SUPERNOVA BUBBLE OR HOLIDAY ORNAMENT?

This colorful creation was made by combining data from two of NASA's Great Observatories. Optical data of SNR 0509-67.5 and its accompanying star field, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, are composited with X-ray energies from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The result shows soft green and blue hues of heated material from the X-ray data surrounded by the glowing pink optical shell which shows the ambient gas being shocked by the expanding blast wave from the supernova. Ripples in the shell's appearance coincide with brighter areas of the X-ray data.

The Type 1a supernova that resulted in the creation of SNR 0509-67.5 occurred nearly 400 years ago for Earth viewers. The supernova remnant, and its progenitor star reside in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small galaxy about 160,000 light-years from Earth. The bubble-shaped shroud of gas is 23 light-years across and is expanding at more than 11 million miles per hour (5,000 kilometers per second).

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BOB BENSON: TALES OF CHILLY RESEARCH

As the weather gets colder in Maryland, Bob Benson tells tales of winters he used to know in Minnesota, the South Pole, and Alaska. A five-decade career studying Earth's ionosphere the part of Earth's atmosphere that reflects radio communication waves has taken him to some extreme elatitudes.

Standing in the corner of Bob Benson's office is a microfilm reader. You know, the big, boxy machine that was used to look up archived newspaper articles before such things were an Internet search away. That machine is one of the tools Benson has used to scan decades worth of data throughout his 46 years at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. He studies the ionosphere – the swath of our atmosphere filled with electrons and ions stretching from about 30 to 600 miles above Earth's surface  and the data he studied from various ionospheric satellites were displayed on 35-millimeter film.

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CASSINI CELEBRATES 10 YEARS SINCE JUPITER ENCOUNTER

Ten years ago, on Dec. 30, 2000, NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiteron its way to orbiting Saturn. The main purpose was to use the gravity of the largest planet in our solar system to slingshot Cassini towards Saturn, its ultimate destination. But the encounter with Jupiter, Saturn's gas-giant big brother, also gave the Cassini project a perfect lab for testing its instruments and evaluating its operations plans for its tour of the ringed planet, which began in 2004.

 "The Jupiter flyby allowed the Cassini spacecraft to stretch its wings, rehearsing for its prime time show, orbiting Saturn," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Ten years later, findings from the Jupiter flyby still continue to shape our understanding of similar processes in the Saturn system."

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NASA'S TERRA SATELLITE SEES A SNOW-COVERED IRELAND

The Mid-Atlantic and northeastern U.S. are not the only areas dealing with holiday snowfall. Ireland was recently swathed in white on December 22, 2010. When NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument captured a true-color image of the snow.

The overnight arrival of 15 cm (6 in) of snow at the Dublin airport forced its closure. Combined with the closure of the City of Derry airport, travel became quite difficult.MODIS images are created by the MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The MODIS instrument flies onboard NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites.Ireland enjoys a "temperate ocean climate" (Cfb) based on the Koopen climate classification system.

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SOHO FINDS ITS 2000TH COMET

As people on Earth celebrate the holidays and prepare to ring in the New Year, an ESA/NASA spacecraft has quietly reached its own milestone: on December 26, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) discovered its 2000th comet.

 

Drawing on help from citizen scientists around the world, SOHO has become the single greatest comet finder of all time. This is all the more impressive since SOHO was not specifically designed to find comets, but to monitor the sun.

“Since it launched on December 2, 1995 to observe the sun, SOHO has more than doubled the number of comets for which orbits have been determined over the last three hundred years,” says Joe Gurman, the U.S. project scientist for SOHO at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

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A DIFFERENT KIND OF REDUCED GRAVITY

When I flew on my reduced-gravity flight (the experience of which is chronicled, my flight was a total of 32 parabolas 30 microgravity parabolas, plus one lunar and one Martian parabola where we felt what gravity feels like on those worlds. That’s the “typical” experience in the NASA Reduced Gravity Flight Program where students design, build and fly an experiment for reduced gravity.

 

When writing recently about students from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who participated in the program in 2009, I noticed right away a major difference between their experiences than mine: their experiment tested the flow rates of several different kinds of soils under lunar gravity conditions. They needed to test their experiment in lunar gravity one-sixth gravity instead of the microgravity on my flight. While my flight gave me a feel for what it’s like to be on the space shuttle or International Space Station, these students got a much longer feel for what’s like to be an astronaut on the moon.

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GOES-13 SATELLITE CAPTURES POWERFUL SNOWMAKER LEAVING NEW ENGLAND

Snows are finally winding down in New England today, Dec. 27, as a powerful low pressure system brought blizzard conditions from northern New Jersey to Maine over Christmas weekend. The GOES-13 satellite captured an image of the low's center off the Massachusetts coast and saw the snowfall left behind.

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite called GOES-13 captured the visible image. GOES satellites are operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA's GOES Project, located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. creates some of the GOES satellite images and animations.

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NASA RAILROAD KEEPS SHUTTLE'S BOOSTERS ON THE RIGHT TRACK

For nearly three decades, the NASA Railroad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida has kept the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters on track.The mighty boosters fly in pairs and generate a combined 5.3 million pounds of thrust at ignition, pushing the shuttle assembly past the grip of Earth's gravity during the critical first two minutes of flight. Stacked within each of the 15-story-tall, reusable boosters are four solid rocket motor segments packed with a hard, rubbery cocktail of propellants.

Getting the 12-foot-wide, 150-ton segments to the launch site is only possible by rail. The segments are loaded by manufacturer ATK at a plant in Promontory, Utah, then shipped in customized train cars on a seven-day trip to Kennedy.

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RED MOON, RED PLANET

In this season of Christmas tidings, many of us were blessed to witness the eerie Red Moon of the total lunar eclipse a few nights ago on Dec. 21. Here in “bonechilling” New Jersey, it was miraculously crystal clear the entire night from the beginning around 1:30 a.m. EST to the end – about three and one half hours later at around 5 a.m.

 

During totality – when the moon was completely immersed in the umbral shadow for about 72 minutes – the red moon changed from a faint red glow to a brilliant crimson red. At times it appeared to be blood red and as though the surface was stirring and oozing droplets of warm and viscous blood. It was surreal and looked to me as though it had been magically and majestically painted up into the night sky.

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CASSINI MARKS HOLIDAYS WITH DRAMATIC VIEWS OF RHEA

Newly released for the holidays, images of Saturn's second largest moon Rhea obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft show dramatic views of fractures cutting through craters on the moon's surface, revealing a history of tectonic rumbling. The images are among the highest-resolution views ever obtained of Rhea.

"These recent, high-resolution Cassini images help us put Saturn's moon in the context of the moons' geological family tree," said Paul Helfenstein, Cassini imaging team associate, based at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "Since NASA's Voyager mission visited Saturn, scientists have thought of Rhea and Dione as close cousins, with some differences in size and detlensity. The new images show us they're more like fraternal twins, where the resemblance is more than skin deep. This probably comes from their nearness to each other in orbit."

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CONTRACT MARKS NEW GENERATION FOR DEEP SPACE NETWORK

NASA has taken the next step toward a new generation of Deep Space Network antennas. A $40.7 million contract with General Dynamics SATCOM Technologies, San Jose, Calif., covers implementation of two additional 34-meter (112-foot) antennas at Canberra, Australia. This is part of Phase I of a plan to eventually retire the network's aging 70-meter-wide (230-foot-wide) antennas.

The Deep Space Network (DSN) consists of three communications complexes: in Goldstone, Calif.; Madrid, Spain; and Canberra, Australia. The 70-meter antennas are more than 40 years old and are showing signs of surface deterioration from constant use. Additional 34-meter antennas are being installed in Canberra in the first phase; subsequent phases will install additional 34-meter antennas in Goldstone and Madrid.

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J-2X TURBOMACHINERY COMPLETE

NASA and Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne have successfully completed the heart of the J-2X upper stage rocket engine  the turbomachinery assemblies  for the first development engine off the production line.

The engine's turbomachinery consists of two turbopumps, each part pump and part turbine. Turbines provide the power to drive the pumps. One pump pushes high-pressure liquid oxygen, or oxidizer, and the other pumps liquid hydrogen fuel through the engine and to the engine's main injector. When the two meet, the fuels combine in a controlled high-pressure explosion producing the combustion needed to propel a launch vehicle to its journey to space.

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Nasa Satellites Gallery

TRACE SPACECRAFT'S NEW SLEWING PROCEDURE

The fastest path between Point A and Point B is a straight line. Not so fast, says a team of scientists and engineers who recently disproved this commonly accepted notion using a NASA satellite that had not moved more than 15 degrees during its 12-year mission studying the Sun.

In what may seem counterintuitive even to engineers, a team from the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, Calif., Draper Laboratory in Houston, Texas, and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., proved that the spacecraft actually rotated faster to reach a particular target in the sky when it carried out a set of mathematically calculated movements. These maneuvers looked more like the steps dancers would perform doing the tango, the foxtrot, or another ballroom dance.

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DEXTRE'S FINAL EXAM SCHEDULED FOR DECEMBER 22-23, 2010

On December 22-23, 2010, Dextre, the Canadian Space Agency’s robotic handyman aboard the International Space Station (ISS), will undertake a series of tasks that will officially certify the robot for duty. 

Since launched in 2008, Dextre has completed several rounds of tests as part of its certification process. These steps are essential to test the Dextre’s systems and performance, since the robot could not be assembled and tested in Earth’s gravity. Dextre will ride on the end of Canadarm2 to the External Logistic Carrier (ELC2) on the starboard side of the ISS. Dextre will then relocate a storage box known as a Cargo Transport Carrier, a generic platform for ISS cargo and payloads, containing ten circuit breaker boxes (remote power control modules). Dextre will begin by picking up the 442-kg cargo transport carrier and placing the box on its workbench. While still riding on the end of Canadarm2, Dextre will install the cargo transport carrier at its new location a short distance away.

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NASA'S LRO CREATING UNPRECEDENTED TOPOGRAPHIC MAP OF MOON

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is allowing researchers to create the most precise and complete map to date of the moon's complex, heavily cratered landscape.

 

"This dataset is being used to make digital elevation and terrain maps that will be a fundamental reference for future scientific and human exploration missions to the moon," said Dr. Gregory Neumann of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "After about one year taking data, we already have nearly 3 billion data points from the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter on board the LRO spacecraft, with near-uniform longitudinal coverage. We expect to continue to make measurements at this rate through the next two years of the science phase of the mission and beyond. Near the poles, we expect to provide near-GPS-like navigational capability as coverage is denser due to the spacecraft's polar orbit." Neumann will present the map at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco December 17.

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NASA MOVES FORWARD IN COMMERCIAL ROCKET ENGINE TESTING

On Dec. 17, at NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center, a team of operators from Stennis, Orbital Sciences Corporation and Aerojet filled 55 seconds with all three during the second verification test fire of an Aerojet AJ26 rocket engine. Once verified, the engine will be placed on a Taurus II space vehicle and used to launch a cargo supply mission to the International Space Station.

It is all part of NASA’s effort to partner with commercial companies to provide space flights through the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services joint research and development project. Through that program, Orbital has agreed to provide eight cargo supply missions to the space station by 2015. Stennis has partnered with Orbital to test the engines that will power the missions.

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TANKING TEST EVALUATES STRINGERS, GUCP

A daylong test of space shuttle Discovery's external fuel tank took place Dec. 17 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to help engineers evaluate support beams called stringers that make up the ribbed portion of the tank.

 

The tops of two stringers cracked during fueling operations on Nov. 5. That launch attempt was scrubbed after an attaching point between a ventilation pipe and the external tank, known as the ground umbilical carrier plate, or GUCP, developed a hydrogen leak. The “tanking test”, as it’s called, is a critical step in preparing Discovery for launch on its STS133 mission to the International Space Station. The STS-133 launch window opens February 3.Several hours into the test, Mike Moses, Space Shuttle Program Launch Integration manager, said the results looked good although it would take a few weeks to fully analyze them.

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MEXICO QUAKE STUDIES UNCOVER SURPRISES FOR CALIFORNIA

New technologies developed by NASA and other agencies are revealing surprising insights into a major earthquake that rocked parts of the American Southwest and Mexico in April, including increased potential for more large earthquakes in Southern California.

At the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, scientists from NASA and other agencies presented the latest research on the magnitude 7.2 El Mayor-Cucapah earthquake, that region's largest in nearly 120 years. Scientists have studied the earthquake's effects in unprecedented detail using data from GPS, advanced simulation tools and new remote sensing and image analysis techniques, including airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR), satellite synthetic aperture radar and NASA's airborne Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR).

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SORCE'S SOLAR SPECTRAL SURPRISE

Two satellite instruments aboard NASA's Solar Radiation & Climate Experiment (SORCE) mission the Total Solar Irradiance Monitor (TIM) and the Solar Irradiance Monitor (SIM) have made daily measurements of the sun's brightness since 2003. 

 The two instruments are part of an ongoing effort to monitor variations in solar output that could affect Earth's climate. Both instruments measure aspects of the sun's irradiance, the intensity of the radiation striking the top of the atmosphere. Instruments similar to TIM have made daily irradiance measurements of the entire solar spectrum for more than three decades, but the SIM instrument is the first to monitor the daily activity of certain parts of the spectrum, a measurement scientists call solar spectral irradiance.

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CASSINI SPOTS POTENTIAL ICE VOLCANO ON SATURN MOON

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found possible ice volcanoes on Saturn's moon Titan that are similar in shape to those on Earth that spew molten rock. Topography and surface composition data have enabled scientists to make the best case yet in the outer solar system for an Earth-like volcano landform that erupts in ice. The results were presented today at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

 

"When we look at our new 3-D map of Sotra Facula on Titan, we are struck by its resemblance to volcanoes like Mt. Etna in Italy, Laki in Iceland and even some small volcanic cones and flows near my hometown of Flagstaff," said Randolph Kirk, who led the 3-D mapping work, and is a Cassini radar team member and geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Ariz.

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NASA'S ODYSSEY SPACECRAFT SETS EXPLORATION RECORD ON MARS

PASADENA, Calif., -- NASA's Mars Odyssey, which launched in 2001, will break the record Wednesday for longest-serving spacecraft at the Red Planet. The probe begins its 3,340th day in Martian orbit at 5:55 p.m. PST (8:55 p.m. EST) on Wednesday to break the record set by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, which orbited Mars from 1997 to 2006.

Odyssey's longevity enables continued science, including the monitoring of seasonal changes on Mars from year to year and the most detailed maps ever made of most of the planet. In 2002, the spacecraft detected hydrogen just below the surface throughout Mars' high-latitude regions. The deduction that the hydrogen is in frozen water prompted NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission, which confirmed the theory in 2008. Odyssey also carried the first experiment sent to Mars specifically to prepare for human missions, and found radiation levels around the planet from solar flares and cosmic rays are two to three times higher than around Earth.

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GLOBAL ERUPTION ROCKS THE SUN

On August 1, 2010, an entire hemisphere of the sun erupted. Filaments of magnetism snapped and exploded, shock waves raced across the stellar surface, billion-ton clouds of hot gas billowed into space. Astronomers knew they had witnessed something big.

 

"The August 1st event really opened our eyes," says Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin’s Solar and Astrophysics Lab in Palo Alto, CA. "We see that solar storms can be global events, playing out on scales we scarcely imagined before." For the past three months, Schrijver has been working with fellow Lockheed-Martin solar physicist Alan Title to understand what happened during the "Great Eruption."

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NASA: VOYAGER 1 NEARING EDGE OF SOLAR SYSTEM

Since 2004, the unmanned probe has been exploring a region of space where solar wind  a stream of charged particles spewing from the sun at 1 million miles per hour slows abruptly and crashes into the thin gas between stars.

NASA said Monday that recent readings show the average outward speed of the solar wind has slowed to zero, meaning the spacecraft is nearing ever closer to the solar system's edge to a boundary known as the heliopause."It's telling us the heliopause is not too far ahead," said project scientist Edward Stone of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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DEMISE OF LARGE SATELLITE MAY HAVE LED TO THE FORMATION OF SATURN'S RINGS AND INNER MOONS

Saturn's rings are at present 90 to 95 percent water ice. Because dust and debris from rocky meteoroids have polluted the rings, the rings are believed to have consisted of pure ice when they formed. This composition is unusual compared to the approximately half-ice and half-rock mixture expected for materials in the outer Solar System. Similarly, the low densities of Saturn's inner moons show that they too are, as a group, unusually rich in ice.

The previous leading ring origin theory suggests the rings formed when a small satellite was disrupted by an impacting comet. "This scenario would have likely resulted in rings that were a mixture of rock and ice, rather than the ice-rich rings we see today," says the paper's author, Dr. Robin M. Canup, associate vice president of the SwRI Planetary Science Directorate in Boulder.

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SURPLUS FUEL BELIEVED CAUSE FOR RUSSIA'S GLONASS SATELLITE LOSS

The main cause of the loss of Russia's three Glonass-M satellites was due to human error from fueling the booster rocket with an excess of 1.5-2 tons of fuel, the head of the Russian state commission probing the incident said on Friday.

The excessive fuel caused the DM-3 booster rocket to deviate from its course, leading to the subsequent loss of the satellites in the Pacific Ocean earlier in the week."According to preliminary information, the problem was not with the fuel service unit at the launching site, but with one of the sensors showing the fuel level," Gennady Raikunov, the head of the Central Scientific Research Institute of Machine Building, who also heads the investigation commission, said.

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MAJOR SURGERY COMPLETE FOR DEEP SPACE NETWORK ANTENNA

The seven-month upgrade to the historic "Mars antenna" at NASA's Deep Space Network site in Goldstone, Calif. has been completed. After a month of intensive testing, similar to the rehabilitation stage after surgery, the antenna is now ready to help maintain communication with spacecraft during the next decade of space exploration.

The month of October was used as a testing period to make sure the antenna was in working order and fully functional, as scheduled, for Nov. 1. A team of workers completed an intense series of tasks to reach its first milestone - upgrading the 70-meter-wide (230-foot-wide) antenna in time to communicate with the EPOXI mission spacecraft during its planned flyby of comet Hartley 2 on Nov. 4.

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SPACEX LAUNCHES SUCCESS WITH FALCON 9/DRAGON FLIGHT

SpaceX Corp. tested its Falcon 9 and a fully functioning Dragon capsule combination during a brief mission launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station December 8, 2010. The unmanned capsule parachuted back to Earth about 3 hours after liftoff following maneuvers in orbit, a first for the privately owned company.

Flames erupted from the base of the Falcon 9 at 10:43 a.m. as it sat at Launch Complex-40. A few seconds later, the rocket and its Dragon capsule pushed above the surrounding lightning towers and headedintoorbit.The first stage separated on time, and the second stage took over as planned. A camera on board the rocket showed theDragon capsule separate from the second stage and trunk to orbit on its own.

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IDENTIFICATION OF TSUNAMI DEPOSITS IN THE GEOLOGIC RECORD: DEVELOPING CRITERIA USING RECENT TSUNAMI DEPOSITS

There is a need for a clear procedure to identify tsunami deposits in the geologic record. Data from published studies documenting recent tsunami deposits provide a means of developing identification criteria based on the sedimentary characteristics of unequivocal tsunami deposits.

Recent tsunami deposits have many sedimentary characteristics in common. All had sharp or erosional basal contacts. Sand was typically deposited in sheets that blanketed pre-existing topography and generally thinned landward. Deposit thickness was dependent on local topography; deposits were thicker in swales or local depressions and thinner on ridges or topographic highs. Deposits typically had 1–4 layers. Normal grading was common and often confined to individual layers.

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NASA SATELLITES WATCH WORLD’S CITIES GROW

Researchers used NASA’s Landsat satellite to measure and analyze urban growth among a global cross-section of 30 mid-sized cities during the 1990s, according to a two-part study presented at the Fall American Geophysical Union Meeting in San Francisco.

Preliminary results from Boston University research assistant and lead author of the NASA-funded study, Annemarie Schneider, show that some cities in the sample, including Atlanta, Georgia, Calgary, Canada, and Curitiba, Brazil, grew in area by as much as 25 percent from 1990 to 2000. More importantly, this kind of global satellite-derived analysis allows researchers to compare areas and determine spatial trends in how cities have developed.

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NASA SATELLITE SEES AN EARLY METEOROLOGICAL WINTER IN US MIDWEST

NASA's Terra satellite captures daily visible and infrared images around the Earth and took a daytime image of a blanket of snow in the Upper Midwest this week. Even though astronomical winter is less than two weeks away, the central and eastern U.S. are already experiencing meteorological winter.

 

Meteorological winter is basically an identification of the winter season based on "sensible weather patterns" for record keeping purposes.That means "meteorological winter" happens whenever snow and ice occur, even before astronomical winter arrives on December 21, 2010. Astronomical winter is based on the position of the Earth in its orbit around the sun.

The residents of the upper Midwest are already feeling the effects of winter this week, with high temperatures in the 20s and 30s, and wind chills in the single numbers (Fahrenheit) or colder.

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ANTICIPATING COLLISIONS BETWEEN SPACECRAFT AND SPACE JUNK

With its sophisticated predictive model, NASA can peer hundreds of years into the future at Earth-orbiting objects that could crash into each other.

 

In September, a piece of debris broke off from a 19-year-old nonoperational NASA satellite 330 miles up in the sky. The United States Space Surveillance Network (SSN), which is responsible for monitoring the more than 22,000 satellites and other objects in orbit, detected the event, plotted out the fragment's orbital path, and determined that it was headed for the International Space Station (ISS). 

If it hit the $100 billion laboratory, the junk could cause catastrophic damage. Upon receiving the warning, NASA decided to maneuver the spacecraft out of the path of the debris, a task that it now performs about twice a year.

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NASA SATELLITES SEE HEAVY RAINFALL AND DISPLACED THUNDERSTORMS IN SYSTEM 94B

System 94B has not been classified as a tropical depression, but NASA satellite details has shown that it truly is usually creating heavy rainfall near India’s southeastern coast. A subsequent NASA satellite revealed that strong wind shear is continuing to push convection towards the northwest of program 94B’s center of circulation.

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite viewed a place of thunderstorms related to program 94B near the east coast of India in the Bay of Bengal on December 7 at 0123 UTC. details from TRMM’s Precipitation Radar (PR) and Microwave Imager (TMI) proved that some severe thunderstorms with this area off the Indian coast were producing very heavy extreme erainfall of over50mm/hr(~2inches/hour).

The TRMM satellite’s most important purpose is usually to measure rainfall over the tropics nonetheless it has also verified very important for monitoring development of tropical cyclones. TRMM is mostly a combined mission in between NASA and the Japanese room agency JAXA.

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