NASA Preparing to Launch its Newest X-Ray Eyes

NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, is being prepared for the final journey to its launch pad on Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific Ocean. The mission will study everything from massive black holes to our own sun. It is scheduled to launch no earlier than June 13.

"We will see the hottest, densest and most energetic objects with a fundamentally new, high-energy X-ray telescope that can obtain much deeper and crisper images than before," said Fiona Harrison, the NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., who first conceived of the mission 20 years ago.

The observatory is perched atop an Orbital Sciences Corporation Pegasus XL rocket. If the mission passes its Flight Readiness Review on June 1, the rocket will be strapped to the bottom of an aircraft, the L-1011 Stargazer, also operated by Orbital, on June 2. The Stargazer is scheduled to fly from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California to Kwajalein on June 5 to 6.

For more info, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/nustar/news/nustar20120530.html

Hinode Mission to Capture Annular Solar Eclipse This Weekend

On May 20-21, 2012 an annular eclipse of the Sun will be visible from within a narrow corridor along Earth's northern Hemisphere - beginning in eastern Asia, crossing the North Pacific Ocean, and ending in the western United States. A partial eclipse will be visible from a much larger region covering East Asia, North Pacific, North America and Greenland.

During an annular eclipse the moon does not block the entirety of the sun, but leaves a bright ring of light visible at the edges. For the May eclipse, the moon will be at the furthest distance from Earth that it ever achieves - meaning that it will block the smallest possible portion of the sun, and leave the largest possible bright ring around the outside.

The joint JAXA/NASA Hinode mission will observe the eclipse and provide images and movies that will be available on the NASA website at http://www.nasa.gov/sunearth. Due to Hinode’s orbit around the Earth, Hinode will actually observe 4 separate partial eclipses." Scientists often use an eclipse to help calibrate the instruments on the telescope by focusing in on the edge of the moon as it crosses the sun and measuring how sharp it appears in the images. An added bonus: Hinode's X-ray Telescope will be able to provide images of the peaks and valleys of the lunar surface.

The orbits for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), and the joint ESA/NASA mission the Solar Heliospheric Observatory will not provide them with a view of the eclipse.

For more info, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/eclipse-2012.html

Zapping Deadly Bacteria Using Space Technology

 

Technology spin-off from long-running research aboard the International Space Station is opening up a new way to keep hospital patients safe from infections.

Using plasma - electrically charged gas - Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics director Gregor Morfill is developing ways to kill bacteria and viruses that can cause infections in hospitals.

"What we have with plasma is the possibility to supplement our own immune system," says Dr Morfill.

The research began on the International Space Station (ISS), where his physics experiments have been running since 2001.

The first laboratory was the Plasmakristall Experiment Nefedov (PKE-Nefedov) which was replaced in 2006 by the PK-3 Plus lab. Both were developed under a bilateral cooperation between German and Russian space agencies. The development of the third-generation PK-4 lab was started in 2006 with ESA funding for the continuation from 2013 of the complex plasma experiments on ISS.

For more info, visit on http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/zapping_bacteria.html

NASA Flight Tests New ADS-B Device on Ikhana UAS

NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center flew its Ikhana MQ-9 unmanned aircraft with an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B, device, for the first time on March 15.

It was the first time an unmanned aircraft as large as Ikhana – with a 66-foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of more than 10,000 pounds, and a cruising altitude of 40,000 feet -- has flown while equipped with ADS-B. ADS-B is an aircraft tracking technology that all planes operating in certain U.S. airspace must adopt by January 2020 to comply with Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations.

It also was the first flight of hardware for the NASA Aeronautics research project known as UAS in the NAS, which is short for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System.

The equipment performed well during a flight lasting nearly three hours in restricted air space over Dryden's Western Aeronautical Test Range, which is part of Edwards Air Force Base and the China Lake Naval Air Warfare Center.

Being equipped with ADS-B enables NASA's Ikhana to provide much more detailed position, velocity, and altitude information about itself to air traffic controllers, airborne pilots of other ADS-B equipped aircraft flying in its vicinity, and to its pilots on the ground. Currently, only air traffic controllers can see all the aircraft in any given section of the sky.

The ADS-B checkout flight aboard Ikhana kicked off a series in which researchers will collect ADS-B data while performing representative air traffic control-directed maneuvers.

For more info, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/aeronautics/features/ads-b_tested_on_ikhana.html

Columbia Glacier, Alaska

The Columbia Glacier descends from an ice field 3,050 meters (10,000 feet) above sea level, down the flanks of the Chugach Mountains, and into a narrow inlet that leads into Prince William Sound in southeastern Alaska. It is one of the most rapidly changing glaciers in the world.

The Columbia is a large tidewater glacier, flowing directly into the sea. When British explorers first surveyed it in 1794, its nose - or terminus - extended south to the northern edge of Heather Island, a small island near the mouth of Columbia Bay. The glacier held that position until 1980, when it began a rapid retreat that continues today.

These false-color images, captured by Landsat satellites, show how the glacier and the surrounding landscape has changed since 1986. The images were collected by similar sensors - the Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) - on three different Landsat satellites (4, 5, and 7).

The Landsat sensors detect light reflecting off the Earth in the short wave-infrared, near-infrared, and green portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. With this combination of wavelengths, snow and ice appears bright cyan, vegetation is green, clouds are white or light orange, and the open ocean is dark blue. Exposed bedrock is brown, while rocky debris on the glacier’s surface is gray.

By 2011, the terminus had retreated more than 20 kilometers (12 miles) to the north, moving past Terentiev Lake and Great Nunatak Peak. In some years, the terminus retreated more than a kilometer, though the pace has been uneven. The movement of the terminus stalled between 2000 and 2006, for example, because the Great Nunatak Peak and Kadin Peak (directly to the west) constricted the glacier’s movement and held the ice in place.

For more info, visit:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/columbia_glacier.php?src=features-hp

Looking Back on Ten Years of Aqua

Reaching a height of 4 to 5 kilometers (13,000-17,000 feet), the plume of ash from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull Volcano rises above a sea of clouds in this image. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured the image on May 12, 2010.

According to the Iceland Meteorological Office and the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of Iceland, the eruption had changed little from previous days and showed no signs of stopping. As this image shows, the ash plume blew east and southeast on May 12, the plume of previous days had blown south and southeast, closing airports in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, reported BBC News.

For more info, visit: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Gallery/aqua.php?src=features-hp