Groovy Hills Rising from Titan Surface

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New wrinkles on Titan
In this synthetic aperture radar image obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, two generally similar features, upper center and lower right, appear to be low mountains with grooves running roughly in the up-down direction. › Full image and caption
Hills with a wrinkly radial pattern stand out in a new radar image captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Dec. 28, 2009.

The grooved mounds in the picture, which are located in a northern hemisphere region known as Belet, are about 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide and about 60 meters (200 feet) high.

The shapes of these landscape features have not been seen on Titan before, though they bear similarity to spidery features known as coronae on Venus. A corona is a circular to elliptical feature thought to result from the flow of heat in a planet's interior.

Like forensic scientists, radar team members are trying to sleuth out what created these lines and hills on Titan.

"This star-shaped pattern of the hills indicates something significant happening in the middle of the star," said Steve Wall of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., a Cassini scientist on the radar team. "It might be caused by tectonic forces, such as the forces that pull the crust of a planet apart, or rainfall that leads to erosion, or an ice intrusion like a dike."

All of these forces produce grooves on Earth's surface, but Wall says the radar team is not yet sure what is happening on Titan.

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NASA’s WISE Eye Spies Near-Earth Asteroid

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near-Earth asteroid discovered by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer
The red dot at the center of this image is the first near-Earth asteroid discovered by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE › Full image and caption
NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has spotted its first never-before-seen near-Earth asteroid, the first of hundreds it is expected to find during its mission to map the whole sky in infrared light. There is no danger of the newly discovered asteroid hitting Earth.

The near-Earth object, designated 2010 AB78, was discovered by WISE Jan. 12. The mission's sophisticated software picked out the moving object against a background of stationary stars. As WISE circled Earth, scanning the sky above, it observed the asteroid several times during a period of one-and-a-half days before the object moved beyond its view. Researchers then used the University of Hawaii's 2.2-meter (88-inch) visible-light telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea to follow up and confirm the discovery.

The asteroid is currently about 158 million kilometers (98 million miles) from Earth. It is estimated to be roughly 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter and circles the sun in an elliptical orbit tilted to the plane of our solar system. The object comes as close to the sun as Earth, but because of its tilted orbit, it will not pass very close to Earth for many centuries. This asteroid does not pose any foreseeable impact threat to Earth, but scientists will continue to monitor it.

Near-Earth objects are asteroids and comets with orbits that pass relatively close to Earth's path around the sun. In extremely rare cases of an impact, the objects may cause damage to Earth's surface. An asteroid about 10 kilometers (6 miles) wide is thought to have plunged into our planet 65 million years ago, triggering a global disaster and killing off the dinosaurs.

Additional asteroid and comet detections will continue to come from WISE. The observations will be automatically sent to the clearinghouse for solar system bodies, the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., for comparison against the known catalog of solar system objects. A community of professional and amateur astronomers will provide follow-up observations, establishing firm orbits for the previously unseen objects.

"This is just the beginning," said Ned Wright, the mission's principal investigator from UCLA. "We've got a fire hose of data pouring down from space."

On Jan. 14, the WISE mission began its official survey of the entire sky in infrared light, one month after it rocketed into a polar orbit around Earth from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. By casting a wide net, the mission will catch all sorts of cosmic objects, from asteroids in our own solar system to galaxies billions of light-years away. Its data will serve as a cosmic treasure map, pointing astronomers and telescopes, such as NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, to the most interesting finds.

WISE is expected to find about 100,000 previously unknown asteroids in our main asteroid belt, a rocky ring of debris between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It will also spot hundreds of previously unseen near-Earth objects.

By observing infrared light, WISE will reveal the darkest members of the near-Earth object population -- those that don't reflect much visible light. The mission will contribute important information about asteroid and comet sizes. Visible-light estimates of an asteroid's size can be deceiving, because a small, light-colored space rock can look the same as a big, dark one. In infrared, however, a big dark rock will give off more of a thermal, or infrared glow, and reveal its true size. This size information will give researchers a better estimate of how often Earth can expect potentially devastating impacts.

"We are thrilled to have found our first new near-Earth object," said Amy Mainzer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Mainzer is the principal investigator of NEOWISE, a program to mine the collected WISE data for new solar system objects. "Many programs are searching for near-Earth objects using visible light, but some asteroids are dark, like pavement, and don't reflect a lot of sunlight. But like a parking lot, the dark objects heat up and emit infrared light that WISE can see."

"It is great to receive the first of many anticipated near-Earth object discoveries by the WISE system," said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at JPL. "Analysis of the WISE data will go a long way toward understanding the true nature of this population."

JPL manages the WISE mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The ground-based observations are partly supported by the National Science Foundation. ?

More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise .

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Hurricane Season 2010: Tropical Cyclone Olga (Southern Pacific Ocean)

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Olga was a tropical cyclone that formed in the southwestern Pacific Ocean on Saturday, January 23, and crept toward Cairns, Australia. Olga made landfall in Queensland and weakened to a low pressure area.


Ogla made landfall on January 24 at Port Douglas as a category 1 storm. Its center came ashore at around 2 p.m. Australia local time near Cape Tribulation bringing gusty winds and rains.

Today, January 25, a Cyclone Watch continues for the southern Gulf of Carpentaria coast and islands from Port McArthur to Burketown. The low pressure area formerly known as Olga is located in the northwestern part of Queensland, Australia. At 10:00 p.m. Australia Darwin Local time (7:30 a.m. ET) Ex-Tropical Cyclone Olga was estimated to be 251 miles (405 kilometers) west of Georgetown and 93 miles (150 kilometers)southwest of Karumba, near 18.3 degrees South 139.7 degrees East.

Olga the low is moving west at 27 mph (44 kilometers/ph) across the base of Cape York Peninsula towards the Northern Territory/Queensland Border.

It the low moves into the warm waters of the southern Gulf of Carpenteria it could re-intensify into a tropical cyclone, but the Joint Typhoon Warning Center does not currently expect that to occur. Meanwhile, forecasters will keep an eye on the low as it brings rainfall into the Northern Territory.

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NASA’S Mars Rover Spirit Topic Of Media Call Jan. 26

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NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Jan. 26 to discuss the status of the agency's Mars rover Spirit. The robotic explorer has been stuck in sandy soil on Mars for the past eight months.
The participants are:
- Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program, NASA Headquarters in Washington
- John Callas, project manager, Mars Exploration Rovers, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

- Ashley Stroupe, rover driver, Mars Exploration Rovers, JPL
- Steve Squyres, principal investigator, Mars Exploration Rovers, Cornell University

For call in information, journalists should e-mail a request with their name, media affiliation and telephone number to J.D. Harrington at:

j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live at:

http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio

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Reflections

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Expedition 22 flight engineer Oleg Kotov used a digital still camera to take this self-portrait during a January 2010 spacewalk. Also visible in the reflections of his visor are various components of the station and the Earth below. During the spacewalk, Kotov and cosmonaut Maxim Suraev (out of frame) prepared the Mini-Research Module 2 (MRM2), known as Poisk, for future Russian vehicle dockings. Suraev and Expedition 22 commander Jeffrey Williams were the first to use the new docking port when they relocated their Soyuz TMA-16 spacecraft from the aft port of the Zvezda Service Module on Jan. 21.

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Female Teachers’ Math Anxiety May Give Girls the Arithmetic Jitters | 80beats

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girl-mathDoes your first- or second-grade daughter have trouble with math? Her anxiety could be stemming not just from a genuine fear of number crunching but also, a new study indicates, from an anxious female math teacher.

The study (pdf) published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that if a female teacher is anxious about math, she tends to pass on that anxiety to her female students. This can make the female students believe they aren’t hard-wired for math like the boys, and cause them to shy away from fully flexing and developing their mathematical muscles.

The findings are the product of a year-long study on 17 first-and second-grade teachers and 52 boys and 65 girls who were their students [Science Daily]. Researchers recruited the female teachers from a Midwestern school district and assessed their level of math anxiety. They also gave math tests to 117 of these teachers’ students and jotted down their beliefs about math and gender at the beginning and end of the year. By the end of the year, the more anxious teachers were about their own math skills, the more likely their female students – but not the boys – were to agree that “boys are good at math and girls are good at reading” [AP].

The girls who bought into the math-is-for-boys notion also scored, on average, almost 5 points lower than the boys on the tests. The researchers noted that the boys weren’t affected by their teachers’ math anxiety like the girls. However, the researchers aren’t sure exactly how the angst was transmitted from teachers to students. Perhaps math-anxious teachers call on girls to solve math problems less frequently; praise boys more effusively; or simply imply that it’s not important for girls to be good at math [Los Angeles Times]. It’s also not clear if a study of male elementary teachers with math phobia would have produced similar results.

The study suggests that math anxiety could have a long-term effect on girls–as the nervousness could prevent them from picking math and science in high school and may preclude them from having certain careers in engineering, science and technology. It also reveals that there needs to be a fundamental re-thinking of how teachers view the subject, as more than 90 percent of elementary school teachers in the country are women and they are able to get their teaching certificates with very little mathematics preparation, according to the National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education. [Science Daily]. The study’s authors say that teacher training programs should be tweaked to include more math, and that math anxiety among teachers should be openly addressed.

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80beats: Girls and Boys Are Equally Good at Math, Study Finds
80beats: More Evidence That Girls Kick Ass at Math, Just Like Boys

Image: iStockphoto


Comet Barrage Ignited One Jovian Moon While Leaving Its Twin for Dead | 80beats

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jupiter-moonsWhile Jupiter’s two largest moons, Ganymede and Callisto, are nearly the same size, they’re far from identical twins. Now, in a Nature Geoscience study, Amy Barr and her team might have figured out this tale of two similar moons with very different histories.

Voyager and Galileo mission images showed Ganymede, seen here on the right, to be a geologically active place, with a surface that scientists think changes through tectonic processes like those that we have here on the Earth. Callisto, seen on the left, looks totally different: Its rock and ice have not mixed in the same way, and it doesn’t seem to have such active geology, despite being approximately the same size as Ganymede. For 30 years, researchers have wondered what process could have got enough heat into Ganymede to drive its geological evolution without setting off Callisto as well [ScienceNOW Daily News].

Trying to crack the puzzle, Barr turned to comets. Just less than 4 billion years ago, astronomers hypothesize, a wave of comets careened across the solar system during a phase called the late heavy bombardment. Barr’s team of scientists modeled how that comet storm would have affected Jupiter’s satellites. Ganymede, located about 500,000 miles closer to giant Jupiter than Callisto, bore the brunt of its parent’s heavy hands. Jupiter’s extreme gravity (a 150-pound person would weigh 355 pounds on Jupiter) tugged more comets toward Ganymede and caused them to crash at higher speeds than it did for Callisto [Discovery News].

That was the turning point, Barr says. If all those cosmic snowballs pounded Ganymede with enough energy, the formation of its core and other geological processes could have become self-sustaining. Says Barr: “Impacts during this period melted Ganymede so thoroughly and deeply that the heat could not be quickly removed. All of Ganymede’s rock sank to its center the same way that all the chocolate chips sink to the bottom of a melted carton of ice cream” [SPACE.com].

Castillo would not have been so lucky. Shortchanged on impact energy, Callisto would not have melted enough to achieve “runaway” heating during separation, leaving it cold and without a core [ScienceNOW Daily News]. Thus, Barr’s team says, the moon has been dead, geologically speaking, ever since.

Related Content:
80beats: 400 Years After Galileo Spotted Them, The Moons of Jupiter Are Looking Fly (photo gallery)
80beats: Saturn and Jupiter’s Moons Battle for Alien-Hunters’ Attention
80beats: Jupiter Grabbed a Comet for 12 Years, Then Flung It Back Out
80beats: Mysterious Smash on Jupiter Leaves an Earth-Sized Scar
DISCOVER: Jupiter, Not Bust chronicles the Galileo probe’s Jupiter observations in 1996

Image: NASA


Signs of breast cancer

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For many women probably the first symptom of breast cancer is finding a lump in one of their breasts. This, however, is not necessarily a cause for immediate alarm as around 90% of breast lumps found are benign, which means that they are non-cancerous. It is important to know, however, that this can only be ascertained by a doctor and a woman that finds a lump in her breast should seek immediate medical advice.

In general, breast cell change causing lumpiness is more obvious just prior to a period – especially in women over the age of 35 – and is normally indicative of benigness. Women might also notice such things as a change in either the size or shape of the breast or nipple, especially if the nipple sinks into the breast or takes on an irregularity of shape. Any blood-stained discharge from the nipple or any rashes either on or around the nipple should also be immediately examined by a health care professional.

Of course it is important to realize that if you have one of these signs it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have cancer, but you should seek medical advice to be on the safe side. Women should also be concerned about any swelling or lumps in the armpit region, as this can be a sign that the cancer has actually spread to the lymph nodes. There may also be changes in the skin, including dimpling of the skin along with new wrinkling.

There is also a rare type of breast cancer known as inflammatory breast cancer, and this type of cancer can present with different symptoms whereby the entire breast can present with red inflammation and may also be extremely sore – either to the touch or when left alone. The breast itself may also feel hard to the touch, with the skin sometimes resembling an orange peel due to the fact that the pores stand out where the inflammation occurs.

Also, with regards to the previously mentioned rash, this can sometimes signify another rare form of cancer when the rash presents around the nipple. This form is called Paget’s disease, and the rash is red and scaly and can also itch. On first sight, it may resemble eczema and is, in fact, sometimes at first mistaken for this.

In general terms experiencing breast pain is not something to be overly concerned about, although it may signify some other condition that requires some medical attention. A lot of perfectly healthy women find that their breasts are tender and sore during their period, and this is no further cause for concern or a mark of anything portentous as women can experience sore breasts from time to time without any sinister underlying cause. Most breast pain is not a result of cancer, however some breast cancers can cause pain so it is important to see your GP as soon as possible for a quick diagnosis. As ever, early diagnosis and treatment are the keys to a successful recovery, so medical help should be sought in case of any concerns.

World’s Oldest and Most Expensive Camera Hits the Auction Block [Cameras]

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Daguerreotype cameras are the great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfathers of the devices we use for snapshots today. Recently the earliest—and with an expected price of 700,000 euro, the most expensive—examples of such a camera was rediscovered in a private collection.

If you've got between 200,000 euro, the auction's starting price, and 700,000 euro, the expected final price, and a weakness for old, wooden sliding-box cameras then this one's for you. It's got the signature of its name sake, Jacques Mande Daguerre, and was actually built by his brother-in-law.

This is a neat piece of shutterbug history and I truly hope that it ends up in a museum collection where it can be viewed by the public rather than disappearing into another private basement museum. [Slashgear]


Archos 7 Android Tablet Leaked, Featuring Webcam For Video Chat and New 7-Inch Size [Tablets]

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Archos' first Android tablet, the Archos 5, didn't quite live up to its promises,but a second leaked Android tablet from the French could prove more feature-some if realized, with a front-facing webcam and new 7-inch size.

Thanks to a slip-up by the UK retailer Data-Mind, we've got photos and specs of the tablet, which will apparently go on sale in March for £149.99 ($242). It'll have 8GB of onboard storage, a webcam, and 7-inch LCD screen with 800 x 480 pixels. That's 2.2-inches more than the Archos 5, with the storage being the same.

It's not just hardware which will be upgraded between the models, with the software being upgraded too. Song lyrics support, and compatibility for the APE file format will be included, and ArchosFans, which were eagle-eyed enough to spot the leaked product, are speculating about the missing Archos Media Center widget from the homescreen.

Hey, I realize it's difficult to get excited about a non-Apple tablet today, but try and show a little enthusiasm for this potential leaked device? Hmm? [Data-Mind via ArchosFans via ArchosLounge]


Moon in the Mirror | Bad Astronomy

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You may know me as a buster of the Moon landing hoax claims, debunking the dumbosity of people who think the Apollo missions were faked.

But I have been leaked a picture that makes it clear that the truth behind Apollo was far, far bigger than anyone has ever suspected. In fact, it’s a real Thriller.

Reader Dan Brennan from the Unmanned Space Flight bulletin board sent this picture to me:

wechoosethemoon_jackson

It’s a shot from Apollo 11 of Buzz Aldrin in the command module, a screen capture from the amazing (but Flash-heavy) site We Choose the Moon. Before I even read the content of Dan’s email I knew what he wanted to show me. Can you see it? Look just to the right of Buzz, at what should be a gauge on the control panel… but actually shows what looks for all the world (well, all the cis-lunar space) like Michael Jackson!

In fact, I think it is Michael Jackson.

jackson_apolloThe evidence is overwhelming. Sure, he looks like he’s wearing an eyepatch, but given his wardrobe choices over the years, is an eyepatch all that unlikely? And look at this picture for comparison — my Photoshop skillz are unmatched (happily for millions of satisfied Adobe customers). The resemblance is too strong to be coincidence.

So what’s the deal? You might think that Buzz was a fan, so he had a picture of Jackson taped to the console — though Michael was only about 11 when our first mission to the Moon launched, so that’s silly. The gauge in the panel is visible in other images, and you can tell there’s a glass cover on it. That means the face is not taped on, but is in fact a reflection!

The conclusion is clear. What’s going on here, obviously, is that a time-traveling Michael Jackson stowed away aboard the Apollo 11 capsule to experience the mission for himself.

I mean, c’mon. How do you think he learned how to moonwalk?

Shamone!


Apple Before a Launch: "It Can Be a Little Frightening" [Apple]

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Turns out, Apple's veil of secrecy applies internally, as well. Former engineer Edward Eigerman spoke with Bloomberg News this morning about the atmosphere at the company before a major product launch—turns out, it's not all wine and roses.

Eigerman has a unique perspective on the extreme lengths Apple goes through to prevent leaks, having been fired for accidentally slipping software to a client a week early.

The upside is that only a very few people in Cupertino know what's actually going to be announced today, so they're as excited as the rest of us! The downside is that they're also likely in a debilitating paranoiac state. But, hey, you take the good with the bad, right? [Bloomberg via Cult of Mac via 9to5 Mac]


The Original Secret Apple Tablet Almost Made the Windows Mistake [Apple]

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The reason Windows tablets have sucked is that they've crammed desktop interfaces onto tablets. Assumedly, the Apple tablet's magic is in the interface. So it's funny that Apple's secret tablet from over 14 years ago made the same mistake.

The Newton was still in production. But what Apple secretly pitched to select medical centers over a decade ago wasn't a Newton. It was a 10-inch-or-so tablet, running an interface that was much, much closer to the full desktop Mac OS—Mac OS 8 at the time—modified with pen input. Though pitched to the medical market, it was a general-purpose computer that was in the advanced prototype stages. It never shipped. (Much like another ancient Apple tablet.) That's the story, according to one of the few medical personnel who saw the monstrosity.

Imagine something like this, but not quite as swishy.

After this Mac OS tablet was apparently killed in the night, we wouldn't hear about another tablet until after Jobs returned, talk of Inkwell in 2000—the pen input software ultimately built into OS X—with the word of a "tablet" first emerging in 2003.

Apple's still interested in medical IT applications, actually, one place tablet PCs have actually managed to gain traction. Last year, it quietly partnered with Epic Systems, one of the major electronic medical records companies, to test software on the iPhone for accessing patient medical charts. Perhaps less than coincidentally, Apple execs have supposedly been spotted making visits with some frequency to Cedar-Sinai Medical Center in LA, to talk about a new device, and how the hospital might use it. An Apple tablet would make for one very fancy clipboard.


Synthetic Biology Cells Produce Light Show

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From: BBC News Website

Scientists have produced a very unusual light show, engineering bacterial cells to fluoresce in synchrony.

The researchers turned the cells into synchronised "genetic clocks" - programming them to switch a fluorescent protein on and off.

These waves

Engineers 'Can Learn From Slime'

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From: BBC News Website:

The way fungus-like slime moulds grow could help engineers design wireless communication networks.

Scientists drew this conclusion after observing a slime mould as it grew into a network that was almost identical to the Tokyo rail system.

The scientists

Apple Patents Reveal Proximity Detector For Tablets [Apple]

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On the cusp of the Apple event, new patents have been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office, showing a proximity-sensing multitouch screen amongst other features. It could be a patent for today's product announcement, or The Future.

Patently Apple dug up the goods for 13 patents, all of which have been authorized by the USPTO for Apple to use, some years after Apple first filed for them. The timing is worth considering, with the closeness to today's event either being a deliberate hype tactic for whatever's announced today, or coincidental (and for future products.)

The 13 patents include an Automatic Detection of Channel Bandwidth, Color Management System,
Apparatus and Method for Rotating the Display Orientation of a Captured image, a
Video Conferencing System, Interface for Providing Modeless Timeline Based Selection of an Audio or Video File, but none are quite as telling as the Proximity Detector for Tablets.

For the full descriptions of each patent, including diagrams, mosey on over here. [USPTO via Patently Apple via Engadget]


NASA Airborne Radar Studies Haiti Earthquake Faults

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UAVSAR airborne radar will create 3-D maps of earthquake faults over wide swaths of Haiti
NASA's UAVSAR airborne radar will create 3-D maps of earthquake faults over wide swaths of Haiti (red shaded area) and the Dominican Republic (yellow shaded area).
Larger image
In response to the disaster in Haiti on Jan. 12, NASA has added a series of science overflights of earthquake faults in Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the island of Hispaniola to a previously scheduled three-week airborne radar campaign to Central America.

NASA's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar, or UAVSAR, left NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., on Jan. 25 aboard a modified NASA Gulfstream III aircraft.

During its trek to Central America, which will run through mid-February, the repeat-pass L-band wavelength radar, developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., will study the structure of tropical forests; monitor volcanic deformation and volcano processes; and examine Mayan archeology sites. After the Haitian earthquake, NASA managers added additional science objectives that will allow UAVSAR's unique observational capabilities to study geologic processes in Hispaniola following the earthquake. UAVSAR's ability to provide rapid access to regions of interest, short repeat flight intervals, high resolution and its variable viewing geometry make it a powerful tool for studying ongoing Earth processes.

"UAVSAR will allow us to image deformations of Earth's surface and other changes associated with post-Haiti earthquake geologic processes, such as aftershocks, earthquakes that might be triggered by the main earthquake farther down the fault line, and the potential for landslides," said JPL's Paul Lundgren, the principal investigator for the Hispaniola overflights. "Because of Hispaniola's complex tectonic setting, there is an interest in determining if the earthquake in Haiti might trigger other earthquakes at some unknown point in the future, either along adjacent sections of the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault that was responsible for the main earthquake, or on other faults in northern Hispaniola, such as the Septentrional fault."

Lundgren says these upcoming flights, and others NASA will conduct in the coming weeks, months and years, will help scientists better assess the geophysical processes associated with earthquakes along large faults and better understand the risks.

UAVSAR uses a technique called interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or InSAR, that sends pulses of microwave energy from the aircraft to the ground to detect and measure very subtle deformations in Earth's surface, such as those caused by earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and glacier movements. Flying at a nominal altitude of 12,500 meters (41,000 feet), the radar, located in a pod under the aircraft's belly, collects data over a selected region. It then flies over the same region again, minutes to months later, using the aircraft's advanced navigation system to precisely fly over the same path to an accuracy of within 5 meters (16.5 feet). By comparing these camera-like images, interferograms are formed that have encoded the surface deformation, from which scientists can measure the slow surface deformations involved with the buildup and release of strain along earthquake faults.

Since November of 2009, JPL scientists have collected data gathered on a number of Gulfstream III flights over California's San Andreas fault and other major California earthquake faults, a process that will be repeated about every six months for the next several years. From such data, scientists will create 3-D maps for regions of interest.

Flight plans call for multiple observations of the Hispaniola faults this week and in early to mid-February. Subsequent flights may be added based on events in Haiti and aircraft availability. After processing, NASA will make the UAVSAR imagery available to the public through the JPL UAVSAR website and the Alaska Satellite Facility Distributed Active Archive Center. The initial data will be available in several weeks.

Lundgren said the Dominican Republic flights over the Septentrional fault will provide scientists with a baseline set of radar imagery in the event of future earthquakes there. Such observations, combined with post-event radar imagery, will allow scientists to measure ground deformation at the time of the earthquakes to determine how slip on the faults is distributed and also to monitor longer-term motions after the earthquakes to learn more about fault zone properties. The UAVSAR data could also be used to pinpoint exactly which part of the fault slipped during an earthquake, data that can be used by rescue and damage assessment officials to better estimate what areas might be most affected.

For more on UAVSAR, visit: http://uavsar.jpl.nasa.gov . For more on how UAVSAR is being used to study earthquake faults and landslide processes, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=2190 .

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