Surprise Hidden In Titan's Smog: Cirrus-Like Clouds

Every day is a bad-air day on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Blanketed by haze far worse than any smog belched out in Los Angeles, Beijing or even Sherlock Holmes's London, the moon looks like a dirty orange ball. Described once as crude oil without the sulfur, the haze is made of tiny droplets of hydrocarbons with other, more noxious chemicals mixed in. Gunk.

Icky as it may sound, Titan is really the rarest of gems: the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere worthy of a planet. This atmosphere comes complete with lightning, drizzle and occasionally a big, summer-downpour style of cloud made of methane or ethane -- hydrocarbons that are best known for their role in natural gas.

Now, thin, wispy clouds of ice particles, similar to Earth's cirrus clouds, are being reported by Carrie Anderson and Robert Samuelson at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The findings, published February 1 in Icarus, were made using the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) on NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Unlike Titan's brownish haze, the ice clouds have the pearly white appearance of freshly fallen snow. Their existence is the latest clue to the workings of Titan's intriguing atmosphere and its one-way "cycle" that delivers hydrocarbons and other organic compounds to the ground as precipitation. Those compounds don't evaporate to replenish the atmosphere, but somehow the supply has not run out (yet?).

"This is the first time we have been able to get details about these clouds," says Samuelson, an emeritus scientist at Goddard and the co-author of the paper. "Previously, we had a lot of information about the gases in Titan's atmosphere but not much about the [high-altitude] clouds."

Puffy methane and ethane clouds had been found before by ground-based observers and in images taken by Cassini's imaging science subsystem and visual and infrared mapping spectrometer. Compared to those clouds, these are much thinner and located higher in the atmosphere. "They are very tenuous and very easy to miss," says Anderson, the paper's lead author. "The only earlier hints that they existed were faint glimpses that NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft caught as it flew by Titan in 1980."

Out on a Limb

Even before Voyager 1 reached Titan, scientists knew the moon was wrapped in a thick atmosphere that probably contained hydrocarbons. Part of that atmosphere, Voyager found, is a haze so smothering that it hides every bit of the moon's surface.

Only a small amount of visible light penetrates this haze, or aerosol, so studies rely on instruments that operate at wavelengths beyond human sight. This is how Voyager learned that Titan's atmosphere is made mostly of nitrogen, as is Earth's. Unlike Earth's atmosphere, though, Titan's has neither oxygen nor water to speak of. Instead, it contains small amounts of organic materials, including members of the hydrocarbon family such as methane, ethane and propane.

Voyager also picked up indications that Titan's stratosphere, the second-lowest layer of its atmosphere, harbored "ices made from some exotic organic compounds," Samuelson says. "At the time, that was about all we could tell."

Fast-forward a quarter-century to mid-2006, past decades of research conducted from telescopes, past Cassini's arrival at Saturn, past the European Space Agency's Huygens probe landing on Titan and taking the first pictures of the surface, past the discovery of the methane and ethane clouds. At this point, Cassini continues to orbit Saturn and visit Titan and other moons periodically.

More than a half-dozen hydrocarbons have been identified in gas form in Titan's atmosphere, but many more probably lurk there. Researchers worldwide are looking for them, including Anderson and Samuelson, who are using the CIRS (pronounced "sears") instrument on Cassini.

Pinpointing the altitudes where such gases turn into ices is painstaking work. The researchers scan up and down the atmosphere, pausing at each altitude to catalog a slew of signals that have to be teased apart later so that the molecules can be identified. "You can learn a lot about a compound, even if you have no idea what it is, by looking at how it is distributed vertically," says Anderson. "Where does it accumulate? Where does it dissipate? How thick is the boundary? Is there layering going on?"

Anderson and Samuelson start a series of observations near Titan's north pole, at roughly the same latitudes Voyager looked at, 62 °N and 70 °N. On Earth, these would fall just inside and outside the ring for the Arctic Circle.

The team focuses on the observations made when CIRS is positioned to peer into the atmosphere at an angle, grazing the edge of Titan. This path through the atmosphere is longer than the one when the spacecraft looks straight down at the surface. Planetary scientists call this "viewing on the limb," and it raises the odds of encountering enough molecules of interest to yield a strong signal.

It works. When the researchers comb through their data, they succeed in separating the telltale signatures of ice clouds from the aerosol. "These beautiful, beautiful ice clouds are optically thin, and they're diffuse," says Anderson. "But we were able to pick up on them because of the long path lengths of the observations."

In addition to spotting the clouds, the researchers gather enough information to measure the sizes of the ice particles. The results get reported in a January 2010 Icarus paper by Anderson, Samuelson, their Goddard colleague Gordon Bjoraker and Richard Achterberg, a University of Maryland staff member working at Goddard.

"That was convincing evidence," Anderson says. "What Voyager had seen was real."

That Sinking Feeling

Clouds on Titan can't be made from water because of the planet's extreme cold. "If Titan has any water on the surface, it would be solid as a rock," says Goddard's Michael Flasar, the Principal Investigator for CIRS.

Instead, the key player is methane. The action starts high in the atmosphere, where some of the methane gets broken up and reforms into ethane and other hydrocarbons, or combines with nitrogen to make materials called nitriles. Any of these compounds can probably form clouds if enough accumulates in a sufficiently cold area.

The cloud-forming temperatures occur in the "cold, cold depths of Titan's stratosphere," says Anderson. Researchers think that the compounds get moved downward by a constant stream of gas flowing from the pole in the warmer hemisphere to the pole in the colder hemisphere. There, the gas sinks.

This circulation pattern steals so much gas from the warmer hemisphere that researchers can measure the imbalance. The influx of all this gas gives the colder hemisphere more clouds. "At colder temperatures, more gas will condense anyway," Anderson explains, "and on top of that, the atmosphere dumps a whole bunch of extra gas there."

She and Samuelson think this is why the ice clouds were first spotted in the north. When Voyager flew by in November 1980, the north had just crossed from winter into spring. And the north was in mid-winter when the team conducted their early observations. (One Titan year lasts 29-1/2 Earth years, so spring came again to Titan's north in August 2009.)

Still, the team figured, the south shouldn't lack ice clouds; it should just have fewer of them. "For 30 years, Bob [Samuelson] had been saying that these clouds should exist in the southern hemisphere," says Anderson, "so we decided to look."

The team checked Titan's southern hemisphere (at 58 °S latitude) and both sides of the equator (15 °N and 15 °S). Sure enough, they spotted clouds in all three locations. And as predicted, the clouds in the north were more plentiful -- in fact, three times more plentiful -- than those just south of the equator.

"The fact that the clouds are more enhanced at the cold polar region is a promising sign," says Flasar. "It strengthens this idea that the molecules making up these clouds are being carried downward by this global circulation."

Exotic Ices

Part of Titan's allure has long been the organic compounds in the atmosphere, especially because some are thought to be involved in the events that led to life on Earth. One of those is cyanoacetylene, a member of the nitrile family. The compound's distinctive signature made it the first to be picked up in the northern ice clouds by Voyager 1 and by Anderson and Samuelson.

To make a connection between these molecules and life isn't the point for Anderson, though. "I just love ices and aerosols," she says, "and Titan is this great natural laboratory for studying them."

As the researchers continue to identify compounds in Titan's atmosphere, the next likely candidate for an ice is hydrogen cyanide, a nitrile with an earthly reputation as a poison. In the aerosol, the team is investigating an intriguing feature in the data that seems to represent larger hydrocarbons than anybody has identified before, according to Samuelson. Early clues suggest the signature could indicate polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which typically get noticed on Earth as pollutants released by the burning of fossil fuels. In space, PAHs form in the regions where stars are born and die.

Each nugget of information like this is helping scientists piece together the life cycle and ultimate fate of Titan's hydrocarbons, which never reenter the atmosphere via evaporation. "They fall to the surface, and it's a dead end," says Samuelson, "and yet Titan's atmosphere still has methane in it. We are trying to find out why."

The Great Switcheroo

At first, Titan's frozen nitriles seem entirely unrelated to Earth clouds. Even putting aside their exotic ingredients, they form much higher in the atmosphere: at altitudes of about 30 to 60 miles (in the stratosphere) versus no more than 11 miles (in the troposphere) for nearly all Earth clouds.

But Earth does have a few polar stratospheric clouds that appear over Antarctica (and sometimes in the Arctic) during winter. These clouds form in the exceptionally cold air that gets trapped in the center of the polar vortex, a fierce wind that whips around the pole high in the stratosphere. This is the same region where Earth's ozone hole is found.

Titan has its own polar vortex and may even have a counterpart to our ozone hole. The degree of similarity is intriguing, says Flasar, given the different compositions and chemistries of the stratospheric clouds on Earth versus Titan.

"We are starting to find out how similar Titan's clouds are to Earth's," says Samuelson. "How do they compare? How do they not compare?"

The big test of scientists' understanding of Titan's atmosphere will come in 2017, when summer comes to the north and the south plunges into winter. "We expect to find a complete reversal in the circulation of gas then," says Anderson. "The gas should start to flow from the north to the south. And that should mean most of the high-altitude ice clouds will be in the southern hemisphere."

Other major changes are in store for Titan then, Flasar adds, including the disappearance of the fierce winds around the north pole. "The big question is: will the vortex go out with a bang or whimper?" he says. "On Earth, it goes out with a bang. It's very dramatic. But on Titan, maybe the vortex just gradually fizzles out like the smile of the Chesire cat."

Source: Reprinted news release via NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

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NASA Finds Earth-size Planet Candidates in the Habitable Zone

Is our Milky Way galaxy home to other planets the size of Earth? Are Earth-sized planets common or rare? NASA scientists seeking answers to those questions recently revealed their discovery.

"We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone - a region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Some candidates could even have moons with liquid water," said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and the Kepler Mission’s science principal investigator. "Five of the planetary candidates are both near Earth-size and orbit in the habitable zone of their parent stars."

Planet candidates require follow-up observations to verify they are actual planets.

"We have found over twelve hundred candidate planets - that’s more than all the people have found so far in history," said Borucki. "Now, these are candidates, but most of them, I’m convinced, will be confirmed as planets in the coming months and years."

The findings increase the number of planet candidates identified by Kepler to-date to 1,235. Of these, 68 are approximately Earth-size; 288 are super-Earth-size; 662 are Neptune-size; 165 are the size of Jupiter and 19 are larger than Jupiter. Of the 54 new planet candidates found in the habitable zone, five are near Earth-sized. The remaining 49 habitable zone candidates range from super-Earth size -- up to twice the size of Earth -- to larger than Jupiter. The findings are based on the results of observations conducted May 12 to Sept. 17, 2009 of more than 156,000 stars in Kepler’s field of view, which covers approximately 1/400 of the sky.

"The fact that we’ve found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting stars like our sun in our galaxy," said Borucki. "Kepler can find only a small fraction of the planets around the stars it looks at because the orbits aren’t aligned properly. If you account for those two factors, our results indicate there must be millions of planets orbiting the stars that surround our sun."

“We’re about half-way through Kepler’s scheduled mission," said Roger Hunter, the Kepler project manager. "Today’s announcement is very exciting and portends many discoveries to come. It’s looking like the galaxy may be littered with many planets.”

Among the stars with planetary candidates, 170 show evidence of multiple planetary candidates, including one, Kepler-11, that scientists have been able to confirm that has no fewer than six planets.

"Another exciting discovery has been the tremendous variations in the structure of the confirmed planets – some have the density of Styrofoam and others are denser than iron. The Earth's density is in between."

"The historic milestones Kepler makes with each new discovery will determine the course of every exoplanet mission to follow," said Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Kepler, a space telescope, looks for planet signatures by measuring tiny decreases in the brightness of stars caused by planets crossing in front of them - this is known as a transit.

Since transits of planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars occur about once a year and require three transits for verification, it is expected to take three years to locate and verify Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars.

The Kepler science team uses ground-based telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope to perform follow-up observations on planetary candidates and other objects of interest found with the spacecraft. The star field that Kepler observes in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra can only be seen from ground-based observatories in spring through early fall. The data from these other observations helps determine which of the candidates can be validated as planets.

"The first four months of data have given us an enormous amount of interesting information for the science community to explore and to find the planets among the candidates that we have found," said Borucki. "Keep in mind, in the future, we’ll have even more data for small planets in and near the habitable zone for everyone to look at."

Kepler will continue conducting science operations until at least November 2012, searching for planets as small as Earth, including those that orbit stars in a warm habitable zone where liquid water could exist on the surface of the planet. Since transits of planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars occur about once a year and require three transits for verification, it is expected to take three years to locate and verify Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars.

Borucki predicted that the search using the Kepler spacecraft’s continuous and long-duration capability will significantly enhance scientists’ ability to determine the distributions of planet size and orbital period in the future.

"In the coming years, Kepler’s capabilities will allow us to find Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of other stars," Borucki said. "Future missions will be developed to study the composition of planetary atmospheres to determine if they are compatible with the presence of life. The design for these missions depends of Kepler finding whether Earth-size planets in the habitable zone are common or rare."

The Kepler Mission team has discovered a total of 15 exoplanets, including the smallest known exoplanet, Kepler-10b.

"Kepler is providing data 100 times better than anyone has ever done before," said Borucki. "It’s exploring a new part of phase space, a new part of the universe that could not be explored without this kind of precision, so it’s producing absolutely beautiful data. We’re seeing the variability of stars like no one has ever seen before. We’re finding planets smaller than anyone has ever seen before, because the data quality is extremely good."

"In one generation we have gone from extraterrestrial planets being a mainstay of science fiction, to the present, where Kepler has helped turn science fiction into today's reality," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "These discoveries underscore the importance of NASA's science missions, which consistently increase understanding of our place in the cosmos."

Source: Reprinted news release via NASA

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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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NASA's New Lander Prototype Skates Through Integration and Testing

NASA engineers successfully integrated and completed system testing on a new robotic lander recently at Teledyne Brown Engineering’s facility in Huntsville in support of the Robotic Lunar Lander Project at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

The lander prototype was placed on modified skateboards and a customized track system as a low-cost solution to control movement during final testing of the prototype’s sensors, onboard computer, and thrusters. The functional test focused on ensuring that all system components work seamlessly to sense, communicate, and command the lander's movements.

The prototype will be transported to the United States Army Redstone Arsenal Test Center in Huntsville this week to begin strap-down testing, which will lead to free-flying tests later this year.

The lander prototype will aid NASA’s development of a new generation of small, smart, versatile landers for airless bodies such as the moon and asteroids. The lander's design is based on cutting-edge technology, which allows precision landing in high-risk, but high-priority areas, enabling NASA to achieve scientific and exploration goals in previously unexplored locations.

Development of the lander prototype is a cooperative endeavor led by the Robotic Lunar Lander Development Project at the Marshall Center, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory of Laurel, Md., and the Von Braun Center for Science and Innovation, which includes the Science Applications International Corporation, Dynetics Corp., Teledyne Brown Engineering Inc., and Millennium Engineering and Integration Company, all of Huntsville.

Image: The robotic lander prototype was placed on modified skateboards and a customized track system as a low-cost solution to control movement during final testing of the prototype's sensors, onboard computer, and thrusters. (NASA/TBE) 

For more information on the Robotic Lunar Lander Development Project, please visit http://www.nasa.gov/roboticlander.

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Runaway Star Plows Through Space

The blue star near the center of this image is Zeta Ophiuchi. When seen in visible light it appears as a relatively dim red star surrounded by other dim stars and no dust. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

A massive star flung away from its former companion is plowing through space dust. The result is a brilliant bow shock, seen here as a yellow arc in a new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.

The star, named Zeta Ophiuchi, is huge, with a mass of about 20 times that of our sun. In this image, in which infrared light has been translated into visible colors we see with our eyes, the star appears as the blue dot inside the bow shock.

Zeta Ophiuchi once orbited around an even heftier star. But when that star exploded in a supernova, Zeta Ophiuchi shot away like a bullet. It's traveling at a whopping 54,000 miles per hour (or 24 kilometers per second), and heading toward the upper left area of the picture.

As the star tears through space, its powerful winds push gas and dust out of its way and into what is called a bow shock. The material in the bow shock is so compressed that it glows with infrared light that WISE can see. The effect is similar to what happens when a boat speeds through water, pushing a wave in front of it.

This bow shock is completely hidden in visible light. Infrared images like this one from WISE are therefore important for shedding new light on the region.

JPL manages and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise, http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise .

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Partner Galaxies Wildly Different In New WISE Image

This image from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, features two stunning galaxies engaged in an intergalactic dance. The galaxies, Messier 81 and Messier 82, swept by each other a few hundred million years ago, and will likely continue to twirl around each other multiple times before eventually merging into a single galaxy. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer has captured a new view of two companion galaxies -- a somewhat tranquil spiral beauty and its rambunctious partner blazing with smoky star formation.

The unlikely pair, named Messier 81 and Messier 82, got to know each other a lot better during an encounter that occurred a few hundred million years ago. As they swept by each other, gravitational interactions triggered new bursts of star formation. In the case of Messier 82, also known as the Cigar galaxy, the encounter has likely triggered a tremendous wave of new star birth at its core. Intense radiation from newborn massive stars is blowing copious amounts of gas and smoky dust out of the galaxy, as seen in the WISE image in yellow hues.

The new image is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/pia13454.html . The Cigar galaxy is pictured above Messier 81.

"What's unique about the WISE view of this duo is that we can see both galaxies in one shot, and we can really see their differences," said Ned Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator of WISE. "Because the Cigar galaxy is bursting with star formation, it's really bright in the infrared, and looks dramatically different from its less active companion."

The WISE mission completed its main goal of mapping the sky in infrared light in October 2010, covering it one-and-one-half times before its frozen coolant ran out, as planned. During that time, it snapped pictures of hundreds of millions of objects, the first batch of which will be released to the astronomy community in April 2011. WISE is continuing its scan of the skies without coolant using two of its four infrared channels -- the two shorter-wavelength channels not affected by the warmer temperatures. The mission's ongoing survey is now focused primarily on asteroids and comets.

Because WISE has imaged the entire sky, it excels at producing large mosaics like this new picture of Messier 81 and Messier 82, which covers a patch of sky equivalent to three-by-three full moons, or 1.5 by 1.5 degrees.

It is likely these partner galaxies will continue to dance around each other, and eventually merge into a single entity. They are both spiral galaxies, but Messier 82 is seen from an edge-on perspective, and thus appears in visible light as a thin, cigar-like bar. When viewed in infrared light, Messier 82 is the brightest galaxy in the sky. It is what scientists refer to as a starburst galaxy because it is churning out large amounts of new stars.

"The WISE picture really shows how spectacular Messier 82 shines in the infrared even though it is relatively puny in both size and mass compared to its big brother, Messier 81," said Tom Jarrett, a member of the WISE team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

In this WISE view, infrared light has been color coded so that we can see it with our eyes. The shortest wavelengths (3.4 and 3.6 microns) are shown in blue and blue-green, or cyan, and the longer wavelengths (12 and 22 microns) are green and red. Messier 82 appears in yellow hues because its cocoon of dust gives off longer wavelengths of light (the yellow is a result of combining green and red). This dust is made primarily of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are found on Earth as soot.

Messier 81, also known as Bode's galaxy, appears blue in the infrared image because it is not as dusty. The blue light is from stars in the galaxy. Knots of yellow seen dotting the spiral arms are dusty areas of recent star formation, most likely triggered by the galaxy's encounter with its rowdy partner.

"It's striking how the same event stimulated a classic spiral galaxy in Messier 81, and a raging starburst in Messier 82," said WISE Project Scientist Peter Eisenhardt of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "WISE is finding the most extreme starbursts across the whole sky, out to distances over a thousand times greater than Messier 82."

Messier 81 is one of the brightest galaxies in the sky in visible light. Both it and its partner can be seen with binoculars on a dark, clear night in the northern constellation of Ursa Major, which contains the Big Dipper. The galaxies are 12 million light-years away from Earth.

JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program, which NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

More information is online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/wise , http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise .

Source: Reprinted news release via NASA

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The Two-faced Whirlpool Galaxy

These images by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show off two dramatically different face-on views of the spiral galaxy M51, dubbed the Whirlpool Galaxy.

The image at left, taken in visible light, highlights the attributes of a typical spiral galaxy, including graceful, curving arms, pink star-forming regions, and brilliant blue strands of star clusters.

In the image at right, most of the starlight has been removed, revealing the Whirlpool's skeletal dust structure, as seen in near-infrared light. This new image is the sharpest view of the dense dust in M51. The narrow lanes of dust revealed by Hubble reflect the galaxy's moniker, the Whirlpool Galaxy, as if they were swirling toward the galaxy's core.

To map the galaxy's dust structure, researchers collected the galaxy's starlight by combining images taken in visible and near-infrared light. The visible-light image captured only some of the light; the rest was obscured by dust. The near-infrared view, however, revealed more starlight because near-infrared light penetrates dust. The researchers then subtracted the total amount of starlight from both images to see the galaxy's dust structure.

The red color in the near-infrared image traces the dust, which is punctuated by hundreds of tiny clumps of stars, each about 65 light-years wide. These stars have never been seen before. The star clusters cannot be seen in visible light because dense dust enshrouds them. The image reveals details as small as 35 light-years across.

Astronomers expected to see large dust clouds, ranging from about 100 light-years to more than 300 light-years wide. Instead, most of the dust is tied up in smooth and diffuse dust lanes. An encounter with another galaxy may have prevented giant clouds from forming.

Probing a galaxy's dust structure serves as an important diagnostic tool for astronomers, providing invaluable information on how the gas and dust collapse to form stars. Although Hubble is providing incisive views of the internal structure of galaxies such as M51, the planned James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to produce even crisper images.

Researchers constructed the image by combining visible-light exposures from Jan. 18 to 22, 2005, with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), and near-infrared light pictures taken in December 2005 with the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS).

Credit for the NICMOS image: NASA, ESA, M. Regan and B. Whitmore (STScI), and R. Chandar (University of Toledo)

Credit for the ACS image: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Image files and more information about M51 are available on:


http://hubblesite.org/news/2011/03
http://www.nasa.gov/hubble
Source - http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/two-faced.html

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Announcement: Web-Streamed Event Will Cover Mars Science Findings

The National Air and Space Museum in Washington will present a discussion of Mars science Thursday, Jan. 13, from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST (7:30 to 9:30 a.m. PST) in a program to be televised and streamed online.

Mars experts from NASA, the European Space Agency and elsewhere will discuss the past and future of our understanding of the Red Planet. They will take questions from the audience. Viewers will learn the significance of water on Mars and see photographs from spacecraft at Mars.

For more information, see http://www.nasm.si.edu/events/eventDetail.cfm?eventID=2641&hp=hi . To watch the event live on the NASA Television website, go to www.nasa.gov/ntv . To view an archived video after the event, go to http://www.youtube.com/NASAtelevision.

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NASA Radar Reveals Features on Asteroid

A radar image of asteroid 2010 JL33, generated from data taken by NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar on Dec. 11 and 12, 2010. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Radar imaging at NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar in the California desert on Dec. 11 and 12, 2010, revealed defining characteristics of recently discovered asteroid 2010 JL33. The images have been made into a short movie that shows the celestial object's rotation and shape. A team led by Marina Brozovic, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., made the discovery.

"Asteroid 2010 JL33 was discovered on May 6 by the Mount Lemmon Survey in Arizona, but prior to the radar observations, little was known about it," said Lance Benner, a scientist at JPL. "By using the Goldstone Solar System Radar, we can obtain detailed images that reveal the asteroid's size, shape and rotational rate, improve its orbit, and even make out specific surface features."

Data from the radar reveal 2010 JL33 to be an irregular, elongated object roughly 1.8 kilometers (1.1 miles) wide that rotates once every nine hours. The asteroid's most conspicuous feature is a large concavity that may be an impact crater. The images in the movie span about 90 percent of one rotation.

At the time it was imaged, the asteroid was about 22 times the distance between Earth and the moon (8.5 million kilometers, or 5.3 million miles). At that distance, the radio signals from the Goldstone radar dish used to make the images took 56 seconds to make the roundtrip from Earth to the asteroid and back to Earth again.

The 70-meter (230-foot) Goldstone antenna in California's Mojave Desert, part of NASA's Deep Space network, is one of only two facilities capable of imaging asteroids with radar. The other is the National Science Foundation’s 1,000-foot-diameter (305 meters) Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The capabilities of the two instruments are complementary. The Arecibo radar is about 20 times more sensitive, can see about one-third of the sky, and can detect asteroids about twice as far away. Goldstone is fully steerable, can see about 80 percent of the sky, can track objects several times longer per day, and can image asteroids at finer spatial resolution. To date, Goldstone and Arecibo have observed 272 near-Earth asteroids and 14 comets with radar. JPL manages the Goldstone Solar System Radar and the Deep Space Network for NASA.



More information about asteroid radar research is at: http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/ .

More information about the Deep Space Network is at: http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn .

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In Distant Galaxies, New Clues to Century-Old Molecule Mystery

The Triangulum Galaxy, located nearly 3 million light years from Earth, is another far galaxy where researchers have found diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs). The detailed observations needed to see DIBs along a straight line from Earth to an individual star in such a distant galaxy stretch the limits of even the largest telescopes. Credit: NASA/Swift Science Team/Stefan Immler

In a study that pushes the limits of observations currently possible from Earth, a team of NASA and European scientists recorded the "fingerprints" of mystery molecules in two distant galaxies, Andromeda and the Triangulum. Astronomers can count on one hand the number of galaxies examined so far for such fingerprints, which are thought to belong to large organic molecules, says the team's leader, Martin Cordiner of the Goddard Center for Astrobiology at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Figuring out exactly which molecules are leaving these clues, known as "diffuse interstellar bands" (DIBs), is a puzzle that initially seemed straightforward but has gone unsolved for nearly a hundred years. The answer is expected to help explain how stars, planets and life form, so settling the matter is as important to astronomers who specialize in chemistry and biology as determining the nature of dark matter is to the specialists in physics.

Cordiner is presenting the team's research at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, Wash., on Jan. 10, 2011, and the results from Andromeda were published in an Astrophysical Journal paper on Jan. 1. The findings provide some evidence against one of the top candidates on the list of suspects: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a group of molecules that is widespread in space. The research also reveals that some of the signatures found in Andromeda and the Triangulum are similar to ones seen in our own Milky Way, despite some big differences between those galaxies and ours.

"We have studied DIBs in incredibly diverse environments. Some have low levels of UV radiation. Some have radiation levels thousands of times higher. Some have different amounts of 'ingredients' available for making stars and planets," Cordiner says. "And throughout all of these, we see DIBs."

Missing in action

Until now, only two galaxies beyond our own have been investigated in detail for DIBs. Those are our nearest neighbors, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which lie 160,000 to 200,000 light years away. (Researchers have conducted selective studies elsewhere, however.)

Andromeda and the Triangulum are located much farther away, at about 2.5 to 3 million light years from Earth. "At those distances, individual stars are so faint that we need to push even the largest telescopes in the world to their limits in order to observe them," Cordiner says.

That statement might seem strange to anyone who has looked into the night sky and seen either of these galaxies with the naked eye. Under favorable conditions, the galaxies appear as smudges in the constellations that bear their respective names.

But to study DIBs, researchers need to do much more than see that the galaxy is there. They have to pick out individual stars within the galaxy, and only a few telescopes worldwide are powerful enough to gather sufficient light for that. (The team used the Gemini Observatory's telescope in Hawaii.) This is why most DIBs found so far have been in the Milky Way.

Whichever galaxy an astronomer chooses, though, it will be made up of tens to hundreds of billions of stars. "The first step is choosing which stars to observe," Cordiner explains.

Cordiner's colleagues at Queen's University in Belfast, U.K., took the lead on finding good targets. They picked blue supergiants—stars that are very large, very hot and very bright. Supergiants also burn very clean: unlike our sun and other cooler stars, they contribute little background clutter to the observations being made.

To look for DIBs, an astronomer points the telescope at a star and scans through a rainbow made up of thousands of wavelengths of light. This rainbow, or spectrum, is extended a bit beyond visible light, into the UV at the blue end and into the infrared at the red end.

DIBs are not defined by what astronomers see while doing this, but by what they don't see. The colors missing from the rainbow, marked by black stripes, are the ones of interest. Each one is a wavelength being absorbed by some kind of atom or molecule.

A DIB is one of these regions where the color is missing. But compared to the nice, neat "absorption lines" that are identified with atoms or simple molecules, a DIB is not well-behaved, which is why it stands out.

"Astronomers were used to seeing quite sharp, narrow bands where typical atoms and molecules absorb," says Cordiner. "But DIBs are broad; that's why they are called 'diffuse.' Some DIBs have simple shapes and are quite smooth, but others have bumps and wiggles and may even be lopsided."

The mystery deepens

Over time, astronomers have been building up catalogs to show exactly which wavelengths are absorbed by all kinds of atoms and molecules. Each molecule has its own unique pattern, which can be used like a fingerprint: if a pattern found during an astronomical observation matches a pattern in one of the catalogs, the molecule can be identified.

It's a pretty straightforward concept. So, early researchers "would surely not have thought that the solution to the diffuse band problem would still be so elusive," wrote Peter Sarre in a 2006 review article about DIBs. Sarre, a professor of chemistry and molecular astrophysics at the University of Nottingham, U.K., supervised Cordiner's graduate-school work on DIBs.

The significance of the first DIBs, recorded in 1922 in Mary Lea Heger's Ph.D. thesis, was not immediately recognized. But once astronomers began systematic studies, starting with a 1934 paper by P. W. Merrill, they had every reason to believe the problem could be solved within a decade or two.

No such luck

More than 400 DIBs have been documented since then. But not one has been identified with enough certainty for astronomers to consider its case closed.

"With this many diffuse bands, you'd think we astronomers would have enough clues to solve this problem," muses Joseph Nuth, a senior scientist with the Goddard Center for Astrobiology who was not involved in this work. "Instead, it's getting more mysterious as more data is gathered."

Detailed analyses of the bumps and wiggles of the DIBs, suggest that the molecules which give rise to DIBs—called "carriers"—are probably large.

But like beauty, "large" is in the eye of the beholder. In this case, it means the molecule has at least 20 atoms or more. This is quite small compared to, say, a protein but huge compared to a molecule of carbon monoxide, a very common molecule in space.

Recently, though, more interest has been focused on at least one small molecule, a chain made from three carbon atoms and two hydrogen atoms (C3H2). This was tentatively identified with a pattern of DIBs.

Tenacious D

On the list of DIB-related suspects, all molecules have one thing in common: they are organic, which means they are built largely from carbon.

Carbon is great for building large numbers of molecules because it is available almost everywhere. In space, only hydrogen, helium and oxygen are more plentiful. Here on Earth, we find carbon in the planet's crust, the oceans, the atmosphere and all forms of life.

Likewise, astronomers "see DIBs pretty much in any direction we look," says Jan Cami, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He has collaborated with Cordiner before but was not involved in this study. "And we see lots of DIBs."

Carbon is also great for building molecules in all kinds of configurations—millions of carbon compounds have been identified—and especially for building very stable molecules.

DIB carriers also seem to be quite stable. They survive the harsh physical conditions in the interstellar medium—the material found in the space between the stars. They also hang tough in the Large Magellanic Cloud, where radiation levels are thousands of times stronger than in the Milky Way. In fact, says Cordiner, DIB carriers seem comfortable almost everywhere except in the clouds of dense gas where stars are born.

"The carriers are readily formed but not readily destroyed in a wide range of different environments," says Cordiner. "It's remarkable how tenacious these molecules really are."

In short, carriers are thought to be made of carbon, Cami says, "because it's a lot easier to build strong and stable molecules from carbon atoms than from other elements, such as silicon or sulfur. Using those elements rather than carbon would be like building a house from a bucket of sand while there's a huge pile of bricks at the construction site."

The top three carrier candidates are: chain-like molecules, like the one now tentatively associated with a pattern of DIBs; PAHs, which often come up in studies of how planets formed; and compounds related to fullerenes, the soccer-ball-shaped molecules also known as buckyballs.

"This list covers most types of carbon molecules," notes Cami. "Chains are essentially the one-dimensional carbon molecules, PAHs are the two-dimensional ones, and fullerene compounds are the three-dimensional ones."

Present and accounted for

In spite of the challenges of looking for DIBs in other galaxies, it's worth the effort to astronomers because they need to see what DIBs look like under different conditions.

Granted, conditions are not uniform everywhere within a galaxy. Some stars have planets near them; others don't. Between the stars, in the vast tracts of interstellar medium, the relative amounts of gas and dust floating around can be different from one region to the next. And the exact mixture of chemicals can vary a little from place to place.

"But being on Earth and looking at another object in the Milky Way is like being in the crowd at Times Square in New York City on New Year's Eve and trying to find your friend," explains Nuth. "It's much easier to spot the person if you are on a balcony rather than standing in the crowd yourself." Likewise, it's much easier to get a clear overview of a galaxy when you are outside of it.

In some respects, Andromeda and the Triangulum are similar to the Milky Way. All three are spiral galaxies that belong to a collection of more than 30 nearby galaxies called the Local Group. The Milky Way is the largest member of this group. Andromeda is the second-largest, and the Triangulum is third.

Like the Milky Way, Andromeda and the Triangulum are thought to be good places to synthesize large organic molecules, which is what DIBs carriers are thought to be. And yet, says Cordiner, "nobody knew until now whether DIBs actually existed in either galaxy."

The team found that, indeed, DIBs do exist in both places, and they are strong, which implies there are many carriers.

In the Milky Way, when researchers find strong DIBs, they tend to find a lot of dust, too. This makes sense, because whenever there's more raw material available to make DIBs carriers, there's also more available to make dust. The team found the same situation in Andromeda, Cordiner says.

Of greater interest in Andromeda was whether the strength of the DIBs was related to the amount of PAHs, which are high on the list of candidates for carriers. The researchers knew going into the study that PAHs are plentiful in Andromeda, as they are in the Milky Way.

"The details of the PAH population seem to be somewhat different in Andromeda, though," says Cami. "This makes it interesting to try and find out exactly what is different."

But after checking to see if the PAH levels were related to DIBs strength, "we didn't find any correlation between the two," Cordiner says. That finding doesn't rule out a connection, but it might shift more attention to chains of carbon atoms or to fullerene compounds.

The carriers are not pure, isolated fullerenes, says Cami, who led the team that first detected fullerenes in space. More likely, "atoms or molecules are either locked up in fullerene cages or attached to the outside surface, " he explains. "This might even hold for some of the other proposed molecules. For example, you could think of carbon chains dangling from other molecules or even from dust grains."

The more things change . . .

One big difference between the Milky Way and Andromeda is the number of massive young stars. The Milky Way has more than Andromeda. Because those young stars generate a lot of UV radiation, the Milky Way's interstellar medium has higher levels of this radiation than Andromeda's does.

More radiation means a harsher environment, so organic molecules should survive better in an environment with less radiation. In that sense, Andromeda should be more favorable for the carriers of DIBs and, in theory, should be able to boast more of them. But Cordiner and his colleagues found that the DIBs in Andromeda were only slightly stronger than those in the Milky Way, implying that Andromeda can only claim slightly more carriers.

The observations in the Triangulum add even more intrigue. There, the researchers found strong DIBs even though this galaxy differs in its metallicity, which is a measure of the availability of ingredients for making stars and planets.

The consistency from galaxy to galaxy is surprising, given how much the conditions are thought to vary among them. "But there are no detailed studies of Andromeda to tell us everything we want to know about conditions there," says Cordiner. "And even less is known about the Triangulum."

As is usually the case in cutting-edge astronomy, some assumptions had to be made, and a lot depends on how well those assumptions hold up as more information becomes available.

Meanwhile, researchers will try to learn everything they can about DIBs near and far and the organic molecules they represent. "If we're going to understand fully how interstellar chemistry works—how stars and planets form," says Cordiner, "then we need a full understanding of the ingredients they use."

Source: Reprinted news release via NASA

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NASA Checking on Rover Spirit During Martian Spring

An artist's concept portrays a NASA Mars Exploration Rover on the surface of Mars. Two rovers have been built for 2003 launches and January 2004 arrival at two sites on Mars. Each rover has the mobility and toolkit to function as a robotic geologist. Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell University

Mars Exploration Rover Mission Status Report

PASADENA, Calif. -- Nine months after last hearing from the Mars rover Spirit, NASA is stepping up efforts to regain communications with the rover before spring ends on southern Mars in mid-March.

Spirit landed on Mars Jan. 4, 2004 (Universal Time; Jan. 3, Pacific Time) for a mission designed to last for three months. After accomplishing its prime-mission goals, Spirit worked for more than five years in bonus-time extended missions.

"The amount of solar energy available for Spirit is still increasing every day for the next few months," said Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "As long as that's the case, we will do all we can to increase the chances of hearing from the rover again."

After mid-March, prospects for reviving Spirit would begin to drop. Communication strategies would change based on reasoning that Spirit's silence is due to factors beyond just a low-power condition. Mission-ending damage from the cold experienced by Spirit in the past Martian winter is a real possibility.

The rover's motors worked far beyond their design life, but eventually, Spirit lost use of drive motors on two of its six wheels. This left it unable to obtain a favorable tilt for solar energy during the rover's fourth Martian winter, which began last May.

Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, which landed three weeks after Spirit and is still active, both have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life.

Spirit last communicated on March 22, 2010. The rover team had anticipated that the rover would enter a low-power fault mode with minimal activity except charging and heating the batteries and keeping its clock running. With most heaters shut off, Spirit's internal temperatures dipped lower than ever before on Mars. That stress could have caused damage, such as impaired electrical connections, that would prevent reawakening or, even if Spirit returns to operation, would reduce its capabilities.

Southern-Mars spring began in November 2010. Even before that, NASA's Deep Space Network of antennas in California, Spain and Australia has been listening for Spirit daily. The rover team has also been sending commands to elicit a response from the rover even if the rover has lost track of time.

Now, the monitoring is being increased. Additional listening periods include times when Spirit might mistake a signal from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as a signal from Earth and respond to such a signal. Commands for a beep from Spirit will be sent at additional times to cover a wider range of times-of-day on Mars when Spirit might awaken. Also, NASA is listening on a wider range of frequencies to cover more possibilities of temperature effects on Spirit's radio systems.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

 Source: Reprinted news release via NASA

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Rover Will Spend 7th Birthday at Stadium-Size Crater

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured a Dec. 31, 2010, view of the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity on the southwestern rim of a football-field-size crater called "Santa Maria."

Opportunity arrived at the western edge of Santa Maria crater in mid-December and will spend about two months investigating rocks there. That investigation will take Opportunity into the beginning of its eighth year on Mars. Opportunity landed in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars on Jan. 25, 2004, Universal Time (Jan. 24, Pacific Time) for a mission originally planned to last for three months.

The new image is online at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mer/multimedia/gallery/pia13754-anno.html and http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/releases/oppy-santa-maria.php .

Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, which passed its seventh anniversary on Mars this week, both have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Exploration Rover projects for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the orbiter. The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates the HiRISE camera, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo.

Source: Reprinted news release via NASA

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As the World Turns to 2011 GOES Satellites Watch its Approach and Look Back at 2010

The GOES series of satellites keep an eye on the weather happening over the continental U.S. and eastern Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and had a busy time with wild weather in 2010. Today, GOES-13 captured one of the last images of North and South America in 2010 as the world continues to turn toward 2011.

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite called GOES-13 satellite captured a "full-disk image" of North and South America in an image created December 30 at 1445 UTC (9:45 a.m. EST) as the world awaits the new year. The stunning image shows cloud cover associated low pressure areas over the upper Midwestern U.S. and Colorado's Rocky Mountains.

NASA's GOES Project, located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., procures and manages the development and launch of the GOES series of satellites for NOAA on a cost-reimbursable basis. NASA's GOES Project also creates some of the GOES satellite images and GOES satellite imagery animations. NOAA manages the operational environmental satellite program and establishes requirements, provides all funding and distributes environmental satellite data for the United States.

NASA's GOES Project was very busy this year. GOES-13 monitors the eastern continental U.S., Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, while GOES-11 monitors weather conditions over the western U.S. and the Eastern Pacific Ocean.

In 2010, GOES satellites were busy providing images and animations of weather systems from nor'easters to tropical cyclones that caused blizzards, flooding and wind damage.

Most recently, the GOES project used satellite data to create an impressive animation of the great Christmas weekend blizzard that pummeled the northeastern U.S. Prior to that, GOES imagery showed travel conditions for the holiday weekend when that low was over the Colorado Rockies.

On Dec. 19, the GOES-11 satellite captured an image of the famous "Pineapple Express." Occasionally in the winter, a large jet stream forms across the mid-Pacific, carrying a continuous flow of moisture from the vicinity of Hawaii to California, bringing heavy rain and snow to the Sierra-Nevada for several days.

On Dec. 8 GOES-13 satellite imagery revealed a snow-covered, winter-like upper Midwest, several weeks before astronomical winter. On Nov. 24, GOES satellites helped Thanksgiving travelers figure out where delays may be happening.

During the summer, on July 25, GOES-13 imagery tracked one of the most destructive storms in years to strike Washington, D.C. and the surrounding area. Strong winds downed trees and power lines, leaving hundreds of thousands of residents without power, stopping elevators, and darkening malls and movie theaters. Falling trees killed at least two people. The NASA GOES Project created a satellite animation of the storm as moved through the region.

GOES-13 was busy in the Atlantic during the 2010 hurricane season. The Atlantic season started on June 1 and ended on November 30. The Atlantic season tied for third with two other years (1995 and 1887) as having the largest number of named storms at 19, and tied with two other seasons (1969 and 1887) for the second largest number of hurricanes, with 12. GOES-13 covered all of those tropical cyclones. GOES-11 didn't see the action in the Eastern Pacific tropics that GOES-13 did, however. Because of a La Niña event, the 2010 Pacific hurricane season (which began May 15 and ended Nov. 30) was the least active season in terms of the number of named storms and hurricanes on record. All tropical cyclones can be seen at NASA's Hurricane page archives for 2010 at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/archives/index.html.

On April 14, months before hurricane season started, GOES-13 became the official GOES-EAST satellite. GOES-13 was moved from on-orbit storage and into active duty. It is perched 22,300 miles above the equator to spot potentially life-threatening weather, including tropical storm activity in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico..

Before GOES-13 moved into the position previously occupied by GOES-12, GOES-12 captured a parade of three large storms the flooded the upper Midwest and Northeast in the second half of March. In the first half of March, GOES-12 covered storms as they dumped heavy rainfall in the Northeastern U.S.

On March 12, GOES-12 captured a very rare event in the tropics: the second–ever known tropical cyclone called Tropical Storm 90Q formed in the South Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Argentina.

During the first two weeks of February 2010, the GOES-12 weather satellite also observed a record-setting series of "Nor'easter" snow storms which blanketed the mid-Atlantic coast in two blizzards.

Whatever and wherever the weather in 2011, the GOES series of satellites will always go.

Source: Reprinted news release via NASA

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Cassini Celebrates 10 Years Since Jupiter Encounter

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Ten years ago, on Dec. 30, 2000, NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter on its way to orbiting Saturn. The main purpose was to use the gravity of the largest planet in our solar system to slingshot Cassini towards Saturn, its ultimate destination. But the encounter with Jupiter, Saturn's gas-giant big brother, also gave the Cassini project a perfect lab for testing its instruments and evaluating its operations plans for its tour of the ringed planet, which began in 2004.

"The Jupiter flyby allowed the Cassini spacecraft to stretch its wings, rehearsing for its prime time show, orbiting Saturn," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Ten years later, findings from the Jupiter flyby still continue to shape our understanding of similar processes in the Saturn system."

Cassini spent about six months - from October 2000 to March 2001 - exploring the Jupiter system. The closest approach brought Cassini to within about 9.7 million kilometers (6 million miles) of Jupiter's cloud tops at 2:05 a.m. Pacific Time, or 10:05 a.m. UTC, on Dec. 30, 2000.

Cassini captured some 26,000 images of Jupiter and its moons over six months of continual viewing, creating the most detailed global portrait of Jupiter yet.

While Cassini's images of Jupiter did not have higher resolution than the best from NASA's Voyager mission during its two 1979 flybys, Cassini's cameras had a wider color spectrum than those aboard Voyager, capturing wavelengths of radiation that could probe different heights in Jupiter's atmosphere. The images enabled scientists to watch convective lightning storms evolve over time and helped them understand the heights and composition of these storms and the many clouds, hazes and other types of storms that blanket Jupiter.

The Cassini images also revealed a never-before-seen large, dark oval around 60 degrees north latitude that rivaled Jupiter's Great Red Spot in size. Like the Great Red Spot, the large oval was a giant storm on Jupiter. But, unlike the Great Red Spot, which has been stable for hundreds of years, the large oval showed itself to be quite transient, growing, moving sideways, developing a bright inner core, rotating and thinning over six months. The oval was at high altitude and high latitude, so scientists think the oval may have been associated with Jupiter's powerful auroras.

The imaging team was also able to amass 70-day movies of storms forming, merging and moving near Jupiter's north pole. They showed how larger storms gained energy from swallowing smaller storms, the way big fish eat small fish. The movies also showed how the ordered flow of the eastward and westward jet streams in low latitudes gives way to a more disordered flow at high latitudes.

Meanwhile, Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer was able to do the first thorough mapping of Jupiter's temperature and atmospheric composition. The temperature maps enabled winds to be determined above the cloud tops, so scientists no longer had to rely on tracking features to measure winds. The spectrometer data showed the unexpected presence of an intense equatorial eastward jet (roughly 140 meters per second, or 310 mph) high in the stratosphere, about 100 kilometers (60 miles) above the visible clouds. Data from this instrument also led to the highest-resolution map so far of acetylene on Jupiter and the first detection of organic methyl radical and diacetylene in the auroral hot spots near Jupiter's north and south poles. These molecules are important to understanding the chemical interactions between sunlight and molecules in Jupiter's stratosphere.

As Cassini approached Jupiter, its radio and plasma wave instrument also recorded naturally occurring chirps created by electrons coming from a cosmic sonic boom. The boom occurs when supersonic solar wind - charged particles that fly off the sun - is slowed and deflected around the magnetic bubble surrounding Jupiter.

Because Cassini arrived at Jupiter while NASA's Galileo spacecraft was still orbiting the planet, scientists were also able to take advantage of near-simultaneous measurements from two different spacecraft. This coincidence enabled scientists to make giant strides in understanding the interaction of the solar wind with Jupiter. Cassini and Galileo provided the first two-point measurement of the boundary of Jupiter's magnetic bubble and showed that it was in the act of contracting as a region of higher solar wind pressure blew on it.

"The Jupiter flyby benefited us in two ways, one being the unique science data we collected and the other the knowledge we gained about how to effectively operate this complex machine," said Bob Mitchell, Cassini program manager based at JPL. "Today, 10 years later, our operations are still heavily influenced by that experience and it is serving us very well."

In celebrating the anniversary of Cassini's visit 10 years ago, scientists are also excited about the upcoming and proposed missions to the Jupiter system, including NASA's Juno spacecraft, to be launched next August, and the Europa Jupiter System Mission, which has been given a priority by NASA.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. 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. The composite infrared spectrometer team is based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., where the instrument was built. The radio and plasma wave science team is based at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, where the instrument was built.

Source: Reprinted news release via NASA

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NASA's Terra Satellite Sees a Snow-Covered Ireland

The Mid-Atlantic and northeastern U.S. are not the only areas dealing with holiday snowfall. Ireland was recently swathed in white on December 22, 2010. When NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument captured a true-color image of the snow. The overnight arrival of 15 cm (6 in) of snow at the Dublin airport forced its closure. Combined with the closure of the City of Derry airport, travel became quite difficult.

MODIS images are created by the MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The MODIS instrument flies onboard NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites.

Ireland enjoys a "temperate ocean climate" (Cfb) based on the Koopen climate classification system. Such climates normally enjoy cool, cloud-covered summers and mild winters. Ireland’s climate is also moderated by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, which flows off the western shore. Snow commonly falls only in the highest elevations; dustings may occur elsewhere a few times each year. Significant accumulations anywhere in the country are rare.

The winter of 2009-2010 was unusually cold and snowy. Called “The Big Freeze” by the British media, it brought widespread transportation problems, school closings, power failures and twenty five deaths. A low of -22.3°C (-8.1°F) was recorded on January 8, 2010, making it the coldest winter since 1978/79.

Although it has just begun, the winter of 2010-2011 threatens to be just as challenging. The earliest widespread snowfall since 1993 occurred on November 24, primarily affecting Great Britain and Scotland. Two days later snow began to cover Ireland, and the continuing severe weather has taken a toll. It has disrupted air, road and rail travel, closed schools and businesses, and caused power outages. Livestock and horses have had difficulty finding grass to eat, some relying on volunteer feeding efforts for survival. Local temperature records were broken, including a new record low for Northern Ireland of -18.7°C (-2°F) at Castlederg on December 23. As of that date, 20 deaths had been attributed to the winter weather and associated hazards.

Image: The Emerald Isle was swathed in white on December 22, 2010, when the MODIS instrument aboard the Terra satellite passed overhead, capturing this true-color image. Credit: NASA Goddard/MODIS Rapid Response Team, Jeff Schmaltz

Source: Reprinted news release via NASA 

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I'm Dreaming Of A Weightless Christmas - Merry Christmas From The International Space Station

The crew on the International Space Station wishes everyone on the planet earth Merry Christmas and happy holidays. Aboard the ISS, Expedition 26 Commander Scott Kelly of NASA and Flight Engineers Cady Coleman of NASA and Paolo Nespoli of the ESA.



Via NASAtelevision, Neatorama
Image credit: Nasa

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Holiday Pictures Of Saturn's Moon Rhea By NASA's Cassini Spacecraft

Newly released for the holidays, images of Saturn's second largest moon Rhea obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft show dramatic views of fractures cutting through craters on the moon's surface, revealing a history of tectonic rumbling. The images are among the highest-resolution views ever obtained of Rhea.

The images, captured on flybys on Nov. 21, 2009 and March 2, 2010, can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini , http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org.

"These recent, high-resolution Cassini images help us put Saturn's moon in the context of the moons' geological family tree," said Paul Helfenstein, Cassini imaging team associate, based at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "Since NASA's Voyager mission visited Saturn, scientists have thought of Rhea and Dione as close cousins, with some differences in size and density. The new images show us they're more like fraternal twins, where the resemblance is more than skin deep. This probably comes from their nearness to each other in orbit."

Cassini scientists designed the March 2010 and November 2009 encounters in part to search for a ring thought to encircle the moon. During the March flyby, Cassini made its closest- approach to Rhea's surface so far, swooping within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of the moon. Based on these observations, however, scientists have since discounted the possibility that Rhea might currently have a faint ring above its equator.

These flybys nonetheless yielded unique views of other features on the moon, including ones that are among the best ever obtained of the side of Rhea that always faces away from Saturn. Other views show a web of bright, "wispy" fractures resembling some that were first spotted on another part of Rhea by the two Voyager spacecraft in 1980 and 1981.

At that time, scientists thought the wispy markings on the trailing hemispheres – the sides of moons that face backward in the orbit around a planet – of Rhea and the neighboring moon Dione were possible cryovolcanic deposits, or the residue of icy material erupting. The low resolution of Voyager images prevented a closer inspection of these regions. Since July 2004, Cassini's imaging cameras have captured pictures the trailing hemispheres of both satellites several times at much higher resolution. The images have shown that the wispy markings are actually exposures of bright ice along the steep walls of long scarps, or lines of cliffs, that indicate tectonic activity produced the features rather than cryovolcanism.

Data collected by Cassini's imaging cameras in November 2009 showed the trailing hemisphere at unprecedented resolution. Scientists combined images taken about one hour apart to create a 3-D image of this terrain, revealing a set of closely spaced troughs that sometimes look linear and sometimes look sinuous. The 3-D image also shows uplifted blocks interspersed through the terrain that cut through older, densely cratered plains. While the densely cratered plains imply that Rhea has not experienced much internal activity since its early history that would have repaved the moon, these imaging data suggest that some regions have ruptured in response to tectonic stress more recently. Troughs and other fault topography cut through the two largest craters in the scene, which are not as scarred with smaller craters, indicating that these craters are comparatively young. In some places, material has moved downslope along the scarps and accumulated on the flatter floors.

A mosaic of the March flyby images shows bright, icy fractures cutting across the surface of the moon, sometimes at right angles to each other. A false-color view of the entire disk of the moon's Saturn-facing side reveals a slightly bluer area, likely related to different surface compositions or to different sizes and fine-scale textures of the grains making up the moon's icy soil.

The new images have also helped to enhance maps of Rhea, including the first cartographic atlas of features on the moon complete with names approved by the International Astronomical Union. Thanks to the recent mission extension, Cassini will continue to chart the terrain of this and other Saturnian moons with ever-improving resolution, especially for terrain at high northern latitudes, until 2017.

"The 11th of January 2011 will be especially exciting, when Cassini flies just 76 kilometers [47 miles] above the surface of Rhea," said Thomas Roatsch, a Cassini imaging team scientist based at the German Aerospace Center Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin. "These will be by far the best images we've ever had of Rhea's surface – details down to just a few meters will become recognizable."

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 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.

Image: Hemispheric color differences on Saturn's moon Rhea are apparent in this false-color view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This image shows the side of the moon that always faces the planet. 
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI
Source: Reprinted news release (with edits) via NASA

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Mars Movie: I'm Dreaming of a Blue Sunset

A new Mars movie clip gives us a rover's-eye view of a bluish Martian sunset, while another clip shows the silhouette of the moon Phobos passing in front of the sun.

America's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, carefully guided by researchers with an artistic sense, has recorded images used in the simulated movies.

These holiday treats from the rover's panoramic camera, or Pancam, offer travel fans a view akin to standing on Mars and watching the sky.

"These visualizations of an alien sunset show what it must have looked like for Opportunity, in a way we rarely get to see, with motion," said rover science team member Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, College Station. Dust particles make the Martian sky appear reddish and create a bluish glow around the sun.

Lemmon worked with Pancam Lead Scientist Jim Bell, of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., to plot the shots and make the moving-picture simulation from images taken several seconds apart in both sequences.

The sunset movie, combining exposures taken Nov. 4 and Nov. 5, 2010, through different camera filters, accelerates about 17 minutes of sunset into a 30-second simulation. One of the filters is specifically used to look at the sun. Two other filters used for these shots provide color information. The rover team has taken Pancam images of sunsets on several previous occasions, gaining scientifically valuable information about the variability of dust in the lower atmosphere. The new clip is the longest sunset movie from Mars ever produced, taking advantage of adequate solar energy currently available to Opportunity.

The two Martian moons are too small to fully cover the face of the sun, as seen from the surface of Mars, so these events -- called transits or partial eclipses -- look quite different from a solar eclipse seen on Earth. Bell and Lemmon chose a transit by Phobos shortly before the Mars sunset on Nov. 9, 2010, for a set of Pancam exposures taken four seconds apart and combined into the new, 30-second, eclipse movie. Scientifically, images years apart that show Phobos' exact position relative to the sun at an exact moment in time aid studies of slight changes in the moon's orbit. This, in turn, adds information about the interior of Mars.

The world has gained from these movies and from more than a quarter million other images from Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, since they landed on Mars in January 2004. Those gains go beyond the facts provided for science.

Bell said, "For nearly seven years now, we've been using the cameras on Spirit and Opportunity to help us experience Mars as if we were there, viewing these spectacular vistas for ourselves. Whether it's seeing glorious sunsets and eclipses like these, or the many different and lovely sandy and rocky landscapes that we've driven through over the years, we are all truly exploring Mars through the lenses of our hardy robotic emissaries.

"It reminds me of a favorite quote from French author Marcel Proust: 'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes,'" he added.


Embedded video from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology


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. For more information about the mission, see http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov .

Image: Movie from Mars - Phobos Passes in Front of Sun's Face, Nov. 9, 2010.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Texas A&M

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