JPL to Host High-Tech Small Business Conference

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

Priscilla Vega 818-354-1357
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Priscilla.v.vega@jpl.nasa.gov

News release: 2012-030 Jan. 30, 2012

JPL to Host High-Tech Small Business Conference

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will host the 24th
annual High-Tech Conference for Small Business on Tuesday, March 6, and Wednesday, March
7, at the Westin Los Angeles Airport Hotel.

For the past 24 years, the conference has provided a forum for technologically oriented small
businesses owned by minorities, women, veterans and service-disabled individuals to discuss
subcontract opportunities with major corporations, federal agencies, local government agencies
and JPL's purchasing and technical communities.

"The beginning of 2012 brings a high emphasis on promoting new opportunities among small
businesses," said Edgar Murillo, High-Tech Conference coordinator and a small business
administrator at JPL. "This conference is a great platform for small businesses to become
informed about potential opportunities through workshops and networking."

Due to limited space, only prime contractors and government agencies will be allowed to exhibit.
There is no fee to exhibit. Interested and qualified exhibitors should contact Jasmine Colbert at
818-354-8689, or at Jasmine.N.Colbert@jpl.nasa.gov .

It is estimated there will be 1,000 attendees, including nearly 200 prime contractors, as well as
various JPL subcontractors and government representatives, participating as exhibitors.

Interested attendees are encouraged to register early for this event. Online registration is
available at: http://acquisition.jpl.nasa.gov/boo/2012HT/index.asp .

The cost is $150 per person. The registration deadline is Monday, Feb.6. The Westin Los
Angeles Airport Hotel is located at 5400 West Century Blvd., Los Angeles 90045.

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

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NASA Study Solves Case of Earth's 'Missing Energy'

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 PHONE 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: 2012-029 Jan. 27, 2012

NASA Study Solves Case of Earth's 'Missing Energy'

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-029&cid=release_2012-029

Two years ago, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in
Boulder, Colo., released a study claiming that inconsistencies between satellite
observations of Earth's heat and measurements of ocean heating amounted to
evidence of "missing energy" in the planet's system.

Where was it going? Or, they wondered, was something wrong with the way
researchers tracked energy as it was absorbed from the sun and emitted back
into space?

An international team of atmospheric scientists and oceanographers, led by
Norman Loeb of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and
including Graeme Stephens of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
Calif., set out to investigate the mystery.

They used 10 years of data -- spanning 2001 to 2010 -- from NASA Langley's
orbiting Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System Experiment (CERES)
instruments to measure changes in the net radiation balance at the top of Earth's
atmosphere. The CERES data were then combined with estimates of the heat
content of Earth's ocean from three independent ocean-sensor sources.

Their analysis, summarized in a NASA-led study published Jan. 22 in the journal
Nature Geosciences, found that the satellite and ocean measurements are, in
fact, in broad agreement once observational uncertainties are factored in.

"One of the things we wanted to do was a more rigorous analysis of the
uncertainties," Loeb said. "When we did that, we found the conclusion of missing
energy in the system isn't really supported by the data."

"Missing Energy" is in the Ocean

"Our data show that Earth has been accumulating heat in the ocean at a rate of
half a watt per square meter (10.8 square feet), with no sign of a decline," Loeb
said. "This extra energy will eventually find its way back into the atmosphere and
increase temperatures on Earth."

Scientists generally agree that 90 percent of the excess heat associated with
increases in greenhouse gas concentrations gets stored in Earth's ocean. If
released back into the atmosphere, a half-watt per square meter accumulation of
heat could increase global temperatures by 0.3 or more degrees centigrade (0.54
degree Fahrenheit).

Loeb said the findings demonstrate the importance of using multiple measuring
systems over time, and illustrate the need for continuous improvement in the way
Earth's energy flows are measured.

The science team at the National Center for Atmospheric Research measured
inconsistencies from 2004 and 2009 between satellite observations of Earth's
heat balance and measurements of the rate of upper ocean heating from
temperatures in the upper 700 meters (2,300 feet) of the ocean. They said the
inconsistencies were evidence of "missing energy."

Other authors of the paper are from the University of Hawaii, the Pacific Marine
Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, the University of Reading United Kingdom
and the University of Miami.

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NASA's Kepler Announces 11 New Planetary Systems

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

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

News release: 2012-026 Jan. 26, 2012

NASA's Kepler Announces 11 New Planetary Systems

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-026&cid=release_2012-026

NASA's Kepler mission has discovered 11 new planetary systems hosting 26 confirmed
planets. These discoveries nearly double the number of verified Kepler planets and triple
the number of stars known to have more than one planet that transits, or passes in front of,
the star. Such systems will help astronomers better understand how planets form.

The planets orbit close to their host stars and range in size from 1.5 times the radius of
Earth to larger than Jupiter. Fifteen are between Earth and Neptune in size. Further
observations will be required to determine which are rocky like Earth and which have thick
gaseous atmospheres like Neptune. The planets orbit their host star once every six to 143
days. All are closer to their host star than Venus is to our sun.

"Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,"
said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Now,
in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has
discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that
our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits."

Kepler identifies planet candidates by repeatedly measuring the change in brightness of
more than 150,000 stars to detect when a planet passes in front of the star. That passage
casts a small shadow toward Earth and the Kepler spacecraft.

"Confirming that the small decrease in the star's brightness is due to a planet requires
additional observations and time-consuming analysis," said Eric Ford, associate professor
of astronomy at the University of Florida and lead author of the paper confirming Kepler-23
and Kepler-24. "We verified these planets using new techniques that dramatically
accelerated their discovery."

Each of the newly confirmed planetary systems contains two to five closely spaced
transiting planets. In tightly packed planetary systems, the gravitational pull of the planets
on each other causes some planets to accelerate and some to decelerate along their
orbits. The acceleration causes the orbital period of each planet to change. Kepler detects
this effect by measuring the changes, or so-called Transit Timing Variations.

Planetary systems with Transit Timing Variations can be verified without requiring
extensive ground-based observations, accelerating confirmation of planet candidates. This
detection technique also increases Kepler's ability to confirm planetary systems around
fainter and more distant stars.

"By precisely timing when each planet transits its star, Kepler detected the gravitational tug
of the planets on each other, clinching the case for 10 of the newly announced planetary
systems," said Dan Fabrycky, Hubble Fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
and lead author for a paper confirming Kepler-29, 30, 31 and 32.

Five of the systems (Kepler-25, Kepler-27, Kepler-30, Kepler-31 and Kepler-33) contain a
pair of planets where the inner planet orbits the star twice during each orbit of the outer
planet. Four of the systems (Kepler-23, Kepler-24, Kepler-28 and Kepler-32) contain a
pairing where the outer planet circles the star twice for every three times the inner planet
orbits its star.

"These configurations help to amplify the gravitational interactions between the planets,
similar to how my sons kick their legs on a swing at the right time to go higher," said Jason
Steffen, the Brinson postdoctoral fellow at Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics in
Batavia, Ill., and lead author of a paper confirming Kepler-25, 26, 27 and 28.

Kepler-33, a star that is older and more massive than our sun, had the most planets. The
system hosts five planets, ranging in size from 1.5 to 5 times that of Earth. All of the planets
are located closer to their star than any planet is to our sun.

The properties of a star provide clues for planet detection. The decrease in the star's
brightness and duration of a planet transit combined with the properties of its host star
present a recognizable signature. When astronomers detect planet candidates that exhibit
similar signatures around the same star, the likelihood of any of these planet candidates
being a false positive is very low.

"The approach used to verify the Kepler-33 planets shows the overall reliability is quite
high," said Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett
Field, Calif., and lead author of the paper on Kepler-33. "This is a validation by multiplicity."

These discoveries are published in four different papers in the Astrophysical Journal and
the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., manages Kepler's ground system
development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., managed the Kepler mission's development.

Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight
system and supports mission operations with the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space
Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes Kepler
science data. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery Mission and is funded by NASA's Science
Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington.

For more information about the Kepler mission and to view the digital press kit, visit
http://www.nasa.gov/kepler . More information about exoplanets and NASA's planet-
finding program is at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov .

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Vesta Likely Cold and Dark Enough for Ice

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

News release: 2012-024 Jan. 25, 2012

Vesta Likely Cold and Dark Enough for Ice

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-024&cid=release_2012-024

Though generally thought to be quite dry, roughly half of the giant asteroid Vesta is expected to be so cold and to receive so little sunlight that water ice could have survived there for billions of years, according to the first published models of Vesta's average global temperatures and illumination by the sun.

"Near the north and south poles, the conditions appear to be favorable for water ice to exist beneath the surface," says Timothy Stubbs of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Stubbs and Yongli Wang of the Goddard Planetary Heliophysics Institute at the University of Maryland published the models in the January 2012 issue of the journal Icarus. The models are based on information from telescopes including NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Vesta, the second-most massive object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, probably does not have any significant permanently shadowed craters where water ice could stay frozen on the surface all the time, not even in the roughly 300-mile-diameter (480-kilometer-diameter) crater near the south pole, the authors note. The asteroid isn't a good candidate for permanent shadowing because it is tilted on its axis at about 27 degrees, which is even greater than Earth's tilt of roughly 23 degrees. In contrast, the moon, which does have permanently shadowed craters, is tilted at only about 1.5 degrees. As a result of its large tilt, Vesta has seasons, and every part of the surface is expected to see the sun at some point during Vesta's year.

The presence or absence of water ice on Vesta tells scientists something about the tiny world's formation and evolution, its history of bombardment by comets and other objects, and its interaction with the space environment. Because similar processes are common to many other planetary bodies, including the moon, Mercury and other asteroids, learning more about these processes has fundamental implications for our understanding of the solar system as a whole. This kind of water ice is also potentially valuable as a resource for further exploration of the solar system.

Though temperatures on Vesta fluctuate during the year, the model predicts that the average annual temperature near Vesta's north and south poles is less than roughly minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit (145 kelvins). That is the critical average temperature below which water ice is thought to be able to survive in the top 10 feet or so (few meters) of the soil, which is called regolith.

Near Vesta's equator, however, the average yearly temperature is roughly minus 190 degrees Fahrenheit (150 kelvins), according to the new results. Based on previous modeling, that is expected to be high enough to prevent water from remaining within a few meters of the surface. This band of relatively warm temperatures extends from the equator to about 27 degrees north and south in latitude.

"On average, it's colder at Vesta's poles than near its equator, so in that sense, they are good places to sustain water ice," says Stubbs. "But they also see sunlight for long periods of time during the summer seasons, which isn't so good for sustaining ice. So if water ice exists in those regions, it may be buried beneath a relatively deep layer of dry regolith."

The modeling also indicates that relatively small surface features, such as craters measuring around 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter, could significantly affect the survival of water ice. "The bottoms of some craters could be cold enough on average -- about 100 kelvins -- for water to be able to survive on the surface for much of the Vestan year [about 3.6 years on Earth]," Stubbs explains. "Although, at some point during the summer, enough sunlight would shine in to make the water leave the surface and either be lost or perhaps redeposit somewhere else."

So far, Earth-based observations suggest that the surface of Vesta is quite dry. However, the Dawn spacecraft is getting a much closer view. Dawn is investigating the role of water in the evolution of planets by studying Vesta and Ceres, two bodies in the asteroid belt that are considered remnant protoplanets - baby planets whose growth was interrupted when Jupiter formed.

Dawn is looking for water using the gamma ray and neutron detector (GRaND) spectrometer, which can identify hydrogen-rich deposits that could be associated with water ice. The spacecraft recently entered a low orbit that is well suited to collecting gamma ray and neutron data.

"Our perceptions of Vesta have been transformed in a few months as the Dawn spacecraft has entered orbit and spiraled closer to its surface," says Lucy McFadden, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard and a Dawn mission co-investigator. "More importantly, our new views of Vesta tell us about the early processes of solar system formation. If we can detect evidence for water beneath the surface, the next question will be is it very old or very young, and that would be exciting to ponder."

The modeling done by Stubbs and Wang, for example, relies on information about Vesta's shape. Before Dawn, the best source of that information was a set of images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1994 and 1996. But now, Dawn and its camera are getting a much closer view of Vesta.

"The Dawn mission gives researchers a rare opportunity to observe Vesta for an extended period of time, the equivalent of about one season on Vesta," says Stubbs. "Hopefully, we'll know in the next few months whether the GRaND spectrometer sees evidence for water ice in Vesta's regolith. This is an important and exciting time in planetary exploration."

Dawn's mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital Sciences Corp. in Dulles, Va., 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. The asteroid modeling by Stubbs and Wang is an extension of analysis originally applied to the moon and partially funded by the NASA Lunar Science Institute.

Jia-Rui Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jccook@jpl.nasa.gov

Elizabeth Zubritsky 301-614-5438
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
elizabeth.a.zubritsky@nasa.gov

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NASA's NuSTAR Ships to Vandenberg for March 14 Launch

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

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

Trent J. Perrotto 202-358-0321
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Trent.J.Perrotto@nasa.gov

News release: 2012-023 Jan. 25, 2012

NASA's NuSTAR Ships to Vandenberg for March 14 Launch

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-023&cid=release_2012-023

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, shipped to
Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., on Tuesday, to be mated to its Pegasus launch vehicle. The
observatory will detect X-rays from objects ranging from our sun to giant black holes billions of
light-years away. It is scheduled to launch March 14 from an aircraft operating out of Kwajalein
Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

"The NuSTAR mission is unique because it will be the first NASA mission to focus X-rays in
the high-energy range, creating the most detailed images ever taken in this slice of the
electromagnetic spectrum," said Fiona Harrison, the mission's principal investigator at the
California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.

The observatory shipped from Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Va., where the spacecraft
and science instrument were integrated. It is scheduled to arrive at Vandenberg on Jan. 27, where
it will be mated to the Pegasus, also built by Orbital, on Feb. 17.

The mission will be launched from the L-1011 "Stargazer" aircraft, which will take off near the
equator from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific. NuSTAR and its Pegasus will fly from Vandenberg
to Kwajalein attached to the underside of the L-1011, and are scheduled to arrive on March 7.

On launch day, after the airplane arrives at the planned drop site over the ocean, the Pegaus will
drop from the L-1011 and carry NuSTAR to an orbit around Earth.

"NuSTAR is an engineering achievement, incorporating state-of-the-art high-energy X-ray
mirrors and detectors that will enable years of astronomical discovery," said Yunjin Kim, the
mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

NuSTAR's advanced telescope consists of two sets of 133 concentric shells of mirrors, which
were shaped from flexible glass similar to that found in laptop screens. Because X-rays require
large focusing distances, or focal lengths, the telescope has a lengthy 33-foot (10-meter) mast,
which will unfold a week after launch.

These and other advances in technology will enable NuSTAR to explore the cosmic world of
high-energy X-rays with much improved sensitivity and resolution over previous missions.
During its two-year primary mission, NuSTAR will map the celestial sky in X-rays, surveying
black holes, mapping supernova remnants, and studying particle jets travelling away from black
holes near the speed of light.

NuSTAR also will probe the sun, looking for microflares theorized to be on the surface that
could explain how the sun's million-degree corona, or atmosphere, is heated. It will even test a
theory of dark matter, the mysterious substance making up about one-quarter of our universe, by
searching the sun for evidence of a hypothesized dark matter particle.

"NuSTAR will provide an unprecedented capability to discover and study some of the most
exotic objects in the universe, from the corpses of exploded stars in the Milky Way to
supermassive black holes residing in the hearts of distant galaxies," said Lou Kaluzienski,
NuSTAR program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

NuSTAR is a small-explorer mission managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation. Its instrument was built by a
consortium including Caltech, JPL, Columbia University, New York, N.Y., NASA's Goddard
Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., the Danish Technical University in Denmark, the
University of California, Berkeley, and ATK-Goleta. NuSTAR will be operated by U.C.
Berkeley, with the Italian Space Agency providing its equatorial ground station located at
Malindi, Kenya. NASA's Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech
for NASA.

For more information, visit http://www.nasa.gov/nustar and http://www.nustar.caltech.edu/ .

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Durable NASA Rover Beginning Ninth Year of Mars Work

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

Feature: 2012-022 Jan. 24, 2012

Durable NASA Rover Beginning Ninth Year of Mars Work

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-022&cid=release_2012-022

Eight years after landing on Mars for what was planned as a three-month mission, NASA's
enduring Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is working on what essentially became a new
mission five months ago.

Opportunity reached a multi-year driving destination, Endeavour Crater, in August 2011. At
Endeavour's rim, it has gained access to geological deposits from an earlier period of Martian
history than anything it examined during its first seven years. It also has begun an investigation
of the planet's deep interior that takes advantage of staying in one place for the Martian winter.

Opportunity landed in Eagle Crater on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004, Universal Time and EST (Jan.
24, PST), three weeks after its rover twin, Spirit, landed halfway around the planet. In backyard-
size Eagle Crater, Opportunity found evidence of an ancient wet environment. The mission met
all its goals within the originally planned span of three months. During most of the next four
years, it explored successively larger and deeper craters, adding evidence about wet and dry
periods from the same era as the Eagle Crater deposits.

In mid-2008, researchers drove Opportunity out of Victoria Crater, half a mile (800 meters) in
diameter, and set course for Endeavour Crater, 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter.

"Endeavour is a window further into Mars' past," said Mars Exploration Rover Program Manager
John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The trek took three years. In a push to finish it, Opportunity drove farther during its eighth year
on Mars -- 4.8 miles (7.7 kilometers) -- than in any prior year, bringing its total driving distance to
21.4 miles (34.4 kilometers).

The "Cape York" segment of Endeavour's rim, where Opportunity has been working since
August 2011, has already validated the choice of Endeavour as a long-term goal. "It's like
starting a new mission, and we hit pay dirt right out of the gate," Callas said.

The first outcrop that Opportunity examined on Cape York differs from any the rover had seen
previously. Its high zinc content suggests effects of water. Weeks later, at the edge of Cape
York, a bright mineral vein identified as hydrated calcium sulfate provided what the mission's
principal investigator, Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., calls "the clearest
evidence for liquid water on Mars that we have found in our eight years on the planet."

Mars years last nearly twice as long as Earth years. Entering its ninth Earth year on Mars,
Opportunity is also heading into its fifth Martian winter. Its solar panels have accumulated so
much dust since Martian winds last cleaned them -- more than in previous winters -- the rover
needs to stay on a sun-facing slope to have enough energy to keep active through the winter.

The rover team has not had to use this strategy with Opportunity in past winters, though it did so
with Spirit, farther from the equator, for the three Martian winters that Spirit survived. By the
beginning of the rovers' fourth Martian winter, drive motors in two of Spirit's six wheels had
ceased working, long past their design lifespan. The impaired mobility kept the rover from
maneuvering to an energy-favorable slope. Spirit stopped communicating in March 2010.

All six of Opportunity's wheels are still useful for driving, but the rover will stay on an outcrop
called "Greeley Haven" until mid-2012 to take advantage of the outcrop's favorable slope and
targets of scientific interest during the Martian winter. After the winter, or earlier if wind cleans
dust off the solar panels, researchers plan to drive Opportunity in search of clay minerals that a
Mars orbiter's observations indicate lie on Endeavour's rim.

"The top priority at Greeley Haven is the radio-science campaign to provide information about
Mars' interior," said JPL's Diana Blaney, deputy project scientist for the mission. This study uses
weeks of tracking radio signals from the stationary rover to measure wobble in the planet's
rotation. The amount of wobble is an indicator of whether the core of the planet is molten,
similar to the way spinning an egg can be used to determine whether it is raw or hard-boiled.

Other research at Greeley Haven includes long-term data gathering to investigate mineral
ingredients of the outcrop with spectrometers on Opportunity's arm, and repeated observations
to monitor wind-caused changes at various scales.

The Moessbauer spectrometer, which identifies iron-containing minerals, uses radiation from
cobalt-57 in the instrument to elicit a response from molecules in the rock. The half-life of cobalt-
57 is only about nine months, so this source has diminished greatly. A measurement that could
have been made in less than an hour during the rover's first year now requires weeks of holding
the spectrometer on the target.

Observations for the campaign to monitor wind-caused changes range in scale from dunes in
the distance to individual grains seen with the rover's microscopic imager. "Wind is the most
active process on Mars today," Blaney said. "It is harder to watch for changes when the rover is
driving every day. We are taking advantage of staying at one place for a while."

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. More information about Opportunity is online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/rovers and http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov . You can follow the project
on Twitter at http://twitter.com/MarsRovers and on Facebook at
http://www.facebook.com/marsrovers .

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Upcoming Workshops at NASA/JPL's Educator Resource Center

Upcoming Educator Workshops Jan. 24, 2012

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

These workshops are being offered on Saturdays at the NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center in Pomona, Calif. from 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., please call 909-397-4420 to reserve your spot. For more information and directions, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=115 . For a full list of professional development workshops from NASA/JPL Education, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=110 .

Periodic Table

Date: Saturday, March 17, 2012, 10 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Target audience:Formal and informal educators (all grades)

Location:NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center, Pomona, Calif.

Overview: Do you have trouble understanding the Periodic Table of Elements? This California standards-based workshop will teach you basic principles of what the table represents by using our solar system as an exciting basis for understanding. You will be able to use these activities as a terrific way for students to review for the fifth grade state science test. These activities are easily understood by most third grades. All educators are welcome.This workshop is being offered at the NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center located in Pomona, please call 909-397-4420 to reserve your spot.

For more information and directions, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=115

Climate

Date: Saturday, April 14, 2012, 10 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Target audience:Educators

Location:NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center, Pomona, Calif.

Overview: In this workshop teachers will get an overview of what we know about climate change and how we know it. Enjoy some simple chemistry, videos, games, and student inventions. This is a great, standards based, way to teach and inspire students to think about our impact on our environment.This workshop is being offered at the NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center located in Pomona, please call 909-397-4420 to reserve your spot.

For more information and directions, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=115

Reading, Writing and Rings

Date: Saturday, May 12, 2012, 10 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Target audience:1st through 8th grade educators (all educators are welcome)

Location:NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center, Pomona, Calif.

Overview: Cassini-Huygens Mission Writing, and Rings uses science notebooks throughout the lessons, student assessment, and a wealth of science and math integration with language arts to make this an exciting student journey! Recommended for educator grades first through eighth, all educators are welcome. This workshop is being offered at the NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center located in Pomona, please call 909-397-4420 to reserve your spot.

For more information and directions, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=115

Lunar and Meteorite Sample Certification Program

Date: Saturday, June 23, 2012, 10 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Target audience:Educators

Location:NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center, Pomona, Calif.

Overview: This workshop is recommended for all grades in a classroom setting. NASA makes actual lunar samples from the historic Apollo missions available to lend to teachers. You must attend this certification workshop to bring the excitement of real lunar rocks and regolith samples to your students. This workshop is being offered at the NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center located in Pomona, please call 909-397-4420 to reserve your spot.

For more information and directions, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=115

Deep Space Network, Physics of Sound

Date: Saturday, July 21, 2012, 10 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Target audience:2nd through 8th grade educators

Location:NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center, Pomona, Calif.

Overview: Have you ever wondered how NASA "talks" to our various missions? In this workshop teachers will learn about NASA's Deep Space Network of dishes here on Earth. Come enjoy "center-based" lessons that illustrate how sound moves through solids, liquids and gases. This workshop is being offered at the NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center located in Pomona, please call 909-397-4420 to reserve your spot.

For more information and directions, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=115
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Cassini Sees the Two Faces of Titan's Dunes

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

Jia-Rui Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jccook@jpl.nasa.gov

Markus Bauer 011-31-71-565-6799
European Space Agency, Noordwijk, the Netherlands
markus.bauer@esa.int

Feature: 2012-021 Jan. 23, 2012

Cassini Sees the Two Faces of Titan's Dunes

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-021&cid=release_2012-021

A new analysis of radar data from NASA's Cassini mission, in partnership with the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, has revealed regional variations among sand dunes on
Saturn's moon Titan. The result gives new clues about the moon's climatic and geological history.

Dune fields are the second most dominant landform on Titan, after the seemingly uniform plains, so
they offer a large-scale insight into the moon's peculiar environment. The dunes cover about 13
percent of the surface, stretching over an area of 4 million square miles (10 million square
kilometers). For Earthly comparison, that's about the surface area of the United States.

Though similar in shape to the linear dunes found on Earth in Namibia or the Arabian Peninsula,
Titan's dunes are gigantic by our standards. They are on average 0.6 to 1.2 miles (1 to 2 kilometers)
wide, hundreds of miles (kilometers) long and around 300 feet (100 meters) high. However, their
size and spacing vary across the surface, betraying the environment in which they have formed and
evolved.

Using radar data from the Cassini spacecraft, Alice Le Gall, a former postdoctoral fellow at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who is currently at the French research
laboratory LATMOS, Paris, and collaborators have discovered that the size of Titan's dunes is
controlled by at least two factors: altitude and latitude.

In terms of altitude, the more elevated dunes tend to be thinner and more widely separated. The
gaps between the dunes seem to appear to Cassini's radar, indicating a thinner covering of sand.
This suggests that the sand needed to build the dunes is mostly found in the lowlands of Titan.

Scientists think the sand on Titan is not made of silicates as on Earth, but of solid hydrocarbons,
precipitated out of the atmosphere. These have then aggregated into grains 0.04 inch in size by a
still unknown process.

In terms of latitude, the sand dunes on Titan are confined to its equatorial region, in a band between
30 degrees south latitude and 30 degrees north latitude. However, the dunes tend to be less
voluminous toward the north. Le Gall and colleagues think that this may be due to Saturn's
elliptical orbit.

Titan is in orbit around Saturn, and so the moon's seasons are controlled by Saturn's path around
the sun. Because Saturn takes about 30 years to complete an orbit, each season on Titan lasts for
about seven years. The slightly elliptical nature of Saturn's orbit means that the southern
hemisphere of Titan has shorter but more intense summers. So the southern regions are probably
drier, which implies they have less ground moisture. The drier the sand grains, the more easily they
can be transported by the winds to make dunes. "As one goes to the north, we believe the soil
moisture probably increases, making the sand particles less mobile and, as a consequence, the
development of dunes more difficult." says Le Gall.

Backing this hypothesis is the fact that Titan's lakes and seas are not distributed symmetrically by
latitude. These reserves of liquid ethane and methane are predominantly found in the northern
hemisphere, suggesting again that the soil is moister toward the north and so, again, the sand grains
are less easy to transport by the wind.

"Understanding how the dunes form as well as explaining their shape, size and distribution on
Titan's surface is of great importance to understanding Titan's climate and geology because the
dunes are a significant atmosphere-surface exchange interface", says Nicolas Altobelli, ESA's
Cassini-Huygens project scientist. "In particular, as their material is made out of frozen atmospheric
hydrocarbon, the dunes might provide us with important clues on the still puzzling methane/ethane
cycle on Titan, comparable in many aspects with the water cycle on Earth."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the 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, D.C. 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
U.S. and several European countries.

For more information about the Cassini mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .

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Upcoming Workshop at NASA/JPL's Educator Resource Center

Upcoming Educator Workshops Jan. 19, 2012

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

Toys In Space ll

Date: Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012, 10 a.m. - 12 p.m.

Target audience: K-12 educators

Location:NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center, Pomona, Calif.

Overview: View the educational video "Toys in Space II," which was taped during the flight of STS-54. The video shows astronauts on the space shuttle and students back on Earth co-investigating the behavior of toys in space. Video program segments show the toys' behavior in 1G (Earth's gravity) and then their behavior in the microgravity environment of space! This workshop is being offered at the NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center located in Pomona, please call 909-397-4420 to reserve your spot.

For more information and directions, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=115

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Montana Students Pick Winning Names for Moon Craft

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

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

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

Whitney Lawrence Mullen 858-638-1432
Sally Ride Science, San Diego
wmullen@sallyridescience.com

News release: 2012-015 Jan. 17, 2012

Montana Students Pick Winning Names for Moon Craft

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-015&cid=release_2012-015

PASADENA, Calif. -- Twin NASA spacecraft that achieved orbit around the moon New Year's Eve and
New Year's Day have new names, thanks to elementary students in Bozeman, Mont. Their winning
entry, "Ebb and Flow," was selected as part of a nationwide school contest that began in October 2011.

The names were submitted by fourth graders from the Emily Dickinson Elementary School. Nearly 900
classrooms with more than 11,000 students from 45 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia
participated in the contest. Previously named Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL-A
and -B, the washing machine-sized spacecraft begin science operations in March, after a launch in
September 2011.

"The 28 students of Nina DiMauro's class at the Emily Dickinson Elementary School have really hit the
nail on the head," said Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Cambridge, Mass. "We were really impressed that the students drew their inspiration by
researching GRAIL and its goal of measuring gravity. Ebb and Flow truly capture the spirit and
excitement of our mission."

Zuber and Sally Ride, America's first woman in space and CEO of Sally Ride Science in San Diego,
selected the names following the contest, which attracted 890 proposals via the Internet and mail. The
contest invited ideas from students ages 5 to 18 enrolled in U.S. schools. Although everything from
spelling and grammar to creativity was considered, Zuber and Ride primarily took into account the
quality of submitted essays.

"With submissions from all over the United States and even some from abroad, there were a lot of great
entries to review," Ride said. "This contest generated a great deal of excitement in classrooms across
America, and along with it an opportunity to use that excitement to teach science."

GRAIL is NASA's first planetary mission carrying instruments fully dedicated to education and public
outreach. Each spacecraft carries a small camera called GRAIL MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge
Acquired by Middle school students). Thousands of students in grades five through eight will select
target areas on the lunar surface and send requests for study to the GRAIL MoonKAM Mission
Operations Center in San Diego.

The winning prize for the Dickinson students is to choose the first camera images. Dickinson is one of
nearly 2,000 schools registered for the MoonKAM program, which is led by Ride and her team at Sally
Ride Science in collaboration with undergraduate students at the University of California in San Diego.

"These spacecraft represent not only great science, but great inspiration for our future," said Jim Green,
director of NASA's Planetary Science Division in Washington. "As they study our lunar neighbor, Ebb
and Flow will undergo nearly the same motion as the tides we feel here on Earth."

Launched in September 2011, Ebb and Flow will be placed in a near-polar, near-circular orbit with an
altitude of about 34 miles (55 kilometers). During their science mission, the duo will answer
longstanding questions about the moon and give scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other
rocky planets in the solar system formed.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the GRAIL mission for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The GRAIL mission is part of the Discovery Program
managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems
in Denver built the spacecraft. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for
NASA.

To read the winning submission visit: https://moonkam.ucsd.edu/about/spacecraft_names . Information
about MoonKAM is available online at: https://moonkam.ucsd.edu . For more information about
GRAIL visit: http://www.nasa.gov/grail or http://grail.nasa.gov .

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NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Three Smallest Exoplanets

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

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

Trent J. Perrotto 202-358-0321
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Trent.J.Perrotto@nasa.gov

Michele Johnson 650-604-6982
NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Michele.Johnson@nasa.gov

NEWS RELEASE: 2012-009 Jan. 11, 2012

NASA's Kepler Mission Finds Three Smallest Exoplanets

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-009&cid=release_2012-009

PASADENA, Calif. – Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler mission have discovered the
three smallest planets yet detected orbiting a star beyond our sun. The planets orbit a single star,
called KOI-961, and are 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth. The smallest is about the size
of Mars.

All three planets are thought to be rocky like Earth but orbit close to their star, making them too hot
to be in the habitable zone, which is the region where liquid water could exist. Of the more than 700
planets confirmed to orbit other stars, called exoplanets, only a handful are known to be rocky.

"Astronomers are just beginning to confirm the thousands of planet candidates uncovered by Kepler
so far," said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
"Finding one as small as Mars is amazing, and hints that there may be a bounty of rocky planets all
around us."

Kepler searches for planets by continuously monitoring more than 150,000 stars, looking for telltale
dips in their brightness caused by crossing, or transiting, planets. At least three transits are required to
verify a signal as a planet. Follow-up observations from ground-based telescopes also are needed to
confirm the discoveries.

The latest discovery comes from a team led by astronomers at the California Institute of Technology
in Pasadena. The team used data publicly released by the Kepler mission, along with follow-up
observations from the Palomar Observatory, near San Diego, and the W.M. Keck Observatory atop
Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Their measurements dramatically revised the sizes of the planets from what
was originally estimated, revealing their small nature.

The three planets are very close to their star, taking less than two days to orbit around it. The KOI-
961 star is a red dwarf with a diameter one-sixth that of our sun, making it just 70 percent bigger than
Jupiter.

"This is the tiniest solar system found so far," said John Johnson, the principal investigator of the
research from NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena. "It's actually more similar to Jupiter and its moons in scale than any other planetary
system. The discovery is further proof of the diversity of planetary systems in our galaxy."

Red dwarfs are the most common kind of star in our Milky Way galaxy. The discovery of three rocky
planets around one red dwarf suggests that the galaxy could be teeming with similar rocky planets.

"These types of systems could be ubiquitous in the universe," said Phil Muirhead, lead author of the
new study from Caltech. "This is a really exciting time for planet hunters."

The discovery follows a string of recent milestones for the Kepler mission. In December 2011,
scientists announced the mission's first confirmed planet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star: a
planet 2.4 times the size of Earth called Kepler-22b. Later in the month, the team announced the
discovery of the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system, called
Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f.

For the latest discovery, the team obtained the sizes of the three planets (called KOI-961.01, KOI-
961.02 and KOI-961.03) with the help of a well-studied twin star to KOI-961, Barnard's Star. By
better understanding the KOI-961 star, they could then determine how big the planets must be to have
caused the observed dips in starlight. In addition to the Kepler observations and ground-based
telescope measurements, the team used modeling techniques to confirm the planet discoveries.

Prior to these confirmed planets, only six other planets had been confirmed using the Kepler public
data.

NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., manages Kepler's ground system
development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif., managed the Kepler mission's development.

For information about the Kepler mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/kepler .

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

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NASA Teacher Workshop: Flight

Upcoming Educator Workshops Jan. 11, 2012

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

NASA Teacher Workshop: Flight

Date: Saturday, Jan. 14, 2012, 10 a.m. - 12 p.m.

Target audience: Teachers, grades K - 12 and pre-service teachers

Location: Columbia Memorial Space Center, 12400 Columbia Way, Downey, Calif.

Overview: Learn about the four forces of flight, math and the physics of gliders, helicopters, kites and rockets! Learn about the basic principles of flight. Conduct scientific experiments and construct aircraft models (kite, helicopter and glider). Use questioning and redesign to make these activities educationally challenging! RSVP required, call the Columbia Memorial Space Center at 562-231-1200 to save your spot!

Also attend the Columbia Memorial Space Center's Teacher Open House on Jan. 14, 2012 from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. for a look at the Center and information on field trips. Admission is free for teachers! (Family and friends of a teacher are also welcome to attend but must pay the $5 admission fee.) Learn more at http://www.columbiaspacescience.org/events/?event_id=47 .

Please call the Columbia Memorial Space Center at 562-231-1200 to register. See a listing of upcoming workshops at http://www.columbiaspacescience.org/event-list/ .

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Stars Pop Onto the Scene in New WISE Image

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

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

Trent J. Perrotto 202-358-0321
NASA Headquarters, Washington
trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov

News release: 2012-008 Jan. 10, 2012

Stars Pop Onto the Scene in New WISE Image

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-008&cid=release_2012-008

PASADENA, Calif. -- A new, large mosaic from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer
(WISE) showcases a vast stretch of cosmic clouds bubbling with new star birth. The region -- a
1,000-square-degree chunk of our Milky Way galaxy -- is home to numerous star-forming
clouds, where massive stars have blown out bubbles in the gas and dust.

"Massive stars sweep up and destroy their natal clouds, but they continuously spark new stars to
form along the way," said WISE Mission Scientist Dave Leisawitz of NASA Goddard Space
Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Leisawitz is co-author of a new paper reporting the results in the
Astrophysical Journal. "Occasionally a new, massive star forms, perpetuating the sequence of
events and giving rise to the dazzling fireworks display seen in this WISE mosaic."

The new image is online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/pia15256.html .

The WISE space telescope mapped the entire sky two times in infrared light, completing its
survey in February of 2011. Astronomers studying how stars form took advantage of WISE's all-
encompassing view by studying several star-forming clouds, or nebulae, including 10 pictured in
this new view.

The observations provide new evidence for a process called triggered star formation, in which
the winds and sizzling radiation from massive stars compress gas and dust, inducing a second
generation of stars. The same winds and radiation carve out the cavities, or bubbles, seen
throughout the image.

Finding evidence for triggered star formation has proved more difficult than some might think.
Astronomers are not able to watch the stars grow and evolve like biologists watching zebras in
the wild. Instead, they piece together a history of star formation by looking at distinct stages in
the process. It's the equivalent of observing only baby, middle-aged and elderly zebras with
crude indicators of their ages. WISE is helping to fill in these gaps by providing more and more
"specimens" for study.

"Each region we looked at gave us a single snapshot of star formation in progress," said Xavier
Koenig, lead author of the new study at Goddard, who presented the results today in Austin,
Texas, at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. "But when we look at a
whole collection of regions, we can piece together the chain of events."

After looking at several of the star-forming nebulae, Koenig and his colleagues noticed a pattern
in the spatial arrangement of newborn stars. Some were found lining the blown-out cavities, a
phenomenon that had been seen before, but other new stars were seen sprinkled throughout the
cavity interiors. The results suggest that stars are born in a successive fashion, one after the
other, starting from a core cluster of massive stars and moving steadily outward. This lends
support to the triggered star formation theory, and offers new clues about the physics of the
process.

The astronomers also found evidence that the bubbles seen in the star-forming clouds can spawn
new bubbles. In this scenario, a massive star blasts away surrounding material, eventually
triggering the birth of another star massive enough to carve out its own bubble. A few examples
of what may be first- and second-generation bubbles can be seen in the new WISE image.

"I can almost hear the stars pop and crackle," said Leisawitz.

The complete WISE catalogue will be released to the public astronomy community in the spring
of 2012.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages, and operated WISE for NASA's
Science Mission Directorate. The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode after it scanned the
entire sky twice, completing its main objectives. Edward Wright is the principal investigator and
is at UCLA. The mission was selected competitively under NASA's Explorers Program managed
by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built
by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah. The spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace
& Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the
Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and
http://jpl.nasa.gov/wise .

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Herschel and Spitzer See Nearby Galaxies' Stardust

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

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

Trent J. Perrotto 202-358-0321
NASA Headquarters, Washington
trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov

Image advisory: 2012-006 Jan. 10, 2012

Herschel and Spitzer See Nearby Galaxies' Stardust

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-006&cid=release_2012-006

PASADENA, Calif. – The cold dust that builds blazing stars is revealed in new images that
combine observations from the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency-led
mission with important NASA contributions; and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The new
images map the dust in the galaxies known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two of the
closest neighbors to our own Milky Way galaxy.

The new images are available at the following links:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/herschel/multimedia/pia15254.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/herschel/multimedia/pia15255.html

The Large Magellanic Cloud looks like a fiery, circular explosion in the combined Herschel-
Spitzer infrared data. Ribbons of dust ripple through the galaxy, with significant fields of star
formation noticeable in the center, center-left and top right (the brightest center-left region is
called 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula, for its appearance in visible light). The Small
Magellanic Cloud has a much more irregular shape. A stream of dust extends to the left in this
image, known as the galaxy's "wing," and a bar of star formation appears on the right.

The colors in these images indicate temperatures in the dust that permeate the Magellanic
Clouds. Colder regions show where star formation is at its earliest stages or is shut off, while
warm expanses point to new stars heating dust surrounding them. The coolest areas and objects
appear in red, corresponding to infrared light taken up by Herschel's Spectral and Photometric
Imaging Receiver at 250 microns, or millionths of a meter. Herschel's Photodetector Array
Camera and Spectrometer fills out the mid-temperature bands, shown in green, at 100 and 160
microns. The warmest spots appear in blue, courtesy of 24- and 70-micron data from Spitzer.

"Studying these galaxies offers us the best opportunity to study star formation outside of the
Milky Way," said Margaret Meixner, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute,
Baltimore, Md., and principal investigator for the mapping project. "Star formation affects the
evolution of galaxies, so we hope understanding the story of these stars will answer questions
about galactic life cycles."

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are the two biggest satellite galaxies of our home
galaxy, the Milky Way, though they are still considered dwarf galaxies compared to the big
spiral of the Milky Way. Dwarf galaxies also contain fewer metals, or elements heavier than
hydrogen and helium. Such an environment is thought to slow the growth of stars. Star formation
in the universe peaked around 10 billion years ago, even though galaxies contained lesser
abundances of metallic dust. Previously, astronomers only had a general sense of the rate of star
formation in the Magellanic Clouds, but the new images enable them to study the process in
more detail.

The results were presented today at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society
in Austin, Texas.

Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by
consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel
Project Office is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed
mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA
Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States' astronomical community.

JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate,
Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech. Caltech
manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Herschel, visit http://www.herschel.caltech.edu,
http://www.nasa.gov/herschel and http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel/index.html.

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

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Before They Were Stars: New Image Shows Space Nursery

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

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

Trent J. Perrotto 202-358-0321
NASA Headquarters, Washington
trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov

Image advisory: 2012-007 Jan. 10, 2012

Before They Were Stars: New Image Shows Space Nursery

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-007&cid=release_2012-007

PASADENA, Calif. -- The stars we see today weren't always as serene as they appear, floating
alone in the dark of night. Most stars, likely including our own sun, grew up in cosmic turmoil, as
illustrated in this new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

The image shows one of the most active and turbulent regions of star birth in our Milky Way
galaxy, a region called Cygnus X. The choppy cloud of gas and dust lies 4,500 light-years away in
the constellation Cygnus or the "Swan." It is home to thousands of massive stars and many more
stars around the size of our sun or smaller. Spitzer has captured an infrared view of the entire
region, bubbling with star formation.

"Spitzer captured the range of activities happening in this violent cloud of stellar birth," said
Joseph Hora of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., who
presented the results today at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin,
Texas. "We see bubbles carved out by massive stars, pillars of new stars, dark filaments lined with
stellar embryos and more."

The new image is online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/pia15253.html .

Most stars are thought to form in huge star-forming regions like Cygnus X. Over time, the stars
dissipate and migrate away from each other. It's possible that our sun was once packed tightly
together with other, more massive stars in a similarly chaotic, though less extreme, region.

The turbulent star-forming clouds are marked with bubbles, or cavities, carved out by radiation
and winds from the most massive of stars. Those massive stars tear the cloud material to shreds,
terminating the formation of some stars while triggering the birth of others.

"One of the questions we want to answer is how such a violent process can lead to both the death
and birth of new stars," said Sean Carey, a team member from NASA's Spitzer Science Center at
the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. "We still don't know exactly how stars
form in such disruptive environments."

Infrared data from Spitzer is helping to answer questions like these by giving astronomers a
window into the dustier parts of the complex. Infrared light travels through dust, whereas visible
light is blocked. For example, embryonic stars blanketed by dust pop out in the Spitzer
observations. In some cases, the young stars are embedded in finger-shaped pillars of dust that line
the hollowed out cavities and point toward the central, massive stars. In other cases, these stars can
be seen lining very dark, snake-like filaments of thick dust.

Another question scientists hope to answer is how these pillars and filaments are related.

"We have evidence that the massive stars are triggering the birth of new ones in the dark
filaments, in addition to the pillars, but we still have more work to do," said Hora.

Infrared light in this image has been color-coded according to wavelength. Light of 3.6 microns is
blue, 4.5-micron light is blue-green, 8.0-micron light is green, and 24-micron light is red. These
data were taken before the Spitzer mission ran out of its coolant in 2009, and began its "warm"
mission.

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

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NASA Finds Russian Runoff Freshening Canadian Arctic

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

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

Sandra Hines 206-543-2580
University of Washington, Seattle
shines@uw.edu

News release: 2012-002 Jan. 4, 2012

NASA Finds Russian Runoff Freshening Canadian Arctic

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-002&cid=release_2012-002

PASADENA, Calif. – A new NASA and University of Washington study allays concerns that
melting Arctic sea ice could be increasing the amount of freshwater in the Arctic enough to have an
impact on the global "ocean conveyor belt" that redistributes heat around our planet.

Lead author and oceanographer Jamie Morison of the University of Washington's Applied Physics
Laboratory in Seattle, and his team, detected a previously unknown redistribution of freshwater
during the past decade from the Eurasian half of the Arctic Ocean to the Canadian half. Yet despite
the redistribution, they found no change in the net amount of freshwater in the Arctic that might
signal a change in the conveyor belt.

The team attributes the redistribution to an eastward shift in the path of Russian runoff through the
Arctic Ocean, which is tied to an increase in the strength of the Northern Hemisphere's west-to-east
atmospheric circulation, known as the Arctic Oscillation. The resulting counterclockwise winds
changed the direction of ocean circulation, diverting upper-ocean freshwater from Russian rivers
away from the Arctic's Eurasian Basin, between Russia and Greenland, to the Beaufort Sea in the
Canada Basin bordered by the United States and Canada. The stronger Arctic Oscillation is
associated with two decades of reduced atmospheric pressure over the Russian side of the Arctic.
Results of the NASA- and National Science Foundation-funded study are published Jan. 5 in the
journal Nature.

Between 2003 and 2008, the resulting redistribution of freshwater was equivalent to adding 10 feet (3
meters) of freshwater over the central Beaufort Sea.

The freshwater changes were seen between 2005 and 2008 by combining ocean bottom pressure, or
mass, data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites with ocean height data
from NASA's ICESat satellite. By calculating the difference between the two sets of measurements,
the team was able to map changes in freshwater content over the entire Arctic Ocean, including
regions where direct water sample measurements are not available.

"Knowing the pathways of freshwater is important to understanding global climate because
freshwater protects sea ice by helping create a strongly stratified cold layer between the ice and
warmer, saltier water below that comes into the Arctic from the Atlantic Ocean," said Morison. "The
reduction in freshwater entering the Eurasian Basin resulting from the Arctic Oscillation change
could contribute to sea ice declines in that part of the Arctic."

"Changes in the volume and extent of Arctic sea ice in recent years have focused attention on melting
ice," said co-author and senior research scientist Ron Kwok of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif., which manages Grace for NASA. "The Grace and ICESat data allow us to now
examine the impacts of widespread changes in ocean circulation."

Kwok said on whole, Arctic Ocean salinity is similar to what it was in the past, but the Eurasian
Basin has become more saline, and the Canada Basin has freshened. In the Beaufort Sea, the water is
the freshest it's been in 50 years of record keeping, with only a tiny fraction of that freshwater
originating from melting ice and the vast majority coming from Russian river water.

The Beaufort Sea stores more freshwater when an atmospheric pressure system called the Beaufort
High strengthens, driving a counterclockwise wind pattern. Consequently, it has been argued that the
primary cause of freshening is a strengthening of the Beaufort High, but salinity began to decline
early in the 1990s, when the Beaufort High relaxed and the counterclockwise Arctic Oscillation
pattern increased.

"We discovered a pathway that allows Russian river runoff to feed the Beaufort gyre," Kwok said.
"The Beaufort High is important, but so are the hemispheric-scale effects of the Arctic Oscillation."

"To better understand climate-related changes in sea ice and the Arctic overall, climate models need
to more accurately represent the Arctic Oscillation's low pressure and counterclockwise circulation
on the Russian side of the Arctic Ocean," Morison added.

For more on Grace and ICESat, visit: http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/ , http://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/
, and http://icesat.gsfc.nasa.gov/icesat/ .

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

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NASA's Twin Grail Spacecraft Reunite in Lunar Orbit

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

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle@jpl.nasa.gov

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

Caroline McCall 617-253-1682
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge
cmcall5@mit.edu

News release: 2012-001 Jan. 1, 2012

NASA's Twin Grail Spacecraft Reunite in Lunar Orbit

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-001&cid=release_2012-001

NASA'S TWIN GRAIL SPACECRAFT REUNITE IN LUNAR ORBIT

PASADENA, Calif. -- The second of NASA's two Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL)
spacecraft has successfully completed its planned main engine burn and is now in lunar orbit. Working
together, GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B will study the moon as never before.

"NASA greets the new year with a new mission of exploration," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden.
"The twin GRAIL spacecraft will vastly expand our knowledge of our moon and the evolution of our own
planet. We begin this year reminding people around the world that NASA does big, bold things in order to
reach for new heights and reveal the unknown."

GRAIL-B achieved lunar orbit at 2:43 p.m. PST (5:43 p.m. EST) today. GRAIL-A successfully completed
its burn yesterday at 2 p.m. PST (5 p.m. EST). The insertion maneuvers placed the spacecraft into a near-
polar, elliptical orbit with an orbital period of approximately 11.5 hours. Over the coming weeks, the GRAIL
team will execute a series of burns with each spacecraft to reduce their orbital period to just under two
hours. At the start of the science phase in March 2012, the two GRAILs will be in a near-polar, near-
circular orbit with an altitude of about 34 miles (55 kilometers).

During GRAIL's science mission, the two spacecraft will transmit radio signals precisely defining the distance
between them. As they fly over areas of greater and lesser gravity caused by visible features such as
mountains and craters, and masses hidden beneath the lunar surface, the distance between the two
spacecraft will change slightly.

Scientists will translate this information into a high-resolution map of the moon's gravitational field. The data
will allow scientists to understand what goes on below the lunar surface. This information will increase
knowledge of how Earth and its rocky neighbors in the inner solar system developed into the diverse worlds
we see today.

Each spacecraft carries a small camera called GRAIL MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle
school students) with the sole purpose of education and public outreach. The MoonKAM program is led by
Sally Ride, America's first woman in space, and her team at Sally Ride Science in collaboration with
undergraduate students at the University of California in San Diego.

GRAIL MoonKAM will engage middle schools across the country in the GRAIL mission and lunar
exploration. Thousands of fifth- to eighth-grade students will select target areas on the lunar surface and send
requests to the GRAIL MoonKAM Mission Operations Center in San Diego. Photos of the target areas will
be sent back by the GRAIL satellites for students to study.

A student contest that began in October 2011 also will choose new names for the spacecraft. The new
names are scheduled to be announced in January 2012. Ride and Maria Zuber, the mission's principal
investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, chaired the final round of judging.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the GRAIL mission for NASA's Science
Mission Directorate, Washington. The GRAIL mission is part of the Discovery Program managed at
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built
the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the Çalifornia Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For more information about GRAIL, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/grail

Information about MoonKAM is available online at:

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/grail/education.cfm

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