Kepler's Insight to Physical Nature of Planetary Systems

It’s been 808 days since the launch of one of NASA’s most prolific space observatories: the Kepler exoplanet-hunting space telescope. Kepler team members met in Boston this week at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to give a status report on their progress toward answering one of the most timeless questions in astronomy: how abundant are Earth-sized planets in the Galaxy?

They are methodically closing in on the answer, but certainly not there yet.

For the past two years, the spacecraft has kept a steady gaze on 165,000 stars in the summer constellation Cygnus. To date, Kepler has tallied 1235 candidate exoplanets with orbits inclined such that they can be seen passing in front of their stars. This trawl has required a staggering 5.5 billion separate brightness measurements.

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Longtime NASA tradition tied to North Texas

Few men order more flowers than Mark Shelton.

"I need to send some roses to Mission Control, please," he told a florist over the phone.

At 54, Shelton has never worked for NASA, but he is responsible for one of its longest traditions. Every time NASA launches a shuttle, Shelton sends roses to Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Each rose represents every astronaut in space at the time. Shelton said he orders an extra white flower to represent the astronauts who have perished over the years.

He has sent a bouquet for every mission since 1987, the one following Challenger. It makes a total of 108 flower shipments in all.

"They don't get much attention in the media when things are going well," Shelton said of NASA. "But it's every bit as dangerous... every single [flight]. We wanted a way to give them a low-key reminder that the public cares."

NASA cares, too.

The space agency has invited Shelton to launches over the years, sent autographs from astronauts, Christmas cards from flight directors, and even a get well card when he had a heart attack.

"I don't know how they knew I was in the hospital then," he said.

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NASA to Train Future Spacewalkers in Asteroid Landscape on Ocean Floor

Before humans explore an asteroid in space, a group of NASA astronauts and scientists will test concepts and techniques for the future expeditions on a mock space rock on the ocean floor.

This week, engineers are laying the foundations for the 15th expedition of NASA's Extreme Environment Mission Operations, or NEEMO 15 for short, which is scheduled to begin on Oct. 17. To prepare for that fall undersea mission, diving crews are setting up the tools and rocky environment needed to simulate an asteroid landscape. [Photos: Asteroids in Deep Space]

NEEMO expeditions take place at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Aquarius Underwater Laboratory, which rests more than 62 feet (19 meters) below the ocean's surface, off the coast of Key Largo in the Florida Keys.

This year's NEEMO 15 expedition will simulate a trip to an asteroid, and the so-called "aquanauts" will investigate how best to anchor to the surface of a space rock and how to move around, said NASA spokesperson Brandi Dean.

To prepare for the 10-day October mission, various engineering tests will be conducted from May 9 to May 13 at the Aquarius laboratory. The NEEMO support team will perform surface dives to lay out the test site, including configuring a rock wall, NASA officials said.

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NASA to test untethered lander

A squat, insectlike contraption is set to fly untethered for the first time soon in a NASA test of technologies designed to take humans to the moon, Mars or beyond.

The unmanned Morpheus lander, named after the Greek god of dreams, was built at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston using cutting-edge technologies that the agency hopes will one day enable manned missions to another planet or even an asteroid. The vehicle, about the size of an SUV, could carry about 1,100 pounds of cargo to the moon.

Not only are the technologies onboard innovative, but NASA's process of building the lander is, too.

"Part of what this project set out to do was to question the way we've done things," Project Morpheus manager Matt Ondler told Space.com. "We purposefully set out to see if we could do things faster and cheaper, leveraging off the work that was already done."

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NASA Selects Summer of Innovation Projects

NASA announced partnerships with nine organizations that will help the agency implement its 2011 Summer of Innovation (SoI) education program.

SoI uses NASA's out-of-this-world missions and technology programs to boost summer learning in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, particularly for underrepresented and underperforming students.

The SoI 2011 partners are:

Chester County Intermediate School District-Unit 24, Downingtown, Pa.
Albany State University, Albany, Ga.
Nebraska Department of Education, Lincoln
Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, Houston
University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho
Puerto Rico Institute of Robotics, Inc., San Juan, Puerto Rico
Rio Grande Valley Science Association, Edinburgh, Texas
Indiana Association of United Ways, Inc., Indianapolis
South Dakota Discovery Center and Aquarium, Pierre


"I am delighted that we have such a broad and diverse group of partner organizations ready to implement this year's Summer of Innovation program," said Leland Melvin, NASA associate administrator for education. "We look forward to building on the momentum that began last year, so we can engage and inspire even more middle school students to reach higher and pursue STEM career opportunities."

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NASA Spacecraft Closing in On Huge Asteroid Vesta

A NASA spacecraft has reached a new phase of its mission to Vesta, the second-largest asteroid in the solar system, and is on track to arrive at the huge space rock in July.

The probe, NASA's Dawn spacecraft, is now using cameras for the first time to aid its approach to Vesta, a massive asteroid that many astronomers classify as a protoplanet. If all goes well, the ion-propelled probe should enter orbit around Vesta on July 16 to begin a year-long study of the mysterious space rock.

"We feel a little like Columbus approaching the shores of the New World," said Christopher Russell, Dawn principal investigator at UCLA, in a statement. "The Dawn team can't wait to start mapping this terra incognita."

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Watch this week: We’ll see meteors from Halley’s Comet

There’s a show happening later this week you won’t want to miss.

NASA recently reminded us that the Earth will pass through a stream of debris from Halley’s comet on May 6th. The result? A “mild but beautiful meteor shower” called the eta Aquarids.

If you want to witness the show, NASA’s advice is to be awake in the early morning hours this Friday. You’ll also want to get as far away from city lights as you can.

“Each eta Aquarid meteoroid is a piece of Halley’s Comet doing a kamikaze death dive into the atmosphere,” said NASA astronomer Bill Cooke. “Many people have never seen this famous comet, but on the morning of May 6th they can watch bits of it leave fiery trails across the sky.”

Halley’s Comet,which orbits the sun every 76 years, leaves behind a trail of vaporized debris when it swings by the sun. That means twice a year, the Earth gets a meteor shower. (In May, that’s the eta Aquarids. In October, it’s the Orionids.)

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Lightning Strikes Behind Shuttle Endeavour in Spectacular Photos

A barrage of thunderstorms and lightning in Florida created a spectacular backdrop for the space shuttle Endeavour late Thursday in striking photos taken on the eve of the spacecraft's final launch.

The stunning snapshots show Endeavour atop the seaside Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., as bolts of lightning light up the cloud-filled sky above. For those brief instants, the lightning cast an eerie purple glow over the shuttle and launch pad. [Photo of Endeavour and lightning]

NASA photographer Bill Ingalls snapped the photos, which the space agency posted online, during a series of storms that temporarily stalled efforts by shuttle technicians to prepare Endeavour for its planned launch on Friday, April 29, at 3:47 p.m. EDT (1947 GMT).

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Did investment in the shuttle program pay off?

After 133 missions, 14 astronauts lost in two tragic accidents and almost four decades of work, NASA's space shuttles will head to museums once this year's final two missions are done.

So what did we get for the $113.7 billion that NASA says was spent on the shuttle?

A century-long dream, the reusable, winged space plane was sold by the space agency as the logical successor to the Apollo missions of the moon-race era in the early 1970s. Budget cuts and compromises such as enlarging the shuttle payload to hold military satellites limited the promise of making space travel cheap, frequent and easy, says historian Roger Launius of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

"The history of the space shuttle is one of biting off more than we can chew," says policy analyst Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado. In a recent Nature journal estimate, Pielke put the true cost of the program at $192 billion from 1971 to 2010 (more than the space agency estimate partly because of adjustments for inflation), or about $1.5 billion per launch. In 1972, NASA estimated each launch could be done for $10.4million.

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Dry ice lake suggests Mars once had a ‘Dust Bowl’

Mars today has a brutal environment — frigid, arid and, because of its very thin atmosphere, constantly bombarded by lethal radiation. But it was worse 600,000 years ago, according to new research that suggests the planet had a far dustier, stormier atmosphere.

“It was an unpleasant place to hang out,” said lead researcher Roger Phillips of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.
The evidence comes from the discovery of a huge underground reservoir of dry ice, or frozen carbon dioxide, at its south pole — much more than scientists realized. They suspect some of that store of carbon dioxide was once in Mars’ atmosphere, making it denser.

In the recent geologic past, when Mars’ axis tilted, sunlight reached the southern polar cap, melting some of the frozen carbon dioxide. This release would have made the atmosphere thicker and caused more dust to loft into the air, creating severe storms. Other times, carbon dioxide cycled back into the ground as part of a seasonal cycle.

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Transcendence Splashes Down

It is objectively no small feat, slipping the surly bonds of Earth. But somehow, over its 30 years of existence, NASA’s Space Shuttle program has become roughly as thrilling as the Delta Shuttle. Still, there’s something sad about the end of the program, which will officially shut down after Endeavour’s 25th and final mission, on April 29, and one last there-and-back by Space Shuttle Atlantis in June. It’s not so much that the program’s increasingly prosaic missions—they have amounted, in recent years, to something like space carpooling—will be missed. The sadness instead comes from the petering out of space travel’s promised transcendence.

The commonplace marvels of modern technology probably have something to do with this awe deficit—a 400-mile vertical round-trip in a less-than-sleek 1992-model vehicle may not seem as miraculous as it did in a time before one could, if booked on the right airline, stream Parks and Recreation onto an iPad mid-flight. The Shuttle program’s geopolitical moment has passed, too. We’re no longer going to space to prove that our way of life is superior to an evil empire’s; instead, we’re going up there to do some repairs, drop off a magnetic spectrometer, and see the sights. And with deficits suddenly the Greatest Threat Our Nation Has Ever Faced, such errands now stand out as a sore thumb of a line item. The Space Shuttle program has cost nearly $200 billion over its lifetime; at a moment when we’re cutting holes in the social safety net to try to balance the books, Friday’s Shuttle launch will cost what NASA says is nearly half a billion dollars and another estimate puts at $1.2 billion. That the “economic, scientific and technological returns of space exploration have far exceeded the investment,” as former NASA life-sciences director Joan Vernikos has written, makes the accounting look a little more favorable, of course. But simply talking about it that way suggests just how un-wonderful space has become.

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A Rose of Galaxies? NASA Rings In Hubble's 21st Birthday

If space-based telescopes could tipple, they probably wouldn't need to--not with images like the one above on tap. NASA's celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope's 21st birthday (hey, it's legal!) with an image that almost resembles starry petals on some vast and distant heavenly rose.

You're in fact staring at a shot of two galaxies in an interstellar tete-a-tete, in which one (dubbed UGC 1810) is being persuaded by another (dubbed UGC 1813) to “blossom." The two galaxies exert gravitational forces on each other that warp their shapes, culminating in the rose-like appearance of UGC 1810. There's even a slender “tidal bridge” of matter slung between both galaxies--separated by “tens of thousands” of light years--like an intergalactic zip line.

Call the whole thing “Arp 273,” because NASA does, and it's located in the constellation Andromeda, about 300 million light-years distant from us.

As for the Hubble itself, my first memories when it launched back in April 1990 are probably the same as yours: it couldn't "see" clearly due to a flawed mirror. The servicing mission that eventually fixed it didn't occur until December 1993, incidentally the most complex mission ever undertaken at that point, and one in which astronauts were trained in the use of over 100 instruments to repair and fine tune things.

"Hubble is America's gift to the world," said Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland in a NASA statement. "Its jaw-dropping images have rewritten the textbooks and inspired generations of schoolchildren to study math and science. It has been documenting the history of our universe for 21 years. Thanks to the daring of our brave astronauts, a successful servicing mission in 2009 gave Hubble new life. I look forward to Hubble's amazing images and inspiring discoveries for years to come."

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Next Generation Space Telescope

NASA engineer Ernie Wright looks on as the first six flight ready James Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror segments are prepped to begin final cryogenic testing at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

This represents the first six of 18 segments that will form NASA's James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror for space observations. Engineers began final round-the-clock cryogenic testing to confirm that the mirrors will respond as expected to the extreme temperatures of space prior to integration into the telescope's permanent housing structure.

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Budget pessimism may drive JWST launch date to 2018

Struggling to match schedules with bleak funding realities, NASA and contractor officials say launch of the troubled James Webb Space Telescope could be delayed to 2018, four years later than the date NASA publicly pronounced last fall.
Testifying before a U.S. Senate subcommittee Monday, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said the agency is still completing a bottoms-up assessment of the next-generation space observatory before announcing a specific launch readiness date and cost projections.

Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., asked Bolden how much money is needed to put JWST back on track, saying lawmakers need realistic numbers to incorporate into the federal budget process.

Mikulski is the chair of the commerce, justice and science subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

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NASA's Jupiter-Bound Spacecraft Arrives in Florida

NASA's Juno spacecraft has arrived in Florida to begin final preparations for a launch this summer. The spacecraft was shipped from Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, to the Astrotech payload processing facility in Titusville, Fla., on April 8, 2011. The solar-powered Juno spacecraft will orbit Jupiter's poles 33 times to find out more about the gas giant's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.

"The Juno spacecraft and the team have come a long way since this project was first conceived in 2003," said Scott Bolton, Juno's principal investigator, based at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. "We're only a few months away from a mission of discovery that could very well rewrite the books on not only how Jupiter was born, but how our solar system came into being."

On April 11, Juno will be removed from its shipping container, the first of the numerous milestones to prepare it for launch. Later that week, the spacecraft will begin functional testing to verify its state of health after the road trip from Colorado. After this, the team will load updated flight software and perform a series of mission readiness tests. These tests involve the entire spacecraft flight system, as well as the associated science instruments and the ground data system.

Juno will be carried into space aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket lifting off from Launch Complex-41 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The launch period opens Aug. 5, 2011, and extends through Aug. 26. For an Aug. 5 liftoff, the launch window opens at 8:39 a.m. PDT (11:39 am EDT) and remains open through 9:39 a.m. PDT (12:39 p.m. EDT).

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