NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered the first direct evidence for a superfluid, a bizarre, friction-free state of matter, at the core of a neutron star. Superfluids created in laboratories on Earth exhibit remarkable properties, such as the ability to climb upward and escape airtight containers. The finding has important implications for understanding nuclear interactions in matter at the highest known densities.
Neutron stars contain the densest known matter that is directly observable. One teaspoon of neutron star material weighs six billion tons. The pressure in the star's core is so high that most of the charged particles, electrons and protons, merge resulting in a star composed mostly of uncharged particles called neutrons.
The new Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM) Leonardo should know its way around the International Space Station by now. This flight marks its eighth and final visit to the orbiting laboratory, its new home.
Leonardo was one of three Multipurpose Logistics Modules built by the Italian Space Agency under contract. It was delivered to Kennedy Space Center in 1998.Its first spaceflight was on Discovery’s STS-102 mission launched March 8, 2001. Leonardo brought six systems racks to the station: two robotic workstation racks for the station's robotic arm and its four cameras, two DC-to-DC converter units which convert electrical power from the station's solar arrays to a form usable by station systems and experiments, the U.S. lab Avionic 3 and a Crew Health Care System rack.
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They nicknamed it the "Little Balloon That Could." Launched in December of 2010 from McMurdo Station in Antarctica, the research balloon was a test run and it bobbed lower every day like it had some kind of leak. But every day for five days it rose back up in the sky to some 112,000 feet in the air.
Down on Earth, physicist Robyn Millan was cheering it on, hoping the test launch would bode well for the success of her grand idea: launches in 2013 and 2014 of 20 such balloons to float in the circular wind patterns above the South Pole. Each balloon will help track electrons from space that get swept up in Earth's magnetic field and slide down into our atmosphere. Such electrons are an integral part of the turbulent magnetic space weather system that extends from the sun to Earth.
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Imagine flying around in space to examine a future space observatory that’s under construction today. Thanks to animators and web developers, Internet users can get a fly by tour of NASA's next-generation, tennis court-sized James Webb Space Telescope on their computer.
This new interactive utilizes cutting-edge Flash and 3-D interactivity through an engine for Flash called Away 3D. Models of this complexity are rarely truly interactive, and this one comes at the start of a trend that will bring true 3D interactivity to the web via Flash."We wanted to make the 3-D Webb feature fun and inviting," said Michael McClare, Senior Media Producer for the Webb telescope project for Honeywell at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. He said that users do not need to download anything to make the interactive fly-by tour work.
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The contributions of NASA and Kennedy Space Center were stitched into the fabric of one of the nation's most recognizable symbols Friday when flags from Florida's Spaceport were sewn into an American Flag recovered near ground zero following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"The National 9/11 Flag" is on a cross-country journey to be restored to its original 13-stripe design using pieces of fabric from American flags destined for retirement in all 50 states. The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex was the official stop for the state of Florida on Feb. 18."For our site to be chosen, you know, on one hand I believe is all together fitting and proper because what we do at Kennedy Space Center is dare mighty things on behalf of the American people and all of humankind," said Joe Dowdy, special operations manager at Kennedy. "Some of that involves sacrifice and certainly this flag is an incredible demonstration of what free people sometimes have to be called upon to do, to sacrifice even their own lives."
NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, will carry a next generation, onboard "chemical element reader" to measure the chemical ingredients in Martian rocks and soil. The instrument is one of 10 that will help the rover in its upcoming mission to determine the past and present habitability of a specific area on the Red Planet. Launch is scheduled between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18, 2011, with landing in August 2012.
The Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) instrument, designed by physics professor Ralf Gellert of the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, uses the power of alpha particles, or helium nuclei, and X-rays to bombard a target, causing the target to give off its own characteristic alpha particles and X-ray radiation. This radiation is "read by" an X-ray detector inside the sensor head, which reveals which elements and how much of each are in the rock or soil.
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What would our solar system look like if visitors from other worlds took a series of pictures NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft did just that by piecing together the first portrait of our solar system from the inside looking out. Comprised of 34 images, the mosaic provides a complement to the solar system portrait from the outside looking in taken by Voyager 1 in 1990.
"Obtaining this portrait was a terrific feat by the MESSENGER team," says MESSENGER principal investigator Sean Solomon, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "This snapshot of our neighborhood also reminds us that Earth is a member of a planetary family that was formed by common processes four and a half billion years ago. Our spacecraft is soon to orbit the innermost member of the family, one that holds many new answers to how Earth-like planets are assembled and evolve."
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On Feb. 11, 2011, a group of 57 avid space enthusiasts received a rare “behind-the-scenes” glimpse at NASA’s Ames Research Center and then instantly shared their adventure with the world.
These space geeks are also known as “tweeps”—people who use Twitter, follow space-themed accounts, such as @NASA_Ames, and tweet about their love for space. More than 400 people registered online for a chance to participate in the Tweetup, which included tours of the Vertical Motion Simulator, Future Flight Central, Fluid Mechanics Lab and the Kepler Science Operations Center.
NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center is flight testing two new supersonic shockwave probes to determine their viability as research tools.
The probes were designed by Eagle Aeronautics of Hampton, Va., under a NASA Research Announcement, and manufactured by Triumph Aerospace Systems of Newport News, Va. The probes were first tested in a wind tunnel at NASA's Langley Research Center, also in Hampton. The new probes are being flown on NASA Dryden's F-15B research test bed aircraft. Supersonic flight over land is severely restricted in the United States and elsewhere because the sonic booms created by the shock waves propagating from supersonic aircraft are an annoyance to many and can damage private property.
In November 2010, the scientific journal Icarus published a paper by astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, who proposed the existence of a binary companion to our sun, larger than Jupiter, in the long-hypothesized "Oort cloud" a faraway repository of small icy bodies at the edge of our solar system. The researchers use the name "Tyche" for the hypothetical planet.
Their paper argues that evidence for the planet would have been recorded by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).WISE is a NASA mission, launched in December 2009, which scanned the entire celestial sky at four infrared wavelengths about 1.5 times. It captured more than 2.7 million images of objects in space, ranging from faraway galaxies to asteroids and comets relatively close to Earth. Recently, WISE completed an extended mission, allowing it to finish a complete scan of the asteroid belt, and two complete scans of the more distant universe, in two infrared bands.
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NASA is looking for a non-profit group to manage International Space Station research that's being performed in orbit under its designation as an official U.S. National Laboratory. Completed proposals are due April 1, 2011.
NASA plans to sign a cooperative agreement this year with an independent, nonprofit research management organization to stimulate, develop and manage use of the station by a wide pool of U.S. research organizations for all National Laboratory experiments. NASA will continue to manage its own research aimed at space exploration advances. As space station assembly is completed this year, NASA and its international partners are transitioning to full use of the unique scientific outpost for research. In an effort to ensure broad access to the orbiting laboratory, Congress designated the station a national laboratory in 2005.
Forty years after the first lunar rover rolled across the moon's surface, 84 teams of enterprising future engineers will demonstrate the same ingenuity and can-do spirit at the 18th annual NASA Great Moon buggy Race, set for April 1-2 in Huntsville, Ala.
The event challenges high school and college students to design, build and race lightweight, human-powered rovers "moon buggies" which address many of the same engineering challenges dealt with by Apollo-era lunar rover developers in the late 1960s.Teams include U.S. high school, college and university students from 22 states and Puerto Rico; and international challengers from six countries, including returning teams from Canada, India and Germany and for the first time racers from Ethiopia, Pakistan and Russia. For a complete list of competitors.
NASA's Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus.
The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST (11:40 p.m. EST) at a distance of approximately 178 kilometers (111 miles). Stardust took 72 high-resolution images of the comet. It also accumulated 468 kilobytes of data about the dust in its coma, the cloud that is a comet's atmosphere. The craft is on its second mission of exploration called Stardust-Next, having completed its prime mission collecting cometary particles and returning them to Earth in 2006.
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Stardust-Next is a low-cost mission that expands on the investigation of comet Tempel 1 initiated by NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages Stardust-Next for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. Joe Veverka of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., is the mission's principal investigator. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft and manages day-to-day mission operations.
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As of today, Feb. 14, at 9:21 a.m. PST (12:21 p.m. EST), NASA's Stardust-Next mission spacecraft is within a quarter-million miles (402,336 kilometers) of its quarry, comet Tempel 1, which it will fly by tonight. The spacecraft is cutting the distance with the comet at a rate of about 10.9 kilometers per second (6.77 miles per second or 24,000 mph).
The flyby of Tempel 1 will give scientists an opportunity to look for changes on the comet's surface since it was visited by NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft in July 2005. Since then, Tempel 1 has completed one orbit of the sun, and scientists are looking forward to discovering any differences in the comet. The closest approach is expected tonight at approximately 8:40 p.m. PST (11:40 p.m. EST).
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Mission controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., watched as data down linked from the Stardust spacecraft indicated it completed its closest approach with comet Tempel 1. An hour after closest approach, the spacecraft turned to point its large, high-gain antenna at Earth.
It is expected that images of the comet's nucleus collected during the flyby will be received on Earth starting at about midnight California time (3 a.m. EST on Tuesday, Feb. 15).Preliminary data already transmitted from the spacecraft indicate the time of closest approach was about 8:39 p.m. PST (11:39 p.m. EST), at a distance of 181 kilometers (112 miles) from Tempel 1.
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On February 11, 2010, at 10:23 in the morning, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) launched into space on an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral. A year later, SDO has sent back millions of stunning images of the sun and a host of new data to help us understand the complex star at the heart of our solar system.
"One of the highlights of the last year is just that everything worked so smoothly," says astrophysicist Dean Pesnell, the project scientist for SDO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centerin Greenbelt, Md. "We turned it on in March and it immediately started sending us data at 150 megabits per second. It worked from the very get go."
Hey’re called atmospheric rivers narrow regions in Earth's atmosphere that transport enormous amounts of water vapor across the Pacific or other regions. Aptly nicknamed "rivers in the sky," they can transport enough water vapor in one day, on average, to flood an area the size of Maryland 0.3 meters (1 foot) deep, or about seven times the average daily flow of water from the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico.
The phenomenon was the subject of a recent major emergency preparedness scenario led by the U.S. Geological Survey, "ARkStorm," which focused on the possibility of a series of strong atmospheric rivers striking California - a scenario of flooding, wind and mudslides the USGS said could cause damages exceeding those of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
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Stars at all stages of development, from dusty little tots to young adults, are on display in a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. This cosmic community is called the North American nebula. In visible light, the region resembles the North American continent, with the most striking resemblance being the Gulf of Mexico. But in Spitzer's infrared view, the continent disappears. Instead, a swirling landscape of dust and young stars comes into view.
"One of the things that makes me so excited about this image is how different it is from the visible image, and how much more we can see in the infrared than in the visible," said Luisa Rebull of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. Rebull is lead author of a paper about the observations, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. "The Spitzer image reveals a wealth of detail about the dust and the young stars here."
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For the second time in less than a month, two Russian cosmonauts will venture outside the International Space Station on Feb. 16 to install a pair of earthquake and lightning sensing experiments, and to retrieve a pair of spacecraft material evaluation panels.
Expedition 26 Flight Engineers Dmitry Kondratyev and Oleg Skripochka are scheduled to float outside the Pirs airlock at 8:15 a.m. EST Wednesday to begin the five-and-a-half-hour excursion. Both spacewalkers will wear Russian Orlan-MK spacesuits. On their previous spacewalk, completed Jan. 21, they completed installation of a new high-speed data transmission system, removed an old plasma pulse experiment, installed a camera for the new Rassvet docking module and retrieved a materials exposure package. That spacewalk lasted 5 hours, 23 minutes.
In communities all across the U.S., travelers that went to the moon and back with the Apollo 14 mission are living out their quiet lives. The whereabouts of more than 50 are known. Many, now aging, reside in prime retirement locales: Florida, Arizona and California. A few are in the Washington.
Hundreds more are out there or at least, they were. And Dave Williams of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., wants to find them before it's too late.The voyagers in question are not astronauts. They're "moon trees" redwood, loblolly pine, sycamore, Douglas fir, and sweetgum trees sprouted from seeds that astronaut Stuart Roosa took to the moon and back 40 years ago."Hundreds of moon trees were distributed as seedlings," says Williams, "but we don't have systematic records showing where they all went."
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NASA will host several live activities for the Stardust-NEXT mission's close encounter with comet Tempel 1. The closest approach is expected at approximately 8:37 p.m. PST (11:37 p.m. EST) on Feb. 14, with confirmation received on Earth at about 8:56 p.m. PST (11:56 p.m. EST).
Live coverage of the Tempel 1 encounter will begin at 8:30 p.m. PST on Feb. 14 on NASA Television and the agency's website. The coverage will include live commentary from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and video from Lockheed Martin Space System's mission support area in Denver.
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NASA's Stardust spacecraft marked its 12th anniversary in space on Monday, Feb. 7, with a rocket burn to further refine its path toward a Feb. 14 date with a comet.
The half-minute trajectory correction maneuver, which adjusts the spacecraft's flight path, began at about 1 p.m. PST (4 p.m. EST) on Monday, Feb. 7. The 30-second-long firing of the spacecraft's rockets consumed about 69 grams (2.4 ounces) of fuel and changed the spacecraft's speed by 0.56 meters per second (1.3 mph).
The Glory spacecraft and its Taurus XL launch vehicle are coming together at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California as NASA gets ready to launch its first Launch Services Program mission of 2011.
Researchers are looking for more puzzle pieces to fill out the picture of Earth's climate and Glory was designed to give them the pieces relating to the role tiny particles known as aerosols play in the planet's weather. The spacecraft, about the size of a refrigerator, is also equipped with an instrument to measure the sun's impact on Earth's conditions. Glory is to lift off Feb. 23 at 5:09 a.m. EST.
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Piece by piece a team of NASA researchers put together a huge composite and metal structure that looked a lot like high-tech tinkertoys on steroids.
The structural mechanics and concepts branch engineers are going back to the past to try to explore the future. Most of them were involved with large space structure research done at NASA's Langley Research Center from the 70s to the early 90s. Now they're dusting off some of the hardware to see if the concepts would work in the 21st century.
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"This is a big moment in solar physics," says Vourlidas. "STEREO has revealed the sun as it really is--a sphere of hot plasma and intricately woven magnetic fields."
Each STEREO probe photographs half of the star and beams the images to Earth. Researchers combine the two views to create a sphere. These aren't just regular pictures, however. STEREO's telescopes are tuned to four wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet radiation selected to trace key aspects of solar activity such as flares, tsunamis and magnetic filaments. Nothing escapes their attention.
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If you're distributing 412 million data products in a year to more than 1.1 million users, how do you ever make sure people are getting what they want? The Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS) Project based at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., came up with a simple formula: They ask.
EOSDIS is the network of Earth science data centers that process, store, and make available the trove of data from NASA's past and current Earth-observing satellites. For the past seven years, EOSDIS management has collected thousands of responses from users of its system as a way to both gather metrics and improve on its delivery. EOSDIS works with the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to systematically track its standing and progress through the eyes of its users.
On Jan. 31, 2011, NASA's Cassini spacecraft passed by several of Saturn's intriguing moons, snapping images along the way.
Cassini passed within about 60,000 kilometers (37,282 miles) of Enceladus and 28,000 kilometers (17,398 miles) of Helene. It also caught a glimpse of Mimas in front of Saturn's rings. In one of the images, Cassini is looking at the famous jets erupting from the south polar terrain of Enceladus.
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NASA's NEOWISE mission has completed its survey of small bodies, asteroids and comets, in our solar system. The mission's discoveries of previously unknown objects include 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs). The NEOs are asteroids and comets with orbits that come within 45 million kilometers (28 million miles) of Earth's path around the sun.
NEOWISE is an enhancement of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission that launched in December 2009. WISE scanned the entire celestial sky in infrared light about 1.5 times. It captured more than 2.7 million images of objects in space, ranging from faraway galaxies to asteroids and comets close to Earth.
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One of the largest winter storms since the 1950s is affecting 30 U.S. states today with snow, sleet, freezing rain and rain. NASA satellites have gathering data on the storm that stretches from Texas and the Rockies to the New England states. NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites have been providing visible, infrared and microwave looks at the storm system's clouds, precipitation, temperatures and extent.
Visible and infrared images and animations of the storm's clouds and movement are created every 15 minutes by the NASA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. using data from GOES-11 and GOES-13, the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites. The GOES-13 and GOES-11 satellites that cover the eastern and western U.S., respectively, are operated by NOAA.
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