Successful Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Mission

orbiting sentinels is expected to return to Earth in a few days. The agency's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation (ICESat) satellite completed a very productive scientific mission earlier this year. NASA lowered the satellite's orbit last month and then decommissioned the spacecraft in preparation for re-entry. It is estimated that the satellite will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and largely burn up on or about August 29.

ICESat's lasting legacy will be its impact on the understanding of ice sheet and sea ice dynamics. The mission has led to scientific advances in measuring changes in the mass of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, polar sea ice thickness, vegetation-canopy heights, and the heights of clouds and aerosols. Using ICESat data, scientists identified a network of lakes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. ICESat introduced new capabilities, technology and methods such as the measurement of sea ice freeboard – or the amount of ice and snow that protrudes above the ocean surface - for estimating sea ice thickness.

WISE Captures the Unicorn's Rose

Unicorns and roses are usually the stuff of fairy tales, but a new cosmic image taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Explorer (WISE) shows the Rosette nebula located within the constellation Monoceros, or the Unicorn.

This flower-shaped nebula, also known by the less romantic name NGC 2237, is a huge star-forming cloud of dust and gas in our Milky Way galaxy. Estimates of the nebula's distance vary from 4,500 to 5,000 light-years away.

At the center of the flower is a cluster of young stars called NGC 2244. The most massive stars produce huge amounts of ultraviolet radiation, and blow strong winds that erode away the nearby gas and dust, creating a large, central hole. The radiation also strips electrons from the surrounding hydrogen gas, ionizing it and creating what astronomers call an HII region.

Although the Rosette nebula is too faint to see with the naked eye, NGC 2244 is beloved by amateur astronomers because it is visible through a small telescope or good pair of binoculars. The English astronomer John Flamsteed discovered the star cluster NGC 2244 with a telescope around 1690, but the nebula itself was not identified until John Herschel (son of William Herschel, discoverer of infrared light) observed it almost 150 years later.

Perseids Complete 2010

The 2010 Perseid meteor shower is drawing to a close after painting brilliant streaks across the August nighttime skies. This year's shower began around July 17, peaked August 12-13 and will be officially over by August 24.

"The Perseids are a great shower, one I look forward to every year. And this year didn’t disappoint!" said Dr. Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, located at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The Perseid meteor shower has been observed for at least 2,000 years and is associated with the comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the sun once every 133 years or so. Each year in August, the Earth passes through a cloud of the comet's debris. These bits of ice and dust travel around 132,000 mph, burning up about 56 miles overhead in the Earth's atmosphere to create one of the best meteor showers of the year. The shower is called the "Perseids" because the meteors appear to come from the direction of the constellation Perseus.

space shuttle orbiter

A jet engine noise reduction device called a chevron, now in use on commercial airliners, is a good example of a NASA-developed technology that climbed the TRL scale to success, said Fay Collier, manager of NASA's Environmentally Responsible Aviation Project.

Chevrons are the saw-tooth pattern that can be seen on the trailing edges of some jet engine nozzles. As hot air from the engine core mixes with cooler air blowing through the engine fan, the jagged edges serve to smooth the mixing, which reduces turbulence that creates noise.

The new Boeing 787 is among the most modern jets relying on chevrons to reduce engine noise levels, sporting chevrons on the nacelles, or fan housings. The Boeing 747-8 has chevrons on both the nacelles and inner core engine nozzles.

GRIP 'Shakedown' Flight Planned over Gulf Coast

The first flight of NASA's hurricane airborne research mission is scheduled to take off from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., on Tuesday, Aug. 17. NASA's DC-8 research aircraft will be making a planned five-hour flight along the Gulf Coast from western Florida to Louisiana primarily as a practice run for the many scientific instruments aboard.

Mission scientists, instrument teams, flight crew and support personnel gathered in Fort Lauderdale this weekend to begin planning the six-week Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes mission, or GRIP. NASA's DC-8, the largest of NASA's three aircraft taking part in the mission, is based at the Fort Lauderdale airport. The two other aircraft -- the WB-57 based in Houston and the autonomous Global Hawk flying out of southern California -- will join the campaign in about a week.

NRC's 2010 Astrophysics Decadal Survey

National Research Council's Astro2010 report, New Worlds, New Horizons in Astronomy and Astrophysics. We appreciate the science community's efforts in defining a set of compelling science objectives for space-based astrophysical research for the coming decade, and for carefully considering the cost of the initiatives the report recommends.

We look forward to assessing the report's findings and recommendations for strengthening the nation's world-class space astrophysics program. From new worlds to new physics, the coming decade of discovery leverages not only our current space observatories – such as the Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra and Fermi space telescopes – but also our planned facilities – especially those from previous decadal surveys, the James Webb Space Telescope and the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). The survey calls for new facilities that expand our reach into the cosmos that will include opportunities for coordination and cooperation with other Federal agencies and international partners.

Launch Preps Move Ahead for Mission to International Space Station

During space shuttle Discovery's final spaceflight, the STS-133 crew members will take important spare parts to the International Space Station along with the Express Logistics Carrier-4. Discovery is being readied for flight inside Kennedy's Orbiter Processing Facility-3 while its solid rocket boosters are stacked inside the nearby Vehicle Assembly Building. STS-133 is slated to launch Nov. 1.

Crew to Perform Second of Three Spacewalks Wednesday

Flight controllers and engineers continue meetings to review the results from the first spacewalk conducted Saturday by International Space Station Expedition 24 Flight Engineers Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson and to plan for the second of what now will be three spacewalks to complete the replacement of a failed pump module on the station’s starboard truss.

In the wake of an eight-hour, three-minute spacewalk Saturday that fell short of removing the failed pump module due to a leak in the fourth of four ammonia line connectors hooked up to the old pump, mission operations and station program officials laid out a series of procedures for Wheelock and Caldwell Dyson to perform at the beginning of the second spacewalk Wednesday designed to greatly reduce, or eliminate the possibility of ammonia leaking from the final fluid connector – called M3 – when it is demated to set the stage for the failed pump to be removed from the truss.

Second CME to Hit Earth's Magnetic Field

Another great image from the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) of the news-making solar event on August 1, 2010 resulting in two Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) launched in Earth's direction.

Earth's magnetic field is still reverberating from the CME impact of August 3rd, which sparked auroras as far south as Wisconsin and Iowa in the United States. Analysts believe a second CME is right behind it, due to arrive today. This second impact could re-energize the fading geomagnetic storm and spark a new round of Northern Lights.

Hundreds of New Views from Telescope Orbiting Mars

At the center of this view of an area of mid latitude northern Mars, a fresh crater about 6 meters in diameter holds an exposure of bright material, blue in this false color image.

The latest set of new images from the telescopic High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment Camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter offers detailed views of diverse Martian landscapes.

Features as small as desks are revealed in the 314 observations made between June 6 and July 7, 2010, now available on the camera team's site and NASA's Planetary Data System.

The camera is one of six instruments on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which reached Mars in 2006.

Wind Shear Accident Was Catalyst for Technology

On that day 25 years ago the public affairs specialist was a young U.S. Air Force airman heading home on leave to North Carolina, flying out of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.

"I was looking out my window, sitting at the end of the runway aboard the second airplane lined up to take off," said Creech. "I had a window seat and was looking out the window when I noticed some really, really black thunder clouds at our end of the runway. Then I saw orange, extremely bright orange, light. My brain didn't register what I was seeing."

One hundred and thirty four people of the 163 on board the Delta Lockheed L-1011 and one person on the ground died that day, in part because of a powerful thunderstorm microburst-induced wind shear, a rare but potentially deadly downdraft.

Dave Hinton, now the deputy director of the Aeronautics Research Directorate at NASA's Langley Research Center, also remembers that accident vividly. He and a team of researchers studied it for years as part of their efforts to help develop predictive wind shear radar, a technology that is now standard on all airliners.

"It was a tremendously productive cooperation between multiple agencies and companies," said Hinton. "We advanced the state of the art from basic knowledge of a meteorological phenomena to developing well defined system requirements for on board sensors and crew procedures."

"They followed the technology development and as a result provided the credibility and basis for certification," said Hinton. "That meant that within two to three years of our wrapping up the project there were certified systems available. " Those airborne systems, better ground-based radar and improved pilot training have now virtually eliminated U.S. airliner wind shear accidents.

NASA's ATHLETE Warms Up for High Desert Run

Engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are currently putting their All-Terrain, Hex-Limbed, Extra Terrestrial Explorer through a series of long drive tests on the long, dirt roads found adjacent to JPL.

The JPL grounds do not include an unpaved area of sufficient size for testing such a large robot over a long distance. Some of the dirt roads in the Arroyo Seco are wide enough for ATHLETE, and its close proximity to JPL allows the robot to be secured in its hangar between test runs.

The engineers want to test the moon rover's ability to meet a NASA milestone of traveling at least 40 kilometers over 14 days under its own power. The official demonstration is slated to begin in the Arizona high desert next month.

ATHLETE is a 1/2-scale working prototype of a robot under development to transport habitats and other cargo on the surface of the Moon or Mars. The ATHLETE concept is a level cargo deck carried by six wheels, each on the end of a configurable leg. The prototype stands approximately 4.5 meters tall and 4.5 meters wide and weighs about . The robot moves relatively slowly, with a top speed during traverse of approximately 2 kilometers per hour.

GRAIL Spacecraft Takes Shape

Engineers have conducted a fuel tank check of one of NASA's GRAIL mission spacecraft scheduled for launch in 2011. Confirming the size and fit of manufactured components is one of the steps required prior to welding the spacecraft's fuel tanks into the propulsion system's feed lines.

The image was taken on June 29, 2010, during the propulsion subsystem assembly and integration effort in the Space Support Building clean room at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver.

The GRAIL mission will fly twin spacecraft in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field in unprecedented detail. The mission will also answer longstanding questions about Earth's moon, and provide scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed.

Enormous Star blazes speedy and enraged in snap

An exceptional model of enormous stars that survive fast and die young has been photographed by a European observatory in Chile.The blazing hot star is called WR 22 and is detaching its atmosphere many millions of times sooner than our own sun in external blasts that unleash powerful radiation releases.

t has about 70 times the mass of the sun, and its brightness permits Earth spectators to spot its intensity with the unaided eye from over 5,000 light-years away. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.

WR 22 sits in a southern arrangement of stars, the Carina Constellation, which symbolizes the keel of Jason's ship Argo in Greek mythology. It is one of many incredibly bright stars in the Carina Nebula a giant province of star structure in the southern Milky Way galaxy.

The astronomical sighting came from European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory. Its colorful image imitates the interactions between the extreme ultraviolet radiation coming from hot massive stars such as WR 22 and vast gas clouds composed mostly of hydrogen.

The upper-left image also contains the star Eta Carinae, just 7,500 light-years away and more than 100 times the mass of our sun. Astronomers expect such gigantic stars to lose their entire hydrogen envelopes before they go out with a supernova bang.

Cosmonauts Complete First Expedition 24 Spacewalk

Flight Engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Mikhail Kornienko concluded a six-hour, 42-minute spacewalk Tuesday at 6:53 a.m. EDT. The cosmonauts began their spacewalk when they opened the hatches of the Pirs docking compartment at 12:11 a.m.

This was the 147th spacewalk overall in support of International Space Station assembly and maintenance. The cosmonauts wore their Russian Orlan spacesuits to outfit the new Rassvet module for a Kurs automated rendezvous system capability for future dockings of Russian vehicles arriving at the station to link up to Rassvet. They also routed and mated Command and Data Handling cables on the Zvezda and Zarya modules.

A video camera was removed and replaced on the aft end of Zvezda then successfully tested. The old camera was safely jettisoned away from the station. The new camera will be used to provide television views of the final approach and docking of future European Automated Transfer Vehicles carrying cargo to the complex.

This was Kornienko’s first spacewalk and Yurchikhin’s fourth. Yurchikhin’s first three spacewalks occurred when he was commander of Expedition 15 in 2007.

The second spacewalk of Expedition 24 is planned for August 5 by Flight Engineers Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson in U.S. spacesuits out of the Quest airlock. They will install a power cable to the Unity module in preparation for the installation of the Permanent Multipurpose Module during the STS-133 mission in November.

A Portable Data Grapple Caldwell Dyson will be making the first spacewalk of her career. Wheelock will be conducting his fourth. His first three spacewalks occurred as a mission specialist during STS-120 in late 2007.

Curiosity Rover Grows by Leaps and Bounds

Talk about a growth spurt. In one week, Curiosity grew by approximately 1 meter spacecraft technicians and engineers attached the rover's neck and head called the Remote Sensing Mast to its body. At around 2 meters tall, the next rover to Mars now stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Mounted on Curiosity's mast are two navigation cameras , two mast cameras , and the laser-carrying chemistry camera .

While it now has a good head on its shoulders, Curiosity's "eyes" , have been blindfolded in a protective silvery material. The Mastcam, containing two digital cameras, will soon be unveiled, so engineers can test its picture-taking abilities.

Up next today , the towering rover will take its first baby steps: a slow roll on the floor of the clean room where it's being built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Watch Curiosity's progress live from the clean room on Ustream until 3:30 p.m. PDT tod

NASA Moves Forward on Commercial Partnership for Rocket Engine Testing

Engineers at NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center recently installed an Aerojet AJ26 rocket engine for qualification testing as part of a partnership that highlights the space agency's commitment to work with commercial companies to provide space transportation.

Stennis has partnered with Orbital Sciences Corporation to test the AJ26 engines that will power the first stage of the company's Taurus II space launch vehicle. Orbital is working in partnership with NASA under the agency's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services research and development project. The company is under contract with NASA through the Commercial Resupply Services program to provide eight cargo missions to the International Space Station through 2015.

Stennis operators have been modifying their E-1 test facility since April 2009 to test the AJ26 engines for Orbital. Work has included construction of a 27-foot-deep flame deflector trench.
The latest step in the project involved delivery and installation of an AJ26 engine for testing. In upcoming days, operators will perform a series of "chilldown" test, which involves running sub cooled rocket propellants through the engine, just as will occur during an actual "hotfire" ignition test.

The chilldown tests are used to verify proper temperature conditioning of the engine systems and elapse time required to properly chill the engine, and to measure the quantity of liquid oxygen required to perform the operation.

Once the installed engine passes the chilldown and other qualification tests, it will be removed from the Stennis E-1 test facility. The first actual flight engine then will be delivered and installed for hotfire testing.

Spitzer Space Telescope

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have discovered carbon molecules, known as "buckyballs," in space for the first time. Buckyballs are soccer ball shaped molecules that were first observed in a laboratory 25 years ago.

They are named for their resemblance to architect Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, which have interlocking circles on the surface of a partial sphere. Buckyballs were thought to float around in space, but had escaped detection until now.

Cassini Sees Moon Building Giant Snowballs in Saturn Ring

While orbiting Saturn for the last six years, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has kept a close eye on the collisions and disturbances in the gas giant's rings. They provide the only nearby natural laboratory for scientists to see the processes that must have occurred in our early solar system, as planets and moons coalesced out of disks of debris.

New images from Cassini show icy particles in Saturn's F ring clumping into giant snowballs as the moon Prometheus makes multiple swings by the ring. The gravitational pull of the moon sloshes ring material around, creating wake channels that trigger the formation of objects as large as 20 kilometers in diameter.

"Scientists have never seen objects actually form before," said Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member based at Queen Mary, University of London. "We now have direct evidence of that process and the rowdy dance between the moons and bits of space debris."

Murray discussed the findings today at the Committee on Space Research meeting in Bremen, Germany, and they are published online by the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters on July 14, 2010. A new animation based on imaging data shows how one of the moons interacts with the F ring and creates dense, sticky areas of ring material.

Saturn's thin, kinky F ring was discovered by NASA's Pioneer 11 spacecraft in 1979. Prometheus and Pandora, the small "shepherding" moons on either side of the F ring, were discovered a year later by NASA's Voyager 1. In the years since, the F ring has rarely looked the same twice, and scientists have been watching the impish behavior of the two shepherding moons for clues.

The newly found F ring objects appear dense enough to have what scientists call "self-gravity." That means they can attract more particles to themselves and snowball in size as ring particles bounce around in Prometheus's wake, Murray said. The objects could be about as dense as Prometheus, though only about one-fourteenth as dense as Earth.

The new findings could also help explain the origin of a mysterious object about 5 to 10 kilometers in diameter that Cassini scientists spotted in 2004 and have provisionally dubbed S/2004 S 6. This object occasionally bumps into the F ring and produces jets of debris.

"The new analysis fills in some blanks in our solar system's history, giving us clues about how it transformed from floating bits of dust to dense bodies," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The F ring peels back some of the mystery and continues to surprise us."

NASA Goddard Felt July 16 Quake

A small earthquake, centered in Germantown, Md. occurred at 5:04 a.m. EDT today, July 16, and its vibrations were felt from West Virginia to Bridgeport, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center located in Greenbelt lies about 25 miles east-southeast of today's small earthquake and reported no damages. In fact, there were no reports of damage throughout Maryland.

The earthquake registered 3.6 on the Richter scale, according to the U.S. Geological Survey , the agency that monitors quakes around the U.S. USGS reported that the quake occurred today, Friday, July 16, 2010 at 5:04:47 a.m. EDT. The quake originated 5 kilometers deep and it was centered at 39.167°North, 77.252°West, in Germantown, Md. That latitude and longitude positions the quake's epicenter just west of Interstate 270 and south of Maryland state route 119.

Although earthquakes are monitored by the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA conducts research in various earthquake projects. That research is done in earthquake country, however, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., just outside of Los Angeles. NASA measures, computes, and models crustal deformation using GPS and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar from its airborne unmanned aerial vehicle SAR platform and international satellites.

"Crustal deformation occurs both as a result of earthquakes and quietly," said Andrea Donnellan, a geophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. and a research professor at the University of Southern California and NASA's Applied Sciences Program Area Co-Lead for Natural Disasters.

NASA funds several projects that integrate the GPS and InSAR data into models that provide insight into fault activity and earthquake potential, and Donnellan is the Principal Investigator of NASA's QuakeSim project, as well as supercomputing, earthquake modeling, and UAVSAR projects.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the quake was too small for NASA to detect. The last earthquake in the region occurred in May of 2008 and was even smaller, registering a magnitude of 2.0 on the Richter Scale.