U.S. Senator Mark Warner and U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott joined Bolden and science center executives for the event.

"President Obama's call for us to win the future means we need to develop the skills and capabilities to stay competitive in the global economy," Administrator Bolden said. "Today's students have the opportunity to build and take part in tomorrow's big adventures and keep our country strong and competitive through science, technology, engineering and mathematics."

STEM education is the foundation of NASA's learning initiatives, such as the Summer of Innovation (SoI) project. Begun in 2010, the project engages middle school students in STEM studies and hands-on, or participatory, exploration during the summer hiatus, when many lose academic skills acquired during the school year. SoI also supports a continuum of coordinated services to engage students in meaningful ways through summer and extended learning during the school year. NASA will announce this year's Summer of Innovation plans in the spring.

"Americans have never been afraid of the future, and we shouldn't start now. We know what the challenges are, and we know that these new times demand new thinking and new skills, including advanced math and science," Sen. Warner said. "We need to face up to these challenges by working together to make sure that our young people get a fair chance to compete, and to win, in the race for the future."

The MathScience Innovation Center's goal is to be the innovator, incubator and advocate of 21st Century math and science programs for the Virginia capital region's kindergarten through 12th grade educators and students. It also houses the Challenger Learning Center for Space Science Education. Today marks the 25th anniversary of the loss of space shuttle Challenger and her crew of seven.

Before Bolden, Warner and Scott took the stage, students had an opportunity to engage in hands-on activities related to science and exploration, including a rocket-building exercise. Education staff from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., led the activities. Studies have shown that hands-on, experiential learning is a key factor in capturing students' interest in technical fields and inspiring the next generation to reach new heights.

For More information visit http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/5-8/features/richmond_stem.html

On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger accident, Kennedy Space Center observed NASA's Day of Remembrance, Jan. 27, with a wreath-laying ceremony at the KSC Visitor Complex Space Mirror Memorial. The Day of Remembrance honors members of the NASA family who lost their lives while furthering the cause of exploration and discovery, including the astronaut crews of Apollo 1 and shuttles Challenger and Columbia.

Kennedy's Center Director Robert Cabana, Deputy Center Director Janet Petro, and United Space Alliance's Associate Program Manager for Solid Rocket Boosters Roger Elliott laid the wreath, inscribed with the words, "Remembering our Fallen Heroes," at the memorial, and observed a moment of silence.

A statement issued by President Barack Obama read in part, "Today, on this Day of Remembrance when NASA reflects on the mighty sacrifices made to push those frontiers, America's space agency is working to achieve even greater goals. Through triumph and tragedy, each of us has benefited from their courage and devotion, and we honor their memory by dedicating ourselves to a better tomorrow. Despite the challenges before us today, let us commit ourselves and continue their valiant journey toward a more vibrant and secure future."

Before a wreath-laying ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden also issued a statement that read in part, "The legacy of those who have perished is present every day in our work and inspires generations of new space explorers. Every day, with each new challenge we overcome and every discovery we make, we honor these remarkable men and women. Please join me in working to fulfill their dreams for the future."

"I think it's really important that every year we take a few moments of our day, on this Day of Remembrance, to remember those that paid the ultimate sacrifice in the quest to explore space," Cabana said. "The loss of their lives would be meaningless if we did not continue. I think it's extremely important to continue our quest to explore and expand our knowledge."

On Jan. 28, The Astronauts Memorial Foundation's remembrance service at the Space Mirror Memorial was attended by NASA officials, dignitaries, families of the fallen, Kennedy workers and the general public.

Moderated by the foundation's President Stephen Feldman, the guest speakers included NASA Associate Administrator for Space Operations William Gerstenmaier; Dr. June Scobee Rodgers, widow of STS-51L Commander Francis R. "Dick" Scobee and founding chair of the Challenger Center for Space Science Education; Cabana; former astronaut and chairman of The Astronauts Memorial Foundation Mike McCulley; and Rick Soria, 2009 Alan Shepard Technology in Education Award winner.

Scobee Rodgers said, "We're not a nation of naysayers, we're a nation of believers. We're innovators and problem solvers. We're risk-takers with a pioneering spirit. We as a nation are indebted to the space pioneers who blazed a trail of exploration and discovery."

She and the families of the lost Challenger crew came together and created the Challenger Center as a living tribute to their loved ones. Scobee Rodgers said their vision became a reality with the first one in Houston. There are now 48 Challenger Centers throughout the U.S., and also in Canada, England and South Korea.

"It's time for the next 25 years to unfold," Scobee Rodgers said.

McCulley read a portion of the Gettysburg Address, ending with the words, "that we here shall highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain."

Cabana said, "We learned many lessons from the loss of Challenger. And the vehicle that returned to flight two-and-a-half years later may have looked the same, but had hundreds of changes to make it safer and more reliable."

Soria, the Alan Shepard Technology in Education Award winner said, "It is fitting to pause and challenge each other to become more involved in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education of our students. The future beckons."

It's not easy to look back and reflect," Gerstenmaier said. "We learned that little things that seem harmless can become catastrophic events. The human spaceflight team has learned tremendous lessons from these events.

"We seek to answer the most difficult questions imaginable and formulate new questions," Gerstenmaier said. "Rededicate yourselves to expanding the frontier of knowledge in a manner that is fitting of the huge sacrifice made by those who have gone before."

"We will continue to strive to be better. To explore, to expand our knowledge of our universe and to reach beyond," Cabana said.

At the conclusion of the memorial, Scobee Rodgers and Gerstenmaier placed a wreath below the names of the Challenger crew.

The event was open to the general public and the visitor complex provided flowers for attendees to place at the memorial throughout the day.

The Apollo 1 tragedy occurred at Launch Pad 34, Jan. 27, 1967, during a preflight test. Astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee lost their lives when a fire swept through the command module.

Space shuttle Challenger's STS-51L mission ended in tragedy during ascent after lifting off from Launch Pad 39B on Jan. 28, 1986. A faulty O-ring on one of the solid rocket boosters caused a chain of events that resulted in an explosion and the loss of Challenger and its seven crew members. Commander Scobee, Pilot Michael J. Smith, Mission Specialists Judith A. Resnik, Ellison S. Onizuka, and Ronald E. McNair, and Payload Specialists Gregory B. Jarvis and Sharon Christa McAuliffe perished in the accident.

Space shuttle Columbia and the seven-member crew of the STS-107 mission perished when the orbiter broke apart during re-entry Feb. 1, 2003. Lost were Commander Rick D. Husband, Pilot William C. McCool, Payload Commander Michael P. Anderson, Mission Specialists Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown and Laurel B. Clark, and Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon, with the Israeli Space Agency.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/news/remembrance_2011.html

The University of New Mexico leads the project, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provides the advanced digital electronic systems, which represent a major component of the observatory.

The first station in the Long Wavelength Array, with 256 antennas, is scheduled to start surveying the sky by this summer. When complete, the Long Wavelength Array will consist of 53 stations, with a total of 13,000 antennas strategically placed in an area nearly 400 kilometers (248 miles) in diameter. The antennas will provide sensitive, high-resolution images of a region of the sky hundreds of times larger than the full moon. These images could reveal radio waves coming from planets outside our solar system, and thus would turn out to be a new way to detect these worlds. In addition to planets, the telescope will pick up a host of other cosmic phenomena.

"We'll be looking for the occasional celestial flash," said Joseph Lazio, a radio astronomer at JPL. "These flashes can be anything from explosions on surfaces of nearby stars, deaths of distant stars, exploding black holes, or even perhaps transmissions by other civilizations." JPL scientists are working with multi-institutional teams to explore this new area of astronomy. Lazio is lead author of an article reporting scientific results from the Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array, a precursor to the new array, in the December 2010 issue of Astronomical Journal.

The new Long Wavelength Array will operate in the radio-frequency range of 20 to 80 megahertz, corresponding to wavelengths of 15 meters to 3.8 meters (49.2 feet to 12.5 feet). These frequencies represent one of the last and most poorly explored regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

In recent years, a few factors have triggered revived interest in radio astronomy at these frequencies. The cost and technology required to build these low-frequency antennas has improved significantly. Also, advances in computing have made the demands of image processing more attainable. The combination of cost-effective hardware and technology gives scientists the ability to return to these wavelengths and obtain a much better view of the universe. The predecessor Long Wavelength Demonstrator Array was also in New Mexico. It was successful in identifying radio flashes, but all of them came from non-astronomy targets -- either the sun, or meteors reflecting TV signals high in Earth's atmosphere. Nonetheless, its findings indicate how future searches using the Long Wavelength Array technology might lead to new discoveries.

Radio astronomy was born at frequencies below 100 megahertz and developed from there. The discoveries and innovations at this frequency range helped pave the way for modern astronomy. Perhaps one of the most important contributions made in radio astronomy was by a young graduate student at New Hall (since renamed Murray Edwards College) of the University of Cambridge, U.K. Jocelyn Bell discovered the first hints of radio pulsars in 1967, a finding that was later awarded a Nobel Prize. Pulsars are neutron stars that beam radio waves in a manner similar to a lighthouse beacon.

Long before Bell's discovery, astronomers believed that neutron stars, remnants of certain types of supernova explosions, might exist. At the time, however, the prediction was that these cosmic objects would be far too faint to be detected. When Bell went looking for something else, she stumbled upon neutron stars that were in fact pulsing with radio waves -- the pulsars. Today about 2,000 pulsars are known, but within the past decade, a number of discoveries have hinted that the radio sky might be far more dynamic than suggested by just pulsars.

"Because nature is more clever than we are, it's quite possible that we will discover something we haven't thought of," said Lazio.

 The Long Wavelength Array project is led by the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, N.M., and includes the Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M., the United States Naval Research Laboratories, Washington, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The California Institute of Technology manages JPL for NASA.

The combined observations from multiple telescopes has provided astronomers with a detailed new look at how galaxy and black hole formation may have occurred in the early universe. This image shows optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope in red, green and blue, X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in purple, and radio data from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Large Array in yellow. A compact X-ray source at the center of the galaxy coincides with a radio source, giving evidence for an actively growing supermassive black hole with a mass of about one million times that of the sun.

For More information visit http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1848.html

Earth’s climate continues to change at a rapid pace.

Last week, NASA announced that 2010 was tied as the warmest year on record. Likewise, the last decade was the warmest in the 130-year global temperature record maintained by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.

Meanwhile, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, engineers are preparing NASA’s next Earth-observing mission -- a satellite called Glory -- for launch in late February. The satellite, which contains two instruments that will monitor key parts of the climate system, aims to offer a new stream of data that climatologists will use as part of an ongoing effort to improve the accuracy of climate models.

The Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor (APS), a science instrument mounted on the Earth-facing side of the spacecraft, will collect information about small airborne particles called aerosols that can affect climate by absorbing and scattering light. The Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM), which is located on the opposite side of the spacecraft, facing the sun, will measure the intensity of solar radiation at the top of Earth’s atmosphere.

While climatologists have a good understanding of the role that greenhouse gases have on climate, less is known about the impacts of aerosols and long-term solar variability. "We are trying to achieve better measurements of both aerosols and total solar irradiance in order to calculate the energy budget -- the amount of energy entering and exiting Earth’s atmosphere -- as accurately as possible," said Michael Mishchenko, Glory’s project scientist and a researcher at GISS.

Perplexing Particles

The need for better measurements is particularly acute for aerosols. "The range of uncertainty associated with the climate impact of aerosols is three or four times that of greenhouse gases," said James Hansen, the director of GISS and a member of Glory’s science team.

Aerosol particles, or the gases that lead to their formation, can come from vehicle tailpipes and desert winds, from sea spray and campfires, volcanic eruptions and factories. Even lush forests, soils, or communities of plankton in the ocean can be sources of certain types of aerosols.

Detecting subtle differences between the many different types of aerosols -- such as salt, mineral dust, soot, and smoke -- will be one of Glory’s primary strengths. And by closely monitoring the shape and size distribution of aerosols, as well as the way in which the particles reflect light, scientists will be able to distinguish natural from human-produced aerosols more precisely.

Of the 25 climate models included by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a major report released in 2007, only a handful considered the scattering or absorbing role of aerosol types other than sulfates, a well-studied category of aerosol produced by volcanic eruptions and by burning certain fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, clouds, which form in the presence of aerosols and can be more reflective when human-produced aerosol particles are present, remain a sort of terra incognito to climatologists. Less than a third of the IPCC models included aerosol impacts on clouds, even in a limited way, and, again, those that did only considered sulfates.

Glory, with its innovative APS, aims to advance understanding of the problematic particles. While other NASA instruments—including ground, aircraft, and satellite-based instruments—have studied aerosols in the past, the APS is NASA’s first satellite-based instrument that will do so by measuring the polarization of light, the orientation of light-wave vibrations.

The Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), the French space agency, has launched instruments capable of measuring polarized light in the past. However, Mishchenko expects APS to make more accurate polarimetric measurements of aerosols because it will measure particles from more than 250 angles across nine different spectral channels.

Each type of aerosol leaves a unique polarization signature on light it encounters. Glory scientists, like detectives analyzing blood droplets at a crime scene to reconstruct what happened, will look at the polarization of scattered light and work backwards to deduce the type of aerosol that must have scattered it.

"We know the technique works because we’ve been testing it for a number of years with an airplane-based version of the APS called the Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP)," said Brian Cairns, Glory’s APS instrument scientist and a researcher at GISS.


Monitoring the Sun

Scientists used to describe the incoming energy from the sun -- the foundation of Earth’s climate -- as the "solar constant." However, satellite measurements made by numerous instruments during the last three decades have revealed that solar output actually fluctuates by about 0.1 percent over an 11-year cycle as the sun progresses through periods of more and less intense electromagnetic activity.

"Those fluctuations do not explain the global warming the planet has experienced in the last few decades," said Judith Lean, a member of Glory’s science team and a researcher at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. "However, it’s possible -- probable even -- that longer-term solar cycles exist that could have an impact on climate."

There are clues that broader solar cycles exist -- historical records of sunspots and other types of evidence show that the sun entered an extended quiet period of solar activity between 1645 and 1715 called the Maunder Minimum, for example -- but modern satellite instruments have only been available to monitor total solar irradiance since 1978.

Glory’s TIM instrument will extend and improve upon the existing record of solar irradiance that multiple satellite missions -- some sponsored by NASA and others by international partners -- have maintained. NASA’s most recent solar irradiance instrument was launched in 2003 on the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite, and included a first-generation TIM instrument.

Learning from that instrument, engineers have modified the electronics of the instrument to make the Glory TIM even more accurate. "The Glory TIM should be three times more accurate than the SORCE TIM and about ten times more accurate than earlier instruments," said Greg Kopp, a physicist at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the leader of the TIM science team.

The Glory TIM has a key advantage: access to a one-of-a-kind TSI Radiometer Facility. Funded by NASA and built by LASP, the new facility has allowed Kopp’s team to validate the TIM instrument -- as well as check many ground-based versions of some of the other instruments that have measured solar irradiance -- in the most rigorous manner to date.

Retrofitting a Spacecraft

Overall, at 1.9 meters (6.2 feet) by 1.4 meters (4.6 feet), Glory is neither the largest nor the heaviest of NASA’s Earth-observing satellites. The whole of the spacecraft is not much taller than most people, and is slightly narrower than a park bench. It weighs about 525 kilograms (1,158 pounds), about half the weight of a vintage Volkswagen Beetle.

But there’s one detail that makes Glory particularly interesting: the spacecraft’s bus was originally designed for the Vegetation Canopy Lidar (VCL), a mission that never flew due to a technical glitch in the development of an instrument.

Transforming VCL -- a spacecraft that would have launched on a larger rocket, flown in a different orbit, and faced slightly different conditions in space -- into Glory wasn’t easy. "We had to overcome some interesting engineering challenges, but we have done multiple rounds of environmental tests on all of the components on the spacecraft and we’re confident Glory is ready for the space environment," said Bryan Fafaul, Glory’s project manager.

When Glory launches, it will join a group of satellites called the A-Train that fly in similar low-Earth orbits and make coordinated measurements of the surface. "In a sense, we’ve created the first 'super-observatory' with the A-Train," said Joy Bretthauer, the program executive for Glory at NASA headquarters.

NASA held a press conference about Glory on January 20 at NASA headquarters in Washington.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Glory/news/climate-puzzle.html