Catching Space Weather in the Act

Close to the globe, Earth's magnetic field wraps around the planet like a gigantic spherical web, curving in to touch Earth at the poles. But this isn't true as you get further from the planet. As you move to the high altitudes where satellites fly, nothing about that field is so simple. Instead, the large region enclosed by Earth's magnetic field, known as the magnetosphere, looks like a long, sideways jellyfish with its round bulb facing the sun and a long tail extending away from the sun.

In the center of that magnetic tail lies the plasma sheet. Here, strange things can happen. Magnetic field lines pull apart and come back together, creating explosions when they release energy. Disconnected bits of the tail called "plasmoids" get ejected into space at two million miles per hour. And legions of charged particles flow back toward Earth.

Such space weather events cause auroras and, when very strong, can produce radiation events that could cause our satellites to fail. But until now no one has been able to take pictures of these fascinating processes in the plasma sheet.

Tropically Speaking, NASA Investigates Precipitation Shapes, Sizes for Severity

Rain drops are fat and snowflakes are fluffy, but why does it matter in terms of predicting severe storms?

We've all seen fat rain drops, skinny rain drops, round hailstones, fluffy snowflakes and even ice needles. This summer, NASA researchers are going to get a look at just how much these shapes influence severe storm weather. To do it, they'll have to look inside the guts of some of the world's fiercest storms. NASA recently assembled a team of hurricane scientists from across the country to carry out high-altitude-aircraft surveillance to explore in detail how storms form, intensify and dissipate.

Earth scientists and engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., have redesigned one of their instruments, the Advanced Microwave Precipitation Radiometer, or AMPR, to better observe the different shapes of precipitation. In August and September, AMPR will fly at an altitude of 60,000 feet over the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. It will sit in the bomb bay of a WB-57 airplane, which is based at the NASA Johnson Space Center's Ellington Field in Houston.

AMPR will sit in the bomb bay of a WB-57 airplane, where it will scan the surfaces below to measure both how hard it’s raining and the type of precipitation being produced by a storm. (NASA/JSC)

During these flights, AMPR researchers will test a new build -- the instrument is an upgraded version of the original AMPR built at NASA Marshall in the early 1990s -- and use it to participate in NASA's upcoming hurricane study, the Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes field campaign, better known as GRIP. The campaign involves three planes mounted with 14 different instruments, including AMPR. The instruments will all work together to create the most complete view of a hurricane to date.

Researchers hope the hurricane campaign will help them answer some of nature's most perplexing questions. As tropical storms grow, they produce massive amounts of rain -- a key element in the development of full-scale hurricanes. Scientists will use AMPR along with the other instruments, such as data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission or TRMM satellite, to figure out just how hard it's raining inside these ferocious storms, and how much of that rain is associated with the production of ice during intensification.

"If you don't know how hard it's raining or where the rain is forming in the atmosphere, you don't know hurricanes," said Dr. Walt Petersen, AMPR principle investigator and Marshall Center earth scientist. "AMPR provides us an opportunity to see their precipitation structure by using an instrument like those currently flying on, for example, the TRMM and Aqua satellites in space."

That's because AMPR doesn't just give scientists new information about hurricanes. The instrument also enables them to test equipment currently in space. Every day, numerous weather satellites orbit Earth to measure the rainfall rate of storms across the globe. They work much like AMPR except over much larger scales. Because they're so far above the Earth and moving so fast, they can take only one measurement every few miles along their track. Scientists can correct for such coarse measurements, but to do so they need highly accurate data. AMPR can take several measurements per mile, giving scientists the data they need to verify that weather satellites continue to provide accurate data.

Crashing waves in the deep ocean can generate enough energy to create a seismic "hum." (Bruce Molnia/U.S. Geological Survey)

"It's like the pixels in your computer screen," Petersen said. "When satellites take measurements, they have really big pixels, and we might lose some of the finer details of what's happening on the ground. AMPR has much smaller pixels, much higher resolution, and allows us to see a much clearer picture. It's a part of our arsenal to make sure what we're measuring from space makes sense. We'd hate to send something up and not have it accurately measure what's happening on the ground."

That information translates into better predictions of hurricane track and intensity -- how hard it's going to rain in a certain area when a hurricane hits, for example, aiding in early flood warnings.

AMPR doesn't just measure how hard rain falls. Within the last several years, the AMPR team has worked vigorously to upgrade the instrument. These upgrades will enable AMPR to more accurately detect what kind of precipitation is in the storm. By identifying the shape of the precipitation, AMPR may present scientists with recognizable signatures that define different types of precipitation. For example, varying combinations of fat or skinny rain drops, snow, ice or hail distributed throughout the depth of the storm will produce different brightness temperatures when viewed at different angles. A storm may develop and behave differently depending on these variations.

Engineers packed the 380-pound AMPR payload with a delicate set of instruments and computer hardware. AMPR gathers data by measuring the amount of microwave radiation rising from the surface beneath -- often the ocean. Because rain water is a better emitter of microwave radiation than ocean water, the radiation measured from rainfall is actually greater during a big storm. This measurement is converted to a "brightness temperature," which correlates to how much radiation is being generated. The more rain, the higher the brightness temperature.

Alternatively, if a hurricane's clouds are full of ice or hail, as they usually are, much of the microwave radiation is scattered away. The corresponding brightness temperature is much lower than the anticipated surface measurement. Scientists can use those changes to determine how hard it's raining inside a storm or how much ice a given storm might contain.

"Whether rain drops are fat or skinny, and whether ice is round or bumpy, these factors are critical when we're trying to estimate rainfall rates," Petersen explained. "Because of air drag, the rate at which these precipitation particles fall through the air depends on their thickness or shape. A fat rain drop falls more slowly than a hail stone of the same size, for example -- that factor enables you to determine rainfall rate."

This image over Southern Brazil, taken from the space shuttle by an astronaut in February 1984 and shows a mixture of cold and warm clouds. (NASA/JSC)

After the GRIP experiment ends in September, Petersen and his team will unload the data and begin analyzing it, adding their findings to the increasingly large body of hurricane knowledge.

"The GRIP experiment will give us information about how a hurricane circulates and how it intensifies. Basically we have a bunch of theories about the role of precipitation in hurricanes, and we need to test them. That's where instruments like AMPR come in."

After this summer’s hurricane study, AMPR will continue to fly in storm campaigns. It's already scheduled for a major joint NASA and U.S. Department of Energy study in April 2011 to support the Global Precipitation Measurement

Petersen loves the challenge. Storms have fascinated him ever since his junior year of high school, when lightning struck just inches away from him while he was at a drive-in movie.

"The thing that excites me is looking inside a storm that we can't fly into," he said. "We can't fly inside these big storms because they're just too nasty. The only way to get information about what's going on inside is to do what AMPR does.

"Being able to look at the guts of a storm and figure out what's going on, that's the key thing for me," he added.

With any luck, AMPR's look into hurricanes will put scientists one step closer to predicting some of the world's fiercest storms.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/missions/grip/news/ampr.html

Galactic Super-Volcano in Action

This image shows the eruption of a galactic “super-volcano” in the massive galaxy M87, as witnessed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NSF's Very Large Array (VLA). At a distance of about 50 million light years, M87 is relatively close to Earth and lies at the center of the Virgo cluster, which contains thousands of galaxies.

The cluster surrounding M87 is filled with hot gas glowing in X-ray light (and shown in blue) that is detected by Chandra. As this gas cools, it can fall toward the galaxy's center where it should continue to cool even faster and form new stars.

However, radio observations with the VLA (red) suggest that in M87 jets of very energetic particles produced by the black hole interrupt this process. These jets lift up the relatively cool gas near the center of the galaxy and produce shock waves in the galaxy's atmosphere because of their supersonic speed.

The interaction of this cosmic “eruption” with the galaxy's environment is very similar to that of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland that occurred in 2010. With Eyjafjallajokull, pockets of hot gas blasted through the surface of the lava, generating shock waves that can be seen passing through the grey smoke of the volcano. This hot gas then rises up in the atmosphere, dragging the dark ash with it. This process can be seen in a movie of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano where the shock waves propagating in the smoke are followed by the rise of dark ash clouds into the atmosphere.

In the analogy with Eyjafjallajokull, the energetic particles produced in the vicinity of the black hole rise through the X-ray emitting atmosphere of the cluster, lifting up the coolest gas near the center of M87 in their wake. This is similar to the hot volcanic gases drag up the clouds of dark ash. And just like the volcano here on Earth, shockwaves can be seen when the black hole pumps energetic particles into the cluster gas. The energetic particles, coolest gas and shockwaves are shown in a labeled version.

Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/KIPAC/N. Werner et al Radio: NSF/NRAO/AUI/W. Cotton

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/photo10-110.html

NASA Video Shows Global Reach of Pollution from Fires

A series of large wildfires burning across western and central Russia, eastern Siberia and western Canada has created a noxious soup of air pollution that is affecting life far beyond national borders. Among the pollutants created by wildfires is carbon monoxide, a gas that can pose a variety of health risks at ground level. Carbon monoxide is also an ingredient in the production of ground-level ozone, which causes numerous respiratory problems. As the carbon monoxide from these wildfires is lofted into the atmosphere, it becomes caught in the lower bounds of the mid-latitude jet stream, which swiftly transports it around the globe.

Two movies were created using continuously updated data from the "Eyes on the Earth 3-D" feature on NASA's global climate change website http://climate.nasa.gov/ . They show three-day running averages of daily measurements of carbon monoxide present at an altitude of 5.5 kilometers (18,000) feet, along with its global transport. The data are from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua spacecraft. AIRS is most sensitive to carbon monoxide at this altitude, which is a region conducive to long-range transport of the smoke. The abundance of carbon monoxide is shown in parts per billion, with the highest concentrations shown in yellows and reds.

The first movie, centered over Moscow, highlights the series of wildfires that continue to burn across Russia. It covers the period between July 18 and Aug. 10, 2010.

The second movie is centered over the North Pole and covers the period from July 16 to Aug. 10, 2010. From this vantage point, the long-range transport of pollutants is more easily visible.

AIRS is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., under contract to NASA. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

More information about AIRS can be found at http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov .

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20100811.html

Ping-Pong Balls to Float Crew Capsule Simulator

If ping-pong balls can float a sunken boat, they should be able to keep an uncrewed space capsule simulator from sinking.

Right?

That's what a team of summer students and engineers think at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. Langley is fabricating a proposed design of an astronaut crew module simulator for uncrewed flight-testing as part of the agency's effort to build a vehicle to replace the space shuttle.

The Orion crew exploration vehicle is the nation's next generation spacecraft designed to carry up to four astronauts to low Earth orbit and beyond.

Orion's first suborbital flight test will launch to 400,000 feet, or 75 miles above Earth. Because the crew module will not be pressurized during the test, it will not have the buoyancy of a pressurized spacecraft. This puts the simulated crew module at risk of sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean after splashdown.

To save the valuable test article for analysis and possible reuse, Langley called on a team of creative minds for a solution.

NASA Langley students gather around the crew module mockup that they propose to keep afloat with ping-pong balls after it splashes down. From left, front row: Edward Tillistrand, Brice Collamer, Patrick Cragg, Caroline Kirk and Kurian Thomas. In the capsule, from left; Joseph Randall Hunt, Heather Blount and Victor Stewart. Credit: NASA/Sean Smith

And as it turned out, inexpensive, lightweight ping-pong balls provided the answer. Langley engineer John DiNonno proposed the idea, and the Orion Flight Test Office told the team to study it.

The idea quickly became "very plausible," said student Caroline Kirk.

Way to go

"At first we didn't really realize that we were going to get so far in proving that it would be possible," said Kirk, a Suffolk, Va., native attending Virginia Tech as an aerospace engineering major. "But when we thought about everything logically, it just seemed like ping-pong balls were the way to go."

She and a team of seven other students worked the project in Langley's Mechanical Systems Branch, where they were assigned for the summer.

DiNonno got the idea from a Discovery Channel program about raising a sunken boat using 27,000 ping-pong balls.

Engineer David Covington said that when DiNonno suggested the ping-pong ball idea, "I just laughed. Not a 'what are you thinking' kind of laugh, but more of a 'that's the most awesome thing I've heard in a long time' laugh. I asked him 'are you serious?' and he said 'yeah, we're authorized to do a four-week study.' So we went straight to work."

Ensuring the outcome would be relatively low-cost was a top priority, said DiNonno.

"Recovering the capsule was not a requirement, but it was a desire," he said. "So there wasn't going to be a lot of investment in it."

Testing process

The students divided the tasks needed to determine if the idea was feasible, each becoming a "principal investigator" for a specific area.

They tested ping-pong balls of varying quality, much the way spacecraft hardware is tested. They studied how the balls would react to the near-vacuum at the edge of space. Using buoyancy tests, they determined how well the balls would float.

The students also subjected the ping-pong balls to mechanical loads using a hydraulic press, and heated them to see how they would react to the high temperatures of descent into the Earth's atmosphere. And they performed electrostatic discharge tests to determine if the balls would produce a static charge that could disrupt the space capsule's electronics.

Ping-Pong Ball Facts

›› Ping-pong balls are made of celluloid, which is processed cotton.
›› Each ping-pong ball weighs less than an ounce (2.7 grams) and is roughly 1.5 inches (38 - 40 mm) in diameter.
›› Ping-pong ball quality is rated from zero to three stars.

Credit: Microsoft

The ping-pong balls passed all the challenges, said Heather Blount, a materials science engineering student at Virginia Tech.

"Through all our testing and calculations, we figured out that it could be a safe and viable option," said Blount, of Yorktown, Va.

Keeping the crew module afloat would take at least 150,000 ping-pong balls, the students estimate, at a retail price of 50 cents or less each -- a fraction of the cost of traditional options. The students hope to reduce the cost through a bulk purchase.

If the flight test is approved, the ping-pong ball concept would still need to be vetted with the flight test team and reviewed by NASA senior management. If implemented, the ping-pong balls probably will be put into netted bags and secured inside the crew module just prior to launch. They would virtually fill the available space inside the uncrewed capsule.

Then, when the unsealed capsule splashes down, the buoyancy of the ping-pong balls will offset the weight of incoming water and it will float instead of sink.

The ping-pong balls also will reduce the volume of air that needs to be vented from the capsule during ascent - as well as drawn in during descent - as the capsule travels through significant changes in atmospheric pressure.

'Awesome' students

Approval of the flight test, as well as a launch date, has yet to be determined. "Even if it is not used, it's an idea that's out there that someone else could use," said Langley engineer Amanda Cutright, a student mentor.

Cutright said she has been enthused by the students.

"It's awesome working with them," she said. "They bring a different perspective. I've been really impressed with how quickly they pick up new ideas and new technology. It seems each team of students that we mentor learns quicker and is able to provide creative ideas."

Yammer

The ping-pong ball team has been using a social media tool called Yammer to communicate with each other, share files, links, work status, questions, and solutions.

"Yammer has been a great tool to communicate with the interns," said Brendan Shaughnessy, an engineer in the Mechanical Systems Branch. "They can post updates on their work or links to websites they found. I can also let them all know about something I need them to do or that I've done in one quick message."

To join NASA's Yammer site, you must have an email address that ends in nasa.gov.

The Orion FTA Students site is open to anyone with a NASA Yammer account.

Credit: Yammer.com

Kirk said the ping-pong ball project has been a unique experience. At school, she said, "we do lab experiments but nothing similar to this at all. Being able to develop an experiment that will be used for space flight tests is an opportunity of a lifetime."

NASA employees and contractors involved in the project include engineers Amanda Cutright; Brendan Shaughnessy, Analytical Services and Materials Inc.; David Covington, ATK Space Systems Inc.; and John DiNonno, all of the Mechanical Systems Branch.

Student team members:

Brice Collamer, Virginia Tech, Langley Aerospace Research Summer Scholars (LARSS) program
→ Principal investigator for electrostatic discharge tests
Patrick Cragg, Princeton University, DEVELOP program
→ Principal investigator for further testing and research
Kurian Thomas, University of Virginia, DEVELOP program
→ Principal investigator for loading tests and cost analysis
Caroline Kirk, Virginia Tech, LARSS
→ Co-principal investigator for vacuum oven tests
Joseph Randall Hunt, Western Carolina University, Undergraduate Student Research Program
→ Principal investigator for packing efficiency tests and operations concerns
Heather Blount, Virginia Tech, LARSS
→ Co-principal investigator for vacuum oven tests
Edward Tillistrand, University of Virginia, DEVELOP program
→ Principal investigator for buoyancy tests and quantity analysis
Victor Stewart, Virginia Tech, Cooperative Education Program
→ Principal investigator for support and review of experiment work

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/constellation/orion/orionfta-pingpong.html

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IBEX Spacecraft Finds Discoveries Close to Home

Imagine floating 35,000 miles above the sunny side of Earth. Our home planet gleams below, a majestic whorl of color and texture. All seems calm around you. With no satellites or space debris to dodge, you can just relax and enjoy the black emptiness of space.

But looks can be deceiving.

In reality, you've unknowingly jumped into an invisible mosh pit of electromagnetic mayhem — the place in space where a supersonic "wind" of charged particles from the Sun crashes head-on into the protective magnetic bubble that surrounds our planet. Traveling at a million miles per hour, the solar wind's protons and electrons sense Earth's magnetosphere too late to flow smoothly around it. Instead, they're shocked, heated, and slowed almost to a stop as they pile up along its outer boundary, the magnetopause, before getting diverted sideways.

Space physicists have had a general sense of these dynamic goings-on for decades. But it wasn't until the advent of the Interstellar Boundary Explorer or IBEX, a NASA spacecraft launched in October 2008, that they've been able to see what the human eye cannot: the first-ever images of this electromagnetic crash scene. They can now witness how some of the solar wind's charged particles are being neutralized by gas escaping from Earth's atmosphere.

A New Way to See Atoms

IBEX wasn't designed to keep tabs on Earth's magnetosphere. Instead, its job is to map interactions occurring far beyond the planets, 8 to 10 billion miles away, where the Sun's own magnetic bubble, the heliosphere, meets interstellar space.

IBEX found that Energetic Neutral Atoms, or ENAs, are coming from a region just outside Earth's magnetopause where nearly stationary protons from the solar wind interact with the tenuous cloud of hydrogen atoms in Earth's exosphere. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Only two spacecraft, Voyagers 1 and 2, have ventured far enough to probe this region directly. IBEX, which travels in a looping, 8-day-long orbit around Earth, stays much closer to home, but it carries a pair of detectors that can observe the interaction region from afar.

Here's how: When fast-moving protons in the solar wind reach the edge of the heliosphere, they sometimes grab electrons from the slower-moving interstellar atoms around them, like batons getting passed between relay runners. This charge exchange creates electrically neutral hydrogen atoms that are no longer controlled by magnetic fields. Suddenly, they're free to go wherever they want — and because they're still moving fast, they quickly zip away from the interstellar boundary in all directions.

> Download video

This animation shows a neutral solar particle's path leaving the Sun, following the magnetic field lines out to the Heliosheath. The solar particle hits a hydrogen atom, stealing it's electron and we follow it until we see it hit one of IBEXs detectors. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Some of these "energetic neutral atoms," or ENAs, zip past Earth, where they're recorded by IBEX. Its two detectors don't take pictures with conventional optics. Instead, they record the number and energy of atoms arriving from small spots of sky about 7 degrees across (the apparent size of a tennis ball held at arm's length). Because its spin axis always points at the Sun, the spacecraft slowly turns throughout Earth's orbit and its detectors scan overlapping strips that create a complete 360 degrees map every six months.

A Collision Zone Near Earth

Because IBEX is orbiting Earth, it also has a front-row seat for observing the chaotic pileup of solar-wind particles occurring along the "nose" of Earth's magnetopause, about 35,000 miles out. ENAs are created there too, as solar-wind protons wrest electrons from hydrogen atoms in the outermost vestiges of our atmosphere, the exosphere.

Other spacecraft have attempted to measure the density of the dayside exosphere, without much success. NASA's Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) spacecraft probably detected ENAs from this region a decade ago, but its detectors didn't have the sensitivity to pinpoint or measure the source.

Now, thanks to IBEX, we know just how tenuous the outer exosphere really is. "Where the interaction is strongest, there are only about eight hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter," explains Stephen A. Fuselier, the Lockheed Martin Space Systems researcher who led the mapping effort. His team's results appear in the July 8 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The key observations were made in March and April 2009, when IBEX was located far from Earth — about halfway to the Moon's orbit — and its detectors could scan the region directly in front of the magnetopause. During some of the March observations, the European Space Agency's Cluster 3 spacecraft was positioned just in front of the magnetopause, where it measured the number of deflected solar-wind protons directly. "Cluster played a very important role in this study," Fuselier explains. "It was in the right place at the right time."

Artist concept of the IBEX satellite. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

The new IBEX maps show that the ENAs thin out at locations away from the point of peak intensity. This falloff makes sense, Fuselier says, because Earth's magnetopause isn't spherical. Instead, it has a teardrop shape that's closest to Earth at its nose but farther away everywhere else. So at locations well away from the magnetopause's centerline, even fewer of the exosphere's hydrogen atoms are hanging around to interact with the solar wind. "No exosphere, no ENAs," he explains.

A Versatile Spacecraft

Since its launch, IBEX has also scanned another nearby world, with surprising results. The moon has no atmosphere or magnetosphere, so the solar wind slams unimpeded into its desolate surface. Most of those particles get absorbed by lunar dust. In fact, space visionaries wonder if the moon's rubbly surface has captured enough helium-3, an isotope present in tiny amounts in the Sun's outflow, to serve as a fuel for future explorers.

Yet cosmic chemists have long thought that some solar-wind protons must be bouncing off the lunar surface, becoming ENAs through charge exchange as they do. So does the moon glow in IBEX's scans? Indeed it does, says David J. McComas of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, who serves as the mission's Principal Investigator.

In a report published last year in Geophysical Research Letters, McComas and other researchers conclude that about 10 percent of the solar-wind particles striking the Moon escape to space as ENAs detectable by IBEX. That amounts to roughly 150 tons of recycled hydrogen atoms per year.

Meanwhile, the squat, eight-sided spacecraft continues its primary task of mapping the interactions between the outermost heliosphere and the interstellar medium that lies beyond. McComas and his team are especially eager to learn more about the mysterious and unexpected "ribbon" of ENAs that turned up in the spacecraft's initial all-sky map.

At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., IBEX Mission Scientist Robert MacDowall says the spacecraft should be able to continue its observations through at least 2012. "We weren't sure those heliospheric interactions would vary with time, but they do," he explains, "and it's great that IBEX will be able to record them for years to come."

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ibex/em-crash.html

Backpack, Communications Network Face Desert Test

Science experiments don't always involve bubbling beakers and people dressed in lab coats and goggles. In the case of NASA's Desert RATS project, an experiment can look like a plastic box bolted to a backpack frame and be carried around the Arizona desert for a month.

Inside the plastic box is a host of off-the-shelf electronics capable of telling the backpacker where he is, letting him talk to distant colleagues and beaming pictures of notable objects to geologists and other scientists.

"The backpack tells you where you are, where you were and it allows you to communicate and share your experience with someone in a different location," said Marc Seibert, a senior research engineer at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. "This backpack has been dreamed about for 10 years."

The backpack is an important part of Kennedy's role in the Desert Research and Technology Studies project, which is set up as a large-scale experiment to find out what equipment and operations scenarios NASA needs to explore the surface of an alien world, such as an asteroid, the moon or Mars.

A team of astronauts, scientists and engineers from several NASA centers head to Arizona's desert each year to simulate the unique environment of space explorers. The effort is meant to test equipment and people to find out the best way to explore another world.

Kennedy's engineers develop the communications, navigation and data transmission networks needed, a task that includes a semitrailer set up as a mission operations center, a command vehicle, a specialized RV, a pair of Humvees plus enough communications gear to set up a wireless network for a small crew of explorers to talk back to "Earth" like they will from other planets.

Equipment from other centers, such as a pair of large rovers, has to work on the same communications network. The rovers, for example, relay the signals from the backpacks to the mission operations center.

Although the area they test in is not a perfect stand-in for the moon or Mars in terms of having breathable air and normal gravity, the site does a pretty good job of isolating the participants, said Mike Miller, communications research engineer at Kennedy.

"We have to take everything to the site, just like we will to other planet surfaces," Miller said.

The research program began 13 years ago, and grows in complexity with each annual run. The 2010 program is focused largely on seeing how effectively astronauts can explore a foreign surface under different communications scenarios and rover modes of operation. It also will put pressure on the scientists to have daily plans ready when the explorers awake each day. That means long nights of studying the day's findings to find out what should be done the next.

"This is probably the highest fidelity lunar simulation that's ever been done," Seibert said.

The backpack carries a pair of cameras, a GPS antenna to pinpoint location and all the electronics needed to store then transmit information. The person wearing the backpack controls its systems using an electronic wrist display, supplied by NASA's Glenn Research Center in Ohio, that is generations ahead of the flip cards Apollo astronauts used during the first trips to the moon. Researchers will also test an iPod Touch from NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Image above: Mike Miller demonstrates one of the backpacks his team designed and built for the Desert Research and Technology Studies project's upcoming field test in Arizona. Miller led the team that developed the backpacks. The backpacks are equipped with GPS antennas, communications components and cameras. They are meant to show researchers what an astronaut might need to explore an alien world and give designers a look at the hardships the equipment could encounter. Photo credit: NASA/Frank Michaux

Right now, the backpack and its host of attached gear only has to stand up to the winds and heat of a desert on Earth.

"Environment is a big thing out there," Miller said. "The winds are very high, it gets very hot. We are pretty much out in the middle of nowhere."

Designers don't have to worry just yet about the life support systems that would be required for any astronaut working on another world. The life support functions will be incorporated into the backpacks as they evolve and improve. Other parts of the backpack design will be incorporated into the rover so the astronauts can quickly leave the vehicle for a spacewalk.

Miller said the month-long exercise should show them whether the design works technically and what can be improved.

Image above: Isaac Hutson assembles components at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for one of the backpacks that will be tested during the Desert Research and Technology Studies project's upcoming field test in Arizona. The backpacks are equipped with GPS antennas, communications components and cameras. Photo credit: NASA/Frank Michaux

"Success would be to have all the systems up and working, for the scientists to get the science data and the test team to meet their objectives," Miller said.

Miller and his team were given the backpack assignment only a couple months before the equipment had to be assembled and shipped out.

"We only had two to three months here for everything, the design and building, getting the parts, everything," Miller said as others on his team put the finishing touches on a couple of backpacks.

With the short time frame, Miller said his group worked with Glenn partners and with off-the-shelf equipment to get the job done. The software for the controls was written from scratch to make the gear work with each other and operate to their needs.

"The whole communications infrastructure has been upgraded this year," Miller said.

The biggest challenge, he said, was keeping the weight down since the individual components could not be made from scratch by Miller's team.

Between excursions, the Desert RATS participants catalog what they've learned and look at ways to incorporate changes for the next one, along with passing on changes to other in-depth research programs NASA runs.

The backpack's capabilities are designed with space exploration in mind, but the arrangement may have applications for earthbound explorers, too. Basically, a geologist or other explorer could make a solo trek with the backpack and, on his return, play back the whole trip or selected highlights for those who weren't on the journey.

"Any explorer could use this backpack," Seibert said.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/moonandmars/desert_rats_backpack.html

Fermi Detects 'Shocking' Surprise from Supernova's Little Cousin

Astronomers using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected gamma-rays from a nova for the first time, a finding that stunned observers and theorists alike. The discovery overturns the notion that novae explosions lack the power to emit such high-energy radiation.

A nova is a sudden, short-lived brightening of an otherwise inconspicuous star. The outburst occurs when a white dwarf in a binary system erupts in an enormous thermonuclear explosion.

"In human terms, this was an immensely powerful eruption, equivalent to about 1,000 times the energy emitted by the sun every year," said Elizabeth Hays, a Fermi deputy project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "But compared to other cosmic events Fermi sees, it was quite modest. We're amazed that Fermi detected it so strongly."

Fermi's Large Area Telescope saw no sign of a nova in 19 days of data prior to March 10 (left), but the eruption is obvious in data from the following 19 days (right). The images show the rate of gamma rays with energies greater than 100 million electron volts (100 MeV); brighter colors indicate higher rates. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

Gamma rays are the most energetic form of light, and Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) detected the nova for 15 days. Scientists believe the emission arose as a million-mile-per-hour shock wave raced from the site of the explosion.

A paper detailing the discovery will appear in the Aug. 13 edition of the journal Science.

The story opened in Japan during the predawn hours of March 11, when amateur astronomers Koichi Nishiyama and Fujio Kabashima in Miyaki-cho, Saga Prefecture, imaged a dramatic change in the brightness of a star in the constellation Cygnus. They realized that the star, known as V407 Cyg, was 10 times brighter than in an image they had taken three days earlier.

The team relayed the nova discovery to Hiroyuki Maehara at Kyoto University, who notified astronomers around the world for follow-up observations. Before this notice became widely available, the outburst was independently reported by three other Japanese amateurs: Tadashi Kojima, Tsumagoi-mura Agatsuma-gun, Gunma prefecture; Kazuo Sakaniwa, Higashichikuma-gun, Nagano prefecture; and Akihiko Tago, Tsuyama-shi, Okayama prefecture.

Japanese amateur astronomers discovered Nova Cygni 2010 in an image taken at 19:08 UT on March 10 (4:08 a.m. Japan Standard Time, March 11). The erupting star (circled) was 10 times brighter than in an image taken several days earlier. The nova reached a peak brightness of magnitude 6.9, just below the threshold of naked-eye visibility. Credit: K. Nishiyama and F. Kabashima/H. Maehara, Kyoto Univ.

On March 13, Goddard's Davide Donato was on-duty as the LAT "flare advocate," a scientist who monitors the daily data downloads for sources of potential interest, when he noticed a significant detection in Cygnus. But linking this source to the nova would take several days, in part because key members of the Fermi team were in Paris for a meeting of the LAT scientific collaboration.

"This region is close to the galactic plane, which packs together many types of gamma-ray sources -- pulsars, supernova remnants, and others in our own galaxy, plus active galaxies beyond them," Donato said. "If the nova had occurred elsewhere in the sky, figuring out the connection would have been easier."

The LAT team began a concerted effort to identify the mystery source over the following days. On March 17, the researchers decided to obtain a "target-of-opportunity" observation using NASA's Swift satellite -- only to find that Swift was already observing the same spot.

"At that point, I knew Swift was targeting V407 Cyg, but I didn't know why," said Teddy Cheung, an astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, D.C., and the lead author of the study. Examining the Swift data, Cheung saw no additional X-ray sources that could account for what Fermi's LAT was seeing.

V407 Cyg had to be it.

Half an hour later, Cheung learned from other members of the LAT team that the system had undergone a nova outburst, which was the reason the Swift observations had been triggered. "When we looked closer, we found that the LAT had detected the first gamma rays at about the same time as the nova's discovery," he said.

This image from Steve O'Connor in St. Georges, Bermuda, shows the nova (red star, center) on March 17, about a week into the eruption. Credit: Steve O'Connor

V407 Cyg lies 9,000 light-years away. The system is a so-called symbiotic binary containing a compact white dwarf and a red giant star about 500 times the size of the sun.

"The red giant is so swollen that its outermost atmosphere is just leaking away into space," said Adam Hill at Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France. The phenomenon is similar to the solar wind produced by the sun, but the flow is much stronger. "Each decade, the red giant sheds enough hydrogen gas to equal the mass of Earth," he added.

The white dwarf intercepts and captures some of this gas, which accumulates on its surface. As the gas piles on for decades to centuries, it eventually becomes hot and dense enough to fuse into helium. This energy-producing process triggers a runaway reaction that explodes the accumulated gas.

The white dwarf itself, however, remains intact.

The blast created a hot, dense expanding shell called a shock front, composed of high-speed particles, ionized gas and magnetic fields. According to an early spectrum obtained by Christian Buil at Castanet Tolosan Observatory, France, the nova's shock wave expanded at 7 million miles per hour -- or nearly 1 percent the speed of light.

Watch V407 Cyg go nova! Gamma rays (magenta) arise when accelerated particles in the explosion's shock wave crash into the red giant's stellar wind. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/ Conceptual Image Lab.

The magnetic fields trapped particles within the shell and whipped them up to tremendous energies. Before they could escape, the particles had reached velocities near the speed of light. Scientists say that the gamma rays likely resulted when these accelerated particles smashed into the red giant's wind.

"We know that the remnants of much more powerful supernova explosions can trap and accelerate particles like this, but no one suspected that the magnetic fields in novae were strong enough to do it as well," said NRL's Soebur Razzaque.

Supernovae remnants endure for 100,000 years and affect regions of space thousands of light-years across.

Kent Wood at NRL compares astronomical studies of supernova remnants to looking at static images in a photo album. "It takes thousands of years for supernova remnants to evolve, but with this nova we've watched the same kinds of changes over just a few days," he said. "We've gone from a photo album to a time-lapse movie."

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/GLAST/news/shocking-nova.html

Saving the Samples

People who lived through extended power outages know that one of the first concerns is the food in the freezer. Short of eating all the ice cream you can, there is little to do to save perishable items. The International Space Station (ISS) experienced a similar power outage on orbit this week. Only ISS freezers hold science instead of food.

On Saturday, July 31, an ISS system pump failed due to an electrical current spike, shutting down half the ISS cooling system. The crew’s first concern was ensuring a safe and stable environment. Saving the science onboard was a follow-up goal, as the pump failure also impaired the Low Temperature Loop (LTL) in the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM). This meant the ISS crew had to shut down one of the onboard science freezers, the Minus Eighty-Degree Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI).

The ISS perishable experiment samples in danger of thawing included:

• Nutrition: Studies changes in human physiology during long-term space flight.
• HydroTropi: Examines a cucumber model plant and changes in root structure and direction of growth due to gravity and other stimuli.
• SOLO: Studies the mechanisms of fluid and salt retention in the body during space flight.

The ISS crew and NASA Cold Stowage team worked together to save the samples, preventing the loss of scientific knowledge and international investment. John Bartlett, resident Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) Payload Operations Director, was on consol in MSFC at the time of the transfers and commented, “Two MELFIs operating on orbit has always been a contingency plan for a failed unit on board.” MELFI 2 was not impacted, as it resides in the U.S. Laboratory and not JEM, so the ground team decided to relocate MELFI 1 samples to MELFI 2.

View of Shannon Walker as she works to replace a dewar tray filled with samples, into the Minus Eighty Laboratory Freezer for ISS (MELFI-1) in the Kibo laboratory during Expedition 24. In the larger image, Tracy Caldwell-Dyson can be seen assisting. Image credit: NASA

Instructions to locate and transfer the science in MELFI 1 were sent to the POIC, who called the instructions up to the ISS crew. Mr. Bartlett commended the effort, "I was extremely pleased with the quick response by the MELFI/COLD Team... for them to provide such a well structured, two phased retrieval and stow plan in that short of a time was outstanding!"

The crew performed the transfer in two stages. They used the Double Coldbag (DCB) and two -32 Degrees Celcius Icepac Belts for deep frozen samples. The crew then used a coldbag with +4 Degrees Celcius Ice Bricks to transfer the remaining frozen samples to MELFI 2.

Thanks to the quick actions and teamwork between the ISS crew and ground support, all samples now safely reside in MELFI 2. The crew may not have been working with ice cream in their freezers, but they certainly deserve a celebratory ice cream social with their teammates when they return home to Earth!

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/science/save_samples.html

WISE's View of a Wispy Cloud

This image captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) highlights the Small Magellanic Cloud. Also known as NGC 292, the Small Magellanic Cloud is a small galaxy about 200,000 light-years away.

The Small Magellanic Cloud is named after the Portuguese explorer Fernando de Magellan who observed it on his voyage around the world in 1519. Since it is visible to the naked eye in dark-sky conditions, it is likely that people in the southern hemisphere observed the galaxy long before Magellan recorded it.

Located in the constellation Tucana, the Small Magellanic Cloud looks like a wispy cloud that circles the south celestial pole. Nearby, but not visible in this image, is the Large Magellanic Cloud, a sister galaxy to the Small Magellanic Cloud. Astronomers originally thought that both galaxies were orbiting our Milky Way galaxy. But recent research suggests that they might be moving too fast to be bound by the Milky Way's gravity and are passing by for the first time.

This WISE image illustrates why the SMC is considered an irregular galaxy. Galaxies are classified according to their shape, such as spiral or elliptical. Irregular galaxies don't fit into any of these categories -- they are unique in shape.

The two streaks seen in the upper half of the image are satellites orbiting Earth, which happened to pass in front of the Small Magellanic Cloud when WISE captured this view.

This mosaic image was made from all four infrared detectors aboard WISE. The color in this image represents different wavelengths of infrared light. Blue and cyan represent light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns mostly emitted from stars. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is mostly light from warm dust.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/pia13124.html

M-Class Solar Flare Erupts

An M-class flare erupted in active sunspot region 1093, peaking at 1824 UTC on August 7, 2010. The eruption hurled a coronal mass ejection (CME) into space. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory observed the flare. The CME is not fully directed toward Earth, but some of the plasma cloud may glance the magnetosphere between August 9 and August 10, causing a geomagnetic disturbance and possible aurora.

Credit: NASA/SDO

Scientists classify solar flares according to their x-ray brightness in the wavelength range 1 to 8 Angstroms. There are 3 categories: X-class flares are major events that can trigger planet-wide radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation storms. M-class flares are medium-sized; they can cause brief radio blackouts that affect Earth's polar regions. Minor radiation storms sometimes follow M-class flares. Compared to X- and M-class, C-class flares are small with few noticeable consequences on Earth.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/sunearthsystem/main/News080910-flare.html

This Month in Exploration - August

From the early days of experimental airplanes to NASA’s soaring space shuttles, the evolution of flight has mirrored the evolution of society. The ongoing scientific discoveries that are part of aeronautics and space flight have improved life on Earth and allowed humans to begin investigating the secrets of the universe. “This Month in Exploration” presents the rich history of human flight, contextualizing where we’ve been and examining the exploration history NASA is making today.

100 Years Ago

August 31, 1910: Glenn Curtiss established a record for longest flight over water when he completed a course from Euclid beach in Cleveland, Ohio to Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. Flying his biplane over Lake Erie parallel to the shore, Curtiss completed the trip in about an hour and fifteen minutes.

A Loening Amphibian aircraft similar to the three used on the MacMillan Arctic Expedition. Credit: NASA

85 Years Ago

August 1, 1925: Under the command of Lt. Cmdr. Richard E. Byrd, a U.S. Naval Air detail began aerial exploration of a 30,000-square-mile area near Etah, North Greenland using three Loening amphibian seaplanes introduced the previous year. The excursion was part of the MacMillan Arctic Expedition, the United States’ contribution to the global race to Earth’s last unexplored frontiers, the North and South Poles.

75 Years Ago

August 28, 1935: The Equipment Laboratory at Wright Field tested automatic radio-navigation equipment, called the Sperry automatic pilot, by mechanically linking it to a standard radio compass.

50 Years Ago

August 12, 1960: NASA launched its first communications satellite, the Echo 1, via a Thor- Delta rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The satellite transmitted a radio message from President Dwight D. Eisenhower across the nation, demonstrating the feasibility of global radio communications via satellites. Echo 1 was the most visible and largest satellite launched at that time. Although the mission was successful, it was quickly superseded by active-repeater communications satellites such as Telstar.

A static inflation test of the 135 foot satellite Echo 1. Credit: NASA

45 Years Ago

August 21-29, 1965: NASA launched the Gemini-V via Titan-II rocket. Several records were set during this eight-day orbital flight, including the single longest manned spaceflight, total U.S. manned hours in space and a new altitude record for an American spacecraft. American astronaut Gordon Cooper was also the first man to make a second orbital flight and achieved the record for the most spaceflight time.

35 Years Ago

August 20, 1975: NASA launched Viking 1 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla. It was the first of two spacecraft on the historic mission to the planet Mars. The primary objectives of the Viking mission were to return high-resolution images of the Martian surface, analyze the structure and composition of the atmosphere and surface and search for evidence of life on Mars.

25 Years Ago

August 27, 1985: NASA launched space shuttle Discovery (STS-51I) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla. The shuttle deployed three communications satellites and retrieved, repaired and re-launched the TELSAT-1 Communications Satellite, Syncom IV-3.

10 Years Ago

August 9, 2000: The European Space Agency launched the second pair of Cluster II mission satellites, named Rumba and Tango, aboard a Soyuz-Fregat rocket from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome. The Cluster mission used simultaneous measurements from four satellites to provide detailed analysis of the effects of solar wind on Earth’s magnetic field. The mission is still in effect today and has resulted in around 1000 scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals.

Astronaut Neil A. Armstrong in the Lunar Module during the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission. Credit: NASA

5 Years Ago

August 12, 2005: NASA launched the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla. aboard the first Atlas V rocket used for an interplanetary mission. The ongoing mission was to map the physical features of Mars, including its atmosphere and its subterranean layering.

Present Day

August 5, 2010: Neil A. Armstrong turns 80 this year. Born in Wapakoneta, Ohio in 1930, Armstrong was the first person to walk on the moon. He is credited with the famous quote: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

August 22, 2010: Science fiction writer Ray Bradbury was born 100 years ago on this day in Waukegan, Ill. He wrote “The Martian Chronicles” published in 1949. Among his poems is one inspired by a trip to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla. where he compared his tour of the Saturn hanger to “walking around inside Shakespeare’s head.”

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/thismonth/this_month_aug10.html

NASA Lightning Research Happens in a Flash

Lightning's connection to hurricane intensification has eluded researchers for decades, and for a riveting 40 days this summer, NASA lightning researchers will peer inside storms in a way they never have before.

Earth scientists and engineers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., will soon fly the Lightning Instrument Package, or LIP, a flight instrument designed to track and document lightning as hurricanes develop and intensify. In August and September, LIP will fly on a remotely piloted Global Hawk airplane over the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean at an altitude of 60,000 feet. LIP will be part of a NASA hurricane study called Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes, or GRIP for short. The study involves three storm chaser planes mounted with 15 instruments. LIP and the other instruments will work together to create the most complete view of hurricanes to date.

Dr. Richard Blakeslee (right) and Tony Kim (left) of the Marshall Center test the electric field mills used to measure lightning produced by thunderstorms. (NASA/MSFC/D. Stoffer)

"We're now putting LIP on an aircraft that can stay in the air for 30 hours," said Richard Blakeslee LIP principal investigator and Earth scientist at the the Marshall Center. "That’s unprecedented. We typically fly on airplanes that fly over a storm for a period of 10-15 minutes. But this plane can stay with a storm for hours."

"We'll be able to see a storm in a way we’ve never seen it before," he added. "We'll see how the storm develops over the long term, and how lightning varies with all the other things going on inside a hurricane. It's the difference between a single photograph and a full-length movie. That’s quite a paradigm shift."

While scientists know an increase in lightning means the storm is changing, it remains a mystery as to whether that increase signifies strengthening or weakening. Though scientists have quite a few ideas, they lack the data to firmly establish a concrete relationship. Researchers hope LIP's upcoming flights will change that. If scientists can figure out the ties between lightning and hurricane severity, meteorologists may be able to greatly improve their short-term forecasts. Researchers have connected lightning to everything from strong winds to flooding to tornadoes, and a few extra minutes of warning time can save lives each year.

The Lightning Instrument Package will fly aboard the Global Hawk, a remotely piloted airplane that reaches altitudes of 60,000 feet, about twice the height of a commercial airliner. LIP has flown numerous times before, but will now be on an aircraft that can stay in the air for 30 hours, an unprecedented improvement. (NASA)

"We can use lightning as a natural sensing tool to see into the heart of a storm," said Blakeslee. "Lightning allows us to get at rain and other processes going on within a storm."

For Blakeslee and the rest of the LIP team, the hurricane study this fall presents a tremendous opportunity. In its nearly 15-year lifespan, LIP has flown nearly 100 missions in 10 major field campaigns, soaring over more than 800 storms. That's unparalleled for a lightning instrument, according to Blakeslee, and LIP researchers hope it will continue its long tradition of successful research.

The Guts of the Lightning Instrument Package

LIP's instruments may look simple, but they're surprisingly complex. To measure the electric field in a storm, the instrument relies on electric field mills, devices that allow scientists to measure the amount of lightning a storm produces. Originally developed at NASA, the mills look like big cans -- each about a foot long and approximately 8 inches across. As the instrument flies through the air, a plate covering each can rotates, covering and uncovering four metal disks housed inside. Uncover a disk and electricity from the storm rushes in. Cover the disk and it rushes back out. The whole process converts the electrical current from DC to AC and back to DC, allowing scientists to measure how strong a storm's electric field is, and how prone to lightning it might be. A sudden shift in the strength of the electrical field allows scientists to determine that a lightning strike has occurred.

In addition, a conductivity probe reveals how easily electrical current can flow through the storm to the upper part of the atmosphere. The probe is a small nose-cone shaped device with two sensor tubes attached to each side. As the plane flies near a hurricane, small electrical particles called ions rush through the tube, allowing the team to count them.

The instrument will measure the amount of lightning produced by hurricanes and tropical storms. Lightning’s connection to hurricane intensification has eluded researchers for decades, and NASA scientists hope the upcoming hurricane experiment will help answer some puzzling questions. (NASA)

The LIP team uses all that data to determine how much lightning a hurricane produces and where it originates within the storm. By combining that data with wind speed, rainfall rate and other information, researchers can connect how lightning relates to hurricane intensification. And because Blakeslee and his team get their data real time, they can redirect the plane as needed to improve the likelihood of quality results.

After the summer hurricane study ends in September, the team will analyze, evaluate, and eventually release the data, a process which should take several months. Following that, the Lightning Instrument Package will continue to fly in hurricane and storm studies in hopes of collecting more data. The more data, the better the forecasts, Blakeslee said -- and the nearer scientists move to understanding these powerful storms.
The Long Journey of LIP

Of course, Blakeslee and the rest of the LIP team have had to overcome their fair share of challenges.

"When we first started out, we didn’t even know if what we do now was possible," Blakeslee said. "One of my colleagues told me, 'You won’t be able to make current measurements over storms.' But I said, 'Yes we can.' And now we do."

Lightning can serve as a natural sensing tool that allows scientists to understand what else could be happening in a storm. (National Weather Service/F. Smith)

"It's a pretty rewarding feeling," he said. "The biggest challenge now is that there’s always more to study than we possibly can. We've got to pick and choose, and sometimes that can be frustrating."

But for Blakeslee, there's nothing else he'd rather do.

"Lightning is just cool," he laughed. "I've always enjoyed hands-on science, and everything about lightning measurements is hands-on science. You build the instruments. You put them on airplanes. You go out and fly them. You get back the data. And then there's the satisfaction that it’s not all abstract -- we can actually apply what we're learning to real people, real situations and real problem-solving."

For now, the LIP team looks forward with anticipation to sending their instrument out on an unprecedented journey -- hopefully one that will bring scientists one step closer to solving one of science’s biggest mysteries.

For more information about NASA storm research and upcoming study, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/grip

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/missions/grip/news/lightning.html

WISE Reveals a Hidden Star Cluster

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has seen a cluster of newborn stars enclosed in a cocoon of dust and gas in the constellation Camelopardalis. The cluster, AFGL 490, is hidden from view in visible light by the cloud. But WISE's infrared vision sees the glow of the dust itself, and penetrates this dust to see the infant stars within.

Not much is known about this stealthy star cluster. Its distance from Earth is estimated to be about 2,300 light-years. The portion of the star-forming nebula captured in this view stretches across about 62 light-years of space.

All four infrared detectors aboard WISE were used to make this mosaic. Color is representational: blue and cyan represent infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is dominated by light from stars. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is mostly light from warm dust.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/pia13123.html

Blowing in the Wind: Cassini Helps with Dune Whodunit

The answer to the mystery of dune patterns on Saturn's moon Titan did turn out to be blowing in the wind. It just wasn't from the direction many scientists expected.

Basic principles describing the rotation of planetary atmospheres and data from the European Space Agency's Huygens probe led to circulation models that showed surface winds streaming generally east-to-west around Titan's equatorial belt. But when NASA's Cassini spacecraft obtained the first images of dunes on Titan in 2005, the dunes' orientation suggested the sands – and therefore the winds – were moving from the opposite direction, or west to east.

A new paper by Tetsuya Tokano in press with the journal Aeolian Research seeks to explain the paradox. It explains that seasonal changes appear to reverse wind patterns on Titan for a short period. These gusts, which occur intermittently for perhaps two years, sweep west to east and are so strong they do a better job of transporting sand than the usual east-to-west surface winds. Those east-to-west winds do not appear to gather enough strength to move significant amounts of sand.

A related perspective article about Tokano's work by Cassini radar scientist Ralph Lorenz, the lead author on a 2009 paper mapping the dunes, appears in this week's issue of the journal Science.

"It was hard to believe that there would be permanent west-to-east winds, as suggested by the dune appearance," said Tokano, of the University of Cologne, Germany. "The dramatic, monsoon-type wind reversal around equinox turns out to be the key."

Cassini radar sees sand dunes on Saturn's giant moon Titan (upper photo) that are sculpted like Namibian sand dunes on Earth (lower photo). The bright features in the upper radar photo are not clouds but topographic features among the dunes. Image credit: NASA/JPL - upper photo; NASA/JSC - lower photo

The dunes track across the vast sand seas of Titan only in latitudes within 30 degrees of the equator. They are about a kilometer (half a mile) wide and tens to hundreds of kilometers (miles) long. They can rise more than 100 meters (300 feet) high. The sands that make up the dunes appear to be made of organic, hydrocarbon particles. The dunes' ridges generally run west-to-east, as wind here generally sheds sand along lines parallel to the equator.

Scientists predicted winds in the low latitudes around Titan's equator would blow east-to-west because at higher latitudes the average wind blows west-to-east. The wind forces should balance out, based on basic principles of rotating atmospheres.

Tokano re-analyzed a computer-based global circulation model for Titan he put together in 2008. That model, like others for Titan, was adapted from ones developed for Earth and Mars. Tokano added in new data on Titan topography and shape based on Cassini radar and gravity data. In his new analysis, Tokano also looked more closely at variations in the wind at different points in time rather than the averages. Equinox periods jumped out.

Equinoxes occur twice a Titan year, which is about 29 Earth years. During equinox, the sun shines directly over the equator, and heat from the sun creates upwelling in the atmosphere. The turbulent mixing causes the winds to reverse and accelerate. On Earth, this rare kind of wind reversal happens over the Indian Ocean in transitional seasons between monsoons.

The episodic reverse winds on Titan appear to blow around 1 to 1.8 meters per second (2 to 4 mph). The threshold for sand movement appears to be about 1 meter per second (2 mph), a speed that the typical east-to-west winds never appear to surpass. Dune patterns sculpted by strong, short episodes of wind can be found on Earth in the northern Namib sand seas in Namibia, Africa.

Scientists have used data from the Cassini radar mapper to map the global wind pattern on Saturn's moon Titan using data collected over a four-year period, as depicted in this image. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

"This is a subtle discovery -- only by delving into the statistics of the winds in the model could this rather distressing paradox be resolved," said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar scientist based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. "This work is also reassuring for preparations for proposed future missions to Titan, in that we can become more confident in predicting the winds which can affect the delivery accuracy of landers, or the drift of balloons."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the United States and several European countries. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

More Cassini information is available, at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

For more information visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/whycassini/cassini20100729.html