On July 17, 1962, Major Robert White flew the X-15 to an altitude of 314,750 feet, or 59 miles, becoming the first "winged astronaut." He was the first to fly at Mach 4, Mach 5 and Mach 6; he was the first to fly a winged vehicle into space. After a career of 'firsts' White died on March 17, 2010.

White was one of the initial pilots selected for the X-15 program, representing the Air Force in the joint program with NASA, the Navy, and North American Aviation. Between April 13, 1960, and Dec. 14, 1962, he made 16 flights in the rocket-powered aircraft.

His July 17, 1962, flight to an altitude of 314,750 feet set a world record. This was 59.6 miles, significantly higher than the 50 miles the Air Force accepted as the beginning of space, qualifying White for astronaut wings. The X-15 rocket-powered aircraft were built by North American Aviation and developed to provide in-flight information and data on aerodynamics, structures, flight controls and the physiological aspects of high-speed, high-altitude flight.

A follow-on program used the aircraft as testbeds to carry various scientific experiments beyond the Earth's atmosphere on a repeated basis. Information gained from the highly successful X-15 program contributed to the development of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo manned spaceflight programs, and also the space shuttle program. The X-15s made a total of 199 flights and the first aircraft X-15-1, serial number 56-6670, is now located at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

According to an article by Al Hallonquist, White's achievements as an X-15 pilot "allowed him to become the fifth American to attain astronaut wings and only the second Air Force pilot to do this."

White retired from the Air Force as a Major General.

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View my blog's last three great articles...

• NASA Celebrates Sun-Earth Day Activities with Live...
• Cassini Shows Saturnian Roller Derby, Strange Weat...
• NASA's Spitzer Unearths Primitive Black Holes

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Recent sea-level height data from the NASA/European Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 oceanography satellite shows El Niño 2009-2010 hanging in there. Image credit: Credit: NASA/JPL Ocean Surface Topography Team
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El Niño 2009-2010 just keeps hanging in there. Recent sea-level height data from the NASA/European Ocean Surface Topography Mission/Jason-2 oceanography satellite show that a large-scale, sustained weakening of trade winds in the western and central equatorial Pacific during late-January through February has triggered yet another strong, eastward-moving wave of warm water, known as a Kelvin wave. Now in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, this warm wave appears as the large area of higher-than-normal sea surface heights (warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures) between 150 degrees west and 100 degrees west longitude. A series of similar, weaker events that began in June 2009 initially triggered and has sustained the present El Niño condition.

JPL oceanographer Bill Patzert says it's too soon to know for sure, but he would not be surprised if this latest and largest Kelvin wave is the "last hurrah" for this long-lasting El Niño.

Patzert explained, "Since June 2009, this El Niño has waxed and waned, impacting many global weather events. I,and many other scientists, expect the current El Niño to leave the stage sometime soon. What comes next is not yet clear, but a return to El Niño's dry sibling, La Niña, is certainly a possibility, though by no means a certainty. We'll be monitoring conditions closely over the coming weeks and months."

An El Niño also causes unusual changes in atmospheric circulation and convection around the globe. JPL's Microwave Limb Sounder instrument on NASA's Aura spacecraft captured a large eastward shift of deep convection from the current El Niño, indicated by large amounts of cloud ice in the upper troposphere. For more information, visit: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/?IDNumber=pia12961

• X-15 Pilot Robert White Dies
• NASA Celebrates Sun-Earth Day Activities with Live...
• Cassini Shows Saturnian Roller Derby, Strange Weat...

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NASA EDGE, an award-winning talk show known for offbeat, funny and informative behind-the-scene stories about the space agency, will celebrate Sun-Earth Day 2010, with a live webcast about our sun and its effects on Earth. The program will air at 1 p.m. EDT, Saturday, March 20, from the exhibit floor of the National Science Teachers Association conference in Philadelphia.

To view the webcast, visit:

http://www.ustream.tv/user/NASA_EDGE

• Cassini Shows Saturnian Roller Derby, Strange Weat...
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From our vantage point on Earth, Saturn may look like a peaceful orb with rings worthy of a carefully raked Zen garden, but NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been shadowing the gas giant long enough to see that the rings are a rough and tumble roller derby. It has also revealed that the planet itself roils with strange weather and shifting patterns of charged particles. Two review papers to be published in the March 19 issue of the journal Science synthesize Cassini's findings since arriving at Saturn in 2004.

"This rambunctious system gives us a new feel for how an early solar system might have behaved," said Linda Spilker, a planetary scientist and the new Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "This kind of deep, rich data can only be collected by an orbiting spacecraft, and we look forward to the next seven years around Saturn bringing even more surprises."

In the paper describing the elegant mess of activity in the rings, lead author Jeff Cuzzi, Cassini's interdisciplinary scientist for rings and dust who is based at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., describes how Cassini has shown us that collisions are routine and chunks of ice leave trails of debris in their wakes. Spacecraft data have also revealed how small moons play tug-of-war with ring material and how bits of rubble that would otherwise join together to become moons are ultimately ripped apart by the gravitational pull that Saturn exerts.

During equinox, the period when sunlight hits the rings exactly edge-on, Cassini witnessed rings that are normally flat - about tens of meters (yards) thick - being flipped up as high as the Rocky Mountains.

The spacecraft has also shown that the rings are composed mostly of water ice, with a mysterious reddish contaminant that could be rust or small organic molecules similar to those found in red vegetables on Earth.

"It has been amazing to see the rings come to life before our very eyes, changing even as we watch, being colorful and taking on a tangible, 3-D nature," Cuzzi said. "The rings were still a nearly unstructured object in even the best telescopes when I was a grad student, but Cassini has brought us an intimate familiarity with them."

Cuzzi said Cassini scientists were surprised to find such fine-scale structure nearly everywhere in the rings, forcing them to be very careful about generalizing their findings across the entire ring disk. The discovery that the rings are clumpy has also called into question some of the previous estimates for the mass of the rings because there might be clusters of material hidden inside of the clumps that have not yet been measured.

In the review paper on Saturn's atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetosphere, lead author Tamas Gombosi, Cassini's interdisciplinary scientist for magnetosphere and plasma science who is based at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, describes how Cassini helped scientists understand a south polar vortex that has a diameter 20 to 40 times that of a terrestrial hurricane, and the bizarrely stable hexagon-shaped jet stream at the planet's north pole. Cassini scientists have also calculated a variation in Saturn's wind speeds at different altitudes and latitudes that is 10 times greater than the wind speed variation on Earth.

According to Gombosi's paper, Cassini has also shown us that the small moon Enceladus, not the sun or Saturn's largest moon Titan, is the biggest contributor of charged particles to Saturn's magnetic environment. The charged particles from Enceladus, a moon that features a plume of water vapor and other gases spraying from its south polar region, also contribute to the auroras around the poles of the planet.

"We learned from Cassini that the Saturnian magnetosphere is swimming in water," Gombosi said. "This is unique in the solar system and makes Saturn's plasma environment particularly fascinating."

Of course, Cassini's intense investigation has opened up a host of new mysteries. For example, Cassini has shown us images of occasional cannon-ball-like objects that rocket across one of the outer rings known as the F ring, without many clues about where they came from or why they quickly disappear.

Learning more about a kind of radio emission known as "kilometric radiation" at Saturn has unsettled debates about the planet's rotation rate rather than settled them. While the regular periods of kilometric radiation have given scientists a sense of the rotation rate at Jupiter, Saturn has clocked different periods for the radiation during NASA's Voyager flybys in 1980 and 1981 and the nearly six years of Cassini's investigations. The modulations vary by about 30 seconds to a minute, but they shouldn't be varying at all. The inconsistency may be related to a source in the magnetic bubble around the planet rather than the core of the gas giant, but scientists are still debating.

"Cassini has answered questions we were not even smart enough to ask when the mission was planned and raised a lot of new ones," Cuzzi said. "We are hot on the trail, though."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

More Cassini information is available at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

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