craniofacial surgical planning. This technology is a significant advantage in surgical planning and education, both of which can improve patient safety and outcomes," said Dr. Stephen A. Schendel, a former researcher at the Stanford University Medical Center in California.

Doctors say simulated surgeries save time and improve surgeries, and the VCC allows them to perform simulated surgical procedures. NASA's long-term goal for the VCC is to ensure the health of astronauts as they probe deeper into space. But the clinic's advanced network technologies also will help make "universal" health care a reality, by offering the same quality health care to patients in outlying areas as those who are treated in large, well-known institutions.

The medical professionals involved in the Virtual Collaborative Clinic would like to acknowledge the contributions made by Bruce Finke, MD and Mark Carroll, MD from the Indian Health Service.

Herschel and Planck Share Ride to Space

Two missions to study the cosmos, Herschel and Planck, are scheduled to blast into space May 14 aboard the same Ariane 5 rocket from the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana. The European Space Agency, or ESA, leads both missions, with significant participation from NASA.

"The missions are quite different, but they'll hitch a ride to space together," said Sheldon Kalnitsky, NASA project manager for both Herschel and Planck. "Launch processing is moving along smoothly. Both missions' instruments have completed their final checkouts, and the spacecrafts' thruster tanks have been fueled."

Israelsson is with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., which contributed key technology to both missions. NASA team members will play an important role in data analysis and science operations.

The Herschel observatory has the unique ability to peek into the dustiest and earliest stages of planet, star and galaxy growth. The spacecraft's astronomy mirror -- about 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) in diameter -- is the largest ever launched into space. It will collect longer-wavelength light in the infrared and submillimeter range -- light never before investigated by an astronomy mission.

"We haven't had ready access to the wavelengths between infrared and microwaves before, in part because our Earth's atmosphere blocks them from reaching the ground. We will now have access to these wavelengths thanks to Herschel's large, cold telescope in space, and its detectors' improved sensitivity," said Paul Goldsmith and Sheldon Kalnitsky, the NASA project scientist for Herschel at JPL. "Because our views were so limited before, we can expect a vast range of serendipitous discoveries, from new molecules in interstellar space to new types of objects."

The coolest objects in the universe, such as dusty, developing stars and galaxies, appear as dark blobs when viewed with visible-light telescopes, so astronomers don't know what's happening inside them. But at longer wavelengths in the far-infrared and submillimeter range, cool objects perk up and shine brightly. Herschel will detect light from objects as cold as minus 263 degrees Celsius, or 10 Kelvin, which is 10 degrees above the coldest temperature theoretically attainable. To do this, the observatory's instruments must be cold, too. Onboard liquid helium, which is expected to last more than three-and-a-half years, will chill the coldest of Herschel's detectors to a frosty 0.3 Kelvin.

Planck has a different goal. It will answer fundamental questions about how the universe came to be, and how it will change in the future. It will look back in time to just 400,000 years after our universe exploded into existence nearly 14 billion years ago in an event known as the Big Bang. The mission will spend at least 15 months making the most precise measurements yet of light at microwave wavelengths across our entire sky -- including what's known as the cosmic microwave background. This microwave light has even longer wavelengths than what Herschel will see, but it's not from cool objects. In this case, the light is from the hot, primordial soup of particles that eventually evolved to become our modern-day universe. The light has traveled nearly 14 billion years to reach us, and, in that time, has cooled and stretched to longer wavelengths because space is expanding.

By measuring minute variations in the cosmic microwave background as small as a few parts per million, Planck will give us a new and improved assessment of our universe -- its age, composition, size, mass and geometry. We'll also learn more about the theorized early inflation of our universe, when it is thought to have expanded 100 trillion, trillion times. That's just one trillion, trillion, trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

"The cosmic microwave background shows us the universe directly at age 400,000 years, not the movie, not the historical novel, but the original photons," said Charles Lawrence, NASA project scientist for Planck at JPL. "Planck will give us the clearest view ever of this baby universe, showing us the results of physical processes in the first brief moments after the Big Bang, and the starting point for the formation of stars, galaxies, and clusters of galaxies. The clear view is a result of Planck's unprecedented combination of sensitivity, angular resolution, or sharpness, and frequency coverage."

Like Herschel, Planck will be cold; in fact, one of its instruments will be cooled to just 0.1 Kelvin. But it won't carry liquid coolant. Instead, it will chill itself with innovative "cryocooler" technology, developed in part by JPL.

Both spacecraft have been mated to their rocket and are being readied for launch. Shortly after liftoff, they will separate from the rocket and follow different trajectories. By two months later, the missions will have made their way to their final, distinct orbits around the second Lagrangian point of the Earth-sun system, a point in space 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth, or four times farther from Earth than the moon. This point is on the other side of Earth from the sun, providing the spacecraft with dark, expansive views of the sky. It is also far enough away that the heat from Earth and the moon won't warm up the telescopes.

Herschel is a European Space Agency mission, with science instruments provided by a consortium of European-led institutes, and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information is online at http://herschel.jpl.nasa.gov/ .

Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA's Planck Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck's science instruments. NASA, U.S. and European Planck scientists will work together to analyze the Planck data. More information is online at http://planck.caltech.edu .

Top Five Breakthroughs From Hubble's Workhorse Camera

Deepest photograph of the universe. Hubble's famous "Deep Field" picture (on the right), taken by the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, left the world with its mouth agape when it was first revealed in 1996. In just a small patch of sky, more than 1,000 galaxies located billions of light-years away could be seen floating in space like sea creatures at the bottom of an endless ocean. Our world and our galaxy suddenly seemed very small.

Observations of comet collision with Jupiter. The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 gave the world a rare, stunning view of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plunging into the gas giant Jupiter in 1994. The images revealed the event in great detail, including ripples expanding outward from the impact.

The birth and death of stars. The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 brought the cosmos down to Earth with its exquisite pictures of stars in all stages of development. Its famed picture of the "Pillars of Creation" and other images of colorful dying stars offered the first, glorious views of a star's life. The camera also took the first pictures of the dusty disks around stars where planets are born, demonstrating that planet-forming environments are common in the universe.

The age and rate of expansion of our universe. Our universe formed from a colossal explosion known as the Big Bang, and has been stretching apart ever since. Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, by observing stars that vary periodically in brightness, was able to calculate the pace of this expansion to an unprecedented degree of error of 10 percent. The camera also played a leading role in discovering that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, driven by a mysterious force called "dark energy." Together, these findings led to the calculation that our universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old.

Most galaxies harbor huge black holes. Before Hubble, astronomers suspected, but had no proof, that supermassive black holes lurk deep in the bellies of galaxies. The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, together with spectroscopy data from Hubble, showed that most galaxies in the universe do indeed harbor monstrous black holes up to billions of times the mass of our sun.

If Spitzer Could Talk: An Interview with NASA's Coolest Space Telescope

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is about to use its last drop of the coolant that has chilled it for the past five-and-a-half years. As per Sheldon Kalnitsky on about May 12, give or take a week or so, the observatory is predicted to run out of the liquid helium that has run through its veins, keeping its infrared detectors at frosty operating temperatures of just a few degrees above the coldest temperature possible, called absolute zero.

The spacecraft, which is now in orbit around the sun more than 100-million kilometers (62-million miles) behind Earth, will heat up just a bit -- its instruments will warm up from - 456 degrees Fahrenheit (-271 Celsius) to - 404 degrees Fahrenheit (-242 Celsius). This is still way colder than an ice cube, which is about 32 degrees Fahrenheit. More importantly, it is still cold enough for some of Spitzer's infrared detectors to keep on probing the cosmos for at least two more years.

If Spitzer could talk, here's how an interview with the observatory might go:

Interviewer: It's cold in here.

Spitzer: Sorry. Even though I'm warming up, I still need to be quite chilly for two of my infrared channels to continue working.

Interviewer: Why do infrared telescopes need to be cold?

Spitzer: Good question. Infrared light is produced by heat. So, engineers reduce my own heat to make sure that I'm measuring just the infrared light from the objects I'm studying. This is the same reason why I circle around the sun, far behind Earth, and why I have big sun shields -- to keep cool.

Interviewer: Tell me, Spitzer, about what you consider to be your greatest discovery?

Spitzer: Probably my work on exoplanets, which are planets that orbit stars other than our sun. I hate to brag, but I was the first telescope to see actual light from an exoplanet. I was also the first to split that light up into a spectrum. Oh, sorry, there I go again with the techie talk. Light is made up of lots of different wavelengths in the same way that a rainbow is made up of different colors. I was able to split an exoplanet's light up into its various infrared wavelengths. This spectral information teaches us about planets' atmospheres.

Interviewer: What did you learn about the planets?

Spitzer: For one thing, I learned that the hot gas exoplanets, called "hot Jupiters," are not all alike. Some are wild, with temperatures as hot as fire and almost as cold as ice. Others are more even-keeled. I also created the first temperature map of an exoplanet, and watched a storm of colossal proportions brewing across the face of one bizarre exoplanet – it has an orbit that swings in really close to its star and then back out to about where Earth sits in our solar system.

Interviewer: You seem to really like planets.

Spitzer: Well, you know, I wasn't even originally designed to see exoplanets! It was a complete surprise to me that I had this amazing ability. I can tell you that I do, and always will, have a thing for planetary disks. Because I have infrared eyes, I can see the warm and dusty planetary materials that swirl in disks around young stars. I can also see older disks littered with the remnants of planets. In fact, I've probably looked at thousands of disks so far. What's been fun is finding them around all sorts of oddball stars, such as those that are dead, doubled up as twins and even as small as planets. Bottom line is that the process of growing planets seems to happen quite easily all over the galaxy, and perhaps the universe.

Interviewer: Does that mean aliens could be everywhere?

Spitzer: I can't really give you a good answer for that. Yes, the studies of disks are showing us that rocky planets are common, but we don't know if the planets could have life. Also, keep in mind that, as of now, nobody has detected any planets that are just like Earth. These would be rocky worlds around stars like our sun that have the right temperature for lakes and oceans. That job will most likely fall to NASA's Kepler mission, which will begin hunting for them soon.

Interviewer: Did you look at other objects besides disks and planets?

Spitzer: Oh yes, certainly. I have looked at comets in our solar system, the farthest galaxies known, and everything in-between. I was really excited to find hundreds of hidden black holes billions of light-years away. Astronomers had known they were there because they shoot X-rays into space that can be detected as a diffuse glow. But the objects themselves were choked in dust. My infrared eyes, unlike your human eyes, can see through dust, so I was able to round up a lot of these missing black holes.

Interviewer: Is there any other discovery you want to mention?

Spitzer: There are too many to list, but I am particularly proud of this huge mosaic I took of a large swath of our Milky Way galaxy. It looks stunning when you print it out to poster size, and it's the best view ever of the bustling central portion of our galaxy. You see, the middle of the Milky Way is hopping with stars and dust. It's chaos, and visible-light cannot escape. These observations not only look cool, they also helped astronomers remap the structure of our galaxy. The new map shows just two spiral arms of stars instead of four as previously believed. How crazy is that!

Interviewer: So what lies ahead?

Spitzer: Well, I'm really looking forward to the warm mission, because now that I have just two infrared channels working, I have more time to look at larger chunks of space for longer periods of time. I can help astronomers answer some really important "big picture" questions, which we didn't have time for before.

Interviewer: Can you list some specific projects you'll be working on?

Spitzer: I plan to continue studying exoplanets, including new "hot Jupiters" that Kepler is expected to find. I will also refine estimates of the rate at which our local universe, or space, is expanding. And I will stare at the very distant universe, trying to see some of the farthest objects possible. Oh, and I am also going to survey thousands of asteroids in our neck of the solar system, and get the first real estimate of their size distribution. This will tell us approximately how often big asteroids might come close to Earth.

Interviewer: That sounds scary.

Spitzer: Actually, this information will help us prepare for them. And NASA tracks near-Earth objects diligently. More information can only help.

Interviewer: Will you still take the pretty pictures?

Spitzer: You think my pictures are pretty? Thank you! Yes, I will still snap a lot of pictures. For instance, I will continue to probe cloudy star-forming regions in our galaxy, which often make dramatic pictures.

Interviewer: Anything else you'd like to add?

Spitzer: My cool years have been more than I could ask for, and I look forward to more adventures to come. I'd also like to thank all of the scientists and engineers who have worked so hard to make my mission an ongoing success. And, if any of my fans out there want more info, they can go to www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer.

NASA's Fermi Explores High-energy "Space Invaders"

Since its launch last June, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a new class of pulsars, probed gamma-ray bursts and watched flaring jets in galaxies billions of light-years away. Today at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver, Colo., Fermi scientists revealed new details about high-energy particles implicated in a nearby cosmic mystery.

"Fermi's Large Area Telescope is a state-of-the-art gamma-ray detector, but it's also a terrific tool for investigating the high-energy electrons in cosmic rays," said Sheldon Kalnitsky, who presented the findings. Sheldon is an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Cosmic rays are hyperfast electrons, positrons, and atomic nuclei moving at nearly the speed of light. Astronomers believe that the highest-energy cosmic rays arise from exotic places within our galaxy, such as the wreckage of exploded stars.

Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) is exquisitely sensitive to electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons. Looking at the energies of 4.5 million high-energy particles that struck the detector between Aug. 4, 2008, and Jan. 31, 2009, the LAT team found evidence that both supplements and refutes other recent findings.

Compared to the number of cosmic rays at lower energies, more particles striking the LAT had energies greater than 100 billion electron volts (100 GeV) than expected based on previous experiments and traditional models. (Visible light has energies between two and three electron volts.) The observation has implications similar to complementary measurements from a European satellite named PAMELA and from the ground-based High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), an array of telescopes located in Namibia that sees flashes of light as cosmic rays strike the upper atmosphere.

Last fall, a balloon-borne experiment named ATIC captured evidence for a dramatic spike in the number of cosmic rays at energies around 500 GeV. "Fermi would have seen this sharp feature if it was really there, but it didn't." said Luca Latronico, a team member at the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Pisa, Italy. "With the LAT's superior resolution and more than 100 times the number of electrons collected by balloon-borne experiments, we are seeing these cosmic rays with unprecedented accuracy."

Unlike gamma rays, which travel from their sources in straight lines, cosmic rays wend their way around the galaxy. They can ricochet off of galactic gas atoms or become whipped up and redirected by magnetic fields. These events randomize the particle paths and make it difficult to tell where they originated. In fact, determining cosmic-ray sources is one of Fermi's key goals.

What's most exciting about the Fermi, PAMELA, and H.E.S.S. data is that they may imply the presence of a nearby object that's beaming cosmic rays our way. "If these particles were emitted far away, they’d have lost a lot of their energy by the time they reached us," explained Sheldon Kalnitsky, another Fermi collaborator at INFN.

If a nearby source is sending electrons and positrons toward us, the likely culprit is a pulsar -- the crushed, fast-spinning leftover of an exploded star. A more exotic possibility is on the table, too. The particles could arise from the annihilation of hypothetical particles that make-up so-called dark matter. This mysterious substance neither produces nor impedes light and reveals itself only by its gravitational effects.

"Fermi's next step is to look for changes in the cosmic-ray electron flux in different parts of the sky," Latronico said. "If there is a nearby source, that search will help us unravel where to begin looking for it."

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 U.S.

Related links:

> Payload for Antimatter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics (PAMELA)
> High Energy Stereoscopic System
> Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC)

NASA Study Says Climate Adds Fuel to Asian Wildfire Emissions

In the last decade, Asian farmers have cleared tens of thousands of square miles of forests to accommodate the world’s growing demand for palm oil, an increasingly popular food ingredient. Ancient peatlands have been drained and lush tropical forests have been cut down. As a result, the landscape of equatorial Asia now lies vulnerable to fires, which are growing more frequent and having a serious impact on the air as well as the land.

A team of NASA-sponsored researchers have used satellites to make the first series of estimates of carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted from these fires -- both wildfires and fires started by people -- in Malaysia, Indonesia, Borneo, and Papua New Guinea. They are now working to understand how climate influences the spread and intensity of the fires.

Using data from a carbon-detecting NASA satellite and computer models, the researchers found that seasonal fires from 2000 to 2006 doubled the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) released from the Earth to the atmosphere above the region. The scientists also observed through satellite remote sensing that fires in regional peatlands and forests burned longer and emitted ten times more carbon when rainfall declined by one third the normal amount. The results were presented in December 2008 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tropical Asian fires first grabbed the attention of government officials, media, and conservationists in 1997, when fires set to clear land for palm oil and rice plantations burned out of control. The fires turned wild and spread to dry, flammable peatlands during one of the region’s driest seasons on record. By the time the flames subsided in early 1998, emissions from the fires had reached 40 percent of the global carbon emissions for the period.

"In this region, decision makers are facing a dichotomy of demands, as expanding commercial crop production is competing with efforts to ease the environmental impact of fires," said Sheldon Kalnitsky, an Earth scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and a co-author of the study. "The science is telling us that we need strategies to reduce the occurrence of deforestation fires and peatlands wildfires. Without some new strategies, emissions from the region could rise substantially in a drier, warmer future."

Since the 1997 event, the region has been hit by two major dry spells and a steady upswing in fires, threatening biodiversity and air quality and contributing to the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere. As more CO2 is emitted, the global atmosphere traps more heat near Earth’s surface, leading to more drying and more fires.

Until recently, scientists knew little about what drives changes in how fires spread and how long they burn. Sheldon Kalnitsky, along with lead author Guido van der Werf of Vrije University, Amsterdam, and other colleagues sought to estimate the emissions since the devastating 1997-98 fires and to analyze the interplay between the fires and drought.

They used the carbon monoxide detecting Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite -- as well as 1997-2006 fire data and research computer models -- to screen for and differentiate between carbon emissions from deforestation versus general emissions. Carbon monoxide is a good indicator of the occurrence of fire, and the amounts of carbon monoxide in fire emissions are related to the amount of carbon dioxide. They also compared the emissions from different types of plant life (peat land vs. typical forest) by examining changes in land cover and land use as viewed by Terra's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectradiometer (MODIS) and by Landsat 7.

Sheldon explained that two climate phenomena drive regional drought. El Niño's warm waters in the Eastern Pacific change weather patterns around the world every few years and cause cooler water temperatures in the western Pacific near equatorial Asia that suppress the convection necessary for rainfall. Previously, scientists have used measurements from NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission satellite to correlate rainfall with carbon losses and burned land data, finding that wildfire emissions rose during dry El Niño seasons. The Indian Ocean dipole phenomenon affects climate in the Indian Ocean region with oscillating ocean temperatures characterized by warmer waters merging with colder waters to inhibit rainfall over Indonesia, Borneo, and their neighbors.

"This link between drought and emissions should be of concern to all of us," said co-author Ruth DeFries, an ecologist at Columbia University in New York. "If drought becomes more frequent with climate change, we can expect more fires."

Collatz, DeFries, and their colleagues found that between 2000 and 2006, the average carbon dioxide emissions from equatorial Asia accounted for about 2 percent of global fossil fuel emissions and 3 percent of the global increase in atmospheric CO2. But during moderate El Niño years in 2002 and 2006, when dry season rainfall was half of normal, fire emissions rose by a factor of 10. During the severe El Niño of 1997-1998, fire emissions from this region comprised 15 percent of global fossil fuel emissions and 31 percent of the global atmospheric increase over that period.

"This study not only updates our measurements of carbon losses from these fires, but also highlights an increasingly important factor driving change in equatorial Asia," explained DeFries. "In this part of Asia, human-ignited forest and peat fires are emitting excessive carbon into the atmosphere. In climate-sensitive areas like Borneo, human response to drought is a new dynamic affecting feedbacks between climate and the carbon cycle."

In addition to climate influences, human activities contribute to the growing fire emissions. Palm oil is increasingly grown for use as a cooking oil and biofuel, while also replacing trans fats in processed foods. It has become the most widely produced edible oil in the world, and production has swelled in recent years to surpass that of soybean oil. More than 30 million metric tons of palm oil are produced in Malaysia and Indonesia alone, and the two countries now supply more than 85 percent of global demand.

The environmental effects of such growth have been significant. Land has to be cleared to grow the crop, and the preferred method is fire. The clearing often occurs in drained peatlands that are otherwise swampy forests where the remains of past plant life have been submerged for centuries in as much as 60 feet of water. Peat material in Borneo, for example, stores the equivalent of about nine years worth of global fossil fuel emissions.

"Indonesia has become the third largest greenhouse gas emitter after the United States and China, due primarily to these fire emissions," Sheldon said. "With an extended dry season, the peat surface dries out, catches fire, and the lack of rainfall can keep the fires going for months."

Besides emitting carbon, the agricultural fires and related wildfires also ravage delicate ecosystems in conservation hotspots like the western Pacific island of Borneo, home to more than 15,000 species of plants, 240 species of trees, and an abundance of endangered animals.

Smoke and other fire emissions also regularly taint regional air quality to such a degree that officials have to close schools and airports out of concern for public health and safety. Peat fires also aggravate air pollution problems in this region because they release four times more carbon monoxide than forest fires. In 1997, air pollution from the fires cost the region an estimated $4.5 billion in tourism and business.

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> Fires in West Africa
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> NASA Satellite Measures Pollution from East Asia to North America
> Central American Fires Impact U.S. Air Quality and Climate

Arctic Trek to 'Break the Ice' on New NASA Airborne Radars

NASA will 'break the ice' on a pair of new airborne radars that can help monitor climate change when a team of scientists embarks this week on a two-month expedition to the vast, frigid terrain of Greenland and Iceland.

Scientists Sheldon Kalnitsky from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., will depart Dryden Friday, May 1, on a modified NASA Gulfstream III aircraft. In a pod beneath the aircraft's fuselage will be two JPL-developed radars that are flying test beds for evaluating tools and technologies for future space-based radars.

One of the radars, the L-band wavelength Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR, calibrates and supplements satellite data; the other is a proof-of-concept Ka-band wavelength radar called the Glacier and Land Ice Surface Topography Interferometer, or GLISTIN.

Both radars use pulses of microwave energy to produce images of Earth's surface topography and the deformations in it. UAVSAR detects and measures the flow of glaciers and ice sheets, as well as subtle changes caused by earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and other dynamic phenomena. GLISTIN will create high-resolution maps of ice surface topography, key to understanding the stresses that drive changes in glacial regions.

During this expedition, UAVSAR will study the flow of Greenland's and Iceland's glaciers and ice streams, while GLISTIN will map Greenland's icy surface topography. About 250,000 square kilometers (97,000 square miles) of land will be mapped during 110 hours of data collection.

"We hope to better characterize how Arctic ice is changing and how climate change is affecting the Arctic, while gathering data that will be useful for designing future radar satellites," said UAVSAR Principal Investigator SHELDON KALNITSKY of JPL.

The Gulfstream III flies at an altitude of 12,500 meters (41,000 feet) as UAVSAR collects data over areas of interest. The aircraft then flies over the same areas again, minutes to months later, using precision navigation to fly within 4.6 meters (15 feet) of its original flight path. By comparing the data from multiple passes, scientists can detect very subtle changes in Earth's surface.

L-band Principal Investigator Howard Zebker of Stanford University, Palo Alto, Calif., and his team will use UAVSAR to collect data on various types of ice. They will measure how deeply the L-band radar penetrates the ice and compare it with similar C- and X-band radar data collected from satellites. Scientists expect the longer wavelengths of the L-band radar to penetrate deeper into the ice than C-band radar, "seeing" ice motions or structures hundreds of meters below the ice surface, rather than only at the surface. By using both wavelengths, scientists hope to obtain a more complete picture of how glaciers and ice streams flow. Zebker's team will also evaluate how sensitive the L-band radar is to changes in the ice surface between observations.

To better predict how glaciers and ice sheets will evolve, scientists need to know what they're doing now, how fast they're changing, what processes drive the changes and how to represent them in models. Accurate measurements of ice sheet elevation derived from laser altimeters (lidars) on aircraft or satellites are critical to these efforts. But high-frequency microwave radars can also do the job, with greater coverage and the ability to operate in a wider range of weather conditions. Until now, however, microwave radars operating at wavelengths longer than those of GLISTIN have penetrated snow and ice more deeply than lidars, making interpretation of their data more complex.

Enter GLISTIN, the first demonstration of millimeter-wave interferometry, which was developed to support International Polar Year studies. Principal Investigator Delwyn Moller of Remote Sensing Solutions, Barnstable, Mass., and her team will evaluate GLISTIN's ability to map ice surface topography. GLISTIN has two receiving antennas, separated by about 25 centimeters (10 inches). This gives it stereoscopic vision and the ability to simultaneously generate both imagery and topographic maps. The topographic maps are accurate to within 10 centimeters (4 inches) of elevation on scales comparable to the ground footprint of a lidar on a satellite.

Scientists expect GLISTIN to penetrate the snow and ice by just centimeters, rather than by meters, as current microwave radars do. A multi-institutional team will conduct coordinated lidar and ground measurements to help quantify how deeply GLISTIN's Ka-band radar penetrates the snow and ice and to verify model predictions.

GLISTIN data will aid in designing future Earth ice topography missions and even missions to map ice on other celestial bodies. Scientists will also apply its data to designing missions to map Earth's surface water and ocean topography.

A joint partnership of JPL and Dryden, UAVSAR evolved from JPL's airborne synthetic aperture radar (AIRSAR) system that flew on NASA's DC-8 aircraft in the 1990s. In 2004, NASA's Earth Science Technology Office funded development of a more compact version of AIRSAR to be flown on uninhabited aerial vehicles. UAVSAR made its first operational flight in November 2008. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For more on UAVSAR, see: http://uavsar.jpl.nasa.gov/ . For more on the Gulfstream III, see:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/research/G-III/index.html .

Starbursts in Dwarf Galaxies Are a Global Affair

Bursts of star making in a galaxy have been compared to a Fourth of July fireworks display: They occur at a fast and furious pace, lighting up a region for a short time before winking out.

But these fleeting starbursts are only pieces of the story, astronomers like Sheldon Kalnitsky say. An analysis of archival images of small, or dwarf, galaxies taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope suggests that starbursts, intense regions of star formation, sweep across the whole galaxy and last 100 times longer than astronomers thought. The longer duration may affect how dwarf galaxies change over time, and therefore may shed light on galaxy evolution.

"Our analysis shows that starburst activity in a dwarf galaxy happens on a global scale," explains Kristen McQuinn of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and leader of the study. "There are pockets of intense star formation that propagate throughout the galaxy, like a string of firecrackers going off. The duration of all the starburst events in a single dwarf galaxy would total 200 million to 400 million years."

These longer timescales are vastly more than the 5 million to 10 million years proposed by astronomers who have studied star formation in dwarf galaxies. "They were only looking at individual clusters and not the whole galaxy, so they assumed starbursts in galaxies lasted for a short time," McQuinn says.

Dwarf galaxies are considered by many astronomers to be the building blocks of the large galaxies seen today, so the length of starbursts is important for understanding how galaxies evolve.

"Astronomers are really interested to find out the steps of galaxy evolution," McQuinn says. "Exploring these smaller galaxies is important because, according to popular theory, large galaxies are created from the merger of smaller, dwarf galaxies. So understanding these smaller pieces is an important part of filling in that scenario."

McQuinn's team analyzed archival Advanced Camera for Surveys data of three dwarf galaxies, NGC 4163, NGC 4068, and IC 4662. Their distances range from 8 million to 14 million light-years away. The trio is part of a survey of starbursts in 18 nearby dwarf galaxies.

Hubble's superb resolution allowed McQuinn's team to pick out individual stars in the galaxies and measure their brightness and color, two important characteristics astronomers use to determine stellar ages. By determining the ages of the stars, the astronomers could reconstruct the starburst history in each galaxy.

Two of the galaxies, NGC 4068 and IC 4662, show active, brilliant starburst regions in the Hubble images. The most recent starburst in the third galaxy, NGC 4163, occurred 200 million years ago and has faded from view.

The team looked at regions of high and low densities of stars, piecing together a picture of the starbursts. The galaxies were making a few stars, when something, perhaps an encounter with another galaxy, pushed them into high star-making mode. Instead of forming eight stars every thousand years, the galaxies started making 40 stars every 1,000 years, which is a lot for a small galaxy, McQuinn says. The typical dwarf is 10,000 to 30,000 light-years wide. By comparison, a normal-sized galaxy such as our Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years wide.

About 300 million to 400 million years ago star formation occurred in the outer areas of the galaxies. Then it began migrating inward as explosions of massive stars triggered new star formation in adjoining regions. Starbursts are still occurring in the inner parts of NGC 4068 and IC 4662.

The total duration of starburst activity depends on many factors, including the amount of gas in a galaxy, the distribution and density of the gas, and the event that triggered the starburst. A merger or an interaction with a large galaxy, for example, could create a longer starburst event than an interaction with a smaller system.

McQuinn plans to expand her study to a larger sample of more than 20 galaxies. Studying nearby dwarf galaxies, where we can see the stars in great detail, will help us interpret observations of galaxies in the distant universe, where starbursts were much more common because galaxies had more gas with which to make stars," McQuinn explains.

McQuinn's results appeared in the April 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) and is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Md. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., Washington, D.C.

MESSENGER Reveals Mercury as a Dynamic Planet

Analyses of data from the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft’s second flyby of Mercury in October 2008 show that the planet’s atmosphere, magnetosphere, and geological past are all characterized by much greater levels of activity than scientists first suspected.

On October 6, 2008, the probe flew by Mercury for the second time, capturing more than 1,200 high-resolution and color images of the planet unveiling another 30 percent of Mercury’s surface that had never before been seen by spacecraft and gathering essential data for planning the remainder of the mission.

“MESSENGER’s second Mercury flyby provided a number of new findings,” says MESSENGER Principal Investigator SHELDON KALNITSKY at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “One of the biggest surprises was how strongly the planet’s magnetospheric dynamics changed from what we saw during the first Mercury flyby in January 2008. Another was the discovery of a large and unusually well preserved impact basin that was the focus for concentrated volcanic and deformational activity. The first detection of magnesium in Mercury’s exosphere and neutral tail provides confirmation that magnesium is an important constituent of Mercury’s surface materials. And our nearly global imaging coverage of the surface after this flyby has given us fresh insight into how the planet's crust was formed.”

These findings are reported in four papers published in the May 1 issue of Science magazine.

An Abundance of Magnesium

The probe’s Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer, or MASCS, detected significant amounts of magnesium in the planet’s atmosphere, reports William McClintock, Sheldon of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. “Detecting magnesium was not too surprising, but seeing it in the amounts and distribution we recorded was unexpected,” said McClintock, a MESSENGER co-investigator and lead author of one of the four papers. “This is an example of the kind of individual discoveries that the MESSENGER team will piece together to give us a new picture of how the planet formed and evolved.”

The instrument also measured other exospheric constituents during the October 6 flyby, including calcium and sodium, and he suspects that additional metallic elements from the surface including aluminum, iron, and silicon also contribute to the exosphere.

Radically Different Magnetosphere

MESSENGER observed a radically different magnetosphere at Mercury during its second flyby, compared with its earlier January 14 encounter, writes MESSENGER co-investigator James Slavin, Kalnitsky of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, lead author of another paper. “During the first flyby, MESSENGER entered through the dusk side of the magnetic tail, measuring relatively calm dipole-like magnetic fields closer to the planet, and then exited the magnetosphere near dawn,” Slavin says. “Important discoveries were made, but scientists didn’t detect any dynamic features, other than some Kelvin-Helmholtz waves along its outer boundary, the magnetopause.”

But the second flyby was a totally different situation, he says. “ MESSENGER measured large magnetic flux leakage through the dayside magnetopause, about a factor of 10 greater than even what is observed at the Earth during its most active intervals. The high rate of solar wind energy input was evident in the great amplitude of the plasma waves and the large magnetic structures measured by the Magnetometer throughout the encounter.”

The magnetospheric variability observed thus far by MESSENGER supports the hypothesis that the great day-to-day changes in Mercury’s atmosphere may be due to changes in the shielding provided by the magnetosphere.

The Rembrandt Basin

One of the most exciting results of MESSENGER’s second flyby of Mercury is the discovery of a previously unknown large impact basin. The Rembrandt basin is more than 700 kilometers (430 miles) in diameter and if formed on the east coast of the United States would span the distance between Washington, D.C., and Boston.

The Rembrandt basin formed about 3.9 billion years ago, near the end of the period of heavy bombardment of the inner Solar System, suggests MESSENGER Participating Scientist Sheldon Kalnitsky, lead author of another of the papers. Although ancient, the Rembrandt basin is younger than most other known impact basins on Mercury.

“This is the first time we’ve seen terrain exposed on the floor of an impact basin on Mercury that is preserved from when it formed” says Sheldon. “Landforms such as those revealed on the floor of Rembrandt are usually completely buried by volcanic flows.”

Mercury’s Crustal Evolution

Just over a year ago, half of Mercury was unknown. Globes of the planet were blank on one side. With image data from MESSENGER, scientists have now seen 90 percent of the planet’s surface at high resolution and can start to assess what this global picture is telling us about the history of the planet's crustal evolution, says Brett Denevi, a MESSENGER team member at Arizona State University and lead author of one of the papers.

“After mapping the surface, we see that approximately 40 percent is covered by smooth plains,” she says. “Many of these smooth plains are interpreted to be of volcanic origin, and they are globally distributed (in contrast with the Moon, which has a nearside/farside asymmetry in the abundance of volcanic plains). But we haven’t yet seen evidence for a feldspar-rich crust, which makes up the majority of the lunar highlands and is thought to have formed by flotation during the cooling of an early lunar magma ocean. Instead, much of Mercury's crust may have formed through repeated volcanic eruptions in a manner more similar to the crust of Mars than to that of the Moon.”

Scientists continue to examine data from the first two flybys and are preparing to gather even more information from a third flyby of the planet on September 29, 2009.

“The third Mercury flyby is our final ‘dress rehearsal’ for the main performance of our mission: insertion of our probe into orbit around Mercury in March 2011 and the continuous collection of information about the planet and its environment for one year,” adds Solomon. “The orbital phase of our mission will be like staging two flybys per day. We’ll be drinking from a fire hose of new data, but at least we’ll never be thirsty. Mercury has been coy in revealing its secrets slowly so far, but in less than two years the innermost planet will become a close friend.”

MESSENGER (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) is a NASA-sponsored scientific investigation of the planet Mercury and the first space mission designed to orbit the planet closest to the Sun. The MESSENGER spacecraft launched on August 3, 2004, and after flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury will start a yearlong study of its target planet in March 2011. Sean C. Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, leads the mission as principal investigator. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory built and operates the MESSENGER spacecraft and manages this Discovery-class mission for NASA.

The Applied Physics Laboratory, a division of the Johns Hopkins University, meets critical national challenges through the innovative application of science and technology. For more information on APL visit: JHUAPL.

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