1. NASA

Category Archives: NASA

NASA Spacecraft Will Visit Asteroid With New Name

Posted on by

An asteroid that will be explored by a NASA spacecraft has a new name, thanks to a third-grade student in North Carolina. NASA's Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft will visit the asteroid now called Bennu, named after an important ancient Egyptian avian deity. OSIRIS-Rex is scheduled to launch in 2016, rendezvous with Bennu in 2018 and return a sample of the asteroid to Earth in 2023.

The name for the carbon-rich asteroid, designated in the scientific community as (101955) 1999 RQ36, is the winning entry in an international student contest. Nine-year-old Michael Puzio suggested the name because he imagined the Touch-and-Go Sample Mechanism (TAGSAM) arm and solar panels on OSIRIS-REx look like the neck and wings in drawings of Bennu, which Egyptians usually depicted as a gray heron. Puzio wrote the name suits the asteroid because it means "the ascending one," or "to shine."

TAGSAM will collect a sample from Bennu and store it for return to Earth. The sample could hold clues to the origin of the solar system and the source of water and organic molecules that may have contributed to the development of life on Earth. The mission will be a vital part of NASA's plans to find, study, capture and relocate an asteroid for exploration by astronauts. NASA recently announced an asteroid initiative proposing a strategy to leverage human and robotic activities for the first human mission to an asteroid while also accelerating efforts to improve detection and characterization of asteroids.

"There were many excellent entries that would be fitting names and provide us an opportunity to educate the world about the exciting nature of our mission," said Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona in Tucson, a contest judge and the principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission. "The information about the composition of Bennu and the nature of its orbit will enable us to explore our past and better understand our future."

More than 8,000 students, all younger than 18, from more than 25 countries worldwide entered the "Name that Asteroid!" contest last year. Each contestant submitted one name with a maximum of 16 characters and a short explanation for the name.

The contest was a partnership with The Planetary Society in Pasadena, CA; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA; and the University of Arizona. The partners assembled a panel to review the submissions and submit a top choice to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Committee for Small Body Nomenclature. The IAU is the governing body that officially names a celestial object. "Bennu struck a chord with many of us right away," said Bruce Betts, director of projects for the Planetary Society and a contest judge. "While there were many great entries, the similarity between the image of the heron and the TAGSAM arm of OSIRIS-REx was a clever choice. The parallel with asteroids as both bringers of life and as destructive forces in the solar system also created a great opportunity to teach."

The Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research Program survey team discovered the asteroid in 1999, early in NASA's Near-Earth Objects Observation Program, which detects and catalogs near-Earth asteroids and comets.

See more here:

NASA Spacecraft Will Visit Asteroid With New Name

NASA Opens New Era in Measuring Western US Snowpack

Posted on by

A new NASA airborne mission has created the first maps of the entire snowpack of two major mountain watersheds in California and Colorado, producing the most accurate measurements to date of how much water they hold.

The data from NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory mission will be used to estimate how much water will flow out of the basins when the snow melts. The data-gathering technology could improve water management for 1.5 billion people worldwide who rely on snowmelt for their water supply.

"The Airborne Snow Observatory is on the cutting edge of snow remote-sensing science," said Jared Entin, a program manager in the Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Decision makers like power companies and water managers now are receiving these data, which may have immediate economic benefits."

The mission is a collaboration between NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and the California Department of Water Resources in Sacramento.

A Twin Otter aircraft carrying NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory began a three-year demonstration mission in April that includes weekly flights over the Tuolumne River Basin in California's Sierra Nevada and monthly flights over Colorado's Uncompahgre River Basin. The flights will run through the end of the snowmelt season, which typically occurs in July.

The Tuolumne watershed and its Hetch Hetchy Reservoir are the primary water supply for San Francisco. The Uncompahgre watershed is part of the Upper Colorado River Basin that supplies water to much of the western United States.

The mission's principal investigator, Tom Painter of JPL, said the mission fills a critical need in an increasingly thirsty world, initially focusing on the western United States, where snowmelt provides more than 75 percent of the total freshwater supply.

"Changes in and pressure on snowmelt-dependent water systems are motivating water managers, governments and others to improve understanding of snow and its melt," Painter said.

"The western United States and other regions face significant water resource challenges because of population growth and faster melt and runoff of snowpacks caused by climate change. NASA's Airborne Snow Observatory combines the best available technologies to provide precise, timely information for assessing snowpack volume and melt."

The observatory's two instruments measure two properties most critical to understanding snowmelt runoff and timing. Those two properties have been mostly unmeasured until now.

Follow this link:

NASA Opens New Era in Measuring Western US Snowpack

NASA smartphone satellites beam clear images of Earth

Posted on by

The trio of Android smartphones NASA blasted into orbit recently have ended their journey by burning up in the atmosphere, but not before snapping shots of Earth -- and the pictures don't look too bad.

The "PhoneSats" were a NASA experiment to develop super-cheap satellites and to determine whether a consumer-grade smartphone can be used as the main flight avionics of a capable satellite, NASA said.

[ RELATED: 13 awesome and scary things in near Earth space

MORE: NASA identifies top 10 space junk missions ]

NASA says the three miniature satellites used their smartphone cameras to take pictures of Earth and transmitted these "image-data packets" to multiple ground stations. As part of their preparation for space, the smartphones were outfitted with a low-powered transmitter operating in the amateur radio band. Every packet held a small piece of the big picture. As the data became available, the PhoneSat Team and multiple amateur radio operators around the world collaborated to piece together photographs from the tiny data packets.

Piecing together the photo was a very successful collaboration between NASA's PhoneSat team and volunteer amateur ham radio operators around the world. NASA researchers and hams working together was an excellent example of Citizen Science, or crowd-sourced science, which is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur or nonprofessional scientists. On the second day of the mission, the Ames team had received more than 200 packets from amateur radio operators.

"Three days into the mission we already had received more than 300 data packets," said Alberto Guillen Salas, an engineer at Ames and a member of the PhoneSat team. "About 200 of the data packets were contributed by the global community and the remaining packets were received from members of our team with the help of the Ames Amateur Radio Club station, NA6MF."

The mission successfully ended Saturday, April 27, after predicted atmospheric drag caused the PhoneSats to re-enter Earth's atmosphere and burn up, NASA said.

Follow Michael Cooney on Twitter: @nwwlayer8 and on Facebook.

Read more about anti-malware in Network World's Anti-malware section.

Continue reading here:

NASA smartphone satellites beam clear images of Earth

NASA wants to send your best haiku… to Mars

Posted on by

Crave's Eric Mack has one to kick things off, and he'll send your rejected poems to Mars (not that Mars) on his own dime.

This beauty is hungry for poems!

For its trip to Mars, NASA wants haikus like this, Why? Because it's cool.

That's pretty much the gist of this whole story, actually. Maybe I should start composing all stories in the form of a haiku to save us all time.

It's no joke, though, that NASA really is collecting submissions of three-line poems from the public to send into space aboard the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft, which will launch later this year for a mission to study the Red Planet's atmosphere.

NASA and the University of Colorado at Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics are coordinating the "Going to Mars" campaign to collect names and haiku from any members of the public to be added to a DVD that will ride aboard MAVEN.

All the names of entrants will be included on the DVD, but only three haikus will be chosen to make the trip. Why there's only room for three poems, or why any martians floating around in the planet's upper atmosphere are more likely to have access to a DVD player than a USB port or SD card reader remain mysteries, but it's a fun campaign nonetheless.

Anyone can register on the Going to Mars Web site and submit his or her name and haiku to be included, but if you're under 18, you're technically supposed to have a parent or teacher go through the registration and submission process for you.

MAVEN is the first craft dedicated to exploring Mars' upper atmosphere in the hopes of learning more about the history of water on the surface of the planet. I'm also hopeful it's undertaking a few secret secondary missions to scout out future locations for martian condos, and to film future flicks in the Chronicles of Riddick series.

If you've got any haikus you think martians would dig, please try them out on us here first, in the comments below. I'll send my three favorites that don't make it onto MAVEN on a USB stick to the Mars candy company of McLean, Va.

More:

NASA wants to send your best haiku... to Mars

NASA Agrees to Pay Russians $70 Million Per Astronaut

Posted on by

By Rich Smith | More Articles May 4, 2013 |

NASA will be hitching rides on Russian rockets for at least three more years.

Last week, NASA announced the signing of a $424 million extension of its contract with the Russian Federal Space Agency, also known as Roscosmos, hiring the latter to transport U.S., Canadian, European, and Japanese astronauts to the International Space Station through 2016. The contract also extends a deal for Roscosmos to bring said astronauts back from the ISS through June 2017.

NASA hopes to bring U.S. domestic space transport back on line by 2017, with private contractors including Boeing (NYSE: BA) , Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) , Sierra Nevada, and SpaceX all vying to provide a "space taxi" service to ISS for the USA. Until then, however, NASA must piggyback on Russian rockets and ride in Soyuz space capsules.

Its latest contract with Roscosmos fixes prices for astronaut training, preparation, and transport to and from the ISS for six astronauts at approximately $70.7 million a head.

Go here to see the original:

NASA Agrees to Pay Russians $70 Million Per Astronaut

NASA High School STEM Challenge Announces Winning Team, Invites Students to Present Ideas at NASA Goddard

Posted on by

The NASA RealWorld-InWorld Engineering Design Challenge, an integrated science, technology, engineering and mathematics program focused on NASA's forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope, has named the 2012-2013 first place team. The team, which consisted of high school juniors and seniors participating in the NASA INSPIRES program, included: Abigail Radford of Ashville, N.C.; Joshua Dijamco of Jackson, N.J.; Jonathan Hernandez of Elizabeth, N.J.; Katherine Denner of Horsham, Penn.; and Jim Gerard of Merritt Island, Fla.

The team will travel to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., May 6 for a daylong VIP event. They will present their winning engineering design concept to Dr. John Mather, senior project scientist for the Webb telescope mission and 2006 Nobel Prize winner, and other engineers and scientists working on the mission.

"The RealWorld-InWorld Engineering Design Challenge is an amazing way to connect students with real NASA engineers and scientists, which allows them to study a real NASA engineering project in an immersive way," said Maggie Masetti of the NASA Webb telescope education and public outreach team at Goddard. "I was able to watch some of the students present their final projects, and it was rewarding to see what they'd learned, especially about how to coordinate a team (whose members were often separated by great physical distance) to achieve a goal."

The team was evaluated by graduate engineering students and professionals of various relevant disciplines and selected among a group of five finalist teams. Evaluators included a professor of engineering from the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, K-12 STEM educators, graduate students from engineering and multiple related disciplines, as well as past RWIW team leaders.

Students on the team, all high school sophomores or juniors, collaborated virtually from their respective locations. The team was led by Marco Balducci, a graduate research assistant at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who currently works in the Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research.

This marked the third year of the NASA RWIW Engineering Design Challenge. For the 2012-2013 run, the program asked grade 8-12 students to develop engineering design solutions to one of two real-world NASA Webb telescope challenges. Students chose to either re-design a shield to keep Webb telescope cold enough to "detect infrared light from faint sources such as distant galaxies and extrasolar planets" or to re-design a mirror assembly so that Webb telescope may produce images that are "sufficiently bright and sharp to look back in time to when galaxies were young."

RWIW earns its name due to the two phases of the program. Phase one, "RealWorld," requires "paper and pencil," and guides students through the design process inside participating classrooms or other formal and informal learning environments. Phase two, "InWorld," takes place within a digital universe created within the Activeworlds, 3-D multiuser, PC-based system. There, students from across the United States interact with peers and university-student mentors, using interactive collaborative tools and professional-level modeling and simulation software to develop engineering design solutions.

The program is a collaboration between the James Webb Space Telescope education and public outreach group, NASA Goddard, NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.,USA TODAY Education and the National Institute of Aerospace.

For more information about the NASA RealWorld-InWorld Engineering Design Challenge, visit:

http://www.NASArealworldinworld.org

Originally posted here:

NASA High School STEM Challenge Announces Winning Team, Invites Students to Present Ideas at NASA Goddard

NASA GSFC Solicitation: Space Geodesy SLR

Posted on by

Synopsis - May 02, 2013

General Information

Solicitation Number: RFI-2013SpaceGeodesySLR Posted Date: May 02, 2013 FedBizOpps Posted Date: May 02, 2013 Recovery and Reinvestment Act Action: No Original Response Date: Jun 07, 2013 Current Response Date: Jun 07, 2013 Classification Code: A -- Research and Development NAICS Code: 541712

Contracting Office Address

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 210.Y, Greenbelt, MD 20771

Description

Description

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Space Geodesy Project (SGP) is soliciting information to improve its understanding of the interest, capabilities, and Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) estimates for planning the construction, deployment, and operation of the next generation Space Geodesy (SG) Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR) Stations that will be part of a new NASA's Space Geodetic Network (SGN). NASA is considering the construction of up to ten new SLR stations that will contribute to the larger Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS).

One of the main objectives of SGP is to produce the necessary observations for realization of the Terrestrial Reference Frame (TRF). Scientific objectives dictate the desire for a TRF definition with accuracy of 1 mm and stable to 0.1mm/yr (millimeters per year), including geocenter and with a scale accurate to 0.1ppb (parts per billion), and stable to 0.01 ppb/yr. (Source: Gross et al., 2009). This is a factor of 10-20 beyond current capability.

The NASA SGN will comprise integrated, multi-technique next generation space geodetic observing systems, as the core NASA contribution to a global network designed to produce the higher quality data required to maintain the Terrestrial Reference Frame and provide information essential for fully realizing the measurement potential of the current and coming generation of Earth Observing spacecraft. It is anticipated that to achieve the desired level of accuracy and stability the SG sites will collocate and use in unison several key techniques of observation, including Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), Satellite Laser Ranging (SLR), Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and Doppler Orbitography and Radiopositioning Integrated by Satellite (DORIS). Other secondary instruments (such as gravimeters) may be added.

Read more:

NASA GSFC Solicitation: Space Geodesy SLR

NASA's GROVER roves over snow for over a month

Posted on by

NASA's GROVER, without solar panels. The laptop is a temporary fixture (Photo: Gabriel Trisca, Boise State University)

NASA's autonomous, solar-powered explorer GROVER has been kitted out with ground-penetrating radar to take to Greenland's ice sheet on Friday. There the robot will spend a month analyzing the accumulation of snow and how this contributes to the ice sheet over time. The scientists involved hope to identify a new layer of ice that has formed since summer 2012, an unusually warm summer which saw melting across 97 percent of the area of the ice sheet. During that time, an iceberg twice the size of Manhattan calved from the Petermann Glacier, part of the ice sheet.

NASA hopes it can offset its ice accumulation data against summer melt to gauge net loss.

Though ice sheet may sound modest next to the word glacier, it is actually reserved for only the largest contiguous chunks of ice. While any sheet more than 50,000 sq km (19,000 sq miles) qualifies, the only two sheets existent today surpass that threshold by a country mile. Greenland's ice sheet covers 1.7 million sq km of the country's land area (almost all of it in other words). The Antarctic ice sheet is much larger again, covering 14 million sq km.

GROVER stands for both Greenland Rover and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research. The explorer came about as a result of two summer engineering bootcamps held at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 2010 and 2011. Students pitched the idea of a solar-powered rover to Goddard glaciologist Lora Koenig, who became an adviser to the GROVER project. Equipping GROVER with radar was Koenig's idea; an alternative to using manned snow-going vehicles or aircraft which are more expensive to operate.

With solar panels attached, GROVER stands 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, and weighs in at 800 pounds (360 kg). Though the steep angle the PV panels are mounted at would compromise efficiency in most environments, on the snowy ice sheet, the high reflectance of the ground means this is much less of an issue. Because energy is at a premium, a low-power radar system has been used, and GROVER will trundle along at an average of 2 km/h (1.2 mph). Despite this modest speed (actually, not so bad given its working environment), it's thought that GROVER will be capable of gathering more data than a besnowmobiled human, thanks to the sun shining all day at these latitudes during the summer months.

Initially GROVER will stay within a 3-mile range of base camp where it will communicate with the research team over Wi-Fi. Once it's confirmed that all systems are GROVER, the robot will be let off the leash and its data recovered at the end of the summer. In the future, though, the researchers hope that GROVER will be able to report data in real time via satellite. Though capable of functioning autonomously, a satellite link would allow researchers to take control of GROVER remotely.

Source: NASA

Just enter your friends and your email address into the form below

For multiple addresses, separate each with a comma

Read more:

NASA's GROVER roves over snow for over a month


  1. NASA