A Perfect STORRM

It was a perfect STORRM. On Tuesday, July 20, NASA and its industry partners Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., successfully demonstrated a new sensor technology that will make it easier and safer for spacecraft to rendezvous and dock to the International Space Station.

This new docking navigation system prototype consists of an eye safe lidar Vision Navigation Sensor, or VNS, a high-definition docking camera, as well as the avionics and flight software. Both sensors will provide real time three-dimensional images to the crew with a resolution 16 times higher than the current space shuttle sensors. This next generation system also provides data from as far away as three miles three times the range of the current shuttle navigation sensor.

STORRM was developed by the Orion Project Office at NASA Johnson, which is responsible for program management, technology evaluation, flight test objectives, operational concepts, contract management and data post-processing.

Engineers at NASA Langley were responsible for engineering management, design and build of the avionics,STORRM software application and reflective elements. They are also responsible for the integration, testing and certification of these components. Industry partners Lockheed Martin Space Systems and Ball Aerospace Technologies Corp. were responsible for the design, build and testing of the VNS and docking camera.

Alien Planets meet secure Around Dying Sta

Two far-away alien planets around a dying star have been naked locked in the closest orbital cuddle ever seen, a new study has established.These two gas giant planets are jump by their mutual gravitational magnetism, and are faster and tighter than any beforehand discovered set of planets.

"This is the tightest system that's ever been discovered, and we're at a loss to clarify why this happened," said Caltech astronomer John Johnson, organizer of the new study, in a statement. "The newly discovered pair is orbiting the immense dying star HD 200964, located roughly 223 light years from Earth.

"A planetary system with such closely spaced giant planets would be smashed quickly if the planets weren't doing such a well harmonized dance," said co-researcher Eric Ford of the University of Florida in Gainsville. "This makes it a real puzzle how the planets could have found their rhythm More close planets

In addition, the team also exposed two more extra solar planets also protected in a tight embrace around a diverse star. Both these planets, and the pair in the first set, are gas giants more immense than Jupiter. Like most exo planets, they were uncovered by measuring the wobble, or Doppler shift, in the light emitted by their parent stars as the planets orbit around them.

NASA jury Calls for Asteroid security Office

BOULDER, Colo. a defensive Earth from frightening space rocks that could collision our planet should be selected a top stage NASA planned goal, according to an organization mission force. To realize that objective, NASA should institute a Planetary Defense Coordination Office to manage the endeavor, the mission power said.

The seven-person NASA Advisory Council's Ad-Hoc Task Force on Planetary Defense called for the original asteroid watching bureau after reviewing ideas for detecting, characterizing and deflecting threatening near-Earth objects , as well as discussing international harmonization to deal with the concern.

The task force, which met here July 8-9, is reviewing its support of launching an infrared detector spacecraft positioned into a Venus-like orbit to supply a long-distance lookout for NEOs, which could speed up scrutiny duties by decades compared to relying solely on ground-based clarification.

Previous astronauts Russell Schweickart and Tom Jones are co-chairs of the Ad-Hoc Task Force, which is made up of members from academia and scientific institutions counting NASA.

NASA Spacecraft Camera Yields Most Accurate Mars Map Ever

PASADENA, Calif. A camera aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has helped develop the most accurate global Martian map ever. Researchers and the public can access the map via several websites and explore and survey the entire surface of the Red Planet.

The map was constructed using nearly 21,000 images from the Thermal Emission Imaging System or THEMIS, a multi band infrared camera on Odyssey. Researchers at Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Facility in Tempe, in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., have been compiling the map since THEMIS observations began eight years ago.

The pictures have been smoothed, matched, blended and cartographically controlled to make a giant mosaic. Users can pan around images and zoom into them. At full zoom, the smallest surface details are 100 meters . While portions of Mars have been mapped at higher resolution, this map provides the most accurate view so far of the entire planet.

"We've tied the images to the cartographic control grid provided by the U.S. Geological Survey, which also modeled the THEMIS camera's optics," said Philip Christensen, principal investigator for THEMIS and director of the Mars Space Flight Facility. "This approach lets us remove all instrument distortion, so features on the ground are correctly located to within a few pixels and provide the best global map of Mars to date."

Working with THEMIS images from the new map, the public can contribute to Mars exploration by aligning the images to within a pixel's accuracy at NASA's "Be a Martian" website, which was developed in cooperation with Microsoft Corp.

Antarctica Traced from Space

Antarctica may not be the world's largest landmass it's the fifth largest continent but resting on top of that land is the world's largest ice sheet. That ice holds more than 60 percent of Earth's fresh water and carries the potential to significantly raise sea level. The continent is losing ice to the sea, and scientists want to know how much.

Antarctica's ice generally flows from the middle of the continent toward the edge, dipping toward the sea before lifting back up and floating. The point where ice separates from land is called the "grounding line." For scientists, an accurate map of the grounding line is a first step toward a complete calculation of how much ice the continent is losing.

Such a map is a primary objective of the Antarctic Surface Accumulation and Ice Discharge project. Researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., led a team that used high resolution satellite images, along with newly developed computer software, to trace the most accurate Antarctic grounding line ever compiled.

"This project has been a major achievement to come from the International Polar Year," said Robert Bindschadler, a cryosphere scientist based at Goddard who presented his team's work in June at the International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference. "This project included young scientists, it was an international effort, and it produced freely available data all from satellites."

"Completion of this line was huge, as we connected 3.5 million geographic around the continent," said Goddard's Amy Wichlacz, who popped a cork in celebration after eight months of meticulously connecting the dots.

The next step is to use satellite elevation data from ICESat to determine the ice thickness near the grounding line.

Video Camera Will Show Mars Rover's Touchdown

A downward pointing camera on the front-left side of NASA's Curiosity rover will give adventure fans worldwide an unprecedented sense of riding a spacecraft to a landing on Mars.

The Mars Descent Imager will start recording high-resolution video about two minutes before landing in August 2012. Initial frames will glimpse the heat shield falling away from beneath the rover, revealing a swath of Martian terrain below illuminated in afternoon sunlight. The first scenes will cover ground several kilometers across. Successive images will close in and cover a smaller area each second.

The full color video will likely spin, then shake, as the Mars Science Laboratory mission's parachute, then its rocket-powered backpack, slow the rover's descent. The left-front wheel will pop into view when Curiosity extends its mobility and landing gear.

"We will get it down in stages," said Malin. "First we'll have thumbnails of the descent images, with only a few frames at full scale."

Malin Space Science Systems delivered the Mars Descent Imager in 2008, when NASA was planning a 2009 launch for the mission. This camera shares many design features, including identical electronic detectors, with two other science instruments the same company is providing for Curiosity: the Mast Camera and the Mars Hand Lens Imager.

The company also provided descent imagers for NASA's Mars Polar Lander, launched in 1999, and Phoenix Mars Lander, launched in 2007. However, the former craft was lost just before landing and the latter did not use its descent imager due to concern about the spacecraft's data handling capabilities during crucial moments just before landing.

See Beautiful Ontario Lacus: Cassini's Guided Tour

Ontario Lacus, the largest lake in the southern hemisphere of Saturn's moon Titan, turns out to be a perfect exotic vacation spot, provided you can handle the frosty, subzero temperatures and enjoy soaking in liquid hydrocarbon.

Several recent papers by scientists working with NASA's Cassini spacecraft describe evidence of beaches for sunbathing in Titan's low light, sheltered bays for mooring boats, and pretty deltas for wading out in the shallows. They also describe seasonal changes in the lake's size and depth, giving vacationers an opportunity to visit over and over without seeing the same lake twice.

With such frigid temperatures and meager sunlight, you wouldn't think Titan has a lot in common with our own Earth," said Steve Wall, deputy team lead for the Cassini radar team, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "But Titan continues to surprise us with activity and seasonal processes that look marvelously, eerily familiar."

Cassini arrived at Saturn in 2004 when the southern hemisphere of the planet and its moons were experiencing summer. The seasons have started to change toward autumn, with winter solstice darkening the southern hemisphere of Titan in 2017. A year on Titan is the equivalent of about 29 Earth years.

Cassini first obtained an image of Ontario Lacus with its imaging camera in 2004. A paper submitted to the journal Icarus by Alex Hayes, a Cassini radar team associate at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and colleagues finds that the lake's shoreline has receded by about 10 kilometers . This has resulted in a liquid level reduction of about 1 meter per year over a four year period.

NASA Sensor Completes Initial Gulf Oil Spill Flights

NASA's Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer instrument collected an image over the site of the Deepwater Horizon BP oil rig disaster on May 17, 2010. Crude oil on the surface appears orange to brown. Scientists are using spectroscopic methods to analyze measurements for each point in images like this one to detail the characteristics of the oil on the surface.

AVIRIS extensively mapped the region affected by the spill during 11 flights conducted between May 6 and May 25, 2010, at the request of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In total, AVIRIS measured more than 100,000 square kilometers of the national oil spill response. The instrument flew at altitudes of up to 19,800 meters aboard a NASA ER-2 aircraft from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif.

Figure 1 depicts AVIRIS imaging spectrometer measurements along the Gulf coast to measure the characteristics and condition of the ecosystem and habitat prior to possible oil contamination and impact. The location is near Johnson's Bayou and along the Gulf Beach Highway, between Port Arthur, La., to the west and Cameron, La., to the east. The west corner of the image includes part of the Texas Point National Wildlife Refuge.

AVIRIS data provide scientists with many different types of information about the spill. Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey's Spectroscopy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., are working to determine the characteristics of the oil based upon the AVIRIS measured spectral signature.

NASA Finds Super Hot Planet with Unique Comet-Like Tail

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the existence of a baked object that could be called a "cometary planet." The gas giant planet, named HD 209458b, is orbiting so close to its star that its heated atmosphere is escaping into space.

Observations taken with Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph powerful stellar winds are sweeping the cast-off atmospheric material behind the scorched planet and shaping it into a comet-like tail.

"Since 2003 scientists have theorized the lost mass is being pushed back into a tail, and they have even calculated what it looks like," said astronomer Jeffrey Linsky of the University of Colorado in Boulder, leader of the COS study. "We think we have the best observational evidence to support that theory. We have measured gas coming off the planet at specific speeds, some coming toward Earth. The most likely interpretation is that we have measured the velocity of material in a tail."

The planet, located 153 light-years from Earth, weighs slightly less than Jupiter but orbits 100 times closer to its star than the Jovian giant. The roasted planet zips around its star in a short 3.5 days. In contrast, our solar system's fastest planet, Mercury, orbits the Sun in 88 days. The extrasolar planet is one of the most intensely scrutinized, because it is the first of the few known alien worlds that can be seen passing in front of, or transiting, its star.

Linsky and his team used COS to analyze the planet's atmosphere during transiting events. During a transit, astronomers study the structure and chemical makeup of a planet's atmosphere by sampling the starlight that passes through it. The dip in starlight because of the planet's passage, excluding the atmosphere, is very small, only about 1.5 percent. When the atmosphere is added, the dip jumps to 8 percent, indicating a bloated atmosphere.

COS detected the heavy elements carbon and silicon in the planet's super-hot, 2,000-degree-Fahrenheit atmosphere. This detection revealed the parent star is heating the entire atmosphere, dredging up the heavier elements and allowing them to escape the planet.

The COS data also showed the material leaving the planet was not all traveling at the same speed. "We found gas escaping at high velocities, with a large amount of this gas flowing toward us at 22,000 miles per hour," Linsky said. "This large gas flow is likely gas swept up by the stellar wind to form the comet-like tail trailing the planet."
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The results appeared in the July 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute conducts Hubble science operations.

Curiosity Spins Its Wheels

The wheels that will touch down on Mars in 2012 are several rotations closer to spinning on the rocky trails of Mars.This video clip of the test shows engineers in the JPL clean room where the rover is being assembled as they put all six wheels into motion for the first time.

Engineers raised the rover just as a car mechanic would hoist a car to check the wheels, and started the engine to get the wheels rotating. The wheel mobility system has 10 motors in all four for steering the rover and six for driving. During this test, all 10 motors ran in every direction. Each wheel spun forward and backwards.

Next up for Curiosity is a series of "tune-ups" to prep the rover for driving.

Juno Armored Up to Go to Jupiter

NASA's Juno spacecraft will be forging ahead into a treacherous environment at Jupiter with more radiation than any other place NASA has ever sent a spacecraft, except the sun. In a specially filtered cleanroom in Denver, where Juno is being assembled, engineers recently added a unique protective shield around its sensitive electronics. New pictures of the assembly were released today.

"Juno is basically an armored tank going to Jupiter," said Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator, based at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "Without its protective shield, or radiation vault, Juno's brain would get fried on the very first pass near Jupiter."

Jupiter's radiation belts are shaped like a huge doughnut around the planet's equatorial region and extend out past the moon Europa, about 650,000 kilometers out from the top of Jupiter's clouds.

"For the 15 months Juno orbits Jupiter, the spacecraft will have to withstand the equivalent of more than 100 million dental X-rays," said Bill Mc Alpine, Juno's radiation control manager, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "In the same way human beings need to protect their organs during an X-ray exam, we have to protect Juno's brain and heart."

The vault is not designed to completely prevent every Jovian electron, ion or proton from hitting the system, but it will dramatically slow down the aging effect radiation has on electronics for the duration of the mission.

"The centralized radiation vault is the first of its kind," Bolton said. "We basically designed it from the ground up."

When NASA's Galileo spacecraft visited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, its electronics were shielded by special components designed to be resistant to radiation. Galileo also didn't need to survive the harshest radiation regions, where Juno will operate.

But Juno isn't relying solely on the radiation vault. Scientists designed a path that takes Juno around Jupiter's poles, spending as little time as possible in the sizzling radiation belts around Jupiter's equator.

Ares I-X Engineers Discuss Flight Test Results

The Ares I-X flight test in 2009 met all its primary goals and provided a solid foundation for future rockets, the engineers who designed the rocket and oversaw the launch said during a recent presentation at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

"The rocket just performed beautifully," Deputy Mission Manager Jon Cowart told a group that included engineers who will be counted on to develop future launch vehicles. "Certainly one of the coolest things I have done," he said.

Although the Ares I-X comprised a four-segment solid rocket booster as a first stage and was topped with a dummy fifth segment and upper stage, the results showed the design is solid, Ares I-X officials said.

"It wasn't just good for designing an Ares rocket," Cowart said, "it was good for designing rockets in general." The launch on Oct. 28, 2009, from Kennedy's Launch Pad 39B answered a great deal of fundamental questions about the rocket's performance and aerodynamic design. For example, Chris Calfee of Marshall Space Flight Center said the telemetry gave engineers a good look at the thrust oscillations the booster would experience during ascent. Calfee served as the first stage Integrated Product Team leader for the Ares I-X.

Heavy Metal Rock Set to Take the Stage

PASADENA, Calif. On its way to a 2014 rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft, with NASA instruments aboard, will fly past asteroid Lutetia this Saturday, July 10.

The instruments aboard Rosetta will record the first close up image of a metal asteroid. They will also make measurements to help scientists derive the mass of the object, understand the properties of the asteroid's surface crust, record the solar wind in the vicinity and look for evidence of an atmosphere. The spacecraft will pass the asteroid at a minimum distance of 3,160 kilometers and at a velocity of 15 kilometers per second.

"Little is known about asteroid Lutetia other than it is about 100 kilometers wide," said Claudia Alexander, project scientist for the U.S. role in the Rosetta mission, from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Allowing Rosetta's suite of science instruments to focus on this target of opportunity should greatly expand our knowledge of this huge space rock, while at the same time giving the mission's science instruments a real out-of-this-world workout."

The Lutetia flyby is the final scientific milestone for Rosetta before controllers put the spacecraft into hibernation early in 2011, only to wake up in early 2014 for approach to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

NASA has contributed an ultraviolet instrument , a plasma instrument, a microwave instrument portions of the electronics package for the double focusing mass spectrometer of the Rosetta orbiter sensor for ion and neutral analysis , among other contributions to this international mission. NASA's Deep Space Network, managed by JPL, will be providing support for tracking and science operations.

Last Shuttle External Tank Rollout

Commemorating 37 years of successful tank deliveries, NASA and Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company held a ceremony on Thursday, July 8, at the agency's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans to rollout the final external tank for the last space shuttle flight.

The last external tank scheduled to fly on a shuttle mission was completed on June 25 by Lockheed Martin workers at Michoud. The tank, designated ET-138, will travel on a wheeled transporter one mile to the Michoud barge dock. ET-138 will then travel on a 900-mile sea journey to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where it will support shuttle Endeavour's STS-134 launch.

The external tank, the "gas tank" for the orbiter, holds the propellants used by the space shuttle main engines. It also is the "backbone" of the shuttle during launch, providing structural support for attachment with the solid rocket boosters and orbiter. It is the only component of the space shuttle that is not reused.

The three main components of the external tank include the liquid oxygen tank, liquid hydrogen tank and the collar-like intertank, which connects the two propellant tanks. The intertank houses instrumentation and processing equipment and provides the attachment structure for the solid rocket boosters.

Solid rocket development motor

Preparations are under way for the testing of NASA's next-generation, five segment solid rocket development motor DM-2 in September. The test is designed to advance the understanding, safety, technology and capability of solid rocket motors.

The five-segment DM-2 motor capable of producing 22 million horsepower and generating as much as 3.6 million pounds of thrust was developed by ATK Space Systems, a division of Alliant Techsystems of Brigham City, Utah, the prime contractor for the solid rocket motor ,and is being assembled at ATK's test stand in Promontory, Utah. This will be the second, full-scale, full-duration test of the new development motor, which follows the successful test of DM-1 last fall.

"The successful DM-1 test provided our team with great results," said Andy Schorr, first stage, five-segment motor lead for Ares Projects at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "All performance measurements were within specified limits and 46 total objectives, covering each significant design feature of the motor, were met.

During this "cold motor" test, DM-2's overall temperature will be lowered to 40 degrees Fahrenheit to validate the motor's performance. This is in contrast to the DM-1 test firing which was conducted at ambient temperature. As the test is conducted, technicians will collect data from 759 sensors to assess the motor's performance and validate motor enhancements. Measurements gathered will be used to evaluate thrust, roll control, acoustics, motor vibrations, nozzle modifications and insulation upgrades.

A development test motor is used to simulate conditions experienced in flight. It offers engineers an opportunity to better assess the strength of the motor's current design, spot any flaws in the new designs, verify new materials and certify manufacturing processes.

Stellar Shrapnel

This combination image shows N49, the aftermath of a supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud. A new long scrutiny from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory reveals evidence for a bullet-shaped object being blown out of debris field left over from an exploded star.

In order to detect this bullet, researchers used Chandra to observe N49 for more than 30 hours. Using the new Chandra data, the age of N49 as it appears in the image is thought to be about 5,000 years and the energy of the explosion is predictable to be about twice that of an average supernova. These preliminary results suggest that the original explosion was caused by the collapse of a massive star.

NASA’s Earth-Observing missions

The “Know Your Earth” project is a venture between NASA’s Earth-Observing missions and National CineMedia. Know Your Earth is a fun, engaging, and educational three-minute segment of “Did You Know” questions that all have a message that focuses on global climate change and literacy throughout the Lobby Entertainment Network in 291 national movie theaters. Know Your Earth is now being shown as part of the Lobby Entertainment Network during the summer movie blockbuster month of July 2010.

Know Your Earth
This animated video shares a series of fascinating facts about how climate change affects oceans, land, the atmosphere and ice sheets around the world. With the help of an animated astronaut touring the Earth, the video explains how NASA’s Earth-observing satellite fleet enables scientists to gather accurate data and understand those changes.

ISS Progress 38 Launches

As the Progress made its way to the orbiting complex Thursday, the Expedition 24 crew members made preparations for its arrival and worked with a variety of science experiments.

Commander Alexander Skvortsov and Flight Engineer Mikhail Kornienko had a conference with specialists on Earth to review docking procedures for the arrival of the Progress.

The Progress is scheduled to dock to the International Space Station using the automated Kurs docking system at 12:58 p.m. Friday.

To make room for the ISS Progress 38, the Expedition 24 crew relocated the Soyuz TMA-19 spacecraft from the aft end of the Zvezda service module to the Rassvet module Monday.

Flight Engineer Doug Wheelock worked with the VO2max experiment, which involves recording the oxygen intake of exercising crew members before, during and after their stays aboard the station to evaluate and document the changes in their aerobic capacity.

Flight Engineer Tracy Caldwell Dyson worked with the Coarsening in Solid-Liquid Mixtures-2 experiment, which studies the way that particles of tin suspended in a molten tin/lead mixture increase in size – a process known as coarsening – without the influence of the Earth’s gravity. This work has direct applications to metal alloy manufacturing on Earth, including materials critical for aerospace applications.