Monthly Archives: September 2013

[Antares] Launch Replays of Antares Rocket with Inaugural Cygnus Spacecraft Heading to Space Station – Video

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[Antares] Launch Replays of Antares Rocket with Inaugural Cygnus Spacecraft Heading to Space Station
FULL LAUNCH VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iamuBcm4qs Launch replays from various camera angles. The very first fully functioning Cygnus spacecraft b...

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[Antares] Launch Replays of Antares Rocket with Inaugural Cygnus Spacecraft Heading to Space Station - Video

Voyager 1: Hearing the Sounds of Interstellar Space | NASA Space Science HD Video – Video

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Voyager 1: Hearing the Sounds of Interstellar Space | NASA Space Science HD Video
See graph explanation below: From NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: NASA #39;s Voyager 1 spacecraft captured these sounds of interstellar space. Voyager 1 #39;s plasma...

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Voyager 1: Hearing the Sounds of Interstellar Space | NASA Space Science HD Video - Video

Milky Way Galaxy’s Central Black Hole – A Poor Eater? | NASA Chandra Space Science HD – Video

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Milky Way Galaxy #39;s Central Black Hole - A Poor Eater? | NASA Chandra Space Science HD
Visit my website at http://www.junglejoel.com - the largest black hole in our galaxy is a very lean eater compared to black holes in other galaxies. Please r...

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Milky Way Galaxy's Central Black Hole - A Poor Eater? | NASA Chandra Space Science HD - Video

NASA Seeks America's Best and Brightest for Space Technology Research Fellowships

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NASA is seeking applications from U.S. graduate students for the agency's Space Technology Research Fellowships. The research grants, worth as much as $68,000 per year, will coincide with the start of the 2014 fall term.

Applications will be accepted from students pursuing or planning to pursue master's or doctorate degrees in relevant space technology disciplines at accredited U.S. universities. The grants will sponsor U.S. graduate student researchers who show significant potential to contribute to NASA's strategic space technology objectives through their studies. To date, NASA has awarded grants to 193 student researchers from 68 universities located in 33 states and one U.S. territory.

"To maintain our global leadership in space technology we must continue our investments in university research where some of the best future advancements in space technology reside," said Michael Gazarik, NASA's associate administrator for space technology in Washington. "These investments will enable a new generation of our best and brightest graduate students to contribute meaningfully to the advancement of technology capabilities for future NASA missions, as well as the nations technology based economy."

Sponsored by NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, the fellowships are improving Americas technological competitiveness by providing the nation with a pipeline of innovative space technologies.

The deadline for submitting applications is Nov. 13. For more information and instructions on how to submit applications, visit: http://tinyurl.com/NSTRF14

NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate is building, testing and flying the technologies needed for NASA's missions that are also of benefit to the nation. For more information about NASA's Space Technology Program, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/spacetech

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NASA Seeks America's Best and Brightest for Space Technology Research Fellowships

NASA Curiosity Rover detects no methane on Mars

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Data from NASA's Curiosity rover has revealed the Martian environment lacks methane. This is a surprise to researchers because previous data reported by U.S. and international scientists indicated positive detections. The roving laboratory performed extensive tests to search for traces of Martian methane.

Whether the Martian atmosphere contains traces of the gas has been a question of high interest for years because methane could be a potential sign of life, although it also can be produced without biology.

"This important result will help direct our efforts to examine the possibility of life on Mars," said Michael Meyer, NASA's lead scientist for Mars exploration. "It reduces the probability of current methane-producing Martian microbes, but this addresses only one type of microbial metabolism. As we know, there are many types of terrestrial microbes that don't generate methane."

Curiosity analyzed samples of the Martian atmosphere for methane six times from October 2012 through June and detected none. Given the sensitivity of the instrument used, the Tunable Laser Spectrometer, and not detecting the gas, scientists calculate the amount of methane in the Martian atmosphere today must be no more than 1.3 parts per billion. That is about one-sixth as much as some earlier estimates. Details of the findings appear in the Thursday edition of Science Express.

"It would have been exciting to find methane, but we have high confidence in our measurements, and the progress in expanding knowledge is what's really important," said the report's lead author, Chris Webster of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We measured repeatedly from Martian spring to late summer, but with no detection of methane."

Webster is the lead scientist for spectrometer, which is part of Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory. It can be tuned specifically for detection of trace methane. The laboratory also can concentrate any methane to increase the gas' ability to be detected. The rover team will use this method to check for methane at concentrations well below 1 part per billion.

Methane, the most abundant hydrocarbon in our solar system, has one carbon atom bound to four hydrogen atoms in each molecule. Previous reports of localized methane concentrations up to 45 parts per billion on Mars, which sparked interest in the possibility of a biological source on Mars, were based on observations from Earth and from orbit around Mars. However, the measurements from Curiosity are not consistent with such concentrations, even if the methane had dispersed globally.

"There's no known way for methane to disappear quickly from the atmosphere," said one of the paper's co-authors, Sushil Atreya of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. "Methane is persistent. It would last for hundreds of years in the Martian atmosphere. Without a way to take it out of the atmosphere quicker, our measurements indicate there cannot be much methane being put into the atmosphere by any mechanism, whether biology, geology, or by ultraviolet degradation of organics delivered by the fall of meteorites or interplanetary dust particles."

The highest concentration of methane that could be present without being detected by Curiosity's measurements so far would amount to no more than 10 to 20 tons per year of methane entering the Martian atmosphere, Atreya estimated. That is about 50 million times less than the rate of methane entering Earth's atmosphere.

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NASA Curiosity Rover detects no methane on Mars

NASA rover finds no methane on Mars in blow to search for life

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LOS ANGELES NASA's Curiosity rover hasn't discovered any signs of methane in the atmosphere of Mars, a finding that does not bode well for the possibility that microbes capable of producing the gas could be living below the planet's surface, scientists said Thursday.

Since landing in Gale Crater last year, the car-size rover has gulped Mars air and scanned it with a tiny laser in search of methane. On Earth, most of the gas is a byproduct of life, spewed when animals digest or plants decay.

Curiosity lacks the tools to directly hunt for simple life, past or present. But scientists had high hopes that the rover would inhale methane after orbiting spacecraft and Earth-based telescopes detected plumes of the gas several years ago.

During Curiosity's first eight months on the red planet, it sniffed the air during the day and at night as the season changed from spring to summer.

"Every time we looked, we never saw it," said Christopher Webster, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who led the research published online in the journal Science.

Webster said while the result was "disappointing in many ways," the hunt for the elusive gas continues.

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NASA rover finds no methane on Mars in blow to search for life

NASA's Global Hawks Mark 100th NASA Flight Milestone

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NASA Global Hawk 871 rolls out on the runway at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility after landing following a flight in the 2013 HS3 hurricane formation and intensification mission.Image Credit: NASA WFF.

NASA's Global Hawk unmanned aircraft project celebrated a flight milestone on Sept. 17, 2013. The two Global Hawks reached a combined 100 NASA flights while deployed to NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., to study hurricane formation and intensification in the Atlantic Ocean region.

NASA's Global Hawk 871 departed Sept. 17 from Wallops marking the 25th flight for this aircraft, the first of seven built by Northrop Grumman under the original Global Hawk Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrator development program sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This aircraft first flew under NASA operation in May 2010.

The same day, NASA Global Hawk 872 returned to Wallops after making its 75th flight. This aircraft was the sixth built as a technology demonstrator and was first flown by NASA in October 2009.

The 100 flights are a combination of early evaluation flights, science instrument checkout flights, science missions and several technology development flights flown for the Northrop Grumman Corp. under a Space Act Agreement with NASA.

This graphic image shows the flight path (red lines) of NASA Global Hawk 872 over tropical storm Humberto during its flight on Sept. 16 and 17, overlaid on this NOAA GOES-East satellite image from Sept. 17.Image Credit: NASA GOES Project.

The two aircraft are currently supporting NASA's Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) mission, which is studying tropical storms and the processes that underlie hurricane formation and intensification. The aircraft are equipped with instruments to survey the overall environment of the storms and peer into the inner core of hurricanes to study their structure and processes. Global Hawks are well suited for hurricane investigations because they can fly for as long as 28 hours and over-fly hurricanes at altitudes greater than 60,000 feet. The aircraft have a range of 11,000 nautical miles.

The Global Hawks were transferred to NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., from the U.S. Air Force in 2007. In addition to a ground operations center at Dryden, a newer second operations center was developed at Wallops and is in use for the HS3 mission. The project also developed a portable operations center, giving the aircraft the additional capability of deploying to other U.S. and foreign locations.

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NASA's Global Hawks Mark 100th NASA Flight Milestone

NASA looks to post-2020 International Space Station operations

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Barring a catastrophic malfunction or damaging impacts from space debris, NASA should be able to keep the International Space Station (ISS) in operation at least through 2020 and, with steady funding, careful planning and a bit of luck, through 2028 -- the 30th anniversary of the first module's launch -- officials say.

But reduced power from degraded solar arrays and other crippling consequences of decades spent in the extreme environment of space will slowly but surely take their toll and the cost-benefit ratio eventually will tilt in favor of abandonment and a fiery controlled re-entry.

The International Space Station.

While the engineering and management challenges associated with keeping the station operational are daunting, ISS program manager Michael Suffredini says they should be doable, as long as NASA has the resources to build spare parts, pay for cargo launches and provide transportation for U.S. astronauts, either aboard U.S. commercial spacecraft or Russian Soyuz capsules.

"We have a space station that is designed in a modular fashion meant for repair," Suffredini told CBS News. "So as long as you have spares for all the things that can break, you can last as long as the structure will let you last. Within reason.

"The structure, it turns out, most of it was originally designed for 30 years. So all that margin has made it relatively easy for us to get to 2020. 2028 will be a little bit more challenging. ... We may have to sharpen our pencils to get to 2028."

Boeing, NASA's space station prime contractor, is currently conducting a detailed engineering analysis to verify that the U.S. segment of the complex can safely operate through the end of the decade. Russian engineers are assessing their own hardware, as are the other international partners.

The Boeing analysis is not yet complete and additional work will be needed to to show the lab can be safely operated beyond 2020. But Suffredini said no major surprises have cropped up so far and he's optimistic the station eventually can be cleared to fly through 2028 -- in theory, at least.

"When we get to 2028, the solar arrays are going to be struggling, I'm probably going to have a handful of radiator lines that have been isolated," he said. "2028 might be possible, but it also might be very challenging because then you're talking about the cost of replacing big things that may be prohibitive.

"All our analysis kind of says we think we can get to 2028 and that's the path we're headed on. As we start getting beyond 2028, if it makes sense, and things aren't failing at a rate that makes it difficult for us to keep up, and the country thinks it's the right thing to do, then we can look at going beyond that.

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NASA looks to post-2020 International Space Station operations

PermaGloss™ – "self-healing" Ceramic Polymer Nanotechnology car paint protection – Video

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PermaGloss™ - "self-healing" Ceramic Polymer Nanotechnology car paint protection
PermaGloss™ - Ceramic Polymer Nanotechnology Paint Protection with self-healing Nanoparticles, the ultimate solution in protecting paint surfaces with "self-...

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PermaGloss™ - "self-healing" Ceramic Polymer Nanotechnology car paint protection - Video