WISE has launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. Image credit: United Launch Alliance

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, lifted off over the Pacific Ocean this morning on its way to map the entire sky in infrared light.

A Delta II rocket carrying the spacecraft launched at 9:09 a.m. EST from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The rocket deposited WISE into a polar orbit 326 miles above Earth.

"WISE thundered overhead, lighting up the pre-dawn skies," said William Irace, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "All systems are looking good, and we are on our way to seeing the entire infrared sky better than ever before."

Engineers acquired a signal from the spacecraft via NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System just 10 seconds after the spacecraft separated from the rocket. Approximately three minutes later, WISE re-oriented itself with its solar panels facing the sun to generate its own power. The next major event occurred about 17 minutes later. Valves on the cryostat, a chamber of super-cold hydrogen ice that cools the WISE instrument, opened. Because the instrument sees the infrared, or heat, signatures of objects, it must be kept at chilly temperatures -- its coldest detectors are less than minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit.

"WISE needs to be colder than the objects it's observing," said Ned Wright of UCLA, the mission's principal investigator. "Now we're ready to see the infrared glow from hundreds of thousands of asteroids, and hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies."

With the spacecraft stable, cold and communicating with mission controllers at JPL, a month-long checkout and calibration is underway.

WISE will see the infrared colors of the whole sky with sensitivity and resolution far better than the last infrared sky survey, performed 26 years ago. The space telescope will spend nine months scanning the sky once, then one-half the sky a second time. The primary mission will end when WISE's frozen hydrogen runs out, about 10 months after launch.

Just about everything in the universe glows in infrared, which means the mission will catalog a variety of astronomical targets. Near-Earth asteroids, stars, planet-forming disks and distant galaxies all will be easy for the mission to see. Hundreds of millions of objects will populate the WISE atlas, providing astronomers and other space missions, such as NASA's planned James Webb Space Telescope, with a long-lasting infrared roadmap.

JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission was competitively selected under the Explorers Program, managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. NASA's Launch Services Program at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla., managed the payload integration and the launch service.

More information about the WISE mission is available online at:

A new modeling study from NASA confirms that when tiny air pollution particles we commonly call soot – also known as black carbon – travel along wind currents from densely populated south Asian cities and accumulate over a climate hotspot called the Tibetan Plateau, the result may be anything but inconsequential.

In fact, the new research, by NASA’s William Lau and collaborators, reinforces with detailed numerical analysis what earlier studies suggest: that soot and dust contribute as much (or more) to atmospheric warming in the Himalayas as greenhouse gases. This warming fuels the melting of glaciers and could threaten fresh water resources in a region that is home to more than a billion people.

Lau explored the causes of rapid melting, which occurs primarily in the western Tibetan Plateau, beginning each year in April and extending through early fall. The brisk melting coincides with the time when concentrations of aerosols like soot and dust transported from places like India and Nepal are most dense in the atmosphere.

"Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally," said William Lau, head of atmospheric sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Based on the differences it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in this region. There’s a localized phenomenon at play."

Nicknamed the “Third Pole”, the region in fact holds the third largest amount of stored water on the planet beyond the North and South Poles. But since the early 1960s, the acreage covered by Himalayan glaciers has declined by over 20 percent. Some Himalayan glaciers are melting so rapidly, some scientists postulate, that they may vanish by mid-century if trends persist. Climatologists have generally blamed the build-up of greenhouse gases for the retreat, but Lau’s work suggests that may not be the complete story.

He has produced new evidence suggesting that an “elevated heat pump” process is fueling the loss of ice, driven by airborne dust and soot particles absorbing the sun’s heat and warming the local atmosphere and land surface. A related modeling study by Lau and colleagues has been submitted to Environmental Research Letters for publication.

A unique landscape plays supporting actor in the melting drama. The Himalayas, which dominate the plateau region, are the source of meltwater for many of Asia’s most important rivers—the Ganges and Indus in India, the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh, the Salween through China, Thailand and Burma, the Mekong across Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and the Yellow and Yangtze rivers in China. When fossil fuels are burned without enough oxygen to complete combustion, one of the byproducts is black carbon, an aerosol that absorbs solar radiation (Most classes of aerosols typically reflect incoming sunlight, causing a cooling effect). Rising populations in Asia, industrial and agricultural burning, and vehicle exhaust have thickened concentrations of black carbon in the air.

Sooty black carbon travels east along wind currents latched to dust – its agent of transport – and become trapped in the air against Himalayan foothills. The particles’ dark color absorbs solar radiation, creating a layer of warm air from the surface that rises to higher altitudes above the mountain ranges to become a major catalyst of glacier and snow melt.

Building on work by Veerabhardran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, Calif., Lau and colleagues conducted modeling experiments that simulated the movement of air masses in the region from 2000 to 2007. They also made detailed numerical analyses of how soot particles and other aerosols absorb heat from the sun.

"Field campaigns with ground observations are already underway with more planned to test Lau’s modeling results," said Hal Maring who manages the Radiation Sciences program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "But even at this stage we should be compelled to take notice."

“Airborne particles have a much shorter atmospheric lifespan than greenhouse gases,” continued Maring. “So reducing particle emissions can have much more rapid impact on warming.”

"The science suggests that we’ve got to better monitor the flue on our 'rooftop to the world," said Lau. "We need to add another topic to the climate dialogue."

Related Links:

> The Dark Side of Carbon: Will Black Carbon Siphon Asia’s Drinking Water Away?
> Soot is Key Player in Himalayan Warming, Looming Water Woes in Asia
> Asian Summer Monsoon Stirred by Dust in the Wind
> A Unique Geography -- and Soot and Dust -- Conspire Against Himalayan Glaciers
> About Bill Lau
> Ramanathan’s Nature Study

The Himalayas, home to the tallest mountains on Earth, include more than 110 peaks and stretch 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles). Bounded to the north by the Tibetan Plateau, to the west by deserts, and to the south by a bowl-like basin teeming with people, the mountains hold 10,000 glaciers.

These massive rivers of ice spill off mountain sides and grind down through creviced valleys. In the spring, when the monsoon carries moist air from the Indian Ocean, the glaciers begin to thaw, replenishing lakes, streams, and some of Asia's mightiest rivers, on which more than a billion people depend.

South of the Himalayas -- which forms the east-west edge of the table-like Tibetan Plateau -- the mountains give way to the Indo-Gangetic plain, one of the most fertile and densely populated areas on Earth. The plain has become a megalopolis of cities including Delhi, Dhaka, Kanpur, and Karachi, as well as a hotspot for air pollution, with a steady supply of industrial soot mixing with ash and other particles in the air.

To the west, in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent, the Thar Desert stretches across 200,000 square kilometers (77,000 square miles) of arid, dusty land. During the spring, westerly winds pluck dust and sand from the Thar and blow it toward the Indo-Gangetic plain.

The dust joins a mash of industrial pollutants to create a massive brown cloud visible from space. Underneath the brown cloud, some solar radiation is blocked from reaching the surface, causing the under-lying land surface to cool.

"Surprisingly, these brown aerosol clouds seem to have potent climate consequences that affect the entire region," Lau said.

The thick soot and dust layer absorbs solar radiation, and heats up the air around the Himalayan foothills. The warm, rising air enhances the seasonal northward flow of humid monsoon winds, forcing moisture and hot air up the slopes of the Himalayas.

As the aerosol particles rise on the warm, convecting air, they produce more rain over northern India and the Himalayan foothill, which further warms the atmosphere and fuels a "heat pump" that draws yet more warm air to the region.

"The phenomenon changes the timing and intensity of the monsoon, effectively transferring heat from the low-lying lands over the subcontinent to the atmosphere over the Tibetan Plateau, which in turn warms the high-altitude land surface and hastens glacial retreat," Lau said. His modeling shows that aerosols -- particularly black carbon and dust -- likely cause as much of the glacial retreat in the region as greenhouse gases via this "heat pump" effect.

Related Links:

> The Dark Side of Carbon: Will Black Carbon Siphon Asia’s Drinking Water Away?
> Soot is Key Player in Himalayan Warming, Looming Water Woes in Asia
> Asian Summer Monsoon Stirred by Dust in the Wind
> Glacier-capped Mountains in Tibet

Called "Mission:Science," the site is designed to showcase NASA's educational science resources and encourage students to study and pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.

"This site will allow teenagers, who have their own unique language and style, to get information faster and have fun at the same time," said Ruth Netting, manager of education and outreach activities in NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "NASA provides a vast amount of STEM information online for students of all ages, but this Web site boosts the content available for this age group."

The site also features social networking tools, links to enter science contests or participate in a family science night, information about college research programs, and an array of NASA images, animation, videos and podcasts.

NASA's Science Mission Directorate studies Earth, explores the planetary bodies of our solar system, examines the sun and its influence throughout the solar system and scans the universe to gauge its expanse while searching for Earth-like planets. To access the Mission:Science Web site, visit:

NASA food scientist Vickie Kloeris and astronaut Sandy Magnus, who was aboard the orbiting laboratory during the 2008 holiday season, are available the week of Dec. 14-18 to discuss how the traditional holiday feast can be observed in space. To arrange an interview, media representatives should contact the newsroom at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston at 281-483-5111.

Station Commander Jeff Williams and Flight Engineer Maxim Suraev are currently the sole residents aboard the complex. They will spend the holidays with three new crew members. NASA astronaut T.J. Creamer, Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kotov and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi are set to arrive on the station Dec. 22 after launching on a Soyuz spacecraft on Dec. 20 from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

Although they may not get the home cooking people on Earth enjoy this season, the station crew can celebrate with a well-stocked, and by all accounts tasty, pantry. The view from their table, speeding 220 miles above Earth at five miles per second, cannot be beat.

Space food has come a long way from the early days of "tubes and cubes." The current station's menu includes more than 250 different food and beverage items provided by the U.S. and Russia. Foods from other partner nations also are available on the station's menu.

Kloeris is the manager of the International Space Station Food System. Magnus served as a flight engineer for the 18th station crew. During the three months she spent in orbit, Magnus kept a journal about her experiences of cooking in space. Her efforts to spice up food aboard the station are detailed at:

To arrange an interview via NASA Television, journalists should contact Derek Sollosi at 281-792-7515 or by e-mail to derek.sollosi-1@nasa.gov by 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 16. B-roll of Stott's flight will air from 5:30 a.m. to 6 a.m. Dec. 17.

Stott, of Clearwater, Fla., served as a flight engineer for Expeditions 20 and 21 aboard the station and joined five other crew members living on the orbiting complex. She was the chief robotics operator, responsible for capturing, berthing and later releasing the first Japanese cargo ship flown to the station. In addition to working on multiple scientific studies, she also conducted a 6-and-a-half-hour spacewalk in September to continue station assembly.

Stott was the final station resident to fly to and from the complex on the space shuttle. She launched on space shuttle Discovery in August and returned to Earth aboard shuttle Atlantis in November. Stott spent a total of 91 days in space, 87 of them aboard the station. Stott has been assigned to fly on the STS-133 mission in September 2010, currently the final scheduled flight of the Space Shuttle Program.

The NASA Live Interview Media Outlet channel will be used for the interviews. The channel is a digital satellite C-band downlink by uplink provider Americom. It is on satellite AMC 6, transponder 5C, located at 72 degrees west, downlink frequency 3785.5 Mhz based on a standard C-band 5150 Mhz L.O., vertical polarity, FEC is 3/4, data rate is 6.00 Mhz, symbol rate is 4.3404 Mbaud, transmission DVB, minimum Eb/N0 is 6.0 dB.

The interviews also will be broadcast live on NASA TV. For streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit:

A well-known icing problem involves ice forming on wings and other surfaces that can cause drag and power loss on an aircraft. A different threat emerges when airplanes fly into clouds with high ice content found near thunderstorms in very high altitudes. Ice particles, once thought benign because they would simply bounce of airplane surfaces, can accrete deep inside jet engines and shut down the power. This is called “ice particle icing,” to distinguish it from icing caused by super-cooled liquid droplets, which typically occurs at lower altitudes.

There have been more than 240 icing-related incidents in commercial aviation since the 1990s, of which 62 resulted in power-loss likely due to ice particle icing, according to a study authored by Jeanne G. Mason, J. Walter Strapp and Phillip Chow. This condition is difficult for pilots to identify because in many cases the ice is forming only inside the engine, without any visible icing on the wings.

Researchers at NASA’s Langley Research Center are taking a closer look at the phenomenon, which is considered a significant threat to commercial airlines. NASA scientists are developing ways to identify the conditions that cause ice particle icing to better warn pilots about where this might occur.

“It’s something that hasn’t been explored much,” said Chris Yost, a NASA contractor and research scientist with Science Systems and Applications Inc. in Hampton, Va. Yost said his research is at a preliminary stage now, focused on pinpointing the types of clouds connected with ice particle icing. He will present his latest results at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco on Dec. 14.

“These are deep convection, thunderstorm-like clouds,” Yost said. “Thin, wispy cirrus stuff is not so much a problem.”

NASA research is aiming to improve weather forecasts that could steer pilots away from trouble. Building on tools developed to detect surface icing conditions, NASA scientists are using cloud observations from two satellites, CALIPSO and CloudSat.

CALIPSO and CloudSat fly only seconds apart on the same orbit. Together they provide never-before-seen 3-D perspectives of how clouds and aerosols form, evolve, and affect weather and climate. In preliminary research, CloudSat and CALIPSO have been used to build on previous methods of identifying the type of moisture particles that lead to ice particle icing problems. CALIPSO’s lidar is used to create a vertical profile of clouds to accurately measure cloud height while CloudSat provides the estimates of ice concentration in those clouds. Together the two instruments provide very detailed information about the vertical structure of clouds, and the ice particles within them.

Yost and other SSAI researchers have been working with Patrick Minnis, at NASA’s Langley Research Center, on incorporating CALIPSO and CloudSat data into forecast models with the goal of identifying potential ice particle icing conditions.

NASA’s research on ice particle icing began in 2005 with the integration of cloud data from the NOAA satellite GOES. This was followed on by a field experiment on NASA’s DC-8 in 2007 to compare ice particle measurements from GOES with actual aircraft measurements. While this data significantly increased researchers understanding of the icing process, the integration of CALIPSO and CloudSat data has vastly enhanced the ability to see what is within the clouds.

Yost is currently comparing satellite records of weather conditions with the coordinates and time and date of specific airplane power-loss incidents in recent years. The research could illuminate more specifically what type of weather leads to ice particle icing and whether ice particle icing was a factor in these accidents. Future plans include flights with NASA’s DC-8 to take on-board measurements as a comparison point for CALIPSO and CloudSat observations.

Minnis described the group’s ongoing work as a first cut, but envisions it leading to better forecasting of potential ice particle icing conditions in the future.

“The ultimate goal of the project is to be integrated into existing forecast models and eventually into the NextGen (Next Generation Air Transportation System) cockpit system,” Minnis said.

Aviation safety organizations around the world are presently working with the ultimate goal of being able to accurately forecast inflight icing conditions in real-time for pilots. The integration of NASA satellite data into forecasting models is bringing them closer than to that goal, step by step.

Related Links:

> NASA Langley Cloud Radiation Group
> Advanced Satellite Aviation Weather Products (ASAP)
> NASA's Applied Sciences Program

In research being presented this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, scientists from NASA and the University of California, Irvine, detailed California's groundwater changes and outlined Grace-based research on other global aquifers. The twin Grace satellites monitor tiny month-to-month changes in Earth's gravity field primarily caused by the movement of water in Earth's land, ocean, ice and atmosphere reservoirs. Grace's ability to directly 'weigh' changes in water content provides new insights into how Earth's water cycle may be changing.

Combined, California's Sacramento and San Joaquin drainage basins have shed more than 30 cubic kilometers of water since late 2003, said professor Jay Famiglietti of the University of California, Irvine. A cubic kilometer is about 264.2 billion gallons, enough to fill 400,000 Olympic-size pools. The bulk of the loss occurred in California's agricultural Central Valley. The Central Valley receives its irrigation from a combination of groundwater pumped from wells and surface water diverted from elsewhere.

"Grace data reveal groundwater in these basins is being pumped for irrigation at rates that are not sustainable if current trends continue," Famiglietti said. "This is leading to declining water tables, water shortages, decreasing crop sizes and continued land subsidence. The findings have major implications for the U.S. economy, as California's Central Valley is home to one sixth of all U.S. irrigated land, and the state leads the nation in agricultural production and exports."

"By providing data on large-scale groundwater depletion rates, Grace can help California water managers make informed decisions about allocating water resources," said Grace Project Scientist Michael Watkins of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., which manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Preliminary studies show most of the water loss is coming from the more southerly located San Joaquin basin, which gets less precipitation than the Sacramento River basin farther north. Initial results suggest the Sacramento River basin is losing about 2 cubic kilometers of water a year. Surface water losses account for half of this, while groundwater losses in the northern Central Valley add another 0.6 cubic kilometers annually. The San Joaquin Basin is losing 3.5 cubic kilometers a year. Of this, more than 75 percent is the result of groundwater pumping in the southern Central Valley, primarily to irrigate crops.

Famiglietti said recent California legislation decreasing the allocation of surface waters to the San Joaquin Basin is likely to further increase the region's reliance on groundwater for irrigation. "This suggests the decreasing groundwater storage trends seen by Grace will continue for the foreseeable future," he said.

The California results come just months after a team of hydrologists led by Matt Rodell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., found groundwater levels in northwest India have declined by 17.7 cubic kilometers per year over the past decade, a loss due almost entirely to pumping and consumption of groundwater by humans.

"California and India are just two of many regions around the world where Grace data are being used to study droughts, which can have devastating impacts on societies and cost the U.S. economy $6 to $8 billion annually," said Rodell. Other regions under study include Australia, the Middle East – North Africa region and the southeastern United States, where Grace clearly captured the evolution of an extended drought that ended this spring. In the Middle East – North Africa region, Rodell is leading an effort to use Grace and other data to systematically map water- and weather-related variables to help assess regional water resources. Rodell added Grace may also help predict droughts, since it can identify pre-existing conditions favorable to the start of a drought, such as a deficit of water deep below the ground.

NASA is working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to incorporate Grace data into NOAA's U.S. and North American Drought Monitors, premier tools used to minimize drought impacts. The tools rely heavily on precipitation observations, but are limited by inadequate large-scale observations of soil moisture and groundwater levels. "Grace is the only satellite system that provides information on these deeper stores of water that are key indicators of long-term drought," Rodell said.

Grace is a partnership of NASA and the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The University of Texas Center for Space Research, Austin, has overall mission responsibility. JPL developed the satellites. DLR provided the launch, and GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, Germany, operates the mission. For more on Grace, see http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/ and http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/ . Other media contacts: Margaret Baguio, University of Texas Center for Space Research, 512-471-6922; Jennifer Fitzenberger, University of California, Irvine, 949-824-3969.

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

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