Why do we love Hubble.

SDO Observes Massive Eruption And Scorching Rain

Just last week, scientists working with NASA's new Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) released the most astonishing movies of the sun anyone had ever seen. Now, they're doing it again.

"SDO has just observed a massive eruption on the sun-one of the biggest in years," says Lika Guhathakurta of NASA headquarters in Washington DC. "The footage is not only dramatic, but also could solve a longstanding mystery of solar physics."

Karel Schrijver of Lockheed Martin's Solar and Astrophysics Lab is leading the analysis. "We can see a billion tons of magnetized plasma blasting into space while debris from the explosion falls back onto the sun surface. These may be our best data yet."

The movie, recorded on April 19th, spans four hours of actual time and more than 100,000 km of linear space. "It's huge," says Schrijver. Indeed, the entire planet Earth could fit between the plasma streamers with room to spare.

Astronomers have seen eruptions like this before, but rarely so large and never in such fluid detail. As science team member Alan Title of Lockheed Martin pointed out at last week's press conference, "no other telescope comes close to the combined spatial, temporal and spectral resolution of SDO."

Schrijver says his favorite part of the movie is the coronal rain. "Blobs of plasma are falling back to the surface of the sun, making bright splashes where they hit," he explains. "This is a phenomenon I've been studying for years."

Coronal rain has long been a mystery. It's not surprising that plasma should fall back to the sun. After all, the sun's gravity is powerful. The puzzle of coronal rain is how slowly it seems to fall. "The sun's gravity should be pulling the material down much faster than it actually moves. What's slowing the descent?" he wonders.

For the first time, SDO provides an answer.

"The rain appears to be buoyed by a 'cushion' of hot gas," says Schrijver. "Previous observatories couldn't see it, but it is there."

One of SDO's game-changing capabilities is temperature sensing. Using an array of ultraviolet telescopes called the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), the observatory can remotely measure the temperature of gas in the sun's atmosphere. Coronal rain turns out to be relatively cool-"only" 60,000 K. When the rains falls, it is supported, in part, by an underlying cushion of much hotter material, between 1,000,000 and 2,200,000 K.

"You can see the hot gas in the color-coded temperature movie," says Schrijver. "Cool material is red, hotter material is blue-green. The hot gas effectively slows the descent of the coronal rain."

Dick Fisher, the head of NASA's Heliophysics Division in Washington DC, has been working in solar physics for nearly forty years. "In all that time," he says, "I've never seen images like this."

"I wonder, what will next week bring?"

Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory returns first images

The first public release of images from the satellite record huge explosions and great looping prominences of gas.

The observatory's super-fine resolution is expected to help scientists get a better understanding of what drives solar activity.

Launched in February on an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, SDO is expected to operate for at least five years.

Researchers hope in this time to go a long way towards their eventual goal of being able to forecast the effects of the Sun's behaviour on Earth.

Solar activity has a profound influence on our planet. Huge eruptions of charged particles and the emission of intense radiation can disrupt satellite, communication and power systems, and pose a serious health risk to astronauts.

Scientists working on SDO say they are thrilled with the quality of the data received so far.

"When we see these fantastic images, even hard-core solar physicists like myself are struck with awe, literally," said Lika Guhathakurta, the SDO programme scientist at Nasa Headquarters.

SDO is equipped with three instruments to investigate the physics at work inside, on the surface and in the atmosphere of the Sun.

The probe views the entire solar disc with a resolution 10 times better than the average high-definition television camera. This allows it to pick out features on the surface and in the atmosphere that are as small as 350km across.

The pictures are also acquired at a rapid rate, every few seconds.

In addition, the different wavelengths in which the instruments operate mean scientists can study the Sun's atmosphere layer by layer.

A key quest will be to probe the inner workings of the solar dynamo, the deep network of plasma currents that generates the Sun's tangled and sometimes explosive magnetic field.

It is the dynamo that ultimately lies behind all forms of solar activity, from the solar flares that explode in the Sun's atmosphere to the relatively cool patches, or sunspots, that pock the solar disc and wander across its surface for days or even weeks.

"The SDO images are stunning and the level of detail they reveal will undoubtedly lead to a new branch of research into how the fine-scale solar magnetic fields form and evolve, leading to a much, much better understanding of how solar activity develops," said co-investigator Richard Harrison from the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).

"It's like looking at the details of our star through a microscope," he told BBC News.

And Dr Guhathakurta added: "It's thought that [SDO] is going to revolutionise heliophysics much as the Hubble Space Telescope has revolutionised astrophysics and cosmology, which is true. There is however a very key difference. While Hubble is designed to observe almost everything in the cosmos, SDO is designed to study only one thing and that is our very own star. It is tailor-made for the study of Sun star."

SDO's three remote-sensing instruments are:

Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) : will study the motions and magnetic fields at the Sun's surface, or photosphere, to determine what is happening inside the star. It will try to decipher the physics of the solar dynamo - the very source of the Sun's activity. The dynamo regulates all forms of solar activity from the lightning-fast eruptions of solar flares to the slow decadal undulations of the sunspot cycle.

Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) : is a suite of four telescopes that will image the corona, the outer layer of the Sun's atmosphere. The AIA filters cover 10 different wavelength bands, or colours, from the extreme ultraviolet to the visible. It will see details as small as 725km across. These images will be acquired every 10 seconds. Previous observatories have taken pictures at best every few minutes.

Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE) : will measure the Sun's energy output in extreme-ultraviolet (E-UV) wavelengths (this is called irradiance) with unprecedented precision. The Sun is at its most variable in the E-UV. E-UV rays can break apart atoms and molecules in the Earth's upper-atmosphere, creating a layer of ions that can severely disturb radio signals.

The UK has a prominent role in the mission through the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot; the e2v company in Chelmsford which supplied CCD camera detectors; the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in London; the University of Warwick; the University of Sheffield; and the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) in Preston.

UCLan handles the SDO data coming into the UK. With the mission producing some 1.5 tera-bytes per day, it requires a dedicated gateway for scientists to exploit.

Source:- SDO

Remarks of President Barack Obama Space Exploration in the 21st Century

The President's speech opened a conference on the new course for NASA and the future of the U.S. in human spaceflight. › Feature Story | › Photos, Videos, and Other Resources | › Watch President's Speech | › President's Transcript

President Obama Outlines His Plan at Kennedy Space Center from SpaceRef on Vimeo.

NASA's Swift Catches 500th Gamma-ray Burst w/ Video Timeline

This all-sky map shows the locations of Swift's 500 gamma-ray bursts, color coded by the year in which they occurred. In the background, an infrared image shows the location of our galaxy and its largest satellites.

In its first five years in orbit, NASA's Swift satellite has given astronomers more than they could have hoped for. Its discoveries range from a nearby nascent supernova to a blast so far away that it happened when our universe was only 5 percent of its present age. Swift primarily studies gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) -- the biggest and most mysterious explosions in the cosmos. On April 13, the spacecraft's "burst-o-meter" cataloged its 500th GRB.

"On the one hand, it's just a number, but on the other it is a remarkable milestone," said Neil Gehrels, Swift's lead researcher at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Each burst has turned over a new piece of the puzzle and a clearer picture is emerging."

"Over five years and 500 bursts, Swift has fulfilled every significant promise of its mission and, in addition, brought a wealth of surprises," noted Derek Fox, a Swift team member at Penn State in University Park, Pa.

Burst 500, officially known as GRB 100413B, exploded in constellation Cassiopeia as a long burst, a type usually associated with the death of a massive star. It wasn't detected in on-board analysis of data from the spacecraft's Burst Alert Telescope (BAT), which was interrupted 18 seconds after the burst as Swift slewed to a pre-planned target.

Instead, GRB 100413B came to light when David Palmer, an astrophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, later analyzed the data. "The BAT team regularly digs through the data once it comes to the ground and finds weak bursts like this one that take a bit of special care," said Goddard's Judith Racusin, who coordinated burst observations that day.

Summaries of other notable bursts in Swift's storied career are listed below.

Swift's main job is to quickly localize each gamma-ray burst, report its position so that others can immediately conduct follow-up observations, and then study the burst using its X-ray and Ultraviolet/Optical telescopes. But it does much more, including ultraviolet studies of exploding stars, monitoring black holes and neutron stars for surges of high-energy radiation, and carrying out a long-term X-ray survey of the entire sky.

The spacecraft rocketed into orbit in November 2004. Managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Swift was built and is operated in collaboration with Penn State, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and General Dynamics of Gilbert, Ariz. Other partners include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Brera Observatory and the Italian Space Agency in Italy, with additional collaborators in Germany and Japan.

Origins

Because gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light, the brief but brilliant blasts represent a colossal energy release. Gamma-ray bursts were discovered in 1967 by unclassified military satellites designed to look for clandestine nuclear tests. The first observations required extensive analysis to be sure that the bursts were truly originating beyond the solar system, and they weren't published until 1973.

Over the following years, astronomers learned that sufficiently sensitive instruments could detect about two bursts per day, on average, somewhere in the sky. Of those twice-daily GRBs, Swift's Burst Alert Telescope snares about one in eight for detailed study.

According to Lorella Angelini, a Goddard astrophysicist now developing a comprehensive burst database, the number of recorded GRBs is approaching 6,000. Yet if one considers only bursts with measured distances, Swift's share of the total is a whopping 75 percent.

An earlier NASA satellite, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, showed that bursts come in long and short varieties, with long bursts (those lasting longer than two seconds) outnumbering short bursts three to one. Compton also showed that bursts occur randomly and evenly over the sky. Maps of GRB distribution bear no hint of our galaxy's structure. This means that they are extremely far away — and all the more powerful.

Across the universe

A key breakthrough in understanding GRBs came from the Italian-Dutch satellite Beppo-SAX, which in 1997 provided the first precise burst positions. It later discovered lingering X-ray emission -- dubbed "afterglows" -- at burst locations. Observatories on the ground quickly discovered afterglows in visible light, which provided information that confirmed the burst's enormous distances. Astronomers now regularly study afterglows across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Most of the time, the hard task of measuring burst distances falls to ground-based observatories, which can target a burst's location with telescopes far larger than the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope aboard Swift.

"Getting on the afterglows quickly with large ground-based telescopes remains a key element in understanding GRBs," said Fox, whose research focuses on follow-up observations. "It's this synergy between Swift and ground observatories that has really moved the ball forward, especially for short bursts."

And the farther the burst, the more important rapid ground follow-up becomes. At distances greater than about 12 billion light-years, gas clouds block ultraviolet wavelengths before they can reach Earth, and all optical light becomes shifted into infrared wavelengths only detectable by specially-equipped ground-based telescopes. Astronomers scramble to detect afterglow from new bursts as soon as they can.

"Thanks to such efforts, we know Swift has seen GRBs as close as about 100 million light-years and as far away as 13 billion light-years," adds Gehrels. Put another way, Swift sees gamma-ray bursts over a span of time equivalent to about 95 percent of the universe's age.

The long and the short of GRBs

By the time Swift launched, mounting evidence already pointed to the deaths of massive stars as the source of most long GRBs -- a scenario that still stands. When such a star runs out of fuel, its core collapses and likely forms a black hole surrounded by a dense hot disk of gas called an accretion disk. Somehow, the black hole diverts part of the infalling matter into a pair of high-energy jets that tear through the collapsing star.

The jets move so fast -- upwards of 99.9 percent the speed of light -- that collisions within them produce gamma rays. As the jet breaches the star's surface, a gamma-ray burst is born. The jet continues on, later striking gas beyond the star to produce afterglows.

Short bursts, however, proved much harder to pin down. "We didn't know their most basic properties," notes Ehud Nakar, an astrophysicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. "We knew so little we weren't even sure that short GRBs were a unique astrophysical phenomenon."

It turns out they are. "Long GRBs originate from the collapse of stars just millions of years old, but the objects that give rise to some short GRBs reach ages of billions of years before exploding," Nakar adds.

The emerging picture is that short GRBs arise when two compact objects -- either a pair of neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole -- collide and merge. These objects, which are the crushed cores of exploded stars, pack more mass than the sun into volumes just a few miles across. For those bound in a binary system, Einstein's relativity seals their fate.

According to Einstein, massive orbiting objects give off a type of energy called gravitational radiation. Although no one has yet detected these waves, astronomers have observed an effect predicted by this energy loss -- the slowly shrinking orbits of binary neutron stars. Over billions of years, the stellar cinders grow ever closer and finally merge in an event that unleashes titanic energies and creates a short GRB.

But Nakar thinks the full picture still eludes astronomers. "So far, the data favor merging neutron stars, and that is certainly the most popular idea, but other scenarios remain possible. We still do not know the origin of short GRBs."

Thanks mainly to burst identifications from Swift and the afterglow observations they make possible, scientists now have details on dozens of short bursts and their afterglows. "We're now beginning to understand the home galaxies of short GRBs," Fox said.

Over the past five years, Swift has delivered a great deal of revolutionary science. But its career isn't over yet -- and with a little luck, there will be much more to come.

Swift GRB highlights

April 13, 2010: NASA's Swift discovers its 500th burst. GRB 100413B is a long burst in the constellation Cassiopeia.

April 23, 2009: GRB 090423 in Leo holds the record for the farthest burst yet known -- 13.04 billion light-years away. "The burst is beyond the farthest confirmed galaxies and quasars, making it the most distant object we know in the universe today," Fox said. This find validates models suggesting that galaxy and star formation were well under way in the universe's first billion years and that some early stars died as bursts.

March 19, 2008: GRB 080319B, in Boötes, is truly extraordinary. It produces enough light to be seen briefly with the unaided eye, cresting at visual magnitude 5.3 despite occurring 7.5 billion light-years away -- or more than halfway across the visible universe. Scientists conclude that one of its particle jets appears to have been aimed squarely at Earth.

July 14, 2007: GRB 070714B explodes in Taurus. Afterglow observations indicate a distance of 7.3 billion light-years, making this one of the farthest short bursts to date.

Feb. 18, 2006: GRB 060218 explodes in Aries 450 million light-years away -- in our back yard, cosmically speaking. Although faint, the burst emits detectable gamma rays for more than 40 minutes and detectable optical and X-ray emission lasts more than 10 days. The event is a hybrid, showing characteristics of both a GRB and a supernova, and leads to the best observations yet exploring connections between these phenomena.

Sept. 4, 2005: At a distance of 12.77 billion light-years, GRB 050904, located in Pisces, is the farthest-known GRB at the time, the first of many such Swift records.

May 9, 2005: GRB 050509B, in Coma Berenices, erupts with a flash of gamma-rays that lasts just 0.03 second. Swift turns to the burst fast enough to detect 11 X-ray photons, making this the first short burst with a detected afterglow.

Dec. 17, 2004: Swift's first burst, in Crater, is eight-second-long GRB 041217.

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Scientists capture 'terrifying' Tolkien-like eclipse (w/ Video)

Scientists have captured a 'terrifying' image of a giant Goliath-like star undergoing a two year eclipse. First discovered by a German astronomer 180 years ago, it is the first close-up image of an eclipse beyond the solar system to be captured on camera by scientists.

Astronomers at the University of St Andrews, who collaborated in the international study, describe the find as a ‘terrifying image... like something from a Tolkien book’.

St Andrews physicists Ettore Pedretti and Nathalie Thureau are members of an international team led by Brian Kloppenborg at the University of Denver. The group combined the light of four telescopes more than 300 metres apart to capture a magnified image of the giant star undergoing a ‘stellar eclipse’.

The star, Epsilon Aurigae, is the fifth brightest star in the constellation Auriga, which is known as ‘the charioteer’. Every 27 years Epsilon Aurigae becomes two to three times dimmer, with the dimmed light lasting about two years. The phenomenon was first observed in 1821 by the German astronomer Johann Fritsch.

Using an instrument created at the University of Michigan, astronomers have for the first time imaged a peculiar binary star eclipse that happens once every 27 years.

The resulting image, roughly 140 times sharper than those provided by the Hubble Space Telescope, provides new insights into the distant stellar system, even though the effect of the eclipse is so big that the star almost disappears from view.

Dr Pedretti said, "From the image, we can confirm that the eclipse of Epsilon Aurigae is caused by a thin disc of opaque dust trailed by a massive and unseen companion. Like David, tiny particles of dust are able to kill the light of this ‘Goliath’ star.

“It resembles an image from a book by J.R.R. Tolkien. It is like seeing the vessel of the sun, guided by the Maya Arien, being swallowed by the dragon Smaug and plunging Middle Earth in a second-age of darkness. It is a terrifying image".

The innovative light-combining technique used to view the star is called optical interferometry. Dr Pedretti built the infrared camera used to take superfast ‘snapshots' of the combined light of four telescopes. It has to be very fast in order to 'freeze' the image against the turbulent atmosphere.

Dr Thureau was responsible for the design of some critical optics that combine the light from the four telescopes. She commented, "With this image we have solved an 180 year old mystery. Astronomers have been puzzled for more than a century about this star and we took two pictures that may finally solve the mystery. In fact we will continue to capture images since the eclipse lasts about two years.”

Dr Pedretti and Dr Thureau aim to form the first group in Scotland which will build instruments for optical and infrared interferometry, exploting their high-resolution images.

"Our aim is to exploit existing interferometers around the world in order to take detailed pictures of distant and interesting astronomical objects that are not achievable even with the largest single telescopes," explained Dr Pedretti.

The research, which involved the Universities of St Andrews, Denver, Georgia State and Michigan, is published in this week's issue of Nature.

More information: The paper is called "Infrared images of the transiting disk in the epsilon Aurigae System."

Source:- University of St Andrews/ PhysOrg.com

Neil deGrasse Tyson on What NASA Means to America's Future

Neil deGrasse Tyson spoke at the University at Buffalo and answered a student's question about federal cutbacks to NASA funding.

Interview: Astronaut Mike Massimino on Craig Ferguson

Astronaut Mike Massimino appeared on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on 7/15/2009

Neil deGrasse Tyson Interview on The Colbert Report

Neil deGrasse Tyson Interview on The Colbert Report (6-29-2009)
The ever-personable Neil deGrasse Tyson returns to the Report to give Stephen a lesson in astrophysics.

Few Good Constellation Informative Videos

"Guests Bret Drake, Clarence Sams and Wendell Mendell explain future missions, the requirements of future explorers and the scientific and economic implications."

Astronaut Scott Parazynski chat with kids

Astronaut Scott Parazynski has a chat with Kids, any one of those could be next Niel Armstrong.

Video: Behind the Scenes at the GOES-O Launch Pad

NASA is preparing for the launch of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-O (GOES-O) from Space Launch Complex 37 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. The GOES-O launch is targeted for June 26 during a launch window from 6:14 to 7:14 p.m. EDT. GOES-O will contribute the data needed for accurate NOAA forecasts for severe weather, including hurricanes that threaten at least 35 million Americans living in areas vulnerable to land-falling hurricanes.

Watch the launch live at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more info: http://www.nasa.gov/GOES-O
http://www.noaa.gov

Derrick Pitts on Craig Ferguson

Derrick Pitts's Interview on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson

Earth Rise By KAGUYA on two occasions

KAGUYA taking "Earth-rise" by HDTV (Nov. 7, 2007) [HD]

KAGUYA (SELENE) taking "Earth-rise" by HDTV on Nov. 7, 2007. Aspect ratio 16:9 and HD quality in English narration. (C)JAXA/NHK

KAGUYA taking "Full Earth-rise" by HDTV (Apr. 5, 2008) [HD]

KAGUYA (SELENE) taking "Full Earth-rise" by HDTV on Apr. 5, 2008. Aspect ratio 16:9 and HD quality in English narration. (C)JAXA/NHK

The Future of Hope - Kibo Prologue to the Future - STS-127 2J/A Mission [HD]

The 2J/A Mission (STS-127), the last of the Kibo designated assembly flights, will deliver Kibo's external experiment platform, the Exposed Facility (EF), and an external stowage pallet, the Experiment Logistics Module-Exposed Section (ELM-ES), to the ISS. (JASRAC:V-0901126)

New NASA Missions to Reach Moon Tuesday, Sending Back Live Video

Overview
After its successful launch, LCROSS is now on its way to the moon. Approximately five days after launch, the spacecraft will perform a lunar swingby to enter into an elongated polar Earth orbit to position LCROSS for impact on the lunar south pole (see mission overview video). Shortly after periselene, the time of closest approach to the lunar surface, the LCROSS science payload will be switched on for the duration of one hour for calibration of its cameras and spectrometers.

Graphic visualizations of the early part of the LCROSS orbit leading up to lunar swingby at Launch +5 days. The blue line represents the Earth's orbit around the sun. The white circle is the moon's orbit around the Earth. The yellow line is the orbit of the LCROSS spacecraft. The intersection of the yellow line with the moon's orbit represents the Launch +5 days lunar swingby. Credit: NASA

Streaming Video Coverage of the Lunar Swingby
The LCROSS instrumentation will send back data to Earth for approximately one hour. The first 30 minutes will contain a view of the lunar surface from an altitude of approximately 9,000 km. The video feed is set to display one frame per second. During the latter 30 minutes, the spacecraft will perform multiple scans of the moon's horizon to calibrate its sensors. During this latter half hour, the video image will update only occasionally. The 3D visualization stream will show the spacecraft position and attitude throughout the swingby.

WASHINGTON -- Two NASA spacecraft will reach major mission milestones early Tuesday morning as they approach the moon -- one will send back live streaming imagery via the Internet as it swings by the moon, the other will insert itself into lunar orbit to begin mapping the moon's surface.

After a four and a half day journey to the moon, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, will be captured by the moon's gravity and prepare for the commissioning phase of its mission on June 23. NASA TV live coverage of LRO's orbit insertion begins at 5:30 a.m. EDT Tuesday, with the actual engine burn to begin orbit insertion starting at 5:47 a.m.

In addition to animation and footage of LRO, live interviews will be broadcast from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., with Cathy Peddie, LRO deputy project manager at Goddard; Jim Garvin, Goddard chief scientist; Laurie Leshin, Goddard deputy director for Science and Technology; Mike Wargo, NASA's chief lunar scientist in the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington; Rich Vondrak, LRO project scientist at Goddard; and Craig Tooley, LRO project manager at Goddard.

At 8:20 a.m. Tuesday, the Science Operations Center at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., will stream live telemetry-based spacecraft animation and the visible camera images from the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, spacecraft as it swings by the moon before entering into a looping polar Earth orbit. Live video streaming via the Internet will last approximately one hour.

The live video streams of the LCROSS swingby will be available at:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/lunarswingby

The LCROSS swingby starts near the lunar south pole and continues north along the far side of the moon. The maneuver will put the LCROSS spacecraft and its spent second stage Centaur rocket in the correct flight path for the October impact near the lunar south pole. The swingby also will give the mission operations team the opportunity to practice the small trajectory correction maneuvers needed to target the permanently shadowed crater that will be selected by the LCROSS science team.

During the swingby, the science team will make measurements of the moon's surface and the lunar horizon to calibrate the spacecraft's cameras and spectrometers. The LCROSS visible spectrometer will make the first near-ultraviolet survey of the selected locations on the far-side of the moon giving scientists a unique look at the concentration of minerals and elements in the lunar soil.

LCROSS and its attached Centaur upper stage rocket separately will collide with the moon the morning of Oct. 9, 2009, creating a pair of debris plumes that will be analyzed for the presence of water ice or water vapor, hydrocarbons and hydrated materials.

The LRO and LCROSS missions are providing mission updates on Twitter at:

http://www.twitter.com/lro_nasa and http://www.twitter.com/lcross_nasa

For more information about NASA's LCROSS and LRO missions, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/lro and http://www.nasa.gov/lcross

For NASA TV downlink information, schedules and links to streaming video, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

NASA Returning to the Moon with First Lunar Launch in a Decade

NASA's LRO and LCROSS spacecraft on top of the Atlas V rocket launch from Complex 41 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Photo credit: United Launch Alliance/Pat Corkery

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter launched at 5:32 p.m. EDT Thursday aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The satellite will relay more information about the lunar environment than any other previous mission to the moon.

The orbiter, known as LRO, separated from the Atlas V rocket carrying it and a companion mission, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, and immediately began powering up the components necessary to control the spacecraft. The flight operations team established communication with LRO and commanded the successful deployment of the solar array at 7:40 p.m. The operations team continues to check out the spacecraft subsystems and prepare for the first mid-course correction maneuver. NASA scientists expect to establish communications with LCROSS about four hours after launch, at approximately 9:30 p.m.

"This is a very important day for NASA," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington, which designed and developed both the LRO and LCROSS missions. "We look forward to an extraordinary period of discovery at the moon and the information LRO will give us for future exploration missions."

The spacecraft will be placed in low polar orbit about 31 miles, or 50 kilometers, above the moon for a one year primary mission. LRO's instruments will help scientists compile high resolution three-dimensional maps of the lunar surface and also survey it at many spectral wavelengths. The satellite will explore the moon's deepest craters, exploring permanently sunlit and shadowed regions, and provide understanding of the effects of lunar radiation on humans.

"Our job is to perform reconnaissance of the moon's surface using a suite of seven powerful instruments," said Craig Tooley, LRO project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "NASA will use the data LRO collects to design the vehicles and systems for returning humans to the moon and selecting the landing sites that will be their destinations."

High resolution imagery from LRO's camera will help identify landing sites for future explorers and characterize the moon's topography and composition. The hydrogen concentrations at the moon's poles will be mapped in detail, pinpointing the locations of possible water ice. A miniaturized radar system will image the poles and test communication capabilities.

"During the 60 day commissioning period, we will turn on spacecraft components and science instruments," explained Cathy Peddie, LRO deputy project manager at Goddard. "All instruments will be turned on within two weeks of launch, and we should start seeing the moon in new and greater detail within the next month."

"We learned much about the moon from the Apollo program, but now it is time to return to the moon for intensive study, and we will do just that with LRO," said Richard Vondrak, LRO project scientist at Goddard.

All LRO initial data sets will be deposited in the Planetary Data System, a publicly accessible repository of planetary science information, within six months of launch.

Goddard built and manages LRO. LRO is a NASA mission with international participation from the Institute for Space Research in Moscow. Russia provides the neutron detector aboard the spacecraft.

The LRO mission is providing updates via @LRO_NASA on Twitter. To follow, visit:

http://www.twitter.com/lro_nasa

For more information about the LRO mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/lro

NASA | LRO/LCROSS Launch Prep Behind the Scenes with Jim Garvin

Jim Garvin, NASA Goddards Chief Scientist, gives his take on the LRO/LCROSS launch, NASAs first venture back to the moon in a decade. Be prepared for excitement and adventure!

Video: Unlikely Suns Reveals Improbable Planets

Brown Dwarf is a star so small—some are hardly more massive than a large planet—that it never lit up. Astronomers scarcely even bothered to look for planets around such runts. Yet they have now seen hints of mini solar systems forming around brown dwarfs and similarly unlikely objects.

Few if any astronomers expected the sheer diver­sity of planets beyond our solar system. The most extreme systems are those that orbit neutron stars, white dwarfs and brown dwarfs.
Neutron stars are born in supernova explosions, and planets orbiting them probably congealed from the debris. The bodies orbiting white dwarfs are the hardy survivors of the demise of a sunlike star. And brown dwarfs, themselves barely more massive than planets, nonetheless appear to be sites of planet formation.

Read Entire Article at Scientific American

LHC rapper returns to drop knowledge about rare isotopes

Kate McAlpine, the rapper who garnered much notice millions of YouTube views for her track about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is back with a new track on a new subject: rare isotopes.

In the video (viewable below), McAlpine waxes poetic on the creation and study of the elemental variants known as isotopes at the planned Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB). (Isotopes of an element have the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons and hence different masses.) Among other goals, FRIB hopes to elucidate the nuclear reactions at the cores of stars and the physics of stellar explosions, known as supernovae, that create many of the elements that make up planets and their inhabitants.

McAlpine produced her blockbuster LHC rap as a science writer for CERN, the European lab for particle physics that manages the gargantuan particle accelerator, which operators hope to bring back online before the end of the year. (An electrical malfunction shut the machine down shortly after its initial start-up this past September.) And she has a personal connection to FRIB as well: Michigan State University, her alma mater, will design and host the facility.