NASA Dawn Spacecraft Captures First Image Of Nearing Asteroid

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has obtained its first image of the giant asteroid Vesta, which will help fine-tune navigation during its approach. Dawn expects to achieve orbit around Vesta on July 16, when the asteroid is about 117 million miles from Earth. The image from Dawn's framing cameras was taken on May 3 when the spacecraft began its approach and was approximately 752,000 miles (1.21 million km) from Vesta. The asteroid appears as a small, bright pearl against a background of stars. Vesta also is known as a protoplanet, because it is a large body that almost formed into a planet. "After plying the seas of space for more than a billion miles, the Dawn team finally spotted its target," said Carol Raymond, Dawn's deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "This first image hints of detailed portraits to come from Dawn's upcoming visit."

Vesta is 330 miles (530 km) in diameter and the second most massive object in the asteroid belt. Ground- and space-based telescopes obtained images of the bright orb for about two centuries, but with little surface detail. Mission managers expect Vesta's gravity to capture Dawn in orbit on July 16. To enter orbit, Dawn must match the asteroid's path around the sun, which requires very precise knowledge of the body's location and speed. By analyzing where Vesta appears relative to stars in framing camera images, navigators will pin down its location and enable engineers to refine the spacecraft's trajectory. Dawn will start collecting science data in early August at an altitude of approximately 1,700 miles (2,700 km) above the asteroid's surface. As the spacecraft gets closer, it will snap multi-angle images allowing scientists to produce topographic maps.

Dawn will later orbit at approximately 120 miles (200 km) to perform other measurements and obtain closer shots of parts of the surface. Dawn will remain in orbit around Vesta for one year. After another long cruise phase, Dawn will arrive in 2015 at its second destination, Ceres, an even more massive body in the asteroid belt. Gathering information about these two icons of the asteroid belt will help scientists unlock the secrets of our solar system's early history. The mission will compare and contrast the two giant asteroids shaped by different forces. Dawn's science instruments will measure surface composition, topography and texture. Dawn also will measure the tug of gravity from Vesta and Ceres to learn more about their internal structures. The spacecraft's full odyssey will take it on a 3-billion-mile (5-billion-km) journey, which began with its launch in September 2007.

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NASA Satellite Finds Earth's Clouds are Getting Lower

Earth's clouds got a little lower about one percent on average during the first decade of this century, finds a new NASA-funded university study based on NASA satellite data. The results have potential implications for future global climate.

Scientists at the University of Auckland in New Zealand analyzed the first 10 years of global cloud-top height measurements (from March 2000 to February 2010) from the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft. The study, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, revealed an overall trend of decreasing cloud height. Global average cloud height declined by around one percent over the decade, or by around 100 to 130 feet (30 to 40 meters). Most of the reduction was due to fewer clouds occurring at very high altitudes.

Lead researcher Roger Davies said that while the record is too short to be definitive, it provides a hint that something quite important might be going on. Longer-term monitoring will be required to determine the significance of the observation for global temperatures.

Preview of a Forthcoming Supernova

At the turn of the 19th century, the binary star system Eta Carinae was faint and undistinguished. In the first decades of the century, it became brighter and brighter, until, by April 1843, it was the second brightest star in the sky, outshone only by Sirius (which is almost a thousand times closer to Earth). In the years that followed, it gradually dimmed again and by the 20th century was totally invisible to the naked eye.

The star has continued to vary in brightness ever since, and while it is once again visible to the naked eye on a dark night, it has never again come close to its peak of 1843.NASA's Hubble Telescope captured an image of Eta Carinae. This image consists of ultraviolet and visible light images from the High Resolution Channel of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The field of view is approximately 30 arcseconds across.

The larger of the two stars in the Eta Carinae system is a huge and unstable star that is nearing the end of its life, and the event that the 19th century astronomers observed was a stellar near-death experience. Scientists call these outbursts supernova impostor events, because they appear similar to supernovae but stop just short of destroying their star.Although 19th century astronomers did not have telescopes powerful enough to see the 1843 outburst in detail, its effects can be studied today. The huge clouds of matter thrown out a century and a half ago, known as the Homunculus Nebula, have been a regular target for Hubble since its launch in 1990. This image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys High Resolution Channel, is the most detailed yet, and shows how the material from the star was not thrown out in a uniform manner, but forms a huge dumbbell shape.

Preps Continue for Launching Engine Icing Research

NASA scientists are making progress in their preparations to mount a detailed research campaign aimed at solving a modern-day aviation mystery involving the unlikely combination of fire and ice inside a running jet engine.

The investigation deals with the seemingly strange notion that ice crystals associated with warm-weather storms can be ingested into the core of a jet engine, melt and then re-freeze, potentially causing the engine to lose power or shut down altogether. Safety officials have documented more than 150 incidents of this phenomenon since 1988. Most of the incidents have occurred in the tropics.

“It doesn’t seem intuitive that ice can form in the core of a warm engine,” said Ron Colantonio, manager of the Atmospheric Environment Safety Technologies Project at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. So in order to make sense of the mystery, NASA and its research partners are planning to gather information by flying a specially-outfitted business jet in high-altitude, warm-weather conditions suspected of having a large amount of ice crystals.

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THEMIS Celebrates Five Years of Watching Aurora and Space Weather

People still talk about the launch. It was the first – and so far, only – time NASA has launched five satellites at one time. Carefully balanced inside a Delta II rocket, the five THEMIS (short for Timed History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) spacecraft were launched into space from Cape Canaveral at 6:01 p.m. ET on February 17, 2007. The spacecraft were nestled in a ring shape, four around the outside and one on a middle pedestal. A critical sequencing guided how each spacecraft launched into space, first the top one, then the ones on the outside, so the platform would remain balanced and stable.

"The launch of THEMIS was one of the first Explorer missions I oversaw from concept through launch and on-orbit checkout and it still stands out in my mind," says Willis Jenkins, the Program Executive for NASA's Explorers Program, a program that supports less expensive and highly focused missions. "Trying to get five spacecraft together on one rocket was a challenge, but our team came up with unique ways to build and launch them."

Those five satellites working in tandem was crucial for THEMIS' job of tracking energy as it moves through space. Energy and radiation from the sun impacts and changes Earth's magnetic environment, the magnetosphere, and such impacts cause "space weather" that can harm satellites in space. As they orbit around Earth, the THEMIS satellites work together to gather data on how any given space weather event travels through space – something impossible to understand with a single spacecraft, which cannot differentiate between an occurrence that happens throughout space, rather than in a single location. Since 2007, the THEMIS satellites have reinvigorated studies of the magnetosphere, mapping the details of how explosive auroras occur, how the solar wind transfers energy to Earth's space environment, and how chirping waves in space relate to blinking auroras on Earth.

NASA Performs First J-2X Powerpack Test of the Year

Engineers at NASA's Stennis Space Center conducted an initial test of the J-2X engine powerpack Feb. 15, kicking off a series of key tests in development of the rocket engine that will carry humans deeper into space than ever before.

This test is the first of about a dozen various powerpack tests that will be conducted throughout the year at Stennis. The initial test was designed to ensure powerpack and facility control systems are functioning properly. It also marked the first step in establishing start sequencing for tests and was the first time cryogenic fuels were introduced into the powerpack to ensure the integrity of the facility and the test article in preparation for full power, longer duration testing.

The powerpack is a system of components on the top portion of the J-2X engine, including the gas generator, oxygen and fuel turbopumps, and related ducts and valves. On the full J-2X engine, the powerpack system feeds the thrust chamber system which produces engine thrust.

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'Honeycombs' and Hexacopters Help Tell Story of Mars

In a rough-and-tumble wonderland of plunging canyons and towering buttes, some of the still-raw bluffs are lined with soaring, six-sided stone columns so orderly and trim, they could almost pass as relics of a colossal temple. The secret of how these columns, packed in edge to edge, formed en masse from a sea of molten rock is encrypted in details as tiny as the cracks running across their faces. To add to this mystery's allure, decoding it might do more than reveal the life story of some local lava: it might help explain the history of Mars.

But with trips to Mars hard to come by, the interns of the 2011 Lunar and Planetary Sciences Academy (LPSA) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., traveled to the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington state. It's a region that has been helping scientists understand the forces that shape planetary surfaces for a century "The Legacy of Megafloods".

Here, the honeycomb-shaped columns bear a striking resemblance to those spotted in images of Marte Vallis and other regions of Mars. "Many of the landscape features in the Channeled Scablands are similar to ones seen on the surface of Mars, so we can study volcanic activity on Mars by looking in our own backyard," says Andrew Ryan, who was the student coordinator for the LPSA field trip and is now in graduate school at Arizona State University in Tempe.

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Commercial Crew Program Introduces CCiCap Initiative

Aerospace companies bidding for NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP) development dollars will be expected to present the agency with a viable spacecraft and rocket combination along with blueprints for a mission control center and ground operations. "We don't want a sales pitch, we don't want an advertisement," said Ed Mango, CCP program manager, during a preproposal conference on Feb. 14. "We want to know how they are technically going to make this happen."

Mango and his team are anticipating a bright next phase of development as the agency prepares to award funding for fully integrated crew transportation systems in the summer of 2012. The awards are expected to lead to activities engineers dream about, such as drop tests, engine test fires, pad abort tests and demonstration flights.

"For the first time, we are asking for the full-up, end-to-end integrated system," said Phil McAlister, NASA's director of Commercial Spaceflight Development.The conference was a follow-on to an agency Announcement for Proposals (AFP) issued Feb. 7 that requested aerospace companies submit their plans for the Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) initiative by March 23. The conference was held to explain details of the AFP and answer questions from industry. More than 50 industry partners and stakeholders from 25 companies attended to ask NASA what it would be looking for in terms of milestones, funding, schedules, strategies, safety cultures, business modules and eventual flight certification standards.

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Transforming Galaxies

Many of the Universe's galaxies are like our own, displaying beautiful spiral arms wrapping around a bright nucleus. Examples in this stunning image, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, include the tilted galaxy at the bottom of the frame, shining behind a Milky Way star, and the small spiral at the top center.

Other galaxies are even odder in shape. Markarian 779, the galaxy at the top of this image, has a distorted appearance because it is likely the product of a recent galactic merger between two spirals. This collision destroyed the spiral arms of the galaxies and scattered much of their gas and dust, transforming them into a single peculiar galaxy with a unique shape.

This galaxy is part of the Markarian catalogue, a database of over 1500 galaxies named after B. E. Markarian, the Armenian astronomer who studied them in the 1960s. He surveyed the sky for bright objects with unusually strong emission in the ultraviolet.Ultraviolet radiation can come from a range of sources, so the Markarian catalog is quite diverse. An excess of ultraviolet emissions can be the result of the nucleus of an "active" galaxy, powered by a supermassive black hole at its center. It can also be due to events of intense star formation, called starbursts, possibly triggered by galactic collisions. Markarian galaxies are, therefore, often the subject of studies aimed at understanding active galaxies, starburst activity, and galaxy interactions and mergers.

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NASA Seeks Proposals for Green Propellant Technology Demonstrations

NASA is seeking technology demonstration proposals for green propellant alternatives to the highly toxic fuel hydrazine. As NASA works with American companies to open a new era of access to space, the agency seeks innovative and transformative fuels that are less harmful to our environment.

Hydrazine is an efficient and ubiquitous propellant that can be stored for long periods of time, but is also highly corrosive and toxic. It is used extensively on commercial and defense department satellites as well as for NASA science and exploration missions. NASA is looking for an alternative that decreases environmental hazards and pollutants, has fewer operational hazards and shortens rocket launch processing times.

"High performance green propulsion has the potential to significantly change how we travel in space," said Michael Gazarik, director of NASA's Space Technology Program at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "NASA's Space Technology Program seeks out these sort of cross-cutting, innovative technologies to enable our future missions while also providing benefit to the American space industry. By reducing the hazards of handling fuel, we can reduce ground processing time and lower costs for rocket launches, allowing a greater community of researchers and technologists access to the high frontier."

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3-D Map Study Shows Before-After of 2010 Mexico Quake

Geologists have a new tool to study how earthquakes change the landscape, and it's giving them insight into how earthquake faults behave. In the Feb. 10 issue of the journal Science, a team of scientists from the United States, Mexico and China, including geophysicist Eric Fielding of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., reports the most comprehensive before-and-after picture yet of an earthquake zone, using data from the magnitude 7.2 event that struck near Mexicali, northern Mexico in April 2010.

"This study provides new information on how rocks in and around fault zones are deformed during earthquakes," said Fielding. "It helps scientists understand past events and assess the likelihood of future earthquakes in other complex systems of faults."

The team, working with the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, flew over the area with lidar (light detection and ranging), which bounces laser pulses off the ground and measures their reflection to determine the height of the surface. New airborne lidar equipment can measure features in the surface height to within a few inches. The researchers were able to make a detailed scan after the earthquake over about 140 square miles (363 square kilometers) in less than three days, said Michael Oskin, geology professor at the University of California, Davis. He is the lead author of the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey, Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (Mexico) and NASA.

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Supersonic Research Fleet Grows at Kennedy

The final pieces of a unique squadron of supersonic fighters arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday, Jan. 19, where they will be reassembled and put to work with a private company aiming to use them for research and microgravity training.

The new planes were part of a group of five F-104 fighters bought by Starfighters Inc. from the Italian Air Force. The company already had four of the aircraft, but that wasn't enough for the company to pursue a number of different opportunities. With nine aircraft at his disposal, Starfighters owner Rick Svetkoff said there will always be aircraft available to fly missions for a variety of customers. As importantly, the company will have what it needs to fly two aircraft on a single mission, with one serving as a chase plane to photograph experiments.

"Now we're in a position where we can really start operations," Svetkoff said. "Before, we couldn't do a lot of things we wanted to do." Starfighters operates out of a hangar at the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy under an agreement with Kennedy. Svetkoff's main goal is to fly research and development missions, ranging from experiments flown for universities to evaluating rocket and spacecraft components in high-stress environments including high-acceleration and microgravity.

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Launch Aborts Challenge Rocket Engineers

While companies design and perfect spacecraft and rockets to take people into space safely, teams of NASA engineers are deciphering what needs to happen if a launch goes wrong. In other words, what kind of ejection system will astronauts need to survive?

"We're trying to give the crew that last option for when things go bad," said Brent Jett, deputy director of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, or CCP, and four-time space shuttle astronaut. Keep in mind that the system needs to work at all points during ascent, from the launch pad where the air is thick and the spacecraft is not moving at all, to more than 100 miles above Earth, where there is no discernable air and the spacecraft and crew are speeding along at 17,500 mph, or about 5 miles a second.

Also, consider that because rockets can malfunction and even explode within a second of the first problem, the ejection system needs to be able to spot a problem and get the spacecraft out of danger before it's too late. "Basically, you're separating from the rocket with a smaller rocket and it's a pretty extreme environment to put the crew into," said Chris Gerace, deputy chief of CCP's Systems Engineering and Requirements Office.

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SpaceX Test Fires Engine Prototype for Astronaut Escape System

One of NASA's industry partners, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), completed a full-duration, full-thrust firing of its new SuperDraco engine prototype at the company’s Rocket Development Facility in McGregor, Texas. The firing was in preparation for the ninth milestone to be completed under SpaceX's funded Space Act Agreement (SAA) with NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP).

“SpaceX and all our industry partners are being extremely innovative in their approaches to developing commercial transportation capabilities,” said Commercial Crew Program Manager Ed Mango. “We are happy that our investment in SpaceX was met with success in the firing of its new engine.”

Nine months after CCP awarded SpaceX $75 million to design and test its Dragon spacecraft with a launch abort system, the company test fired its SuperDraco development engine to demonstrate its capabilities of keeping an astronaut crew safe during launch and ascent. The engine produced full thrust within approximately 100 milliseconds of the ignition command. It also fired for 5 seconds, which is the same amount of time the engines would burn during an emergency abort.

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Remnant of an Explosion With a Powerful Kick?

Vital clues about the devastating ends to the lives of massive stars can be found by studying the aftermath of their explosions. In its more than twelve years of science operations, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has studied many of these supernova remnants sprinkled across the Galaxy. The latest example of this important investigation is Chandra's new image of the supernova remnant known as G350.1+0.3. This stellar debris field is located some 14,700 light years from the Earth toward the center of the Milky Way.

Evidence from Chandra and from ESA's XMM-Newton telescope suggest that a compact object within G350.1+0.3 may be the dense core of the star that exploded. The position of this likely neutron star, seen by the arrow pointing to "neutron star" in the inset image, is well away from the center of the X-ray emission. If the supernova explosion occurred near the center of the X-ray emission then the neutron star must have received a powerful kick in the supernova explosion.

Data from Chandra and other telescopes suggest this supernova remnant, as it appears in the image, is between 600 and 1,200 years old. If the estimated location of the explosion is correct, this means that the neutron star has been moving at a speed of at least 3 million miles per hour since the explosion This is comparable to the exceptionally high speed derived for the neutron star in Puppis A, another neutron star moving at a blistering pace within a supernova remnant. The G350+1+0.3 data provide new evidence that extremely powerful "kicks" may be imparted to neutron stars left behind once the supernova has exploded.

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