An image of Haiti from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission in 2000 Credit: NASA

NASA is helping provide information to support disaster recovery efforts in Haiti in the wake of Tuesday’s killer earthquake.

According to the space agency, two NASA Earth monitoring satellites — the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, or ASTER, and NASA’s Earth Observing-1 ,or EO-1 — are beaming down images of areas hardest hit by the quake. Before-and-after pictures will be used to help damage assessment and recovery efforts.

Read the rest of the article here…

A map of the Milky Way. Credit: NASA/JPL

Holiday tidings come from NASA’s Voyager 2 this week, offering a view of deep space beyond our sun’s solar system.

Now speeding through space at more than 34,000 miles-per-hour, the 1977 space probe resides more than 8.3. billion miles away from the sun. That is twice as far as Pluto. Two years ago, Voyager 2 passed into the region of space where the sun’s solar wind peters out as it plows into the interstellar gases of our Milky Way galaxy. And now it’s giving us some news from this region, called the “heliosheath,” by astrophysicists.

“This is a magic mission,” says space scientist Merav Opher of George Mason University. in Fairfax, Va.. “After all these years, Voyager 2 is still working and sending us first hand (on-site) data.”

Read more…

In all, the first half of 2009 proved an extremely challenging and rewarding time for NASA. Form January to June, NASA completed a complicated analysis of the Space Shuttle fleets Flow Control Valves, launched the Kepler Space Telescope to search for extra-solar Earth-like planets, conducted the STS-119 Shuttle mission, performed a dual-pad flow for STS-125 and STS-400 and the subsequent and highly successful STS-125 mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope, and launched LRO/LCROSS.

In a recent interview with NASASpaceFlight.com, Space Shuttle Program Launch Integration Manager Mike Moses talked extensively about the incredible year the Shuttle processing teams had and their ability to accomplish everything they did in 2009.

“It was all about the teams and their ability to create triple and quadruple redundancies in schedules,” Moses said.

“On the surface, it didn’t appear that we had all that challenging of a year. But if you take it month by month you can really see the issues the teams worked through and the amazing jobs those teams did to get us into a launch posture six times this year.”

Read the rest of this article here…

Artist’s rendering of the Voyager 2 spacecraft as it studies the outer limits of the heliosphere — a magnetic ‘bubble’ around the Solar System that is created by the solar wind. Scientists observed the magnetic bubble is not spherical, but pressed inward in the southern hemisphere. Credit: NASA/JPL

Our solar system is passing through a cloud of interstellar material that shouldn’t be there, astronomers say. And now the decades-old Voyager spacecraft has helped solved the mystery.

The cloud is called the “Local Fluff.” It’s about 30 light-years wide and holds a wispy mix of hydrogen and helium atoms, according to a NASA statement released today. Stars that exploded nearby, about 10 million years ago, should have crushed the Fluff or blown it away.

So what’s holding the Fluff in place?

“Using data from Voyager, we have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system,” explained Merav Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. “This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together ["The Fluff"] and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all.”

The Fluff is much more strongly magnetized than anyone had previously suspected,” Opher said. “This magnetic field can provide the extra pressure required to resist destruction.”

Opher and colleagues detail the discovery in the Dec. 24 issue of the journal Nature.

Read the rest here…

An artist’s conception shows New Horizons at Pluto. Credit: NASA / JHU APL

NASA’s New Horizons probe passed a key milestone today on its nine-year journey and is now closer to Pluto, its primary target, than it is to Earth. But it still has more than five years and more than 1.5 billion miles to go.

The 1,054-pound (480-kilogram) piano-sized spacecraft blasted off for the solar system’s most controversial dwarf planet almost four years ago. New Horizons was the fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth, and thanks to a gravitational boost from Jupiter, it’s closing in on Pluto at the rate of 750,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers) per day. The probe is due to zoom past Pluto and its three moons on July 14, 2015.

As of today, New Horizons is between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus – a little more than 1.527 billion miles (2.463 billion kilometers) from Earth and 1.526 billion miles (nearly 2.462 billion kilometers) from Pluto, according to today’s status report from mission control at John Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. (APL is managing the mission on NASA’s behalf.)

Read the rest at MSNBC Cosmic Blog

A map of the Milky Way. Credit: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Holiday tidings come from NASA’s Voyager 2 this week, offering a view of deep space beyond our sun’s solar system.

Now speeding through space at more than 34,000 miles-per-hour, the 1977 space probe resides more than 8.3. billion miles away from the sun. That is twice as far as Pluto. Two years ago, Voyager 2 passed into the region of space where the sun’s solar wind peters out as it plows into the interstellar gases of our Milky Way galaxy. And now it’s giving us some news from this region, called the “heliosheath,” by astrophysicists.

“This is a magic mission,” says space scientist Merav Opher of George Mason University. in Fairfax, Va.. “After all these years, Voyager 2 is still working and sending us first hand (on-site) data.”

Voyager 2’s vantage, revealed in the Dec. 24 Nature journal in a study led by Opher and colleagues, shows that beyond the solar system, the galaxy’s magnetic field is unexpectedly strong, about twice as much as expected, and unexpectedly tilted. Our galaxy is essentially a twin-armed flat disk of stars 100,000 light years across rotating around a spherical ball of stars in its center (one light year is about 5.9 trillion miles.).

Continue reading…

Taken by astronaut William Anders from the Apollo 8 spacecraft, this December 1968 photo of Earth rising over the lunar surface would become one of the most famous images of the 20th century. Credit: NASA

NASA heads into 2010 with the bittersweet assignment of retiring the space shuttle after nearly three decades. But that’s not all the agency has planned: There are also launches of three new satellites aimed at better understanding the Earth’s climate and oceans, and the sun.

Two of the probes will examine Earth — specifically the concentration of salt in the world’s oceans and the presence of aerosol particles, such as soot, in the atmosphere. A third mission will study the sun and its effect on space weather including solar flares that can disrupt communication on Earth.

All three come at a critical time for NASA. Data from the two Earth probes will likely influence global-warming research, and the trio of launches could serve as bright spots in a year otherwise dominated by debate over the future of the agency’s manned space program.

“They are extraordinary timely,” said Michael Freilich, head of NASA’s Earth-science division, of the two Earth probes. “It is a quest for understanding of the Earth system and [to improve] our ability to predict how our wonderful environment and our planet is going to change in the future.”

Combined, the three missions will cost more than $1.5 billion.

Get the full details here…

“…we must choose between two assumptions: either the souls which move the planets are the less active the farther the planet is removed from the sun, or there is only one moving soul in the center of all the orbits, that is the sun, which drives the planet the more vigorously the closer the planet is, but whose force is quasi-exhausted when acting on the outer planets because of the long distance and the weakening of the force which it entails.” (in ref. 1, p 261)

As the story goes, on Christmas night 2,000 years ago, wise men followed a star in the night sky to reach the baby Jesus. NASA-Ames is following the stars too, looking for life on other worlds, and astronomers have a new celestial tool to help them.

“If we’re going to be looking for planets, earth-like planets are the key,” Foothill College Astronomy Department Chair Andrew Fraknoi said.

Fraknoi has loved astronomy since childhood. He says NASA’s Kepler mission is one of the most exciting in quite some time.

“In the last 16 years, we’ve discovered over 400 planets going around other stars, but the methods so far that we have been using only allowed us to find big planets like Jupiter,” Fraknoi said.

Kepler is a telescope designed to find planets orbiting other stars by looking for a break in the star light as a planet moves in front of it.

The challenge now is to find planets that are half to twice the size of the earth in the habitable zone of their stars, where it is possible that water and even life might exist.

Read the rest here…

NASA has intentionally crashed a 3,000-pound MD-500 helicopter loaded with dummies to test a new safety shield, which could someday be used to make the cars we drive safer.

According to a report in Discovery News, the small helicopter, donated by the US Army for NASA’s research program, survived a 35-foot plunge to the ground intact, thanks to a lightweight honeycomb structure that bore the brunt of the impact.

The honeycomb shield, made of Kevlar 129 – the same material used to make bulletproof vests – was attached to the underside of a 3,000-pound MD-500 helicopter at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

The shields can be made of any material, as it is the structure of the honeycomb that provides the strength and flexibility to cushion the impact.

“The beauty of the honeycomb is that it will allow you to customize,” said project engineer Sotiris Kellas.

“We like composites because we have more options for tailoring, but they can be made out of any material you want,” he added.

For the test, which took place earlier this month, the craft was suspended in the air with cables. Restraints were released, allowing the helicopter to fall, and just before it hit the ground, explosive devices fired to break the cable.

Read the rest of the article here…

The Extended-Range/Multi-Purpose UAS is built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and is set to deploy with the Army operators next fall. In addition to collecting images and intelligence, the ER/MP will also pack a deadly punch: It can carry four laser-guided Hellfire missiles.

“We call it around here ‘the sexiest program in the Army,’ ” said Lt. Col. Kevin Messer, ER/MP product manager in the Army’s UAS Project Office on Redstone Arsenal.

The visit to General Atomics certainly wasn’t his first look at the aircraft – “I’ve got most of it memorized,” Messer said – but it was a rare experience for the group of men training to fly the ER/MP.

“Seldom does the Army soldier ever get an opportunity to go to a plant to see where their item is being built and what it’s all about and what it takes to build it,” he said. “They now see how it’s all put together. They can see the different skill sets needed to be able to build the airframe and the skill sets needed for all the electronics.”

Continue reading here…