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https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nine-year-old-mars-rover-passes-40-year-old-record

Nine-Year-Old Mars Rover Passes 40-Year-Old Record

NASA's Mars rover Opportunity now holds the record for farthest driving by a NASA vehicle on a world away from Earth, passing a mark set by an Apollo astronaut-driven rover.

PASADENA, Calif. -- While Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt visited Earth's moon for three days in December 1972, they drove their mission's Lunar Roving Vehicle 19.3 nautical miles (22.210 statute miles or 35.744 kilometers). That was the farthest total distance for any NASA vehicle driving on a world other than Earth until yesterday.The team operating NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity received confirmation in a transmission from Mars today that the rover drove 263 feet (80 meters) on Thursday, bringing Opportunity's total odometry since landing on Mars in January 2004 to 22.220 statute miles (35.760 kilometers).Cernan discussed this prospect a few days ago with Opportunity team member Jim Rice of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The Apollo 17 astronaut said, "The record we established with a roving vehicle was made to be broken, and I'm excited and proud to be able to pass the torch to Opportunity."The international record for driving distance on another world is still held by the Soviet Union's remote-controlled Lunokhod 2 rover, which traveled 23 miles (37 kilometers) on the surface of Earth's moon in 1973.Opportunity began a multi-week trek this week from an area where it has been working since mid-2011, the "Cape York" segment of the rim of Endeavour Crater, to an area about 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers) away, "Solander Point."NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL also manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project and its rover, Curiosity, which landed on Mars in August 2012.For more information about Opportunity, visithttp://www.nasa.gov/roversandhttp://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov. You can follow the project on Twitter and on Facebook at:http://twitter.com/MarsRoversandhttp://www.facebook.com/mars.rovers.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/dawn-finds-possible-ancient-ocean-remnants-at-ceres

Dawn Finds Possible Ancient Ocean Remnants at Ceres

Ceres' crust as we see it today, with its mixture of ice, salts and hydrated materials, represents most of the dwarf planet's ancient ocean, scientists say.

Minerals containing water are widespread on Ceres, suggesting the dwarf planet may have had a global ocean in the past. What became of that ocean? Could Ceres still have liquid today? Two new studies from NASA's Dawn mission shed light on these questions.The Dawn team found that Ceres' crust is a mixture of ice, salts and hydrated materials that were subjected to past and possibly recent geologic activity, and that this crust represents most of that ancient ocean. The second study builds off the first and suggests there is a softer, easily deformable layer beneath Ceres' rigid surface crust, which could be the signature of residual liquid left over from the ocean, too."More and more, we are learning that Ceres is a complex, dynamic world that may have hosted a lot of liquid water in the past, and may still have some underground," said Julie Castillo-Rogez, Dawn project scientist and co-author of the studies, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.What's inside Ceres? Gravity will tell.Landing on Ceres to investigate its interior would be technically challenging and would risk contaminating the dwarf planet. Instead, scientists use Dawn's observations in orbit to measure Ceres' gravity, in order to estimate its composition and interior structure.The first of the two studies, led by Anton Ermakov, a postdoctoral researcher at JPL, used shape and gravity data measurements from the Dawn mission to determine the internal structure and composition of Ceres. The measurements came from observing the spacecraft's motions with NASA's Deep Space Network to track small changes in the spacecraft's orbit. This study is published in theJournal of Geophysical Research.Ermakov and his colleagues' research supports the possibility that Ceres is geologically active -- if not now, then it may have been in the recent past. Three craters -- Occator, Kerwan and Yalode -- and Ceres' solitary tall mountain, Ahuna Mons, are all associated with "gravity anomalies." This means discrepancies between the scientists' models of Ceres' gravity and what Dawn observed in these four locations can be associated with subsurface structures."Ceres has an abundance of gravity anomalies associated with outstanding geologic features," Ermakov said. In the cases of Ahuna Mons and Occator, the anomalies can be used to better understand the origin of these features, which are believed to be different expressions of cryovolcanism.The study found the crust's density to be relatively low, closer to that of ice than rocks. However, a study by Dawn guest investigator Michael Bland of the U.S. Geological Survey indicated that ice is too soft to be the dominant component of Ceres' strong crust. So, how can Ceres' crust be as light as ice in terms of density, but simultaneously much stronger? To answer this question, another team modeled how Ceres' surface evolved with time.A 'Fossil' Ocean at CeresThe second study, led by Roger Fu at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, investigated the strength and composition of Ceres' crust and deeper interior by studying the dwarf planet's topography. This study is published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science LettersBy studying how topography evolves on a planetary body, scientists can understand the composition of its interior. A strong, rock-dominated crust can remain unchanged over the 4.5-billion-year-old age of the solar system, while a weak crust rich in ices and salts would deform over that time.By modeling how Ceres' crust flows, Fu and colleagues found it is likely a mixture of ice, salts, rock and an additional component believed to be clathrate hydrate. A clathrate hydrate is a cage of water molecules surrounding a gas molecule. This structure is 100 to 1,000 times stronger than water ice, despite having nearly the same density.The researchers believe Ceres once had more pronounced surface features, but they have smoothed out over time. This type of flattening of mountains and valleys requires a high-strength crust resting on a more deformable layer, which Fu and colleagues interpret to contain a little bit of liquid.The team thinks most of Ceres' ancient ocean is now frozen and bound up in the crust, remaining in the form of ice, clathrate hydrates and salts. It has mostly been that way for more than 4 billion years. But if there is residual liquid underneath, that ocean is not yet entirely frozen. This is consistent with several thermal evolution models of Ceres published prior to Dawn's arrival there, supporting the idea that Ceres' deeper interior contains liquid left over from its ancient ocean.The Dawn mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of mission participants, visit:https://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/missionMore information about Dawn is available at the following sites:https://www.nasa.gov/dawnhttps://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-space-telescope-finds-fewer-asteroids-near-earth

NASA Space Telescope Finds Fewer Asteroids Near Earth

New observations by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, show there are significantly fewer near-Earth asteroids in the mid-size range than previously thought.

PASADENA, Calif. -- New observations by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, show there are significantly fewer near-Earth asteroids in the mid-size range than previously thought. The findings also indicate NASA has found more than 90 percent of the largest near-Earth asteroids, meeting a goal agreed to with Congress in 1998.Astronomers now estimate there are roughly 19,500 -- not 35,000 -- mid-size near-Earth asteroids. Scientists say this improved understanding of the population may indicate the hazard to Earth could be somewhat less than previously thought. However, the majority of these mid-size asteroids remain to be discovered. More research also is needed to determine if fewer mid-size objects (between 330 and 3,300-feet wide) also mean fewer potentially hazardous asteroids, those that come closest to Earth.The results come from the most accurate census to date of near-Earth asteroids, the space rocks that orbit within 120 million miles (195 million kilometers) of the sun into Earth's orbital vicinity. WISE observed infrared light from those in the middle to large-size category. The survey project, called NEOWISE, is the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE mission. Study results appear in the Astrophysical Journal."NEOWISE allowed us to take a look at a more representative slice of the near-Earth asteroid numbers and make better estimates about the whole population," said Amy Mainzer, lead author of the new study and principal investigator for the NEOWISE project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It's like a population census, where you poll a small group of people to draw conclusions about the entire country."WISE scanned the entire celestial sky twice in infrared light between January 2010 and February 2011, continuously snapping pictures of everything from distant galaxies to near-Earth asteroids and comets. NEOWISE observed more than 100 thousand asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, in addition to at least 585 near Earth.WISE captured a more accurate sample of the asteroid population than previous visible-light surveys because its infrared detectors could see both dark and light objects. It is difficult for visible-light telescopes to see the dim amounts of visible-light reflected by dark asteroids. Infrared-sensing telescopes detect an object's heat, which is dependent on size and not reflective properties.Though the WISE data reveal only a small decline in the estimated numbers for the largest near-Earth asteroids, which are 3,300 feet (1 kilometer) and larger, they show 93 percent of the estimated population have been found. This fulfills the initial "Spaceguard" goal agreed to with Congress. These large asteroids are about the size of a small mountain and would have global consequences if they were to strike Earth. The new data revise their total numbers from about 1,000 down to 981, of which 911 already have been found. None of them represents a threat to Earth in the next few centuries. It is believed that all near-Earth asteroids approximately 6 miles (10 kilometers) across, as big as the one thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs, have been found."The risk of a really large asteroid impacting the Earth before we could find and warn of it has been substantially reduced," said Tim Spahr, the director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.The situation is different for the mid-size asteroids, which could destroy a metropolitan area if they were to impact in the wrong place. The NEOWISE results find a larger decline in the estimated population for these bodies than what was observed for the largest asteroids. So far, the Spaceguard effort has found and is tracking more than 5,200 near-Earth asteroids 330 feet or larger, leaving more than an estimated 15,000 still to discover. In addition, scientists estimate there are more than a million unknown smaller near-Earth asteroids that could cause damage if they were to impact Earth."NEOWISE was just the latest asset NASA has used to find Earth's nearest neighbors," said Lindley Johnson, program executive for the Near Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The results complement ground-based observer efforts over the past 12 years. These observers continue to track these objects and find even more."WISE is managed and operated by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at the University of California, Los Angeles. The WISE science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing occur at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology.For more information about the mission, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/wise.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/jpl-to-host-evening-lecture-on-galileo-mission

JPL to Host Evening Lecture on Galileo Mission

Galileo Project Scientist Dr. Torrence V. Johnson will host a lecture entitled "The Galileo Mission: Uncovering the Mysteries of Jupiter and its Moons" at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's von Karman Auditorium on Thursday, December 12, at 7 p.m. This lecture is open to the public. Admission is free and seating is on a first-come, first served basis. The event will last approximately two hours.

Galileo Project Scientist Dr. Torrence V. Johnson will host a lecture entitled "The Galileo Mission: Uncovering the Mysteries of Jupiter and its Moons" at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's von Karman Auditorium on Thursday, December 12, at 7 p.m. This lecture is open to the public. Admission is free and seating is on a first-come, first served basis. The event will last approximately two hours.Launched in 1989 aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, the Galileo spacecraft successfully entered orbit around Jupiter on December 7, 1995 after deploying its instrument-laden probe into the turbulent depths of Jupiter's atmosphere. The probe relayed to Earth the first-ever direct measurements of Jupiter's chemistry, winds, and atmosphere, finding the planet drier and windier than expected.Galileo's scientific focus in the last year has been the study of the Jovian atmosphere, magnetic environment, and four large satellites - Io, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto. Striking images of Jupiter and its moon taken during a year's worth of flybys will be presented. In addition, Johnson will describe the scientific discoveries made possible by the sophisticated instruments onboard the spacecraft. The Galileo mission is scheduled to continue studying the Jovian system until December 7, 1997.Dr. Torrence V. Johnson is currently Project Scientist of the Galileo mission. He received his Ph.D in Planetary Science from the California Institute of Technology in 1970, is a co investigator for the Galileo Near Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS) and a team member of the Cassini mission and Voyager mission imaging science teams. In 1980, he received a NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for studies of the Galilean satellites, and received another in 1981 for interpretation of Voyager imaging data.This lecture is one of the JPL von Karman Lecture Series hosted monthly by the JPL Public Information Office. JPL is located at 4800 Oak Grove Dr., Pasadena. For directions or further information, call (818) 354-5011. An internet site dedicated to the von Karman Lecture Series is located athttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/lecture/.818-354-5011

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/dawn-obtains-first-low-altitude-images-of-vesta

Dawn Obtains First Low Altitude Images of Vesta

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has sent back the first images of the giant asteroid Vesta from its low-altitude mapping orbit.

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Dawn spacecraft has sent back the first images of the giant asteroid Vesta from its low-altitude mapping orbit. The images, obtained by the framing camera, show the stippled and lumpy surface in detail never seen before, piquing the curiosity of scientists who are studying Vesta for clues about the solar system's early history.At this detailed resolution, the surface shows abundant small craters, and textures such as small grooves and lineaments that are reminiscent of the structures seen in low-resolution data from the higher-altitude orbits. Also, this fine scale highlights small outcrops of bright and dark material.A gallery of images can be found online at:http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/dawn/multimedia/gallery-index.html.The images were returned to Earth on Dec. 13.  Dawn scientists plan to acquire data in the low-altitude mapping orbit for at least 10 weeks. The primary science objectives in this orbit are to learn about the elemental composition of Vesta's surface with the gamma ray and neutron detector and to probe the interior structure of the asteroid by measuring the gravity field.The Dawn mission to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. The Dawn Framing Cameras have been developed and built under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, with significant contributions by DLR German Aerospace Center, Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The framing camera project is funded by the Max Planck Society, DLR, and NASA/JPL.More information about the Dawn mission is online at:http://www.nasa.gov/dawnandhttp://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/historic-deep-space-network-antenna-starts-major-surgery

Historic Deep Space Network Antenna Starts Major Surgery

Like a hard-driving athlete whose joints need help, the giant "Mars antenna" at NASA's Deep Space Network site in Goldstone, Calif. has begun major, delicate surgery.

Like a hard-driving athlete whose joints need help, the giant "Mars antenna" at NASA's Deep Space Network site in Goldstone, Calif. has begun major, delicate surgery. The operation on the historic 70-meter-wide (230-foot) antenna, which has received data and sent commands to deep space missions for over 40 years, will replace a portion of the hydrostatic bearing assembly. This assembly enables the antenna to rotate horizontally.The rigorous engineering plans call for lifting about 4 million kilograms (9 million pounds) of finely tuned scientific instruments a height of about 5 millimeters (0.2 inches) so workers can replace the steel runner, walls and supporting grout. This is the first time the runner has been replaced on the Mars antenna.The operation, which will cost about $1.25 million, has a design life of 20 years."This antenna has been a workhorse for NASA/JPL for over 40 years," said Alaudin Bhanji, Deep Space Network Project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "It has provided a critical lifeline to dozens of missions, while enabling scientific results that have enriched the hearts and minds of generations. We want it to continue doing so."The repair will be done slowly because of the scale of the task, with an expected completion in early November. During that time, workers will also be replacing the elevation bearings, which enable the antenna to track up and down from the horizon. The network will still be able to provide full coverage for deep space missions by maximizing use of the two other 70-meter antennas at Deep Space complexes near Madrid, Spain, and Canberra, Australia, and arraying several smaller 34-meter (110-foot) antennas together.NASA built the Mars antenna when missions began venturing beyond the orbit of Earth and needed more powerful communications tools. The Mars antenna was the first of the giant antennas designed to receive weak signals and transmit very strong ones far out into space, featuring a 64-meter-wide (210-foot) dish when it became operational in 1966. (The dish was upgraded from 64 to 70 meters in 1988 to enable the antenna to track NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft as it encountered Neptune and Uranus.)While officially dubbed Deep Space Station 14, the antenna picked up the Mars name from its first task: tracking the Mariner 4 spacecraft, which had been lost by smaller antennas after its historic flyby of Mars. Through its history, the Mars antenna has supported missions including Pioneer, Cassini and the Mars Exploration Rovers. It received Neil Armstrong's famous communiqué from Apollo 11: "That's one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind." It has also helped with imaging nearby planets, asteroids and comets by bouncing its powerful radar signal off the objects of study.A flat, stable surface is critical for the Mars antenna to rotate slowly as it tracks spacecraft. Three steel pads support the weight of the antenna rotating structure, dish and other communications equipment above the circular steel runner. A film of oil about the thickness of a sheet of paper -- about 0.25 millimeters (0.010 inches) -- is produced by a hydraulic system to float the three pads.After decades of constant use, oil has seeped through the runner joints, slowly degrading the structural integrity of the cement-based grout that supports it. Rather than continuing on a weekly schedule to adjust shims underneath the runner to keep it flat, Deep Space Network managers decided to replace the whole runner assembly."As with any large, rotating structure that has operated almost 24 hours per day, seven days per week for over 40 years, we eventually have to replace major elements," said Wayne Sible, the network's deputy project manager at JPL. "We need to replace those worn parts so we can get another 20 years of valuable service from this national treasure."Over the next few months, workers will lay a new epoxy grout that is impervious to oil and fit the antenna with a thicker runner with more tightly sealed joints. They will then test that the rotation is smooth before turning the antenna back on again."The runner replacement task has been in development for close to two years," said JPL's Peter Hames, who is responsible for maintaining the network's antennas. "We've been testing and evaluating modern epoxy grouts, which were unavailable when the antenna was built, updating the design of the runner and designing a replacement process that has to be performed without completely disassembling the antenna. We've had to make sure we've reviewed it for practicality and safety."JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Deep Space Network for NASA Headquarters, Washington. More information about the Deep Space Network is online at:http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn/index.html.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-honor-awards-1985

NASA Honor Awards 1985

Achievements as diverse as comet studies and managing programs for small businesses have earned 1985 NASA Honor Awards for 20 employees of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Achievements as diverse as comet studies and managing programs for small businesses have earned 1985 NASA Honor Awards for 20 employees of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Medals for those honorees, and commendations for seven JPL work teams being honored with group awards, will be presented in ceremony Thursday, Dec. 5, in JPL's von Karman Auditorium. One member of the public will also receive an individual award.JPL Director Lew Allen will preside during the ceremonies, beginning at 9:30 a.m. Dr. Burton I. Edelson, NASA associate administrator for space science and applications, will make remarks and help Dr. Allen present the awards.The Honor Awards are given annually in recognition of outstanding achievements throughout NASA. This year's citations at JPL are for contributions in science, engineering, management, exceptional service and for variety of group efforts.Award winners are: Exceptional Scientific Achievement MedalFour JPL employees are to receive this award:-- Amitava Gupta of Pasadena, for exceptional contributions in understanding the effects of space environment on polymeric materials.-- Joseph Maserjian of La Crescenta, for pioneering efforts studying radiation effects in metal-oxide- semiconductor integrated circuits.-- Zdenek Sekanina of La Canada, for outstanding contributions in understanding the dynamics of cometary nuclei and the physical processes that govern their dust emissions.-- Joe W. Waters of La Canada, for exceptional achievements in development and application of microwave and submillimeter remote sensing technology. Exceptional Engineering Achievement MedalThree employees will receive this award:-- Robert E. Freeland of La Crescenta, for exceptional contributions to development and application of structures technology to large space antennas.-- William G. Melbourne of La Canada, for outstanding leadership in spacecraft tracking, orbit determination and navigation, and for design of precise geodetic measurement technique using Global Positioning System satellites.-- Robert Nathan of Pasadena, for exceptional contributions to planetary and scientific data analysis through conception and development of image-processing techniques. Oustanding Leadership MedalTwo JPL managers are to receive this medal:-- Duane F. Dipprey of La Canada, for exceptional skill as an engineering manager and versatility in dealing with broad array of technical fields.-- Gael F. Squibb of La Crescenta, for outstanding contributions as Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) project manager, especially in handling post-flight activities and establishing the IRAS Data Processing and Analysis Center. Exceptional Service MedalEleven JPL employees will receive this award:-- Charles Beichman of Hollywood, for variety of contributions to the IRAS project, including hardware and software development, science planning and post-flight data analysis.-- Edward R. Caro of Monterey Park, for exceptional achievements in development and application of spaceborne synthetic aperture radar technology.-- Elmer L. Floyd of La Crescenta, for sustained technical contributions in the development of variety of mechanical systems for spacecraft, flight instruments and in civil applications.-- Terry W. Koerner of La Canada, for exceptional contributions in development and demonstration of techniques for analyzing, troubleshooting and testing power subsystems for spacecraft.-- Thomas H. May of Pasadena, for extraordinary initiative in increasing the effectiveness of the Small Business and Small Disadvantaged Business programs at JPL.-- Sylvia L. Miller of Arcadia, for outstanding contributions in design and implementation of the all-sky survey for the IRAS mission.-- Eni G. Njoku of Pasadena, for noteworthy contributions to the field of microwave remote sensing, particularly in measuring sea surface temperature from space.-- Donald G. Rea of Pasadena, for consistently outstanding efforts in planning and coordination of scientific research programs, studies of future spaceflight experiments and projects, and conducting support research and technology programs at JPL.-- Bruce T. Tsurutani of Glendale, for contributions to heliospheric plasma physics and, particularly, for work on the structure and dynamics of the Earth's distant magnetic tail using International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE) observations.-- Gerald E. Voecks of La Crescenta, for success in development of catalytic processes for generation of hydrogen from liquid fuels, and for assisting transfer of such technology to the industrial production of fuel cells.-- Ivan Dale Wells of Hesperia, for exceptional engineering contributions to the successful repair of the bearing and pedestal of the Deep Space Network's 64-meter Goldstone antenna. Public Service MedalRaymond E. Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis will receive this medal for his exceptional leadership and participation in number of advisory groups on science data management for NASA. Group Achievement AwardSeven groups are to be recognized in this category:-- Goldstone 64-Meter Antenna Repair Team;-- Networks Consolidation Program Team;-- Photographic Support Team for the Federal Aviation Agency's aircraft controlled impact demonstration;-- Pilot Ocean Data System Development Team;-- Satellite Emission Radio Interferometry Earth Surveying (SERIES-X) Project Development Team;-- Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR-B) Development Team;-- NASA Office of Inspector General at JPL.818-354-5011

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-neowise-mission-spies-one-comet-maybe-two

NASA's NEOWISE Mission Spies One Comet, Maybe Two

NASA's NEOWISE mission has recently discovered some celestial objects traveling through our neighborhood, including one on the blurry line between asteroid and comet.

NASA's NEOWISE mission has recently discovered some celestial objects traveling through our neighborhood, including one on the blurry line between asteroid and comet. Another--definitely a comet--might be seen with binoculars through next week.An object called 2016 WF9 was detected by the NEOWISE project on Nov. 27, 2016. It's in an orbit that takes it on a scenic tour of our solar system. At its farthest distance from the sun, it approaches Jupiter's orbit. Over the course of 4.9 Earth-years, it travels inward, passing under the main asteroid belt and the orbit of Mars until it swings just inside Earth's own orbit. After that, it heads back toward the outer solar system. Objects in these types of orbits have multiple possible origins; it might once have been a comet, or it could have strayed from a population of dark objects in the main asteroid belt.2016 WF9 will approach Earth's orbit on Feb. 25, 2017. At a distance of nearly 32 million miles (51 million kilometers) from Earth, this pass will not bring it particularly close. The trajectory of 2016 WF9 is well understood, and the object is not a threat to Earth for the foreseeable future.A different object, discovered by NEOWISE a month earlier, is more clearly a comet, releasing dust as it nears the sun. This comet, C/2016 U1 NEOWISE, "has a good chance of becoming visible through a good pair of binoculars, although we can't be sure because a comet's brightness is notoriously unpredictable," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.As seen from the northern hemisphere during the first week of 2017, comet C/2016 U1 NEOWISE will be in the southeastern sky shortly before dawn. It is moving farther south each day and it will reach its closest point to the sun, inside the orbit of Mercury, on Jan. 14, before heading back out to the outer reaches of the solar system for an orbit lasting thousands of years. While it will be visible to skywatchers at Earth, it is not considered a threat to our planet either.NEOWISE is the asteroid-and-comet-hunting portion of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. After discovering more than 34,000 asteroids during its original mission, NEOWISE was brought out of hibernation in December of 2013 to find and learn more about asteroids and comets that could pose an impact hazard to Earth. If 2016 WF9 turns out to be a comet, it would be the 10th discovered since reactivation. If it turns out to be an asteroid, it would be the 100th discovered since reactivation.What NEOWISE scientists do know is that 2016 WF9 is relatively large: roughly 0.3 to 0.6 mile (0.5 to 1 kilometer) across.It is also rather dark, reflecting only a few percent of the light that falls on its surface. This body resembles a comet in its reflectivity and orbit, but appears to lack the characteristic dust and gas cloud that defines a comet."2016 WF9 could have cometary origins," said Deputy Principal Investigator James "Gerbs" Bauer at JPL. "This object illustrates that the boundary between asteroids and comets is a blurry one; perhaps over time this object has lost the majority of the volatiles that linger on or just under its surface."Near-Earth objects (NEOs) absorb most of the light that falls on them and re-emit that energy at infrared wavelengths. This enables NEOWISE's infrared detectors to study both dark and light-colored NEOs with nearly equal clarity and sensitivity."These are quite dark objects," said NEOWISE team member Joseph Masiero, "Think of new asphalt on streets; these objects would look like charcoal, or in some cases are even darker than that."NEOWISE data have been used to measure the size of each near-Earth object it observes. Thirty-one asteroids that NEOWISE has discovered pass within about 20 lunar distances from Earth's orbit, and 19 are more than 460 feet (140 meters) in size but reflect less than 10 percent of the sunlight that falls on them.The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has completed its seventh year in space after being launched on Dec. 14, 2009.Data from the NEOWISE mission are available on a website for the public and scientific community to use. A guide to the NEOWISE data release, data access instructions and supporting documentation are available at:http://wise2.ipac.caltech.edu/docs/release/neowise/Access to the NEOWISE data products is available via the on-line and API services of the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive.A list of peer-reviewed papers using the NEOWISE data is available at:http://neowise.ipac.caltech.edu/publications.html

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/dawn-sends-sharper-scenes-from-ceres

Dawn Sends Sharper Scenes from Ceres

The closest-yet views of Ceres, delivered by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, show the small world's features in unprecedented detail, including Ceres' tall, conical mountain; crater formation features and narrow, braided fractures.

The closest-yet views of Ceres, delivered by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, show the small world's features in unprecedented detail, including Ceres' tall, conical mountain; crater formation features and narrow, braided fractures."Dawn is performing flawlessly in this new orbit as it conducts its ambitious exploration. The spacecraft's view is now three times as sharp as in its previous mapping orbit, revealing exciting new details of this intriguing dwarf planet," said Marc Rayman, Dawn's chief engineer and mission director, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.At its current orbital altitude of 915 miles (1,470 kilometers), Dawn takes 11 days to capture and return images of Ceres' whole surface. Each 11-day cycle consists of 14 orbits. Over the next two months, the spacecraft will map the entirety of Ceres six times.The spacecraft is using its framing camera to extensively map the surface, enabling 3-D modeling. Every image from this orbit has a resolution of 450 feet (140 meters) per pixel, and covers less than 1 percent of the surface of Ceres.At the same time, Dawn's visible and infrared mapping spectrometer is collecting data that will give scientists a better understanding of the minerals found on Ceres' surface.Engineers and scientists will also refine their measurements of Ceres' gravity field, which will help mission planners in designing Dawn's next orbit -- its lowest -- as well as the journey to get there. In late October, Dawn will begin spiraling toward this final orbit, which will be at an altitude of 230 miles (375 kilometers).Dawn is the first mission to visit a dwarf planet, and the first to orbit two distinct solar system targets. It orbited protoplanet Vesta for 14 months in 2011 and 2012, and arrived at Ceres on March 6, 2015.Dawn's mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of mission participants, visit:http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/missionMore information about Dawn is available at the following sites:http://dawn.jpl.nasa.govhttp://www.nasa.gov/dawn

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/solar-storms-linked-to-magnetic-disturbances-on-earth

Solar Storms Linked to Magnetic Disturbances on Earth

Scientists observing solar storms with a soft x-ray telescope on board the orbiting Japanese Yohkoh satellite have found a direct link between the solar eruptions and magnetic storms in Earth's upper atmosphere.

Scientists observing solar storms with a soft x-ray telescope on board the orbiting Japanese Yohkoh satellite have found a direct link between the solar eruptions and magnetic storms in Earth's upper atmosphere."This is the first time that we have been able to see these high temperature regions at the center of the Sun in x-ray images," said Dr. Hugh Hudson, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, during an international conference on magnetic storms held Feb. 12-16 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory."The Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, dims just before these particles are ejected, allowing us to watch the bright flow of material as it is flung into space," Hudson told physicists, power and utility company representatives and members of the Department of Energy's national laboratories. "It's this dimming signature in the Sun's corona that tells us a magnetic storm is on the way."All of the causes of magnetic storms originate at the Sun, researchers reported at the weeklong conference, co-sponsored by the American Geophysical Union and the National Science Foundation. The particle storms begin when large amounts of coronal mass break away from the Sun and travel rapidly toward Earth."Magnetic storms are caused by abrupt, intense events on the Sun, which impact Earth's magnetic field," said Dr. Bruce Tsurutani, a plasma physicist at JPL and co-convener of the conference. "If we can predict that these storms will occur, certainly we will be able to reduce the cost of damage on Earth."New observations at latitudes above and below the Sun's equator point to that possibility. Scientists observing these events as they occur can give industries hardest hit, such as the power and electric utilities, 50 to 70 hours of advance warning that a magnetic disturbance is imminent."These releases of great amounts of the outer corona travel very rapidly toward Earth, at thousands of kilometers per second and, in some cases, tens of thousands of kilometers per second," explained Dr. Douglas Hamilton, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland. "Magnetic clouds take two to three days to arrive at Earth."Major disturbances from the Sun erupt about every three to four years, resulting in widespread power blackouts. The most severe in recent years struck in 1989, when an outage in the Quebec province almost shut down the entire northeastern U.S. grid as well, said John Kappenman, an engineer at Minnesota Power.Sometimes the collisions produce auroras, shimmering curtains of light in the northern and southern hemispheres. Other times they create large fluctuating currents that wreck havoc with technologies on the ground. Kappenman said that with a few days advance notice, power and utility companies could mitigate damage by shutting down transformers or redirecting power through alternate grids.Once the storms enter Earth's ionosphere, they alter the composition of the Van Allen radiation belts, Hamilton said. During intense solar storms, large amounts of electrically charged oxygen are drawn out of Earth's upper atmosphere and become part of the radiation belts."We once thought that the Van Allen radiation belts were made up of electrons and protons, the simplest subatomic charged particles, but we know now that in these very large storms, a vast amount of electrically charged oxygen is drawn into them and can intensify the belts by a factor of 10 to 20," Hamilton said."We're learning that the Earth is not just a passive bystander getting buffeted by clouds of solar gas," he said. "Rather, the Earth itself, the very tenuous upper reaches of the atmosphere, contain a lot of electrically charged matter that contributes new particles to the Van Allen belt."North America is, by far, the most vulnerable to magnetic fluctuations, Kappenman added. The landmass is closest to Earth's magnetic north pole and outranks other industrial centers as having the largest and most complex power grids.A recent power industry study, spanning 25 years of magnetic storms, revealed correlations between disturbances in the upper atmosphere and blackouts at power plants from Maine to California, he said."Rock geologies in North America are extremely vulnerable to these magnetic storms because they complicate or add coupling effects to power systems," Kappenman said. "The failures are occurring in fairly large numbers and we see patterns in failure rates in different parts of the country."New England, for example, has a transformer failure rate that is 60 percent higher than other regions of the country due to its geological composition. The Pacific Northwest, similarly, revealed a transformer failure rate 48 percent higher than other regions of the U.S."These power outages are one of the biggest nightmares we live with in the power industry," Kappenman said, "in that the duration of an outage could be several hours, possibly extending into days. The cost to industry well exceeds $100 million in failed equipment alone. These storms not only hamper critical public services but cause life threatening situations."NASA is participating in the international Solar-Terrestrial Physics program to launch new spacecraft to study space weather for the benefit of human life. With new spacecraft such as Polar and the Advanced Composition Explorer, researchers believe storm forecasting will reach new levels of accuracy and allow industries enough time to safeguard communities all over the world.818-354-5011

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/5-things-to-know-about-how-swot-will-look-at-the-worlds-water

5 Things to Know About How SWOT Will Look at the World’s Water

The international Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission will provide high-definition data on the salt- and fresh water on Earth’s surface.

On Dec. 12, NASA will launch the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite into Earth orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Themission is a collaborative effortbetween NASA and the French space agency Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) – with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the UK Space Agency – that will survey water on more than 90% of the planet’s surface.The satellite will measure the height of water in Earth’s freshwater bodies and the ocean, providing insights into how the ocean influences climate change; how a warming world affects lakes, rivers, and reservoirs; and how communities can better prepare for disasters, like floods.Here are five ways that SWOT will change what we know about water on Earth:1. SWOT will survey nearly all water on Earth’s surface for the first time.Water is essential for life on this planet. But it also plays a critical role in storing and moving much of the excess heat and carbon trapped in Earth’s atmosphere by greenhouse gas emissions. It influences our weather and climate as well. SWOT will help researchers track Earth’s water budget – where the water is today, where it’s coming from, and where it’s going to be tomorrow. This is key to understanding how water resources are changing, what impact those changes will have on local environments, and how the ocean reacts to and influences climate change.The SWOT mission will collection information on the height of water in Earth’s lakes, rivers, reservoirs, and ocean.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CNES/Thales Alenia Space2. SWOT will see Earth’s water in higher definition than ever before.The spacecraft’s science instruments will view the planet’s freshwater bodies and the ocean with unprecedented clarity. SWOT will be able to collect data on ocean features less than 60 miles (100 kilometers) across, helping to improve researchers’ understanding of the ocean’s role in climate change. Earth’s seas have absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers think that short-lived ocean features, such as fronts and eddies, absorb a lot of that heat – and the extra carbon that produced it.By providing a high-definition view of freshwater bodies, SWOT will help generate a much more complete picture of Earth’s water budget. Many big rivers remain a mystery to researchers, who can’t outfit them with monitoring instruments for various reasons, including inaccessibility. The spacecraft’s instruments will observe the entire length of nearly all rivers wider than 330 feet (100 meters), viewing them in three dimensions for the first time. Likewise, where ground and satellite technologies currently provide data on only a few thousand of the world’s largest lakes, SWOT will expand that number to over a million lakes larger than 15 acres (62,500 square meters).Data from the SWOT satellite will help people monitor freshwater resources and aid communities prepare for the consequences of a changing climate.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/CNES/Thales Alenia Space3. The satellite will address some of the most pressing climate change questions of our time.An important part of predicting our future climate is determining at what point the ocean slows down the absorption of excess heat trapped in the atmosphere and starts releasing it back into the air, where it could accelerate global warming. SWOT will provide crucial information about this global ocean-atmosphere heat exchange, enabling researchers to test and improve climate forecasts. In addition, the satellite will help fill gaps in researchers’ picture of how sea level is changing along coastlines, offering insights that can then be used to improve computer models for sea level rise projections and the forecasting of coastal floods.4. SWOT data will be used to inform decisions about our daily lives.Climate change is also accelerating Earth’s water cycle, leading to more volatile precipitation patterns, including torrential downpours and extreme droughts. Some communities around the world will thus experience floods while other suffer droughts. SWOT data will be used to monitor drought conditions in lakes and improve flood forecasts for rivers, providing essential information to water management agencies, disaster preparedness agencies, universities, civil engineers, and others who need to track water in their local areas.Get the Latest JPL NewsSUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER5. This mission is paving the way for future NASA Earth missions while also building on a long-standing international partnership.With its innovative technology and commitment to engaging a diverse community of people who plan to use the mission’s data, SWOT is laying a path for future Earth-observing missions. Measurements from SWOT – and the tools to support researchers in analyzing the information – will be free and accessible. This will help to foster research and applications activities by a wide range of users, including those who may not usually have the opportunity to access this knowledge.Such an ambitious mission is possible because of a decades-long collaboration between NASA and CNES that started in the 1980s to monitor Earth’s ocean. This partnership pioneered the use of a space-based instrument called an altimeter to study sea level with the launch of theTOPEX/Poseidonsatellite in 1992. The NASA-CNES partnership has continued uninterrupted for three decades and has expanded to encompass work with other agencies, including the CSA and the UK Space Agency for SWOT, as well as ESA (European Space Agency), the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, and the European Commission for theSentinel-6 Michael Freilichsatellite, which launched in November 2020.More About the MissionSWOT is being jointly developed by NASA and CNES, with contributions from the CSA and the UK Space Agency. JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, leads the U.S. component of the project. For the flight system payload, NASA is providing the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) instrument, a GPS science receiver, a laser retroreflector, a two-beam microwave radiometer, and NASA instrument operations. CNES is providing the Doppler Orbitography and Radioposition Integrated by Satellite (DORIS) system, the dual frequency Poseidon altimeter (developed by Thales Alenia Space), the KaRIn radio-frequency subsystem (together with Thales Alenia Space and with support from the UK Space Agency), the satellite platform, and ground control segment. CSA is providing the KaRIn high-power transmitter assembly. NASA is providing the launch vehicle and associated launch services.To learn more about SWOT, visit:https://swot.jpl.nasa.gov/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/cassini-sees-seasonal-rains-transform-titans-surface

Cassini Sees Seasonal Rains Transform Titan's Surface

As spring continues to unfold at Saturn, April showers on the planet's largest moon, Titan, have brought methane rain to its equatorial deserts, as revealed by Cassini.

PASADENA, Calif. -- As spring continues to unfold at Saturn, April showers on the planet's largest moon, Titan, have brought methane rain to its equatorial deserts, as revealed in images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This is the first time scientists have obtained current evidence of rain soaking Titan's surface at low latitudes.Extensive rain from large cloud systems, spotted by Cassini's cameras in late 2010, has apparently darkened the surface of the moon. The best explanation is these areas remained wet after methane rainstorms. The observations released today in the journal Science, combined with earlier results in Geophysical Research Letters last month, show the weather systems of Titan's thick atmosphere and the changes wrought on its surface are affected by the changing seasons."It's amazing to be watching such familiar activity as rainstorms and seasonal changes in weather patterns on a distant, icy satellite," said Elizabeth Turtle, a Cassini imaging team associate at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Md., and lead author of today's publication. "These observations are helping us to understand how Titan works as a system, as well as similar processes on our own planet."The Saturn system experienced equinox, when the sun lies directly over a planet's equator and seasons change, in August 2009. (A full Saturn "year" is almost 30 Earth years.) Years of Cassini observations suggest Titan's global atmospheric circulation pattern responds to the changes in solar illumination, influenced by the atmosphere and the surface, as detailed in the Geophysical Research Letters paper. Cassini found the surface temperature responds more rapidly to sunlight changes than does the thick atmosphere. The changing circulation pattern produced clouds in Titan's equatorial region.Clouds on Titan are formed of methane as part of an Earth-like cycle that uses methane instead of water. On Titan, methane fills lakes on the surface, saturates clouds in the atmosphere, and falls as rain. Though there is evidence that liquids have flowed on the surface at Titan's equator in the past, liquid hydrocarbons, such as methane and ethane, had only been observed on the surface in lakes at polar latitudes. The vast expanses of dunes that dominate Titan's equatorial regions require a predominantly arid climate. Scientists suspected that clouds might appear at Titan's equatorial latitudes as spring in the northern hemisphere progressed. But they were not sure if dry channels previously observed were cut by seasonal rains or remained from an earlier, wetter climate.An arrow-shaped storm appeared in the equatorial regions on Sept. 27, 2010 -- the equivalent of early April in Titan's "year" -- and a broad band of clouds appeared the next month. As described in the Science paper, over the next few months, Cassini's imaging science subsystem captured short-lived surface changes visible in images of Titan's surface. A 193,000-square-mile (500,000-square-kilometer) region along the southern boundary of Titan's Belet dune field, as well as smaller areas nearby, had become darker. Scientists compared the imaging data to data obtained by other instruments and ruled out other possible causes for surface changes. They concluded this change in brightness is most likely the result of surface wetting by methane rain.These observations suggest that recent weather on Titan is similar to that over Earth's tropics. In tropical regions, Earth receives its most direct sunlight, creating a band of rising motion and rain clouds that encircle the planet."These outbreaks may be the Titan equivalent of what creates Earth's tropical rainforest climates, even though the delayed reaction to the change of seasons and the apparently sudden shift is more reminiscent of Earth's behavior over the tropical oceans than over tropical land areas," said Tony Del Genio of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, a co-author and a member of the Cassini imaging team.On Earth, the tropical bands of rain clouds shift slightly with the seasons but are present within the tropics year-round. On Titan, such extensive bands of clouds may only be prevalent in the tropics near the equinoxes and move to much higher latitudes as the planet approaches the solstices. The imaging team intends to watch whether Titan evolves in this fashion as the seasons progress from spring toward northern summer."It is patently clear that there is so much more to learn from Cassini about seasonal forcing of a complex surface-atmosphere system like Titan's and, in turn, how it is similar to, or differs from, the Earth's," said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. "We are eager to see what the rest of Cassini's Solstice Mission will bring."The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visithttp://www.nasa.gov/cassiniandhttp://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-perseverance-makes-new-discoveries-in-mars-jezero-crater

NASA’s Perseverance Makes New Discoveries in Mars’ Jezero Crater

The rover found that Jezero Crater’s floor is made up of volcanic rocks that have interacted with water.

Scientists got a surprise when NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover began examining rocks on the floor of Jezero Crater in spring of 2021: Because the crater held a lake billions of years ago, they had expected to find sedimentary rock, which would have formed when sand and mud settled in a once-watery environment. Instead, they discovered the floor was made of two types of igneous rock – one that formed deep underground from magma, the other from volcanic activity at the surface.The findings are described in four new papers published Thursday, Aug. 25. In Science, one offers an overview of Perseverance’s exploration of the crater floor before it arrived at Jezero’s ancient river delta in April 2022; a second study in the same journal details distinctive rocks that appear to have formed from a thick body of magma. The other two papers, published in Science Advances, detail the unique ways that Perseverance’s rock-vaporizing laser and ground-penetrating radar established that igneous rocks cover the crater floor.Rock of AgesIgneous rocks are excellent timekeepers: Crystals within them record details about the precise moment they formed.“One great value of the igneous rocks we collected is that they will tell us about when the lake was present in Jezero. We know it was there more recently than the igneous crater floor rocks formed,” said Ken Farley of Caltech, Perseverance’s project scientist and the lead author of the first of the new Science papers. “This will address some major questions: When was Mars’ climate conducive to lakes and rivers on the planet’s surface, and when did it change to the very cold and dry conditions we see today?”NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover looks out at an expanse of boulders on the floor of Jezero Crater in front of a location nicknamed “Santa Cruz” on Feb. 16, 2022, the 353rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSSFull Image DetailsHowever, because of how it forms, igneous rock isn’t ideal for preserving the potential signs of ancient microscopic life Perseverance is searching for. In contrast, determining the age of sedimentary rock can be challenging, particularly when it contains rock fragments that formed at different times before the rock sediment was deposited. But sedimentary rock often forms in watery environments suitable for life and is better at preserving ancient signs of life.That’s why the sediment-rich river delta Perseverance has been exploring since April 2022 has been so tantalizing to scientists. The rover has begun drilling and collecting core samples of sedimentary rocks there so thatthe Mars Sample Return campaigncould potentially return them to Earth to be studied by powerful lab equipment too large to bring to Mars.Mysterious Magma-Formed RocksA second paper published in Science solves a longstanding mystery on Mars. Years ago, Mars orbiters spotted a rock formation filled with the mineral olivine. Measuring roughly 27,000 square miles (70,000 square kilometers) – nearly the size of South Carolina – this formation extends from the inside edge of Jezero Crater into the surrounding region.Get the Latest JPL NewsSUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTERScientists have offered various theories why olivine is so plentiful over such a large area of the surface, including meteorite impacts, volcanic eruptions, and sedimentary processes. Another theory is that the olivine formed deep underground from slowly cooling magma – molten rock – before being exposed over time by erosion.Yang Liu of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and her co-authors have determined that last explanation is the most likely. Perseverance abraded a rock to reveal its composition; studying the exposed patch, the scientists homed in on the olivine’s large grain size, along with the rock’s chemistry and texture.Using Perseverance’s Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, orPIXL, they determined the olivine grains in the area measure 1 to 3 millimeters – much larger than would be expected for olivine that formed in rapidly cooling lava at the planet’s surface.“This large crystal size and its uniform composition in a specific rock texture require a very slow-cooling environment,” Liu said. “So, most likely, this magma in Jezero wasn’t erupting on the surface.”Unique Science ToolsThe two Science Advances papers detail the findings of science instruments that helped establish that igneous rocks cover the crater floor. The instruments include Perseverance’sSuperCamlaser and a ground-penetrating radar calledRIMFAX(Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment).SuperCam is equipped with rock-vaporizing laser that can zap a target as small as a pencil tip from up to 20 feet (7 meters) away. It studies the resulting vapor using a visible-light spectrometer to determine a rock’s chemical composition. SuperCam zapped 1,450 points during Perseverance’s first 10 months on Mars, helping scientists arrive at their conclusion about igneous rocks on the crater floor.In addition, SuperCam used near-infrared light – it’s the first instrument on Mars with that capability – to find that water altered minerals in the crater floor rocks. However, the alterations weren’t pervasive throughout the crater floor, according to the combination of laser and infrared observations.“SuperCam’s data suggests that either these rock layers were isolated from Jezero’s lake water or that the lake existed for a limited duration,” said Roger Wiens, SuperCam’s principal investigator at Purdue University and Los Alamos National Laboratory.RIMFAX marks another first: Mars orbiters carry ground-penetrating radars, but no spacecraft on the surface of Mars have before Perseverance. Being on the surface, RIMFAX can provide unparalleled detail, and surveyed the crater floor as deep as 50 feet (15 meters).Its high-resolution “radargrams” show rock layers unexpectedly inclined up to 15 degrees underground. Understanding how these rock layers are ordered can help scientists build a timeline of Jezero Crater’s formation.“As the first such instrument to operate on the surface of Mars, RIMFAX has demonstrated the potential value of a ground-penetrating radar as a tool for subsurface exploration,” said Svein-Erik Hamran, RIMFAX’s principal investigator at the University of Oslo in Norway.The science team is excited by what they’ve found so far, but they’re even more excited about the science that lies ahead.More About the MissionA key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars isastrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includesArtemismissions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.For more about Perseverance:mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/rosettas-comet-imaging-the-coma

Rosetta's Comet: Imaging the Coma

A distinct coma surrounds Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as seen from Rosetta.

Less than a week before Rosetta's rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, images obtained by OSIRIS, the spacecraft's onboard scientific imaging system, show clear signs of a coma surrounding the comet's nucleus.A new image from July 25, 2014, clearly reveals an extended coma shrouding 67P's nucleus. "Our coma images cover an area of 150 by 150 square kilometers (90 by 90 square miles)," said Luisa Lara from the Institute of Astrophysics in Andalusia, Spain. Most likely these images show only the inner part of the coma, where particle densities are highest. Scientist expect that 67P's full coma actually reaches much farther.In the current image, the hazy, bright, circular structure to the right of the comet's nucleus is an artifact of the OSIRIS optical system. The center of the image located around the position of the nucleus is overexposed here.Other new images of the comet's nucleus confirm the collar-like appearance of the neck region, which appears brighter than most parts of the comet's body and head. Possible explanations range from differences in material or grain size to topological effects.Rosetta is a European Space Agency mission with contributions from its member states and NASA.The scientific imaging system, OSIRIS, was built by a consortium led by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (Germany) in collaboration with Center of Studies and Activities for Space, University of Padua (Italy), the Astrophysical Laboratory of Marseille (France), the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, CSIC (Spain), the Scientific Support Office of the European Space Agency (Netherlands), the National Institute for Aerospace Technology (Spain), the Technical University of Madrid (Spain), the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Uppsala University (Sweden) and the Institute of Computer and Network Engineering of the TU Braunschweig (Germany). OSIRIS was financially supported by the national funding agencies of Germany (DLR), France (CNES), Italy (ASI), Spain, and Sweden and the ESA Technical Directorate.Rosetta's Philae lander is provided by a consortium led by DLR, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, CNES and ASI. Rosetta will be the first mission in history to rendezvous with a comet, escort it as it orbits the sun, and deploy a lander to its surface.NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, a division of the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena, manages the U.S. participation in the Rosetta mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Rosetta carries three NASA instruments in its 21-instrument payload.For more information on the U.S. instruments aboard Rosetta, visit:http://rosetta.jpl.nasa.govMore information about Rosetta is available at:http://www.esa.int/rosetta

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-instrument-preparing-for-launch-to-space-station

NASA Instrument Preparing for Launch to Space Station

A tiny instrument designed at JPL will launch this afternoon (Oct. 27) to the International Space Station.

UPDATED: 4:00 p.m. PDT (7:00 p.m. EDT), Oct. 28. A mishap occurred shortly after liftoff. Orbital has declared a contingency. NASA and Orbital are still determining when a press conference will be held. For more information as it becomes available, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/UPDATED: 5:19 p.m. PDT (8:19 p.m. EDT), Oct. 27.The next launch attempt for Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket is scheduled for 3:22 p.m. PDT (6:22 p.m. EDT) Tuesday, Oct. 28 from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.Monday's launch attempt was scrubbed because of a boat down range in the trajectory Antares would have flown had it lifted off.A dramatic Virginia sunrise frames the launchpad where a JPL-built instrument sits, poised for launch on the Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket this afternoon. The launchpad is at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The photo was taken on Sunday, Oct. 26. The rocket is delivering the tiny satellite - called the Radiometer Atmospheric Cubesat Experiment (RACE, for short) - as part of its load of supplies for the International Space Station. Launch is scheduled for 3:45 p.m. PDT (6:45 p.m. EDT).RACE will test new technology to measure water vapor, a measurement important for climate and weather studies. CubeSats are small, lightweight and low-cost satellites.Image credit: NASA/ Joel Kowsky

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/west-antarctic-glacier-loss-appears-unstoppable

West Antarctic Glacier Loss Appears Unstoppable

A new NASA study finds that a section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in a state of irreversible decline, with nothing to stop it from melting into the sea.

A new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, Irvine, finds a rapidly melting section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appears to be in an irreversible state of decline, with nothing to stop the glaciers in this area from melting into the sea.The study presents multiple lines of evidence, incorporating 40 years of observations that indicate the glaciers in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica "have passed the point of no return," according to glaciologist and lead author Eric Rignot, of UC Irvine and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The new study has been accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.These glaciers already contribute significantly to sea level rise, releasing almost as much ice into the ocean annually as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. They contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected. Rignot said these findings will require an upward revision to current predictions of sea level rise."This sector will be a major contributor to sea level rise in the decades and centuries to come," Rignot said. "A conservative estimate is it could take several centuries for all of the ice to flow into the sea."Three major lines of evidence point to the glaciers' eventual demise: the changes in their flow speeds, how much of each glacier floats on seawater, and the slope of the terrain they are flowing over and its depth below sea level. In a paper in April, Rignot's research group discussed the steadily increasing flow speeds of these glaciers over the past 40 years. This new study examines the other two lines of evidence.The glaciers flow out from land to the ocean, with their leading edges afloat on the seawater. The point on a glacier where it first loses contact with land is called the grounding line. Nearly all glacier melt occurs on the underside of the glacier beyond the grounding line, on the section floating on seawater.Just as a grounded boat can float again on shallow water if it is made lighter, a glacier can float over an area where it used to be grounded if it becomes lighter, which it does by melting or by the thinning effects of the glacier stretching out. The Antarctic glaciers studied by Rignot's group have thinned so much they are now floating above places where they used to sit solidly on land, which means their grounding lines are retreating inland."The grounding line is buried under a thousand or more meters of ice, so it is incredibly challenging for a human observer on the ice sheet surface to figure out exactly where the transition is," Rignot said. "This analysis is best done using satellite techniques."The team used radar observations captured between 1992 and 2011 by the European Earth Remote Sensing (ERS-1 and -2) satellites to map the grounding lines' retreat inland. The satellites use a technique called radar interferometry, which enables scientists to measure very precisely -- within less than a quarter of an inch -- how much Earth's surface is moving. Glaciers move horizontally as they flow downstream, but their floating portions also rise and fall vertically with changes in the tides. Rignot and his team mapped how far inland these vertical motions extend to locate the grounding lines.The accelerating flow speeds and retreating grounding lines reinforce each other. As glaciers flow faster, they stretch out and thin, which reduces their weight and lifts them farther off the bedrock. As the grounding line retreats and more of the glacier becomes waterborne, there's less resistance underneath, so the flow accelerates.Slowing or stopping these changes requires pinning points -- bumps or hills rising from the glacier bed that snag the ice from underneath. To locate these points, researchers produced a more accurate map of bed elevation that combines ice velocity data from ERS-1 and -2 and ice thickness data from NASA's Operation IceBridge mission and other airborne campaigns. The results confirm no pinning points are present upstream of the present grounding lines in five of the six glaciers. Only Haynes Glacier has major bedrock obstructions upstream, but it drains a small sector and is retreating as rapidly as the other glaciers.The bedrock topography is another key to the fate of the ice in this basin. All the glacier beds slope deeper below sea level as they extend farther inland. As the glaciers retreat, they cannot escape the reach of the ocean, and the warm water will keep melting them even more rapidly.The accelerating flow rates, lack of pinning points and sloping bedrock all point to one conclusion, Rignot said."The collapse of this sector of West Antarctica appears to be unstoppable," he said. "The fact that the retreat is happening simultaneously over a large sector suggests it was triggered by a common cause, such as an increase in the amount of ocean heat beneath the floating sections of the glaciers. At this point, the end of this sector appears to be inevitable."Because of the importance of this part of West Antarctica, NASA's Operation IceBridge will continue to monitor its evolution closely during this year's Antarctica deployment, which begins in October. IceBridge uses a specialized fleet of research aircraft carrying the most sophisticated suite of science instruments ever assembled to characterize changes in thickness of glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice.For additional images and video related to this new finding, visit:http://go.nasa.gov/1m6YZSfFor additional information on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and its potential contribution to sea level rise, visit:http://go.nasa.gov/1oIfSlOFor more information on Operation IceBridge, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/icebridgeThe California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.NASA monitors Earth's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.For more information about NASA's Earth science activities in 2014, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/earthrightnow

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-curiosity-mars-rover-finds-a-clay-cache

NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Finds a Clay Cache

The rover recently drilled two samples, and both showed the highest levels of clay ever found during the mission.

NASA's Curiosity rover has confirmed that the region on Mars it's exploring, called the "clay-bearing unit," is well deserving of its name. Two samples the rover recently drilled at rock targets called "Aberlady" and "Kilmarie" have revealed the highest amounts of clay minerals ever found during the mission. Both drill targets appear in a new selfie taken by the rover on May 12, 2019, the 2,405th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.This clay-enriched region,located on the side of lower Mount Sharp, stood out to NASA orbiters before Curiosity landed in 2012. Clay often forms in water, which is essential for life; Curiosity is exploring Mount Sharp to see if it had the conditions to support life billions of years ago. The rover's mineralogy instrument, called CheMin (Chemistry and Mineralogy), provided the first analyses of rock samples drilled in the clay-bearing unit. CheMin also found very little hematite, an iron oxide mineral that was abundant just to the north, on Vera Rubin Ridge.Other than proof that there was a significant amount of water once in Gale Crater, what these new findings mean for the region is still up for debate. It's likely that the rocks in the area formed as layers of mud in ancient lakes - something Curiosity also found lower on Mount Sharp. Water interacted with sediment over time,leaving an abundance of clay in the rocks there.Amid this new drilling and analyzing, Curiosity took a break to watch some clouds - all in the name of science. The rover used its black-and-white Navigation Cameras (Navcams) to snap images of drifting clouds on May 7 and May 12, 2019, sols 2400 and 2405. They're likely water-ice clouds about 19 miles (31 kilometers) above the surface.The mission's team has been trying to coordinate cloud observations with NASA's InSight lander, located about 373 miles (600 kilometers) away, which recentlytook its own cloud images. Capturing the same clouds from two vantage points can help scientists calculate their altitude.More information about Curiosity is at:https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/More information about Mars is at:https://mars.nasa.gov/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/in-a-first-scientists-map-particle-laden-rivers-in-the-sky

In a First, Scientists Map Particle-Laden Rivers in the Sky

Windy regions high in the atmosphere can transport pollutants like dust or soot thousands of miles around the world and disrupt everyday life for thousands of people.

Last summer, “Godzilla” came for the Caribbean and the U.S. Gulf Coast. This particular monster wasn’t of the sci-fi variety, but, rather, a massive dust storm kicked up by winds from the Sahara Desert and carried an ocean away. The dust storm was an extreme example of a phenomenon that happens regularly: the global transport of dust, soot, and other airborne particles, collectively known as aerosols, by jets of winds in the atmosphere. The result is the formation of what are called aerosol atmospheric rivers.Gaining a better understanding of how these particles are transported around the globe is important because certain aerosols can nourish rainforest soil, help or hinder cloud formation, reduce visibility, or affect air quality – which can impact human health. But studies of aerosol transport have tended to focus on single events in a particular part of the world. There wasn’t really a way of looking at them in a holistic, global way.Get the Latest JPL NewsSUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTERIn a first, arecent studypublished in the journal Geophysical Research Letters does just that. Five types of aerosols are of particular interest to researchers: dust, two kinds of carbon particles (soot and organic carbon), sulfate (emitted during events like volcanic eruptions or the burning of fossil fuels), and sea salt. The authors identified where aerosol atmospheric rivers tend to occur and how often extreme events, similar to the Godzilla dust storm, happen each year. To do this, they took a computer program they previously developed to detectatmospheric riversaround the world that move water vapor and produce precipitation, and they modified it to detect aerosol atmospheric rivers instead.The shift from using atmospheric rivers to study the movement of water vapor to using them to study aerosol transport was something of a revelation, because researchers only started to use the global detection framework of atmospheric rivers to look at the movement of extreme amounts of water vapor about six years ago. The concept of atmospheric rivers is only about 20 years old.“It took scientists time to recognize and leverage atmospheric rivers as a concept,” said Duane Waliser, one of the study’s co-authors and an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. And it wasn’t until Waliser was speaking to his colleague, Arlindo da Silva, an aerosol researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, about the atmospheric river concept that a light went on for both of the researchers. “‘We should take our algorithm and apply it to your aerosol dataset,’” Waliser said.Location, Location, LocationAfter modifying the atmospheric river algorithm for aerosol atmospheric rivers, the study’s authors applied it to a state-of-the-art reconstruction of Earth’s atmosphere called the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, Version 2 (MERRA-2) from NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office. It incorporates datasets from satellites, airborne instruments, and sensors on the ground from 1980 to the present to produce a representation of the structure of Earth’s atmosphere every six hours.MERRA-2 enabled the researchers to look back in time to analyze the location and frequency of aerosol atmospheric rivers around the world from 1997 to 2014. The study authors found that regions including the Sahara, Patagonia, Asian deserts, and Namibia are big sources of dust aerosol atmospheric rivers, while areas like the eastern U.S., the southern Amazon and Africa, and northern India tend to produce ones dominated by soot resulting from wildfires and the burning of fossil fuels.The analysis also showed these atmospheric rivers tend to move large amounts of aerosols in a limited number of extreme events instead of in a steady stream throughout the year.“We were astonished to find that a few major events a year can transport between 40% to 100% of the aerosols moved by the atmosphere,” said Sudip Chakraborty, an atmospheric scientist at JPL and a study co-author.Now that scientists have a way of looking at aerosol atmospheric rivers globally, the framework gives them a way to study how these particle-laden rivers in the sky affect Earth’s climate. This includes how aerosols interact with clouds to potentially supercharge storms, how they trap or reflect heat in the atmosphere, and whether phenomena like El Niño and La Niña affect atmospheric aerosol river pathways and frequency.The new approach also gives researchers insight into how aerosol atmospheric rivers could affect communities around the world, through their impacts on air quality and visibility and their ability to move plant pathogens that can affect crops. “When you realize a lot of the transport is happening in just a few big events, then you know to focus on those big events,” said da Silva.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-selects-partners-for-mars-2020-name-the-rover-contest-seeks-judges

NASA Selects Partners for Mars 2020 'Name the Rover' Contest, Seeks Judges

The contest for U.S. schoolchildren will open in fall 2019, but judges can sign up now.

NASA has selected two partner organizations to run a nationwide contest giving K-12 students in U.S. schools a chance to make history by naming the Mars 2020 rover. An application to become contest judge also is now available online.Battelle Education, of Columbus, Ohio, and Future Engineers, of Burbank, California, will collaborate with NASA on the Mars 2020 "Name the Rover" contest, which will be open to students in the fall of 2019. The student contest is part of NASA's efforts to engage the public in its missions to the Moon and Mars.The Mars 2020 'Name the Rover' contest will be open to students in the fall of 2019.The currently unnamed rover is a robotic scientist weighing more than 2,300 pounds (1,000 kilograms). It will search for signs of past microbial life, characterize the planet's climate and geology, collect samples for future return to Earth and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. The spacecraft is targeted for a July 2020 launch and is expected to touch down on Mars in February 2021."We're very excited about this exceptional partnership," said George Tahu, Mars 2020 program executive in NASA's Planetary Science Division at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "Contests like this present excellent opportunities to invite young students and educators to be a part of this journey to understand the possibilities for life beyond Earth and to advance new capabilities in exploration technology."By focusing the Mars 2020 "Name the Rover" contest on K-12 entries, NASA seeks to engage U.S. students in the engineering and scientific work that makes Mars exploration possible. The contest also supports national goals to stimulate interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and help create the next generation of STEM leaders.Battelle will connect students to the Mars 2020 mission through its portfolio of STEM networks. It will help recruit judges and students and also curate resources for teachers.Future Engineers is an education technology company that engages K-12 students with innovation contests and challenges. The Mars 2020 "Name the Rover" contest will be hosted on Future Engineers' web platform, which will serve as the online portal for entry submission and judging.Judges NeededK-12 students are not the only ones able to participate in the contest. NASA also is seeking volunteers to help judge the thousands of contest entries anticipated to pour in from around the country. U.S. residents interested in offering approximately five hours of their time to review student-submitted rover names may visit the Future Engineers website and register to be a judge:https://www.futureengineers.org/registration/judge/nametheroverThe Mars 2020 Project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages rover development for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Launch Services Program, based at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is responsible for launch management. Mars 2020 will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.For more information about the Mars 2020 rover, visit:https://www.nasa.gov/mars2020For more about NASA's Moon to Mars plans, visit:https://www.nasa.gov/topics/moon-to-mars

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/topexposeidon-confirms-condition-for-el-nino

TOPEX/Poseidon Confirms Condition for El Nino

Sea surface measurements taken by the U.S./French TOPEX/Poseidon satellite have confirmed that conditions are ripe for development of an El Nio event in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean this winter.

Sea surface measurements taken by the U.S./French TOPEX/Poseidon satellite have confirmed that conditions are ripe for development of an El Nio event in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean this winter.Data from the radar altimeter onboard TOPEX/Poseidon reveal a new Kelvin wave moving toward the western coast of South America. A Kelvin wave is a large warm water mass that moves along the equator in the Pacific Ocean. Such Kelvin wave pulses sometimes give rise to El Nio conditions in the eastern equatorial Pacific.Using near real-time data from TOPEX/Poseidon, this most recent wave pulse has been confirmed by Drs. Jim Mitchell and Gregg Jacobs of the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi."This wave was generated in early August at the equator around 160 East longitude and moved eastward in the form of a bulge of sea surface elevation of 10 to 15 centimeters above normal," said Jacobs.The Kelvin wave pulse which began in August may have faded in strength in early October. At this time, the rise of sea surface in the west is indicative of the onset of a stronger Kelvin wave.The NRL team continues to monitor these developments in addition to using numerical ocean models to better understand the evolution of the Kelvin wave's strength, Mitchell said.The data confirm an advisory issued recently by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Analysis Center that El Nio conditions would continue in 1993-94.This Kelvin wave, plus other oceanographic and meteorological indicators, has indicated a strong potential for the redevelopment of the El Nio conditions that have persisted through two consecutive winters in 1991 and 1992, according to the NOAA advisory."The rise of warm water hinders cold deep waters from reaching the surface. Off the coast of South America, cold deep waters bring vital nutrients to sea life. When the Kelvin wave reaches South America, the deep waters no longer reach the surface and the fish stocks become severely depleted," according to Jacobs.The El Nio phenomenon has been blamed for causing devastating weather conditions around the world including severe floods in the Midwest, colder than normal winters in the eastern United States and wetter than normal conditions in California.The TOPEX/Poseidon mission is addressing long-term climate issues. By mapping the circulation of the world's oceans over several years, scientists can better understand how the ocean transports heat, influences the atmosphere and affects long-term climate, said Dr. Lee-Lueng Fu, TOPEX/Poseidon project scientist at JPL.Data from the satellite are distributed monthly for analysis by more than 200 scientists around the world.JPL manages the NASA portion of the joint U.S./French TOPEX/Poseidon mission. Launched Aug. 10, 1992, it is the second satellite in NASA's Mission to Planet Earth program, a long-term effort to study Earth as a global environmental system.818-354-5011

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-curiosity-beams-back-a-color-360-of-gale-crater

NASA's Curiosity Beams Back a Color 360 of Gale Crater

The first images from Curiosity's color Mast Camera, or Mastcam, have been received by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

PASADENA, Calif. - The first images from Curiosity's color Mast Camera, or Mastcam, have been received by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The 130 low-resolution thumbnails, which were received Thursday morning, provide scientists and engineers of NASA's newest Mars rover their first color, horizon-to-horizon glimpse of Gale Crater."After a year in cold storage, where it endured the rigors of launch, the deep space cruise to Mars and everything that went on during landing, it is great to see our camera is working as planned," said Mike Malin, principal investigator of the Mastcam instrument from Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. "As engaging as this color panorama is, it is important to note this is only one-eighth the potential resolution of images from this camera."The Curiosity team also continued to downlink high-resolution black-and-white images from its Navigation Camera, or Navcam. These individual images have been stitched together to provide a high-resolution Navcam panorama, including a glimpse of the rover's deck. Evident on some portions of the deck are some small Martian pebbles."The latest Navcam images show us that the rocket engines on our descent stage kicked up some material from the surface of Mars, several pieces which ended up on our rover's deck," said Mike Watkins, mission manager for Curiosity from JPL. "These small pebbles we currently see are up to about 1 centimeter [0.4 inch] in size and should pose no problems for mission operations. It will be interesting to see how long our hitchhikers stick around."Curiosity's color panorama of Gale Crater is online at:http://1.usa.gov/P7VsUw. Additional images from Curiosity are available at:http://1.usa.gov/MfiyD0.Mission engineers devoted part of their third Martian day, or "Sol 3," to checking the status of four of Curiosity's science instruments after their long trip. The rover's Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, Chemistry and Mineralogy analyzer, Sample Analysis at Mars, and Dynamic of Albedo Neutrons instruments were each energized and went through a preliminary checkout. The team also performed a check on the rover's second flight computer.Even before landing, the mission's science team began the process of creating a geological map of about 150 square miles (about 390 square kilometers) within Gale Crater that includes the landing area."It is important to understand the geological context around Curiosity," said Dawn Sumner of the University of California, Davis, a member of the Curiosity science team. "We want to choose a route to Mount Sharp that makes good progress toward the destination while allowing important science observations along the way."The mapping project divided the area into 151 quadrangles of about one square mile (about 2.6 square kilometers) each. Curiosity landed in the quadrangle called Yellowknife. Yellowknife is the city in northern Canada that was the starting point for many of the great geological expeditions to map the oldest rocks in North America.Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking rocks' elemental composition from a distance, are the first of their kind on Mars. Curiosity will use a drill and scoop, which are located at the end of its robotic arm, to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into the rover's analytical laboratory instruments.To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site places the rover within driving distance of layers of the crater's interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.The Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.For more about NASA's Curiosity mission, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/marsandhttp://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl.Follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at:http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosityandhttp://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/jpl-engineer-in-a-class-of-her-own

JPL Engineer in a Class of Her Own

Dr. Ayanna Howard, an electrical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has been selected as one of the top 100 innovators by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review Magazine.

Dr. Ayanna Howard, an electrical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has been selected as one of the top 100 innovators by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review Magazine.The award was presented at the Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Technology Review Magazine chose 100 innovators 35 years or younger, who are making a dramatic impact on our world. They are all on the cutting edge of technology, computing, biotech and medicine.Howard is the only JPL engineer to hold this prestigious honor. "It's such an extreme honor and blessing to have my research acknowledged as part of the technological future," she said. "I just do what I love, and somehow the opportunities unfold."Howard sees a future where humans and machines work together to explore new terrain. Her expertise is in neural networks, robotics and machine vision. She joined JPL in 1991, where she has led research efforts on various projects. Currently, she is developing a software system that mimics the decisions humans make and allows rovers to safely navigate on the surface of Mars. Rovers could also use the software to assist in rescue operations in buildings shattered by earthquakes or bombs. Howard also leads a technology development effort to create an artificial intelligence toolkit for interactive learning.Howard received a bachelor's of science degree in computer engineering from Brown University, Providence, R.I., and her Master's and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is actively involved in community service activities, talking with students around the world about the wonders of robotics, computers and technology. She also started the Pasadena Delta Academy, a mentoring program for at-risk girls that encourages careers in math and science. She lives in Altadena with her husband and one-year-old son.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/hubble-views-warped-galaxy-as-camera-passes-milestone

Hubble Views Warped Galaxy as Camera Passes Milestone

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has imaged an unusual edge-on galaxy, revealing remarkable details of its warped dusty disc and showing how colliding galaxies trigger the birth of new stars.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has imaged an unusual edge-on galaxy, revealing remarkable details of its warped dusty disc and showing how colliding galaxies trigger the birth of new stars.The image, taken by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), is online athttp://heritage.stsci.edu. The camera was designed and built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. During observations of the galaxy, the camera passed a milestone, taking its 100,000th image since shuttle astronauts installed it in Hubble in 1993.The dust and spiral arms of normal spiral galaxies, like our Milky Way, look flat when seen edge- on. The new image of the galaxy ESO 510-G13 shows an unusual twisted disc structure, first seen in ground-based photographs taken at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. ESO 510-G13 lies in the southern constellation Hydra, some 150 million light-years from Earth. Details of the galaxy's structure are visible because interstellar dust clouds that trace its disc are silhouetted from behind by light from the galaxy's bright, smooth central bulge.The strong warping of the disc indicates that ESO 510-G13 has recently collided with a nearby galaxy and is in the process of swallowing it. Gravitational forces distort galaxies as their stars, gas, and dust merge over millions of years. When the disturbances die out, ESO 510-G13 will be a single galaxy.The galaxy's outer regions, especially on the right side of the image, show dark dust and bright clouds of blue stars. This indicates that hot, young stars are forming in the twisted disc. Astronomers believe star formation may be triggered when galaxies collide and their interstellar clouds are compressed.The Hubble Heritage Team used WFPC2 to observe ESO 510-G13 in April 2001. Pictures obtained through blue, green, and red filters were combined to make this color-composite image, which emphasizes the contrast between the dusty spiral arms, the bright bulge, and the blue star-forming regions. Additional information about the Hubble Space Telescope is online athttp://www.stsci.edu.The Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md., manages space operations for Hubble for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The institute is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-insight-will-study-mars-while-standing-still

NASA's InSight Will Study Mars While Standing Still

The lander's unique science can teach us how planets are born.

You don't need wheels to explore Mars.After touching down in November, NASA's InSight spacecraft will spread its solar panels, unfold a robotic arm ... and stay put. Unlike the space agency's rovers, InSight is a lander designed to study an entire planet from just one spot.This sedentary science allows InSight to detect geophysical signals deep below the Martian surface, including marsquakes and heat. Scientists will also be able to track radio signals from the stationary spacecraft, which vary based on the wobble in Mars' rotation. Understanding this wobble could help solve the mystery of whether the planet's core is solid.Here are five things to know about how InSight conducts its science.1. InSight Can Measure Quakes Anywhere on the PlanetQuakes on Earth are usually detected using networks of seismometers. InSight has only one - calledSEIS(Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure) - so its science team will use some creative measurements to analyze seismic waves as they occur anywhere on the planet.SEIS will measure seismic waves from marsquakes and meteorite strikes as they move through Mars. The speed of those waves changes depending on the material they're traveling through, helping scientists deduce what the planet's interior is made of.Seismic waves come in a surprising number of flavors. Some vibrate across a planet's surface, while others ricochet off its center. They also move at different speeds. Seismologists can use each type as a tool to triangulate where and when a seismic event has happened.This means InSight could have landed anywhere on Mars and, without moving, gathered the same kind of science.2. InSight's Seismometer Needs Peace and QuietSeismometers are touchy by nature. They need to be isolated from "noise" in order to measure seismic waves accurately.SEIS is sensitive enough to detect vibrations smaller than the width of a hydrogen atom. It will be the first seismometer ever set on the Martian surface, where it will be thousands of times more accurate than seismometers that sat atopthe Viking landers.To take advantage of this exquisite sensitivity, engineers have given SEIS a shell: a wind-and-thermal shield that InSight's arm will place over the seismometer. This protective dome presses down when wind blows over it; a Mylar-and-chainmail skirt keeps wind from blowing in. It also gives SEIS a cozy place to hide away from Mars' intense temperature swings, which can create minute changes in the instrument's springs and electronics.3. InSight Has a Self-Hammering NailHave you ever tried to hammer a nail? Then you know holding it steady is key. InSight carries a nail that also needs to be held steady.This unique instrument, calledHP3(Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package), holds a spike attached to a long tether. A mechanism inside the spike will hammer it up to 16 feet (5 meters) underground, dragging out the tether, which is embedded with heat sensors.At that depth, it can detect heat trapped inside Mars since the planet first formed. That heatshaped the surfacewith volcanoes, mountain ranges and valleys. It may even have determined where rivers ran early in Mars' history.4. InSight Can Land in a Safe SpotBecause InSight needs stillness - and because it can collect seismic and heat data from anywhere on the planet - the spacecraft is free to land in the safest location possible.InSight's team selected a location on Mars' equator called Elysium Planitia - as flat and boring a spot as any on Mars. That makes landing just a bit easier, as there's less to crash into, fewer rocks to land on and lots of sunlight to power the spacecraft. The fact that InSight doesn't use much power and should have plenty of sunlight at Mars' equator means it can provide lots of data for scientists to study.5. InSight Can Measure Mars' WobbleInSight has two X-band antennas on its deck that make up a third instrument, called RISE (Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment). Radio signals from RISE will be measured over months, maybe even years, to study the tiny "wobble" in the rotation of the planet. That wobble is a sign of whether Mars' core is liquid or solid - a trait that could also shed light on the planet's thin magnetic field.Collecting detailed data on this wobble hasn't happened since Mars Pathfinder's three-month mission in 1997 (although the Opportunity rover made a few measurements in 2011 while it remained still, waiting out the winter). Every time a stationary spacecraft sends radio signals from Mars, it can help scientists improve their measurements.About InSightJPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supports spacecraft operations for the mission.A number of European partners, including France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), support the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument, with significant contributions from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Switzerland, Imperial College and Oxford University in the United Kingdom, and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument.For more information about InSight, visit:https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-mars-helicopter-to-make-first-flight-attempt-sunday

NASA's Mars Helicopter to Make First Flight Attempt

The small rotorcraft's "Wright Brothers moment" is two Mars days away.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is two days away from making humanity’s first attempt at powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. If all proceeds as planned, the 4-pound (1.8-kg) rotorcraft is expected to take off from Mars’ Jezero Crater Sunday, April 11, at 12:30 p.m. local Mars solar time (10:54 p.m. EDT, 7:54 p.m. PDT), hovering 10 feet (3 meters) above the surface for up to 30 seconds. Mission control specialists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California expect to receive the first data from the first flight attempt the following morning at around 4:15 a.m. EDT (1:15 a.m. PDT). NASA TV will air live coverage of the team as they receive the data, with commentary beginning at 3:30 a.m. EDT (12:30 a.m. PDT).Get the Latest JPL NewsSUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER“While Ingenuity carries no science instruments, the little helicopter is already making its presence felt across the world, as future leaders follow its progress toward an unprecedented first flight,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters. “We do tech demos like this to push the envelope of our experience and provide something on which the next missions and the next generation can build. Just as Ingenuity was inspired by the Wright brothers, future explorers will take off using both the data and inspiration from this mission.”The Mars Helicopter is a high-risk, high-reward technology demonstration. If Ingenuity were to encounter difficulties during its 30-sol (Martian day) mission, it would not impact the science gathering of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover mission.NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter does a slow spin test of its blades, on April 8, 2021, the 48th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. This image was captured by the Navigation Cameras on NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechFull Image DetailsFlying in a controlled manner on Mars is far more difficult than flying on Earth. Even though gravity on Mars is about one-third that of Earth’s, the helicopter must fly with the assistance of an atmosphere whose pressure at the surface is only 1% that of Earth. If successful, engineers will gain invaluable in-flight data at Mars for comparison to the modeling, simulations, and tests performed back here on Earth. NASA also will gain its first hands-on experience operating a rotorcraft remotely at Mars. These datasets will be invaluable for potential future Mars missions that could enlist next-generation helicopters to add an aerial dimension to their explorations.“From day one of this project our team has had to overcome a wide array of seemingly insurmountable technical challenges,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity project manager at JPL. “And here we are – safely on Mars – on the eve of our first flight attempt. We got this far with a never-say-die attitude, a lot of friends from many different technical disciplines, and an agency that likes to turn far-out ideas into reality.”“Mars is hard not only when you land, but when you try to take off from it and fly around, too.”MiMi Aung, Ingenuity Project ManagerAnatomy of a First FlightSunday’s flight will be autonomous, with Ingenuity’s guidance, navigation, and control systems doing the piloting. That’s mostly because radio signals will take 15 minutes, 27 seconds to bridge the 173-million-mile (278-million-kilometer) gap between Mars and Earth. It’s also because just about everything about the Red Planet is demanding.“Mars is hard not only when you land, but when you try to take off from it and fly around, too,” said Aung. “It has significantly less gravity, but less than 1% the pressure of our atmosphere at its surface. Put those things together, and you have a vehicle that demands every input be right.”Events leading up to the first flight test begin when the Perseverance rover, which serves as a communications base station for Ingenuity, receives that day’s instructions from Earth. Those commands will have traveled from mission controllers at JPL through NASA’s Deep Space Network to a receiving antenna aboard Perseverance. Parked at “Van Zyl Overlook,” some 215 feet (65 meters) away, the rover will transmit the commands to the helicopter about an hour later.Then, at 10:53 p.m. EDT (7:53 p.m. PDT), Ingenuity will begin undergoing its myriad preflight checks. The helicopter will repeat the blade-wiggle test it performed three sols prior. If the algorithms running the guidance, navigation, and control systems deem the test results acceptable, they will turn on the inertial measurement unit (an electronic device that measures a vehicle’s orientation and rotation) and inclinometer (which measures slopes). If everything checks out, the helicopter will again adjust the pitch of its rotor blades, configuring them so they don’t produce lift during the early portion of the spin-up.The spin-up of the rotor blades will take about 12 seconds to go from 0 to 2,537 rpm, the optimal speed for the first flight. After a final systems check, the pitch of the rotor blades will be commanded to change yet again – this time so they can dig into those few molecules of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and argon available in the atmosphere near the Martian surface. Moments later, the first experimental flight test on another planet will begin.“It should take us about six seconds to climb to our maximum height for this first flight,” said JPL’s Håvard Grip, the flight control lead for Ingenuity. “When we hit 10 feet, Ingenuity will go into a hover that should last – if all goes well – for about 30 seconds.”While hovering, the helicopter’s navigation camera and laser altimeter will feed information into the navigation computer to ensure Ingenuity remains not only level, but in the middle of its 33-by-33-foot (10-by-10-meter) airfield – a patch of Martian real estate chosen for its flatness and lack of obstructions. Then, the Mars Helicopter will descend and touch back down on the surface of Jezero Crater, sending data back to Earth, via Perseverance, to confirm the flight.Perseverance is expected to obtain imagery of the flight using its Navcam and Mastcam-Z imagers, with the pictures expected to come down that evening (early morning Monday, April 12, in Southern California). The helicopter will also document the flight from its perspective, with a color image and several lower-resolution black-and-white navigation pictures possibly being available by the next morning.“The Wright brothers only had a handful of eyewitnesses to their first flight, but the historic moment was thankfully captured in a great photograph,” said Michael Watkins, director of JPL. “Now 117 years later, we are able to provide a wonderful opportunity to share the results of the first attempt at powered, controlled flight on another world via our robotic photographers on Mars.”More About IngenuityThe Ingenuity Mars Helicopter was built by JPL, which also manages this technology demonstration project for NASA Headquarters in Washington. It is supported by NASA’s Science, Aeronautics, and Space Technology mission directorates. NASA’s Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley and NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, provided significant flight performance analysis and technical assistance.At NASA Headquarters, Dave Lavery is the program executive for the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. At JPL, MiMi Aung is the project manager and J. (Bob) Balaram is chief engineer.JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter.For more information about Ingenuity:https://go.nasa.gov/ingenuity-press-kitandhttps://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopterMore About PerseveranceA key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars isastrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.JPL built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.For more about Perseverance:nasa.gov/perseveranceandmars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/work-stopped-on-alternative-cameras-for-mars-rover

Work Stopped on Alternative Cameras for Mars Rover

The main camera instrument for the next rover to Mars will use a pair of cameras with different focal lengths, already installed and tested, rather than twin zoom cameras.

The NASA rover to be launched to Mars this year will carry the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument already on the vehicle, providing the capability to meet the mission's science goals.Work has stopped on an alternative version of the instrument, with a pair of zoom-lens cameras, which would have provided additional capabilities for improved three-dimensional video. The installed Mastcam on the Mars Science Laboratory mission's Curiosity rover uses two fixed-focal-length cameras: a telephoto for one eye and wider angle for the other. Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, built the Mastcam and was funded by NASA last year to see whether a zoom version could be developed in time for testing on Curiosity."With the Mastcam that was installed last year and the rover's other instruments, Curiosity can accomplish its ambitious research goals," said Mars Science Laboratory Project Scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "Malin Space Science Systems has provided excellent, unprecedented science cameras for this mission. The possibility for a zoom-camera upgrade was very much worth pursuing, but time became too short for the levels of testing that would be needed for them to confidently replace the existing cameras. We applaud Malin Space Science Systems for their tremendous effort to deliver the zooms, and also the Mars Science Laboratory Project's investment in supporting this effort."Malin Space Science Systems has also provided the Mars Hand Lens Imager and the Mars Descent Imager instruments on Curiosity. The company will continue to pursue development of the zoom system, both to prove out the design and to make the hardware available for possible use on future missions."While Curiosity won't benefit from the 3D motion imaging that the zooms enable, I'm certain that this technology will play an important role in future missions," said Mastcam Co-Investigator James Cameron. "In the meantime, we're certainly going to make the most of our cameras that are working so well on Curiosity right now."Mastcam Principal Investigator Michael Malin said, "Although we are very disappointed that the zoom cameras will not fly, we expect the fixed-focal-length cameras to achieve all of the primary science objectives of the Mastcam investigation."The rover and other parts of the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft are in testing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., which manages the project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The spacecraft will be delivered to NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida in coming months for launch late this year. In August 2012, Curiosity will land on Mars for a two-year mission to examine whether conditions in the landing area have been favorable for microbial life and for preserving evidence about whether life has existed there.For more information about work on the zoom version of Mastcam, seehttp://www.msss.com/news/index.php?id=22. For more information about the mission, seehttp://www.nasa.gov/msl.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-hibernating-mars-rover-may-not-call-home

NASA's Hibernating Mars Rover May Not Call Home

NASA mission controllers have not heard from the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit since March 22, and the rover is facing its toughest challenge yet - trying to survive the harsh Martian winter.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA mission controllers have not heard from the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit since March 22, and the rover is facing its toughest challenge yet - trying to survive the harsh Martian winter.The rover team anticipated Spirit would go into a low-power "hibernation" mode since the rover was not able to get to a favorable slope for its fourth Martian winter, which runs from May through November. The low angle of sunlight during these months limits the power generated from the rover's solar panels. During hibernation, the rover suspends communications and other activities so available energy can be used to recharge and heat batteries, and to keep the mission clock running.On July 26, mission managers began using a paging technique called "sweep and beep" in an effort to communicate with Spirit."Instead of just listening, we send commands to the rover to respond back to us with a communications beep," said John Callas, project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "If the rover is awake and hears us, she will send us that beep."Based on models of Mars' weather and its effect on available power, mission managers believe that if Spirit responds, it most likely will be in the next few months. However, there is a very distinct possibility Spirit may never respond."It will be the miracle from Mars if our beloved rover phones home," said Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program in Washington. "It's never faced this type of severe condition before - this is unknown territory."Because most of the rover's heaters were not being powered this winter, Spirit is likely experiencing its coldest internal temperatures yet -- minus 55 degrees Celsius (minus 67 degrees Fahrenheit). During three previous Martian winters, Spirit communicated about once or twice a week with Earth and used its heaters to stay warm while parked on a sun-facing slope for the winter. As a result, the heaters were able to keep internal temperatures above minus 40 degrees Celsius (which is also minus 40 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale).Spirit is designed to wake up from its hibernation and communicate with Earth when its battery charge is adequate. But if the batteries have lost too much power, Spirit's clock may stop and lose track of time. The rover could still reawaken, but it would not know the time of day, a situation called a "mission-clock fault." Spirit would start a new timer to wake up every four hours and listen for a signal from Earth for 20 minutes of every hour while the sun is up.The earliest date the rover could generate enough power to send a beep to Earth was calculated to be around July 23. However, mission managers don't anticipate the batteries will charge adequately until late September to mid-October. It may be even later if the rover is in a mission-clock fault mode. If Spirit does wake up, mission managers will do a complete health check on the rover's instruments and electronics.Based on previous Martian winters, the rover team anticipates the increasing haziness in the sky over Spirit will offset longer daylight for the next two months. The amount of solar energy available to Spirit then will increase until the southern Mars summer solstice in March 2011. If we haven't heard from it by March, it is unlikely that we will ever hear from it."This has been a long winter for Spirit, and a long wait for us," said Steve Squyres, the principal investigator for NASA's two rovers who is based at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "Even if we never heard from Spirit again, I think her scientific legacy would be secure. But we're hopeful we will hear from her, and we're eager to get back to doing science with two rovers again."Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, began exploring Mars in January 2004 on missions planned to last three months. Spirit has been nearly stationary since April 2009, while Opportunity is driving toward a large crater named Endeavour. Opportunity covered more distance in 2009 than in any prior year. Both rovers have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life.NASA's JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.For more information about the rovers, visithttp://www.nasa.gov/rovers.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/probes-suggest-magnetic-bubbles-at-solar-system-edge

Probes Suggest Magnetic Bubbles at Solar System Edge

Observations from NASA's Voyager spacecraft suggest the edge of our solar system may not be smooth, but filled with a turbulent sea of magnetic bubbles.

PASADENA, Calif. -- Observations from NASA's Voyager spacecraft, humanity's farthest deep space sentinels, suggest the edge of our solar system may not be smooth, but filled with a turbulent sea of magnetic bubbles.While using a new computer model to analyze Voyager data, scientists found the sun's distant magnetic field is made up of bubbles approximately 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) wide. The bubbles are created when magnetic field lines reorganize. The new model suggests the field lines are broken up into self-contained structures disconnected from the solar magnetic field. The findings are described in the June 9 edition of the Astrophysical Journal.Like Earth, our sun has a magnetic field with a north pole and a south pole. The field lines are stretched outward by the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emanating from the star that interacts with material expelled from others in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy. The Voyager spacecraft, more than 9 billion miles (14 billion kilometers) away from Earth, are traveling in a boundary region. In that area, the solar wind and magnetic field are affected by material expelled from other stars in our corner of the Milky Way galaxy."The sun's magnetic field extends all the way to the edge of the solar system," said astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University. "Because the sun spins, its magnetic field becomes twisted and wrinkled, a bit like a ballerina's skirt. Far, far away from the sun, where the Voyagers are, the folds of the skirt bunch up."Understanding the structure of the sun's magnetic field will allow scientists to explain how galactic cosmic rays enter our solar system and help define how the star interacts with the rest of the galaxy.So far, much of the evidence for the existence of the bubbles originates from an instrument aboard the spacecraft that measures energetic particles. Investigators are studying more information and hoping to find signatures of the bubbles in the Voyager magnetic field data."We are still trying to wrap our minds around the implications of the findings," said University of Maryland physicist Jim Drake, one of Opher's colleagues.Launched in 1977, the Voyager twin spacecraft have been on a 33-year journey. They are en route to reach the edge of interstellar space. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., built the spacecraft and continues to operate them. The Voyager missions are a part of the Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.To view supporting images about the research, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/sunearth.More information about Voyager is available at:http://www.nasa.gov/voyagerandhttp://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/mars-may-be-emerging-from-an-ice-age

Mars May Be Emerging from an Ice Age

NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey missions have provided evidence of a recent ice age on Mars.

NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey missions have provided evidence of a recent ice age on Mars. In contrast to Earth's ice ages, a martian ice age waxes when the poles warm up and water vapor is transported toward lower latitudes. Martian ice ages wane when the poles cool and lock water into polar icecaps.The "pacemakers" of ice ages on Mars appear to be much more extreme than the comparable drivers of climate change on Earth. Variations in the planet's orbit and tilt produce remarkable changes in the distribution of water ice from polar regions down to latitudes equivalent to Houston or Egypt. Researchers, using NASA spacecraft data and analogies to Earth's Antarctic Dry Valleys, report their findings in the Thursday, Dec. 18 edition of the journal Nature."Of all the solar system planets, Mars has the climate most like that of Earth. Both are sensitive to small changes in orbital parameters," said planetary scientist Dr. James Head of Brown University, Providence, R.I., lead author of the study. "Now we're seeing that Mars, like Earth, is in a period between ice ages."Discoveries on Mars, since 1999, of relatively recent water- carved gullies, glacier-like flows, regional buried ice and possible snow packs created excitement among scientists who study Earth and other planets. Information from the Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions provided more evidence of an icy recent past.Head and his co-authors from Brown (Drs. John Mustard and Ralph Milliken), Boston University (Dr. David Marchant) and Kharkov National University, Ukraine (Dr. Mikhail Kreslavsky) examined global patterns of landscape shapes and near-surface water ice mapped by the orbiters. They concluded that a covering of water ice mixed with dust mantled the surface of Mars to latitudes as low as 30 degrees, and is now degrading and retreating. By observing the small number of impact craters in those features and by backtracking the known patterns of changes in Mars' orbit and tilt, they estimated the most recent ice age occurred just 400,000 to 2.1 million years ago, very recent in geological terms. "These results show that Mars is not a dead planet, but it undergoes climate changes that are even more pronounced than on Earth," Head said.Marchant, a glacial geologist who has spent 17 field seasons in the Mars-like Antarctic Dry Valleys, said, "These extreme changes on Mars provide perspective for interpreting what we see on Earth. Landforms on Mars that appear to be related to climate changes help us calibrate and understand similar landforms on Earth. Furthermore, the range of microenvironments in the Antarctic Dry Valleys helps us read the Mars record."Mustard said, "The extreme climate changes on Mars are providing us with predictions we can test with upcoming Mars missions, such as Europe's Mars Express and NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers. Among the climate changes that occurred during these extremes is warming of the poles and partial melting of water at high altitudes. This clearly broadens the environments in which life might occur on Mars."According to the researchers, during a martian ice age, polar warming drives water vapor from polar ice into the atmosphere. The water comes back to ground at lower latitudes as deposits of frost or snow mixed generously with dust. This ice-rich mantle, a few meters or yards thick, smoothes the contours of the land. It locally develops a bumpy texture at human scales, resembling the surface of a basketball and also seen in some Antarctic icy terrains. When ice at the top of the mantling layer sublimes back into the atmosphere, it leaves behind dust, which forms an insulating layer over remaining ice. On Earth, by contrast, ice ages are periods of polar cooling. The buildup of ice sheets draws water from liquid-water oceans, which Mars lacks."This exciting new research really shows the mettle of NASA's 'follow-the-water' strategy for studying Mars," said Dr. Jim Garvin, NASA's lead scientist for Mars exploration. "We hope to continue pursuing this strategy in January, if the Mars Exploration Rovers land successfully. Later, the 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and 2007 Phoenix near-polar lander will be able to directly follow up on these astounding findings by Professor Head and his team."Global Surveyor has been orbiting Mars since 1997, Odyssey since 2001. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages both missions for the NASA Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Information about NASA's Mars missions is available on the Internet at:http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/chemical-reactions-may-cause-ozone-depletion

Chemical Reactions May Cause Ozone Depletion

A sequence of chemical reactions that may play role in ozone depletion over the Antarctic has been demonstrated in the laboratory by JPL chemists.

A sequence of chemical reactions that may play role in ozone depletion over the Antarctic has been demonstrated in the laboratory by JPL chemists.Reporting their work in the Friday (Nov. 27) issue of Science, team led by Dr. Mario J. Molina described how they staged series of reactions that could explain how the so-called ozone hole may be caused in large part by chlorine in the atmosphere from chlorofluorocarbon products.In their experiment they specifically showed how chlorine is liberated from an inert form, hydrochloric acid, and converted to form that is easily broken down by sunlight -- paving the way for it to attack ozone.The ozone hole, first reported by British scientists in 1985, is seasonal drop in the protective layer of ozone over the Antarctic that has occurred each southern spring for the past several years. It has been the subject of two research expeditions -- the National Ozone Expedition in 1986 and the Airborne Antarctic Ozone Experiment in 1987 -- mounted by NASA in conjunction with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation and the Chemical Manufacturers Association.According to Molina, scientists have debated three chief groups of theories of what causes the hole. One, the dynamic theory, is that the hole is caused naturally by movements of air. second set of theories has centered on nitrogen oxides of natural origin as key agent in an ozone- destroying process. The third family of theories implicates chlorine, the source of which is the release of manmade chlorofluorocarbons.Based on the two Antarctic expeditions, Molina added, preliminary data show that natural or dynamic forces alone could not cause the hole, although it appears they play an important part. Theories involving nitrogen oxides also were ruled out by the expedition data.Even if chlorine is the key agent, however, atmospheric scientists have not understood fully how it destroys ozone. By developing and testing theory that demonstrates part of such chemical chain, Molina and his colleagues believe they may have an explanation that best fits the data from the 1987 expedition.Their laboratory experiments, conducted before the 1987 expedition, predicted that hydrochloric acid (HCl) and chlorine nitrate (Cl0NO2) can react in ice particles of Antarctic stratospheric clouds to form molecular chlorine (Cl2) and nitric acid (HNO3). The molecular chlorine absorbs light very efficiently, causing it to split into chlorine radicals that can attack ozone. The nitric acid is retained in the ice particles.In the JPL group's scenario, some of the chlorine then form chlorine monoxide (ClO), which in turn reacts with other chlorine monoxide to form combined molecule, or dimer, Cl2O2. Normally this reaction does not occur at other latitudes of the Earth because chlorine monoxide usually combines with nitrogen dioxide (NO2) to form chlorine nitrate. Expedition researchers in 1987, however, found high quantities of ClO and low quantities of NO2 at the South Pole, which suggests that the dimer formation reaction is taking place.The Cl2O2 then undergoes series of further reactions which may eventually result in the release of two single chlorine atoms. These can then react with ozone (O3) to create chlorine monoxide (ClO) and oxygen (O2). The net result is that two ozone atoms have been turned into oxygen, and chlorine monoxide is left to start the process again.While at the University of California at Irvine in the 1970s, Molina was one of two chemists who originally called attention to the possible role of chlorofluorocarbons in destroying ozone, an important atmospheric blanket that screens the Earth from ultraviolet light. His group's current paper, however, describes chemical reactions peculiar to the Antarctic because of temperature and chemical conditions there.Molina co-authored the Science paper with National Research Council resident fellow Dr. Tai-Ly Tso; Dr. Luisa T. Molina; and NRC resident fellow Dr. Frank C-Y. Wang.The JPL work is funded by NASA's Office of Space Science and Applications.818-354-5011

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/dawn-mission-honored-with-collier-trophy

Dawn Mission Honored With Collier Trophy

NASA's Dawn mission, the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial targets, has been honored with the National Aeronautic Association's 2016 Robert J. Collier Trophy.

NASA's Dawn mission, representing the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial targets, was honored with the National Aeronautic Association Robert J. Collier Trophy at a presentation in Arlington, Virginia, on Thursday, June 9, 2016.The award, presented annually, was given to Dawn "In recognition of the extraordinary achievements of orbiting and exploring protoplanet Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, and advancing the nation's technological capabilities in pioneering new frontiers in space travel."The 8-foot-tall (2.4-meter-tall) trophy resides at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington and is engraved with the names of recipients. Dawn competed with a field of nine finalists to win this year's award. Dawn's mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Previous Collier Trophy recipients involving JPL missions include the teams from NASA's Mars Science Laboratory (2012) and Voyager (1980)."All of us at NASA are very proud of our Dawn team. For the past eight years, Dawn has taught us much about Vesta and Ceres, and in a broader sense, about ourselves," said NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman. "This mission isn't only for scientists. It's for all of us who want to discover the nature of uncharted worlds and share that discovery with all who gaze up at the night sky in wonderment."Dawn is a project of NASA's Science Mission Directorate Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of mission participants, visit:http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/missionMore information about Dawn is available at the following sites:http://dawn.jpl.nasa.govhttp://www.nasa.gov/dawnJPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/soil-study-may-yield-harvest-of-water-cycle-data

Soil Study May Yield Harvest of Water Cycle Data

A recently concluded NASA aerial field experiment, high above our nation's heartland, may lead to a clearer understanding of soil moisture-- a key variable in Earth's global water cycle that profoundly influences seasonal weather patterns and agriculture.

A recently concluded NASA aerial field experiment, high above our nation's heartland, may lead to a clearer understanding of soil moisture-- a key variable in Earth's global water cycle that profoundly influences seasonal weather patterns and agriculture.Flying thousands of feet above Iowa farmlands in a NASA DC-8 and a National Center for Atmospheric Research C-130 aircraft, scientists and engineers from multiple NASA centers, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., participated in a three-week field experiment using remote sensing techniques to measure soil moisture content. The NASA scientists were joined by researchers from the Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service, several universities and other agencies, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.The experiment will help pave the way for the eventual development of a remote global soil moisture observing system that will provide observations every three days, or less, over most of the unfrozen, non-forested regions of the globe (dense vegetation such as forests limits the ability to sense the underlying soil moisture). A proposal for such an observing system, called Hydros, was selected recently by NASA as an alternate mission under the Earth System Science Pathfinder small satellite program."Soil moisture is a key variable in Earth's hydrology, or water cycle," said Dr. Eni Njoku, a JPL scientist and co-investigator on the experiment and a project scientist for Hydros."Soil moisture conditions play a vital role in controlling summer precipitation over the central United States and provide initial information for seasonal predictions. Persistently wet or dry soil moisture conditions can also feed back into seasonal weather patterns that cause persistent flooding or droughts," Njoku said. "Today, scientists are limited to scattered ground measurements of soil moisture. A future remote sensing platform orbiting above Earth will enable us to better understand, on a global basis, the factors that influence soil moisture fluctuations. This will enable people everywhere to plant crops more intelligently and mitigate the effects of natural hazards."Njoku said an additional objective of the experiment will be to evaluate how well the Advanced Microwave Sounding Radiometer, a Japanese National Space Development Agency instrument aboard NASA's Aqua satellite, can measure soil moisture of agricultural areas from space. Data from the Aqua instrument will be compared with the more detailed soil moisture information derived from the airborne instruments and ground measurements. The Aqua instrument operates at wavelengths of less than 5 centimeters (about 2 inches), so it may have only limited ability to measure soil moisture under moderate or dense vegetation cover like crops and forests.Two JPL airborne remote sensing instruments were an integral part of the experiment, conducted from June 25 to July 8. The Passive and Active L- and S-band microwave instrument flew at low altitudes (about 1.1 kilometers or 3,500 feet) on the C-130 aircraft. The JPL Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar flew at a higher altitude (about 7.9 kilometers or 26,000 feet) on NASA's DC-8 aircraft. Both instruments operate at long wavelengths (approximately 20 centimeters, or 8 inches) that are sensitive to soil moisture and have the ability to penetrate clouds and moderate vegetation cover.The flights took place over agricultural fields in the Walnut Creek watershed area south of Ames, Iowa. Exhaustive ground sampling of the soil and vegetation (corn and soybean crops) in that region was conducted in conjunction with the overflights.Scientists will spend the next year analyzing data from the spaceborne, airborne and ground-based samplings to better understand the influence of soil moisture on water cycling between the land and atmosphere, and to verify the accuracy of the instrument observations.In addition to JPL's instruments, other airborne microwave instruments operated by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Environmental Technology Laboratory also participated in the experiment, flying aboard the NASA P-3 aircraft. More information on the experiment is available athttp://hydrolab.arsusda.gov/smex02/smex02SCAN.html.The experiment is part of the Terrestrial Hydrology program under NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, a long- term research effort to understand and protect our home planet. Through the study of Earth, NASA will help to provide sound science to policy and economic decision-makers so as to better life here, while developing the technologies needed to explore the universe and search for life beyond our home planet.JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/cruise-over-ceres-in-new-video

Cruise Over Ceres in New Video

Striking 3-D detail highlights a towering mountain, the brightest spots and other features on dwarf planet Ceres in a new video from NASA's Dawn mission.

Striking 3-D detail highlights a towering mountain, the brightest spots and other features on dwarf planet Ceres in a new video from NASA's Dawn mission.http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/details.php?id=1392A prominent mountain with bright streaks on its steep slopes is especially fascinating to scientists. The peak's shape has been likened to a cone or a pyramid. It appears to be about 4 miles (6 kilometers) high, with respect to the surface around it, according to the latest estimates. This means the mountain has about the same elevation as Mount McKinley in Denali National Park, Alaska, the highest point in North America."This mountain is among the tallest features we've seen on Ceres to date," said Dawn science team member Paul Schenk, a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston. "It's unusual that it's not associated with a crater. Why is it sitting in the middle of nowhere? We don't know yet, but we may find out with closer observations."Also puzzling is the famous Occator (oh-KAH-tor) crater, home to Ceres' brightest spots. A new animation simulates the experience of a close flyover of this area. The crater takes its name from the Roman agriculture deity of harrowing, a method of pulverizing and smoothing soil.In examining the way Occator's bright spots reflect light at different wavelengths, the Dawn science team has not found evidence that is consistent with ice. The spots' albedo -­ a measure of the amount of light reflected -­ is also lower than predictions for concentrations of ice at the surface."The science team is continuing to evaluate the data and discuss theories about these bright spots at Occator," said Chris Russell, Dawn's principal investigator at the University of California, Los Angeles. "We are now comparing the spots with the reflective properties of salt, but we are still puzzled by their source. We look forward to new, higher-resolution data from the mission's next orbital phase."An animation of Ceres' overall geography, also available in 3-D, shows these features in context. Occator lies in the northern hemisphere, whereas the tall mountain is farther to the southeast (11 degrees south, 316 degrees east)."There are many other features that we are interested in studying further," said Dawn science team member David O'Brien, with the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona. "These include a pair of large impact basins called Urvara and Yalode in the southern hemisphere, which have numerous cracks extending away from them, and the large impact basin Kerwan, whose center is just south of the equator."Ceres is the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Thanks to data acquired by Dawn since the spacecraft arrived in orbit at Ceres, scientists have revised their original estimate of Ceres' average diameter to 584 miles (940 kilometers). The previous estimate was 590 miles (950 kilometers).Dawn will resume its observations of Ceres in mid-August from an altitude of 900 miles (less than 1,500 kilometers), or three times closer to Ceres than its previous orbit.On March 6, 2015, Dawn made history as the first mission to reach a dwarf planet, and the first to orbit two distinct extraterrestrial targets. It conducted extensive observations of Vesta in 2011-2012.Dawn's mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of mission participants, visit:http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/missionMore information about Dawn is available at the following sites:http://dawn.jpl.nasa.govhttp://www.nasa.gov/dawn

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/scientists-thrilled-to-see-layers-in-mars-rocks-near-opportunity

Scientists Thrilled to See Layers in Mars Rocks Near Opportunity

New pictures from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity reveal thin layers in rocks just a stone's throw from the lander platform where the rover temporarily sits.

New pictures from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity reveal thin layers in rocks just a stone's throw from the lander platform where the rover temporarily sits.Geologists said that the layers -- some no thicker than a finger -- indicate the rocks likely originated either from sediments carried by water or wind, or from falling volcanic ash. "We should be able to distinguish between those two hypotheses," said Dr. Andrew Knoll of Harvard University, Cambridge, a member of the science team for Opportunity and its twin, Spirit. If the rocks are sedimentary, water is a more likely source than wind, he said.The prime goal for both rovers is to explore their landing areas for clues in the rocks and soil about whether those areas ever had watery environments that could possibly have sustained life.Controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., plan to tell Opportunity tonight to start standing up from the crouched and folded posture in which it traveled to Mars."We're going to lift the entire rover, then the front wheels will be turned out," said Mission Manager Jim Erickson of JPL. Several more days of activities are still ahead before the rover will be ready to drive off the lander."We're about to embark on what could be the coolest geological field trip in history," said Dr. Steve Sqyures of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for the rovers' science payload.The layered rocks are in a bedrock outcrop about 30 to 45 centimeters (12 to 18 inches) tall, and only about eight meters (26 feet) away from where Opportunity came to rest after bouncing to a landing three days ago. Examination of their texture and composition with the cameras and spectrometers on the rover may soon reveal whether they are sedimentary, Knoll predicted.Scientists also hope to determine the relationship between those light-colored rocks and the dark soil that covers most of the surrounding terrain. The soil may contain the mineral hematite, which was identified from orbit and motivated the choice of Opportunity's landing area, Squyres said.Opportunity successfully used its high-gain antenna for the first time yesterday. The rover is losing some if its battery charge each night, apparently due to an electric heater at the shoulder joint of the rover's robotic arm. A thermostat turns on the heater whenever the air temperature falls to levels that Opportunity is experiencing every night. The heater is not really needed when the arm is not in use, but ground control has not been able to activate a switch designed to override the thermostat, Erickson said. Mission engineers are working to confirm the diagnosis, determine the ramifications of the power drain, and propose workarounds or fixes.Meanwhile, engineers working on Spirit have determined that the high- gain antenna on that rover is likely in working order despite earlier indications of a possible problem. They are continuing to take information out of Spirit's flash memory. Results from a testbed simulator of the rover's electronics supported the diagnosis of a problem with management of the flash memory, reported JPL's Jennifer Trosper, mission manager.JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Images and additional information about the project are available from JPL athttp://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.govand from Cornell University athttp://athena.cornell.edu.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/how-fast-does-the-world-turn-new-quantum-gyro-may-tell-us

How Fast Does the World Turn? New Quantum Gyro May Tell Us

A discovery that may someday help measure how clouds and earthquakes change Earth's rotation has come from an experiment that made friction-free helium whistle.

A discovery that may someday help measure how clouds and earthquakes change Earth's rotation has come from an experiment that made friction-free helium whistle.By manipulating ultra-cold liquid helium-3 in a hollow, doughnut-shaped container, NASA-funded scientists at the University of California at Berkeley produced a whistling sound that got louder or quieter depending on the orientation relative to the North Pole and Earth's rotation. In principle, small changes in Earth's daily rotation rate will also vary the loudness of the whistle. Although Earth rotates every 24 hours, clouds and the motion of Earth's crust can make any given day slightly longer or shorter. These new findings might provide an unusual new way to measure such changes.This research was an exciting breakthrough for us, said Dr. Richard Packard, a U.C. Berkeley professor. The successful demonstration of this effect may enable scientists to measure extremely slight increases or decreases in the rotation of objects, including Earth. Packard led the research team, along with Dr. S amus Davis, also a U.C. Berkeley professor.Current Earth rotation measurement techniques are not sensitive enough to detect rotational changes caused by earthquakes, even those as large as magnitude 8, said Dr. Richard Gross, a geoscientist at JPL. If we had more sensitive techniques, like those being developed by Dr. Packard, then we could measure the effects on Earth's rotation. That would help us better understand Earth's structure.The team cooled the doughnut-shaped vessel filled with liquid helium-3 to a temperature nearly 1 million times colder than room temperature. At this ultra-cold temperature the liquid becomes a superfluid. A superfluid is a state of matter that has no friction, so the liquid can flow continuously inside the vessel. The liquid in the doughnut acts like a single, super-giant atom that does not follow everyday behavior, but is dictated by the strange rules of quantum physics.This latest discovery builds on the team's previous research. In 1997, they discovered the quantum whistle when they pushed helium through a single perforated membrane between two superfluid-filled chambers. This experiment demonstrated a phenomenon called the Josephson effect. As they tried to push the fluid through the holes, each 1/500th as thick as a human hair, it jiggled to and fro. The vibration frequency increased as they pushed harder on the fluid. They used the world's most sensitive microphone and ordinary headphones to hear the vibrations an oscillating, whistling sound.In this latest research, they put two thin membranes, each with an array of more than 4,000 tiny holes, at opposite sides of the doughnut to divide the fluid. When the researchers tried to push the fluid through the holes with electrostatic pressure, it did not flow in the direction they were pushing. Instead, it flowed in a strange, oscillating pattern, which produced a whistle. In flowing through the doughnut-shaped vessel, the whistle got louder or softer, depending on the vessel's orientation with respect to Earth's rotation axis.The promising new research might also lead to extremely precise gyroscopes to help navigate future NASA spacecraft. This experiment used a tiny amount of helium-3, but by using a much larger amount, an ultra-sensitive gyroscope might be created.Earth is probably too noisy to realize the full potential of this technology, Packard said. The best environment would be on a free-floating satellite, which could have zero vibration.The Berkeley team calls the most recent effect they observed quantum interference of a superfluid. They found that by linking two superfluid quantum systems using a doughnut shape, even a tiny effect of Earth's rotation influences them both through laws of quantum mechanics, and the two systems interfere with each other.In essence, we demonstrated that two weak links behave as one weak link whose properties are influenced by Earth's rotation, Packard said. The successful demonstration of this effect has been a goal of low-temperature physicists for more than 35 years.This research program was conducted under a grant from NASA's Biological and Physical Research Program. Packard co-authored the paper, which will appear in the July 5 issue of Nature, with NASA fellow Ray Simmonds and Drs. Emile Hoskinson and Alexei Marchenkov.The whistling helium sound can be heard online athttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/heliumwhistle.More information on the Biological and Physical Research Program and Fundamental Physics Program is available athttp://spaceresearch.nasa.govandhttp://funphysics.jpl.nasa.gov.JPL manages the Fundamental Physics in Microgravity Research Program for NASA's Office of Biological and Physical Research, Washington, D.C. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/mars-orbiters-spectrometer-shows-oort-comets-coma

Mars Orbiter's Spectrometer Shows Oort Comet's Coma

The imaging spectrometer on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has provided an image of the coma surrounding a comet that flew near Mars this week.

The Compact Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) observed comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring as the comet sped close to Mars on Oct. 19. CRISM recorded imaging data in 107 different wavelengths, showing the inner part of the cloud of dust, called the coma, surrounding the comet's nucleus.Two images from CRISM presenting three of the recorded wavelengths are online at:http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA15291Comet Siding Spring -- an Oort Cloud comet that may contain material from the formation of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago -- was making its first voyage through the inner solar system. CRISM and many other instruments and spacecraft combined forces to provide an unprecedented data set for an Oort Cloud comet.The appearance of color variations in the CRISM observations of the inner coma could be due to the properties of the comet's dust, possibly dust grain size or composition. The full spectra will be analyzed to better understand the reason for the color variations.The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, provided and operates CRISM. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the orbiter.For more about CRISM, visit:http://crism.jhuapl.edu/For more about Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, visit:http://mars.nasa.gov/mro/For more about comet Siding Spring, including other images of the comet, visit:http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/comets/sidingspring/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/say-cheese-on-mars-perseverances-selfie-with-ingenuity

Say Cheese on Mars: Perseverance’s Selfie With Ingenuity

NASA’s newest Mars rover used a camera on the end of its robotic arm to snap this shot of itself with the Ingenuity helicopter nearby.

NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took a selfie with the Ingenuity helicopter, seen here about 13 feet (4 meters) away in this image from April 6, 2021, the 46th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Perseverance captured the image using a camera called WATSON (Wide Angle Topographic Sensor for Operations and eNgineering), part of theSHERLOC(Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals) instrument, located at the end of the rover’s robotic arm.Perseverance’s selfie with Ingenuity was stitched together from 62 individual images taken while the rover was looking at the helicopter, then again while it was looking at the WATSON camera. Videos explaining how NASA’s Perseverance and Curiosity rovers take their selfies can be foundhere.Get the Latest JPL NewsSUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTEROnce the team is ready to attempt the first flight, Perseverance will receive and relay to Ingenuity the final flight instructions from JPL mission controllers. Several factors will determine the precise time for the flight, including modeling of local wind patterns informed by measurements taken by theMEDA(Mars Environmental Dynamics Analyzer) instrument aboard Perseverance. Ingenuity will run its rotors to 2,537 rpm and, if all final self-checks look good, lift off. After climbing at a rate of about 3 feet per second (1 meter per second), the helicopter will hover at 10 feet (3 meters) above the surface for up to 30 seconds. Then, Ingenuity will descend and touch back down on the Martian surface.Several hours after the first flight has occurred, Perseverance will downlink Ingenuity’s first set of engineering data and, possibly, images and video from the rover’s Navigation Cameras and Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras. From the data downlinked that first evening after the flight, the Ingenuity team expects to be able to determine if its first attempt to fly at Mars was a success. Flight test results will be discussed by the Ingenuity team in a media conference that same day.NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory built and manages operations of Perseverance and Ingenuity for the agency. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA. WATSON was built by Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) in San Diego, and is operated jointly by MSSS and JPL.The Mars helicopter technology demonstration activity is supported by NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, and Space Technology Mission Directorate.A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars isastrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet's geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includesArtemismissions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.For more about Perseverance:mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/.For more about Ingenuity:go.nasa.gov/ingenuity

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/european-cassini-hardware-delivered-to-nasa

European Cassini Hardware Delivered to NASA

A saucer-shaped, gold-colored space probe nearly 3 meters (9 feet) in diameter has been delivered to NASA by the European Space Agency and is now being readied for testing on the graphite and aluminum framework of the Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft.

A saucer-shaped, gold-colored space probe nearly 3 meters (9 feet) in diameter has been delivered to NASA by the European Space Agency and is now being readied for testing on the graphite and aluminum framework of the Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft.The engineering model of Europe's Huygens probe, delivered to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is twin to the actual flight model that is destined to parachute to the exotic surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. The reflective fabric that blankets the probe will provide thermal and micrometeorite protection to the device in space. The flight model of the Huygens probe will be installed on the Cassini spacecraft at Cape Canaveral, FL, prior to launch on Oct. 6, 1997.A second important delivery of European hardware for Cassini was received on July 21 with the arrival of Italy's specially tailored engineering model of the 10-meter (13-foot)-diameter high-gain telecommunications antenna. The antenna, provided by the Italian Space Agency, Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, will serve as the Cassini spacecraft's "voice box" and "ears," sending data back and receiving commands from Earth during the 11-year-long mission. The multi-channel antenna is also a crucial part of several of Cassini's scientific investigations, including imaging radar and gravity experiments."With these major deliveries from our European partners, we remain on schedule to meet our Saturn launch date," said Cassini project manager Richard J. Spehalski at JPL. "These critical hardware contributions enable us to proceed into technical qualification of the Cassini orbiter and Huygens probe hardware." Mated together, the probe and orbiter hardware will undergo months of structural and space environmental testing.The Cassini spacecraft will fly a looping, seven-year-long course, swinging twice past Venus and once past Earth and Jupiter to reach Saturn, about 1.4 billion kilometers (nearly 1 billion miles) away. Once there, Cassini will release the Huygens probe, with six instruments onboard, to explore Titan's atmosphere and surface. Over the course of its two-and-a-half hour parachute descent to Titan's surface, the Huygens probe is expected to return a wealth of data to the Cassini orbiter for relay back to Earth.Titan is a moon the size of a small planet. Its chemically complex atmosphere is primarily nitrogen and is rich in hydrocarbons, resembling the early atmosphere of Earth. Lakes or small oceans of liquid ethane may surround a continent-size surface feature on Titan recently discovered by scientists using the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. Studies of Titan by the Huygens probe will not only provide insight into the history and status of this unique body, but will also provide clues to the early history of Earth.With the Huygens probe portion of the mission completed, the Cassini spacecraft itself will remain in orbit around Saturn to return nearly four years of scientific information about the planet, its rings, moons and magnetic environment. Cassini will also conduct numerous flybys of Titan to gather more information about its atmosphere and global surface characteristics. An imaging radar instrument that can see through Titan's opaque atmospheric haze will gather data to produce photograph-like images of the surface.Many of Saturn's moons will be targets of intensive study, as will the dynamics, structure and make-up of the planet's rings. Saturn itself, made up mostly of hydrogen and helium, will be characterized in detail, and Cassini will study how charged particles from the Sun interact with the large, complex magnetic environment that envelops Saturn.The Huygens Probe is named for 17th-century Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens, who discovered Titan in 1659. The Cassini spacecraft is named for Italian-French astronomer Jean-Dominque Cassini, who discovered four more of Saturn's moons and in 1675 found the gap -- now called the Cassini Division -- that separates two of Saturn's more prominent rings.The Cassini mission is an international project jointly managed by NASA, the European Space Agency and Agenzia Spaziale Italiana. Contractors, academic institutions and space and science agencies from 17 countries are participating in the mission.The overall Cassini mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.818-354-5011

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-mars-lander-sees-falling-snow-soil-data-suggest-liquid-past

NASA Mars Lander Sees Falling Snow, Soil Data Suggest Liquid Past

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds. Spacecraft soil experiments also have provided evidence of past interaction between minerals and liquid water, processes that occur on Earth.A laser instrument designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars has detected snow from clouds about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) above the spacecraft's landing site. Data show the snow vaporizing before reaching the ground."Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars," said Jim Whiteway, of York University, Toronto, lead scientist for the Canadian-supplied Meteorological Station on Phoenix. "We'll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground."Phoenix experiments also yielded clues pointing to calcium carbonate, the main composition of chalk, and particles that could be clay. Most carbonates and clays on Earth form only in the presence of liquid water."We are still collecting data and have lots of analysis ahead, but we are making good progress on the big questions we set out for ourselves," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson.Since landing on May 25, Phoenix already has confirmed that a hard subsurface layer at its far-northern site contains water-ice. Determining whether that ice ever thaws would help answer whether the environment there has been favorable for life, a key aim of the mission.The evidence for calcium carbonate in soil samples from trenches dug by the Phoenix robotic arm comes from two laboratory instruments called the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, or TEGA, and the wet chemistry laboratory of the Microscopy, Electrochemistry and Conductivity Analyzer, or MECA."We have found carbonate," said William Boynton of the University of Arizona, lead scientist for the TEGA. "This points toward episodes of interaction with water in the past."The TEGA evidence for calcium carbonate came from a high-temperature release of carbon dioxide from soil samples. The temperature of the release matches a temperature known to decompose calcium carbonate and release carbon dioxide gas, which was identified by the instrument's mass spectrometer.The MECA evidence came from a buffering effect characteristic of calcium carbonate assessed in wet chemistry analysis of the soil. The measured concentration of calcium was exactly what would be expected for a solution buffered by calcium carbonate.Both TEGA, and the microscopy part of MECA, have turned up hints of a clay-like substance. "We are seeing smooth-surfaced, platy particles with the atomic-force microscope, not inconsistent with the appearance of clay particles," said Michael Hecht, MECA lead scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.The Phoenix mission, originally planned for three months on Mars, now is in its fifth month. However, it faces a decline in solar energy that is expected to curtail and then end the lander's activities before the end of the year. Before power ceases, the Phoenix team will attempt to activate a microphone on the lander to possibly capture sounds on Mars."For nearly three months after landing, the sun never went below the horizon at our landing site," said Barry Goldstein, JPL Phoenix project manager. "Now it is gone for more than four hours each night, and the output from our solar panels is dropping each week. Before the end of October, there won't be enough energy to keep using the robotic arm."The Phoenix mission is led by Smith at the University of Arizona. Project management is the responsibility of JPL with development partnership by Lockheed Martin in Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute.More information about Phoenix is athttp://www.nasa.gov/phoenix.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/juno-solves-39-year-old-mystery-of-jupiter-lightning

Juno Solves 39-Year Old Mystery of Jupiter Lightning

NASA's Juno spacecraft finds lightning on Jupiter is same as in Earth in some ways, opposite in others.

Ever since NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft flew past Jupiter in March, 1979, scientists have wondered about the origin of Jupiter's lightning. That encounter confirmed the existence of Jovian lightning, which had been theorized for centuries. But when the venerable explorer hurtled by, the data showed that the lightning-associated radio signals didn't match the details of the radio signals produced by lightning here at Earth.In a new paper published in Nature today, scientists from NASA's Juno mission describe the ways in which lightning on Jupiter is actually analogous to Earth's lightning. Although, in some ways, the two types of lightning are polar opposites."No matter what planet you're on, lightning bolts act like radio transmitters -- sending out radio waves when they flash across a sky," said Shannon Brown of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, a Juno scientist and lead author of the paper. "But until Juno, all the lightning signals recorded by spacecraft [Voyagers 1 and 2, Galileo, Cassini] were limited to either visual detections or from the kilohertz range of the radio spectrum, despite a search for signals in the megahertz range. Many theories were offered up to explain it, but no one theory could ever get traction as the answer."Enter Juno, which has been orbiting Jupiter since July 4, 2016. Among its suite of highly sensitive instruments is the Microwave Radiometer Instrument (MWR), which records emissions from the gas giant across a wide spectrum of frequencies."In the data from our first eight flybys, Juno's MWR detected 377 lightning discharges," said Brown. "They were recorded in the megahertz as well as gigahertz range, which is what you can find with terrestrial lightning emissions. We think the reason we are the only ones who can see it is because Juno is flying closer to the lighting than ever before, and we are searching at a radio frequency that passes easily through Jupiter's ionosphere."While the revelation showed how Jupiter lightning is similar to Earth's, the new paper also notes that where these lightning bolts flash on each planet is actually quite different."Jupiter lightning distribution is inside out relative to Earth," said Brown. "There is a lot of activity near Jupiter's poles but none near the equator. You can ask anybody who lives in the tropics -- this doesn't hold true for our planet."Why do lightning bolts congregate near the equator on Earth and near the poles on Jupiter? Follow the heat.Earth's derives the vast majority of its heat externally from solar radiation, courtesy of our Sun. Because our equator bears the brunt of this sunshine, warm moist air rises (through convection) more freely there, which fuels towering thunderstorms that produce lightning.Jupiter's orbit is five times farther from the Sun than Earth's orbit, which means that the giant planet receives 25 times less sunlight than Earth. But even though Jupiter's atmosphere derives the majority of its heat from within the planet itself, this doesn't render the Sun's rays irrelevant. They do provide some warmth, heating up Jupiter's equator more than the poles -- just as they heat up Earth. Scientists believe that this heating at Jupiter's equator is just enough to create stability in the upper atmosphere, inhibiting the rise of warm air from within. The poles, which do not have this upper-level warmth and therefore no atmospheric stability, allow warm gases from Jupiter's interior to rise, driving convection and therefore creating the ingredients for lightning."These findings could help to improve our understanding of the composition, circulation and energy flows on Jupiter," said Brown. But another question looms. "Even though we see lightning near both poles, why is it mostly recorded at Jupiter's north pole?"In a second Juno lightning paper published today in Nature Astronomy, Ivana Kolmašová of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, and colleagues, present the largest database of lightning-generated low-frequency radio emissions around Jupiter (whistlers) to date. The data set of more than 1,600 signals, collected by Juno's Waves instrument, is almost 10 times the number recorded by Voyager 1. Juno detected peak rates of four lightning strikes per second (similar to the rates observed in thunderstorms on Earth) which is six times higher than the peak values detected by Voyager 1."These discoveries could only happen with Juno," said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio. "Our unique orbit allows our spacecraft to fly closer to Jupiter than any other spacecraft in history, so the signal strength of what the planet is radiating out is a thousand times stronger. Also, our microwave and plasma wave instruments are state-of-the-art, allowing us to pick out even weak lightning signals from the cacophony of radio emissions from Jupiter. "NASA's Juno spacecraft will make its 13th science flyby over Jupiter's mysterious cloud tops on July 16.NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Microwave Radiometer instrument (MWR) was built by JPL. The Juno Waves instrument was provided by the University of Iowa. Lockheed Martin Space, Denver, built the spacecraft.More information on Juno can be found at:https://www.nasa.gov/junohttps://www.missionjuno.swri.eduMore information about Jupiter can be found at:https://www.nasa.gov/jupiterThe public can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at:https://www.facebook.com/NASAJunohttps://www.twitter.com/NASAJuno

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-study-sees-earths-water-cycle-pulse-quickening

NASA Study Sees Earth's Water Cycle Pulse Quickening

The circulation of water drives our planet's pulse. A new NASA/university study of river water flowing into oceans offers an early warning that the pulse may be speeding up.

Freshwater is flowing into Earth's ocean in greater amounts every year, thanks to more frequent and extreme storms related to global warming, according to a first-of-its-kind study by a team of NASA and university researchers.The team, led by Tajdarul Syed of the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, India, and formerly with the University of California, Irvine, used NASA and other world-scale satellite observations to track total water volume flowing from the continents into the ocean each month. They found 18 percent more water fed into the world's ocean from rivers and melting polar ice sheets in 2006 than in 1994. The average annual rise was 1.5 percent."That might not sound like much - 1.5 percent a year - but after a few decades, it's huge," said Jay Famiglietti, UC Irvine Earth system science professor and principal investigator on the study, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He noted that while freshwater is essential to humans and ecosystems, the rain is falling in all the wrong places, for all the wrong reasons."In general, more water is good," Famiglietti said. "But here's the problem: Not everybody is getting more rainfall, and those who are may not need it. What we're seeing is exactly what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted - that precipitation is increasing in the tropics and the Arctic Circle with heavier, more punishing storms. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people live in semiarid regions, and those are drying up."Famiglietti said the evaporation and precipitation cycle taught in grade school is accelerating dangerously because of higher temperatures fueled by greenhouse gases. Hotter weather above the ocean causes freshwater to evaporate faster, which leads to thicker clouds unleashing more powerful storms over land. The resulting rainfall then travels via rivers to the sea in ever-larger amounts, and the cycle begins again."Many scientists and models have suggested that if the water cycle is intensifying because of climate change, then we should be seeing increasing river flow. Unfortunately, there is no global discharge measurement network, so we have not been able to tell," wrote Famiglietti and Syed.Satellite records of sea-level rise, precipitation and evaporation were used to create a unique 13-year record - the longest and first of its kind. The trends the researchers found were all the same: increased evaporation from the ocean that led to increased precipitation on land and more flow back into the ocean. Among the NASA data used in the ongoing study are measurements from the NASA/European Topex/Poseidon and Jason-1 satellite altimeters and the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. The study is funded by NASA and Earth system science fellowships."As we turn up the thermostat on planet Earth, it's not just higher temperatures we have to think about," said co-author Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Long-term changes in rainfall will be a part of climate change too. What we've shown here is that we now have the tools to see global climate change as it occurs - not just the warming, but changes in the hydrological cycle as well."The researchers cautioned that although they had analyzed more than a decade of data, it was still a relatively short time frame. Natural ups and downs that appear in climate data make detecting long-term trends challenging. Further study is needed, they said, and is underway.Other authors of the study include Don Chambers of the University of South Florida, Tampa, Fla.; and Kyle Hilburn of Remote Sensing Systems, Santa Rosa, Calif.For more information, see the UC Irvine news release:http://today.uci.edu/news/2010/10/nr_oceans_101004.php.For more on Topex/Poseidon and Jason-1, visit:http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov. For more on GRACE, see:http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/andhttp://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/clusters-of-weather-extremes-will-increase-risks-to-corn-crops-society

Clusters of Weather Extremes Will Increase Risks to Corn Crops, Society

To assess how climate warming will change risks such as crop failures and wildfires, it’s necessary to look at how the risks are likely to interact.

Troubles never come singly, the proverb says. A new NASA study shows that the old saying will become increasingly true of climate troubles in a warmer world. The study shows that extreme weather events such as floods and heat waves will increasingly cluster closer in time and space, heightening the risks of crop failures, wildfires, and other hazards to society.By the year 2100, increases in heat waves, drought, and excessive rainfall combined will double the risk of climate-related failures of corn harvests in at least three of the world’s six major corn-growing regions in the same year, according to thestudy, published in Environmental Research Letters. The U.S. Midwest is at the highest risk of being the site of one of these multiple harvest failures.Many previous studies have modeled changes in a single climate indicator, such as the number of days above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) in a certain region. But the greatest impacts usually come when extremes occur simultaneously or in close sequence. For example, Western states are all too familiar with the scenario where excessive heat and drought fuel a wildfire, and then heavy rainfall creates a new hazard, landslides, in the burned area.Get the Latest JPL NewsSUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTERClimate scientists have been working for years to understand and represent these complex chains of interacting events numerically in climate models – a daunting task that pushes the limits of available computing power. “It’s only in the last five or so years that a framework has been developed for applying compound-risk thinking to climate analysis in a way that you can actually compute without getting in hopelessly over your head,” said study lead author Colin Raymond, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.For their study, the research team used a well-known German climate model called the Max Planck Institute Grand Ensemble to run 100 individual simulations of the years 1991 to 2100. The simulations of the past (1991 to 2020) showed that the model was able to represent extreme-event clusters, such as the alteration of extreme heat with extreme rainfall, consistently with the way they actually occurred during that period. The researchers analyzed simulations of the future through 2100 to examine probable future changes in climate hazards, particularly in hazards that could occur simultaneously or in close succession.Raymond and his colleagues focused on how the increased clustering of both temperature and precipitation hazards will affect corn. This important food crop is grown worldwide, with six major regions, or breadbaskets, accounting for about two-thirds of all production. The U.S. is the world’s top corn grower, harvesting some 419 million tons (380.3 million metric tonnes) in 2021.The model simulations showed that by 2100, extreme heat waves around the world lasting at least three days will occur two to four times as often as they do now. Three-day extremes in rainfall will generally increase 10% to 50% in frequency. The researchers also analyzed how these increased events will cluster in time and in location. They then looked at how all of these changes combined could affect future corn harvests, using the relationship between climate extremes in heat and rainfall and past crop failures as a guide.By their best estimate, the chance that a cluster of events will cause corn crops to fail in at least three of the world’s breadbaskets in the same year will nearly double, from 29% to 57%, by the year 2100. While small, the chance that harvests will fail in the five largest breadbasket regions in a single year will grow even more significantly – from 0.6% to 5.4%. The U.S. Midwest is the region most likely to be included in years with three breadbasket failures, followed by Central Europe.The study also examined how risks to wildfires and human health would increase as extremes follow one another more closely. All the results showed, Raymond said, that “things are interconnected in a way that we haven’t quite appreciated up to this point. It’s not just heat waves. It’s not just heat and drought. It’s all of those interconnections that best explain the severe impacts we care most about when we’re trying to prevent major disasters.”

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-helps-in-upcoming-asteroid-mission-homecoming

NASA Helps in Upcoming Asteroid Mission Homecoming

A Japanese spacecraft will return a capsule to Earth on June 13 in a uninhabited area of South Australia. NASA scientists and engineers have played a contributing role in the mission.

The space and astronomy worlds have June 13 circled on the calendar.That's when the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) expects the sample return capsule of the agency's technology demonstrator spacecraft, Hayabusa, to boomerang back to Earth. The capsule, along with its mother ship, visited a near-Earth asteroid, Itokawa, five years ago and has logged about 2 billion kilometers (1.25 billion miles) since its launch in May 2003.With the return of the Hayabusa capsule, targeted for June 13 at Australia's remote Woomera Test Range in South Australia, JAXA will have concluded a remarkable mission of exploration -- one in which NASA scientists and engineers are playing a contributing role."Hayabusa will be the first space mission to have made physical contact with an asteroid and returned to Earth," said Tommy Thompson, NASA's Hayabusa project manager from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The mission and its team have faced and overcome several challenges over the past seven years. This round-trip journey is a significant space achievement and one which NASA is proud to be part of."Launched May 9, 2003, from the Kagoshima Space Center, Uchinoura, Japan, Hayabusa was designed as a flying testbed.  Its mission: to research several new engineering technologies necessary for returning planetary samples to Earth for further study.  With Hayabusa, JAXA scientists and engineers hoped to obtain detailed information on electrical propulsion and autonomous navigation, as well as an asteroid sampler and sample reentry capsule.The 510-kilogram (950-pound) Hayabusa spacecraft rendezvoused with asteroid Itokawa in September 2005. Over the next two-and-a-half months, the spacecraft made up-close and personal scientific observations of the asteroid's shape, terrain, surface altitude distribution, mineral composition, gravity, and the way it reflected the sun's rays. On Nov. 25 of that year, Hayabusa briefly touched down on the surface of Itokawa. That was only the second time in history a spacecraft descended to the surface of an asteroid (NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous-Shoemaker spacecraft landed on asteroid Eros on Feb. 12, 2001). Hayabusa marked the first attempt to sample asteroid surface material.The spacecraft departed Itokawa in January 2007.  The road home for the technology demonstrator has been a long one, with several anomalies encountered along the way. But now the spacecraft is three days away from its home planet, and the Australian government, working closely with JAXA, has cleared the mission for landing. A team of Japanese and American navigators is guiding Hayabusa on the final leg of its journey. Together, they calculate the final trajectory correction maneuvers Hayabusa's ion propulsion system must perform for a successful homecoming."We have been collaborating with the JAXA navigators since the launch of the mission," said Shyam Bhaskaran, a member of JPL's Hayabusa navigation team.  "We worked closely with them during the descents to the asteroid, and now are working together to guide the spacecraft back home."To obtain the data they need, the navigation team frequently calls upon JAXA's tracking stations in Japan, as well as those of NASA's Deep Space Network, which has antennas at Goldstone, in California's Mojave Desert; near Madrid, Spain; and near Canberra, Australia.  In addition, the stations provide mission planners with near-continuous communications with the spacecraft to keep them informed on spacecraft health."Our task is to help advise JAXA on how to best get a spacecraft traveling at 12.2 kilometers per second (27,290 miles per hour) to intersect a very specific target point 200 kilometers (120 miles) above the Earth," said Bhaskaran.  "Once that is done, and the heat shield of the sample return capsule starts glowing from atmospheric friction, our job is done."While atmospheric entry may be the end of the line for the team that has plotted the spacecraft's every move for the past 2 billion kilometers, NASA's involvement continues for the craft's final 200 kilometers (120 miles), to the surface of the Australian Outback. A joint Japanese-U.S. team operating on the ground and in the air will monitor this most critical event to help retrieve the capsule and heat shield."This is the second highest velocity re-entry of a capsule in history," said Peter Jenniskens, a SETI Institute scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "This extreme entry speed will result in high heating rates and thermal loads to the capsule's heat shield. Such manmade objects entering with interplanetary speed do not happen every day, and we hope to get a ringside seat to this one."Jenniskens is leading an international team as it monitor the final plunge of Hayabusa to Earth using NASA's DC-8 airborne laboratory, which is managed and piloted by a crew from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif. The DC-8 flies above most clouds, allowing an unfettered line of sight for its instrument suite measuring the shock-heated gas and capsule surface radiation emitted by the re-entry fireball.The data acquired by the high-flying team will help evaluate how thermal protection systems behave during these super-speedy spacecraft re-entries.  This, in turn, will help engineers understand what a sample return capsule returning from Mars would undergo. The Hayabusa sample return capsule re-entry observation will be similar to earlier observations by the DC-8 team of NASA's Stardust capsule return, and the re-entry of the European Space Agency's ATV-1 ("Jules Verne") automated transfer vehicle.Soon after the sample return capsule touches down on the ground, Hayabusa team members will retrieve it and transport it to JAXA's sample curatorial facility in Sagamihara, Japan. There, Japanese astromaterials scientists, assisted by two scientists from NASA and one from Australia, will perform a preliminary cataloging and analysis of the capsule's contents."This preliminary analysis follows the basic protocols used for Apollo moon rocks, Genesis and Stardust samples," said Mike Zolensky, a scientist at NASA's Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate at the Johnson Space Center, Houston.  "If this capsule contains samples from the asteroid, we expect it will take a year to determine the primary characteristics of the samples, and learn how to best handle them. Then the samples will be distributed to scientists worldwide for more detailed analysis.""The Japanese and NASA engineers and scientists involved in Hayabusa's return from asteroid Itokawa are proud of their collaboration and their joint accomplishments," said Thompson. "Certainly, any samples retrieved from Itokawa will provide exciting new insights to understanding the early history of the solar system. This will be the icing on the cake, as this mission has already taught us so much. "For more information about the Hayabusa mission, visit:http://www.isas.jaxa.jp/e/enterp/missions/hayabusa/index.shtml.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/a-new-tool-for-weighing-unseen-planets

A New Tool for 'Weighing' Unseen Planets

The NEID instrument will help scientists determine the density of distant planets, which can reveal whether the planet is rocky, like Earth, or mostly gaseous, like Jupiter.

A new instrument funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation called NEID (pronounced "NOO-id"; sounds like "fluid") will help scientists measure the masses of planets outside our solar system -exoplanets- by observing the gravitational pull they exert on their parent stars. That information can help reveal a planet's composition, one critical aspect in determining its potential habitability.NEID recently made its first observations on the WIYN 3.5-meter (11.5-foot) telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory when it studied 51 Pegasi, which in 1995 was the first Sun-like star found to host an exoplanet.A new NASA-funded planet-hunting instrument has been installed on the WIYN telescope, on Arizona's Kitt Peak. NEID (pronounced "NOO-id," rhymes with fluid) is a spectrometer that is one of the first instruments of its kind with the precision to detect small, terrestrial planets around nearby stars. NEID will also confirm the presence of planets discovered by NASA's TESS space telescope, and reveal details of their anatomy.Located in southern Arizona, the observatory sits on land of the Tohono O'odham Nation, and NEID's pronunciation evokes a word that roughly translates as "to see" in the Tohono O'odham language. The instrument finds and studies planets using what is called the radial velocity method, where scientists measure how the star wobbles slightly due to an orbiting planet's gravitational pull. The more massive the planet, the stronger its tug and the faster the star moves. (A smaller star is also more susceptible to a planet's gravitational pull than a larger one.)Armed with measurements of a planet's diameter and mass, scientists can determine its density as well, which can typically reveal whether the planet is rocky (like Earth, Venus and Mars) or mostly gaseous (like Jupiter and Saturn). This is a first step toward finding potentially habitable worlds similar to Earth. When applied to many planets, the method provides a more comprehensive view of what types are most common in the galaxy and how other planetary systems form.Measuring WobblePlanets in our own solar system cause our Sun to wobble: Jupiter, with its immense gravity, causes our home star to move back and forth at roughly 43 feet per second (13 meters per second), whereas Earth causes a more sedate movement of only 0.3 feet per second (0.1 meters per second). The speed is proportional to an orbiting planet's mass as well as to the mass of the star and the distance between those two objects.Until now, instruments have typically been able to measure speeds as low as about 3 feet per second (1 meter per second), but NEID belongs to a new generation of instruments capable of achieving about three-times-finer precision. It has the potential to detect and study rocky planets around stars smaller than the Sun. In addition, the scientists and engineers working with the instrument want to use it to demonstrate "extreme precision radial velocity" that could perhaps one day detect planets as small as Earth orbiting around Sun-like stars in the habitable zone, where liquid water could potentially exist on a planet's surface.NEID will also confirm the presence and measure masses of planets discovered by NASA's recently launchedTESS(or Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) space telescope, which detects planets via a different method from NEID: TESS hunts for tiny dips in the light coming from nearby stars, an indication that a planet is crossing the star's face, or disk. This approach can reveal how big around the planet is (information necessary for calculating the planet's density) and, based on the wobble, the length of its "year," or one trip around its star. NEID can also investigate planet candidates found by other telescopes.Members of the NEID team will discuss the first light results at the235th meeting of the American Astronomical Societyin Honolulu.The NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research (NN-EXPLORE) partnership funds NEID, short for NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet Investigations with Doppler spectroscopy. NN-EXPLORE is managed at NASA by the Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP), based at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The NEID team is led by the Pennsylvania State University with major partners at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Arizona, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech.The NEID spectrograph was built at the Pennsylvania State University. NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIR Lab) was responsible for modifications to the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope to accommodate NEID. The telescope port adapter design was led by the NOIR Lab and was constructed at the University of Wisconsin. Additional NEID participants include Carleton College, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, the University of California Irvine, the University of Colorado and Macquarie University.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/aquarium-test-helps-scientists-look-for-life-in-extreme-environments

Aquarium Test Helps Scientists Look for Life in Extreme Environments

NASA's search for life elsewhere in the solar system is bringing space scientists to the giant kelp forest exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to test a new scientific probe that might one day look for life in oceans that may exist on Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

NASA's search for life elsewhere in the solar system is bringing space scientists to the giant kelp forest exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium to test a new scientific probe that might one day look for life in oceans that may exist on Jupiter's icy moon Europa.Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are conducting these first-time engineering tests at the California aquarium as a precursor to an experiment that will place a scientific probe in an underwater Hawaiian volcanic vent later this year. The Lo'ihi Underwater Volcanic Vent Mission Probe will investigate an undersea volcano located 27 kilometers (20 miles) east of the Big Island of Hawaii at a depth of about 1,300 meters (4,250 feet)."The purpose of using the Monterey Bay Aquarium kelp tank is to begin testing the instruments in an aquatic environment that contains some biological material that will stimulate and test the hardware," said JPL's Dr. Lonne Lane, principal investigator for the experiment. "The information to be gathered from these experiments at the aquarium and later in Hawaii will prepare us for future missions to difficult places like Antarctica's Lake Vostok (under 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) of ice), and below the surface of Jupiter's ice-encrusted moon Europa."The use of the aquarium also provides a cost-effective, controlled environment for this first experiment. Open ocean opportunities with deep-diving submersibles are extremely limited and often expensive, Lane explained."As part of JPL's new astrobiology effort, we are bringing new instrumentation and approaches to areas that in the past have been deemed either very difficult or impossible to explore," he said."The long-range goal of this experiment is a multi-faceted investigation of deep ocean volcanic vents and sea floor cracks from which very hot water flow out into the deep ocean. The foremost question we are trying to answer is: Can and do simple biological species exist within the hot water vents? If so, what are the temperature limits for their survival and what are the chemical conditions they need for growth?" Lane said.The search for life and organisms in extreme environments has prompted scientists to examine the thin, gelatinous (jellyfish-like) veils of material that have been previously observed at underwater volcanic hot water vents. Although there have been only a few observations of this material, on at least one occasion the white material has appeared to actually come from the vent throat. Measurements of thermal conditions inside the vents have produced a range of temperatures from near 80 C (176 F) to almost 350 C (662 F). The presence of life forms inside these vents would challenge what scientists believe is the accepted temperature range for life to exist. Currently the accepted temperature range is about -5 C to 110 C (23 F to 230 F), according to Lane.After the August tests in Monterey, the team will take the probe to Hawaii in October."The goal of the Lo'ihi mission in Hawaii is to develop an instrumented underwater probe that can be placed inside these deep, hot water vents. The probe will determine temperature, chemical state, nutrient supply, the identity of organic material and conduct limited visual imaging," said JPL's Lloyd French, project lead and system architect for the probe mission. "The first experiments will concentrate on temperature and imaging the vent walls, while the chemical and spectroscopic instruments are being developed for the second year deployment. The scientific probe will be placed inside the underwater vent by a robotic arm controlled from within an underwater submersible."The Lo'ihi mission is a joint venture between JPL and the University of Hawaii, with involvement from Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratories and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, is conducting the tests for NASA's Office of Space Sciences, Washington, DC.To download full resolution images of Europa, please visit NASA's Planetary Photojournal.818-354-5011

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/an-inside-look-at-hurricane-dorian-from-a-mini-satellite

An Inside Look at Hurricane Dorian from a Mini Satellite

A satellite the size of a cereal box revealed the rain-swept interior of the storm using its miniaturized technology.

A new view of Hurricane Dorian shows the layers of the storm, as seen by an experimental NASA weather satellite that's the size of a cereal box. TEMPEST-D reveals rain bands in four layers of the storm as Hurricane Dorian approaches Florida on Sept. 3, 2019. The multiple vertical layers show where the strongest convective "storms" within the hurricane are pushing high into the atmosphere, with pink, red and yellow corresponding to the areas of heaviest rainfall.Known as aCubeSat, TEMPEST-D (Temporal Experiment for Storms and Tropical Systems Demonstration) uses a miniaturized version of a microwave radiometer - a radio wave instrument used to measure rain and moisture within the clouds. If TEMPEST-D can successfully track storms like Dorian, the technology demonstration could lead to a train of small satellites that work together to track storms around the world. CubeSats are much less expensive to produce than traditional satellites; in multiples they could improve our global storm coverage and forecasting data.TEMPEST-D is led by Colorado State University in Fort Collins and managed by JPL in partnership with Blue Canyon Technologies in Boulder, Colorado, and Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The mission is sponsored by NASA's Earth Ventures program and managed by the Earth Science Technology Office at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The radiometer instrument was built by JPL and employs high-frequency microwave amplifier technology developed by Northrop Grumman.JPL is managed by Caltech in Pasadena for NASA.More information about this mission is available here:https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/cubesat/missions/tempest-d.phpFor more NASA images of Hurricane Dorian, visit the NASA Disasters Program:https://disasters.nasa.gov/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/signs-of-life-on-mars-nasas-perseverance-rover-begins-the-hunt

Signs of Life on Mars? NASA’s Perseverance Rover Begins the Hunt

After testing a bristling array of instruments on its robotic arm, NASA’s latest Mars rover gets down to business: probing rocks and dust for evidence of past life.

NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has begun its search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet. Flexing its 7-foot (2-meter) mechanical arm, the rover is testing the sensitive detectors it carries, capturing their first science readings. Along with analyzing rocks using X-rays and ultraviolet light, the six-wheeled scientist will zoom in for closeups of tiny segments of rock surfaces that might show evidence of past microbial activity.NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took this close-up of a rock target nicknamed “Foux” using its WATSON camera on the end of the rover’s robotic arm. The image was taken July 11, 2021, the 139th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSCalledPIXL, or Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry, the rover’s X-ray instrument delivered unexpectedly strong science results while it was still being tested, said Abigail Allwood, PIXL’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Located at the end of the arm, the lunchbox-size instrument fired its X-rays at a small calibration target – used to test instrument settings – aboard Perseverance and was able to determine the composition of Martian dust clinging to the target.“We got our best-ever composition analysis of Martian dust before it even looked at rock,” Allwood said.That’s just a small taste of what PIXL, combined with the arm’s other instruments, is expected to reveal as it zeroes in on promising geological features over the weeks and months ahead.Scientists say Jezero Crater was a crater lake billions of years ago, making it a choice landing site for Perseverance. The crater has long since dried out, and therover is now picking its way across its red, broken floor.“If life was there in Jezero Crater, the evidence of that life could be there,” said Allwood, a key member of the Perseverance “arm science” team.PIXL, one of seven instruments aboard NASA's Perseverance Mars rover, is equipped with light diodes circling its opening to take pictures of rock targets in the dark. Using artificial intelligence, PIXL relies on the images to determine how far away it is from a target to be scanned.Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechTo get a detailed profile of rock textures, contours, and composition, PIXL’s maps of the chemicals throughout a rock can be combined with mineral maps produced by theSHERLOCinstrument and its partner, WATSON. SHERLOC – short for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals – uses an ultraviolet laser to identify some of the minerals in the rock, while WATSON takes closeup images that scientists can use to determine grain size, roundness, and texture, all of which can help determine how the rock was formed.Early WATSON closeups have already yielded a trove of data from Martian rocks, the scientists said, such as a variety of colors, sizes of grains in the sediment, and even the presence of “cement” between the grains. Such details can provide important clues about formation history, water flow, and ancient, potentially habitable Martian environments. And combined with those from PIXL, they can provide a broader environmental and even historical snapshot of Jezero Crater.“What is the crater floor made out of? What were the conditions like on the crater floor?” asks Luther Beegle of JPL, SHERLOC’s principal investigator. “That does tell us a lot about the early days of Mars, and potentially how Mars formed. If we have an idea of what the history of Mars is like, we’ll be able to understand the potential for finding evidence of life.”This data shows chemicals detected within a single rock on Mars by PIXL, one of the instruments on the end of the robotic arm aboard NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. PIXL allows scientists to study where specific chemicals can be found within an area as small as a postage stamp.Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechThe Science TeamWhile the rover has significant autonomous capabilities, such as driving itself across the Martian landscape, hundreds of earthbound scientists are still involved in analyzing results and planning further investigations.“There are almost 500 people on the science team,” Beegle said. “The number of participants in any given action by the rover is on the order of 100. It’s great to see these scientists come to agreement in analyzing the clues, prioritizing each step, and putting together the pieces of the Jezero science puzzle.”That will be critical when the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover collects its first samples for eventual return to Earth. They’ll be sealed in superclean metallic tubes on the Martian surface so that a future mission could collect them and send back to the home planet for further analysis.Despite decades of investigation on the question of potential life, the Red Planet has stubbornly kept its secrets.“Mars 2020, in my view, is the best opportunity we will have in our lifetime to address that question,” said Kenneth Williford, the deputy project scientist for Perseverance.The geological details are critical, Allwood said, to place any indication of possible life in context, and to check scientists’ ideas about how a second example of life’s origin could come about.Combined with other instruments on the rover, the detectors on the arm, including SHERLOC and WATSON, could make humanity’s first discovery of life beyond Earth.More About the MissionA key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars isastrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. The rover will characterize the planet’s geology and past climate, pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet, and be the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith (broken rock and dust).Subsequent NASA missions, in cooperation with ESA (European Space Agency), would send spacecraft to Mars to collect these sealed samples from the surface and return them to Earth for in-depth analysis.The Mars 2020 Perseverance mission is part of NASA’s Moon to Mars exploration approach, which includesArtemismissions to the Moon that will help prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet.JPL, which is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages operations of the Perseverance rover.For more about Perseverance:mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/andnasa.gov/perseverance

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-mars-lander-to-dig-team-probes-flash-memory

NASA Mars Lander to Dig; Team Probes Flash Memory

NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission generated an unusually high volume of spacecraft housekeeping data on Tuesday causing the loss of some non-critical science data.

TUCSON, Ariz. -- NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission generated an unusually high volume of spacecraft housekeeping data on Tuesday causing the loss of some non-critical science data. Phoenix engineers are analyzing why this anomaly occurred. The science team is planning spacecraft activities for Thursday that will not rely on Phoenix storing science data overnight but will make use of multiple communication relays to gain extra data quantity."The spacecraft is healthy and fully commandable, but we are proceeding cautiously until we understand the root cause of this event," said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Usually Phoenix generates a small amount of data daily about maintaining its computer files, and this data gets a high priority in what gets stored in the spacecraft's non-volatile flash memory. On Tuesday, the quantity of this data was so high that it prevented science data from being stored in flash memory, so the remaining science data onboard Wednesday, when the spacecraft powered down for the Martian night after completing its 22nd Martian day, or sol, since landing, was not retained. None of that science data was high-priority data. Almost all was imaging that can be retaken, with the exception of images taken of a surface that Phoenix's arm dug into after the images were taken.To avoid stressing Phoenix's capacity for storing data in flash memory while powered off for overnight sleeps, the team commanded Phoenix Tuesday evening to refrain from any new science investigations on Wednesday and to lower the priority for the type of file-housekeeping data that exceeded expected volume on Tuesday."We can continue doing science that does not rely on non-volatile memory," Goldstein said. Most science data collected during the mission has been downlinked to Earth on the same sol it has been collected, not requiring overnight storage, but on some sols the team has intentionally included imaging that yields more data than can fit in the afternoon communication passes. This has been done in order to take advantage of the capacity to downlink additional data during communications passes on the following Martian mornings. In the short term, while the root cause of the unexpected amount of housekeeping data is being determined, the science team will forgo that strategy of storing data overnight.Meanwhile, extra communication-relay opportunities have been added to Thursday's schedule, so the science plan for the day will be able to generate plentiful data without needing overnight storage. Trench-digging, imaging and weather monitoring are in the plan.The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith of the University of Arizona with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, located in Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark; Max Planck Institute, Germany; and the Finnish Meteorological Institute. For more about Phoenix, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/phoenixandhttp://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-webb-spots-swirling-gritty-clouds-on-remote-planet

NASA’s Webb Spots Swirling, Gritty Clouds on Remote Planet

In just a few hours of observations, the space telescope revealed a dynamic atmosphere on a planet 40 light-years from Earth.

Researchers observing with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have pinpointed silicate cloud features in a distant planet’s atmosphere. The atmosphere is constantly rising, mixing, and moving during its 22-hour day, bringing hotter material up and pushing colder material down. The resulting brightness changes are so dramatic that it is the most variable planetary-mass object known to date. The team, led by Brittany Miles of the University of Arizona, also made extraordinarily clear detections of water, methane, and carbon monoxide with Webb’s data, and found evidence of carbon dioxide. This is the largest number of molecules ever identified all at once on a planet outside our solar system.Cataloged as VHS 1256 b, the planet is about 40 light-years away and orbits not one, but two stars over a 10,000-year period. “VHS 1256 b is about four times farther from its stars than Pluto is from our Sun, which makes it a great target for Webb,” Miles said. “That means the planet’s light is not mixed with light from its stars.” Higher up in its atmosphere, where the silicate clouds are churning, temperatures reach a scorching 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit (830 degrees Celsius).Instruments aboard the James Webb Space Telescope known asspectrographs, one on its Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and another on its Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), observed planet VHS 1256 b. The resulting spectrum shows signatures of silicate clouds, water, methane, and carbon monoxide.Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI); Science: Brittany Miles (University of Arizona), Sasha Hinkley (University of Exeter), Beth Biller (University of Edinburgh), Andrew Skemer (University of California, Santa Cruz)Within those clouds, Webb detected both larger and smaller silicate dust grains, which are shown on aspectrum. “The finer silicate grains in its atmosphere may be more like tiny particles in smoke,” noted co-author Beth Biller of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. “The larger grains might be more like very hot, very small sand particles.”VHS 1256 b has low gravity compared to more massivebrown dwarfs, which means that its silicate clouds can appear and remain higher in its atmosphere where Webb can detect them. Another reason its skies are so turbulent is the planet’s age. In astronomical terms, it’s quite young. Only 150 million years have passed since it formed – and it will continue to change and cool over billions of years.In many ways, the team considers these findings to be the first “coins” pulled out of a spectrum that researchers view as a treasure chest of data. They’ve only begun identifying its contents. “We’ve identified silicates, but better understanding which grain sizes and shapes match specific types of clouds is going to take a lot of additional work,” Miles said. “This is not the final word on this planet – it is the beginning of a large-scale modeling effort to fit Webb’s complex data.”Get the Latest JPL NewsSUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTERAlthough all of the features the team observed have been spotted on other planets elsewhere in the Milky Way by other telescopes, other research teams typically identified only one at a time. “No other telescope has identified so many features at once for a single target,” said co-author Andrew Skemer of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “We’re seeing a lot of molecules in a single spectrum from Webb that detail the planet’s dynamic cloud and weather systems.”The team came to these conclusions by analyzing data known asspectragathered by two instruments aboard Webb, theNear-Infrared Spectrograph(NIRSpec) and theMid-Infrared Instrument(MIRI). Since the planet orbits at such a great distance from its stars, the researchers were able to observe it directly, rather than using thetransit techniqueor acoronagraphto take this data.There will be plenty more to learn about VHS 1256 b in the months and years to come as this team – and others – continue to sift through Webb’s high-resolution infrared data. “There’s a huge return on a very modest amount of telescope time,” Biller added. “With only a few hours of observations, we have what feels like unending potential for additional discoveries.”What might become of this planet billions of years from now? Since it’s so far from its stars, it will become colder over time, and its skies may transition from cloudy to clear.The researchers observed VHS 1256 b as part of Webb’sEarly Release Science program, which is designed to help transform the astronomical community’s ability to characterize planets and the disks where they form.The team’s paper, entitled “The JWST Early Release Science Program for Direct Observations of Exoplanetary Systems II: A 1 to 20 Micron Spectrum of the Planetary-Mass Companion VHS 1256-1257 b,” will be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on March 22.More About the MissionThe James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency), and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).MIRI was developed through a 50-50 partnership between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory led the U.S. efforts for MIRI, and a multinational consortium of European astronomical institutes contributes for ESA. George Rieke with the University of Arizona is the MIRI science team lead. Gillian Wright is the MIRI European principal investigator. Alistair Glasse with UK ATC is the MIRI instrument scientist, and Michael Ressler is the U.S. project scientist at JPL. Laszlo Tamas with UK ATC manages the European Consortium. The MIRI cryocooler development was led and managed by JPL, in collaboration with Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.For more information about the Webb mission, visit:https://www.nasa.gov/webb

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/galileos-flyby-reveals-callistos-bizarre-landscape

Galileo's Flyby Reveals Callisto's Bizarre Landscape

A spiky landscape of bright ice and dark dust shows signs of slow but active erosion on the surface of Jupiter's moon Callisto in new images from NASA's Galileo spacecraft.

A spiky landscape of bright ice and dark dust shows signs of slow but active erosion on the surface of Jupiter's moon Callisto in new images from NASA's Galileo spacecraft.The pictures taken by Galileo's camera on May 25 from a distance of less than 138 kilometers, or about 86 miles, above Callisto's surface give the highest resolution view ever seen of any of Jupiter's moons."We haven't seen terrain like this before. It looks like erosion is still going on, which is pretty surprising," said James Klemaszewski of Academic Research Lab, Phoenix, Ariz. Klemaszewski is processing and analyzing the Galileo Callisto imagery with Dr. David A. Williams and Dr. Ronald Greeley of Arizona State University, Tempe. The images were released by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., which manages the Galileo mission.Callisto, about the same size as the planet Mercury, is the most distant of Jupiter's four large moons. Callisto's surface of ice and rock is the most heavily cratered of any moon in the solar system, signifying that it is geologically "dead." There is no clear evidence that Callisto has experienced the volcanic activity or tectonic shifting that have erased some or all of the impact craters on Jupiter's other three large moons.The jagged hills in the new images may be icy material thrown outward from a large impact billions of years ago, or the highly eroded remains of a large impact structure, Williams said. Each bright peak is surrounded by darker dust that appears to be slumping off the peak."They are continuing to erode and will eventually disappear," Klemaszewski said. One theory for an erosion process is that, as some of the ice sublimes away into vapor, it leaves behind dust that was bound in the ice. The accumulating dark material may also absorb enough heat from the Sun to warm the ice adjacent to it and keep the process going. The new images show portions of the surface where the sharp knobs have apparently eroded away, leaving a plain blanketed with dark material.The close-up images show craters as small as about 3 meters (10 feet) across, though not as many as some predictions anticipated. One scientific goal from the high-resolution images is to see how many small craters are crowded onto the surface. Crater counts are one way to estimate the age of a moon's surface, and since Callisto has been so undisturbed by other geological processes, its cratering density is useful in calibrating the estimates for Jupiter's other moons.JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages Galileo for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-launches-jpl-built-earth-science-experiment

NASA Launches JPL-Built Earth Science Experiment

The launch of NASA's newest Earth spacecraft also deployed a small research satellite with a JPL-built experiment that will prove technology for future Earth missions.

An experiment developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., to test technology for future NASA Earth science missions was aboard one of five small "CubeSat" research satellites that hitched a ride to orbit Oct. 28 with NASA's newest Earth-observing satellite, the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project, or NPP.NPP, which successfully launched aboard a Delta II rocket from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, will provide critical data to help scientists understand the dynamics of long-term climate patterns and help meteorologists improve short-term weather forecasts. A little more than an hour and a half after launch, the Delta II deployed the five auxiliary CubeSat payloads, which are the third installment of a series of NASA Educational Launch of Nanosatellite missions, also known as ELaNa III.JPL's experiment is aboard a University of Michigan-created CubeSat called the Michigan Multipurpose Mini-satellite/CubeSat On-board processing Validation Experiment, or M-Cubed/COVE. M-Cubed's mission is to obtain mid-resolution color imagery of Earth's surface and to carry COVE. COVE will validate an image processing algorithm designed for use in a science instrument planned for a next-generation satellite mission to survey the impacts of aerosols and clouds on global climate change. The instrument, called the Multiangle Spectro-Polarimetric Imager, or MSPI, is a multi-directional, multi-wavelength, high-accuracy polarization camera system that is a follow-on instrument to the JPL-developed Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument aboard NASA's Terra spacecraft. A prototype MSPI camera, known as AirMSPI, flies aboard NASA's ER-2 high-altitude aircraft and also includes the specialized processor that is flying aboard COVE. M-Cubed/COVE and MSPI development are sponsored by NASA's Earth Science Technology Office in Washington.MSPI is a candidate instrument for NASA's Aerosol-Cloud-Ecosystem (ACE) mission, an Earth satellite recommended by the National Research Council in its 2007 Earth Sciences Decadal Survey. ACE mission objectives include characterizing the role of aerosols in changing Earth's energy balance (the balance between incoming solar energy and outgoing heat from Earth), especially their impact on precipitation and cloud formation.The COVE technology validation experiment, which is designed to last at least six months, will feature the first in-space application of a new radiation-hardened field-programmable gate array (FPGA) processor. COVE will advance technology required for real-time, high-data-rate instrument processing relevant to future Earth science missions.M-Cubed/COVE successfully deployed from the first of three Poly Picosatellite Orbital Deployers aboard the Delta II rocket, and mission controllers at the University of Michigan have acquired a signal. The JPL/Michigan team is now tracking M-Cubed's signal and working to acquire data. Once nominal CubeSat operations are established, the team will then turn on JPL's COVE experiment and begin acquiring data from it.For more information about M-Cubed/COVE, visit:http://umcubed.org/. For more information about the ELaNa III mission, visit:http://go.nasa.gov/tgbuVn. For more on AirMSPI, visit:http://airbornescience.jpl.nasa.gov/airmspi/. For more about NPP, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/npp.JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/science-team-chosen-for-space-interferometry-mission

Science Team Chosen for Space Interferometry Mission

NASA has selected a science team for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), an innovative space system that will hunt for Earth-sized planets around other stars and provide new insights into the origin and evolution of our galaxy.

NASA has selected a science team for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), an innovative space system that will hunt for Earth-sized planets around other stars and provide new insights into the origin and evolution of our galaxy.Scheduled for launch in 2009, SIM will also precisely measure the locations and distances of stars throughout our Milky Way Galaxy, and study other celestial objects. The mission is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.SIM is part of NASA's Origins Program, a series of missions that will help us answer two fundamental questions: How did we get here? Are we alone? The newly selected team consists of 10 principal investigators leading key science teams, and five mission specialists.-- Discovery of Planetary Systems: Dr. Geoffrey W. Marcy, University of California, BerkeleyA search for new planets around nearby stars, which also will study the stars where scientists currently thinkplanets have been found.-- Extrasolar Planets Interferometric Survey: Dr. Michael Shao, JPLA search for planets using a large sample of stars. This study addresses one of SIM's primary science goals: taking acensus of planetary systems around nearby stars.-- The Search for Young Planetary Systems and the Evolution of Young Stars: Dr. Charles A. Beichman, JPLA study of the early stages of the formation of planetary systems around young stars that will provide new insightinto how planets like Earth might have formed.-- Stellar, Remnant, Planetary, and Dark-Object Masses from Astrometric Micro-lensing: Dr. Andrew P. Gould, Ohio State University, Columbus A novel technique of micro-lensing will be used to make exceptionally precise measurements of the massesof stars and a variety of other astronomical sources. Micro- lensinginvolves changes to a star's appearance that occur due to gravity from a nearby object.-- Space Interferometry Mission: Dynamical Observations of Galaxies Key Project: Dr. Edward J. Shaya, Raytheon ITSS CorporationBy determining the precise distances and motion of nearby galaxies, this scientific program will study the formationof the local group of galaxies.-- Astrophysics of Reference Frame Tie Objects: Dr. Kenneth J. Johnston, U.S. Naval ObservatoryThis program will obtain the data required to determine the motion of the Milky Way relative to extremelydistant extra-galactic sources.-- Anchoring the Population II Distances and Ages of Globular Clusters: Dr. Brian C. Chaboyer, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.This program will make observations to determine the ages and distances of globular clusters which areneeded to determine the age of the universe.-- A MASSIF Effort to Determine the Mass-Luminosity Relation for Stars of Various Ages, Metallicities and Evolutionary States:Dr. Todd J. Henry, Georgia State University, AtlantaDetermine to an accuracy of one percent the mass of 100 main sequence stars and a special sample of100 additional field stars. The improved mass-luminosity relation derived from this work would impact many fieldsof astrophysics and could be one of the major accomplishments of the SIM mission.-- Taking the Measure of the Milky Way: Dr. Steven R. Majewski, University of Virginia, CharlottesvilleA study of the motion of stars in our galaxy to determine the forces that cause the motion to understandbetter the distribution of matter in the Milky Way.-- Binary Black Holes, Accretion Disks and Relativistic Jets: Photocenters of Nearby Active Galactic Nuclei and Quasars:Dr. Ann E. Wehrle, JPLA study of possible motions and changes in active galactic nucleii and quasars. The data will provide newand unique insight into the physical processes in these sources.The mission scientists selected for the SIM science team are:-- Education and Public Outreach Scientist: Dr. Guy P. Worthey, St. Ambrose College, Davenport, Iowa-- Data Scientist: Dr. Andreas Quirrenbach, University of California, San Diego-- Instrument Scientist: Dr. Stuart Shaklan, JPL-- Interdisciplinary Scientist: Dr. Shrinivas R. Kulkarni, California Institute of Technology-- Imaging and Nulling Scientist: Dr. Ronald J. Allen, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.SIM will be placed into an Earth-trailing orbit around the Sun. Light gathered by its multiple telescopes will be combined and processed to yield information that could normally be obtained only with a much larger telescope. SIM will also search for planets beyond our solar system. A critical part of the SIM mission will be to identify potential observing targets for the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which will image planetary systems around other stars and look for chemical signatures that indicate a planet could sustain life.Additional information on SIM is available athttp://sim.jpl.nasa.gov. Additional information on the Origins program is available athttp://origins.jpl.nasa.gov.JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages SIM and Terrestrial Planet Finder for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-kepler-mission-finds-three-smallest-exoplanets

NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Three Smallest Exoplanets

Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler mission have discovered the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun.

PASADENA, Calif. - Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler mission have discovered the three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun. The planets orbit a single star, called KOI-961, and are 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth. The smallest is about the size of Mars.All three planets are thought to be rocky like Earth but orbit close to their star, making them too hot to be in the habitable zone, which is the region where liquid water could exist. Of the more than 700 planets confirmed to orbit other stars, called exoplanets, only a handful are known to be rocky."Astronomers are just beginning to confirm the thousands of planet candidates uncovered by Kepler so far," said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Finding one as small as Mars is amazing, and hints that there may be a bounty of rocky planets all around us."Kepler searches for planets by continuously monitoring more than 150,000 stars, looking for telltale dips in their brightness caused by crossing, or transiting, planets. At least three transits are required to verify a signal as a planet. Follow-up observations from ground-based telescopes also are needed to confirm the discoveries.The latest discovery comes from a team led by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The team used data publicly released by the Kepler mission, along with follow-up observations from the Palomar Observatory, near San Diego, and the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Their measurements dramatically revised the sizes of the planets from what was originally estimated, revealing their small nature.The three planets are very close to their star, taking less than two days to orbit around it. The KOI-961 star is a red dwarf with a diameter one-sixth that of our sun, making it just 70 percent bigger than Jupiter."This is the tiniest solar system found so far," said John Johnson, the principal investigator of the research from NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "It's actually more similar to Jupiter and its moons in scale than any other planetary system. The discovery is further proof of the diversity of planetary systems in our galaxy."Red dwarfs are the most common kind of star in our Milky Way galaxy. The discovery of three rocky planets around one red dwarf suggests that the galaxy could be teeming with similar rocky planets."These types of systems could be ubiquitous in the universe," said Phil Muirhead, lead author of the new study from Caltech. "This is a really exciting time for planet hunters."The discovery follows a string of recent milestones for the Kepler mission. In December 2011, scientists announced the mission's first confirmed planet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star: a planet 2.4 times the size of Earth called Kepler-22b. Later in the month, the team announced the discovery of the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f.For the latest discovery, the team obtained the sizes of the three planets (called KOI-961.01, KOI-961.02 and KOI-961.03) with the help of a well-studied twin star to KOI-961, Barnard's Star. By better understanding the KOI-961 star, they could then determine how big the planets must be to have caused the observed dips in starlight. In addition to the Kepler observations and ground-based telescope measurements, the team used modeling techniques to confirm the planet discoveries.Prior to these confirmed planets, only six other planets had been confirmed using the Kepler public data.NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., manages Kepler's ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., managed the Kepler mission's development.For information about the Kepler mission, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/kepler.JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/neowise-observes-carbon-gases-in-comets

NEOWISE Observes Carbon Gases in Comets

Data from NASA's NEOWISE mission are giving new insights into comet dust, nucleus sizes, and production rates for difficult-to-observe gases like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.

After its launch in 2009, NASA's NEOWISE spacecraft observed 163 comets during the WISE/NEOWISE prime mission. This sample from the space telescope represents the largest infrared survey of comets to date. Data from the survey are giving new insights into the dust, comet nucleus sizes, and production rates for difficult-to-observe gases like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Results of the NEOWISE census of comets were recently published in the Astrophysical Journal.Carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2) are common molecules found in the environment of the early solar system, and in comets. In most circumstances, water-ice sublimation likely drives the activity in comets when they come nearest to the sun, but at larger distances and colder temperatures, other common molecules like CO and CO2 may be the main drivers. Spaceborne carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are difficult to directly detect from the ground because their abundance in Earth's own atmosphere obscures the signal. The NEOWISE spacecraft soars high above Earth's atmosphere, making these measurements of a comet's gas emissions possible."This is the first time we've seen such large statistical evidence of carbon monoxide taking over as a comet's gas of choice when they are farther out from the sun," said James Bauer, deputy principal investigator of the NEOWISE mission from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and author of a paper on the subject. "By emitting what is likely mostly carbon monoxide beyond four astronomical units (4 times the Earth-Sun distance; about 370 million miles, 600 million kilometers) it shows us that comets may have stored most of the gases when they formed, and secured them over billions of years. Most of the comets that we observed as active beyond 4 AU are long-period comets, comets with orbital periods greater than 200 years that spend most of their time beyond Neptune's orbit."While the amount of carbon monoxide and dioxide increases relative to ejected dust as a comet gets closer to the sun, the percentage of these two gases, when compared to other volatile gases, decreases."As they get closer to the sun, these comets seem to produce a prodigious amount of carbon dioxide," said Bauer. "Your average comet sampled by NEOWISE would expel enough carbon dioxide to provide the bubble power for thousands of cans of soda per second."The pre-print version of this paper is available at:http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.08446The NEOWISE mission hunts for near-Earth objects using the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft. Funded by NASA's Planetary Science division, the NEOWISE project uses images taken by the spacecraft to look for asteroids and comets, providing a rich source of measurements of solar system objects at infrared wavelengths. These measurements include emission lines that are difficult or impossible to detect directly from the ground.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-holds-briefing-to-discuss-comet-flyby-of-mars-observations

NASA Holds Briefing to Discuss Comet Flyby of Mars Observations

NASA will host a briefing on Thursday, Oct. 9, to outline the space and Earth-based assets that will image and study a comet from relatively close range to Mars on Oct. 19.

NASA will host a briefing at 11 a.m. PDT (2 p.m. EDT) Thursday, Oct. 9, to outline the space and Earth-based assets that will have extraordinary opportunities to image and study a comet from relatively close range to Mars on Sunday, Oct. 19.The briefing will be held at NASA Headquarters' and broadcast live on NASA Television and the agency's website.Comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring will miss Mars by only about 88,000 miles (139,500 kilometers). That is less than half the distance between Earth and its moon and less than one-tenth the distance of any known comet flyby of Earth. The comet's nucleus will come closest to Mars at about 11:27 a.m. PDT (2:27 p.m. EDT), hurtling at about 126,000 mph (56 kilometers per second), relative to Mars.The concerted campaign of observations by multiple spacecraft at Mars and by numerous NASA assets is directed at the comet and its effect on the Martian atmosphere. The observations of the comet may yield fresh clues to our solar system's earliest days more than four billion years ago.Panelists include:- Jim Green, director, Planetary Science Division (PSD), NASA Headquarters, Washington- Kelly Fast, program scientist, PSD- Carey Lisse, senior astrophysicist, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland- Padma Yanamandra-Fisher, senior research scientist, Space Science Institute, Rancho Cucamonga Branch, CaliforniaThe public may ask questions on social media using the hashtag #askNASA.The news conference will be available live and archived on:http://www.ustream.tv/nasajplFor more about the comet, visit:http://mars.nasa.gov/comets/sidingspringFor NASA Television downlink information, scheduling information and streaming video, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/nasatv

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-built-greenhouse-gas-detector-moves-closer-to-launch

NASA-Built Greenhouse Gas Detector Moves Closer to Launch

The instrument will enable nonprofit organization Carbon Mapper to pinpoint and measure methane and carbon dioxide sources from space.

Astate-of-the-art imaging spectrometer, which will measure the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide from space, moved closer to launch this month after being delivered to a clean room at Planet Labs PBC (Planet) in San Francisco.Designed and built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, this science instrument will be part of an effort led by the nonprofitCarbon Mapperorganization to collect data on greenhouse gas point-source emissions. Built around technologies developed for NASA airborne campaigns and space missions, the Carbon Mapper imaging spectrometer will provide targeted data on “super-emitters” – the small percentage of individual sources responsible for a significant fraction of global methane and carbon dioxide emissions.A technician slides the imaging spectrometer, which will measure methane and carbon dioxide from Earth orbit, into a thermal vacuum test chamber at JPL in July. Engineers use the chamber to subject the spectrometer to the extreme temperatures it will encounter in the vacuum of space. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechFull Image DetailsThe Carbon Mapper coalition is a public-private effort led by the Carbon Mapper organization and its partners, including JPL, Planet, the California Air Resources Board, Rocky Mountain Institute, Arizona State University, and the University of Arizona.The instrument is an advanced imaging spectrometer that measures hundreds of wavelengths of light reflected by Earth’s surface and absorbed by gases in the planet’s atmosphere. Different compounds – including methane and carbon dioxide – absorb different wavelengths of light, leaving a spectral “fingerprint” that the imaging spectrometer can identify. These infrared fingerprints, invisible to the human eye, can pinpoint and quantify strong greenhouse gas emissions and accelerate potential mitigation efforts.Engineers prepare the imaging spectrometer – part of an effort led by the nonprofit Carbon Mapper to monitor greenhouse gas emissions – for vibration testing at JPL.Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechFull Image DetailsAn engineer prepares the imaging spectrometer instrument for testing in a thermal vacuum chamber at JPL. The instrument will be part of an effort led by the nonprofit Carbon Mapper organization to collect data on greenhouse gas point-source emissions.Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechFull Image DetailsThe spectrometer arrived Sept. 12 at Planet, where it will be integrated over the next several months into a Tanager satellite designed by the company. Launch is planned for early 2024.Before leaving JPL, the spectrometer was put through a series of critical tests to ensure that it could withstand the rigors of launch and the harsh conditions of space. Engineers subjected the spectrometer to intense vibrations similar to what it will endure atop a rocket blasting into orbit, as well as to the extreme temperatures it will experience in the vacuum of space.There was also an opportunity to use a sample of methane to test the completed instrument while it was in a vacuum chamber at JPL. The test was successful, with the imaging spectrometer producing a clear spectral fingerprint of methane.This spectral “fingerprint” of methane was produced from data taken during a test of the imaging spectrometer at JPL. Part of an effort led by the nonprofit Carbon Mapper, the state-of-the-art instrument measures hundreds of wavelengths of light reflected by Earth’s surface and absorbed by gases in the atmosphere. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechFull Image Details“We are thrilled to see the exceptional quality of the methane spectral signature recorded. This bodes well for the space measurement soon to follow,” said Robert Green, the instrument scientist at JPL.“This delivery is a very exciting step for us as our team can now begin the final stage in satellite integration,” said Jeff Guido, senior director of new missions at Planet. “This milestone is an excellent example of the innovative ways that government, philanthropy, and industry can play to each other’s strengths to build exceptional capability that has the potential for global impact.”Get the Latest JPL NewsSubscribe to the NewsletterThe new satellite is part of a broader effort by Carbon Mapper to survey the globe for point-source emissions of methane and carbon dioxide. That effort includes using measurements provided by an instrument already in orbit: NASA’sEarth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation, or EMIT, an imaging spectrometer developed by JPL and installed on the International Space Station. A second imaging spectrometer is being built by Planet in collaboration with JPL. The teams will continue working side by side to deliver these new greenhouse gas measurement capabilities.More About the ProjectCarbon Mapper is a nonprofit organization focused on facilitating timely action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Its mission is to fill gaps in the emerging global ecosystem of methane and carbon dioxide monitoring systems by delivering data at facility scale that is precise, timely, and accessible to empower science-based decision making and action. The organization is leading the development of the Carbon Mapper constellation of satellites supported by a public-private partnership composed of Planet Labs PBC, JPL, the California Air Resources Board, the University of Arizona, Arizona State University, and RMI, with funding from High Tide Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, and other philanthropic donors.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-insight-lander-hears-martian-winds

NASA InSight Lander 'Hears' Martian Winds

Vibrations picked up by two spacecraft instruments have provided the first sounds of Martian wind.

NASA's Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat TransportInSightlander, which touched down on Mars just 10 days ago, has provided the first ever "sounds" of Martian winds on the Red Planet. A media teleconference about these sounds will be held today at 12:30 p.m. EST (9:30 a.m. PST).InSight sensors captured a haunting low rumble caused by vibrations from the wind, estimated to be blowing between 10 to 15 mph (5 to 7 meters a second) on Dec. 1, from northwest to southeast. The winds were consistent with the direction of dust devil streaks in the landing area, which were observed from orbit."Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat," said Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "But one of the things our mission is dedicated to is measuring motion on Mars, and naturally that includes motion caused by sound waves."Teleconference audio and accompanying visuals will stream live on NASA'swebsite. A follow-along page is available at:https://www.nasa.gov/insightmarswindTwo very sensitive sensors on the spacecraft detected these wind vibrations: an air pressure sensor inside the lander and a seismometer sitting on the lander's deck, awaiting deployment by InSight's robotic arm. The two instruments recorded the wind noise in different ways. The air pressure sensor, part of the Auxiliary Payload Sensor Subsystem (APSS), which will collect meteorological data, recorded these air vibrations directly. The seismometer recorded lander vibrations caused by the wind moving over the spacecraft's solar panels, which are each 7 feet (2.2 meters) in diameter and stick out from the sides of the lander like a giant pair of ears.This is the only phase of the mission during which the seismometer, called the Seismic Experiment for Interior StructureSEIS, will be capable of detecting vibrations generated directly by the lander. In a few weeks, it will be placed on the Martian surface by InSight's robotic arm, then covered by a domed shield to protect it from wind and temperature changes. It still will detect the lander's movement, though channeled through the Martian surface. For now, it's recording vibrational data that scientists later will be able to use to cancel out noise from the lander when SEIS is on the surface, allowing them to detect better actual marsquakes.When earthquakes occur on Earth, their vibrations, which bounce around inside our planet, make it "ring" similar to how a bell creates sound. InSight will see if tremors, or marsquakes, have a similar effect on Mars. SEIS will detect these vibrations that will tell us about the Red Planet's deep interior. Scientists hope this will lead to new information on the formation of the planets in our solar system, perhaps even of our own planet.SEIS, provided by France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES), includes two sets of seismometers. Those contributed by the French will be used once SEIS is deployed from the deck of the lander. But SEIS also includes short period (SP) silicon sensors developed by Imperial College London with electronics from Oxford University in the United Kingdom. These sensors can work while on the deck of the lander and are capable of detecting vibrations up to frequencies of nearly 50 hertz, at the lower range of human hearing."The InSight lander acts like a giant ear," said Tom Pike, InSight science team member and sensor designer at Imperial College London. "The solar panels on the lander's sides respond to pressure fluctuations of the wind. It's like InSight is cupping its ears and hearing the Mars wind beating on it. When we looked at the direction of the lander vibrations coming from the solar panels, it matches the expected wind direction at our landing site."Pike compared the effect to a flag in the wind. As a flag breaks up the wind, it creates oscillations in air pressure that the human ear perceives as flapping. Separately, APSS records changes in pressure directly from the thin Martian air."That's literally what sound is - changes in air pressure," said Don Banfield InSight's science lead for APSS from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "You hear that whenever you speak to someone across the room."Unlike the vibrations recorded by the short period sensors, audio from APSS is about 10 hertz, below the range of human hearing.The raw audio sample from the seismometer was released unaltered; a second version was raised two octaves to be more perceptible to the human ear - especially when heard through laptop or mobile speakers. The second audio sample from APSS was sped up by a factor of 100, which shifted it up in frequency.An even clearer sound from Mars is yet to come. In just a couple years, NASA's Mars 2020 rover is scheduled to land with two microphones on board. The first,provided by JPL, is included specifically to record, for the first time, the sound of a Mars landing. The second is part of theSuperCamand will be able to detect the sound of the instrument's laser as it zaps different materials. This will help identify these materials based on the change in sound frequency.JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, which is managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supports spacecraft operations for the mission.A number of European partners, including CNES and the German Aerospace Center, support the InSight mission. CNES and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris provided SEIS, with significant contributions from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, the Swiss Institute of Technology in Switzerland, Imperial College and Oxford University in the United Kingdom, and JPL. DLR provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties PackageHP3instrument, with significant contributions from the Space Research Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika in Poland. Spain's Centro de Astrobiología supplied the wind sensors.Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie in France are responsible for delivering the SuperCam instrument to NASA. The SuperCam microphone is provided by Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace, a French higher education institution.For more information about InSight, visit:https://www.nasa.gov/insightTeleconference audio and visuals will stream live at:https://www.nasa.gov/livehttps://youtube.com/NASAJPL/live

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-ecostress-monitors-californias-record-breaking-heat-wave

NASA's ECOSTRESS Monitors California's Record-Breaking Heat Wave

From cities to deserts, the intense heat gripping California is being closely monitored by an Earth-observing mission aboard the International Space Station.

As record temperatures andlarge wildfiresscorch California, NASA's Ecosystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS) has been tracking the heat wave from low Earth orbit. While ECOSTRESS's primary mission is to measure the temperature of plants heating up as they run out of water, it can also measure and track heat-related phenomena like heat waves, wildfires, and volcanoes.At 3:56 p.m. PDT (6:56 p.m. EDT) on Aug. 14, as the space station passed over Los Angeles, ECOSTRESS was able to take a snapshot of the soaring land surface temperatures across the county, home to more than 10 million people. (Land surface temperature is the temperature of the ground rather than the air above it.) In the first image, ECOSTRESS measured a temperature range of about 70-125 degrees Fahrenheit (21-52 degrees Celsius), with the coolest being at the coasts and mountains. The highest surface temperatures, in dark red, were found northwest of downtown Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. (The instrument also captured the Ranch fire, seen in the center of the image, as it burned.) Land surface temperatures there reached over 125 degrees Fahrenheit (52 degrees Celsius), with a peak of 128.3 degrees Fahrenheit (53.5 degrees Celsius) between the cities of Van Nuys and Encino.Those afternoon peaks were within range of morning surface temperatures ECOSTRESS gauged two days later in Death Valley, part of California's Mojave Desert. As shown in the second image, from Aug. 16 at 8:50 a.m. PDT (11:50 a.m. EDT), ECOSTRESS recorded a maximum temperature of 122.52 degrees Fahrenheit (50.29 degrees Celsius) near Furnace Creek in Death Valley National Park.ECOSTRESS observations have a spatial resolution of about 77 by 77 yards (70 by 70 meters), which enables researchers to study surface-temperature conditions down to the size of a football field. Due to the space station's unique orbit, the mission can acquire images of the same regions at different times of day, as opposed to crossing over each area at the same time of day like satellites in other orbits do. This is advantageous when monitoring plant stress in the same area throughout the day, for example.The ECOSTRESS mission launched to the space station on June 29, 2018. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, built and manages the mission for the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. ECOSTRESS is an Earth Venture Instrument mission; the program is managed by NASA's Earth System Science Pathfinder program at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.More information about ECOSTRESS is available here:https://ecostress.jpl.nasa.govFor information on Earth science activities aboard the International Space Station, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/issearthscience

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/public-invited-to-send-names-on-roundtrip-mission-to-comet

Public Invited to Send Names on Roundtrip Mission to Comet

Through November, NASA is inviting individuals to submit their names to be etched on a microchip and flown aboard Stardust, a daring roundtrip robotic spacecraft mission to a comet.

Through November, NASA is inviting individuals to submit their names to be etched on a microchip and flown aboard Stardust, a daring roundtrip robotic spacecraft mission to a comet.The Stardust project, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, is collecting up to 300,000 names by Nov. 30, 1997. The names will be electronically etched onto a fingernail-size silicon chip in the Microdevices Lab at JPL, where the Stardust mission is managed. The collection of names is being coordinated with the assistance of The Planetary Society, a non-profit space interest and education group based in Pasadena.Now beginning assembly and scheduled for launch in February 1999, the Stardust spacecraft will embark on a five-year journey through the coma and to approximately 150 kilometers (100 miles) of the nucleus of Comet Wild-2 (pronounced "VILT-2"), gather cometary dust particles and deliver them back to Earth."This is a chance for people to take a vicarious trip to a comet and back again," said Gloria Jew, coordinator for the Stardust mission's public outreach efforts at JPL.Names on the chip will be so small that the width of the type used measures 10 times smaller than the width of a human hair and can be read only with the aid of an electron microscope. Names may be submitted electronically to the Stardust web page athttp://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/or in writing, mailed to The Planetary Society, 65 N. Catalina Ave, Pasadena, CA 91106-2301. Those submitting their names are granting permission for the Stardust project and its partners to use the names submitted in possible future exhibits and/or publications.Stardust will be the first space mission to gather dust and other material from a comet and bring it back to Earth for scientific analysis. In January 2006, an atmospheric reentry capsule housing the comet sample will plunge through the skies over Utah and parachute softly to the Earth's surface. A direct sample of a comet has been long sought by planetary scientists because comets are thought to be nearly pristine examples of the original material from which the Sun and planets were born 4.6 billion years ago.Stardust's scientific bounty from its five-year voyage will also include samples of the interstellar dust that passes through our solar system. Return of this interstellar material will provide scientists with their first opportunity for laboratory study of the composition of the interstellar medium."Stardust has 'double-barreled' science objectives to capture samples of two deep-space phenomena, comets and interstellar dust," said Dr. Kenneth Atkins, Stardust project manager at JPL.Both the comet and interstellar dust samples will be collected in a special material called aerogel, a lightweight transparent silica gel, the lowest density solid material in the world. (Aerogel was most recently used as a lightweight insulating material to protect the Mars Pathfinder Sojourner's electronics from the harsh, cold climate of Mars.)As a Discovery-class mission, Stardust is one of NASA's new "faster, better, cheaper" missions. "Stardust also represents a reversal in traditional exploration technique," said Atkins. "Instead of taking expensively-packaged instruments to the target of interest, Stardust will bring samples of the targets to laboratories on Earth where existing instruments with the latest techniques can be used to examine them. This saves money and provides opportunities for more investigators to participate."Comet Wild-2 is a 'fresh' comet which was recently (in 1974) deflected by Jupiter's gravity from an earlier orbit lying much farther out in the solar system. Having spent most of the last 4.6 billion years in the coldest, most distant reaches of the solar system, Wild-2 represents a well-preserved example of the fundamental building blocks out of which our solar system formed.Stardust is the fourth NASA Discovery mission to be chosen and follows the Mars Pathfinder, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR), and Lunar Prospector missions. The goal of NASA's Discovery Program is to launch many small missions that perform focused science with fast turn-around times, cost less than $150 million (in FY '92 dollars) to build, and are joint efforts with industry, small business and universities.The principal investigator for Stardust is Dr. Donald E. Brownlee of the University of Washington, well-known for his discovery of cosmic particles in Earth's stratosphere. JPL's Dr. Peter Tsou, innovator in aerogel technology and maker of aerogel, serves as deputy investigator.Stardust is being built by Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, CO. JPL will provide the mission science payload that includes the optical navigation camera and manages the overall mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. JPL is a division of the California Insititute of Technology.818-354-5011

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/mars-2020-rover-t-minus-one-year-and-counting

Mars 2020 Rover: T-Minus One Year and Counting

The launch period for NASA's next rover, Mars 2020, opens exactly one year from today, July 17, 2020, and extends through Aug. 5, 2020.

The launch period for NASA's Mars 2020 rover opens exactly one year from today, July 17, 2020, and extends through Aug. 5, 2020. The mission will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and land at Mars'Jezero Crateron Feb. 18, 2021."Back when we started this project in 2013, we came up with a timeline to chart mission progress," said John McNamee, Mars 2020 project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "That every single major spacecraft component on a project with this level of innovation is synching right now with that timeline is a testament to the innovation and perseverance of a great team."In this image, taken on July 11, 2019, engineers at JPL install a sensor-filled turret on the end of the rover's 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) robotic arm. The rover's turret includes HD cameras, the Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals (SHERLOC) science instrument, the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL), and a percussive drill and coring mechanism.On Mars, the arm and turret will work together, allowing the rover to work as a human geologist would: by reaching out to interesting geologic features, scraping, analyzing and even collecting them for further study via Mars 2020's Sample Caching System, which includes 17 motors and will collect samples of Martian rock and soil that will be returned to Earth by a future mission.JPL is building and will manage operations of the Mars 2020 rover for the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington. NASA will use Mars 2020 and other missions, including to the Moon, to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. The agency intends to establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through NASA's Artemis lunar exploration plans.If you want to send your name to Mars with NASA's 2020 mission, you can do so until Sept. 30, 2019. Add your name to the list and obtain a souvenir boarding pass to Mars here:https://go.nasa.gov/Mars2020PassFor more information about the mission, go to:https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/mars-curiositys-labs-are-back-in-action

Mars Curiosity's Labs Are Back in Action

NASA's Curiosity rover is analyzing drilled samples on Mars in one of its onboard labs for the first time in more than a year.

NASA's Curiosity rover is analyzing drilled samples on Mars in one of its onboard labs for the first time in more than a year."This was no small feat. It represents months and months of work by our team to pull this off," said Jim Erickson, project manager of the Mars Science Laboratory mission, which is led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The Curiosity rover is part of the MSL mission. "JPL's engineers had to improvise a new way for the rover to drill rocks on Mars after a mechanical problem took the drill offline in December 2016."The rover drilled its last scheduled rock sample in October 2016.On May 20, a technique called "feed extended drilling" allowed Curiosity to drill its first rock sample since October 2016; on May 31, an additional technique called "feed extended sample transfer" successfully trickled rock powder into the rover for processing byits mineralogy laboratory. Delivery to itschemistry laboratorywill follow in the week ahead.Testing of both the new drilling method and sample delivery will continue to be refined as Curiosity's engineers study their results from Mars. But this is a major milestone for the mission, said Ashwin Vasavada of JPL, the mission's project scientist."The science team was confident that the engineers would deliver -- so confident that we drove back to a site that we missed drilling before. The gambit paid off, and we now have a key sample we might have never gotten," Vasavada said. "It's quite remarkable to have a moment like this, five years into the mission. It means we can resume studying Mount Sharp, which Curiosity is climbing, with our full range of scientific tools."The new sample transfer technique allows Curiosity to position its drill over two small inlets on top of the rover's deck, trickling in the appropriate amount of rock powder for the onboard laboratories to do their analyses.This delivery method had already been successfully tested at JPL. But that's here on Earth; on Mars, the thin, dry atmosphere provides very different conditions for powder falling out of the drill."On Mars we have to try and estimate visually whether this is working, just by looking at images of how much powder falls out," said John Michael Moorokian of JPL, the engineer who led development of the new sample delivery method. "We're talking about as little as half a baby aspirin worth of sample."Too little powder, and the laboratories can't provide accurate analyses. Too much, and it could overfill the instruments, clogging parts or contaminating future measurements. A successful test of the delivery method on May 22 led to even further improvements in the delivery technique.Part of the challenge is that Curiosity's drill is now permanently extended. That new configuration no longer gives it access to a special device that sieves and portions drilled samples in precise amounts. That device, called the Collection and Handling for In-Situ Martian Rock Analysis (CHIMRA), played an important role in delivering measured portions of sample to the laboratories inside the rover.For more information about Curiosity, visit:https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-studying-shared-venus-science-objectives-with-russian-space-research-institute

NASA Studying Shared Venus Science Objectives with Russian Space Research Institute

NASA-sponsored scientists will meet with the Russian Academy of Sciences' Space Research Institute (IKI) next week to continue work on a Joint Science Definition Team study focused on identifying shared science objectives for Venus exploration.

A team of NASA-sponsored scientists will meet with the Russian Academy of Sciences' Space Research Institute (IKI) next week to continue work on a Joint Science Definition Team study focused on identifying shared science objectives for Venus exploration. The visit comes after areportwas recently delivered to both NASA Headquarters in Washington and IKI in Moscow, assessing and refining the science objectives of the IKI Venera-D (Venera-Dolgozhivuschaya) Mission to Venus, Earth's closest planetary neighbor."While Venus is known as our 'sister planet,' we have much to learn, including whether it may have once had oceans and harbored life," said Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "By understanding the processes at work at Venus and Mars, we will have a more complete picture about how terrestrial planets evolve over time and obtain insight into the Earth's past, present and future."Venus has intrigued scientists for decades. Similar to Earth in composition and size, it spins slowly in the opposite direction. The rocky world's thick atmosphere traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect, making it the warmest planet in our solar system with surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead. Glimpses below the clouds reveal volcanoes and an intricate landscape. Venus is named for the Roman goddess of love and beauty, the counterpart to the Greek goddess Aphrodite."On a solar-system scale, Earth and Venus are very close together and of similar size and makeup," said David Senske, co-chair of the U.S. Venera-D science definition team, and a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Among the goals that we would like to see if we can accomplish with such a potential partnership is to understand how Venus' climate operates so as to understand the mechanism that has given rise to the rampant greenhouse effect we see today."The IKI Venera-D mission concept as it stands today would include a Venus orbiter that would operate for up to three years, and a lander designed to survive the incredibly harsh conditions a spacecraft would encounter on Venus' surface for a few hours. The science definition team is also assessing the potential of flying a solar-powered airship in Venus' upper atmosphere. The independent flying vehicle could be released from the Venera-D lander, enter the atmosphere, and independently explore Venus' atmosphere for up to three months.NASA first visited Venus when the JPL-managed Mariner 2 collected data during a flyby in December 1962. NASA's last dedicated mission to explore Venus was Magellan. Launched in 1990, and managed by JPL, Magellan used radar to map 98 percent of the planet at a resolution of 330 feet (100 meters) or better during its four-year mission.The Venera spacecraft program is the only one to date to successfully land on Venus and survive its harsh environment. Said Adriana Ocampo, who leads the Joint Science Definition Team at NASA Headquarters in Washington, "This potential collaboration makes for an enriching partnership to maximize the science results from Venera-D, and continue the exploration of this key planet in our solar system."More information about Venus can be found at:https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/venus

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/comet-panstarrs-rises-to-the-occasion-mid-march

Comet PANSTARRS Rises to the Occasion Mid-March

A beautiful comet with a bulky name is making an appearance this month for lucky sky-watchers in some parts of the world.

Comets visible to the naked eye are a rare delicacy in the celestial smorgasbord of objects in the nighttime sky. Scientists estimate that the opportunity to see one of these icy dirtballs advertising their cosmic presence so brilliantly they can be seen without the aid of a telescope or binoculars happens only once every five to 10 years. That said, there may be two naked-eye comets available for your viewing pleasure this year."You might have heard of a comet ISON, which may become a spectacular naked-eye comet later this fall," said Amy Mainzer, the principal investigator of NASA's NEOWISE mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and self-described cosmic icy dirtball fan. "But if you have the right conditions you don't have to wait for ISON. Within a few days, comet PANSTARRS will be making its appearance in the skies of the Northern Hemisphere just after twilight."Discovered in June 2011, comet 2011 L4 (PANSTARRS) bears the name of the telescopic survey that discovered it -- the less than mellifluous sounding "Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System" which sits atop the Haleakala volcano in Hawaii.Since its discovery a year-and-a-half ago, observing comet PANSTARRS has been the exclusive dominion of comet aficionados in the Southern Hemisphere, but that is about to change. As the comet continues its well-understood and safe passage through the inner-solar system, its celestial splendor will be lost to those in the Southern Hemisphere, but found by those up north."There is a catch to viewing comet PANSTARRS," said Mainzer. "This one is not that bright and is going to be low on the western horizon, so you'll need a relatively unobstructed view to the southwest at twilight and, of course, some good comet-watching weather."Well, there is one more issue -- the time of day, or night, to view it."Look too early and the sky will be too bright," said Rachel Stevenson, a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at JPL. "Look too late, the comet will be too low and obstructed by the horizon. This comet has a relatively small window."By March 8, comet PANSTARRS may be viewable for those with a totally unobstructed view of the western horizon for about 15 minutes after twilight. On March 10, it will make its closest approach to the sun about 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) away. As it continues its nightly trek across the sky, the comet may get lost in the sun's glare but should return and be visible to the naked eye by March 12. As time marches on in the month of March, the comet will begin to fade away slowly, becoming difficult to view (even with binoculars or small telescopes) by month's end. The comet will appear as a bright point of light with its diffuse tail pointing nearly straight up from the horizon like an exclamation point.What, if any, attraction does seeing a relatively dim naked-eye comet with the naked eye hold for someone who works with them every day, with file after file of high-resolution imagery spilling out on her computer workstation?"You bet I'm going to go look at it!" said Mainzer. "Comet PanSTARRS may be a little bit of a challenge to find without a pair of binoculars, but there is something intimately satisfying to see it with your own two eyes. If you have a good viewing spot and good weather, it will be like the Sword of Gryffindor, it should present itself to anyone who is worthy."NASA detects, tracks and characterizes asteroids and comets passing relatively 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 predicts their paths 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, DC. 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, and on Twitter: @asteroidwatch .

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/mars-odyssey-releases-first-data-archive-to-scientists

Mars Odyssey Releases First Data Archive to Scientists

This release is a major milestone for Mars scientists worldwide

NASA has released the first set of data taken by the Mars Odyssey spacecraft to the Planetary Data System, which will now make the information available to research scientists through a new online distribution and access system."This release is a major milestone for Mars scientists worldwide, since the first validated data from our instruments are now available to the entire scientific community," said Dr. R. Stephen Saunders, the Odyssey project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "There are fundamentally new kinds of information in these data sets, including day and night infrared images, maps of hydrogen in the soil, and radiation hazard data for future Mars missions."The information includes the first six weeks of mapping data through the end of March, as well as the observations made during the cruise phase to Mars. The archive consists of formatted instrument data from the gamma-ray spectrometer and high-energy neutron spectrometer; Mars maps from the neutron detectors; about 800 visible and infrared images taken by the camera system; and radiation measurements from the Martian radiation environment experiment. New data will be released to the science community every three months.The Odyssey data are available through a new online access system established by the Planetary Data System at:http://starbrite.jpl.nasa.gov/pds/The Odyssey data release, coupled with the availability of this new system, marks a significant improvement in access to data from solar system exploration missions. Beginning today, validated data from all Odyssey instruments will be available for search and retrieval immediately upon delivery to the Planetary Data System.The system will soon integrate data sets from all Mars missions so researchers can obtain all the data they need at a "one-stop shopping" Internet site. A guide to the Odyssey data sets can be found at the Planetary Data System Geosciences Node at:http://wufs.wustl.edu/missions/odysseyJPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the 2001 Mars Odyssey mission for NASA's Office of Space Science in Washington, D.C. Investigators at Arizona State University in Tempe, the University of Arizona in Tucson and NASA's Johnson Space Center, Houston, operate the science instruments. Additional science partners are located at the Russian Aviation and Space Agency and at Los Alamos National Laboratories, New Mexico. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, is the prime contractor for the project, and developed and built the orbiter. Mission operations are conducted jointly from Lockheed Martin and from JPL.Additional information about the 2001 Mars Odyssey is available on the Internet at:http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/third-drive-of-curiositys-long-trek-covers-135-feet

Third Drive of Curiosity's Long Trek Covers 135 Feet

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity drove 135 feet (41 meters) on Tuesday, July 9, the third drive in a journey of many months from the "Glenelg" area to Mount Sharp.

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Mars rover Curiosity drove 135 feet (41 meters) on Tuesday, July 9, the third drive of a journey of many months from the "Glenelg" area to Mount Sharp.Last week, the mission finished investigating science targets in the Glenelg area, about 500 yards (half a kilometer) east of where Curiosity landed. The mission's next major destination is at the lower layers of Mount Sharp, about 5 miles (8 kilometers) southwest of Glenelg. The July 9 drive brought Curiosity's odometry to about 325 feet (99 meters) since completing the Glenelg investigations and about 0.51 mile (0.95 kilometer) since landing on Mars in August 2012.Mount Sharp, in the middle of Gale Crater, exposes many layers where scientists anticipate finding evidence about how the ancient Martian environment changed and evolved. At targets in the Glenelg area, where Curiosity worked for the first half of 2013, the rover found evidence for an ancient wet environment that had conditions favorable for microbial life. This means the mission already has accomplished its main science objective.NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 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 athttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl,http://www.nasa.gov/mslandhttp://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/. You can follow the mission on Facebook athttp://www.facebook.com/marscuriosityand on Twitter athttp://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-study-finds-atlantic-conveyor-belt-not-slowing

NASA Study Finds Atlantic 'Conveyor Belt' Not Slowing

New NASA measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years.

PASADENA, Calif. - New NASA measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years. The data suggest the circulation may have even sped up slightly in the recent past.The findings are the result of a new monitoring technique, developed by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using measurements from ocean-observing satellites and profiling floats. The findings are reported in the March 25 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.The Atlantic overturning circulation is a system of currents, including the Gulf Stream, that bring warm surface waters from the tropics northward into the North Atlantic. There, in the seas surrounding Greenland, the water cools, sinks to great depths and changes direction. What was once warm surface water heading north turns into cold deep water going south. This overturning is one part of the vast conveyor belt of ocean currents that move heat around the globe.Without the heat carried by this circulation system, the climate around the North Atlantic -- in Europe, North America and North Africa -- would likely be much colder. Scientists hypothesize that rapid cooling 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age was triggered when freshwater from melting glaciers altered the ocean's salinity and slowed the overturning rate. That reduced the amount of heat carried northward as a result.Until recently, the only direct measurements of the circulation's strength have been from ship-based surveys and a set of moorings anchored to the ocean floor in the mid-latitudes. Willis' new technique is based on data from NASA satellite altimeters, which measure changes in the height of the sea surface, as well as data from Argo profiling floats. The international Argo array, supported in part by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, includes approximately 3,000 robotic floats that measure temperature, salinity and velocity across the world's ocean.With this new technique, Willis was able to calculate changes in the northward-flowing part of the circulation at about 41 degrees latitude, roughly between New York and northern Portugal. Combining satellite and float measurements, he found no change in the strength of the circulation overturning from 2002 to 2009. Looking further back with satellite altimeter data alone before the float data were available, Willis found evidence that the circulation had sped up about 20 percent from 1993 to 2009. This is the longest direct record of variability in the Atlantic overturning to date and the only one at high latitudes.The latest climate models predict the overturning circulation will slow down as greenhouse gases warm the planet and melting ice adds freshwater to the ocean. "Warm, freshwater is lighter and sinks less readily than cold, salty water," Willis explained.For now, however, there are no signs of a slowdown in the circulation. "The changes we're seeing in overturning strength are probably part of a natural cycle," said Willis. "The slight increase in overturning since 1993 coincides with a decades-long natural pattern of Atlantic heating and cooling."If or when the overturning circulation slows, the results are unlikely to be dramatic. "No one is predicting another ice age as a result of changes in the Atlantic overturning," said Willis. "Even if the overturning was the Godzilla of climate 12,000 years ago, the climate was much colder then. Models of today's warmer conditions suggest that a slowdown would have a much smaller impact now."But the Atlantic overturning circulation is still an important player in today's climate," Willis added. "Some have suggested cyclic changes in the overturning may be warming and cooling the whole North Atlantic over the course of several decades and affecting rainfall patterns across the United States and Africa, and even the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic."With their ability to observe the Atlantic overturning at high latitudes, Willis said, satellite altimeters and the Argo array are an important complement to the mooring and ship-based measurements currently being used to monitor the overturning at lower latitudes. "Nobody imagined that this large-scale circulation could be captured by these global observing systems," said Willis. "Their amazing precision allows us to detect subtle changes in the ocean that could have big impacts on climate."For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit:http://www.nasa.gov.JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/the-mars-insight-landing-site-is-just-plain-perfect

The Mars InSight Landing Site Is Just Plain Perfect

If the InSight landing zone were ice cream, it would be vanilla.

No doubt about it, NASA explores some of the most awe-inspiring locations in our solar system and beyond. Once seen, who can forget the majesty of astronaut Jim Irwin standing before the stark beauty of the Moon'sHadley Apenninemountain range, of the Hubble Space Telescope's gorgeous"Pillars of Creation" or Cassini's magnificentmosaicof Saturn?Mars also plays a part in this visually compelling equation, with the high-definition imagery from the Curiosity rover of the ridges and rounded buttes at the base ofMount Sharpbringing to mind the majesty of the American Southwest. That said, Elysium Planitia - the site chosen for the Nov. 26 landing of NASA's InSight mission to Mars - will more than likely never be mentioned with those above because it is, well, plain."If Elysium Planitia were a salad, it would consist of romaine lettuce and kale - no dressing," said InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "If it were an ice cream, it would be vanilla."Yes, the landing site of NASA's next Mars mission may very well look like a stadium parking lot, but that is the way the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) project likes it."Previous missions to the Red Planet have investigated its surface by studying its canyons, volcanoes, rocks and soil," said Banerdt. "But the signatures of the planet's formation processes can be found only by sensing and studying evidence buried far below the surface. It is InSight's job to study the deep interior of Mars, taking the planet's vital signs - its pulse, temperature and reflexes."Taking those vital signs will help the InSight science team look back to a time when the rocky planets of the solar system formed. The investigations will depend on three instruments:A six-sensor seismometer called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) will record seismic waves traveling through the interior structure of the planet. Studying seismic waves will tell scientists what might be creating the waves. (On Mars, scientists suspect that the culprits may be marsquakes or meteorites striking the surface.)The mission's Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) will burrow deeper than any other scoop, drill or probe on Mars before to gauge how much heat is flowing out of the planet. Its observations will shed light on whether Earth and Mars are made of the same stuff.Finally, InSight's Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE) experiment will use the lander's radios to assess the wobble of Mars' rotation axis, providing information about the planet's core.For InSight to do its work, the team needed a landing site that checked off several boxes, because as a three-legged lander - not a rover - InSight will remain wherever it touches down."Picking a good landing site on Mars is a lot like picking a good home: It's all about location, location, location," said Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager at JPL. "And for the first time ever, the evaluation for a Mars landing site had to consider what lay below the surface of Mars. We needed not just a safe place to land, but also a workspace that's penetrable by our 16-foot-long (5-meter) heat-flow probe."The site also needs to be bright enough and warm enough to power the solar cells while keeping its electronics within temperature limits for an entire Martian year (26 Earth months).So the team focused on a band around the equator, where the lander's solar array would have adequate sunlight to power its systems year-round. Finding an area that would be safe enough for InSight to land and then deploy its solar panels and instruments without obstructions took a little longer."The site has to be a low-enough elevation to have sufficient atmosphere above it for a safe landing, because the spacecraft will rely first on atmospheric friction with its heat shield and then on a parachute digging into Mars' tenuous atmosphere for a large portion of its deceleration," said Hoffman. "And after the chute has fallen away and the braking rockets have kicked in for final descent, there needs to be a flat expanse to land on - not too undulating and relatively free of rocks that could tip the tri-legged Mars lander."Of 22 sites considered, only Elysium Planitia, Isidis Planitia and Valles Marineris met the basic engineering constraints. To grade the three remaining contenders, reconnaissance images from NASA's Mars orbiters were scoured and weather records searched. Eventually, Isidis Planitia and Valles Marineris were ruled out for being too rocky and windy.That left the 81-mile long, 17-mile-wide (130-kilometer-long, 27-kilometer-wide) landing ellipse on the western edge of a flat, smooth expanse of lava plain."If you were a Martian coming to explore Earth's interior like we are exploring Mars' interior, it wouldn't matter if you put down in the middle of Kansas or the beaches of Oahu," said Banerdt. "While I'm looking forward to those first images from the surface, I am even more eager to see the first data sets revealing what is happening deep below our landing pads. The beauty of this mission is happening below the surface. Elysium Planitia is perfect."After a 205-day journey that began on May 5, NASA's InSight mission will touch down on Mars on Nov. 26 a little before 3 p.m. EST (12 p.m. PST). Its solar panels will unfurl within a few hours of touchdown. Mission engineers and scientists will take their time assessing their "workspace" prior to deploying SEIS and HP3on the surface - about three months after landing - and begin the science in earnest.InSight was the 12th selection in NASA's series of Discovery-class missions. Created in 1992, the Discovery Program sponsors frequent, cost-capped solar system exploration missions with highly focused scientific goals.JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage and lander, and supports spacecraft operations for the mission.A number of European partners, including France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), support the InSight mission. CNES provided the SEIS instrument, with significant contributions from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Switzerland, Imperial College and Oxford University in the United Kingdom, and JPL. DLR provided the HP3instrument.For more information about InSight, visit:https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/For more information about NASA's Mars missions, go to:https://mars.nasa.gov

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/team-continues-analyzing-spirit-computer-reboots-and-amnesia-events

Team Continues Analyzing Spirit Computer Reboots and Amnesia Events

After three days of completing Earth-commanded activities without incident last week, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit had a bout of temporary amnesia Friday, April 17, and rebooted its computer Saturday, April 18, behavior similar to events about a week earlier.

After three days of completing Earth-commanded activities without incident last week, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit had a bout of temporary amnesia Friday, April 17, and rebooted its computer Saturday, April 18, behavior similar to events about a week earlier.Engineers operating Spirit are investigating the reboots and the possibly unrelated amnesia events, in which Spirit unexpectedly fails to record data into the type of memory, called flash, where information is preserved even when power is off. Spirit has had three of these amnesia events in the past 10 days, plus one on Jan. 25. No causal link has been determined between the amnesia events and the reboots.The most recent reboot put Spirit back into an autonomous operations mode in which the rover keeps itself healthy. Spirit experienced no problems in this autonomous mode on Sunday. The rover team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., revised plans today for regaining Earth control of Spirit's operations and resuming diagnostic and recovery activities by the rover."We are proceeding cautiously, but we are encouraged by knowing that Spirit is stable in terms of power and thermal conditions and has been responding to all communication sessions for more than a week now," said JPL's Sharon Laubach, chief of the rover sequencing team, which develops and checks each day's set of commands.During the past week of diagnostic activities, the rover has successfully moved its high-gain dish antenna and its camera mast, part of checking whether any mechanical issues with those components may be related to the reboots, the amnesia events, or the failure to wake up for three consecutive communication sessions two weeks ago.Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, completed their original three-month prime missions on Mars in April 2004 and have continued their scientific investigations on opposite sides of the planet through multiple mission extensions. Engineers have found ways to cope with various symptoms of aging on both rovers. The current diagnostic efforts with Spirit are aimed at either recovering undiminished use of the rover or, if some capabilities have been diminished, to determine the best way to keep using the rover.Laubach said, "For example, if we do determine that we can no longer use the flash memory reliably, we could design operations around using the random-access memory." Spirit has 128 megabytes of random-access memory, or RAM, which can store data as long as the rover is kept awake before its next downlink communications session.JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/dawn-sees-young-surface-on-giant-asteroid

Dawn Sees 'Young' Surface on Giant Asteroid

Like a Hollywood starlet constantly retouching her makeup, the giant asteroid Vesta is constantly stirring its outermost layer to present a young face.

Like a Hollywood starlet constantly retouching her makeup, the giant asteroid Vesta is constantly stirring its outermost layer to present a young face. Data from NASA's Dawn mission show that a form of weathering that occurs on the moon and other airless bodies we've visited in the inner solar system does not alter Vesta's outermost layer in the same way. Carbon-rich asteroids have also been splattering dark material on Vesta's surface over a long span of the body's history. The results are described in two papers released today in the journal Nature."Dawn's data allow us to decipher how Vesta records fundamental processes that have also affected Earth and other solar system bodies," said Carol Raymond, Dawn deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "No object in our solar system is an island. Throughout solar system history, materials have exchanged and interacted."Over time, soils on Earth's moon and asteroids such as Itokawa have undergone extensive weathering in the space environment. Scientists see this in the accumulation of tiny metallic particles containing iron, which dulls the fluffy outer layer. Dawn's visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR) and framing camera detected no accumulation of such tiny particles on Vesta, and this particular protoplanet, or almost-planet, remains bright and pristine.Nevertheless, the bright rays of the youngest features on Vesta are seen to degrade rapidly and disappear into background soil. Scientists know frequent, small impacts continually mix the fluffy outer layer of broken debris. Vesta also has unusually steep topography relative to other large bodies in the inner solar system, which leads to landslides that further mix surface material."Getting up close and familiar with Vesta has reset our thinking about the character of the uppermost soils of airless bodies," said Carle Pieters, one of the lead authors and a Dawn team member based at Brown University, Providence, R.I. "Vesta 'dirt' is very clean, well mixed and highly mobile."Early pictures of Vesta showed a variety of dramatic light and dark splotches on Vesta's surface. These light and dark materials were unexpected and now show the brightness range of Vesta is among the largest observed on rocky bodies in our solar system.Dawn scientists suspected early on that bright material is native to Vesta. One of their first hypotheses for the dark material suggested it might come from the shock of high-speed impacts melting and darkening the underlying rocks or from recent volcanic activity. An analysis of data from VIR and the framing camera has revealed, however, that the distribution of dark material is widespread and occurs both in small spots and in diffuse deposits, without correlation to any particular underlying geology. The likely source of the dark material is now shown to be the carbon-rich material in meteoroids, which are also believed to have deposited hydrated minerals from other asteroids on Vesta.To get the amount of darkening we now see on Vesta, scientists on the Dawn team estimate about 300 dark asteroids with diameters between 0.6 to 6 miles (1 and 10 kilometers) likely hit Vesta during the last 3.5 billion years. This would have been enough to wrap Vesta in a blanket of mixed material about 3 to 7 feet (1 to 2 meters) thick."This perpetual contamination of Vesta with material native to elsewhere in the solar system is a dramatic example of an apparently common process that changes many solar system objects," said Tom McCord, the other lead author and a Dawn team member based at the Bear Fight Institute, Winthrop, Wash. "Earth likely got the ingredients for life - organics and water - this way."Launched in 2007, Dawn spent more than a year investigating Vesta. It departed in September 2012 and is currently on its way to the dwarf planet Ceres.JPL manages the Dawn mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va., designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.For more information about Dawn, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/dawnandhttp://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/atmosphere-checked-one-mars-year-before-a-landing

Atmosphere Checked, One Mars Year Before a Landing

In preparation for NASA's next rover landing on the Red Planet, one Mars year away, an instrument studying the Martian atmosphere from orbit has begun a campaign.

PASADENA, Calif. -- What will the Martian atmosphere be like when the next Mars rover descends through it for landing in August of 2012?An instrument studying the Martian atmosphere from orbit has begun a four-week campaign to characterize daily atmosphere changes, one Mars year before the arrival of the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity. A Mars year equals 687 Earth days.The planet's thin atmosphere of carbon dioxide is highly repeatable from year to year at the same time of day and seasonal date during northern spring and summer on Mars.The Mars Climate Sounder instrument on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter maps the distribution of temperature, dust, and water ice in the atmosphere. Temperature variations with height indicate how fast air density changes and thus the rates at which the incoming spacecraft slows down and heats up during its descent."It is currently one Mars year before the Mars Science Laboratory arrival season," said atmospheric scientist David Kass of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This campaign will provide a set of observations to support the Mars Science Laboratory engineering team and Mars atmospheric modelers. The information will constrain the expected climate at their landing season. It will also help define the range of possible weather conditions on landing day."During the four years the Mars Climate Sounder has been studying the Martian atmosphere, its observations have seen conditions only at about three in the afternoon and three in the morning. For the new campaign, the instrument team is inaugurating a new observation mode, looking to both sides as well as forward. This provides views of the atmosphere earlier and later in the day by more than an hour, covering the range of possible times of day that the rover will pass through the atmosphere before landing.JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, provided the Mars Climate Sounder instrument and manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Science Laboratory projects for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. For more about NASA's Mars exploration program, seehttp://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/prolific-nasa-orbiter-reaches-five-year-mark

Prolific NASA Orbiter Reaches Five-Year Mark

NASA's versatile Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which began orbiting Mars five years ago tomorrow, March 10, has radically expanded our knowledge of the Red Planet and is now working overtime.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's versatile Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which began orbiting Mars five years ago tomorrow, March 10, has radically expanded our knowledge of the Red Planet and is now working overtime.The mission has provided copious information about ancient environments, ice-age-scale climate cycles and present-day changes on Mars.The orbiter observes Mars' surface, subsurface and atmosphere in unprecedented detail. The spacecraft's large solar panels and dish antenna have enabled it to transmit more data to Earth -- 131 terabits and counting, including more than 70,000 images -- than all other interplanetary missions combined. Yet many things had to go well for the mission to achieve these milestones.After a seven-month journey from Earth, the spacecraft fired its six main engines for nearly 27 minutes as it approached Mars on March 10, 2006. Mars could not capture it into orbit without this critically timed maneuver to slow the spacecraft. The orbiter's intended path took it behind Mars, out of communication, during most of the engine burn."That was tense, waiting until the spacecraft came back out from behind Mars and we had contact," recalled Dan Johnston, now the mission's deputy project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission met all its science goals in a two-year primary science phase. Two extensions, the latest beginning in 2010, have added to the bounty of science returns.The mission has illuminated three very different periods of Mars history. Its observations of the heavily cratered terrains of Mars, the oldest on the planet, show that different types of ancient watery environments formed water-related minerals. Some of these would have been more favorable for life than others.In more recent times, water appears to have cycled as a gas between polar ice deposits and lower-latitude deposits of ice and snow. Extensive layering in ice or rock probably took hundreds of thousands to millions of years to form and, like ice ages on Earth, is linked to cyclic changes in the tilt of the planet's rotation axis and the changing intensity of sunlight near the poles.The present climate is also dynamic, with volatile carbon dioxide and, just possibly, summertime liquid water modifying gullies and forming new streaks. With observations of new craters, avalanches and dust storms, the orbiter has shown a partially frozen world, but not frozen in time, as change continues today.In addition to its science observations, the mission provides support for other spacecraft as they land and operate on the surface. The orbiter's cameras captured the Phoenix Mars Lander as it parachuted to the surface in 2008 and monitored the atmosphere for dust storms that would affect Phoenix and the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter augmented NASA's Mars Odyssey in performing relay functions for these missions.JPL's Phil Varghese, project manager for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, said, "The spacecraft is still in excellent health. After five years at Mars, it continues with dual capabilities for conducting science observations, monitoring the Mars environment and serving as a relay."The orbiter has examined potential landing sites for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission, which will land a rover named Curiosity at one of those sites in August 2012. "We are preparing to support the arrival of the Mars Science Laboratory and the rover's surface operations," Varghese said. "In the meantime, we will extend the science observations into a third Martian year." One Mars year lasts nearly two Earth years.The orbiter's Mars Color Imager has produced more than four Earth years of daily global weather maps. More than 18,500 images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera have resolved features as small as a desk in target areas scattered around the planet that, combined, cover about as much ground as Alaska. More than 36,900 images from the Context Camera cover nearly two-thirds of the surface of Mars at a resolution that allows detection of features the size of large buildings.The Compact Reconnaissance Spectrometer for Mars has mapped minerals on more than three-fourths of the planet's surface. The Mars Climate Sounder has monitored atmospheric temperature and aerosols with more than 59 million soundings. The Shallow Radar has checked for underground layers in more than 8,600 swaths of ground-penetrating observations."Each Mars year is unique, and additional coverage gives us a better chance to understand the nature of changes in the atmosphere and on the surface," said JPL's Rich Zurek, project scientist for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. "We have already learned that Mars is a more dynamic and diverse planet than what we knew five years ago. We continue to see new things."JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the orbiter and partners with JPL in spacecraft operations. For more about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, visithttp://www.nasa.gov/mro.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/galileo-to-taste-jupiter-before-taking-final-plunge

Galileo to Taste Jupiter Before Taking Final Plunge

In the end, the Galileo spacecraft will get a taste of Jupiter before taking a final plunge into the planet's crushing atmosphere, ending the mission on Sunday, Sept. 21.

In the end, the Galileo spacecraft will get a taste of Jupiter before taking a final plunge into the planet's crushing atmosphere, ending the mission on Sunday, Sept. 21. The team expects the spacecraft to transmit a few hours of science data in real time leading up to impact.The spacecraft has been purposely put on a collision course with Jupiter to eliminate any chance of an unwanted impact between the spacecraft and Jupiter's moon Europa, which Galileo discovered is likely to have a subsurface ocean. The long-planned impact is necessary now that the onboard propellant is nearly depleted.Without propellant, the spacecraft would not be able to point its antenna toward Earth or adjust its trajectory, so controlling the spacecraft would no longer be possible."It has been a fabulous mission for planetary science, and it is hard to see it come to an end," said Dr. Claudia Alexander, Galileo project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "After traversing almost 3 billion miles and being our watchful eyes and ears around Jupiter, we're keeping our fingers crossed that, even in its final hour, Galileo will still give us new information about Jupiter's environment."Although scientists are hopeful to get every bit of data back for analysis, the likelihood of getting anything is unknown because the spacecraft has already endured more than four times the cumulative dose of harmful jovian radiation it was designed to withstand. The spacecraft will enter an especially high-radiation region again as it approaches Jupiter.Launched in the cargo bay of Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1989, the mission has produced a string of discoveries while circling the solar system's largest planet, Jupiter, 34 times. Galileo was the first mission to measure Jupiter's atmosphere directly with a descent probe and the first to conduct long-term observations of the jovian system from orbit.It found evidence of subsurface liquid layers of salt water on Europa, Ganymede and Callisto and it examined a diversity of volcanic activity on Io. Galileo is the first spacecraft to fly by an asteroid and the first to discover a moon of an asteroid.The prime mission ended six years ago, after two years of orbiting Jupiter. NASA extended the mission three times to continue taking advantage of Galileo's unique capabilities for accomplishing valuable science. The mission was possible because it drew its power from two long-lasting radioisotope thermoelectric generators provided by the Department of Energy.From launch to impact, the spacecraft has traveled 4,631,778,000 kilometers (about 2.8 billion miles).Its entry point into the giant planet's atmosphere is about 1/4 degree south of Jupiter's equator. If there were observers floating along at the cloud tops, they would see Galileo streaming in from a point about 22 degrees above the local horizon. Streaming in could also be described as screaming in, as the speed of the craft relative to those observers would be 48.2 kilometers per second (nearly 108,000 miles per hour). That is the equivalent of traveling from Los Angeles to New York City in 82 seconds. In comparison, the Galileo atmospheric probe, aerodynamically designed to slow down when entering and parachute gently through the clouds, first reached the atmosphere at a slightly more modest 47.6 kilometers per second (106,500 miles per hour) when it was deployed in 1995."This is a very exciting time for us as we draw to a close on this historic mission and look back at its science discoveries. Galileo taught us so much about Jupiter but there is still much to be learned, and for that we look with promise to future missions," said Dr. Charles Elachi, director of JPL.JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Galileo mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington.Additional information about the Galileo mission and its discoveries is available online at:http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov.For information about NASA TV on the Internet, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.htmlFor information about NASA, visit:http://www.nasa.gov

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/mysteries-of-the-solar-nebula

Mysteries of the Solar Nebula

A few billion years ago, after generations of more ancient suns had been born and died, a swirling cloud of dust and gas collapsed upon itself to give birth to an infant star.

A few billion years ago, after generations of more ancient suns had been born and died, a swirling cloud of dust and gas collapsed upon itself to give birth to an infant star.As the ball-shaped cloud fell inward it began to flatten and rotate, eventually resembling a spinning pancake. Mostly the stuff of the cloud was simple atoms of hydrogen and helium, but it was peppered here and there by more complicated elements forged in the internal furnaces and death explosions of older stars. Even as a new sun took shape at the center of the cloud, disturbances formed farther out. In a remarkably short time by astronomical standards -- "just" tens of millions of years, or less -- these whirlpools of matter condensed into planets.Today that star system is home to an amazing diversity of environments -- from immense mountains and enormous, jagged canyons on rocky inner planets to sulfur volcanos and ice geysers on moons circling huge gas planets farther out from the star, their orbits crisscrossed by legions of comets and asteroids.This is the story, astronomers tell us, of how the Sun, our Earth and the solar system that both of them occupy came to be. There is plenty of evidence from observations over many decades to establish the broad outlines of the story. But exactly how the placental cloud of dust and gas, called the "solar nebula," turned into the solar system that we see around us today still poses many mysteries for scientists.One of the main ways that scientists approach the question of how the solar system formed is by comparing the elements and isotopes that made up the original cloud of dust and gas to the compositions of the planets, moons, asteroids and comets in the solar system today. (An isotope is a variation of an element that is heavier or lighter than the standard form of the element because each atom has more or fewer neutrons in its nucleus.) But what were the ingredients in the original solar nebula?Fortunately, nature provides a fossil record of the solar nebula. Like other stars its size, the Sun has an outer atmosphere that is slowly but steadily flowing off into space. This material, consisting mostly of electrically charged atoms called ions, flows outward past the planets in a constant stream called the "solar wind." This wind is a snapshot of the materials in the surface layers of the Sun, which in turn reflects the makeup of the original solar nebula.This is the rationale of the Genesis mission. By flying out beyond the interfering influences of Earth's magnetic fields, the spacecraft can collect samples of the solar wind revealing the makeup of the cloud that formed the solar system nearly 5 billion years ago.Astronomers have long studied the Sun's composition by breaking down the Sun's color spectrum using instruments on telescopes and satellites. But these observations are not precise enough for today's planetary science. By analyzing the solar wind in terrestrial laboratories, Genesis scientists can find precise ratios of isotopes and elements in the solar nebula. The basic data gained from the Genesis mission are needed to advance theories about the solar nebula and evolution of the planets.Genesis' main goal is to probe the mystery of oxygen in the solar system. The amounts of oxygen isotopes vary among the solar system bodies, though the reason for the variety is totally unknown. Different parts of the solar system have distinct proportions of three isotopes of oxygen called O16, O17 and O18. O16 is the most common form of an oxygen atom, containing eight protons and eight neutrons to add up to an atomic weight of about 16. O17 has one extra neutron, whereas O18 has two extra neutrons.Though scientists know the ratio of oxygen isotopes in bodies like asteroids, Earth, the Moon and Mars, the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the Sun is not well-understood.Genesis will provide this last puzzle piece to determine how the solar nebula evolved into the solar system bodies.Understanding the origins of the variations of the oxygen isotopes is a key to understanding the origin of the solar system. Does any part of today's solar system contain the same ratios of these oxygen isotopes as what Genesis finds existed in the original solar nebula? Finding out how these isotope ratio differences survived will narrow the possibilities of how the different materials or regions of the nebula mixed or didn't mix.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-radar-spots-relatively-large-asteroid-prior-to-flyby

NASA Radar Spots Relatively Large Asteroid Prior to Flyby

Radar images of asteroid 2014 JO25 were obtained early Tuesday morning, with NASA's 70-meter antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California.

Radar images of asteroid 2014 JO25 were obtained in the early morning hours on Tuesday, with NASA's 70-meter (230-foot) antenna at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California. The images reveal a peanut-shaped asteroid that rotates about once every five hours. The images have resolutions as fine as 25 feet (7.5 meters) per pixel.Asteroid 2014 JO25 was discovered in May 2014 by astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Arizona -- a project of NASA's Near-Earth Objects Observations Program in collaboration with the University of Arizona. The asteroid will fly safely past Earth on Wednesday at a distance of about 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers), or about 4.6 times the distance from Earth to the moon. The encounter is the closest the object will have come to Earth in 400 years and will be its closest approach for at least the next 500 years.› DOWNLOAD VIDEO Radar Imagery of Asteroid 2014 JO25"The asteroid has a contact binary structure - two lobes connected by a neck-like region," said Shantanu Naidu, a scientist from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who led the Goldstone observations. "The images show flat facets, concavities and angular topography."The largest of the asteroid's two lobes is estimated to be 2,000 feet (620 meters) across.Radar observations of the asteroid also have been conducted at the National Science Foundation's Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Additional radar observations are being conducted at both Goldstone and Arecibo on April 19 20, and 21, and could provide images with even higher resolution.Radar has been used to observe hundreds of asteroids. When these small, natural remnants of the formation of the solar system pass relatively close to Earth, deep space radar is a powerful technique for studying their sizes, shapes, rotation, surface features, and roughness, and for more precise determination of their orbital path.NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, manages and operates NASA's Deep Space Network, including the Goldstone Solar System Radar, and hosts the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies for NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program within the agency's Science Mission Directorate.More information about asteroids and near-Earth objects can be found at:http://cneos.jpl.nasa.govhttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatchFor more information about NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefenseFor asteroid and comet news and updates, follow AsteroidWatch on Twitter:http://twitter.com/AsteroidWatch

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/data-from-nasa-rovers-voyage-to-mars-aids-planning

Data From NASA Rover's Voyage to Mars Aids Planning

Radiation measurements made during the flight of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory to Mars in 2012 provide helpful information for design of future human deep-space expeditions.

PASADENA, Calif. -- Measurements taken by NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission as it delivered the Curiosity rover to Mars in 2012 are providing NASA the information it needs to design systems to protect human explorers from radiation exposure on deep-space expeditions in the future.Curiosity's Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) is the first instrument to measure the radiation environment during a Mars cruise mission from inside a spacecraft that is similar to potential human exploration spacecraft. The findings reduce uncertainty about the effectiveness of radiation shielding and provide vital information to space mission designers who will need to build in protection for spacecraft occupants in the future."As this nation strives to reach an asteroid and Mars in our lifetimes, we're working to solve every puzzle nature poses to keep astronauts safe so they can explore the unknown and return home," said William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations in Washington. "We learn more about the human body's ability to adapt to space every day aboard the International Space Station. As we build the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket to carry and shelter us in deep space, we'll continue to make the advances we need in life sciences to reduce risks for our explorers. Curiosity's RAD instrument is giving us critical data we need so that we humans, like the rover, can dare mighty things to reach the Red Planet."The findings, which are published in the May 31 edition of the journal Science, indicate radiation exposure for human explorers could exceed NASA's career limit for astronauts if current propulsion systems are used.Two forms of radiation pose potential health risks to astronauts in deep space. One is galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), particles caused by supernova explosions and other high-energy events outside the solar system. The other is solar energetic particles (SEPs) associated with solar flares and coronal mass ejections from the sun.Radiation exposure is measured in units of Sievert (Sv) or milliSievert (one one-thousandth Sv). Long-term population studies have shown exposure to radiation increases a person's lifetime cancer risk. Exposure to a dose of 1 Sv, accumulated over time, is associated with a five percent increase in risk for developing fatal cancer.NASA has established a three percent increased risk of fatal cancer as an acceptable career limit for its astronauts currently operating in low-Earth orbit. The RAD data showed the Curiosity rover was exposed to an average of 1.8 milliSieverts of GCR per day on its journey to Mars. Only about three percent of the radiation dose was associated with solar particles because of a relatively quiet solar cycle and the shielding provided by the spacecraft.The RAD data will help inform current discussions in the United States' medical community, which is working to establish exposure limits for deep-space explorers in the future."In terms of accumulated dose, it's like getting a whole-body CT scan once every five or six days," said Cary Zeitlin, a principal scientist at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio and lead author of the paper on the findings. "Understanding the radiation environment inside a spacecraft carrying humans to Mars or other deep space destinations is critical for planning future crewed missions."Current spacecraft shield much more effectively against SEPs than GCRs. To protect against the comparatively low energy of typical SEPs, astronauts might need to move into havens with extra shielding on a spacecraft or on the Martian surface, or employ other countermeasures. GCRs tend to be highly energetic, highly penetrating particles that are not stopped by the modest shielding provided by a typical spacecraft."Scientists need to validate theories and models with actual measurements, which RAD is now providing," said Donald M. Hassler, a program director at SwRI and principal investigator of the RAD investigation. "These measurements will be used to better understand how radiation travels through deep space and how it is affected and changed by the spacecraft structure itself. The spacecraft protects somewhat against lower energy particles, but others can propagate through the structure unchanged or break down into secondary particles."After Curiosity landed on Mars in August, the RAD instrument continued operating, measuring the radiation environment on the planet's surface. RAD data collected during Curiosity's science mission will continue to inform plans to protect astronauts as NASA designs future missions to Mars in the coming decades.SwRI, together with Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, built RAD with funding from NASA's Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate and Germany's national aerospace research center, Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt.NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project and the project's Curiosity rover. The NASA Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington manages the Mars Exploration Program.For more information about the mission, visit:http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl,http://www.nasa.gov/mslandhttp://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl. To follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter visit:http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosityandhttp://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity.For more information about NASA human spaceflight and exploration, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/exploration.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/dawn-discovers-evidence-for-organic-material-on-ceres

Dawn Discovers Evidence for Organic Material on Ceres

NASA's Dawn mission has found evidence for organic material on Ceres, a dwarf planet and the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

NASA's Dawn mission has found evidence for organic material on Ceres, a dwarf planet and the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Scientists using the spacecraft's visible and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIR) detected the material in and around a northern-hemisphere crater called Ernutet. Organic molecules are interesting to scientists because they are necessary, though not sufficient, components of life on Earth.The discovery adds to the growing list of bodies in the solar system where organics have been found. Organic compounds have been found in certain meteorites as well as inferred from telescopic observations of several asteroids. Ceres shares many commonalities with meteorites rich in water and organics -- in particular, a meteorite group called carbonaceous chondrites. This discovery further strengthens the connection between Ceres, these meteorites and their parent bodies."This is the first clear detection of organic molecules from orbit on a main belt body," said Maria Cristina De Sanctis, lead author of the study, based at the National Institute of Astrophysics, Rome. The discovery is reported in the journal Science.Data presented in the Science paper support the idea that the organic materials are native to Ceres. The carbonates and clays previously identified on Ceres provide evidence for chemical activity in the presence of water and heat. This raises the possibility that the organics were similarly processed in a warm water-rich environment.Significance of organicsThe organics discovery adds to Ceres' attributes associated with ingredients and conditions for life in the distant past. Previous studies have found hydrated minerals, carbonates, water ice, and ammoniated clays that must have been altered by water. Salts and sodium carbonate, such as those found in the bright areas of Occator Crater, are also thought to have been carried to the surface by liquid."This discovery adds to our understanding of the possible origins of water and organics on Earth," said Julie Castillo-Rogez, Dawn project scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.Where are the organics?The VIR instrument was able to detect and map the locations of this material because of its special signature in near-infrared light.The organic materials on Ceres are mainly located in an area covering approximately 400 square miles (about 1,000 square kilometers). The signature of organics is very clear on the floor of Ernutet Crater, on its southern rim and in an area just outside the crater to the southwest. Another large area with well-defined signatures is found across the northwest part of the crater rim and ejecta. There are other smaller organic-rich areas several miles (kilometers) west and east of the crater. Organics also were found in a very small area in Inamahari Crater, about 250 miles (400 kilometers) away from Ernutet.In enhanced visible color images from Dawn's framing camera, the organic material is associated with areas that appear redder with respect to the rest of Ceres. The distinct nature of these regions stands out even in low-resolution image data from the visible and infrared mapping spectrometer."We're still working on understanding the geological context for these materials," said study co-author Carle Pieters, professor of geological sciences at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.Next steps for DawnHaving completed nearly two years of observations in orbit at Ceres, Dawn is now in a highly elliptical orbit at Ceres, going from an altitude of 4,670 miles (7,520 kilometers) up to almost 5,810 miles (9,350 kilometers). On Feb. 23, it will make its way to a new altitude of around 12,400 miles (20,000 kilometers), about the height of GPS satellites above Earth, and to a different orbital plane. This will put Dawn in a position to study Ceres in a new geometry. In late spring, Dawn will view Ceres with the sun directly behind the spacecraft, such that Ceres will appear brighter than before, and perhaps reveal more clues about its nature.The Dawn mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of mission participants, visit:http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/missionMore information about Dawn is available at the following sites:http://www.nasa.gov/dawnhttp://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/silica-on-a-mars-volcano-tells-of-wet-and-cozy-past

Silica on a Mars Volcano Tells of Wet and Cozy Past

Mounds of a mineral deposited on a volcanic cone more than three billion years ago may preserve evidence of one of the most recent habitable microenvironments on Mars.

PASADENA, Calif. -- Light-colored mounds of a mineral deposited on a volcanic cone more than three billion years ago may preserve evidence of one of the most recent habitable microenvironments on Mars.Observations by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter enabled researchers to identify the mineral as hydrated silica and to see its volcanic context. The mounds' composition and their location on the flanks of a volcanic cone provide the best evidence yet found on Mars for an intact deposit from a hydrothermal environment -- a steam fumarole, or hot spring. Such environments may have provided habitats for some of Earth's earliest life forms."The heat and water required to create this deposit probably made this a habitable zone," said J.R. Skok of Brown University, Providence, R.I., lead author of a paper about these findings published online today by Nature Geoscience. "If life did exist there, this would be a promising type of deposit to entomb evidence of it -- a microbial mortuary."No studies have yet determined whether Mars has ever supported life. The new results add to accumulating evidence that, at some times and in some places, Mars has had favorable environments for microbial life. This specific place would have been habitable when most of Mars was already dry and cold. Concentrations of hydrated silica have been identified on Mars previously, including a nearly pure patch found by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit in 2007. However, none of those earlier findings were in such an intact setting as this one, and the setting adds evidence about the origin.Skok said, "You have spectacular context for this deposit. It's right on the flank of a volcano. The setting remains essentially the same as it was when the silica was deposited."The small cone rises about 100 meters (100 yards) from the floor of a shallow bowl named Nili Patera. The patera, which is the floor of a volcanic caldera, spans about 50 kilometers (30 miles) in the Syrtis Major volcanic region of equatorial Mars. Before the cone formed, free-flowing lava blanketed nearby plains. The collapse of an underground magma chamber from which lava had emanated created the bowl. Subsequent lava flows, still with a runny texture, coated the floor of Nili Patera. The cone grew from even later flows, apparently after evolution of the underground magma had thickened its texture so that the erupted lava would mound up."We can read a series of chapters in this history book and know that the cone grew from the last gasp of a giant volcanic system," said John Mustard, Skok's thesis advisor at Brown and a co-author of the paper. "The cooling and solidification of most of the magma concentrated its silica and water content."Observations by cameras on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter revealed patches of bright deposits near the summit of the cone, fanning down its flank, and on flatter ground in the vicinity. The Brown researchers partnered with Scott Murchie of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., to analyze the bright exposures with the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) instrument on the orbiter.Silica can be dissolved, transported and concentrated by hot water or steam. Hydrated silica identified by the spectrometer in uphill locations -- confirmed by stereo imaging -- indicates that hot springs or fumaroles fed by underground heating created these deposits. Silica deposits around hydrothermal vents in Iceland are among the best parallels on Earth.Murchie said, "The habitable zone would have been within and alongside the conduits carrying the heated water." The volcanic activity that built the cone in Nili Patera appears to have happened more recently than the 3.7-billion-year or greater age of Mars' potentially habitable early wet environments recorded in clay minerals identified from orbit.NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory provided and operates CRISM, one of six instruments on the orbiter. For more information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/mro.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-phoenix-mars-mission-gets-thumbs-up-for-2007-launch

NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission Gets Thumbs Up for 2007 Launch

NASA has given the green light to a project to put a long-armed lander onto the icy ground of the far-northern martian plains.

NASA has given the green light to a project to put a long-armed lander onto the icy ground of the far-northern martian plains. NASA's Phoenix lander is designed to examine the site for potential habitats for water ice and to look for possible indicators of life, past or present.Today's announcement allows the Phoenix mission to proceed with preparing the spacecraft for launch in August 2007. This major milestone followed a critical review of the project's planning progress and preliminary design since its selection in 2003.Phoenix is the first project in NASA's Mars Scout Program of competitively selected missions. Scouts are innovative and relatively low-cost complements to the core missions of the agency's Mars exploration program."The Phoenix Mission explores new territory in the northern plains of Mars analogous to the permafrost regions on Earth," said the project's principal investigator, Dr. Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "NASA's confirmation supports this project and may eventually lead to discoveries relating to life on our neighboring planet."Phoenix is a stationary lander. It has a robotic arm to dig down to the martian ice layer and deliver samples to sophisticated analytical instruments on the lander's deck. It is specifically designed to measure volatiles, such as water and organic molecules, in the northern polar region of Mars. In 2002, NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter found evidence of ice-rich soil very near the surface in the arctic regions.Like its namesake, Phoenix rises from ashes, carrying the legacies of two earlier attempts to explore Mars. The 2001 Mars Surveyor lander, administratively mothballed in 2000, is being resurrected for Phoenix. Many of the scientific instruments for Phoenix were built or designed for that mission or the unsuccessful Mars Polar Lander in 1999."The Phoenix team's quick response to the Odyssey discoveries and the cost-saving adaptation of earlier missions' technology are just the kind of flexibility the Mars Scout Program seeks to elicit," said NASA's Mars Exploration Program Director, Doug McCuistion."Phoenix revives pieces of past missions in order to take NASA's Mars exploration into an exciting future," said NASA's Director, Solar System Division, Science Mission Directorate, Dr. Andrew Dantzler.The cost of the Phoenix mission is $386 million, which includes the cost of launch. The partnership developing the Phoenix mission includes the University of Arizona; NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver; and the Canadian Space Agency, which is providing weather-monitoring instruments."The confirmation review is an important step for all major NASA missions," said JPL's Barry Goldstein, project manager for Phoenix. "This approval essentially confirms NASA's confidence that the spacecraft and science instruments will be successfully built and launched, and that once the lander is on Mars, the science objectives can be successfully achieved."Much work lies ahead. Team members will assemble and test every subsystem on the spacecraft and science payload to show they comply with design requirements. Other tasks include selecting a landing site, which should be aided by data provided by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter launching in August, and preparing to operate the spacecraft after launch.JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages Phoenix for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visithttp://www.nasa.gov/home/index.html. For information about the Phoenix Mission to Mars on the Web, visithttp://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/jason-3-in-orbit

Jason-3 in Orbit

The Jason-3 international oceanography satellite mission is scheduled for launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California on Sunday, Jan. 17.

Update: January 17, 2016 12:30pm PSTThe spacecraft has successfully separated from the rocket, its solar panels have opened, and a signal has been received from the spacecraft.› Read moreUpdate: January 17, 2016 10:50am PSTThe Jason-3 satellite has lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on board SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. In about an hour, it will separate from the rocket and begin deploying its two solar arrays.The Jason-3 international oceanography satellite mission is scheduled for launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California on Sunday, Jan. 17. Liftoff aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg's Space Launch Complex 4 East is targeted for 10:42:18 a.m. PST (1:42:18 p.m. EST) at the opening of a 30-second launch window. If needed, a backup launch opportunity is available on Monday, Jan. 18 at 10:31:04 a.m. PST (1:31:04 p.m. EST).Jason-3 will add to a 23-year satellite record of global sea surface heights, a measurement with scientific, commercial and practical applications related to climate change, currents and weather. Jason-3 data will be used for monitoring global sea level rise, researching human impacts on oceans, aiding prediction of hurricane intensity, and operational marine navigation. The mission is planned to last at least three years, with a goal of five years. It is a four-agency international partnership of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA, the French Space Agency CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales), and EUMETSAT (the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites).Launch TimelineAbout 154 seconds (just over two minutes) after the Falcon-9 rocket lifts off, the main engine will cut off. About three seconds after that, the rocket's first stage will separate. Second-stage ignition will follow in about eight seconds. Half a minute into the second-stage burn, the payload fairing, or launch vehicle nose cone, will be jettisoned -- a bit over three minutes after launch. The first cutoff of the second-stage engine will take place nine minutes after liftoff.The Jason-3 spacecraft and second stage will then coast in an intermediate orbit for about another 46 minutes. The second-stage engine will fire a second time about 55 minutes after launch to place Jason-3 in the desired orbit. Separation of the rocket and spacecraft will occur about half a minute later, or almost 56 minutes after liftoff. A little more than two minutes later, Jason-3 will begin to deploy its twin solar arrays to prepare for operation.Where to Find Launch CoverageOn launch day, Jan. 17, NASA Television coverage will begin at 8 a.m. PST (11 a.m. EST). For NASA TV downlink and schedule information and streaming video, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/nasatvFor extensive prelaunch, countdown and launch-day coverage, go to:http://blogs.nasa.gov/Jason-3For more information about the mission, visit:http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/jason-3/http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/jason3/NOAA, in collaboration with the European partners, is responsible for the Jason-3 mission. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is responsible for Jason-3 project management. NASA's Launch Services Program at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida provides launch management. SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, is NASA's launch service provider of the Falcon 9 rocket.Story has been updated on 1-16-2016 at 8:15 a.m. PT

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/farewell-to-a-pioneering-pollution-sensor

Farewell to a Pioneering Pollution Sensor

Farewell to TES, the first instrument to monitor tropospheric ozone from space.

On Jan. 31, NASA ended the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer's (TES) almost 14-year career of discovery. Launched in 2004 on NASA's Aura spacecraft, TES was the first instrument designed to monitor ozone in the lowest layers of the atmosphere directly from space. Its high-resolution observations led to new measurements of atmospheric gases that have altered our understanding of the Earth system.TES was planned for a five-year mission but far outlasted that term. A mechanical arm on the instrument began stalling intermittently in 2010, affecting TES's ability to collect data continuously. The TES operations team adapted by operating the instrument to maximize science operations over time, attempting to extend the data set as long as possible. However, the stalling increased to the point that TES lost operations about half of last year. The data gaps hampered the use of TES data for research, leading to NASA's decision to decommission the instrument. It will remain on the Aura satellite, receiving enough power to keep it from getting so cold it might break and affect the two remaining functioning instruments."The fact that the instrument lasted as long as it did is a testament to the tenacity of the instrument teams responsible for designing, building and operating the instrument," said Kevin Bowman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the TES principal investigator.A True Earth System SounderTES was originally conceived to measure ozone in the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere between the surface and the altitude where intercontinental jets fly, using high-spectral-resolution observations of thermal infrared radiation. However, TES cast a wider net, capturing signatures of a broad array of other atmospheric gases as well as ozone. That flexibility allowed the instrument to contribute to a wide range of studies -- not only atmospheric chemistry and the impacts of climate change, but studies of the cycles of water, nitrogen and carbon.One of the surprises of the mission was the measurement of heavy water: water molecules composed of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen that has more neutrons than normal hydrogen. The ratio of deuterium to "normal" water in water vapor gives clues to the vapor's history -- how it evaporated and fell as precipitation in the past -- which in turns helps scientists discern what controls the amount in the atmosphere.Heavy water data have led to fundamental advances in our understanding of the water cycle that were not possible before, such as how tropical thunderstorms keep the troposphere hydrated, how much water in the atmosphere is evaporated from plants and soil as compared to surface water, and how water "exhaled" from southern Amazon vegetation jump-starts the rainforest's rainy season. JPL scientist John Worden, the pioneer of this measurement, said, "It's become one of the most important applications of TES. It gives us a unique window into Earth's hydrological cycle."While the nitrogen cycle isn't as well measured or understood as the water cycle, nitrogen makes up 78 percent of the atmosphere, and its conversion to other chemical compounds is essential to life. TES demonstrated the first space measurement of a key nitrogen compound, ammonia. This compound is a widely used fertilizer for agriculture in solid form, but as a gas, it reacts with other compounds in the atmosphere to form harmful pollutants.Another nitrogen compound, peroxyacetyl nitrate (PAN), can be lofted into the troposphere from fires and human emissions. Largely invisible in data collected at ground level, this pollutant can travel great distances before it settles back to the surface, where it can form ozone. TES showed how PAN varied globally, including how fires influenced its distribution. "TES really paved the way in our global understanding of both PAN and [ammonia], two keystone species in the atmospheric nitrogen cycle," said Emily Fischer, an assistant professor in the department of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.The Three Faces of OzoneOzone, a gas with both natural and human sources, is known for its multiple "personalities." In the stratosphere ozone is benign, protecting Earth from incoming ultraviolet radiation. In the troposphere, it has two distinct harmful functions, depending on altitude. At ground level it's a pollutant that hurts living plants and animals, including humans. Higher in the troposphere, it's the third most important human-produced greenhouse gas, trapping outgoing thermal radiation and warming the atmosphere.TES data, in conjunction with data from other instruments on Aura, were used to disentangle these personalities, leading to a significantly better understanding of ozone and its impact on human health, climate and other parts of the Earth system.Air currents in the mid- to upper troposphere carry ozone not only across continents but across oceans to other continents. A2015 studyusing TES measurements found that the U.S. West Coast's tropospheric ozone levels were higher than expected, given decreased U.S. emissions, partly because of ozone that blew in across the Pacific Ocean from China. The rapid growth in Asian emissions of precursor gases -- gases that interact to create ozone, including carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide -- changed the global landscape of ozone."TES has borne witness to dramatic changes in which the gases that create ozone are produced. TES's remarkably stable measurements and ability to resolve the layers of the troposphere allowed us to separate natural changes from those driven by human activities," said JPL scientist Jessica Neu, a coauthor of the study.Regional changes in emissions of ozone precursor gases alter not only the amount of ozone in the troposphere, but its efficiency as a greenhouse gas. Scientists used TES measurements of ozone's greenhouse effect, combined with chemical weather models, toquantifyhow the global patterns of these emissions have altered climate. "In order to both improve air quality and mitigate climate change, we need to understand how human pollutant emissions affect climate at the scales in which policies are enacted [that is, at the scale of a city, state or country]. TES data paved the way for how satellites could play a central role," said Daven Henze, an associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder.A Pathfinder Mission"TES was a pioneer, collecting a whole new set of measurements with new techniques, which are now being used by a new generation of instruments," Bowman said. Its successor instruments are used for both atmospheric monitoring and weather forecasting. Among them are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) instrument on the NOAA-NASA Suomi-NPP satellite and the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI) series, developed by the French space agency in partnership with EUMETSAT, the European meteorological satellite organization.Cathy Clerbaux, a senior scientist with the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique who is the leading scientist on the IASI series, said, "TES's influence on later missions like ours was very important. TES demonstrated the possibility of deriving the concentration of atmospheric gases by using interferometry to observe their molecular properties. Although similar instruments existed to sound the upper atmosphere, TES was special in allowing measurements nearer the surface, where pollution lies. The scientific results obtained with IASI greatly benefited from the close collaboration we developed with the TES scientists."TES scientists have been pioneers in another way: by combining the instrument's measurements with those of other instruments to produce enhanced data sets, revealing more than either original set of observations. For example, combining the Ozone Monitoring Instrument on Aura's measurements in ultraviolet wavelengths with TES's thermal infrared measurements gives a data set with enhanced sensitivity to air pollutants near the surface.The team is now applying that capability to measurements by other instrument pairs - for example, enhanced carbon monoxide (CO) from CrIS with CO and other measurements from the TROPOspheric Monitoring Instrument (TROPOMI) on the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor satellite. "The application of the TES algorithms to CrIS and TROPOMI data will continue the 18-year record of unique near-surface carbon monoxide measurements from [NASA's Terra' satellite's Measurement of Pollution in the Troposphere instrument, or MOPITT] into the next decade," said Helen Worden, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, who is both the principal investigator of MOPITT and a TES science team member.These new techniques developed for TES along with broad applications throughout the Earth System assure that the mission's legacy will continue long after TES's final farewell.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/mars-may-be-emerging-from-an-ice-age

Mars May Be Emerging from an Ice Age

NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey missions have provided evidence of a recent ice age on Mars.

NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey missions have provided evidence of a recent ice age on Mars. In contrast to Earth's ice ages, a martian ice age waxes when the poles warm up and water vapor is transported toward lower latitudes. Martian ice ages wane when the poles cool and lock water into polar icecaps.The "pacemakers" of ice ages on Mars appear to be much more extreme than the comparable drivers of climate change on Earth. Variations in the planet's orbit and tilt produce remarkable changes in the distribution of water ice from polar regions down to latitudes equivalent to Houston or Egypt. Researchers, using NASA spacecraft data and analogies to Earth's Antarctic Dry Valleys, report their findings in the Thursday, Dec. 18 edition of the journal Nature."Of all the solar system planets, Mars has the climate most like that of Earth. Both are sensitive to small changes in orbital parameters," said planetary scientist Dr. James Head of Brown University, Providence, R.I., lead author of the study. "Now we're seeing that Mars, like Earth, is in a period between ice ages."Discoveries on Mars, since 1999, of relatively recent water- carved gullies, glacier-like flows, regional buried ice and possible snow packs created excitement among scientists who study Earth and other planets. Information from the Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions provided more evidence of an icy recent past.Head and his co-authors from Brown (Drs. John Mustard and Ralph Milliken), Boston University (Dr. David Marchant) and Kharkov National University, Ukraine (Dr. Mikhail Kreslavsky) examined global patterns of landscape shapes and near-surface water ice mapped by the orbiters. They concluded that a covering of water ice mixed with dust mantled the surface of Mars to latitudes as low as 30 degrees, and is now degrading and retreating. By observing the small number of impact craters in those features and by backtracking the known patterns of changes in Mars' orbit and tilt, they estimated the most recent ice age occurred just 400,000 to 2.1 million years ago, very recent in geological terms. "These results show that Mars is not a dead planet, but it undergoes climate changes that are even more pronounced than on Earth," Head said.Marchant, a glacial geologist who has spent 17 field seasons in the Mars-like Antarctic Dry Valleys, said, "These extreme changes on Mars provide perspective for interpreting what we see on Earth. Landforms on Mars that appear to be related to climate changes help us calibrate and understand similar landforms on Earth. Furthermore, the range of microenvironments in the Antarctic Dry Valleys helps us read the Mars record."Mustard said, "The extreme climate changes on Mars are providing us with predictions we can test with upcoming Mars missions, such as Europe's Mars Express and NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers. Among the climate changes that occurred during these extremes is warming of the poles and partial melting of water at high altitudes. This clearly broadens the environments in which life might occur on Mars."According to the researchers, during a martian ice age, polar warming drives water vapor from polar ice into the atmosphere. The water comes back to ground at lower latitudes as deposits of frost or snow mixed generously with dust. This ice-rich mantle, a few meters or yards thick, smoothes the contours of the land. It locally develops a bumpy texture at human scales, resembling the surface of a basketball and also seen in some Antarctic icy terrains. When ice at the top of the mantling layer sublimes back into the atmosphere, it leaves behind dust, which forms an insulating layer over remaining ice. On Earth, by contrast, ice ages are periods of polar cooling. The buildup of ice sheets draws water from liquid-water oceans, which Mars lacks."This exciting new research really shows the mettle of NASA's 'follow-the-water' strategy for studying Mars," said Dr. Jim Garvin, NASA's lead scientist for Mars exploration. "We hope to continue pursuing this strategy in January, if the Mars Exploration Rovers land successfully. Later, the 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and 2007 Phoenix near-polar lander will be able to directly follow up on these astounding findings by Professor Head and his team."Global Surveyor has been orbiting Mars since 1997, Odyssey since 2001. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages both missions for the NASA Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Information about NASA's Mars missions is available on the Internet at:http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/cassini-plasma-spectrometer-turns-off

Cassini Plasma Spectrometer Turns Off

The Cassini plasma spectrometer instrument (CAPS) aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft was turned off between Friday, June 1 and Saturday, June 2, when a circuit breaker tripped off after the instrument experienced some unexpected voltage shifts.

Cassini Mission Status ReportPASADENA, Calif. - The Cassini plasma spectrometer instrument (CAPS) aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft was turned off between Friday, June 1 and Saturday, June 2, when a circuit breaker tripped off after the instrument experienced some unexpected voltage shifts.Engineers are currently investigating this issue, which they believe is due to short circuits in the instrument. In June 2011, the instrument was turned off because of similar problems, but was switched on again in March 2012 once investigators determined that tin plating on electronic components had grown "whiskers" large enough to contact another conducting surface and carry electrical current, resulting in a voltage shift. At that time, it was believed that these "whiskers" were not capable of carrying sufficient current to cause any damage, and the voltage shifts didn't have any effect on normal spacecraft operations because the power subsystem is designed to operate in the presence of such shifts.More details about whiskers on the CAPS instrument can be found here:http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-078.The cause is still under investigation, but engineers will be looking into this issue over the next few months.Cassini launched in 1997 and has been exploring the Saturn system since 2004. The project completed its original prime mission in 2008 and has been extended twice. Cassini is now in its solstice mission, which will enable scientists to observe seasonal change in the Saturn system through the northern summer solstice.??The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.For more information about the Cassini mission, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/cassiniandhttp://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/evidence-seen-for-wet-past-on-ganymede-jupiters-largest-moon

Evidence Seen For Wet Past on Ganymede, Jupiter's Largest Moon

Bright, flat terrain in long swaths on the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Ganymede may testify that water or slush emerged there about a billion years ago, say planetary scientists who have combined stereo images from NASA's Galileo and Voyager missions to examine provocative features on that moon.

Bright, flat terrain in long swaths on the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Ganymede may testify that water or slush emerged there about a billion years ago, say planetary scientists who have combined stereo images from NASA's Galileo and Voyager missions to examine provocative features on that moon.This bright terrain, long since frozen over, lies uniformly in troughs about one kilometer (a little over a half mile) lower than Ganymede's older, darker, cratered terrain.Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system and larger than the planet Mercury. The roles that volcanism and various forms of tectonics have played in molding its complex topography have been hotly debated over the years. But the newly created images, taking advantage of the large quantity of Voyager images and the higher resolution of Galileo's, point to volcanism as the main impetus behind the troughs."What we think we're seeing is evidence of an eruption of water on the surface of Ganymede," said Dr. William B. McKinnon, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and co-author of the study published in Nature on March 1, 2001. "We see these long, smooth troughs that step down up to a full kilometer. They're really very much like rift valleys on the Earth and they're repaved with something pretty smooth. The material in the troughs is more like terrestrial lava in terms of its fluidity than relatively stiff glacial ice." He said the material is banked up against the edges of the walls of the trough and appears to have been more fluid than solid ice would have been, even if it were relatively warm ice. These features support the idea that they were created by volcanism.The report's other authors are Dr. Paul Schenk of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, Texas; Dr. David Gwynn of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Dr. Jeffrey Moore of NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffet Field, Calif. Images from the report are available online from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena.The researchers used stereo imaging -- a method where three-dimensional objects are reproduced by combining two or more images of the same subject taken from slightly different angles -- to reconstruct the physical topography of Ganymede's terrains. Maps were then generated from the stereo images. "This is a new kind of stereo topographical information over hundreds of kilometers across Ganymede," McKinnon said. The images provide new clues about what happened on Ganymede long ago and how that moon reworks its older, darker material.One trough extends an estimated 900 kilometers (about 600 miles), the approximate distance between St. Louis and New Orleans. "The long trough is probably a billion years old, but it's actually one of the younger volcanic features," McKinnon said. "It's the last gasp of the process that made the bright terrain."According to McKinnon, the geological explanation for such long lanes of flatness is that they occurred by the extending and opening up of Ganymede's crust. And then that portion of the crust became flooded with some sort of lava. The high-resolution Galileo images show that material that flooded the lanes is "no less liquid than a slush," said McKinnon. "But it is not glacial ice, which would have big moraines and big round edges like a flowing glacier does."Moreover, the images reveal depressions that resemble volcanic calderas along the edges of the bright terrains. On Earth, calderas are large, more-or-less circular craters usually caused by the collapse of underground lava reservoirs. "The caldera-like features make a pretty good circumstantial case for volcanism causing this topography," McKinnon said. "We think these particularly bright terrains were formed by volcanism, which means that most or all the other bright terrains started out this way, and became fractured or grooved over time through tectonic forces."Galileo has been orbiting Jupiter since 1995. Its 12 scientific experiments have enhanced researchers' understanding of Jupiter's atmosphere, large moons and vast magnetic field. It carried the first atmospheric probe to enter Jupiter's atmosphere. In other firsts, it was the first mission to discover a satellite of an asteroid (Ida's satellite Dactyl), the first to go into orbit around Jupiter, the first to make a close flyby of an asteroid (Gaspra), and the first to provide direct observations of a comet hitting a planet (Shoemaker-Levy 9). Galileo has also provided extensive information about active volcanism on the moon Io and the possibility of a subsurface ocean on the moon Europa. Later this year, it will make close approaches to the moons Callisto and Io.The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft each passed near Jupiter in 1979 and then explored more distant parts of the solar system. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Galileo and Voyager missions for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-nasa-fire-and-smoke-web-page-shows-latest-fire-views-research

New NASA 'Fire and Smoke' Web Page Shows Latest Fire Views, Research

NASA satellites, aircraft and research know-how, including resources and expertise from JPL, comprise a wealth of cutting-edge tools to help firefighters battle wildfires.

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA satellites, aircraft and research know-how, including resources and expertise from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., comprise a wealth of cutting-edge tools to help firefighters battle wildfires. These tools also have helped scientists understand the impact of fires and smoke on Earth's climate and ecosystems. Now, a new NASA Web site brings to the public and journalists the latest information about this ongoing effort.The NASA "Fire and Smoke" Web site debuting Tuesday, July 22, includes regular updates of NASA images of fires and their associated smoke plumes in the United States and around the world. The site also features articles on the latest research results and multimedia resources from across NASA.The site is updated regularly with new images from NASA's suite of Earth-observing satellites and airborne observatories, including the unmanned Ikhana aircraft that recently pinpointed wildfire hotspots across California. NASA's investment in these observational resources, and the research and development to transform them into practical tools for operational agencies, supports ongoing nationwide efforts to fight wildfires.The Web site is available at:http://www.nasa.gov/fires.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/curiosity-peels-back-layers-on-ancient-martian-lake

Curiosity Peels Back Layers on Ancient Martian Lake

A long-lasting lake on ancient Mars provided stable environmental conditions that differed from one part of the lake to another, NASA's Curiosity rover mission has found.

Fast Facts:› NASA's Curiosity Mars rover mission has provided an unprecedented level of detail about an ancient lake environment on Mars that offered favorable conditions for microbial life.› A lake in Mars' Gale Crater long ago was stratified, with oxidant-rich shallows and oxidant-poor depths.› The lake offered multiple types of microbe-friendly environments simultaneously.A long-lasting lake on ancient Mars provided stable environmental conditions that differed significantly from one part of the lake to another, according to a comprehensive look at findings from the first three-and-a-half years of NASA's Curiosity rover mission.Different conditions favorable for different types of microbes existed simultaneously in the same lake.Previous work had revealed the presence of a lake more than three billion years ago in Mars' Gale Crater. This study defines the chemical conditions that existed in the lake and uses Curiosity's powerful payload to determine that the lake was stratified. Stratified bodies of water exhibit sharp chemical or physical differences between deep water and shallow water. In Gale's lake, the shallow water was richer in oxidants than deeper water was."These were very different, co-existing environments in the same lake," said Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York, lead author of a report of the findings in the June 2 edition of the journal Science. "This type of oxidant stratification is a common feature of lakes on Earth, and now we've found it on Mars. The diversity of environments in this Martian lake would have provided multiple opportunities for different types of microbes to survive, including those that thrive in oxidant-rich conditions, those that thrive in oxidant-poor conditions, and those that inhabit the interface between those settings."Whether Mars has ever hosted any life is still unknown, but seeking signs of life on any planet -- whether Earth, Mars or more-distant icy worlds -- begins with reconstruction of the environment to determine if it was capable of supporting life.Curiosity's primary goal when it landed inside Gale Crater in 2012 was to determine whether Mars has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life. In its first year, on the crater floor at "Yellowknife Bay," the rover found evidence of ancient freshwater river and lake environments with all the main chemical ingredients for life and a possible energy source for life. Curiosity has since driven to the base of Mount Sharp, a layered mountain inside the crater, and inspected rock layers that grow progressively younger as the rover gains elevation on lower Mount Sharp.Differences in the physical, chemical and mineral characteristics of several sites on lower Mount Sharp at first presented a puzzle to the rover team. For example, some rocks showed thicker layering with a larger proportion of an iron mineral called hematite, while other rocks showed very fine layers and more of an iron mineral called magnetite. Comparing these properties suggested very distinctive environments of deposition.Researchers considered whether these differences could have resulted from environmental conditions fluctuating over time or differing from place to place."We could tell something was going on," Hurowitz said. "What was causing iron minerals to be one flavor in one part of the lake and another flavor in another part of the lake? We had an 'Aha!' moment when we realized that the mineral information and the bedding-thickness information mapped perfectly onto each other in a way you would expect from a stratified lake with a chemical boundary between shallow water and deeper water."In addition to revealing new information about chemical conditions within the lake, the report by Hurowitz and 22 co-authors also documents fluctuations in the climate of ancient Mars. One such change happened between the time crater-floor rocks were deposited and the time the rocks that now make up the base of Mount Sharp were deposited. Those later rocks are exposed at "Pahrump Hills" and elsewhere.The method the team used for detecting changes in ancient climate conditions on Mars resembles how ice cores are used to study past temperature conditions on Earth. It is based on comparing differences in the chemical composition of layers of mud-rich sedimentary rock that were deposited in quiet waters in the lake. While the lake was present in Gale, climate conditions changed from colder and drier to warmer and wetter. Such short-term fluctuations in climate took place within a longer-term climate evolution from the ancient warmer and wetter conditions that supported lakes, to today's arid Mars."These results give us unprecedented detail in answering questions about ancient environmental conditions on Mars," said Curiosity Project Scientist Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "I'm struck by how these fascinating conclusions on habitability and climate took everything the mission had to offer: a set of sophisticated science instruments, multiple years and miles of exploration, a landing site that retained a record of the ancient environment, and a lot of hard work by the mission team."In mid-2017, Curiosity is continuing to reach higher and younger layers of Mount Sharp to study how the ancient lake environment evolved to a drier environment more like modern Mars. The mission is managed by JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Curiosity and other Mars science missions are all part of ambitious robotic exploration to understand Mars, which helps lead the way for sending humans to Mars in the 2030s. For more about Curiosity, visit:https://www.nasa.gov/curiosityhttps://mars.nasa.gov/msl/

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/for-aquarius-sampling-seas-no-grain-of-salt-task

For Aquarius, Sampling Seas No 'Grain of Salt' Task

Twenty years after scientists first recognized that precise measurements of ocean salinity from space were possible, NASA's Aquarius mission is poised to realize their dream.

The breakthrough moment for oceanographer Gary Lagerloef, the principal investigator for NASA's new Aquarius mission, came in 1991. That's when he knew it would be possible to make precise measurements of ocean salinity from space. It has taken nearly two decades to turn that possibility into a reality.Lagerloef was looking at data collected by a NASA aircraft flying over the ocean off the coast of Maryland. It was testing a new radiometer, an instrument that can sense thermal signals emitted by land, clouds and the ocean surface. The instrument not only captured the unique signature of dissolved salt in the surface water below, it showed how the water's salt content varied from one side of the Gulf Stream to the other."That flight was a turning point," said Lagerloef, a senior scientist at Earth & Space Research, Seattle. "We could clearly see the range that we needed to study salinity from its lowest levels in the North Pacific to the highest salinity levels in the North Atlantic."Salinity, or saltiness, plays a critical role in ocean circulation and is a key tracer for understanding the ocean's role in Earth's global water cycle. While satellites routinely provide information on sea surface temperature, sea level, ocean color and ocean winds, historically, no global view of ocean surface salinity had been available. Salinity measurements were limited to those by ships, buoys and floats until recently - and are still few and far between.Measuring salinity from space is extremely challenging and has been one of the last frontiers for ocean remote sensing. The European Space Agency launched a mission to measure soil moisture and ocean salinity in 2009. And now the Aquarius/SAC-D mission developed by NASA and Argentina's space agency, the Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales, is being readied for launch on June 9. The two missions are complementary, but differ in focus and technology. One important difference is that Aquarius uses both a passive radiometer to detect ocean salinity and an active scatterometer radar to correct the radiometer's salinity measurements for wind roughness (waves) at the sea surface. This is the first combination of this kind used in space for Earth observations, whereas the European Space Agency mission uses only a passive radiometer.Aquarius is dedicated to making precise measurements of ocean salinity over months and years, providing important new information for climate studies. It will produce monthly maps of the surface salinity of the global ocean with a 93-mile (150-kilometer) resolution and an accuracy of 0.2 practical salinity units, which is equal to about one-eighth teaspoon of salt in a gallon of water. (Practical salinity is a scale used to describe the concentration of dissolved salts in seawater, nearly equivalent to parts per thousand.) The mission is to make these measurements continuously for at least three years."This is a level of accuracy and stability that has never been achieved in space before," said Aquarius Instrument Scientist Simon Yueh, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., which is managing the mission for NASA through its commissioning phase."The first challenge is that the signal we are measuring is very small," said Aquarius Deputy Principal Investigator David Le Vine, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "It is a very tiny signal in a noisy environment. In addition, the dynamic range - the difference in the signal that comes from water with low salinity and water with high salinity - is also small."The Aquarius instrument has three separate radiometers aimed at the ocean below. The radiometers are designed to detect and measure a particular wavelength of microwave energy being emitted by the ocean."Everything radiates energy," explained Le Vine. "When you see the glow of an electric stove, you're seeing thermal radiation. It is in a range that our eyes can see. Night-vision goggles let you see radiation in the infrared part of the spectrum. For Aquarius, we're measuring radiation at microwave frequencies."The radiometers on Aquarius measure the microwave emissions from the sea surface at 1.4 gigahertz in the L-band portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This energy, which is measured as an equivalent temperature called the "brightness temperature" in Kelvin, has a direct correlation to surface salinity."Lots of things interfere with the salinity signal Aquarius is measuring, such as land and atmospheric effects," said Le Vine. "Ocean waves are a particularly significant source of 'noise' that can confuse the signal from salinity. That's why we have an additional instrument, a scatterometer, on board to help correct for this." The scatterometer sends a radar pulse to the ocean surface that is reflected back to the spacecraft, providing information about the ocean surface.Because of its importance, the 1.4 gigahertz band is protected for scientific use. Nevertheless, says Aquarius Science Team Member Frank Wentz, director of Remote Sensing Systems, Santa Rosa, Calif., stray signals from radar, telephone and radio occasionally cause problems. Aquarius' radiometers are designed to detect much of this interference and eliminate contaminated measurements.Wentz is part of the team creating the complicated mathematical formula - called a retrieval algorithm - that Aquarius will use to translate brightness temperature into measurements of salinity. "It's basically a big subtraction process," he said. "We figure out all the things that interfere with the signal we want and eliminate their effect on our measurement. This would be challenging enough to do even if the ocean were perfectly flat like a mirror. Instead, because of waves, it's more like a funhouse mirror that distorts everything."Aquarius' primary focus is to see how salinity varies from place to place and changes with time. This task would be easier if there were a greater difference in the signal between the regions with low salinity and those with high salinity.Over the open ocean, salinity is relatively constant. It ranges from about 32 to 37 parts per thousand. The corresponding change in brightness temperature -- what Aquarius measures -- is very small. Aquarius has been designed to detect changes in salinity as small as about two parts per 10,000, which corresponds to about 0.1 Kelvin. "This will be about 10 times more accurate than previous spaceborne radiometer observations of other sea surface characteristics," said Yueh.Aquarius has to be extremely stable as well as sensitive. "If we want to see small things over long periods of time, we have to make sure that the instrument itself doesn't change. We need to know that any variations we observe are real and not caused by the instrument itself," said Yueh. Making this happen required special engineering attention to temperature control and calibration.Controlling the temperature, critical for maintaining precision and stability, within a large instrument is difficult. JPL engineers had to design special computer models to understand the system's thermal behavior and its electronics. "This had never been done before for an instrument of this size operating over months and years," said Yueh.All microwave radiometers, including Aquarius, require a calibration reference point. Most operational spacecraft radiometers continuously turn to look at cold space in order to calibrate their instruments. Aquarius, however, uses internal calibration to help retain its stability. "We have a big antenna and a large instrument," said Yueh. "No one wants to spin this instrument around frequently to look at an external reference."While Aquarius benefits from advanced technologies such as internal calibration and sophisticated radiometers, its ability to measure global ocean surface salinity with unprecedented accuracy is the result of years of research and planning.The key to making this challenging measurement, say Aquarius science team members, is in the details. And from the tiny, detailed measurements of salinity that Aquarius makes, a new "big" picture of Earth's ocean will emerge.For more information on Aquarius, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/aquarius.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/witness-first-mars-launch-from-west-coast

Witness First Mars Launch from West Coast

NASA invites digital creators to apply for social media credentials to cover the launch of the InSight mission to Mars, May 3-5, at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Are you a digital creator, citizen journalist or active on social media? Do you have an idea for a unique way to share the story of the West Coast's first interplanetary rocket launch?Apply nowto attend launch activities for NASA's InSight mission, May 3-5, at Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, California.InSight's launch begins a six-month journey to Mars, where the lander will deploy the first seismometer to the surface of another planet. By measuring marsquakes, InSight will map the deep interior of Mars to help us better understand how rocky planets, including Earth, are formed.NASA will grant up to 75 NASA Social credentials, which give access similar to news media. Participants will go behind the scenes, meet mission personnel and share their experiences online.NASA Social participants will have the opportunity to:Witness the first interplanetary launch from the West Coast of the United StatesSpeak with InSight mission scientists and engineersParticipate in a special televised pre-launch briefingView and take photographs of the Atlas V-401 rocket on the launch padTour facilities at Vandenberg Air Force BaseInteract with NASA social media managers and fellow space enthusiastsNASA' s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The InSight spacecraft, including cruise stage and lander, was built and tested by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver. A number of European partners, including France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission.Social media accreditation for the InSight Launch NASA Social is open onthis page. The deadline to apply is 8:59 p.m. PDT (11:59 p.m. EDT) on March 19. All social media accreditation applications will be considered on a case-by-case basis.For more information on InSight, visit:https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/Interact with the InSight mission on social media via:https://twitter.com/NASAInSighthttps://facebook.com/NASAInSight

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/icelandic-volcano-eruption-cause-of-late-third-century-bc-famines

Icelandic Volcano Eruption Cause of Late Third Century BC Famines

In the late Third Century BC, about half of northern China's population perished in wide-spread famines which may have been caused by an Icelandic volcano eruption, two NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists said.

In the late Third Century BC, about half of northern China's population perished in wide-spread famines which may have been caused by an Icelandic volcano eruption, two NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists said.In an abstract and presentation prepared for the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union Thursday, Dec. 10 at session on climate and ice, Drs. Kevin Pang and James Slavin said the volcanic cloud may have blocked the sun for long period of time.A cold, wet spell began in late 209 BC, Pang said, based on studies of the Chinese chronicles, an ancient history, with the aid of Dr. Hung-hsiang Chou of the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA.The people of northern China were extremely unlucky during that period, Pang said. Not only were the forces of nature aligned against them, but their numbers were further decimated by the despotic rule of the Chin Emperors and an ongoing war of succession between rebel factions.The weather records of the Chinese chronicles were corroborated by Greenland ice core data which show peak of sulfuric acid dated at 210 30 BC deposited there by very large Icelandic eruption.Additionally, study of the cycles in the texture of Danish bogs also has shown tha the period of about 205 BC were wet years for the entire northern European Plain.Solar disturbances also have been suggested as cause of climatic change. At least five auroras were recorded in China from 209 to 204 BC, high frequency for ancient texts. Analyses of Chinese and European auroral records show peak of solar activity in 205 BC or shortly before.But Pang said the increased solar activity would not be consistent with the cold spell.The cloud from the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, however, could have made "the stars invisible for three months," Pang said, quoting the Chinese chronicles.He said he and his colleagues also determined the relative importance of the climatic change and the battles of the war of succession by examining regional differences in grain prices in 205 BC.They found that grain prices west of the Yellow River were twice as high as elsewhere in the northern regions. But the campaigns were waged to the east and south of the river, showing the war was not the primary cause of the shortages.The 1987 Fall Meeting of the AGU was scheduled for the San Francisco Civic Auditorium Dec. 7-11.818-354-5011

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/video-documents-three-year-trek-on-mars-by-nasa-rover

Video Documents Three-Year Trek on Mars by NASA Rover

A sequence of images, each taken at the end of a Martian day's drive, and a soundtrack from rover accelerometer data make a unique audio-visual record of a trek on Mars.

While NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity was traveling from Victoria crater to Endeavour crater, between September 2008 and August 2011, the rover team took an end-of-drive image on each Martian day that included a drive. A new video compiles these 309 images, providing an historic record of the three-year trek that totaled about 13 miles (21 kilometers) across a Martian plain pocked with smaller craters.The video featuring the end-of-drive images is now available online, athttp://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=114782241. It shows the rim of Endeavour becoming visible on the horizon partway through the journey and growing larger as Opportunity neared that goal. The drive included detours, as Opportunity went around large expanses of treacherous terrain along the way.The rover team also produced a sound track for the video, using each drive day's data from Opportunity's accelerometers. The low-frequency data has been sped up 1,000 times to yield audible frequencies."The sound represents the vibrations of the rover while moving on the surface of Mars," said Paolo Bellutta, a rover planner at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who has plotted many of Opportunity's drives and coordinated production of the video. "When the sound is louder, the rover was moving on bedrock. When the sound is softer, the rover was moving on sand."Opportunity and its rover twin, Spirit, completed their three-month prime missions on Mars in April 2004. Both rovers continued for years of bonus, extended missions. Both have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life. Spirit stopped communicating in 2010. Opportunity continues its work at Endeavour. NASA will launch the next-generation Mars rover, car-size Curiosity, this autumn, for arrival at Mars' Gale crater in August 2012.JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. More information about the rovers is online at:http://www.nasa.gov/roversandhttp://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov. You can also follow the mission on Facebook athttp://www.facebook.com/marsroversand on Twitter athttp://www.twitter.com/marsrovers.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-statement-on-student-asteroid-calculations

NASA Statement on Student Asteroid Calculations

The Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has not changed its current estimates for the very low probability (1 in 45,000) of an Earth impact by the asteroid Apophis in 2036.

PASADENA, Calif. -- The Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has not changed its current estimates for the very low probability (1 in 45,000) of an Earth impact by the asteroid Apophis in 2036.Contrary to recent press reports, NASA offices involved in near-Earth object research were not contacted and have had no correspondence with a young German student, who claims the Apophis impact probability is far higher than the current estimate.This student's conclusion reportedly is based on the possibility of a collision with an artificial satellite during the asteroid's close approach in April 2029. However, the asteroid will not pass near the main belt of geosynchronous satellites in 2029, and the chance of a collision with a satellite is exceedingly remote.Therefore, consideration of this satellite collision scenario does not affect the current impact probability estimate for Apophis, which remains at 1 in 45,000.NASA detects and tracks asteroids and comets passing close to Earth. The Near Earth Object Observation Program, commonly called "Spaceguard," discovers, characterizes and computes trajectories for these objects to determine if any could be potentially hazardous to our planet.For more information, visithttp://neo.jpl.nasa.gov.For more information about JPL on the Internet, visitwww.jpl.nasa.gov. For information about NASA, visitwww.nasa.gov.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-tool-may-assist-us-regional-sea-level-planning

New Tool May Assist US Regional Sea Level Planning

A new tool may help planners and decision makers identify key regions of the U.S. coastline that are vulnerable to regional sea level changes on 10- to 20-year timescales.

Thanks in large part to satellite measurements, scientists' skill in measuring how much sea levels are rising on a global scale - currently 0.13 inch (3.4 millimeters) per year - has improved dramatically over the past quarter century. But at the local level, it's been harder to estimate specific regional sea level changes 10 or 20 years away - the critical timeframe for regional planners and decision makers.That's because sea level changes for many reasons, on differing timescales, and is not the same from one place to the next. Developing more accurate regional forecasts of sea level rise will therefore have far-reaching benefits for the more than 30 percent of Americans who currently reside along the Pacific, Atlantic or Gulf Coasts of the contiguous United States.New research published this week in the Journal of Climate reveals that one key measurement -- large-scale upper-ocean temperature changes caused by natural cycles of the ocean -- is a good indicator of regional coastal sea level changes on these decadal timescales. Such data may give planners and decision makers a new tool to identify key regions of U.S. coastlines that may be vulnerable to sea level changes on 10- to 20-year timescales."Decision makers need a diverse set of tools with different informational needs," said lead author Veronica Nieves of UCLA and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "Having a better understanding of the chances of local flood damage from rising seas in coastal areas is a key factor in being able to assess vulnerability, risk and adaptation options." Such tools could help planners decide whether a given part of a coastline would be better served by "soft" techniques, such as beach replenishment or preservation of wetlands, or by "hard" techniques, such as construction of sea walls or levees.Nieves' team, which included participation from the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies in Esporles, Spain, set out to detect decadal sea level changes over large U.S. coastal ocean regions. They compared existing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) records of upper-ocean temperatures in coastal waters for each U.S. ocean coastline with records of actual sea level changes from 1955 to 2012, and data from U.S./European satellite altimeter missions since 1992. They identified those sea level changes that have a large impact at regional scales in many locations, including largely populated cities. Sea level along the U.S. East Coast and West Coast can rise and fall by an inch or two (several centimeters) over the course of a decade or two because of fluctuations in upper ocean temperatures.Their method was able to explain about 70 percent of regional sea level variability on decadal time scales for the West Coast, about 80 percent for the East Coast, and about 45 percent for the Gulf Coast. Along the Gulf Coast, the authors say other factors, such as tidal effects and the ongoing subsidence, or sinking, of the land, can play a more important role."Our study shows that large-scale upper-ocean temperature changes provide a good way to distinguish decade-long natural ocean signals from longer-term global warming signals," said Nieves. "This is important for regional planning, because it allows policymakers to identify places where climate change dominates the observed sea level rise and places where the climate change signal is masked by shorter-term regional variability caused by natural ocean climate cycles."Nieves said an example is the U.S. West Coast, where the phase of a multi-decadal ocean climate pattern called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has helped keep sea level rise lower during the past two decades. With the recent shift of this oscillation to its opposite phase, scientists expect sea level rise along the West Coast to accelerate in coming years."Scientists have worked hard to understand the really fast changes in sea level, such as storm surges, because they cause major damage, and the really slow changes because long-term sea level rise will shape the coastlines of the future," said study co-author Josh Willis of JPL. "But in between these fast and slow changes, there's a gap in our understanding. The results of our study help fill that gap."

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-hosting-events-for-valentines-night-comet-encounter

NASA Hosting Events for Valentine's Night Comet Encounter

NASA will host several live activities for the Stardust-NExT mission's close encounter with comet Tempel 1.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA will host several live activities for the Stardust-NExT mission's close encounter with comet Tempel 1. The closest approach is expected at approximately 8:37 p.m. PST (11:37 p.m. EST) on Feb. 14, with confirmation received on Earth at about 8:56 p.m. PST (11:56 p.m. EST).Live coverage of the Tempel 1 encounter will begin at 8:30 p.m. PST on Feb. 14 on NASA Television and the agency's website. The coverage will include live commentary from mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and video from Lockheed Martin Space System's mission support area in Denver.Live coverage of a news briefing is planned for 10 a.m. PST on Feb. 15. Scheduled participants are:-- Ed Weiler, NASA associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, Washington-- Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.-- Tim Larson, Stardust-NExT project manager, JPL-- Don Brownlee, Stardust-NExT co-investigator, University of Washington, SeattleMission coverage schedule (all times PST and subject to change):-- 8:30 to 10 p.m., Feb. 14: Live NASA TV commentary begins from mission control; includes coverage of closest approach and the re-establishment of contact with the spacecraft following the encounter.-- Midnight to 1:30 a.m., Feb. 15: NASA TV commentary will chronicle the arrival and processing of the first five of 72 close-approach images the team expects to be downlinked after the encounter. The images are expected to include a close-up view of the comet's surface.-- 10 a.m., Feb. 15: News briefing-- Starting on Feb. 9, NASA TV will air Stardust-NExT mission animation and other video during its Video File segments. For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.-- Commentary and the news conference will also be carried live on one of JPL's Ustream channels. During events, viewers can engage in a real-time chat and submit questions to the Stardust-NExT team at:http://www.ustream.tv/user/NASAJPL2.The public can watch a real-time animation of the Stardust-NExT comet flyby using NASA's new "Eyes on the Solar System" Web tool. JPL created this 3-D environment, which allows people to explore the solar system from their computers. It is available at:http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/eyes.This flyby of Tempel 1 will give scientists an opportunity to look for changes on the comet's surface since it was visited by NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft in July 2005. Since then, Tempel 1 has completed one orbit of the sun, and scientists are looking forward to monitoring any differences in the comet.During its 12 years in space, Stardust became the first spacecraft to collect samples of a comet (Wild 2 in 2004), which were delivered to Earth in 2006 for study. The Stardust-NExT mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft and manages day-to-day mission operations.A press kit and other detailed information about Stardust-NExT is available at:http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-curiosity-rover-inspects-unusual-bedrock

NASA's Curiosity Rover Inspects Unusual Bedrock

The laser-firing instrument on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has identified a rock target that is rich in silica, prompting further investigation with the rover.

Fast Facts:› Rover examines geological contact zone near 'Marias Pass'› Silica-rich rocks identified nearby with laser-firing instrument› Test of rover's drill prepares for next use on Mars rockApproaching the third anniversary of its landing on Mars, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has found a target unlike anything it has studied before -- bedrock with surprisingly high levels of silica. Silica is a rock-forming compound containing silicon and oxygen, commonly found on Earth as quartz.This area lies just downhill from a geological contact zone the rover has been studying near "Marias Pass" on lower Mount Sharp.In fact, the Curiosity team decided to back up the rover 46 meters (151 feet) from the geological contact zone to investigate the high-silica target dubbed "Elk." The decision was made after they analyzed data from two instruments, the laser-firing Chemistry & Camera (ChemCam) and Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN), which show elevated amounts of silicon and hydrogen, respectively. High levels of silica in the rock could indicate ideal conditions for preserving ancient organic material, if present, so the science team wants to take a closer look."One never knows what to expect on Mars, but the Elk target was interesting enough to go back and investigate," said Roger Wiens, the principal investigator of the ChemCam instrument from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. ChemCam is coming up on its 1,000th target, having already fired its laser more than 260,000 times since Curiosity landed on Mars Aug. 6, 2012, Universal Time (evening of Aug. 5, Pacific Time).In other news, an engineering test on the rover's sample-collecting drill on July 18 is aiding analysis of intermittent short circuits in the drill's percussion mechanism, in preparation for using the drill in the area where the rover has been working for the past two months. The latest test did not result in any short circuits, so the team plans to continue with more tests, performed on the science targets themselves.Before Curiosity began further investigating the high-silica area, it was busy scrutinizing the geological contact zone near Marias Pass, where a pale mudstone meets darker sandstone."We found an outcrop named Missoula where the two rock types came together, but it was quite small and close to the ground. We used the robotic arm to capture a dog's-eye view with the MAHLI camera, getting our nose right in there," said Ashwin Vasavada, the mission's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. MAHLI is short for Mars Hand Lens Imager.The rover had reached this area after a steep climb up a 20-foot (6-meter) hill. Near the top of the climb, the ChemCam instrument fired its laser at the target Elk, and took a spectral reading of its composition."ChemCam acts like eyes and ears of the rover for nearby objects," said Wiens.The rover had moved on before the Elk data were analyzed, so a U-turn was required to obtain more data. Upon its return, the rover was able to study a similar target, "Lamoose," up close with the MAHLI camera and the arm-mounted Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS).Curiosity has been working on Mars since early August 2012. It reached the base of Mount Sharp last year after fruitfully investigating outcrops closer to its landing site and then trekking to the mountain. The main mission objective now is to examine successively higher layers of Mount Sharp.The U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory developed ChemCam in partnership with scientists and engineers funded by the French national space agency. Russia's space agency provided Curiosity's DAN instrument. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, built the rover and manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information about Curiosity, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/mslhttp://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mslYou can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at:http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosityhttp://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/can-poor-air-quality-mask-global-warmings-effects

Can Poor Air Quality Mask Global Warming's Effects?

In the 1900s, the U.S. warmed everywhere except the Southeast, where warming didn't begin till the 1990s. A study finds air quality improvements may have played a role.

During the 20th century, the average temperature of the continental United States rose by almost 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.5 degree Celsius) -- everywhere, that is, except in the Southeast. There, until the 1980s, the temperature actually decreased slightly. Climate scientists dubbed this peculiar phenomenon the "warming hole," and it was the cause of much speculation. But beginning in the 1990s, temperatures in the Southeast began to warm again, and in the early years of the 21st century this warming has accelerated.A new study published in the journal Remote Sensing presents evidence that a significant improvement in air quality in the region may have contributed to the disappearance of the warming hole after about 1990 -- and that other polluted regions outside the United States, such as China and India, may experience the same phenomenon.One major factor in poor air quality is airborne aerosols -- tiny particles of dust, soot from wood burning, coal and oil combustion, or sulfates created by precursor gases emitted from factories and car exhaust, to name a few sources. Aerosols can decrease temperature by dimming sunlight at Earth's surface and by increasing the amount and lifetimes of clouds, which reflect sunlight back into space.After the warming hole mysteriously disappeared, various studies proposed possible causes: changes in cloud cover, precipitation or in the amount of aerosols produced by air pollution. In 2006, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began implementing a more stringent cap on the concentration of aerosol particles smaller than about 1/10,000th of an inch (2.5 micrometers) in diameter. To comply with the regulation, many U.S. power utilities and industrial companies began reducing their use of coal and installing filters to reduce emissions.A similar change to temperature trends occurred in Europe in the 1980s after new regulations improved air quality there. Because reduced aerosol particle concentrations allow more sunlight to reach Earth's surface, the scientists hypothesized that the improvements in U.S. air quality could also be responsible for the temperature change over the Southeast.To test this hypothesis, a team led by Mika Tosca, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (who is now with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago), used three surface temperature data sets. The data sets were compiled by the University of Delaware, the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, and the Global Historical Climatology Network (which compiles surface temperature and precipitation data). They also used aerosol data from two satellite instruments: the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA's Terra satellite, launched in 1999, and the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization (CALIOP) on the Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO) satellite, a joint mission between NASA and the French space agency, CNES, launched in 2006.The data show that between 2000 and 2015, while summertime temperatures in the Southeast United States increased by roughly 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.75 degree Celsius), significantly faster than the increase in the continental United States during the 20th century, the amount of summertime aerosols decreased overall by about 20 percent, with a much steeper decline after 2007. The timing of this decline coincided with the implementation of the new EPA standards.To help determine how much of the temperature change was caused by the changes in aerosols, Tosca and colleagues used a model that simulates how the sun's energy travels through Earth's atmosphere, using the MISR and CALIOP satellite data as inputs. The increase in sunlight shown in the model results matches well with daily measurements taken at a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) solar radiation monitoring station in Goodwin Creek, Mississippi, suggesting that the decrease in aerosols is a plausible explanation for most of the disappearance of the warming hole.Tosca acknowledges that linkages between aerosols and clouds could also play a role. The next step would be to run a more sophisticated climate model that takes into account clouds and the aerosols' effects on them. The team would also like to apply this kind of analysis to other areas with high air pollution levels, such as China and India. They hypothesize that these areas might have "warming holes" of their own -- regions where the effects of climate change are being muted by the high concentrations of aerosols in the atmosphere. If these areas reduce air pollution in the future, they might experience a sudden temperature jump as well."Overall, the goal is to more accurately predict what will happen to our planet," Tosca said. "This type of observation-based research gives us better models, better models give us better forecasts, and better forecasts enable better policy."The study is titled "Attributing Accelerated Summertime Warming in the Southeast United States to Recent Reductions in Aerosol Burden: Indications from Vertically-Resolved Observations." Other institutions participating in the study included the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, a cooperative agreement between NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; the Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California; and the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. MISR was built and is managed by JPL, and CALIOP is jointly administered by NASA and the French space agency, Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-to-host-media-teleconference-on-national-near-earth-object-preparedness-report

NASA to Host Media Teleconference on National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Report

NASA will host a media teleconference at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) Wednesday, June 20, to discuss a new report detailing U.S. plans for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that could pose a hazard to Earth.

NASA will host a media teleconference at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) Wednesday, June 20, to discuss a new report detailing U.S. plans for near-Earth objects (NEOs) that could pose a hazard to Earth. While no known NEOs currently pose significant risks of impact, the report is a key step to addressing a nationwide response to any future risks.Titled, "National Near-Earth Object Preparedness Strategy and Action Plan," the document identifies actions to enhance the federal government's coordination and preparedness posture during the next 10 years to address potential hazards posed by NEOs.Participants are:Lindley Johnson, Planetary Defense Coordination Office, NASA Headquarters, WashingtonAaron Miles, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, WashingtonLeviticus Lewis, National Response Coordination Branch, Federal Emergency Management Agency, WashingtonAudio of the teleconference will stream live at:https://www.nasa.gov/liveTo ask questions via social media during the teleconference, use the hashtag #askNASA.For information about NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office, visit:https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/art-science-of-space-navigation-is-topic-of-free-jpl-lecture

Art & Science of Space Navigation Is Topic of Free JPL Lecture

Navigating spacecraft across the solar system has been likened to celestial billiards, where an artful "bumper shot" may be needed to get from one planet to another. A Jet Propulsion Laboratory spacecraft navigation expert will explain the art and science of this arcane field in a public lecture called "Navigation: Cruisin' Through Space," to be held Thursday, Oct. 19 at JPL and Friday, Oct. 20 at Pasadena City College.

Navigating spacecraft across the solar system has been likened to celestial billiards, where an artful "bumper shot" may be needed to get from one planet to another. A Jet Propulsion Laboratory spacecraft navigation expert will explain the art and science of this arcane field in a public lecture called "Navigation: Cruisin' Through Space," to be held Thursday, Oct. 19 at JPL and Friday, Oct. 20 at Pasadena City College.Both lectures are at 7 p.m. Parking and admission are free and on a first-come, first-served basis.Dr. Donald Gray, veteran of numerous space missions, will explain how JPL became the world leader in space navigation by delivering spacecraft to planets, comets, and asteroids throughout the solar system with unprecedented accuracy. Gray will also describe experiences that highlight the exuberance, nail biting, and triumph of innovation inherent in the field.Gray, who has been with JPL for more than 25 years, has worked on the navigation teams of the Viking missions to Mars, the Voyager missions to the outer planets, and the Cassini mission to Saturn. He is currently working on Genesis, scheduled to launch next year on a mission to gather a sample of particles that stream outward from the Sun and return them to Earth for study.Gray received a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland in 1955, and a master's degree and doctorate in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963 and 1967. Gray is the recipient of two NASA Exceptional Achievement Medals and a NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal, among the agency's highest honors.The lecture at JPL will be held in the von Karman Auditorium, located at 4800 Oak Grove Dr., Pasadena. The Pasadena City College lecture will be held in The Forum at the campus, located at 1570 E. Colorado Blvd. in Pasadena. More information on the von Karman Lecture Series can be found athttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/lectureor by calling (818) 354-0112. For directions to JPL, seehttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/tours/routes.html.JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/soil-sutures-and-climate-modeling-among-investigations-riding-spacex-crs-25-dragon-to-international-space-station

Soil, Sutures, and Climate Modeling Among Investigations Riding SpaceX CRS-25 Dragon to International Space Station

EMIT, a mission developed at JPL to measure the composition of minerals that become airborne dust, is among the investigations launching to the space station next month.

The 25thSpaceXcargo resupply services mission (SpaceX CRS-25) carrying scientific research and technology demonstrations to theInternational Space Stationis scheduled forlaunchJune 9 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Experiments aboard the Dragon capsule include studies of the immune system, wound healing, soil communities, and cell-free biomarkers, along with mapping the composition of Earth’s dust and testing an alternative to concrete.Download high-resolutionphotos and videosof the research mentioned in this article.Here are more details on some of the research launching to the space station:Mapping Earth’s DustThe Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT), developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, employsNASA imaging spectroscopytechnology to measure the mineral composition of dust in Earth’s arid regions. Mineral dust blown into the air can travel significant distances and haveimpactEarth’s climate, weather, vegetation, and more. For example, dust containing dark minerals that absorb sunlight can warm an area, while light-colored mineral dust can cool it. Blowing dust also affects air quality, surface conditions such as rate of snow melt, and phytoplankton health in the ocean. The investigation collects images for one year to generate maps of the mineral composition in the regions on Earth that produce dust. Such mapping could advance our understanding of the effects of mineral dust on human populations now and in the future.Dust from northwest Africa blows over the Canary Islands in this image captured by the NOAA-20 satellite on Jan. 14. An upcoming NASA mission, the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT), will help scientists better understand the role of airborne dust in heating and cooling the atmosphere.Credit: NASA Earth ObservatorySpeedier Immune System AgingAging is associated with changes in the immune response known as immunosenescence. Microgravity causes changes in human immune cells that resemble this condition but happen faster than the actual process of aging on Earth. TheImmunosenescenceinvestigation, sponsored by ISS National Lab, uses tissue chips to study how microgravity affects immune function during flight and whether immune cells recover post-flight.Tissue chipsare small devices that contain human cells in a 3D structure, allowing scientists to test how those cells respond to stresses, drugs, and genetic changes.“Immune aging impacts tissue stem cells and their ability to repair tissues and organs,” says principal investigator Sonja Schrepfer, professor of surgery at University of California, San Francisco. “Our studies aim to understand critical pathways to prevent and to reverse aging of immune cells.”“Spaceflight conditions enable the study of immune aging that would not be feasible in the lab,” says co-investigator Tobias Deuse, professor of surgery at UCSF. This work could support development of treatments for immune system aging on Earth. The investigation also could support development of methods to protect astronauts during future long-duration spaceflight.The 25th SpaceX cargo resupply services mission (SpaceX CRS-25) carrying scientific research and technology demonstrations to the International Space Station is scheduled for launch June 9 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Credit: NASASew Me Up, ScottyAs we travel farther from Earth, humans need to be prepared to deal with medical emergencies, including wounds, without hospitals and other medical support. Wound healing is a complex process, and scientists are not sure why wounds often heal imperfectly or create scars.Suture In Space, an investigation from ESA (European Space Agency), examines the behavior of sutures and wound healing in microgravity. A better understanding of the role of mechanical forces (such as tension, stretching, and compression) in the healing of sutured wounds could help determine requirements for suturing materials and techniques suitable for future space missions to the Moon and Mars.During preparation for the investigation, researchers developed a new technique for improving and extending the survival of tissue cultures. For future space travel, this invention could promote wound healing and regeneration processes, improving response to emergencies. On Earth, the technique could aid laboratory studies on transplants, cell regeneration, and surgical techniques and improve the ability to preserve tissues for use in emergency situations, such as for burn and vascular surgeries and tissue and organ transplants. Better preservation of manufactured tissues also could contribute to improvements in 3D bioprinting of tissues and organs.Get the Latest JPL NewsSUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTERSoil in SpaceOn Earth, complex communities of microorganisms carry out key functions in soil, including cycling of carbon and other nutrients and supporting plant growth.DynaMoSexamines how microgravity affects metabolic interactions in communities of soil microbes. This research focuses on microbe communities that decompose chitin, a natural carbon polymer on Earth.“Soil microorganisms carry out beneficial functions that are essential for life on our planet,” says principal investigator Janet K. Jansson, chief scientist and laboratory fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “To harness these beneficial activities for future space missions, we need to understand more about how conditions in space, like microgravity and radiation, influence these microbes and the beneficial functions that they provide. Perhaps in the future, we will use beneficial soil microbes to enhance growth of crops on the lunar surface.”Improved understanding of the function of soil microorganism communities also could reveal ways to optimize these communities to support agricultural production on Earth.Genes, No CellsCell-free technology is a platform for producing protein without specialized equipment of living cells that need to be cultured.Genes in Space-9, sponsored by the ISS National Lab, demonstrates cell-free production of protein in microgravity and evaluates two cell-free biosensors that can detect specific target molecules. This technology could provide a simple, portable, and low-cost tool for medical diagnostics, on-demand production of medicine and vaccines, and environmental monitoring on future space missions.“Biosensors are a class of synthetic biology tools with immense potential for spaceflight applications in contaminant detection, environmental monitoring, and point-of-care diagnostics,” said Selin Kocalar, student winner of Genes in Space 2021. “This investigation seeks to validate their use aboard the space station. If it is successful, Genes in Space-9 will lay the foundation for downstream applications of biosensors for space exploration and resource-limited settings on Earth.”Genes in Space, an annual research competition, challenges students in grades 7 through 12 to design DNA experiments to be conducted on the space station. The program has launched eight investigations so far, and some have resulted in publications furthering our knowledge on genetics experiments through space-based research, including the first experiment to useCRISPR technologyin microgravity in 2019.Better ConcreteBiopolymer Research for In-Situ Capabilitieslooks at how microgravity affects the process of creating a concrete alternative made with an organic material and on-site materials such as lunar or Martian dust, known as a biopolymer soil composite (BPC). Using resources available where construction takes place makes it possible to increase the mass of the construction material and, therefore, the amount of shielding.“Astronauts on the Moon and Mars will need habitats that provide radiation shielding, but transporting large amounts of conventional construction materials from Earth is logistically and financially infeasible,” said team member Laywood Fayne. “Our student team, led by Michael Lepech from the Blume Earthquake Engineering Center at Stanford University, is studying a way to convert regolith in these environments into a concrete-like material by mixing in water and a protein known as bovine serum albumin.”This material hardens as the water evaporates, a process affected by gravity, explains team co-lead James Wall. “Our project consists of making six bricks in microgravity to compare to bricks made on Earth at 1 g and less than 1 g,” Wall says. “We will investigate the number and orientations of protein bridges, compressive strength, and porosity. Our conclusions could help determine how these bricks might form on the Moon and Mars.”BPCs also could offer an environmentally friendly concrete alternative for making structures on Earth. In 2018, concrete production represented 8% of global carbon emissions. BPC material has zero carbon emissions and can be made from local, readily available resources, which also simplifies supply chains. This experiment is a part of NASA’s Student Payload Opportunity with Citizen Science (SPOCS) program, which provides students enrolled in institutions of higher learning the opportunity to design and build an experiment to fly to and return from the International Space Station.NASA’s EMIT Will Map Tiny Dust Particles to Study Big Climate ImpactsNASA’s EMIT Mission Media Reel

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-topexposeidon-oceanography-mission-ends

NASA's Topex/Poseidon Oceanography Mission Ends

The joint NASA/Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales Topex/Poseidon oceanography satellite ceased operations after nearly 62,000 orbits of Earth.

The joint NASA/Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales Topex/Poseidon oceanography satellite ceased operations after nearly 62,000 orbits of Earth. The spacecraft lost its ability to maneuver, bringing to a close a successful 13-year mission."Topex/Poseidon revolutionized the study of Earth's oceans, providing the first continuous, global coverage of ocean surface topography and allowing us to see important week-to-week oceanic variations," said Dr. Mary Cleave, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "Its data made a huge difference in our understanding of the oceans and their effect on global climatic conditions."Topex/Poseidon data have helped in hurricane and El Nino/La Nina forecasting, ocean and climate research, ship routing, offshore industries, fisheries management, marine mammals' research, modernizing global tide models and ocean debris tracking."Topex/Poseidon was built to fly up to five years, but it became history's longest Earth-orbiting radar mission," said Topex/Poseidon Project Scientist Dr. Lee-Lueng Fu of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "It provided, on average, more than 98 percent of the science data it was designed to collect in every 10-day measurement cycle, a remarkable achievement."The satellite's pitch reaction wheel, which helps keep the spacecraft in its proper orbital orientation, stalled on October 9, and ground controllers concluded the wheel was not functioning. The satellite remains in orbit 1,336 kilometers (830 miles) above the Earth, posing no threat to the planet."Topex/Poseidon was a unique mission that attracted users around the world, including more than 600 scientists in 54 countries," said Dr. Yves Menard, Topex/Poseidon project scientist at Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales in Toulouse, France.Topex/Poseidon's data have been the subject of more than 2,100 research publications; major science and application achievements include:- the first decade-long global descriptions of seasonal and yearly ocean current changes- refined scientists' estimates of rising global sea level during the past decade- provided a new understanding of the role tides play in mixing the deep ocean- developed the most accurate ever global ocean tides' models- provided the first global data set to test ocean general circulation model performance- demonstrated global positioning system measurements in space could determine spacecraft positions with unprecedented accuracy, enabling rapid delivery of data.Jason, a follow-on oceanography mission launched in December 2001, is continuing Topex/Poseidon's study of ocean circulation affects on the Earth's climate. Jason precisely maps the surface height, wind speed and wave height of 95 percent of Earth's ice-free oceans every 10 days. The data provide invaluable input for short-term weather forecasting, long-term climate forecasting and prediction models.Topex/Poseidon's stellar performance allowed it to fly in tandem with Jason for nearly three years, doubling data collection. This allowed the study of smaller-scale ocean phenomena like coastal tides, ocean eddies and currents. It also improved understanding of how low-frequency ocean waves transmit signals of climate change.Beyond Jason, the Ocean Surface Topography Mission is in development for a scheduled launch in 2008. It will continue providing high-precision sea surface height data to the oceanographic science community.The joint effort had its genesis in 1979, when NASA began developing the Topex mission, while the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales was planning a similar one called Poseidon. The agencies formed a single mission in 1983, and it was launched August 10, 1992. JPL manages the U.S. portion of Topex/Poseidon/Jason for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales manages the French portion of both missions.For information about both missions on the Web, visit:http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.govandhttp://www.aviso.oceanobs.com.JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/large-distant-comets-more-common-than-previously-thought

Large, Distant Comets More Common Than Previously Thought

NASA's WISE spacecraft, scanning the entire sky at infrared wavelengths, has delivered new insights about distant cometary wanderers.

Comets that take more than 200 years to make one revolution around the Sun are notoriously difficult to study. Because they spend most of their time far from our area of the solar system, many "long-period comets" will never approach the Sun in a person's lifetime. In fact, those that travel inward from the Oort Cloud -- a group of icy bodies beginning roughly 186 billion miles (300 billion kilometers) away from the Sun -- can have periods of thousands or even millions of years.NASA's WISE spacecraft, scanning the entire sky at infrared wavelengths, has delivered new insights about these distant wanderers. Scientists found that there are about seven times more long-period comets measuring at least 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) across than had been predicted previously. They also found that long-period comets are on average up to twice as large as "Jupiter family comets," whose orbits are shaped by Jupiter's gravity and have periods of less than 20 years.Researchers also observed that in eight months, three to five times as many long-period comets passed by the Sun than had been predicted. The findingsare published in the Astronomical Journal."The number of comets speaks to the amount of material left over from the solar system's formation," said James Bauer, lead author of the study and now a research professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. "We now know that there are more relatively large chunks of ancient material coming from the Oort Cloud than we thought."The Oort Cloud is too distant to be seen by current telescopes, but is thought to be a spherical distribution of small icy bodies at the outermost edge of the solar system. The density of comets within it is low, so the odds of comets colliding within it are rare. Long-period comets that WISE observed probably got kicked out of the Oort Cloud millions of years ago. The observations were carried out during the spacecraft's primary mission before it was renamed NEOWISE and reactivated to target near-Earth objects (NEOs)."Our study is a rare look at objects perturbed out of the Oort Cloud," said Amy Mainzer, study co-author based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and principal investigator of the NEOWISE mission. "They are the most pristine examples of what the solar system was like when it formed."Astronomers already had broader estimates of how many long-period and Jupiter family comets are in our solar system, but had no good way of measuring the sizes of long-period comets. That is because a comet has a "coma," a cloud of gas and dust that appears hazy in images and obscures the cometary nucleus. But by using the WISE data showing the infrared glow of this coma, scientists were able to "subtract" the coma from the overall comet and estimate the nucleus sizes of these comets. The data came from 2010 WISE observations of 95 Jupiter family comets and 56 long-period comets.The results reinforce the idea that comets that pass by the Sun more often tend to be smaller than those spending much more time away from the Sun. That is because Jupiter family comets get more heat exposure, which causes volatile substances like water to sublimate and drag away other material from the comet's surface as well."Our results mean there's an evolutionary difference between Jupiter family and long-period comets," Bauer said.The existence of so many more long-period comets than predicted suggests that more of them have likely impacted planets, delivering icy materials from the outer reaches of the solar system.Researchers also found clustering in the orbits of the long-period comets they studied, suggesting there could have been larger bodies that broke apart to form these groups.The results will be important for assessing the likelihood of comets impacting our solar system's planets, including Earth."Comets travel much faster than asteroids, and some of them are very big," Mainzer said. "Studies like this will help us define what kind of hazard long-period comets may pose."NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed and operated WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The NEOWISE project is funded by the Near Earth Object Observation Program, now part of NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode in 2011 after twice scanning the entire sky, thereby completing its main objectives. In September 2013, WISE was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission to assist NASA's efforts to identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.For more information on WISE, visit:https://www.nasa.gov/wise

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/new-era-begins-as-mars-global-surveyor-completes-prime-mission

New Era Begins as Mars Global Surveyor Completes Prime Mission

NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which has collected more information about the red planet than all previous missions combined, completes its primary science mission today and begins a new era of continued exploration.

NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which has collected more information about the red planet than all previous missions combined, completes its primary science mission today and begins a new era of continued exploration."By any conceivable measure the scientific impact of Mars Global Surveyor has been extraordinary. In many ways we now know Mars to be a different planet than when the spacecraft arrived in 1997, and our perspective continues to evolve as the data keep flowing," said Dr. Arden Albee, Global Surveyor project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "In some aspects, we now have better maps of Mars than we do of Earth.""During the primary science mission, the spacecraft studied the climate, surface topography and subsurface resources and mapped the entire planet," said Tom Thorpe, Global Surveyor project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The extended mission will continue to take advantage of these extraordinary mapping capabilities and the data will be used to select future landing sites for several upcoming missions."Mars Global Surveyor's extended mission has been approved through April 2002.The robotic orbiter was launched on Nov. 7, 1996, and arrived at Mars on Sept. 12, 1997. The spacecraft began its primary mapping mission in March 1999 and has collected data for a full Martian year, equivalent to about two Earth years. Those comprehensive observations are proving invaluable to understanding the seasonal changes on Mars.Some of the most significant findings of the mission include:-- Enticing evidence for recent liquid water at the Martian surface.-- Dramatic evidence for layering of rocks that points to widespread ponding of water or lakes on Mars in its early history.-- The first good estimate of the amount of water currently trapped in both Martian polar caps combined -- about one and a half times the amount of ice in Greenland.-- Topographic evidence for a South Pole-to-North Pole slope that controlled the transport of water and sediments, and recognition of the flat Northern Hemisphere that has been proposed as the possible site of an ancient ocean.-- The surprising detection of highly magnetized crust in the Southern Hemisphere, which indicates rapid cooling of Mars in the beginning of its history that may have contributed to its earlier, warmer climate.-- The first reliable models of the crustal structure of Mars, including the detection of ancient impact basins and possible channels buried beneath the northern plains.-- Identification of the mineral hematite, indicating a past surface-hydrothermal environment that may be an analog for the kinds of areas in which early life developed on Earth.-- Significantly improved understanding of the dynamics of the atmosphere, including the monitoring of cyclonic storms, and the daily and seasonal behavior of carbon dioxide and water ice clouds.-- Extensive evidence for the role of dust in re-shaping the recent Martian environment in the form of dust devils, dust storms, dunes and sand sheets.As of 4:33 p.m. PST (7:33 p.m. EST) January 31, 2001, the spacecraft will have made 8,505 orbits of the planet and taken more than 58,000 images, 490 million laser-altimeter shots to measure topography and 97 million spectral measurements.The Global Surveyor mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. Lockheed Martin Astronautics, Denver, Colo., developed and operates the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology.Additional information on the mission can be found at:http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/