Lawmakers are remaking NASA in order to leave parts of the agencys earth science program untouched but remove its climate change research.

Its still unclear exactly how lawmakers plan to transform NASAs mission, but Republicans and Trump administration officials have said they want the agency to focus on deep-space missions and away from climate change research, which is a part of its Earth Sciences Division. That has created uncertainty about the fate of the Earth Sciences Division, which accounts for about $2 billion of NASAs $20 billion budget.

At a House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing yesterday, Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said he wants a rebalancing of NASAs mission. The lawmaker told E&E News he wants the agency to reprioritize its mission because the Obama administration cut space exploration funds.

Specifically, that could mean NASAs work on climate change would go to another agency, with or without funding, or possibly would get cut. Smith and other Republicans avoided laying out specifics but acknowledged that earth science at NASA would likely face some significant changes in the near future.

By rebalancing, Id like for more funds to go into space exploration; were not going to zero out earth sciences, he said. Our weather satellites have been an immense help, for example, and thats from NASA, but Id like for us to remember what our priorities are, and there are another dozen agencies that study earth science and climate change, and they can continue to do that. Meanwhile, we only have one agency that engages in space exploration, and they need every dollar they can muster for space exploration.

A reauthorization bill could pass the Senate as soon as today and would allow President Trump to introduce a fiscal 2018 budget request that could allow the administration more input on NASA, Smith said.

The Earth Sciences Division at NASA is far broader than climate change and provides invaluable weather information relied upon by businesses across the globe. Earth science has been an essential part of NASA since its inception, and the division collects data from satellites, analyzing it and distributing it to government agencies, universities and the public. NASA currently has more than a dozen earth science satellites in orbit studying oceans, the atmosphere and the biosphere, and more are planned in the coming years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is where some Republicans want climate change research to be centered, does not have the same ability to develop the satellites that monitor the planet.

The earth science budget at NASA has been flat for more than 20 years, said Ellen Stofan, the agencys former chief scientist. She said NASA builds satellites that study the oceans, agriculture, the weather and other key facets of everyday lives.

NASAs earth science program is critically important, and I would remind people that the technologies that come out of the investments in the earth science program spawn new industries, she said. The earth science program is an investment in this country, and it returns benefits to all of us every day.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said he expects that climate research could be targeted by Republicans in the budget reauthorization, especially since previous Republican proposals called for shifting climate change away from NASA to U.S. EPA or other agencies. But that just included moving the responsibilities of the NASA climate work to EPA without any extra funding, he said. Beyer said its clear that the GOP is targeting research because it doesnt like the information it imparts, and that he expects it will soon come after NASAs climate change work.

I think its entirely possible, with unitary power from a party that doesnt think climate change is real, or if it is real, we cant do anything about it, he said.

A number of the witnesses at the House committee hearing, most invited by Republicans, expressed a desire to increase NASAs push toward deep space and manned missions. Harrison Schmitt, an Apollo 17 astronaut and a former Republican senator from New Mexico, criticized the agencys direction under President Obama and said the agency should be focused on space.

Many of the things NASA does are really in the purview of other agencies, and I think that ought to be examined very closely by this committee, which has responsibility for several agencies, not just NASA, Schmitt said. Just because you start to focus on the moon, Mars or deep space doesnt mean these programs have to go away; they can be taken under the umbrella of other agencies, and that ought to be looked at very carefully.

Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.), who confirmed that he is the running to become NASA administrator, said he is open to moving part of the earth science study out of the agency and into NOAA, or even swapping a few programs between the two agencies. He was generally supportive of the earth science but did not commit to keeping climate research at NASA.

I support earth science; it is critically important for us as a nation to understand what is happening on our own planet, so I think there is broad consensus, bipartisan, that earth science is important, he said.

The changes to NASA are likely not going to be introduced in the reauthorization bill that will come soon, but could be introduced in the near future, said Bob Walker, a former Pennsylvania Republican congressman who drafted the Trump administrations space policy and is actively involved in the deliberations.

I think we will probably have the earth science programs under this authorization maintained exactly where they are, so the question, then, is whether or not you then have accepted a bifurcated NASA mission profile that in the past has consigned us for three decades of not moving humans out of low-Earth orbit, he said.

Walker said the direction of NASA can be changed in the near future, particularly if the Trump administration or a national space council wants a renewed focus on deep space.

Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at http://www.eenews.net.

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When Denver resident Doug Kacena was a freshman at the University of Colorado Boulder in 1994, his older sister, Melissa, asked for a favor.

I needed a whole bunch of hands to take measurements of bacteria every two hours, recalls Melissa Kacena, who was working on her masters degree at the same school.

The bacteria project wound up on Space Station Mir and Kacena went on to get her Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at CU Boulder and did post-doctoral work at Yale University. The younger Kacena? He dropped out of the molecular cellular developmental biology program to major in art. Hes now a ground-breaking abstract artist who recently challenged traditional artists to give him paintingsso he could paint over them.

More than 20 years later, Melissa Kacena asked her brother for another favor.

The siblings reunited ona project that is headed for space on Saturday. Melissa Kacenais currently in Cape Canaveral, Fla., prepping 40 micefor a trip to the International Space Station. Theyll be studied as part of a bone recovery experiment. She tapped herbrother to design the official patch for the teams space mission, the Rodent Research IV.

Doug Kacena

It was an incredible honor to be asked to do it, said Doug Kacena. I did it before anyone had a chance to rethink it.

Embroidered patches with personal stories have been a part of NASAs history since 1965. But most patches dont make it into the public eye or even NASA space stores andno one seems to know how many patches exist.

I would estimate about 200 to 250 total, and that doesnt take into account the patches designed by the customers (military, commercial and NASA) that rode on those launches, saidRobert Pearlman, editor at collectSPACE, which is full of key moments in space history.

The space agency lets mission participants design their own patches for team-bonding purposes, according to Bill Barry, NASAs chief historian. ButNASA only keeps track of patches fromofficial trips, which include all manned missions, shuttle launches and select others or about 160 since the first patch was used in 1965. NASA makes the taxpayer-funded designs available to the public, so anyone can create one. NASA prefers to stick to its blue and white logo.

NASAs view is that multiple images dilute the brand, Barry said. We use the NASA logo for all communication purposes.

But Barry understands the affinity for space mission patches.

When I was a kid back in the 60s, I had a complete collection of all the Apollo mission patches, Barry said. And I was crushed when I learned as an adult that they werent real. The crew-sized ones were bigger.

NASA

The custom began in 1965 with the Gemini 5. Astronauts Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad were preparing for an eight-day orbit around Earth and wanted a Conestoga wagon and stenciled on the side, 8 Days or Bust, said Barry. Both of those guys were fun-loving characters. Lets put it that way.

NASA didnt want to risk criticism if the mission was shorter or longer than eight days. They approved the patch, but not the wording. That was covered up by a piece of white cloth. And from then on, space mission patches became a thing as long as NASA gave its approval.

But unofficial patches dont have to follow any guidelines since they are not used for official NASA communication, Barry said. There could be multiple patches for the same launch if multiple parties are involved.

Private companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance have made their own mission patches.Other government agencies that have launched satellites also have created patches, including the elusive U.S. National Reconnaissance Office.Theories abound as to what the secretive satellites were intended for, with mystery patches to boot. One patch for the NROL-35 mission has a purple-haired wizard holding a trident and ball of fire. Another, for a 2011 launch, shows a bird engulfed in flames with an American flag in the background and Latin words that translate to Better the devil you know, according to the Smithsonian.

NASA

The patch for the Space Shuttle Challenger STS-51-L mission included the names of all seven crew members, which included Ellison Onizuka, who graduated from CU Boulder, and Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher in space, The shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into mission, killing everyone on board.

NASA

The patch for the final flight of Space Shuttle Columbia STS-107 is shaped like a shuttle and includes the symbol for microgravity, g. Crew members included Kalpana Chawla, who earned her PhD from CU Boulder. The shuttle disintegrated on reentry to earth and all seven members were killed.

NASA

In 1965, Gemini 5 was the first NASA space mission to get an official patch. Astronauts Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad, prepping for the 8-day orbit around earth, wanted a patch showing a wagon with the words "8 Days or Bust." NASA nixed the wording and from then on, allowed patches for missions as long as they received NASA approval.

Doug Kacena

Rodent Research IV is one of the projects heading to space on the SpaceX Dragon capsule, scheduled to launch Feb. 18, 2017 in Florida. Scientist Melissa Kacena, who is originally from Colorado, is sending 40 mice to the International Space Station to study how bones heal in a weightless environment. She asked brother Doug Kacena, a Denver artist, to design the patch.

CollectSpace.com

The Russian Soyuz TMA-17M mission patch paid tribute to NASA's Apollo 17 mission, said Soyuz commander Oleg Konenenko, according to space-news site CollectSpace.com.

CollectSpace.com

After comedian Stephen Colbert staged a write-in campaign to win a NASA poll, the comedian got his own patch, but not for any space mission. It's in honor of the ISS's new excercise machine: the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, according to space news site CollectSpace.com.

One popular patch was worn by the crew that launched the Spirit and OpportunityMars rovers in 2003. Entertainment company Warner Bros. workedwith the Air Force to create patches for each rover, one featured Marvin The Martian, the other Daffy Duck as Duck Dodgers.

Even astronaut classes have their own patches, like the astronaut class of 1990. The 13th class played on the unlucky number by picking a black cat and calling themselves, the Hairballs.

Research teams like Rodent Research IV have jumped at the chance to design their own patches.

Provided by Melissa Kacena

That brings us back to Melissa Kacena, now a professor of orthopaedic surgery at Indiana University School of Medicine. Shes been working with her students for more than three years on a methodthat helps bone fractures heal while a person is weightless, via crutches or recuperating in bed. Thats hard to test with mice, who dont like to stay still even when asked nicely, she said.

Bone fractures actually heal better with exercise, which increases bone strength. But walking on a fracture doesnt help the bone-healing process if a metal or hardware implant is involved.

If all your body weight goes into the implant, it will eventually fail. You need the bone to start growing before the implant fails, she said.

With support from the U.S. Department of Defense, the project becomes the fourth to send mice into space. Astronauts at the space station will help with the research before sending everything back to Earth after four weeks.

Were going to learn so much about the bone-healing process, she said, important because theres a really good chance that astronauts will get a fracture if they go to Mars.

Astronauts lose about 1 to 3 percent of bone density each month in space, she said. A person with osteoporosis loses 1 percent a year. If you lose (bone mass) going to Mars, theres an increased risk of fractures. We need to know how to heal.

After asking her team to come up with patch designs, they turned to her brother, Doug, who created a fairly straightforward design.The Rodent Research IV patch shows a silhouette of a mouse, its tail tucked underneath a strand of DNA.A galaxy of stars is in the background while the SpaceX Dragon capsule floats near the patchs edge.

The embroidered patch is scheduled to hitch a ride Saturday on the SpaceX Dragon during its CRS-10 cargo resupply mission to the ISS, a trip originally set for last summer.

Before the group packed up its gear and headed to Florida, Melissa Kacena talked to her team.

I told them that not everyone has these kinds of opportunities to work with NASA, she said. I reminded them when I was a grad student, working with NASA really inspired me and opened doors. Hopefully they will solve the problems of tomorrow.

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Denver artist Kacena tapped by sister to design NASA patch for Rodent Research IV mission - The Denver Post

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UPDATE: SpaceX aborted the CRS-10 launch a few seconds before liftoff. In a series of tweets, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk explained that one of the hydraulic pistons controlling the second stage vector control system was acting slightly odd. Vector control is how rockets steerIf the Falcon 9s was on the fritz, it would not be able to put the Dragon capsule on an intercept course with the ISS once the rocket reached low Earth orbit. Musk added that the system 99% likely to be fine but that 1% chance isnt worth rolling the dice. He hopes to make the next launch window for CRS-10, Sunday, February 18, at 9:38am EST.

SpaceX is back, and its launching your tax dollars into low Earth orbit. Saturday morning will mark the private rocket companys tenth mission to the International Space Stationand its second launch attempt since a Falcon 9 rocket blew up on a launchpad last September.

Saturdays launch will lift off from Cape Canaverals launchpad 39A, the same slab of concrete used for the Apollo missions. Thats a neat bit of ourobouros, especially since a congressional investigation just finished looking at SpaceXs potential to ferry humans to the ISS. The report, released on Thursday, detailed concerns over some cracked turbine fuel pumpsan old issue, already being fixed. But thats not likely to soothe anyone with lingering concerns that this company is struggling to overcome technical difficulties. In the short term, the only real indication will come on Saturday, when the Falcon 9 leaves behind either a swirl of smoke or a smoldering heap of metal.

Late last summer, SpaceX had been riding high on its back to back (to back to back) Falcon 9 barge landings. It was planning to increase its launch tempo, up to two rocket launches a month, and hoped to do a test flight of its anticipated Falcon Heavy rocket. CEO Elon Musk was even billed to speak at a fall conference about his long term ambitions to start a colony on Mars.

But the September 2016 explosion, which destroyed a $200 million satellite, put a limp in SpaceXs swagger. The company paused all launches (and landings) to investigate the mishap. By November, the consensus was that the superchilled oxygen the Falcon 9 uses for fuel had frozen, sparking a combustion.

In mid-January 2017, the company returned to flight, successfully launching (and landing) a Falcon 9 bearing 10 telecommunications satellites. But the small victory was overshadowed two weeks later when the Wall Street Journal broke the report from the Government Accountability Office, an oversight group that directs investigations on behalf of congress. Congress was merely checking up on SpaceXs progress towards building a crew vehicle for NASA. SpaceXs president and COO Gwynne Shotwell shot back at the Journal earlier today at a press conference. Weve known about, and flown with, cracks in the turbine wheel since the beginning of the Falcon 9 program, she says. She added that SpaceX is well on its way to fixing the issue so NASA is comfortable putting astronauts on top of the rockets, not just cargo.

Shotwell also said SpaceX engineers are working on a small leak in the second stage of the Falcon 9 scheduled to launch tomorrow at 10:01am. She said they still plan to launch on schedule. But the issue significantly ups the amplitude of fingernail gnawing, because that rocket is topped with millions of dollars in science projects from NASA and the Department of Defense. Those government contracts for ISS resupply missions are some of SpaceXs biggest assets, to the companys bottom lineand its reputation. They are also one of the only avenues for the public to get an inner look at the companys operations, because of audits like the one the GAO released on February 16.

Only one other private spaceflight company has secured similar deals with the government: SpaceXs biggest rival, United Launch Alliance. In addition to gear-launching contracts, both companies secured multi-billion dollar deals to develop launch vehicles capable of sending astronauts to and from the ISSand the GAO report showed that both are struggling to meet their deadlines. SpaceX and ULA were supposed to have their launch systems ready for certification review later this year, but both have delayed their launches until 2018. If the delays reach into 2019, NASA astronauts will have to hitch more rides with the Russians.

The ISS is set to retire in 2024. The longer the delay is on these commercial launch systems, the less time these companies will have to demonstrate repeated flights to the station, says Christina Chaplain, director for the GAO review. But delays are normal for rocket development programs. Chaplain isnt even that worried about the defects the Wall Street Journal made hay about two weeks ago. I just think the report itself is not as exciting as the leaked version, she says.

If tomorrows launch goes off without a hitch, SpaceX will attempt to land the first stage back at Cape Canaveral. With both those successes out of the way, the company could focus more on its longer term goalslaunching the Falcon Heavy, finishing work on the crew capsule, and eventually going to Marsand less on sweeping away the wreckage of the past.

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DECATUR, Ala. - We are one step closer to space!

Today in Decatur, NASA unveiled a part of the Space Launch System. The SLSis the worlds most powerful rocket that will launch astronauts into deep space.

"It's a terrific day as you can see behind me it's the first upper stage for NASA'S SLS Rocket. We're going to roll it out of here and take it to Kennedy Space Center. It will be the first integrated piece of the big rocket that will eventually take NASA astronauts beyond low Earth orbit." saidSLS Program Manager John Shannon of Boeing.

The Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage or ICPSwill provide the thrust needed to send the Orion Spacecraft and 13 secondary payloads beyond the moon before it returns to Earth.

"This is a great example of what the engineers in north Alabama are capable of," said Shannon.

This is the first rocket capable of going into deep space since the Saturn program in the early 70's. We will have "The ability to put large masses into space," said Shannon. "To get out to the moon again with crew or cargo and eventually to go to Mars."

As for for when we could expect take off? The second stage will integrate into the entire vehicle in mid-2018. But there's more to be done after that.

"We will be waiting on getting the core stage out of our production facility in New Orleans. It will go Stennis Space Center in Mississippi and it will be test fired. Then it will go to the Cape and be made up with this nice piece of hardware and we'll have a real capability to launch crews."

NASA believes the SLSwill launch crews of four astronauts in the agency's Orion Spacecraft on missions to explore multiple deep-space destinations.

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"There's 40 something astronauts in cue for assignment roughly. And my position, I'm very fortunate whose technical assignment is the space launch system."Butch Wilmore has had two spaceflights in his career. He currently works on all the propulsion elements of theSLS.

"Thousands across this nation that have their prints on this vehicle." From designers, architects, engineers and much more. "So, when you see that American flag on the vehicle it means literally America across this great nation putting their all and their passion into human space flight. And that makes it special," said Wilmore.

Wilmore said this is an exciting time, as we will have the opportunity to take humans to lower Earth orbit. He says America is on a journey to Mars.

"That doesn't mean that we're launching in a specific time frame," explained Wilmore. "We hope to get to Mars by a certain time frame. You know, everybody's got their opinion as to when we can do that. But you can't make it to Mars without unless you've got robust systems just to support human life."

Wilmore said those systems potentially need to be able to support human life for 3 and a half yearsandthe unveiling of the ICPStoday is the first step to getting there.

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Scientists have revived new life forms that have been living inside giant crystals on Earth for up to 60,000 years.

And now it is believed the discovery by NASA - in a cathedral-sized cave in Mexico - could be a hint of what life is like on Mars.

The microbes have been found inside spiky crystals in the Naica Mine in Chihuahua, some of which stand at an incredible five-metres long.

Shut off from light or oxygen, around 100 different bugs have been revived, 90 per cent of which have never been discovered before.

The lifeforms have been found in a state of 'geolatency' - where living organisms remain viable in geological materials for long periods of time.

The new discovery comes after scientists were always left baffled by images of the crystals alone - believing it to be a 'Photoshop hoax'.

But the finding of the tiny bugs has now left the NASA team astounded, as it could be a hint of how life can survive on other planets.

Describing the research project, Dr Penelope Boston, the director of NASAs Astrobiology Institute and leader of the project, said: "It was a transformative experience it really felt strange.

"It was a very hard environment to work in, but tear-inducingly beautiful. Its like being inside a geode."

The cave in which the discovery was made sits above a large pocked of volcanic magma, where temperatures can reach up to 60C.

For this reason, astrobiologists have dubbed the cave as 'hell'.

Most life could not survive there but scientists have discovered some organisms have evolved to feed on the sulphides, iron, manganese or copper oxide inside.

"They're really showing us what our kind of life can do in terms of manipulating materials," said Dr Boston.

"These guys are living in an environment where there's not organic food as we understand it.

They're an example at very high temperatures of organisms making their living essentially by munching down inorganic minerals and compounds.

"This is maybe the deep history of our life here."

Dr Boston says the team had to wear 'space suits' to protect them from the heat and allow them to breathe.

"That chamber is at the 800 metre level," she added.

The deepest part we accessed (where the crystals were found) was a place called Hell, very evocatively."

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NASA discovers 'hint of alien life' inside mysterious crystals from Mexican cave which scientists thought was ... - Mirror.co.uk

Expedition 46 Commander Scott Kelly during a three-hour and 16-minute spacewalk on Dec. 21, 2015.

NASA

Ground control to Major Tom: What happens when an astronaut needs to use the bathroom? Out of all the innovations developed in mankinds quest to go forth and explore the universe, NASA has still not moved beyond the adult diaper for astronauts who need to relieve themselves when they head out for a spacewalk or during a rocket launch.

Yes, its gross, but thanks to the 60-day Space Poop Challenge, spearheaded by crowdfunding platform HeroX with the support of NASA has come up with some inventive solutions for responding to natures call in zero gravity.

On Wednesday, HeroX revealed the three winners of the contest, which called for solutions to human waste management inside a spacesuit while still protecting the health and safety of its astronaut occupant for up to six days. The challenge specified just what quantity would need to be managed during that time. Current spacesuit-compatible adult diapers last for less than one day.

We are very excited to have had the opportunity to partner with NASAs Johnson Space Center on this challenge, HeroX CEO Christian Cotichini said in a press release The opportunity to contribute to future NASA missions by helping to protect astronaut health and safety, combined with the curiosity that surrounds performing the most basic of human bodily functionsin microgravity, seemed like a perfect HeroX crowdsourcing opportunity.

More than 5,000 solutions were proposed, according to HeroX, and teams from all over the world participated in the competition. Some people submitted as individuals while others contributed as a team. Eventually the judges narrowed the field down to 21 finalists before naming the winners.

HeroX

First prize went to Col. Thatcher R. Cardon, a U.S. Air Force officer and physician. His proposal centers on an access port that covers the perineum a more polite way of describing the crotch zone under the tailbone. It has two flaps that open out and a small valve through which waste can be expelled from the suit.

His idea came from invasive surgery where, as Cardon told the Washington Post, you have to do a lot of complex things in a very small opening.

Cardons design won him a $15,000 prize.

A team called the Space Poop Unification of Doctors (SPUDs) won second place worth $10,000 for an air-powered waste-disposal system.

The $5,000 third-place prize went to Hugo Shelley for the SWIMSuitZero Gravity Underwear, which features a catheter design that can be used in microgravity. The unique undergarment compresses, seals and sanitizes solid waste, according to Shelleys description.

These designs wont necessarily be put directly into use in space anytime soon, but the contest could lead the way for innovations down the line.

It was wonderful to see the global response from our crowdsourcing challenge, Kirstyn Johnson, Space Suit Technology Engineer at NASA, said in a statement. We enjoyed seeing the innovative approaches that were sent in given such a demanding scenario. Others at NASA are now thinking about ways we can leverage a crowdsourcing approach to solve some more of our spaceflight challenges.

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NASA completes its "space poop challenge" - CBS News

It sure doesnt pay to underestimate Ceres: NASAs Dawn spacecraft has spotted signs of organic molecules on the frigid dwarf planet.

The findings, published this weekin the journal Science, may shed light on the prevalence of pre-life chemistry in the solar system while marking Ceres as one of the worlds that could potentially host microbial life.

Because Ceres is a dwarf planet that may still preserve internal heat from its formation period and may even contain a subsurface ocean, this opens the possibility that primitive life could have developed on Ceres itself, Michael Kppers of the European Space Agency, who was not involved in the study, wrote in a commentary. It joins Mars and several satellites of the giant planets in the list of locations in the solar system that may harbor life.

Ceres, one of five dwarf planets in the solar system, is also an asteroid the largest of them, in fact. Formed around 4.5 billion years ago, it sits in the belt of rocky debris that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Asteroids are the leftover building blocks of planetary formation, largely unchanged by thegeologic processes that occur onEarth and other planets. Bystudying these space fossils, scientists hope topiece together what the early solar system looked like.

Among the asteroids, Ceres is special. As a dwarf planet, it got stuck somewhere along the way to becoming a full-grown world. Frozen in this state, Ceres also offers a snapshot of planetary adolescence.

Scientists have long wondered whether asteroids had not just water but also organic matter that could have been brought to Earth, perhaps providingthe right chemical ingredients for lifeto emerge. Water and organic molecules have been discovered in meteorites that are thought to be chunks of asteroids that fell to Earth. But its also possible these meteorites werecontaminated or transformed by Earths environment.

Hints of organics have been found on two actual asteroids, 24 Themis and 65 Cybele, though in both casesthe signal was pretty weak. (ESAs Rosetta mission found clear signals on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko howeverthat, of course, is not an asteroid.)

Thanks to theDawn spacecraft, which reached the frigid little world in 2015, scientists have detected super-bright salt deposits in Cerescraters and identified Ahuna Monsas an ice volcano. But now, using its Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometerinstrument, the spacecraft has spottedorganics lying on the surface.

When light hits any material, that material will absorb certain wavelengths while reflecting the rest. Since the absorbed wavelengths are unique to the materials properties, those missing bands of light serve asa chemical fingerprint that a spectrometer can useto determinethe composition of the surface.

The organic matter detected on Cereslies in a roughly 1,000-square-kilometer area near an approximately 50-kilometer-wide crater named Ernutet. While the scientists arent sure exactly what the compounds are, the fingerprint is characteristic of material containing carbon-hydrogen bonds, and may include components like methyl and methylene.

We were not expecting to see something like this on the surface of Ceres, said study coauthor Christopher Russell, a UCLA planetary scientist and Dawns principal investigator. These simple molecules, he added, are really pre-biological, but theyre in the family of materials that we would expect if Ceres was working its way along the complexity path.

Together with some of the other stuff already known to be on Ceres, this makes for what could theoretically be a life-friendly environment, perhaps even an environment with the right chemical precursors for life.

The combined presence on Ceres of ammonia-bearing hydrated minerals, water ice, carbonates, salts, and organic material indicates a very complex chemical environment, suggesting favorable environments to prebiotic chemistry, the study authors wrote.

But how did the organics get there?

One possibility is that they were delivered by comets or other asteroids. But the distribution of theorganic material doesnt match the pattern that would have beenleft by an impact. Besides, the authors pointed out,any organic-rich body that slammed into Ceres would probably be superheated by the collision, causing much of that organic matter to break down.

If the organics really didoriginate on Ceres itself, as the authors suspect, then researchers willhave to figure out how this material made it from the interior of thedwarf planet to its surface. For now, thatprocess remains a mystery.

Whatever the explanation, the findings show that Ceres like Mars and other worlds such asSaturns moonEnceladus may also have the right chemical ingredients for life.

Scientists could learn more if they were able tolook at the isotopic composition of thewater ice, Russell added. This could reveal whether Ceres formed where it lies, or whether it formed farther out and eventually moved in.

But that would require a lander of some sort, he pointed out, not the type ofremote sensing instruments on Dawn. That job, he added,would have to wait for a future mission to the dwarf planet.

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NASA's Dawn mission finds life's building blocks on dwarf planet Ceres - Los Angeles Times

It's a good day to be an astronaut!(Photo: NASA/Carla Cioffi)

NASA recently turned to the public to find a solutionthat will allowastronauts to poop while stuck in their space suits for up to six days.

More than 5,000 solutions from 19,000 competitors were submitted to the Space Poop Challenge, which was organized by NASA Tournament Lab, and overseen by HeroX, a crowdsourcing competition platform.

"As astronauts travel farther into the solar system, explorers may need to remain in their suits for several days on their way back to Earth in the event of an emergency situation," NASA said in a statement."This challenge sought solutions for fecal, urine, and menstrual management systems for the crews launch and entry suits."

On Wednesday, the winners were announced. With the grand prize of $15,000 going to Thatcher Cardon, a family physician, and flight surgeon. He won the challenge for his MACES Perineal Access & Toileting System (M-PATS).

Cardon told NPR his design was inspired by minimally invasive surgical techniques that can do some amazing things in very small openings.

"I never thought that keeping the waste in the suit would be any good," Cardon told NPR. "So I thought, 'How can we get in and out of the suit easily?

Cardons design features an airlock at the crotch of the suit, which will allow items like inflatable bedpans and diapers to be passed through, NPR reported.

While crew members currently wear diapers that are adequate for a few hours, NASA needed a long-term solution in case crew members were forced to stay in their spacesuits for up to six days.

As humans travel to the moon and Mars, we will have many problems to solve some are as simple as how do we go to the bathroom in space, it isnt glamorous, but it is necessary for survival, Astronaut Richard Mastracchio said in an October video about the competition.

The other Space Poop Challenge winners included a team of three from Houston who took home $10,000, and Hugo Shelly, who took home $5,000 for a design called "SWIMSuit - Zero Gravity Underwear."

NASA will use "aspects of the winning designs to develop future waste management systems for use in the suit, Kirstyn Johnson, spacesuit engineer at NASAs Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a statement.

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An artists' conception of the mysterious Planet 9.(Photo: NASA)

Want to work for NASA from the comforts of your couch?The space agency is looking to fulfill an amateur astronomer's dream credit for the discovery of a new planet.

NASA is looking for helpto findthe mysterious and as-yet undiscovered Planet 9, which astronomers think may be the most distant planet in our solar system.

A new website Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 lets people comb through footage captured by the agency's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission a few years ago.

The footage shows objectsgradually movingacross the sky."There are too many images for us to search through by ourselves," NASA said.

In this case, people are better than computers at spotting and identifying objects, such as a planet, in the footage. Human eyes can easily recognize the important moving objects while ignoring the background stars and other objects that computer programs would flag.

Astronomers believe the planet exists because of strange orbits of other distant objects that spin beyond Neptune. If Planet 9 also known as Planet X is there and is as bright as some predictions, it could show up in the WISE moviestaken in 2010 and 2011.

This "has the potential to unlock once-in-a-century discoveries, and it's exciting to think they could be spotted first by a citizen scientist," said Aaron Meisner, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in analyzing WISE images.

If an average citizen spots something that leads to a discovery, he or she will get shared credit with the professional astronomers.

"There are just over four light-years between Neptune and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, and much of this vast territory is unexplored," said lead researcher Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Planet 9 could have a mass about 10 times that of Earth and an orbit about 20 times farther from the sun, on average, than Neptune, NASA said. It may take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to make one full orbit around the sun, NASA suspects.

Pluto used to be the ninth planet before its demotion to dwarf planet status 10 years ago. NASA said the search for Planet 9 is a 21st-century version of the technique astronomer Clyde Tombaugh used to find Pluto in 1930, a discovery made 87 years ago this week.

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NASA wants you to find a missing planet - USA TODAY

Watch the sun break out in spots over and over again in a new NASA video of the sunshowing seven years of sunspot footage, collected by the agency's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).

The SDO launched in December 2009 and has been in space long enough to see most of an 11-year solar cycle, which is characterized by a peak in activity, such as the appearance of sunspots and explosions of material from the surface. The mission is intended to help scientists learn more about the sun's influence on the Earth by studying the sun's atmosphere. In 2013, the SDO and other observatories observed the most muted solar peak in 100 years, which is captured in the video. Data in the video is represented up to January 2017.

The larger, orange sun on the left side of the screen represents visible light captured by the HMI (Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager). The black dots are sunspots, which are concentrations of magnetic fields that appear darker than the surroundings. Simply put, larger and more frequent sunspots tend to correlate with more solar activity. [Sunspot Photos: Amazing Views of Spots on the Sun]

The smaller, golden sun in the lower right shows the star in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, based on data from the SDO's Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA). Here you can see some of the corona, which is the sun's outer atmosphere. Scientists are still trying to figure out why the corona has a temperature in the millions of degrees, while the surface is at 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius.) A phenomenon called "heat bombs," which occur when magnetic fields cross in the corona and realign, may be partially responsible.

The graph in the upper-right corner of the video screen "shows the sunspot number, a measurement based on the number of individual spots and the number of sunspot groups," NASA added in a statement. "In this case, the line represents a smoothed 26-day average to more clearly show the overall trend."

And although solar energy is essential for life on Earth, solar activity can wreak havoc on satellites and even ground-based power grids, potentially damaging Earth's power and communication infrastructures.

Forecasting and preparing for such events is one reason why NASA and governments worldwide are interested in learning more about how the sun works.

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace, or Space.com @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

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Seeing Spots: NASA Video Shows 7 Years of Solar Activity - Space.com

A massive, 1-mile-long (1.6 kilometers) chunk of ice has broken off Antarctica's fast-changing Pine Island Glacier, and NASA satellites captured the dramatic event as the icy surface cracked and ripped apart.

The Pine Island Glacier is one of the largest glaciers within the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, accounting for about 20 percent of the ice sheet's total ice flow to the ocean, according to NASA scientists. The immense glacier is also one of the least stable, and in recent years, the ice sheet has been quickly retreating and losing massive amounts of ice. Previously, icebergs the size of cities have broken off of the Pine Island Glacier. [Photo Gallery: Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier Cracks]

The glacier's last major iceberg break an event known as calving was in July 2015, when an iceberg measuring almost 225 square miles (580 square kilometers) separated from Pine Island Glacier.

The Earth-watching Landsat 8 satellite captured images of the latest iceberg event between Jan. 25 and 29, seeing the progression from the initial crack to the iceberg floating into the bay. Though this latest iceberg is about 10 times smaller than the 2015 event, measuring between 0.6 and 1.2 miles (1 to 2 km), NASA scientists said the recent break shows how fragile the ice shelf is.

"I think this event is the calving equivalent of an 'aftershock' following the much bigger event," Ian Howat, a glaciologist at The Ohio State University, said in a statement. "Apparently, there are weaknesses in the ice shelf just inland of the rift that caused the 2015 calving that are resulting in these smaller breaks."

More icebergs may break off of the Pine Island Glacier in the near future. NASA has previously photographed small rifts developing about 6 miles (10 km) from the ice front, and one such rift was observed on Nov. 4, 2016, during one of the agency'sOperation IceBridgeflights to monitor the region.

Climate change and the warming ocean have been linked to the the retreat and melt of the world's ice. According to Howat, such "rapid fire" calving is generally unusual for the glacier, but West Antarctic glaciers are eroding due to the flow of warm ocean water beneath them. A recent study found that thewarming ocean was melting an ice crevasseof the Pine Island Glacier at the bedrock level, melting the glacier from its center.

These warmer ocean waters are causing the Antarctic ice shelf to break from the inside out. As such, scientists expect further calving along the glacier and have warned that theWest Antarctic Ice Sheet could collapsewithin the next 100 years.

Original article on Live Science.

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NASA Satellite Spots Mile-Long Iceberg Breaking Off of Antarctic Glacier - Live Science

February 16, 2017 On Feb. 15 at 2246 UTC (5:46 p.m. EST) the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured this image of Ex-Tropical Cyclone Dineo along the southeastern coast of Mozambique. Credit:NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite got a night-time view of former Tropical Cyclone Dineo over the southeastern coast of Mozambique. Warnings have already been posted in the northeastern region of South Africa as Dineo continues to track inland.

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center or JTWC issued their final warning on the system on February 15. Later in the day at 2246 UTC (5:46 p.m. EST) the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided a night-time, infrared image of the ex-tropical cyclone. The image showed that the storm had become somewhat elongated as it continued to weaken. The interaction with the land of Mozambique is expected to continue weakening the storm as it tracks further inland on Feb. 16.

On Feb. 16 at 0000 UTC (Feb. 15 at 7 p.m. EST) Ex-Tropical Cyclone Dineo was located near 23.4 degrees south latitude and 34.1 degrees east longitude, just inland from the coast of southeastern Mozambique. Dineo was moving to the west at 9 knots (10.3 mph/16.6 kph) and maximum sustained surface winds were estimated at 60 knots (69 mph/111 kph).

On Feb. 16, the South African Weather Service posted warnings for the northeastern part of the country where the effects of Ex-tropical Cyclone Dineo were already being experienced

A warning for severe thunderstorms was in effect over the south-western parts of the Waterberg District of Limpopo with possible heavy rain leading to localized flooding as well as large amounts of small hail. There was also warnings for damaging winds and flooding in Vhembe and Mopani District Municipalities of Limpopo from late afternoon on Thursday, persisting into tomorrow Friday morning, February 17.

A Heavy Rain warning is also in effect. Heavy rains may create localized flooding in Vhembe and Mopani District Municipalities of Limpopo, from Thursday late afternoon, persisting into Friday morning, Feb. 17. For updated warnings from the South African Weather Service, visit: http://www.weathersa.co.za..

Explore further: NASA sees Tropical Cyclone Dineo at Mozambique coast

When NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Tropical Cyclone Dineo in the Mozambique Channel on Feb. 15, the storm was centered just off the coast of Mozambique and moving toward landfall.

NASA's Terra satellite saw strong thunderstorms spiraling into the heart of Tropical Cyclone Dineo on Valentine's Day as it continued to strengthen in the Mozambique Channel.

The fifth tropical cyclone of the Southern Indian Ocean season formed today, February 13 as NASA's Aqua satellite captured a visible image of the storm.

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured a night-time image of Tropical Cyclone Carlos using infrared light that showed the storm was being stretched out. Carlos is being adversely affected by the Westerlies.

Tropical Cyclone Carlos became sub-tropical and weakened to a remnant low pressure area over the weekend of February 11 and 12. By February 13, as NASA's Terra satellite passed over the remnants, the storm still showed a ...

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of newly formed Tropical Cyclone 05B in the Bay of Bengal, Northern Indian Ocean.

Seagrass meadows - bountiful underwater gardens that nestle close to shore and are the most common coastal ecosystem on Earth - can reduce bacterial exposure for corals, other sea creatures and humans, according to new research ...

New findings from the University of Michigan explain an Ice Age paradox and add to the mounting evidence that climate change could bring higher seas than most models predict.

Oxygen is an essential necessity of life on land. The same applies for almost all organisms in the ocean. However, the oxygen supply in the oceans is threatened by global warming in two ways: Warmer surface waters take up ...

Gleaning data from old rocks may result in bias. Now, geophysicists have a way to improve their methods to overcome challenges in studying the history of the Earth's core and magnetic field that make up the geodynamo.

Dr Pim Bongaerts, a Research Fellow at The University of Queensland's Global Change Institute (GCI) and ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, and lead author of the study, said deep reefs share coral species with ...

Cracks in the Greenland Ice Sheet let one of its aquifers drain to the ocean, new NASA research finds. The aquifers, discovered only recently, are unusual in that they trap large amounts of liquid water within the ice sheet. ...

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NASA gets a night-time view ex-Tropical Cyclone Dineo - Phys.Org

At 98 years old, one of the three inspiring female African-American mathematicians the Academy Award-nominated film Hidden Figures is based still has a head for numbers and would like to be back in her chair at NASAs Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

The book and movie Hidden Figures tells the story of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, who were among the first African-American women to work for NASA during the space race in the 1950s and 1960s, when their job assignments in the segregated computers division at Langley were far beneath the heights they would eventually climb through excellent work and perseverance achieving equality.

Johnsons first job at NASA was as a computer programmer in a segregated unit of all African-American women, where her brilliant math skills were recognized.

I miss working, she says. I worked all my life, all kinds of jobs.

The bigger challenge was overcoming racial prejudice.

John Glenn trusted Johnsons telemetry calculations over those from computers that were relatively new at the time.

Yes, he was like me, she said. He didn't trust the computers.

He knew her equations done by hand had worked for some very high-stakes missions.

So how did she feel about so much weight riding on her arithmetic?

No problem.

Math never stumped Johnson.

She is a legend now at NASA, where a lot has changed since her 33 years there. She was a major catalyst for that change. Her brilliant mind for math led to great strides in the race to get to space and back.

She says she was just doing her job, but her parts putting America out front in the pioneering days of the space race and bringing her race from the back of the bus when they rode to work both earned a place in history.

The movie offers only a glimpse of Johnson's life away from NASA. The single mother of three daughters has a new husband who is still in her life.

Christine Darden was hired as a computer programmer in 1967, two years before NASA put a man on the moon. As a trained mathematician, she eventually wanted to do more.

Turned down by her immediate supervisors when she asked if she could work in an engineering group, she had the courage to go to a more senior supervisor because of the shoulders of women she stood on, like those of Katherine Johnson.

We were enabled to move up in our jobs because of what they did and the way they worked, Darden said.

She rose to the rank of supervisor and retired as head of the department of education and legislative affairs.

Engineer Julie Williams-Byrd is one of the women NASA designated a "modern figure." Right now, NASA is looking at sending people to Mars.

Thinking about sending humans to Mars, we start with a concept, right, we start visualizing, she says.

Williams-Byrd has her name on the door at NASA, something Katherine Johnson may have dreamed of when she was creating trajectories in her head.

Published at 9:45 PM EST on Feb 15, 2017 | Updated 6 hours ago

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'Hidden Figures' Broke Ground for Modern Figures at NASA - NBC4 Washington

In 2012, a team of scientists from the Kepler mission announced they would start to hunt for moons orbiting distant exoplanets. While Kepler has discovered thousands of extrasolar planets, the hunt for these so-called "exomoons" has so far come up empty.

The major problem has been that for a moon to be detectable in the Kepler data, it would have to be about 10 percent the mass of Earth, or roughly the mass of Mars. This is about ten times larger than the largest moons in our own solar system.

While the formation of planetary satellites seems to be a natural by-product of planet formation, scientist Amy Barr of the Planetary Science Institute (PSI) wondered if it would be possible for large moons possibly even Earth-like habitable moons to form. And if so, could they possibly be common in the galaxy?

Using modeling and simulations, Barr and her fellow researchers found it is theoretically possible for super-sized moons to form around both rocky and gas planets, but only if the planets themselves are sufficiently large enough. Large rocky moons could be created from collisions between super-Earth sized rocky worlds, and exomoons around gas giants may be able to form by co-accretion or capture.

RELATED: Hunting for Exomoons That May Host Alien Life

"Our results are the first to demonstrate the masses of the moons that could form in the varied set of impact conditions possible within exoplanetary systems,"said Barr, a senior scientist at PSI. "Most importantly, we have shown that it is possible to form exomoons with masses above the theoretical detection limits of the ongoing Hunt for Exomoons with Kepler survey, moons of more than a tenth of an Earth mass."

Just as the Kepler spacecraft used the transit method to detect planets passing in front of the disc of the parent star which causes a temporary drop in brightness the transit method should also be the best and most direct method for detecting exomoons. That's why a team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics started theHunt of Exomoons with Kepler (HEK) project.But finding exomoons has been a fruitless challenge, mostly because of the size needed for the moon to be detectable.

However, solar systems found by Kepler are quite different than our own, and the most common size of planet in the Kepler data is new class of planets called super-Earths. These are planets between the size of Earth and Neptune, which we don't have in our own cosmic neighborhood.

"Very little is known about how the satellite formation processes proposed for our solar system might scale to different planetary masses and stellar conditions," wrote Barr in her paper.

Using hydrodynamical simulations which have been used to study how Earth's moon may have formed by a large impact Barr was able to determine how much material would be launched into orbit by the collision of two rocky super-Earth exoplanets. Collisions between rocky planets with masses of two to seven Earth masses can launch into orbit enough mass to create a satellite large enough to be detected in Kepler transit data.

"These outcomes are broadly similar to the Moon-forming impact, but when two super-earths collide, the disk is much hotter and more massive," said Barrin a press release.

And her paper,"Formation of Massive Rocky Exomoons by Giant Impact"explains that the models suggest that detectable rocky exomoons can be produced for a variety of impact conditions and may be associated with host planets of various sizes.

A second paper,"Formation of Exomoons: A Solar System Perspective,"demonstrates how large exomoons could form by co-accretion around growing gas giant planets, or by capturing wandering bodies, or other processes that did not take place in our Solar System.

RELATED: 'Smaller Than Earth'-Sized Exomoon Discovered?

Barr also looked at current theories of how moons form in our Solar System, and how those theories might apply to the formation of exomoons.

"Some of the old theories about the formation of Earth's Moon, for example, fission, could operate in other solar systems," said Barr. "With new observatories coming online soon, this is a good time to revisit some of the old ideas, and see if we might be able to predict how common exomoons might be, and what it would take to detect them."

Barr said that these studies of the types of exotic moon-forming events has "yielded promising initial results, relevant to the current efforts to observe exomoons," and that the models suggest that detectable exomoons can be produced in a variety of conditions and may be associated with host planets of various sizes.

As of this writing, the combined Kepler and K2 missions have found 2,476 confirmed planets, with an additional 5,216 planet "candidates," meaning they have yet to be confirmed. The exomoon count is currently at zero, but the work by Barr and her colleagues provides hope that discovering exomoons could be the next big thing.

WATCH VIDEO: Proxima B: Another Earth Just Next Door

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NASA's Kepler Mission Could Detect Exomoons Formed by Giant Impacts - Space.com

This story reflects the views of this author, but not necessarily the editorial position of Fast Company.

Its tough to be NASA in 2017. The last time anyone walked on the Moon was more than 40 years ago. The Space Shuttle has flown its last mission, and the only way to get to the International Space Station is on a Russian rocket. News headlines are confined to the agencys role in studying climate change. Meanwhile, the commercial space industry is booming, throwing NASA's comparatively sluggish pace into high relief.

Now, as the Trump administration begins to shape federal agencies around its own agenda, NASA's future remains to be seen. It will be a few weeks before the budget that the White House sends to Congress reveals what might be next for NASA. But one thing is already clear: If the president aims for a grand, outer-space "moonshot" like some of his predecessors have, things aren't likely to go well. In fact, the best way Trump can revitalize NASA is by keeping it focused on not-so-flashy yet crucial innovations.

Each new presidential administration seems compelled to reset the agency's agenda, to put its own mark on the final frontier. In the 1990s, the mission was to build the Space Station as a precursor to visiting Mars. Then the George W. Bush administration decided to return to the Moon. The Obama administration targeted Mars once againas well as manned exploration of near-Earth asteroids.

Any one of these moonshot missions would take decades to realize. But the odds of us attaining any of them shrink pretty much every eight years, when we change our mind about what were doing and why.

To be fair, some of this is baked into NASA's DNA, ever since Kennedys famous, "We choose to go to the moon" speech in 1962. It was a brilliant vision and speech, but as soon as we reached the Moon, we started debating what NASAs next big goal would bewithout ever stopping to question whether the agency really needed to chase a new single big goal.

If the Trump administration shakes up NASA in the wrong waytoward yet another moonshotwe'll perpetuate a cycle that's kept the agency treading water for decades. Instead, NASA needs some time to focus on less high-flying work, namely developing the core technologies that will open up space for the next generation.

Lets look into the future, say 50 years from now. Imagine humanity as a multiplanet species. We have thriving settlements in orbit and on Mars. Robots mine asteroids for water and rare elements. Daily hyper-spectral imagery is used to optimize agriculture and manage our climate. In-space manufacturing produces materials that are impossible to make on Earth. Space-based solar power stations beam green power down to Earth. Enormous telescopes capture images of planets around other stars and scour them for signs of life.

With the right investments, these sci-fi dreams are all achievable. But they all depend on new technologies that we haven't spent the time or money developing yetlike in-space 3D printing to fabricate large structures in zero-G, in-space refueling technology, and robotic means of harnessing outer space's in-situ resources.

It isn't that these advancements are technologically infeasible in 2017; it's just that none have yet had a chance to be demonstrated in space (mostly because, like most innovations, they aren't likely to succeed the first timewhich means a lot of money for probably few immediate returns).

Caught between limited budgets and grandiose, moonshot visions, NASA doesn't have the tolerance for failure that ultimately drives progress. But if we make technological advancement the mission, then the only real failure is a failure to innovate.

So here's a new mission for NASA that the Trump administration should seriously consider: Use the agency's $19 billion annual budget to make this green, multiplanet future a reality. With refocused priorities, NASA could develop technologies that will truly open the space frontierall within a single presidential administration. Here's how:

1. Large-scale, in-space construction. The current Space Station was constructed by building modules on Earth and then bolting them together in space. But what if we could send up bulk raw materials and then 3D print the structure in space? By constructing in zero gravity, we could use a much less massive frame and greatly increase the total area of the structure.

Commercial space companies are rapidly reducing launch costs and ramping up to support weekly, or even more frequent, launches. So this kind of construction could be done with regular deliveries from Earth to an onsite team, not unlike a construction project in New York or Hong Kong.

This way, multiple big structures could be assembled in a short period of timeincluding space stations for dozens of astronauts to run experiments on everything from zero-gravity manufacturing to in-space biology; large telescopes capable of directly imaging planets around other stars; or in-space solar power stations capable of beaming power back to Earth.

2. In-space refueling. As Elon Musk is fond of saying, it would be crazy to fly from Los Angeles to New York and then throw away the 737 because we dont know how to refill the fuel tanks. But NASA is still treating its spacecraft that way. Just adding the ability to launch spacecraft with empty tanks, and then separately send up the fuel, would greatly reduce mission costs and risk. There's no reason we can't do this in principle, but no previous mission has ever deemed it worth the cost of trying to demonstrate that tech for the first time.

3. Local resource utilization. Pioneers of the next frontier should take a lesson from those of the last one, who never lived in covered wagons longer than it took them to build a log cabin. Mars and the Moon both contain raw materials for construction and the extraction of water and atmospheres. Many asteroids also house significant amounts of water that can used to synthesize rocket fuel.

This is one of the most important building blocks for in-space operation at scale. But space missions aren't designed this wayonce again, because the technology hasn't been demonstrated before, so it's not something mission planners can depend on.

4. Developing human-robotic teams. We already know how to build self-driving cars on Earth, and construction and resource extraction in space will likewise be robotic. But complex manipulation and repair tasks will still require a human touch. Our in-space future will depend on autonomous robots remotely controlled by humans, plus some direct astronaut labor. We need to build out the technology for each of these modalities and show how they work together to accomplish complex tasks.

There are more than just these four technologies NASA will need to develop in order to truly open space up to the next generation. Others include in-space crop production, inflatable habitats, autonomous rendezvous and docking, and highly efficient ion thrusters, to name a few. But these are the best places to start, and with the right executive mandate, we can achieve all of them within the next decade or so.

This line of thinking leads to a very different vision for NASAone that flies much closer to the ground, so to speak, at least for now. Instead of trying to get to the Moon or Mars using current technology, focus on developing the technology itself. NASA has done this for years in Aeronautics (the first "A" in NASA). The agency pioneered wind tunnels, worked through different approaches to air-traffic control, studied pilot fatigue and its role in air crashes, and, more broadly, built much of the core technology we take for granted every time we fly.

President Trump is all about shaking things up, and this approach to NASA would surely do that, while setting the agency up for real success. It would also cement U.S. leadership in space innovation and inaugurate a new era of public-private space partnership.

There are many things NASA does exceptionally well. Unmanned exploration missions continue to return spectacular resultswitness the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the ongoing flood of data from the Mars rovers and orbiters. Science missions, from Hubble to WMAP, advance our fundamental understanding of the universe, and NASA continues to inspire generations of children who have at one time or another dreamt of becoming astronauts.

But we've reached a point where we won't be able to push ahead without investing in the next generation of tech R&D. If NASA leads the way on that, the commercial space sector will follow. Other nations will follow. More sophisticated NASA missions to Mars, the Moon, asteroids, and more exotic destinations will suddenly become both affordable and achievable. The space frontier will openand it won't have taken another moonshot to do it.

James Crawford is the founder of Orbital Insight, Inc., one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2017.

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How Trump Can Save NASA By Keeping It Grounded - Fast Company

USA Today Network James Dean, Florida Today 7:09 a.m. ET Feb. 15, 2017

Robert Cabana, director of Kennedy Space Center, talked about the center's future as a multi-user spaceport during a National Space Club Florida Committee luncheon Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2017, in Cape Canaveral.(Photo: Malcolm Denemark, Florida Today)

CAPE CANAVERALNASA and Kennedy Space Center are awaiting direction from the Trump administration about whether it wants to make changes to NASAs human exploration program, the center's director said Tuesday.

The presidential appointments team is still in the process of gathering data, Director Robert Cabana told the National Space Club Florida Committee in Cape Canaveral. We look for some direction here in the very near future.

Acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot has instructed teams to continue executing plans set during the Obama administration, including preparations to launch giant Space Launch System rockets and Orion crew capsules on deep space missions.

Cabana said he believes the rocket and capsule, slated to send astronauts around the moon and eventually on their way to Mars, are flexible enough to adapt to new missions.

Related: SpaceX targets Feb. 18 launch, landing in Fla.

I truly believe the architecture that weve created, this capability-based architecture, allows us to go anywhere in our quest to explore beyond our home planet, he said. Well be able to take any kind of shift in direction. But in the meantime, our plate is full with all the things that we have to do.

Those things include modernizing infrastructure such as the Vehicle Assembly Building, launch pad 39B, a firing room, crawler-transporter and mobile launch tower for the first launch of aSpace Launch System rocket. The unmanned flight called Exploration Mission-1 is planned in late 2018.

The Orion spacecraft flying that mission is being assembled at Kennedy Space Center.

More broadly, Cabana reiterated that space center has realized its post-shuttle vision to become a home to not only NASA, but also to commercial operations and other government agencies.

What we dreamed six years ago is now a reality, Cabana said. We really are a multi-user spaceport.

Related: Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex plans expansion, new attractions

That identity will be cemented in place even more firmly this weekend, he said, if SpaceX is cleared to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from the space center's historic pad 39A for the first time.

The launch of International Space Station supplies is planned around 10 a.m. Saturday, pending approval of a launch license by the Federal Aviation Administration and other preparations proceeding on schedule.

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SpaceXs Dragon cargo capsule has joined the rocket inside SpaceXs new hangar at the base pad 39A, the former Saturn V and shuttle pad that NASA in 2014 leased to the company for 20 years.

Yeah, its historic, Cabana said of the upcoming launch. But its one more step solidifying what weve done, what weve put in place. What a great use of an asset that would have just sat and rusted away in the salt air.

SpaceX hopes to launch astronauts from pad 39A to the space station starting next year. Boeing also plans to launch crews next year from neighboring Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Boeing is assembling its CST-100 Starliner crew capsules in a former shuttle hangar. The company operates two more hangars for the Air Forces X-37B military space plane program.

Related: Atlas V rocket blasts off with missile warning satellite

Space Florida now manages the three-mile Kennedy Space Center shuttle runway, which it hopes to turn into a commercial hub for horizontal launches and landings by the likes of Virgin Galactic or Sierra Nevada Corp.

At the space center's Exploration Park, just outside the centers south gate, Blue Origin and OneWeb Satellites are building large manufacturing centers for production of rockets and satellites, respectively.

Everything that we said we were going to accomplish, weve been able to accomplish, Cabana said. And the Space Coast has totally turned around.

The ability of NASAs own exploration systems to survive political changes, Cabana said, depends in part on the agencys ability to deliver projects on time and within budgets.

And as long as we continue to do that, were going to have credibility with all our legislators, and more will be asked of us, he said. As soon as we start falling short, then people are going to start looking for a different solution to the problem.

Follow James Dean on Twitter: @flatoday_jdean

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NASA, Kennedy Space Center await direction from Trump - USA TODAY

In 1962, a young reporter named Ursula Vils signed on to The Los Angeles Times at the beginning of the most spectacular and productive period of human spaceflight in United States history. A year earlier, Alan Shepard had become the first American to fly in space, and eight months later, John Glenn would become the first American to orbit the earth. Before the end of the decade, the United States would plant the stars and stripes on the moon.

As part of the papers coverage of the space program, Vils, a former womens editor who would go on to work in the Family and View sections of the Times, contributed to a series on the women who worked at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas, and other NASA centers and contractors. The series profiled women in various technical and clerical positions whose work contributed to what was by the mid-1960s a vast technological enterprise and a source of national prestige.

Last year, women who worked in the space program and other scientific and technological institutions throughout the 20th century were given some long-overdue attention by new nonfiction books like Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt and The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel. A third book, Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly, was adapted into a film. In particular, the critical and financial success of the film, about black women computers working to calculate spacecraft trajectories for NASAs Mercury program, presented a more nuanced and complete history of the space programa history that, until this point, has been predominantly told through the accomplishments of white men.

In the same way, revisiting Vilss reporting reintroduces women whose pioneering work has largely been forgotten. Sometimes, Vilss dated journalistic style confines these women to the tropes of mid-century gender roles. Yet often her stories cut both ways, getting at the heart of womens struggles to be accepted and succeed in male-dominated professions.

Many of the women Vils wrote about worked in technical positions like physiology or engineering, but others held more traditional pink collar jobs as secretaries and stenographers. Vils profiled Marilyn Bockting when she was an assistant to George Low, a high-ranking administrator at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. Bockting managed Lows calendar and correspondence, and a large part of her job consisted of responding to letters from the public. Vils portrays her as something of an informant about the lives of the families of astronauts and administrators, whose stories were highly sought-after by the press and public. The Lows have five children and Mrs. Low says she even had to schedule her last baby around Gordon Coopers flight, Vils reports via Bockting. But Bockting was no idle gossip; she went on to be one of the first women to be promoted to a management position at NASA.

Women also worked for aerospace firms that contracted with the agency. Vils profiled Paula Robb, who worked in the Stowage Group at North American Rockwell during the Apollo program in 1972, just as the program was ending. Known at work as P.F. Robb, her job was to design the packing scheme for Apollo spacecraft, ensuring that all the astronauts gear was organized and stowed securely for their voyage. Vils describes Robb as not an engineer, but quotes her as saying she has always worked in engineering and notes that she had never held a secretarial job.

Robb was openly critical of the gender hierarchy of her profession. Why should anyone be surprised that when P.F. Robb answers the phone, its a woman? she asks Vils. Why should it be more of surprise than if its a man? But Vils undermines Robbs critique somewhat when she follows this quote with a description of how North American Rockwells P. H. Robb is very much Mrs. Ronald Robb, wife of a management systems analyst. And Vils goes on to juxtapose Robbs family life and professional organizing skills by quoting Robbs description of how she planned her pregnancies so carefully that when her son was born she missed the first calculation by 23 hours and 32 minutes.

Vils uses a similar framing for the work of Rita Rapp, an aerospace technologistenvironmental physiology, whose job entailed the packing and organizing of food containers onboard spacecraft. When describing astronaut food, Vils quotes Rapp to note that with the freeze-dried rehydratable foods, the astronauts can eat with a spoon, which means we can use larger chunks of food. Its the difference between baby foods and junior foods. But later, Rapp emphasizes that her job relates more to viewing food as the hardwareits my job to see its on board the spacecraft. The analogy of baby food suggests a domestic connotation for Rapps work, but Rapp shows how it is in fact part of the technology of the spaceflight.

Many of Vilss pieces are studded with asides liked these that feel outdated or even sexist. Vils usually gives a physical description of the women she profiles, noting if they are pretty and their height and hair and eye color. But each profile attempts to account for the challenges these women faced working in a male-dominated environment. Vils often includes anecdotes that highlight the tension that sometimes surrounded womens position in the space program: I finally got a desk, said endocrinologist Carolyn Leach, and added that Im sure heshe nodded toward a male scientists desk that share office space with hersexpects me to hang polka-dot curtains in here. I just wish I had the time to do it. Indeed, Leach was too busy with a career: In 1994, she became the first woman director of Johnson Space Center.

By highlighting domestic metaphors, workers personal and family lives, and assumptions her readers would have had about specifically feminine skills, Vils frames the labor of women working in the space program in the gendered terms that would have been familiar to her audience. At a time when more and more women were working outside the home and in technical professions that had been long been reserved for men, Vilss reporting is a snapshot of the ways that women negotiated new roles for themselves.

As far as I know, Vils never profiled any women of color for her series, though they were undoubtedly working in many other fields besides computing. Their absence in the Timess reporting reflects the dynamics of gender and race in mid-century America. Though people of color did work at NASA before the passage of the Civil Rights act in 1964, it wasnt until that year that the agency began actively recruiting black engineers. Access to specialized education was limited for people of color, and technical education was generally reserved for men. Vilss reporting is one avenue toward recovering the contributions of women to the story of human spaceflight in the United States, but clearly there is much work left to be done.

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The Lost Stories of NASA's 'Pink-Collar' Workforce - The Atlantic

An illustration produced by NASA that shows HAT-P-2b, left, and how it appears to cause heartbeat-like pulsations in its host star, HAT-P-2.NASA/JPL-Caltech

It looks like Valentine's Day isn't just limited to Earth or its solar system.

On Tuesday, NASA announced the discovery of a distant star with a "heartbeat." The space agency observed the heartbeat-like vibrations on the outer shell of a star called HAT-P-2, making the detection with its Spitzer Space Telescope, according to details published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. The star is reportedly 370 light-years away, and scientists believe the star's behavior was caused by an exoplanet, dubbed HAT-P-2b, circling it in a tight orbit.

The planet, NASA found, appears to interact with the star every time it makes its closest approach in its orbit, almost as if it's giving the start a "kiss." If this gravitational force is what causes the heartbeat, then these findings could have major implications for how scientists look for and study exoplanets in the future.

"We had intended the observations to provide a detailed look at HAT-P-2bs atmospheric circulation," Nikole Lewis, co-author and astronomer at Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, said in a statement . "The discovery of the oscillations was unexpected but adds another piece to the puzzle of how this system evolved."

Lewis and her team were surprised to find a relatively small planet like HAT-P-2b could have such an effect on the much-larger star it orbits. But even though the planet's mass is eight times the size of our solar system's largest planet, Jupiter, its host star, HAT-P-2, is approximately 100 times larger than the planet it interacts with, according to the findings.

"Our observations suggest that our understanding of planet-star interactions is incomplete," Julien de Wit, postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, said in the same statement. "There's more to learn from studying stars in systems like this one and listening for the stories they tell through their 'heartbeats.'"

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NASA Detects Star's 'Heartbeat' Just in Time for Valentine's Day - TIME

Our sun might not seem as enigmatic as more exotic, distant stars, but its still a marvelously mysterious miasma of incandescent plasma. And its certainly worthy of our scientific attention: Curiosity aside, a violent solar event could disrupt satellites and cause $2 trillion in damages for the U.S. alone. Yet, despite living in its atmosphere, we dont understand some of its defining phenomena. For sixty years, we havent understood why the surface is a cozy 5,500 Celsius, while the halo called the coronaseveral million kilometers away from the stars surface and 12 orders of magnitude less denseboasts a positively sizzling 1-2 million Celsius.

To figure out why, NASA needs to fly a little closer to the sunand touch it.

We know that magnetic reconnectionwhen magnetic field lines moving in opposite directions intertwine and snap like rubber bandspropels nuclear weapon-like waves of energy away from surface. Meanwhile, magnetohydrodynamic wavesvibrating guitar string-like waves of magnetic force driven by the flow of plasmatransfer energy from the surface into corona. However, without more data, our understanding of phenomena like coronal heating and solar wind acceleration remain largely theoretical...but not for long.

Launching in 2018, NASAs Solar Probe Plus will travel nearly seven years, setting a new record for fastest moving object as it zips 37.6 million kilometers closer to the sun than any spacecraft that has ever studied our host star. But what manner of sensory equipment does one bring to Dantes Inferno?

Spacecraft systems engineer Mary Kae Lockwood tells PopSci that the craft will rely on four main instruments. The Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons systems, or SWEAP, will monitor charges created by colliding electrons, protons and helium ions to analyze solar windninety times closer to the sun than previous attempts. Similarly, the ISIS (Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun) employs a state-of-the-art detection system to analyze energetic particles (think: cancer-causing, satellite-disabling particles).

The FIELDS sensor, meanwhile, will analyze electric and magnetic fields, radio emissions, and shock waveswhile gathering information on the high-speed dust particles sanding away at the craft using a technique discovered by accident. Lastly, the Wide-field Imager for Solar Probe, or WISPR telescope, will make 3D, cat-scan-like images of solar wind and the suns atmosphere.

Theres just one problem. Between intense heat, solar radiation, high-energy particles, the fallout of solar storms, dust, and limited communication opportunities at closest approach, all that sensitive equipment is going to an environment that almost makes Junos new home look sympathetic by comparison.

One of the things we had to watch out for in the design, according to Lockwood, was the electrical charging of the spacecraft by the solar wind. The probe has to be conductive so that the instruments that are actually measuring the solar wind dont have interference.

To get close enough to worry about that, though, the probes has to lose some energy says Lockwood, performing several Venus flybys to shrink its orbit [allowing] us to get . . . closer and closer to the sun.

However, that comes with interesting design challenges, because youre not only going into the sun as heatshield mechanical engineer Beth Congdon tells PopSci. You get hot on approach, and then come out and get cold, over and over for 7 flybys and 24 orbits. You actually need to have it cyclically survive hot and cold temperatures. And high energy particles. And hypervelocity dust. For that, you need a heat shield different from any other heat shield that has ever existed.

A lot of heat shields you typically think about, like the shuttle . . . They have a few minutes maximum of that kind of heat. But at the probes closest approach of 5.9 million kilometers, Congdon says, temperatures will reach up to 1,377 Celsius for a full day.

But carbon can come to the rescue. On Earth, carbon likes to oxidise and make barbeque, chimes Congdon, [but] in the vacuum of space, its a great material for high temperature applications. The probes shield is made of carbon foam, sandwiched between layers of carbon composite, with a reflective ceramic coating.

Whats more, she says, most shields have the luxury of being attached to a vibration-dampening platform. This shield, on the other hand, had to be integrated in such a way that it could mitigate vibration without one so that we could keep the whole system as low mass as possible. The slim, trim, and ultralight build, however, makes it challenging to keep all the sensitive equipment hidden safely behind it.

To that end, the craft is outfitted with solar limb sensors. These sensors would be the first thing to get illuminated if the spacecraft started drifting off-kilter, and would inform the autonomous guidance and control system that keeps all the instruments behind the thermal protection system, and which is even outfitted with a backup processor in case of any malfunctions.

Meanwhile, the solar array, facing solar intensity 475 times greater than here on Earthin an environment where one degree of change, at closest approach, equals a 30 percent change in powerwill automatically retract behind the heat shield whenever it swings toward the sun. From there, itll be kept at a cool 160 Celsius by a network of water-filled titanium channels.

So while the heatshield weathers a minefield of million-mile-per-hour winds and countless coronal mass ejections, the communication system scarcely able to relay information for 11 straight days, the array will be kept comfortableall while powering an autonomous 1,345 lb scientist on the doorstep of our little cosmic neighborhoods big, confounding catalyst.

Going to a place changes everything we think about a place. Just look at New Horizons and how its changed our thoughts, beliefs, and understanding of Pluto. Were really excited to go and totally change our view of the sun, says Congdon. Understanding the suns defining phenomena is a tantalizing goal. But first we have to contend with 143.3 million kilometers of spaceand one of NASAs most technically challenging builds, over half a century in the making.

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How NASA is planning to touch the sun - Popular Science

FAIRCHILD AIR FORCE BASE, Wash. (AFNS) -- Four NASA astronauts trained with U.S. Air Force Survival School instructors in water survival and recovery Feb. 10, at the base fitness center pool here.

The astronauts underwent the training in preparation for anticipated test flights of the new commercially made American rockets, the Boeing CST-100 Starliner and the SpaceX Dragon.

Its a different space program now, said Sunita Williams, a NASA astronaut. Were flying in capsules instead of shuttles, and they can land anywhere. You never know when an emergency situation may happen, so were grateful to get this training.

The astronauts were put through the paces of bailing out from a simulated crash landing in water. They learned to deploy and secure a life raft, rescue endangered crewmembers, avoid hostile forces and experience being hoisted into a rescue vehicle.

This is the first time weve gotten a complete environmental training experience, lots of wind, waves and rain, said Doug Hurley, a NASA astronaut. This is a great way to experience how bad it can get and how important it is to be prepared.

The astronauts opted to join in with more than 20 water survival course students, despite being given the option to train alone.

They didnt want to train on their own, said Lt. Col. Chas Tacheny, the chief of NASA Human Space Flight Support-Houston. They wanted to train with the group because some of these people may one day be preforming search and rescue for them.

Other NASA astronauts visited the survival school last year in an effort to research and test the viability of its training course and facilities. The astronauts liked what they experienced and NASA has since developed its training partnership with the schoolhouse.

The SERE instructors are advising us in water recovery, Behnken said. These experts are the most experienced Ive ever seen. They are able to spot holes in our training and fill the gaps.

NASAs Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston possesses a large water training facility built to simulate weightless conditions during space walks, but its not properly equipped to simulate water surface conditions for recovery training.

This training is vital for future NASA mission recovery operations, said Behnken. We are working with the experts here to eventually replicate the survival school water survival training equipment at the NBL facility in Houston.

Im impressed by the use of the facilities here, Williams said. Its a small space, but they really manage to simulate all kinds of weather conditions and situations we might experience during a water landing.

The survival school originally had a separate detachment at the Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, where it conducted water survival training in open ocean waters. The training was brought to Fairchild Air Force Base in August 2015 in an effort to save time and money by consolidating training at one location.

It was a good decision for the Air Force to streamline our training efforts by moving all portions of water survival training here, said Col. John Groves, the 336th Training Group commander. However, the fitness center pool was designed for recreational use and isnt suited to the ever increasing demands placed on it by our training programs. Bottom line, we owe it to our Airmen and mission partners such as NASA, who rely on our unique training capabilities, to have a purpose built water survival training facility.

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NASA astronauts at survival school highlights capabilities, needs - Air Force Link