NASA Essay Contest Examines Missions to Icy Worlds

Essay Contest Jan. 31, 2013

NASA Essay Contest Examines Missions to Icy Worlds

NASA is inviting U.S. students in grades 5-12 to participate in an essay contest about proposed missions to explore Saturn's moon Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa.

To enter, students must describe in 500 words or fewer why one of the proposed missions to these icy worlds is the most interesting of the bunch. Winning essays will be posted on a NASA website, and winners and their classes will be invited to participate in a video conference or teleconference with NASA scientists.

The proposed missions include exploring Titan with an orbiter and balloon and investigating Europa with a lander. Both missions would have science instruments to study their subjects -- an exciting prospect for astrobiologists. Students are encouraged to include details of the science instruments they might include on these spacecraft to help with key investigations.

The deadline to enter the Titan & Europa essay contest is February 28, 2013. Questions can be sent to titaneuropa@jpl.nasa.gov.

To learn more about the contest, proposed missions and icy moons, visit http://icyworlds.jpl.nasa.gov/contest/. Videos about astrobiology, Titan and Europa can be found at http://icyworlds.jpl.nasa.gov/contest/videos/.

This contest is sponsored by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, with participation from the Titan Astrobiology team and the Astrobiology of Icy Worlds team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Good luck!
The Titan and Icy Worlds NASA Astrobiology Institute Education & Public Outreach Teams
titaneuropa@jpl.nasa.gov


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NASA's Cassini Watches Storm Choke on Its Own Tail

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

News feature: 2013-040 Jan. 31, 2013

NASA's Cassini Watches Storm Choke on Its Own Tail

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-040&cid=release_2013-040

Call it a Saturnian version of the Ouroboros, the mythical serpent that bites its own tail. In a new paper that provides the most detail yet about the life and death of a monstrous thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn, scientists from NASA's Cassini mission describe how the massive storm churned around the planet until it encountered its own tail and sputtered out. It is the first time scientists have observed a storm consume itself in this way anywhere in the solar system.

"This Saturn storm behaved like a terrestrial hurricane – but with a twist unique to Saturn," said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, who is a co-author on the new paper in the journal Icarus. "Even the giant storms at Jupiter don't consume themselves like this, which goes to show that nature can play many awe-inspiring variations on a theme and surprise us again and again."

Earth's hurricanes feed off the energy of warm water and leave a cold-water wake. This storm in Saturn's northern hemisphere also feasted off warm "air" in the gas giant's atmosphere. The storm, first detected on Dec. 5, 2010, and tracked by Cassini's radio and plasma wave subsystem and imaging cameras, erupted around 33 degrees north latitude. Shortly after the bright, turbulent head of the storm emerged and started moving west, it spawned a clockwise-spinning vortex that drifted much more slowly. Within months, the storm wrapped around the planet at that latitude, stretching about 190,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) in circumference, thundering and throwing lightning along the way.

Terrestrial storms have never run into their own wakes – they encounter topographic features like mountains first and expend themselves. But Saturn has no land to stop its hurricanes. The bright, turbulent storm head was able to chomp all the way around the planet. It was only when the head of the storm ran into the vortex in June 2011 that the massive, convective storm faded away. Why the encounter would shut down the storm is still a mystery.

By Aug. 28, after 267 days, the Saturn storm stopped thundering for good. While Cassini's infrared detectors continue to track some lingering effects in higher layers of Saturn's atmosphere, the troposphere -- which is the weather-producing layer, lower in the atmosphere – has been quiet at that latitude.

"This thunder-and-lightning storm on Saturn was a beast," said Kunio Sayanagi, the paper's lead author and a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Virginia. "The storm maintained its intensity for an unusually long time. The storm head itself thrashed for 201 days, and its updraft erupted with an intensity that would have sucked out the entire volume of Earth's atmosphere in 150 days. And it also created the largest vortex ever observed in the troposphere of Saturn, expanding up to 7,500 miles [12,000 kilometers] across."

The vortex grew to be as large as the giant storm known as Oval BA on Jupiter. But Oval BA and Jupiter's more famous storm – the Great Red Spot – are not thunder-and-lightning storms. Jupiter's storms also have a quiet center, unlike the violence at the center of Saturn's storms.

"Cassini's stay in the Saturn system has enabled us to marvel at the power of this storm," said Scott Edgington, Cassini's deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We had front-row seats to a wonderful adventure movie and got to watch the whole plot from start to finish. These kinds of data help scientists compare weather patterns around our solar system and learn what sustains and extinguishes them."

This storm was the longest running of the massive storms that appear to break out in Saturn's northern hemisphere once every Saturn year (30 Earth years). The longest storm of any size ever detected on Saturn actually unfolded over 334 days in 2009 in an area known as "Storm Alley" in the southern hemisphere, but it was about 100 times smaller in area than the latest northern storm.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the U.S., England, France and Germany. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

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

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Herschel Finds Star Past Its Prime Possibly Making Planets

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

J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241
NASA Headquarters, Washington
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

News release: 2013-038 Jan. 30, 2013

Herschel Finds Star Past Its Prime Possibly Making Planets

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-038&cid=release_2013-038

PASADENA, Calif. -- A star thought to have passed the age at which it can form planets may, in fact, be creating new worlds. The disk of material surrounding the surprising star called TW Hydrae may be massive enough to make even more planets than we have in our own solar system.

The findings were made using the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Telescope, a mission in which NASA is a participant.

At roughly 10 million years old and 176 light years away, TW Hydrae is relatively close to Earth by astronomical standards. Its planet-forming disk has been well studied. TW Hydrae is relatively young but, in theory, it is past the age at which giant plants already may have formed.

"We didn't expect to see so much gas around this star," said Edwin Bergin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Bergin led the new study appearing in the journal Nature. "Typically stars of this age have cleared out their surrounding material, but this star still has enough mass to make the equivalent of 50 Jupiters," Bergin said.

In addition to revealing the peculiar state of the star, the findings also demonstrate a new, more precise method for weighing planet-forming disks. Previous techniques for assessing the mass were indirect and uncertain. The new method can directly probe the gas that typically goes into making planets.

Planets are born out of material swirling around young stars, and the mass of this material is a key factor controlling their formation. Astronomers did not know before the new study whether the disk around TW Hydrae contained enough material to form new planets similar to our own.

"Before, we had to use a proxy to guess the gas quantity in the planet-forming disks," said Paul Goldsmith, the NASA project scientist for Herschel at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "This is another example of Herschel's versatility and sensitivity yielding important new results about star and planet formation."

Using Herschel, scientists were able to take a fresh look at the disk with the space telescope to analyze light coming from TW Hydrae and pick out the spectral signature of a gas called hydrogen deuteride. Simple hydrogen molecules are the main gas component of planets, but they emit light at wavelengths too short to be detected by Herschel. Gas molecules containing deuterium, a heavier version of hydrogen, emit light at longer, far-infrared wavelengths that Herschel is equipped to see. This enabled astronomers to measure the levels of hydrogen deuteride and obtain the weight of the disk with the highest precision yet.

"Knowing the mass of a planet-forming disk is crucial to understanding how and when planets take shape around other stars," said Glenn Wahlgren, Herschel program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

Whether TW Hydrae's large disk will lead to an exotic planetary system with larger and more numerous planets than ours remains to be seen, but the new information helps define the range of possible planet scenarios.

"The new results are another important step in understanding the diversity of planetary systems in our universe," said Bergin. "We are now observing systems with massive Jupiters, super-Earths, and many Neptune-like worlds. By weighing systems at their birth, we gain insight into how our own solar system formed with just one of many possible planetary configurations."

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

More information is online at http://www.herschel.caltech.edu , http://www.nasa.gov/herschel and http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel .

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

J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241
NASA Headquarters, Washington
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

2013-038

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NASA to Launch Ocean Wind Monitor to Space Station

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

Trent J. Perrotto 202-358-1100
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov

Josh Byerly 281-483-5111
NASA Johnson Space Center, Houston
Josh.byerly@nasa.gov

News release: 2013-037 Jan. 29, 2013

NASA to Launch Ocean Wind Monitor to Space Station

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-037&cid=release_2013-037

PASADENA, Calif. – In a clever reuse of hardware originally built to test parts of NASA's QuikScat
satellite, the agency will launch the ISS-RapidScat instrument to the International Space Station in
2014 to measure ocean surface wind speed and direction.

The ISS-RapidScat instrument will help improve weather forecasts, including hurricane monitoring,
and understanding of how ocean-atmosphere interactions influence Earth's climate.

"The ability for NASA to quickly reuse this hardware and launch it to the space station is a great
example of a low-cost approach that will have high benefits to science and life here on Earth," said
Mike Suffredini, NASA's International Space Station program manager.

ISS-RapidScat will help fill the data gap created when QuikScat, which was designed to last two
years but operated for 10, stopped collecting ocean wind data in late 2009. A scatterometer is a
microwave radar sensor used to measure the reflection or scattering effect produced while scanning
the surface of Earth from an aircraft or a satellite.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have studied next-generation
replacements for QuikScat, but a successor will not be available soon. To meet this challenge cost-
effectively, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the agency's station program
proposed adapting leftover QuikScat hardware in combination with new hardware for use on the
space station.

"ISS-RapidScat represents a low-cost approach to acquiring valuable wind vector data for improving
global monitoring of hurricanes and other high-intensity storms," said Howard Eisen, ISS-RapidScat
project manager at JPL. "By leveraging the capabilities of the International Space Station and
recycling leftover hardware, we will acquire good science data at a fraction of the investment needed
to launch a new satellite."

ISS-RapidScat will have measurement accuracy similar to QuikScat's and will survey all regions of
Earth accessible from the space station's orbit. The instrument will be launched to the space station
aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft. It will be installed on the end of the station's Columbus
laboratory as an autonomous payload requiring no interaction by station crew members. It is expected
to operate aboard the station for two years.

ISS-RapidScat will take advantage of the space station's unique characteristics to advance
understanding of Earth's winds. Current scatterometer orbits pass the same point on Earth at
approximately the same time every day. Since the space station's orbit intersects the orbits of each of
these satellites about once every hour, ISS-RapidScat can serve as a calibration standard and help
scientists stitch together the data from multiple sources into a long-term record.

ISS-RapidScat also will collect measurements of Earth's global wind field at all times of day for all
locations. Variations in winds caused by the sun can play a significant role in the formation of
tropical clouds and tropical systems that play a dominant role in Earth's water and energy cycles. ISS-
RapidScat observations will help scientists understand these phenomena better and improve weather
and climate models.

The ISS-RapidScat project is a joint partnership of JPL and NASA's International Space Station
Program Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, with support from the Earth Science
Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more on NASA's scatterometry missions, visit: http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm . For more
information about the International Space Station, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/station .

You can follow JPL News on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/nasajpl and on Twitter at:
http://www.twitter.com/nasajpl . The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL
for NASA.

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Thawing 'Dry Ice' Drives Groovy Action on Mars

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

Alan Fischer 520-382-0411
Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz.
fischer@psi.edu

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

News release: 2013-034 Jan. 24, 2013

Thawing 'Dry Ice' Drives Groovy Action on Mars

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-034&cid=release_2013-034

PASADENA, Calif. -- Researchers using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter see seasonal changes on far-northern Martian sand dunes caused by warming of a winter blanket of frozen carbon dioxide.

Earth has no naturally frozen carbon dioxide, though pieces of manufactured carbon-dioxide ice, called "dry ice," sublime directly from solid to gas on Earth, just as the vast blankets of dry ice do on Mars. A driving factor in the springtime changes where seasonal coverings of dry ice form on Mars is that thawing occurs at the underside of the ice sheet, where it is in contact with dark ground being warmed by early-spring sunshine through translucent ice. The trapped gas builds up pressure and breaks out in various ways.

Transient grooves form on dunes when gas trapped under the ice blanket finds an escape point and whooshes out, carrying out sand with it. The expelled sand forms dark fans or streaks on top of the ice layer at first, but this evidence disappears with the seasonal ice, and summer winds erase most of the grooves in the dunes before the next winter. The grooves are smaller features than the gullies that earlier research linked to carbon-dioxide sublimation on steeper dune slopes.

Similar activity has been documented and explained previously where seasonal sheets of frozen carbon dioxide form and thaw near Mars' south pole. Details of the different northern seasonal changes are newly reported in a set of three papers for the journal Icarus. A video showing some of the changes is online at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.php?id=1184 .

The findings reinforce growing appreciation that Mars today, however different from its former self, is still a dynamic world, and however similar to Earth in some respects, displays some quite unearthly processes.

"It's an amazingly dynamic process," said Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute, Tucson. She is lead author of the first of the three new reports. "We had this old paradigm that all the action on Mars was billions of years ago. Thanks to the ability to monitor changes with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of the new paradigms is that Mars has many active processes today."

With three Martian years (six Earth years) of data in hand from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera, the researchers report on the sequence and variety of seasonal changes. The spring changes include outbursts of gas carrying sand, polygonal cracking of the winter ice blanketing the dunes, sandfalls down the faces of the dunes, and dark fans of sand propelled out onto the ice.

"It is a challenge to catch when and how those changes happen, they are so fast," said Ganna Portyankina of the University of Bern in Switzerland, lead author of the second report. "That's why only now we start to see the bigger picture that both hemispheres actually tell us similar stories."

The process of outrushing gas that carves grooves into the northern dunes resembles the process creating spider-shaped features in far southern Mars, as seen in an image at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA12249, but the spiders have not been seen in the north. The seasonal dry-ice sheets overlie different types of terrain in the two hemispheres. In the south, diverse terrains include the flat, erodible ground where the spiders form, but in the north, a broad band of sand dunes encircles the permanent north polar ice cap.

Another difference is in brightening on parts of the ice-covered dunes. This brightening in the north results from the presence of water-ice frost, while in the south, similar brightening is caused by fresh carbon dioxide. The third paper of the Icarus set, by Antoine Pommerol of the University of Bern and co-authors, reports distribution of the water frost using the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM). The light water frost is blown around by spring winds.

The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates the HiRISE camera, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., provided and operates CRISM. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the orbiter. For more about the mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mro .

A slide show of Martian icy scenes is online at: http://1.usa.gov/ZoAO8I .

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NASA Officially Joins ESA's 'Dark Universe' Mission

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
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Whitney Clavin 818-354-4673
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241
NASA Headquarters, Washington
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

News release: 2013-033 Jan. 24, 2013

NASA Officially Joins ESA's 'Dark Universe' Mission

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-033&cid=release_2013-033

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA has joined the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Euclid mission, a space telescope designed to investigate the cosmological mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

Euclid will launch in 2020 and spend six years mapping the locations and measuring the shapes of as many as 2 billion galaxies spread over more than one-third of the sky. It will study the evolution of our universe, and the dark matter and dark energy that influence its evolution in ways that still are poorly understood.

The telescope will launch to an orbit around the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2. The Lagrange point is a location where the gravitational pull of two large masses, the sun and Earth in this case, precisely equals the force required for a small object, such as the Euclid spacecraft, to maintain a relatively stationary position behind Earth as seen from the sun.

"NASA is very proud to contribute to ESA's mission to understand one of the greatest science mysteries of our time," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington.

NASA and ESA recently signed an agreement outlining NASA's role in the project. NASA will contribute 16 state-of-the-art infrared detectors and four spare detectors for one of two science instruments planned for Euclid.

"ESA's Euclid mission is designed to probe one of the most fundamental questions in modern cosmology, and we welcome NASA's contribution to this important endeavor, the most recent in a long history of cooperation in space science between our two agencies," said Alvaro Giménez, ESA's Director of Science and Robotic Exploration.

In addition, NASA has nominated three U.S. science teams totaling 40 new members for the Euclid Consortium. This is in addition to 14 U.S. scientists already supporting the mission. The Euclid Consortium is an international body of 1,000 members who will oversee development of the instruments, manage science operations and analyze data.

Euclid will map the dark matter in the universe. Matter as we know it -- the atoms that make up the human body, for example -- is a fraction of the total matter in the universe. The rest, about 85 percent, is dark matter consisting of particles of an unknown type. Dark matter first was postulated in 1932, but still has not been detected directly. It is called dark matter because it does not interact with light. Dark matter interacts with ordinary matter through gravity and binds galaxies together like an invisible glue.

While dark matter pulls matter together, dark energy pushes the universe apart at ever-increasing speeds. In terms of the total mass-energy content of the universe, dark energy dominates. Even less is known about dark energy than dark matter.

Euclid will use two techniques to study the dark universe, both involving precise measurements of galaxies billions of light-years away. The observations will yield the best measurements yet of how the acceleration of the universe has changed over time, providing new clues about the evolution and fate of the cosmos.

Euclid is an ESA mission with science instruments provided by a consortia of European institutes and with important participation from NASA. NASA's Euclid Project Office is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. JPL will contribute the infrared flight detectors for the Euclid science instrument. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., will test the infrared flight detectors prior to delivery. Three U.S. science teams will contribute to science planning and data analysis. JPL is managed by for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For more information about Euclid, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/euclid, http://sci.esa.int/science-e/www/area/index.cfm?fareaid=102 and http://www.euclid-ec.org/ .

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Curiosity Rover on Display for Premiere of Mars Film

This is a feature of the NASA/JPL Education Office

Feature Jan. 22, 2013

Curiosity Rover on Display for Premiere of Mars Film

Hear the story of the first quests to explore the Red Planet and get up close and personal with two pieces of Mars exploration history on Jan. 23 as JPL premieres its latest documentary film, "The Changing Face of Mars," at Caltech's Beckman Auditorium.

Space enthusiasts will have a chance to see a full-scale replica of the Curiosity Mars rover as well as the "first image of Mars" assembled from Mariner 4 data, a historic image with unusual origins that's featured in the 90-minute documentary.

"With these two exhibits, the past will encounter the present and will serve as enriching reminders to demonstrate just how far we have come in the robotic exploration of the solar system," notes the film's producer/director/writer, Blaine Baggett, director of the office of communication and education at JPL.

From just a flickering red speck in the night sky to a world rife with scientific treasure, Mars has so spellbound our minds and imaginations that the quest to unmask it is nearly as storied as the planet itself. Since the Mariner 4 spacecraft first visited the Red Planet in 1965, our understanding of Mars has drastically changed.

"The Changing Face of Mars" is told through a mix of archival footage and interviews with the scientists and engineers who pioneered Mars exploration. One of those pioneers, John Casani, will provide introductory remarks before the free premiere on Wednesday.

We hope you and your students will join us in celebrating the achievements of those who have and will "dare mighty things" in the ongoing quest to explore one of our most fascinating planetary neighbors.

To learn more about the film and attend the Jan. 23 premiere, which is open to the public, visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/faceofmars/.

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Martian Crater May Once Have Held Groundwater-Fed Lake

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

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

Alan Fischer 520-382-0411
Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz.
fischer@psi.edu

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

News release: 2013-028 Jan. 20, 2013

Martian Crater May Once Have Held Groundwater-Fed Lake

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-028&cid=release_2013-028

PASADENA, Calif. -- A NASA spacecraft is providing new evidence of a wet underground
environment on Mars that adds to an increasingly complex picture of the Red Planet's early
evolution.

The new information comes from researchers analyzing spectrometer data from NASA's Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter, which looked down on the floor of McLaughlin Crater. The Martian
crater is 57 miles (92 kilometers) in diameter and 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers) deep. McLaughlin's
depth apparently once allowed underground water, which otherwise would have stayed hidden,
to flow into the crater's interior.

Layered, flat rocks at the bottom of the crater contain carbonate and clay minerals that form in
the presence of water. McLaughlin lacks large inflow channels, and small channels originating
within the crater wall end near a level that could have marked the surface of a lake.

Together, these new observations suggest the formation of the carbonates and clay in a
groundwater-fed lake within the closed basin of the crater. Some researchers propose the crater
interior catching the water and the underground zone contributing the water could have been wet
environments and potential habitats. The findings are published in Sunday's online edition of
Nature Geoscience.

"Taken together, the observations in McLaughlin Crater provide the best evidence for carbonate
forming within a lake environment instead of being washed into a crater from outside," said
Joseph Michalski, lead author of the paper, which has five co-authors. Michalski also is affiliated
with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., and London's Natural History Museum.

Michalski and his co-authors used the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars
(CRISM) on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to check for minerals such as carbonates,
which are best preserved under non-acidic conditions.

"The MRO team has made a concerted effort to get highly processed data products out to
members of the science community like Dr. Michalski for analysis," said CRISM Principal
Investigator Scott Murchie of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in
Laurel, Md. "New results like this show why that effort is so important."

Launched in 2005, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and its six instruments have provided more
high-resolution data about the Red Planet than all other Mars orbiters combined. Data are made
available for scientists worldwide to research, analyze and report their findings.

"A number of studies using CRISM data have shown rocks exhumed from the subsurface by
meteor impact were altered early in Martian history, most likely by hydrothermal fluids,"
Michalski said. "These fluids trapped in the subsurface could have periodically breached the
surface in deep basins such as McLaughlin Crater, possibly carrying clues to subsurface
habitability."

McLaughlin Crater sits at the low end of a regional slope several hundreds of miles, or
kilometers, long on the western side of the Arabia Terra region of Mars. As on Earth,
groundwater-fed lakes are expected to occur at low regional elevations. Therefore, this site
would be a good candidate for such a process.

"This new report and others are continuing to reveal a more complex Mars than previously
appreciated, with at least some areas more likely to reveal signs of ancient life than others," said
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Rich Zurek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif.

The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., provided and
operates CRISM. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the orbiter.

To see an image of the carbonate-bearing layers in McLaughlin Crater, visit:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16710 .

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

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NASA Celebrates Anniversary of First NASA Tweetup

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
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Veronica McGregor 818-354-9452
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
veronica.c.mcgregor@jpl.nasa.gov

John Yembrick / Jason Townsend 202-358-1584 / 202-358-0359
NASA Headquarters, Washington
john.yembrick@nasa.gov / jason.c.townsend@nasa.gov

News feature: 2013-027 Jan. 18, 2013

NASA Celebrates Anniversary of First NASA Tweetup

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-027&cid=release_2013-027

This month marks the fourth anniversary of the first NASA Tweetup, held at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 21, 2009. NASA Tweetups, now known as NASA Socials, have brought thousands of people who engage with the agency via social media together for unique in-person experiences of exploration and discovery.

The first Tweetup brought 130 individuals to JPL to meet and speak directly with mission scientists and engineers. It included a behind-the-scenes tour of JPL, with a stop at the Spacecraft Assembly Facility where the Curiosity Mars rover was then under construction, and the mission control area of NASA's Deep Space Network. The event was streamed live for those who wanted to attend virtually via the Internet.

"Our first Tweetup allowed space enthusiasts and the simply curious from around the country to meet with our mission personnel. Connections were formed that continue today, bringing together people with a passion for space from all walks of life," said Veronica McGregor, social media manager at JPL. "We knew immediately that we wanted to do more of these events."

Since 2009, NASA has hosted more than 50 Tweetups at 15 locations. Attendees have had the opportunity to witness shuttle launches, and spacecraft launches to the moon, Jupiter and Mars; fly an F/A-18 flight simulator; and rub elbows with astronauts. Participants chosen at random from online submissions go behind the scenes at NASA facilities, take photos, ask questions and share the experience with their social media followers.

In 2012, NASA expanded the Tweetup program to include not only Twitter users, but Facebook, Google+ and other social networks, reflecting the agency's broadening use of social media platforms to engage new audiences. As part of this effort, the "NASA Tweetup" is now known as "NASA Social."

It's amazing how far we've come since the first NASA Tweetup," said John Yembrick, NASA's social media lead at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "Social media allows us to now connect directly with the public, who are now able to communicate directly with their space program."

NASA social media followers at seven field centers around the nation came together virtually for the first multi-center NASA Social on Aug. 3, 2012. This event, originating from JPL, previewed the landing of the Mars Curiosity rover. Participants had the opportunity to ask questions of the JPL science and engineering teams, as well as tour their respective host NASA center.

To find out about and register for an opportunity to participate in an upcoming NASA Social, visit http://www.nasa.gov/social .

For information about connecting and collaborating with NASA, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/connect .

For a full list of previous NASA Socials, visit the Wikipedia entry curated by former attendees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Social .


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Study Finds Severe Climate Jeopardizing Amazon Forest

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

News Release: 2013-025 Jan. 17, 2013

Study Finds Severe Climate Jeopardizing Amazon Forest

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-025&cid=release_2013-025

PASADENA, Calif. – An area of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of California continues to suffer from the effects of a megadrought that began in 2005, finds a new NASA-led study. These results, together with observed recurrences of droughts every few years and associated damage to the forests in southern and western Amazonia in the past decade, suggest these rainforests may be showing the first signs of potential large-scale degradation due to climate change.

An international research team led by Sassan Saatchi of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., analyzed more than a decade of satellite microwave radar data collected between 2000 and 2009 over Amazonia. The observations included measurements of rainfall from NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and measurements of the moisture content and structure of the forest canopy (top layer) from the Seawinds scatterometer on NASA's QuikScat spacecraft.

The scientists found that during the summer of 2005, more than 270,000 square miles (700,000 square kilometers, or 70 million hectares) of pristine, old-growth forest in southwestern Amazonia experienced an extensive, severe drought. This megadrought caused widespread changes to the forest canopy that were detectable by satellite. The changes suggest dieback of branches and tree falls, especially among the older, larger, more vulnerable canopy trees that blanket the forest.

While rainfall levels gradually recovered in subsequent years, the damage to the forest canopy persisted all the way to the next major drought, which began in 2010. About half the forest affected by the 2005 drought – an area the size of California – did not recover by the time QuikScat stopped gathering global data in November 2009 and before the start of a more extensive drought in 2010.

"The biggest surprise for us was that the effects appeared to persist for years after the 2005 drought," said study co-author Yadvinder Malhi of the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. "We had expected the forest canopy to bounce back after a year with a new flush of leaf growth, but the damage appeared to persist right up to the subsequent drought in 2010."

Recent Amazonian droughts have drawn attention to the vulnerability of tropical forests to climate change. Satellite and ground data have shown an increase in wildfires during drought years and tree die-offs following severe droughts. Until now, there had been no satellite-based assessment of the multi-year impacts of these droughts across all of Amazonia. Large-scale droughts can lead to sustained releases of carbon dioxide from decaying wood, affecting ecosystems and Earth's carbon cycle.

The researchers attribute the 2005 Amazonian drought to the long-term warming of tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures. "In effect, the same climate phenomenon that helped form hurricanes Katrina and Rita along U.S. southern coasts in 2005 also likely caused the severe drought in southwest Amazonia," Saatchi said. "An extreme climate event caused the drought, which subsequently damaged the Amazonian trees."

Saatchi said such megadroughts can have long-lasting effects on rainforest ecosystems. "Our results suggest that if droughts continue at five- to 10-year intervals or increase in frequency due to climate change, large areas of the Amazon forest are likely to be exposed to persistent effects of droughts and corresponding slow forest recovery," he said. "This may alter the structure and function of Amazonian rainforest ecosystems."

The team found that the area affected by the 2005 drought was much larger than scientists had previously predicted. About 30 percent (656,370 square miles, or 1.7 million square kilometers) of the Amazon basin's total current forest area was affected, with more than five percent of the forest experiencing severe drought conditions. The 2010 drought affected nearly half of the entire Amazon forest, with nearly a fifth of it experiencing severe drought. More than 231,660 square miles (600,000 square kilometers) of the area affected by the 2005 drought were also affected by the 2010 drought. This "double whammy" by successive droughts suggests a potentially long-lasting and widespread effect on forests in southern and western Amazonia.

The drought rate in Amazonia during the past decade is unprecedented over the past century. In addition to the two major droughts in 2005 and 2010, the area has experienced several localized mini-droughts in recent years. Observations from ground stations show that rainfall over the southern Amazon rainforest declined by almost 3.2 percent per year in the period from 1970 to 1998. Climate analyses for the period from 1995 to 2005 show a steady decline in water availability for plants in the region. Together, these data suggest a decade of moderate water stress led up to the 2005 drought, helping trigger the large-scale forest damage seen following the 2005 drought.

Saatchi said the new study sheds new light on a major controversy that existed about how the Amazon forest responded following the 2005 megadrought. Previous studies using conventional optical satellite data produced contradictory results, likely due to the difficulty of correcting the optical data for interference by clouds and other atmospheric conditions.

In contrast, QuikScat's scatterometer radar was able to see through the clouds and penetrate into the top few meters of vegetation, providing daily measurements of the forest canopy structure and estimates of how much water the forest contains. Areas of drought-damaged forest produced a lower radar signal than the signals collected over healthy forest areas, indicating either that the forest canopy is drier or it is less "rough" due to damage to or the death of canopy trees.

Results of the study were published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Other participating institutions included UCLA; University of Oxford, United Kingdom; University of Exeter, Devon, United Kingdom; National Institute for Space Research, Sao Jose dos Campos, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Boston University, Mass.; and NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

For more on NASA's scatterometry missions, visit: http://winds.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm . You can follow JPL News on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/nasajpl and on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/nasajpl . The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.
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Titan Gets a Dune 'Makeover'

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
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CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
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Jia-Rui Cook 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jccook@jpl.nasa.gov

Bill Steigerwald 301-286-5017
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
william.a.steigerwald@nasa.gov

News feature: 2013-024 Jan. 17, 2013

Titan Gets a Dune 'Makeover'

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-024&cid=release_2013-024

Titan's siblings must be jealous. While most of Saturn's moons display their ancient faces pockmarked by thousands of craters, Titan – Saturn's largest moon – may look much younger than it really is because its craters are getting erased. Dunes of exotic, hydrocarbon sand are slowly but steadily filling in its craters, according to new research using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

"Most of the Saturnian satellites – Titan's siblings – have thousands and thousands of craters on their surface. So far on Titan, of the 50 percent of the surface that we've seen in high resolution, we've only found about 60 craters," said Catherine Neish, a Cassini radar team associate based at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "It's possible that there are many more craters on Titan, but they are not visible from space because they are so eroded. We typically estimate the age of a planet's surface by counting the number of craters on it (more craters means an older surface). But if processes like stream erosion or drifting sand dunes are filling them in, it's possible that the surface is much older that it appears.

"This research is the first quantitative estimate of how much the weather on Titan has modified its surface," adds Neish.

Titan is the only moon in the solar system with a thick atmosphere, and the only world besides Earth known to have lakes and seas on its surface. However, Titan has a frigid surface temperature of around minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit (94 kelvins). The rain that falls from Titan's skies is not water, but contains liquid methane and ethane, compounds that are gases at Earth's temperatures.

Neish and her team compared craters on Titan to craters on Jupiter's moon Ganymede. Ganymede is a giant moon with a water ice crust, similar to Titan, so craters on the two moons should have similar shapes. However, Ganymede has almost no atmosphere and thus no wind or rain to erode its surface.

"We found that craters on Titan were on average hundreds of yards [meters] shallower than similarly sized craters on Ganymede, suggesting that some process on Titan is filling its craters," says Neish, who is lead author of a paper about this research published online in the journal Icarus on Dec. 3, 2012.

The team used the average depth-versus-diameter trend for craters on Ganymede derived from stereo images from NASA's Galileo spacecraft. The same trend for craters on Titan was calculated using estimates of the crater depth from images made by Cassini's radar instrument.

Titan's atmosphere is mostly nitrogen with a trace of methane and other, more complex molecules made of hydrogen and carbon (hydrocarbons). The source of Titan's methane remains a mystery because methane in the atmosphere is broken down over relatively short time scales by sunlight. Fragments of methane molecules then recombine into more complex hydrocarbons in the upper atmosphere, forming a thick, orange smog that hides the surface from view. Some of the larger particles eventually rain out onto the surface, where they appear to get bound together to form the sand.

"Since the sand appears to be produced from the atmospheric methane, Titan must have had methane in its atmosphere for at least several hundred million years in order to fill craters to the levels we are seeing," says Neish. However, researchers estimate Titan's current supply of methane should be broken down by sunlight within tens of millions of years, so Titan either had a lot more methane in the past, or it is being replenished somehow.

Team members say it's possible that other processes could be filling the craters on Titan: erosion from the flow of liquid methane and ethane, for example. However, this type of weathering tends to fill a crater quickly at first, then more slowly as the crater rim gets worn down and less steep. If liquid erosion were primarily responsible for the infill, then the team would expect to see a lot of partially filled craters on Titan. "However, this is not the case," says Neish. "Instead we see craters at all stages; some just beginning to be filled in, some halfway, and some that are almost completely full. This suggests a process like windblown sand, which fills craters and other features at a steady rate."

Solid materials under stress flow very slowly over time. This is called viscous flow, and it is like what happens when someone takes a scoop out of a fresh tub of whipped cream -- the material slowly flows in to fill the hole and flatten the surface. Craters on icy satellites tend to get shallower over time as the ice flows viscously, so it's possible that some of the shallow craters on Titan are simply much older or experienced a higher heat flow than the similarly sized, fresh craters on Ganymede studied in this work.

However, Titan's crust is mostly water ice, and at the extremely low temperatures on Titan, ice shouldn't flow enough to account for such a large difference in depth compared to the Ganymede craters, according to the team. Also, just like stream erosion, deformation from viscous flow tends to happen rapidly at first, then more slowly as the material adjusts, so one would expect to see a lot of partially filled craters on Titan if its surface were deforming easily through viscous flow.

As Cassini flies past Titan on its multi-year tour of Saturn and its moons, its radar instrument gradually builds up a map of the surface. To date, the instrument has provided data in strips covering approximately 50 percent of Titan's surface. The craters measured by the team are all within about 30 degrees of the equator, a relatively dry region on Titan.

"However, the presence of liquids on the surface and in the near subsurface can also cause extensive modification to crater shape, as is observed on Earth," says Neish. "In the case of Titan, liquids consist of hydrocarbons, either as wet sediments (such as those observed at the Huygens landing site) or shallow marine environments (such as the lakes observed at the north and south poles). Craters formed in similar environments on Earth lack any significant surface topography, including the absence of a raised rim, as wet sediments slump into the crater. It is possible that the lack of topography associated with marine-target impacts may help to explain the relative scarcity of impact craters observed near the poles of Titan. If Titan's polar regions are saturated by liquid hydrocarbons, craters formed in those regions may lack any recognizable topographic expression."

The team thinks these considerations are good areas for more research. Based on the data so far, the difference in depth between craters on Titan and Ganymede is best explained by filling from windblown sand. However, erosion from liquids and viscous flow might contribute to the modification of Titan's craters.

NASA's Cassini mission, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the NASA Postdoctoral Program, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities, funded the research.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and ASI, 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. 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 US and several European countries.

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Bubbling up Organics in an Ocean Vent Simulator

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
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CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
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Jia-Rui Cook 818-354-0850
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jccook@jpl.nasa.gov

Karen Jenvey 650-604-4789
Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
karen.jenvey@nasa.gov

News release: 2013-023 Jan. 16, 2013

Bubbling up Organics in an Ocean Vent Simulator

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-023&cid=release_2013-023

This week, fizzy ocean water and the alkaline fluid that bubbles up from deep ocean vents are coursing through a structure at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. that is reminiscent of the pillared Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz. Scientists with the NASA Astrobiology Institute's JPL Icy Worlds team have built this series of glass tubes, thin barrels and valves with a laser and a detector system. The set-up mimics the conditions at hydrothermal vents at the bottom of Earth's ocean and also detects compounds coming out of it. They want to see if sending these two liquids through a sample of rock that simulates ancient volcanic ocean crust can lead to the formation of simple organic molecules such as ethane and methane, and amino acids, biologically important organic molecules. Scientists have long considered these compounds the precursor ingredients for what later led to chains of RNA, DNA and microbes.

A group of researchers at JPL, including senior geologist Mike Russell, Icy Worlds Principal Investigator Isik Kanik, postdoctoral fellow Laurie Barge, graduate student Lauren White and visiting scholar Takazo Shibuya, have been testing this "origin of life" theory in a refrigerator-sized apparatus at an annex to the Microdevices Laboratory at JPL. The latest segment of the experiment, which is running this week, will track the transformation of carbon molecules into the hydrocarbons methane and ethane. Scientists want to know where the carbon for the organic molecules originates.

"What we're trying to do is to climb down and create the conditions for the very first steps to the beginning of life as we know it," said Russell, who is leading the experiment. "That's the hard part."

The experiment is a key component of the Icy Worlds project, which is managed at JPL for the NASA Astrobiology Institute, based at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. The project aims to learn more about potentially habitable environments such as Mars, as well as liquid water environments on icy bodies like Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa. "If this ocean experiment is successful, scientists would have a better handle on where to look for the building blocks of life on Earth and beyond, and what signatures we should be looking for of life and of habitable environments in the solar system," said Kanik.

This experiment has its roots in a theory from Russell in 1989 that moderately warm, alkaline hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean could have hatched life about 4 billion years ago. The ancient ocean at these vents contains carbon dioxide, which provides the supply of carbon that could be reassembled into organic molecules. In 2000, such a vent was discovered at the bottom of the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The vent later showed signs of generating simple organic molecules.

The scientists have tagged isotopes of carbon dioxide and dissolved them in briny ocean-like water, creating a fizzy sample that would probably taste like salty soda. They made an alkaline solution by dissolving sodium hydroxide in water to simulate the fluids coming out of these kinds of hydrothermal vents. Scientists will alternately send the two solutions through a thin barrel of iron-magnesium-silica-volcanic-type rock that was synthesized by Shibuya, so it doesn't have any of the existing life that would be found in actual ocean crust samples. A tunable diode laser –- a twin of one presently operating on NASA's Mars Curiosity rover –- is used to search for methane, ethane and other volatiles in the solution that flows out.

The experiment runs as close a simulation to the conditions of these hydrothermal vents as is feasible in a lab setting – at 100 times the pressure of Earth's surface and at about 90 degrees Celsius (about 200 degrees Fahrenheit). Scientists are alternating the fluid flows to simulate the circulation at the ocean floor.

Founded in 1998, the NASA Astrobiology Institute is a partnership between NASA, 15 U.S. teams, and six international consortia. NAI's goals are to promote, conduct, and lead interdisciplinary astrobiology research, train a new generation of astrobiology researchers, and share the excitement of astrobiology with learners of all ages. The NAI is part of NASA's Astrobiology program, which supports research into the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere. For more information, visit http://astrobiology.nasa.gov/.

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

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NASA Ozone Study May Benefit Air Standards, Climate

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

News release: 2013-022 Jan. 16, 2013

NASA Ozone Study May Benefit Air Standards, Climate

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-022&cid=release_2013-022

PASADENA, Calif. – A new NASA-led study finds that when it comes to combating global warming caused by emissions of ozone-forming chemicals, location matters.

Ozone is both a major air pollutant with known adverse health effects and a greenhouse gas that traps heat from escaping Earth's atmosphere. Scientists and policy analysts are interested in learning how curbing the emissions of these chemicals can improve human health and also help mitigate climate change.

Research scientists Kevin Bowman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and Daven Henze of the University of Colorado, Boulder, set out to quantify, down to areas the size of large metropolitan regions, how the climate-altering impacts of these chemical emissions vary around the world. The chemicals, which are produced from sources such as planes, factories and automobiles, are converted to ozone in the presence of sunlight and subsequently transported by wind around our planet. Among these chemicals are nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and non-methane hydrocarbons.

By combining satellite observations of how much heat ozone absorbs in Earth's atmosphere with a model of how chemicals are transported in the atmosphere, the researchers discovered significant regional variability – in some places by more than a factor of 10 -- in how efficiently ozone trapped heat in Earth's atmosphere, depending upon where the ozone-forming chemical emissions were located. This variability was found within individual continents and even among different regions with similar emission levels within individual countries. High-latitude regions such as Europe had a smaller impact than lower-latitude regions like North America. Ozone was observed to be a more efficient greenhouse gas over hot regions like the tropics or relatively cloud-free regions like the Middle East. The satellite data were collected by the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer instrument on NASA's Aura spacecraft.

"When it comes to reducing ozone levels, emission reductions in one part of the world may drive greenhouse warming more than a similar level of emission reductions elsewhere," said Bowman, lead author of the study, published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "Where you clean up ozone precursor emissions makes a big difference. It's all about -- to use a real estate analogy -- location, location, location."

Variations in chemicals that lead to the production of ozone are driven by industry and human population. For example, the U.S. Northeast has much higher ozone precursor emission levels than, say, Wisconsin.

"We show that, for example, even though Chicago has a level of ozone precursor emissions three times larger than the levels in Atlanta, reducing emissions by 10 percent in the Atlanta region has the same impact on climate as reducing emissions by 10 percent in Chicago," Bowman added. "This is because Atlanta is a much more efficient place than Chicago for affecting climate through ozone."

The researchers found that the top 15 regional contributors to global ozone greenhouse gas levels were predominantly located in China and the United States, including the regions that encompass New Orleans, Atlanta and Houston.

Bowman and Henze found considerable variability in how different types of emissions contribute to ozone's greenhouse gas effect. For example, compared to all nitrogen dioxide emissions -- both human-produced and natural -- industrial and transportation sources make up a quarter of the total greenhouse gas effect, whereas airplanes make up only one percent. They also found that nitrogen dioxide contributes about two-thirds of the ozone greenhouse gas effect compared to carbon monoxide and non-methane hydrocarbons.

Bowman said the research suggests that solutions to improve air quality and combat climate change should be tailored for the regions in which they are to be executed.

"One question that's getting a lot of interest in policy initiatives such as the United Nations' Environment Programme Climate and Clean Air Coalition is controlling short-lived greenhouse gases like methane and ozone as part of a short-term strategy for mitigating climate change," Bowman said. "Our study could enable policy researchers to calculate the relative health and climate benefits of air pollution control and pinpoint where emission reductions will have the greatest impacts. This wasn't really possible to do at these scales before now. This is particularly important in developing countries like China, where severe air pollution problems are of greater concern to public officials than climate change mitigation in the short term."

"Our study is an important step forward in this field because we've built a special model capable of looking at the effects of location at a very high resolution," said Henze. "The model simulations are based upon actual observations of ozone warming effects measured by NASA's Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer satellite instrument. This is the first time we've been able to separate observed heat trapping due to ozone into its natural versus human sources, and even into specific types of human sources, such as fossil fuels versus biofuels. This information can be used to mitigate climate change while improving air quality."

For more information on TES, visit: http://tes.jpl.nasa.gov . You can follow JPL News on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/nasajpl and on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/nasajpl .

The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

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NASA Mars Rover Preparing to Drill Into First Martian Rock

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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

News release: 2013-20 Jan. 15, 2013

NASA Mars Rover Preparing to Drill Into First Martian Rock

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-020&cid=release_2013-020

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars rover Curiosity is driving toward a flat rock with pale veins that may hold clues to a wet history on the Red Planet. If the rock meets rover engineers' approval when Curiosity rolls up to it in coming days, it will become the first to be drilled for a sample during the Mars Science Laboratory mission.

The size of a car, Curiosity is inside Mars' Gale Crater investigating whether the planet ever offered an environment favorable for microbial life. Curiosity landed in the crater five months ago to begin its two-year prime mission.

"Drilling into a rock to collect a sample will be this mission's most challenging activity since the landing. It has never been done on Mars," said Mars Science Laboratory project manager Richard Cook of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The drill hardware interacts energetically with Martian material we don't control. We won't be surprised if some steps in the process don't go exactly as planned the first time through."

Curiosity first will gather powdered samples from inside the rock and use those to scrub the drill. Then the rover will drill and ingest more samples from this rock, which it will analyze for information about its mineral and chemical composition.

The chosen rock is in an area where Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam) and other cameras have revealed diverse unexpected features, including veins, nodules, cross-bedded layering, a lustrous pebble embedded in sandstone, and possibly some holes in the ground.

The rock chosen for drilling is called "John Klein" in tribute to former Mars Science Laboratory deputy project manager John W. Klein, who died in 2011.

"John's leadership skill played a crucial role in making Curiosity a reality," said Cook.

The target is on flat-lying bedrock within a shallow depression called "Yellowknife Bay." The terrain in this area differs from that of the landing site, a dry streambed about a third of a mile (about 500 meters) to the west. Curiosity's science team decided to look there for a first drilling target because orbital observations showed fractured ground that cools more slowly each night than nearby terrain types do.

"The orbital signal drew us here, but what we found when we arrived has been a great surprise," said Mars Science Laboratory project scientist John Grotzinger, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "This area had a different type of wet environment than the streambed where we landed, maybe a few different types of wet environments."

One line of evidence comes from inspection of light-toned veins with Curiosity's laser-pulsing Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument, which found elevated levels of calcium, sulfur and hydrogen.

"These veins are likely composed of hydrated calcium sulfate, such as bassinite or gypsum," said ChemCam team member Nicolas Mangold of the Laboratoire de Planétologie et Géodynamique de Nantes in France. "On Earth, forming veins like these requires water circulating in fractures."

Researchers have used the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) to examine sedimentary rocks in the area. Some are sandstone, with grains up to about peppercorn size. One grain has an interesting gleam and bud-like shape that have brought it Internet buzz as a "Martian flower." Other rocks nearby are siltstone, with grains finer than powdered sugar. These differ significantly from pebbly conglomerate rocks in the landing area.

"All of these are sedimentary rocks, telling us Mars had environments actively depositing material here," said MAHLI deputy principal investigator Aileen Yingst of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz. "The different grain sizes tell us about different transport conditions."

JPL, a division of Caltech, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

To see an image of the rock, visit: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16567 .

For more information about the mission, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl , http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl . Follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

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NASA Hosts Jan. 15 Telecon About Mars Rover Progress

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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

Media Advisory: 2013-018b                                                                          Jan. 14, 2013

NASA Hosts Jan. 15 Telecon About Mars Rover Progress

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-018&cid=release_2013-018

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA will host a media teleconference at 10 a.m. PST (1 p.m. EST) on Tuesday, Jan. 15, to provide an update about the Curiosity rover's mission to Mars' Gale Crater.

The Mars Science Laboratory Project and its Curiosity rover are five months into a two-year prime mission to investigate whether conditions may have been favorable for microbial life.

Audio and visuals of the event will be streamed live online at: http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio and
http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl .

Visuals will be available at the start of the event at: http://go.nasa.gov/curiositytelecon .

For more information about NASA's Curiosity mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mars and
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .

Follow the mission on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

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NASA's Galex Reveals the Largest-Known Spiral Galaxy

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

Lynn Chandler 301-286-2806
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
lynn.chandler-1@nasa.gov

J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241
Headquarters, Washington
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

News release: 2013-016 Jan. 10, 2013

NASA's Galex Reveals the Largest-Known Spiral Galaxy

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-016&cid=release_2013-016

PASADENA, Calif. -- The spectacular barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 has ranked among the biggest stellar systems for decades. Now a team of astronomers from the United States, Chile and Brazil has crowned it the largest known spiral, based on archival data from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission, which has since been loaned to the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena.

Measuring tip-to-tip across its two outsized spiral arms, NGC 6872 spans more than 522,000 light-years, making it more than five times the size of our Milky Way galaxy.

"Without GALEX's ability to detect the ultraviolet light of the youngest, hottest stars, we would never have recognized the full extent of this intriguing system," said lead scientist Rafael Eufrasio, a research assistant at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who is a doctoral student at Catholic University of America in Washington. He presented the findings Thursday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, Calif.

The galaxy's unusual size and appearance stem from its interaction with a much smaller disk galaxy named IC 4970, which has only about one-fifth the mass of NGC 6872. The odd couple is located 212 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Pavo.

Astronomers think large galaxies, including our own, grew through mergers and acquisitions -- assembling over billions of years by absorbing numerous smaller systems.

Intriguingly, the gravitational interaction of NGC 6872 and IC 4970 may have done the opposite, spawning what may develop into a new small galaxy.

"The northeastern arm of NGC 6872 is the most disturbed and is rippling with star formation, but at its far end, visible only in the ultraviolet, is an object that appears to be a tidal dwarf galaxy similar to those seen in other interacting systems," said team member Duilia de Mello, a professor of astronomy at Catholic University.

The tidal dwarf candidate is brighter in ultraviolet than other regions of the galaxy, a sign it bears a rich supply of hot young stars less than 200 million years old.

The researchers studied the galaxy across the spectrum using archival data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, the Two Micron All Sky Survey, and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, as well as GALEX.

By analyzing the distribution of energy by wavelength, the team uncovered a distinct pattern of stellar age along the galaxy's two prominent spiral arms. The youngest stars appear in the far end of the northwestern arm, within the tidal dwarf candidate, and stellar ages skew progressively older toward the galaxy's center.

The southwestern arm displays the same pattern, which is likely connected to waves of star formation triggered by the galactic encounter.

A 2007 study by Cathy Horellou at Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden and Baerbel Koribalski of the Australia National Telescope Facility developed computer simulations of the collision that reproduced the overall appearance of the system as we see it today. According to the closest match, IC 4970 made its closest approach about 130 million years ago and followed a path that took it nearly along the plane of the spiral's disk in the same direction it rotates. The current study is consistent with this picture.

As in all barred spirals, NGC 6872 contains a stellar bar component that transitions between the spiral arms and the galaxy's central regions. Measuring about 26,000 light-years in radius, or about twice the average length found in nearby barred spirals, it is a bar that befits a giant galaxy.

The team found no sign of recent star formation along the bar, which indicates it formed at least a few billion years ago. Its aged stars provide a fossil record of the galaxy's stellar population before the encounter with IC 4970 stirred things up.

"Understanding the structure and dynamics of nearby interacting systems like this one brings us a step closer to placing these events into their proper cosmological context, paving the way to decoding what we find in younger, more distant systems," said team member and Goddard astrophysicist Eli Dwek.

The study also included Fernanda Urrutia-Viscarra and Claudia Mendes de Oliveira at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil and Dimitri Gadotti at the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile.

The GALEX mission is led by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, which is responsible for science operations and data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also in Pasadena, manages the mission and built the science instrument. GALEX was developed under NASA's Explorers Program managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. In May 2012, NASA loaned GALEX to Caltech, which continues spacecraft operations and data management using private funds.

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

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JPL to Host High-Tech Small Business Conference

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
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CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
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Elena Mejia 818-393-5467
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Elena.mejia@jpl.nasa.gov

News release: 2013-014 January 9, 2013

JPL to Host High-Tech Small Business Conference

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-014&cid=release_2013-014

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will host the 25th annual High-Tech Conference for Small Business on Tuesday, March 5, and Wednesday, March 6, at the Westin Hotel located near Los Angeles International Airport.

The conference will provide an opportunity for small businesses to discuss contracting and subcontracting opportunities with major corporations, federal agencies, local government agencies and JPL's purchasing and technical communities.

Various "how-to" workshops will include information about conducting business with JPL and the federal government, certification programs offered by the federal government and JPL's future needs.

"This conference is a great platform for small businesses to become informed about potential opportunities through workshops and networking," said Edgar Murillo, High-Tech Conference coordinator and a small-business administrator at JPL.

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 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/2013HT/index.asp .

The cost is $150 per person. The Westin Los Angeles Airport Hotel is located at 5400 West Century Blvd., Los Angeles, Calif. 90045.

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

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NASA, ESA Telescopes Find Evidence for Asteroid Belt Around Vega

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
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J.D. Harrington 202-358-5241
NASA Headquarters, Washington
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News release: 2013-012 Jan. 8, 2013

NASA, ESA Telescopes Find Evidence for Asteroid Belt Around Vega

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-012&cid=release_2013-012

PASADENA, Calif. – Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a large asteroid belt around the star Vega, the second brightest star in northern night skies. The scientists used data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, in which NASA plays an important role.

The discovery of an asteroid belt-like band of debris around Vega makes the star similar to another observed star called Fomalhaut. The data are consistent with both stars having inner, warm belts and outer, cool belts separated by a gap. This architecture is similar to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our own solar system.

What is maintaining the gap between the warm and cool belts around Vega and Fomalhaut? The results strongly suggest the answer is multiple planets. Our solar system's asteroid belt, which lies between Mars and Jupiter, is maintained by the gravity of the terrestrial planets and the giant planets, and the outer Kuiper belt is sculpted by the giant planets.

"Our findings echo recent results showing multiple-planet systems are common beyond our sun," said Kate Su, an astronomer at the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Su presented the results Tuesday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, Calif., and is lead author of a paper on the findings accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

Vega and Fomalhaut are similar in other ways. Both are about twice the mass of our sun and burn a hotter, bluer color in visible light. Both stars are relatively nearby, at about 25 light-years away. The stars are thought to be around 400 million years old, but Vega could be closer to its 600 millionth birthday. Fomalhaut has a single candidate planet orbiting it, Fomalhaut b, which orbits at the inner edge of its cometary belt.

The Herschel and Spitzer telescopes detected infrared light emitted by warm and cold dust in discrete bands around Vega and Fomalhaut, discovering the new asteroid belt around Vega and confirming the existence of the other belts around both stars. Comets and the collisions of rocky chunks replenish the dust in these bands. The inner belts in these systems cannot be seen in visible light because the glare of their stars outshines them.

Both the inner and outer belts contain far more material than our own asteroid and Kuiper belts. The reason is twofold: the star systems are far younger than our own, which has had hundreds of millions more years to clean house, and the systems likely formed from an initially more massive cloud of gas and dust than our solar system.

The gap between the inner and outer debris belts for Vega and Fomalhaut also proportionally corresponds to the distance between our sun's asteroid and Kuiper belts. This distance works out to a ratio of about 1:10, with the outer belt 10 times farther from its host star than the inner belt. As for the large gap between the two belts, it is likely there are several undetected planets, Jupiter-size or smaller, creating a dust-free zone between the two belts. A good comparison star system is HR 8799, which has four known planets that sweep up the space between two similar disks of debris.

"Overall, the large gap between the warm and the cold belts is a signpost that points to multiple planets likely orbiting around Vega and Fomalhaut," said Su.

If unseen planets do, in fact, orbit Vega and Fomalhaut, these bodies will not likely stay hidden.

"Upcoming new facilities such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope should be able to find the planets," said paper co-author Karl Stapelfeldt, chief of the Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

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 at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about Spitzer, visit: http://spitzer.caltech.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer .

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 JPL, which 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 Caltech, supports the United States astronomical community. More information is online at: http://www.herschel.caltech.edu , http://www.nasa.gov/herschel , and http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Herschel/index.html .

You can follow JPL News on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/nasajpl and on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/nasajpl .

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