Station Crew Celebrates Christmas

Aboard the orbiting International Space Station, Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford, Russian Flight Engineers Oleg Novitskiy, Evgeny Tarelkin and Roman Romanenko, NASA Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn and Canadian Space Agency Chris Hadfield celebrated Christmas on the orbital laboratory Dec. 25, 2012 through song and downlink messages of cheer for flight controllers on the ground.

PhoneSat: Smart, Small and Sassy

The fast-paced proliferation and popularity of mobile devices here on Earth, like smartphones loaded with powerful operating systems, will find a new niche market– this time in space, thanks to NASA’s trailblazing PhoneSat project.

To be rocketed into space early next year, PhoneSat is set to showcase use of lower cost, off-the-store-shelf, commercially available technology that enables space commerce, educational activities and citizen-exploration.

“PhoneSat demonstrates a philosophy of taking a creative idea, then building and testing that inspiration in a very rapid way…as opposed to long planning processes typical of larger spacecraft programs,” said Andrew Petro, NASA program executive for Small Spacecraft Technology within the Space Technology Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Petro said PhoneSat is an out of the box activity, one novel pathway being explored for small-sized satellites that, quite literally, “chip away” at lowering the cost of constructing future spacecraft.
PhoneSat takes advantage of commercial products already imbued with speedy computing chips, lots of memory and ultra-tiny sensors like high-resolution cameras and navigation devices.
That’s a mix of attributes akin to what spacecraft require, Petro said. “Those are already built into a smart phone and that’s what we’re taking advantage of in the PhoneSat Project, which could ultimately lead to very low-cost satellite designs.”

Non-traditional hardware

“From the programmatic level, we’re exploring the use of non-traditional hardware and systems providers…outside of what you normally call the aerospace industries,” said Bruce Yost, manager of the Small Spacecraft Technology program at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., home to a tight-knit team of engineers that conceived of and developed PhoneSat.
“PhoneSat is a way to find other ways to do some of our space missions in a non-traditional manner,” Yost said.

There are three prototype satellites built for launch in the PhoneSat Project, each a “nanosatellite” that is a 4-inch cube and weighs just three pounds. The three PhoneSats are dubbed Alexander, Graham, and Bell.
PhoneSat 1.0 makes use of Nexus One smartphone technology made by HTC Corporation and Google’s Android operating system.

A beta version of PhoneSat 2.0 joins the two battery-powered PhoneSat 1.0 spacecraft. PhoneSat 2.0 is built around an updated Nexus S smartphone made by Samsung Electronics which runs Google’s Android operating system to provide a faster core processor, avionics and gyroscopes.
PhoneSat 2.0 has solar panels to enable longer-duration missions and a GPS receiver. It also has magnetorquer coils—electro-magnets that interact with Earth’s magnetic field—as well as reaction wheels to actively control the satellite’s orientation in space.

“We’re providing a set of 3 satellites, inserted into a spring-loaded dispenser attached to the launch vehicle. They’re stacked in there like a toaster,” said Jim Cockrell, PhoneSat 1.0 project manager at NASA Ames.
An Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares booster, roaring skyward from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Va., will eject the trio of PhoneSat spacecraft into low Earth orbit in 2013.

Creative and cost-saving approach

A creative and cost-saving approach in fabricating the solar paneled PhoneSat 2.0 is the use of Triangular Advanced Solar Cells, or TASC. Purchased from Spectrolab of Sylmar, Calif. at a modest price, the solar cells are “leftovers” from the manufacturing process of larger solar cells.
Cockrell said the cells are very small so it took more of them to cover the given surface area available on the PhoneSat. The cells offer high efficiency (27 percent) and, as they are a byproduct of the fabrication of larger cells, they are sold very cheaply—about $250 for a quantity of 100, he noted.

Yet another cost-cutting avenue taken was the PhoneSat project’s use of economical, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) brushless DC motors.
Cockrell said that the mass of the motors armatures provide all the momentum needed. “No external flywheel is attached, and they have built-in speed controllers,” he said, “so the mechanical and electrical designs have minimum moving parts and are simple.”

Because they are COTS hardware they are inexpensive. For comparison, Cockrell added, the least expensive, space-qualified, purpose-built attitude control system for CubeSats can cost two orders of magnitude more than the PhoneSat attitude control system made from COTS parts.

Technology demonstration

“The PhoneSat project is kind of a technology demonstration effort,” said Jasper Wolfe, technical lead for attitude determination and control of the launch vehicle for the PhoneSat Project at NASA Ames.
During the PhoneSat Project’s time in orbit, a global amateur radio community will be engaged, able to download and upload packets of data. Wolfe is anxious to see how they creatively utilize the Earth orbiting PhoneSats.

“Personally, one of the other benefits from PhoneSat is inspirational…demonstrating cool, cheap technologies that can inspire a lot of people to get involved in space,” Wolfe said. “We want to keep up with all the technologies that are coming out and continually find new applications for technologies from other industries, particularly low-cost industries.”
NASA’s Petro said the PhoneSat Project is a forerunner of things to come that can decrease the costs of future small spacecraft.

Hubble Eyes the Needle Galaxy

Like finding a silver needle in the haystack of space, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced this beautiful image of the spiral galaxy IC 2233, one of the flattest galaxies known.

Typical spiral galaxies like the Milky Way are usually made up of three principal visible components: the disk where the spiral arms and most of the gas and dust is concentrated; the halo, a rough and sparse sphere around the disk that contains little gas, dust or star formation; and the central bulge at the heart of the disk, which is formed by a large concentration of ancient stars surrounding the Galactic Center.

However, IC 2233 is far from being typical. This object is a prime example of a super-thin galaxy, where the galaxy’s diameter is at least ten times larger than the thickness. These galaxies consist of a simple disk of stars when seen edge on. This orientation makes them fascinating to study, giving another perspective on spiral galaxies. An important characteristic of this type of objects is that they have a low brightness and almost all of them have no bulge at all.

The bluish color that can be seen along the disk gives evidence of the spiral nature of the galaxy, indicating the presence of hot, luminous, young stars, born out of clouds of interstellar gas. In addition, unlike typical spirals, IC 2233 shows no well-defined dust lane. Only a few small patchy regions can be identified in the inner regions both above and below the galaxy’s mid-plane.

Lying in the constellation of Lynx, IC 2233 is located about 40 million light-years away from Earth. This galaxy was discovered by British astronomer Isaac Roberts in 1894.

This image was taken with the Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, combining visible and infrared exposures.

A Cosmic Holiday Ornament, Hubble-Style

Tis the season for holiday decorating and tree-trimming. Not to be left out, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed a festive-looking nearby planetary nebula called NGC 5189. The intricate structure of this bright gaseous nebula resembles a glass-blown holiday ornament with a glowing ribbon entwined.

Planetary nebulae represent the final brief stage in the life of a medium-sized star like our sun. While consuming the last of the fuel in its core, the dying star expels a large portion of its outer envelope. This material then becomes heated by the radiation from the stellar remnant and radiates, producing glowing clouds of gas that can show complex structures, as the ejection of mass from the star is uneven in both time and direction.

A spectacular example of this beautiful complexity is seen in the bluish lobes of NGC 5189. Most of the nebula is knotty and filamentary in its structure. As a result of the mass-loss process, the planetary nebula has been created with two nested structures, tilted with respect to each other, that expand away from the center in different directions.

NASA Satellite Finds an Unusually Tall Storm-cell in Cyclone Evan

NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite found an unusually tall towering thunderstorm in Cyclone Evan.

According to Owen Kelley of the TRMM satellite team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md, the most startling feature of the December 16 overflight of Tropical Cyclone Evan was the extremely tall storm-cell in the north side of the eyewall. At the time TRMM passed overhead and captured an image of the storm, Evan was about to rake across the northern coast of the islands of Fiji.

The updrafts in this tower extended high enough to lift precipitation-size ice 17 km (10.5 miles) above the ocean surface. Tall precipitation cells are generally taken to be anything at least 14.5 km (9 miles) high and are nicknamed "hot towers," but what was seen in Evan's eyewall was a different category of storm cell.

Storm-cells as tall as the one in the eyewall of Evan have been long known to occur occasionally over land, but before the TRMM satellite, there were not thought to occur over ocean far from land. While field campaigns have periodically studied one location or other over the ocean, what TRMM has taught us is that such sporadic observations are insufficient if you want catch rare events. After 15 years of continuous operation, TRMM satellite reveals the rare features and challenges our understanding of how the weather works. The ocean is an unlikely place to find extremely tall oceanic cells because the ocean surface stays roughly constant in temperature, unlike the land which quickly heats up over the course of a day, increasing low-level instability, and encouraging tall cells to form.

During the first 10 years of the TRMM mission, only 5 thunderstorm cells as tall as the one seen in cyclone Evan were observed in South Pacific tropical cyclones. Due to their rarity, perhaps these 17-km-tall (10.5 mile) cells deserve their own nickname. To distinguish them from run-of-the-mill hot towers, one can call these cells "titans," "super towers," or just extremely tall.

Over all of the tropical oceans, only 174 such extremely tall cells were observed during the first 10 years of TRMM (1). That's 174 extremely tall cells out of the approximately 9 million oceanic storms that TRMM saw during that time. It is worth noting however, that even TRMM has its limitations. It does not observe the whole earth continuously and frequently misses short-lived events. With this in mind, these extremely tall cells most likely occur more often than TRMM observes them although they do make up a very small fraction of the ocean's weather.

TRMM also observed cloud top temperatures. At the north side of the eyewall, was the upper-level outflow from the extremely tall tower, i.e. the tower's "exhaust fumes." The exhaust moves outward horizontally in every direction, including toward the eye at the center of the tropical cyclone. It is through a process called "forced subsidence" that the exhaust from eyewall towers may warm the air in the tropical cyclone's eye. Warming the air in the eye lowers the surface pressure and encourages intensification of the winds circling the eye. 

New Trio Launches to Join Expedition 34

 

Three new crew members are on their way to join their Expedition 34 crewmates aboard the International Space Station. They launched aboard the Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft at 7:12 a.m. EST (6:12 p.m. Baikonur time) Wednesday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan.

Flight Engineers Tom Marshburn, Roman Romanenko and Chris Hadfield will orbit the Earth for two days before docking to the Rassvet module at 9:12 a.m. Friday. The new trio will join Commander Kevin Ford and Flight Engineers Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeny Tarelkin who’ve been residing at the orbital laboratory since Oct. 26.

Hadfield last visited the station in April 2001 aboard space shuttle Endeavour as an STS-100 mission specialist. He helped install the Canadarm2, the station’s robotic arm, during two spacewalks. Hadfield will be Canada’s first station commander when Expedition 35 begins. Marshburn went to the station in July 2009 aboard shuttle Endeavour for the STS-127 mission. He performed three spacewalks to help complete the construction of the Japanese Kibo laboratory module.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/

From Cassini for the Holidays: A Splendor Seldom Seen

NASA's Cassini spacecraft, in orbit around Saturn for more than eight years now, has delivered another glorious, backlit view of the planet Saturn and its rings.

On Oct. 17, 2012, during its 174th orbit around the gas giant, Cassini was deliberately positioned within Saturn's shadow, a perfect location from which to look in the direction of the sun and take a backlit view of the rings and the dark side of the planet. Looking back towards the sun is a geometry referred to by planetary scientists as "high solar phase;" near the center of your target's shadow is the highest phase possible. This is a very scientifically advantageous and coveted viewing position, as it can reveal details about both the rings and atmosphere that cannot be seen in lower solar phase.

The last time Cassini had such an unusual perspective on Saturn and its rings, at sufficient distance and with sufficient time to make a full system mosaic, occurred in September 2006, when it captured a mosaic, processed to look like natural color, entitled "In Saturn's Shadow." In that mosaic, planet Earth put in a special appearance, making "In Saturn's Shadow" one of the most popular Cassini images to date.
The mosaic being released today by the mission and the imaging team, in celebration of the 2012 holiday season, does not contain Earth; along with the sun, our planet is hidden behind Saturn. However, it was taken when Cassini was closer to Saturn and therefore shows more detail in the rings than the one taken in 2006.

"Of all the many glorious images we have received from Saturn, none are more strikingly unusual than those taken from Saturn's shadow," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini's imaging team lead based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the U.S., England, France and Germany. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

X-48 Blended Wing Body Research Aircraft Makes 100th Test Flight

  

The Boeing X-48 Blended Wing Body subscale research aircraft made its 100th flight in late October at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.

The milestone occurred Oct. 30 when the unmanned X-48C aircraft was flown on two separate 25-minute flights -- the seventh and eighth flights for the X-48C since it began flying Aug. 7. Between 2007 and 2010, the aircraft, then in the X-48B configuration, made 92 flights.

"Once again, working closely with NASA, we have been pleased to pass another flight-test milestone in our work to explore and validate the aerodynamic characteristics and efficiencies of the Blended Wing Body concept," said Boeing X-48 project manager Mike Kisska of Boeing Research and Technology.

"We are thrilled by the continued success of our flight testing and the useful data that we have collected during the first eight X-48C flights," added Heather Maliska, NASA Dryden's X-48C project manager.

Kisska noted that with 100 test flights flown, the X-48 has far surpassed the previous record of 40 flights performed by a single unmanned X-plane, held by one of the X-45A Joint Unmanned Combat Aircraft technology demonstrators, also developed by Boeing.

Typhoon Bopha

Infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite have watched the strong thunderstorms in Typhoon Bopha fizzle and shrink in area over the weekend as wind shear increased. Bopha has now dissipated in the South China Sea, just west of Luzon, Philippines.

NASA's Aqua satellite has been providing data on Bopha since the day it formed on Nov. 26. In the storm's last days, Aqua's Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument captured infrared data of the storm and showed that cloud top temperatures warmed from Dec. 8 through Dec. 9 as cloud heights fell and thunderstorms lost their punch.

AIRS infrared data reveals where the coldest, highest cloud tops are located in a tropical cyclone. The coldest cloud tops indicate the strongest storms with the heaviest rain. On Dec. 8, AIRS data revealed a large area of strong thunderstorms surrounded the center of circulation as the storm skirted the west coast of Luzon, the northern Philippines. That same day, Bopha triggered more warnings for the Philippines.

Curiosity's 'Rocknest' Workplace

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover documented itself in the context of its work site, an area called "Rocknest Wind Drift," on the 84th Martian day, or sol, of its mission (Oct. 31, 2012). The rover worked at this location from Sol 56 (Oct. 2, 2012) to Sol 100 (Nov. 16, 2012).

The drift consists of sand trapped on the downwind side of a group of dark cobbles the team named Rocknest. This mosaic of 55 images from the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) shows the first four of five places from which the rover's scoop obtained sand to clean the sample handling and processing system. The scooped material was ultimately delivered to the Chemistry and Mineralogy Experiment (CheMin) and the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory instruments housed inside the rover's body. The annotated version of this figure shows the location of a scoop taken at a later date -- the fifth and final scoop, and the only one that provided grains delivered to SAM.

Before scooping, the rover team put an approximately 20-inch-wide (about 50- centimeter-wide) wheel print on the Rocknest wind drift. This allowed MAHLI and the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) to determine whether the drift really consisted of sand with small enough sizes to clean the Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis (CHIMRA) instrument and be delivered to CheMin and SAM. The drift material at the center of the wheel print, named "Portage" by the rover team, was examined by the APXS.

The rover's robotic arm is not visible in the mosaic because the MAHLI that took this mosaic is on the turret at the end of the arm. Wrist motions and turret rotations on the arm allowed MAHLI to acquire the mosaic's 55 images.

HS3 Hurricane Mission Ends for 2012

NASA's 2012 Hurricane and Severe Storms Sentinel, or HS3, mission came to an end Nov. 6 when a NASA unmanned Global Hawk aircraft flew a final data-collection mission in the North Pacific Ocean over a large storm in preparation for next year's campaign. 

The primary activity of the 2012 HS3 mission included a NASA Global Hawk aircraft that flew from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., in September to investigate the environment and cloud structure of hurricanes Leslie and Nadine in the Atlantic Ocean with more than 148 hours flown over six science flights. A second Global Hawk equipped to examine hurricane precipitation and wind structure was unable to deploy to Wallops before the end of the hurricane campaign, but successfully completed its maiden science research voyage in the Pacific flight. 

The Global Hawk departed from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., Nov. 5 and flew along the Pacific Coast to as far north as Washington state. The aircraft flew over four Pacific Ocean buoys and a low pressure system south of the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. The 24.2-hour flight allowed for testing of several instruments that will be flown during the 2013 HS3 campaign. All three instruments operated well and collected good data.

NASA Predicts Total Blackout in Dec. 2012

NASA predicts total blackout on 23-25 Dec 2012 during alignment of Universe.
US scientists predict Universe change, total blackout of planet for 3 days from Dec 23 2012.
It is not the end of the world, it is an alignment of the Universe, where the Sun and the earth will align for the first time. The earth will shift from the current third dimension to zero dimension, then shift to the forth dimension. During this transition, the entire Universe will face a big change, and we will see a entire brand new world.

The 3 days blackout is predicted to happen on Dec 23, 24, 25....during this time, staying calm is most important, hug each other, pray pray pray, sleep for 3 nights...and those who survive will face a brand new world....for those not prepared, many will die because of fear. Be happy, enjoy every moment now. Don't worry, pray to God everyday. There is a lot of talk about what will happen in 2012, but many people don't believe it, and don't want to talk about it for fear of creating fear and panic.

We don't know what will happen, but it is worth listening to USA's NASA talk about preparation. Whether it's true or not, better be prepared. No panic, stay calm, just prays. Remember to smile more, love more and forgive more...every day. Better avoid traveling during December.