Voyage to Vaccine Discovery Continues with Space Station Salmonella Study

Any scientist can tell you that research is a time-consuming pursuit. In fact, it can take decades to show results, as the knowledge compounds and inspires additional studies. This building of information is what led to the Recombinant Attenuated Salmonella Vaccine or RASV investigation, which launched to the International Space Station on July 8, 2011.

The investigation combines decades of expertise between two Arizona State University research teams. One team, led by Cheryl Nickerson, Ph.D. specializes in the use of the spaceflight platform to provide insight into how microbial pathogens cause infection and disease in the human body. The other team, led by Roy Curtiss III, Ph.D. focuses on the design and clinical testing of next generation vaccines to protect against diseases caused by pathogenic microbes. In addition, the Arizona State University researchers partnered with Mark Ott, Ph.D., at NASA's Johnson Space Center to strengthen the team's core expertise of space microbiology.

The vaccine samples that were flown on STS-135 are a genetically altered strain of Salmonella that carries a protective antigen against Streptococcus pneumonia -- a bacteria that causes life-threatening diseases, such as pneumonia, meningitis, and bacteremia. This organism is responsible for more than 10 million deaths annually and is particularly dangerous for newborns and the elderly, as they are less responsive to current anti-pneumococcal vaccines. "We have the opportunity," commented Nickerson, "to utilize spaceflight as a unique research and development platform for novel applications with potential to help fight a globally devastating disease."

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NASA's WISE Mission Finds First Trojan Asteroid Sharing Earth's Orbit

Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth. Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet. Because they constantly lead or follow in the same orbit as the planet, they never can collide with it. In our solar system, Trojans also share orbits with Neptune, Mars and Jupiter. Two of Saturn's moons share orbits with Trojans.

Scientists had predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have been difficult to find because they are relatively small and appear near the sun from Earth's point of view. "These asteroids dwell mostly in the daylight, making them very hard to see," said Martin Connors of Athabasca University in Canada, lead author of a new paper on the discovery in the July 28 issue of the journal Nature. "But we finally found one, because the object has an unusual orbit that takes it farther away from the sun than what is typical for Trojans. WISE was a game-changer, giving us a point of view difficult to have at Earth's surface."

The WISE telescope scanned the entire sky in infrared light from January 2010 to February 2011. Connors and his team began their search for an Earth Trojan using data from NEOWISE, an addition to the WISE mission that focused in part on near-Earth objects, or NEOs, such as asteroids and comets. NEOs are bodies that pass within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) of Earth's path around the sun. The NEOWISE project observed more than 155,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and more than 500 NEOs, discovering 132 that were previously unknown.

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NASA's Chandra Observatory Images Gas Flowing Toward Black Hole

The flow of hot gas toward a black hole has been clearly imaged for the first time in X-rays. The observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will help tackle two of the most fundamental problems in modern astrophysics: understanding how black holes grow and how matter behaves in their intense gravity.

The black hole is at the center of a large galaxy known as NGC 3115, which is located about 32 million light years from Earth. A large amount of previous data has shown material falling toward and onto black holes, but none with this clear a signature of hot gas.

By imaging the hot gas at different distances from this supermassive black hole, astronomers have observed a critical threshold where the motion of gas first becomes dominated by the black hole's gravity and falls inward. This distance from the black hole is known as the "Bondi radius."

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Testing NASA's Next Deep Space Vehicle

A big boom sounded across NASA Langley Research Center's Landing and Impact Research Facility, also known as the gantry, as the pyros fired releasing the 22,000-pound (9,979 kg) test article from its tethers. Seconds later it splashed into the new Hydro Impact Basin -- an oversized pool that for the next few years will be the testing bed to certify future space vehicles for safe water landings.

Despite the temperature hovering near 100 degrees (37.8 °C) and it being close to the end of the work day, enthusiastic NASA employees and engineers involved in the testing waited along the perimeter of the gantry to witness the second drop of the Orion MPCV test article.Test engineer Robin Hardy is typically anxious before a test, especially when it comes to the unknown.

"I felt myself straining to hear our test operator say that the data systems were 'triggered,'" Hardy said. "Anything could happen, but seeing the test article hit the mark, come to rest right side up inside the pool for this high energy drop -- the relief was palpable. You can't help but cheer and hoot and clap and know that in the end it was all worth it."All month gantry technicians and engineers have worked 12-hour days to make sure the drop tests remained on schedule.

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MAVEN Mission Completes Major Milestone

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission reached a major milestone last week when it successfully completed its Mission Critical Design Review (CDR).MAVEN, scheduled for launch in late 2013, will be the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The goal of MAVEN is to determine the history of the loss of atmospheric gases to space through time, providing answers about Mars climate evolution. It will accomplish this by measuring the current rate of escape to space and gathering enough information about the relevant processes to allow extrapolation backward in time.

Noting this milestone, Michael Meyer, Lead Scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters said. "It is a real pleasure to see the MAVEN team is doing an exemplary job on this important mission, which was identified as a top priority mission in the 2002 National Research Council Decadal Survey and addresses high-priority goals of two Divisions—Planetary Sciences and Heliophysics."

"Understanding how and why the atmosphere changed through time is an important scientific objective for Mars," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN Principal Investigator from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado (CU/LASP) at Boulder. "MAVEN will make the right measurements to allow us to answer this question. We’re in the middle of the hard work right now—building the instruments and spacecraft—and we’re incredibly excited about the science results we’re going to get from the mission."

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Atlantis and Crew Land in Florida, Closing Out Shuttle Era

"It is great to have Atlantis safely home after a tremendously successful mission -- and home to stay," said Bob Cabana, Kennedy Space Center director, referencing Atlantis' retirement at Kennedy's Visitor Complex."I'm unbelievably proud to be here representing the Space Shuttle Program and the thousands of people across the country who do the work," said Mike Moses, space shuttle launch integration manager. "Hearing the sonic booms as Atlantis came home for the last time really drove it home to me that this has been a heck of a program."

"The workers out here and across the country in the Space Shuttle Program have dedicated their lives, their hearts and their souls to this program, and I couldn't be more proud of them," said Mike Leinbach, space shuttle launch director at Kennedy.A crew news conference with the STS-135 astronauts is scheduled for noon and will be carried live on NASA TV and online at www.nasa.gov/ntv. Atlantis landed at 5:57 a.m. EDT, after 200 orbits around Earth and a journey of 5,284,862 miles.

The STS-135 crew consisted of Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot Doug Hurley, Mission Specialists Sandra Magnus and Rex Walheim. They delivered more than 9,400 pounds of spare parts, spare equipment and other supplies in the Raffaello multi-purpose logistics module - including 2,677 pounds of food - that will sustain space station operations for the next year. The 21-foot long, 15-foot diameter Raffaello brought back nearly 5,700 pounds of unneeded materials from the station.

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NASA's Hubble Discovers Another Moon Around Pluto

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite – temporarily designated P4 -- was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet.

The new moon is the smallest discovered around Pluto. It has an estimated diameter of 8 to 21 miles (13 to 34 km). By comparison, Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is 648 miles (1,043 km) across, and the other moons, Nix and Hydra, are in the range of 20 to 70 miles in diameter (32 to 113 km)."I find it remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km)," said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who led this observing program with Hubble.

The finding is a result of ongoing work to support NASA's New Horizons mission, scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015. The mission is designed to provide new insights about worlds at the edge of our solar system. Hubble's mapping of Pluto's surface and discovery of its satellites have been invaluable to planning for New Horizons' close encounter."This is a fantastic discovery," said New Horizons’ principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "Now that we know there's another moon in the Pluto system, we can plan close-up observations of it during our flyby."

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NASA Dawn Spacecraft Returns Close-Up Image of Asteroid Vesta

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has returned the first close-up image after beginning its orbit around the giant asteroid Vesta. On Friday, July 15, Dawn became the first probe to enter orbit around an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

The image taken for navigation purposes shows Vesta in greater detail than ever before. When Vesta captured Dawn into its orbit, there were approximately 9,900 miles (16,000 kilometers) between the spacecraft and asteroid. Engineers estimate the orbit capture took place at 10 p.m. PDT Friday, July 15 (1 a.m. EDT Saturday, July 16).

Vesta is 330 miles (530 kilometers) in diameter and the second most massive object in the asteroid belt. Ground- and space-based telescopes have obtained images of Vesta for about two centuries, but they have not been able to see much detail on its surface. "We are beginning the study of arguably the oldest extant primordial surface in the solar system," said Dawn principal investigator Christopher Russell from the University of California, Los Angeles. "This region of space has been ignored for far too long. So far, the images received to date reveal a complex surface that seems to have preserved some of the earliest events in Vesta's history, as well as logging the onslaught that Vesta has suffered in the intervening eons."

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GOES-13 Satellite Tracks Tropical Storm Bret

The GOES-13 satellite that monitors weather over the eastern U.S. recorded a movie of the birth and strengthening of the Atlantic Ocean season's second tropical storm. Tropical Storm Bret was born in the northwestern Bahamas and continues to strengthen.

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite called GOES-13 provides continuous visible and infrared imagery of the eastern U.S. and Atlantic Ocean basin from its position in space. GOES satellites are operated by NOAA, and the NASA GOES Project located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. creates images and compiled them into the video of the storm as it developed on July 17 and developed in the early morning hours of July 18th into a tropical storm.

The animation includes sped up infrared and visible frames of data from the GOES-13 satellite and is squeezed down to 27 seconds. The movie shows satellite imagery that was captured from July 16 at 1945 UTC (3:45 p.m. EDT) until July 18 at 1940 UTC.

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Hubble's Neptune Anniversary Pictures

Today, Neptune has arrived at the similar location in space where it was discovered nearly 165 years ago. To commemorate the event, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has in use these "anniversary pictures" of the blue-green giant planet.

Neptune is the most distant main planet in our solar system. German astronomer Johann Galle discovered the planet on September 23, 1846. At the time, the detection doubled the size of the known solar system. The planet is 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion kilometers) beginning the Sun, 30 times farther than Earth. Under the Sun's weak pull at that distance, Neptune plods down in its huge orbit, slowly completing one uprising approximately every 165 years.

These four Hubble images of Neptune were in use with the Wide Field Camera 3 on June 25-26, during the planet's 16-hour rotation. The snapshots were in use at roughly four-hour intervals, offering a full view of the planet. The images disclose high-altitude clouds in the northern and southern hemispheres. The clouds are collected of methane ice crystals.

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Gas Giant Spacecraft All Gassed Up

The Juno spacecraft finished hydrazine fuel loading, oxidizer loading and final tank pressurizations this week, and now the whole propulsion system is ready for the trip to Jupiter. The spacecraft is currently at the Astrotech processing ability in Titusville, Fla.

Hydrazine is the fuel of choice for the majority spacecraft because of its stored energy. When the fuel is mixed with the oxidizer, the liquid ignites in the propulsion system's major engine to perform the spacecraft's four large maneuvers. One of these maneuvers includes insert the spacecraft into orbit approximately Jupiter in 2016.

With the fueling completion, the spacecraft is 99 percent prepared for launch. Once the final thermal blanket closeouts and wet spin tests are whole, the spacecraft will be 100 percent ready for fitting onto the Atlas 551 launch vehicle.

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Cassini Spacecraft Captures Images and Sounds of Big Saturn Storm

Scientists analyzing data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft now have the first-ever, up-close details of a Saturn storm that is eight times the surface area of Earth.

On Dec. 5, 2010, Cassini first detected the storm that has been raging ever since.

It appears at approximately 35 degrees north latitude on Saturn. Pictures from Cassini's imaging cameras show the storm wrapping around the entire planet covering approximately 1.5 billion square miles (4 billion square kilometers).

The storm is about 500 times larger than the biggest storm previously seen by Cassini during several months from 2009 to 2010. Scientists studied the sounds of the new storm's lightning strikes and analyzed images taken between December 2010 and February 2011. Data from Cassini's radio and plasma wave science instrument showed the lightning flash rate as much as 10 times more frequent than during other storms monitored since Cassini's arrival to Saturn in 2004. The data appear in a paper published this week in the journal Nature.

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Wakeup Music of the Space Shuttle’s Final Mission

Use of music to awaken astronauts on space missions dates back at least to the Apollo Program, when astronauts returning from the moon were serenaded by their colleagues in mission control with lyrics from popular songs that seemed appropriate for the occasion.

Usually picked by flight controllers or by crew members’ friends and family members, most wakeup calls are musical, but sometimes include dialog from movies or TV shows. The playlist is eclectic, ranging from rock, country, classical, bluegrass and jazz, to children’s choruses and songs from the countries of international crewmembers. The recording is usually followed by a call from the CAPCOM in Mission Control, wishing the crew a good morning.

The common element of all these selections is that they promote a sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps among the astronauts and ground support personnel.

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NASA's Hubble Makes One Millionth Science Observation

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope crossed another milestone in its space odyssey of exploration and discovery. On Monday, July 4, the Earth-orbiting observatory logged its one millionth science observation during a search for water in an exoplanet's atmosphere 1,000 light-years away.

"For 21 years Hubble has been the premier space science observatory, astounding us with deeply beautiful imagery and enabling ground-breaking science across a wide spectrum of astronomical disciplines," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. He piloted the space shuttle mission that carried Hubble to orbit. "The fact that Hubble met this milestone while studying a faraway planet is a remarkable reminder of its strength and legacy."

Although Hubble is best known for its stunning imagery of the cosmos, the millionth observation is a spectroscopic measurement, where light is divided into its component colors. These color patterns can reveal the chemical composition of cosmic sources.

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Punching Holes in the Sky

Scientists, photographers and amateur cloud watchers have been looking up with wonderment and puzzlement at "hole punch" clouds for decades. Giant, open spaces appear in otherwise continuous cloud cover, presenting beautiful shapes but also an opportunity for scientific investigation. A new paper published last week in Science inquires into how the holes get punched – airplanes are the culprit – and into the potential for the phenomenon's link to increased precipitation around major airports.

"It appears to be a rather widespread effect for aircraft to inadvertently cause some measureable amount of rain or snow as they fly through certain clouds," said lead author Andrew Heymsfield of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Co. "This is not necessarily enough precipitation to affect global climate, but it is likely to be noticeable around major airports in the midlatitudes."

NASA Langley Research Center cloud specialist Patrick Minnis was one of the co-authors on the paper. NASA satellites Aqua, Terra, CALIPSO and CloudSat were used in the analysis. The research was also partly funded by NASA grants.

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NASA Chat: Administrator Bolden Answers Questions About NASA's Future

As we prepare to fly the final space shuttle mission to the International Space Station, NASA continues with plans to extend humanity's presence into the solar system by developing a new heavy lift rocket and crew capsule to take astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit.

We will use the space station as a test bed and stepping stone for the challenging journey ahead. We are changing the way we do business, fostering a commercial industry that will safely service low Earth orbit so we can focus our energy and resources on sending astronauts to an asteroid and eventually to Mars.

All the while, NASA continues to invest in science missions that study our earth, solar system and beyond, as well as aeronautics research focused on increased safety and reduced economic impact on flight. We're also focused on educating the next generation of technology leaders and investing in high payoff, high-risk technology that industry cannot tackle today.

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