Surprise Picture for WISE's Fourth Anniversary

In an unexpected juxtaposition of cosmic objects that are actually quite far from each other, a newly released image from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) shows a dying star, called the Helix nebula, surrounded by the tracks of asteroids. The nebula is far outside our solar system, while the asteroid tracks are inside our solar system. The portrait, discovered by chance in a search for asteroids, comes at a time when the mission's team is celebrating its fourth launch anniversary -- and new lease on life. In August, NASA decided to bring WISE out of hibernation to search for more asteroids. The mission was rechristened NEOWISE, formerly the name of the asteroid-hunting portion of WISE.

"I was recently looking for asteroids in images collected in 2010, and this picture jumped out at me," said Amy Mainzer, the NEOWISE principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "I recognized the Helix nebula right away." WISE launched into the morning skies above Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California on Dec. 14, 2009. By early 2011, it had finished scanning the entire sky twice in infrared light, snapping pictures of nearly one billion objects, including remote galaxies, stars and asteroids. Upon completing its main goals, WISE was put to sleep. Now, engineers are bringing the spacecraft out of slumber, as it cools back down to the chilly temperatures required for infrared observations. The spacecraft no longer has onboard coolant, but two of its infrared channels still work and can be used for asteroid hunting.

"WISE is the spacecraft that keeps on giving," said Ned Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator of WISE before it transitioned into NEOWISE. In the Helix nebula image, infrared wavelengths of light have been assigned different colors, with longer wavelengths being red, and shorter, blue. The bluish-green and red materials are expelled remnants of what was once a star similar to our sun. As the star aged, it puffed up and its outer layers sloughed off. The burnt-out core of the star, called a white dwarf, is heating the expelled material, inducing it to glow with infrared light. Over time, the brilliant object, known as a planetary nebula, will fade away, leaving just the white dwarf.

Skirting around the edges of the Helix nebula are the footprints of asteroids marching across the field of view. Each set of yellow dots is a series of pictures of an asteroid. As the asteroid moved, WISE snapped several pictures, all of which are represented in this view. Scientists use these data to discover and characterize asteroids, including those that pass relatively close to Earth, called near-Earth asteroids. Infrared data are particularly useful for finding the smaller, darker asteroids that are more difficult to see with visible light, and for measuring the asteroids’ sizes.

The other streaks in the picture are Earth-orbiting satellites and cosmic rays. JPL manages and operates NEOWISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The WISE mission was selected competitively under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah. The spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information is online at http://neowise.ipac.caltech.edu, http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu .

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

2013-365

Source: http://www.nasa.gov

#SpotOrion As NASA Spacecraft Travels Cross Country

A test version of NASA’s Orion spacecraft has taken to the road for the next several weeks, as it makes its way across country for recovery tests off the coast of California. The mockup rolled away from NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., on Dec. 11, and will arrive at Naval Base San Diego in California in early January. There, the Orion stand in will be used in February to support tests simulating the recovery of Orion following its return from space.

The Orion mockup will travel through Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona before crossing the California border. For updates on where the capsule is or is headed, follow @NASA_Orion on Twitter. If spotted, individuals are encouraged to share their photos of the mockup via social media using the hashtag #SpotOrion. The mockup, called a boilerplate test article, has already been used in a number of tests to ensure that Orion will be ready for its first mission, Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), scheduled for September 2014. That mission will take Orion to 3,600 miles above the Earth’s surface before returning it at speeds of up to 20,000 miles per hour for a splash landing in the Pacific Ocean.

During the underway recovery tests in San Diego, the mockup will be set adrift in open and unstable waters, providing NASA and the Navy the opportunity to recover the capsule and bring it into the well deck of the USS San Diego. While deployed, the team will seek out various sea states in which to practice the capsule recovery procedures. This will help build a knowledge base of how the capsule recovery differs in calm and rough seas and what the true physical limits are.

The 18,000-pound mockup is a full-size replica of the Orion spacecraft currently being built at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. NASA and the Navy previously used this mockup to practice recovery in calm seas during a stationary recovery test in August where the spacecraft was set adrift in the waters of Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia and recovered into the docked well deck of the USS Arlington. The mockup was also dropped from 25 feet above the water of Langley’s Hydro Impact Basin to simulate different splashdown scenarios.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov

NASA Investigating the Life of Comet ISON

After several days of continued observations, scientists continue to work to determine and to understand the fate of Comet ISON: There's no doubt that the comet shrank in size considerably as it rounded the sun and there's no doubt that something made it out on the other side to shoot back into space. The question remains as to whether the bright spot seen moving away from the sun was simply debris, or whether a small nucleus of the original ball of ice was still there. Regardless, it is likely that it is now only dust.  

Comet ISON, which began its journey from the Oort Cloud some 3 million years ago, made its closest approach to the sun on Nov. 28, 2013. The comet was visible in instruments on NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, and the joint European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, via images called coronagraphs. Coronagraphs block out the sun and a considerable distance around it, in order to better observe the dim structures in the sun's atmosphere, the corona. As such, there was a period of several hours when the comet was obscured in these images, blocked from view along with the sun. During this period of time, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory could not see the comet, leading many scientists to surmise that the comet had disintegrated completely. However, something did reappear in SOHO and STEREO coronagraphs some time later – though it was significantly less bright.

Whether that spot of light was merely a cloud of dust that once was a comet, or if it still had a nucleus – a small ball of its original, icy material – intact, is still unclear. It seems likely that as of Dec. 1, there was no nucleus left. By monitoring its changes in brightness over time, scientists can estimate whether there's a nucleus or not, but our best chance at knowing for sure will be if the Hubble Space Telescope makes observations later in December 2013.

Regardless of its fate, Comet ISON did not disappoint researchers. Over the last year, observatories around the world and in space gathered one of the largest sets of comet observations of all time, which should provide fodder for study for years to come. The number of space-based, ground-based, and amateur observations were unprecedented, with twelve NASA space-based assets observing over the past year.

Related Links:

For more information on Comet ISON: www.nasa.gov/ison

To download recent ISON imagery: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/CometISON.html

NASA and Planetary Resources Sign Agreement to Crowdsource Asteroid Detection

NASA and Planetary Resources Inc., of Bellevue, Wash., are partnering to develop crowd-sourced software solutions to enhance detection of near-Earth objects using agency-funded data. The agreement is NASA's first partnership associated with the agency's Asteroid Grand Challenge.

Under a non-reimbursable Space Act Agreement, Planetary Resources will facilitate the use of NASA-funded sky survey data and help support the algorithm competition and review results. NASA will develop and manage the contests and explore use of the best solutions for enhancing existing survey programs. The first contest is expected to launch early in 2014 based on Planetary Resources' and Zooniverse's Asteroid Zoo platform currently in development. The partnership was announced Nov. 21 at NASA's Asteroid Initiative Ideas Synthesis Workshop in Houston.

"This partnership uses NASA resources in innovative ways and takes advantage of public expertise to improve identification of potential threats to our planet," said Lindley Johnson, program executive of NASA's near Earth object observation program. "This opportunity is one of many efforts we're undertaking as part of our asteroid initiative."

Through NASA's asteroid initiative, the agency is enhancing its ongoing efforts to identify and characterize near-Earth objects for scientific investigation, find asteroids potentially hazardous to Earth and find candidates viable for redirection to a stable orbit near the moon as a destination for exploration by astronauts.

"The foundation of the asteroid grand challenge is partnerships like this one," said Jason Kessler, program executive for the asteroid grand challenge. "It fits the core purpose of the grand challenge perfectly: find innovative ways to combine ideas and resources to solve the problem of dealing with potentially hazardous asteroids."

NASA's efforts capitalizes on activities across the agency's human exploration, science and space technology efforts

"Asteroids hold the resources necessary to enable a sustainable, even indefinite presence in space -- for science, commerce and continued prosperity here on Earth," said Chris Lewicki, president and chief engineer of Planetary Resources. "By harnessing the public's interest in space and asteroid detection, we can more quickly identify the potential threats, as well as the opportunities."

The algorithm contests are managed and executed by NASA's Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI). CoECI was established at the request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to advance NASA open innovation efforts and extend that expertise to other federal agencies. CoECI uses NASA Tournament Lab (NTL) for its advanced algorithmic and software development contests.  Through its contract with Harvard Business School in association with Harvard's Institute of Quantitative Social Sciences, NTL uses the TopCoder platform to enable a community of over 600,000 competitors to create the most innovative, efficient and optimized solutions for specific, real-world challenges faced by NASA.

Source: www.nasa.gov

NASA Sees 'Watershed' Cosmic Blast in Unique Detail

On April 27, a blast of light from a dying star in a distant galaxy became the focus of astronomers around the world. The explosion, known as a gamma-ray burst and designated GRB 130427A, tops the charts as one of the brightest ever seen.

A trio of NASA satellites, working in concert with ground-based robotic telescopes, captured never-before-seen details that challenge current theoretical understandings of how gamma-ray bursts work.

"We expect to see an event like this only once or twice a century, so we're fortunate it happened when we had the appropriate collection of sensitive space telescopes with complementary capabilities available to see it," said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division in Washington.

Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the cosmos, thought to be triggered when the core of a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel, collapses under its own weight, and forms a black hole. The black hole then drives jets of particles that drill all the way through the collapsing star and erupt into space at nearly the speed of light.

Gamma-rays are the most energetic form of light. Hot matter surrounding a new black hole and internal shock waves produced by collisions within the jet are thought to emit gamma-rays with energies in the million-electron-volt (MeV) range, or roughly 500,000 times the energy of visible light. The most energetic emission, with billion-electron-volt (GeV) gamma rays, is thought to arise when the jet slams into its surroundings, forming an external shock wave.

The Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) aboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope captured the initial wave of gamma rays from GRB 130427A shortly after 3:47 a.m. EDT April 27. In its first three seconds alone, the "monster burst" proved brighter than almost any burst previously observed.

Source: www.nasa.gov

MAVEN Prelaunch Updates

MAVEN Launch Preps on Schedule

Fri, 18 Nov 2013 10:40 AM EDT

MAVEN launch preparations remain on schedule and have continued to go well since spacecraft processing resumed earlier this month. On Tuesday, Oct. 22, MAVEN is slated for a spin test without propellant aboard. Once complete, the spacecraft will be prepared for fueling. The Atlas V rocket payload fairing will be moved into the clean room on Oct. 21 in preparation for MAVEN's encapsulation beginning in early November.

The Atlas booster was hoisted into the vertical integration facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 41 on Oct. 11, and the Centaur upper stage was hoisted atop the Atlas the following Monday. United Launch Alliance has completed powering of the stacked vehicle for checkout. The Combined Systems Test, an electrical test of the rocket, is scheduled for Oct. 22.

The launch of MAVEN is scheduled for Nov. 18 at 1:28 p.m. EST.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/

Asteroid 2013 TV135 – A Reality Check

Newly discovered asteroid 2013 TV135 made a close approach to Earth on Sept. 16, when it came within about 4.2 million miles (6.7 million kilometers). The asteroid is initially estimated to be about 1,300 feet (400 meters) in size and its orbit carries it as far out as about three quarters of the distance to Jupiter's orbit and as close to the sun as Earth's orbit. It was discovered on Oct. 8, 2013, by astronomers working at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in Ukraine. As of Oct. 14, asteroid 2013 TV135 is one of 10,332 near-Earth objects that have been discovered.

With only a week of observations for an orbital period that spans almost four years, its future orbital path is still quite uncertain, but this asteroid could be back in Earth’s neighborhood in 2032. However, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office states the probability this asteroid could then impact Earth is only one in 63,000. The object should be easily observable in the coming months and once additional observations are provided to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., the initial orbit calculations will be improved and the most likely result will be a dramatic reduction, or complete elimination, of any risk of Earth impact.  

"To put it another way, that puts the current probability of no impact in 2032 at about 99.998 percent," said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "This is a relatively new discovery. With more observations, I fully expect we will be able to significantly reduce, or rule out entirely, any impact probability for the foreseeable future."

NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing close to Earth using both ground- and space-based telescopes. The Near-Earth Object Observations Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," discovers these objects, characterizes a subset of them and identifies their orbits to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.

JPL manages the Near-Earth Object Program Office for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

More information about asteroids and near-Earth objects is at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch

Source: http://www.nasa.gov

Cygnus En Route for Sunday Rendezvous With Station

While the newest commercial cargo vehicle to join the International Space Station’s resupply fleet launched Wednesday morning on its demonstration flight, the Expedition 37 crew aboard the orbiting complex was hard at work with medical research, emergency simulation training and preparations for Sunday’s arrival of the new space freighter.

NASA commercial space partner Orbital Sciences Corp. of Dulles, Va., launched its Cygnus cargo spacecraft aboard its Antares rocket at 10:58 a.m. EDT Wednesday from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport Pad-0A at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. At the time of launch, the space station was flying about 261 miles above the southern Indian Ocean. Cygnus will rendezvous with the station on Sunday on its demonstration mission to deliver 1,300 pounds of cargo, including food and clothing, to the space station's Expedition 37 crew.

All three Expedition 37 crew members -- Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg and Luca Parmitano -- gathered around a laptop computer screen in the station’s Destiny laboratory to watch a live video stream of the launch of Cygnus. Nyberg then sent her congratulations to Orbital Sciences via her Twitter account, @AstroKarenN.

Nyberg and Parmitano began their workday aboard the space station reviewing Cygnus’ cargo manifest and discussing with ground teams the plan to unload the cargo.  During the month that Cygnus is berthed to the station, the crew will unload its 1,300 pounds of cargo and reload it with trash for disposal when Cygnus departs for a destructive re-entry in the Earth’s atmosphere. The two astronauts then moved on to some on-board training to review the installation procedure for Cygnus. When Cygnus nears the station on Sunday, Parmitano, with assistance from Nyberg, will use the robotics workstation in the cupola to command the station’s 57-foot robotic arm, Canadarm2, to reach out and grapple the vehicle. He will then maneuver the arm to guide Cygnus to its docking port on the Earth-facing side of the Harmony node for installation.

All three Expedition 37 crew members participated in on-board training to review their roles and responsibilities in the event of an emergency aboard the station such as a fire or rapid depressurization. Afterward, they tagged up with flight controllers at Mission Control in Houston to review the drill and discuss any changes needed. Nyberg and Parmitano wrapped up their workday with another round of medical tests for the Ocular Health study as they used a fundoscope to examine each other’s eyes in detail. Vision changes have been observed in some astronauts returning from long-duration spaceflight, and flight surgeons are seeking to learn more about its root causes and develop countermeasures to minimize this risk.

Source: www.nasa.gov

Heliophysics Nugget: Mapping Tons of Meteoric Dust in the Sky

Heliophysics nuggets are a collection of early science results, new research techniques, and instrument updates that further our attempt to understand the sun and the dynamic space weather system that surrounds Earth. On Aug.11 and 12, 2013, the annual Perseid meteor shower will peak, filling the sky with streaks of light, commonly known as shooting stars. Such visually stunning showers are actually but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to meteoroids slamming into Earth's atmosphere: Some 10 to 40 tons of material of invisible meteoric dust enters the atmosphere from interplanetary space every day.

The big showers like the Perseids, and later the Leonids in November, are caused when Earth and its atmosphere travels through a region of the sky filled with left over debris lost by a particular comet. In the case of the Perseids, the small fragments were ripped of the tail of comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the sun once every 130 years. The fragments light up due to the immense friction created when they plough into the gas surrounding Earth. Each such fragment is approximately the size of a dime, but the more constant, sporadic meteoroids have been around much longer, breaking down over time into tiny fragments only about as wide as a piece of human hair.

"This is interplanetary dust," said Diego Janches, who studies micrometeoroids at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The fragments are either remnants from the solar system's formation, or they are produced by collisions between asteroids or comets from long ago". Janches researches such tiny meteoroids using radar systems set up around the globe, in places such as Sweden, Puerto Rico and Alaska, or the radar system he deployed and operates in Tierra Del Fuego, Argentina. These fragments plough into Earth's atmosphere at speeds of between 7 to 44 miles per second. They also bring with them minerals and metals from their parent bodies, such as sodium, silicon, calcium and magnesium.

"The small meteoroids feed the atmosphere with all these extra materials," Janches said. "They come in, release metallic atoms that get deposited in the mesosphere and then get pushed around from pole to pole by the general global circulation. So by using the metals as tracers, you can answer some important questions about the general composition and movement of the atmosphere." The radar systems set up around the world can track such motion. The meteors collide with atoms in the atmosphere and leave behind a path of electrons and charged particles. This electrically charged region acts as a perfect mirror for radar waves, so the radar bounces back carrying both position information and Doppler shift information. This can be used to measure speed and direction of the background atmospheric winds at the altitudes where the meteoric tails are produced, between 40 and 60 miles high in the sky. Because there are so many such trails, they can be used to measure the velocity and direction of the winds continuously, helping to map out very complex wind patterns on a minute-by-minute basis.

Similar techniques, but using lasers, can be used to map how something like sodium sweeps through the entire atmosphere, thus tracing the global circulation system. This system also sweeps the meteoric dust to the poles where, during the summertime, they can serve as nuclei for ice crystals in the sky forming what's called night-shining or noctilucent clouds.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov

Curiosity Makes Its Longest One-Day Drive on Mars

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's Mars rover Curiosity drove twice as far on July 21 as on any other day of the mission so far: 109.7 yards (100.3 meters). The length of the drive took advantage of starting the 340th Martian day, or sol, of the mission from a location with an unusually good view for rover engineers to plan a safe path. In weeks to come, the rover team plans to begin using "autonav" capability for the rover to autonomously navigate a path for itself, which could make such long drives more frequent.

Curiosity is about three weeks into a multi-month trek, from the "Glenelg" area where it worked for the first half of 2013, to an entry point for the mission's major destination: the lower layers of Mount Sharp. The mission's longest one-day drive prior to July 21 was about 54 yards (49 meters), on Sol 50 (Sept. 26, 2012). After completing the longer drive, Curiosity drove 68.2 yards (62.4 meters) on July 23 (Sol 342), bringing the mission's total driving distance so far to 0.81 mile (1.23 kilometers).

The Sol 340 drive included three segments, with turns at the end of the first and second segments. Rover planners used information from stereo imaging by the Navigation Camera (Navcam) on Curiosity's mast, plus images from the telephoto-lens Mast Camera (Mastcam).  The drive also used the rover's capability to use imagery taken during the drive to calculate the driving distance, a way to verify that wheels have not been slipping too much while turning.

"What enabled us to drive so far on Sol 340 was starting at a high point and also having Mastcam images giving us the size of rocks so we could be sure they were not hazards," said rover planner Paolo Bellutta of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We could see for quite a distance, but there was an area straight ahead that was not clearly visible, so we had to find a path around that area."

The rover was facing southwest when the sol began. It turned slightly more to the west before driving and used visual odometry to be sure it drove the intended distance (about 55 yards or 50 meters) before turning back farther southward. The second leg, next turn, and third leg completed the drive without visual odometry, though the rover was using another new capability: to turn on visual odometry autonomously if tilt or other factors exceed predetermined limits. New software on Curiosity gives it the capability to use visual odometry through a range of temperatures. This was needed because testing this spring indicated the Navcam pair linked to the rover's B-side computer is more sensitive to temperature than anticipated. Without the compensating software, the onboard analysis of stereo images could indicate different distances to the same point, depending on the temperature at which the images are taken. The rover was switched from its A-side computer to the redundant B-side computer on Feb. 28 due to a flash-memory problem -- subsequently resolved -- on the A-side. The Navcam pair linked to the A-side computer shows less variability with temperature than the pair now in use.

"For now, we're using visual odometry mostly for slip-checking," said JPL's Jennifer Trosper, deputy project manager for Curiosity. "We are validating the capability to begin using autonav at different temperatures." The autonomous navigation capability will enable rover planners to command drives that go beyond the route that they can confirm as safe from previous-sol images. They can tell the rover to use the autonomous capability to choose a safe path for itself beyond that distance.

Curiosity landed at the "Bradbury Landing" location within Gale Crater on Aug. 6, 2012, EDT and Universal Time (Aug. 5, PDT). From there, the rover drove eastward to the Glenelg area, where it accomplished the mission's major science objective of finding evidence for an ancient wet environment that had conditions favorable for microbial life. The rover's route is now southwestward. At Mount Sharp, in the middle of Gale Crater, scientists anticipate finding evidence about how the ancient Martian environment changed and evolved.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project's Curiosity rover. More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the mission on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

Source: http://www.nasa.gov

Telescope Door on IRIS Solar Observatory Opens

Today at 11:14 pm PDT (2:14 pm EDT) the IRIS Lockheed Martin instrument team successfully opened the door on NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, which launched June 27, 2013, aboard a Pegasus XL rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. A 60-day check out period began at launch. The first 30 days, which ends July 27, consists of tests and spacecraft system checks. The team will use the remaining 30 days for initial observing runs to fine tune instrument observations. If all is nominal, the team plans to begin normal science mode by August 26.

All data will be available to scientists and the public as soon as the mission begins science operations. The team is looking forward to receiving high-resolution images and spectra soon after first light. Additional mission updates will be provided as warranted.

Large Coronal Hole Near the Sun’s North Pole

The European Space Agency/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, captured this image of a gigantic coronal hole hovering over the sun’s north pole on July 18, 2013, at 9:06 a.m. EDT. Coronal holes are dark, low density regions of the sun’s outermost atmosphere, the corona. They contain little solar material, have lower temperatures, and therefore, appear much darker than their surroundings.

Coronal holes are a typical feature on the sun, though they appear at different places and with more frequency at different times of the sun’s activity cycle. The activity cycle is currently ramping up toward what is known as solar maximum, currently predicted for late 2013. During this portion of the cycle, the number of coronal holes decreases. During solar max, the magnetic fields on the sun reverse and new coronal holes appear near the poles with the opposite magnetic alignment. The coronal holes then increase in size and number, extending further from the poles as the sun moves toward solar minimum again.  At such times, coronal holes have appeared that are even larger than this one.

The holes are important to our understanding of space weather, as they are the source of a high-speed wind of solar particles that streams off the sun some three times faster than the slower wind elsewhere. While it’s unclear what causes coronal holes, they correlate to areas on the sun where magnetic fields soar up and away, failing to loop back down to the surface, as they do elsewhere.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov

Comet Ison Brings Holiday Fireworks

This July Fourth the solar system is showing off some fireworks of its own. Superficially resembling a skyrocket, comet ISON is hurtling toward the sun presently at a whopping 48,000 mph. Its swift motion is captured in this time-lapse movie made from a sequence of pictures taken May 8, 2013, by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. At the time the images were taken, the comet was 403 million miles from Earth, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

The movie shows a sequence of Hubble observations taken over a 43-minute span and compresses this into just five seconds. The comet travels 34,000 miles in this brief video, or 7 percent of the distance between Earth and the moon. The deep-space visitor streaks silently against the background stars. Unlike a firework, the comet is not combusting, but in fact is pretty cold. Its skyrocket-looking tail is really a streamer of gas and dust bleeding off the icy nucleus, which is surrounded by a bright star-like-looking coma. The pressure of the solar wind sweeps the material into a tail, like a breeze blowing a windsock.

As the comet warms as it moves closer to the sun, its rate of sublimation (a process similar to evaporation in which solid matter transitions directly into gas) will increase. The comet will get brighter and its tail will grow longer. The comet is predicted to reach naked-eye visibility in November. The comet is named after the organization that discovered it, the Russia-based International Scientific Optical Network. This false-color, visible-light image was taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc., in Washington, D.C.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov

Antares rocket makes its maiden voyage into space

Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket had its first successful launch today, carrying a mock cargo ship into orbit before the rocket burned up in the atmosphere. It comes after two delays, for both weather and mechanical failure, but resulted in a strong showing for the Antares' two-stage booster engine, which utilizes a combination of liquid and solid fuels. Once testing is complete, the rocket is expected to take over resupply and crew launches to the International Space Station. The dummy cargo ship, which weighed over four tons, included three small Phonesat satellites as part of a NASA research experiment, as well as a larger Dove-1 satellite carried on behalf of telecom company Cosmogia.

It's part of a longterm shift at NASA from public missions to private contracts, which has also seen billion-dollar contracts for Elon Musk's SpaceX project project and a gradual phase-out of NASA's own space shuttle project. As one Nasa administrator told Space.com, "This is the culmination of a plan that we've been on for several years." With this successful launch behind them, Orbital Sciences is planning subsequent launches every three to six months, with two more scheduled for 2013 and at least one more mock-launch before they start ferrying actual cargo.

Russia’s Progress Cargo Spacecraft to Be ‘Buried’ in Pacific

MOSCOW, April 21 (RIA Novosti) - The Progress M-17M cargo spacecraft, which undocked from the International Space Station on April 15, will be "buried" in the Pacific Ocean on Sunday, Russia's Mission Control said. “Progress’s engines will switch to the braking mode at 6:07 p.m. Moscow time [02:07 p.m. GMT] on April 21. The space freighter’s fragments that will not burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere will splash down at 6:58 p.m. Moscow time in the Pacific Ocean far from navigation routes,” Mission Control said.

The Progress M-17M arrived at the orbital station on October 31 last year. It was the second spacecraft in the history of the world orbiter’s operation that performed an accelerated docking with the ISS just under six hours after liftoff from the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan. The first accelerated docking was performed by the M-16M space freighter in August 2012. The Progress M-17M space freighter undocked from the Zvezda module of the Russian segment on the ISS on April 15 and operated in an autonomous mode in the next six days, conducting a series of scientific experiments under the Radar-Progress project.

The departure of Progress M-17M clears a docking port on the Zvezda module for the next Russian resupply vehicle, Progress M-19M, which will blast off aboard a Soyuz-U carrier rocket from the Baikonur space center on April 24. With a record of more than 130 launches since 1972, Progress-family freighters remain the backbone of the Russian space cargo fleet. In addition to their main mission as cargo spacecraft, they are used to adjust the space station’s orbit and conduct scientific experiments.

U.S. Orbital to launch space rocket Sunday

WASHINGTON, April 20 (Xinhua) -- Orbital Sciences Corp., one of two private companies that currently hold a contract with U.S. space agency NASA to fly unmanned cargo missions to the International Space Station, has rescheduled the test flight of its Antares rocket to Sunday.

"Today's Antares launch has been scrubbed due to upper wind conditions," said NASA via its official Twitter ajgn%3Dc6e next launch attempt will be Sunday, April 21 at 5 p.m. EDT ( 2100 GMT)." A Wednesday attempt to launch the rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia, was called off due to "a premature separation of an umbilical connection on the second stage". The Virginia-based Orbital signed a 1.9-billion-U.S.-dollar deal with NASA to fly eight unmanned supply missions using the Antares and Cygnus cargo delivery system.

Another U.S. company, California-based SpaceX, made history when its Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial vehicle in history to successfully attach to the space station in a May 2012 test flight. Dragon has already made three trips to the space station and it still needs to complete another ten to fulfill its 1.6-billion- dollar contract with NASA. The next SpaceX cargo run is scheduled for September.

NASA sees distant planets that seem ideal for life

AP Science Writer= WASHINGTON (AP) — NASA's planet-hunting telescope has discovered two planets that seem like ideal places for some sort of life to flourish. And they are just the right size and in just the right place. One is toasty, the other nippy.

The distant duo are the best candidates for habitable planets that astronomers have found so far, said William Borucki, the chief scientist for NASA's Kepler telescope. And it's got astronomers thinking that similar planets that are just about right for life — "Goldilocks planets" — might be common in the universe. The discoveries, published online Thursday in the journal Science, mark a milestone in the search for planets where life could exist. In the four years that Kepler has been trailing Earth's orbit, the telescope has found 122 exoplanets — planets outside our solar system. In the past, those planets haven't fit all the criteria that would make them right for life of any kind from microbes to man. Many planets aren't in the habitable zone — where it's not too hot and not too cold for liquid water. And until now, the few found in that ideal zone, were just too big. Those are likely to be gas balls like Neptune and that's not suitable for life. Similarly, any Earth-size planets weren't in the right place near their stars, Borucki said. In the Goldilocks game of looking for other planets like ours, the new discoveries, called Kepler-62-e and Kepler-62-f are just right. And they are fraternal twins. They circle the same star, an orange dwarf, and are next to each other — closer together than Earth and its neighbor Mars.

The planets are slightly wider than Earth, but not too big. Kepler-62-e is a bit balmy, like a Hawaiian world and Kepler-62-f is a bit frosty, more Alaskan, Borucki said. The pair is 1,200 light-years away; a light-year is almost 6 trillion miles. "This is the first one where I'm thinking 'Huh, Kepler-62-f really might have life on it'," said study co-author David Charbonneau of Harvard. "This is a very important barrier that's been crossed. Why wouldn't it have life?"

To make it warm enough for life the planet would need greenhouse gas trapping its star's heat because the star only gives off one-fifth the energy of our sun, but that's something that is likely to happen, Borucki said. Both planets are tantalizing. The dozens of researchers who co-authored the study disagree on which one is better suited to life. Lisa Kaltenegger of the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy in Germany likes Kepler-62-e more because it's closer to the star and is warmer. She said it is probably "like Washington in May." That planet is so close it may need clouds to cool off and it's more likely to be an all-water world, unlike any other in our solar system, Kaltenegger said. Astronomers cannot confirm that either planet has water, but based on other research, it's a good assumption, she said. The planets circle a star that is 7 billion years old — about 2.5 billion years older than our sun. Kepler spots the planets as they go between Earth and their star ever so slightly, reducing the light from the star.

"If there's life at all on those planets, it must be very advanced" evolutionarily because the planets are so old, said Borucki. On a watery planet, oceans are prime spots for life, including flying fish that could evolve into birds, Borucki said. And on the rocky planet, with a heavier gravity than Earth, life might look a tad different, he said. In another study also published by some of the same authors in Astrophysical Journal, the astronomers found a different set of planets that are slightly bigger, but probably not gas giants, and circle a star that more resembles our sun. One of those planets is on edge of the habitable zone — maybe in, maybe out — and could be considered a potential third good place for a habitable zone, said Thomas Barclay of NASA's Ames Research Center, which runs the Kepler telescope.

All told, researchers announced seven new exoplanets on Thursday, upping the grand total found so far by Kepler and Earth-bound telescopes to about 850, according to NASA. Pennsylvania State University professor James Kasting called the findings "a big discovery." Kasting and Sara Seager of MIT, who weren't part of the research, pointed out that Kepler's job is to look at one distant corner of the sky and to find what fraction of stars seemed to have the right sized planets in the habitable zone. "This is HUGE," Seager wrote in an email. "Do you realize that as soon as Kepler could find close-to-Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars, Kepler found it. Goldilocks planets must be everywhere."

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Online:

Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

NASA Wallops rolls out the Antares for next week's test launch

WALLOPS ISLAND — The fully integrated Antares rocket was rolled out over the weekend to prepare for next week's long-awaited launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) at NASA Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore. A 135-foot, medium-lift rocket, the Antares will be the largest ever to launch out of Wallops since the flight facility was established in 1945. The launch is set for 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 17, but NASA officials say the larger launch window is 5 to 8 p.m. that day through April 21.

The Antares and its Cygnus cargo spacecraft were developed and built by Orbital Sciences Corporation, a space transportation company based in Dulles, as part of its $1.9 billion contract with NASA to resupply the International Space Station through 2016. According to Orbital, the Antares is capable of lifting about 11,000 pounds of payload such as crew supplies and scientific experiments into low-earth orbit. "In layman's terms, a small-lift is a pickup truck, medium-lift is a semi and heavy-lift would be a train," said Dale K. Nash, executive director of the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority that oversees MARS. "That's a fairly significant step into that market," Nash said, "and resupplying the International Space Station is a very critical, very challenging mission."

According to Wallops Flight Facility spokesman Keith Koehler, about 100 media representatives, including social media and three international new organizations, have been credentialed so far to view the launch from Wallops. If it's successful, a mission later this year will launch the Cygnus to demonstrate it can rendezvous with the space station. If that succeeds, Orbital will conduct eight resupply missions out of MARS. State leaders hope having Orbital as a key customer will establish its spaceport as a major hub for the emerging commercial space industry, attract other commercial customers and bring investment and jobs to the state and region.

Orbital has said Antares launches will be visible throughout Hampton Roads, but the NASA Wallops website indicates two primary viewing locations for launches. One is at the Wallops Visitors Center along Virginia Highway 175, and the other is the beach on the Virginia side of Assateague Island, although capacity is based on such factors as the time of year and the state of the beach.

US not going to make another manned moon landing: NASA

Washington, April 09: NASA chief Charles Bolden has said that the space agency is not sending astronauts to the moon any time soon. Bolden's remarks came during a joint meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board in Washington last week. According to a report by SpacePolitics.com, Bolden said the focus would remain on human missions to asteroids and to Mars.

Last week, Russia rekindled its plans for a robotic moon exploration program, unveiling its first new moon mission since the Soviet Union launched Luna 24 in 1976. Russian space scientists are scripting a new plan to reconnect with the moon, one scientist explained. Igor Mitrofanov of the Institute for Space Research said that exploration of the moon is an important part of the program. Russia is a spacefaring country not only with the robotic but also manned flight, he added.