Nasa Technology News

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."

During Wednesday's Flight Readiness Review at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA managers agreed that the shuttle, crew, support teams and procedures are ready for flight to deliver the Tranquility node and cupola to the International Space Station at 4:39 a.m. EST Feb. 7.

"We reviewed all the aspects of the shuttle and space station… the processing in Florida has gone exceptionally well ," said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations, during a post-FRR news conference Wednesday. "This is really a complicated mission … if you take a look through the press kits you'll gain an appreciation of what will be going on at the station."

International Space Station Program Manager Mike Suffredini agreed, "This is the primary objective of this mission -- the installation and activation of this module." Suffredini addressed the issues with the ammonia hoses and how the spares had been rebuilt and tested, keeping the launch date on target. "The team deserves an enormous amount of credit for coming up with that solution and implementing it as quickly as they were able to do."

Mike Moses, space shuttle launch integration manager, said it was a clean vehicle and clean flow. "We're real proud of the work everyone has done."

Mike Leinbach, space shuttle launch director, said, "We're in outstanding shape." He also said Endeavour's aft doors will be closed eight to nine days ahead of schedule and the teams are looking at a standard flow ahead. "There are no problems and we're in great shape," said Leinbach.

This two-frame animation aids evaluation of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit during a drive on the rover's 2,147th Martian day, or sol (Jan. 16, 2010).

The two wide-angle views shown one after the other in this animation come from Spirit's rear hazard-avoidance camera. One was taken at the end of the previous drive (two days earlier) and thus shows the scene prior to the Sol 2147 drive. The other was taken after the Sol 2147 drive. Visible changes from the first to the second, as a result of the rover's motion, include the landscape appearing to shift to the right and the forground rocks near the bottom of the image appearing to come closer.

The view is to the south, looking at and beyond Spirit's rear wheels, with the bottom surface of a solar panel at the top of the image. During this drive, Spirit moved about 3.5 centimeters (1.4 inches) southward and yawed slightly counterclockwise. Neither the right-rear wheel (at the left in this view) nor the right-front wheel can contribute to driving.

The rover team began commanding extrication drives in November after months of Earthbound testing and analysis to develop a strategy for attempting to drive Spirit out of this soft-soil site, called "Troy." The extrication drives have made little progress and the probability of getting Spirit out of the sand trap is low.

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.

The near-Earth object, designated 2010 AB78, was discovered by WISE Jan. 12. After the mission's sophisticated software picked out the moving object against a background of stationary stars, researchers followed up and confirmed the discovery with the University of Hawaii's 2.2-meter (88-inch) visible-light telescope near the summit of Mauna Kea.

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 is not thought to pass near our planet. This asteroid does not pose any foreseeable impact threat to Earth, but scientists will continue to monitor it.

WISE, which began its all-sky survey on Jan. 14, is expected to find about 100-thousand previously undiscovered asteroids in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter, and hundreds of new near-Earth asteroids. It will also spot millions of new stars and galaxies.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the WISE 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.

At NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, launch officials at the Space Shuttle Program's Flight Readiness Review decided today to move forward with the targeted launch date of Feb. 7.

At the executive-level Flight Readiness Review meeting being held at Kennedy on Jan. 27, NASA managers will evaluate all activities and elements necessary for the safe and successful performance of shuttle mission operations -- from the prelaunch phase through post-landing. They also will examine the readiness of the space shuttle, flight crew and payloads to determine if everything is set to proceed with launch.

The official launch date will be set at the review and announced during a press briefing following the meeting.

Endeavour's STS-130 Mission

Commander George Zamka will lead the STS-130 mission to the International Space Station aboard space shuttle Endeavour. Terry Virts will serve as the pilot. Mission Specialists are Nicholas Patrick, Robert Behnken, Stephen Robinson and Kathryn Hire. Virts will be making his first trip to space.

Shuttle Endeavour and its crew will deliver to the space station a third connecting module, the Italian-built Tranquility node and the seven-windowed cupola, which will be used as a control room for robotics. The mission will feature three spacewalks.

Liftoff from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is targeted for February 7, 2010, at 4:39 a.m. EST

Participating organizations include museums, science centers, Challenger Centers and other institutions of informal education. Selected projects will partner with NASA's Museum Alliance, an Internet-based, nationwide network of more than 400 science centers, planetariums, museums, aquariums, zoos, observatory visitor centers, NASA visitor centers, nature centers and park visitor centers.

Projects in the program will engage learners of all ages as well as educators who work in formal or informal science education. The projects will provide NASA-inspired space, science, technology, engineering or mathematics educational opportunities, including planetarium shows and exhibits.

In conjunction with NASA's Museum Alliance, the grants focus on NASA-themed space exploration, aeronautics, space science, Earth science, microgravity or a combination of themes. Some projects will include partnerships with elementary and secondary schools, colleges and universities.

The projects are located in Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New York, North Carolina, Oregon and South Dakota. The nine grants have a maximum five-year period of performance and range in value from approximately $120,000 to $1.5 million. Selected projects work with the NASA Shared Service Center in Mississippi to complete the business review necessary before a NASA award is issued.

Proposals were selected through a merit-based, external peer-review process. NASA's Office of Education and mission directorates collaborated to solicit and review the grant applications. This integrated approach distinguishes NASA's investment in informal education. NASA received 67 proposals from 32 states and the District of Columbia.

The solar-powered lander operated two months longer than its three-month prime mission during summer on northern Mars before the seasonal ebb of sunshine ended its work. Since then, Phoenix's landing site has gone through autumn, winter and part of spring. The lander's hardware was not designed to survive the temperature extremes and ice-coating load of an arctic Martian winter.

In the extremely unlikely case that Phoenix survived the winter, it is expected to follow instructions programmed on its computer. If systems still operate, once its solar panels generate enough electricity to establish a positive energy balance, the lander would periodically try to communicate with any available Mars relay orbiters in an attempt to reestablish contact with Earth. During each communications attempt, the lander would alternately use each of its two radios and each of its two antennas.

Odyssey will pass over the Phoenix landing site approximately 10 times each day during three consecutive days of listening this month and two longer listening campaigns in February and March.

"We do not expect Phoenix to have survived, and therefore do not expect to hear from it. However, if Phoenix is transmitting, Odyssey will hear it," said Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer for the Mars Exploration Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We will perform a sufficient number of Odyssey contact attempts that if we don't detect a transmission from Phoenix, we can have a high degree of confidence that the lander is not active."

Blobs of warm ice that periodically rise to the surface and churn the icy crust on Saturn's moon Enceladus explain the quirky heat behavior and intriguing surface of the moon's south polar region, according to a new paper using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

"Cassini appears to have caught Enceladus in the middle of a burp," said Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz and a co-author of the new paper in Nature Geoscience. "These tumultuous periods are rare and Cassini happens to have been watching the moon during one of these special epochs."

The south polar region captivates scientists because it hosts the fissures known as "tiger stripes" that spray water vapor and other particles out from the moon. While the latest paper, released on Jan. 10, doesn't link the churning and resurfacing directly to the formation of fissures and jets, it does fill in some of the blanks in the region's history.

"This episodic model helps to solve one of the most perplexing mysteries of Enceladus," said Bob Pappalardo, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., of the research done by his colleagues. "Why is the south polar surface so young? How could this amount of heat be pumped out at the moon's south pole? This idea assembles the pieces of the puzzle."

About four years ago, Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer instrument detected a heat flow in the south polar region of at least 6 gigawatts, the equivalent of at least a dozen electric power plants. This is at least three times as much heat as an average region of Earth of similar area would produce, despite Enceladus' small size. The region was also later found by Cassini's ion and neutral mass spectrometer instrument to be swiftly expelling argon, which comes from rocks decaying radioactively and has a well-known rate of decay.

Launched on Dec. 14, WISE will scan the entire sky for millions of hidden objects, including asteroids, "failed" stars and powerful galaxies. WISE data will serve as navigation charts for other missions, such as NASA's Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, pointing them to the most interesting targets the mission finds.

A new WISE infrared image was taken shortly after the space telescope's cover was removed, exposing the instrument's detectors to starlight for the first time. The picture shows about 3,000 stars in the Carina constellation and can be viewed online at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/wise20100106.html .

The image covers a patch of sky about three times larger than the full moon, and was presented today at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington. The patch was selected because it does not contain any unusually bright objects, which could damage instrument detectors if observed for too long. The picture was taken while the spacecraft was staring at a fixed patch of sky and is being used to calibrate the spacecraft's pointing system.

When the WISE survey begins, the spacecraft will scan the sky continuously as it circles the globe, while an internal scan mirror counteracts its motion. This allows WISE to take "freeze-frame" snapshots every 11 seconds, resulting in millions of images of the entire sky.

"Right now, we are busy matching the rate of the scan mirror to the rate of the spacecraft, so we will capture sharp pictures as our telescope sweeps across the sky," said William Irace, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

To sense the infrared glow of stars and galaxies, the WISE spacecraft cannot give off any detectable infrared light of its own. This is accomplished by chilling the telescope and detectors to ultra-cold temperatures. The coldest of WISE's detectors will operate at less than 8 Kelvin, or minus 445 degrees Fahrenheit.

The first sky survey will be complete in six months, followed by a second scan of one-half of the sky lasting three months. The mission ends when the frozen hydrogen that keeps the instrument cold evaporates away, an event expected to occur in October 2010.

Launched on Dec. 14, WISE will scan the entire sky for millions of hidden objects, including asteroids, "failed" stars and powerful galaxies. WISE data will serve as navigation charts for other missions, such as NASA's Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, pointing them to the most interesting targets the mission finds.

A new WISE infrared image was taken shortly after the space telescope's cover was removed, exposing the instrument's detectors to starlight for the first time. The picture shows about 3,000 stars in the Carina constellation and can be viewed online at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/wise20100106.html .

The image covers a patch of sky about three times larger than the full moon, and was presented today at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington. The patch was selected because it does not contain any unusually bright objects, which could damage instrument detectors if observed for too long. The picture was taken while the spacecraft was staring at a fixed patch of sky and is being used to calibrate the spacecraft's pointing system.

When the WISE survey begins, the spacecraft will scan the sky continuously as it circles the globe, while an internal scan mirror counteracts its motion. This allows WISE to take "freeze-frame" snapshots every 11 seconds, resulting in millions of images of the entire sky.

"Right now, we are busy matching the rate of the scan mirror to the rate of the spacecraft, so we will capture sharp pictures as our telescope sweeps across the sky," said William Irace, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

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• The Surface and Atmosphere Geochemical Explorer, or SAGE, mission to Venus would release a probe to descend through the planet's atmosphere. During descent, instruments would conduct extensive measurements of the atmosphere's composition and obtain meteorological data. The probe then would land on the surface of Venus, where its abrading tool would expose both a weathered and a pristine surface area to measure its composition and mineralogy. Scientists hope to understand the origin of Venus and why it is so different from Earth. Larry Esposito of the University of Colorado in Boulder, is the principal investigator.

• The Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer spacecraft, called Osiris-Rex, would rendezvous and orbit a primitive asteroid. After extensive measurements, instruments would collect more than two ounces of material from the asteriod's surface for return to Earth. The returned samples would help scientists better undertand and answer long-held questions about the formation of our solar system and the origin of complex molecules necessary for life. Michael Drake, of the University of Arizona in Tucson, is the principal investigator.

• MoonRise: Lunar South Pole-Aitken Basin Sample Return Mission would place a lander in a broad basin near the moon's south pole and return approximately two pounds of lunar materials for study. This region of the lunar surface is believed to harbor rocks excavated from the moon's mantle. The samples would provide new insight into the early history of the Earth-moon system. Bradley Jolliff, of Washington University in St. Louis, is the principal investigator.