Minotaur Rocket Launch Completed from NASA Wallops

An U.S. Air Force Minotaur 1 rocket carrying the Department of Defense Operationally Responsive Space office’s ORS-1 satellite was successfully launched at 11:09 p.m. EDT today from NASA’s Launch Range at the Wallops Flight Facility and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia.

“We are very pleased to continue our support to the U.S. Air Force and the Operationally Responsive Space Office (ORS) with today’s successful launch,” said Bill Wrobel, director of NASA’s Wallops flight Facility. “This is the fourth Minotaur 1 launch from Wallops since December 2006 and we look forward to collaborating with the Air Force and ORS on future projects.”

“Today’s launch continues the Wallops legacy of providing efficient and cost effective support to our launch customers that include government and commercial organizations,” Wrobel said.

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Paving the Way for Space-Based Air Pollution Sensors

Although the nation’s air has grown significantly cleaner in recent decades, about 40 percent of Americans – 127 million people – live in counties where pollution levels still regularly exceed national air quality standards established by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Most of the areas with the heaviest pollution are in California, but other parts of the country are anything but immune. On the drive down I-95 between Baltimore and Washington D.C., for example, sweltering summer heat and relentless traffic often leave plumes of polluted air stewing over the highway making the area one of the top 20 smoggiest metro areas in the country.

Come July, all that health-sapping pollution will have company: a 117-foot P-3B NASA research aircraft flying spirals over six ground stations in Maryland. The aircraft is part of a month-long field campaign designed to improve satellite measurements of air pollution.

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Modified GT Sets World Speed Record at SLF

A modified Ford GT set a world record during testing June 16 and 17 when Johnny Bohmer reached 223 mph on the runway of NASA Kennedy Space Center's Shuttle Landing Facility. A Guinness World Records judge authenticated the accomplishment, confirming Bohmer's place in automotive history, along with Kennedy's role in the achievement.

Bohmer's Performance Power Racing modified the car and was testing the suspension and aerodynamic coatings at the runway. The record is the first in the new Guinness category of standing mile for a street-legal car. That means Bohmer began from a standstill and revved up to speeds faster than the space shuttle's average touchdown speed.

"This is probably the best place on the Earth," Bohmer said before the run. "It's very nice, I'm very happy with it. I took it up to 210 (June 16) without trying."Built for spacecraft returning from orbit at high speeds, the three-mile long concrete runway is becoming a preferred testing ground for drivers and racing teams. Joe Gibbs racing, which competes in NASCAR events, has used the runway for evaluations, as have Indy Car teams.

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Getting Ready for the Next Big Solar Storm

In Sept. 1859, on the eve of a below-average solar cycle, the sun unleashed one of the most powerful storms in centuries. The underlying flare was so unusual, researchers still aren't sure how to categorize it. The blast peppered Earth with the most energetic protons in half-a-millennium, induced electrical currents that set telegraph offices on fire, and sparked Northern Lights over Cuba and Hawaii.

"A similar storm today might knock us for a loop," says Lika Guhathakurta, a solar physicist at NASA headquarters. "Modern society depends on high-tech systems such as smart power grids, GPS, and satellite communications--all of which are vulnerable to solar storms."She and more than a hundred others are attending the fifth annual Space Weather Enterprise Forum—"SWEF" for short.

The purpose of SWEF is to raise awareness of space weather and its effects on society especially among policy makers and emergency responders. Attendees come from the US Congress, FEMA, power companies, the United Nations, NASA, NOAA and more. As 2011 unfolds, the sun is once again on the eve of a below-average solar cycle—at least that’s what forecasters are saying. The "Carrington event" of 1859 (named after astronomer Richard Carrington, who witnessed the instigating flare) reminds us that strong storms can occur even when the underlying cycle is nominally weak.

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LRO Showing Us the Moon as Never Before

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has forever changed our view of the moon, literally bringing it into sharper focus and showing us the whole globe in unprecedented detail. This rich new portrait has been rendered by LRO's seven onboard instruments, which together have delivered more than 192 terabytes of data, images and maps -- the equivalent of nearly 41,000 typical DVDs. "This is a tremendous accomplishment," says Douglas Cooke, Associate Administrator of the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington. "The exploration phase of the mission delivered a lot more than it originally promised, and that's been just the beginning for LRO."

The primary objective of the mission was to enable safe and effective exploration of the moon. "To do so, we needed to leverage the very best that the science community had to offer," says Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist of the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington. "And by doing that, we've fundamentally changed our scientific understanding of the moon."

The most precise and complete topographic maps to date of the moon's complex, heavily cratered landscape have been created from the more than 4 billion measurements -- and still counting -- taken by LRO's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA). These maps are more accurate and sample more places on the lunar surface than any available before. In fact, LOLA has taken more than 100 times more measurements than all previous lunar instruments of its kind combined, opening up a world of possibilities for future exploration and for science.

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NASA Chat: Striking Up a Conversation About Lightning

June is Lightning Safety Awareness Month. Lightning is the number two killer of severe weather. Flooding is number one. A lot of people think if it is sunny or maybe just a few clouds around and you hear thunder, it is okay to stay outside until you actually see the lightning. That is not true. If you hear thunder when you are outside, that means that lightning is close enough to strike you!

On Thursday, June 23, from 7-8 p.m. EDT, Dr. Richard Blakeslee, atmospheric research scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., will answer your questions about lightning safety, the global distribution and frequency of lightning occurrence as well as some of its physical characteristic.

The relationship of lightning to severe storms and weather (e.g., lightning rate changes may serve as a "pre-cursor" or advanced indicator to later severe weather at the ground such as tornadoes), and other lightning research topics such as lightning-hurricane relationships and terrestrial gamma ray burst.

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NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer Ranks Among World's Fastest

NASA's largest supercomputer is seventh on the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful, high-performance computers. The announcement was made at the 26th International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany.

Pleiades, located at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., supports more than 1,000 active users around the country who are advancing our knowledge about the Earth, solar system and the universe. Pleiades is used to meet the computing needs on NASA's most demanding modeling and simulation projects in aeronautics; Earth and space science; exploration systems and technologies; and future space operations.

"We're really excited that Pleiades delivered nearly 83 percent of the theoretical peak performance," said Rupak Biswas, chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at Ames. "This means our science and engineering users get extremely efficient use of their computing time on the system. Reaching the sustained petaflop per second rate is a significant milestone for NASA and its industry partners."

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Recalculating the Distance to Interstellar Space

Scientists analyzing recent data from NASA's Voyager and Cassini spacecraft have calculated that Voyager 1 could cross over into the frontier of interstellar space at any time and much earlier than previously thought. The findings are detailed in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

Data from Voyager's low-energy charged particle instrument, first reported in December 2010, have indicated that the outward speed of the charged particles streaming from the sun has slowed to zero. The stagnation of this solar wind has continued through at least February 2011, marking a thick, previously unpredicted "transition zone" at the edge of our solar system.

"There is one time we are going to cross that frontier, and this is the first sign it is upon us," said Tom Krimigis, prinicipal investigator for Voyager's low-energy charged particle instrument and Cassini's magnetospheric imaging instrument, based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

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NASA's Chandra Finds Massive Black Holes Common in Early Universe

Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, astronomers found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies.

By pointing Chandra at a patch of sky for more than six weeks, astronomers obtained what is known as the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS). When combined with very deep optical and infrared images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the new Chandra data allowed astronomers to search for black holes in 200 distant galaxies, from when the universe was between about 800 million to 950 million years old.

"Until now, we had no idea what the black holes in these early galaxies were doing, or if they even existed,” said Ezequiel Treister of the University of Hawaii, lead author of the study appearing in the June 16 issue of the journal Nature. “Now we know they are there, and they are growing like gangbusters."

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Unique 'Portrait' Of Shuttle and International Space Station Released

Newly-released portraits show the International Space Station together with the space shuttle, the vehicle that helped build the complex during the last decade. The pictures are the first taken of a shuttle docked to the station from the perspective of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

On May 23, the Soyuz was carrying Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev, NASA astronaut Cady Coleman and European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli back to Earth. Once their vehicle was about 600 feet from the station, Mission Control Moscow, outside the Russian capital, commanded the orbiting laboratory to rotate 130 degrees. This move allowed Nespoli to capture digital photographs and high definition video of shuttle Endeavour docked to the station.

The Soyuz landed in Kazakhstan and was taken to Moscow for routine post-landing analysis. NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, then processed the imagery as part of the standard disposition of spacecraft cargo.

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