Commercial Spaceflight Federation Applauds Historic Vote Setting NASA’s New Direction

With passage of NASA bill, the commercial sector will take on primary role for Low Earth Orbit crew transportation:

Washington, D.C. – The Commercial Spaceflight Federation applauds last night’s historic vote by the House of Representatives approving the NASA Authorization Act of 2010, a bill already passed by the Senate on August 5. The legislation now goes to the President for his signature.

The bill specifies $1.612 billion for commercial crew and cargo programs, including $612 million in Fiscal Year 2011, and sets the stage for full funding of the commercial crew program over a 6-year period as stated by one of the bill’s primary authors, Senator Bill Nelson of Florida. The Commercial Crew Program will enable multiple companies, including established firms with decades of experience as well as newer entrepreneurial firms, to develop systems for crew transportation to and from the International Space Station in Low Earth Orbit. The bill also establishes the Office of the Chief Technologist, boosts total funding for technology R&D to $2.5 billion over three years, and strengthens the Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research Program with $45 million over three years.

Commercial Spaceflight Federation President Bretton Alexander stated, “Tomorrow marks the start of the new fiscal year and begins a historic new chapter for NASA. Marking a once-in-a-generation shift, Congress has established that commercial vehicles will now be the primary means of flying astronauts to Low Earth Orbit, allowing NASA to focus its own resources on exploring distant destinations like asteroids and Mars. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation looks forward to working in partnership with NASA to develop safe, reliable commercial capabilities to transport astronauts to and from Low Earth Orbit.”

Commercial Spaceflight Federation Executive Director John Gedmark remarked, “America’s space industry is taking a quantum leap forward with this historic shift. The United States has the innovation, the workforce, and the economic strength to achieve human spaceflight on a private basis, and it is by employing these unique strengths that we will maintain US leadership in space. This bill will allow multiple private companies to move forward with developing this capability that will not only save the taxpayers money, but will reduce our dependence on Russia and create thousands of new high-tech jobs in the process.”

Mark Sirangelo, Chairman of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, concluded, “The bill represents a fundamental change in the way NASA does business, leveraging the complementary strengths of NASA and industry. The bill’s expanded funding for commercial crew and cargo, technology R&D, and commercial suborbital research will help accelerate the growth of the commercial spaceflight industry like never before. In the next decade, the commercial spaceflight industry will open up the space frontier to people from all walks of life– whether scientists, private astronauts, educators, or explorers.”

The Commercial Spaceflight Federation would like to thank all members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate who contributed to the passage of this historic legislation.

About the Commercial Spaceflight Federation
The mission of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) is to promote the development of commercial human spaceflight, pursue ever-higher levels of safety, and share best practices and expertise throughout the industry. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation’s member companies, which include commercial spaceflight developers, operators, spaceports, suppliers, and service providers, are creating thousands of high- tech jobs nationwide, working to preserve American leadership in aerospace through technology innovation, and inspiring young people to pursue careers in science and engineering. For more information please visit http://www.commercialspaceflight.org or contact Executive Director John Gedmark at john@commercialspaceflight.org or at 202.349.1121.

CSF Congratulates Initial Winning Launch Providers in NASA’s Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research Program

Washington, D.C. – The Commercial Spaceflight Federation is pleased to congratulate two of its member companies, Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems, for winning an initial NASA test flight contract as part of the Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) Program.  The first round of the program, an open competition for small businesses, was formally kicked off by NASA earlier this year with a Request for Quotations for commercial reusable suborbital flight services.

As part of the CRuSR awards, Armadillo Aerospace will perform three flights of their Super-Mod vehicle and Masten Space Systems will perform four flights of their Xaero vehicle, during fall and winter 2010.  These flights “will allow the two companies to perform test flights of their experimental vehicles near the edge of space,” according to NASA.

“As strong advocates for the CRuSR program, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation could not be more pleased to see the program move from concept to first test flights in such a short time period,” said Bretton Alexander, President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.  “It was only six months ago that the Commercial Spaceflight Federation co-organized a science conference at which nearly 300 researchers and educators learned about the potential of the new commercial suborbital vehicles being built by Armadillo Aerospace, Blue Origin, Masten Space Systems, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR Aerospace, and we are pleased to see that NASA has responded to this interest.”

“We congratulate Masten and Armadillo on being selected for initial test flights and look forward to future rounds of CRuSR selections.  It will be truly exciting to see all the opportunities for low-cost science, education, and research that these commercial suborbital vehicles will enable,” added Alexander.

NASA Chief Technologist Bobby Braun, whose Space Technology Program will host the CRuSR Office starting in Fiscal Year 2011, stated in a NASA press release that,  ”These two awards are just the beginning of an innovative teaming relationship with industry to provide affordable access to the edge of space while evaluating the microgravity environment for future science and technology experiments,” and added, “CRuSR represents the sort of government-commercial partnership that will facilitate near-space access at affordable costs.”

NASA’s full press release can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/aug/HQ_10-203_CRuSR_Awards.html

CSF Welcomes New Associate Members Barrios Technology, BWSC, J&P Technologies, ORBITEC, & Triumph Aerospace-NN

Washington, D.C. – The Commercial Spaceflight Federation is pleased to announce that Barrios Technology, BWSC, J&P Technologies, ORBITEC, and Triumph Aerospace Systems-Newport News have joined the Federation as Associate Members. With the addition of these five new Associate Members – in locations ranging from Huntsville, Alabama and Houston, Texas to Madison, Wisconsin and San Diego, California – the Commercial Spaceflight Federation now includes over 35 leading aerospace companies.

Bretton Alexander, President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, stated, “We are very excited to have these innovative companies joining the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. Each of these new members is contributing unique skills and capabilities to the commercial space sector, and each company better enables our organization to accomplish its key mission of promoting the growth of the commercial space industry.”

The new associate members of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation made the following statements:

• Sandy Johnson, President and CEO of Barrios Technology, stated, “Joining the Commercial Spaceflight Federation aligns with Barrios’ history in human spaceflight and our mission to provide extraordinary value to our customers. I believe participation in the Commercial Spaceflight Federation will help us bring our experience, expertise, and services to support the growth of the commercial spaceflight industry.” Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Barrios Technology is an aerospace engineering and technology services firm specializing in engineering, space mission operations, systems engineering and integration, and technical assistance for the space industry.

• Bruce Anderson, Vice President of BWSC, stated, “We are looking forward to being part of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and an active participant in its activities in support of commercial spaceflight. These are exciting times for the nation and all that are involved in human spaceflight.” Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee with a location in Huntsville, Alabama, BWSC is a professional services firm that includes engineers, architects, and scientists, and with clients including NASA and DoD as well as industrial, commercial, and institutional clients.

• Jennifer Lewis, President of J&P Technologies, stated, “J&P Technologies is proud to join the Commercial Spaceflight Federation team! We strongly support the U.S. manned space program and believe that a safe and affordable commercial spaceflight component is paramount in helping our country maintain leadership in space. J&P looks forward to working with other Commercial Spaceflight Federation members, and will leverage our experience in the development and operation of human-rated space systems to help assure the success of the commercial spaceflight industry.” Based in Houston, Texas near NASA’s Johnson Space Center, J&P Technologies was established in 1997 to provide system engineering services for the development and support of unique and complex systems.

• Tom Crabb, President of Orbital Technologies Corporation (ORBITEC), stated, “ORBITEC looks forward to joining the great path-finding work of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation to make space travel as common as air travel, a perfect match to our current and future products in life support, habitation, and propulsion systems for short duration transit, long duration low Earth orbit, and extended interplanetary travel – safely, reliably, and cost effectively.” Based in Madison, Wisconsin, ORBITEC is a leading high technology development and subsystem integration company.

• Bill Jacobson, President of Triumph Aerospace Systems – Newport News, stated, “Triumph Aerospace Systems – Newport News is very excited to join the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. We look forward to working with the Commercial Spaceflight Federation as both an engineering/technical services provider and as an industry leader in the engineering and manufacturing of complex aerospace hardware, test articles and prototype systems, in support of a developing and critically important commercial space industry.” Previously known as Allied Aerospace Industries Inc., Triumph Aerospace Systems – Newport News is an industry leader in the engineering and manufacture of complex aerospace hardware and prototype systems for ground test and flight applications.

About the Commercial Spaceflight Federation
The mission of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (CSF) is to promote the development of commercial human spaceflight, pursue ever-higher levels of safety, and share best practices and expertise throughout the industry. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation’s member companies, which include commercial spaceflight developers, operators, spaceports, suppliers, and service providers, are creating thousands of high-tech jobs nationwide, working to preserve American leadership in aerospace through technology innovation, and inspiring young people to pursue careers in science and engineering. For more information please visit http://www.commercialspaceflight.org or contact Executive Director John Gedmark at john@commercialspaceflight.org or at 202.349.1121.

About Barrios Technology
Headquartered in Houston, Texas, near NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Barrios Technology is an aerospace engineering and technology services firm. Barrios specializes in engineering, space mission operations, systems engineering and integration, and technical assistance for the space industry. From planning to on-orbit support to post-flight analysis, Barrios supports all phases of space mission operations. For more information please visit http://www.barriostechnology.com.

About BWSC
BWSC is a professional services firm that includes engineers, architects, and scientists, with clients including NASA and DoD as well as industrial, commercial, and institutional clients. Headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee with locations including Huntsville, Alabama, BWSC’s projects have included designing new buildings as well as demolitions, modifications and expansions of existing buildings and testing facilities; energy audits; process design for laboratories; and mechanical and electrical upgrades. The company provides mechanical engineering services, facilities design/upgrades, and industrial design services. For more information please visit http://www.bargewaggoner.com.

About J&P Technologies
Based in Houston, Texas, J&P Technologies was established in 1997 to provide system engineering services for the development and support of unique and complex systems, specifically in the aerospace and biomedical industries. J&P provides expertise in all phases of system development including: systems engineering and integration, test planning and management, software and system prototyping and development, technical documentation, sustaining and maintenance support, and software and system safety. For more information please visit http://www.jandptech.com.

About ORBITEC
ORBITEC (Orbital Technologies Corporation) is a leading high technology development and subsystem integration company based in Madison, Wisconsin. ORBITEC offers commercially mature solutions and strong capabilities in five distinct areas: Propulsion, Propellant, and Power Systems; Life Support and Environment Control; Bio-based products and production systems; Interactive 3D Simulation Software; and Next Generation Fire Suppression. For more information please visit http://www.orbitec.com.

About Triumph Aerospace Systems – Newport News
Previously known as Allied Aerospace Industries Inc., Triumph Aerospace Systems -Newport News is an industry leader in the engineering and manufacture of complex aerospace hardware and prototype systems for ground test and flight applications. With locations in San Diego, CA; Huntsville, AL; Cheshire, CT; and Newport News, VA, the company’s capabilities include engineering, manufacturing, instrumentation and assembly, and testing. For more information please visit http://www.tasnn.com.

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Space Adventures to market Boeing commercial crew flights

CST-100 illustration

Illustration of Boeing's proposed CST-100 commercial crew capsule.

When Space Adventures announced last week a joint press conference with Boeing to discuss “a unique agreement between the two companies on commercial crew transportation services”, as the announcement put it, it seemed obvious what that agreement would involve: Space Adventures would sell seats on the CST-100, the commercial crew capsule that Boeing is developing to primarily serve other markets, such as transporting NASA crews to and from the International Space Station.

And that, in fact, was the announcement made yesterday. However, the nearly 90-minute press conference, held in a conference room at a Boeing office in Rosslyn, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, DC, provided plenty of opportunity for both companies to expound on the agreement and provide more details (or, in some cases, the lack of details). In short, Space Adventures will market “excess seating capacity” on CST-100 flights, primarily to the ISS, to potential spaceflight participants as soon as 2015.

Specific details about such flight, though, have yet to be worked out. John Elbon, vice president and program manager for commercial crew transportation systems at Boeing, said the notional model they were working from is taking advantage of any crew transportation flights NASA would procure as part of a future commercial crew program. The CST-100 is designed to accommodate up to seven people, but current NASA crew rotation models would require only four seats. The remaining capacity could be used for extra cargo, or for one or more spaceflight participants. He also didn’t rule out the possibility of dedicated flights, although this agreement between Boeing and Space Adventures does not include any flights to Bigelow Aerospace’s proposed commercial orbital facilities (Bigelow is a partner with Boeing on its current $18-million NASA Commercial Crew Development, or CCDev, award.)

Eric Anderson, chairman of Space Adventures (and who will remain involved with the company even though he took a job last week as president of Intentional Software, a company founded by two-time Space Adventures client Charles Simonyi) was vague about pricing for such seats, other than that they would be “competitive” with Soyuz pricing. Later, he noted that Space Adventures’ last Soyuz customer, Guy Laliberté, paid “around $40 million” for his trip.

Neither company would divulge how big they think the market is for such flights, but they were confident that there would be sufficient customers, even with a ticket price in the tens of millions. “We believe that we will be able to bring the spaceflight experience to a greater number of people than we would have before,” Anderson said. He added that “every flight opportunity that we have had the opportunity to sell, we have sold”, and thus the market was not constrained by the number of people who want to fly, but instead the number of flight opportunities.

Of course, this is all contingent on Boeing developing the CST-100, which the company said is, in turn, dependent on receiving NASA funding through a commercial crew program—a hot topic of debate across the Potomac from Boeing’s offices. “If we had to do this with Boeing investment only,” Elbon said, “we wouldn’t be able to close the business case.” NASA, he said, provides the program both development money as well as business transporting astronauts to and from the ISS. He said there are examples of past markets that got started with government investment, and Anderson noted aviation industry was supported by government airmail in its early years. “I think the argument that if it’s not purely funded and purely financed by private industry that there’s no market, I think that is, with all due respect, hogwash.”

Scaled ready to begin SpaceShipTwo glide tests

[Update 2: SpaceShipTwo has successfully completed its first glide test, landing at Mojave Air and Space Port shortly after 8 am PDT (11 am EDT) Sunday morning, a little more than 10 minutes after being released by WhiteKnightTwo.]

[Update: the first glide test is indeed taking place Sunday morning; follow along at the Popular Mechanics liveblog, reporting from Mojave.]

The long wait for the first free flight by SpaceShipTwo may nearly be over. Popular Mechanics reported Saturday that, according to its sources, Scaled will perform the first glide test as soon as Sunday morning, taking the aircraft up to an altitude of 15,000 meters (50,000 feet) and then release it. SpaceShipTwo most recently flew a captive carry flight with the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft on September 30th; according to the published test log the flight was a “rehearsal mission” for upcoming glide tests.

WhiteKnightTwo landing gear collapses

WK2 in flight

WhiteKnightTwo in flight over Las Cruces airport in June 2009. The landing gear is partially extended during this overflight.

The AP reported late today that part of the landing gear for Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo aircraft collapsed upon landing at the end of a test flight today at Mojave Air and Space Port in California. An FAA spokesman told the AP that the left main landing gear, the one that collapsed, was damaged, but he did not know if there was any other damage to the aircraft. SpaceShipTwo was not attached to the aircraft during Thursday’s flight.

Scaled Composites issued a brief statement about the incident, offering few details about what happened in the “minor” incident:

A minor incident occurred on the runway at Mojave airport this morning, which involved a mechanical problem with the left hand-side landing gear of WhiteKnightTwo. No injuries were sustained and the incident did not involve the Spaceship which was not attached to WhiteKnightTwo. WhiteKnightTwo was on its 37th test flight, and has been flying since December 2008. Further information will be posted in due course.

Weekend roundup

Is Virgin Galactic only accepting US citizens now? That’s the claim of an article Sunday in the Irish Independent, which reports that an Irishman living in England “received a legal notice from Virgin Galactic stating that at present only US citizens can be considered for inclusion.” The company has signed up and accepted deposits from a number of people outside the US, so it’s not clear what would cause this change in direction, if in fact correct. The obvious concern would be something having to do with US export control regulations, but Bigelow Aerospace won a ruling last year that ITAR-related agreements were not needed for prospective spaceflight participants.

Even without that issue, Bruce Dickinson isn’t interested in flying on Virgin Galactic. The 52-year-old British lead singer of Iron Maiden, who is a licensed commercial pilot and Star Trek fan, would seem to be in the ideal demographic for space tourism, but he tells QMI Media he’s not interested right now because of price and safety issues. “I think I’d want to take a long hard look at those little suborbital things before I got on one,” he said. “And for the amount of money it costs, well, I could think of a lot of things you could do that would be a lot more fun, and last a lot longer.”

Those who do want to, and are able to, fly on Virgin Galactic may be able to enjoy a little bit of a shortcut to Spaceport America. The New Mexico Spaceport Authority approved Friday a proposal to pave a road on the southern approach to the spaceport. The road, from the Upham exit on I-25, will shorten the travel time for people coming to the spaceport from Las Cruces from one hour and 40 minutes down to one hour as they will no longer have to take the current northern approach through Truth and Consequences. The money for paving the road comes from “unexpected savings” on other aspects of the project because of a “good bid climate”, freeing up the $11.5 million needed for the paving.

That decision, as well as the FAA’s award of a commercial space transportation “center of excellence” to New Mexico State University, get the seal of approval of the Las Cruces Sun-News in an editorial Sunday. With a greater emphasis on commercial spaceflight emerging in national space policy, “NMSU and Spaceport America are poised to lead the way in a burgeoning new industry with limitless potential.”

Virgin: Irish article “entirely inaccurate”

Virgin Galactic has responded to yesterday’s report that the company is only accepting US citizens for its flights by, in effect, saying the article is completely off base. The Irish Independent article claimed that an Irishman living in England, Cyril Bennis, had been told by the company that it was currently only accepting US citizens. A Virgin official said Monday that Bennis had inquired about flying non-US citizens on its flights and was told that they were accepting deposits from Americans and others alike “because we fully intend to be able to fly these pioneering people”. (That would include, of course, Sir Richard Branson, who has previously said he and his family would go on the first SpaceShipTwo commercial flight.) The company will do so “in a way which fully complies with all applicable laws and regulations including those which relate to US export controls”; as noted yesterday, there’s already precedent for allowing spaceflight participants to be trained for such flights without going through ITAR-related paperwork. “Unfortunately we were not contacted by the Independent before the piece was published and so had no chance to correct an entirely inaccurate report,” the Virgin official said.

Spaceport America update, a gubernatorial visit to MARS

County commissioners in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, approved earlier this week a plan to pave a road to Spaceport America. The paving will be paid by the spaceport project, although the county is contributing the equivalent of $200,000 in engineering and surveying services for the project, which will pave an existing road to cut the travel time to the spaceport for people coming from the south. Spaceport developers are also dealing with a drop in the water table in the region that has affected a number of nearby residents, whose wells have gone dry as a result of heavy use of water during the spaceport’s construction, particularly when paving its 10,000-foot (3,000-meter) runway. The water table is “showing all the right signs of recharge”, said Spaceport America director Rick Homans, but residents are still concerned about any long-term affects.

On the other side of the country, Maryland governor Martin O’Malley visited Wallops Flight Facility, home to the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS), earlier this week. Wallops is in Virginia, but close to the Maryland border; many people who work there live in Maryland. The statement by O’Malley’s office about the visit said little about the commercial potential of the spaceport, instead playing up the impact of NASA and other government space-related spending on state’s economy. By contrast, Virginia governor Bob McDonnell has played up the commercial potential of Wallops, including plans by Orbital Sciences Corporation to launch ISS cargo missions from MARS using its new Taurus 2 rocket.

CRuSR makes its first awards

Armadillo Aerospace Scorpius vehicle

Armadillo Aerospace's Scorpius vehicle on a flight as part of the Lunar Lander Challenge in September 2009.

On Monday NASA announced that it has made $475,000 in awards to Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems for experimental flights of suborbital reusable vehicles. These are the first contracts for test flights under the agency’s Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR) program, which is designed to support flight opportunities on commercial suborbital vehicles for a variety of research purposes. The flights will take place at Spaceport America in New Mexico (for Armadillo) and Mojave Air and Space Port in California (for Masten) this fall and winter, reaching altitudes of between 5 and 40 kilometers.

The announcement coincided with a “Flight Opportunities” panel at the AIAA Space 2010 conference Monday afternoon in Anaheim, California. As it turned out, it wasn’t much of a panel session: most of the scheduled panelists were unavailable for one reason or another, but officials from the CRuSR program and the NASA Office of the Chief Technologist (CRuSR’s parent organization) were present and offered some additional details beyond what was in the NASA release. For example, the $475,000 awarded was split roughly evenly between the two companies, with one getting approximately $250,000 and the other approximately $225,000. (I was later told that Masten got the slightly larger award.)

The NASA press release mentioned that the vehicle will be carrying antennas to support the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) navigation system for the FAA, but that will not be the only payload they will carry. Dougal Maclise said at the panel session that the vehicles will also carry a “flight monitor” from NASA Ames to measure the flight environment of the vehicles, including acceleration and vibration. A third payload is a “particle agglomeration” experiment from the Space Sciences Lab at the University of California Berkeley tat has previously flown on the ISS. The key requirements for all the experiments, he said, is that they be “self-sufficient, autonomous, and expendable”.

The flights will begin as soon as October, with Armadillo flying out of Spaceport America; the Masten flights will begin late this year. Those two companies were pretty much the only ones who could meet CRuSR’s requirements to perform test flights, even at relatively low altitudes, within six months of contract award (a requirement in the solicitation). Virgin Galactic has not yet started glide tests of SpaceShipTwo, let alone powered flights, while XCOR Aerospace will not be ready to begin vehicle tests in the next six months. (Blue Origin’s status is more secretive, as usual for them, but there’s no evidence they are in an active flight test program.)

NASA Cameras Spot Meteors From Obscure Shower

It's a strange-sounding name for a constellation, coming from the Greco-Roman word for giraffe, or "camel leopard". The October Camelopardalids are a collection of faint stars that have no mythology associated with them -- in fact, they didn't begin to appear on star charts until the 17th century.

Even experienced amateur astronomers are hard-pressed to find the constellation in the night sky. But in early October, it comes to prominence in the minds of meteor scientists as they wrestle with the mystery of this shower of meteors, which appears to radiate from the giraffe's innards.

The October Camelopardalids are not terribly spectacular, with only a handful of bright meteors seen on the night of Oct. 5. It may have been first noticed back in 1902, but definite confirmation had to wait until Oct. 2005, when meteor cameras videotaped 12 meteors belonging to the shower. Moving at a speed of 105,000 miles per hour, Camelopardalids ablate, or burn up, somewhere around 61 miles altitude, according to observations from the NASA allsky meteor cameras on the night of Oct. 5, 2010.

So they aren't spectacular. Their speed is calculated. Their "burn up" altitudes and orbits are known. So what's the mystery?

Camelopardalids have orbits -- see diagram at right -- which indicates that they come from a long period comet, like Halley's Comet. But the Camelopardalids don't come from Halley, nor from any of the other comets that have been discovered.

Hence the mystery: somewhere out there is -- or was -- a comet that passes close to Earth which has eluded detection. These tiny, millimeter size bits of ice leaving pale streaks of light in the heavens are our only clues about a comet of a mile, maybe more, in diameter.

This is why astronomers keep looking at the Camelopardalids meteors. They hope that measuring more orbits may eventually help determine the orbit of the comet, enabling us to finally locate and track this shadowy visitor to Earth's neighborhood.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/watchtheskies/camelopardalis.html


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Cassini Catches Saturn Moons in Paintball Fight

Scientists using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have learned that distinctive, colorful bands and splotches embellish the surfaces of Saturn's inner, mid-size moons. The reddish and bluish hues on the icy surfaces of Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione and Rhea appear to be the aftermath of bombardments large and small.

A paper based on the findings was recently published online in the journal Icarus. In it, scientists describe prominent global patterns that trace the trade routes for material exchange between the moons themselves, an outer ring of Saturn known as the E ring and the planet's magnetic environment. The finding may explain the mysterious Pac-Man thermal pattern on Mimas, found earlier this year by Cassini scientists, said lead author Paul Schenk, who was funded by a Cassini data analysis program grant and is based at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

"The beauty of it all is how the satellites behave as a family, recording similar processes and events on their surfaces, each in its own unique way," Schenk said. "I don't think anyone expected that electrons would leave such obvious fingerprints on planetary surfaces, but we see it on several moons, including Mimas, which was once thought to be rather bland."

Schenk and colleagues processed raw images obtained by Cassini's imaging cameras from 2004 to 2009 to produce new, high-resolution global color maps of these five moons. The new maps used camera frames shot through visible-light, ultraviolet and infrared filters which were processed to enhance our views of these moons beyond what could be seen by the human eye.

"The richness of the Cassini data set – visible images, infrared images, ultraviolet images, measurements of the radiation belts – is such that we can finally 'paint a picture' as to how the satellites themselves are 'painted,'" said William B. McKinnon, one of six co-authors on the paper. McKinnon is based at Washington University in St. Louis and was also funded by the Cassini data analysis program.

Icy material sprayed by Enceladus, which makes up the misty E ring, appears to leave a brighter, blue signature. The pattern of bluish material on Enceladus, for example, indicates that the moon is covered by the fallback of its own "breath."

Enceladean spray also appears to splatter the parts of Tethys, Dione and Rhea that run into the spray head-on in their orbits around Saturn. But scientists are still puzzling over why the Enceladean frost on the leading hemisphere of these moons bears a coral-colored, rather than bluish, tint.

On Tethys, Dione and Rhea, darker, rust-colored, reddish hues paint the entire trailing hemisphere, or the side that faces backward in the orbit around Saturn. The reddish hues are thought to be caused by tiny particle strikes from circulating plasma, a gas-like state of matter so hot that atoms split into an ion and an electron, in Saturn's magnetic environment. Tiny, iron-rich "nanoparticles" may also be involved, based on earlier analyses by the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team.

Mimas is also touched by the tint of Enceladean spray, but it appears on the trailing side of Mimas. This probably occurs because it orbits inside the path of Enceladus, or closer to Saturn, than Tethys, Dione and Rhea.

In addition, Mimas and Tethys sport a dark, bluish band. The bands match patterns one might expect if the surface were being irradiated by high-energy electrons that drift in a direction opposite to the flow of plasma in the magnetic bubble around Saturn. Scientists are still figuring out exactly what is happening, but the electrons appear to be zapping the Mimas surface in a way that matches the Pac-Man thermal pattern detected by Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer, Schenk said.

Schenk and colleagues also found a unique chain of bluish splotches along the equator of Rhea that re-open the question of whether Rhea ever had a ring around it. The splotches do not seem related to Enceladus, but rather appear where fresh, bluish ice has been exposed on older crater rims. Though Cassini imaging scientists recently reported that they did not see evidence in Cassini images of a ring around Rhea, the authors of this paper suggest the crash of orbiting material, perhaps a ring, to the surface of Rhea in the not-too-distant past could explain the bluish splotches.

"Analyzing the image color ratios is a great way to really enhance the otherwise subtle color variations and make apparent some of the processes at play in the Saturn system," said Amanda Hendrix, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The Cassini images highlight the importance and potential effects of so-called 'space weathering' that occurs throughout the solar system – on any surface that isn't protected by a thick atmosphere or magnetic field."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. 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/cassini20101007.html


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NASA’s WMAP Project Completes Satellite Operations

After nine years of scanning the sky, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) space mission has concluded its observations of the cosmic microwave background, the oldest light in the universe. The spacecraft has not only given scientists their best look at this remnant glow, but also established the scientific model that describes the history and structure of the universe.

"WMAP has opened a window into the earliest universe that we could scarcely imagine a generation ago," said Gary Hinshaw, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who manages the mission. "The team is still busy analyzing the complete nine-year set of data, which the scientific community eagerly awaits."

WMAP was designed to provide a more detailed look at subtle temperature differences in the cosmic microwave background that were first detected in 1992 by NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). The WMAP team has answered many longstanding questions about the universe's age and composition. WMAP acquired its final science data on Aug. 20. On Sept. 8, the satellite fired its thrusters, left its working orbit, and entered into a permanent parking orbit around the sun.

"We launched this mission in 2001, accomplished far more than our initial science objectives, and now the time has come for a responsible conclusion to the satellite's operations," said Charles Bennett, WMAP's principal investigator at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

WMAP detects a signal that is the remnant afterglow of the hot young universe, a pattern frozen in place when the cosmos was only 380,000 years old. As the universe expanded over the next 13 billion years, this light lost energy and stretched into increasingly longer wavelengths. Today, it is detectable as microwaves.

WMAP is in the Guinness Book of World Records for "most accurate measure of the age of the universe." The mission established that the cosmos is 13.75 billion years old, with a degree of error of one percent.

WMAP also showed that normal atoms make up only 4.6 percent of today's cosmos, and it verified that most of the universe consists of two entities scientists don't yet understand.

Dark matter, which makes up 23 percent of the universe, is a material that has yet to be detected in the laboratory. Dark energy is a gravitationally repulsive entity which may be a feature of the vacuum itself. WMAP confirmed its existence and determined that it fills 72 percent of the cosmos.

Another important WMAP breakthrough involves a hypothesized cosmic "growth spurt" called inflation. For decades, cosmologists have suggested that the universe went through an extremely rapid growth phase within the first trillionth of a second it existed. WMAP's observations support the notion that inflation did occur, and its detailed measurements now rule out several well-studied inflation scenarios while providing new support for others.

"It never ceases to amaze me that we can make a measurement that can distinguish between what may or may not have happened in the first trillionth of a second of the universe," says Bennett.

WMAP was the first spacecraft to use the gravitational balance point known as Earth-Sun L2 as its observing station. The location is about 930,000 miles or (1.5 million km) away.

"WMAP gave definitive measurements of the fundamental parameters of the universe," said Jaya Bapayee, WMAP program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Scientists will use this information for years to come in their quest to better understand the universe."

Launched as MAP on June 30, 2001, the spacecraft was later renamed WMAP to honor David T. Wilkinson, a Princeton University cosmologist and a founding team member who died in September 2002.

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


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Hubble Probes Comet 103P/Hartley 2 in Preparation for DIXI flyby

Hubble Space Telescope observations of comet 103P/Hartley 2, taken on September 25, are helping in the planning for a November 4 flyby of the comet by NASA's Deep Impact eXtended Investigation (DIXI) spacecraft.

Analysis of the new Hubble data shows that the nucleus has a diameter of approximately 0.93 miles (1.5 km), which is consistent with previous estimates.

The comet is in a highly active state, as it approaches the Sun. The Hubble data show that the coma is remarkably uniform, with no evidence for the types of outgassing jets seen from most "Jupiter Family" comets, of which Hartley 2 is a member.

Jets can be produced when the dust emanates from a few specific icy regions, while most of the surface is covered with relatively inert, meteoritic-like material. In stark contrast, the activity from Hartley 2's nucleus appears to be more uniformly distributed over its entire surface, perhaps indicating a relatively "young" surface that hasn't yet been crusted over.

Hubble's spectrographs - the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) -- are expected to provide unique information about the comet's chemical composition that might not be obtainable any other way, including measurements by DIXI. The Hubble team is specifically searching for emissions from carbon monoxide (CO) and diatomic sulfur (S2). These molecules have been seen in other comets but have not yet been detected in 103P/Hartley 2.

103P/Hartley has an orbital period of 6.46 years. It was discovered by Malcolm Hartley in 1986 at the Schmidt Telescope Unit in Siding Spring, Australia. The comet will pass within 11 million miles of Earth (about 45 times the distance to the Moon) on October 20. During that time the comet may be visible to the naked eye as a 5th magnitude "fuzzy star" in the constellation Auriga.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/hartley-2.html


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Cluster Helps Disentangle Turbulence in the Solar Wind

From Earth, the Sun looks like a calm, placid body that does little more than shine brightly while marching across the sky. Images from a bit closer, of course, show it’s an unruly ball of hot gas that can expel long plumes out into space – but even this isn’t the whole story. Surrounding the Sun is a roiling wind of electrons and protons that shows constant turbulence at every size scale: long streaming jets, smaller whirling eddies, and even microscopic movements as charged particles circle in miniature orbits. Through it all, great magnetic waves and electric currents move through, stirring up the particles even more.

This solar wind is some million degrees Celsius, can move as fast as 750 kilometers (466 statute miles) per second, and – so far – defies a complete description by any one theory. It’s hotter than expected, for one, and no one has yet agreed which of several theories offers the best explanation.

Now, the ESA/NASA Cluster mission – four identical spacecraft that fly in a tight formation to provide 3-dimensional snapshots of structures around Earth – has provided new information about how the protons in the solar wind are heated.

“We had a perfect window of 50 minutes,” says NASA scientist Melvyn Goldstein, chief of the Geospace Physics Laboratory at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. and co-author of the new paper that appeared in Physical Review Letters on September 24. “It was a time when the four Cluster spacecraft were so close together they could watch movements in the solar wind at a scale small enough that it was possible to observe the heating of protons through turbulence directly for the first time."

Scientists know that large turbulence tends to “cascade” down into smaller turbulence -- imagine the sharply defined whitecaps on top of long ocean waves. In ocean waves, the energy from such cascades naturally adds a small amount of heat from friction as the particles shift past each other, thus heating the water slightly. But the fast, charged particles – known as “plasma” -- around the sun don’t experience that kind of friction, yet they heat up in a similar way.

“Unlike the usual fluids of everyday life,” says Fouad Sahraoui, lead author of a new paper on the solar wind and a scientist at the CNRS-Ecole Polytechnique-UPMC in France, “plasmas possess electric and magnetic fields generated by the motions of proton and electrons. This changes much of the intuitive images that we get from observing conventional fluids.”

Somehow the magnetic and electric fields in the plasma must contribute to heating the particles. Decades of research on the solar wind have been able to infer the length and effects of the magnetic waves, but direct observation was not possible before the Cluster mission watched large waves from afar. These start long as long wavelength fluctuations, but lose energy – while getting shorter – over time. Loss of energy in the waves transfer energy to the solar wind particles, heating them up, but the exact method of energy transfer, and the exact nature of the waves doing the heating, has not been completely established.

In addition to trying to find the mechanism that heats the solar wind, there’s another mystery: The magnetic waves transfer heat to the particles at different rates depending on their wavelength. The largest waves lose energy at a continuous rate until they make it down to about 100-kilometer wavelength. They then lose energy even more quickly before they hit around 2-kilometer wavelength and return to more or less the previous rate. To tackle these puzzles, scientists used data from Cluster when it was in the solar wind in a position where it could not be influenced by Earth’s magnetosphere.

For this latest paper, the four Cluster spacecraft provided 50 minutes of data at a time when conditions were just right -- the spacecraft were in a homogeneous area of the solar wind, they were close together, and they formed a perfect tetrahedral shape -- such that the instruments could measure electromagnetic waves in three dimensions at the small scales that affect protons.

The measurements showed that the cascade of turbulence occurs through the action of a special kind of traveling waves – named Alfvén waves after Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén, who discovered them in 1941.

The surprising thing about the waves that Cluster observed is that they pointed perpendicular to the magnetic field. This is in contrast to previous work from the Helios spacecraft, which in the 1970’s examined magnetic waves closer to the sun. That work found magnetic waves running parallel to the magnetic field, which can send particles moving in tight circular orbits – a process known as cyclotron resonance -- thus giving them a kick in both energy and temperature. The perpendicular waves found here, on the other hand, create electric fields that efficiently transfer energy to particles by, essentially, pushing them to move faster.

Indeed, earlier Cluster work suggested that this process – known as Landau damping – helped heat electrons. But, since much of the change in temperature with distance from the sun is due to changes in the proton temperature, it was crucial to understand how they obtained their energy. Since hot electrons do not heat protons very well at all, this couldn’t be the mechanism.

That Landau damping is what adds energy to both protons and electrons – at least near Earth – also helps explain the odd rate change in wave fluctuations as well. When the wavelengths are about 100 kilometers or a bit shorter, the electric fields of these perpendicular waves heat protons very efficiently. So, at these lengths, the waves transfer energy quickly to the surrounding protons -- offering an explanation why the magnetic waves suddenly begin to lose energy at a faster rate. Waves that are about two kilometers, however, do not interact efficiently with protons because the electric fields oscillate too fast to push them. Instead these shorter waves begin to push and heat electrons efficiently and quickly deplete all the energy in the waves.

“We can see that not all the energy is dissipated by protons,” Sahraoui said. “The remaining energy in the wave continues its journey toward smaller scales, wavelengths of about two kilometers long. At that point, electrons in turn get heated.”

Future NASA missions such as the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, scheduled for launch in 2014, will be able to probe the movements of the solar wind at even smaller scales.

Cluster recently surpassed a decade of passing in and out of our planet's magnetic field, returning invaluable data to scientists worldwide. Besides studying the solar wind, Cluster’s other observations include studying the composition of the earth’s aurora and its magnetosphere.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/sunearthsystem/main/cluster-turbulence.html


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NASA’s Webb Telescope MIRI Instrument Takes One Step Closer To Space


A major instrument due to fly aboard NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is getting its first taste of space in the test facilities at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the United Kingdom. The Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) has been designed to contribute to areas of investigation as diverse as the first light in the early Universe and the formation of planets around other stars.

"The start of space simulation testing of the MIRI is the last major engineering activity needed to enable its delivery to NASA. It represents the culmination of 8 years of work by the MIRI consortium, and is a major progress milestone for the Webb telescope project," said Matt Greenhouse, NASA Project Scientist for the Webb telescope Integrated Science Instrument Module, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

The James Webb Space Telescope represents the next generation of space telescope and, unlike its predecessor Hubble, it will have to journey far from home. Its ultimate destination is L2, a gravitational pivot point located 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) away, on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. Here it is cool enough for the MIRI to obtain exquisite measurements that astronomers will use to help decipher the Universe. "At L2 we are at an environmentally stable point where we can be permanently shaded from light from the Sun and Earth. That allows us to reach the very low temperatures - as low as 7K (- 447.1 Fahrenheit) in the case of MIRI – that are necessary to measure in the mid-infrared," says Jose Lorenzo Alvarez, MIRI Instrument Manager for European Space Agency (ESA).

The MIRI provides imaging, coronagraphy and integral field spectroscopy over the 5-28 micron wavelength range. It is being developed as a partnership between Europe and the U.S. The MIRI is one of four instruments flying aboard the Webb telescope. The other instruments include: NIRSpec (a near-infrared spectrograph), NIRCam (a near-infrared camera), and TFI (a tunable filter imager).

One of the jewels in the MIRI's crown is the potential to observe star formation that has been triggered by an interaction between galaxies. This phenomena has been difficult to study with Hubble or ground-based telescopes since the optical and near-infrared light from these newly formed stars is hidden from view by clouds of dust that typically surround newly formed stars This will not be a problem for MIRI, as it is sensitive to longer wavelengths of light in the range 5 to 28 microns, which can penetrate the dust.

However, keeping the MIRI at a colder temperature than on Pluto, for a sustained period of time, was one of the biggest engineering challenges facing those charged with constructing the instrument. "A critical aspect, to achieving the right sensitivity, is to ensure stable operation at 7 Kelvin (- 447.1 Fahrenheit) that will last for the five years of the mission," explains Alvarez.

This past spring, the flight model of the MIRI began to take shape as the key sub-assemblies - the imager, the spectrometer optics, and the input-optics and calibration module - were delivered to RAL for integration. Each of the optical sub-assemblies of the MIRI had at that stage already, separately, undergone exhaustive mechanical and thermal testing to make sure they can not only survive the rigors of a journey to L2, but also remain operational for the life of the mission. At RAL, the sub-assemblies were integrated into the flight model and are now being tested again, as a complete instrument, using a specially designed chamber developed at RAL to reproduce the environment at L2.

For the purposes of these environmental and calibration tests the Webb telescope optics are simulated using the MIRI Telescope Simulator (MTS) that was built in Spain. Following completion of these tests, the MIRI will be shipped to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., U.S. next spring, when the instrument will be integrated with the Webb’s Integrated Science Instrument Module.

When the MIRI eventually reaches its sheltered position, located four times further away from the Earth than the Moon, scientists can begin probing the Universe's secrets, including its earliest days. "We'd like to try and identify very young galaxies, containing some of the first stars that formed in the Universe," says Gillian Wright, European Principal Investigator for MIRI based at the U.K. Astronomy Technology Centre, Edinburgh, U.K.

With the current generation of space telescopes, distinguishing between a galaxy mature enough to have a central black hole and a young galaxy at a high redshift is troublesome, as they appeared similar in the near-infrared. A key to the MIRI's potential success is its ability to see through cosmic dust. When stars form they burn through the elements, creating dust which ends up in the interstellar medium of the galaxy. The re-radiated emission from this dust creates a spectrum markedly different from that of a galaxy with no dust; the emission is expected to be 5-10 times stronger in the mature galaxy. "MIRI provides a diagnostic of whether there has been a previous generation of stars that had gone supernova and created dust. In the first generation of stars there would be no dust or black holes because there hadn't been time to make any," explains Wright.

The astronomers who will use the MIRI and the James Webb Space Telescope are also particularly keen to explore the formation of planets around distant stars, another area where the ability to peer through the dust becomes important. "MIRI is absolutely essential for understanding planet formation because we know that it occurs in regions which are deeply embedded in dust," said Wright. MIRI's beam width of 0.1 arc seconds allows the instrument to image 30-35 Astronomical Units (AU) of a proto-planetary disc.

With most such discs thought to be hundreds of AU across, the MIRI can build up highly resolved mosaics of these planetary nurseries in unprecedented detail. With its spectrometer, the MIRI could even reveal the existence of water and/or hydrocarbons within the debris, paving the way for investigations into the habitability of other planetary systems.

The James Webb Space Telescope is a joint project of NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/miri-test.html


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How Warm Was This Summer?

An unparalleled heat wave in eastern Europe, coupled with intense droughts and fires around Moscow, put Earth’s temperatures in the headlines this summer. Likewise, a string of exceptionally warm days in July in the eastern United States strained power grids, forced nursing home evacuations, and slowed transit systems. Both high-profile events reinvigorated questions about humanity’s role in climate change.

But, from a global perspective, how warm was the summer exactly? How did the summer's temperatures compare with previous years? And was global warming the "cause" of the unusual heat waves? Scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, led by GISS's director, James Hansen, have analyzed summer temperatures and released an update on the GISS website that addresses all of these questions.

Globally, June through August, according to the GISS analysis, was the fourth-warmest summer period in GISS’s 131-year-temperature record. The same months during 2009, in contrast, were the second warmest on record. The slightly cooler 2010 summer temperatures were primarily the result of a moderate La Niña (cooler than normal temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean) replacing a moderate El Niño (warmer than normal temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean).


As part of their analysis, Hansen and colleagues released a series of graphs that help explain why perceptions of global temperatures vary -- often erroneously -- from season to season and year to year. For example, unusually warm summer temperatures in the United States and eastern Europe created the impression of global warming run amuck in those regions this summer, while last winter's unusually cool temperatures created the opposite impression. A more global view, as shown below for 2009 and 2010, makes clear that extrapolating global trends based on the experience of one or two regions can be misleading.

"Unfortunately, it is common for the public to take the most recent local seasonal temperature anomaly as indicative of long-term climate trends," Hansen notes. "[We hope] these global temperature anomaly maps may help people understand that the temperature anomaly in one place in one season has limited relevance to global trends."

Last winter, for example, unusually cool temperatures in much of the United States caused many Americans to wonder why temperatures seemed to be plummeting, and whether the Earth could actually be experiencing global warming in the face of such frigid temperatures. A more global view, seen in the lower left of the four graphs above, shows that global warming trends had hardly abated. In fact, despite the cool temperatures in the United States, last winter was the second-warmest on record.

Meanwhile, the global seasonal temperatures for the spring of 2010 -- March, April, and May -- was the warmest on GISS's record. Does that mean that 2010 will shape up to be the warmest on record? Since the warmest year on GISS’s record -- 2005 -- experienced especially high temperatures during the last four calendar months of the year, it’s not yet clear how 2010 will stack up.

"It is likely that the 2005 or 2010 calendar year means will turn out to be sufficiently close that it will be difficult to say which year was warmer, and results of our analysis may differ from those of other groups," Hansen notes. "What is clear, though, is that the warmest 12-month period in the GISS analysis was reached in mid-2010."

The Russian heat wave was highly unusual. Its intensity exceeded anything scientists have seen in the temperature record since widespread global temperature measurements became available in the 1880s. Indeed, a leading Russian meteorologist asserted that the country had not experienced such an intense heat wave in the last 1,000 years. And a prominent meteorologist with Weather Underground estimated such an event may occur as infrequently as once every 15,000 years.

In the face of such a rare event, there’s much debate and discussion about whether global warming can "cause" such extreme weather events. The answer -- both no and yes -- is not a simple one.

Weather in a given region occurs in such a complex and unstable environment, driven by such a multitude of factors, that no single weather event can be pinned solely on climate change. In that sense, it's correct to say that the Moscow heat wave was not caused by climate change.

However, if one frames the question slightly differently: "Would an event like the Moscow heat wave have occurred if carbon dioxide levels had remained at pre-industrial levels," the answer, Hansen asserts, is clear: "Almost certainly not."

The frequency of extreme warm anomalies increases disproportionately as global temperature rises. "Were global temperature not increasing, the chance of an extreme heat wave such as the one Moscow experienced, though not impossible, would be small," Hansen says.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/summer-temps.html


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NASA and NSF-Funded Research Finds First Potentially Habitable Exoplanet

A team of planet hunters from the University of California (UC) Santa Cruz, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced the discovery of a planet with three times the mass of Earth orbiting a nearby star at a distance that places it squarely in the middle of the star's "habitable zone."

This discovery was the result of more than a decade of observations using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, one of the world's largest optical telescopes. The research, sponsored by NASA and the National Science Foundation, placed the planet in an area where liquid water could exist on the planet's surface. If confirmed, this would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one.

To astronomers, a "potentially habitable" planet is one that could sustain life, not necessarily one where humans would thrive. Habitability depends on many factors, but having liquid water and an atmosphere are among the most important.

The new findings are based on 11 years of observations of the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 581using the HIRES spectrometer on the Keck I Telescope. The spectrometer allows precise measurements of a star's radial velocity (its motion along the line of sight from Earth), which can reveal the presence of planets. The gravitational tug of an orbiting planet causes periodic changes in the radial velocity of the host star. Multiple planets induce complex wobbles in the star's motion, and astronomers use sophisticated analyses to detect planets and determine their orbits and masses.

"Keck's long-term observations of the wobble of nearby stars enabled the detection of this multi-planetary system," said Mario R. Perez, Keck program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Keck is once again proving itself an amazing tool for scientific research."

Steven Vogt, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz, and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution lead the Lick-Carnegie Exoplanet Survey.

"Our findings offer a very compelling case for a potentially habitable planet," said Vogt. "The fact that we were able to detect this planet so quickly and so nearby tells us that planets like this must be really common."

The paper reports the discovery of two new planets around Gliese 581. This brings the total number of known planets around this star to six, the most yet discovered in a planetary system outside of our own. Like our solar system, the planets around Gliese 581 have nearly-circular orbits.

The new planet designated Gliese 581g has a mass three to four times that of Earth and orbits its star in just under 37 days. Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet with a definite surface and enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere.

Gliese 581, located 20 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra, has two previously detected planets that lie at the edges of the habitable zone, one on the hot side (planet c) and one on the cold side (planet d). While some astronomers still think planet d may be habitable if it has a thick atmosphere with a strong greenhouse effect to warm it up, others are skeptical. The newly-discovered planet g, however, lies right in the middle of the habitable zone.

The planet is tidally locked to the star, meaning that one side is always facing the star and basking in perpetual daylight, while the side facing away from the star is in perpetual darkness. One effect of this is to stabilize the planet's surface climates, according to Vogt. The most habitable zone on the planet's surface would be the line between shadow and light (known as the "terminator").

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/gliese_581_feature.html


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Goddard Team Obtains the ‘Unobtainium’ for NASA’s Next Space Observatory

Imagine building a car chassis without a blueprint or even a list of recommended construction materials.

In a sense, that's precisely what a team of engineers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., did when they designed a one-of-a-kind structure that is one of 9 key new technology systems of the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM). Just as a chassis supports the engine and other components in a car, the ISIM will hold four highly sensitive instruments, electronics, and other shared instrument systems flying on the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's next flagship observatory.

From scratch — without past experience to help guide them — the engineers designed the ISIM made of a never-before-manufactured composite material and proved through testing that it could withstand the super-cold temperatures it would encounter when the observatory reached its orbit 1.5-million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth. In fact, the ISIM structure survived temperatures that plunged as low as 27 Kelvin (-411 degrees Fahrenheit), colder than the surface of Pluto.

"It is the first large, bonded composite spacecraft structure to be exposed to such a severe environment," said Jim Pontius, ISIM lead mechanical engineer.

The 26-day test was specifically carried out to test whether the car-sized structure contracted and distorted as predicted when it cooled from room temperature to the frigid — very important since the science instruments must maintain a specific location on the structure to receive light gathered by the telescope's 6.5-meter (21.3-feet) primary mirror. If the structure shrunk or distorted in an unpredictable way due to the cold, the instruments no longer would be in position to gather data about everything from the first luminous glows following the big bang to the formation of star systems capable of supporting life.

"The tolerances are much looser on the Hubble Space Telescope," said Ray Ohl, a Goddard optical engineer who leads ISIM's optical integration and test. "The optical requirements for Webb are even more difficult to meet than those on Hubble."

Despite repeated cycles of testing, the truss-like assembly designed by Goddard engineers did not crack. The structure shrunk as predicted by only 170 microns — the width of a needle —when it reached 27 Kelvin (-411 degrees Fahrenheit), far exceeding the design requirement of about 500 microns. "We certainly wouldn’t have been able to realign the instruments on orbit if the structure moved too much," said ISIM Structure Project Manager Eric Johnson. "That's why we needed to make sure we had designed the right structure."

Obtaining the Unobtainium

Achieving the milestone was just one of many firsts for the Goddard team. Almost on every level, "we pushed the technology envelope, from the type of material we would use to build ISIM to how we would test it once it was assembled," Pontius added. "The technology challenges are what attracted the people to the program."

One of the first challenges the team tackled after NASA had named Goddard as the lead center to design and develop ISIM was identifying a structural material that would assure the instruments' precise cryogenic alignment and stability, yet survive the extreme gravitational forces experienced during launch.

An exhaustive search in the technical literature for a possible candidate material yielded nothing, leaving the team with only one alternative — developing its own as-yet-to-be manufactured material, which team members jokingly referred to as "unobtainium." Through mathematical modeling, the team discovered that by combining two composite materials, it could create a carbon fiber/cyanate-ester resin system that would be ideal for fabricating the structure's square tubes that measure 75-mm (3-inch) in diameter.

How then would engineers attach these tubes? Again through mathematical modeling, the team found it could bond the pieces together using a combination of nickel-alloy fittings, clips, and specially shaped composite plates joined with a novel adhesive process, smoothly distributing launch loads while holding the instruments in precise locations — a difficult engineering challenge because different materials react differently to changes in temperature.

"We engineered from the small pieces to the big pieces testing along the way to see if the failure theories were correct. We were looking to see where the design could go wrong," Pontius explained. "By incorporating the lessons learned into the final flight structure, we met the requirements and test validated our building-block approach."

Making Cold, Colder

The test inside Goddard's Space Environment Simulator — a three-story thermal-vacuum chamber that simulates the temperature and vacuum conditions found in space — presented its own set of technological hurdles. "We weren't sure we could get the simulator cold enough," said Paul Cleveland, a technical consultant at Goddard involved in the project. For most spacecraft, the simulator's ability to cool down to 100 Kelvin (-279.7 degrees Fahrenheit) is cold enough. Not so for the Webb telescope, which will endure a constant temperature of 39 Kelvin (-389.5 degrees Fahrenheit) when it reaches its deep-space orbit.

The group engineered a giant tuna fish can-like shroud, cooled by helium gas, and inserted it inside the 27-foot diameter chamber. "When you get down to these temperatures, the physics change," Cleveland said. Anything, including wires or small gaps in the chamber, can create an intractable heat source. "It's a totally different arena," he added. "One watt can raise the temperature by 20 degrees Kelvin. We had to meticulously close the gaps."

With the gaps closed and the ISIM safely lowered into the helium shroud, technicians began sucking air from the chamber to create a vacuum. They activated the simulator's nitrogen panels to cool the chamber to 100 Kelvin (-279.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and began injecting helium gas inside the shroud to chill the ISIM to the correct temperature.

To measure ISIM's reaction as it cooled to the sub-freezing temperatures, the team used a technique called photogrammetry, the science of making precise measurements by means of photography. However, using the technique wasn't so cut-and-dried when carried out in a frosty, airless environment, Ohl said. To protect two commercial-grade cameras from extreme frostbite, team members placed the equipment inside specially designed protective canisters and attached the camera assemblies to the ends of a motorized boom.

As the boom made nearly 360-degree sweeps inside the helium shroud, the cameras snapped photos through a gold-coated glass window of reflective, hockey puck-shaped targets bolted onto ISIM's composite tubes. From the photos, the team could precisely determine whether the targets moved, and if so, by how much.

"It passed with flying colors," Pontius said, referring to the negligible shrinkage. "This test was a huge success for us."

With the critical milestone test behind them, team members say their work likely will serve NASA in the future. Many future science missions will also operate in deep space, and therefore would have to be tested under extreme cryogenic conditions. In the meantime, though, the facility will be used to test other Webb telescope systems, including the backplane, the structure to which the Webb telescope’s 18 primary mirror segments are bolted when the observatory is assembled. "We need to characterize its bending at cryogenic temperatures," Ohl said.


For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/jwst-unobtainium.html


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Wildfires: A Symptom of Climate Change

This summer, wildfires swept across some 22 regions of Russia, blanketing the country with dense smoke and in some cases destroying entire villages. In the foothills of Boulder, Colo., this month, wildfires exacted a similar toll on a smaller scale.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of wildfires large and small are underway at any given time across the globe. Beyond the obvious immediate health effects, this "biomass" burning is part of the equation for global warming. In northern latitudes, wildfires actually are a symptom of the Earth's warming.

'We already see the initial signs of climate change, and fires are part of it," said Dr. Amber Soja, a biomass burning expert at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) in Hampton, Va.

And research suggests that a hotter Earth resulting from global warming will lead to more frequent and larger fires.

The fires release "particulates" -- tiny particles that become airborne -- and greenhouse gases that warm the planet.

Human ignition

A common perception is that most wildfires are caused by acts of nature, such as lightning. The inverse is true, said Dr. Joel Levine, a biomass burning expert at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

"What we found is that 90 percent of biomass burning is human instigated," said Levine, who was the principal investigator for a NASA biomass burning program that ran from 1985 to 1999.

Levine and others in the Langley-led Biomass Burning Program travelled to wildfires in Canada, California, Russia, South African, Mexico and the wetlands of NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Biomass burning accounts for the annual production of some 30 percent of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a leading cause of global warming, Levine said.

Dr. Paul F. Crutzen, a pioneer of biomass burning, was the first to document the gases produced by wildfires in addition to carbon dioxide.

"Modern global estimates agree rather well with the initial values," said Crutzen, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1995 with Mario J. Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland for their "work in atmospheric chemistry, particularly concerning the formation and decomposition of ozone."

Northern exposure

Whether biomass burning is on the rise globally is not clear. But it definitely is increasing in far northern latitudes, in "boreal" forests comprised largely of coniferous trees and peatlands.

The reason is that, unlike the tropics, northern latitudes are warming, and experiencing less precipitation, making them more susceptible to fire. Coniferous trees shed needles, which are stored in deep organic layers over time, providing abundant fuel for fires, said Soja, whose work at the NIA supports NASA.

"That's one of the reasons northern latitudes are so important," she said, "and the smoldering peat causes horrible air quality that can affect human health and result in death."

Fires in different ecosystems burn at different temperatures due to the nature and structure of the biomass and its moisture content. Burning biomass varies from very thin, dry grasses in savannahs to the very dense and massive, moister trees of the boreal, temperate and tropical forests.

Fire combustion products vary over a range depending on the degree of combustion, said Levine, who authored a chapter on biomass burning for a book titled "Methane and Climate Change," published in August by Earthscan.

Flaming combustion like the kind in thin, small, dry grasses in savannahs results in near-complete combustion and produces mostly carbon dioxide. Smoldering combustion in moist, larger fuels like those in forest and peatlands results in incomplete combustion and dirtier emission products such as carbon monoxide.

Boreal fires burn the hottest and contribute more pollutants per unit area burned.

'Eerie experience'

Being near large wildfires is a unique experience, said Levine. "The smoke is so thick it looks like twilight. It blocks out the sun. It looks like another planet. It's a very eerie experience."

In Russia, the wildfires are believed caused by a warming climate that made the current summer the hottest on record. The hotter weather increases the incidence of lightning, the major cause of naturally occurring biomass burning.

Soja said she hopes the wildfires in Russia prompt the country to support efforts to mitigate climate change. In fact, Russia's president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, last month acknowledged the need to do something about it.

"What's happening with the planet's climate right now needs to be a wake-up call to all of us, meaning all heads of state, all heads of social organizations, in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate," said Medvedev, in contrast to Russia's long-standing position that human-induced climate change is not occurring.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/wildfires.html