Our School - PUMS Vedapatti!: August 2018

Friday, 31 August 2018

NASA Invites Media to Witness Final Orion Parachute Test in Arizona Desert

NASA is inviting media to view the final test of the Orion spacecraft’s parachute system on Wednesday, Sept. 12, at the U.S. Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. This test is the last in a series of eight to qualify the parachutes for crewed Orion missions to the Moon and beyond.

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Martian Skies Clearing over Opportunity Rover

A planet-encircling dust storm on Mars, which was first detected May 30 and halted operations for the Opportunity rover, continues to abate.

With clearing skies over Opportunity's resting spot in Mars' Perseverance Valley, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, believe the nearly 15-year-old, solar-powered rover will soon receive enough sunlight to automatically initiate recovery procedures -- if the rover is able to do so. To prepare, the Opportunity mission team has developed a two-step plan to provide the highest probability of successfully communicating with the rover and bringing it back online.

"The Sun is breaking through the haze over Perseverance Valley, and soon there will be enough sunlight present that Opportunity should be able to recharge its batteries," said John Callas, Opportunity project manager at JPL. "When the tau level [a measure of the amount of particulate matter in the Martian sky] dips below 1.5, we will begin a period of actively attempting to communicate with the rover by sending it commands via the antennas of NASA's Deep Space Network. Assuming that we hear back from Opportunity, we will begin the process of discerning its status and bringing it back online."

The rover's last communication with Earth was received June 10, and Opportunity's current health is unknown. Opportunity engineers are relying on the expertise of Mars scientists analyzing data from the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to estimate the tau near the rover's position.

"The dust haze produced by the Martian global dust storm of 2018 is one of the most extensive on record, but all indications are it is finally coming to a close," said MRO Project Scientist Rich Zurek at JPL. "MARCI images of the Opportunity site have shown no active dust storms for some time within 3,000 kilometers [about 1,900 miles] of the rover site."

With skies clearing, mission managers are hopeful the rover will attempt to call home, but they are also prepared for an extended period of silence. "If we do not hear back after 45 days, the team will be forced to conclude that the Sun-blocking dust and the Martian cold have conspired to cause some type of fault from which the rover will more than likely not recover," said Callas. "At that point our active phase of reaching out to Opportunity will be at an end. However, in the unlikely chance that there is a large amount of dust sitting on the solar arrays that is blocking the Sun's energy, we will continue passive listening efforts for several months."

The additional several months for passive listening are an allowance for the possibility that a Red Planet dust devil could come along and literally dust off Opportunity's solar arrays. Such "cleaning events" were first discovered by Mars rover teams in 2004 when, on several occasions, battery power levels aboard both Spirit and Opportunity increased by several percent during a single Martian night, when the logical expectation was that they would continue to decrease. These cleaning dust devils have even been imaged by both rovers on the surface and spacecraft in orbit (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8lfJ0c7WQ8 and https://mars.nasa.gov/resources/5307/the-serpent-dust-devil-of-mars/).

The chances are small that dust accumulation would be the root cause of Opportunity's lack of communication. Nonetheless, each day during the passive phase, JPL's Radio Science group will scour the signal records taken by a very sensitive broadband receiver of radio frequencies emanating from Mars, looking for a sign that the rover is trying to reach out.

Even if the team hears back from Opportunity during either phase, there is no assurance the rover will be operational. The impact of this latest storm on Opportunity's systems is unknown but could have resulted in reduced energy production, diminished battery performance, or other unforeseen damage that could make it difficult for the rover to fully return online.

While the situation in Perseverance Valley is critical, the rover team is cautiously optimistic, knowing that Opportunity has overcome significant challenges during its 14-plus years on Mars. The rover lost use of its front steering -- its left-front in June of 2017, and right front in 2005. Its 256-megabyte flash memory is no longer functioning. The team also knows that everything about the rover is well beyond its warranty period -- both Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit, were constructed for 90-day missions (Spirit lasted 20 times longer and Opportunity is going on 60 times). The rovers were designed to travel about 1,000 yards, and Opportunity has logged more than 28 miles. Through thick and thin, the team has seen their rover soldier on. Now, Opportunity engineers and scientists of Opportunity are planning, and hoping, that this latest dilemma is just another bump in their Martian road.

"In a situation like this you hope for the best but plan for all eventualities," said Callas. "We are pulling for our tenacious rover to pull her feet from the fire one more time. And if she does, we will be there to hear her."

Updates on the dust storm and tau can be foundhere.

JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, built Opportunity and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

For more information about Opportunity, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/rovers

https://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov

News Media Contact

DC Agle

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-9011

agle@jpl.nasa.gov

JoAnna Wendel

NASA Headquarters, Washington

202-358-1003

Joanna.r.wendel@nasa.gov

2018-206

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NASA Awards Contract for Earth Science Mission Hosting Services

NASA has awarded a contract to General Atomics of San Diego, California, for services required to host the agency’s Multi-Angle Imager for Aerosols (MAIA) instrument on a commercial satellite in low-Earth orbit.

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NASA Awards Contract to Upgrade Launch Pad Fuel System for World’s Largest Rocket

NASA has awarded a contract to Precision Mechanical, Inc., in Cocoa, Florida, for the manufacture, fabrication and installation of upgrades to the Liquid Hydrogen (LH2) System at Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

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Thursday, 30 August 2018

Media Invited to News Conference with NASA Astronaut Anne McClain and Space Station Crewmates

NASA astronaut Anne McClain, along with her crewmates, David Saint-Jacques of the Canadian Space Agency and Oleg Kononenko of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, will discuss their upcoming mission to the International Space Station in a news conference at 2 p.m. EDT Thursday, Sept. 6, at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

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NASA Awards Electrical Systems Engineering Services Contract

NASA has awarded the Electrical Systems Engineering Services (ESES) III contract to Science Systems and Applications, Inc. (SSAI) of Greenbelt, Maryland.

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Wednesday, 29 August 2018

NASA's InSight Has a Thermometer for Mars

Ambitious climbers, forget Mt. Everest. Dream about Mars.

The Red Planet has some of the tallest mountains in the solar system. They include Olympus Mons, a volcano nearly three times the height of Everest. It borders a region called the Tharsis plateau, where three equally awe-inspiring volcanoes dominate the landscape.

But what geologic processes created these features on the Martian surface? Scientists have long wondered -- and may soon know more.

NASA and DLR (German Aerospace Center) plan to take the planet's temperature for the first time ever, measuring how heat flows out of the planet and drives this inspiring geology. Detecting this escaping heat will be a crucial part of a mission called InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

InSight will be the first mission to study Mars' deep interior, using its Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument to measure heat as it is conducted from the interior to the planet's surface. This energy was in part captured when Mars formed more than 4 billion years ago, preserving a record of its creation. That energy is also due to the decay of radioactive elements in the rocky interior.

The way heat moves through a planet's mantle and crust determines what surface features it will have, said Sue Smrekar of JPL, the mission's deputy principal investigator and the deputy lead for HP3.

"Most of the planet's geology is a result of heat," Smrekar said. "Volcanic eruptions in the ancient past were driven by the flow of this heat, pushing up and constructing the towering mountains Mars is famous for."

A mole for Mars

While scientists have modeled the interior structure of Mars, InSight will provide the first opportunity to find ground truth -- by literally looking below the ground.

HP3, built and operated by DLR, will be placed on the Martian surface after InSight lands on Nov. 26, 2018. A probe called a mole will pummel the ground, burying itself and dragging a tether behind it. Temperature sensors embedded in this tether will measure the natural internal heat of Mars.

That's no easy task. The mole has to burrow deep enough to escape the wide temperature swings of the Martian surface. Even the spacecraft's own "body heat" could affect HP3's super-sensitive readings.

"If the mole gets stuck higher up than expected, we can still measure the temperature variation," said HP3 investigation lead Tilman Spohn of DLR. "Our data will have more noise, but we can subtract out daily and seasonal weather variations by comparing it with ground-temperature measurements."

In addition to burrowing, the mole will give off heat pulses. Scientists will study how quickly the mole warms the surrounding rock, allowing them to figure out how well heat is conducted by the rock grains at the landing site. Densely packed grains conduct heat better -- an important piece of the equation for determining Mars' internal energy.

Cooking up a new planet

For an example of planetary heat flow, imagine a pot of water on a stove.

As water heats, it expands, becomes less dense, and rises. The cooler, denser water sinks to the bottom, where it heats up. This cycling of cool to hot is called convection. The same thing happens inside a planet, churning rock over millions of years.

Just as expanding bubbles can push off a pot lid, volcanoes are lids being blown off the top of a world. They shape a planet's surface in the process. Most of the atmosphere on rocky planets forms as volcanoes expel gas from deep below. Some of Mars' biggest dry river beds are believed to have formed when the Tharsis volcanoes spewed gas into the atmosphere. That gas contained water vapor, which cooled into liquid and may have formed the channels surrounding Tharsis.

The smaller the planet, the faster it loses its original heat. Since Mars is only one-third the size of Earth, most of its heat was lost early in its history. Most Martian geologic activity, including volcanism, occurred in the planet's first billion years.

"We want to know what drove the early volcanism and climate change on Mars," Spohn said. "How much heat did Mars start with? How much was left to drive its volcanism?"

NASA's orbiters have given scientists a "macro" view of the planet, allowing them to study Martian geology from above. HP3will offer a first look at the inside of Mars.

"Planets are kind of like an engine, driven by heat that moves their internal parts around," Smrekar said. "With HP3, we'll be lifting the hood on Mars' engine for the first time."

What scientists learn during the InSight mission won't just apply to Mars. It will teach them how all rocky planets formed -- including Earth, its Moon and even planets in other solar systems.

More information about InSight is at:

https://mars.nasa.gov/insight

JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The InSight spacecraft, including cruise stage and lander, was built and tested by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver.

News Media Contact

Andrew Good

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-2433

andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov

2018-205

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Tuesday, 28 August 2018

NASA Administrator Visits JPL, Talks Exploration

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine toured and met with scientists and engineers at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on Monday, Aug. 27. At one stop, he was briefed on the agency's next Mars landing, InSight, by team members in the In-Situ Instrument Laboratory, where a full-scale engineering model of the spacecraft is being tested in preparation for the mission's Nov. 26 landing on the Red Planet.

Among the other stops in the administrator's day-long tour of JPL were the Spacecraft Assembly Facility, where he saw the Mars 2020 rover mission under construction; and the space simulator chamber where the Mars Helicopter is being tested in a Mars-like atmosphere.

The administrator was also briefed on the Europa clipper mission and on JPL-led Earth research and missions.

InSight, which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, will study the deep interior of Mars to learn how all rocky planets formed, including Earth and its Moon. The lander's instruments include a seismometer to detect marsquakes, and a probe that will monitor the flow of heat from the planet's interior.

Mars 2020 is targeted for launch in July 2020 aboard an Atlas V 541 rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The rover will conduct geological assessments of its landing site on Mars, determine the habitability of the environment, search for signs of ancient Martian life, and assess natural resources and hazards for future human explorers. Additionally, scientists will use the instruments aboard the rover to identify and collect samples of rock and soil, encase them in sealed tubes and leave them on the surface of Mars for potential return to Earth by a future mission to the Red Planet.

News Media Contact

DC Agle

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-9011

agle@jpl.nasa.gov

2018-204

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NASA Investment in Cholera Forecasts Helps Save Lives in Yemen

For the first time ever, measurements from NASA Earth-observing research satellites are being used to help combat a potential outbreak of life-threatening cholera. Humanitarian teams in Yemen are targeting areas identified by a NASA-supported project that precisely forecasts high-risk regions based on environmental conditions observed from space.

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JPL Roles in NASA's Sun-Bound Parker Solar Probe

The navigation for NASA's Parker Solar Probe is led by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which also has a role in two of the spacecraft's four onboard instrument suites. Parker Solar Probe will fly closer to the Sun than any previous spacecraft and through the solar corona itself.

One instrument, called the Energetic Particle Instrument-Hi (EPI-Hi), will investigate the mysteries of high-speed solar particles that hurtle toward Earth at close to the speed of light. Observations by the Parker Solar Probe will lead to better predictions of space weather and address fundamental mysteries about the Sun's dynamic corona. EPI-Hi is part of the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun, led by Principal Investigator David McComas of Princeton University in New Jersey.

This animation shows Parker Solar Probe flying through the solar corona and coronal mass ejections. The fields of view of the two WISPR telescopes are defined by the pyramid-shaped rays coming from WISPR instrument. When approaching the Sun, the spacecraft flies such that its heat shield is always facing the Sun to protect the instruments and spacecraft from the intense solar radiation. As it gets closer to the Sun, the solar panels are folded back behind the shield so that only the tips are exposed to sunlight. The animation also shows how WISPR uses the heat shield to block out the direct sunlight so it can view the corona, which is seen in reflected sunlight

"We will be exploring a region of space that has never before been visited," said Mark Wiedenbeck, the lead investigator on the EPI-Hi instrument and a principal research scientist at JPL. "We have ideas about what will be found, but the most important results may well come from observations that are completely unexpected."

Of particular interest to the EPI-Hi team is the unsolved riddle of how a small fraction of the charged particles from the Sun reach near-light speeds. These particles, protons, electrons and heavy ions can reach Earth in less than an hour, creating space weather hazards to humans and hardware in space. Until now, scientists had been observing from a distance the effects of what is happening near the Sun. With the Parker Solar Probe now on its way to fly through the region where it is happening, scientists are confident they will obtain new clues and insight into the process.

The EPI-Hi instrument consists of stacks of silicon detectors designed to snag high-speed particles and measure their energies. Some of the detectors are very thin, with the thinnest being about one-eighth the thickness of a standard sheet of paper. For the detectors to make the required measurements, the thickness of these detectors could vary by no more than one-hundredth the thickness of a sheet of paper.

Another instrument on Parker Solar Probe -- the Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe Plus (WISPR) - is the only camera aboard the spacecraft. It will take images of the Sun's corona and inner heliosphere. The imager has two telescopes that will capture images of the solar wind, shock waves and other coronal structures as they approach and pass the spacecraft.WISPR provides a very wide field-of-view, extending from 13 degrees away from the center of the Sun to 108 degrees away.

"If you saw the solar eclipse last August, you saw the Sun's corona. That is our destination. WISPR will be taking images of the corona as it flies through it. The images will help us understand the morphology, velocity, acceleration and density of evolving solar wind structures when they are close to the Sun," said JPL scientist Paulett Liewer, a member of the WISPR Science Team. The WISPR principal pnvestigator is Russell Howard of the Naval Research Laboratory.

In leading Parker's navigation efforts, JPL is helping to implement the mission's innovative trajectory, developed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, which built and operates the spacecraft for NASA. The Parker Solar Probe will use seven Venus flybys over nearly seven years to gradually shrink its orbit around the Sun, coming as close as 3.83 million miles (6.16 million kilometers) to the Sun, well within the orbit of Mercury and about seven times closer to the Sun than any spacecraft before.

In addition, the Parker Solar Probe Observatory Scientist, Principal Investigator Marco Velli, a UCLA professor, holds a part-time appointment as Heliophysics Liaison to NASA at JPL.

The Parker Solar Probe lifted off on Aug. 12, 2018, on a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket from Space Launch Complex-37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The mission's findings will help researchers improve their forecasts of space weather events, which have the potential to damage satellites and harm astronauts on orbit, disrupt radio communications and, at their most severe, overwhelm power grids.

EPI-Hi is managed for NASA by Caltech in collaboration with JPL, which is a division of Caltech. The Parker Solar Probe is part of NASA's Living with a Star Program, or LWS, to explore aspects of the Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society. LWS is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, for the Heliophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Johns Hopkins APL manages the Parker Solar Probe mission for NASA.

More information on Parker Solar Probe is available at:

https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/parker-solar-probe

http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu

News Media Contact

DC Agle

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-9011

agle@jpl.nasa.gov

JoAnna Wendel

NASA Headquarters, Washington

202-358-1003

Joanna.r.wendel@nasa.gov

Geoffrey Brown

The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland

240-228-5618

Geoffrey.Brown@jhuapl.edu

2018-203

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Saturday, 25 August 2018

Multiple NASA Instruments Capture Hurricane Lane

Instruments on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites were watching as Hurricane Lane -- a category 2 storm as of Friday, Aug. 24 -- made its way toward Hawaii.

NASA's Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) captured images of Lane on just before noon local time on Aug. 24. MISR, flying onboard NASA's Terra satellite, carries nine cameras that observe Earth at different angles. It takes approximately seven minutes for all the cameras to observe the same location, and the motion of the clouds during that time is used to compute the wind speed at the cloudtops.

The image shows the storm as viewed by the central, downward-looking camera. Also included is a stereo anaglyph, which combines two of the MISR angles to show a three-dimensional view of Lane. The image has been rotated in such a way that north is at the bottom. You will need red-blue glasses to view the anaglyph (with the red lens placed over your left eye).

NASA's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) captured Hurricane Lane when the Aqua satellite passed overhead on Aug. 22 and 23. The infrared imagery represents the temperatures of cloud tops and the ocean surface. Purple shows very cold clouds high in the atmosphere above the center of the hurricane, while blue and green show the warmer temperatures of lower clouds surrounding the storm center. The orange and red areas, away from the storm, have almost no clouds, and the ocean shines through. In the Aug. 22 image, a prominent eye is also visible. No eye is visible on the Aug. 23 image, either because it was too small for AIRS to detect or it was covered by high, cold clouds.

MISR was built and is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of Caltech. The Terra spacecraft is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The MISR data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center in Hampton, Virginia.

AIRS, in conjunction with the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) senses emitted infrared and microwave radiation from Earth to provide a three-dimensional look at Earth's weather and climate. Working in tandem, the two instruments make simultaneous observations all the way down to Earth's surface, even in the presence of heavy clouds. With more than 2,000 channels sensing different regions of the atmosphere, the system creates a global, three-dimensional map of atmospheric temperature and humidity, cloud amounts and heights, greenhouse gas concentrations, and many other atmospheric phenomena. Launched into Earth orbit in 2002, the AIRS and AMSU instruments fly onboard NASA's Aqua spacecraft and are managed by JPL.

More information about MISR is available at these sites:

https://www-misr.jpl.nasa.gov/

https://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/project/misr/misr_table

More information about AIRS is at:

https://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/

News Media Contact

Esprit Smith

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-354-4269

esprit.smith@jpl.nasa.gov

2018-202

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Digital Creators: Apply for NASA Mars Landing Event

NASA's InSight lander is scheduled for touchdown on Mars on a mission to study the planet's interior on Monday, Nov. 26. Apply to join the InSight NASA Social for a rare opportunity to experience landing live at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where the mission is managed. Collaborate with other artists, influencers, educators, storytellers, creators and curious minds throughout the two-day event.

On Nov. 25, go behind the scenes with the InSight team, and learn about their mission to map the deep interior of Mars and study marsquakes. On Nov. 26, share the spacecraft's landing on the Red Planet with NASA communicators, scientists and engineers.

Up to 30 NASA Social participants will be selected to have the opportunity to:

Participate in a televised pre-landing briefing
Speak with InSight mission scientists and engineers
Interact with NASA social media managers and fellow attendees
Tour special facilities around JPL, including mission control for all spacecraft beyond the Moon; an indoor "Mars Yard" featuring InSight spacecraft test hardware; and the laboratory where InSight chips were made to carry 2.4 million names to Mars
Experience landing alongside journalists and NASA team members

Previous NASA Socials hosted 360-degree photographers, Instagrammers, actors, musicians, teachers, graphic artists, writers, filmmakers, vloggers and others using digital tools to share experiences and inform audiences. Creators who can help tell NASA's story to an audience that the agency might not currently reach are encouraged to apply.

Registration for this event is now open. The deadline to apply is Sept. 3 at 8:59 p.m. PDT (11:59 p.m. EDT). All applications will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is a Mars lander designed to give the Red Planet its first thorough checkup since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. It is the first outer space robotic explorer to study in-depth the "inner space" of Mars: its crust, mantle and core.

JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The InSight spacecraft, including cruise stage and lander, was built and tested by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver. A number of European partners, including France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission.

For more information on InSight, visit:

https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/

Interact with the mission on social media:

https://twitter.com/NASAInSight

https://facebook.com/NASAInSight

News Media Contact

Stephanie L. Smith

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-5463

slsmith@jpl.nasa.gov

Jason Townsend

NASA Headquarters, Washington

202-358-0359

jason.c.townsend@nasa.gov

2018-201

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15 of Spitzer's Greatest Discoveries From 15 Years in Space

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spent 15 years in space. In honor of this anniversary, 15 of Spitzer's greatest discoveries are featured in a gallery.

Launched into a solar orbit on Aug. 25, 2003, Spitzer trails behind Earth and has been gradually drifting farther away from our planet. Spitzer was the final of NASA's four Great Observatories to reach space. Initially scheduled for a minimum 2.5-year primary mission, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has lasted far beyond its expected lifetime.

#15: The first exoplanet weather map

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
Larger view

Spitzer detects infrared light, which is often emitted by warm objects such as heat radiation. While Spitzer mission designers never planned to use the observatory to study planets beyond our solar system, its infrared vision has proven to be an invaluable tool in this field.

In May 2009, scientists using data from Spitzer produced the first-ever "weather map" of an exoplanet -- a planet that orbits a star other than the Sun. This exoplanet weather map charted temperature variations over the surface of a giant gas planet, HD 189733b. In addition, the study revealed that roaring winds likely whip through the planet's atmosphere. The image above shows an artist's impression of the planet.

#14: Hidden cradles of newborn stars

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
Larger view

Infrared light can, in most cases, penetrate gas and dust clouds better than visible light. As a result, Spitzer has provided unprecedented views into regions where stars are born. This image from Spitzer shows newborn stars peeking out from beneath their natal blanket of dust in the Rho Ophiuchi dark cloud.

Called "Rho Oph" by astronomers, this cloud is one of the closest star-forming regions to our own Solar System. Located near the constellations Scorpius and Ophiuchus on the sky, the nebula is about 410 light years away from Earth.

#13: A growing galactic metropolis

Image credit: Subaru/NASA/JPL-Caltech
Larger view

In 2011, astronomers using Spitzer detected a very distant collection of galaxies called COSMOS-AzTEC3. The light from this group of galaxies had traveled for more than 12 billion years to reach Earth.

Astronomers think objects like this one, called a proto-cluster, eventually grew into modern galaxy clusters, or groups of galaxies bound together by gravity. COSMOS-AzTEC3 was the most distant proto-cluster ever detected at the time.It provides researchers with a better idea of how galaxies have formed and evolved throughout the history of the universe.

#12: The recipe for 'comet soup'

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Larger view

When NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft intentionally smashed into comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, it expelled a cloud of material that contained the ingredients of our solar system's primordial "soup." Combining data from Deep Impact with observations by Spitzer, astronomers analyzed that soup and began to identify the ingredients that eventually produced planets, comets and other bodies in our solar system.

Many of the components identified in the comet dust were known comet ingredients, such as silicates, or sand. But there were also surprise ingredients, such as clay, carbonates (found in seashells), iron-bearing compounds, and aromatic hydrocarbons that are found in barbecue pits and automobile exhaust on Earth. The study of these ingredients provides valuable clues about the formation of our solar system.

Friday, 24 August 2018

South Dakota, Texas Students to Speak with Astronauts on International Space Station

University and middle school students from South Dakota, and junior high students from Texas, will talk live with astronauts on the International Space Station next week.

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Thursday, 23 August 2018

NASA Invites Media to Cover InSight Mars Landing Activities at Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Media are invited to apply for credentials to cover activities at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the landing of the agency’s Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission on Mars at about noon PST Nov. 26.

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Wednesday, 22 August 2018

'NASA Selfies' and TRAPPIST-1 VR Apps Now Available

The universe is at your fingertips with two new digital products from NASA.

The NASA Selfies app and NASA's Exoplanet Excursions virtual reality app were created to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the launch of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Spitzer's incredible discoveries and amazing images are at the center of these new products.

NASA Selfies app

The new NASA Selfies app lets you generate snapshots of yourself in a virtual spacesuit, posing in front of gorgeous cosmic locations, like the Orion Nebula or the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The simple interface means you just snap a photo of yourself, pick your background, and share on social media.

The app also provides information about the science behind these stunning images. There are currently 30 eye-catching images to choose from, all taken by Spitzer. More images from the agency's other science and human spaceflight missions will be added in the future.

The app is available for iOS and Android.

NASA's Exoplanet Excursions VR app

In NASA's Exoplanet Excursions virtual reality app, VR users are taken on a guided tour of the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system.

TRAPPPIST-1 is the only known exoplanet system to host seven roughly Earth-size planets. Spitzer played a major role in detecting these planets and providing information that has helped scientists learn about the planets' likely compositions. The TRAPPIST-1 system is too far away for telescopes to directly observe these planets, but this VR experience features artists' impressions of what the planets might look like. These impressions are based on data from Spitzer and other telescopes that have studied the TRAPPIST-1 system.

Users of the app are navigated around five of the seven planets, surrounded by the blackness of space and the faint lights of distant stars.

The VR app will be available for Oculus and Vive through the Spitzer mission website and will soon be available through the Oculus store. A 360-degree video is also be available on the Spitzer Youtube page that allows viewers to explore the virtual TRAPPIST-1 system on their desktop, smartphone or with a smartphone-based 360-viewer like Google Cardboard.

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-1821

Calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov

2018-198

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NASA Launching Advanced Laser to Measure Earth’s Changing Ice

Next month, NASA will launch into space the most advanced laser instrument of its kind, beginning a mission to measure – in unprecedented detail – changes in the heights of Earth’s polar ice.

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15 Years in Space for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope

Initially scheduled for a minimum 2.5-year primary mission, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has gone far beyond its expected lifetime -- and is still going strong after 15 years.

Launched into a solar orbit on Aug. 25, 2003, Spitzer was the final of NASA's four Great Observatories to reach space. The space telescope has illuminated some of the oldest galaxies in the universe, revealed a new ring around Saturn, and peered through shrouds of dust to study newborn stars and black holes. Spitzer assisted in the discovery of planets beyond our solar system, including the detection of seven Earth-size planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1, among other accomplishments.

"In its 15 years of operations, Spitzer has opened our eyes to new ways of viewing the universe," said Paul Hertz, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Spitzer's discoveries extend from our own planetary backyard, to planets around other stars, to the far reaches of the universe. And by working in collaboration with NASA's other Great Observatories, Spitzer has helped scientists gain a more complete picture of many cosmic phenomena."

A view into the past

Spitzer detects infrared light -- most often heat radiation emitted by warm objects. On Earth, infrared light is used in a variety of applications, including night-vision instruments.

With its infrared vision and high sensitivity, Spitzer has contributed to the study of some of the most distant galaxies in the known universe. The light from some of those galaxies traveled for 13.4 billion years to reach Earth. As a result, scientists see these galaxies as they were less than 400 million years after the birth of the universe.

Among this population of ancient galaxies was a surprise for scientists: "big baby" galaxies that were much larger and more mature than scientists thought early-forming galaxies could be. Large, modern galaxies are thought to have formed through the gradual merger of smaller galaxies. But the "big baby" galaxies showed that massive collections of stars came together very early in the universe's history.

Studies of these very distant galaxies relied on data from both Spitzer and the Hubble Space Telescope, another one of NASA's Great Observatories. Each of the four Great Observatories collects light in a different wavelength range. By combining their observations of various objects and regions, scientists can gain a more complete picture of the universe.

"The Great Observatories program was really a brilliant concept," said Michael Werner, Spitzer project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "The idea of getting multispectral images or data on astrophysical phenomenon is very compelling, because most heavenly bodies produce radiation across the spectrum. An average galaxy like our own Milky Way, for example, radiates as much infrared light as visible wavelength light. Each part of the spectrum provides new information."

New worlds

In recent years, scientists have utilized Spitzer to study exoplanets, or planets orbiting stars other than our Sun, although this was not something the telescope's designers anticipated.

With Spitzer's help, researchers have studied planets with surfaces as hot as stars, others thought to be frozen solid, and many in between. Spitzer has studied some of the nearest known exoplanets to Earth, and some of the most distant exoplanets ever discovered.

Spitzer also played a key role in one of the most significant exoplanet discoveries in history: the detection of seven, roughly Earth-size planets orbiting a single star. The TRAPPIST-1 planetary system was unlike any alien solar system ever discovered, with three of its seven planets located in the "habitable zone," where the temperature might be right for liquid water to exist on the planets' surfaces. Their discovery was an enticing step in the search for life elsewhere in the universe.

"The study of extrasolar planets was still in its infancy when Spitzer launched, but in recent years, often more than half of Spitzer's observation time is used for studies of exoplanets or searches for exoplanets," said Lisa Storrie-Lombardi, Spitzer's project manager at JPL. "Spitzer is very good at characterizing exoplanets, even though it wasn't designed to do that."

Some other major discoveries made using the Spitzer space telescope include:

-- The largest known ring around Saturn, a wispy, fine structure with 300 times the diameter of Saturn.

-- First exoplanet weather map of temperature variations over the surface of a gas exoplanet. Results suggested the presence of fierce winds.

-- Asteroid and planetary smashups. Spitzer has found evidence for several rocky collisions in other solar systems, including one thought to involve two large asteroids.

-- Recipe for "comet soup." Spitzer observed the aftermath of the collision between NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft and comet Tempel 1, finding that cometary material in our own solar system resembles that around nearby stars.

-- The hidden lairs of newborn stars. Spitzer's infrared images have provided unprecedented views into the hidden cradles where young stars grow up, revolutionizing our understanding of stellar birth.

-- Buckyballs in space. Buckyballs are soccer-ball-shaped carbon molecules discovered in laboratory research with multiple technological applications on Earth..

-- Massive clusters of galaxies. Spitzer has identified many more distant galaxy clusters than were previously known.

-- One of the most extensive maps of the Milky Way galaxyever compiled, including the most accurate map of the large bar of stars in the galaxy's center, created using Spitzer data from the Galactic Legacy Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire project, or GLIMPSE.

An extended journey

Spitzer has logged over 106,000 hours of observation time. Thousands of scientists around the world have utilized Spitzer data in their studies, and Spitzer data is cited in more than 8,000 published papers.

Spitzer's primary mission ended up lasting 5.5 years, during which time the spacecraft operated in a "cold phase," with a supply of liquid helium cooling three onboard instruments to just above absolute zero. The cooling system reduced excess heat from the instruments themselves that could contaminate their observations. This gave Spitzer very high sensitivity for "cold" objects.

In July 2009, after Spitzer's helium supply ran out, the spacecraft entered a so-called "warm phase." Spitzer's main instrument, called the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC), has four cameras, two of which continue to operate in the warm phase with the same sensitivity they maintained during the cold phase.

Spitzer orbits the Sun in an Earth-trailing orbit (meaning it literally trails behind Earth as the planet orbits the Sun) and has continued to fall farther and farther behind Earth during its lifetime. This now poses a challenge for the spacecraft, because while it is downloading data to Earth, its solar panels do not directly face the Sun. As a result, Spitzer must use battery power during data downloads. The batteries are then recharged between downloads.

"Spitzer is farther away from Earth than we ever thought it would be while still operating," said Sean Carey, manager of the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech in Pasadena, California. "This has posed some real challenges to the engineering team, and they've been extremely creative and resourceful to keep Spitzer operating far beyond its expected lifetime."

In 2016, Spitzer entered an extended mission dubbed "Spitzer Beyond." The spacecraft is currently scheduled to continue operations into November 2019, more than 10 years after entering its warm phase.

In celebration of Spitzer's 15 years in space, NASA has released two new multimedia products: The NASA Selfies app for iOS and Android, and the Exoplanet Excursions VR Experience for Oculus and Vive, as well as a 360-video version for smartphones. Spitzer's incredible discoveries and amazing images are at the center of these new products.

JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech in Pasadena, California. Spacecraft operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the IPAC at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit:

https://spitzer.caltech.edu

https://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-1821

Calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov

2018-197

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Tuesday, 21 August 2018

Vice President Pence Talks Future Human Space Exploration at NASA’s Johnson Space Center

Vice President Mike Pence, with NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, will visit NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston Thursday, Aug. 23, to discuss the future of human space exploration and the agency’s plans to return to the Moon as a forerunner to future human missions to Mars.

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Ice Confirmed at the Moon's Poles

In the darkest and coldest parts of its polar regions, a team of scientists has directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon's surface. These ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient. At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrated at lunar craters, while the northern pole's ice is more widely, but sparsely spread.

A team of scientists, led by Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii and Brown University and including Richard Elphic from NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, used data from NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument to identify three specific signatures that definitively prove there is water ice at the surface of the Moon.

M3, aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, launched in 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organization, was uniquely equipped to confirm the presence of solid ice on the Moon. It collected data that not only picked up the reflective properties we'd expect from ice, but was able to directly measure the distinctive way its molecules absorb infrared light, so it can differentiate between liquid water or vapor and solid ice.

Most of the newfound water ice lies in the shadows of craters near the poles, where the warmest temperatures never reach above minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of the very small tilt of the Moon's rotation axis, sunlight never reaches these regions.

Previous observations indirectly found possible signs of surface ice at the lunar south pole, but these could have been explained by other phenomena, such as unusually reflective lunar soil.

With enough ice sitting at the surface -- within the top few millimeters -- water would possibly be accessible as a resource for future expeditions to explore and even stay on the Moon, and potentially easier to access than the water detected beneath the Moon's surface.

Learning more about this ice, how it got there, and how it interacts with the larger lunar environment will be a key mission focus for NASA and commercial partners, as we endeavor to return to and explore our closest neighbor, the Moon.

The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on August 20, 2018.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, designed and built the moon mineralogy mapper instrument and was home to its project manager.

News Media Contact

DC Agle

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-9011

agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Jessica Culler

Ames Research Center, Silicon Valley

650-604-4789

jessica.culler@nasa.gov

2018-195

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NASA Gets Up Close with Greenland's Melting Ice

With a new research plane and a new base to improve its chances of outsmarting Atlantic hurricanes, NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland campaign takes to the sky this week for its third year of gathering data on how the ocean around Greenland is melting its glaciers.

OMG's first two years of operations already collected the most comprehensive data available on the subject, but OMG Principal Investigator Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, is hungry for more. "We're beginning to see some surprising changes in the ocean, just since the start of OMG in 2016, that are affecting the ice," said Willis, an oceanographer at JPL. "We want to see if those changes are still there after two years, and if they're spreading farther along the Greenland coast."

Willis and Project Manager Steve Dinardo, also of JPL, are leaving for Greenland this week on an airborne campaign to do just that. For the third year in a row, they will drop about 250 probes just offshore all around the island, with some drops close to the fronts of ocean-terminating glaciers. The probes sink 3,000 feet (1,000 meters) into the seawater, recording temperature and salinity as they go. The researchers hope to make their first flight on Aug 22 and complete the work in two to three weeks, depending on weather.

Beating the Weather

Unfortunately for OMG, the best time to drop probes into the ocean around Greenland -- the time with the most open water -- is during hurricane season. "Hurricanes go up to Greenland to die," said Dinardo. "In 2016, there were days the winds were so strong we couldn't even open the hangar doors." Weather groundings stretched the planned three-week deployment to five weeks.

In 2017, weather struck closer to home: Hurricane Harvey sidelined the Houston-based plane and crew just days before the campaign was scheduled to begin. Dinardo managed to locate a viable alternative aircraft and get the OMG team airborne within a month of the originally planned start.

This year's new plane and new base should improve OMG's weather odds. The plane, a Basler BT-67 operated by NASA contractor Airtec, can take off and land on a shorter runway than either of the planes OMG previously used. That allows the team to base their east coast operations in Kulusuk, a small airport in southeastern Greenland, rather than a larger airport in Iceland. The lengthy "commute" from Iceland cut into the time available for research on each flight, and the longer flight path meant more places where there might be bad weather.

When they complete the east coast drops, the team will move to Thule, a U.S. air base in northwestern Greenland, for drops on the western side of the island.

"Being in Greenland the whole time, we can get a little more up close and personal with the ice sheet and glaciers," Willis said.

OMG and Narwhals

The changing ocean around Greenland affects living creatures as well as glaciers. Narwhals -- smallish whales with long single tusks -- are uniquely adapted to Arctic waters, moving seasonally from the open ocean to the glacier fronts of Greenland and Canada. Kristin Laidre, a research scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, studies these elusive mammals and their habitats. She quickly saw the value of OMG's observations, publishing the first peer-reviewed paper to use OMG data.

Laidre and Ian Fenty of JPL, an OMG co-principal investigator, are on the west side of Greenland from the airborne OMG team this week, on a six-day research cruise. Their team will place moorings in front of three important glaciers in northwestern Greenland, with acoustic recorders and OMG data loggers attached to the mooring chains. These instruments will log ocean temperature and conductivity (used to calculate salinity) and detections of narwhals.

This intensive local data set is likely to add new insights into OMG's larger-scale measurements, Fenty said. "Because the instruments will take measurements every hour for two years, we will get a totally new understanding of the changing ocean close to the ice," he noted. "These data will help us interpret our OMG probe data and allow us to evaluate and improve our [computer] simulations of the ocean currents in the area."

Laidre said, "We don't know a lot about what's important to narwhals -- how physical oceanography influences their habitat preferences. OMG is collecting really detailed information on the physics of the system. For us, having access to those data and working with the OMG investigators can bring us a long way in studying these animals."

News Media Contact

Esprit Smith

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California

818-354-4269

Esprit.Smith@jpl.nasa.gov

Written by Carol Rasmussen

NASA's Earth Science News Team

2018-194

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NASA to Host Media Briefing on Mission to Return Asteroid Sample to Earth

NASA will host a media teleconference at 2 p.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 24, to provide an update on upcoming activities related to the agency’s first mission to return a sample of an asteroid to Earth.

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Monday, 20 August 2018

NASA's InSight Passes Halfway to Mars, Instruments Check In

NASA's InSight spacecraft, en route to a Nov. 26 landing on Mars, passed the halfway mark on Aug. 6. All of its instruments have been tested and are working well.

As of Aug. 20, the spacecraft had covered 172 million miles (277 million

What's the latest news from Mars? A global dust storm is starting to settle, but still obscures the Martian surface; the Curiosity rover turns six and drills a new rock sample; the InSight lander is more than halfway to Mars and has tested its instruments and cameras.

kilometers) since its launch 107 days ago. In another 98 days, it will travel another 129 million miles (208 million kilometers) and touch down in Mars' Elysium Planitia region, where it will be the first mission to study the Red Planet's deep interior. InSight stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.

The InSight team is using the time before the spacecraft's arrival at Mars to not only plan and practice for that critical day, but also to activate and check spacecraft subsystems vital to cruise, landing and surface operations, including the highly sensitive science instruments.

InSight's seismometer, which will be used to detect quakes on Mars, received a clean bill of health on July 19. The SEIS instrument (Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure) is a six-sensor seismometer combining two types of sensors to measure ground motions over a wide range of frequencies. It will give scientists a window into Mars' internal activity.

"We did our final performance checks on July 19, which were successful," said Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator of InSight from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

The team also checked an instrument that will measure the amount of heat escaping from Mars. After being placed on the surface, InSight's Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument will use a self-hammering mechanical mole burrowing to a depth of 10 to 16 feet (3 to 5 meters). Measurements by sensors on the mole and on a science tether from the mole to the surface will yield the first precise determination of the amount of heat escaping from the planet's interior. The checkout consisted of powering on the main electronics for the instrument, performing checks of its instrument sensor elements, exercising some of the instrument's internal heaters, and reading out the stored settings in the electronics module.

The third of InSight's three main investigations -- Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE) -- uses the spacecraft's radio connection with Earth to assess perturbations of Mars' rotation axis. These measurements can provide information about the planet's core.

"We have been using the spacecraft's radio since launch day, and our conversations with InSight have been very cordial, so we are good to go with RISE as well," said Banerdt.

The lander's cameras checked out fine as well, taking a spacecraft selfie of the inside of the spacecraft's backshell. InSight Project Manager Tom Hoffman from JPL said that, "If you are an engineer on InSight, that first glimpse of the heat shield blanket, harness tie-downs and cover bolts is avery reassuring sight as it tells us our Instrument Context Camera is operating perfectly. The next picture we plan to take with this camera will be of the surface of Mars."

If all goes as planned, thecamera will take the first image of Elysium Planitia minutes after InSight touches down on Mars.

A number of European partners, including France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument, with significant contributions from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Switzerland, Imperial College and Oxford University in the United Kingdom, and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument.

For more information about InSight, and to follow along on its flight to Mars, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/insight

More information is at:

https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/

You can also follow along on InSight's path to Mars by visiting NASA's Eyes on the Solar System:

https://go.nasa.gov/2FSWReg

News Media Contact

DC Agle

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-9011

agle@jpl.nasa.gov

JoAnna Wendel

NASA Headquarters, Washington

202-358-1003

Joanna.r.wendel@nasa.gov

2018-193

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NASA Hosts Live Science Chat: One Year After Eclipse 2017

On the one-year anniversary of the historic 2017 Eclipse Across America, NASA will host a Science Chat at 10:30 a.m. EDT, Tuesday, Aug. 21, to discuss new science data and the public impact of the celestial event experienced by millions.

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Friday, 17 August 2018

NASA to Host Media Briefing on New Ice-Monitoring Mission

NASA will host a media teleconference at 1 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Aug. 22, to discuss the upcoming launch of the Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat-2), which will fly NASA’s most advanced laser altimeter to measure Earth’s changing ice.

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Six Things About Opportunity's Recovery Efforts

NASA's Opportunity rover has been silent since June 10, when a planet-encircling dust storm cut off solar power for the nearly-15-year-old rover. Now that scientists think the global dust storm is "decaying" -- meaning more dust is falling out of the atmosphere than is being raised back into it -- skies might soon clear enough for the solar-powered rover to recharge and attempt to "phone home."

No one will know how the rover is doing until it speaks. But the team notes there's reason to be optimistic: They've performed several studies on the state of its batteries before the storm, and temperatures at its location. Because the batteries were in relatively good health before the storm, there's not likely to be too much degradation. And because dust storms tend to warm the environment -- and the 2018 storm happened as Opportunity's location on Mars entered summer -- the rover should have stayed warm enough to survive.

What will engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, be looking for -- and what will those signs mean for recovery efforts?

A tau below 2

Dust storms on Mars block sunlight from reaching the surface, raising the level of a measurement called "tau." The higher the tau, the less sunlight is available; the last tau measured by Opportunity was 10.8 on June 10. To compare, an average tau for its location on Mars is usually 0.5.

JPL engineers predict that Opportunity will need a tau of less than 2.0 before the solar-powered rover will be able to recharge its batteries. A wide-angle camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will watch for surface features to become visible as the skies clear. That will help scientists estimate the tau.

Updates on the dust storm and tau can be found here.

Two Ways to Listen for Opportunity

Several times a week, engineers use NASA's Deep Space Network, which communicates between planetary probes and Earth, to attempt to talk with Opportunity. The massive DSN antennas ping the rover during scheduled "wake-up" times, and then search for signals sent from Opportunity in response.

In addition, JPL's radio science group uses special equipment on DSN antennas that can detect a wider range of frequencies. Each day, they record any radio signal from Mars over most of the rover's daylight hours, then search the recordings for Opportunity's "voice."

Rover faults out

When Opportunity experiences a problem, it can go into so-called "fault modes" where it automatically takes action to maintain its health. Engineers are preparing for three key fault modes if they do hear back from Opportunity.

Low-power fault: engineers assume the rover went into low-power fault shortly after it stopped communicating on June 10. This mode causes the rover to hibernate, assuming that it will wake up at a time when there's more sunlight to let it recharge.
Clock fault: critical to operating while in hibernation is the rover's onboard clock. If the rover doesn't know what time it is, it doesn't know when it should be attempting to communicate. The rover can use environmental clues, like an increase in sunlight, to make assumptions about the time.
Uploss fault: when the rover hasn't heard from Earth in a long time, it can go into "uploss" fault -- a warning that its communication equipment may not be functioning. When it experiences this, it begins to check the equipment and tries different ways to communicate with Earth.

What happens if they hear back?

After the first time engineers hear from Opportunity, there could be a lag of several weeks before a second time. It's like a patient coming out of a coma: It takes time to fully recover. It may take several communication sessions before engineers have enough information to take action.

The first thing to do is learn more about the state of the rover. Opportunity's team will ask for a history of the rover's battery and solar cells and take its temperature. If the clock lost track of time, it will be reset. The rover would take pictures of itself to see whether dust might be caked on sensitive parts, and test actuators to see if dust slipped inside, affecting its joints.

Once they've gathered all this data, the team would take a poll about whether they're ready to attempt a full recovery.

Not out of the woods

Even if engineers hear back from Opportunity, there's a real possibility the rover won't be the same.

The rover's batteries could have discharged so much power -- and stayed inactive so long -- that their capacity is reduced. If those batteries can't hold as much charge, it could affect the rover's continued operations. It could also mean that energy-draining behavior, like running its heaters during winter, could cause the batteries to brown out.

Dust isn't usually as much of a problem. Previous storms plastered dust on the camera lenses, but most of that was shed off over time. Any remaining dust can be calibrated out.

Send Opportunity a postcard

Do you miss Opportunity as much as the rover's team? You can write a message sharing your thoughts here.

Wednesday, 15 August 2018

Carbon Monoxide from California Wildfires Drifts East

California is being plagued by massive wildfires, and the effects on air quality from those fires can extend far beyond the state's borders. In addition to ash and smoke, fires release carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. Carbon monoxide is a pollutant that can persist in the atmosphere for about a month and can be transported great distances.

New images made with data acquired by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on NASA's Aqua satellite show the high concentrations of carbon monoxide emitted from the fires (in orange/red) between July 29 and August 8. As the time series progresses, carbon monoxide high in the atmosphere is shown drifting east -- with one branch moving southward toward Texas and the other forking to the northeast.

From space, AIRS measures carbon monoxide high up in the atmosphere -- where it has little effect on the air we breathe. However, strong winds can carry this pollutant downward to where it can have significant effects on air quality. The time series of images shows just how far the carbon monoxide from California's wildfires has travelled eastward and what areas may be at greater risk of experiencing its effects.

Other NASA instruments contribute to the study of carbon monoxide as well, including the Measurement of Pollution In The Troposphere (MOPITT), which looks at carbon monoxide in the lower atmosphere, and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) which can detect carbon monoxide (and provide other useful surface data) over large areas of land.

The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder, AIRS, in conjunction with the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit, AMSU, senses emitted infrared and microwave radiation from Earth to provide a three-dimensional look at Earth's weather and climate. Working in tandem, the two instruments make simultaneous observations all the way down to Earth's surface, even in the presence of heavy clouds. With more than 2,000 channels sensing different regions of the atmosphere, the system creates a global, three-dimensional map of atmospheric temperature and humidity, cloud amounts and heights, greenhouse gas concentrations, and many other atmospheric phenomena. Launched into Earth orbit in 2002, the AIRS and AMSU instruments fly on board NASA's Aqua spacecraft and are managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena.

For more information about AIRS, visit:

https://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/

News Media Contact

Esprit Smith

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-354-4269

esprit.smith@jpl.nasa.gov

2018-191

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ASTERIA Wins Small Satellite Mission of the Year Award

The ASTERIA mission has earned the Small Satellite Mission of the Year award from the Small Satellite Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). The award is given to a mission that has "demonstrated a significant improvement in the capability of small satellites," according to the award description.

The mission is a collaboration between NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and the Massachusets Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

The award was presented at this month's annual Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah, hosted by AIAA and Utah State University. Finalists for the award are selected by committee, and the winner is chosen through a public vote.

ASTERIA stands for Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics. For its primary mission, ASTERIA was designed to test miniaturized technology for precisely measuring the brightness of stars, which includes the ability to stabilize the spacecraft so that it can point itself directly at a star for an extended period of time.

While this technology has been readily demonstrated in larger satellites, shrinking it down to fit inside a small satellite was an engineering challenge. In the future, this technology could be used in satellites to assist in searching for transiting exoplanets.

ASTERIA is a CubeSat, a type of small satellite made of "units" that are 10 centimeters cubed, or about 4 inches on each side. ASTERIA is the size of six CubeSat units, making it roughly 10 centimeters by 20 centimeters by 30 centimeters (3.9 inches by 7.8 inches by 11.8 inches). With its two solar panels unfolded, the satellite is about as long as a skateboard.

Deployed into low-Earth orbit in November 2017, ASTERIA completed its primary mission in February and is now operating in an extended mission. The mission is funded through the JPL Phaeton Program for training early career employees.

More information on ASTERIA is online at:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/cubesat/missions/asteria.php

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-1821

Calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov

2018-190

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Monday, 13 August 2018

NASA Awards Contract for Construction of New Research Support Building

NASA has selected Walsh Construction Company II, LLC of Chicago to build a new Research Support Building (RSB) at the agency’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

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Sunday, 12 August 2018

NASA, ULA Launch Parker Solar Probe on Historic Journey to Touch Sun

Hours before the rise of the very star it will study, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe launched from Florida Sunday to begin its journey to the Sun, where it will undertake a landmark mission. The spacecraft will transmit its first science observations in December, beginning a revolution in our understanding of the star that makes life on Earth possible.

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Saturday, 11 August 2018

NASA Awards $2.3 Million in Grants to Minority Serving Institutions to Expand STEM Education

NASA's Minority University Research and Education Program (MUREP) Aerospace Academy (MAA) has selected seven Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) for cooperative agreement awards totaling nearly $2.3 million.

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NASA Astronaut to Speak with Students, Parents, Teachers at YouthSpark

Students attending Microsoft’s YouthSpark event will have the opportunity to speak with NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station next week as part of NASA’s Year of Education on Station.

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Friday, 10 August 2018

Water Is Destroyed, Then Reborn in Ultrahot Jupiters

Imagine a place where the weather forecast is always the same: scorching temperatures, relentlessly sunny, and with absolutely zero chance of rain. This hellish scenario exists on the permanent daysides of a type of planet found outside our solar system dubbed an "ultrahot Jupiter." These worlds orbit extremely close to their stars, with one side of the planet permanently facing the star.

What has puzzled scientists is why water vapor appears to be missing from the toasty worlds' atmospheres, when it is abundant in similar but slightly cooler planets. Observations of ultrahot Jupiters by NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes, combined with computer simulations, have served as a springboard for a new theoretical study that may have solved this mystery.

According to the new study, ultrahot Jupiters do in fact possess the ingredients for water (hydrogen and oxygen atoms). But due to strong irradiation on the planet's daysides, temperatures there get so intense that water molecules are completely torn apart.

"The daysides of these worlds are furnaces that look more like a stellar atmosphere than a planetary atmosphere," said Vivien Parmentier, an astrophysicist at Aix Marseille University in France and lead author of the new study. "In this way, ultrahot Jupiters stretch out what we think planets should look like."

While telescopes like Spitzer and Hubble can gather some information about the daysides of ultrahot Jupiters, the nightsides are difficult for current instruments to probe. The new paper proposes a model for what might be happening on both the illuminated and dark sides of these planets, based largely on observations and analysis of the ultrahot Jupiter known as WASP-121b, and from three recently published studies, coauthored by Parmentier, that focus on the ultrahot Jupiters WASP-103b, WASP-18b and HAT-P-7b, respectively. The new study suggests that fierce winds may blow the sundered water molecules into the planets' nightside hemispheres. On the cooler, dark side of the planet, the atoms can recombine into molecules and condense into clouds, all before drifting back into the dayside to be splintered again.

Water is not the only molecule that may undergo a cycle of chemical reincarnation on these planets, according to the new study. Previous detections of clouds by Hubble at the boundary between day and night, where temperatures mercifully fall, have shown that titanium oxide (popular as a sunscreen) and aluminum oxide (the basis for ruby, the gemstone) could also be molecularly reborn on the ultrahot Jupiters' nightsides. These materials might even form clouds and rain down as liquid metals and fluidic rubies.

Star-planet hybrids

Among the growing catalog of planets outside our solar system -- known as exoplanets -- ultrahot Jupiters have stood out as a distinct class for about a decade. Found in orbits far closer to their host stars than Mercury is to our Sun, the giant planets are tidally locked, meaning the same hemisphere always faces the star, just as the Moon always presents the same side to Earth. As a result, ultrahot Jupiters' daysides broil in a perpetual high noon. Meanwhile, their opposite hemispheres are gripped by endless nights. Dayside temperatures reach between 3,600 and 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 and 3,000 degrees Celsius), ranking ultrahot Jupiters among the hottest exoplanets on record. Nightside temperatures are around 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit cooler (1,000 degrees Celsius), cold enough for water to re-form and, along with other molecules, coalesce into clouds.

Hot Jupiters, cousins to ultrahot Jupiters with dayside temperatures below 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 Celsius), were the first widely discovered type of exoplanet, starting back in the mid-1990s. Water has turned out to be common in their atmospheres. One hypothesis for why it appeared absent in ultrahot Jupiters has been that these planets must have formed with very high levels of carbon instead of oxygen. Yet the authors of the new study say this idea could not explain the traces of water also sometimes detected at the dayside-nightside boundary.

To break the logjam, Parmentier and colleagues took a cue from well-established physical models of the atmospheres of stars, as well as "failed stars," known as brown dwarfs, whose properties overlap somewhat with hot and ultrahot Jupiters. Parmentier adapted a brown dwarf model developed by Mark Marley, one of the paper's coauthors and a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, to the case of ultrahot Jupiters. Treating the atmospheres of ultrahot Jupiters more like blazing stars than conventionally colder planets offered a way to make sense of the Spitzer and Hubble observations.

"With these studies, we are bringing some of the century-old knowledge gained from studying the astrophysics of stars, to the new field of investigating exoplanetary atmospheres," said Parmentier.

Spitzer's observations in infrared light zeroed in on carbon monoxide in the ultrahot Jupiters' atmospheres. The atoms in carbon monoxide form an extremely strong bond that can uniquely withstand the thermal and radiational assault on the daysides of these planets. The brightness of the hardy carbon monoxide revealed that the planets' atmospheres burn hotter higher up than deeper down. Parmentier said verifying this temperature difference was key for vetting Hubble's no-water result, because a uniform atmosphere can also mask the signatures of water molecules.

"These results are just the most recent example of Spitzer being used for exoplanet science -- something that was not part of its original science manifest," said Michael Werner, project scientist for Spitzer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "In addition, it's always heartening to see what we can discover when scientists combine the power of Hubble and Spitzer, two of NASA's Great Observatories."

Although the new model adequately described many ultrahot Jupiters on the books, some outliers do remain, suggesting that additional aspects of these worlds' atmospheres still need to be understood. Those exoplanets not fitting the mold could have exotic chemical compositions or unanticipated heat and circulation patterns. Prior studies have argued that there is a more significant amount of water in the dayside atmosphere of WASP-121b than what is apparent from observations, because most of the signal from the water is obscured. The new paper provides an alternative explanation for the smaller-than-expected water signal, but more studies will be required to better understand the nature of these ultrahot atmospheres.

Resolving this dilemma could be a task for NASA's next-generation James Webb Space Telescope, slated for a 2021 launch. Parmentier and colleagues expect it will be powerful enough to glean new details about the daysides, as well as confirm that the missing dayside water and other molecules of interest have gone to the planets' nightsides.

"We now know that ultrahot Jupiters exhibit chemical behavior that is different and more complex than their cooler cousins, the hot Jupiters," said Parmentier. "The studies of exoplanet atmospheres is still really in its infancy and we have so much to learn."

The new study is forthcoming in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech in Pasadena. Spacecraft operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at IPAC at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages Hubble. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations.

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-393-1821

Calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov

Written by Adam Hadhazy

2018-189

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