NASA Goddard Delivers Magnetometers for NASA's Next Mission to Mars

Magnetometers built by scientists and engineers at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. for NASA's Mars Atmosphere And Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission have been delivered to the University of California at Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory for integration into the Particles and Field Package.

"The team worked hard and completed delivery of the magnetometers on schedule," said Jack Connerney, Magnetometer Instrument Lead from NASA Goddard. "We are looking forward to launch, orbit insertion and seeing the data come back."

The pair of flux gate magnetometers measures the magnetic field at the location of the spacecraft. As part of the Particles and Fields Package, the magnetometer sensors are positioned at the outermost ends of the solar panels to keep them as far away as possible from stray magnetic fields generated by the spacecraft. Since the motion of escaping charged particles is governed by the magnetic field, this measurement is important in understanding how the solar wind interacts with the planet’s atmosphere and causes loss to space.

Orion Clean Room Subs Filters, Fans for Ceiling

Turns out a clean room doesn't necessarily need a roof, NASA is finding out as it tries out a design that could be assembled around the Orion spacecraft as it is prepared for launch in the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The key to the concept, developed by Astrotech, is two 10-foot-high walls of filter-equipped fans positioned 30 feet apart to push and pull the air in one direction across the capsule, keeping particles from settling on the spacecraft's surface.

A set of clear walls completes the box, but there is no ceiling. That's important because engineers want to use the large cranes already in the VAB to lift the Orion spacecraft and its shell into place as it is assembled on top of the Space Launch System rocket. If they have to build a clean room with its own crane, the cost would be much higher.

NASA Team to Test New Vehicle-Descent Technologies

NASA technologists will get a chance next summer to relive the good old days when Agency engineers would affix space-age gizmos to rockets just to see if the contraptions worked.

In what will be the first of four high-altitude balloon flights to begin in the summer of 2013, technologists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., and Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va., are preparing to test new deceleration devices that could replace current descent technologies for landing ever-larger payloads at higher elevations on Mars.

NASA hasn't tested deceleration technologies supersonically since 1972 when it conducted four high-altitude tests of a supersonic parachute used during the Viking program. "We’ve been stuck with that design ever since," said Mark Adler, NASA’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) program lead. NASA will use the same technology again this year when it delivers the Curiosity rover to Mars.

Forest Recovering from Mt. St. Helens Explosion

Mt. St. Helens exploded 32 years ago on May 18. It began with a small series of earthquakes and culminated with the volcano erupting, a cataclysmic collapse of the flank of the mountain and the largest landslide in recorded history.

This time series of data shows the explosion and subsequent recovery of life on the volcano. Landsat, a satellite program operated by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey acquired the images between 1979 and 2011. In them, scientists have an unprecedented opportunity to witness how life recovers from devastation.The animation begins with vegetation as red because early Landsat satellites couldn't 'see' blue light. That changed with launch of Landsat 5 in 1984 and its natural color abilities.

The collapse of the mountain was like uncorking a bottle of champagne. Fifty-seven people died when rocks, hot ash, gas and steam exploded out of the Earth. The blast debris, which is gray in the images, covered over 230 square miles (600 square kilometers) and blew down 4 billion board-feet of timber.

Refurbishment on Grand Scale for Iconic VAB

The Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida has been a landmark to the technological advancements of sending men to the moon and astronauts into space for more than 45 years. But the VAB, as it is best known, is due for major renovations to continue processing launch vehicles and support the subsequent launching of a new generation of astronauts into orbit and deeper into space than ever before.

"This is home improvement, VAB style," said Jose Lopez, who is managing the effort to refurbish a structure that was once the biggest in the world. "We're going for more flexibility and reliability with modern equipment. That building has many systems that haven't been touched up since it was built (in 1965)."

Although the work is massive simply because of the scale of the VAB, Lopez said now is the time to do it and take advantage of the pause in rocket processing that is to end in a couple years. Before another generation of rocket processing kicks in, Lopez said, the VAB must be outfitted with everything it needs to host these rockets and spacecraft assembly for another 40 years.

HIFiRE Scramjet Research Flight Will Advance Hypersonic Technology

A team that includes NASA and the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is celebrating the successful launch of an experimental hypersonic scramjet research flight from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on the island of Kauai, Hawaii.

NASA, AFRL and Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) are working with a number of partners on the HIFiRE (Hypersonic International Flight Research Experimentation Program) program to advance hypersonic flight normally defined as beginning at Mach 5 five times the speed of sound. The research program is aimed at exploring the fundamental technologies needed to achieve practical hypersonic flight. Being able to fly at hypersonic speeds could revolutionize high speed, long distance flight and provide more cost-effective access to space.

During the experiment the scramjet aboard its sounding rocket climbed to about 100,000 feet (30,480 meters) in altitude, accelerated from Mach 6 to Mach 8 (4,567 to 6,090 miles per hour; 7,350 to 9,800 kilometers per hour) and operated about 12 seconds a big accomplishment for flight at hypersonic speeds. It was the fourth of a planned series of up to 10 flights under HIFiRE and the second focused on scramjet engine research.

NASA.gov Wins Two 2012 Webby Awards

NASA's website, www.nasa.gov, has won awards in two categories as the best government site in the 16th Annual Webby Awards, the leading international honor for the world's best websites.The site received its fourth consecutive People's Voice Award, its fifth overall, in a popular vote and for the first time won the judges' Webby Award in the category.

"We are honored to once again be recognized for our online communications efforts," said David Weaver, associate administrator for communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "On a daily basis, our extraordinary web team provides a clear and accessible view into the agency's missions and milestones, to the benefit of American taxpayers and millions who follow us around the world."

Since winning the 2011 People's Voice award, the site had its busiest day ever with the launch of the final space shuttle mission in July 2011. More than 560,000 people watched the launch on NASA's webcast. The site had 18 million visits during the two-week mission, during which it distributed 1.2 billion megabytes of data. Previously, that had equaled a year's worth of information sent to the public.

Jet Engine to Eat Cereal and Crayons for a Purpose

NASA's Aviation Safety Program is developing technology for improved sensors to help spot changes in vibration, speed, temperature and emissions which are symptomatic of engine glitches. These advanced sensors could alert ground crews to problems that can be eliminated with preventive maintenance before becoming serious safety concerns. Ultimately, the sensors could alert pilots to the presence of destructive volcanic ash particles too small for the eyes to see, giving more time for evasive action to prevent engine damage in flight.

Letting a jet engine suck up foreign objects usually is a no-no, but engineers at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center will bend the rules in an upcoming experiment with a U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo transport. The cereal and crayons will leave a colorful trail of grains and wax that the researchers can see and study to gauge how well the sensors work.

Dryden engineers ran a similar test using water in December 2011 to lay the groundwork for more complex experiments. They operated the C-17 in normal use and simulated fault conditions after outfitting one of its two Pratt & Whitney F117 turbofan engines military versions of Pratt & Whitney's commercial airline PW-2000 turbofan engines with the advanced sensors.

Lyrids 'Balloon-Cam' Update

During the peak of the 2012 Lyrid meteor on the night of April 21-22, Dr. Tony Phillips with Science@NASA and a group of students in Bishop, Calif., launched a balloon and an attached camera into the atmosphere. Their hope was to capture footage of Lyrid meteors from above Earth's atmosphere. Here's an update on the balloon and its journey.

The balloon had a hard landing due to unusual way it popped; suffice it to say the parachute was not fully functional because it had a pound of rubber sitting on top of it! The last data file the DVR was writing to was corrupted because of the impact. However, the balloon captured lots of video, and the camera appears to be intact despite the rough descent. Fortunately, a 12,000-foot mountain caught the payload before it could plummet any further.

NASA Goddard Engineers Testing Webb Telescope's OSIM and BIA Instruments

Several critical items related to NASA's next-generation James Webb Space Telescope are being tested in the giant thermal vacuum test chamber at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

These photos show the OTE (Optical Telescope Element) Simulator or OSIM wrapped in a silver blanket on a platform, being lowered down into a vacuum chamber (called the Space Environment Simulator, or SES) by a crane to be tested to withstand the cold temperatures of space.

The OSIM simulates the Webb telescope for the purposes of testing the science instruments that will fly on the observatory. The OSIM itself will never fly into space, but it is a vital part of the testing program to verify that the science cameras and spectrographs will function as planned.

Decades of Data Show Spring Advancing Faster Than Experiments Suggest

Plants are leafing out and flowering sooner each year than predicted by results from controlled environmental warming experiments, according to data from a major new archive of historical observations assembled with the help of a NASA researcher.

Researchers use experiments that manipulate the temperature of the environment surrounding small plots of plants to gauge how specific plants will react to higher temperatures. The observed plant responses can then be incorporated into models that predict future ecosystem changes as temperatures around the globe continue to rise. But when a group of scientists compared these results to a massive new archive of historical observations, they found that the warming experiments are dramatically underestimating how plants respond to climate change.

The results were published online in the journal Nature on May 2. In addition to quantifying how a broad collection of plant species have responded to date to rising temperatures, the study suggests that the way warming experiments are conducted needs to be re-evaluated.

NASA Satellite Measurements Imply Texas Wind Farm Impact on Surface Temperature

A Texas region containing four of the world's largest wind farms showed an increase in land surface temperature over nine years that researchers have connected to local meteorological effects of the turbines.The land surface temperature around the west-central Texas wind farms warmed at a rate of .72 degrees Celsius per decade during the study period relative to nearby regions without wind farms, an effect most likely caused by the turbulence in turbine wakes acting like fans to pull down warmer air from higher altitudes at night, said lead author Liming Zhou at the University of Albany, State University of New York.

The results were published in the April 29 issue of Nature Climate Change. Zhou and colleagues studied land surface temperature data ranging from 2003 to 2011, from the MODIS (Moderate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instruments on NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites.Land surface temperature measures the temperature of the Earth’s surface itself, as opposed to the air temperature readings used in daily weather reports. Across a broad landscape, land surface temperature depends closely on the land cover type and nature of the surface. In specific locations, land surface temperature varies widely from day to night while air temperature varies within a smaller range.

The warming observed by MODIS mostly occurred at night. In the Texas region studied, the land surface temperature after sunset typically cools faster than the air temperature. But as the wind turbines continued to turn, the movement brought warmer air to the surface and thus created a warming effect compared to non-wind farm regions. The researchers expected to see the reverse during the day a slight cooling effect but the data instead showed a small warming or negligible effect in daytime.