Ice may cover parts of Mercury

The planet closest to the sun appears to have more ice at its poles than does Earth's moon, say scientists analyzing data from the Messenger spacecraft.

Despite their proximity to the sun, portions of the surface of Mercury appear to be covered in ice, scientists said Thursday after analyzing about 20,000 new images of the solar system's smallest planet.

The pictures beamed to Earth by the Messenger spacecraft strongly suggest that frozen water — and perhaps other frozen substances — coat portions of impact craters near the planet's north and south poles. Permanently enshrouded in shadow, these surfaces are typically 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

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Giant black holes a window into origins of earliest galaxies

Astronomers have discerned evidence for supermassive black holes at the hearts of some of the earliest galaxies detected to date – budding when the universe was between 700 million and 950 million years old.

The detection, announced Wednesday and appearing in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, already is hinting at answers to longstanding riddles surrounding the origin of supermassive black holes, which lurk in the cores of all galaxies.

The observations also are helping to tease out the role these black holes in galactic centers might have played in lighting up the universe following an early period known as the "dark ages."


The results mark "the first time we've caught black holes in the act of vigorously growing in the early universe," along with their host galaxies, says Mitchell Begelman, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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Shuttle’s End Leaves NASA a Pension Bill

The nation’s space agency plans to spend about half a billion dollars next year to replenish the pension fund of the contractor that has supplied thousands of workers to the space shuttle program.

The shuttle program accounts for a vast majority of the business of United Space Alliance, originally a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. With the demise of the shuttle program, United Space Alliance will be left without a source of revenue to keep its pension plan afloat. So the company wants to terminate its family of pension plans, covering 11,000 workers and retirees, and continue as a smaller, nimbler concern to compete for other contracts.

Normally, a company that lost a lifeblood contract would have little choice but to declare bankruptcy and ask the federal insurer, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, to take over its pensions. But that insurer limits benefits, meaning not everyone gets as much as they had been promised. United Space Alliance’s plan also allows participants to take their pensions as a single check and includes retiree health benefits, neither of which would be permitted by the pension insurer.

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NASA's Curiosity Continues Mobility Checkouts

Spacecraft specialists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., have been putting the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, through various tests in preparation for shipment to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida this month.

A new set of images online shows the rover maneuvering its robotic arm and driving in JPL's Spacecraft Assembly Facility, where it was built. The images are available at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/multimedia/index.html .

Assembly and testing work is on track for launch of the Mars Science Laboratory from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., during the period from Nov. 25 to Dec. 18, 2011.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. This mission will land Curiosity on Mars in August 2012.

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Some NASA boosters question need for new rocket

By month’s end, NASA plans to present Congress with a design for a new rocket that one day could take astronauts to the moon or beyond.

Several options are on the table, including one that recycles key parts of the space shuttle, set to retire in July. But as engineers ponder designs, even some NASA boosters are posing a deeper question:

Why even build it?

With Congress struggling to control spending, critics are wondering whether the country needs a new spaceship that lacks both a mission and destination except for occasional trips to the International Space Station.

"I don’t think we need it. I don’t think we can afford to operate it. I think it will be rarely used and expensive to maintain," said Alan Stern, a former NASA associate administrator. "The most likely possibility is that it (the rocket) is unfortunately going to collapse under its own weight in a couple years."

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Centennial-based ULA gives a boost to NASA mission to study ocean salinity

When NASA's Aquarius satellite lifted off Friday to study ocean salinity, it was aboard a Delta II rocket provided by United Launch Alliance.

The Centennial-based company has six launches planned this year, with four involving Colorado aerospace firms.

"We typically spend two to four years on a given mission, with a lot of the early work occurring at our facility," said Jim Sponnick, ULA's vice president of mission operations. "So it is beneficial they are immediate to the area."

The launch schedule calls for ULA to tap its range of rockets. Destinations and weight decide what rocket and configurations are used, Sponnick said.

On the large side is the Atlas V rocket that will launch the Juno mission on Aug. 5. The 8,000-pound spacecraft was designed and built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. in south Jefferson County. The NASA mission aims to understand Jupiter's origin and evolution.

GRAIL's twin spacecraft, due for launch Sept. 8 on a Delta II, also were designed and built by Lockheed. Weighing 800 pounds together, the spacecraft will study the moon's gravitational field.

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NASA Satellite Snaps 3 Billionth Photo of Earth

A 5-year-old NASA satellite has hit a mindboggling milestone high above Earth: The spacecraft snapped its 3 billionth image of the planet … that's right, 3 billion.

The prolific Earth-observation satellite, called CALIPSO, took the image on June 2 using laser and infrared ranging instruments and has since gone on to take more imagery. A June 3 image from the satellite shows a vertical look at the massive smoke plume from the wildfires in Arizona.

Since its 2006 launch, the CALIPSO satellite has traveled more than 750 million miles (1.2 million kilometers) as it orbits the Earth, NASA officials said in a statement. The amount of data and images it has recorded would fill 10,500 DVDs or 75,000 CDs, they added

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NASA Selects Energid Technologies

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have funded Energid Technologies Corporation to develop a proxy digital simulation for lunar and planetary rovers.

To calculate contact among bodies and modeling interactions, the new proxy simulation uses a novel architecture. Algorithm being an especially important component, it allows each type of interaction to use a different algorithm. Two-year funding for this effort follows Energid's demonstration of the viability of simulating a rover and integrating with NASA's tools, during a six-month proof-of-concept effort. Using Energid's existing software, the approach relies on new modeling algorithms.

"There is no universal robotics simulation algorithm," said Chalongrath Pholsiri, principal engineer at Energid Technologies. "A wheel rotating against soft soil or regolith responds differently from a metal body striking a rock. We have many powerful technologies to apply to create the proxy simulation for NASA and we will discover more over the next two years."

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NASA Releases First Pic of Shuttle Docked at Space Station

NASA on Tuesday released the first-ever image of a space shuttle docked at the International Space Station.

The image, which shows the space shuttle Endeavour docked at the ISS, was taken from the Soyuz TMA-20 after it left the station on May 23. Expedition 27 crew member Paolo Nespoli snapped the shot from an altitude of approximately 200 miles as he and Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev and NASA astronaut Cady Coleman headed back to Earth.

They trio landed in Kazakhstan later that day after spending 159 days in space, and their spacecraft was taken to Moscow for routine post-landing analysis. NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, then processed the imagery, which will be posted on NASA's Web site as it becomes available. For more, see the slideshow below.

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Edge of Solar System Filled with Bubbles, NASA Says

The edge of our solar system is filled with a turbulent sea of magnetic bubbles, according to new NASA research.

Scientists made the discovery by using a new computer model, which is based on data from NASA's twin Voyager probes. The unmanned Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, which launched in 1977, are plying the outer reaches of our solar system, a region known as the heliosheath.

The new discovery suggests that researchers will need to revise their views about the solar system's edge, NASA officials said. A more detailed picture of this region is key to our understanding of how fast-moving particles known as cosmic rays are spawned, and how they reach near-Earth space.

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Ga. Tech to host NASA symposium on shuttle program

Georgia Tech is hosting a symposium this week to explore the agency's space shuttle program, which ends soon.

The event is Monday through Wednesday at the university's Global Learning Center. It will bring together international scientists, engineers, mission designers, policymakers and others to talk about shuttle missions and the future of space exploration.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will open the symposium on Tuesday. Other speakers include astronauts Steve Hawley and Shannon Lucid and NASA deputy chief technologist Michael Gazarik.

Just one flight remains in the U.S. shuttle program with a targeted launch of July 8.

The five shuttles - Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour - have flown more than 130 times and carried more than 360 people into space.

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The sky’s the limit for NASA research

Business story “Go big, or go to war with the weapons you have” revealed the stunning fact “that between 1995 and 2009, the Pentagon spent more than $32 billion on weapons programs that were eventually canceled.” The programs were all for the Army.

In the same period, NASA was forced to cancel development efforts that had been underway for years to build space telescopes that could detect and study Earth-like planets around the stars closest to the sun. The problem was that these telescopes would cost a few billion dollars apiece, and NASA could not afford them.

Astronomers now know that Earth-like planets are commonplace — alien life is likely to exist in our neighborhood of the galaxy. Perhaps the Pentagon should start protecting us from a possible alien threat by surveillance of nearby habitable planets. If so, NASA (for whom I chair an advisory astrophysics subcommittee) has a few ideas on how to proceed.

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Space shuttle Endeavour not expected to arrive in L.A. until late 2012

The space shuttle Endeavour is expected to arrive at its permanent retirement home in Los Angeles in the latter half of 2012, the president of the California Science Center said Wednesday.

Initially, museum officials had said the shuttle could arrive by the end of this year. But NASA officials said it would take longer to detoxify the space shuttle and prepare it for retirement. Complicating the timeline was the delay in Endeavour's final mission and preparation for the upcoming mission of the shuttle Atlantis in July, which will mark the last voyage of the space shuttle program.

In the meantime, Jeffrey Rudolph, the California Science Center's president, said the museum, in Exposition Park, is making progress raising $28.8 million to pay for Endeavour's cleanup at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and to bring it to Los Angeles.

"We're not there yet. But we're feeling good about it," Rudolph said of the fundraising effort.

Parsons, a global engineering firm based in Pasadena, is donating its services to cover the logistics of transporting the orbiter from LAX to the museum grounds. The orbiter will have to be routed on streets that are not obstructed by freeway overpasses, Rudolph said.

Rudolph said it would have been impractical for NASA to have Endeavour land at Edwards Air Force Base in California, because much of the equipment to detoxify the shuttle is in Florida.

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NASA's Super Cooling Technology

NASA recently formed technical partnerships with the U.S. Air Force and National Renewable Energy Laboratory to address thermal-control concerns in microprocessors. The problem is as old as the days of the integrated circuit which appeared in the 1960's and is the basis for the modern computer age. The more advanced the electronics, the more power it use and the hotter it gets. This can easily lead to overheating which can cause malfunction.


The new EHD thermal control will be demonstrated in June on NASA's Terrier-Improved Orion rocket mission, which is flying the Small Rocket/Spacecraft Technology (SMART) platform. This new microsatellite measures about 16 inches in diameter and was specifically designed to give scientific users less expensive access to space.

According to NASA, the main objective of the EHD demonstration is showing that a prototype pump can withstand the extreme launch loads as the rocket lifts off and hurtles toward space. Should it survive the vibration, the technology will have achieved a major milestone in its development. Another test is set to 2013 when the EHD will be taken into the International Space Station and tested as part of a long-term operation.

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Shuttle Astronauts Serenaded by Song Contest Winners

The astronauts on the space shuttle Endeavour woke up this evening to a song that was written specially for the crew who are flying the orbiter on its final mission.

A NASA contest sought original song entries to awaken the astronauts during Endeavour's STS-134 flight. The competition received 1,350 submissions, and NASA selected 10 songs as finalists before opening it up to six weeks of public voting. [The Astronaut's Playlist: Groovy Songs for Space Travelers]

"More than 1.5 million votes were cast to determine the first and second place songs," NASA officials said.

The second place winner, "Dreams You Give" by Brian Plunkett from Halfway, Mo., earned 612,959 votes, or 38.8 percent. Plunkett's song was played at 6:57 p.m. EDT (2257 GMT) tonight (May 30) to wake up Endeavour's six-astronaut crew.

"We're looking forward to another busy day and hopefully getting home tomorrow," Endeavour's commander Mark Kelly said after being woken with the tune. "That song was the second place winner in the wakeup music contest. Congratulations to Brian Plunkett from Halfway, Mo."

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How NASA's OSIRIS-REx probe got its name

If Osiris, ancient Egyptian god of the underworld, and Tyrannosaurus rex, king of the dinosaurs, somehow had a baby, and that baby was an asteroid-bound spacecraft, it would be named OSIRIS-REx.

Yes, OSIRIS-REx is the acronym for the vessel that, NASA just announced, will launch in 2016, travel four years to an asteroid, chip off some rock samples and bring them back to Earth. The combination robot-spacecraft is the brainchild of researchers at the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Lab. And so is its funky name.

The deputy principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx team, Dante Lauretta, is a mythology buff. "Why he has this interest I have no idea," principal investigator Michael Drake told Life's Little Mysteries, "but he was doodling on a pad and trying to capture the principal themes of what we are trying to do with this mission — study life origins, identify resources, planetary security in the form of asteroid deflection — and he realized he got the name of Osiris out of that, an ancient god of Egypt who may have been one of the first pharaohs."

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U of A and NASA looking at asteroid headed for Earth

The University of Arizona won an $800 million contract from NASA to go to an asteroid.

The OSIRIS-REx project will take a sample from Asteroid 1999RQ36 which scientists hope unlocks the origins of life on Earth, but that's not all.

"It actually has the highest probability of any object to hit the Earth in the year 2182," OSIRIS-REx Principal Investigator Michael Drake explained.

It's clearly not an eminent threat and not the main focus of the mission, but it's something NASA and U of A scientists are looking for from OSIRIS-REx.

Drake told KOLD News 13, "To understand how we'd actually mitigate against a dinosaur type ending impact. We don't want to go the way of the dinosaurs."

So to avoid that scenario, NASA and the U of A will send OSIRIS-REx to the asteroid and collect samples to get us some much needed asteroid answers.

"In spite of Bruce Willis, we do not know how to deflect these things. We will learn scientifically the properties we need to decide how to deflect them," Drake said.

While they try to figure out how to send the asteroid in another direction, scientists believe this mission is just the beginning.

Peter Smith, a scientist on the mission said, "It's the precursor to human missions to an asteroid and how exciting would that be. Can you imagine being tethered to your spacecraft and floating over to the asteroid and picking up samples."

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NASA to launch asteroid mission in 2016

Earlier this week, NASA announced plans to use the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle as the basis for a new spacecraft designed for deep space travel called the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV). The MPCV is expected to be the primary spacecraft for NASA’s manned mission to a nearby asteroid in 2020, as set forth by President Obama last year. To prepare for that mission, NASA plans to launch a new science mission to an asteroid in 2016. The mission will be called Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer, or OSIRIS-REx.

It will take OSIRIS-REx four years to travel to 1999 RQ36, a near-Earth asteroid. Once within three miles of the asteroid, the spacecraft will perform a comprehensive surface mapping over a period of six months. That mapping will allow for a location to be selected which OSIRIS-REx will approach to put the site within range of the spacecraft’s robotic arm which will be extended to collect two ounces of material. That material will be stored in a capsule, similar to the one used by the Stardust spacecraft to collect comet particles. The asteroid material will be returned to Earth and is expected to arrive in 2023 at which time it will be analyzed for the presence of organic molecules, key ingredients in creating life, which have been found in previous meteorite and comet samples.

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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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Space Station Returns 3 Crew Members to Earth

The International Space Station will release two astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut, returning them to earth tonight after more than five months living and working in orbit.

Russian cosmonaut Dmitry Kondratyev, Expedition 27 commander, and astronauts Catherine (Cady) Coleman of NASA and Paolo Nespoli of Italy will be landing their Russian-built Soyuz space capsule somewhere in Central Asia, probably on the steppes of Kazakhstan.

Kondratyev, Coleman and Nespoli will depart from the space station while the space shuttle Endeavour and its six-astronaut crew are docked at the orbiting laboratory. Endeavour is being retired following this, its last mission. The shuttle's team is half way through a 16-day mission to aid in the space station's day-to-day following the end of NASA's space shuttle program.

"I think we've done a lot of great science, and certainly I think the space station is in a really good state for the future," Coleman said, according to Space.com.

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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 postpones Endeavour launch until 16 May

This is the latest in a series of delays since the shuttle's launch on 29 April was scrapped due to problems with its hydraulic systems. After the initial postponement, the agency targeted May 2, then May 8, and now mid-May at the earliest. Nasa managers have got to be worried that each subsequent delay is threatening the space shuttle programme's last ever launch, that of Atlantis, which is currently slated for 28 June.

"Kennedy [Space Center] technicians are continuing work to resolve an issue in a heater circuit associated with Endeavour's hydraulic system that resulted in the [April 29] launch postponement," Nasa said in a release on Friday. "Technicians determined the failure was inside an aft load control assembly, which is a switchbox in the shuttle's aft compartment, and possibly its associated electrical wiring."

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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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Shuttle will launch no earlier than May 10

Shuttle Endeavour won't set sail on its final flight before next Tuesday, May 10, at the earliest as Kennedy Space Center teams work to repair an electrical problem that scrubbed last Friday's launch attempt.

NASA had hoped a second attempt might be possible as soon as Sunday, but determined it would take about two more days than originally thought to ready the shuttle for another countdown.

"It became apparent Monday that more time was required," said Allard Beutel, a KSC spokesman.

Friday's launch scrubbed when heaters on a fuel line feeding part of the shuttle's hydraulic power system failed to turn on, a problem that could have led to a fire during flight.

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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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NASA's Voyager Probes to Leave Solar System by 2016

It may be decades before humanity sets foot on Mars, but we're only five years away from sampling the vast stretches of interstellar space beyond our solar system for the first time, researchers say.

NASA's twin unmanned Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977, are streaking toward the edge of the solar system at around 37,000 mph (60,000 kph). At that rate, they'll probably pop out of our sun's sphere of influence and into interstellar space by 2016 or so, according to mission scientists.

"They are about to break free of the solar system," Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., said during a media teleconference yesterday (April 28). "We are trying to get outside of our bubble, into interstellar space, to directly measure what is there."

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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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NASA Awards Knowledge Sharing and Curriculum Contract

NASA selected InuTeq, LLC in Greenbelt, Md., for a follow-on contract award for support services for the agency's Office of the Chief Engineer's Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership (APPEL).

InuTeq, LLC is a Small Business Administration 8(a)-certified small disadvantaged business. The company will provide services for developing NASA's technical workforce in systems engineering, engineering, and program and project management.

InuTeq also will provide curriculum development and knowledge sharing services; support for international collaboration; implementation of e-Learning into the APPEL program; and publish the Academy Sharing Knowledge Magazine.

The contract period of performance is five years, including options, with a maximum total value of $35,884,987.

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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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NASA clears shuttle Endeavour for April 29 launch

The shuttle Endeavour was cleared for a launch attempt on April 29 to deliver a new class of physics instrument to the International Space Station on NASA's next-to-last shuttle flight, officials said Tuesday.

Liftoff of the 134th shuttle mission is scheduled for 3:47 p.m. EDT from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The all-veteran crew is led by Mark Kelly, husband of Arizona Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who is recovering from a January 8 shooting that killed six people and injured 12 others.

Pending approval from her doctors, Giffords, who has not been seen publicly since the attack outside a Tucson, Arizona, grocery store, plans to attend the launch, Kelly has said.

The primary purpose of the flight is to deliver the $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, or AMS, particle detector, an instrument designed to detect dark matter, antimatter and other exotic phenomena.

"It has the potential of returning really Earth-shattering science," said NASA's Bill Gerstenmaier.

A team of 600 scientists from 16 nations, including China and Taiwan, are partners in the project.

After installing AMS the Endeavour astronauts will turn their attention to four spacewalks and other tasks to help get the space station ready for operations without shuttle support. The station is a $100 billion project of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada that has been under construction since 1998, 220 miles above Earth.

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NASA awards $270M to spacecraft builders

NASA on Monday awarded almost $270 million to developers of four U.S. spacecraft that are the frontrunners to fly astronauts after the shuttle.

Two capsules, a space plane and a gumdrop-shaped spacecraft were selected under a program seeking to develop commercial vehicles to taxi astronauts to the International Space Station or other destinations by the middle of the decade.

After two more shuttle flights, NASA will rely on Russian spacecraft for rides to the space station until a U.S. commercial service becomes available.

"We're committed to safely transporting U.S. astronauts on American-made spacecraft and ending the outsourcing of this work to foreign governments," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said in a statement. "These agreements are significant milestones in NASA's plans to take advantage of American ingenuity to get to low-Earth orbit, so we can concentrate our resources on deep space exploration."

NASA hopes privately run crew transportation will cost less than a government-run system, allow the agency to focus on building a giant rocket and capsule for exploration and help spur a market for commercial spaceflight.

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Final Landings for NASA’s Space Shuttles — and some planning thoughts

The news of the decision was made last week. Fierce competition for the three remaining Space Transport System (STS) vehicles — “Space Shuttles” in non NASA speak — which have been in orbit, as well as the engineless Enterprise which flew in Earth’s atmosphere but not designed for orbital missions — was had though the cost to each museum would be high. Estimated costs are around $28 million USD to render each shuttle safe for public display and transport with the added hefty requirement to display the each shuttle indoors.

Here are the locations with some added thoughts:

STS Atlantis will go to the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Cape Canaveral, Florida. I am not sure if the existing buildings there will house her, or not. Getting Atlantis to KSC will be easy as she has been routinely flown there in order to accomplish her missions but getting her to the display site will need some attention.

STS Discovery is destined for the National Air & Space Museum Steven F Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia near Washington DC. This museum is the current home for STS Enterprise which will be transported to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City, New York. The Udvar-Hazy Center is located in the southeastern corner of Dulles International Airport and the design of the museum reflects that of an extremely large aircraft hangar. Extracting the Enterprise and inserting the Discovery should be a straight forward affair though one that would be interesting to watch. Dulles may experience a unique event, NASA’s shuttle carrying Boeing B-747 landing with one shuttle and taking off with another.

STS Endevour has been slated to retire to the California Science Center in Los Angeles, California. This museum has a Lockheed A-12 “Blackbird” nicknamed individually”Titanium Goose”* on outside display along with a Douglas DC-8 also on outside display. The museum is not on an airfield — getting the Endevour to LAX will be easy enough to accomplish but taking her over 10 miles (16km) of urban roadways will be challenging and a new building will be required.

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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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Father of Mission Control honored by NASA

For more than four decades, building 30 at NASA’s Johnson Space Center has been home to Mission Control. It still is, but on Thursday it took on a new name to honor the “father of Mission Control,” Christopher C. Kraft Jr.

Kraft began his space flight career soon after graduating from Virginia Tech University in 1944 with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NASA’s predecessor agency.

In 1958 he volunteered for the Space Task Group, the organization charged with creating what is NASA today.

The group created the first flight manuals and developed the procedures for the operation of a never-before concept, a central control center.

New concept

“A control center was a new idea,” former Gemini and Apollo program flight director and Kraft protégée Glynn Lunney said during ceremonies in front of the mission control center. “Whenever there was a picture of a control center, it was ours. And now I don’t think you can go into a building that people don’t have a control center in it. What you see behind us is a pretty big building, but it’s not so much the building, the concrete and the consoles, it’s the idea behind it.

“This represents a pretty profound idea and Chris brought it to us.”

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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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Who Will Get Shuttles? NASA Naming Winners Tuesday

NASA will be announcing where the retiring space shuttles will go on display once the program ends this summer.

Twenty-one museums and centers around the country put in bids for the spaceships. NASA is disclosing the winners Tuesday on the 30th anniversary of the first space shuttle launch in 1981.

The shuttle program is winding down with only two more flights left. Shuttle Discovery ended its flying career last month and it's going to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Up for grabs are shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis and the prototype Enterprise.

Some of the hot contenders are visitor centers at Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center, the Air Force Museum in Ohio and museums in New York City, Seattle and Chicago.

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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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Expedition 27 Resumes Busy Schedule With New Crew Members

The six-member Expedition 27 crew is back to work after docking activities on Wednesday and an off-duty day Thursday. They reviewed roles, responsibilities and emergency procedures and conducted the usual complement of science and maintenance activities. New flight engineers Alexander Samokutyaev and Andrey Borisenko were busy inside the Russian segment of the International Space Station. Samokutyaev worked on a science experiment that measures radiation inside the orbital laboratory. Borisenko unloaded cargo from the newly docked Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft. Flight Engineer Ron Garan, who also joined Expedition 27 on Wednesday night, worked in the American side of the space station. Garan checked out the Water Processing Assembly in the Destiny laboratory and worked on cooling loops in the Columbus laboratory.

NASA spacecraft join in cosmic observation

NASA says three of its orbiting spacecraft have teamed up to study a puzzling cosmic blast of energy, one that has lasted more than a week.

The Swift Gamma Burst Mission spacecraft, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory have been observing a phenomenon scientists say is brighter, longer-lasting and more variable than anything they've seen before, a NASA release said Thursday.

Astronomers say the unusual blast is likely the result of a star wandering too close to its galaxy's central black hole where intense gravitation tidal are tearing the star apart, and the in-falling gas is streaming toward the hole.

The model suggests the spinning black hole has formed an outflowing jet of X-rays and gamma rays along its rotational axis that is pointed in our direction.

"The best explanation at the moment is that we happen to be looking down the barrel of this jet," said Andrew Levan at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, who led the Chandra observations.

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Russian Soyuz spacecraft docks at International Space Station

Russian Soyuz Commander Alexander Samokutyayev, NASA Flight Engineer Ron Garan and cosmonaut Andrey Borisenko joined three other crew members on the International Space Station.

It was the first time in space for Russians Samokutyayev and Borisenko. The Soyuz launch on April 6 came less than a week before the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic flight from the same, once secret Baikonur launch facility to become the first human in orbit.

The successful launch of the Soyuz spacecraft will likely ease concerns over reliance on the single-use Russian spacecraft as NASA mothballs its shuttle fleet later this year.

Lift off had been postponed from March 30 due to a glitch in the upgraded Soyuz's communication system.

The three men will spend six months aboard the station conducting about 40 experiments as part of the 100 billion dollar project.

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NASA delays shuttle

The 25th and final flight of shuttle Endeavour will slip 10 days to April 29, clearing the way for the previously scheduled launch of a robotic Russian space freighter and its arrival at the International Space Station.

The high-profile shuttle mission, commanded by the husband of critically wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, coincidentally will take place the same day as the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

"Somehow I don't think that factored into (shuttle launch date) planning," said Allard Beutel, a spokesman for NASA's Kennedy Space Center. "It is what it is."

Endeavour and six astronauts aim to deliver a $2 billion cosmic ray detector that could shed new light on the origin, evolution and fate of the universe.

There has been a high level of human interest in the mission because Giffords, who was shot in the head during a Jan. 8 assassination attempt, is making a remarkable recovery and hopes to attend the launch.

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Scientists ponder sun's next move from quiet phase

Could a cooler sun, which some solar astronomers now predict, save us from global warming?

The short answer is "no," scientists say.

"That would be convenient and would make a lot of people happy," said Greg Kopp, a physicist with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado.

Kopp notes that the sun has been in a quiet phase during the last decade's rise in global temperatures.

"Human-caused climate effects are far outweighing the solar effects currently," said Kopp, who is an instrument scientist for a NASA satellite that measures the sun's heat output, or total solar irradiance.

Satellites have measured the sun's radiation at the point where it reaches Earth's atmosphere for 32 years. The average difference between energy at the peak and minimum of solar cycles is less than 0.1 percent.

That flux is easily absorbed and balanced by the Earth's oceans, Kopp said, and has a minimal effect on the Earth's temperature.

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Villagers’ son prepares for historic space shuttle launch, shares details in NASA press conference

Two years ago, Village of Duval residents Steve and Beth Feustel stood witness as their son Andrew prepared for his inaugural voyage into space.

Soon, Andrew Feustel will return to space, this time serving as lead spacewalker during Space Shuttle Endeavour’s

STS-134 mission to the International Space Station. According to NASA, the mission’s targeted launch date is April 19 from Kennedy Space Center.

During a Thursday morning press conference held at KSC, Feustel and the rest of Endeavour’s crew shared their thoughts on the upcoming mission, the preparations that are now under way and their activity since arriving at KSC on Tuesday evening.

During the mission, crew members will be delivering the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 to the International Space Station, according to NASA.

Space shuttle Commander Mark Kelly described the AMS as “one of the premier science experiments of the 21st century.”

Information from NASA explains that the AMS searches for “various types of unusual matter by measuring cosmic rays.”

“We are pretty excited with what the results are going to be,” Kelly said, explaining that the AMS “could be teaching us things about the universe that are completely unexpected.”

Feustel is well prepared to tackle the challenge. Upon introducing each of his crew members, Kelly noted Feustel’s previous spacewalks during Space Shuttle Atlantis’

STS-125 mission to make repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope.

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