Super Guppy Swallows Two Jets Whole | NASA Aviation Science Video
Visit my website at http://www.junglejoel.com - two of NASA #39;s T-38 aircraft disappear into the cargo bay of NASA #39;s giant Super Guppy at Dryden Flight Researc...

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Super Guppy Swallows Two Jets Whole | NASA Aviation Science Video - Video

Lime Rock NASA track day 3/30/13
The fastest of my recorded laps with laptimer overlay. 01:11.86 71.8 seconds.

By: Ed Hansen

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Lime Rock NASA track day 3/30/13 - Video

Lime Rock NASA NE hpde 3/30/13
Another good lap. 01:12.6 72.5 seconds.

By: Ed Hansen

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Lime Rock NASA NE hpde 3/30/13 - Video

Space Shuttle Launch NASA Endeavour from Kennedy Space Center

By: usmc8201

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Space Shuttle Launch NASA Endeavour from Kennedy Space Center - Video

Apr. 3, 2013 A laboratory experiment at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., simulating the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan suggests complex organic chemistry that could eventually lead to the building blocks of life extends lower in the atmosphere than previously thought. The results now point out another region on the moon that could brew up prebiotic materials.

The paper was published in Nature Communications this week.

"Scientists previously thought that as we got closer to the surface of Titan, the moon's atmospheric chemistry was basically inert and dull," said Murthy Gudipati, the paper's lead author at JPL. "Our experiment shows that's not true. The same kind of light that drives biological chemistry on Earth's surface could also drive chemistry on Titan, even though Titan receives far less light from the sun and is much colder. Titan is not a sleeping giant in the lower atmosphere, but at least half awake in its chemical activity."

Scientists have known since NASA's Voyager mission flew by the Saturn system in the early 1980s that Titan, Saturn's largest moon, has a thick, hazy atmosphere with hydrocarbons, including methane and ethane. These simple organic molecules can develop into smog-like, airborne molecules with carbon-nitrogen-hydrogen bonds, which astronomer Carl Sagan called "tholins."

"We've known that Titan's upper atmosphere is hospitable to the formation of complex organic molecules," said co-author Mark Allen, principal investigator of the JPL Titan team that is a part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, headquartered at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "Now we know that sunlight in the Titan lower atmosphere can kick-start more complex organic chemistry in liquids and solids rather than just in gases."

The team examined an ice form of dicyanoacetylene -- a molecule detected on Titan that is related to a compound that turned brown after being exposed to ambient light in Allen's lab 40 years ago.

In this latest experiment, dicyanoacetylene was exposed to laser light at wavelengths as long as 355 nanometers. Light of that wavelength can filter down to Titan's lower atmosphere at a modest intensity, somewhat like the amount of light that comes through protective glasses when Earthlings view a solar eclipse, Gudipati said. The result was the formation of a brownish haze between the two panes of glass containing the experiment, confirming that organic-ice photochemistry at conditions like Titan's lower atmosphere could produce tholins.

The complex organics could coat the "rocks" of water ice at Titan's surface and they could possibly seep through the crust, to a liquid water layer under Titan's surface. In previous laboratory experiments, tholins like these were exposed to liquid water over time and developed into biologically significant molecules, such as amino acids and the nucleotide bases that form RNA.

"These results suggest that the volume of Titan's atmosphere involved in the production of more complex organic chemicals is much larger than previously believed," said Edward Goolish, acting director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute. "This new information makes Titan an even more interesting environment for astrobiological study."

The team included Isabelle Couturier of the University of Provence, Marseille, France; Ronen Jacovi, a NASA postdoctoral fellow from Israel; and Antti Lignell, a Finnish Academy of Science postdoctoral fellow from Helsinki at JPL.

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NASA team investigates complex chemistry at Saturn's moon Titan

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity just might be the latest in a long line of Mars-exploring robots to discover the building blocks for primitive life on the Red Planet.

The Curiosity rover may have gathered evidence for the presence of perchlorates in Rocknest a sand patch inside the rover's Gale Crater landing site on the Red Planet, scientists say. If so, it shores up the case that the material may well be globally distributed on Mars.

Not only can perchlorates, which are a class of salts, serve as an energy source for potential Martian microorganisms, they are also a sensitive marker of past climate and can lead to the formation of liquid brines under current conditions on the planet.

The possibility that perchlorates are widespread on Mars was detailed in a March 19 presentation at the 44th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

Curiosity's possible detection

The possible detection of perchlorates at Curiositys Gale crater site was spotlighted by Doug Archer, a scientist with the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. He is focused on the habitability of various Martian environments over time. [The Search for Life on Mars (A Photo Timeline)]

Archer pointed to the rovers Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite that recently ran four samples from Rocknest. That area was selected as the source of the first samples analyzed because it is representative of both windblown material in the Gale Crater and the planet's globally distributed dust, he said.

"When we heated this up, we saw a large oxygen release at the same time we saw the release of these chlorinated hydrocarbons," Archer said, thus making a strong case for the presence of perchlorate salts in Rocknest's soil.

Phoenix finding

Perchlorates were first identified on Mars in the polar region by the Wet Chemistry Laboratory on NASAs Phoenix lander in 2008.

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Has NASA 's Curiosity Rover Found Clues to Life's Building Blocks on Mars?

NASA's Suomi NPP polar-orbiting weather satellite captured dramatic footage of an 'extensive fracturing event' in the Arctic ice sheet this winter, and the scale of this event is causing some concern.

The time-lapse video compresses down over two months worth of observations into just over a minute, to show the full magnitude of the event.

[ Related: Arctic sea ice hits yearly max, but still dwindling ]

Suomi NPP view on February 23, 2013The fracturing started in late January, as a warm-weather system over Alaska fed an ocean current known as the Beaufort Gyre. This strengthened current picked away at the southwest corner of the ice sheet until a massive crack opened up north of central Alaska (at about 3 secs into the video), and then another crack, apparently around 1,000 kms long, opens up in late February (at around 30 sec in the video), leading to the collapse of the rest of the ice sheet, all the way east to Bank Island.

It took just seven days for the fractures to progress across the entire area from west to east, Trudy Wohlleben, senior ice forecaster at the Canadian Ice Service, told the National Post.

According to Walt Meier, a research scientist with the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC), it's not unusual for this area to experience fracturing events. However, what is unusual is the extent of the fracturing and the scale (both length and width) of the cracks being seen, and it's the age of the ice that's being blamed.

The region is covered almost completely by seasonal or first-year ice ice that has formed since last September, said Meier, according to the NASA Earth Observatory article. This ice is thinner and weaker than the older, multi-year ice, so it responds more readily to winds and is more easily broken up.

Last September saw the lowest extent of Arctic sea ice since records began in 1979. The sea ice rebounded by record levels over the winter (only because it dropped to such a record low, though), reaching its maximum extent on March 15th. However, even that was still the sixth-lowest sea ice extent on record, and this year's melt has started nearly two weeks before last year's.

[ More Geekquinox: Ham press turns out to be a $5-million iron meteorite ]

With this much of the Arctic ice sheet fracturing this soon into the seasonal melt, it can't bode well for what minimum extent we'll see in the fall. The ice didn't disappear, of course, but with more dark ocean water being exposed this early, that will lead to higher Arctic ocean temperatures and more melting. So, we could set an even lower record minimum this year.

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NASA satellite witnesses Arctic ice sheet being torn to shreds

UPDATE for April 3:The first official announcements for today's news have been released. See the latest story here: Dark Matter Possibly Found by $2 Billion Space Station Experiment.

NASA will reveal the first discoveries from a $2 billion antimatter-hunting experiment on the International Space Station on Wednesday (April 2), and you can watch the announcement live online.

Scientists with NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy will unveil the new findings during a 1:30 p.m. EDT (1630 GMT) press conference that will focus on the first science results from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS).

You can watch the AMS discovery announcement live on SPACE.com, courtesy of NASA TV.

"AMS is a state-of-the-art cosmic ray particle physics detector located on the exterior of the International Space Station," NASA officials said in a statement. Scientists are using the spectrometer to delve deeper into the nature of antimatter, dark matter, an invisible substance thought to make up a quarter of the entire universe, and other space mysteries. [See photos of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer in space]

Scientists know that every matter particle has an antimatter partner particle with opposite charge; for instance, the antimatter counterpart of an electron is a positron. When matter meets its antimatter counterpart, the two annihilate each other. That annihilation has led to the puzzling prevalence of matter over antimatter in the universe.

NASA officials provided little detail on the exact discoveries to be unveiled on Wednesday, but AMS principal investigator Samuel Ting has dropped some tantalizing clues.

In February, Ting said the first results from the AMS experiment were just weeks away from being released, hinting that scientists would announce a substantial science finding. Ting is a physicist at MIT who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1976.

"It will not be a minor paper," Ting said on Feb. 17 during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston. Ting did not go into detail about the nature of the results, but did say they represent a "small step" toward understanding the true nature of dark matter, even if it is not the final answer.

Several NASA scientists and administrators will take part in tomorrow's briefing. They include:

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NASA Unveiling 1st Results from Antimatter-Hunting Experiment Wednesday

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Space technology advancements such as NASA's Robonaut 2 (left) can help humanity launch more ambitious space exploration missions.

By Miriam KramerSpace.com

NASA is asking software coders on Earth to help a robotic astronaut helper on the International Space Station use its cold mechanical eyes to see better.

Robonaut 2 a humanoid robot being tested by astronauts on the space station is designed to perform mundane and complex tasks to help make life on the orbiting lab easier for human crew members. So far, the robot (which NASA affectionately calls R2 for short) has carried out a series of routine tasks on the space station, performed sign language and learned how to shake hands with human crewmates.

But NASA thinks the robot can do more and launched two new contests under the $10,000 Robonaut Challenge on Mondayto make it happen.

The new competitions, managed for NASA by the group TopCoder under the agency's NASA Tournament Lab, will give 470,000 software developers, digital creators and algorithmists the chance to help the robot butler "see" and interact with the station in a new way.

Each of the competitions will run for three weeks, and $10,000 in prize money will be awarded. As of this article's publication, 533 people have registered for the first competition, and 10 have submitted final algorithms. [Robonaut 2: NASA's Space Droid (Photos)]

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NASA asks coders to make robot astronaut more helpful

Climate scientist James Hansen is retiring from NASA this week to devote himself to the fight against global warming.

Hansen's retirement concludes a 46-year career at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, but he plans to use his time to take up legal challenges to the federal and state governments over limiting greenhouse gas emissions.

In recent years, Hansen, 72, has become an activist for climate change, which didn't sit well with NASA headquarters in Washington. "As a government employee, you can't testify against the government," Hansen told The New York Times.

Supporting his "moral obligation" to step up to the fight now, Hansen adds in the Times article that burning a substantial fraction of Earth's fossil fuels guarantees "unstoppable changes" in the planet's climate, leaving an unfixable problem for future generations.

The distinguished NASA scientist has spent his career at the Goddard Institute on the campus of Columbia University. He has testified in Congress dozens of times, and has issued warnings and published papers that drew criticism from climate-change skeptics. [The Reality of Climate Change: 10 Myths Busted]

Hansen was arrested in February while protesting the proposed construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline that would carry heavy crude oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast. "We have reached a fork in the road," he told the Washington Post at the time, adding that politicians must understand they can "go down this road of exploiting every fossil fuel we have tar sands, tar shale, off-shore drilling in the Arctic but the science tells us we can't do that without creating a situation where our children and grandchildren will have no control over, which is the climate system."

With his departure from NASA, Hansen told the Times he plans to lobby European leaders to institute a tax on oil derived from tar sands, whose extraction leads to more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil. He could not have done these things as a government employee, he said.

Hansen will probably work in a converted barn on his farm in Pennsylvania, but may possibly set up a small institute or take an academic appointment, according to the Times. He will continue to publish papers in academic journals, but will not run the powerful computers and other resources NASA provided for tracking and forecasting global warming and its effects.

Raised in a small town in Iowa, Hansen initially studied the planet Venus, but switched to studying the effect of human greenhouse gas emissions on Earth during the 1970s.

He was one of the first scientists to raise alarm about global warming and its effects on climate and the environment. After testifying at a Congressional committee in 1988that man-made global warming has begun, Hansen was quoted widely as saying, "It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here."

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NASA Climate Scientist James Hansen Quits to Fight Global Warming