These sun glints are like sunshine glancing off the hood of a car. We can see them reflecting off a smooth surface when we are positioned in just the right way with respect to the sun and the smooth surface. On a planetary scale, only liquids and ice can form a surface smooth enough to produce the effect—land masses are too rough—and the surface must be very large. To stand out against a background of other radiation from a planet, the reflected light must be very bright. We won’t necessarily see glints from every distant planet that has liquids or ice.

“But these sun glints are important because, if we saw an extrasolar planet which had glints that popped up periodically, we would know that we were seeing lakes, oceans or other large bodies of liquid, such as water,” says Drake Deming, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Deming is the deputy principal investigator who leads the team that works on the Extrasolar Planet Observations and Characterization (EPOCh) part of Deep Impact’s extended mission, called EPOXI. “And if we found large bodies of water on a distant planet, we would become much more optimistic about finding life.”

One of EPOCh’s goals is to observe the Earth from far away—in this case, about 11 million miles away—so that we know what an Earth-like planet would look like when viewed from our spacecraft. The images in these videos were collected when the spacecraft was close enough to resolve some of Earth’s features, but at the same time, Earth could be treated as a very distant, single point. “This allows us to properly simulate what we would have observed if Earth were an extrasolar planet,” says Michael A’Hearn, principal investigator for EPOXI.

The researchers expected to see the sun glints but were surprised by the intensity and small focus of some, says Goddard’s Richard K. Barry. Glints appeared over oceans, most likely in relatively calm patches, and over a few land masses, probably caused by large inland lakes. Barry, who is leading the Earth-glint research effort, is putting together a catalog that will relate each glint to an exact location on Earth.

Together, the new videos provide the first view of Earth for a full rotation from the north pole (shown in one video) and south pole (the second video). The resolution is high enough to distinguish land masses, bodies of water and clouds. Each 16-second video is a compilation of a series of green, blue and near-infrared images taken every 15 minutes on a single day. Each is also the end product of months of planning, sophisticated data processing and analysis by the team.

The choice of infrared light, which is beyond the range of human sight, instead of visible red produces a better contrast between land and water. “People think of land as being greenish, but that’s because our eyes aren’t sensitive in the infrared,” Deming explains. “Vegetation actually shows up better in the infrared.”

Seen from very far away, Earth looks like a blue dot. “But the blue comes from Rayleigh scattering in our atmosphere rather than from the oceans,” says Nicolas Cowan, an EPOCh team member at the University of Washington. “That means that our planet appears blue even to an observer located above the North Pole, despite the fact that there isn’t always much ocean in sight. As Earth spins, different surface features rotate in and out of view, causing the color of the blue dot to change slightly from one hour to the next.”

For an observer above the pole, most of the visible part of Earth is covered in snow, ice and clouds. From far away, these appear grayish and are hard to tell apart because they are all basically water molecules in different forms. “But when a large expanse of bare land, like the Sahara Desert, rotates into view, Earth gets a bit redder because continents reflect near infrared light relatively well,” Cowan explains.

Given just this limited amount of information, the researchers could begin to describe an extrasolar planet’s surface—perhaps even infer the existence of oceans and continents.

Of course, gathering this type of information about an exoplanet is a big undertaking. Once gathered, though, such data could point scientists toward the best targets to investigate first. “This is just the first step in trying to understand the nature of the surfaces of extrasolar planets,” says A’Hearn.

The University of Maryland is the Principal Investigator institution, leading the overall EPOXI mission. NASA Goddard leads the extrasolar planet observations. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages EPOXI for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The spacecraft was built for NASA by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo.

From Spitzer's perch up in space, the galaxy's clouds of dust and stars come into clear view. The telescope's infrared vision reveals choppy piles of recycled stardust -- dust that is being soaked up by new star systems and blown out by old ones.

To some people, the new view might resemble a sea creature, or even a Rorschach inkblot test. But to astronomers, it offers a unique opportunity to study the whole life cycle of stars close-up. The image is available online at http://www.nasa.gov/AAS and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/aas .

"It's quite the treasure trove," said Karl Gordon, the principal investigator of the latest Spitzer observations at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. "Because this galaxy is so close and relatively large, we can study all the various stages and facets of how stars form in one environment."

The Small Magellanic Cloud, and its larger sister galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, are named after the seafaring explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who documented them while circling the globe nearly 500 years ago. From Earth's southern hemisphere, they can appear as wispy clouds. The Small Magellanic Cloud is the farther of the pair, at 200,000 light-years away.

Recent research has shown that the galaxies may not, as previously suspected, orbit around the Milky Way. Instead, they are thought to be merely sailing by, destined to go their own way. Astronomers say the two galaxies, which are both less evolved than a galaxy like ours, were triggered to create bursts of new stars by gravitational interactions with the Milky Way and with each other. In fact, the Large Magellanic Cloud may eventually consume its smaller companion.

Gordon and his team are interested in the Small Magellanic Cloud not only because it is so close and compact, but also because it is very similar to young galaxies thought to populate the universe billions of years ago. The Small Magellanic Cloud has only one-fifth the amount of heavier elements, such as carbon, contained in the Milky Way, which means that its stars haven't been around long enough to pump large amounts of these elements back into their environment. Such elements were necessary for life to form in our solar system.

Studies of the Small Magellanic Cloud therefore offer a glimpse into the different types of environments in which stars form.

The new Spitzer observations were presented today at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington. They reveal the galaxy's youngest stars embedded in thick dust, in addition to the older stars, which spit the dust out. Taken together with visible-light observations, these Spitzer data help provide a census of the whole stellar population.

"With Spitzer, we are pinpointing how to best calculate the numbers of new stars that are forming right now," said Gordon. "Observations in the infrared give us a view into the birthplace of stars, unveiling the dust-enshrouded locations where stars have just formed."

Infrared light is color-coded in the new picture, so that blue shows older stars, green shows organic dust and red highlights dust-enshrouded star formation. Light encoded in blue has a wavelength of 3.6 microns; green is 8.0 microns; and red is 24 microns. This image was taken before Spitzer ran out of its liquid coolant in May 2009 and began its "warm" mission.

Other collaborators include: M. Meixner, M, Sewilo and B. Shiao of the Space Telescope Science Institute; M. Meade, B. Babler, S. Bracker of the University of Wisconsin at Madison; C. Engelbracht, M. Block, K. Misselt of the University of Arizona, Tucson; R. Indebetouw of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville; and J. Hora and T. Robitaille of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.

The image includes Spitzer observations taken previously by a team led by Alberto Bolatto of the University of Maryland, College Park.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

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Allen was born Dec. 30, 1925, in Miami. He studied at the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and had a distinguished career in the U.S. Army and the Air Force, where he remained until 1982, achieving the rank of four-star general and serving as Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

In 1954, while still an Air Force officer assigned to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Allen completed his doctorate in nuclear physics. He specialized in the potentially damaging effects of high-altitude nuclear explosions on the ground and on

After leaving Los Alamos in 1961, Allen served in various scientific posts within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force. Allen became director of the

Burial is planned for Arlington National Cemetery, but funeral arrangements have not been made yet.

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ASRC Primus will develop, integrate, sustain, and manage the information technology infrastructure and systems for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., in the areas of information systems management, business infrastructure and application development, system administration, and network design.

The contract encompasses all phases of information technology project implementation, design and development, integration, operations, maintenance, sustaining engineering, data administration, system administration and management.

For information about NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, visit:

"David has done a terrific job as the acting Dryden director, and I am pleased he will be continuing as director," Bolden said. "David's expertise, leadership and flight research acumen will benefit NASA and the entire aerospace community."

McBride will direct all aspects of facility management, strategy and operations at Dryden, one of NASA's 10 field centers. McBride became Dryden's acting director on April 4, 2009, upon the retirement of former center director Kevin L. Petersen. He also served as Dryden's deputy director since June 8, 2008, first in an acting capacity before his official appointment on Jan. 4, 2009.

McBride's prior management assignments at Dryden include serving as associate director for programs, a role overseeing the complete portfolio of center projects supporting exploration, science, and aeronautics.

He also managed NASA's Flight Research Program at Dryden. The program conducted flight research that expanded aerospace knowledge and capabilities. Activities included the record-breaking flight of the solar-powered Helios aircraft, the Active Aeroelastic Wing flight project and the revolutionary Intelligent Flight Control System, demonstrating adaptive neural network flight control systems.

McBride began his career at Dryden as a cooperative education student in 1982, specializing in digital flight control systems analysis. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Mexico in 1985 and an executive Masters of Business Administration from the University of New Mexico in 1998.

For McBride's biography, visit:

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"With the addition of Jennifer's chemical toolkit, the range of organic molecules that

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A pulsar is the rapidly spinning and highly magnetized core left behind when a massive star explodes. Because only rotation powers their intense gamma-ray, radio and particle emissions, pulsars gradually slow as they age. But the oldest pulsars spin hundreds of times per second -- faster than a kitchen blender. These millisecond pulsars have been spun up and rejuvenated by accreting matter from a companion star.

"Radio astronomers discovered the first millisecond pulsar 28 years ago," said Paul Ray at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. "Locating them with all-sky radio surveys requires immense time and effort, and we've only found a total of about 60 in the disk of our galaxy since then. Fermi points us to specific targets. It's like having a treasure map."

Millisecond pulsars are nature's most precise clocks, with long-term, sub-microsecond stability that rivals human-made atomic clocks. Precise monitoring of timing changes in an all-sky array of millisecond pulsars may allow the first direct detection of gravitational waves -- a long-sought consequence of Einstein's relativity theory.

"The Global Positioning System uses time-delay measurements among satellite clocks to determine where you are on Earth," explained Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va. "Similarly, by monitoring timing changes in a constellation of suitable millisecond pulsars spread all over the sky, we may be able to detect the cumulative background of passing gravitational waves."

The sources Fermi detected are not associated with any known gamma-ray emitting objects and did not show evidence of pulsing behavior. However, scientists considered it likely that many of the unidentified sources would turn out to be pulsars.

For a more detailed look at radio wavelengths, Ray organized the Fermi Pulsar Search Consortium and recruited a handful of radio astronomers with expertise in using five of the world's largest radio telescopes -- the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in W.Va., the Parkes Observatory in Australia, the Nancay Radio Telescope in France, the Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany and the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico.

After studying approximately 100 targets, and with a computationally intensive data analysis still under way, the discoveries have started to pour in.

"Other surveys took a decade to find as many of these pulsars as we have," said Ransom, who led one of the discovery groups. "Having Fermi tell us where to look is a huge advantage."

Four of the new objects are "black widow" pulsars, so called because radiation from the recycled pulsar is destroying the companion star that helped spin it up.

"Some of these stars are whittled down to masses equivalent to tens of Jupiters," said Ray. "We've doubled the known number of these systems in the galaxy's disk, and that will help us better understand how they evolve."

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership, developed in collaboration with the Department of Energy, along with important contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and the U.S. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.