Rick "C.J." Sturckow, commanding the STS-128 mission of Discovery, led his crew of astronauts to the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday to begin three days of launch training. Flying in T-38 jet trainers, Sturckow and Mission Specialist Patrick Forrester landed first under cloud-strewn skies. Mission Specialists Jose Hernandez and Sweden's Christer Fuglesang landed in separate planes just afterward. Pilot Kevin Ford and Mission Specialists Nicole Stott and John "Danny" Olivas arrived a few minutes later. The training the next few days includes M113 emergency vehicle practice and simulated shuttle landings in the Shuttle Training Aircraft. Discovery is being prepped at Launch Pad 39A for its part during Friday's countdown rehearsal, when the astronauts will be strapped in while they and the launch teams at Kennedy and the Mission Control Center in Houston, practice the complex choreography of liftoff.

Discovery Readies for Station Resupply Flight

Space shuttle Discovery will carry the Leonardo supply module to the International Space Station during STS-128, along with a new crew member for the station, Nicole Stott. Commanded by veteran astronaut Rick "C.J." Sturckow, the mission is targeted to liftoff Aug. 25 to deliver refrigerator-sized racks full of equipment, including the COLBERT treadmill, an exercise device named after comedian Stephen Colbert. Stott will take the place of Tim Kopra, who moved into the station during STS-127. Pilot Kevin Ford and Mission Specialists Patrick Forrester, Jose Hernandez, John "Danny" Olivas and Sweden's Christer Fuglesang round out the crew.

STS-128 Additional Resources
› Mission Summary (592 Kb PDF)

Endeavour Lands at Kennedy Space Center

Space shuttle Endeavour landed at Florida's Kennedy Space Center on Friday with a touchdown at 10:48 a.m. EDT, capping the 16-day STS-127 mission to the International Space Station. The shuttle began its descent from orbit with a deorbit engine firing at 9:41 a.m., followed by a smooth re-entry that brought the winged spacecraft across Central America, Cuba and the state of Florida on its way to the spaceport.

Endeavour launched July 15 at 6:03 p.m. EDT from Kennedy's Launch Pad 39A. Highlighted by five spacewalks and intricate robotics work, the mission completed construction of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo laboratory. Astronauts attached a platform to the outside of the Japanese module that will allow experiments to be exposed to space.

STS-127 Additional Resources
› Mission Press Kit (6.9 Mb PDF)
› Mission Summary (429 Kb PDF)
› Meet the STS-127 Crew

This image of Earth taken from 200 kilometers (124 miles) above the lunar surface was taken by the Moon Mineralogy Mapper, one of two NASA instruments onboard the Indian Space Research Organization's Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Australia is visible in the lower center of the image. The image is presented as a false-color composite with oceans a dark blue, clouds white, and vegetation an enhanced green. The image data were acquired on July 22, 2009.

The Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument is a state-of-the-art imaging spectrometer designed to provide the first map of the entire lunar surface at high spatial and spectral resolution. Scientists will use this information to answer questions about the moon's origin and development and the evolution of terrestrial planets in the early solar system. Future astronauts will use it to locate resources, possibly including water, that can support exploration of the moon and beyond.

The Moon Mineralogy Mapper was selected as a Mission of Opportunity through the NASA Discovery Program. Carle Pieters of Brown University, Providence, R.I., is the principal investigator and has oversight of the instrument as a whole, as well as the Moon Mineralogy Mapper Science Team. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., designed and built the Moon Mineralogy Mapper and is home to its project manager, Mary White. JPL manages the program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft was constructed, launched, and is operated by the Indian Space Research Organisation.

More information about Chandrayaan-1 is at : http://www.isro.org/Chandrayaan .

More information about NASA's Moon Mineralogy Mapper is at : http://m3.jpl.nasa.gov .

New meteorological data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft indicates the value for Saturn's rotation period could be more than 5 minutes shorter than previously believed - and that Saturn is more like its larger neighbor Jupiter than previously considered. The rate at which Saturn spins provides important data for planetary scientists interested in the ringed world. Obtaining an accurate fix on that number is critical to enhancing scientist's understanding of the planet's evolution, formation and meteorology. The report on this finding, led by Cassini scientist Peter Read of Oxford University, England, is published in the July 30 issue of the journal Nature.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. JPL manages the mission for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

More information about the Cassini mission is available at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini or http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .

NASA will honor Apollo astronaut Al Worden with the presentation of an Ambassador of Exploration Award for his contributions to the U.S. space program.

Worden will receive the award during a ceremony Thursday, July 30, at 4 p.m. EDT. The ceremony will be held at the Apollo Saturn V Center at NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, where the moon rock will be displayed.

Reporters interested in covering the ceremony should contact Andrea Farmer at 321-449-4318 or Jillian McRae at 321-449-4273.

NASA is giving the Ambassador of Exploration Award to the first generation of explorers in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs for realizing America's goal of going to the moon. The award is a moon rock encased in Lucite, mounted for public display. The rock is part of the 842 pounds of lunar samples collected during six Apollo expeditions from 1969 to 1972. Those astronauts who receive the award will then present the award to a museum of their choice, where the moon rock will be placed for public display.

Worden served as command module pilot for the Apollo 15 mission, which set several moon records for NASA, including the longest lunar surface stay time, the longest lunar extravehicular activity and the first use of a lunar roving vehicle. Worden spent 38 minutes in a spacewalk outside the command module and logged a total of 295 hours, 11 minutes in space during the mission.

Worden was born in Jackson, Mich. He received a bachelor of military science degree from the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., in 1955, and master of science degrees in astronautical and aeronautical engineering and instrumentation engineering from the University of Michigan in 1963.

For more biographical information about Worden, visit:

NASA Television will broadcast a Video File of the event. For NASA TV streaming video, schedules and downlink information, visit:

For more information about the Apollo Saturn V Center, visit:

For information about and pictures of the NASA Ambassador of Exploration Award, visit:

This image shows the Japanese Experiment Module - Exposed Facility as it looks from inside Kibo. The Japanese Experiment Module, or JEM, called Kibo -- which means "hope" in Japanese -- is Japan's first human space facility and enhances the unique research capabilities of the International Space Station. Experiments in Kibo focus on space medicine, biology, Earth observations, material production, biotechnology and communications research. Kibo experiments and systems are operated from the Mission Control Room at the Space Station Operations Facility, or SSOF, at Tsukuba Space Center in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, just north of Tokyo.

Aviation enthusiasts seek out certain destinations. There are Paris and Farnborough for the big international crowd, Kill Devil Hills, N.C. for the historians and Oshkosh, Wisc., for those who crave a look at aircraft that are a little different.

For a week every summer a small airfield in central Wisconsin is an aviator's dream world. It's been that way for more than half a century, since what is now called EAA AirVenture started as a way to celebrate men and women who fly experimental aircraft.

It's grown so much since 1953 that Wittman Regional Airport, the home of the Experimental Aircraft Association, becomes the busiest airport in the country for that week according to the Federal Aviation Administration. That's pretty amazing since it normally doesn't even have scheduled airline service.

Among the aircraft expected to fly into the airfield this year will be a research aircraft from NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. A NASA Gulfstream III aircraft will land at EAA AirVenture and be parked for public viewing at Aeroshell Square, perhaps not far from a huge Airbus 380 or Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo spacecraft. The G-III serves as multi-role testbed for a variety of flight research experiments. The aircraft's pilot will be available to answer questions.

And they aren't the only NASA researchers and engineers who will talk to members of the public at the air show about everything from uncrewed air vehicles, past and future moon missions to how the space shuttle flies.

This year marks a special anniversary for NASA and the rest of the world — 40 years since humans first walked on the moon. To commemorate the occasion visitors to EAA AirVenture will be able to see a piece of the lunar surface in person. A moon rock picked up by astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 1971 during the Apollo XIV mission is a star attraction at the NASA pavilion.

This year we're celebrating not only our historic landing on the moon 40 years ago, but looking forward to the next generation of moon missions," said Jim Hull, NASA exhibits manager. "Last month we launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It's circling the moon right now, transmitting images. Then this fall the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite will impact the moon looking for water ice."

The Oshkosh exhibit reflects the country's plans to return to the moon. Outside the building are two huge inflatables that represent a lunar habitat concept and the Orion crew capsule. Inside visitors can learn more about robotic moon missions and the systems that will rocket astronauts to the lunar surface from engineers from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

From the moon, air show participants are able to move onto Mars and a full-scale replica of one of the Mars Exploration Rovers in front of a three-dimensional Martian landscape.

No NASA presentation at an air show is complete without a look at NASA's contributions to aeronautics. Not only do exhibits feature a number of NASA-developed aviation technologies that are now common in airplanes, a special education area allows youngsters to make and take their own ring wing gliders and offer other hands-on activities.

But by far one of the most popular stops at the NASA building is the area known as the NASA craftsmen. Technicians from NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and Langley Research center in Hampton, Va., show off some of the models and tools researchers use to advance aerospace design.

NASA astronaut Pam Melroy is leaving the agency to take a job in the private sector. Melroy, a retired Air Force colonel, is a veteran of three space shuttle flights and the second woman to command one.

"Pam has performed superbly as an astronaut," said Steve Lindsey, chief of the Astronaut Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "She has flown three highly successful space shuttle missions and contributed in several other technical areas during her 14 years of service with the Astronaut Office. Her leadership as the commander of the STS-120 space shuttle mission paved the way to six-person crew operations on the International Space Station."

"As a classmate and a friend, I feel privileged to have served beside her. We wish Pam the best of luck in her new career -- she will be missed," Lindsey added.

Melroy flew on shuttle missions STS-92 in 2000, STS-112 in 2002 and STS-120 in 2007. She served as pilot on her first two flights and commanded the third. She has logged more than 924 hours in space, contributing to the construction of the space station on every mission. She was selected as an astronaut in December 1994.

Melroy made history with Expedition 16 Commander Peggy Whitson in October 2007 when the hatches between the space shuttle and space station were opened. They became the first female spacecraft commanders to lead space shuttle and space station missions concurrently.

For Melroy's complete biography, visit:

For information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged a wild creature of the dark -- a coiled galaxy with an eye-like object at its center.

The galaxy, called NGC 1097, is located 50 million light-years away. It is spiral-shaped like our Milky Way, with long, spindly arms of stars. The "eye" at the center of the galaxy is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. In this color-coded infrared view from Spitzer, the area around the invisible black hole is blue and the ring of stars, white.

The black hole is huge, about 100 million times the mass of our sun, and is feeding off gas and dust along with the occasional unlucky star. Our Milky Way's central black hole is tame by comparison, with a mass of a few million suns.

"The fate of this black hole and others like it is an active area of research," said George Helou, deputy director of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Some theories hold that the black hole might quiet down and eventually enter a more dormant state like our Milky Way black hole."

The ring around the black hole is bursting with new star formation. An inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy is causing the ring to light up with new stars.

"The ring itself is a fascinating object worthy of study because it is forming stars at a very high rate," said Kartik Sheth, an astronomer at NASA's Spitzer Science Center. Sheth and Helou are part of a team that made the observations.

In the Spitzer image, infrared light with shorter wavelengths is blue, while longer-wavelength light is red. The galaxy's red spiral arms and the swirling spokes seen between the arms show dust heated by newborn stars. Older populations of stars scattered through the galaxy are blue. The fuzzy blue dot to the left, which appears to fit snuggly between the arms, is a companion galaxy.

"The companion galaxy that looks as if it's playing peek-a-boo through the larger galaxy could have plunged through, poking a hole," said Helou. "But we don't know this for sure. It could also just happen to be aligned with a gap in the arms."

Other dots in the picture are either nearby stars in our galaxy, or distant galaxies.

This image was taken during Spitzer's "cold mission," which lasted more than five-and-a-half years. The telescope ran out of coolant needed to chill its infrared instruments on May 15, 2009. Two of its infrared channels will still work perfectly during the new "warm mission," which is expected to begin in a week or so, once the observatory has been recalibrated and warms to its new temperature of around 30 Kelvin (about minus 406 degrees Fahrenheit).

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. Spitzer's infrared array camera, which made the observations, was built by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The instrument's principal investigator is Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

For more information about Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

It was an extraordinary feat when Apollo engineers designed a spacecraft to go somewhere no human had ever gone before. Especially when that place was the moon - 240,000 miles from Earth. Now forty years after the first moon landing, NASA has turned its attention back to lunar missions, this time planning to stay longer.

The spacecraft to carry future explorers to the moon, the Orion crew exploration vehicle, looks very similar to the Apollo spacecraft. The crew module borrows the familiar conical shape with a curved heatshield, which has proven to be the optimal shape for missions returning from the moon.

Additionally, Orion and Apollo both use the same heat-resistant thermal material, called AVCOAT, to shield the capsules from heat generated by the 25,000 mile-per-hour atmosphere re-entry from missions to the moon.

However, the Orion crew module is one-third larger than the Apollo command module and the inside will be different. Engineers will incorporate advances in technology into the interior and since the plan for missions to the moon is different, different types of systems are being designed also.

When Apollo astronauts visited the moon, they only stayed for a few days at a time, three astronauts traveled to lunar orbit on Apollo, and then only two descended to the moon’s surface.

When America returns to the moon, four astronauts will ride in Orion to lunar orbit and then all of them will move into the Altair lunar lander to go explore the moon. Orion will operate on its own in lunar orbit, standing by for the return trip to Earth.

Orion will start out supporting week-long missions and then will be able to support up to 210-day missions when astronauts eventually live and work at outposts on the moon.

Being able to operate autonomously in lunar orbit will be a key factor in Orion being able to support longer missions. Its systems will operate automatically, with Mission Control watching from Earth, while the crew explores the moon.

By going to the moon for extended periods of time, astronauts will search for resources and learn how to work safely in a harsh environment -- stepping stones to future exploration. The moon also offers many clues about the time when the planets were formed.

To support longer missions, Orion also will have larger tanks to carry the fuel for course adjustments during the trip and will use advanced solar array technology to collect sunlight for conversion into electricity. Apollo used fuel cell technology (as does the space shuttle), which requires oxygen and hydrogen be carried along for the ride. Using solar arrays saves weight that can be used to enhance safety and launch more cargo.

Orion will have more power, too. It will hold six batteries for power storage and will use a 120V DC power distribution system, compared to Apollo’s three-battery storage and 28V DC system.

Orion’s crew module will feature a streamlined glass cockpit interface for the astronauts, with about ten times fewer switches than Apollo’s roughly 450 switches.

It has been 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin, and 150 since the publication of his world-changing work, On the Origin of Species. It has been 50 years since the creation of the international Charles Darwin Foundation and the establishment of the Galapagos National Park by the government of Ecuador.

And it has been 25 years since Gene Feldman made the cover of Science magazine with his first paper about the living evolutionary and environmental experiment that is the Galapagos archipelago.

Now a NASA oceanographer, Feldman was studying imagery from the Coastal Zone Color Scanner on NASA's Nimbus 7 satellite while working on his doctoral research at the State University of New York. From his experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Western Samoa, Feldman had been curious about why some regions around oceanic islands were more productive than others. His interest was piqued when he learned that there was a NASA satellite that might help unravel the mystery.

After building a data set of some of the first ocean color observations of the region, Feldman and his colleagues believed they saw a strong correlation between the changes in the patterns and abundance of floating marine plants (phytoplankton) during the 1982-83 El Niño and the decline of seabirds and fur seals.

What was happening in the sea -- measured by ocean scientists in the currents, temperatures, chemistry, and plankton abundance -- was affecting the life in the water and on land. And all of it was visible, for the first time, from space.

At the time, Feldman wrote: "Satellite ocean color observations, with their synoptic, broad area coverage, place the often limited surface measurements into a broader perspective." Feldman and colleagues have spent the past three decades building on those remote observations of the Galapagos and of the oceans worldwide.

Of all the places in the world, there's no place like the Galapagos. The 19 volcanic islands are relatively new in geologic time, ranging from one to four million years old, with new islands still sprouting. They sit along the equator, between 700 to 1000 kilometers (435 to 621 miles) from the nearest land masses, and the isolation has also made the islands a natural laboratory for evolution.

The Galapagos are most famous for their iguanas, tortoises, blue-footed Boobies and, of course, Darwin's finches. "You'll find tropical, sub-tropical, and almost Antarctic species," Feldman says. "It's the only place where you'll find both penguins and coral reefs."

The marine life is influenced by unique oceanographic conditions. Specifically, the deep "equatorial undercurrent," or Cromwell Current, flows from the middle Pacific and slams into the islands, pushing up cool water and nutrients from the depths and into the shallower waters. Fingers of this water push east, between and beyond the islands, fertilizing the ocean on the leeward side and creating biological abundance and diversity in an area that might otherwise be barren.

For five decades, the Charles Darwin Foundation (CDF) has been promoting and supporting research to understand and monitor biodiversity in this natural laboratory. From July 20 to 24, CDF will take stock of what has been learned in five decades, bringing together biologists, geologists, oceanographers, and historians for the Galapagos Science Symposium.

Feldman was invited to the symposium, taking him back to where it all began professionally. He has studied the islands from 600 kilometers (372 miles) up in space. He helped established a ground station on the islands to retrieve data from NASA's SeaWifs instrument on Orbital Corporation's SeaStar spacecraft. But he has never been there in person.

After the symposium, Gene will set out with John Morrison of the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, Stuart Bank of Charles Darwin Research Station, and other colleagues for a short research cruise. Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, NASA, and CDF, the team will conduct a systematic study of the oceanographic conditions that make the waters around Galapagos so fertile for life and the evolution of it. They will also look for signals of climate change and how it affects marine ecosystems.

Divers will map habitat and survey the reefs. Water sampling instruments will examine water chemistry, temperature, and the concentration of plankton. And, of course, remote sensing eyes from Feldman's beloved satellites will capture the big picture. Throughout the trip, Gene will share his experiences through a series of blog entries on the NASA Earth Observatory.

He hopes to follow in Darwin’s footsteps and in the HMS Beagle’s wake. He has been reading the journals of Darwin and of Beagle Captain Robert Fitzroy -- not just the published accounts, but the original, hand-written notebooks and logs. He has been reading the accounts of 19th century whalers who frequented the area. He wants his 2009 trip to be his own voyage of discovery.

"I feel like I know the Galapagos so well, but I also know that I don’t know them at all."

NASA's Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base (renamed the Dryden Flight Research Center), generally thought of as an aeronautical flight-test facility in the 1960s, made a number of contributions to the NASA space program during that era as well.

For example, researchers explored the concept of paraglider landings for a space vehicle and the use of wingless spacecraft that could glide to precise landings, but it was the X-15 hypersonic research program and the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle that had the most direct impact on the Apollo missions to the Moon.

The North American Aviation X-15 rocket planes--designed to explore the problems of atmospheric and space flight at supersonic and hypersonic speeds--served as flying laboratories, carrying scientific experiments above the reaches of the atmosphere. Many research results from the X-15 program at Dryden Flight Research Center contributed directly to the success of the Apollo lunar missions, now being celebrated on the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing on July 20, 1969. North American – later North American Rockwell, then Rockwell International – served as prime contractor for both the X-15 and Apollo Command/Service Module spacecraft.

Designers of the Apollo CSM drew upon experience from the X-15 program, and even used the X-15 as a test bed for new materials. Advanced titanium and nickel-steel alloys developed for the X-15 were used in the Apollo and later spacecraft designs. The discovery of localized hot spots on the X-15, for example, led to development of a bi-metallic 'floating retainer' concept to dissipate stresses in the X-15's windshield. This technology was subsequently applied to the Apollo and space shuttle orbiter windshields.

The X-15's performance allowed researchers to accurately simulate the aerodynamic heating conditions that the Apollo Saturn rocket would face, and allowed full recovery of test equipment, calibration of results, and repeated testing where necessary. In 1967, technicians applied samples of cryogenic insulation--designed for use on the Apollo Saturn V second stage--to the X-15's speed brakes to test the material's adhesive characteristics and response to high temperatures.

X-15 re-entry experience and heat-transfer data were also valuable, and led to design of a computerized mathematical model for aerodynamic heating that was used in the initial Apollo design study. Lessons learned from X-15 turbulent heat-transfer studies contributed to the design of the Apollo CSM because designers found that they could build lighter-weight vehicles using less thermal protection than was previously thought possible.

Following the challenge by president John F. Kennedy in 1962 to land on the moon, two groups began working on a way to prepare astronauts for the critical descent and landing on the moon. The problems facing them were considerable: how to build a free-flying simulator that could negate 5/6ths of the Earth's gravity while entirely eliminating the effects of the atmosphere, since the moon had no atmosphere and only 1/6th of Earth's gravity.

Ideas for this unique type of flying machine had begun circulating at Dryden Flight Research Center, a year earlier. Center engineers initially didn't know that Bell Aircraft Company, later Bell Aerosystems, was also working on the task, but by the end of the year, the center had awarded a study contract to Bell. Bell was the only firm in the United States that had significant experience developing vertical takeoff aircraft using jet lift for takeoff and landing. After winning a contract from the center to design and build the machines in 1963, Bell delivered two Lunar Landing Research Vehicles or LLRVs--often called 'flying bedsteads' due to their ungainly appearance--to the Flight Research Center in 1964 for flight testing and development.

The LLRV had a jet engine hung vertically in the middle of the frame, fixed inside two gimbals, allowing the vehicle itself to rotate as much as 40 degrees in any direction while the jet remained vertically aligned. A series of hydrogen peroxide thrusters, eight around the frame's center and four at each corner, provided lunar simulation thrust that the pilot controlled.

Three analog computers took data on side forces and vehicle weight and produced just enough jet thrust so that, in lunar simulation, the LLRV descended as though in lunar gravity. Any gusts of wind were cancelled when the computers sensed them and fired thrusters to automatically cancel the wind. There were no mechanical links between the pilot and the engine or thrusters: everything was sent to the computers that, in turn, commanded the thrust desired.

During flight tests, a pilot directed the LLRV to climb about 300 feet, initiated lunar simulation mode, and then had less than eight minutes to complete a safe descent. Research flying over the next two-and-half years yielded a configuration suitable for astronaut training, and Bell subsequently built three similar craft--Lunar Landing Training Vehicles--that were sent to the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston, now the Johnson Space Center. One of the LLRVs at the Flight Research Center was also sent to Houston for the training.

Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong recalled later that his landing on the moon on July 20, 1969 was a familiar job because of the LLTV’s authenticity.

As a side note, today's aircraft with fly-by-wire digital electronic control systems trace their lineage to the LLRV and its analog computers, and to the engineers who worked on that project. They cut their teeth on computer-controlled flight systems with the LLRV, allowing them the confidence to modify an F-8 jet fighter into the first aircraft with pure digital fly-by-wire electronic controls.

Partially restored by a movie company in the late 1990s, one of the two original Lunar Landing Research Vehicles remains on sheltered display today at NASA Dryden.

The solar wind is hotter than it should be, and for decades researchers have puzzled over the unknown source of energy that heats it. In a paper published in the June 12 issue of Physical Review Letters, NASA scientists say they may have found the answer.

"The energy source is turbulence," says co-author Melvyn Goldstein, chief of the Geospace Physics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "The sun heats the solar wind by stirring it up."

It's a bit like stirring your coffee--in reverse. When you stir your morning cup of Joe, the coffee cools off. But when the sun stirs the solar wind, the solar wind heats up.

Consider the coffee. When you stir it with a spoon, the stirring produces swirls and vortices in the liquid. The vortices fragment into smaller and smaller eddies until, at the smallest scales, the motions dissipate and the energy turns into heat. Because energy cascades down from the large swirls to the smaller ones, the process is called a turbulent cascade.

Theoretically, the turbulent cascade should heat the coffee. Real coffee cools off, however, because the act of stirring brings warm coffee from the depths of the cup into contact with cooler air above. Cool air absorbs the heat—the heat the coffee had to begin with plus the heat you added by stirring—and you can take a sip without scalding yourself.

But there is no cool air in space, and therein lies the difference between coffee and solar wind.

The sun stirs the solar wind with fast streams of gas that pour out of holes in the sun's atmosphere. Essentially, the solar wind stirs itself. The stirring produces swirls and eddies; larger eddies break into smaller ones, producing a cascade of energy that eventually dissipates as heat. The temperature shoots up and there is no cool air to stop it.

"We've suspected for years that turbulence heats the solar wind," says Fouad Sahraoui, lead author of the paper and a visiting NASA Fellow from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. "Now we're getting detailed measurements of the process in action."

The key data came from a quartet of European spacecraft collectively known as Cluster, launched in 2000 to study the giant bubble of magnetism that surrounds Earth. The magnetosphere protects our planet from solar wind and cosmic rays. It contains the Van Allen radiation belts, auroras, and giant electrical "ring currents" of staggering power. Cluster spends much of its time inside the magnetosphere, where the spacecraft can study the wide variety of phenomena at work there.

One day in March 2006, the four spacecraft took a brief excursion outside the bubble into the solar wind. For three hours, their sensors made rapid-fire measurements of electromagnetic waves and turbulent eddies in the million-kilometer-per-hour gas flowing past them.

"That was when we made the discovery," says Goldstein. "Turbulent energy was cascading from large scale structures around 1,000,000 kilometers (621,400 miles) in size all the way down to structures as small as 3 kilometers (1.8 miles). At the small end of the cascade, energy was absorbed by electrons in the solar wind."

Sahraoui and Goldstein would like to confirm their findings and flesh out the details by sending Cluster back into the solar wind for more than "three lucky hours." But the basic result seems solid enough: Turbulent heating boosts the temperature of the solar wind near Earth from tens of thousands of degrees (the value theoreticians expect) to hundreds of thousands or more.

Goldstein says such turbulent heating probably happens in many other astrophysical situations, from stellar winds to planetary magnetospheres to black holes. There's even a down-to-Earth application: nuclear fusion reactors. Turbulence inside experimental fusion chambers can produce instabilities that destroy the confinement of the fusion plasma.

"The solar wind is a natural laboratory for understanding this physics," says Sahraoui, "and we are planning more observations to see how common the phenomenon might be."

Related Links:

Cluster – home page
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=8

Cluster's insight into space turbulence – press release
http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/object/index.cfm?fobjectid=44480

The Solar Wind – a tutorial
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SolarWind.shtml

Evidence of a Cascade and Dissipation of Solar-Wind Turbulence at the Electron Gyroscale, F. Sahraoui et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 231102 (2009)
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=PRLTAO000102000023231102000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

A NASA research plane spent the month of June crisscrossing the southern Great Plains in search of more detailed information on the least understood variable in long-term climate change scenarios.

Tiny suspended particles are nearly everywhere in the atmosphere, and what we see as dust, smoke, soot or haze in the sky scientists study collectively as aerosols. Some aerosols are easy to see with the naked eye, however, they have proven difficult to pin down in terms of their impact on the climate and, in the long run, climate change.

The month of flights – from a Department of Energy Climate Research Facility near Ponca City, Oklahoma – were conducted in part to help evaluate algorithms to be used in the upcoming Glory mission as well as to address NASA’s larger goal of getting a tighter grip on the important but poorly quantified impact of aerosols on climate. A team from NASA’s Langley Research Center flew the center’s B200 plane for the research flights. The B200 was outfitted with a lidar instrument which measures vertical profiles of aerosols and an instrument called a polarimeter, developed by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, that measures polarized light scattered by aerosols to gather more accurate details about the size, shape and composition of aerosols.

Aerosols directly affect Earth’s energy budget – the balance of incoming and outgoing radiation – by absorbing and scattering incoming solar rays. That impact is understood only within a large margin of uncertainty. Aerosols also influence cloud formation. The microscopic particles help form water and ice clouds and can change cloud properties – often leading to greater cloud cover and a cooling effect. This indirect effect has been even harder to measure and model than the direct effect. It accounts for the largest uncertainty in models used for predicting future climate, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report. This finding led the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP), in a report released in January 2009, to state the case for much-needed improvements in both measuring and modeling aerosols in the atmosphere including their interactions with clouds. The commonly accepted range of potential surface temperature increase over the course of a century – assuming a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide – is 1.2 degrees to 4.7 degrees Celsius. Most of the temperature increase should occur in the latter part of the century. The majority of the uncertainty that leads to that wide range in the prediction of heating is due to unknowns about the impact of aerosols.

“Such a range is too wide to meaningfully predict the climate response to greenhouse gases,” the CCSP report concluded.

The flights in Oklahoma were designed to offer a closer look at aerosol-cloud interactions and see how the airborne polarimeter – called the Research Scanning Polarimeter (RSP) – and lidar – called the High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL) – could work together to give a more complete picture of aerosols. Data from the flights – which covered a vast region of the southern plains, in an attempt to capture useful data over a common type of land surface – will test the algorithms to be used to process data gathered by the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor (APS) that will fly on the Glory satellite. In addition, the flights also served as a test of the instruments’ ability to make measurements of the size, type, amount, and distribution of aerosols.

Brian Cairns, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies-based principal investigator for the RSP instrument and the Aerosol Polarimetry Sensor that will fly on Glory, said polarimetry could eventually significantly improve remote sensing measurements of aerosol size and substantially reduce the uncertainty related to measurements of amounts of aerosols.

On the more experimental end, Cairns said, scientists are using the data from the lidar and polarimeter to look at the concentration of water droplets in clouds – an important parameter that could be significantly influenced by the presence of manmade aerosols, such as pollution. Determining a suitable method for measuring droplet concentration could go a long way toward making better estimates of the influence aerosols have on cloud properties.

“You’re really just trying to get the number concentration of droplets,” Cairns said. “Over oceans, it’s not that variable within a given type of clouds. But with the addition of some pollution, that could change.”

In the long line of NASA’s ground-, airborne- and satellite-based instruments designed to observe aerosols, these flights pairing the RSP and HSRL provides another important perspective.

“The idea is we can combine data from the two instruments to get more detailed information about the aerosols,” said Rich Ferrare, a research scientist with the HSRL team at Langley. “We can combine the data to get more than either, alone, can provide.”

Ferrare also said that while satellite-based sensors provide a global view of aerosol coverage, airborne measurements allow scientists to get a closer look at the still incompletely understood processes of aerosol-cloud interactions. Studying that full range is necessary to ultimately reduce the unknowns about aerosols and their impact on climate.

“Just from the measurement standpoint, you’ve got to be able to look at the small scale, to see how those processes work,” Ferrare said. “You also need global measurements from satellites. Then you need to improve the models.

“There are a lot of things involved in reducing those error bars.”

Related Links:

> High Spectral Resolution Lidar (HSRL)
> Glory: Observing the Earth's Aerosols and Solar Irradiance

NASA and Northrop Grumman are keeping a "trained eye" on the James Webb Space Telescope, by training their engineers on how to handle and assemble the telescope's Optical Telescope Element (OTE), also known as the "eye" of the telescope.

Recently, a mock-up of the OTE’s Primary Mirror Backplane Assembly (PMBA), which supports the telescope’s mirror segments, was used to simulate how the element frame will be handled when the actual components of the telescope are being assembled.

The OTE's support frame will actually house all 18 of the Primary Mirror Segment Assemblies that comprise the Primary Mirror on the telescope. The OTE gathers the light coming from space and directs it into the science instruments.

The James Webb Space Telescope is the next-generation premier space observatory, exploring deep space phenomena from distant galaxies to nearby planets and stars. The Webb Telescope will give scientists clues about the formation of the universe and the evolution of our own solar system, from the first light after the Big Bang to the formation of star systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth.

The Webb telescope needs a large mirror (made up of the 18 mirrors) to collect as much light as possible to see galaxies from the beginning of the Universe. The Webb telescope scientists and engineers have determined that a primary mirror 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) across is needed to collect enough light to measure these galaxies.

As with the assembly of any satellite or spacecraft, it's important for engineers to practice first, so, a mock-up of the PMBA was created at Northrop Grumman, Redondo Beach, Calif. for that purpose. Engineers there are simulating the handling, installation and alignment of the frame as they will when doing so with the flight hardware. They also check for clearance problems in advance of moving the real telescope between Northrop Grumman’s facility in Redondo Beach Calif. and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md."When it comes to handling one-of-a-kind space telescopes, practice makes perfect," said Lee Feinberg, NASA Optical Telescope Element Manager at Goddard.

Charles Atkinson, Deputy Telescope Manager, Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems said, "Even though it is many months from when we will perform the Integration and Test of the actual flight hardware, the mock-up has already been incredibly beneficial. The OTE's large size and many handling and test configurations make early demonstrations very important when laying out the handling equipment and volume necessary to perform the various integration and test operations."

The other major components of the OTE include the Secondary Mirror Assembly and its tripod support, the secondary mirror support structure, the Aft Optics Subsystem which contains the tertiary mirror and the fine steering mirror, the Deployable Tower Assembly, along with electronics and thermal control hardware. In addition to holding the OTE together, the PMBA will be where the science instruments, in the Integrated Science Instrument Module, are installed in the Observatory.

The Primary Mirror Backplane Assembly that holds the OTE is too wide to fit inside a rocket. So, the answer to making it fit is to enable the OTE to fold up. That's just what the engineering team has enabled the OTE to do. Once folded it will fit into a rocket, and once launched will then unfold in space under the command of messages transmitted from Earth.

All of the flight primary mirror segments that will populate the OTE have completed the grinding phase. "With all 18 flight mirror segments in the final polishing stage of production its time to start preparations for their installation, beginning with the challenging task of handling the telescope’s outsized mounting structure," said Mark Clampin, Webb Telescope Observatory Project Scientist at Goddard.

The 18 primary mirror segments in the OTE are made up of three slightly different shapes, consisting of six mirrors of each shape. Another challenge to engineers was to make the mirrors light enough to launch, so they solved that problem by using a metal called Beryllium.

Once the actual OTE structure is built and finalized and the mirrors have been completed, the mirrors will be integrated into the OTE. "Mirror installation begins on the structure in August 2011 and the telescope is built with the mirrors in May 2012," Feinberg said. NASA Goddard is managing the overall development effort for the Webb Telescope. The telescope, being built by Northrop Grumman, is a joint project of NASA and many U.S. partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. The Webb telescope is expected to launch in 2014.

Related Link:

> JWST Project web site

Scientists have combined a trio of shots taken seconds apart through different colored filters to create a special-effects portrait of a moving dust devil on Mars.

The panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit was taking exposures through different filters during the 1,919th Martian day of Spirit's mission (May 27, 2009) as part of constructing a large color panorama. Three westward shots, with several seconds intervening between them, caught a whirlwind in motion. A composite image combining the three exposures to make a color image of the Martian ground shows the dust devil in different colors, according to where it was on the horizon when each exposure was taken.

Dust devils occur on both Mars and on Earth when solar energy heats the surface, resulting in a layer of warm air just above the surface. Since the warmed air is less dense than the cooler atmosphere above it, it rises, making a swirling thermal plume that picks up the fine dust from the surface and carries it up into the atmosphere. This plume of dust moves with the local wind.

More than 650 dust devils have been recorded by Spirit since its operations began in 2004. The mission is currently in its third season of dust devils on Mars, which typically begin in Martian spring.