JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW New NASA Space Cowboy Successfully Deploys Its 'Lasso' Like a cowboy at a rodeo, NASA's newest Earth-observing satellite, the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), has triumphantly raised its "arm" and unfurled a huge golden "lasso" (antenna). Read the full story New NASA Earth Missions Expand View of Home Planet Four new NASA Earth-observing missions are collecting data from space - with a fifth newly in orbit - after the busiest year of NASA Earth science launches in more than a decade. Read the full story

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

DAY IN REVIEW 'Bright Spot' on Ceres Has Dimmer Companion Dwarf planet Ceres continues to puzzle scientists as NASA's Dawn spacecraft gets closer to being captured into orbit around the object. The latest images from Dawn, taken nearly 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers) from Ceres, reveal that a bright spot that stands out in previous images lies close to yet another bright area. "Ceres' bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently in the same basin. This may be pointing to a volcano-like origin of the spots, but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations," said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles. Images are available at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4491 Using its ion propulsion system, Dawn will enter orbit around Ceres on March 6. As scientists receive better and better views of the dwarf planet over the next 16 months, they hope to gain a deeper understanding of its origin and evolution by studying its surface. The intriguing bright spots and other interesting features of this captivating world will come into sharper focus. "The brightest spot continues to be too small to resolve with our camera, but despite its size it is brighter than anything else on Ceres. This is truly unexpected and still a mystery to us," said Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottingen, Germany. Dawn visited the giant asteroid Vesta from 2011 to 2012, delivering more than 30,000 images of the body along with many other measurements, and providing insights about its composition and geological history. Vesta has an average diameter of 326 miles (525 kilometers), while Ceres has an average diameter of 590 miles (950 kilometers). Vesta and Ceres are the two most massive bodies in the asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn's mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of acknowledgements, visit: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission For information about NASA's Dawn mission, visit: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

DAY IN REVIEW NASA to Highlight Results from New Earth Missions Over the past 12 months NASA has added five missions to its orbiting Earth-observing fleet - the biggest one-year increase in more than a decade. NASA scientists will discuss early observations from the new missions and their current status during a media teleconference at 11 a.m. PST (2 p.m. EST) Thursday, Feb. 26. New views of global carbon dioxide, rain and snowfall, ocean winds, and aerosol particles in the atmosphere will be presented during the briefing. The first of the five new missions - the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) core observatory - was launched from Japan one year ago on Feb. 27, 2014. The most recent, the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, was launched from California on Jan. 31 and is in its checkout phase before starting to collect data. Two missions are collecting NASA's first ongoing Earth observations from the International Space Station (ISS), including the JPL-managed ISS-Rapid Scatterometer (RapidScat). The teleconference panelists are: -- Peg Luce, deputy director of the Earth Science Division in NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Headquarters, Washington -- Gail Skofronick-Jackson, GPM project scientist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland -- Ralph Basilio, Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 project manager, JPL -- Ernesto Rodriguez, ISS-RapidScat project scientist, JPL -- Matthew McGill, Cloud Aerosol Transport System (CATS) principal investigator, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center The public may ask questions during the briefing on Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA. Supporting graphics for the briefing will be posted at the start of the event at: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/Gallery/EarthNowBriefing.html Audio of the briefing, as well as supporting graphics, will stream live at: http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio For more information about NASA's Earth science programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/earthrightnow

 

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JPL Education Workshop This Saturday: Deep Space Network and the Physics of Sound

 

JPL EDUCATION / WORKSHOPS Deep Space Network and the Physics of Sound Date: Saturday, Feb. 28, 10 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. Target Audience: Educators for grades 2-8 (educators for all grades are welcome) Location: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, von Karman Auditorium Overview: Have you ever wondered how NASA "talks" to spacecraft?  In this workshop, educators will learn about the Deep Space Network -- the system of giant antennas stationed around the world that allows us to communicate with distance spacecraft -- and understand why there is no sound in space. Come enjoy "center-based" lessons that illustrate how sound moves through solids, liquids and gases. Call the Educator Resource Center at (818) 393-5917 to reserve your spot. This free workshop is offered through the NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center, which provides formal and informal educators with NASA resources and materials that support STEM learning. For more information, visit the Educator Resource Center page at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=115. For a list of more upcoming educator workshops from NASA/JPL Education, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=387

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

DAY IN REVIEW NASA, ESA Telescopes Give Shape to Furious Black Hole Winds NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and ESA's (European Space Agency) XMM-Newton telescope are showing that fierce winds from a supermassive black hole blow outward in all directions -- a phenomenon that had been suspected, but difficult to prove until now. This discovery has given astronomers their first opportunity to measure the strength of these ultra-fast winds and prove they are powerful enough to inhibit the host galaxy's ability to make new stars. "We know black holes in the centers of galaxies can feed on matter, and this process can produce winds. This is thought to regulate the growth of the galaxies," said Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. Harrison is the principal investigator of NuSTAR and a co-author on a new paper about these results appearing in the journal Science. "Knowing the speed, shape and size of the winds, we can now figure out how powerful they are." Supermassive black holes blast matter into their host galaxies, with X-ray-emitting winds traveling at up to one-third the speed of light. In the new study, astronomers determined PDS 456, an extremely bright black hole known as a quasar more than 2 billion light-years away, sustains winds that carry more energy every second than is emitted by more than a trillion suns. "Now we know quasar winds significantly contribute to mass loss in a galaxy, driving out its supply of gas, which is fuel for star formation," said the study's lead author, Emanuele Nardini of Keele University in England. NuSTAR and XMM-Newton simultaneously observed PDS 456 on five separate occasions in 2013 and 2014. The space telescopes complement each other by observing different parts of the X-ray light spectrum: XMM-Newton views low-energy and NuSTAR views high-energy. Previous XMM-Newton observations had identified black-hole winds blowing toward us, but could not determine whether the winds also blew in all directions. XMM-Newton had detected iron atoms, which are carried by the winds along with other matter, only directly in front of the black hole, where they block X-rays. The scientists combined higher-energy X-ray data from NuSTAR with observations from XMM-Newton. By doing this, they were able to find signatures of iron scattered from the sides, proving the winds emanate from the black hole not in a beam, but in a nearly spherical fashion. "This is a great example of the synergy between XMM-Newton and NuSTAR," said Norbert Schartel, XMM-Newton project scientist at ESA. "The complementarity of these two X-ray observatories is enabling us to unveil previously hidden details about the powerful side of the universe." With the shape and extent of the winds known, the researchers could then determine the strength of the winds and the degree to which they can inhibit the formation of new stars. Astronomers think supermassive black holes and their home galaxies evolve together and regulate each other's growth. Evidence for this comes in part from observations of the central bulges of galaxies -- the more massive the central bulge, the larger the supermassive black hole. This latest report demonstrates a supermassive black hole and its high-speed winds greatly affect the host galaxy. As the black hole bulks up in size, its winds push vast amounts of matter outward through the galaxy, which ultimately stops new stars from forming. Because PDS 456 is relatively close, by cosmic standards, it is bright and can be studied in detail. This black hole gives astronomers a unique look into a distant era of our universe, around 10 billion years ago, when supermassive black holes and their raging winds were more common and possibly shaped galaxies as we see them today. "For an astronomer, studying PDS 456 is like a paleontologist being given a living dinosaur to study," said study co-author Daniel Stern of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "We are able to investigate the physics of these important systems with a level of detail not possible for those found at more typical distances, during the 'Age of Quasars.'" NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nustar http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/

 

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Upcoming Educator Workshop: The Design of Discovery - Registration Deadline Extended!

 

JPL EDUCATION / WORKSHOPS The Design of Discovery *** Registration dealine extended*** Date: March 7, 2015 Target Audience: K-12 educators Locations/Times: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California: 8:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m. PT UCAR - Boulder, Colorado: 9:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. MT Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas: 10:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. CT Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland: 11:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. ET For more information and to register, visit: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/discovery/design_of_discovery.asp. The deadline to register is February 27. Overview: What does it take for scientists and engineers to work together and move fantastic ideas from dream to reality to meet the challenges of complex missions? Find out in the Discovery Program's fifth annual workshop with a special focus on the engineering solutions associated with space exploration. Be the first to learn a new guided-engineering, maker-based "design a mission" project to help students understand the relationship between scientific objectives and the engineering and design process. • Hear the latest on emerging science from the New Horizons mission as it begins to return images of Pluto -- after more than nine years of travel! • Follow the ion-propelled Dawn mission as it nears orbit around dwarf planet Ceres. • Learn how the MESSENGER mission -- after returning so much fantastic science data about Mercury -- will make a big bang once it runs out of fuel. Hands-on, standards-aligned science and engineering activities and multimedia interactives: •    For both K-12 and out-of-school time educators •    Break-out sessions at varying grade levels Resource materials: •    A flash drive containing mission-designed curriculum and activities for all grade levels with links to great online interactives. •    Posters, bookmarks, stickers and more! The cost of the workshop is $25. Lunch and snacks will be provided. Webinar Option: For those who cannot attend in person, the panel discussions will be streamed live and archived. See the workshop website for the link as the time gets closer. For a list of more upcoming educator workshops from NASA/JPL Education, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=387

 

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Upcoming Educator Workshop: Deep Space Network and the Physics of Sound

 

JPL EDUCATION / WORKSHOPS Deep Space Network and the Physics of Sound Date: Saturday, February 28, 2015, 10:00am to 12:45pm Target Audience: Educators grades 2nd – 8th (all grades are welcome) Location: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, von Karman Auditorium For more information and to register, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=422. Overview: Have you ever wondered how NASA "talks" to our various missions? The Deep Space Network celebrated 50 years of communication with NASA spacecraft in our solar system and beyond. In this workshop teachers will learn about NASA's Deep Space Network of dishes here on Earth and understand why there is no sound in space. Come enjoy "center-based" lessons that illustrate how sound moves through solids, liquids and gases. To register please call JPL's Educator Resource Center 818-393-5917. For a list of more upcoming educator workshops from NASA/JPL Education, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=387

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

DAY IN REVIEW Dawn Captures Sharper Images of Ceres Craters and mysterious bright spots are beginning to pop out in the latest images of Ceres from NASA's Dawn spacecraft. These images, taken Feb. 12 at a distance of 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) from the dwarf planet, pose intriguing questions for the science team to explore as the spacecraft nears its destination. The image is available at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA19056 "As we slowly approach the stage, our eyes transfixed on Ceres and her planetary dance, we find she has beguiled us but left us none the wiser," said Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission, based at UCLA. "We expected to be surprised; we did not expect to be this puzzled." Dawn will be gently captured into orbit around Ceres on March 6. As the spacecraft delivers better images and other data, the science team will be investigating the nature and composition of the dwarf planet, including the nature of the craters and bright spots that are coming into focus. The latest images, which have a resolution of 4.9 miles (7.8 kilometers) per pixel, represent the sharpest views of Ceres to date. The spacecraft explored the giant asteroid Vesta for 14 months during 2011 and 2012. Scientists gained numerous insights about the geological history of this body and saw its cratered surface in fine detail. By comparing Vesta and Ceres, they will develop a better understanding of the formation of the solar system. Dawn's mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., of Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The framing cameras were provided by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottingen, Germany, with significant contributions by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin, and in coordination with the Institute of Computer and Communication Network Engineering, Braunschweig. The visible and infrared mapping spectrometer was provided by the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, built by Selex ES, and is managed and operated by the Italian Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology, Rome. The gamma ray and neutron detector was built by Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, and is operated by the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Arizona. For more information about Dawn, visit: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

DAY IN REVIEW 'Pale Blue Dot' Images Turn 25 Valentine's Day is special for NASA's Voyager mission. It was on Feb. 14, 1990, that the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back at our solar system and snapped the first-ever pictures of the planets from its perch at that time beyond Neptune. This "family portrait" captures Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth and Venus from Voyager 1's unique vantage point. A few key members did not make it in: Mars had little sunlight, Mercury was too close to the sun, and dwarf planet Pluto turned out too dim. Taking these images was not part of the original plan, but the late Carl Sagan, a member of the Voyager imaging team at the time, had the idea of pointing the spacecraft back toward its home for a last look. The title of his 1994 book, "Pale Blue Dot," refers to the image of Earth in this series. "Twenty-five years ago, Voyager 1 looked back toward Earth and saw a 'pale blue dot,' " an image that continues to inspire wonderment about the spot we call home," said Ed Stone, project scientist for the Voyager mission, based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. The image of Earth contains scattered light that resembles a beam of sunlight, which is an artifact of the camera itself that makes the tiny Earth appear even more dramatic. Voyager 1 was 40 astronomical units from the sun at this moment. One astronomical unit is 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers. These family portrait images are the last that Voyager 1, which launched in 1977, returned to Earth. Mission specialists subsequently turned the camera off so that the computer controlling it could be repurposed. The spacecraft is still operating, but no longer has the capability to take images. "After taking these images in 1990, we began our interstellar mission. We had no idea how long the spacecraft would last," Stone said. Today, Voyager 1, at a distance of 130 astronomical units, is the farthest human-made object from Earth, and it still regularly communicates with our planet. In August 2012, the spacecraft entered interstellar space - the space between the stars -- and has been delivering data about this uncharted territory ever since. Its twin, Voyager 2, also launched in 1977, is also journeying toward interstellar space. Voyager 1 is more than three times farther from Earth than it was on Valentine's Day 25 years ago. Today, Earth would appear about 10 times dimmer from Voyager's vantage point. Sagan wrote in his "Pale Blue Dot" book: "That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. ... There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world." A video clip of Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's co-author and widow, discussing the pale blue dot image, is available at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/details.php?id=1363 NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, built and operates the twin Voyager spacecraft. The Voyagers Interstellar Mission is a part of NASA's Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. For more information about Voyager, visit: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

DAY IN REVIEW A New Way to View Titan: 'Despeckle' It -- Radar images of Titan have always had a grainy appearance due to electronic noise. -- A new tool suppresses the noise, resulting in clearer views than ever before. During 10 years of discovery, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has pulled back the smoggy veil that obscures the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Cassini's radar instrument has mapped almost half of the giant moon's surface; revealed vast, desert-like expanses of sand dunes; and plumbed the depths of expansive hydrocarbon seas. What could make that scientific bounty even more amazing? Well, what if the radar images could look even better? Thanks to a recently developed technique for handling noise in Cassini's radar images, these views now have a whole new look. The technique, referred to by its developers as "despeckling," produces images of Titan's surface that are much clearer and easier to look at than the views to which scientists and the public have grown accustomed. Typically, Cassini's radar images have a characteristic grainy appearance. This "speckle noise" can make it difficult for scientists to interpret small-scale features or identify changes in images of the same area taken at different times. Despeckling uses an algorithm to modify the noise, resulting in clearer views that can be easier for researchers to interpret. Antoine Lucas got the idea to apply this new technique while working with members of Cassini's radar team when he was a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Noise in the images gave me headaches," said Lucas, who now works at the astrophysics division of France's nuclear center (CEA). Knowing that mathematical models for handling the noise might be helpful, Lucas searched through research published by that community, which is somewhat disconnected from people working directly with scientific data. He found that a team near Paris was working on a "de-noising" algorithm, and he began working with them to adapt their model to the Cassini radar data. The collaboration resulted in some new and innovative analysis techniques. "My headaches were gone, and more importantly, we were able to go further in our understanding of Titan's surface using the new technique," Lucas said. As helpful as the tool has been, for now, it is being used selectively. "This is an amazing technique, and Antoine has done a great job of showing that we can trust it not to put features into the images that aren't really there," said Randy Kirk, a Cassini radar team member from the U.S. Geologic Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona. Kirk said the radar team is going to have to prioritize which images are the most important to applying the technique. "It takes a lot of computation, and at the moment quite a bit of 'fine-tuning' to get the best results with each new image, so for now we'll likely be despeckling only the most important -- or most puzzling -- images," Kirk said. Despeckling Cassini's radar images has a variety of scientific benefits. Lucas and colleagues have shown that they can produce 3-D maps, called digital elevation maps, of Titan's surface with greatly improved quality. With clearer views of river channels, lake shorelines and windswept dunes, researchers are also able to perform more precise analyses of processes shaping Titan's surface. And Lucas suspects that the speckle noise itself, when analyzed separately, may hold information about properties of the surface and subsurface. "This new technique provides a fresh look at the data, which helps us better understand the original images," said Stephen Wall, deputy team lead of Cassini's radar team, which is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "With this innovative new tool, we will look for details that help us to distinguish among the different processes that shape Titan's surface," he said. Details about the new technique were published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the US and several European countries. More information about Cassini: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov

 

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NASA Hosts Month of Educator Webinars Linking Sports and STEM

 

JPL EDUCATION / WORKSHOPS NASA STEM Mania! Date: Feb. 23 - March 19, 2015 Target Audience: Informal and formal educators for grades K-12 Location: Online (webinars) Overview: NASA's free STEM Mania webinar series features 16 standards-based educator workshops that give K-12 educators fun ideas for engaging students in STEM through sports. Check out some of the exciting workshops being offered and register today at: http://www.nasa.gov/larc/stem-mania-2015/ For a list of more upcoming educator workshops from NASA/JPL Education, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=387

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

DAY IN REVIEW Newly elected to the National Academy of Engineering are JPL's Dan Goebel (left) and Graeme Stephens (right). Image credit: JPL National Academy of Engineering Adds Two JPL Members Two researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional distinction for engineers. Graeme L. Stephens, the director for the Center for Climate Sciences at JPL, and Dan M. Goebel, a senior research scientist at JPL who develops technologies for deep space missions, join 65 other U.S. members and 12 foreign members as the newest additions to the organization. The academy, which now has 2,263 U.S. members and 221 foreign members, honors those who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature," and to the "pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education." Stephens is being honored for his elucidation of Earth's cloud system and radiation balance. He completed his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Melbourne in 1973 and received his doctorate in meteorology in 1977 from the same university. His research activities focus on atmospheric radiation, including the application of remote sensing to understand the role of hydrological processes in climate change. He has authored more than 240 peer-reviewed publications and a reference textbook on remote sensing of the atmosphere. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Reading in England, and a professor at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. He also serves as the principal investigator of NASA's CloudSat mission and was involved in the early development of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission, launched last year. Goebel is being honored for his contributions to low-temperature plasma sources for thin-film manufacturing, plasma materials interactions and electric propulsion. He received a bachelor's degree in physics, a master's degree in electrical engineering, and a doctorate in applied plasma physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1977, 1978 and 1981, respectively. Goebel is responsible for the development of high-efficiency electric thrusters, advanced long-life propulsion components and thruster-life model validation for deep space missions. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Physical Society; an adjunct professor at UCLA; and the author of more than 120 technical papers and one book on electric propulsion. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

DAY IN REVIEW Why Comets Are Like Deep Fried Ice Cream --Studying comet composition helps explain how early Earth may have received water and organics. --New research used "Himalaya," an icebox-like instrument. Astronomers tinkering with ice and organics in the lab may have discovered why comets are encased in a hard, outer crust. Using an icebox-like instrument nicknamed Himalaya, the researchers show that fluffy ice on the surface of a comet would crystalize and harden as the comet heads toward the sun and warms up. As the water-ice crystals form, becoming denser and more ordered, other molecules containing carbon would be expelled to the comet's surface. The result is a crunchy comet crust sprinkled with organic dust. "A comet is like deep fried ice cream," said Murthy Gudipati of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, corresponding author of a recent study appearing in The Journal of Physical Chemistry. "The crust is made of crystalline ice, while the interior is colder and more porous. The organics are like a final layer of chocolate on top." The lead author of the study is Antti Lignell, a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, who formerly worked with Gudipati at JPL. Researchers already knew that comets have soft interiors and seemingly hard crusts. NASA's Deep Impact and the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft both inspected comets up close, finding evidence of soft, porous interiors. Last November, Rosetta's Philae probe bounced to a landing on the surface of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, confirming that comets have a hard surface. The black, soot-like coats of comets, made up of organic molecules and dust, had also been seen before by the Deep Impact mission. But the exact composition of comet crust -- and how it forms -- remains unclear. In the new study, researchers turned to labs on Earth to put together a model of crystallizing comet crust. The experiments began with amorphous, or porous, ice -- the proposed composition of the chilliest of comets and icy moons. In this state, water vapor molecules are flash-frozen at extremely cold temperatures of around 30 Kelvin (minus 243 degrees Celsius, or minus 405 degrees Fahrenheit), sort of like Han Solo in the Star Wars movie "The Empire Strikes Back." Disorderly states are preserved: Water molecules are haphazardly mixed with other molecules, such as the organics, and remain frozen in that state. Amorphous ice is like cotton candy, explains Gudipati: light and fluffy and filled with pockets of space. On Earth, all ice is in the crystalline form. It's not cold enough to form amorphous ice on our planet. Even a handful of loose snow is in the crystalline form, but contains much smaller ice crystals than those in snowflakes. Gudipati and Lignell used their Himalaya cryostat instrument to slowly warm their amorphous ice mixtures from 30 Kelvin to 150 Kelvin (minus 123 degrees Celsius, or minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit), mimicking conditions a comet would experience as it journeys toward the sun. The ice had been infused with a type of organics, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs, which are seen everywhere in deep space. The results came as a surprise. "The PAHs stuck together and were expelled from the ice host as it crystallized. This may be the first observation of molecules clustering together due to a phase transition of ice, and this certainly has many important consequences for the chemistry and physics of ice," said Lignell. With PAHs kicked out of the ice mixtures, the water molecules had room to link up and form the more tightly packed structures of crystalline ice. "What we saw in the lab -- a crystalline comet crust with organics on top -- matches what has been suggested from observations in space," said Gudipati. Deep fried ice cream is really the perfect analogy, because the interior of the comets should still be very cold and contain the more porous, amorphous ice." The composition of comets is important to understanding how they might have delivered water and organics to our nascent, bubbling-hot Earth. New results from the Rosetta mission show that asteroids may have been the primary carriers of life's ingredients; however, the debate is ongoing and comets may have played a role. For Gudipati, comets are capsules containing clues not only to our planet's history but to the birth of our entire solar system. He said, "It's beautiful to think about how far we have come in our understanding of comets. Future missions designed to bring cold samples of comets back to Earth could allow us to fully unravel their secrets." Rosetta is a European Space Agency mission with contributions from its member states and NASA. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the U.S. contribution of the Rosetta mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

 

DAY IN REVIEW Planck Mission Explores the History of Our Universe New data from Planck are helping scientists better understand the history and fabric of our universe, as well as our own Milky Way galaxy. Read the full story Dawn Gets Closer Views of Ceres NASA's Dawn spacecraft, on approach to dwarf planet Ceres, has acquired its latest and closest-yet snapshot of this mysterious world. Read the full story

 

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JPL News - Day in Review

DAY IN REVIEW NASA Aircraft, Spacecraft Aid Atmospheric River Study NASA is part of CalWater 2015, a massive research effort to study atmospheric rivers this month. Atmospheric rivers are flows of tropical moisture across the Pacific Ocean to the West Coast, where the moisture falls as rain or snow. One type of atmospheric river is called the Pineapple Express because it originates near Hawaii. Storms driven by atmospheric rivers produce about 40 percent of California's annual water supply, but also most of its major floods. NASA's ER-2 instrumented research aircraft is scheduled to fly later this week as part of a field campaign to study atmospheric rivers, short-lived weather events that carry a flood of moisture from the tropics to the U.S. West Coast. Current forecasts are predicting that northern California will receive several inches of rain from an atmospheric river storm on Thursday and Friday. CalWater 2015, a multiagency, interdisciplinary field campaign, is designed to improve understanding of when and how California ends up on the receiving end of an atmospheric river, and also how much rain these events can bring -- a crucial concern in the state's ongoing historic drought. "In California, we count on atmospheric rivers to deliver about 40 percent of our annual freshwater supply," said Duane Waliser, chief Earth scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and a member of the CalWater 2015 scientific steering team. "They also account for most of our major floods. It's crucial that we learn as much as we can about them to help support water managers' decisions and disaster preparedness." CalWater 2015 will run till about Feb. 27. During this period, when weather forecasters see a major atmospheric river event developing in the Pacific Ocean -- typically about five days before rain reaches the West Coast -- the ER-2 and three other research aircraft will fly through and above the storm while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's research ship, the Ronald H. Brown, makes complementary measurements from the ocean surface and NASA's ISS-RapidScat mission collects related data from its perch on the International Space Station. The ER-2 flies at about 65,000 feet (20 kilometers) -- above 94 percent of Earth's atmosphere. It will carry four scientific instruments designed and managed at NASA. "We're adding a unique remote sensing component to the campaign," said JPL's David Diner, principal investigator for AirMSPI, one of the onboard instruments. "It's exciting for us to coordinate with other aircraft that are flying at lower altitudes and with surface facilities, and to contribute the contextual view that we get from the high altitude." The four instruments are: -- AirMSPI, JPL's Airborne Multiangle SpectroPolarimetric Imager, which observes both natural and polarized sunlight reflected from Earth at multiple viewing angles to study microscopic airborne particles, cloud cover and other factors related to weather. -- AVIRIS Classic, the Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer, an optical sensor that records upwelling light from Earth's surface and atmosphere. Also a JPL instrument, AVIRIS is used to identify and measure molecules and particles on Earth and in the air by the way they absorb and scatter light. -- CPL, the Cloud Physics Lidar, which studies clouds and aerosols by lidar, a detection system that is like radar but uses laser light instead of radio waves. Designed and operated by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, CPL catalogs and tracks particles in the atmosphere. Its deployment in CalWater 2015 also provides a unique opportunity to validate measurements by NASA's Cloud-Aerosol Transport System (CATS) instrument early in its operational lifetime. CATS was launched to the International Space Station on Jan. 10. -- HAMSR, JPL's High Altitude MMIC (Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit) Sounding Radiometer, a microwave radiometer that collects observations that can be used to determine the temperature, water vapor and liquid water in clouds throughout the atmosphere, as well as the presence of precipitation. NASA's ISS-RapidScat mission, operated by JPL, is providing its observations of wind speed and direction over the Pacific to the researchers in near-real time. In return, the RapidScat science team will receive shipboard measurements of the same winds to help calibrate the RapidScat instrument and validate its observations. "It's a good collaboration because we happen to be looking at similar phenomena at the same time," said JPL's Ernesto Rodriguez, the RapidScat project scientist. CalWater 2015's research team includes representatives from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego; the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington; Colorado State University in Fort Collins; the Earth System Research Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado; and JPL. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA. Besides the ER-2, the other research aircraft are a P-3 and a Gulfstream IV aircraft from NOAA and a Gulfstream I aircraft from the DOE. The ER-2 flies from its home base at the NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center facility in Palmdale, California; other research flights originate at McClellan Airfield in Sacramento. Ground-based instruments throughout the state are also collecting data.

 

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Upcoming Educator Workshop: The Design of Discovery

 

JPL EDUCATION / WORKSHOPS The Design of Discovery Date: March 7, 2015 Target Audience: K-12 educators Locations/Times: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California: 8:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m. PT UCAR - Boulder, Colorado: 9:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. MT Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas: 10:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. CT Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland: 11:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. ET For more information and to register, visit: http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/discovery/design_of_discovery.asp. The deadline to register is February 20. Overview: What does it take for scientists and engineers to work together and move fantastic ideas from dream to reality to meet the challenges of complex missions? Find out in the Discovery Program's fifth annual workshop with a special focus on the engineering solutions associated with space exploration. Be the first to learn a new guided-engineering, maker-based "design a mission" project to help students understand the relationship between scientific objectives and the engineering and design process. • Hear the latest on emerging science from the New Horizons mission as it begins to return images of Pluto -- after more than nine years of travel! • Follow the ion-propelled Dawn mission as it nears orbit around dwarf planet Ceres. • Learn how the MESSENGER mission -- after returning so much fantastic science data about Mercury -- will make a big bang once it runs out of fuel. Hands-on, standards-aligned science and engineering activities and multimedia interactives: •    For both K-12 and out-of-school time educators •    Break-out sessions at varying grade levels Resource materials: •    A flash drive containing mission-designed curriculum and activities for all grade levels with links to great online interactives. •    Posters, bookmarks, stickers and more! The cost of the workshop is $25. Lunch and snacks will be provided. Webinar Option: For those who cannot attend in person, the panel discussions will be streamed live and archived. See the workshop website for the link as the time gets closer. For a list of more upcoming educator workshops from NASA/JPL Education, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=387

 

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