Another Stealth NASA Report

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Reference Model for the International Space Station, U.S. National Laboratory

"In response to the recent GAO recommendations and White House direction, SOMD reviewed all prior studies and elected to commission an independent assessment by an objective third party. ProOrbis, LLC was selected to conduct the assessment based on two factors: (1) ProOrbis is a management consulting firm specializing in the re-positioning of sophisticated high technology assets for maximum value generation, and; (2) ProOrbis had no prior history in the civil space sector and thus offered freedom from predisposed biases. In June 2010, ProOrbis was formally tasked to provide within 90 days a "reference model" for an organization and strategic approach that could maximize the value to the nation for the U.S. share of the ISS. The ProOrbis final report, "Reference Model for the ISS U.S. National Laboratory" is the result of that effort."

Keith's Note: As far as I can tell, NASA never issued a press release about this report. With all the talk of human spaceflight and commercialization, one would think that an attempt to frame the future uses of the ISS would be of broad interest. Guess not.

NASA Fans: Get Ready for Lean Budgets

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Election Adds To Space Policy Uncertainty, Aviation Week

"Unless the post-election lame duck session - controlled by the outgoing Democratic majority - finds a way to fund the STS-135 mission, it will be a tempting cash cow next January as the Republican majority looks for ways to match their belt-tightening campaign rhetoric with legislative action."

Space News Asks the Experts

"Marcia Smith, founder and editor, Spacepolicyonline.com: The Republican takeover of the House is not good news for NASA. It's not that Republicans don't like NASA. As far as I can tell, just about everyone in the United States loves NASA. But they love NASA more in good economic times than in bad, and these are really bad economic times. The message from the election is not just that America is angry at Washington, but that Bill Clinton is still correct -- it's the economy, stupid.

Bill Adkins, principal, Center for Space Strategic Studies: Presumptive House Speaker John Boehner proposed during the campaign to roll back federal spending to 2008 levels. In previous years, NASA's budget has been spared from budget freezes while other non-defense agencies have seen their budgets flat-lined, but the game is changing. The current FY11 budget may be NASA's high-water mark for a while."

GOP to gain control of NASA oversight, UPI

"Wolf is the ranking member of the powerful House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, and Science and Subcommittee, which oversees NASA spending, and will likely assume the panel's chairmanship come January. He has been a vocal critic of Obama's plans for NASA, claiming the president is effectively ceding U.S. leadership in space."

SCRUB – Discovery GO for Launch but Weather Forecast is not Good

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Discovery Will Attempt to Launch Thursday Though Weather Might Force Another Delay, SpaceRef

"Wednesday afternoon NASA's Mission Management Team met at 2:45 pm EDT to review the main engine #3 backup controller issue which caused a day's delay in the launch of space shuttle Discovery. After the meeting a GO was given to attempt a launch Thursday."

Marc's UPDATE 6:15 am EDT: SCRUB - NASA will not launch Discovery due to the weather conditions. Low cloud cover, expected ongoing rain have forced a 24 hour delay. Mission managers will reconvene tomorrow at 5:00 am EDT to discuss the weather for Friday's launch. Friday is looking better but expected high winds could be a problem. You can follow updates on the NASAWatch or SpaceRef Twitter accounts as events happen. launch on Friday would be at 3:04 pm EDT.

One Step Closer To Becoming A World Space Port

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European Business Innovation Centre Network and Space Florida Initiate International Market Development Program

"The European Business Innovation Centre Network (EBN) and Space Florida last week initiated a Memorandum of Understanding to develop new market opportunities and resources for Small and Medium Aerospace Enterprises in Europe and Florida. Ongoing activities will further business development and job creation initiatives in the aerospace sector for Florida, as well as establish Florida as the threshold to American markets for European SMEs. The agreement was signed at the European Satellite Navigation Conference in Munich."

EPOXI Flies Past Comet Hartley 2

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NASA's EPOXI Mission Successfully Flies By Comet Hartley 2

"NASA's EPOXI mission successfully flew by comet Hartley 2 at about 7 a.m. PDT (10 a.m. EDT) today, and the spacecraft has begun returning images. Hartley 2 is the fifth comet nucleus visited by a spacecraft. Scientists and mission controllers are currently viewing never-before-seen images of Hartley 2 appearing on their computer terminal screens."

NASA Spacecraft on Final Approach Toward Comet

NASA to Host Live Events for November 4 Comet Encounter

Images are online here.

Making The ISS Into A National Laboratory

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NASA Solicitation: Public Day for a Future Cooperative Agreement Notice

"NASA/HQ is holding a Public Day for potential Proposers on the planned acquisition of an entity to develop and manage the US share of the ISS as a national laboratory. The acquisition will result in the award of a Cooperative Agreement. The Public Day will be held on Friday, December 10, 2010, from 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. at the NASA Headquarters James Webb Auditorium. Section 504 of Public Law 111-267, the NASA Authorization Act for 2010 establishes eligibility criteria regarding the selected recipient of this planned cooperative agreement: 1) the entity must be "exempt from taxation under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986" and 2) the entity must not have "any other organizational objective or responsibilities on behalf of the organization or any parent organization or other entity."

Will The New Republican-Led House Try to Cut NASA’s Budget?

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Does GOP Control Of House Jeopardize NASA's Future?, WFTV

"The Republicans ran their election campaigns promising to cut government spending and that puts the extra shuttle mission, and much of NASA's future in question. Congress still has to approve billions for NASA. It gave its OK to fly Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis one more time, but it hasn't provided funding for that last extra Atlantis mission. In fact, NASA needed more money for it and the space agency could be fighting just to keep what it has under the new Congress. While there have been a lot of discussions, and even a vote in Congress to allow NASA to fly the space shuttle Atlantis one more time next year, there's a chance the change in power in Congress could not only keep Atlantis from making that extra trip, it could cut into NASA's future."

Election Brings New Leadership to NASA Oversight Committees, SpaceNews

"In the meantime, with incoming Republican leaders threatening to dial back discretionary spending across the federal government next year, the $19 billion Congress authorized for NASA in 2011 could be in jeopardy. House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), who is expected to become speaker of the House in January, voted against the recently enacted NASA legislation and more broadly has pledged to roll back spending in an effort to reduce the federal deficit."

Boehner's challenge: Uniting establishment lawmakers, emboldened freshmen, McClathcy Newspapers

"Boehner also has called for extending tax cuts and reining in federal spending to be priorities. On spending, he's called for ending the practice of rolling many federal programs into comprehensive spending bills in favor of requiring specific votes agency by agency. "Members shouldn't have to vote for big increases at the Commerce Department just because they support NASA," he said last month in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. "Each department and agency should have to justify itself each year to the full House and Senate, and be judged on its own."

Discovery a NO GO for Launch

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Discovery Still on Track for Wednesday Afternoon Launch, SpaceRef

"Although NASA had to work a couple of issues last night, at this point there are no technical constraints that would preclude a launch tomorrow afternoon. The weather outlook is still favorable with only a 30% chance of weather violation.

The first issue came up last night was a faulty regulator on the launch pad nitrogen purge system which was repaired. Early this morning though during engine check-outs, the engine 3 backup engine controller did not come up as expected. The problem was narrowed down to a circuit breaker or switch. Transient contamination was narrowed down as the issue which sometimes happens according to Steve Payne, NASA test director. Recycling the breaker and switch solved the issue."

Marc 's Update: It seems that backup controller problem which NASA thought was fixed is still a problem. From the latest status update, "Engineers continue to analyze data that showed voltage irregularities and will meet this afternoon to review their data.". Managers are currently meeting to discuss the situation.

Marc 's 5:43 PM EDT Update: Launch has been scrubbed for a Wednesday launch. Electrical issues need to be addressed so launch is now set for Thursday at 3:29 PM EDT. However with a 70% chance of violating the constraints for launch due to weather, it would appear Friday is the more likely day for launch.

NASA and LEGO Join Forces

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NASA And The LEGO Group Partner To Inspire Children To Build And Explore The Future

"A LEGO space shuttle headed to orbit helps mark the Tuesday signing of a Space Act Agreement between NASA and The LEGO Group to spark children's interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). To commemorate the beginning of this partnership, the small LEGO shuttle will launch with the crew of the space shuttle Discovery on its STS-133 mission, targeted to launch Wednesday, Nov. 3, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida."

Cloud Computing Now Used for Mars Rovers

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Mars Rovers Mission Using Cloud Computing, NASA

"The project team that built and operates the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity has become the first NASA space mission to use cloud computing for daily mission operations.

Cloud computing is a way to gain fast flexibility in computing ability by ordering capacity on demand -- as if from the clouds -- and paying only for what is used. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project moved to this strategy last week for the software and data that the rovers' flight team uses to develop daily plans for rover activities. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., which manages the project, gained confidence in cloud computing from experience with other uses of the technology, including public participation sites about Mars exploration."

Marc 's Note: Why isn't JPL using NASA's own Nebula Cloud Computing Platform?

ISS Turns 10

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A message to NASA employees from Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator

"With passage of the NASA Authorization bill, we will now be able to extend the life of the station to at least 2020. Representatives of the five international agencies that built and operate the outpost have also agreed on this in principle. Indeed, one of the station's greatest legacies is the international partnerships we have forged to create something awe-inspiring that benefits people all over the world. Partnerships with other nations will be essential to the global exploration enterprise of the future, and with each new day, NASA and its partners are pushing the envelope of human achievement in space into uncharted territory. On board the station right now are six talented and courageous travelers representing NASA and our Russian partners."

The CarDomain Blog Is Now Autoholics

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Well, it's time – this town ain't big enough for all of us, so we're packing up our bags and skipping town. The CarDomain Blog as we know it is going to shift into neutral for now, and we will be relocating to our awesome new party pad: Autoholics!

But here's the crazy thing:

Cloaking Effect in Atoms Baffles Scientists

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From New Scientist - Online News:

Atoms called positronium inexplicably scatter off gas particles as if they were lone electrons, even though they contain an anti-electron as well. The finding hints that engineers could use the well-known scattering properties of electrons as a rul

Why Big Tech Companies Can Still Innovate

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From CNN.com - Technology:

Earlier this week, one of Google's rock-star engineers left that mammoth company -- population: 23,000 -- for Facebook, which has about 2,000 employees. The departure of Lars Rasmussen, co-creator of Google Maps and Google Wave, is only one example, bu

Aerocaribbean Flight Crashes In Cuba

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From AviationWeek.com Homepage:

There were reportedly no survivors following the crash of an Aerocaribbean ATR-72-212 turboprop in central Cuba on Nov. 4. The aircraft was carrying 68 people, including seven crew members, according to local media reports and state authorities. B

Mars Rovers Mission Using Cloud Computing

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The project team that built and operates the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity has become the first NASA space mission to use cloud computing for daily mission operations.

Cloud computing is a way to gain fast flexibility in computing ability by ordering capacity on demand -- as if from the clouds -- and paying only for what is used. NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Project moved to this strategy last week for the software and data that the rovers' flight team uses to develop daily plans for rover activities. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., which manages the project, gained confidence in cloud computing from experience with other uses of the technology, including public participation sites about Mars exploration.

"This is a change to thinking about computer capacity and data storage as a commodity like electricity, or even the money in your bank account," said JPL's John Callas, rover project manager. "You don't keep all your money in your wallet. Instead you go to a nearby ATM and get cash when you need it. Your money is safe, and the bank can hold as much or as little of the money as you want. Data is the same way: You don't need to have it on you all the time. It can be safely stored elsewhere and you can get it anytime via an Internet connection.

"When we need more computing capacity, we don't need to install more servers if we can rent more capacity from the cloud for just the time we need it. This way we don't waste electricity and air conditioning with servers idling waiting to be used, and we don't have to worry about hardware maintenance and operating system obsolescence."

Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004 for what were planned as three-month missions. Bonus, extended missions have continued for more than six years. Opportunity is currently active, requiring daily activity plans by a team of engineers at JPL, and scientists at many locations in North America and Europe. Spirit has been silent since March 2010 and is believed to be in a low-power hibernation mode for the Martian winter.

"The rover project is well suited for cloud computing," said Khawaja Shams, a JPL software engineer supporting the project. "It has a widespread user community acting collaboratively. Cloud enables us to deliver the data to each user from nearby locations for faster reaction time." Also, the unexpected longevity of the mission means the volume of data used has outgrown the systems originally planned for handling and sharing data, which makes the virtually limitless capacity of cloud computing attractive.

JPL collaborated with the cloud team of Amazon.com Inc., Seattle, to plan and implement the use of cloud computing in the Mars Exploration Rover Project's daily operations. JPL developed the rover project's activity-planning software, called Maestro.

"We have worked closely with multiple cloud vendors since 2007 to learn the best ways to gain the advantages of cloud computing," said Tomas Soderstrom, chief technology officer for the JPL Office of the Chief Information Officer. "To implement JPL CIO Jim Rinaldi's vision of renting instead of buying capacity, we pragmatically look past the hype about cloud computing to find the practical, cost-efficient real mission applications. The Mars Exploration Rover project's use of clouds is one example of this results-oriented partnership. More will follow."

In support of the federal Open Government Initiative, which increases public access to data collected by the federal government, JPL collaborated with the cloud team at Microsoft Corp., Redmond, Wash., to launch the "Be a Martian" website in November 2009. The site enables the public to participate as citizen scientists to improve Mars maps and take part in Mars research tasks.

For another early use of cloud computing, JPL worked with the cloud team at Google Inc., Mountain View, Calif. The Google cloud served a project in which JPL and computer science students at the University of California, San Diego, developed an educational application enabling fifth- and sixth-graders to tag labels onto images from Mars spacecraft.

In addition to establishing a private cloud and working with Amazon, Google and Microsoft, JPL has also collaborated with other vendors of public cloud computing. Soderstrom said, "We defined a 'cloud-oriented architecture' to use clouds as an extension of our own resources and to run the computing and storage where it is most appropriate for each application."

The extended missions of Spirit and Opportunity have provided a resource for testing innovations during an active space mission for possible use in future missions. New software uploads giving the rovers added autonomy have been one example, and cloud computing is another. JPL is currently building and testing NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, for launch in late 2011 in the Mars Science Laboratory mission. This rover will land on Mars in August 2012.

Shams said, "The experience we gain using cloud computing for planning Opportunity's activities may be valuable when Curiosity reaches Mars, too."

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/news/mer20101102.html

Using Planet Colors to Search for Alien Earths

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Earth is invitingly blue. Mars is angry red. Venus is brilliant white. Astronomers have learned that a planet's "true colors" can reveal important details. For example, Mars is red because its soil contains rusty red stuff called iron oxide. And the famous tint of our planet, the "blue marble"? It's because the atmosphere scatters blue light rays more strongly than red ones. Therefore the atmosphere looks blue from above and below.

Planets around other stars probably exhibit a rainbow of colors every bit as diverse as those in our solar system. And astronomers would like to eventually harness color to learn more about exoplanets. Are they rocky or gaseous — or earthlike?

In a study recently accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, a team led by NASA astronomer Lucy McFadden and UCLA graduate student Carolyn Crow describe a simple way to distinguish between the planets of our solar system based on color information. Earth, in particular, stands out clearly among the planets, like a blue jay in a flock of seagulls.

"The method we developed separates the planets out," Crow says. "It makes Earth look unique."

This suggests that someday, when we have the technology to gather light from individual exoplanets, astronomers could use color information to identify earthlike worlds. "Eventually, as telescopes get bigger, there will be the light-gathering power to look at the colors of planets around other stars," McFadden says. "Their colors will tell us which ones to study in more detail."

Earth the Exoplanet

The project began in 2008, when Crow teamed up with McFadden, her faculty mentor at the University of Maryland in College Park. McFadden currently heads university and post-doctoral programs at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

New color information about Earth, the moon, and Mars became available, thanks to NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft. En route to a planned encounter this November with Comet 103P/Hartley 2, Deep Impact observed Earth. The idea was to determine what our home looks like to alien astronomers and eventually use that insight to figure out how to spot earthlike worlds around other stars.

As Deep Impact cruised through space, its High Resolution Instrument (HRI) measured the intensity of Earth's light. HRI is an 11.8-inch (30 cm) telescope that feeds light through seven different color filters mounted on a revolving wheel. Each filter samples the incoming light at a different portion of the visible-light spectrum, from ultraviolet and blue to red and near-infrared. On May 28, 2008, Deep Impact even caught a glimpse of the moon's light as it crossed in front of Earth. Later, in 2009, HRI scoped Mars.

McFadden wondered what combination of color information from the filters would best distinguish Earth from the other planets and moons of the solar system. She recruited Crow to work on the project. Eight other researchers from NASA, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington (Seattle), and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab also joined the team.

The Magic Mix

The Deep Impact color data covered Earth, the moon, and Mars. The relative amounts of light passing through the filters vary for each planet or moon, providing a kind of color fingerprint. To this the team added existing color information about Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn's moon Titan.

A simple side-by-side comparison of color data on all the major planets was a confusing mess. The team finally found a combination of three different filters — one in the blue, one in the green, and one in the red — that highlights the differences between the planets.

On a special "color-color" diagram the team created, the planets cluster into groups based on similarities in the wavelengths of sunlight that their surfaces and atmospheres reflect. The gas giants Jupiter and Saturn huddle in one corner, Uranus and Neptune in a different one. The rocky inner planets Mars, Venus, and Mercury cluster off in their own corner of "color space."

But Earth is the true loner in color space. Its uniqueness traces to two factors. One is the scattering of blue light by the atmosphere. This is called Rayleigh scattering, after the English scientist who discovered it.

The other reason Earth stands out in color space is because it does not absorb a lot of infrared light. That's because our atmosphere is low in infrared-absorbing gases like methane and ammonia, compared to the gas giant planets Jupiter and Saturn.

"It is Earth's atmosphere that dominates the colors of Earth," Crow says. "It's the scattering of light in the ultraviolet and the absence of absorption in the infrared."

Colorful Future

Someday, the three-filter approach may provide a rough "first cut" look at exoplanet surfaces and atmospheres. "There are some things we can tell from the colors but there are some things that we can't quite tell without additional information," Crow says.

For example, if an exoplanet shows a similar color fingerprint to Earth's, it would not necessarily mean that the planet has the blue skies and vast oceans of our home. But it would tell us to look at that planet more closely.

And that would be an important first step toward making sense of the colorful complexity of the 490 (and counting) alien planets already discovered, and the scores more on the way.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/planet-colors.html

Cassini Sees Saturn Rings Oscillate Like Mini-Galaxy

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Scientists believe they finally understand why one of the most dynamic regions in Saturn's rings has such an irregular and varying shape, thanks to images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. And the answer, published online today in the Astronomical Journal, is this: The rings are behaving like a miniature version of our own Milky Way galaxy.

This new insight, garnered from images of Saturn's most massive ring, the B ring, may answer another long-standing question: What causes the bewildering variety of structures seen throughout the very densest regions of Saturn's rings?

Another finding from new images of the B ring's outer edge was the presence of at least two perturbed regions, including a long arc of narrow, shadow-casting peaks as high as 3.5 kilometers (2 miles) above the ring plane. The areas are likely populated with small moons that might have migrated across the outer part of the B ring in the past and got trapped in a zone affected by the moon Mimas' gravity. This process is commonly believed to have configured the present-day solar system.

"We have found what we hoped we'd find when we set out on this journey with Cassini nearly 13 years ago: visibility into the mechanisms that have sculpted not only Saturn's rings, but celestial disks of a far grander scale, from solar systems, like our own, all the way to the giant spiral galaxies," said Carolyn Porco, co-author on the new paper and Cassini imaging team lead, based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

Since NASA's Voyager spacecraft flew by Saturn in 1980 and 1981, scientists have known that the outer edge of the planet's B ring was shaped like a rotating, flattened football by the gravitational perturbations of Mimas. But it was clear, even in Voyager's findings, that the outer B ring's behavior was far more complex than anything Mimas alone might do.

Now, analysis of thousands of Cassini images of the B ring taken over a four-year period has revealed the source of most of the complexity: at least three additional, independently rotating wave patterns, or oscillations, that distort the B ring's edge. These oscillations, with one, two or three lobes, are not created by any moons. They have instead spontaneously arisen, in part because the ring is dense enough, and the B ring edge is sharp enough, for waves to grow on their own and then reflect at the edge.

"These oscillations exist for the same reason that guitar strings have natural modes of oscillation, which can be excited when plucked or otherwise disturbed," said Joseph Spitale, lead author on today's article and an imaging team associate at the Space Science Institute. "The ring, too, has its own natural oscillation frequencies, and that's what we're observing."

Astronomers believe such "self-excited" oscillations exist in other disk systems, like spiral disk galaxies and proto-planetary disks found around nearby stars, but they have not been able to directly confirm their existence. The new observations confirm the first large-scale wave oscillations of this type in a broad disk of material anywhere in nature.

Self-excited waves on small, 100-meter (300-foot) scales have been previously observed by Cassini instruments in a few dense ring regions and have been attributed to a process called "viscous overstability." In that process, the ring particles' small, random motions feed energy into a wave and cause it to grow. The new results confirm a Voyager-era predication that this same process can explain all the puzzling chaotic waveforms found in Saturn's densest rings, from tens of meters up to hundreds of kilometers wide.

"Normally viscosity, or resistance to flow, damps waves -- the way sound waves traveling through the air would die out," said Peter Goldreich, a planetary ring theorist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "But the new findings show that, in the densest parts of Saturn's rings, viscosity actually amplifies waves, explaining mysterious grooves first seen in images taken by the Voyager spacecraft."

The two perturbed B ring regions found orbiting within Mimas' zone of influence stretch along arcs up to 20,000 kilometers (12,000 miles) long. The longest one was first seen last year when the sun's low angle on the ring plane betrayed the existence of a series of tall structures through their long, spiky shadows. The small moons disturbing the material are probably hundreds of meters to possibly a kilometer or more in size.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/cassini20101101.html