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NASA Administrator Addresses Media on Orion Recovery Operations Testing

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NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will address media at 9 a.m. PST Saturday, Feb. 22 at U.S. Naval Base San Diego following testing of splashdown recovery operations for the agency's Orion spacecraft.

NASA and the Navy are conducting tests to prepare for recovery of Orion after it splashes down in the Pacific Ocean at the end of its first space flight, Exploration Flight Test-1, in September. Tests with the USS San Diego off the coast of San Diego Feb. 18-21 will allow teams to demonstrate and evaluate the processes, procedures, hardware and personnel that will be needed for recovery operations.

Media also will see and photograph the Orion test article that will be used during the recovery testing.

Briefing participants also include:

-- Mark Geyer, Orion program manager -- Mike Generale, NASA recovery director -- Larry Price, deputy Orion program manager for Lockheed Martin -- Rear Adm. Frank Ponds, Commander, Expeditionary Strike Group Three

International media who want to attend must respond to Brandi Dean atbrandi.k.dean@nasa.govor 281-483-5111by 3 p.m. EST Wed., Feb. 19. U.S. media must respond to Dean by 6 p.m. EST Thursday, Feb. 20.

Journalists must meet at the Naval Base San Diego Pass/ID office at 7:45 a.m. Feb. 22, for a security sweep in order to gain access to the base. The Naval Base San Diego Pass/ID Office is located north of the main gate (Gate 6) on Harbor Drive and 32nd Street.

Orion is America's new spacecraft that will take astronauts to destinations not yet explored by humans, including an asteroid and Mars. It will have an emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during space travel and provide safe re-entry from deep space. During Exploration Flight Test-1, an uncrewed spacecraft will travel to approximately 3,600 miles in altitude before returning to Earth at speeds as fast as 20,000 mph and temperatures above 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit to evaluate the spacecrafts heat shield and other systems.

For more information about the USS San Diego (LPD 22), visit:http://www.public.navy.mil/surfor/LPD22

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NASA Administrator Addresses Media on Orion Recovery Operations Testing

NASA Teaches Humanoid Robonaut 2 Medical Skills for Space Emergencies (Video)

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NASA is training a humanoid space robot to pull double duty as an emergency doctor in space a surrogate physician that could one day be controlled by experts on Earth to help sick or injured astronauts.

The $2.5 millionRobonaut 2, nicknamed R2, is designed to work alongside the astronauts and even take over some of their more tedious duties inside and outside the International Space Station. The new NASA training is adding telemedicine skills to that mix.

In a newvideo of Robonaut 2's telemedicine training, the automaton performed an ultrasound scan on a mannequin and even used a syringe like it would to administer a real-life injection. The tests were performed using a ground-based version of R2 robot, the mechanical twin of the one currently aboard the space station.

"I would say that within an hour I trained him more than with other students I'm working for a week, so I think that he's learning really fast," Dr. Zsolt Garami, of the Houston Methodist Research Institute, says in the video.

Far from earthly hospitals, astronauts who currently live on space station, typically in six-month-long stints, must be trained in basic surgery and medical procedures in case of an emergency. But Robonaut 2,which has a camera-equipped head, could administer care to spaceflyers, controlled by doctors on the ground.

So far, tests with Robonaut 2 have shown that human controllers can perform tasks "correctly and efficiently by using R2's dexterity to apply the appropriate level of force and can track their progress using R2's vision system," NASA officials explained in a video description.Garami said the robot might eventually be able to learn to do some tasks on its own.

Robonaut 2's telemedical skills could be useful on Earth, too, allowing doctors to conduct complex medical procedures on humans in remote locations, according to NASA.

The space-bound Robonaut 2 launched to the International Space Station as just a torso with arms in 2011 during the final flight of the space shuttle Discovery. That Robonaut 2 will get legs, a set of high-tech limbs with seven joints each, sometime later this year, NASA officials have said.

Follow Megan Gannon onTwitterandGoogle+. Follow us@SPACEdotcom,FacebookorGoogle+. Originally published onSpace.com.

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NASA Teaches Humanoid Robonaut 2 Medical Skills for Space Emergencies (Video)

MARS – UGLIEST ALIEN EVER? NASA Curiosity Shocking New Image: MARS ZOO 2014. ArtAlienTV 1360p – Video

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MARS - UGLIEST ALIEN EVER? NASA Curiosity Shocking New Image: MARS ZOO 2014. ArtAlienTV 1360p
Mars - The ugliest looking Mars alien ever found (so far): NASA Curiosity shocking new Image: This is one of the clearest aliens you will ever see. Right in ...

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MARS - UGLIEST ALIEN EVER? NASA Curiosity Shocking New Image: MARS ZOO 2014. ArtAlienTV 1360p - Video

Mars Alien Animal Corpse: NASA Hippo Curiosity? MARS ZOO 2014. "Skewermorph". ArtAlienTV 738p – Video

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Mars Alien Animal Corpse: NASA Hippo Curiosity? MARS ZOO 2014. "Skewermorph". ArtAlienTV 738p
This Mars anomaly looks very much like a dessicated Hippo corpse covered in sand. It may have been preserved when the water evaporated during the cataclysm o...

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Mars Alien Animal Corpse: NASA Hippo Curiosity? MARS ZOO 2014. "Skewermorph". ArtAlienTV 738p - Video

NASA solves Martian rock mystery

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NASA has solved the mystery of the "Martian jelly doughnut." First seen by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on January 8, the 1.5-in (4 cm) wide, white-rimmed, red-centered rock that resembles a piece of pastry seemingly appeared out of nowhere, but the space agency now says that it's actually a rock fragment dislodged by the rover's passing.

The "jelly doughnut," also known as Pinnacle Island, made its appearance when it showed up in an image sent by Opportunity where nothing was present four days earlier. It looked a bit as if a fungus had suddenly grown from the Martian soil and prompted a law suit in a California court by science writer Rhawn Joseph, who claimed that the rock was a living organism that NASA refused to investigate properly.

However, far from being dramatic proof of life on the Red Planet, new images indicate that Pinnacle Island is a fragment of a rock that one of Opportunity's wheels struck which broke off and rolled downhill.

"Once we moved Opportunity a short distance, after inspecting Pinnacle Island, we could see directly uphill an overturned rock that has the same unusual appearance," says Opportunity Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis. "We drove over it. We can see the track. That's where Pinnacle Island came from."

In the interests of thoroughness, Opportunity examined Pinnacle Island and found it contained high levels of water soluble manganese and sulfur, indicating a wetter environment in the ancient past. "This may have happened just beneath the surface relatively recently," Arvidson says. "Or it may have happened deeper below ground longer ago and then, by serendipity, erosion stripped away material above it and made it accessible to our wheels."

Opportunity is now headed south to study an exposed section of rock higher up the slope in the direction of a ridge called the McClure-Beverlin Escarpment in honor of engineers Jack Beverlin and Bill McClure, who saved the Mariner 6 Mars probe from destruction on liftoff on February 14, 1969.

The sudden appearance of the "jelly doughnut" (Image: NASA)

This maneuver is the first that Opportunity has made in a month as it waited out a spell of bad weather. According to NASA, part of the reason for this move is to place the rover's solar panels at better advantage as the Martian southern hemisphere passes its winter solstice. Nursing Opportunity's power supply is of considerable importance to NASA due to the rover operating over a decade past its design life.

"We are now past the minimum solar-energy point of this Martian winter," said Opportunity Project Manager John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "We now can expect to have more energy available each week. What's more, recent winds removed some dust from the rover's solar array. So we have higher performance from the array than the previous two winters."

Launched on July 7, 2003, Opportunity is the second and final Mars Exploration Rover and twin of the now defunct Spirit rover. It landed on January 25, 2004, three weeks after Spirit, in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars for a mission scheduled to last 90 Martian days, but ten years later, it's still going strong. It continues to study Martian soil and provide surface calibration for orbital observations by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and has traversed about 25 mi (40 km), making it one of the most well-traveled rovers in history.

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NASA solves Martian rock mystery

NASA Moon Dust Probe Beams Its 1st Lunar Photos to Earth

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NASA's newest moon probe has beamed its view of the lunar surface back to Earth for the first time.

The Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer spacecraft (called LADEE for short) beamed the new moon photos which NASA released Feb. 13 to ground controllers on Earth earlier this month. The new images show stars and a pockmarked lunar landscape.

LADEE's star tracker cameras took the wide-angle photos. The small spacecraft uses these cameras to figure out its orientation in orbit, a very important job. The accuracy of the probe's moon dust researching instruments relies upon knowing where it is located in space, NASA officials said. [See all five new moon photos and more from NASA's LADEE probe]

"Star tracker cameras are actually not very good at taking ordinary images," Butler Hine LADEE project manager said in a statement. "But they can sometimes provide exciting glimpses of the lunar terrain."

The five images were taken at one-minute intervals on Feb. 8 and capture slightly different parts of the northern western hemisphere of the moon. The star tracker cameras took the images during lunar day with Earthshine lighting up the moon's surface, NASA officials said.

The first photo shows the crater Krieger with the crater Toscanelli, in the foreground. The second image shows another crater called Wallaston P close the horizon and part of the moon mountain Mons Herodotus, according to NASA. LADEE's third picture captured the lunar mountain range, Montes Agricola.

"Image four in the series captures Golgi, about four miles (6 km) in diameter, and three-mile-wide (5 km) Zinner," NASA officials said in an announcement. "The final image views craters Lichtenberg A and Schiaparelli E in the smooth mare basalt plains of Western Oceanus Procellarum, west of the Aristarchus plateau."

LADEE launched into spacelastSeptember to investigate the moon's thin atmosphere and mysterious lunar dust.

Scientists are trying to solve a mystery that dates back to the Apollo moon missions and even before. Astronauts observed an odd glow on the moon's horizon before sunrise, and scientists think that it could have been caused by electrically charged dust in the moon's thin atmosphere (called an exosphere). LADEE's instrumentation is designed to investigate if it was dust that caused that light.

Understanding the moon's exosphere could also help scientists learn more about exospheres on other small bodies in the solar system. Researchers think that exospheres are the most common kinds of atmospheres in the solar system.

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NASA Moon Dust Probe Beams Its 1st Lunar Photos to Earth


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