NASA's Chandra Sees Runaway Pulsar Firing an Extraordinary Jet

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has seen a fast-moving pulsar escaping from a supernova remnant while spewing out a record-breaking jet – the longest of any object in the Milky Way galaxy -- of high-energy particles.

The pulsar, a type of neutron star, is known as IGR J11014-6103. IGR J11014-6103's peculiar behavior can likely be traced back to its birth in the collapse and subsequent explosion of a massive star.
Originally discovered with the European Space Agency satellite INTEGRAL, the pulsar is located about 60 light-years away from the center of the supernova remnant SNR MSH 11-61A in the constellation of Carina. Its implied speed is between 2.5 million and 5 million mph, making it one of the fastest pulsars ever observed.

"We've never seen an object that moves this fast and also produces a jet," said Lucia Pavan of the University of Geneva in Switzerland and lead author of a paper published Tuesday,in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. "By comparison, this jet is almost 10 times longer than the distance between the sun and our nearest star."

The X-ray jet in IGR J11014-6103 is the longest known in the Milky Way galaxy. In addition to its impressive span, it has a distinct corkscrew pattern that suggests the pulsar is wobbling like a spinning top.
IGR J11014-6103 also is producing a cocoon of high-energy particles that enshrouds and trails behind it in a comet-like tail. This structure, called a pulsar wind nebula, has been observed before, but the Chandra data show the long jet and the pulsar wind nebula are almost perpendicular to one another.

"We can see  this pulsar is moving directly away from the center of the supernova remnant based on the shape and direction of the pulsar wind nebula," said co-author Pol Bordas, from the University of Tuebingen in Germany. "The question is, why is the jet pointing off in this other direction?"
Usually, the spin axis and jets of a pulsar point in the same direction as they are moving, but IGR J11014-6103's spin axis and direction of motion are almost at right angles.

"With the pulsar moving one way and the jet going another, this gives us clues that exotic physics can occur when some stars collapse," said co-author Gerd Puehlhofer also of the University of Tuebingen..
One possibility requires an extremely fast rotation speed for the iron core of the star that exploded. A problem with this scenario is that such fast speeds are not commonly expected to be achievable.
The supernova remnant that gave birth to IGR J11014-6013 is elongated from top-right to bottom-left in the image roughly in line with the jet's direction. These features and the high speed of the pulsar are hints that jets could have been an important feature of the supernova explosion that formed it.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., controls Chandra's science and flight operations.


David Lindahl Scam

New Laser Technology Reveals How Ice Measures Up

ew results from NASA's MABEL campaign demonstrated that a photon-counting technique will allow researchers to track the melt or growth of Earth’s frozen regions.
When a high-altitude aircraft flew over the icy Arctic Ocean and the snow-covered terrain of Greenland in April 2012, it was the first polar test of a new laser-based technology to measure the height of Earth from space.

Aboard that aircraft flew the Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental Lidar, or MABEL, which is an airborne test bed instrument for NASA's ICESat-2 satellite mission slated to launch in 2017. Both MABEL and ICESat-2's ATLAS instrument are photon counters – they send out pulses of green laser light and time how long it takes individual light photons to bounce off Earth's surface and return. That time, along with ATLAS’ exact position from an onboard GPS, will be plugged into computer programs to tell researchers the elevation of Earth's surface – measuring change to as little as the width of a pencil.

This kind of photon-counting technology is novel for satellites; from 2003 to 2009, ICESat-1’s instrument looked at the intensity of a returned laser signal, which included many photons. So getting individual photon data from MABEL helps scientists prepare for the vast amounts of elevation data they'll get from ICESat-2.
"Using the individual photons to measure surface elevation is a really new thing," said Ron Kwok, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's never been done from orbiting satellites, and it hasn't really been done much with airborne instruments, either."

ICESat-2 is tasked with measuring elevation across Earth's entire surface, including vegetation and oceans, but with a focus on change in the frozen areas of the planet, where scientists have observed dramatic impacts from climate change. There, two types of ice – ice sheets and sea ice – reflect light photons in different patterns. Ice sheets and glaciers are found on land, like Greenland and Antarctica, and are formed as frozen snow and rain accumulates. Sea ice, on the other hand, is frozen seawater, found floating in the Arctic Ocean and offshore of Antarctica.

MABEL's 2012 Greenland campaign was designed to observe a range of interesting icy features, said Bill Cook, MABEL's lead scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. With the photon counts from different surfaces, other scientists could start analyzing the data to determine which methods of analyzing the data allow them to best measure the elevation of Earth's surface.

"We wanted to get a wide variety of target types, so that the science team would have a lot of data to develop algorithms," Cook said. "This was our first real dedicated science mission."

The flights over the ocean near Greenland, for example, allowed researchers to demonstrate that they can measure the height difference between open water and sea ice, which is key to determining the ice thickness. MABEL can detect enough of the laser light photons that bounce off Earth surface and return to the instrument, and programs can then make necessary elevation calculations, Cook said.

"Part of what we're doing with MABEL is to demonstrate ICESat-2's instrument is going to have the right sensitivity to do the measurements," Cook said. "You can do this photon counting if you have enough photons."
In an article recently published in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, Kwok and his colleagues showed how to calculate elevation from MABEL data, and do so over different types of ice – from open water, to thin, glassy ice, to the snow-covered ice.

"We were pretty happy with the precision," Kwok said. "The flat areas are flat to centimeter level, and the rough areas are rough." And the density of photons detection could also tell researchers what type of ice the instrument was flying over.

The contours of the icy surface are also important when monitoring ice sheets and glaciers covering land. The original ICESat-1 mission employed a single laser, which made it more difficult to measure whether the ice sheet had gained or lost elevation. With a single beam, when the instrument flew over a spot a second time, researchers couldn't tell if the snowpack had melted or if the laser was slightly off and pointed down a hill. Because of this, scientists needed 10 passes over an area to determine whether the ice sheet was changing, said Kelly Brunt, a research scientist at NASA Goddard.

"ICESat-1 was fantastic, but it was a single beam instrument," Brunt said. "We're more interested in repeating tracks to monitor change – that's hard to do."
ICESat-2 addresses this problem by splitting the laser into six beams. These are arranged in three pairs, and the beams within a pair are spaced 295 feet (90 meters), or just less than a football field apart. By comparing the height of one site to the height of its neighbor, scientists can determine the terrain's general slope.
Brunt and her colleagues used MABEL data from the 2012 Greenland campaign to try to detect slopes as shallow as 4 percent incline; their results will be published in the May 2014 issue of the journal Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters. They counted only a portion of the photons, in order to simulate the weaker laser beams that ICESat-2 will carry. With computer programs to determine the slope, the researchers verified it against results from earlier missions.

"The precision is great," Brunt said. "We're very confident that with ICESat-2's beam pair, we can see slope."
And there are still more things for MABEL to measure. The instrument team is planning a 2014 summer campaign to fly over glaciers and ice sheets in warmer weather. "We want to see what the effects of the melt is," Cook said. "How do glaciers look if they're warmer, rather than colder?"

Pine Island Iceberg Breaking Loose

Between November 9–11, 2013, a large iceberg separated from the calving front of Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier. Scientists first detected a rift in the glacier in October 2011. By July 2013, infrared and radar images showed that the crack had cut completely across the ice shelf. New satellite images now show that Iceberg B-31 is finally moving away from the coast.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired these natural color images of Pine Island Glacier on November 10 (top) and November 3, 2013. Dubbed B-31 by the U.S. National Ice Center, the new iceberg is estimated to be 35 kilometers by 20 kilometers (21 by 12 miles), roughly the size of Singapore. A team of scientists from Sheffield and Southampton universities will track the 700 square-kilometer chunk of ice and try to predict its path using satellite data.
the iceberg on November 13, when it had moved farther out into Pine Island Bay.

Cyclone Helen in India

NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image of Cyclone 04B (Helen) on November 21, 2013. The cyclone was weakening as it moved northwest and was expected to make landfall in the state of Andhra Pradesh as a tropical storm or category 1 cyclone overnight on November 21–22. Indian government authorities were preparing coastal areas for possible evacuations.

At 1500 Universal Time (8 p.m. local time) on November 21, Helen had maximum sustained winds of 102 kilometers (63 miles) per hour, and maximum wave heights of up to 6 meters (20 feet).

Spitzer and ALMA Reveal a Star's Bubbly Birth

It's a bouncing baby . . . star! Combined observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the newly completed Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile have revealed the throes of stellar birth as never before in the well-studied object known as HH 46/47.

Herbig-Haro (HH) objects form when jets shot out by newborn stars collide with surrounding material, producing small, bright, nebulous regions. To our eyes, the dynamics within many HH objects are obscured by enveloping gas and dust. But the infrared and submillimeter wavelengths of light seen by Spitzer and ALMA, respectively, pierce the dark cosmic cloud around HH 46/47 to let us in on the action.

The Spitzer observations show twin supersonic jets emanating from the central star that blast away surrounding gas and set it alight into two bubbly lobes. HH 46/47 happens to sit on the edge of its enveloping cloud in such a way that the jets pass through two differing cosmic environments. The rightward jet, heading into the cloud, is plowing through a "wall" of material, while the leftward jet's path out of the cloud is relatively unobstructed, passing through less material. This orientation serves scientists well by offering a handy compare-and-contrast setup for how the outflows from a developing star interact with their surroundings.

"Young stars like our sun need to remove some of the gas collapsing in on them to become stable, and HH 46/47 is an excellent laboratory for studying this outflow process," said Alberto Noriega-Crespo, a scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. "Thanks to Spitzer, the HH 46/47 outflow is considered one of the best examples of a jet being present with an expanding bubble-like structure."

Noriega-Crespo led the team that began studying HH 46/47 with Spitzer nearly 10 years ago when the telescope first began observing the heavens. Now, using a new image processing technique developed in the past few years, he and his colleagues have been able to render HH 46/47 in higher resolution.

Meanwhile, the fresh views of HH 46/47 by ALMA have revealed that the gas in the lobes is expanding faster than previously thought. This faster expansion has an influence on the overall amount of turbulence in the gaseous cloud that originally spawned the star. In turn, the extra turbulence could have an impact on whether and how other stars might form in this gaseous, dusty, and thus fertile, ground for star-making.
A team led by Hector Arce at Yale University, New Haven, Conn., carried out the ALMA observations and their analysis was published recently in The Astrophysical Journal.

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 in Pasadena. Spacecraft operations are based at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile.

NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Approaches 'Cooperstown'

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity completed its first two-day autonomous drive Monday, bringing the mobile laboratory to a good vantage point for pictures useful in selecting the next target the rover will reach out and touch.

When it drives autonomously, the rover chooses a safe route to designated waypoints by using its onboard computer to analyze stereo images that it takes during pauses in the drive. Prior to Monday, each day’s autonomous drive came after a segment earlier that day that was exactly charted by rover team members using images sent to Earth. The Sunday-Monday drive was the first time Curiosity ended an autonomous driving segment, then continued autonomously from that same point the next day.

The drives brought Curiosity to about 262 feet (about 80 meters) from "Cooperstown," an outcrop bearing candidate targets for examination with instruments on the rover's arm. The moniker, appropriate for baseball season, comes from a named rock deposit in New York. Curiosity has not used its arm-mounted instruments to examine a target since departing an outcrop called "Darwin" on Sept. 22. Researchers used the arm's camera and spectrometer for four days at Darwin; they plan to use them on just one day at Cooperstown.

Starting to use two-day autonomous driving and the shorter duration planned for examining Cooperstown serve to accelerate Curiosity's progress toward the mission's main destination: Mount Sharp.

In July, Curiosity began a trek of about 5.3 miles (8.6 kilometers), starting from the area where it worked for the first half of 2013, headed to an entry point to Mount Sharp. Cooperstown is about one-third of the way along the route. The team used images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to plot the route and choose a few points of potential special interest along the way, including Darwin and Cooperstown. 

"What interests us about this site is an intriguing outcrop of layered material visible in the orbital images," said Kevin Lewis of Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., a participating scientist for the mission who has been a leader in planning the Cooperstown activities. "We want to see how the local layered outcrop at Cooperstown may help us relate the geology of Yellowknife Bay to the geology of Mount Sharp."

The team is using images taken from the vantage point reached on Monday to decide what part of the Cooperstown outcrop to investigate with the arm-mounted instruments.

The first day of the two-day drive began Sunday with about 180 feet (55 meters) on a southwestward path that rover drivers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., evaluated ahead of time as safe. The autonomous-driving portion began where that left off, with Curiosity evaluating the best way to reach designated waypoints ahead. The vehicle drove about 125 feet (38 meters) autonomously on Sunday.

"We needed to store some key variables in the rover's non-volatile memory for the next day," said JPL rover driver John Wright. Curiosity's volatile memory is cleared when the rover goes into energy-conserving sleep mode overnight.

The stored variables included what direction the rover was driving when it ended the first day's drive, and whether it had classified the next 10 feet (3 meters) in that direction as safe for driving. When it began its second day of driving, Curiosity resumed evaluating the terrain ahead for safe driving and drove 105 feet (32 meters), all autonomously.

This new capability enables driving extra days during multi-day activity plans that the rover team develops on Fridays and before holidays.

A key activity planned for the week of Nov. 4 is uploading a new version of onboard software -- the third such upgrade since landing.  These upgrades allow continued advances in the rover's capabilities. The version prepared for upload next week includes, for example, improvements in what information the rover can store overnight to resume autonomous driving the next day. It also expands capabilities for using the robotic arm while parked on slopes. The team expects that to be crucial for investigations on Mount Sharp.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project's Curiosity rover.

Juno Status Report

As of Oct. 17, Juno was approximately 4.4 million miles (7.1 million kilometers) from Earth. The one-way radio signal travel time between Earth and Juno is currently about 24 seconds. Juno is currently traveling at a velocity of about 23.6 miles (38 kilometers) per second relative to the sun. Velocity relative to Earth is about 6.5 miles (10.4 kilometers) per second. Juno has now traveled 1.01 billion miles (1.63 billion kilometers, or 10.9 AU) since launch.

Juno’s Earth flyby gravity assist was completed on Oct. 9. Several Juno science instruments made planned observations during the approach to Earth, including the Advanced Stellar Compass, JunoCam and Waves. These observations provided a useful opportunity to test the instruments during a close planetary encounter and ensure that they work as designed. The main goal of the flyby -- to give the spacecraft the boost it needed in order to reach Jupiter – was accomplished successfully, and the spacecraft is in good health and responding to ground controllers.

Soon after its closest approach to Earth, the spacecraft initiated the first of two "safe modes" that have occurred since the flyby.  Safe mode is a state that the spacecraft may enter if its onboard computer perceives conditions on the spacecraft are not as expected.  Onboard Juno, the safe mode turned off instruments and a few non-critical spacecraft components, and pointed the spacecraft toward the sun to ensure the solar arrays received power.  The likely cause of the safe mode was an incorrect setting for a fault protection trigger for the spacecraft's battery. During the eclipse, the solar cells, as expected, were not generating electricity, and the spacecraft was drawing on the battery supply. When the voltage dropped below this fault protection trigger, the spacecraft initiated the safe mode sequence. The spacecraft acted as expected during the transition into and while in safe mode. The spacecraft exited the safe mode on Oct. 12.

The spacecraft entered the safe mode configuration again on Sunday evening (10/13/13).  When the spacecraft's onboard computer transitioned from the Earth flyby sequence to the cruise sequence, a component called the stellar reference unit remained in the Earth flyby configuration.  When the spacecraft's computer saw the draw on electricity was slightly greater than expected, it did as it was programmed to do and initiated a safe mode event.

Navigation has confirmed that Juno's current trajectory is "near-perfect" vs. planned. The mission team is in two-way communications with the spacecraft and it is operating as expected, and designed for, in safe mode. They expect to exit safe mode sometime next week.

Juno will arrive at Jupiter on July 4, 2016, at 7:29 p.m. PDT (10:29 p.m. EDT).
Juno was launched on Aug. 5, 2011. Once in orbit around Jupiter, the spacecraft will circle the planet 33 times, from pole to pole, and use its collection of eight science instruments to probe beneath the gas giant's obscuring cloud cover. Juno's science team will learn about Jupiter's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere, and look for a potential solid planetary core.

Juno's name comes from Greek and Roman mythology. The god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief, and his wife, the goddess Juno, was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter's true nature.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

A Giant Misalignment in a Multiple Planet System

A long-standing puzzle in the study of exoplanets is the formation of hot Jupiters, gas giant planets that snuggly orbit their host star. To explain their short orbital periods, theory suggests that hot Jupiters form in long orbits and then quiescently migrate through the protoplanetary disc, the flat ring of dust and debris that circles a newly fashioned star and coalesces to form the planets.

This theory was challenged when the orbital plane of hot Jupiters were discovered to be frequently misaligned with the equator of their host stars. Scientists interpreted this as evidence that hot Jupiters are the result of chaotic close encounters with other planets.

A decisive test between the two theories are systems with more than one planet: if misalignments are indeed caused by dynamical perturbations which lead to the creation of hot Jupiters, then multi-planet systems without hot Jupiters should be preferentially aligned. What new research reveals is quite different.

Using data from the NASA's Kepler space telescope, an international research team led by Daniel Huber, a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., studied Kepler-56, a red giant star four times larger than the sun located at a distance of approximately 3,000 light years from Earth. By analyzing the fluctuations in brightness at different points on the surface of Kepler-56, Huber and his collaborators discovered that the star's rotation axis is tilted by about 45 degrees to our line of sight.

"This was a surprise because we already knew about the existence of two planets transiting in front of Kepler-56. This suggested that the host star must be misaligned with the orbits of both planets," explains Huber. "What we found is quite literally a giant misalignment in an exoplanet system."

The culprit for the misalignment is suspected to be a third, massive companion in a long period orbit, revealed by observations obtained with the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

"Computer calculations show the outer companion may have torqued the orbital planes of the transiting planets in concert, leaving them co-planar but periodically misaligning them with the equator of the host star," said Daniel Fabrycky, co-author and professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago.

Nearly 20 years after the discovery of the first hot Jupiter, the giant misalignment in the Kepler-56 system marks an important step towards a unified explanation for the formation of hot Jupiters.

"We now know that misalignments are not just confined to hot Jupiter systems," said Huber. "Further observations will reveal whether the tilting mechanism in Kepler-56 could also be responsible for misalignments observed in hot Jupiter systems."

Cassini Spacecraft Finds 'Plastic' in Space

A small amount of propylene was identified in Titan's lower atmosphere by Cassini's Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS). This instrument measures the infrared light, or heat radiation, emitted from Saturn and its moons in much the same way our hands feel the warmth of a fire.
Propylene is the first molecule to be discovered on Titan using CIRS. By isolating the same signal at various altitudes within the lower atmosphere, researchers identified the chemical with a high degree of confidence. Details are presented in a paper in the Sept. 30 edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"This chemical is all around us in everyday life, strung together in long chains to form a plastic called polypropylene," said Conor Nixon, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and lead author of the paper. "That plastic container at the grocery store with the recycling code 5 on the bottom -- that's polypropylene."
CIRS can identify a particular gas glowing in the lower layers of the atmosphere from its unique thermal fingerprint. The challenge is to isolate this one signature from the signals of all other gases around it.
The detection of the chemical fills in a mysterious gap in Titan observations that dates back to NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft and the first-ever close flyby of this moon in 1980.
Voyager identified many of the gases in Titan's hazy brownish atmosphere as hydrocarbons, the chemicals that primarily make up petroleum and other fossil fuels on Earth.
On Titan, hydrocarbons form after sunlight breaks apart methane, the second-most plentiful gas in that atmosphere. The newly freed fragments can link up to form chains with two, three or more carbons. The family of chemicals with two carbons includes the flammable gas ethane. Propane, a common fuel for portable stoves, belongs to the three-carbon family.
Voyager detected all members of the one- and two-carbon families in Titan's atmosphere. From the three-carbon family, the spacecraft found propane, the heaviest member, and propyne, one of the lightest members. But the middle chemicals, one of which is propylene, were missing.
As researchers continued to discover more and more chemicals in Titan's atmosphere using ground- and space-based instruments, propylene was one that remained elusive. It was finally found as a result of more detailed analysis of the CIRS data.
"This measurement was very difficult to make because propylene's weak signature is crowded by related chemicals with much stronger signals," said Michael Flasar, Goddard scientist and principal investigator for CIRS. "This success boosts our confidence that we will find still more chemicals long hidden in Titan's atmosphere."
Cassini's mass spectrometer, a device that looks at the composition of Titan's atmosphere, had hinted earlier that propylene might be present in the upper atmosphere. However, a positive identification had not been made.
"I am always excited when scientists discover a molecule that has never been observed before in an atmosphere," said Scott Edgington, Cassini's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "This new piece of the puzzle will provide an additional test of how well we understand the chemical zoo that makes up Titan's atmosphere."
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The CIRS team is based at Goddard.

LADEE Project Manager Update: Initial Checkout Complete

After a spectacular launch, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft was placed by the Minotaur V launch vehicle into an elliptic orbit around Earth, as the start of our journey to the moon.  After adjusting some fault protection settings to enable the reaction wheels, mission controllers at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., successfully completed the initial systems checkout phase, and everything looks good so far. This checkout included spacecraft acquisition, tracking, and ranging by all the ground stations. The propulsion system also was activated to do a momentum dump, which means that the spacecraft spin and the reaction wheel spins were reduced together to a nominal state.

LADEE is doing fine and its trajectory to the moon is good. The LADEE spacecraft is currently in an elliptical orbit around Earth, about 162,000 miles (260,000 Km) in altitude. Mission controllers are now performing an extended checkout phase including guidance, navigation and control characterization, reaction control system tests, and on-board controller tuning.

The spacecraft was at the highest point in the current orbit (apogee) at 9:30 a.m. PDT, Tuesday Sept. 10. Then it will drop back down to a closest approach to Earth (perigee) at 9:38 a.m. PDT on Friday, Sept. 13, where we will perform an engine burn to boost its orbit.

LADEE will continue with two more of these elliptical orbits until it is captured around the moon to do its initial Lunar Orbit Insertion (LOI-1) burn on Sunday Oct. 6th. After that we are in lunar orbit. This LOI burn is one of the most critical phases of the mission, because without it working we do not get into lunar orbit.

Lunar Mission: Testing a Multi-Use Spacecraft Design

LADEE is the first spacecraft designed, developed, built, integrated and tested at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. Using a Modular Common Spacecraft Bus architecture, also developed by Ames, LADEE will demonstrate how to build a first class spacecraft at reduced cost. The LADEE spacecraft makes use of general purpose spacecraft modules that allow for a plug-and-play approach to manufacturing and assembly. This approach along with commercial off-the-shelf products allows mission designers to develop, assemble and test multiple spacecraft modules at the same time – essentially giving them the versatility to get the biggest bang for NASA's buck.

“LADEE’s common bus is an innovative concept that brings NASA a step closer to multi-use designs and assembly line production, while moving away from custom design,” said Ames Director S. Pete Worden. "This mission will put the common bus design to the test. This same common bus can be used on future missions to explore other destinations, including voyages to orbit and land on the moon, low-Earth orbit, and near-Earth objects."

The space agency has adopted a “more with less” approach to robotic missions. It also is about using NASA’s small satellite missions to test cutting-edge space technologies for rapid development. These technology demonstrations allow NASA the opportunities to test in space emerging science and engineering technologies, and economical commercial off-the-shelf technologies on a smaller scale. These demonstrations also help researchers better understand how hardware will survive the harsh radiation, temperature and vacuum conditions encountered in space. All while being faster, more efficient and less expensive than traditional missions.

Findings could reap untold benefits for science and industry here on Earth. Rapid technology developments will allow future NASA missions to pursue bolder and more sophisticated science, enable safe and rewarding human missions beyond low-Earth orbit and enable entirely new approaches to U.S. space operations.

“NASA is looking for affordable ways to launch often and inexpensively,” said David Korsmeyer, Director of Engineering at NASA Ames.  “We can use off-the-shelf components because customized components are expensive to continually develop and improve. If these systems work successfully, NASA will be looking for other commercial technologies to use for space exploration.”
Instead of building increasingly large and complex exploratory missions, these low-cost accelerated missions could open the door for creativity, clever problem solving, and inspired missions with simple goals. Mission planners expect the next decade could see amazing developments as NASA continues to fund missions using this innovative concept.

“Simplicity was not a necessary aspect of this mission, but is clearly a driver for successful missions,” said Butler Hine, LADEE project manager at Ames. “The important thing is to maximize the success per dollar.”

NASA's TRMM Sees Heavy Rain Over Taiwan from Tropical Storm Kong-Rey

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite flew directly above western Taiwan on August 28, 2013 at 2108 UTC when Tropical Storm Kong-Rey was dropping enormous amounts of rain. Kong-Rey is expected to affect Japan over the next several days while moving parallel to its western coastline.

Flooding from torrential rainfall with totals of over 500 mm (~19.7 inches) have been reported in western Taiwan. A rainfall analysis from TRMM's Microwave Imager (TMI) and Precipitation Radar (PR) instruments revealed that precipitation was falling was at a rate of over 205mm/8 inches per hour in intense bands of rain over southwestern Taiwan.

TRMM data was used to create a 3-D image looking from the east, showed the extremely high storms located on the western side of Taiwan. TRMM showed that the tops of those powerful thunderstorms were often reaching heights above 16.5 km (~10.3 miles).

On Aug. 30 at 1500 UTC/11 a.m. EDT, Kong-Rey had weakened to a tropical depression with maximum sustained winds near 30 knots/34.5 mph/55.5 kph. It had passed Taiwan and was centered near 31.7 north and 126.6 east, about 251 nautical miles/288 miles/465 km west-southwest of Sasebo, Japan. Kong-Rey was moving northeastward at 13 knots/15 mph/20.9 kph.

Tropical Depression Kong-Rey is now predicted to move to the north then northeast and remain just off the western coast of Japan until it makes a brief landfall near Misawa in the north on Sept. 1. Resident along western Japan can expect showers, gusty winds and rough surf over the next several days.

NASA Prepares for First Virginia Coast Launch to Moon

In an attempt to answer prevailing questions about our moon, NASA is making final preparations to launch a probe at 11:27 p.m. EDT Friday, Sept. 6, from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Va.
The small car-sized Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) is a robotic mission that will orbit the moon to gather detailed information about the structure and composition of the thin lunar atmosphere and determine whether dust is being lofted into the lunar sky. A thorough understanding of these characteristics of our nearest celestial neighbor will help researchers understand other bodies in the solar system, such as large asteroids, Mercury, and the moons of outer planets.

"The moon's tenuous atmosphere may be more common in the solar system than we thought," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science in Washington. "Further understanding of the moon's atmosphere may also help us better understand our diverse solar system and its evolution."
The mission has many firsts, including the first flight of the Minotaur V rocket, testing of a high-data-rate laser communication system, and the first launch beyond Earth orbit from the agency's Virginia Space Coast launch facility.

LADEE also is the first spacecraft designed, developed, built, integrated and tested at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The probe will launch on a U.S. Air Force Minotaur V rocket, an excess ballistic missile converted into a space launch vehicle and operated by Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va.

LADEE was built using an Ames-developed Modular Common Spacecraft Bus architecture, a general purpose spacecraft design that allows NASA to develop, assemble and test multiple modules at the same time. The LADEE bus structure is made of a lightweight carbon composite with a mass of 547.2 pounds -- 844.4 pounds when fully fueled.

"This mission will put the common bus design to the test," said Ames Director S. Pete Worden. "This same common bus can be used on future missions to explore other destinations, including voyages to orbit and land on the moon, low-Earth orbit, and near-Earth objects."

Butler Hine, LADEE project manager at Ames, said the innovative common bus concept brings NASA a step closer to multi-use designs and assembly line production and away from custom design. "The LADEE mission demonstrates how it is possible to build a first class spacecraft at a reduced cost while using a more efficient manufacturing and assembly process," Hine said.

Approximately one month after launch, LADEE will begin its 40-day commissioning phase, the first 30 days of which the spacecraft will be performing activities high above the moon's surface. These activities include testing a high-data-rate laser communication system that will enable higher rates of satellite communications similar in capability to high-speed fiber optic networks on Earth.

After commissioning, LADEE will begin a 100-day science phase to collect data using three instruments to determine the composition of the thin lunar atmosphere and remotely sense lofted dust, measure variations in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and collect and analyze samples of any lunar dust particles in the atmosphere. Using this set of instruments, scientists hope to address a long-standing question: Was lunar dust, electrically charged by sunlight, responsible for the pre-sunrise glow above the lunar horizon detected during several Apollo missions?
After launch, Ames will serve as a base for mission operations and real-time control of the probe. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will catalogue and distribute data to a science team located across the country.

NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington funds the LADEE mission. Ames manages the overall mission. Goddard manages the science instruments and technology demonstration payload, the science operations center and provides overall mission support. Wallops is responsible for launch vehicle integration, launch services and operations. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages LADEE within the Lunar Quest Program Office.

Swapping Motion-Sensing Units

Mission Status Report

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is switching from one motion-sensing device to a duplicate unit onboard.

The veteran orbiter relies on this inertial measurement unit (IMU) for information about changes in orientation. This information is important for maintaining spacecraft attitude and for pointing the orbiter's large antenna and science-observation instruments.

The spacecraft has two identical copies of this motion-sensing device, called IMU-1 and IMU-2.  Either of them can be used with either of the spacecraft's redundant main computers. Each contains three gyroscopes and three accelerometers.

"The reason we're doing this is that one of the gyroscopes on IMU-1 is approaching its end of life, so we want to swap to our redundant unit early enough that we still have some useful life preserved in the first unit," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Mission Manager Reid Thomas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The orbiter began investigating Mars in 2006. Since completing its primary science phase in 2008, it has continued to work as an extended mission.
The swap has been planned for this week, with procedures expected to take less than two days before the orbiter resumes its normal functions of science observations from orbit and communication relay for Mars rovers.

"To make sure we have a smooth transition, regaining attitude knowledge as quickly as possible, we will power off all instruments, do the IMU swap, maneuver to sun point, do the IMU swap, and then put the spacecraft into safe mode," Thomas said. "The safe-mode process re-initializes the spacecraft's knowledge of its attitude."

IMU-2 has been used previously, but IMU-1 has been used much more. After the swap, IMU-1 will remain available if needed for short periods.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has provided more data about Mars than all other earlier and current missions combined. It also relays to Earth information from both of NASA's active Mars rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity, sharing that function with the NASA Mars Odyssey orbiter.

NASA's WISE Finds Mysterious Centaurs May Be Comets

The true identity of centaurs, the small celestial bodies orbiting the sun between Jupiter and Neptune, is one of the enduring mysteries of astrophysics. Are they asteroids or comets? A new study of observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) finds most centaurs are comets.

Until now, astronomers were not certain whether centaurs are asteroids flung out from the inner solar system or comets traveling in toward the sun from afar. Because of their dual nature, they take their name from the creature in Greek mythology whose head and torso are human and legs are those of a horse.

"Just like the mythical creatures, the centaur objects seem to have a double life," said James Bauer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Bauer is lead author of a paper published online July 22 in the Astrophysical Journal. "Our data point to a cometary origin for most of the objects, suggesting they are coming from deeper out in the solar system."

"Cometary origin" means an object likely is made from the same material as a comet, may have been an active comet in the past, and may be active again in the future.
The findings come from the largest infrared survey to date of centaurs and their more distant cousins, called scattered disk objects. NEOWISE, the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE mission, gathered infrared images of 52 centaurs and scattered disk objects. Fifteen of the 52 are new discoveries. Centaurs and scattered disk objects orbit in an unstable belt. Ultimately, gravity from the giant planets will fling them either closer to the sun or farther away from their current locations.

Although astronomers previously observed some centaurs with dusty halos, a common feature of outgassing comets, and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope also found some evidence for comets in the group, they had not been able to estimate the numbers of comets and asteroids.

Infrared data from NEOWISE provided information on the objects' albedos, or reflectivity, to help astronomers sort the population. NEOWISE can tell whether a centaur has a matte and dark surface or a shiny one that reflects more light. The puzzle pieces fell into place when astronomers combined the albedo information with what was already known about the colors of the objects. Visible-light observations have shown centaurs generally to be either blue-gray or reddish in hue. A blue-gray object could be an asteroid or comet. NEOWISE showed that most of the blue-gray objects are dark, a telltale sign of comets. A reddish object is more likely to be an asteroid.

"Comets have a dark, soot-like coating on their icy surfaces, making them darker than most asteroids," said the study's co-author, Tommy Grav of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz. "Comet surfaces tend to be more like charcoal, while asteroids are usually shinier like the moon."

The results indicate that roughly two-thirds of the centaur population are comets, which come from the frigid outer reaches of our solar system. It is not clear whether the rest are asteroids. The centaur bodies have not lost their mystique entirely, but future research from NEOWISE may reveal their secrets further.

Tropical Ecosystems Boost Carbon Dioxide as Temperatures Rise

NASA scientists and an international team of researchers have found tropical ecosystems can generate significant carbon dioxide when temperatures rise, unlike ecosystems in other parts of the world.

The researchers discovered a temperature increase of just 1 degree Celsius in near-surface air temperatures in the tropics leads to an average annual growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide equivalent to one-third of the annual global emissions from combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation combined. In tropical ecosystems carbon uptake is reduced at higher temperatures. This finding provides scientists with a key diagnostic tool to better understand the global carbon cycle.

"What we learned is that in spite of droughts, floods, volcano eruptions, El Niño and other events, the Earth system has been remarkably consistent in regulating the year-to-year variations in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels," said Weile Wang, a research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and lead author of a paper published Wednesday, July 24, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study provides support for the "carbon-climate feedback" hypothesis proposed by many scientists. This hypothesis asserts a warming climate will lead to accelerated carbon dioxide growth in the atmosphere from vegetation and soils. Multiple Earth system processes, such as droughts and floods, also contribute to changes in the atmospheric carbon dioxide growth rate. The new finding demonstrates observed temperature changes are a more important factor than rainfall changes in the tropics.

The team used a state-of-the-art, high-performance computing and data access facility called NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) at Ames to investigate the mechanisms underlying the relationship between carbon dioxide levels and increased temperatures. The NEX facility allowed scientists to analyze widely available data of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global air temperatures between 1959 and 2011, while studying outputs from several global dynamic vegetation models.

"Climate warming is what we know with certainty will happen under climate change in the tropics,," said Josep G. Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project in Canberra, Australia, and co-author on the paper. This implies that the release of carbon dioxide from the tropical ecosystems will very likely be accelerated with future warming.

Events that can temporarily influence climate, such as volcanic eruptions, may disturb the strength of the relationship between annual temperature and carbon dioxide growth for a few years, but the coupling always recovers after such events.

"The study really highlights the importance of long-term Earth observations for improving our understanding of the Earth system," said Rama Nemani, principal scientist at Ames for the NEX project." Conclusions drawn from analysis of shorter records could be misleading."

Reports Detail Mars Rover Clues to Atmosphere's Past

PASADENA, Calif. – A pair of new papers report measurements of the Martian atmosphere's composition by NASA's Curiosity rover, providing evidence about loss of much of Mars' original atmosphere.

Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) suite of laboratory instruments inside the rover has measured the abundances of different gases and different isotopes in several samples of Martian atmosphere. Isotopes are variants of the same chemical element with different atomic weights due to having different numbers of neutrons, such as the most common carbon isotope, carbon-12, and a heavier stable isotope, carbon-13.

SAM checked ratios of heavier to lighter isotopes of carbon and oxygen in the carbon dioxide that makes up most of the planet's atmosphere. Heavy isotopes of carbon and oxygen are both enriched in today's thin Martian atmosphere compared with the proportions in the raw material that formed Mars, as deduced from proportions in the sun and other parts of the solar system. This provides not only supportive evidence for the loss of much of the planet's original atmosphere, but also a clue to how the loss occurred.

"As atmosphere was lost, the signature of the process was embedded in the isotopic ratio," said Paul Mahaffy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.  He is the principal investigator for SAM and lead author of one of the two papers about Curiosity results in the July 19 issue of the journal Science.
Other factors also suggest Mars once had a much thicker atmosphere, such as evidence of persistent presence of liquid water on the planet's surface long ago even though the atmosphere is too scant for liquid water to persist on the surface now. The enrichment of heavier isotopes measured in the dominant carbon-dioxide gas points to a process of loss from the top of the atmosphere -- favoring loss of lighter isotopes -- rather than a process of the lower atmosphere interacting with the ground.

Curiosity measured the same pattern in isotopes of hydrogen, as well as carbon and oxygen, consistent with a loss of a substantial fraction of Mars' original atmosphere. Enrichment in heavier isotopes in the Martian atmosphere has previously been measured on Mars and in gas bubbles inside meteorites from Mars. Meteorite measurements indicate much of the atmospheric loss may have occurred during the first billion years of the planet's 4.6-billion-year history. The Curiosity measurements reported this week provide more precise measurements to compare with meteorite studies and with models of atmospheric loss.

The Curiosity measurements do not directly measure the current rate of atmospheric escape, but NASA's next mission to Mars, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN), will do so. "The current pace of the loss is exactly what the MAVEN mission now scheduled to launch in November of this year is designed to determine," Mahaffy said.
The new reports describe analysis of Martian atmosphere samples with two different SAM instruments during the initial 16 weeks of the rover's mission on Mars, which is now in its 50th week. SAM's mass spectrometer and tunable laser spectrometer independently measured virtually identical ratios of carbon-13 to carbon-12. SAM also includes a gas chromatograph and uses all three instruments to analyze rocks and soil, as well as atmosphere.

"Getting the same result with two very different techniques increased our confidence that there's no unknown systematic error underlying the measurements," said Chris Webster of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. He is the lead scientist for the tunable laser spectrometer and the lead author for one of the two papers. "The accuracy in these new measurements improves the basis for understanding the atmosphere's history."

Curiosity landed inside Mars' Gale Crater on Aug. 6, 2012 Universal Time (on Aug. 5 PDT). The rover this month began a drive of many months from an area where it found evidence for a past environment favorable for microbial life, toward a layered mound, Mount Sharp, where researchers will seek evidence about how the environment changed. 

Hubble Sees Stars That go out with a Whimper

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the planetary nebula IC 289, located in the northern constellation of Cassiopeia. Formerly a star like our sun, it is now just a cloud of ionized gas being pushed out into space by the remnants of the star’s core, visible as a small bright dot in the middle of the cloud.

Weirdly enough, planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets. Early observers, when looking through small telescopes, could only see undefined, smoky forms that looked like gaseous planets — hence the name. The term has stuck even though modern telescopes like Hubble have made it clear that these objects are not planets at all, but the outer layers of dying stars being thrown off into space.

Stars shine as a result of nuclear fusion reactions in their cores, converting hydrogen to helium. All stars are stable, balancing the inward push caused by their gravity with the outwards thrust from the inner fusion reactions in their cores. When all the hydrogen is consumed the equilibrium is broken; the gravitational forces become more powerful than the outward pressure from the fusion process and the core starts to collapse, heating up as it does so.

When the hot, shrinking core gets hot enough, the helium nuclei begin to fuse into carbon and oxygen and the collapse stops. However, this helium-burning phase is highly unstable and huge pulsations build up, eventually becoming large enough to blow the whole star’s atmosphere away.

A Beautiful End to a Star’s Life

Stars like the Sun can become remarkably photogenic at the end of their life. A good example is NGC 2392, which is located about 4,200 light years from Earth. NGC 2392, nicknamed the "Eskimo Nebula", is what astronomers call a planetary nebula. This designation, however, is deceiving because planetary nebulas actually have nothing to do with planets. The term is simply a historic relic since these objects looked like planetary disks to astronomers in earlier times looking through small optical telescopes.

Instead, planetary nebulas form when a star uses up all of the hydrogen in its core -- an event our Sun will go through in about five billion years. When this happens, the star begins to cool and expand, increasing its radius by tens to hundreds of times its original size. Eventually, the outer layers of the star are carried away by a thick 50,000 kilometer per hour wind, leaving behind a hot core. This hot core has a surface temperature of about 50,000 degrees Celsius, and is ejecting its outer layers in a much faster wind traveling six million kilometers per hour. The radiation from the hot star and the interaction of its fast wind with the slower wind creates the complex and filamentary shell of a planetary nebula. Eventually the remnant star will collapse to form a white dwarf star.

Now days, astronomers using space-based telescopes are able to observe planetary nebulas such as NGC 2392 in ways their scientific ancestors probably could never imagine. This composite image of NGC 2392 contains X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in purple showing the location of million-degree gas near the center of the planetary nebula. Data from the Hubble Space Telescope show – colored red, green, and blue – the intricate pattern of the outer layers of the star that have been ejected. The comet-shaped filaments form when the faster wind and radiation from the central star interact with cooler shells of dust and gas that were already ejected by the star.

The observations of NGC 2392 were part of a study of three planetary nebulas with hot gas in their center. The Chandra data show that NGC 2392 has unusually high levels of X-ray emission compared to the other two. This leads researchers to deduce that there is an unseen companion to the hot central star in NGC 2392. The interaction between a pair of binary stars could explain the elevated X-ray emission found there. Meanwhile, the fainter X-ray emission observed in the two other planetary nebulas in the sample – IC 418 and NGC 6826 – is likely produced by shock fronts (like sonic booms) in the wind from the central star. A composite image of NGC 6826 was included in a gallery of planetary nebulas released in 2012.

A paper describing these results is available online and was published in the April 10th, 2013 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The first author is Nieves Ruiz of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) in Granada, Spain, and the other authors are You-Hua Chu, and Robert Gruendl from the University of Illinois, Urbana; Martín Guerrero from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA-CSIC) in Granada, Spain, and Ralf Jacob, Detlef Schönberner and Matthias Steffen from the Leibniz-Institut Für Astrophysik in Potsdam (AIP), Germany.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

First Testing of Orion Launch Abort System Flight Hardware

NASA engineers and contractors have begun tests on NASA’s Launch Abort System (LAS) Fairing Assembly, flight hardware that will be used to cover and protect the Orion crew module during Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), scheduled for September 2014.

Similar to the material of a graphite tennis racquet, the LAS fairing is a lightweight composite structure weighing 3,000 pounds that protects the capsule from the environment around it, whether it's heat, wind or acoustics.

“The fairing surface interacts with the atmosphere as we launch through it,” explains Kevin Rivers, LAS project manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. “It plays a significant role in the EFT-1 launch. It’s got to maintain structural integrity and protect the spacecraft.”

During static loads testing of the LAS fairing, the structure is placed into a large steel frame and loaded by 10 hydraulic actuators – simulating aerodynamic pressures and bending loads experienced during flight.

Approximately 36 strain gauges and 26 displacement sensors are placed on the structure to measure the way it handles various loads and stresses. Testing makes certain that the structure will work during flight and helps to better understand how well the engineering analysis predicts real flight vehicle behavior.

“This test helps to verify that the structure can withstand the worst case flight loads by testing to even higher levels,” said Gary Keyser, Lockheed Martin LAS lead system engineer. “Testing like this gives us confidence in our analysis and the workmanship of the actual flight hardware.”

During EFT-1, Orion will travel to an altitude 3,600 miles above Earth’s surface. It will return at a speed over 20,000 mph for a landing in the Pacific Ocean. If an emergency were to occur on the pad or initial ascent during EFT-1 or future Orion flights, the LAS would jettison the crew module away from the launch vehicle.

Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for Orion, is conducting the tests at the company's Sunnyvale, Calif., facility, along with several other tests for components of Orion this summer. The actual flight hardware will be exposed to loads and pressures greater than those expected during launch.

Traveling beyond low Earth orbit requires comprehensive life support systems capable of sustaining humans for long duration missions. Orion is adaptable to multiple destinations throughout the solar system.

“Traveling to deep space is an exponentially more difficult process than flying to low Earth orbit because we have to carry everything that we need for those missions with us, and the life support systems must be robust and account for contingencies,” said Rivers. “As we travel farther away from Earth, there are more difficult challenges with radiation exposure, communications, and life support for long duration missions. We have to have emergency systems – it is significantly more complex.”

“We are blazing a trail – going to new places –doing what NASA does best.”
NASA is also developing the Space Launch System (SLS), a heavy-lift launch vehicle capable of sending humans in Orion and other payloads to deep space. Orion will first launch on SLS in 2017 on Exploration Mission-1, an uncrewed mission around the moon.