Mighty Eagle' Lander Takes 100-Foot Free Flight

With a whistle and a roar, the "Mighty Eagle," a NASA robotic prototype lander, sailed to an altitude of 100 feet during another successful free flight Aug. 28 at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

During the 35-second run, the vehicle was "open loop" -- navigating autonomously without the command of the onboard camera and flying on a preprogrammed flight profile. Once it reached the 100-foot mark, the "Mighty Eagle" identified a new, larger target on the ground about 100 feet away, took pictures, processed the images and safely landed. Today's test is part of a new series of free flights testing the robotic prototype lander's autonomous rendezvous and capture capabilities. Testing will continue through September.

"We met our goal for this flight, which was to test the new software at triple the height of our last flight," said Dr. Greg Chavers, "Mighty Eagle" test lead at the Marshall Center. "The higher we go, the more realistic the scenario is compared to an actual descent."

"This test article is a vehicle system and requires a lot of team interaction," said Jake Parton, test conductor on today's flight. Parton is one of several young engineers gaining experience and getting guidance from senior engineers on the "Mighty Eagle" project. The test team's ages range from 25 to 71.

"We are getting good experience in handling flight hardware and reacting to real-time conditions and anomalies," said Parton. "Each time we test, we load propellant, launch the vehicle, fly the vehicle and land the vehicle. It’s hands-on flight experience for young engineers."

Nicknamed the "Mighty Eagle" after one of the characters in the popular "Angry Birds" game, the vehicle is a three-legged prototype that resembles an actual flight lander design. It is 4 feet tall and 8 feet in diameter and, when fueled, weighs 700 pounds. It is fueled by 90 percent pure hydrogen peroxide and receives its commands from an onboard computer that activates its onboard thrusters to carry it to a controlled landing using a pre-programmed flight profile.

NASA will use the "Mighty Eagle" to mature the technology needed to develop a new generation of small, smart, versatile robotic landers capable of achieving scientific and exploration goals on the surface of the moon, asteroids or other airless bodies.

The "Mighty Eagle" was developed by the Marshall Center and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., for NASA’s Planetary Sciences Division, Headquarters Science Mission Directorate. Key partners in this project include the Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation, which includes the Science Applications International Corporation, Dynetics Corp., and Teledyne Brown Engineering Inc., all of Huntsville.

With a whistle and a roar, the "Mighty Eagle," a NASA robotic prototype lander, sailed to an altitude of 100 feet during another successful free flight Aug. 28 at the Marshall Center. During the 35-second run, the vehicle was "open loop" -- navigating autonomously without the command of the onboard camera and flying on a preprogrammed flight profile.

Curiosity Communicates with Help From its Friends

This animation shows how NASA's Curiosity rover talks to Earth with the help of orbiting satellites.

Atlas V Launch Attempt Scrubbed for Weather

The second attempt to launch the Atlas V rocket set to carry the twin RBSP spacecraft was scrubbed due to weather.

Sun Has "Eureka!" Moment

This bulbous CME certainly resembled a light bulb. It has the thin outer edge and a bright, glowing core at its center. CMEs are often bulbous, but it has been years since we’ve seen one with the elements (pun intended) of a light bulb.

The frames were taken by Solar and Heliospheric Observatory's (SOHO) Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) C2 instrument. LASCO is able to take images of the solar corona by blocking the light coming directly from the Sun with an occulter disk, creating an artificial eclipse within the instrument itself. The position of the solar disk is indicated in the images by the white circle. The C2 image shows the inner solar corona up to 8.4 million kilometers (5.25 million miles) away from the Sun.

What's It's Like to Land on Mars

This video steps viewers through a portion of the choreography needed to land NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars. It starts with a computer simulation from NASA's Eyes on the Solar System program and uses actual images from Curiosity's Mars Descent Imager. It ends with a high-resolution color image from Curiosity's Mast Camera.

Cretaceous Footprint Found on Goddard Campus

Dinosaur tracker Ray Stanford describes the cretaceous-era nodosaur track he found on the Goddard Space Flight Center campus this year.

NASA is Tracking Electron Beams from the Sun

In the quest to understand how the world's weather moves around the globe, scientists have had to tease apart different kinds of atmospheric movement, such as the great jet streams that can move across a whole hemisphere versus more intricate, localized flows. Much the same must currently be done to understand the various motions at work in the great space weather system that links the sun and Earth as the sun shoots material out in all directions, creating its own version of a particle sea to fill up the solar system.

"People think of the sun as giving out light and heat," says Ruth Skoug, a space scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, N.M. "But it is also always losing particles, losing mass."

For example, the sun sends out a steady outflow of solar particles called the solar wind and additionally giant, sudden explosions of material called coronal mass ejections or CMEs erupt out into space. Skoug studies a third kind of particle flow: jets of high-energy electrons streaming from the sun known as electron strahl. Through a new five-year study of observations of the strahl, Skoug and her colleagues have researched another piece of this giant space weather puzzle around Earth.

Skoug says that each fast-moving electron is by and large constrained to move along magnetic field lines that flow out from the sun, some of which loop back to touch the sun again, others which extend out to the edges of the solar system. The charge on an electron interacts with the field lines such that each particle sticks close to the line, somewhat like a bead on an abacus – with the added motion that the electron gyrates in circles around the field lines at the same time.

In general, the magnetic fields get weaker further away from the sun. A physical law that applies in those cases in which electrons are not pushed off course, or “scattered,” demands that the electron gyrations get smaller and more stretched out along the field line. If this were the only physics at work, therefore, one would expect the strahl to become a more and more focused, pencil-thin beam when measured near Earth. This measurement is done by NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) mission, but it shows that the expected focusing doesn’t quite happen.

"Wherever we look, the electron strahl is much wider than we would have expected," says Eric Christian, the NASA's deputy project scientist for ACE at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "So there must be some process that helps scatter the electrons into a wider beam."

Indeed, the strahls come in a wide variety of sizes, so Skoug and her colleagues sifted through five years worth of ACE data to see if they could find any patterns. While they spotted strahls of all widths, they did find that certain sizes showed up more frequently. They also found that strahls along open field lines, those that do not return to the sun, have different characteristics than those on closed field lines, those that do return to the sun. On the open field lines, the most common width by far is about ten times the size of the thin beam of electrons expected if there had been no extra scattering. The closed field lines, however, showed a nearly equal number of strahls at that width and at a width some four times even larger.

The strahls on the closed field lines showed an additional pattern. While the strahls might differ in width, they did not tend to differ in the total number of electrons passing by. This suggests that the different shaped strahls – which often come from similar places on the sun -- may have been the same in composition when they left the sun, but were altered by the path they traveled and scattering they encountered along their journey.

While each piece of statistical information like this may seem slightly esoteric, together they help constrain what kinds of scattering might be at work in space.

"We don't yet know how the electrons get scattered into these different widths," says Skoug. "The electrons are so spread out that they rarely bump into each other to get pushed off course, so instead we think that electromagnetic waves add energy, and therefore speed, to the particles."

There are numerous types of these waves, however, traveling at different speeds, in different sizes and in different directions, and no one yet knows which kinds of waves might be at work. Research like this helps start the process of eliminating certain scattering options, since the correct version must, of course, cause the specific variations seen by Skoug and her colleagues.

The Radiation Belt Storm Probes

The Radiation Belt Storm Probe mission (RBSP) will explore the Van Allen Radiation Belts in the Earth's magnetosphere. The charge particles in these regions can be hazardous to both spacecraft and astronauts. The mission will explore space weather changes in Earth's space environment caused by the sun which can affect our technology.

Morpheus Flight Test

Housekeeping Aboard Space Station

NASA astronaut Joe Acaba, Expedition 32 flight engineer, uses a vacuum cleaner during housekeeping operations in the Permanent Multipurpose Module (PMM) of the International Space Station.

NASA’s big moment: Mars rover Curiosity all set for Sunday landing

Pasadena, California:

The Mars rover Curiosity, the most sophisticated mobile science lab ever sent to another world, hurtled closer to the Red Planet on Saturday, on track “to fly through the eye of the needle” for a precise, safe landing on Sunday night, NASA officials said.

Mission control engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles acknowledge that delivering the one-ton, six-wheeled, nuclear-powered rover in one piece is a highly risky proposition under the best of circumstances.

But JPL’s team said the spacecraft and its systems were all healthy and performing flawlessly, and that weather forecasts over the landing zone on Mars were favourable, as Curiosity streaked to within 2.8 million miles (4.5 million km) of its destination.

NASA, facing deep cuts in its science budget and struggling to regain its footing after cancellation of the space shuttle program, the agency’s centerpiece for 30 years, has a lot riding on a successful Mars landing.

Mars is the chief component of NASA’s long-term deep space exploration plans. Curiosity is designed primarily to search for evidence that the planet most similar to Earth may have once harbored ingredients necessary for microbial life to evolve.



After an eight-month voyage of more than 350 million miles (567 million km), engineers said they were hopeful that the rover will land precisely as planned near the foot of a tall mountain rising from the floor of a vast impact basin called Gale Crater.

“We’re on target to fly through the eye of the needle,” Arthur Amador, the Mars Science Laboratory mission manager, told reporters at a briefing about 36 hours before landing time.

With Curiosity in the final stretch of its journey encased in a capsule-like shell, the spacecraft is essentially flying on automatic pilot, guided by a computer packed with pre-programmed instructions.

PRECISE APPROACH

So precise has the vessel’s approach to Mars been that NASA engineers passed on one last opportunity to perform a trajectory adjustment by remote control on Friday.

On Sunday, mission control will activate the craft’s backup computer, ensuring that it will assume onboard command of the vessel should the primary computer fail during entry into the Martian atmosphere and its tricky descent to the surface.

Two hours before atmospheric entry, mission control will send its very last transmission to Curiosity, a “parameter update” giving the craft its exact position in space.

After that, controllers will have little to do but anxiously track Curiosity’s progress as it flies into Mars’ upper atmosphere at 13,000 miles (20,921 km) per hour, 17 times the speed of sound, and begins a descent and landing sequence NASA refers to as “the seven minutes of terror.”

Curiosity’s fate will then hinge on a complex series of maneuvers that include a giant parachute deployment and a never-before-used jet-powered “sky crane” that must descend to the right spot over the planet, lower the rover to the ground on nylon tethers, cut the cords and fly away.

“This is the most challenging landing we’ve ever attempted,” said Doug McCuistion, NASA’s Mars Exploration Program director.

If everything works according to plan, controllers at JPL will know within a minute or two that the Curiosity is safely on the ground, alerted by a terse radio transmission relayed to Earth from the Mars orbiter Odyssey flying overhead.

If no landing signal comes, it could take hours or days for scientists to learn if radio communications with the rover were merely disrupted or that it crashed or burned up during descent.

Flight controllers anticipate clear and calm conditions at Gale Crater for landing, which will occur in the Martian late afternoon. There may be some haze in the planet’s pink skies from ice clouds, typical for this time of year, with temperatures at about 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

From 154 million miles (248 million kilometers) away, 1,400 scientists, engineers and guests are expected to tensely wait at JPL to learn Curiosity’s fate. Another 5,000 people will be watching from the nearby California Institute of Technology, the academic home of JPL.

A NASA Television broadcast from mission control will take over the giant Toshiba screens in Times Square in New York City.