THEY CAME. THEY SAW. THEY TWEETED.

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.

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ANDROMEDA IS SO HOT 'N' COLD

This mosaic of the Andromeda spiral galaxy highlights explosive stars in its interior, and cooler, dusty stars forming in its many rings. The image is a combination of observations from the Herschel Space Observatory taken in infrared light (seen in orange hues), and the XMM-Newton telescope captured in X-rays (seen in blues). NASA plays a role in both of these European Space Agency-led missions.

Herschel provides a detailed look at the cool clouds of star birth that line the galaxy's five concentric rings. Massive young stars are heating blankets of dust that surround them, causing them to glow in the longer-wavelength infrared light, known as far-infrared, that Herschel sees.

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HOTSPOTS IN FOUNTAINS ON THE SUN'S SURFACE HELP EXPLAIN CORONAL HEATING MYSTERY

Among the many constantly moving, appearing, disappearing and generally explosive events in the sun's atmosphere, there exist giant plumes of gas as wide as a state and as long as Earth that zoom up from the sun's surface at 150,000 miles per hour. Known as spicules, these are one of several phenomena known to transfer energy and heat throughout the sun's magnetic atmosphere, or corona.

Thanks to NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the Japanese satellite Hinode, these spicules have recently been imaged and measured better than ever before, showing them to contain hotter gas than previously observed. Thus, they may perhaps play a key role in helping to heat the sun's corona to a staggering million degrees or more. (A number made more surprising since the sun's surface itself is only about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.)

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DEVELOPERS SUPPORT JPL-LED SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE

The Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT) architecture, originally developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., was recently selected to become a fully-fledged Top Level Project at the Apache Software Foundation, Forest Hill, Md. This important recognition means that OODT will be one of the few projects to receive project management and resource support from the open-source software foundation

 

The Object Oriented Data Technology architecture makes use of metadata to seek out disparate and geographically dispersed computing and data resources for use by any end user. For example, users of a data network could use OODT tools to make data that is physically hosted on one side of the country searchable and available for processing on the other side of the country.

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A GALAXY FOR EVERYONE

This collage of galaxies from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, showcases the many "flavors" that galaxies come in, from star-studded spirals to bulging ellipticals to those paired with other companion galaxies. The WISE team put this collage together to celebrate the anniversary of the mission's launch on Dec. 14, 2009.

After launch and a one-month checkout period, WISE began mapping the sky in infrared light. By July of this year, the entire sky had been surveyed, detecting hundreds of millions of objects, including the galaxies pictured here. In October of this year, after scanning the sky about one-and–a-half times, the spacecraft ran out of its frozen coolant, as planned. With its two shortest-wavelength infrared detectors still operational, the mission continues to survey the sky, focusing primarily on asteroids and comets.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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