Nasa Technology News

Here are five quick facts about the EPOXI mission, scheduled to fly by comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4, 2010.

1. High Fives - This is the fifth time humans will see a comet close-up, and the Deep Impact spacecraft flew by Earth for its fifth time on Sunday, June 27, 2010.

2. Eco-friendly Spacecraft: Recycle, Reuse, Record - The EPOXI mission is recycling the Deep Impact spacecraft, whose probe intentionally collided with comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, revealing, for the first time, the inner material of a comet. The spacecraft is now approaching a second comet rendezvous, a close encounter with Hartley 2 on Nov. 4. The spacecraft is reusing the same trio of instruments used during Deep Impact: two telescopes with digital imagers to record the encounter, and an infrared spectrometer.

3. Small, Mighty and Square-Dancing in Space - Although comet Hartley 2 is smaller than Tempel 1, the previous comet visited by Deep Impact, it is much more active. In fact, amateur skywatchers may be able to see Hartley 2 in a dark sky with binoculars or a small telescope. Engineers specifically designed the mighty Deep Impact spacecraft to point a camera at Tempel 1 while its antenna was directed at Earth. This flyby of comet Hartley 2 does not provide the same luxury. It cannot both photograph the comet and talk with mission controllers on Earth. Engineers have instead programmed Deep Impact to dance the do-si-do. The spacecraft will spend the week leading up to closest approach swinging back and forth between imaging the comet and beaming images back to Earth.

4. Storytelling Comets - Comets are an important aspect of studying how the solar system formed and Earth evolved. Comets are leftover building blocks of solar system formation, and are believed to have seeded an early Earth with water and organic compounds. The more we know about these celestial bodies, the more we can learn about Earth and the solar system.

5. What's in a Name? - EPOXI is a hybrid acronym binding two science investigations: the Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization (EPOCh) and Deep Impact eXtended Investigation (DIXI). The spacecraft keeps its original name of Deep Impact, while the mission is called EPOXI.

Scientists returned this week to the Southern Hemisphere where NASA's Operation IceBridge mission is set to begin its second year of airborne surveys over Antarctica. The mission monitors the region's changing sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers.

Researchers will make flights from Punta Arenas, Chile, on NASA's DC-8, a 157-foot airborne laboratory equipped with a suite of seven instruments. The focus is on re-surveying areas that are undergoing rapid change and embarking on new lines of investigation.

"We are excited to learn how the glaciers and sea ice have changed since last year's campaign," said Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We also are going to be mapping uncharted regions that will allow us to better assess future behavior of the Antarctic ice sheets and sea ice."

IceBridge science flights are scheduled to begin this week and continue through mid-November. Flights will take off from Punta Arenas and cross the Southern Ocean to reach destinations including West Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula and coastal areas. Each flight lasts about 11 hours.

Instruments for the 2010 Antarctic campaign are the same as those flown in 2009. A laser instrument will map and identify surface changes. Radar instruments will penetrate the snow and ice to see below the surface, providing a profile of ice characteristics and also the shape of the bedrock supporting it. A gravity instrument will measure the shape of seawater-filled cavities at the edge of some major fast-moving glaciers.

Using these tools, researchers will survey targets of on-going and potential rapid change, including the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is the area that has the greatest potential to rapidly increase sea level. Another concern is that the ice sheet is below sea level, adding to its instability.

Revisiting previously flown areas, scientists can begin to quantify the magnitude of changes to land ice. Pine Island Glacier, the largest ice stream in West Antarctica with significant potential contribution to sea level rise, has long been a primary target for sustained observations. Satellite data, most recently from NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) have shown dramatic thinning there of up to 10 meters per year in places. Previous IceBridge flights mapped the surface of the glacier and unusual features beneath it, providing clues to the glacier's rapid retreat and ice loss.

In addition to flying previous lines over the glacier, the IceBridge team plans to fly a new horseshoe pattern to sample the tributaries feeding into Pine Island Glacier's main trunk. Other new flight lines will further explore the Antarctic Peninsula to map new targets, including the George VI Ice Shelf, above and below the ice.

Three high-priority flights are aimed at measuring sea ice, including a plan to map and measure sea ice across the Weddell Sea. Scientists want to know why sea ice in Antarctica is growing in extent, unlike sea ice in the Arctic, which is declining in extent. Current theories range from ozone depletion to changing ocean dynamics.

Other flights are being planned to be coordinated with existing space and ground-based missions, such as the European Space Agency's ice-observing Cryosat-2 satellite and European ship-based research. Overlapping measurements help researchers calibrate instruments and boost confidence in the resulting observations.

"A concerted effort like this will allow us to produce long time series of data spanning from past satellite missions to current and future missions," Studinger said. "This is only possible through international collaboration. We are excited to have many opportunities to work with our international partners during the upcoming campaign."

The lunar rocks brought back to the Earth by the Apollo astronauts were found to have very little water, and to be much drier than rocks on Earth. An explanation for this was that the Moon formed billions of years ago in the solar system's turbulent youth, when a Mars-sized planet crashed into Earth. The impact stripped away our planet's outer layer, sending it into orbit. The pieces later coalesced under their own gravity to form our Moon. Heat from all this mayhem vaporized most of the water in the lunar material, so the water was lost to space.

However, there was still a chance that water might be found in special places on the Moon. Due to the Moon's orientation to the Sun, scientists theorized that deep craters at the lunar poles would be in permanent shadow and thus extremely cold and able to trap volatile material like water as ice perhaps delivered there by comet impacts or chemical reactions with hydrogen carried by the solar wind.

Last year on October 9, NASA's LCROSS (Lunar Crater Remote Observation and Sensing Satellite) intentionally crashed its companion Centaur upper stage into the Cabeus crater near the lunar south pole. The idea was to kick up debris from the bottom of the crater so its composition could be analyzed. The Centaur hit at over 5,600 miles per hour, sending up a plume of material over 12 miles high.

"Seeing mostly pure water ice grains in the plume means water ice was somehow delivered or chemical processes are causing ice to accumulate in large quantities," said Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "Furthermore, the diversity and abundance of certain materials called volatiles in the plume, suggest a variety of sources, like comets and asteroids, and an active water cycle within the lunar shadows."

LCROSS was a companion mission to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission.

The two missions were designed to work together, and support from LRO was critical to the success of LCROSS. During impact, LRO, which is normally looking at the lunar surface, was tilted toward the horizon so it could observe the plume. Shortly after the Centaur hit the Moon, LRO flew past debris and gas from the impact while its instruments collected data.

"LRO assisted LCROSS in two primary ways -- selecting the impact site and confirming the LCROSS observations," said Gordon Chin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., LRO associate project scientist.

"Since observatories on Earth were also planning to view the impact, there were a lot of constraints on the location -- the impact plume had to rise out of the crater and into sunlight, and it had to be visible from Earth," said Chin.

Prior to the impact, LRO's instruments worked together to map and provide details on the polar regions, according to Chin. For example, LRO's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument built up three-dimensional (topographic) maps of the surface. This data was plugged into computer simulations to see how shadows change as the Moon moves in its orbit, so that regions in permanent shadow could be identified. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) helped by making images of the actual regions of light and shade, which were used to verify the simulation's accuracy. Finally, LOLA measured the depths of polar craters to find areas where the impact could still be seen from Earth.

Since hydrogen is a component of water, maps of lunar hydrogen deposits are useful for finding areas that might hold water. Preliminary hydrogen maps were provided by the spacecraft's Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector (LEND) instrument. Regions that had relatively high amounts of hydrogen were identified as the most promising for the impact.

"Over a year ago, we formally suggested Cabeus to the LCROSS principal investigator," said LEND principal investigator, Igor Mitrofanov of the Institute for Space Research, Moscow. "According to our current data, the regolith within the Cabeus impact crater may have the highest content of water anywhere on the Moon, perhaps up 4.0 percent weight."

"Originally, the LCROSS team was going with a site further north than the Cabeus crater, because it was better for Earth visibility," said Chin. "However, LEND revealed that the area did not have a high hydrogen concentration, but Cabeus did. Also, Diviner showed that Cabeus was one of the coldest sites, and LOLA indicated it was in permanent shadow. So, we were able to inform the decision to aim for Cabeus further south -- while it was a little less visible from Earth, Cabeus was ultimately better for what we were trying to find."

Temperature maps from LRO's Diviner instrument were also crucial to identify where the coldest places were.

David Paige, principal Investigator of the Diviner instrument from the University of California, Los Angeles, used temperature measurements of the lunar south pole obtained by Diviner to model the stability of water ice both at and near the surface.

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake that caused more than 200,000 casualties and devastated Haiti's economy in January resulted not from the Enriquillo fault, as previously believed, but from slip on multiple faults -- primarily a previously unknown, subsurface fault -- according to a study published online this week in Nature Geoscience.

In addition, because the earthquake did not involve slip near Earth's surface, the study suggests that it did not release all of the strain that has built up on faults in the area over the past two centuries, meaning that future surface-rupturing earthquakes in this region are likely.

Geophysicist Eric Fielding of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., along with lead author Gavin Hayes of the U.S. Geological Survey and other colleagues from USGS, the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, the University of Texas at Austin, and Nagoya University, Japan, used a combination of seismological observations, geologic field data and satellite geodetic measurements to analyze the earthquake source. Initially the Haiti earthquake was thought to be the consequence of movement along a single fault -- the Enriquillo -- that accommodates the motion between the Caribbean and North American tectonic plates. But scientists in the field found no evidence of surface rupture on that fault.

The researchers found the pattern of surface deformation was dominated by movement on a previously unknown, subsurface thrust fault, named the Léogâne fault, which did not rupture the surface.

Fielding, who processed synthetic aperture radar interferometry data from a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) satellite used in the study, said, "I was surprised when I saw the satellite data showed the Haiti earthquake must have ruptured a different fault than the major Enriquillo fault, which everybody expected was the source. Without the radar images, we might still be wondering what happened."

Fielding said NASA images acquired after the earthquake over the major fault zones of Hispaniola by the JPL-built Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) airborne instrument will give scientists much more detailed information should another large earthquake occur in the region in the future.

For more information, read the USGS news release: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2612 .
To read the full study, visit: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo977 .

A team of researchers and collaborators from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Arizona's College of Optical Sciences in Tucson has successfully conducted the first test flight of a prototype science instrument for a next-generation satellite mission to survey the impacts of aerosols and clouds on global climate change.

The Multiangle SpectroPolarimetric Imager, or MSPI, is a multi-directional multi-wavelength, high-accuracy polarization camera that is a follow-on instrument to the JPL-developed Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) aboard NASA's Terra spacecraft.

It is a candidate instrument for NASA's Aerosol-Cloud-Ecosystem (ACE) mission, an Earth satellite recommended by the National Research Council in its 2007 Earth Sciences Decadal Survey. ACE mission objectives include characterizing the role of aerosols in changing Earth's energy balance (the balance between incoming solar energy and outgoing heat from Earth), especially their impact on precipitation and cloud formation.

An airborne prototype version of the instrument, the AirMSPI, was checked out Oct. 7 on one of NASA's high-altitude ER-2 Earth Resources aircraft during a two-hour flight from NASA's Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif.

For more information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/Features/ER-2_Multiangle_Polarizing_Imager.html .
For more on AirMSPI, see: http://airbornescience.jpl.nasa.gov/airmspi/ .

The historic Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, developed and built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, left JPL Wednesday morning, Oct. 13, for points east. Known informally as "The Camera That Saved Hubble," the baby-grand-piano-sized camera was on temporary loan from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington.

During its stay at JPL, the historic camera was a popular attraction for groups of school children and other visitors, including thousands of people who attended JPL's annual Open House in May.

Next stop for the camera: It will be on display for a short time at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Colorado, and then it will return to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, where it will go on permanent display. The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 was the workhorse camera on Hubble after being added to the observatory in December 1993 to correct an imaging problem created by the telescope's faulty primary mirror. During its tenure aboard Hubble, the camera produced many of the mission's most stunning deep space images.

Its high-image resolution and quality are some of the reasons the camera became the space telescope's most requested instrument during its operational lifetime. Logging 15 years aboard the observatory, the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 was Hubble's longest-serving instrument. Space-walking astronauts retrieved the camera during the final Hubble servicing mission in May 2009. More information about the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 is at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wfpc2 . An image gallery contains some of the camera's historic photos.

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered that a giant star in a remote galaxy ended its life with a dust-shrouded whimper instead of the more typical bang.

Researchers suspect that this odd event -- the first one of its kind ever viewed by astronomers – was more common early in the universe.

It also hints at what we would see if the brightest star system in our Milky Way galaxy exploded, or went supernova.

The discovery is reported in a paper published online in the Astrophysical Journal. The lead author is Christopher Kochanek, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, Columbus.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope continues to make significant progress, successfully completing a series of sunshield vent tests that validate the telescope's sunshield design.

"While adequate venting is a design consideration for all spaceflight hardware, this was a particularly unique challenge for the sunshield given the large volume of trapped air in the membrane system at launch," said Keith Parrish, Webb telescope sunshield manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "From the beginning of its development venting features have been a critical part of the overall sunshield design. Since we cannot vent test the actual flight article these test have shown the design works and the sunshield will vent safely on its way to orbit."

The sunshield on the Webb telescope will block the heat of the Sun and Earth from reaching the cold section of the Observatory. That's a critical function because the telescope and instruments must be cooled below 50 Kelvin (~-369.7 Fahrenheit) to allow them to see faint infrared emissions from astronomical objects. The sunshield consists of five layers of Kapton ®E with aluminum and doped-silicon coatings to reflect the sun's heat back into space.

Using flight-like sunshield membranes, the tests are designed to mimic the rapid change in air pressure the folded sunshield will experience the first minutes of launch. Several different folding configurations each underwent a series of 90-second depressurization tests and proved that the stowed sunshield will retain its shape during launch and allow trapped air to escape safely, both critical to sunshield deployment and performance.

Northrop Grumman Corporation is leading Webb's design and development effort for NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The first tests were conducted the last week of August in vacuum chambers at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems' Redondo Beach facility. Another series of complementary tests were completed in October where air was injected into the stowed sunshield test article, and that provided more detailed data used in evaluating analytical models.

"This is another significant risk reduction activity that continues to move sunshield development forward," said Scott Willoughby, Webb Telescope program manager for Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. "We have demonstrated the effectiveness of our sunshield vent design."

Three critical full-scale sections of the sunshield were tested: the section on top of the spacecraft around the tower that supports the telescope; the vertical pallet structure that contains the folded sunshield membranes, and the intervening four-bar linkage area that is folded in an inverted V-shape. The flow paths are complex and the sunshield material, a tough plastic film, Kapton ®E, is only one to two thousandths of an inch thick and covers a surface area the size of a tennis court.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the world's next-generation space observatory and successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The most powerful space telescope ever built, Webb will observe the most distant objects in the universe, provide images of the very first galaxies ever formed and see unexplored planets around distant stars.

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The Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite has completed assembly at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and is nearly ready for a December delivery to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., where it will be installed into the Curiosity rover.

The Mars Science Laboratory mission will use SAM and other instruments on Curiosity to examine whether an intriguing area of Mars has had environmental conditions favorable for microbial life and favorable for preserving evidence of life, if it existed. Launch is scheduled for late 2011, with landing in August 2012.

SAM will explore molecular and elemental chemistry relevant to life. It will analyze samples of Martian rock and soil to assess carbon chemistry through a search for organic compounds, and to look for clues about planetary change.

SAM is in flight configuration, meaning its instruments are in the condition they will be in during launch and are ready to begin operations on Mars. The instrument suite (a mass spectrometer, gas chromatograph and tunable laser spectrometer) started final environmental testing this week, which includes vibration and thermal testing to ensure SAM can survive the launch, deep space flight and conditions on Mars.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of the large asteroid Vesta that will help refine plans for the Dawn spacecraft's rendezvous with Vesta in July 2011.

Scientists have constructed a video from the images that will help improve pointing instructions for Dawn as it is placed in a polar orbit around Vesta. Analyses of Hubble images revealed a pole orientation, or tilt, of approximately four degrees more to the asteroid's east than scientists previously thought.

This means the change of seasons between the southern and northern hemispheres of Vesta may take place about a month later than previously expected while Dawn is orbiting the asteroid. The result is a change in the pattern of sunlight expected to illuminate the asteroid. Dawn needs solar illumination for imaging and some mapping activities.

"While Vesta is the brightest asteroid in the sky, its small size makes it difficult to image from Earth," said Jian-Yang Li, a scientist participating in the Dawn mission from the University of Maryland in College Park. "The new Hubble images give Dawn scientists a better sense of how Vesta is spinning, because our new views are 90 degrees different from our previous images. It's like having a street-level view and adding a view from an airplane overhead."

The recent images were obtained by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in February. The images complemented previous ones of Vesta taken from ground-based telescopes and Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 between 1983 and 2007. Li and his colleagues looked at 216 new images -- and a total of 446 Hubble images overall -- to clarify how Vesta was spinning. The journal Icarus recently published the report online.

"The new results give us food for thought as we make our way toward Vesta," said
Christopher Russell, Dawn's principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Because our goal is to take pictures of the entire surface and measure the elevation of features over most of the surface to an accuracy of about 33 feet, or the height of a three-story building, we need to pay close attention to the solar illumination. It looks as if Vesta is going to have a late northern spring next year, or at least later than we planned."

Launched in September 2007, Dawn will leave Vesta to encounter the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. Vesta and Ceres are the most massive objects in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists study these celestial bodies as examples of the building blocks of terrestrial planets like Earth. Dawn is approximately 216 million kilometers (134 million miles) away from Vesta. Next summer, the spacecraft will make its own measurements of Vesta's rotating surface and allow mission managers to pin down its axis of spin.

NASA wrapped up one of its largest hurricane research efforts ever last week after nearly two months of flights that broke new ground in the study of tropical cyclones and delivered data that scientists will be able to analyze for years to come.

While the 2010 hurricane season has been a rather quiet one for coastal dwellers, the churning meteorology of the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea seemed to cooperate well with the science goals of the Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) experiment. Those goals were designed to answer some of the most fundamental yet still unanswered questions of hurricane science: What ultimately causes hurricanes to form? Why do some tropical depressions become strong hurricanes, while others dissipate? What causes the rapid strengthening often seen in hurricanes?

Mission scientists, including personnel from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., which had two instruments flying in the campaign, wanted to capture data on hurricanes as they formed and intensified. Ideally, the NASA planes – the manned DC-8 and WB-57, and the remotely piloted Global Hawk – would also fly over systems that were weakening, or that were expected to form into hurricanes yet did not. When the flights had ended, all those goals had been met.

"It was successful beyond my reasonable expectations. It requires cooperation with the weather and good luck with the aircraft," said Mission Scientist Ed Zipser of the University of Utah, Salt Lake City. "It's not so much a logistical challenge as it is a toss of the dice by Mother Nature during our time available. But it takes a good airplane, a skillful crew and good luck with the equipment."

Flying to Hurricanes

Hurricanes Earl and Karl each became important objects of observation for scientists during GRIP. The DC-8 flew to Earl four times, criss-crossing the storm as it intensified to a category 4 hurricane and then weakened. On the final Earl flight, as the storm was breaking down and losing strength, the Global Hawk made its debut hurricane flight and passed over Earl's eye in concert with the DC-8, providing valuable comparison measurements for the instruments on board both aircraft. The WB-57 flew over Earl as well as Karl.

At the outset, scientists hoped that several aspects of GRIP would help gather important data as well as complete a couple of technical accomplishments. First, collaboration with the Air Force, NOAA and the National Science Foundation would allow scientists to observe a single storm system with as many as six aircraft. Second, GRIP featured the debut of NASA's Global Hawk drone in a hurricane research capacity. The unmanned plane's 24-hour flight range gave scientists the ability to observe a hurricane directly as it changed over time and distance, in a way that conventional planes and satellites have not done before.

Both of these aspects of GRIP were used to great effect during the two major hurricanes observed during the campaign, Earl and Karl. "We're all very pleased we were able to get the Global Hawk over a hurricane," said Mission Scientist Gerry Heymsfield of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "There was a question about that. That's a major accomplishment both on the science side and the capability side. It really paves the way for future research."

As the campaign went on, Global Hawk pilots, based remotely at Dryden Flight Research Center, near Palmdale, Calif., grew more comfortable with the drone's capability at 18,288 kilometers (60,000 feet) and over a hurricane. On Sept. 16 and 17, the Global Hawk made a 25-hour flight that included 20 passes over the eye of Karl as it was evolving into a hurricane – precisely the type of formation and storm development that scientists hoped to capture during GRIP.

"None of our other planes can do that," said GRIP Project Manager Marilyn Vasques of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "They've been learning the capabilities of this aircraft at every flight."

On that same flight, the collaboration with the other agencies reached full steam, as six aircraft flew over Karl. The DC-8 was even able to follow the storm after it made landfall in Mexico and began to deteriorate. It is unusual to get the clearances to fly over a hurricane once it has reached land, making the scientific payoff all the more valuable. "We were able to capture some rare detail once it made landfall," Zipser said.

What's in the data?

For all the logistics involved in coordinating flights and using a drone designed for military purposes in a scientific campaign, the chief purpose of the experiment remained getting good data. The instruments on board the GRIP planes provided 3-D observations of storm cloud and precipitation structures, measurements of wind speed in the horizontal and the vertical dimensions, data on lightning strikes, and lidar measurements of clouds and aerosols in and around hurricanes. These are all in addition to the basic yet important measurements of factors such as humidity, pressure and temperature that provide context for more advanced observations.

JPL's two GRIP instruments were the High-Altitude Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit Sounding Radiometer, or HAMSR; and the Airborne Precipitation Radar (APR-2). HAMSR, which flew aboard the Global Hawk uninhabited aerial vehicle, is used to infer the 3-D distribution of temperature, water vapor and cloud liquid water in the atmosphere. The dual-frequency APR-2 weather radar, which flew aboard the DC-8, is used to help scientists understand the processes at work in hurricanes by looking at the vertical structure of the storms.
While scientists will mine the GRIP observations for months and years, the team knows now that it was mostly able to fly over the types of storms and conditions that it wanted to fly over. Both Earl and Karl provided strong examples of rapid intensification. The Global Hawk arrived over Karl shortly after it reached hurricane status, and continued to fly over it as it rapidly strengthened to a Category 3 storm in the next nine to 12 hours. The flights over Karl could provide great insight into the genesis of that system, and the reasons for its rapid intensification soon after it passed over the Yucatan Peninsula and into the Gulf of Mexico.

HAMSR Principal Investigator Bjorn Lambrigtsen of JPL said HAMSR turned out to be the best tool for determining the position of Karl's eye. "The Global Hawk was able to fly over the eye 20 times in a row over a 13-hour period," Lambrigtsen said. "HAMSR provided quick-look data in real time, and the mission science team was able to use those images to get an exact fix on the location of the eye as the storm evolved, and the result was a very large number of exact hits [bulls-eyes]." A comparison with fixes provided by the U.S. Air Force, whose objective during the flights was to determine that information, showed that the HAMSR-based locations were accurate to within a mile or so.

"The number of passes over the eye and the nearly complete coverage for such an extended period of time is unprecedented," Lambrigtsen continued. "It has provided an extremely rich data set that will be used to study the evolution of a tropical storm that re-forms after passing over land – something we have not previously been able to study – and the rapid strengthening of Karl as it approached the Mexican mainland."

JPL's APR-2 instrument was able to show Karl's precipitation structure as it changed from a disorganized disturbance to a tropical storm. "APR-2 measurements of the horizontal winds were among the first data to show the center of the newly formed storm before its first landfall on the Yucatan peninsula," said APR-2 Principal Investigator Steve Durden of JPL. "Wind patterns that were somewhat similar, but less clear, were observed in a disturbance the following week, just prior to its becoming Tropical Storm Matthew. We believe that these data should provide insight into how storms form, one of the key goals of the GRIP experiment."
"The flights into Karl as soon as it emerged over the Gulf and became a hurricane gave us just a fantastic example, and that was the day the Global Hawk did 20 passes over the eye," Zipser said. The GRIP planes were also able to fly to tropical systems – such as Gaston – that were forecast to strengthen and become hurricanes but ultimately did not. In the quest to understand why some tropical depressions become hurricanes and others don't, these were also important flights.

The system known as Gaston formed out of an African easterly wave – one of a number of depressions that routinely form off the coast of Africa and often become hurricanes. It was forecast to become a full-fledged hurricane but it did not. "It had all the elements to become a storm, so scientifically that's very interesting," Vasques said.

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Looking for Life in all the Right Places

In this vast universe, we know of only one site that has rolled out the welcome mat for life -- our planet Earth. Yet we can't help but wonder whether life in some form might exist elsewhere in the cosmos -- perhaps advanced life forms like humans or maybe the slimy mold like the type that thrives in showers.

NASA scientists are trying to answer that age-old question "Are we alone?" by looking at other celestial bodies that might have life, with much of their search concentrated on finding Earthlike planets orbiting other stars. That's because scientists understand many of the conditions that led to life here on Earth, and by looking for similar planets with Earthlike conditions, they hope to increase the odds of finding life.

Location, Location, Location

Until 1995, scientists suspected that other stars might have planets in orbit around them, but they couldn't prove it. Then, in October 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, astronomers at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, found an extra-solar planet orbiting the star 51 Pegasi. They knew it was there because they watched it over a long period of time and observed that the star was moving slightly toward and away from Earth every four days. That indicated that the star was being affected by the gravitational tug of an unseen planet in orbit around it.

Since then, astronomers have detected dozens of planets using similar techniques. With current technology, however, they can find only very large planets like Jupiter, which probably don't harbor life. Unlike Earth or Mars, Jupiter is composed completely of gas and has no solid surface where life can form. Astronomers are anxious to find smaller, more Earthlike planets, with conditions more favorable to life as we know it.

The Hunt is On

This quest presents an enormous challenge. NASA's Origins Program is taking on the challenge with a series of missions designed to find warm, wet, Earthlike planets around other stars -- planets that might sustain life. To do this, we'd need extremely large telescopes, much too big and expensive to be practical. In addition, a planet looks very dim compared to its parent star, which shines like our Sun. It's like looking for a firefly in front of a searchlight.

To help overcome these obstacles, NASA is using a technology called interferometry, which combines light gathered by multiple telescopes to create a much larger, "virtual telescope." This produces a much sharper, more detailed image. Several Origins missions, including the Space Interferometry Mission, with a planned launch later this decade, and the Keck Interferometer, already operating on the ground in Hawaii, are expected to help us find smaller planets than current technology allows.

A much more ambitious mission, like the Terrestrial Planet Finder, may put multiple telescopes on separate spacecraft to fly in formation. Working together, these telescopes would then be able to take "family portraits" of entire solar systems and would analyze spectra to look for the chemical fingerprint life would leave on the reflected light from the planet.

If you went far out into space and looked back at Earth, with special instruments you could detect oxygen, ozone, carbon dioxide and other chemicals in Earth's atmosphere. That would tell you that Earth has living things. Terrestrial Planet Finder will look for similar, telltale chemical signatures of life when it observes Earth-sized planets around other, nearby stars.

We know that life on Earth requires water, an energy source and certain chemicals. We also know that life is surprisingly hardy -- it survives in extremely hostile environments, such as boiling, toxic thermal vents on the ocean floor. If and when we find life elsewhere in the universe, we don't know whether it will be like anything we see on Earth. One thing we can guarantee -- the hunt for planets and the search for life take us on an exciting and profound adventure.

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

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

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

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

The new images are available at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .

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

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

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

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

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

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A unique partnership between NASA and agencies in Africa and Europe has sent more than 30 terabytes of free Earth science satellite data to South African researchers to support sustainable development and environmental applications in Africa.

The data from one of the instruments on NASA's Terra satellite provide observations of Africa's surface and atmosphere, including vegetation structure, airborne pollution particles, cloud heights and winds. Transfer of these data to a distribution center in Africa will make it broadly accessible to African users who have not been able to remotely download the large data files because of limitations in the continent's Internet infrastructure.

The data are from the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) on Terra. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., built and manages the instrument, and NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., processes, archives and distributes the data.

MISR has been making continuous measurements of Earth's surface and atmosphere for more than a decade. MISR observes the sunlit portion of Earth continuously, viewing the entire globe between 82 degrees north and 82 degrees south latitude every nine days. Instead of viewing Earth from a single perspective, the instrument collects images from nine widely spaced view angles.

"NASA is committed to helping governments, organizations and researchers around the world make effective use of Earth observation data to aid in environmental decision making," said Hal Maring, a program manager in the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These efforts support the goals of the Group on Earth Observations, a partnership of international agencies that promotes collaborative use of Earth science data."

South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria will distribute the data at no charge to the research community in the region. CSIR will facilitate access to the large volume of MISR data as part of its broad strategy of educating, training and transferring knowledge to the southern African research community.

"The data transfer can be seen as a birthday present from NASA to the newly-formed South African National Space Agency," said Bob Scholes, CSIR research group leader for ecosystem processes and dynamics. "It will kick-start a new generation of high-quality land surface products, with applications in climate change and avoiding desertification." Desertification is the gradual transformation of habitable land into desert due to climate change or destructive land use practices.

The partnership began in spring 2008, when MISR science team member Michel Verstraete of the European Commission Joint Research Centre Institute for Environment and Sustainability (JRC-IES) in Ispra, Italy, participated in an intensive CSIR field campaign to study the environment around Kruger National Park, a major wildlife reserve in South Africa. The researchers studied the area using direct, airborne and space-based measurements. During the campaign, Verstraete learned of the widespread interest by the South African research community in remote-sensing techniques and applications.

In response, JRC-IES and CSIR signed an agreement in July 2008 to facilitate the interaction and exchange of people, knowledge, data and software.

NASA became involved in the collaboration in 2009 after a training workshop for MISR users in Cape Town, South Africa, organized by JPL and Langley Research Center. Although the workshop sparked interest in the potential use of MISR data, it soon became apparent that accessing a large volume of data was a major hurdle for research and applications in developing countries in general and Africa in particular. While Internet connectivity in Africa has improved greatly in recent years, access and bandwidth remain too limited to support downloading vast data files. This led CSIR to host the data directly.

NASA shipped most of the data on high-density tapes this summer. The agencies will ensure the database stays updated with current MISR observations by upgrading connectivity and facilitating sharing of data among participating academic and research institutions.

"This multi-party collaboration will significantly strengthen academic and research institutions in southern Africa and support sustainable development of the entire subcontinent," said Verstraete, who will spend six months in southern Africa next year to help the regional remote-sensing community use the data.

For more information on MISR, visit: http://misr.jpl.nasa.gov .

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

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NASA has given a green light for development of a 2013 Mars orbiter mission to investigate the mystery of how Mars lost much of its atmosphere: the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (Maven) mission.

Clues on the Martian surface, such as features resembling dry riverbeds and minerals that only form in the presence of liquid water, suggest that Mars once had a denser atmosphere, which supported the presence of liquid water on the surface. As part of a dramatic climate change, most of the Martian atmosphere was lost. Maven will make definitive scientific measurements of present-day atmospheric loss that will offer insight into the Red Planet's history.

Approval to proceed with development followed a review at NASA Headquarters of the detailed plans, instrument suite, budget, and risk factor analysis for the spacecraft.

The mission is led by its principal investigator, Bruce Jakosky of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., manages the mission, which is part of the NASA Mars Exploration Program managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

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The frigid ice of Jupiter's moon Europa may be hiding more than a presumed ocean: it is likely the scene of some unexpectedly fast chemistry between water and sulfur dioxide at extremely cold temperatures. Although these molecules react easily as liquids-they are well-known ingredients of acid rain-Mark Loeffler and Reggie Hudson at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., now report that they react as ices with surprising speed and high yield at temperatures hundreds of degrees below freezing. Because the reaction occurs without the aid of radiation, it could take place throughout Europa's thick coating of ice-an outcome that would revamp current thinking about the chemistry and geology of this moon and perhaps others.

"When people talk about chemistry on Europa, they typically talk about reactions that are driven by radiation," says Goddard scientist Mark Loeffler, who is first author on the paper being published in Geophysical Research Letters. That's because the moon's temperature hovers around 86 to 130 Kelvin (minus 300 to minus 225 degrees Fahrenheit). In this extreme cold, most chemical reactions require an infusion of energy from radiation or light. On Europa, the energy comes from particles from Jupiter's radiation belts. Because most of those particles penetrate just fractions of an inch into the surface, models of Europa's chemistry typically stop there.

"Once you get below Europa's surface, it's cold and solid, and you normally don't expect things to happen very fast under those conditions," explains co-author Reggie Hudson, the associate lab chief of Goddard's Astrochemistry Laboratory.

"But with the chemistry we describe," adds Loeffler, "you could have ice 10 or 100 meters [roughly 33 or 330 feet] thick, and if it has sulfur dioxide mixed in, you're going to have a reaction."

"This is an extremely important result for understanding the chemistry and geology of Europa's icy crust," says Robert E. Johnson, an expert on radiation-induced chemistry on planets and a professor of engineering physics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

From remote observations, astronomers know that sulfur is present in Europa's ice. Sulfur originates in the volcanoes of Jupiter's moon Io, then becomes ionized and is transported to Europa, where it gets embedded in the ice. Additional sulfur might come from the ocean that's thought to lie beneath Europa's surface. "However," says Johnson, "the fate of the implanted or any subsurface sulfur is not understood and depends on the geology and chemistry in the ice crusts."

In experiments that simulated the conditions on Europa, Loeffler and Hudson sprayed water vapor and sulfur dioxide gas onto quarter-sized mirrors in a high-vacuum chamber. Because the mirrors were kept at about 50 to 100 Kelvin (about minus 370 to minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit), the gases immediately condensed as ice. As the reaction proceeded, the researchers used infrared spectroscopy to watch the decrease in concentrations of water and sulfur dioxide and the increase in concentrations of positive and negative ions generated.

Despite the extreme cold, the molecules reacted quickly in their icy forms. "At 130 Kelvin [about minus 225 degrees Fahrenheit], which represents the warm end of the expected temperatures on Europa, this reaction is essentially instantaneous," says Loeffler. "At 100 Kelvin, you can saturate the reaction after half a day to a day. If that doesn't sound fast, remember that on geologic timescales-billions of years-a day is faster than the blink of an eye."

To test the reaction, the researchers added frozen carbon dioxide, also known as dry ice, which is commonly found on icy bodies, including Europa. "If frozen carbon dioxide had blocked the reaction, we wouldn't be nearly as interested," explains Hudson, "because then the reaction probably wouldn't be relevant to Europa's chemistry. It would be a laboratory curiosity." But the reaction continued, which means it could be significant on Europa as well as Ganymede and Callisto, two more of Jupiter's moons, and other places where both water and sulfur dioxide are present.

The reaction converted one-quarter to nearly one-third of the sulfur dioxide into product. "This is an unexpectedly high yield for this chemical reaction," says Loeffler. "We would have been happy with five percent." What's more, the positive and negative ions produced will react with other molecules. This could lead to some intriguing chemistry, especially because bisulfite, a type of sulfur ion, and some other products of this reaction are refractory-stable enough to stick around for a while.

Robert Carlson, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who collaborates with the two researchers, notes that earlier hints of water and sulfur dioxide reacting as solids were found but not explained. "The Loeffler and Hudson results show that really interesting acid–base reactions are going on," he says. "I am anxious to see what might happen when other species are added and how the minor concentrations of sulfur dioxide on the satellite surfaces affect the overall chemistry."

The ultimate test of the laboratory experiments will be whether evidence of any reaction products can be found in data collected during remote observations or future visits to Europa. Johnson agrees that if subsurface sulfur dioxide on Europa "reacts to form refractory species, as [the researchers] indicate, then the picture changes completely. " These results not only will affect our understanding of Europa, but can also be further refined and tested with the proposed Europa Jupiter System mission.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will manage NASA's contributions to the Europa Jupiter System mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. ESA's Directorate of Science and Robotic Exploration will manage the European contribution to the Jupiter mission. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

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Astronomers have discovered a new, cosmic phenomenon, termed "coreshine," which is revealing new information about how stars and planets come to be.

The scientists used data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to measure infrared light deflecting off cores -- cold, dark cocoons where young stars and planetary systems are blossoming. This coreshine effect, which occurs when starlight from nearby stars bounces off the cores, reveals information about their age and consistency. In a new paper, to be published Friday, Sept. 24, in the journal Science, the team reports finding coreshine across dozens of dark cores.

"Dark clouds in our Milky Way galaxy, far from Earth, are huge places where new stars are born. But they are shy and hide themselves in a shroud of dust so that we cannot see what happens inside," said Laurent Pagani of the Observatoire de Paris and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, both in France. "We have found a new way to peer into them. They are like ghosts because we see them but we also see through them."

Pagani and his team first observed one case of the coreshine phenomenon in 2009. They were surprised to see that starlight was scattering off a dark core in the form of infrared light that Spitzer could see. They had thought the grains of dust making up the core were too small to deflect the starlight; instead, they expected the sunlight would travel straight through. Their finding told them that the dust grains were bigger than previously thought -- about 1 micron instead of 0.1 micron (a typical human hair is about 100 microns).

That might not sound like a big difference, but it can significantly change astronomers' models of star and planet formation. For one thing, the larger grain size means that planets -- which form as dust circling young stars sticks together -- might take shape more quickly. In other words, the tiny seeds for planet formation may be forming very early on, when a star is still in its pre-embryonic phase.

But this particular object observed in 2009 could have been a fluke. The researchers did not know if what they found was true of other dark clouds -- until now. In the new study, they examine 110 dark cores, and find that about half of them exhibit coreshine.

The finding amounts to a new tool for not only studying the dust making up the dark cores, but also for assessing their age. The more developed star-forming cores will have larger dust grains, so, using this tool, astronomers can better map their ages across our Milky Way galaxy. Coreshine can also help in constructing three-dimensional models of the cores -- the deflected starlight is scattered in a way that is dependent on the cloud structures.

Said Pagani, "We're opening a new window on the realm of dark, star-forming cores."

Other authors are Aurore Bacmann of the Astrophysics Laboratory of Grenoble, France, and Jürgen Steinacker, Amelia Stutz and Thomas Henning of the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy, Germany. Steinacker is also with the Observatoire de Paris, and Stutz is also with the University of Arizona, Tucson.

The Spitzer measurements are based on data from the mission's public archive, taken before the telescope ran out of its liquid coolant in May 2009 and began its current warm mission.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu/ and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

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