Scientists Discover the First Earth-Sized Rocky Planet

Astronomers have discovered the first Earth-sized planet outside the solar system that has a rocky composition like that of Earth. Kepler-78b whizzes around its host star every 8.5 hours, making it a blazing inferno and not suitable for life as we know it. The results are published in two papers in the journal Nature.
"The news arrived in grand style with the message: 'Kepler-10b has a baby brother,'" said Natalie Batalha, Kepler mission scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.  Batalha led the team that discovered Kepler-10b, a larger but also rocky planet identified by the Kepler spacecraft.
"The message expresses the joy of knowing that Kepler's family of exoplanets is growing," Batalha reflects. "It also speaks of progress. The Doppler teams are attaining higher precision, measuring masses of smaller planets at each turn.  This bodes well for the broader goal of one day finding evidence of life beyond Earth."
Kepler-78b was discovered using data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which for four years simultaneously and continuously monitored more than 150,000 stars looking for telltale dips in their brightness caused by crossing, or transiting, planets.
Two independent research teams then used ground-based telescopes to confirm and characterize Kepler-78b. To determine the planet's mass, the teams employed the radial velocity method to measure how much the gravitation tug of an orbiting planet causes its star to wobble. Kepler, on the other hand, determines the size or radius of a planet by the amount of starlight blocked when it passes in front of its host star.
A handful of planets the size or mass of Earth have been discovered. Kepler-78b is the first to have both a measured mass and size. With both quantities known, scientists can calculate a density and determine what the planet is made of.
Kepler-78b is 1.2 times the size of Earth and 1.7 times more massive, resulting in a density that is the same as Earth's. This suggests that Kepler-78b is also made primarily of rock and iron. Its star is slightly smaller and less massive than the sun and is located about 400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.
One team led by Andrew Howard from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, made follow-up observations using the W. M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. More information on their research can be found here.
The other team led by Francesco Pepe from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, did their ground-base work at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma in the Canary Islands. More information on their research can be found here.
This result will be one of many discussed next week at the second Kepler science conference Nov. 4-8 at Ames. More than 400 astrophysicists from Australia, China, Europe, Latin America and the US will convene to present their latest results using publicly accessible data from Kepler. To learn more about the conference, please visit the website.

NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Approaches 'Cooperstown'

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity completed its first two-day autonomous drive Monday, bringing the mobile laboratory to a good vantage point for pictures useful in selecting the next target the rover will reach out and touch.
When it drives autonomously, the rover chooses a safe route to designated waypoints by using its onboard computer to analyze stereo images that it takes during pauses in the drive. Prior to Monday, each day’s autonomous drive came after a segment earlier that day that was exactly charted by rover team members using images sent to Earth. The Sunday-Monday drive was the first time Curiosity ended an autonomous driving segment, then continued autonomously from that same point the next day.
The drives brought Curiosity to about 262 feet (about 80 meters) from "Cooperstown," an outcrop bearing candidate targets for examination with instruments on the rover's arm. The moniker, appropriate for baseball season, comes from a named rock deposit in New York. Curiosity has not used its arm-mounted instruments to examine a target since departing an outcrop called "Darwin" on Sept. 22. Researchers used the arm's camera and spectrometer for four days at Darwin; they plan to use them on just one day at Cooperstown.
Starting to use two-day autonomous driving and the shorter duration planned for examining Cooperstown serve to accelerate Curiosity's progress toward the mission's main destination: Mount Sharp.
In July, Curiosity began a trek of about 5.3 miles (8.6 kilometers), starting from the area where it worked for the first half of 2013, headed to an entry point to Mount Sharp. Cooperstown is about one-third of the way along the route. The team used images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to plot the route and choose a few points of potential special interest along the way, including Darwin and Cooperstown.
"What interests us about this site is an intriguing outcrop of layered material visible in the orbital images," said Kevin Lewis of Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., a participating scientist for the mission who has been a leader in planning the Cooperstown activities. "We want to see how the local layered outcrop at Cooperstown may help us relate the geology of Yellowknife Bay to the geology of Mount Sharp."
The team is using images taken from the vantage point reached on Monday to decide what part of the Cooperstown outcrop to investigate with the arm-mounted instruments.
The first day of the two-day drive began Sunday with about 180 feet (55 meters) on a southwestward path that rover drivers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., evaluated ahead of time as safe. The autonomous-driving portion began where that left off, with Curiosity evaluating the best way to reach designated waypoints ahead. The vehicle drove about 125 feet (38 meters) autonomously on Sunday.
"We needed to store some key variables in the rover's non-volatile memory for the next day," said JPL rover driver John Wright. Curiosity's volatile memory is cleared when the rover goes into energy-conserving sleep mode overnight.
The stored variables included what direction the rover was driving when it ended the first day's drive, and whether it had classified the next 10 feet (3 meters) in that direction as safe for driving. When it began its second day of driving, Curiosity resumed evaluating the terrain ahead for safe driving and drove 105 feet (32 meters), all autonomously.
This new capability enables driving extra days during multi-day activity plans that the rover team develops on Fridays and before holidays.
A key activity planned for the week of Nov. 4 is uploading a new version of onboard software -- the third such upgrade since landing.  These upgrades allow continued advances in the rover's capabilities. The version prepared for upload next week includes, for example, improvements in what information the rover can store overnight to resume autonomous driving the next day. It also expands capabilities for using the robotic arm while parked on slopes. The team expects that to be crucial for investigations on Mount Sharp.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the project's Curiosity rover.
More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the mission on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

Watching Earth’s Winds, On a Shoestring

Built with spare parts and without a moment to spare, the International Space Station (ISS)-RapidScat isn't your average NASA Earth science mission.
Short for Rapid Scatterometer, ISS-RapidScat will monitor ocean winds from the vantage point of the space station. It will join a handful of other satellite scatterometer missions that make essential measurements used to support weather and marine forecasting, including the tracking of storms and hurricanes. It will also help improve our understanding of how interactions between Earth's ocean and atmosphere influence our climate.
Scientists study ocean winds for a variety of reasons. Winds over the ocean are an important part of weather systems, and in severe storms such as hurricanes they can inflict major damage. Ocean storms drive coastal surges, which are a significant hazard for populations. At the same time, by driving warm surface ocean water away from the coast, ocean winds cause nutrient-rich deep water to well up, providing a major source of food for coastal fisheries. Changes in ocean wind also help us monitor large-scale changes in Earth's climate, such as El Niño.
Scatterometers work by safely bouncing low-energy microwaves - the same kind used at high energy to warm up food in your kitchen - off the surface of Earth. In this case, the surface is not land, but the ocean. By measuring the strength and direction of the microwave echo, ISS-RapidScat will be able to determine how fast, and in what direction, ocean winds are blowing.
"Microwave energy emitted by a radar instrument is reflected back to the radar more strongly when the surface it illuminates is rougher," explains Ernesto Rodríguez, principal investigator for ISS-RapidScat at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "When wind blows over water, it causes waves to develop along the direction of wind. The stronger the wind, the larger the waves."
ISS-RapidScat continues a legacy of measuring ocean winds from space that began in 1978 with the launch of NASA's SeaSat satellite. Most recently, NASA's QuikScat scatterometer, which launched in 1999, gave us a dynamic picture of the world's ocean winds.
But when QuikScat lost its ability to produce ocean wind measurements in 2009, science suffered from the loss of the data. In the summer of 2012, an opportunity arose to fly a scatterometer instrument on the space station. ISS-RapidScat was the result.
Most scatterometer-carrying satellites fly in what's called a sun-synchronous orbit around Earth. In other words, they cross Earth's equator at the same local time every orbit. The space station, however, will carry the ISS-RapidScat in a non-sun-synchronous orbit. This means the instrument will see different parts of the planet at different times of day, making measurements in the same spot within less than an hour before or after another instrument makes its own observations. These all-hour measurements will allow ISS-RapidScat to pick up the effects of the sun on ocean winds as the day progresses. In addition, the space station's coverage over the tropics means that ISS-RapidScat will offer extra tracking of storms that may develop into hurricanes or other tropical cyclones.

Anywhere the wind blows
"We'll be able to see how wind speed changes with the time of day," said Rodríguez. "ISS-RapidScat will link together all previous and current scatterometer missions, providing us with a more complete picture of how ocean winds change. Combined with data from the European ASCAT scatterometer mission, we'll be able to observe 90 percent of Earth's surface at least once a day, and in many places, several times a day."
ISS-RapidScat's near-global coverage of Earth's ocean -- within the space station's orbit inclination of 51.6 degrees north and south of the equator -- will make it an important tool for scientists who observe and predict Earth's weather. "Frequent observations of the winds over the ocean are used by meteorologists to improve weather and hurricane forecasts and by the operational weather communities to improve numerical weather models," said Rodríguez.
Space-based scatterometer instruments have been built before, but much of what makes ISS-RapidScat unusual is how it came to be. "Space Station Program Manager Michael Suffredini offered us a mounting location on the space station and a free ride on a SpaceX Dragon cargo resupply mission launching in early 2014," explained Howard Eisen, the ISS-RapidScat project manager at JPL. "So we had about 18 months to put together an entire mission."
This accelerated timeline is a blink of an eye at NASA, where the typical project is years or decades in the making.
Free ride
Next, Eisen and his team turned to getting creative and crafty with the mission's hardware. In lieu of using newly-designed instruments, which would be expensive and take too long to develop, ISS-RapidScat reuses leftover hardware originally built to test parts of the QuikScat mission. That process involved dusting off and testing pieces of equipment that hadn't seen the light of day since the 1990s. Fortunately the old hardware seems ship-shape and ready to go. "Even though they were spares, they've done an excellent job so far," said Simon Collins, ISS-RapidScat's instrument manager at JPL. Despite their age, the old parts are more than capable of collecting the ocean wind data that ISS-RapidScat need to be a success.
In addition to old spare parts, some new hardware was needed to interface this instrument to the space station and the Dragon spacecraft. ISS-RapidScat will use off-the-shelf, commercially-available computer hardware instead of the expensive, hardened-against-radiation computer chips that are typically used in space missions. "If there's an error or something because of radiation, all we have to do is reset the computer. It's what we call a managed risk," said Eisen. The radiation environment on the space station is much less severe than that experienced en route to Mars, for example, or in more traditional sun-synchronous orbits.
Science bounty
Cost-saving decisions like this are shaping up to make ISS-RapidScat an exceptional bargain of a space mission. "We're doing things differently, and we're trying to do them quickly and cheaply," said Eisen. Considering that the typical launch alone can cost $200 million, ISS-RapidScat's estimated $26 million price tag seems like a bargain. Last year, NASA estimated the cost of a new, free-flying scatterometer satellite mission at approximately $400 million.
The real challenges of getting ISS-RapidScat into space lie in the details. One of the major headaches of such a hurried schedule has been getting the special connectors that will allow ISS-RapidScat to physically attach to the International Space Station. "They're special robotically-mated connectors that haven't been made in years," Eisen said. "We're having to convince the company that produces these connectors to make us a small run in time for the mission, and it hasn't been easy."
The logistics of operating an instrument on the space station are also tricky. "Typically, spacecraft are designed for the instruments they carry," said Collins. "In this case, it's the other way around." For example, ISS-RapidScat's docking point on the space station faces outward toward space - not down toward Earth and the ocean that the instrument is looking at. The space station's flying angle will also change as new pieces are added to it, in response to changes in the station's drag profile. ISS-RapidScat's mount can compensate for both of these challenges.
Another concern the ISS-RapidScat team confronted early on was that one of the space station's docking ports lies squarely within the field of view of the scatterometer. "Bombarding astronauts and visiting supply vehicles with microwave radiation from the instruments was out of the question, and turning the instrument off when there were things docked there would take away too much science," explained Collins. The project's engineers instead devised a plan where the instrument avoids irradiating docking vessels, but continues to scan across the vast majority of its viewing range.
Rodríguez is confident that the reward for overcoming such difficulties will be a bounty of vital science information. "Because it uses much of the same hardware QuikScat did, ISS-RapidScat will allow us to continue the observations of ocean winds already started," said Rodriguez. "Extending this data record will help us observe and understand weather patterns and improve our preparedness for tropical cyclones."

NASA's Next Mission to Mars

NASA hosted a news briefing at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, Oct. 28, to discuss the upcoming launch of the agency's next mission to Mars and the first devoted to understanding the upper atmosphere of the Red Planet.
MAVEN is scheduled to launch at 1:28 p.m. EST Nov. 18 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. MAVEN's data will be used to study the history and change of Mars' atmosphere, climate, and planetary habitability.

Briefing participants were:
- John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters, Washington
- Jim Green, director, Planetary Science Division, Headquarters
- Lisa May, MAVEN program executive, Headquarters
- Kelly Fast, MAVEN program scientist, Headquarters
- Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN principal investigator, University of Colorado Boulder Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics
- David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Expedition 38 Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata

Meet JAXA astronaut Koichi Wakata, flight engineer for the Expedition 38 crew of the International Space Station.

Space Station Live: Oct. 28, 2013

The Space Station Live recap video for Oct. 28, 2013. Watch the full Space Station Live broadcast weekdays on NASA TV at 10 a.m. CDT. http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Expedition 38/39 Crew Departs for Kazakh Launch Site

Expedition 38/39 Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio of NASA and Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and backup crew members Max Suraev of Roscosmos, Reid Wiseman of NASA and Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency participated in traditional ceremonies at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, outside Moscow on Oct. 26. Afterward, they departed for the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to complete their training for the launch of Tyurin, Mastracchio and Wakata to the International Space Station in the Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft on Nov. 7, Kazakh time. The footage also features scenes of Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to fly in space, and Alexei Leonov, the first human to walk in space.

Goodbye Einstein

The Expedition 37 crew onboard the station closed the hatch and said goodbye to ATV-4 "Albert Einstein" cargo ship on Oct. 28. The ATV-4 resupply vehicle arrived at the station in mid-June, delivering more than 7 tons of food, fuel and supplies for the space station crew and . It will undock from the complex on Oct. 28 and will be deorbited Nov. 2 for a destructive entry back into the Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean.

NASA | LLCD: Proving Laser Communication Possible

On October 18th, 2013 the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) made history, transmitting data from lunar orbit to Earth at a rate of 622 Mbps. LLCD, flying aboard NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), is the first NASA mission dedicated to proving high-rate, two-way laser communications is possible. LLCD not only demonstrated a record-breaking download rate but also an error-free data upload rate of 20 Mbps. The laser beam was transmitted the 239,000 miles from the primary ground station at NASA's White Sands Complex in Las Cruces N.M., to the LADEE spacecraft in lunar orbit.

NASA's Orion Spacecraft Comes to Life

NASA's first-ever deep space craft, Orion, has been powered on for the first time, marking a major milestone in the final year of preparations for flight.
Orion's avionics system was installed on the crew module and powered up for a series of systems tests at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida last week. Preliminary data indicate Orion's vehicle management computer, as well as its innovative power and data distribution system -- which use state-of-the-art networking capabilities -- performed as expected.
All of Orion's avionics systems will be put to the test during its first mission, Exploration Flight Test-1(EFT-1), targeted to launch in the fall of 2014.
"Orion will take humans farther than we've ever been before, and in just about a year we're going to send the Orion test vehicle into space," said Dan Dumbacher, NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development in Washington. "The work we're doing now, the momentum we're building, is going to carry us on our first trip to an asteroid and eventually to Mars. No other vehicle currently being built can do that, but Orion will, and EFT-1 is the first step."
Orion provides the United States an entirely new human space exploration capability -- a flexible system that can to launch crew and cargo missions, extend human presence beyond low-Earth orbit, and enable new missions of exploration throughout our solar system.

 

EFT-1 is a two-orbit, four-hour mission that will send Orion, uncrewed, more than 3,600 miles above the Earth's surface --15 times farther than the International Space Station. During the test, Orion will return to Earth, enduring temperatures of 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit while traveling 20,000 miles per hour, faster than any current spacecraft capable of carrying humans. The data gathered during the flight will inform design decisions, validate existing computer models and guide new approaches to space systems development. The information gathered from this test also will aid in reducing the risks and costs of subsequent Orion flights.

"It’s been an exciting ride so far, but we're really getting to the good part now," said Mark Geyer, Orion program manager. "This is where we start to see the finish line. Our team across the country has been working hard to build the hardware that goes into Orion, and now the vehicle and all our plans are coming to life."
Throughout the past year, custom-designed components have been arriving at Kennedy for installation on the spacecraft -- more than 66,000 parts so far. The crew module portion already has undergone testing to ensure it will withstand the extremes of the space environment. Preparation also continues on the service module and launch abort system that will be integrated next year with the Orion crew module for the flight test.
The completed Orion spacecraft will be installed on a Delta IV heavy rocket for EFT-1. NASA is also developing a new rocket, the Space Launch System, which will power subsequent missions into deep space, beginning with Exploration Mission-1 in 2017.
For information about Orion and EFT-1, visit:

NASA Prepares to Launch First Mission to Explore Martian Atmosphere

A NASA spacecraft that will examine the upper atmosphere of Mars in unprecedented detail is undergoing final preparations for a scheduled 1:28 p.m. EST Monday, Nov. 18 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.
The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution mission (MAVEN) will examine specific processes on Mars that led to the loss of much of its atmosphere. Data and analysis could tell planetary scientists the history of climate change on the Red Planet and provide further information on the history of planetary habitability.
"The MAVEN mission is a significant step toward unraveling the planetary puzzle about Mars' past and present environments," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The knowledge we gain will build on past and current missions examining Mars and will help inform future missions to send humans to Mars."
The 5,410-pound spacecraft will launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V 401 rocket on a 10-month journey to Mars. After arriving at Mars in September 2014, MAVEN will settle into its elliptical science orbit.
Over the course of its one-Earth-year primary mission, MAVEN will observe all of Mars' latitudes. Altitudes will range from 93 miles to more than 3,800 miles. During the primary mission, MAVEN will execute five deep dip maneuvers, descending to an altitude of 78 miles. This marks the lower boundary of the planet's upper atmosphere.
"Launch is an important event, but it's only a step along the way to getting the science measurements," said Bruce Jakosky, principal investigator at the University of Colorado, Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (CU/LASP) in Boulder. "We're excited about the science we'll be doing, and are anxious now to get to Mars."
The MAVEN spacecraft will carry three instrument suites. The Particles and Fields Package, provided by the University of California at Berkeley with support from CU/LASP and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., contains six instruments to characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of Mars. The Remote Sensing Package, built by CU/LASP, will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, built by Goddard, will measure the composition of Mars’ upper atmosphere.
"When we proposed and were selected to develop MAVEN back in 2008, we set our sights on Nov. 18, 2013, as our first launch opportunity," said Dave Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at Goddard. "Now we are poised to launch on that very day. That's quite an accomplishment by the team."
MAVEN's principal investigator is based at CU/LASP. The university provided science instruments and leads science operations, as well as education and public outreach, for the mission.
Goddard manages the project and provided two of the science instruments for the mission. Lockheed Martin built the spacecraft and is responsible for mission operations. The University of California at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory provided science instruments for the mission. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., provides navigation support, Deep Space Network support, and Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.

Space Station Live: Oct. 25, 2013

The Space Station Live recap video for Oct. 25, 2013. Watch the full Space Station Live broadcast weekdays on NASA TV at 10 a.m. CDT. http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Back to Mission on This Week @NASA

With the government shutdown over, Administrator Charlie Bolden welcomed employees back to the work of NASA's mission. Bolden visited Goddard Space Flight Center with Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski for an update on several projects, including the Global Precipitation Measurement mission, the Magnetospheric Multiscale spacecraft and the James Webb Space Telescope. Bolden also visited Mississippi to thank employees at Stennis Space Center for their critical engineering and testing work on the agency's next generation rocket engines and the staff of the NASA Shared Services Center for their support of the agency during the shutdown. Also, While we were away, Cygnus Completes!, MAVEN in Waiting, SLS Tests, and More Arctic Sea Ice!

Carbon Worlds May be Waterless, Finds NASA Study

Planets rich in carbon, including so-called diamond planets, may lack oceans, according to NASA-funded theoretical research.
Our sun is a carbon-poor star, and as result, our planet Earth is made up largely of silicates, not carbon. Stars with much more carbon than the sun, on the other hand, are predicted to make planets chock full of carbon, and perhaps even layers of diamond.
By modeling the ingredients in these carbon-based planetary systems, the scientists determined they lack icy water reservoirs thought to supply planets with oceans.
"The building blocks that went into making our oceans are the icy asteroids and comets," said Torrence Johnson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif, who presented the results Oct. 7 at the American Astronomical Society Division of Planetary Sciences meeting in Denver. Johnson, a team member of several NASA planetary missions, including Galileo, Voyager and Cassini, has spent decades studying the planets in our own solar system.
"If we keep track of these building blocks, we find that planets around carbon-rich stars come up dry," he said.
Johnson and his colleagues say the extra carbon in developing star systems would snag the oxygen, preventing it from forming water.
"It's ironic that if carbon, the main element of life, becomes too abundant, it will steal away the oxygen that would have made water, the solvent essential to life as we know it," said Jonathan Lunine of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., a collaborator on the research.
One of the big questions in the study of planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, is whether or not they are habitable. Researchers identify such planets by first looking for those that are situated within the "habitable zone" around their parent stars, which is where temperatures are warm enough for water to pool on the surface. NASA's Kepler mission has found several planets within this zone, and researchers continue to scrutinize the Kepler data for candidates as small as Earth.
But even if a planet is found in this so-called "Goldilocks" zone, where oceans could, in theory, abound, is there actually enough water available to wet the surface? Johnson and his team addressed this question with planetary models based on measurements of our sun's carbon-to-oxygen ratio. Our sun, like other stars, inherited a soup of elements from the Big Bang and from previous generations of stars, including hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, silicon, carbon and oxygen.
"Our universe has its own top 10 list of elements," said Johnson, referring to the 10 most abundant elements in our universe.
These models accurately predict how much water was locked up in the form of ice early in the history of our solar system, billions of years ago, before making its way to Earth. Comets and/or the parent bodies of asteroids are thought to have been the main water suppliers, though researchers still debate their roles. Either way, the objects are said to have begun their journey from far beyond Earth, past a boundary called the "snow line," before impacting Earth and depositing water deep in the planet and on its surface.
When the researchers applied the planetary models to the carbon-rich stars, the water disappeared. "There's no snow beyond the snow line," said Johnson.
"All rocky planets aren't created equal," said Lunine. "So-called diamond planets the size of Earth, if they exist, will look totally alien to us: lifeless, ocean-less desert worlds."

un Emits Third Solar Flare in 2 Days

 UPDATE: Another solar flare erupted from the same area of the sun on Oct. 25, 2013,which peaked at 11:03 a.m. EDT. This flare is classified as an X2.1 class.

The sun emitted a significant solar flare, peaking at 4:01 a.m. EDT on Oct. 25, 2013. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This disrupts the radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing, anywhere from minutes to hours.

To see how this event may impact Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings.
This flare is classified as an X1.7 class flare. "X-class" denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc. In the past, X-class flares of this intensity have caused degradation or blackouts of radio communications for about an hour.
Increased numbers of flares are quite common at the moment, since the sun's normal 11-year activity cycle is currently near solar maximum conditions. Humans have tracked this solar cycle continuously since it was discovered in 1843, and it is normal for there to be many flares a day during the sun's peak activity. The first X-class flare of the current solar cycle occurred in February 2011. The largest X-class flare in this cycle was an X6.9 on Aug. 9, 2011.

Ghostly Specter Haunts the ‘Coldest Place in the Universe

At a cosmologically crisp one degree Kelvin (minus 458 degrees Fahrenheit), the Boomerang nebula is the coldest known object in the universe -- colder, in fact, than the faint afterglow of the Big Bang, the explosive event that created the cosmos.
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile have taken a new look at this object to learn more about its frigid properties and to determine its true shape, which has an eerily ghost-like appearance.
"This ultra-cold object is extremely intriguing and we're learning much more about its true nature with ALMA," said Raghvendra Sahai, a researcher and principal scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and lead author of a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal. “What seemed like a double lobe, or boomerang shape, from Earth-based optical telescopes, is actually a much broader structure that is expanding rapidly into space."
As originally observed with ground-based telescopes, this nebula appeared lopsided, which is how it got its name. Later observations with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope revealed a bow-tie-like structure. The new ALMA data, however, reveal that the Hubble image tells only part of the story, and the twin lobes seen in that image may actually be a trick of light as seen at visible wavelengths.
The researchers discovered a dense lane of millimeter-sized dust grains surrounding the star, which explains why its outer cloud has an hourglass shape in visible light. These minute dust grains have created a mask that shades a portion of the central star and allows its light to leak out only in narrow but opposite directions into the cloud, giving it an hourglass appearance.
"This is important for the understanding of how stars die and become planetary nebulas,” said Sahai. “Using ALMA, we were quite literally, and figuratively, able to shed new light on the death throes of a sun-like star."
The Boomerang nebula, located about 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, is a relatively young example of an object known as a planetary nebula. Planetary nebulas, contrary to their name, are actually the end-of-life phases of stars like our sun that have sloughed off their outer layers. What remains at their centers are white dwarf stars, which emit intense ultraviolet radiation that causes the gas in the nebulae to glow and emit light in brilliant colors.
Read the full ALMA release online at https://public.nrao.edu/news/pressreleases/alma-reveals-coldest-place-in-the-universe .
Additional authors on this paper include Wouter Vlemmings, Chalmers University of Technology, Onsala, Sweden; Patrick Huggins, New York University, New York; Lars-Ake Nyman, Joint ALMA Observatory, Santiago de Chile; and Yiannis Gonidakis, CSIRO, Australia Telescope National Facility.
ALMA, an international astronomy facility, is a partnership of Europe, North America and East Asia in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. ALMA construction and operations are led on behalf of Europe by European Southern Observatory, on behalf of North America by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), and on behalf of East Asia by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). The Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) provides the unified leadership and management of the construction, commissioning and operation of ALMA.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

Antarctic Ozone Hole Slightly Smaller than Average This Year

The ozone hole that forms each year in the stratosphere over Antarctica was slightly smaller in 2013 than average in recent decades, according to NASA satellite data.
The ozone hole is a seasonal phenomenon that starts to form during the Antarctic spring (August and September). The September-October 2013 average size of the hole was 8.1 million square miles (21 million square kilometers). For comparison, the average size measured since the mid-1990s when the annual maximum size stopped growing is 8.7 million square miles (22.5 million square kilometers). However, the size of the hole in any particular year is not enough information for scientists to determine whether a healing of the hole has begun.
"There was a lot of Antarctic ozone depletion in 2013, but because of above average temperatures in the Antarctic lower stratosphere, the ozone hole was a bit below average compared to ozone holes observed since 1990," said Paul Newman, an atmospheric scientist and ozone expert at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The ozone hole forms when the sun begins rising again after several months of winter darkness. Polar-circling winds keep cold air trapped above the continent, and sunlight-sparked reactions involving ice clouds and chlorine from manmade chemicals begin eating away at the ozone. Most years, the conditions for ozone depletion ease before early December when the seasonal hole closes.
Levels of most ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere have gradually declined as the result of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international treaty to protect the ozone layer by phasing out production of ozone-depleting chemicals. As a result, the size of the hole has stabilized, with variation from year to year driven by changing meteorological conditions.


The single-day maximum area this year was reached on Sept. 16 when the maximum area reached 9.3 million square miles (24 million square kilometers), about equal to the size of North America. The largest single-day ozone hole since the mid-1990s was 11.5 million square miles (29.9 million square kilometers) on Sept. 9, 2000.
Science teams from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have been monitoring the ozone layer from the ground and with a variety of instruments on satellites and balloons since the 1970s. These ozone instruments capture different aspects of ozone depletion. The independent analyses ensure that the international community understands the trends in this critical part of Earth's atmosphere. The resulting views of the ozone hole have differences in the computation of the size of the ozone hole, its depth, and record dates.
NASA observations of the ozone hole during 2013 were produced from data supplied by the Ozone Monitoring Instrument on NASA's Aura satellite and the Ozone Monitoring and Profiler Suite instrument on the NASA-NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite. Long-term satellite ozone-monitoring instruments have included the Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer, the second generation Solar Backscatter Ultraviolet Instrument, the Stratospheric Aerosol and Gas Experiment series of instruments, and the Microwave Limb Sounder.

NASA | Canyon of Fire on the Sun

A magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September, breaking the quiet conditions in a spectacular fashion. The 200,000 mile long filament ripped through the sun's atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon of fire. The glowing canyon traces the channel where magnetic fields held the filament aloft before the explosion. Visualizers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. combined two days of satellite data to create a short movie of this gigantic event on the sun.

In reality, the sun is not made of fire, but of something called plasma: particles so hot that their electrons have boiled off, creating a charged gas that is interwoven with magnetic fields.

These images were captured on Sept. 29-30, 2013, by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which constantly observes the sun in a variety of wavelengths.

Different wavelengths help capture different aspect of events in the corona. The red images shown in the movie help highlight plasma at temperatures of 90,000° F and are good for observing filaments as they form and erupt. The yellow images, showing temperatures at 1,000,000° F, are useful for observing material coursing along the sun's magnetic field lines, seen in the movie as an arcade of loops across the area of the eruption. The browner images at the beginning of the movie show material at temperatures of 1,800,000° F, and it is here where the canyon of fire imagery is most obvious.

By comparing this with the other colors, one sees that the two swirling ribbons moving farther away from each other are, in fact, the footprints of the giant magnetic field loops, which are growing and expanding as the filament pulls them upward.

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Pathfinding Operations for Orion Spacecraft at Kennedy Space Center

At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Orion ground test vehicle has been lifted high in the air by crane in the transfer aisle of the Vehicle Assembly Building. The ground test vehicle is being used for pathfinding operations, including simulated manufacturing, assembly and stacking procedures.
Orion is the exploration spacecraft designed to carry astronauts to destinations not yet explored by humans, including an asteroid and Mars. It will have emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during space travel and provide safe re-entry from deep space return velocities. The first unpiloted test flight of Orion, Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1 is scheduled to launch in 2014. EFT-1 will be Orion's first mission, which will send an uncrewed spacecraft 3,600 miles into Earth's orbit. As part of the test flight, Orion will return to Earth at a speed of approximately 20,000 mph for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

Space Station Live: Spacesuit Water Leak Troubleshooting

NASA Public Affairs Officer Dan Huot talks with Alex Kanelakos, EVA flight controller and astronaut instructor, about the current spacesuit troubleshooting work being performed aboard the International Space Station by Flight Engineers Mike Hopkins and Karen Nyberg. During an abbreviated July 16 spacewalk, water leaked into Flight Engineer Luca Parmitano's spacesuit helmet from the internal life-support system of his spacesuit.

Watch the full Space Station Live broadcast weekdays on NASA TV at 10 a.m. CDT. http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Space Station Live: Oct. 24, 2013

The Space Station Live recap video for Oct. 24, 2013. Watch the full Space Station Live broadcast weekdays on NASA TV at 10 a.m. CDT. http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

President Barack Obama Recognizes NASA Employees' Public Service

President Obama met with two NASA employees and 32 fellow public servants in the East Room at the White House in Washington to express gratitude and acknowledge their selection as recipients and finalists of the prestigious 2013 Samuel J. Heyman Service of America Medals or Sammies. The medals are presented annually by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service to recognize the outstanding achievements of federal workers and their significant work for our nation.
David Lavery, program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington, and scientist William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Centers in Moffett, Field, Calif., were the agency's honorees. Lavery and his Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) team received the Science and Environment medal for their work on the successful development, launch, landing, operations, and science activities of the Curiosity rover. Borucki was honored as a finalist for the Career Achievement medal for his visionary work on the Kepler mission launched in 2009. The mission was designed to search for potentially habitable extra-solar planets or exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.
"It's my pleasure to congratulate these two exemplary public servants on behalf of the entire NASA Family," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "David Lavery and William Borucki have demonstrated the very best that NASA has to offer -- a commitment to innovation and discovery that strengthens our nation and improves lives around the world. Their work has deep and lasting value and they most certainly deserve recognition with the Sammie award."
The MSL mission lowered the rover Curiosity on the Martian surface in August 2012 using precision landing technology. Within the first eight months of a planned 23-month primary science mission, Curiosity has already met its major objective of finding evidence of a past environment well suited to supporting microbial life. The rover is currently studying the geology and environment of selected areas in the crater and analyzing samples drilled from rocks or scooped soil from the ground.
"The Mars Science Laboratory project once again showcased NASA's ability to dream big, and then deliver on those aspirations," said Lavery. "At first, the plan for Curiosity was so audacious that it sat at the intersection of imagination and magic. But then the team made it real. And with that, we brought inspiration and pride to America and the world."
Borucki, who conceived and implemented the Kepler mission, has worked for more than 50 years at Ames. Through the first three years of data, Kepler has already discovered more than 3,500 exoplanet candidates and confirmed 156 as exoplanets. Borucki and his team continue to analyze four years of collected data. They expect hundreds, if not thousands, of new discoveries from detailed analysis.
"The results of the Kepler mission show that our galaxy is filled with planets; many of them Earth-size and some of them in the habitable zone," said Borucki. "To continue our exploration for life, we need to find the closest planets and whether these have conditions suitable for life.”
The Sammies have been presented since 2002. Known as the “Oscars” of public service, the Sammies are named in honor of Samuel J. Heyman, an American businessman, hedge fund manager, and philanthropist. Individuals are chosen from submitted nominations with finalists announced in mid-spring of each year. After a detailed review, nine awardees are selected in the fall.
This year's medals honored work ranging from eradicating polio in India to saving the Air Force more than $1 billion in 2012 by reducing energy consumption. The top medal that acknowledges the Federal Employee of the Year was presented to a National Institutes of Health team of doctors for revolutionizing the way hospital-acquired infections can be identified and halted through genetic sequencing of the bacteria.

NASA's SDO Sees Sun Emit a Mid-level Solar Flare

The sun emitted a mid-level solar flare that peaked at 8:30 pm EDT on Oct. 23, 2013. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. Such radiation can disrupt radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing, anywhere from minutes to hours.
To see how this event may impact Earth, please visit NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center at http://spaceweather.gov, the U.S. government's official source for space weather forecasts, alerts, watches and warnings.
This flare is classified as an M9.4 flare, on a scale from M1 to M9.9.  This rating puts it at the very top of the scale for M class flares, which are the weakest flares that can cause some space weather effects near Earth. In the past, they have caused brief radio blackouts at the poles.  The next highest level is X-class, which denotes the most intense flares.
Increased numbers of flares are quite common at the moment, since the sun is near solar maximum. Humans have tracked solar cycles continuously since they were discovered in 1843, and it is normal for there to be many flares a day during the sun's peak activity.

Space Station Live: Oct. 23, 2013

The Space Station Live recap video for Oct. 23, 2013. Watch the full Space Station Live broadcast weekdays on NASA TV at 10 a.m. CDT. http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Expedition 37 Crew Profile, Version 2

Meet the International Space Station's Expedition 37 crew -- Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg, Luca Parmitano, Mike Hopkins, Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy.

Expedition 37/38 Mission Overview

The main focus for the crew onboard the International Space Station this fall is on the station's top priority: groundbreaking scientific research that can't be done anywhere else -- science that helps the people of Earth today and advances the technology needed to support space exploration beyond Earth tomorrow.

Astronaut Educates Home-State Students from Space

Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 37 Flight Engineer Karen Nyberg of NASA discussed her research aboard the orbital laboratory and life in space with students from the Henning, Minn., school district during an in-flight educational event Oct. 23.

Juno Status Report

As of Oct. 17, Juno was approximately 4.4 million miles (7.1 million kilometers) from Earth. The one-way radio signal travel time between Earth and Juno is currently about 24 seconds. Juno is currently traveling at a velocity of about 23.6 miles (38 kilometers) per second relative to the sun. Velocity relative to Earth is about 6.5 miles (10.4 kilometers) per second. Juno has now traveled 1.01 billion miles (1.63 billion kilometers, or 10.9 AU) since launch.
Juno’s Earth flyby gravity assist was completed on Oct. 9. Several Juno science instruments made planned observations during the approach to Earth, including the Advanced Stellar Compass, JunoCam and Waves. These observations provided a useful opportunity to test the instruments during a close planetary encounter and ensure that they work as designed. The main goal of the flyby -- to give the spacecraft the boost it needed in order to reach Jupiter – was accomplished successfully, and the spacecraft is in good health and responding to ground controllers.
Soon after its closest approach to Earth, the spacecraft initiated the first of two "safe modes" that have occurred since the flyby.  Safe mode is a state that the spacecraft may enter if its onboard computer perceives conditions on the spacecraft are not as expected.  Onboard Juno, the safe mode turned off instruments and a few non-critical spacecraft components, and pointed the spacecraft toward the sun to ensure the solar arrays received power.  The likely cause of the safe mode was an incorrect setting for a fault protection trigger for the spacecraft's battery. During the eclipse, the solar cells, as expected, were not generating electricity, and the spacecraft was drawing on the battery supply. When the voltage dropped below this fault protection trigger, the spacecraft initiated the safe mode sequence. The spacecraft acted as expected during the transition into and while in safe mode. The spacecraft exited the safe mode on Oct. 12.
The spacecraft entered the safe mode configuration again on Sunday evening (10/13/13).  When the spacecraft's onboard computer transitioned from the Earth flyby sequence to the cruise sequence, a component called the stellar reference unit remained in the Earth flyby configuration.  When the spacecraft's computer saw the draw on electricity was slightly greater than expected, it did as it was programmed to do and initiated a safe mode event.
Navigation has confirmed that Juno's current trajectory is "near-perfect" vs. planned. The mission team is in two-way communications with the spacecraft and it is operating as expected, and designed for, in safe mode. They expect to exit safe mode sometime next week.
Juno will arrive at Jupiter on July 4, 2016, at 7:29 p.m. PDT (10:29 p.m. EDT).
Juno was launched on Aug. 5, 2011. Once in orbit around Jupiter, the spacecraft will circle the planet 33 times, from pole to pole, and use its collection of eight science instruments to probe beneath the gas giant's obscuring cloud cover. Juno's science team will learn about Jupiter's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere, and look for a potential solid planetary core.
Juno's name comes from Greek and Roman mythology. The god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief, and his wife, the goddess Juno, was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter's true nature.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Cassini Gets New Views of Titan's Land of Lakes

PASADENA, Calif.-- With the sun now shining down over the north pole of Saturn's moon Titan, a little luck with the weather, and trajectories that put the spacecraft into optimal viewing positions, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has obtained new pictures of the liquid methane and ethane seas and lakes that reside near Titan's north pole. The images reveal new clues about how the lakes formed and about Titan's Earth-like "hydrologic" cycle, which involves hydrocarbons rather than water.
The new images are available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/index.html.
While there is one large lake and a few smaller ones near Titan's south pole, almost all of Titan's lakes appear near the moon's north pole. Cassini scientists have been able to study much of the terrain with radar, which can penetrate beneath Titan's clouds and thick haze. And until now, Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer and imaging science subsystem had only been able to capture distant, oblique or partial views of this area.
Several factors combined recently to give these instruments great observing opportunities. Two recent flybys provided better viewing geometry. Sunlight has begun to pierce the winter darkness that shrouded Titan's north pole at Cassini's arrival in the Saturn system nine years ago. A thick cap of haze that once hung over the north pole has also dissipated as northern summer approaches. And Titan's beautiful, nearly cloudless, rain-free weather continued during Cassini's flybys this past summer.
The images are mosaics in infrared light based on data obtained during flybys of Titan on July 10, July 26, and Sept. 12, 2013. The colorized mosaic from the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, which maps infrared colors onto the visible-color spectrum, reveals differences in the composition of material around the lakes. The data suggest parts of Titan's lakes and seas may have evaporated and left behind the Titan equivalent of Earth's salt flats. Only at Titan, the evaporated material is thought to be organic chemicals originally from Titan's haze particles that once dissolved in liquid methane. They appear orange in this image against the greenish backdrop of Titan's typical bedrock of water ice.
"The view from Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer gives us a holistic view of an area that we'd only seen in bits and pieces before and at a lower resolution," said Jason Barnes, a participating scientist for the instrument at the University of Idaho, Moscow. "It turns out that Titan's north pole is even more interesting than we thought, with a complex interplay of liquids in lakes and seas and deposits left from the evaporation of past lakes and seas."
The near-infrared images from Cassini's imaging cameras show a bright unit of terrain in the northern land of lakes that had not previously been visible in the data. The bright area suggests that the surface here is unique from the rest of Titan, which might explain why almost all of the lakes are found in this region. Titan's lakes have very distinctive shapes -- rounded cookie-cutter silhouettes and steep sides -- and a variety of formation mechanisms have been proposed. The explanations range from the collapse of land after a volcanic eruption to karst terrain, where liquids dissolve soluble bedrock. Karst terrains on Earth can create spectacular topography such as the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.
"Ever since the lakes and seas were discovered, we've been wondering why they're concentrated at high northern latitudes," said Elizabeth (Zibi) Turtle, a Cassini imaging team associate based at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md. "So, seeing that there's something special about the surface in this region is a big clue to help narrow down the possible explanations."
Launched in 1997, Cassini has been exploring the Saturn system since 2004. A full Saturn year is 30 years, and Cassini has been able to observe nearly a third of a Saturn year. In that time, Saturn and its moons have seen the seasons change from northern winter to northern summer.
"Titan's northern lakes region is one of the most Earth-like and intriguing in the solar system," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We know lakes here change with the seasons, and Cassini's long mission at Saturn gives us the opportunity to watch the seasons change at Titan, too. Now that the sun is shining in the north and we have these wonderful views, we can begin to compare the different data sets and tease out what Titan's lakes are doing near the north pole."
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA. The VIMS team is based at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Space Station Live: Oct. 22, 2013

The Space Station Live recap video for Oct. 22, 2013. Watch the full Space Station Live broadcast weekdays on NASA TV at 10 a.m. CDT. http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Cygnus completes mission!

After a month's stay at the International Space Station, the Orbital Sciences' Cygnus cargo craft was un-berthed from the Harmony module Oct. 22 by members of the Expedition 37 crew onboard the station. Cygnus will be commanded to de-orbit to a destructive entry back into Earth's atmosphere on Oct. 23. The second U.S. commercial resupply ship to service the station, Cygnus arrived at the outpost on Sept. 29 in a demonstration flight that was the forerunner for its first full commercial delivery mission later this year of food and supplies to the residents of the orbital complex.

Mars Crater May Actually Be Ancient Supervolcano

Scientists from NASA and the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., have identified what could be a supervolcano on Mars—the first discovery of its kind.
The volcano in question, a vast circular basin on the face of the Red Planet, previously had been classified as an impact crater. Researchers now suggest the basin is actually what remains of an ancient supervolcano eruption. Their assessment is based on images and topographic data from NASA's Mars Odyssey, Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, as well as the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter.

In the Oct. 3 issue of the journal Nature, Joseph Michalski, a researcher affiliated with the Planetary Science Institute and the Natural History Museum in London, and Jacob Bleacher of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., laid out their case that the basin, recently named Eden Patera, is a volcanic caldera. Because a caldera is a depression, it can look like a crater formed by an impact, rather than a volcano.
"On Mars, young volcanoes have a very distinctive appearance that allows us to identify them," said Michalski. "The long-standing question has been what ancient volcanoes on Mars look like. Perhaps they look like this one."
The researchers also suggest a large body of magma loaded with dissolved gas (similar to the carbonation in soda) rose through thin crust to the surface quickly. Like a bottle of soda that has been shaken, this supervolcano would have blown its contents far and wide if the top came off suddenly.
"This highly explosive type of eruption is a game-changer, spewing many times more ash and other material than typical, younger Martian volcanoes," said Bleacher. "During these types of eruptions on Earth, the debris may spread so far through the atmosphere and remain so long that it alters the global temperature for years."
After the material is expelled from the eruption, the depression that is left can collapse even further, causing the ground around it to sink. Eruptions like these happened in ages past at what is now Yellowstone National Park in the western United States, Lake Toba in Indonesia and Lake Taupo in New Zealand.
Volcanoes previously had not been identified in the Arabia Terra region of Mars, where Eden Patera is located. The battered, heavily eroded terrain is known for its impact craters. But as Michalski examined this particular basin more closely, he noticed it lacked the typical raised rim of an impact crater.He also could not find a nearby blanket of ejecta, the melted rock that splashes outside the crater when an object hits.
The absence of such key features caused Michalski to suspect volcanic activity. He contacted Bleacher, a volcano specialist, who identified features at Eden Patera that usually indicate volcanism, such as a series of rock ledges that looked like the "bathtub rings" left after a lava lake slowly drains. In addition, the outside of the basin is ringed by the kinds of faults and valleys that occur when the ground collapses because of activity below the surface. The existence of these and other volcanic features in one place convinced the scientists Eden Patera should be reclassified.
The team found a few more candidates for reclassification nearby, suggesting conditions in Arabia Terra may have been favorable for supervolcanoes. It is also possible massive eruptions here could have been responsible for volcanic deposits elsewhere on Mars that have never been linked to a known volcano.
"If just a handful of volcanoes like these were once active, they could have had a major impact on the evolution of Mars," Bleacher said.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the projects operating Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Space Station Live: Oct. 21, 2013

The Space Station Live recap video for Oct. 21, 2013. Watch the full Space Station Live broadcast weekdays on NASA TV at 10 a.m. CDT. http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

NASA: Back to Work, Back to Mission

NASA is once again open for business in a big way. While we were out, several of our on-going missions achieved significant milestones, and although it will take a little time to fully assess the impacts of the government shut down on our other operations, this week will make clear we’re back to our core mission implementing America’s ambitious space program.
Our latest moon mission, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, entered lunar orbit on Oct. 6th, and now is preparing to begin its study of the moon’s atmosphere. We also are pleased that the Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration currently orbiting the moon with LADEE achieved an error-free laser communication downlink with a data rate in excess of 300 megabits-per-second. This new NASA-developed, laser-based space communication system will enable higher rates of satellite communications, similar to the high-speed fiber optic networks we have here on Earth. This will dramatically improve space communication, especially during futur

e human missions to an asteroid and Mars.

 On Oct. 9th, our Juno spacecraft, launched in 2011 on a five-year journey to Jupiter, made its closest approach to Earth. This gave Juno a chance to take some stunning pictures of our planet and it gave us the opportunity to confirm that the spacecraft is operating as expected with a current trajectory that is “near perfect.”
Looking ahead for this week, the Orbital Sciences' Cygnus cargo spacecraft that was launched from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on Sept.18, will complete its successful maiden cargo mission on Tuesday when it un-berths from the International Space Station and burns up harmlessly in Earth’s atmosphere during re-entry the following day. Orbital joins SpaceX as NASA’s second American commercial partner capable of successful resupply missions to the ISS. Sierra Nevada Corp. is poised to resume testing of its Dream Chaser spacecraft at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California.  Sierra Nevada Corp., Boeing and SpaceX are among the U.S. companies working with NASA to develop commercial crew transportation vehicles. Our commitment to launching astronauts from American soil again soon is moving forward.
Things are getting busy at the International Space Station, humanity's home away from Earth for almost 13 years now. The European Space Agency’s Automated Transfer Vehicle-4 is set to undock on Oct. 28 after more than four months at the station. Then, on Nov. 1, Expedition 37 crewmates Karen Nyberg, Luca Parmitano and  Fyodor Yurchikhin will relocate their Soyuz 35 from one station docking port to another.
Less than a week later on Nov. 7, three new station crew members -- NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Koichi Wakata and Soyuz commander Mikhail Tyurin of the Russian Federal Space Agency – will launch aboard their Soyuz 37 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and dock to the station about six hours later.  
For four days, nine astronauts and cosmonauts will live and work together aboard the station before Yurchikhin, Nyberg and Parmitano return to Earth after more than five months in space.
Meanwhile, the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft remains on track for a Nov.18th launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. MAVEN is the first spacecraft devoted to exploring and understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. It will orbit the planet in an elliptical orbit that allows it to pass through and sample the entire upper atmosphere on every orbit. The spacecraft will investigate how the loss of Mars’ atmosphere to space determined the history of water on the surface.
Finally, on a sad note, on Oct.10, in the midst of the shutdown, we learned of the passing of Scott Carpenter, who in 1962 became the second American to orbit Earth. Scott was one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts who helped set the stage for more than a half-century of American leadership in space.  We will miss his passion, his talent and his life-long commitment to exploration.

Managing the Deluge of 'Big Data' From Space

For NASA and its dozens of missions, data pour in every day like rushing rivers. Spacecraft monitor everything from our home planet to faraway galaxies, beaming back images and information to Earth. All those digital records need to be stored, indexed and processed so that spacecraft engineers, scientists and people across the globe can use the data to understand Earth and the universe beyond.
At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., mission planners and software engineers are coming up with new strategies for managing the ever-increasing flow of such large and complex data streams, referred to in the information technology community as "big data."
How big is big data? For NASA missions, hundreds of terabytes are gathered every hour. Just one terabyte is equivalent to the information printed on 50,000 trees worth of paper.
"Scientists use big data for everything from predicting weather on Earth to monitoring ice caps on Mars to searching for distant galaxies," said Eric De Jong of JPL, principal investigator for NASA’s Solar System Visualization project, which converts NASA mission science into visualization products that researchers can use. "We are the keepers of the data, and the users are the astronomers and scientists who need images, mosaics, maps and movies to find patterns and verify theories."
Building Castles of Data
De Jong explains that there are three aspects to wrangling data from space missions: storage, processing and access. The first task, to store or archive the data, is naturally more challenging for larger volumes of data. The Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a planned array of thousands of telescopes in South Africa and Australia, illustrates this problem. Led by the SKA Organization based in England and scheduled to begin construction in 2016, the array will scan the skies for radio waves coming from the earliest galaxies known.
JPL is involved with archiving the array's torrents of images: 700 terabytes of data are expected to rush in every day. That's equivalent to all the data flowing on the Internet every two days. Rather than build more hardware, engineers are busy developing creative software tools to better store the information, such as "cloud computing" techniques and automated programs for extracting data.
"We don't need to reinvent the wheel," said Chris Mattmann, a principal investigator for JPL's big-data initiative. "We can modify open-source computer codes to create faster, cheaper solutions." Software that is shared and free for all to build upon is called open source or open code. JPL has been increasingly bringing open-source software into its fold, creating improved data processing tools for space missions. The JPL tools then go back out into the world for others to use for different applications.
"It's a win-win solution for everybody," said Mattmann.
In Living Color
Archiving isn't the only challenge in working with big data. De Jong and his team develop new ways to visualize the information. Each image from one of the cameras on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, for example, contains 120 megapixels. His team creates movies from data sets like these, in addition to computer graphics and animations that enable scientists and the public to get up close with the Red Planet.
"Data are not just getting bigger but more complex," said De Jong. "We are constantly working on ways to automate the process of creating visualization products, so that scientists and engineers can easily use the data."
Data Served Up to Go
Another big job in the field of big data is making it easy for users to grab what they need from the data archives.
"If you have a giant bookcase of books, you still have to know how to find the book you're looking for," said Steve Groom, manager of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. The center archives data for public use from a number of NASA astronomy missions, including the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the U.S. portion of the European Space Agency's Planck mission.
Sometimes users want to access all the data at once to look for global patterns, a benefit of big data archives. "Astronomers can also browse all the 'books' in our library simultaneously, something that can't be done on their own computers," said Groom.
"No human can sort through that much data," said Andrea Donnellan of JPL, who is charged with a similarly mountainous task for the NASA-funded QuakeSim project, which brings together massive data sets -- space- and Earth-based -- to study earthquake processes.
QuakeSim's images and plots allow researchers to understand how earthquakes occur and develop long-term preventative strategies. The data sets include GPS data for hundreds of locations in California, where thousands of measurements are taken, resulting in millions of data points. Donnellan and her team develop software tools to help users sift through the flood of data.
Ultimately, the tide of big data will continue to swell, and NASA will develop new strategies to manage the flow. As new tools evolve, so will our ability to make sense of our universe and the world.

Expedition 38/39 Crew Undergoes Final Training Outside Moscow

Expedition 38/39 Soyuz Commander Mikhail Tyurin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), NASA Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio and Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and their backups, Max Suraev of Roscosmos, Reid Wiseman of NASA and Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency, conducted final qualification training at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, from Oct. 15-18. Tyurin, Mastracchio and Wakata are scheduled for a Nov. 7 liftoff, Kazakh time, in the Soyuz TMA-11M spacecraft to the International Space Station. Included is an interview with NASA astronaut Suni Williams.

Space Station Crew Members Discuss Life in Space with KSTP-TV and the Bi...

Aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 37 Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg and Michael Hopkins of NASA provided an update of current events on the orbital laboratory during an interview Oct. 18 with the Minneapolis TV station KSTP and the national sports television network BTN (Big Ten Network). Nyberg and Hopkins are working together on the ISS with European Space Agency Flight Engineer Luca Parmitano and fellow residents Fyodor Yurchikhin, Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy of the Russian Federal Space Agency.

NASA's Hubble Sees Comet ISON Intact

A new image of the sunward plunging comet ISON suggests that the comet is intact despite some predictions that the fragile icy nucleus might disintegrate as the sun warms it. The comet will pass closest to the sun on Nov. 28.
In this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image taken on Oct. 9, the comet's solid nucleus is unresolved because it is so small. If the nucleus broke apart then Hubble would have likely seen evidence for multiple fragments.
Moreover, the coma or head surrounding the comet's nucleus is symmetric and smooth. This would probably not be the case if clusters of smaller fragments were flying along. What's more, a polar jet of dust first seen in Hubble images taken in April is no longer visible and may have turned off.
This color composite image was assembled using two filters. The comet's coma appears cyan, a greenish-blue color due to gas, while the tail is reddish due to dust streaming off the nucleus. The tail forms as dust particles are pushed away from the nucleus by the pressure of sunlight. The comet was inside Mars’ orbit and 177 million miles from Earth when photographed. Comet ISON is predicted to make its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 26, at a distance of 39.9 million miles.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)