Warm Ocean Currents Cause Majority of Ice Loss from Antarctica

Warm ocean currents attacking the underside of ice shelves are the dominant cause of recent ice loss from Antarctica, a new study using measurements from NASA's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) revealed.An international team of scientists used a combination of satellite measurements and models to differentiate between the two known causes of melting ice shelves: warm ocean currents thawing the underbelly of the floating extensions of ice sheets and warm air melting them from above. The finding, published today in the journal Nature, brings scientists a step closer to providing reliable projections of future sea level rise.

The researchers concluded that 20 of the 54 ice shelves studied are being melted by warm ocean currents. Most of these are in West Antarctica, where inland glaciers flowing down to the coast and feeding into these thinning ice shelves have accelerated, draining more ice into the sea and contributing to sea-level rise. This ocean-driven thinning is responsible for the most widespread and rapid ice losses in West Antarctica, and for the majority of Antarctic ice sheet loss during the study period."We can lose an awful lot of ice to the sea without ever having summers warm enough to make the snow on top of the glaciers melt," said the study's lead author Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, United Kingdom. "The oceans can do all the work from below."

To map the changing thickness of almost all the floating ice shelves around Antarctica, the team used a time series of 4.5 million surface height measurements taken by a laser instrument mounted on ICESat from October 2003 to October 2008. They measured how the ice shelf height changed over time and ran computer models to discard changes in ice thickness because of natural snow accumulation and compaction. The researchers also used a tide model that eliminated height changes caused by tides raising and lowering the ice shelves.

NASA's Webb Telescope Flight Backplane Section Completed

The center section of the backplane structure that will fly on NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has been completed, marking an important milestone in the telescope's hardware development. The backplane will support the telescope's beryllium mirrors, instruments, thermal control systems and other hardware throughout its mission.

"Completing the center section of the backplane is an important step in completing the sophisticated telescope structure," said Lee Feinberg, optical telescope element manager for the Webb telescope at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "This fabrication success is the result of innovative engineering dating back to the technology demonstration phase of the program."

The center section, or primary mirror backplane support structure, will hold Webb's 18-segment, 21-foot-diameter primary mirror nearly motionless while the telescope peers into deep space. The center section is the first of the three sections of the backplane to be completed.

Rockets Away! More Than 500 Students Participate in NASA Student Launch Projects Challenge

Specially crafted rockets soared high into the skies April 22 at the 2011-12 NASA Student Launch Projects challenge. More than 500 students, representing 53 middle schools, high schools, colleges and universities in 28 states, launched rockets of their own design complete with working science payloads or engineering payload at Bragg Farms in Toney, Ala.

The students vied to see whose rocket could come closest to the 1-mile altitude goal and safely return its onboard science payload to Earth. Fifty-one teams took part, though two faced mechanical or technical issues and did not launch. Ten preliminary awards were presented, and the grand prize -- $5,000 from ATK Aerospace Group in Salt Lake City, Utah -- will be awarded May 18 after final post-flight analysis and review are complete. This is the fifth year ATK has sponsored Student Launch Projects.

Rubber Chicken (Camilla) Flies into Solar Radiation Storm

when the sun unleashed the most intense radiation storm since 2003, peppering satellites with charged particles and igniting strong auroras around both poles, a group of high school students in Bishop, Calif., knew just what to do.They launched a rubber chicken.

The students inflated a helium balloon and used it to send the fowl, named "Camilla," to an altitude of 120,000 feet where she was exposed to high-energy solar protons at point-blank range."We equipped Camilla with sensors to measure the radiation," says Sam Johnson, 16, of Bishop Union High School's Earth to Sky student group1. "At the apex of our flight, the payload was above 99 percent of Earth's atmosphere."

Launching a rubber chicken into a solar storm might sound strange, but the students had good reason:They're doing an astrobiology project."Later this year, we plan to launch a species of microbes to find out if they can live at the edge of space," explains team member Rachel Molina, 17. "This was a reconnaissance flight."Many space enthusiasts are already familiar with Camilla. She's the mascot of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. With help from her keeper, Romeo Durscher of Stanford University, Camilla corresponds with more than 20,000 followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, filling them in on the latest results from NASA's heliophysics missions.

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Study Finds Surprising Arctic Methane Emission Source

The fragile and rapidly changing Arctic region is home to large reservoirs of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. As Earth’s climate warms, the methane, frozen in reservoirs stored in Arctic tundra soils or marine sediments, is vulnerable to being released into the atmosphere, where it can add to global warming. Now a multi-institutional study by Eric Kort of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has uncovered a surprising and potentially important new source of Arctic methane: the ocean itself.

Kort, a JPL postdoctoral scholar affiliated with the Keck Institute of Space Studies at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, led the analysis while he was a student at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. The study was conducted as part of the HIAPER Pole-to-Pole Observations (HIPPO) airborne campaign, which flew a specially instrumented National Science Foundation (NSF)/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Gulfstream V aircraft over the Pacific Ocean from nearly pole to pole, collecting atmospheric measurements from Earth’s surface to an altitude of 8.7 miles (14 kilometers).

The campaign, primarily funded by NSF with additional funding from NCAR, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was designed to improve our understanding of where greenhouse gases are originating and being stored in the Earth system. During five HIPPO flights over the Arctic from 2009 to 2010, Kort’s team observed increased methane levels while flying at low altitudes over the remote Arctic Ocean, north of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. The methane level was about one-half percent larger than normal background levels.

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Enterprise's Ferry Flight Postponed

NASA's planned flight to New York City of space shuttle Enterprise atop the 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) has been postponed until further notice due to an unfavorable weather forecast for Monday, April 23.To ensure a safe flight for Enterprise and the SCA, NASA managers, in consultation with the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, decided Friday to delay the flight because of inclement weather predicted in both New York and Washington, where the flight will originate.

Managers will continue to review weather forecasts and announce a new flight date as soon as practical. Media will have access to the public areas at Dulles to view the departure of Enterprise. Media sending crews to Dulles should contact the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Office of Public Affairs at 703-417-8370. After departing Washington, the SCA and Enterprise will fly over various parts of the New York City metropolitan area before landing and John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Several weeks following the arrival, Enterprise will be "demated" from the 747 and placed on a barge that will be moved by tugboat up the Hudson River to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in June. The shuttle will be lifted by crane and placed on the flight deck of the Intrepid where it will be on exhibit to the public starting this summer in a temporary climate-controlled pavilion. The Intrepid continues work on a permanent exhibit facility to showcase Enterprise that will enhance the museum's space-related exhibits and education curriculum.

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NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Brings 'Earthrise' to Everyone

The spacecraft rolls over, and you glimpse a sliver of intense light starting to climb over the rough horizon. It might be dawn, except that the bright sliver quickly morphs into an arc of dazzling white swirled with vivid blue and then rises far enough to be recognized as the brilliant, marbled Earth. Captured on film, this breathtaking view becomes the iconic photograph "Earthrise."

On December 24, 1968, three people saw this happen firsthand: Apollo 8 Commander Frank Borman and crew members William A. Anders and James A. Lovell, Jr. Now, in honor of Earth Day 2012, the rest of us can see what that was like in a new NASA visualization, which draws on richly detailed maps of the moon's surface made from data gathered by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).

"This visualization recreates for everyone the wondrous experience of seeing Earth from that privileged viewpoint," says LRO Project Scientist Rich Vondrak of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. At the time of the famous photo, Apollo 8 was rounding the moon for the fourth time, traveling in a nearly circular orbit about 110 kilometers (68 miles) above the moon's surface at about a mile per second. "The spacecraft was pointed down to look at the moon's surface, because Anders was conducting an extensive photographic survey," explains James Rice, an astrogeologist at Goddard. "But Lovell needed to perform a navigation sighting, so Borman rolled the spacecraft." That's when Earth abruptly appeared.

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Sector 33 Puts You in the Control Tower

Angry birds in space may be OK, but angry pilots in the sky are another thing altogether. NASA in January released an educational game called Sector 33 in which the goal is to keep imaginary pilots and their airliners happy by remaining a safe distance in the sky from each other using math and problem-solving skills.

In the game, available free of charge for Apple iPhone and iPad devices, the player acts as an air traffic controller by guiding airplanes through a sector of airspace spanning Nevada and California. The player can adjust the planes' path and speed to safely reach certain spots in the sky in the fastest time possible, while at the same time keeping the planes a specific distance from each other.

So far the app has been a big hit with the online community, earning a top rating of five stars with more than 60 percent of those offering customer reviews. "Users of Sector 33 are telling us that they love the app, it's fun yet educational, and makes gamers think on their feet as they try to solve the various air traffic control problems built into the game," said Gregory Condon, manager of NASA's Smart Skies Education Project based at the Ames Research Center in California.

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NASA Flight Tests New ADS-B Device on Ikhana UAS

NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center flew its Ikhana MQ-9 unmanned aircraft with an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B, device, for the first time on March 15.It was the first time an unmanned aircraft as large as Ikhana – with a 66-foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of more than 10,000 pounds, and a cruising altitude of 40,000 feet -- has flown while equipped with ADS-B. ADS-B is an aircraft tracking technology that all planes operating in certain U.S. airspace must adopt by January 2020 to comply with Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations. It also was the first flight of hardware for the NASA Aeronautics research project known as UAS in the NAS, which is short for Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration in the National Airspace System. 

The equipment performed well during a flight lasting nearly three hours in restricted air space over Dryden's Western Aeronautical Test Range, which is part of Edwards Air Force Base and the China Lake Naval Air Warfare Center.Being equipped with ADS-B enables NASA's Ikhana to provide much more detailed position, velocity, and altitude information about itself to air traffic controllers, airborne pilots of other ADS-B equipped aircraft flying in its vicinity, and to its pilots on the ground. Currently, only air traffic controllers can see all the aircraft in any given section of the sky. 

The ADS-B checkout flight aboard Ikhana kicked off a series in which researchers will collect ADS-B data while performing representative air traffic control-directed maneuvers.As part of a collaborative effort, FAA's William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City, N.J., recorded ADS-B data from the flight and will help analyze the performance of the system installed in the aircraft. Researchers also evaluated new ADS-B laptop software for displaying surrounding air traffic information to the UAS pilots on the ground.

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NASA Mission Wants Amateur Astronomers to Target Asteroids

A new NASA outreach project will enlist the help of amateur astronomers to discover near-Earth objects (NEOs) and study their characteristics. NEOs are asteroids with orbits that occasionally bring them close to the Earth.

Starting today, a new citizen science project called "Target Asteroids!" will support NASA's Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security - Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission objectives to improve basic scientific understanding of NEOs. OSIRIS-Rex is scheduled for launch in 2016 and will study material from an asteroid.

Amateur astronomers will help better characterize the population of NEOs, including their position, motion, rotation and changes in the intensity of light they emit. Professional astronomers will use this information to refine theoretical models of asteroids, improving their understanding about asteroids similar to the one OSIRIS-Rex will encounter in 2019, designated 1999 RQ36.

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SCA Crews Focus on Ferrying Shuttles Home

Space shuttle missions came to an end in 2011, it's true, but that doesn’t mean that the shuttles have stopped flying.Space shuttles Discovery, Enterprise and Endeavour will each take to the air one final time in 2012, bound for their retirement destinations aboard a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, or SCA, a modified Boeing 747 jet.

The trio will travel piggyback on NASA 905, the first of two SCAs NASA acquired during the Space Shuttle Program. NASA 905 has been assigned to 65 ferry missions.Discovery's trip from Kennedy to Washington Dulles International Airport in Sterling, Va., is planned for April 17. NASA 905 will arrive in Florida a week before to allow plenty of time for mate/demate operations with the spacecraft.

NASA's specially trained SCA pilots and flight engineers keep their skills sharp with practice flights in an SCA about every three weeks and simulator training twice a year.Pilot Jeff Moultrie will serve as the commander of the flight crew for Discovery's ferry flight and will deliver 905 to Kennedy on April 10. He is prepared for any contingency.

The MIRI Has Two Faces

A short new video takes viewers behind the scenes with the MIRI or the Mid-Infrared Instrument that will fly on-board NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. MIRI is a state-of-the-art infrared instrument that will allow scientists to study distant objects in greater detail than ever before.

The three minute and 19 second video called "The MIRI Has Two Faces" is part of an on-going video series about the Webb telescope called "Behind the Webb." It was produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md. and takes viewers behind the scenes with scientists and engineers who are creating the Webb telescope's components. MIRI's "two faces" allow the instrument to look at the cosmos in pictures and through spectroscopy.

The James Webb Space Telescope contains four science instruments, but only one of them, the MIRI, sees light in the mid-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Mid-infrared light is longer in wavelength than that which the other Webb instruments are designed to observe. This unique capability of the MIRI allows the Webb telescope to study physical processes occurring in the cosmos that the other Webb instruments cannot see.

Student Teams Ready to Compete in NASA's Great Moonbuggy Race April 13-14

Approximately 100 returning and rookie teams from around the world will compete for a top-three finish at the 19th-annual NASA Great Moonbuggy Race, April 13-14, at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville. More than 500 high school, college and university students from 20 states, as well as Puerto Rico, Canada, Germany, Russia, United Arab Emirates, Italy and India, are expected to race their specially crafted lunar rovers or "moonbuggies."

Students begin preparing for the event each year during the fall semester. They must design, build and test a sturdy, collapsible, lightweight vehicle that addresses engineering challenges similar to those resolved and overcome by the original Apollo-era lunar rover development team in the late 1960s at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

"The annual NASA Great Moonbuggy Race is a unique and exciting way to get high school and college students involved in hands-on robotic design and operation," said Leland Melvin, NASA associate administrator for education. "They are working on a solution to a real exploration challenge faced by Apollo mission engineers in the 1960s. Today's student designers could be the engineers and robotics experts who will design a rover for future human exploration of Mars."

GOES Satellite Movie Tracked Tornadic Texas Trouble

A powerful weather system moved through eastern Texas and dropped at least 15 tornadoes in the Dallas suburbs. NASA created an animation of data from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite that shows the frontal system moving through the region yesterday.

NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-13, captures visible and infrared images of weather over the eastern U.S. every 15 minutes, and captured the movement of the weather system that generated the Texas twisters. The 23 second movie runs from April 2 at 1615 UTC through April 4 at 1615 UTC (11:15 a.m. CDT), and shows the progression of the storm system that generated about 15 tornadoes on April 3. Around 2215 UTC (5:15 p.m. CDT) on April 3, the tail end of the front appeared in the GOES animation as a pie-shaped wedge that continued to thin out. It is that wedge where the tornadoes were generated and touched down in the southeastern Dallas suburbs. One thing people viewing the video can take from the satellite view is that if they're seeing GOES imagery live on television, they can relate wedge shaped-frontal clouds with severe weather and be prepared.

NOAA operates the GOES series of satellites, and NASA's GOES Project, located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. compiles the images into animations. The GOES visible and infrared data is compiled and then overlayed on a true-color land surface map of the U.S. that was created using data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument that flies on NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites.

NASA Sees Fields of Green Spring up in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is drilling for a resource possibly more precious than oil.Over the last 24 years, it has tapped hidden reserves of water to grow wheat and other crops in the Syrian Desert. This time series of data shows images acquired by three different Landsat satellites operated by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The green fields that dot the desert draw on water that in part was trapped during the last Ice Age. In addition to rainwater that fell over several hundred thousand years, this fossil water filled aquifers that are now buried deep under the desert's shifting sands.

Saudi Arabia reaches these underground rivers and lakes by drilling through the desert floor, directly irrigating the fields with a circular sprinkler system. This technique is called center-pivot irrigation.Because rainfall in this area is now only a few centimeters (about one inch) each year, water here is a non-renewable resource. Although no one knows how much water is beneath the desert, hydrologists estimate it will only be economical to pump water for about 50 years.

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NASA Space Network to Begin New Design Phase For Ground Segment

The Space Network Ground Segment Sustainment effort successfully completed its Key Decision Point - B review at NASA allowing the project to proceed into Phase B of its lifecycle, the Mission Definition Phase. During this next phase, lasting approximately eight months, the network will hold its Preliminary Design Review and complete additional project planning.

Approval to move forward was granted during a recent Agency Project Management Council meeting at NASA Headquarters, Washington, chaired by William Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate (HEOMD).

"Completing Key Decision Point - B (KDP-B) is a major achievement and reflects the fact that we have a very capable team in place," said Roger Clason, Space Network Ground Segment Sustainment (SGSS) Project Manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.. "It was gratifying to see, at all levels of management, recognition of SGSS's importance to the future of NASA's space communications capabilities."