Satellite News

Scientists using a NASA funded telescope have detected water-ice and carbon-based organic compounds on the surface of an asteroid. The cold hard facts of the discovery of the frosty mixture on one of the asteroid belt's largest occupants, suggests that some asteroids, along with their celestial brethren, comets, were the water carriers for a primordial Earth. The research is published in today's issue of the journal Nature.

"For a long time the thinking was that you couldn't find a cup's worth of water in the entire asteroid belt," said Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Today we know you not only could quench your thirst, but you just might be able to fill up every pool on Earth – and then some."


The discovery is a result of six years of observing asteroid 24 Themis by astronomer Andrew Rivkin of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Rivkin, along with Joshua Emery, of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, employed the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility to take measurements of the asteroid on seven separate occasions beginning in 2002. Buried in their compiled data was the consistent infrared signature of water ice and carbon-based organic materials.

The study's findings are particularly surprising because it was believed that Themis, orbiting the sun at "only" 479 million kilometers (297 million miles), was too close to the solar system's fiery heat source to carry water ice left over from the solar system's origin 4.6 billion years ago.

Space shuttle Discovery roared into orbit April 24, 1990, with a most precious cargo, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. In the two decades since, teams of astronauts working from other shuttles repaired the orbiting eye on the universe and extended its abilities far beyond what was thought possible for longer than many thought realistic.

Hubble, named for groundbreaking astronomer Edwin Hubble, repaid the commitment with some of the most dazzling images the world has seen, along with fresh data that answered a wealth of questions and led to many new ones. The telescope's observations allowed astronomers to set the age of the universe at about 13.7 billion years with a high degree of certainty.

"I never believed in 1990 that the Hubble would end up this great," said Ed Weiler, NASA associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate and chief scientist for the Hubble program when it launched. "It's changed a lot of thinking and it's changed a lot of what I learned 30 years ago in grad school."


Hubble's discoveries stretch over most aspects of astronomy, but its highlights include proving massive black holes exist and defining the age of the universe. It also proved the existence of something no one has seen -- dark energy.

"Nobody ever knew it existed before Hubble," said Jon Grunsfeld, an astronaut and astronomer who worked on Hubble during two shuttle missions.

The telescope's most unique element, though, is its orbit -- a perch so high above the planet that its pictures are not warped or distorted by the air currents, moisture and other effects from Earth's atmosphere.

"It's that extreme clarity that gives us the feeling we've traveled out into space to see these objects," Grunsfeld said. "It really is our time machine."

From more than 300 miles in space, Hubble looked back in time, showing astronomers what embryonic galaxies looked like almost 14 billion years ago. In some cases, Hubble's instruments picked up light that left stars only 600 million years after the Big Bang. "We're seeing the universe as it was perhaps as a toddler," Grunsfeld said.

An image that is perhaps Hubble's most famous, known as the Hubble Deep Field, was made when the telescope was pointed at a small sliver of space in the constellation Ursa Major, which appeared black and empty. Hubble found it brimming with young galaxies and stars in a kind of photographic time capsule from the universe. Astronomers called it a baby picture of space.

Some of the images from the spacecraft show never-before-seen detail of material streaming outward and away from sunspots. Others show extreme close-ups of activity on the sun’s surface. The spacecraft also has made the first high-resolution measurements of solar flares in a broad range of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths.

"These initial images show a dynamic sun that I had never seen in more than 40 years of solar research,” said Richard Fisher, director of the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "SDO will change our understanding of the sun and its processes, which affect our lives and society. This mission will have a huge impact on science, similar to the impact of the Hubble Space Telescope on modern astrophysics.”

Astronauts will soar spaceward in commercial spacecraft while NASA develops technology so humans can venture to Mars and out into the solar system, President Barack Obama told a space conference Thursday at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Laying out his plans, President Obama committed NASA to a series of development milestones he said would lead to new spacecraft for astronauts to ride to the International Space Station, a modified Orion capsule developed as an emergency return spacecraft, and a powerful new rocket. He also promised a host of new technologies that would protect space travelers from radiation and other unique hazards.

"Early in the next decade, a set of crewed flights will test and prove the systems required for exploration beyond low Earth orbit," the president said. "And by 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the moon into deep space. We’ll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s, I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow. And I expect to be around to see it."



The president spoke to 200 senior officials, space and industry leaders, and academic experts inside the Operations and Checkout Building at Kennedy in the same area that was used to process Apollo spacecraft for the missions to the moon in the 1960s and 70s.

Standing in front of one of the space shuttle main engines that launched former U.S. Senator and astronaut John Glenn into orbit, President Obama said, "It was from here that men and women, propelled by sheer nerve and talent, set about pushing the boundaries of humanity's reach.

"The question for us now is whether that was the beginning of something, or the end of something. I prefer to believe it was the beginning of something." The president's fiscal year 2011 budget proposal increases NASA's budget by $6 billion throughout the next five years to fund the plans.

Noting "the sense that folks in Washington -- driven less by vision than by politics -- have for years neglected NASA’s mission and undermined the work of the professionals who fulfill it," the president said the budget increase changes that.

The president's address comes at a critical juncture for NASA because the space shuttle fleet is scheduled to be retired after three more missions. The president said it will be quicker and less costly to let private companies develop new spacecraft for astronauts rather than continue with NASA's Constellation Program, which was deemed too expensive and behind schedule.

"Pursuing this new strategy will require that we revise the old strategy. In part, this is because the old strategy -- including the Constellation Program -- was not fulfilling its promise in many ways," the president said. "That’s not just my assessment; that’s also the assessment of a panel of respected non-partisan experts charged with looking at these issues closely."

President Obama's plan largely mirrors the "flexible path" option offered by a blue-ribbon panel established by the president last year to help decide the best map for future space exploration.

The outline does not do away with all the research and development from Constellation . Noting the success of the agency's development of the Orion crew capsule, Obama called on NASA to develop a version of that spacecraft so it can be launched without a crew to the International Space Station. It will be based there as an emergency craft for astronauts living on the orbiting laboratory.

"This Month in Exploration" every month to find out how aviation and space exploration have changed throughout the years, improving life for humans on Earth and in space. While reflecting on the events that led to NASA's formation and its rich history of accomplishments, "This Month in Exploration" will reveal where the agency is leading us.

100 Years Ago

March 28, 1910: The first powered seaplane, Le Canard ("The Duck"), flew at La Mède harbor in Martigues, France. The plane, invented by Henri Fabre, flew for a distance of about 1600 feet and a maximum height of 7 feet over the water. The seaplane resembled a giant dragonfly flying backward.

95 Years Ago

March 3, 1915: A rider to the U.S. Naval Appropriations Act established the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (later the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or NACA). Its purpose was to manage flight research with a focus on practical solutions to known problems. NACA provided the nation's earliest aeronautics research, helped develop important flight technologies and increased knowledge of flight safety and efficiency.

80 Years Ago

March 21, 1930: The Martin XT5M-1 Navy dive bomber met strength and performance requirements in diving tests. The carrier-based torpedo bomber was the U.S. Navy’s first dive bomber and was designed to deliver a 1,000-pound aerial bomb.

75 Years Ago

March 28, 1935: Robert Goddard launched the first rocket equipped with gyroscopic controls near Roswell, N.M. The rocket attained a height of 4,800 feet, a horizontal distance of 13,000 feet and a speed of 550 mph.

65 Years Ago

March 8, 1945: The U.S. Navy launched a rocket-powered Gorgon air-to-air missile from a PBY-5A patrol bomber aircraft off Cape May, N.J. It was the first powered missile test flight. During the flight it achieved an estimated speed of 550 m.p.h.


60 Years Ago

March 3, 1950: The University of Illinois held a symposium on space medicine at its Professional Colleges in Chicago. This symposium, along with additional meetings, contributed to the realization of the medical community that an understanding of other scientific disciplines was needed in order to meet the complex medical requirements of manned flight and manned space flight. February 9, 1950: The U.S. Navy successfully launched a Martin Viking No. 3 rocket from White Sands Proving Grounds to an altitude

50 Years Ago

March 11, 1960: NASA successfully launched the PIONEER V space probe via a Thor-Able-4 rocket. PIONEER V provided information on solar flare effects, particle energy, radiation and magnetic field measurements emanating from Venus. On March 13, PIONEER V set a new communications record when it transmitted radio signals from a distance of more than 409,000 miles. That record was later broken with several more communications from even greater distances.

45 Years Ago

March 23, 1965: NASA launched Gemini III (the first operational mission of the Gemini series) via a Titan-II rocket. The primary objectives of the mission were to demonstrate manned orbital flight, evaluate the two-man design and test and evaluate the craft’s systems and procedures. Former Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom commanded the mission, with John W. Young, a Naval aviator chosen as an astronaut in 1962, accompanying him.

40 Years Ago


March 5, 1970: NASA flew the first of two YF-12A Blackbirds in a joint program with the U.S. Air Force to explore high-speed, high-altitude flight. The program produced a wealth of information that is still useful today for designing future vehicles that could fly at three times the speed of sound or faster.

30 Years Ago

March 7, 1980: Research pilot John Manke made several test flights in the Gossamer Albatross, a manually operated aircraft propelled by pedals. The tests were part of a NASA project to collect data on large, lightweight aircraft. Manke reached an altitude of 20 feet and reported that the Albatross was like nothing he had ever flown before.

15 Years Ago

March 2, 1995: NASA launched the space shuttle Endeavor (STS-67) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla. The shuttle carried Astro-2, the second astronomy payload for Spacelab, and various experiments. STS-67 was the longest shuttle flight up to that point and it facilitated sustained examination of the "hidden universe" of ultraviolet light.

5 Years Ago

March 4, 2005: The Rosetta spacecraft completed the first of three Earth gravity assists on its way to rendezvous with comet 67P (Churyumov-Gerasimenko)—it used Earth’s gravity to increase its momentum in its journey. Rosetta is a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency. It is designed to eventually land on and investigate the comet while providing insight into the origins of the solar system. The gravity assists, three with Earth and one Mars, are required for the spacecraft to gain enough orbital energy to reach the comet in 2014.

Present Day

March 1, 2010: NASA will launch its GOES-P geostationary satellite via a United Launch Alliance Delta IV rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. GOES-P is the latest in a series of meteorological satellites designed to monitor storm development and weather conditions on Earth.

March 18, 2010: NASA is scheduled to launch space shuttle Discovery on mission STS-131 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla. The shuttle will carry a Multi-Purpose Logistics Module filled with science racks that will be transferred to laboratories of the International Space Station. STS-131 is the 33rd shuttle mission to the station.

NASA today released the most detailed set of images ever taken of the distant dwarf planet Pluto. The images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show an icy and dark molasses-colored, mottled world that is undergoing seasonal changes in its surface color and brightness. Pluto has become significantly redder, while its illuminated northern hemisphere is getting brighter. These changes are most likely consequences of surface ices sublimating on the sunlit pole and then refreezing on the other pole as the dwarf planet heads into the next phase of its 248-year-long seasonal cycle. The dramatic change in color apparently took place in a two-year period, from 2000 to 2002.



The Hubble images will remain our sharpest view of Pluto until NASA's New Horizons probe is within six months of its Pluto flyby. The Hubble pictures are proving invaluable for picking out the planet's most interesting-looking hemisphere for the New Horizons spacecraft to swoop over when it flies by Pluto in 2015.

Though Pluto is arguably one of the public's favorite planetary objects, it is also the hardest of which to get a detailed portrait because the world is small and very far away. Hubble resolves surface variations a few hundred miles across, which are too coarse for understanding surface geology. But in terms of surface color and brightness Hubble reveals a complex-looking and variegated world with white, dark-orange and charcoal-black terrain. The overall color is believed to be a result of ultraviolet radiation from the distant sun breaking up methane that is present on Pluto's surface, leaving behind a dark and red carbon-rich residue.

When Hubble pictures taken in 1994 are compared with a new set of images taken in 2002 to 2003, astronomers see evidence that the northern polar region has gotten brighter, while the southern hemisphere has gotten darker. These changes hint at very complex processes affecting the visible surface, and the new data will be used in continued research.


The images are allowing planetary astronomers to better interpret more than three decades of Pluto observations from other telescopes, says principal investigator Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "The Hubble observations are the key to tying together these other diverse constraints on Pluto and showing how it all makes sense by providing a context based on weather and seasonal changes, which opens other new lines of investigation."

The Hubble pictures underscore that Pluto is not simply a ball of ice and rock but a dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes. These are driven by seasonal changes that are as much propelled by the planet's 248-year elliptical orbit as its axial tilt, unlike Earth where the tilt alone drives seasons. The seasons are very asymmetric because of Pluto's elliptical orbit. Spring transitions to polar summer quickly in the northern hemisphere because Pluto is moving faster along its orbit when it is closer to the sun.

Ground-based observations, taken in 1988 and 2002, show that the mass of the atmosphere doubled over that time. This may be due to warming and sublimating nitrogen ice. The new Hubble images from 2002 to 2003 are giving astronomers essential clues about how the seasons on Pluto work and about the fate of its atmosphere.

The images, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys, are invaluable to planning the details of the New Horizons flyby in 2015. New Horizons will pass by Pluto so quickly that only one hemisphere will be photographed in the highest possible detail. Particularly noticeable in the Hubble image is a bright spot that has been independently noted to be unusually rich in carbon monoxide frost. It is a prime target for New Horizons. "Everybody is puzzled by this feature," says Buie. New Horizons will get an excellent look at the boundary between this bright feature and a nearby region covered in pitch-black surface material.

"The Hubble images will also help New Horizons scientists better calculate the exposure time for each Pluto snapshot, which is important for taking the most detailed pictures possible," says Buie. With no chance for re-exposures, accurate models for the surface of Pluto are essential in preventing pictures that are either under- or overexposed.

The Hubble images are a few pixels wide. But through a technique called dithering, multiple, slightly offset pictures can be combined through computer-image processing to synthesize a higher-resolution view than could be seen in a single exposure. "This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish," says Buie, who developed special algorithms to sharpen the Hubble data.


The Hubble research results appear in the March 2010 issue of the Astronomical Journal. Buie's science team members are William Grundy of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., and Eliot Young, Leslie Young, and Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Buie plans to use Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3 to make further Pluto observations prior to the arrival of New Horizons.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. in Washington, D.C.

The image covers a patch of sky about three times larger than the full moon. The patch was selected because it does not contain any unusually bright objects, which could damage instrument detectors if observed for too long. The picture was taken while the spacecraft was staring at a fixed patch of sky and is being used to calibrate the spacecraft's pointing system.

When the WISE survey begins, the spacecraft will scan the sky continuously as it circles the globe, while an internal scan mirror counteracts its motion. This allows WISE to take "freeze-frame" snapshots every 11 seconds, resulting in millions of images of the entire sky.
"Right now, we are busy matching the rate of the scan mirror to the rate of the spacecraft, so we will capture sharp pictures as our telescope sweeps across the sky," said William Irace, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

To sense the infrared glow of stars and galaxies, the WISE spacecraft cannot give off any detectable infrared light of its own. This is accomplished by chilling the telescope and detectors to ultra-cold temperatures. The coldest of WISE's detectors will operate at less than 8 Kelvin, or minus 445 Fahrenheit.
The first sky survey will be complete in six months, followed by a second scan of one-half of the sky lasting three months. The WISE mission ends when the frozen hydrogen that keeps the instrument cold evaporates away, an event expected to occur in October 2010.

Preliminary survey images are expected to be released six months later, in April 2011, with the final atlas and catalog coming after another 11 months in March 2012. Selected images will be released to the public beginning in February 2010.

Asteroid 2010 AL30, discovered by the LINEAR survey of MIT's Lincoln Laboratories on Jan. 10, will make a close approach to the Earth's surface to within 76,000 miles on Jan. 13 at 12:46 pm Greenwich time (7:46 am EST, 4:46 am PST). Because its orbital period is nearly identical to the Earth's one year period, some have suggested it may be a manmade rocket stage in orbit about the sun. However, this object's orbit reaches the orbit of Venus at its closest point to the sun and nearly out to the orbit of Mars at its furthest point, crossing the Earth's orbit at a very steep angle. This makes it very unlikely that 2010 AL30 is a rocket stage. Furthermore, trajectory extrapolations show that this object cannot be associated with any recent launch and it has not made any close approaches to the Earth since well before the Space Age began.

It seems more likely that this is a near-Earth asteroid about 10-15 meters in size, one of approximately 2 million such objects in near-Earth space. One would expect a near-Earth asteroid of this size to pass within the moon's distance about once every week on average. The asteroid does not pose a risk, in fact, stony asteroids under 25 meters in diameter would be expected to burn up in our atmosphere, causing little or no ground damage.

New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Magellan telescopes suggest that a dense stellar remnant has been ripped apart by a black hole a thousand times as massive as the Sun. If confirmed, this discovery would be a cosmic double play: it would be strong evidence for an intermediate mass black hole, which has been a hotly debated topic, and would mark the first time such a black hole has been caught tearing a star apart.

This scenario is based on Chandra observations, which revealed an unusually luminous source of X-rays in a dense cluster of old stars, and optical observations that showed a peculiar mix of elements associated with the X-ray emission. Taken together, a case can be made that the X-ray emission is produced by debris from a disrupted white dwarf star that is heated as it falls towards a massive black hole. The optical emission comes from debris further out that is illuminated by these X-rays.

The intensity of the X-ray emission places the source in the "ultraluminous X-ray source" or ULX category, meaning that it is more luminous than any known stellar X-ray source, but less luminous than the bright X-ray sources (active galactic nuclei) associated with supermassive black holes in the nuclei of galaxies. The nature of ULXs is a mystery, but one suggestion is that some ULXs are black holes with masses between about a hundred and several thousand times that of the Sun, a range intermediate between stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes located in the nuclei of galaxies.

This ULX is in a globular cluster, a very old and crowded conglomeration of stars. Astronomers have suspected that globular clusters could contain intermediate-mass black holes, but conclusive evidence for this has been elusive.

NASA has selected three proposals as candidates for the agency's next space venture to another celestial body in our solar system. The final project selected in mid-2011 may provide a better understanding of Earth's formation or perhaps the origin of life on our planet.

The proposed missions would probe the atmosphere and crust of Venus; return a piece of a near-Earth asteroid for analysis; or drop a robotic lander into a basin at the moon's south pole to return lunar rocks back to Earth for study.

NASA will select one proposal for full development after detailed mission concept studies are completed and reviewed. The studies begin during 2010, and the selected mission must be ready for launch no later than Dec. 30, 2018. Mission cost, excluding the launch vehicle, is limited to $650 million.

"These are projects that inspire and excite young scientists, engineers and the public," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These three proposals provide the best science value among eight submitted to NASA this year."

Each proposal team initially will receive approximately $3.3 million in 2010 to conduct a 12-month mission concept study that focuses on implementation feasibility, cost, management and technical plans. Studies also will include plans for educational outreach and small business opportunities.

During the Maunder Minimum, a period of diminished solar activity between 1645 and 1715, sunspots were rare on the face of the sun, sometimes disappearing entirely for months to years. At the same time, Earth experienced a bitter cold period known as the "Little Ice Age."

Were the events connected? Scientists cannot say for sure, but it's quite likely. Slowdowns in solar activity -- evidenced by reductions in sunspot numbers -- are known to coincide with decreases in the amount of energy discharged by the sun. During the Little Ice Age, though, few would have thought to track total solar irradiance (TSI), the amount of solar energy striking Earth's upper atmosphere. In fact, the scientific instrument needed to make such measurements -- a spaceborne radiometer -- was still three centuries into the future.

Modern scientists have several tools for studying TSI. Since the 1970s, scientists have relied upon a collection of radiometers on American and European spacecraft to keep a close eye on solar fluctuations from above the atmosphere, which intercepts much of the sun's radiation. When NASA launches the Glory satellite this fall (no earlier than October 2009), researchers will have a more accurate instrument for measuring TSI than they've ever had before.

The Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM) on Glory is more sophisticated, but still related in concept to the very earliest ground-based solar radiometers, which were invented in 1838. Where those radiometers used sunlight to heat water and indicate the intensity of the sun's brightness at the Earth's surface, Glory's TIM instrument will use a black-coated metallic detector to measure how much heat is produced by solar radiation as it reaches the top of the Earth's atmosphere.

After nearly 5 years of concurrent operations with the Afternoon Constellation, known as the "A-Train," the PARASOL satellite is going on another orbit "track." The A-Train includes a number of NASA satellites that orbit the Earth one behind the other on the same track and until this month, PARASOL has been part of that train.

PARASOL is an Earth observation mission, managed by the French Space Agency (CNES). PARASOL stands for "Polarization and Anisotropy of Reflectances for Atmospheric Sciences coupled with Observations from a Lidar." According to CNES, it was maneuvered to leave its position inside the A-Train at 12:48 UTC, December 2, 2009.

The A-Train satellite formation currently consists of five satellites flying in close proximity: Aqua, CloudSat, CALIPSO, PARASOL and Aura. Each of these satellites cross the equator within a few minutes of each another at around 1:30 p.m. local time. By combining the different sets of nearly simultaneous observations, scientists are able to gain a better understanding its main mission, studying the important parameters related to climate change. As an additional benefit, the A-Train satellites provide unique information about tropical cyclones, the collective term for tropical depressions, tropical storms, hurricanes and typhoons.