The Special Ingredients…of Earth!

This Week @ NASA--April 14, 2017

Cassini and the Hubble Space Telescope, two of our long-running missions, are providing new details about the ocean-bearing moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Hubble's monitoring of plume activity on Europa and Cassini's long-term investigation of Enceladus are laying the groundwork for our Europa Clipper mission, slated for launch in the 2020s. Also, Shane Kimbrough returns home after 171 days aboard the Space Station, celebrating the first Space Shuttle mission and more!

Ocean Worlds

Our two long-running missions, Cassini and the Hubble Space Telescope,  are providing new details about “ocean worlds,” specifically the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. 

The details – discussed during our April 13 science briefing – included the announcement by the Cassini mission team that a key ingredient for life has been found in the ocean on Saturn's moon Enceladus. 

Meanwhile, in 2016 Hubble spotted a likely plume erupting from Jupiter’s moon Europa at the same location as one in 2014, reenforcing the notion of liquid water erupting from the moon.

These observations are laying the groundwork for our Europa Clipper mission, planned for launch in the 2020s.

Welcome Home, Shane!

Shane Kimbrough and his Russian colleagues returned home safely after spending 173 days in space during his mission to the International Space Station.

Meet the Next Crew to Launch to the Station

Meanwhile, astronaut Peggy Whitson assumed command of the orbital platform and she and her crew await the next occupants of the station, which is slated to launch April 20.

Student Launch Initiative

We’ve announced the preliminary winner of the 2017 Student Launch Initiative that took place near our Marshall Space Fight Center, The final selection will be announced in May. The students showcased advanced aerospace and engineering skills by launching their respective model rockets to an altitude of one mile, deploying an automated parachute and safely landing them for re-use.

Langley’s New Lab

On April 11, a ground-breaking ceremony took place at our Langley Research Center for the new Systems Measurement Laboratory. The 175,000 square-foot facility will be a world class lab for the research and development of new measurement concepts, technologies and systems that will enable the to meet its missions in space explorations, science and aeronautics.

Yuri’s Night

Space fans celebrated Yuri’s Night on April 12 at the Air and Space Museum and around the world. On April 12, 1961, cosmonaut Yuri Gagrin became the first person to orbit the Earth.

Celebrating the First Space Shuttle Launch

On April 12, 1981, John Young and Bob Crippin launched aboard Space Shuttle Columbia on STS-1 a two-day mission, the first of the Shuttle Program’s 30-year history.

Watch the full episode:

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Ten Years After Katrina

As we remember the devastation that Hurricane Katrina caused ten years ago, we also look to the improvements made in the past decade in storm prediction and forecasting.

Hurricane Katrina impacted many people, businesses and communities; and even two NASA facilities were hit by the storm. Marshall Space Flight Center and Michoud Assembly Facility were both hit by the harsh storm (seen below).

During Hurricane Katrina in 2005, our satellites were hard at work monitoring and watching the storm from above. Thanks to the higher resolution models we have today, simulations can recreate historical storms, like the below of Hurricane Katrina. Scientists can then study these and learn about past events.

Surprisingly, the United States hasn’t experienced the landfall of a Category 3 hurricane or lager since 2005. This is the longest period of time that has passed without a major hurricane making landfall in the U.S. since reliable records began in 1850.

Although we don’t know when a severe storm will form, we do know that advancements in technology can help us better prepare and predict its path. So, on this ten year mark of this devastating storm, we look back to remember what we saw: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/sets/72157656646633089

The stunning Veil Nebula was created after a star about 20 times the mass of the Sun lived fast and died young – exploding in a cataclysmic release of energy known as a supernova.

In a violent stellar explosion roughly 10,000 years ago, shockwaves and debris created this staggeringly beautiful trail through space. The picture above shows a mosaic of six Hubble Space Telescope pictures, a small area roughly two light-years across, and only a tiny fraction of the nebula's vast 110 light-year structure.

To learn more about Hubble’s celebration of Nebula November and see new nebula images, visit our space telescope's nebula page.

You can also keep up with Hubble on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Flickr!

Image credits: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

#TBT to 1989 when Voyager 2 spotted Uranus looking like a seemingly perfect robin’s egg. 💙⁣ ⁣ When our Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by it in this image, one pole was pointing directly at the Sun. This means that no matter how much it spins, one half is completely in the sun at all times, and the other half is in total darkness.. ⁣ ⁣ Far-flung, Uranus – an ice giant of our solar system – is as mysterious as it is distant. Soon after its launch in 2021, our James Webb Space Telescope will change that by unlocking secrets of its atmosphere. ⁣ ⁣ Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech⁣ ⁣

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May the 4th Be With You

Happy May the 4th! 

How many connections does America’s space program have with the fictional world of Star Wars? More than you might think…

Join us as we highlight a few of the real-world TIE-ins between us and Star Wars:

Space Laser

Lasers in space sounds like something straight out of Star Wars, but it’s also a reality for us. Our own GEDI (yes, like Jedi) instrument will launch later this year to the International Space Station.

GEDI stands for the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation lidar. It will study the height of trees and forests, using three lasers split into eight tracks, and create a 3D map of forests around the planet.

With GEDI’s new tree maps, we’ll get a better understanding of how much carbon is stored in forests all over Earth, and how forests will be able to absorb increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The Jedi knights may help protect a galaxy far, far away, but our GEDI will help us study and understand forest changes right here on Earth.

Another JEDI

There’s another Jedi in town and it happens to be orbiting the planet Jupiter. Our Juno spacecraft, which arrived at the gas giant in July 2016, has an instrument on board that goes by the name of JEDI - the Jupiter Energetic Particle Detector Instrument. 

While it doesn’t use a light saber or channel “the force”, it does measure high-energy particles near Jupiter. Data collected with the JEDI instrument will help us understand how the energy of Jupiter’s rotation is being funneled into its atmosphere and magnetosphere. 

Death Star Moon

We know what you’re thinking...”That’s no moon.” But actually, it is! This is a real picture taken by our Cassini spacecraft of Saturn’s moon Mimas. In this view taken on Cassini’s closest-ever flyby of Mimas, the large Herschel Crater dominates, making the moon look like the Death Star. Herschel Crater is 130 kilometers, or 80 miles, wide and covers most of the right of this image. 

We Actually Do Have the Droids You’re Looking For

We have robots roving and exploring all over the solar system, but it's our own “R2” that's most likely to resonate with Star Wars fans. Robonaut 2, launched in 2011, is working along side humans on board the International Space Station, and may eventually help with spacewalks too dangerous for humans. Incidentally, an earlier version of Robonaut bore a strong “facial” resemblance to enigmatic bounty hunter Boba Fett.

Another "droid" seen on the space station was directly inspired by the saga. In 1999, then Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor David Miller, showed the original 1977 Star Wars to his students on their first day of class. After the scene where hero Luke Skywalker learns lightsaber skills by sparring with a floating droid “remotes” on the Millennium Falcon, Miller stood up and pointed: "I want you to build me some of those."

The result was "SPHERES," or Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient, Experimental Satellites.  Originally designed to test spacecraft rendezvous and docking maneuvers, the bowling-ball size mini-satellites can now be powered by smart phones.

A few more TIE ins...

When space shuttle Atlantis left the International Space Station after 2007’s STS-117 mission, it caught a view of the station that looked to some like a TIE fighter. 

The "TIE-ins" go beyond casual resemblance to real engineering. We already use actual ion engines ("TIE" stands for "Twin Ion Engines") on spacecraft like Dawn, currently orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres. In fact, Dawn goes one better with three ion engines. 

Want more Star Wars connections? Check out THIS Tumblr to learn about the REAL planets we’ve found outside our solar system that resemble planets from the movie. 

Take THIS quiz to see if you know more about the Milky Way galaxy or a galaxy far, far away. 

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com. 

New Sun Science Stamps from the U.S. Postal Service

To start off the summer, the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of stamps showcasing views of the Sun from our Solar Dynamics Observatory!

Since its launch in 2010, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (or SDO) has kept up a near-constant watch on the Sun from its vantage point in orbit around Earth. SDO watches the Sun in more than 10 different types of light, including some that are absorbed by Earth’s atmosphere so can only be seen from space. These different types of light allow scientists to study different parts of the Sun – from its surface to its atmosphere – and better understand the solar activity that can affect our technology on Earth and in space.

The new set of stamps features 10 images from SDO. Most of these images are in extreme ultraviolet light, which is invisible to human eyes.

Let’s explore the science behind some of the stamps!

Coronal hole (May 2016)

The dark area capping the northern polar region of the Sun is a coronal hole, a magnetically open area on the Sun from which high-speed solar wind escapes into space. Such high-speed solar wind streams can spark magnificent auroral displays on Earth when they collide with our planet’s magnetic field.

Solar flare (August 2011)

The bright flash on the Sun’s upper right is a powerful solar flare. Solar flares are bursts of light and energy that can disturb the part of Earth’s atmosphere where GPS and radio signals travel.

Active Sun (October 2014)

This view highlights the many active regions dotting the Sun’s surface. Active regions are areas of intense and complex magnetic fields on the Sun – linked to sunspots – that are prone to erupting with solar flares or explosions of material called coronal mass ejections.

Plasma blast (August 2012)

These images show a burst of material from the Sun, called a coronal mass ejection. These eruptions of magnetized solar material can create space weather effects on Earth when they collide with our planet’s magnetosphere, or magnetic environment – including aurora, satellite disruptions, and, when extreme, even power outages.

Coronal loops (July 2012)

These images show evolving coronal loops across the limb and disk of the Sun. Just days after these images were taken, the Sun unleashed a powerful solar flare.

Coronal loops are often found over sunspots and active regions, which are areas of intense and complex magnetic fields on the Sun.

Sunspots (October 2014)

This view in visible light – the type of light we can see – shows a cluster of sunspots near the center of the Sun. Sunspots appear dark because they are relatively cool compared to surrounding material, a consequence of the way their extremely dense magnetic field prevents heated material from rising to the solar surface.

For more Sun science, follow NASA Sun on Twitter, on Facebook, or on the web.

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How did you choose your Flight Director name?

Looking 50 Years in the Future with NASA Earth Scientists

In the 50 years since the first Earth Day, the view from space has revolutionized our understanding of Earth’s interconnected atmosphere, oceans, freshwater, ice, land, ecosystems and climate that have helped find solutions to environmental challenges.

If NASA’s Earth science has changed this much in 50 years, what will it look like in 50 more years?

We asked some researchers what they thought. Here are their answers, in their own words.

Mahta Moghaddam is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Southern California. She’s building a system that helps sensors sync their measurements.

I am interested in creating new ways to observe the Earth. In particular, my team and I are building and expanding a system that will allow scientists to better study soil moisture. Soil moisture plays a vital role in the water and energy cycle and drives climate and weather patterns. When soil is wet and there is enough solar radiation, water can evaporate and form clouds, which precipitate back to Earth. Soil also feeds us – it nourishes our crops and sustains life on Earth. It’s one of the foundations of life! We need to characterize and study soil in order to feed billions of people now and in the future.

Our novel tool aims to observe changes in soil moisture using sensors that talk to each other and make decisions in real time. For instance, if one sensor in a crop field notes that soil is dry in a plot, it could corroborate it with other sensors in the area and then notify a resource manager or decision maker that an area needs water. Or if a sensor in another location senses that soil moisture is changing quickly due to rain or freeze/thaw activity, it could send a command to launch a drone or even to notify satellites to start observing a larger region. We live in one big, connected world, and can and will use many different scales of observations – local to global – from point-scale in-situ sensors to the scales that can be covered by drones, airplanes, and satellites. In just a few years from now, we might see much more vastly automated systems, with some touching not only Earth observations, but other parts of our lives, like drone deliveries of medical tests and supplies.

Odele Coddington is a scientist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She’s building an instrument to measure how much solar energy Earth reflects back into space.

My research is focused on the Earth system response to the Sun’s energy. I spend half of my time thinking about the amount and variability of the Sun’s energy, also known as the solar irradiance. I’m particularly interested in the solar spectral irradiance, which is the study of the individual wavelengths of the Sun’s energy, like infrared and ultraviolet. On a bright, clear day, we feel the Sun’s warmth because the visible and infrared radiation penetrate Earth’s atmosphere to reach the surface. Without the Sun, we would not be able to survive. Although we’ve been monitoring solar irradiance for over 40 years, there is still much to learn about the Sun’s variability. Continuing to measure the solar irradiance 50 years from now will be as important as it is today.

I spend the other half of my time thinking about the many processes driven by the Sun’s energy both within the atmosphere and at the surface. I’m excited to build an instrument that will measure the integrated signal of these processes in the reflected solar and the emitted thermal radiation. This is my first foray into designing instrumentation and it has been so invigorating scientifically. My team is developing advanced technology that will measure Earth’s outgoing radiation at high spatial resolution and accuracy. Our instrument will be small from the onset, as opposed to reducing the size and mass of existing technology. In the future, a constellation of these instruments, launched on miniaturized spacecraft that are more flexible to implement in space, will give us more eyes in the sky for a better understanding of how processes such as clouds, wildfires and ice sheet melting, for instance, alter Earth’s outgoing energy.

Sujay Kumar is a research physical scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. He works on the Land Information System.

Broadly, I study the water cycle, and specifically the variability of its components. I lead the development of a modeling system called the Land Information System that isolates the land and tries to understand all the processes that move water through the landscape. We have conceptual models of land surface processes, and then we try to constrain them with satellite data to improve our understanding. The outputs are used for weather and climate modeling, water management, agricultural management and some hazard applications.

I think non-traditional and distributed platforms will become more the norm in the future. So that could be things like CubeSats and small sats that are relatively cheaper and quicker than large satellites in terms of how much time it takes to design and launch. One of the advantages is that because they are distributed, you’re not relying on a single satellite and there will be more coverage. I also think we’ll be using data from other “signals of opportunity” such as mobile phones and crowd-sourced platforms. People have figured out ways to, for example, retrieve Earth science measurements from GPS signals.

I feel like in the future we will be designing our sensors and satellites to be adaptive in terms of what the observational needs on the ground are. Say a fire or flood happens, then we will tell the satellite to look over there more intensely, more frequently so that we can benefit. Big data is a buzzword, but it’s becoming a reality. We are going to have a new mission call NISAR that’s going to collect so much data that we really have to rethink how traditional modeling systems will work. The analogy I think of is the development of a self-driving car, which is purely data driven, using tons and tons of data to train the model that drives the car. We could possibly see similar things in Earth science.

Hear from more NASA scientists on what they think the future will bring for Earth science: 

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Which is scarier? Launch VS re-entry?

We’re sending people to space this week 🚀 Here’s your chance to ask a past Flight Director in Mission Control your questions!

Ginger Kerrick will be taking your questions in an Answer Time session on Friday, September 27 from 12pm - 1 pm ET here on NASA’s Tumblr! Ginger served as a Flight Director in Mission Control for 11 years and is now the Flight Integration Division Chief at Johnson Space Center. Find out what it’s like to send humans to space and learn more about her position as our first female Hispanic flight director. Make sure to ask your question now by visiting http://nasa.tumblr.com/ask!

Ginger Kerrick, as a child, dreamed of growing up to be either a basketball player or an astronaut. When neither dream came to fruition, Kerrick developed a fresh perspective – best summed up by the phrase “It just wasn’t meant to be” – and later became part of our team, serving in the Mission Control Center at the NASA Johnson Space Center as a Flight Director who has, to date, supported 13 International Space Station and five joint space shuttle missions. It was there that Kerrick, a few years earlier, became the first non-astronaut Capsule Communicator (CapCom), the flight controller that speaks directly to the astronaut crew in space, on behalf of the rest of the Mission Control team. 

Today, Ginger Kerrick is the Flight Integration Division Chief at our Johnson Space Center. Her department is responsible for crew safety and training, among a list of other duties. She has worked for NASA since 1994, and interned here while she was earning a bachelor’s degree in physics from Texas Tech University. She also has a master’s degree in physics from the university.

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