Proposed Mission to Jupiter System Achieves Milestone

Credit: NASA

With input from scientists around the world, American and European scientists working on the potential next new mission to the Jupiter system have articulated their joint vision for the Europa Jupiter System Mission. The mission is a proposed partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency. The scientists on the joint NASA-ESA definition team agreed that the overarching science theme for the Europa Jupiter System Mission will be "the emergence of habitable worlds around gas giants."

The proposed Europa Jupiter System Mission would provide orbiters around two of Jupiter's moons: a NASA orbiter around Europa called the Jupiter Europa Orbiter, and an ESA orbiter around Ganymede called the Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter.

"We've reached hands across the Atlantic to define a mission to Jupiter's water worlds," said Bob Pappalardo, the pre-project scientist for the proposed Jupiter Europa Orbiter, who is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The Europa Jupiter System Mission will create a leap in scientific knowledge about the moons of Jupiter and their potential to harbor life."

The new reports integrate goals that were being separately developed by NASA and ESA working groups into one unified strategy.

The ESA report is being presented to the European public and science community this week, and the NASA report was published online in December. The NASA report is available at http://www.lpi.usra.edu/opag .

The proposed mission singles out the icy moons Europa and Ganymede as special worlds that can lead to a broader understanding of the Jovian system and of the possibility of life in our solar system and beyond. They are natural laboratories for analyzing the nature, evolution and potential habitability of icy worlds, because they are believed to present two different kinds of sub-surface oceans.

The Jupiter Europa Orbiter would characterize the relatively thin ice shell above Europa's ocean, the extent of that ocean, the materials composing its internal layers, and the way surface features such as ridges and "freckles" formed. It will also identify candidate sites for potential future landers. Instruments that might be on board could include a laser altimeter, an ice-penetrating radar, spectrometers that can obtain data in visible, infrared and ultraviolet radiation, and cameras with narrow- and wide-angle capabilities. The actual instruments to fly would be selected through a NASA competitive call for proposals.

Ganymede is thought to have a thicker ice shell, with its interior ocean sandwiched between ice above and below. ESA's Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter would investigate this different kind of internal structure. The Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter would also study the intrinsic magnetic field that makes Ganymede unique among all the solar system's known moons. This orbiter, whose instruments would also be chosen through a competitive process, could include a laser altimeter, spectrometers and cameras, plus additional fields-and-particles instruments

The two orbiters would also study other large Jovian moons, Io and Callisto, with an eye towards exploring the Jupiter system as an archetype for other gas giant planets.

NASA and ESA officials gave the Europa Jupiter System Mission proposal priority status for continued study in 2009, agreeing that it was the most technically feasible of the outer solar system flagship missions under consideration.

Over the next few months, NASA officials will be analyzing the joint strategy and awaiting the outcome of the next Planetary Science Decadal Survey by the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academies. That survey will serve as a roadmap for new NASA planetary missions for the decade beginning 2013.

For more information about the Europa Jupiter System Mission, go to http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/europajupitersystemmissionejsm/ .

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Source: NASA

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Robonaut 2 To Make Television Debut on Super Bowl Sunday

Robonaut 2. Credit: NASA

Robonaut 2, NASA's dexterous humanoid robot, will make its television debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011. Millions of viewers will be able to watch the state-of-the-art robot during a General Motors segment to air during the Super Bowl pre-game show on the Fox network.

Robonaut 2, or R2, was developed and built by NASA and General Motors via a Space Act Agreement. Using the latest technology, it's a new humanoid robot capable of working side-by-side with people. Using leading edge control, sensor and vision technologies, future R-2s could assist astronauts during hazardous space missions and help GM build safer cars and plants.

The two organizations, with the help of engineers from Oceaneering Space Systems of Houston, developed and built the current iteration of Robonaut. Robonaut 2, or R2, is a faster, more dexterous and more technologically advanced robot. Its capabilities include the use of fully-functional hands and arms to do work beyond the scope of prior humanoid machines.

Like its predecessor Robonaut 1, R2 is capable of handling a wide range of tools and interfaces, but R2 is a significant advancement over its predecessor. R2 is capable of speeds more than four times faster than R1, is more compact, is more dexterous, and includes a deeper and wider range of sensing.

Advanced technology spans the entire R2 system and includes: optimized overlapping dual arm dexterous workspace, series elastic joint technology, extended finger and thumb travel, miniaturized 6-axis load cells, redundant force sensing, ultra-high speed joint controllers, extreme neck travel, and high resolution camera and IR systems. The dexterity of R2 allows it to use the same tools that astronauts use and removes the need for specialized tools just for robots.

One advantage of a humanoid design is that Robonaut can take over simple, repetitive, or especially dangerous tasks on places such as the International Space Station.

Source: Reprinted news release via NASA

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Planck Mission Peels Back Layers of the Universe

The Planck mission released a new data catalogue Tuesday from initial maps of the entire sky. The catalogue includes thousands of never-before-seen dusty cocoons where stars are forming, and some of the most massive clusters of galaxies ever observed. Planck is a European Space Agency mission with significant contributions from NASA.

"NASA is pleased to support this important mission, and we have eagerly awaited Planck's first discoveries," said Jon Morse, NASA's Astrophysics Division director at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "We look forward to continued collaboration with ESA and more outstanding science to come."

Planck launched in May 2009 on a mission to detect light from just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, an explosive event at the dawn of the universe approximately 13.7 billion years ago. The spacecraft's state-of-the-art detectors ultimately will survey the whole sky at least four times, measuring the cosmic microwave background, or radiation left over from the Big Bang. The data will help scientists decipher clues about the evolution, fate and fabric of our universe. While these cosmology results won't be ready for another two years or so, early observations of specific objects in our Milky Way galaxy, as well as more distant galaxies, are being released.

"The data we're releasing now are from what lies between us and the cosmic microwave background," said Charles Lawrence, the U.S. project scientist for Planck at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. We ultimately will subtract these data out to get at our cosmic microwave background signal. But by themselves, these early observations offer up new information about objects in our universe -- both close and far away, and everything in between."

Planck observes the sky at nine wavelengths of light, ranging from infrared to radio waves. Its technology has greatly improved sensitivity and resolution over its predecessor missions, NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer and Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

The result is a windfall of data on known and never-before-seen cosmic objects. Planck has catalogued approximately 10,000 star-forming "cold cores," thousands of which are newly discovered. The cores are dark and dusty nurseries where baby stars are just beginning to take shape. They also are some of the coldest places in the universe. Planck's new catalogue includes some of the coldest cores ever seen, with temperatures as low as seven degrees above absolute zero, or minus 447 degrees Fahrenheit. In order to see the coldest gas and dust in the Milky Way, Planck's detectors were chilled to only 0.1 Kelvin.

The new catalogue also contains some of the most massive clusters of galaxies known, including a handful of newfound ones. The most massive of these holds the equivalent of a million billion suns worth of mass, making it one of the most massive galaxy clusters known.

Galaxies in our universe are bound together into these larger clusters, forming a lumpy network across the cosmos. Scientists study the clusters to learn more about the evolution of galaxies and dark matter and dark energy -- the exotic substances that constitute the majority of our universe.

"Because Planck is observing the whole sky, it is giving us a comprehensive look at how all the smaller structures of the universe are connected to the whole," said Jim Bartlett, a U.S. Planck team member at JPL and the Astroparticule et Cosmologie-Universite Paris Diderot in France.

Planck's new catalogue also includes unique data on the pools of hot gas that permeate roughly 14,000 smaller clusters of galaxies; the best data yet on the cosmic infrared background, which is made up of light from stars evolving in the early universe; and new observations of extremely energetic galaxies spewing radio jets. The catalogue covers about one-and-a-half sky scans.

More information on Planck is online at http://www.nasa.gov/planck and http://www.esa.int/planck.

Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA's Planck Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck's science instruments. European, Canadian and U.S. Planck scientists will work together to analyze the Planck data. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
  
Image: This map illustrates the numerous star-forming clouds, called cold cores, that Planck observed throughout our Milky Way galaxy. Planck, a European Space Agency mission with significant NASA participation, detected around 10,000 of these cores, thousands of which had never been seen before. Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech

Source: Reprinted news release via NASA

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NASA Students Want To Use 150,000 Ping Pong Balls To Float Space Capsule

So how awesome are ping pong balls? NASA awesome is how awesome!

The design of a future space capsule to replace the space shuttle has hit a small roadblock...

When NASA hits a roadblock who do you call? The students at NASA's Langley research center of course!

The students have combined their minds to solve a serious dilemma:

"How do you keep an unpressurized space capsule from sinking to the bottom of the ocean?"

The guys at Langley have been working on a new space capsule design to hold astronauts. The design is only in the simluation stage, however, since the craft won't be pressurized like a real space capsule, when NASA goes the test it out; it will sink when it lands in water. So what is NASA to do?

That's when Langley engineer John DiNonno had an epiphany! He suggested that they could just use ping pong balls! If your wondering, he got the idea from watching a show on the Discovery Channel about raising a boat with thousands of ping pong balls. My speculation is that it was probably MythBusters. So much for rocket science, huh?

After the idea was accepted, the idea had to be tested and studied.

The students get to work
The students quickly went to work and started to look at different kinds of ping balls balls and their buoyancy levels and reaction to edge of space vacuum.

Additionally, the students tested the balls with hydraulic press loading, heat applications, and electrostatic discharge tests. All of this was necessary to see how the balls would react through the Earth's atmosphere and to make sure the things didn't produce static electricity that would disrupt the spacecraft's electronics.

All tests passed and yhe students concluded that the ping pong ball idea is completely plausible!

They estimate it will take about 150,000 ping pong balls to keep the test capsule afloat. Wow!

When will the spacecraft launch?
Sadly, even though the idea has been studied and found to be very plausible; it still needs to go through a system before it gets truly accepted. With No launch date yet to be confirmed, Its a waiting game. It might be a while, but I'll keep a look out for it. Gives a whole new meaning to Spaceballs doesn't it?

Further Reading: NASA
Image: NASA/Sean Smith

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• Water On Moon Could Mean A Moon Base Is On The Horizon
• Asteroid Impact Imminent In 2182
• Are We Living Inside A Black Hole

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