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

NASA

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)]

NASA

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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

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 crewmembers. 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 Monday (April 1) to 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)]

"Do you think your code and your solutions can help advance humankind by advancing a humanoid kind?" a promotional video for the competition exclaims.

Contest participants in the two Robonaut competitions may eventually enable Robonaut 2 to better perform "repetitive, monotonous tasks" so that astronauts won't have to, according to a statement issued by TopCoder.

Robonaut vision showdown

The first contest involves writing an algorithm that will make Robonaut 2 locate and understand whether buttons and switches on a dashboard are turned off or on. NASA has provided images of the boards on the station, in a laboratory and in a simulator. Every setting has a different set of circumstances that the robot would need to work within.

"The successful algorithm application must work with each of several different camera systems and varying lighting conditions within each environment," TopCoder officials said.

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Hey Coders! NASA Wants You to Help Robot Astronaut See

UPDATE for 11 a.m. ET: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 unveil the first discoveries from a powerful $2 billion particle physics experiment on the International Space Station in what could be a major vindication for the science tool, which almost never made it into space.

The space agency will hold a press conference at 1:30 p.m. EDT (1830 GMT) today, April 3, to reveal the first science results from the experiment, called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. You can watch the AMS science results live on SPACE.com, via NASA TV.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is an advanced cosmic-ray detector designed to seek out signs of antimatter and elusive dark matter from its perch on the backbone-like main truss of the International Space Station. More than 200 scientists representing 16 countries and 56 institutions are part of the science team, which is led by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, a physicist at MIT.

"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 an announcement Tuesday (April 2). [See photos of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer in space]

NASA and the AMS team have not revealed exactly what the first science results from AMS will be, but Ting has assured that it will be a significant announcement.

"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, adding that it would represent a "small step" toward understanding the true nature of dark matter, even if it is not the final answer.

The spectrometer consists of a huge, 3-foot wide magnet that bends the paths of cosmic particles and steers them into special detectors designed to measure particles' charge, energy and other properties. The complicated space experiment was 16 years in the making, but despite its lofty mission, the 7-ton AMS almost never flew.

In fact, NASA canceled the space shuttle mission originally slated to launch AMS to the space station in 2005. At the time, the space agency cited safety concerns following the 2003 space shuttle Columbia accident an event that led directly to the space shuttle fleet's retirement in 2011.

But NASA's decision to cancel the AMS mission did not sit well with the science community. Scientists launched a persistent campaign to resurrect the AMS launch, including an intense lobbying effort to sway lawmakers in Congress to their side.

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NASA to Announce Major Astrophysics Discovery Today

NASA's first manned outpost in deep space may be a repurposed rocket part, just like the agency's first-ever astronaut abode in Earth orbit.

With a little tinkering, the upper-stage hydrogen propellant tank of NASA's huge Space Launch System rocket would make a nice and relatively cheap deep-space habitat, some researchers say. They call the proposed craft "Skylab II," an homage to the 1970s Skylab space station that was a modified third stage of a Saturn V moon rocket.

"This idea is not challenging technology," said Brand Griffin, an engineer with Gray Research, Inc., who works with the Advanced Concepts Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

"It's just trying to say, 'Is this the time to be able to look at existing assets, planned assets and incorporate those into what we have as a destination of getting humans beyond LEO [low-Earth orbit]?'" Griffin said Wednesday (March 27) during a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations working group. [Gallery: Visions of Deep-Space Stations]

A roomy home in deep space

NASA is developing the Space Launch System (SLS) to launch astronauts toward distant destinations such as near-Earth asteroids and Mars. The rocket's first test flight is slated for 2017, and NASA wants it to start lofting crews by 2021.

The SLS will stand 384 feet tall (117 meters) in its biggest ("evolved") incarnation, which will be capable of blasting 130 metric tons of payload to orbit. Its upper-stage hydrogen tank is big, too, measuring 36.1 feet tall by 27.6 feet wide (11.15 m by 8.5 m).

The tank's dimensions yield an internal volume of 17,481 cubic feet (495 cubic m) roughly equivalent to a two-story house. That's much roomier than a potential deep-space habitat derived from modules of the International Space Station (ISS), which are just 14.8 feet (4.5 m) wide, Griffin said.

The tank-based Skylab II could accommodate a crew of four comfortably and carry enough gear and food to last for several years at a time without requiring a resupply, he added. Further, it would launch aboard the SLS in a single piece, whereas ISS-derived habitatswould need to link up multiple components in space.

Because of this, SkylabII would require relatively few launches to establish and maintain, Griffin said. That and the use of existing SLS-manufacturing infrastructure would translate into big cost savings a key selling point in today's tough fiscal climate.

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NASA Mega-Rocket Could Lead to Skylab 2 Deep Space Station

All Aboard for Cassidy and Crewmates on This Week @NASA

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All Aboard for Cassidy and Crewmates on This Week @NASA - Video

GLASTONBURY, Conn., April 1, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --TopCoder, Inc., the world's largest open innovation platform and competitive community of 470,000 digital creators, today announced two new marathon competitions hosted through the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) that will look to continue delivery of output-based high value returns in the most cost-effective and measurable software development process currently available to government agencies. The competitions will center on NASA's famous space robot Robonaut 2 aboard the International Space Station (ISS). The initial challenge will focus on enabling Robonaut 2 to interact visually with different types of input devices the astronauts use on the Space Station.

(Photo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20130401/NY86625)

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20080820/NYW078LOGO )

Successfully completed projects for NASA on NTL's open and transparent environment for sophisticated technology development include the recent Longeron Shadowing Optimization Challenge, a $30,000 open innovation competition to make the energy-gathering solar arrays of the Space Station more efficient which attracted a pool of more than 4,000 registrants and delivered 459 competitors who produced 2185 unique solutions in less than two weeks, the Space Med Kit competition which delivered a 360 x improvement over the existing NASA algorithm and garnered 2,833 distinct code submissions from 1,095 participants at a cost of $24,000, and thePlanetary Data System Idea Challenge, an open innovationchallenge in deployment and future use mode which found novel ideas for new applications to help general users to search, display and understand the more than 100 terabytes of recorded space images, telemetry and models from 30 years of planetary missions. Additionally, the Food Intake Tracker (FIT) iPad App Conceptualization and Voice Command Idea Generation competitions recently finished with architecture competitions beginning soon. The ISS-FIT competition program is creating new dietary tracking applications for use by astronauts.

"We at TopCoder are thrilled to be again working with Harvard and NASA to provide creative and inventive support of NTL's mission todeliver critical solutions while recognizing the need to return high taxpayer value," said Rob Hughes, President and COO of TopCoder, Inc. "We feel that our collective efforts on Robonaut 2, along with our successful Longeron, PDS and FIT programs have exposed the exciting prospect that game changing solutions can be created at reasonable cost by a new generation of engineers, programmers and technologists which is critical to innovation in the public sector and beyond."

About the Robonaut 2 CompetitionsCompetitors from around the world are welcome to register at http://community.topcoder.com/longcontest/?module=ViewActiveContests . Each phase will run three weeks from start to finish.

This first phase of the two competitions is to enable Robonaut 2 to recognize the state and location of several buttons and switches on a dashboard fitted with LED lights. Contestants will be tasked to work with different sets of imagery from NASA's lab on earth and on the Space Station, as well as in a simulator. The successful algorithm application must work with each of several different camera systems and varying lighting conditions within each environment.

A second contest will ask competitors to use the "seeing" algorithm produced in the first challenge in order to write an algorithm that actually controls the robot's motion. The algorithm will need to "see" an object, recognize it, and correctly operate and interact with it in the most efficient and safe manner possible.

A long term goal is to further develop the capabilities of robots to interact with input devices and move closer to enabling them to one day perform repetitive, monotonous tasks in place of astronauts. Full details are available at http://www.topcoder.com/iss/robonaut/.

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TopCoder and NASA Tournament Lab Champion High Value Output-Based Challenges, Now Look to Bring Sight Capability to ...

Yannick LeJacq , NBC News contributor 4 hrs.

You are the space invaders, NASA manager Jeff Norris declared last week to a packed audience at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

It was a dramatic ending to a surprise talk scheduled at the last minute into a conference usually packed with the most arcane and theoretical pieces of trade information game developers swap with one another over a week at San Franciscos Moscone Convention Center. Gamers and developers alike may have been confused to see real-world space exploration suddenly creep into a flurry of conversations about virtual worlds, but, as Norris explained during his presentation, NASAs projects have often overlapped with the work of game designers.

To start, theres the hallowed ground of the living room, where viewers first witnessed the legendary Apollo 11 landing, which Norris said was the most watched television broadcast at the time in history.

The living room is a place we'd like to be again, Norris said.

While the aerospace organization may still be working on its giant leap into peoples consoles, NASA has already made its way back to the living room with a series of small steps. Last June, NASA released the Kinect-based game Mars Rover Landing in collaboration with Microsofts Xbox 360 team to give players a chance to control the Curiosity rover during its precipitous landing on the surface of the red planetwhich was, uncharacteristically for video games, not peopled with tons of scary Martians, demons, and gateways to hell for once (Sorry, id.)

Norris acknowledged the Mars Rover Landing game along with a small handful of other interactive initiatives that NASA has attempted in the past. But for the future of space exploration, NASA is thinking bigger than a standalone Kinect game. Indeed, Norris and his colleague Victor Luo, a NASA human interface engineer, said that NASA is now working with game controller developers like Microsoft and Leap Motion to come up with new ways to control robots of all shapes and sizes.

Norris and Luo showed GDC a few early prototypes for this new technology, remotely controlling a massive six-limbed spider-like robot referred to as ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Limbed Extra-Terrestrial Explorer, we have a weird fetish for acronyms, they joked) with the palm of one of Luos hands as footage was live-streamed to the conference through a Google Hangout.

The two admitted that the current examples were more simulations than video games per se, calling them part game, part not game. But Luo joked that the thought of moving a one-ton robot with my hand was probably every gamer geek space fan boys dream. This quasi-gameplay was the cool stuff, the hardcore gameplay, the stuff that made us NASAand, therefore, the stuff that NASA was hoping would reignite our curiosity for government-funded space exploration.

But Norris and Luo didnt stop there. Instead, they laid out a bold and science fiction-drenched vision for the future of NASA and space exploration more generally.

Originally posted here:

How NASA wants to use video games to make us all ‘Space Invaders’

Laura Woodmansee is a writer based in Southern California. She holds an M.S. in Journalism from USCs Annenberg School for Journalism and is the author of the books "Women Astronauts," "Women of Space: Cool Careers on the Final Frontier," and "Sex in Space." She contributed this piece to LiveSciences Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

By now, I hope youve heard that NASA has put into suspended animation many of its educational and non-media public outreach, including their STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) educationprograms. This is until it can review all of those programs.

It sounds like an April Fools' Day joke, doesnt it? Believe me, its real. If you hadnt heard about all this, its probably because the various news media havent covered it much. It seems to me that the American people (and the world) ought to know what's happening.

I understand that NASA was forced to make some cuts in order to abide by the sequester. But, Id never have thought our space agency would even consider pausing or deleting so much of something so important to the future of NASA and of the United States as education and outreach.

I hope that these cuts are temporary, a way to force Congress into repealing the sequester for NASA. If it's not, and these cuts are made permanent, the world will lose something special that NASA magic. [Petition Asks White House to Reverse NASA Outreach Sequester Cuts]

If you think this doesnt affect you, think again. NASAs educational and public outreach programs are the key to letting the public know about space science. What comes out of those programs inspires a whole new generation of scientists and engineers, and even artists and writers like myself. By cutting education and public outreach, NASA is shooting itself in the foot.NASA outreach works hard to let the public know just what the space agency does without information, what public interest there is in NASA will fade away.

NASA outreach also inspires kids each year via thousands of school events, conferences, tours, robot tournaments and other fun educational activities. By cutting outreach, NASA risks being responsible for millions of kids and adults not being interested in science, technology, engineering and math. What inspired at least two generations of Americans and others worldwide will be gone. Will kids be aware of what is going on in space science? Probably not. There will be no cool space cards handed out at school by a NASA scientist, engineer or astronaut; no science experiment fun sheets courtesy of NASA outreach and STEM programs. In the long term, if fewer people are interested in space science, there may be no space program at all.

Cutting back, or even halting, NASAs educational outreach programs amounts to sacrificing the future for a bit of a financial break today. It is the scourge of our times. In the United States, optimism for the future used to be our defining characteristic.At one time, NASA embodied the future. Now, we are stuck in the present and unable to imagine a future where economics will again seem, well, good.

So the sequester is hitting NASA hard, at its heart. Sure, some education and outreach programs have been added to the exempted list, and the situation doesnt look quite as bleak as it did when the memo first came out on March 22. But, many good programs are still in danger.

You may think "what can I do?" I suggest you share this news, or this article, with your friends, family and acquaintances who have any sort of interest in space, engineering or technology. You can also contact your congressional representative. With enough people contacting the NASA directors office and congressional representatives, then perhaps we can change things for the better.

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Lack of NASA Outreach Is a Setback to US Science

A NASA video announcement highlighting the agency's space exploration efforts could be coming to a theater near you when the next "Star Trek" film warps onto the big screen in May.

The Aerospace Industries Association, a private organization that represents more than 350 manufacturers involved in spaceflight, has raised more than $42,000 to help place a NASA advertisement in 59 movie theaters for eight weeks across the U.S. The NASA video ad will run before "Star Trek Into Darkness" the next chapter in the rebooted "Star Trek" franchise when it debuts on May 17.

After setting up a campaign on the crowdfunding website IndieGoGo.com on March 26, officials from the AIA met their initial $33,000 goal in six days with the help of more than 1,000 backers.

"By backing this 30-second trailer in the top movie theater markets around the United States, you can show our students and young people that we're in an exciting new era of space exploration," officials from the AIA wrote on the campaign page. "Now is the time to reach them to remind them that an inspiring space program awaits, one that is worthy of their ambition." [See Photos of the "Star Trek Into Darkness"]

The 30-second spot will be a cut-down version of a 2.5 minute video called "We are the Explorers" produced by NASA last year. Narrated by Peter Cullen the voice of Optimus Prime in the "Transformers" movie series the video details the past and possible future of the space agency.

"Right now men and women are working on the next steps to go farther than we have ever gone before," Cullen said in his narration. "New vessels will carry us, and new destinations await us."

This campaign comes on the heels of a March 22 announcement that NASA outreach activities will be scaled back because of sequestration. Due to the series of across-the-board budget cuts, NASA officials have suspended many of the agency's public outreach programs in place to get children and adults involved in the space program.

The AIA seems to be trying to pick up where NASA left off. Officials with the space agency are not legally allowed to use NASA funds to buy advertisement time, but the AIA, as a private organization, is under no such obligation.

"By funding this campaign, we can remind students and the general public that our nation's space agency is working hard on the next era of exploration," AIA officials wrote in the campaign statement. "Keeping the public informed of NASA's activities is a key element of sustaining the health of our space program."

While the campaign has met its initial goal, AIA officials have set a new funding goal they hope to reach before the end of the month. If the campaign raises $94,000 or more, the NASA advertisement will be placed in 750 theaters in the U.S.

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Next 'Star Trek' Film Gets NASA Video Trailer In Crowdfunding Project

NASA Controls Athlete Rover with Leap Motion Controller Live at GDC
NASA Controls 1 ton Athlete Rover LIVE at GDC with Leap Motion Controller. Footage from "We Are the Space Invaders" presentation by Victor Luo Jeffrey Norr...

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NASA Controls Athlete Rover with Leap Motion Controller Live at GDC - Video

Review of UFOs activity in circumsolar space in images NASA Solar Observatory - March 28, 2013
You can see the different types of unidentified objects. Objects have different shapes and sizes. UFOs are in different points in space near the Sun. These o...

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Review of UFOs activity in circumsolar space in images NASA Solar Observatory - March 28, 2013 - Video

4MIN News March 30, 2013: NASA ISON - We Have a Measurement
Earthquake Prediction System: http://youtu.be/_MVsFef4cJo Original music by Nemes1s http://Soundcloud.com/Nemes1s 0bserver Shop: http://www.cafepress.com/s0s...

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4MIN News March 30, 2013: NASA ISON - We Have a Measurement - Video

NASA Needs You
Hank usually likes to keep science and politics separated, but the reality is that a lot of scientific research in the United States is funded by the governm...

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NASA Needs You - Video

Mar. 29, 2013 Astronomers from the University of Maryland at College Park (UMCP) and Lowell Observatory have used NASA's Swift satellite to check out comet C/2012 S1 (ISON), which may become one of the most dazzling in decades when it rounds the sun later this year.

Using images acquired over the last two months from Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT), the team has made initial estimates of the comet's water and dust production and used them to infer the size of its icy nucleus.

"Comet ISON has the potential to be among the brightest comets of the last 50 years, which gives us a rare opportunity to observe its changes in great detail and over an extended period," said Lead Investigator Dennis Bodewits, an astronomer at UMCP.

Additional factors, including an encounter with Mars followed by a scorching close approach to the sun, make comet ISON an object of special interest. In late February, at NASA's request, a team of comet experts initiated the Comet ISON Observing Campaign (CIOC) to assist ground- and space-based facilities in obtaining the most scientifically useful data.

Like all comets, ISON is a clump of frozen gases mixed with dust. Often described as "dirty snowballs," comets emit gas and dust whenever they venture near enough to the sun that the icy material transforms from a solid to gas, a process called sublimation. Jets powered by sublimating ice also release dust, which reflects sunlight and brightens the comet.

Typically, a comet's water content remains frozen until it comes within about three times Earth's distance to the sun. While Swift's UVOT cannot detect water directly, the molecule quickly breaks into hydrogen atoms and hydroxyl (OH) molecules when exposed to ultraviolet sunlight. The UVOT detects light emitted by hydroxyl and other important molecular fragments as well as sunlight reflected from dust.

The Jan. 30 UVOT observations reveal that ISON was shedding about 112,000 pounds (51,000 kg) of dust, or about two-thirds the mass of an unfueled space shuttle, every minute. By contrast, the comet was producing only about 130 pounds (60 kg) of water every minute, or about four times the amount flowing out of a residential sprinkler system.

"The mismatch we detect between the amount of dust and water produced tells us that ISON's water sublimation is not yet powering its jets because the comet is still too far from the sun," Bodewits said. "Other more volatile materials, such as carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide ice, evaporate at greater distances and are now fueling ISON's activity."

At the time, the comet was 375 million miles (604 million km) from Earth and 460 million miles (740 million km) from the sun. ISON was at magnitude 15.7 on the astronomical brightness scale, or about 5,000 times fainter that the threshold of human vision.

Similar levels of activity were observed in February, and the team plans additional UVOT observations.

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NASA 's Swift sizes up comet ISON

NASA | Comet ISON #39;s Path Through the Solar System
Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) may become one of the most dazzling in decades when it rounds the sun later this year. Like all comets, ISON is a clump of frozen gase...

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NASA | Comet ISON's Path Through the Solar System - Video

Posted at 02:42 PM ET, 03/29/2013

Mar 29, 2013 06:42 PM EDT

View Photo Gallery:The first humanoid robot in space has been there for two years. Robonaut 2 arrived in February 2011 and was unpacked the next month. The robot was developed jointly by NASA and General Motors.

NASA Tournament Lab is launching two new competitions, this time to give Robonaut 2, the humanoid robot aboard the international space station, the gift of improved sight. The challenges are the latest offered by the Tournament Lab in conjunction with the open innovation platform TopCoder.

The first competition calls on participants to figure out how to enable Robonaut 2, or R2, to identify buttons and switches on a console fitted with LED lights. The winning entry would be in the form of an algorithm application that works seamlessly with R2s cameras in different lighting conditions. The second competition will build off the first, calling on competitors to write an algorithm that controls the robots motions based on the new sight capability.

The first phase of the competition officially launches Saturday, with a formal announcement scheduled for Monday, according to a TopCoder spokesman. The winner of the first phase of the competition will receive $10,000.

Were right in the middle of advancing and testing robotics using the space station right now, said Jason Crusan, Director of NASAs Advanced Exploration Systems division during a call Friday. This is kind of the right time to onramp other solutions to these image processing problems other than the ones we have come up with.

Robonaut 2 was developed and designed to operate as if it were a humanoid, making sight one of its primary tools. The robot currently employs a two-camera view system. We definitely need the vision piece, said Crusan.

The technology participants will be called on to create has wider applications beyond R2, said Crusan. And the innovator who submits a solution will not be barred from being able to use the code elsewhere, including making commercial products. But the winning entry is sent back into open source to guarantee that NASA and others can use it.

Past technology to emerge from the Robonaut program, a partnership between NASA and General Motors, has been the K-glove, which GM factory workers use, said Julia Badger, the ISS Applications Lead for the Robonaut 2 project. Thats an immediate very quick thing that has spun off.

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NASA and TopCoder to issue Robonaut 2 ‘sight’ challenge

When the Obamaadministrations2014 federal budget gets released in early April, it might include a curious item: a $100 million request for NASA to conduct a mission to capture an asteroid and bring it back to Earth.

This idea comes from an article published March 28 in Aviation Week and Space Technology, which reports on the space industry. The plan would identify a small asteroid, grab it with a robotic spacecraft, and tug it to the vicinity of our planet, perhaps somewhere near the moon. Such a mission was the subject of a two-day meeting of scientists and engineers at Caltech organized by the Keck Institute for Space Studies in 2011.

The somewhat insane-sounding idea was deemed technically feasible by attendees at that meeting, perhaps by using a large magnet or harpoon-like anchor to secure the giant space rock. The Keck meeting concluded that the entire operation would cost about $2.6 billion and require between six and 10 years to tug a roughly 7-meter asteroid back to Earth. NASA has been mulling the merits of such a plan since January. There are plenty of targets: Nearly 20,000 asteroids exist quite close to our planet and President Barack Obama has previously stated that he would like to send humans to explore one of these bodies around 2025.

Going to any asteroid in its current orbit would likely be a six-month trip. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden discussed the presidents plan in December, saying that Obama did not say NASA had to fly all the way to an asteroid. What matters is the ability to put humans with an asteroid. An asteroid that was brought nearer to Earth could conceivably take only a week or so for a round trip.

The mission would be a proving ground for new technology, help make scientific discoveries about the early solar system, and give NASA something to do with the enormous new rocket its building. It could also provide important information to several private companies that want to mine asteroids in the near future. Finally, in the aftermath of the bolide that exploded over Russia, the worlds attention is turned to the need to deflect potentially dangerous asteroids.

Rumors have often swirled around bold new plans for NASA, including a recent idea that the agency could construct a space station that would orbit the moon. That mission has yet to appear but its worth noting that the original source of it came from space policy expert John Logsdon of George Washington University and not from anyone within NASA. Aviation Week is known for having contacts inside the U.S. military and space industries.

Given the large funding needed and the cost-cutting mindset of the current Congress, its not entirely clear if NASA can afford to wrangle an asteroid for some interplanetary feng shui. The presidential budget request is set to be unveiled April 10, several months later than usual because of complications arising from the sequester, a congressionally mandated across-the-board budget cut that will be taking more than a billion dollars from NASAs overall funding. Its possible that the $100 million in the administrations request will be a down payment for the first part of such a mission.

Read more:

Will NASA Announce Plans to Snag an Asteroid and Fly It to Earth?

Synopsis - Mar 20, 2013

Technology Infusion Appendices - Posted on Mar 20, 2013 New!

General Information

Solicitation Number: NNH13ZDA008L Posted Date: Mar 20, 2013 FedBizOpps Posted Date: Mar 20, 2013 Recovery and Reinvestment Act Action: No Original Response Date: Apr 19, 2013 Current Response Date: Apr 19, 2013 Classification Code: A -- Research and Development NAICS Code: 541712

Contracting Office Address

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA Headquarters Acquisition Branch, Code 210.H, Greenbelt, MD 20771

Description

The Planetary Science Division (PSD) within the Science Mission Directorate (SMD) at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Headquarters seeks to understand how to better realize a scientific return on spacecraft system technology investments. This Request for Information (RFI), will provide PSD with recommendations on how to effectively infuse new spacecraft systems technologies that it develops into future competed missions, enabling increased scientific discoveries, lower mission cost, or both. We are collecting input on how to maximize the return on and benefits from current technology investments and thereby improve the prospects of the inclusion of these investments within future competed missions opportunities. We are requesting from the science and mission communities input on specific questions, their assessment of barriers to technology infusion as related to infusion approach, technology readiness, information and documentation products, communication, integration considerations, interaction with technology development areas, costs capped mission areas, risk considerations, system level impacts and implementation, and mission pull. Other volunteered input not supporting one of these areas from responders will also be considered.

To this end, the PSD has formed a team comprised of Radioisotope Power Systems (RPS) Program and In-Space Propulsion Technology (ISPT) Program staff to execute this study. This team will engage the science and mission communities and seek inputs from industry, universities, and other organizations. This team also may seek opinions and analysis from consultants and contractors as needed to achieve the objective of this study.

The most recent PSD Announcements of Opportunities (AOs) have offered the availability of the following technologies to the proposers: The Advanced Stirling Radioisotope Generator (ASRG), aerocapture and aeroshell hardware technologies, the NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) ion propulsion system, and the Advanced Materials Bi-propellant Rocket (AMBR) engine. Specific input on the use of these technologies are also being requested.

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NASA Request for Information: Planetary Science Division Technology Infusion Study