A group of 12 students from Merritt Island High School are participating in Kennedy Space Center's Creating Understanding and Broadening Education through Satellite (CUBES) pilot project. One day soon they may see the tiny satellite they design, called a CubeSat, fly as a secondary payload with a university satellite on one of NASA's expendable launch vehicle missions.

The CUBES project, developed and implemented by Kennedy's Foundations of Leadership Team, is spearheaded by the center's Education Programs Office. The Launch Services Program (LSP) is sponsoring the project and providing the CubeSat kits and additional support material.

Merritt Island is only the second high school in the country, and the first in Florida, to design and build a CubeSat.

Danielle, an incoming senior and CUBES project manager, said she heard about the project through the school's science club and wanted to get involved because it was truly an opportunity of a lifetime.

"I've lived next to the space center my entire life so it is a dream come true to be able to partner with engineers to design, construct and launch a satellite," Danielle said.

Erin, also an incoming senior said she heard about the project through the school's engineering club, as did many of the other students who signed up. Erin readied the preliminary system requirements for review.

"I really wanted to get involved because it seemed like something unique and different than anything else at the school," Erin said. "I knew it would be a great learning experience."

Kennedy mentor Shaun Daly from the Engineering Directorate, is the programmatic manager and liaison to the LSP. He said the mentors are equally excited about the potential to be involved in the development of a CubeSat.

"We hold ourselves to a promise that the students run this project," Daly said. "We will continue to enable learning while giving guidance where needed, but the students make the end decisions."

After completing the first major milestones, which were delivering a mission concept review and preliminary systems requirements review to NASA and industry personnel in late April, the students received approval to continue on to the design phase.

Danielle said the reviews included an overview of the mission and how the team plans to achieve it. She and other students talked about each subsystem, including power, communication, command and data and the requirements needed for each.

"The CubeSat is a tool to educate," said Garrett Skrobot, who is the LSP PPOD/CubeSat mission manager. "It is a way to encourage high school students to get excited about science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers."

Grace Johnson, the CUBES education project manager, said that the tiny satellite's primary mission will be to collect vibration data during the launch, which is one of LSP's goals. The data will be transmitted wirelessly to the university satellite also on the mission, and then from there to Earth.

"This is potentially the beginning of a series of missions that could support that effort," Johnson said. "It's also a way to show that high school students can design and build a small satellite."

Danielle said that LSP requirements need to be changed in order to allow the CubeSat to be powered on during launch for data transmission. Normally, secondary payloads must be powered off so they don't interfere with the primary satellite during launch.

According to Alison Fertig, a physics teacher and project advisor, the students will meet during the summer to redefine requirements and work on their trades. She hopes the students will be able to travel to Utah State University at the beginning of August for the Small Satellite Conference and a CubeSat workshop facilitated by California Polytechnic University.

Daly and several other mentors are exceptionally proud of the work the students already accomplished and also are impressed with the innovative solutions they developed to meet tough engineering challenges in the beginning design phase of the project.

"There is much to come," Daly said. "We expect great things from the students and I am sure they will deliver in a big way."

The view from above of the ARTEMIS orbits as they make the transition from the kidney-shaped Lissajous orbits on either side of the moon to orbiting around the moon. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

They've almost arrived.

It took one and a half years, over 90 orbit maneuvers, and – wonderfully – many gravitational boosts and only the barest bit of fuel to move two spacecraft from their orbit around Earth to their new home around the moon.

Along their travels, the spacecraft have been through orbits never before attempted and made lovely curlicue leaps from one orbit to the next. This summer, the two ARTEMIS spacecraft -- which began their lives as part of the five-craft THEMIS mission studying Earth's aurora – will begin to orbit the moon instead. THEMIS is an acronym for the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interaction during Substorms spacecraft.

Even with NASA's decades of orbital mechanics experience, this journey was no easy feat. The trip required several maneuvers never before attempted, including several months when each craft moved in a kidney-shaped path on each side of the moon around, well, nothing but a gravitational point in space marked by no physical planet or object.

"No one has ever tried this orbit before, it's an Earth-moon libration orbit," says David Folta a flight dynamics engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "It's a very unstable orbit that requires daily attention and constant adjustments."

The journey for ARTEMIS -- short for Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun -- began in 2009, after THEMIS had completed some two years of science data collection on the magnetic environment around Earth, the aurora, and how these are affected by the sun.

The spacecraft are solar-powered, but orbits for the two outermost THEMIS spacecraft had slipped over time and were going to be subjected to regular eight-hour periods of darkness. These spacecraft could withstand up to three hours without sunlight, but this much darkness would soon leave the batteries completely discharged.

Teams at UC-Berkeley and Goddard handled the day-to-day control of the THEMIS spacecraft. The Principal Investigator for the mission, Vassilis Angelopoulos of UCLA talked to the teams about moving the two spacecraft to the moon to study the magnetic environment there. But quick models of a conventional boost technique showed that all the remaining fuel would be used simply in transit. There wouldn't be enough left over for the fuel-hungry process of adjusting direction and speed to actually begin circling the moon.

So Angelopoulos pulled together a new, more complex multi-year-long orbit change plan. The move would rely predominantly on gravity assists from the moon and Earth to move the spacecraft into place. He brought his idea to two engineers who had been involved with launching THEMIS in the first place: David Folta and another flight engineer at Goddard, Mark Woodard. The pair used their own models to validate this new design, and the plan was on.

First step: increase the size of the orbits. The original Earth-centric orbits barely reached half way to the moon. By using small amounts of fuel to adjust speed and direction at precise moments in the orbit, the spacecraft were catapulted farther and farther out into space. It took five such adjustments for ARTEMIS P1 and 27 for ARTEMIS P2.

Next step: make the jump from Earth orbit to the tricky kidney-shaped "Lissajous" orbit, circling what's known as a Lagrangian point on each side of the moon. These points are the places where the forces of gravity between Earth and the moon balance each other – the point does not actually offer a physical entity to circle around. ARTEMIS P1 made the leap – in a beautiful arc under and around the moon -- to the Lagrangian point on the far side of the moon on August 25, 2010. The second craft made the jump to the near side of the moon on October 22. This transfer required a complex series of maneuvers including lunar gravity assists, Earth gravity assists, and deep space maneuvers. The combination of these maneuvers was needed not only to arrive at the correct spot near the moon but also at the correct time and speed.

History was made. Numerous satellites orbit Lagrangian points between Earth and the sun but, while this orbit had been studied extensively, it had never before been attempted.

Not only was this an engineering feat in and of itself, but the spacecraft were now in an ideal spot to study magnetism some distance from the moon. In this position, they could spot how the solar wind – made up of ionized gas known as plasma -- flows past the moon and tries to fill in the vacuum on the other side. A task made complicated since the plasma is forced by the magnetic fields to travel along certain paths.

"It's a veritable zoo of plasma phenomena," says David Sibeck, the project manager for THEMIS and ARTEMIS at Goddard. "The moon carves out a cavity in the solar wind, and then we get to watch how that fills in. It's anything but boring. There's microphysics and particle physics and wave particle interaction and boundaries and layers. All things we haven't had a chance to study before in the plasma."

Life for the flight engineers was anything but boring too. Keeping something in orbit around a spot that has little to mark it except for the balance of gravity is no simple task. The spacecraft required regular corrections to keep it on track and Folta and Woodard watched it daily.

"We would get updated orbit information around 9 a.m. every day," says Woodard. "We'd run that through our software and get an estimate of what our next maneuver should be. We'd go back and forth with Berkeley and together we'd validate a maneuver until we knew it was going to work and keep us flying for another week."

The team learned from experience. Slight adjustments often had bigger consequences than expected. They eventually found the optimal places where corrections seemed to require less subsequent fine-tuning. These sweet spots came whenever the spacecraft crossed an imaginary line joining Earth and the moon, though nothing in theories had predicted such a thing.

The daily vigilance turned out to be crucial. On October 14, the P1 spacecraft orbit and attitude changed unexpectedly. The first thought was that the tracking system might have failed, but that didn't seem to be the problem. However, the ARTEMIS team also noticed that the whole craft had begun to spin about 0.001 revolutions per minute faster. One of the instruments that measures electric fields also stopped working. Best guess? The sphere at the end of that instrument's 82-foot boom had broken off – perhaps because it was struck by something. That sphere was just three ounces on a spacecraft that weighed nearly 190 pounds -- but it adjusted ARTEMIS P1's speed enough that had they caught the anomaly even a few days later they would have had to waste a prohibitive amount of fuel to get back on course.

As it is, ARTEMIS will make it to the moon with even more fuel than originally estimated. There will be enough fuel for orbit corrections for seven to 10 years and then enough left over to bring the two craft down to the moon.

"We are thrilled with the work of the mission planners," says Sibeck. "They are going to get us much closer to the moon than we could have hoped. That's crucial for providing high quality data about the moon's interior, its surface composition, and whether there are pockets of magnetism there."

On January 9, 2011, ARTEMIS P1 jumped over the moon and joined ARTEMIS P2 on the side of the moon closest to Earth. Now the last steps are about to begin.

On June 27, P1 will spiral in toward the moon and enter lunar orbit. On July 17, P2 will follow. P2 will travel in the same direction with the moon, or in prograde; P1 will travel in the opposite direction, in retrograde.

"We've been monitoring ARTEMIS every day and developing maneuvers every week. It's been a challenge, but we've uncovered some great things," says Folta, who will now focus his attention on other NASA flights such as the MAVEN mission to Mars that is scheduled to launch in 2013. "But soon we'll be done with this final maneuvering and, well, we'll be back to just being ARTEMIS consultants."

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/centers/jpl/news/first20110328.html

In this image from November 2010, the U.S. Air Force's ACAT F-16D flew through Sierra Nevada canyons and past peaks during ground collision avoidance test flights.

The ACAT, which stands for Automatic Collision Avoidance Technology, aircraft took off from Edwards Air Force Base on a flight originating from NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. Researchers at Dryden are working with the Air Force Research Laboratory in the ACAT Fighter Risk Reduction Project to develop collision avoidance technologies for fighter/attack aircraft that would reduce the risk of ground and mid-air collisions.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1977.html

The largest fire in the history of the state of Arizona continues to burn and emergency managers and responders are using satellite data from a variety of instruments to plan their firefighting containment strategies and mitigation efforts once the fires are out.

The Landsat 5 satellite captured images of the Wallow North and Horseshoe 2 fires burning in eastern Arizona on June 15, 2011 at 19:54:23 Zulu (3:54 p.m. EDT). Both images are false-colored to allow ease of identification of various objects that will help firefighters and emergency managers. In the images burn scars appear in red and ongoing fire in bright red. Vegetation is colored green, smoke is colored blue and bare ground is tan-colored. The Landsat 5 image is a false color image with a 7, 4, 2 band combination.

The Wallow fire began May 29, 2011 in the Bear Wallow Wilderness area located in eastern Arizona. High winds and low humidity meant that by June 14, 2011 the Wallow Fire became Arizona’s largest wildfire to date with over 487,016 acres burned. On the morning of June 16 the fire is now 29 percent contained, according to Inciweb. Inciweb, the "Incident Information System" website, (www.inciweb.org) is an interagency all-risk incident information management system.

The National Weather Service has posted a Red Flag Warning for June 16 and 17. The warning forecasts strong winds from the southwest with gusts to between 35 and 45 mph.

Inciweb reported that the Horseshoe 2 Fire began on May 8 in Horseshoe Canyon on the Douglas Ranger District of the Coronado National Forest, located in southeast Arizona. The Chiricahua National Monument in the northern area of the fire was closed on June 9 and remains closed. As of June 16, 184,198 acres had burned, and the fire is reported as 60 percent contained.

The Landsat series of satellites is used by emergency managers to acquire a range of imagery and data, from floods to fires. Landsat has also recently provided images of the flooding of the Mississippi River.

The Landsat Program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Landsat satellites have been consistently gathering data about our planet since 1972. They continue to improve and expand this unparalleled record of Earth’s changing landscapes, for the benefit of all. The next Landsat satellite is scheduled to launch in December 2012.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/arizona-fire.html

Scientists analyzing recent data from NASA's Voyager and Cassini spacecraft have calculated that Voyager 1 could cross over into the frontier of interstellar space at any time and much earlier than previously thought. The findings are detailed in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

Data from Voyager's low-energy charged particle instrument, first reported in December 2010, have indicated that the outward speed of the charged particles streaming from the sun has slowed to zero. The stagnation of this solar wind has continued through at least February 2011, marking a thick, previously unpredicted "transition zone" at the edge of our solar system.

"There is one time we are going to cross that frontier, and this is the first sign it is upon us," said Tom Krimigis, prinicipal investigator for Voyager's low-energy charged particle instrument and Cassini's magnetospheric imaging instrument, based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

Krimigis and colleagues combined the new Voyager data with previously unpublished measurements from the ion and neutral camera on Cassini's magnetospheric imaging instrument. The Cassini instrument collects data on neutral atoms streaming into our solar system from the outside.

The analysis indicates that the boundary between interstellar space and the bubble of charged particles the sun blows around itself is likely between 10 and 14 billion miles (16 to 23 billion kilometers) from the sun, with a best estimate of approximately 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers). Since Voyager 1 is already nearly 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) out, it could cross into interstellar space at any time.

"These calculations show we're getting close, but how close? That's what we don't know, but Voyager 1 speeds outward a billion miles every three years, so we may not have long to wait," said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist, based at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Scientists intend to keep analyzing the Voyager 1 data, looking for confirmation. They will also be studying the Voyager 2 data, but Voyager 2 is not as close to the edge of the solar system as Voyager 1. Voyager 2 is about 9 billion miles (14 billion kilometers) away from the sun.

Launched in 1977, the Voyager twin spacecraft have been on a 33-year journey. They are humanity's farthest working deep space sentinels enroute to reach the edge of interstellar space. The Voyagers were built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., which continues to operate both spacecraft. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is managed for NASA by Caltech.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/voyager/voyager20110615.html

This is an artist's concept of the Saturnian plasma sheet based on data from Cassini magnetospheric imaging instrument. It shows Saturn's embedded "ring current," an invisible ring of energetic ions trapped in the planet's magnetic field.

Saturn is at the center, with the red "donut" representing the distribution of dense neutral gas outside Saturn's icy rings. Beyond this region, energetic ions populate the plasma sheet to the dayside magnetopause filling the faintly sketched magnetic flux tubes to higher latitudes and contributing to the ring current. The plasma sheet thins gradually toward the nightside. The view is from above Saturn's equatorial plane, which is represented by grid lines. The moon Titan's location is shown for scale. The location of the bow shock is marked, as is the flow of the deflected solar wind in the magnetosheath.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The magnetospheric imaging instrument was designed, built and is operated by an international team lead by the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University, Laurel, Md.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/gallery/pia10084.html

Satellites provide a lot of useful information and the Landsat 5 satellite captured an image of the long damage track created on June 1, 2011 when a tornado tracked from Springfield to Sturbridge, Mass. An earlier image is now available from 2010 that enables people to more clearly see the damage path the June 2011 twister created on its eastward track.

A Landsat 5 satellite image from October 8, 2010 has been released from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey that shows the area between Springfield and Sturbridge, Mass. where the tornado touched down.

Emergency managers and land managers have contacted NASA and have been using Landsat imagery to determine the tornado's damage path, and help assess what areas have been affected.

The Springfield tornado touched down on June 1, 2011, from a supercell thunderstorm that developed over western Massachusetts. The movement of that storm system was captured in an animation by the Geostationary Operational Environmental (GOES-13) satellite. NASA's GOES Project created the animation from the NOAA managed satellite, and it shows the bubbling up of thunderstorms that possibly spawned the tornadoes.

The supercell thunderstorm produced an EF3 tornado that cut a 39-mile (63-kilometer) track of destruction across southwest and south-central Massachusetts. The tornado remained on the ground for many miles and widened to 0.5 miles (0.8 kilometers), making the path on satellite imagery more obvious.

Landsat 5's Thematic Mapper captured a natural-color image on June 5, 2011 that clearly showed the tornado track, especially when compared with the image from 2010. The after image shows part of the tornado track, including damage in Sturbridge. A tornado was reported on the ground in Sturbridge at 5:22 p.m. according to the Boston Globe newspaper.

The Landsat Program is a series of Earth-observing satellite missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. Since 1972, Landsat satellites have collected information about Earth from space. This science, known as remote sensing, has matured with the Landsat Program.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/mass-tornado-beforeafter.html

The international Aquarius/SAC-D Earth-observing mission, carrying the NASA-built Aquarius instrument, is scheduled to launch at 7:20 a.m. PDT (10:20 a.m. EDT), June 10, 2011, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, along California's central coast. Aquarius will measure the saltiness of Earth's ocean surface to improve climate forecasts.

The satellite observatory is nestled inside the top of a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket. Spacecraft separation from the Delta II is scheduled to occur 56 minutes 42 seconds after launch. One minute later, the observatory's solar panels are scheduled to deploy.

The following spacecraft events will be checked off as they occur:

Launch

The Delta II rocket carrying the Aquarius/SAC-D observatory, with NASA's Aquarius mission, has lifted off into the morning skies above Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. It is heading up and out over the Pacific Ocean.

Fairing separates

The Delta II's first-stage engine has completed its burn, its second-stage engine has ignited as planned, and the rocket's nose cone, or fairing, has separated and been jettisoned as planned, exposing the Aquarius/SAC-D observatory to space.

Coast phase

The Delta II rocket's second-stage engine has temporarily stopped firing, as planned, and the rocket and Aquarius/SAC-D observatory have begun a planned 42-minute, 40-second coast phase. During this time, the second-stage engine will perform two sets of attitude re-orientation maneuvers.

Spacecraft separates and solar arrays are deployed

The Aquarius/SAC-D observatory has successfully separated from its Delta II rocket, ground controllers have acquired its signal, and its solar arrays have been deployed to provide power.

On launch day, June 10, NASA TV commentary coverage of the countdown will begin at 5:30 a.m. PDT (8:30 a.m. EDT). The coverage will be webcast at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv .

Live countdown coverage on NASA's launch blog also begins at 5:30 a.m. PDT (8:30 a.m. EDT). Coverage features real-time updates of countdown milestones, as well as streaming video clips highlighting launch preparations and liftoff.

For more information visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-177

The international Aquarius/SAC-D Earth-observing mission, carrying the NASA-built Aquarius instrument, is scheduled to launch at 7:20 a.m. PDT (10:20 a.m. EDT), June 10, 2011, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, along California's central coast. Aquarius will measure the saltiness of Earth's ocean surface to improve climate forecasts.

The satellite observatory is nestled inside the top of a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket. Spacecraft separation from the Delta II is scheduled to occur 56 minutes 42 seconds after launch. One minute later, the observatory's solar panels are scheduled to deploy.

The following spacecraft events will be checked off as they occur:

Launch

The Delta II rocket carrying the Aquarius/SAC-D observatory, with NASA's Aquarius mission, has lifted off into the morning skies above Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. It is heading up and out over the Pacific Ocean.

Fairing separates

The Delta II's first-stage engine has completed its burn, its second-stage engine has ignited as planned, and the rocket's nose cone, or fairing, has separated and been jettisoned as planned, exposing the Aquarius/SAC-D observatory to space.

Coast phase

The Delta II rocket's second-stage engine has temporarily stopped firing, as planned, and the rocket and Aquarius/SAC-D observatory have begun a planned 42-minute, 40-second coast phase. During this time, the second-stage engine will perform two sets of attitude re-orientation maneuvers.

Spacecraft separates and solar arrays are deployed

The Aquarius/SAC-D observatory has successfully separated from its Delta II rocket, ground controllers have acquired its signal, and its solar arrays have been deployed to provide power.

On launch day, June 10, NASA TV commentary coverage of the countdown will begin at 5:30 a.m. PDT (8:30 a.m. EDT). The coverage will be webcast at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv .

Live countdown coverage on NASA's launch blog also begins at 5:30 a.m. PDT (8:30 a.m. EDT). Coverage features real-time updates of countdown milestones, as well as streaming video clips highlighting launch preparations and liftoff. To access these features, and for more information on Aquarius, go to NASA's Aquarius/SAC-D mission website at http://www.nasa.gov/aquarius .

For more information visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-177

Ever since they were announced, the spiders in space have been living in the limelight. This is, of course, the point -- to watch and learn as the pair of golden orb spiders, or Nephila clavipes, adapt to living in microgravity on the International Space Station. As a result, these two arachnids, dubbed Gladys and Esmeralda by astronaut Cady Coleman, are reaching celebrity status.

The spiders are part of the scientific investigation called Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus Science Insert-05, or CSI-05. This study houses the two spiders in separate habitats and includes chambers for their food supply of fruit flies. Artificial light simulates day and nighttime, as well as temperature and humidity control. The habitats reside in the Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus, or CGBA, on the station, which controls imaging of the arachnids’ activities.

After launching in style as part of the last flight of Endeavour on May 16, 2011, the spiders found their popularity continued to grow. Teachers registered more than 130,000 students so far, gaining instructional materials and the chance to tune in and follow the arachnids' antics via space station videos. In one of the more recent video uploads, Esmeralda displayed diva-like qualities as she showed her hunting skills to be as sharp as ever in microgravity. The video of her capturing a fruit fly on May 26, 2011 is on now available for viewing on YouTube.

Schools around the globe continue to participate in the spider study by visiting BioEd Online. From this site teachers can download a guide to create a control habitat, complete with spider, for their classrooms. "Spiders and space are two things that capture the imagination of most kids, so it's a recipe for fascinating science in the schools," comments International Space Station Associate Program Scientist Tara Ruttley. "I think this will create great memories for the students, and a way to show them how science can be fun as their science classes become more challenging through the years."

Even before they left the ground, the popularity of the spiders was evident, as seen at the prelaunch tweetup on April 28, 2011. This NASA-hosted event brought together registered Twitter users to listen to NASA experts speak on mission-related topics. The participants then shared this information in real time over the social media site. When one of the siblings of Gladys and Esmeralda -- who were already aboard the shuttle on the launch pad -- made a live appearance, it inspired a frenzy of tweets from new fans.

Ruttley was one of the tweetup speakers and also had the unofficial role of spider wrangler at the event, which took place at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla. "As I gave my talk at the tweetup, the spider was passed around within its habitat, seemingly happy enough to spin a pretty amazing web," said Ruttley. "I think the spiders were such a hit with those at the launch because a spider spinning a web is something that everyone can understand and relate to."

The golden orb spider actually spins and then consumes its web on a daily basis. This practice provides the protein necessary to enable renewed web activities each day. Ruttley found this out firsthand, "I noticed the web was gone the next morning, this is because the golden orb spiders actually eat their web overnight and start again the next day, all fresh."

The golden orb spider usually spins a three dimensional, asymmetric web on Earth, but in space they spin more circular webs. The current spiders also prefer to spin according to a timetable, as compared to the orb spiders -- Larinioides patagiatus and Metepeira -- from the previous CSI-03 investigation, who would spin at all times of day. "These spiders seem to stick to a more regimented schedule of spinning in the early morning hours and taking their web down right after lights out." said Stefanie Countryman, Project Manager for CSI-05 at BioServe Space Technologies, University of Colorado.

By watching how a control spider spins on Earth, compared to Esmeralda and Gladys on the space station, students and scientists hope to better understand behavior changes in response to the microgravity environment. The investigation on the space station may only last for 45 days, but the impact of these tiny celebrities will live on in research data and in the minds of their admirers.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/space_spiders_live.html

The Sun unleashed an M-2 (medium-sized) solar flare, an S1-class (minor) radiation storm and a spectacular coronal mass ejection (CME) on June 7, 2011 from sunspot complex 1226-1227. The large cloud of particles mushroomed up and fell back down looking as if it covered an area of almost half the solar surface.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) observed the flare's peak at 1:41a.m. ET (0641 UT). SDO recorded these images (above) in extreme ultraviolet light that show a very large eruption of cool gas. It is somewhat unique because at many places in the eruption there seems to be even cooler material -- at temperatures less than 80,000 K.

All of the solar Heliophysics System Observatory missions captured the event.

When viewed in Solar and Heliospheric Observatory's (SOHO) coronagraphs (top right), the event shows bright plasma and high-energy particles roaring from the Sun.

Also to the right are links to the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) Ahead and Behind coronograph videos showing the CME expansion as viewed from each side of the sun. The STEREO Ahead satellite precedes the Earth as it circles the Sun. The STEREO Behind satellite follows behind the Earth in it's orbit of the Sun. (NOTE: Both STEREO videos will be replaced by better quality version when they become available in 48 hours.)

This not-squarely Earth-directed CME is moving at 1400 km/s according to NASA models. The CME should deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field during the late hours of June 8th or June 9th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras when the CME arrives.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/News060711-blast.html

The Soyuz TMA-02M spacecraft is seen at the launch pad after being raised into vertical position on Sunday, June 5, 2011, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The launch of the Soyuz spacecraft with Expedition 28 Soyuz Commander Sergei Volkov of Russia, NASA Flight Engineer Mike Fossum and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) Flight Engineer Satoshi Furukawa is scheduled for Tuesday, June 7, 2011.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1967a.html

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden is seen in silhouette, left, as he shook hands with workers atop the Mobile Launch Platform as space shuttle Atlantis rolled out of High Bay 3 in the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39A for its final flight, Tuesday, May 31, 2011, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. The 3.4-mile trek, known as rollout, took about seven hours to complete. On STS-135, the orbiter's final, Atlantis will carry the Raffaello multipurpose logistics module to deliver supplies and spare parts to the International Space Station. The launch of STS-135 is targeted for July 8.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1966.html