Top Stories: March 2010

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

UPDATE - NASA Mars Spacecraft Snaps Photos Chosen by Public

UPDATED RELEASE (WITH UPDATED URL INFORMATION) :

The new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter/HiRISE images are available via the NASA Web site
at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/multimedia/images20100331.html
Because of a power outage at the University of Arizona, their Web links are not available
right now.

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

Daniel Stolte 520-626-4402
University of Arizona, Tucson
Stolte@email.arizona.edu

News release: 2010-105 March 31, 2010

NASA Mars Spacecraft Snaps Photos Chosen by Public

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-105&cid=release_2010-105

PASADENA, Calif. -- The most powerful camera aboard a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars has
returned the first pictures of locations on the Red Planet suggested by the public.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera, aboard NASA's Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter is nicknamed, "the people's camera." Through a program called HiWish
that began in January, scientists have received approximately 1,000 suggestions. The first eight
images of areas the public selected are available online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/multimedia/images20100331.html .

"NASA's Mars program is a prime example of what we call participatory exploration," NASA
Administrator Charlie Bolden said. "To allow the public to aim a camera at a specific site on a
distant world is an invaluable teaching tool that can help educate and inspire our youth to pursue
careers in science, technology, engineering and math."

NASA has provided other opportunities for the public to see and explore Mars. A camera on
NASA's Mars Global Surveyor imaged 1,086 targets suggested through a public-request program
from 2003 until 2006. Launched on Nov. 7, 1996, the probe pioneered the use of aerobraking at
Mars and mapped the surface. The original one-year mission was extended four times until
November 2006.

"Some people get into model railroading or Civil War re-enactments. My thing is exploring
Mars," said James Secosky, a retired teacher in Manchester, N.Y., who suggested an area for
HiRISE imaging after he examined online images from other Mars-orbiting cameras.

Another camera aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has taken nearly 500 images after
receiving approximately 1,400 suggestions through a public-request program initiated in 2009.
Odyssey has been orbiting Mars since 2001. It serves as a communications relay for Mars rovers
and makes its own observations and discoveries.

HiRISE is one of six instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Launched in August
2005, the orbiter reached Mars the following year to begin a two-year primary science mission.
The spacecraft has found that Mars has had diverse wet environments at many locations for
differing durations in the planet's history, and Martian climate-change cycles persist into the
present era. The mission is in an extended science phase. The spacecraft will continue to take
several thousand images a year. The mission has returned more data about Mars than all other
spacecraft to the Red Planet combined.

"What we hope is that people become more interested in science and appreciate this opportunity
to explore another world," said Alfred McEwen, principal investigator for the camera at the
University of Arizona in Tucson. "We appreciate fresh thinking outside the box and look for
things we may not have chosen otherwise. It's good to have a lot of eyes on Mars."

The University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory operates the HiRISE camera, which
was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colo. NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages MRO for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in
Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft.

For more information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, visit
http://www.nasa.gov/mro .

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NASA Mars Spacecraft Snaps Photos Chosen by Public

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

Dwayne Brown 202-358-1726
NASA Headquarters, Washington
dwayne.c.brown@nasa.gov

Daniel Stolte 520-626-4402
University of Arizona, Tucson
Stolte@email.arizona.edu

News release: 2010-105 March 31, 2010

NASA Mars Spacecraft Snaps Photos Chosen by Public

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-105&cid=release_2010-105

PASADENA, Calif. -- The most powerful camera aboard a NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars has
returned the first pictures of locations on the Red Planet suggested by the public.

Since 2006, HiRISE has obtained approximately 13,000 observations covering dozens of square
miles, including areas from a student-suggestion program called NASA Quest. However, only
about 1 percent of the Martian surface has been photographed. The public is encouraged to
recommend sites for the other 99 percent. To make a suggestion, visit http://uahirise.org/hiwish .

For more information about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter mission, visit
http://www.nasa.gov/mro .

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Monday, March 29, 2010

1980s Video Icon Glows on Saturn Moon

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91109. TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Jia-Rui C. Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jia-rui.c.cook@jpl.nasa.gov

NEWS RELEASE: 2010-103 March 29, 2010

1980S VIDEO ICON GLOWS ON SATURN MOON

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-103&cid=release_2010-103

PASADENA, Calif. -- The highest-resolution-yet temperature map and images of
Saturn's icy moon Mimas obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal surprising
patterns on the surface of the small moon, including unexpected hot regions that resemble
"Pac-Man" eating a dot, and striking bands of light and dark in crater walls.

"Other moons usually grab the spotlight, but it turns out Mimas is more bizarre than we
thought it was," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "It has certainly given us some new puzzles."

Cassini collected the data on Feb. 13, during its closest flyby of the moon, which is
marked by an enormous scar called Herschel Crater and resembles the Death Star from
"Star Wars."

Scientists working with the composite infrared spectrometer, which mapped Mimas'
temperatures, expected smoothly varying temperatures peaking in the early afternoon near
the equator. Instead, the warmest region was in the morning, along one edge of the
moon's disk, making a sharply defined Pac-Man shape, with temperatures around 92
Kelvin (minus 294 degrees Fahrenheit). The rest of the moon was much colder, around 77
Kelvin (minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit). A smaller warm spot – the dot in Pac-Man's
mouth – showed up around Herschel, with a temperature around 84 Kelvin (minus 310
degrees Fahrenheit).

The warm spot around Herschel makes sense because tall crater walls (about 5 kilometers,
or 3 miles, high) can trap heat inside the crater. But scientists were completely baffled by
the sharp, V-shaped pattern.

"We suspect the temperatures are revealing differences in texture on the surface," said
John Spencer, a Cassini composite infrared spectrometer team member based at
Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "It's maybe something like the difference
between old, dense snow and freshly fallen powder."

Denser ice quickly conducts the heat of the sun away from the surface, keeping it cold
during the day. Powdery ice is more insulating and traps the sun's heat at the surface, so
the surface warms up.

Even if surface texture variations are to blame, scientists are still trying to figure out why
there are such sharp boundaries between the regions, Spencer said. It is possible that the
impact that created Herschel Crater melted surface ice and spread water across the moon.
That liquid may have flash-frozen into a hard surface. But it is hard to understand why
this dense top layer would remain intact when meteorites and other space debris should
have pulverized it by now, Spencer said.

Icy spray from the E ring, one of Saturn's outer rings, should also keep Mimas relatively
light-colored, but the new visible-light images from the flyby paint a picture of surprising
contrasts. Cassini imaging team scientists didn't expect to see dark streaks trailing down
the bright crater walls or a continuous, narrow pile of concentrated dark debris tracing the
foot of each wall.

The pattern may appear because of the way the surface of Mimas ages, said Paul
Helfenstein, a Cassini imaging team associate based at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
Over time, the moon's surface appears to accumulate a thin veil of silicate minerals or
carbon-rich particles, possibly because of meteor dust falling onto the moon, or impurities
already embedded in surface ice.

As the sun's warming rays and the vacuum of space evaporate the brighter ice, the darker
material is concentrated and left behind. Gravity pulls the dark material down the crater
walls, exposing fresh ice underneath. Although similar effects are seen on other moons of
Saturn, the visibility of these contrasts on a moon continually re-paved with small
particles from the E ring helps scientists estimate rates of change on other satellites.

"These processes are not unique to Mimas, but the new high-definition images are like
Rosetta stones for interpreting them," Helfenstein said.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space
Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate,
Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed,
developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space
Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. The composite infrared spectrometer team is based at
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., where the instrument was built.

More information and images are available at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

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Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust: Chandra/Spitzer Image

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

Megan Watzke 617-496-7998
Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Mass.
mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu

IMAGE ADVISORY: 2010-102 March 29, 2010

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust: Chandra/Spitzer Image

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-102&cid=release_2010-102

PASADENA, Calif. -- A new image from NASA's Chandra and Spitzer space telescopes shows
the dusty remains of a collapsed star. The dust is flying past and engulfing a nearby family of
stars.

"Scientists think the stars in the image are part of a stellar cluster in which a supernova
exploded," said Tea Temin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge,
Mass., who led the study. "The material ejected in the explosion is now blowing past these stars
at high velocities."

The composite image of G54.1+0.3 is online at
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/?IDNumber=pia12982 . It shows the Chandra X-ray
Observatory data in blue, and data from the Spitzer Space Telescope in green (shorter
wavelength) and red-yellow (longer). The white source near the center of the image is a dense,
rapidly rotating neutron star, or pulsar, left behind after a core-collapse supernova explosion. The
pulsar generates a wind of high-energy particles -- seen in the Chandra data -- that expands into
the surrounding environment, illuminating the material ejected in the supernova explosion.

The infrared shell that surrounds the pulsar wind is made up of gas and dust that condensed out
of debris from the supernova. As the cold dust expands into the surroundings, it is heated and lit
up by the stars in the cluster so that it is observable in infrared. The dust closest to the stars is the
hottest and is seen glowing in yellow in the image. Some of the dust is also being heated by the
expanding pulsar wind as it overtakes the material in the shell.

The unique environment into which this supernova exploded makes it possible for astronomers to
observe the condensed dust from the supernova that is usually too cold to emit in infrared.
Without the presence of the stellar cluster, it would not be possible to observe this dust until it
becomes energized and heated by a shock wave from the supernova. However, the very action of
such shock heating would destroy many of the smaller dust particles. In G54.1+0.3, astronomers
are observing pristine dust before any such destruction.

G54.1+0.3 provides an exciting opportunity for astronomers to study the freshly formed
supernova dust before it becomes altered and destroyed by shocks. The nature and quantity of
dust produced in supernova explosions is a long-standing mystery, and G54.1+0.3 supplies an
important piece to the puzzle.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for
NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

The Spitzer observations were made before the telescope ran out of its coolant in May 2009 and
began its "warm" mission. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages
Spitzer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted
at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech
manages JPL for NASA.

More information on the Spitzer Space Telescope is online at:
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer . More information on the
Chandra X-ray Observatory is at: http://chandra.harvard.edu and http://chandra.nasa.gov .

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Thursday, March 25, 2010

NASA Study Finds Atlantic 'Conveyor Belt' Not Slowing

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Alan Buis 818-354-0474
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov

News release: 2010-101 March 25, 2010

NASA Study Finds Atlantic 'Conveyor Belt' Not Slowing

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-101&cid=release_2010-101

PASADENA, Calif. – New NASA measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning
Circulation, part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North
Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years. The data suggest the circulation may
have even sped up slightly in the recent past.

The findings are the result of a new monitoring technique, developed by oceanographer Josh Willis of
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using measurements from ocean-observing
satellites and profiling floats. The findings are reported in the March 25 issue of Geophysical
Research Letters.

The Atlantic overturning circulation is a system of currents, including the Gulf Stream, that bring
warm surface waters from the tropics northward into the North Atlantic. There, in the seas
surrounding Greenland, the water cools, sinks to great depths and changes direction. What was once
warm surface water heading north turns into cold deep water going south. This overturning is one part
of the vast conveyor belt of ocean currents that move heat around the globe.

Without the heat carried by this circulation system, the climate around the North Atlantic -- in
Europe, North America and North Africa -- would likely be much colder. Scientists hypothesize that
rapid cooling 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age was triggered when freshwater from
melting glaciers altered the ocean's salinity and slowed the overturning rate. That reduced the amount
of heat carried northward as a result.

Until recently, the only direct measurements of the circulation's strength have been from ship-based
surveys and a set of moorings anchored to the ocean floor in the mid-latitudes. Willis' new technique
is based on data from NASA satellite altimeters, which measure changes in the height of the sea
surface, as well as data from Argo profiling floats. The international Argo array, supported in part by
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, includes approximately 3,000 robotic floats
that measure temperature, salinity and velocity across the world's ocean.

With this new technique, Willis was able to calculate changes in the northward-flowing part of the
circulation at about 41 degrees latitude, roughly between New York and northern Portugal.
Combining satellite and float measurements, he found no change in the strength of the circulation
overturning from 2002 to 2009. Looking further back with satellite altimeter data alone before the
float data were available, Willis found evidence that the circulation had sped up about 20 percent
from 1993 to 2009. This is the longest direct record of variability in the Atlantic overturning to date
and the only one at high latitudes.

The latest climate models predict the overturning circulation will slow down as greenhouse gases
warm the planet and melting ice adds freshwater to the ocean. "Warm, freshwater is lighter and sinks
less readily than cold, salty water," Willis explained.

For now, however, there are no signs of a slowdown in the circulation. "The changes we're seeing in
overturning strength are probably part of a natural cycle," said Willis. "The slight increase in
overturning since 1993 coincides with a decades-long natural pattern of Atlantic heating and
cooling."

If or when the overturning circulation slows, the results are unlikely to be dramatic. "No one is
predicting another ice age as a result of changes in the Atlantic overturning," said Willis. "Even if the
overturning was the Godzilla of climate 12,000 years ago, the climate was much colder then. Models
of today's warmer conditions suggest that a slowdown would have a much smaller impact now.

"But the Atlantic overturning circulation is still an important player in today's climate," Willis added.
"Some have suggested cyclic changes in the overturning may be warming and cooling the whole
North Atlantic over the course of several decades and affecting rainfall patterns across the United
States and Africa, and even the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic."

With their ability to observe the Atlantic overturning at high latitudes, Willis said, satellite altimeters
and the Argo array are an important complement to the mooring and ship-based measurements
currently being used to monitor the overturning at lower latitudes. "Nobody imagined that this large-
scale circulation could be captured by these global observing systems," said Willis. "Their amazing
precision allows us to detect subtle changes in the ocean that could have big impacts on climate."

For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov .

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

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Space Operations Award Going to Mars Rover Team

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

News release: 2010-099 March 25, 2010

Space Operations Award Going to Mars Rover Team

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-099&cid=release_2010-099

PASADENA, Calif. -- The team that operates NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity
will receive the 2010 International Space Ops Award for Outstanding Achievement.

The citation for the award, to be presented April 29 in Huntsville, Ala., says, "For
remarkable success in meeting unique and varied challenges of operating a rover on Mars
and establishing a model for future in-situ operations."

The Mars Exploration Rover Project landed the twin rovers on the Red Planet in January
2004 for missions that were initially planned to last for three months. The team has
operated the rovers for more than six years, making major science discoveries, driving a
combined total of more than 27.5 kilometers (17 miles) over often-challenging terrain, and
tending them through three Martian winters and potentially mission-ending dust storms.

The Space Ops Award for Outstanding Achievement is presented only once every two
years. A panel composed of members from several nations' space agencies selects the
recipient.

The International Committee on Technical Interchange for Space Mission Operations, also
known as the SpaceOps Organization, created the award to recognize "teams whose
exceptional contributions were critical to the success of one or more space missions." There
were only two prior recipients: the Landsat 5 Flight Operations Anomaly Team, in 2006,
and the Ulysses Mission Flight Team, in 2008.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission
Directorate, Washington. For more information about the Mars rovers, visit
http://www.nasa.gov/rovers .

SpaceOps was founded in 1990 to foster continuous technical interchange on all aspects of
space mission operations and ground data systems, and to promote and maintain an
international community of space operations experts.

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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Students Will 'Breakaway' at Robotics Competition

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Contact: Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Whitney.Clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

Event Tip Sheet: 2010-097B March 24, 2010

Students Will 'Breakaway' at Robotics Competition

WHAT:
Fifty-eight high school teams will compete in the 19th season of the Los Angeles
regional FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology)
Robotics Competition. The event, at the Long Beach Convention Center, is free to
the public.

This year's theme is "Breakaway." The teams will compete on a 27-by-54-foot field
with bumps, attempting to earn points by collecting soccer balls in their goals. An
autonomous period starts each match, with robots controlled by pre-programmed
instructions. The autonomous period is followed by a period in which the drivers
control the robots. The event features alliances of three teams competing against
each other to get the highest score by shooting the most balls into a goal,
maneuvering their robots over towers or platforms, or lifting an alliance robot off the
playing surface. Details and animation are available at:
http://robotics.arc.nasa.gov/events/2010_frcwebcasts.php#animation .

The students designed, built and programmed their robots with the help of engineers
from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif., aerospace and other
companies and higher-education institutions. JPL is mentoring 11 of 58 robotics
teams.

The participants are among the 38,000 students in 1,500 teams from around the
world vying to compete in the FIRST championships April 15 to 17 in Atlanta. The
FIRST Robotics Competition is part of NASA's Robotics Alliance Project, which
aims to expand the number of robotics systems experts available to NASA.

WHO:
Fifty-eight high school teams and their coaches and mentors from California, Florida,
Massachusetts and Chile. See list below.

WHEN:
Friday, March 26
9:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Seeding matches

Saturday, March 27
9 a.m.
Opening ceremonies
9:30 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Seeding matches
1:30- 4:30 p.m.
Final competition rounds
4:30 p.m.
Awards ceremony

WHERE:
Long Beach Convention Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, Calif. 90802
Phone: (562) 436-3636. Competition admission is free. Parking fees apply.

More information on NASA's Robotics Alliance Project is at http://robotics.nasa.gov/
Los Angeles FIRST robotics competition list of participating high schools

* denotes schools mentored by JPL.

1. Mark Keppel High School, Alhambra

2. Anaheim High School, Anaheim

3. Servite Alumni Association, Anaheim

4. Arcadia Unified School District, Arcadia*

5. Arroyo Grande High School, Arroyo Grande

6. Beverly Hills High School, Beverly Hills

7. California Academy of Mathematics & Science, Carson

8. Buchanan High School, Clovis

9. Tower Christian School, Clovis

10. Culver City High School, Culver City

11. El Segundo High School, El Segundo

12. Classical Academy High School, Escondido

13. Dos Pueblos High School, Goleta

14. Granada Hills Charter High School, Granada Hills

15. Centinela Valley Union High School, Hawthorne

16. Hope Chapel Academy High School, Hermosa Beach*

17. City Honors High School, Inglewood

18. Woodbridge High School, Irvine

19. Arnold O. Beckman School, Irvine*

20. La Canada High School, La Canada*

21. Crescenta Valley High School, La Crescenta*

22. Clark Magnet High School, La Crescenta*

23. Lancaster High School and Antelope Valley Union High School District, Lancaster

24. Frazier Mountain High School, Lebec

25. The Archer School for Girls, Los Angeles

26. Foshay Learning Center, Los Angeles*

27. King Drew High School, Los Angeles

28. A & S Youth Organization, Los Angeles

29. Manual Arts High School, Los Angeles

30. Crenshaw High School, Los Angeles

31. Milken Community High School, Los Angeles

32. Loyola High School, Los Angeles

33. Bishop Alemany High School, Mission Hills

34. John Burroughs High School, Los Angeles*

35. Campbell Hall School, North Hollywood

36. North Hollywood High School, North Hollywood

37. John Muir High School, Pasadena*

38. Mira Costa High School, Redondo Beach

39. Reseda High School, Reseda

40. Poly High School, Riverside

41. Palos Verdes Peninsula High School, Rolling Hills Estates

42. San Marino High School, San Marino*

43. Rolling Hills Preparatory School, San Pedro

44. Notre Dame High School, Sherman Oaks

45. West Ranch High School, Hart High School, Academy of the Canyons, Stevenson Ranch*

46. Harvard-Westlake School, Studio City

47. La Reina High School, Thousand Oaks High School, Westlake High School and Newbury Park High School, Thousand Oaks

48. South High School, North High School, West High School and Torrance High School, Torrance

49. Vacaville High School and Solano County Office of Education ROP, Vacaville

50. High Tech-LA High School, Van Nuys

51. Saint Bonaventure High School, Ventura

52. Foothill Technology High School, Ventura

53. Verbum Dei High School, Watts

54. West Covina High School, West Covina

55. Chaminade College Preparatory, West Hills

Florida, Massachusetts and International schools:

56. Rockledge High School, Cocoa Beach High School, Viera High School and School Board of Brevard County, Florida

57. Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science, Massachusetts

58. Region Metropolitana, Santiago, Chile

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Mars Rover Examines Odd Material at Small, Young Crater

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

NEWS RELEASE: 2010-096 March 24, 2010

Mars Rover Examines Odd Material at Small, Young Crater

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-096&cid=release_2010-096

PASADENA, Calif -- Weird coatings on rocks beside a young Martian crater remain
puzzling after a preliminary look at data from examination of the site by NASA's
Opportunity rover.

The rover spent six weeks investigating the crater called "Concepción" before resuming its
long journey this month. The crater is about 10 meters (33 feet) in diameter. Dark rays
extending from it, as seen from orbit, flagged it in advance as a target of interest because
the rays suggest the crater is young. An image from orbit showing Opportunity beside
Concepción is at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12969 .

The rocks ejected outward from the impact that dug Concepción are chunks of the same
type of bedrock Opportunity has seen at hundreds of locations since landing in January
2004: soft, sulfate-rich sandstone holding harder peppercorn-size dark spheres like berries
in a muffin. The little spheres, rich in iron, gained the nickname "blueberries."

"It was clear from the images that Opportunity took on the approach to Concepción that
there was strange stuff on lots of the rocks near the crater," said Steve Squyres of Cornell
University, Ithaca, N.Y., principal investigator for Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit.
"There's dark, grayish material coating faces of the rocks and filling fractures in them. At
least part of it is composed of blueberries jammed together as close as you could pack
them. We've never seen anything like this before."

Opportunity used tools on its robotic arm to examine this unusual material on a rock
called "Chocolate Hills." In some places, the layer of closely packed spheres lies between
thinner, smoother layers. "It looks like a blueberry sandwich," said Matt Golombek, a
rover science-team member at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. An
image of the coating material is at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12970 .

Initial analysis of the coating's composition does not show any obvious component from
whatever space rock hit Mars to dig the crater, but that is not a surprise, Golombek said.
"The impact is so fast, most of the impactor vaporizes," he said. "Thin films of melt get
thrown out, but typically the composition of the melt is the stuff that the impactor hit,
rather than the impactor material."

The composition Opportunity found for the dark coating material fits at least two
hypotheses being evaluated, and possibly others. One is that the material resulted from
partial melting of blueberry-containing sandstone from the energy of the impact. Another
is that it formed from filling of fractures in this type of rock before the impact occurred.

"It's possible that when you melt this rock, the sandstone melts before the blueberries do,
leaving intact blueberries as part of a melt layer," Squyres said. "As an alternative, we
know that this type of rock has fractures and that the sandstone can dissolve. Long ago,
water flowing through fractures could have dissolved the sandstone and liberated
blueberries that fell down into the fracture and packed together. In this hypothesis, the
impact that excavated the crater did not play a role in forming this material, but split
rocks along fractures so the material is exposed on the exterior like a coating."

Golombek said, "One consideration that jumps out is that we've been driving around this
part of Mars for six years and never seen this stuff before, then we get to this young
crater and it's coating rocks all around the crater. Sure looks like there's a connection, but
it could just be a coincidence."

The observation that the rocks thrown from the crater have not yet eroded away much is
evidence that the crater is young, confirming the suggestion from the dark rays. Squyres
said, "We're not ready to attach a number to it, but this is really young. It is the youngest
crater we've ever seen with Opportunity and probably the youngest either rover has seen."

One question Opportunity's visit did answer was about the dark rays: "We wondered
before getting to Concepción why the rays are dark," Golombek said. "We found out that
the rays are areas with blocks of light-toned sandstone ejected from the crater. They look
dark from orbit because of the shadows that the blocks are casting when the orbital
images are taken in mid-afternoon."

Since departing Concepción on March 9, Opportunity has driven 614 meters (2,014 feet)
farther along the route to its long-term destination at Endeavour Crater, about 19
kilometers (12 miles) in diameter and still at a drive distance of more than 12 kilometers
(7 miles).

Squyres said, "We're on the road again. We have a healthy rover and we have enough
power for substantial drives. We want to get to Endeavour with a healthy rover. It takes
a compelling target for us to stop and study. And Concepción was a compelling target."
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars
Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. For
more information about the Mars rovers, visit http://www.nasa.gov/rovers .

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Tuesday, March 23, 2010

JPL Scientists to Share Research at Free Climate Day Event

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Alan Buis 818-354-0474
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov

EVENT TIP SHEET: 2010-095B March 23, 2010

JPL Scientists to Share Research at Free Climate Day Event

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-095&cid=advisory_2010-095

WHAT: JPL Climate Day 2010 will bring students, educators and the general public together with
scientists and other climate experts for a free, educational and fun event about Earth's
changing climate.

Researchers and other representatives from NASA, the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, universities and additional organizations will speak on
various aspects of climate change. Topics include the effects of greenhouse gases and
clouds on climate, the difference between weather and climate, the role of the ocean in
global warming, and how scientists study Earth's climate from space. Attendees may
participate in hands-on activities; view exhibits, demonstrations and student
presentations; play Climate Jeopardy and other games; and get information on careers and
resources for teachers and community members. See http://climate.nasa.gov/ClimateDay
for more information.

WHEN: 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday, March 26, and Saturday, March 27. The Friday event is open
only for students and educators, grades 6 through 12, and pre-registration is required. The
Saturday event is open to everyone, with no pre-registration required.

One highlight will be a Public Town Hall, "Our Changing Climate: The Latest from
NASA's Eyes on the Earth," on Saturday, March 27, from 1 to 2:30 p.m. JPL and Scripps
scientists will present their latest research on Earth's atmosphere, ocean, ice, ecosystems
and ancient climate and take audience questions.

WHO: In addition to students, educators and the public, participants include scientists and
others from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; NOAA's National
Weather Service, Oxnard, Calif.; Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of
California, San Diego; The Climate Project, Nashville, Tenn.; Glendale Community
College, Glendale, Calif.; the State University of New York College at Oneonta,
Oneonta, NY; and Fox 11 News, Los Angeles. Climate Day 2010 is presented by JPL in
partnership with the Center for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence-West and NOAA's
National Weather Service.

WHERE: Pasadena Convention Center, Conference Center, Lower Level, 300 E. Green Street,
Pasadena, Calif. 91101.

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NASA Mars Rover Getting Smarter as it Gets Older

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

News release: 2010-094 March 23, 2010

NASA Mars Rover Getting Smarter as it Gets Older

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-094&cid=release_2010-094

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, now in its seventh
year on Mars, has a new capability to make its own choices about whether to make
additional observations of rocks that it spots on arrival at a new location.

Software uploaded this winter is the latest example of NASA taking advantage of the
twin Mars rovers' unanticipated longevity for real Martian test drives of advances made in
robotic autonomy for future missions.

Now, Opportunity's computer can examine images that the rover takes with its wide-
angle navigation camera after a drive, and recognize rocks that meet specified criteria,
such as rounded shape or light color. It can then center its narrower-angle panoramic
camera on the chosen target and take multiple images through color filters.

"It's a way to get some bonus science," said Tara Estlin of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. She is a rover driver, a senior member of JPL's Artificial
Intelligence Group and leader of development for this new software system.

The new system is called Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science, or
AEGIS. Without it, follow-up observations depend on first transmitting the post-drive
navigation camera images to Earth for ground operators to check for targets of interest to
examine on a later day. Because of time and data-volume constraints, the rover team may
opt to drive the rover again before potential targets are identified or before examining
targets that aren't highest priority.

The first images taken by a Mars rover choosing its own target show a rock about the size
of a football, tan in color and layered in texture. It appears to be one of the rocks tossed
outward onto the surface when an impact dug a nearby crater. Opportunity pointed its
panoramic camera at this unnamed rock after analyzing a wider-angle photo taken by the
rover's navigation camera at the end of a drive on March 4. Opportunity decided that this
particular rock, out of more than 50 in the navigation camera photo, best met the criteria
that researchers had set for a target of interest: large and dark.

"It found exactly the target we would want it to find," Estlin said. "This checkout went
just as we had planned, thanks to many people's work, but it's still amazing to see
Opportunity performing a new autonomous activity after more than six years on Mars."

Opportunity can use the new software at stopping points along a single day's drive or at
the end of the day's drive. This enables it to identify and examine targets of interest that
might otherwise be missed.

"We spent years developing this capability on research rovers in the Mars Yard here at
JPL," said Estlin. "Six years ago, we never expected that we would get a chance to use it
on Opportunity."

The developers anticipate that the software will be useful for narrower field-of-view
instruments on future rovers.

Other upgrades to software on Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, since the rovers' first year
on Mars have improved other capabilities. These include choosing a route around
obstacles and calculating how far to reach out a rover's arm to touch a rock. In 2007, both
rovers gained the know-how to examine sets of sky images to determine which ones show
clouds or dust devils, and then to transmit only the selected images. The newest software
upload takes that a step further, enabling Opportunity to make decisions about acquiring
new observations.

The AEGIS software lets scientists change the criteria it used for choosing potential
targets. In some environments, rocks that are dark and angular could be higher-priority
targets than rocks that are light and rounded, for example.

This new software system has been developed with assistance from NASA's Mars
Exploration Rover Project and with funding from the New Millennium Program, the Mars
Technology Program, the JPL Interplanetary Network Development Program, and the
Intelligent Systems Program. The New Millennium Program tests advanced technology in
space flight. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena,
manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate,
Washington.

More information about the Mars rovers is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers . More
information about AEGIS is at:
http://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/newsandevents/newsdetails/?NewsID=677 .
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Thursday, March 18, 2010

Cassini Shows Saturnian Roller Derby, Strange Weather

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-090&cid=release_2010-090

From our vantage point on Earth, Saturn may look like a peaceful orb with rings worthy
of a carefully raked Zen garden, but NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been shadowing the
gas giant long enough to see that the rings are a rough and tumble roller derby. It has also
revealed that the planet itself roils with strange weather and shifting patterns of charged
particles. Two review papers to be published in the March 19 issue of the journal Science
synthesize Cassini's findings since arriving at Saturn in 2004.

"This rambunctious system gives us a new feel for how an early solar system might have
behaved," said Linda Spilker, a planetary scientist and the new Cassini project scientist at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "This kind of deep, rich data can
only be collected by an orbiting spacecraft, and we look forward to the next seven years
around Saturn bringing even more surprises."

In the paper describing the elegant mess of activity in the rings, lead author Jeff Cuzzi,
Cassini's interdisciplinary scientist for rings and dust who is based at NASA Ames
Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., describes how Cassini has shown us that collisions
are routine and chunks of ice leave trails of debris in their wakes. Spacecraft data have
also revealed how small moons play tug-of-war with ring material and how bits of rubble
that would otherwise join together to become moons are ultimately ripped apart by the
gravitational pull that Saturn exerts.

During equinox, the period when sunlight hits the rings exactly edge-on, Cassini
witnessed rings that are normally flat – about tens of meters (yards) thick – being flipped
up as high as the Rocky Mountains.

The spacecraft has also shown that the rings are composed mostly of water ice, with a
mysterious reddish contaminant that could be rust or small organic molecules similar to
those found in red vegetables on Earth.

"It has been amazing to see the rings come to life before our very eyes, changing even as
we watch, being colorful and taking on a tangible, 3-D nature," Cuzzi said. "The rings
were still a nearly unstructured object in even the best telescopes when I was a grad
student, but Cassini has brought us an intimate familiarity with them."

Cuzzi said Cassini scientists were surprised to find such fine-scale structure nearly
everywhere in the rings, forcing them to be very careful about generalizing their findings
across the entire ring disk. The discovery that the rings are clumpy has also called into
question some of the previous estimates for the mass of the rings because there might be
clusters of material hidden inside of the clumps that have not yet been measured.

In the review paper on Saturn's atmosphere, ionosphere and magnetosphere, lead author
Tamas Gombosi, Cassini's interdisciplinary scientist for magnetosphere and plasma
science who is based at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, describes how Cassini
helped scientists understand a south polar vortex that has a diameter 20 to 40 times that
of a terrestrial hurricane, and the bizarrely stable hexagon-shaped jet stream at the planet's
north pole. Cassini scientists have also calculated a variation in Saturn's wind speeds at
different altitudes and latitudes that is 10 times greater than the wind speed variation on
Earth.

According to Gombosi's paper, Cassini has also shown us that the small moon Enceladus,
not the sun or Saturn's largest moon Titan, is the biggest contributor of charged particles
to Saturn's magnetic environment. The charged particles from Enceladus, a moon that
features a plume of water vapor and other gases spraying from its south polar region, also
contribute to the auroras around the poles of the planet.

"We learned from Cassini that the Saturnian magnetosphere is swimming in water,"
Gombosi said. "This is unique in the solar system and makes Saturn's plasma environment
particularly fascinating."

Of course, Cassini's intense investigation has opened up a host of new mysteries. For
example, Cassini has shown us images of occasional cannon-ball-like objects that rocket
across one of the outer rings known as the F ring, without many clues about where they
came from or why they quickly disappear.

Learning more about a kind of radio emission known as "kilometric radiation" at Saturn
has unsettled debates about the planet's rotation rate rather than settled them. While the
regular periods of kilometric radiation have given scientists a sense of the rotation rate at
Jupiter, Saturn has clocked different periods for the radiation during NASA's Voyager
flybys in 1980 and 1981 and the nearly six years of Cassini's investigations. The
modulations vary by about 30 seconds to a minute, but they shouldn't be varying at all.
The inconsistency may be related to a source in the magnetic bubble around the planet
rather than the core of the gas giant, but scientists are still debating.

"Cassini has answered questions we were not even smart enough to ask when the mission
was planned and raised a lot of new ones," Cuzzi said. "We are hot on the trail, though."

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

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

Jia-Rui C. Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jia-rui.c.cook@jpl.nasa.gov

Rachel Prucey 650-604-0643
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
rachel.l.prucey@nasa.gov.

2010-090
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Wednesday, March 17, 2010

NASA’s Spitzer Unearths Primitive Black Holes

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

News release: 2010-088 March 17, 2010

NASA's Spitzer Unearths Primitive Black Holes

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-088&cid=release_2010-088

Astronomers have come across what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive
supermassive black holes known. The discovery, based largely on observations from
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, will provide a better understanding of the roots of our
universe, and how the very first black holes, galaxies and stars came to be.

"We have found what are likely first-generation quasars, born in a dust-free medium and
at the earliest stages of evolution," said Linhua Jiang of the University of Arizona,
Tucson. Jiang is the lead author of a paper announcing the findings in the March 18 issue
of Nature.

Black holes are beastly distortions of space and time. The most massive and active ones
lurk at the cores of galaxies, and are usually surrounded by doughnut-shaped structures of
dust and gas that feed and sustain the growing black holes. These hungry, supermassive
black holes are called quasars.

As grimy and unkempt as our present-day universe is today, scientists believe the very
early universe didn't have any dust -- which tells them that the most primitive quasars
should also be dust-free. But nobody had seen such immaculate quasars -- until now.
Spitzer has identified two -- the smallest on record -- about 13 billion light-years away
from Earth.

The quasars, called J0005-0006 and J0303-0019, were first unveiled in visible light using
data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. That discovery team, which included Jiang, was
led by Xiaohui Fan, a coauthor of the recent paper at the University of Arizona. NASA's
Chandra X-ray Observatory had also observed X-rays from one of the objects. X-rays,
ultraviolet and optical light stream out from quasars as the gas surrounding them is
swallowed.

"Quasars emit an enormous amount of light, making them detectable literally at the edge
of the observable universe," said Fan.

When Jiang and his colleagues set out to observe J0005-0006 and J0303-0019 with
Spitzer between 2006 and 2009, their targets didn't stand out much from the usual quasar
bunch. Spitzer measured infrared light from the objects along with 19 others, all
belonging to a class of the most distant quasars known. Each quasar is anchored by a
supermassive black hole weighing more than 100 million suns.

Of the 21 quasars, J0005-0006 and J0303-0019 lacked characteristic signatures of hot
dust, the Spitzer data showed. Spitzer's infrared sight makes the space telescope ideally
suited to detect the warm glow of dust that has been heated by feeding black holes.

"We think these early black holes are forming around the time when the dust was first
forming in the universe, less than one billion years after the Big Bang," said Fan. "The
primordial universe did not contain any molecules that could coagulate to form dust. The
elements necessary for this process were produced and pumped into the universe later by
stars."

The astronomers also observed that the amount of hot dust in a quasar goes up with the
mass of its black hole. As a black hole grows, dust has more time to materialize around it.
The black holes at the cores of J0005-0006 and J0303-0019 have the smallest measured
masses known in the early universe, indicating they are particularly young, and at a stage
when dust has not yet formed around them.

Other authors include W.N. Brandt of Pennsylvania State University, University Park;
Chris L. Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro, N.M.; Eiichi
Egami of the University of Arizona; Dean C. Hines of the Space Science Institute,
Boulder, Colo.; Jaron D. Kurk of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics,
Germany; Gordon T. Richards of Drexel University, Philadephia, Pa.; Yue Shen of the
Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass.; Michael A. Strauss of
Princeton, N.J.; Marianne Vestergaard of the University of Arizona and Niels Bohr
Institute in Denmark; and Fabian Walter of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy,
Germany. Fan and Kurk were based in part at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
when this research was conducted.

The Spitzer observations were made before the telescope ran out of its liquid coolant in
May 2009, beginning its "warm" mission.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space
Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science
operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about
Spitzer, visit http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

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Teacher Workshops: From Earth's Climate Change to the Moon and Mars

Teacher Workshops: From Earth's Climate Change to the Moon and Mars

This is a feature from the NASA/JPL Education Office.

03.17.10 -- Several teacher workshops are being offered this spring and summer at the NASA/JPL Educator Resource
Center in Pomona, Calif. The workshops are free, but interested educators must contact the resource center in advance at 909-397-4420.

Here is a list of the workshops:

Chemistry and Climate Change
Apr. 20, 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
Recommended for teachers, grades 3 - 8

In this workshop, teachers will get an overview of what NASA scientists know about climate change and
how they know it. There will be a quick introduction to the periodic table of elements, some simple chemistry
and a chance for teachers to brainstorm on some "green inventions." This is a great standards-based way to
teach and inspire students to think about human impact on the environment.

Lunar and Meteorite Sample Certification
May 11 and Aug. 24, 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
Recommended for teachers, grades K - 12

NASA makes real moon rocks and meteorites available for teachers to borrow. The samples are from
NASA's historic Apollo missions. This certification workshop is required in order to bring the excitement
of real lunar rock and meteorite samples to your students.

Robotics and the Marsbound Challenge
July 13, 1 - 3 p.m.
Recommended for teachers, grades 5 - 12

Learn how to use the Marsbound Challenge board activity to teach students how to plan a mission
to Mars, practice basic math skills and work in collaborative groups just like real engineers. In the activity,
students begin with a $250 million budget and see what they can achieve! On Blooms Taxonomy, this activity
is at the evaluation level.

For more information and directions to the NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center, go to http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=115 .

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Planck Mission Images Galactic Web of Cold Dust

Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

Image Advisory: 2010-087 March 17, 2010

Planck Mission Images Galactic Web of Cold Dust

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-087&cid=release_2010-087

Tendrils of the coldest stuff in our galaxy can be seen in a new, large image from Planck, a mission
surveying the whole sky to learn more about the birth of our universe.

Planck, a European Space Agency-led mission with important participation from NASA, launched
into space in May 2009 from Kourou, French Guiana. The space telescope has almost finished its first
of at least four separate scans of the entire sky, a voluminous task that will be completed in early
2012.

The new image, available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/planck/pia12964.html,
highlights a swath of our Milky Way galaxy occupying about one-thirteenth of the entire sky.
It shows the bright band of our galaxy's spiral disk amidst swirling clouds where gas and dust mix together and,
sometimes, ignite to form new stars. The data were taken in the so-called far-infrared portion of the light
spectrum, using two of nine different frequencies available on Planck.

"We've got huge amounts of data streaming down from space," said Ulf Israelsson, the NASA project
manager for the mission at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The intricate process
of sorting through all of it has begun."

The mission's primary objective is to map the cosmic microwave background -- relic radiation left over
from the Big Bang that created our universe about 13.7 billion years ago. Planck's state-of-the-art
technology will provide the most detailed information yet about the size, mass, age, geometry,
composition and fate of the universe.

In addition to cosmological questions like these, the mission will address such astronomy topics as
star formation and galactic structure. Its observations will be used in synergy with data from other
missions, such as the Herschel Space Observatory, another ESA mission with important NASA
participation, and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

"Planck is the first big cosmology mission that will also have a large impact on our understanding of
our galaxy, the Milky Way," said Charles Lawrence, the mission's NASA project scientist at JPL. "We
can see the cold dust and gas that permeate our galaxy on very large scales, while other missions like
Herschel can zoom in to see the detail."

Planck is scheduled to release a first batch of astronomy data, called the Early Release Compact
Source Catalog, in Jan. 2011. Cosmology results on the first two years' worth of data are expected to
be released in Dec. 2012.

Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA's
Planck Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for both of
Planck's science instruments. European, Canadian, U.S. and NASA Planck scientists will work
together to analyze the Planck data. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/planck and
http://www.esa.int/planck .

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Tuesday, March 16, 2010

See Spot on Jupiter. See Spot Glow.

Feature March 16, 2010

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-086&cid=release_2010-086

New thermal images from powerful ground-based telescopes show swirls of warmer air
and cooler regions never seen before within Jupiter's Great Red Spot, enabling scientists
to make the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system.

The observations reveal that the reddest color of the Great Red Spot corresponds to a
warm core within the otherwise cold storm system, and images show dark lanes at the
edge of the storm where gases are descending into the deeper regions of the planet. These
types of data, detailed in a paper appearing in the journal Icarus, give scientists a sense of
the circulation patterns within the solar system's best-known storm system.

"This is our first detailed look inside the biggest storm of the solar system," said Glenn
Orton, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
Calif., who was one of the authors of the paper. "We once thought the Great Red Spot
was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact,
extremely complicated."

Sky gazers have been observing the Great Red Spot in one form or another for hundreds
of years, with continuous observations of its current shape dating back to the 19th century. The spot, which is a cold region averaging about 110 Kelvin (minus 260 degrees
Fahrenheit) is so wide about three Earths could fit inside its boundaries.

The thermal images obtained by giant 8-meter (26-foot) telescopes used for this study --
the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Gemini
Observatory telescope in Chile and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan's
Subaru telescope in Hawaii -- have provided an unprecedented level of resolution and
extended the coverage provided by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s.
Together with observations of the deep cloud structure by the 3-meter (10-foot) NASA
Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii, the level of thermal detail observed from these
giant observatories is comparable to visible-light images from NASA's Hubble Space
Telescope for the first time.

One of the most intriguing findings shows the most intense orange-red central part of the
spot is about 3 to 4 Kelvin (5 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the environment
around it, said Leigh Fletcher, the lead author of the paper, who completed much of the
research as a postdoctoral fellow at JPL and is currently a fellow at the University of
Oxford in England. This temperature differential might not seem like a lot, but it is
enough to allow the storm circulation, usually counter-clockwise, to shift to a weak
clockwise circulation in the very middle of the storm. Not only that, but on other parts of
Jupiter, the temperature change is enough to alter wind velocities and affect cloud
patterns in the belts and zones.

"This is the first time we can say that there's an intimate link between environmental
conditions -- temperature, winds, pressure and composition – and the actual color of the
Great Red Spot," Fletcher said. "Although we can speculate, we still don't know for sure
which chemicals or processes are causing that deep red color, but we do know now that it
is related to changes in the environmental conditions right in the heart of the storm."

Unlocking the secrets of Jupiter's giant storm systems will be one of the targets for
infrared spacecraft observations from future missions including NASA's Juno mission.

2010-086
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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Cassini Data Show Ice and Rock Mixture Inside Titan

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

Jia-Rui C. Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jia-rui.c.cook@jpl.nasa.gov

News release: 2010-084 March 11, 2010

Cassini Data Show Ice and Rock Mixture Inside Titan

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-084&cid=release_2010-084

PASADENA, Calif. -- By precisely tracking NASA's Cassini spacecraft on its low
swoops over Saturn's moon Titan, scientists have determined the distribution of materials
in the moon's interior. The subtle gravitational tugs they measured suggest the interior has
been too cold and sluggish to split completely into separate layers of ice and rock.

The finding, to be published in the March 12 issue of the journal Science, shows how
Titan evolved in a different fashion from inner planets such as Earth, or icy moons such as
Jupiter's Ganymede, whose interiors have split into distinctive layers.

"These results are fundamental to understanding the history of moons of the outer solar
system," said Cassini Project Scientist Bob Pappalardo, commenting on his colleagues'
research. Pappalardo is with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We
can now better understand Titan's place among the range of icy satellites in our solar
system."

Scientists have known that Titan, Saturn's largest moon, is about half ice and half rock,
but they needed the gravity data to figure out how the materials were distributed. It turns
out Titan's interior is a sorbet of ice studded with rocks that probably never heated up
beyond a relatively lukewarm temperature. Only in the outermost 500 kilometers (300
miles) is Titan's ice devoid of any rock, while ice and rock are mixed to various extents at
greater depth.

"To avoid separating the ice and the rock, you must avoid heating the ice too much," said
David J. Stevenson, one of the paper's co-authors and a professor of planetary science at
the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "This means that Titan was built
rather slowly for a moon, in perhaps around a million years or so, back soon after the
formation of the solar system."

This incomplete separation of ice and rock makes Titan less like Jupiter's moon
Ganymede, where ice and rock have fully separated, and perhaps more like another
Jovian moon, Callisto, which is believed to have a mixed ice and rock interior. Though the
moons are all about the same size, they clearly have diverse histories.

The Cassini measurements help construct a gravity map, which may help explain why
Titan has a stunted topography, since interior ice must be warm enough to flow slowly in
response to the weight of heavy geologic structures, such as mountains.

Creating the gravity map required tracking minute changes in Cassini's speed along a line
of sight from Earth to the spacecraft as it flew four close flybys of Titan between
February 2006 and July 2008. The spacecraft took paths between about 1,300 to 1,900
kilometers (800 to 1,200 miles) above Titan.

"The ripples of Titan's gravity gently push and pull Cassini along its orbit as it passes by
the moon and all these changes were accurately recorded by the ground antennas of the
Deep Space Network within 5 thousandths of a millimeter per second [0.2 thousandths of
an inch per second] even as the spacecraft was over a billion kilometers [more than 600
million miles] away," said Luciano Iess, a Cassini radio science team member at Sapienza
University of Rome in Italy, and the paper's lead author. "It was a tricky experiment."

The results don't speak to whether Titan has an ocean beneath the surface, but scientists
say this hypothesis is very plausible and they intend to keep investigating. Detecting tides
induced by Saturn, a goal of the radio science team, would provide the clearest evidence
for such a hidden water layer.

A Cassini interdisciplinary investigator, Jonathan Lunine, said of his colleagues' findings,
"Additional flybys may tell us whether the crust is thick or thin today." Lunine is with
the University of Rome, Tor Vergata, Italy, and the University of Arizona, Tucson. "With
that information we may have a better understanding of how methane, the ephemeral
working fluid of Titan's rivers, lakes and clouds, has been resupplied over geologic time.
Like the history of water on Earth, this is fundamental to a deep picture of the nature of
Titan through time."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space
Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of Caltech, manages the project for
NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed,
developed and assembled at JPL. Cassini's radio science subsystem has been jointly
developed by NASA and the Italian Space Agency (ASI).

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

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Monday, March 8, 2010

Historic Deep Space Network Antenna Starts Major Surgery

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-083&cid=release_2010-083

Like a hard-driving athlete whose joints need help, the giant "Mars antenna" at NASA's
Deep Space Network site in Goldstone, Calif. has begun major, delicate surgery. The
operation on the historic 70-meter-wide (230-foot) antenna, which has received data and
sent commands to deep space missions for over 40 years, will replace a portion of the
hydrostatic bearing assembly. This assembly enables the antenna to rotate horizontally.

The rigorous engineering plans call for lifting about 4 million kilograms (9 million pounds)
of finely tuned scientific instruments a height of about 5 millimeters (0.2 inches) so
workers can replace the steel runner, walls and supporting grout. This is the first time the
runner has been replaced on the Mars antenna.

The operation, which will cost about $1.25 million, has a design life of 20 years.

"This antenna has been a workhorse for NASA/JPL for over 40 years," said Alaudin
Bhanji, Deep Space Network Project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif. "It has provided a critical lifeline to dozens of missions, while enabling
scientific results that have enriched the hearts and minds of generations. We want it to
continue doing so."

The repair will be done slowly because of the scale of the task, with an expected
completion in early November. The network will still be able to provide full coverage for
deep space missions by maximizing use of the two other 70-meter antennas at Deep Space
complexes near Madrid, Spain, and Canberra, Australia, and arraying several smaller 34-
meter (110-foot) antennas together.

NASA built the Mars antenna when missions began venturing beyond the orbit of Earth
and needed more powerful communications tools. The Mars antenna was the first of the
giant antennas designed to receive weak signals and transmit very strong ones far out into
space, featuring a 64-meter-wide (210-foot) dish when it became operational in 1966.
(The dish was upgraded from 64 to 70 meters in 1988 to enable the antenna to track
NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft as it encountered Neptune and Uranus.)

While officially dubbed Deep Space Station 14, the antenna picked up the Mars name
from its first task: tracking the Mariner 4 spacecraft, which had been lost by smaller
antennas after its historic flyby of Mars. Through its history, the Mars antenna has
supported missions including Pioneer, Cassini and the Mars Exploration Rovers. It
received Neil Armstrong's famous communiqué from Apollo 11: "That's one small step
for man. One giant leap for mankind." It has also helped with imaging nearby planets,
asteroids and comets by bouncing its powerful radar signal off the objects of study.

A flat, stable surface is critical for the Mars antenna to rotate slowly as it tracks
spacecraft. Three steel pads support the weight of the antenna rotating structure, dish and
other communications equipment above the circular steel runner. A film of oil about the
thickness of a sheet of paper -- about 0.25 millimeters (0.010 inches) -- is produced by a
hydraulic system to float the three pads.

After decades of constant use, oil has seeped through the runner joints, slowly degrading
the structural integrity of the cement-based grout that supports it. Rather than continuing
on a weekly schedule to adjust shims underneath the runner to keep it flat, Deep Space
Network managers decided to replace the whole runner assembly.

"As with any large, rotating structure that has operated almost 24 hours per day, seven
days per week for over 40 years, we eventually have to replace major elements," said
Wayne Sible, the network's deputy project manager at JPL. "We need to replace those
worn parts so we can get another 20 years of valuable service from this national treasure."

Over the next few months, workers will lay a new epoxy grout that is impervious to oil
and fit the antenna with a thicker runner with more tightly sealed joints. They will then
test that the rotation is smooth before turning the antenna back on again.

"The runner replacement task has been in development for close to two years," said JPL's
Peter Hames, who is responsible for maintaining the network's antennas. "We've been
testing and evaluating modern epoxy grouts, which were unavailable when the antenna
was built, updating the design of the runner and designing a replacement process that has
to be performed without completely disassembling the antenna. We've had to make sure
we've reviewed it for practicality and safety."

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Deep
Space Network for NASA Headquarters, Washington. More information about the Deep
Space Network is online at: http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn/ .

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Friday, March 5, 2010

Watch Students Compete Using Lego Robotics

Watch Students Compete Using Lego Robotics

This is a feature from the NASA/JPL Education Office.

03.05.10 -- Watch school teams test the prowess of their student-built, software-enabled Lego
robots during the annual Southern California NASA Explorer Schools Robotics Competition.
Students in grades 4 through 12 will command their robots to complete tasks on a simulated Martian terrain.

The competition and related activities will be held at JPL on Tues., Mar. 9 from 12:15 to 3:30 p.m.
(Pacific time) and can be seen live on the Internet at http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl . The awards ceremony
will be webcast at 3 p.m. (Pacific time).

All teams are part of the NASA Explorer Schools project, a partnership between NASA and about 200
elementary and middle schools nationwide. The project teaches and encourages students to pursue disciplines
critical to NASA's future engineering, science and technical missions. JPL and NASA's Dryden Flight Research
Center, Edwards, Calif., are the local NASA partners for approximately 25 schools in Southern California.

More information can be found online at http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/fll/default.aspx .

Student teams from the following California schools will be participating:

Charles T. Kranz Intermediate School, El Monte
Jack Weaver School, Murrieta
Johnson Magnet School for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, San Diego
Lake View Elementary School, Huntington Beach
Mesa Union School, Somis
Nestle Avenue Elementary School, Tarzana
North Ridge Magnet School, Moreno Valley
Roosevelt Middle School, Glendale
San Cayetano Elementary School, Fillmore
Shirley Avenue Elementary School, Reseda
Sycamore Hills Elementary School, Fontana
Village Academy High School, Pomona
Vintage Math Science Technology Magnet School, North Hills

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Thursday, March 4, 2010

Is That Saturn's Moon Titan or Utah?

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-078&cid=release_2010-078

Planetary scientists have been puzzling for years over the honeycomb patterns and flat
valleys with squiggly edges evident in radar images of Saturn's moon Titan. Now,
working with a "volunteer researcher" who has put his own spin on data from NASA's
Cassini spacecraft, they have found some recognizable analogies to a type of spectacular
terrain on Earth known as karst topography. A poster session today, Thursday, March 4, at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, displays their
work.

Karst terrain on Earth occurs when water dissolves layers of bedrock, leaving dramatic
rock outcroppings and sinkholes. Comparing images of White Canyon in Utah, the Darai
Hills of Papua New Guinea, and Guangxi Province in China to an area of connected
valleys and ridges on Titan known as Sikun Labyrinthus yields eerie similarities. The
materials may be different – liquid methane and ethane on Titan instead of water, and
probably some slurry of organic molecules on Titan instead of rock – but the processes are
likely quite similar.

"Even though Titan is an alien world with much lower temperatures, we keep learning
how many similarities there are to Earth," said Karl Mitchell, a Cassini radar team
associate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The karst-like
landscape suggests there is a lot happening right now under the surface that we can't
see."

Indeed, Mitchell said, if the karst landscape on Titan is consistent with Earth's, there
could very well be caves under the Titan surface.

Work on these analogies was spearheaded by Mike Malaska of Chapel Hill, N.C., an
organic chemist by trade and a contributor in his spare time to unmannedspaceflight.com,
a Web site for amateur space enthusiasts to try their hand at visualizing NASA data.
Malaska approached radar team member Jani Radebaugh at Brigham Young University in
Provo, Utah, about collaborative work after meeting her at last year's Lunar and Planetary
Science Conference.

"I've been in love with Titan since Cassini beamed down the first images of Titan's
Shangri-La sand sea," Malaska said. "It's been amazing for the public to see data come
down so quickly and get data sets so rich that you can practically imagine riding along
with the spacecraft."

Radebaugh steered Malaska toward a swath of landscape imaged by the radar instrument
on Dec. 20, 2007. Malaska traced out patterns in the landscape on his computer and
classified them into different types of valley patterns. He saw that some of the valleys
had no apparent outlets and wondered where the fluid and material went.

Searching geological literature, he found that such closed valleys were typical of karst
terrain and was led to examples of karst in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Utah and
China. He pulled down images of these places from Google Earth. He got input from
other Cassini team members and associates, including Ralph Lorenz of the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., and Tom Farr of JPL.

Malaska also wanted to make 3-D images and an animation of the area, so he collaborated
with Bjorn Jonsson and Doug Ellison, two other "volunteer researchers" involved with
the Web site. Malaska used a ruddy color palette derived from Cassini's imaging science
subsystem and the descent imaging and spectral radiometer on the European Space
Agency's Huygens probe. He also used some artistic license to model the elevations of
the ridges and dendritic drainage basins, taking as his basic assumption that liquid flows
downward.

"My artistic model seems to fit the current data," Malaska said. "Of course, Cassini could
do another pass and blow the model away. I'm hoping it will be confirmed, though."

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.

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See Spot on Jupiter. See Spot Glow.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Cassini Data Show Ice and Rock Mixture Inside Titan

Monday, March 8, 2010

Historic Deep Space Network Antenna Starts Major Surgery

Friday, March 5, 2010

Watch Students Compete Using Lego Robotics

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Is That Saturn's Moon Titan or Utah?

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