REMINDER: Upcoming Educator Workshop - The Challenge of Discovery

Educator Workshop March 28, 2013

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


Educator Workshop: The Challenge of Discovery

Date: Saturday, April 6, 2013

Target audience: K-12 educators

Location/Time:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.: 8:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m. PT
University of Arizona, Tucson, Ariz.: 8:30 - 2:30 p.m. MT
Johnson Space Center, Houston: 10:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. CT
Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md.: 11:30 a.m - 5:30 p.m ET

Overview: What does it take to make a NASA mission happen, and who are the people who drive these tremendous projects?

In the Discovery Program's third annual multi-site professional development workshop, we delve into the stories behind some amazing NASA missions, from conception to science results. Learn how scientists, engineers and mission operators collaborate to meet the challenges of complex missions to assure the science goals are met. Investigate what it takes to move a fantastic idea from dream to reality.

The Challenge of Discovery workshop will take place in four locations (listed above). All sites will offer special speakers, hands-on activities for K-12 and out-of-school-time educators, and resource packets.

The cost of the workshop is $25. Lunch and snacks will be provided.

Learn more and register by April 1 at http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/discovery/challenge_of_discovery.asp

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Saturn is Like an Antiques Shop, Cassini Suggests

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

News feature: 2013-117 March 27, 2013

Saturn is Like an Antiques Shop, Cassini Suggests

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-117&cid=release_2013-117

A new analysis of data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft suggests that Saturn's moons and rings are gently worn vintage goods from around the time of our solar system's birth.

Though they are tinted on the surface from recent "pollution," these bodies date back more than 4 billion years. They are from around the time that the planetary bodies in our neighborhood began to form out of the protoplanetary nebula, the cloud of material still orbiting the sun after its ignition as a star. The paper, led by Gianrico Filacchione, a Cassini participating scientist at Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics, Rome, has just been published online by the Astrophysical Journal.

"Studying the Saturnian system helps us understand the chemical and physical evolution of our entire solar system," said Filacchione. "We know now that understanding this evolution requires not just studying a single moon or ring, but piecing together the relationships intertwining these bodies."

Data from Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) have revealed how water ice and also colors -- which are the signs of non-water and organic materials --are distributed throughout the Saturnian system. The spectrometer's data in the visible part of the light spectrum show that coloring on the rings and moons generally is only skin-deep.

Using its infrared range, VIMS also detected abundant water ice – too much to have been deposited by comets or other recent means. So the authors deduce that the water ices must have formed around the time of the birth of the solar system, because Saturn orbits the sun beyond the so-called "snow line." Out beyond the snow line, in the outer solar system where Saturn resides, the environment is conducive to preserving water ice, like a deep freezer. Inside the solar system's "snow line," the environment is much closer to the sun's warm glow, and ices and other volatiles dissipate more easily.

The colored patina on the ring particles and moons roughly corresponds to their location in the Saturn system. For Saturn's inner ring particles and moons, water-ice spray from the geyser moon Enceladus has a whitewashing effect.

Farther out, the scientists found that the surfaces of Saturn's moons generally were redder the farther they orbited from Saturn. Phoebe, one of Saturn's outer moons and an object thought to originate in the far-off Kuiper Belt, seems to be shedding reddish dust that eventually rouges the surface of nearby moons, such as Hyperion and Iapetus.

A rain of meteoroids from outside the system appears to have turned some parts of the main ring system – notably the part of the main rings known as the B ring -- a subtle reddish hue. Scientists think the reddish color could be oxidized iron -- rust -- or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which could be progenitors of more complex organic molecules.

One of the big surprises from this research was the similar reddish coloring of the potato-shaped moon Prometheus and nearby ring particles. Other moons in the area were more whitish.

"The similar reddish tint suggests that Prometheus is constructed from material in Saturn's rings," said co-author Bonnie Buratti, a VIMS team member based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Scientists had been wondering whether ring particles could have stuck together to form moons -- since the dominant theory was that the rings basically came from satellites being broken up. The coloring gives us some solid proof that it can work the other way around, too."

"Observing the rings and moons with Cassini gives us an amazing bird's-eye view of the intricate processes at work in the Saturn system, and perhaps in the evolution of planetary systems as well," said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist, based at JPL. "What an object looks like and how it evolves depends a lot on location, location, location."

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team is based at the University of Arizona, Tucson.

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NASA Scientists Find Moon and Asteroids Share Cosmic History

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

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

News release: 2013-114 March 25, 2013

NASA Scientists Find Moon and Asteroids Share Cosmic History

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-114&cid=release_2013-114

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA and international researchers have discovered that Earth's moon has more in common than previously thought with large asteroids roaming our solar system.

Scientists from NASA's Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) in Moffett Field, Calif., discovered that the same population of high-speed projectiles that impacted our lunar neighbor four billion years ago, also hit the giant asteroid Vesta and perhaps other large asteroids.

The research unveils an unexpected link between Vesta and the moon, and provides new means for studying the early bombardment history of terrestrial planets. The findings are published in the March issue of Nature Geoscience.

"It's always intriguing when interdisciplinary research changes the way we understand the history of our solar system," said Yvonne Pendleton, NLSI director. "Although the moon is located far from Vesta, which is in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, they seem to share some of the same bombardment history."

The findings support the theory that the repositioning of gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn from their original orbits to their current location destabilized portions of the asteroid belt and triggered a solar system-wide bombardment of asteroids billions of years ago, called the lunar cataclysm.

The research provides new constraints on the start and duration of the lunar cataclysm, and demonstrates that the cataclysm was an event that affected not only the inner solar system planets, but the asteroid belt as well.

The moon rocks brought back by NASA Apollo astronauts have long been used to study the bombardment history of the moon. Now the ages derived from meteorite samples have been used to study the collisional history of main belt asteroids. In particular, howardite and eucrite meteorites, which are common species found on Earth, have been used to study asteroid Vesta, their parent body. With the aid of computer simulations, researchers determined that meteorites from Vesta recorded high-speed impacts which are now long gone.

Researchers have linked these two datasets and found that the same population of projectiles responsible for making craters and basins on the moon were also hitting Vesta at very high velocities, enough to leave behind a number of telltale, impact-related ages.

The team's interpretation of the howardites and eucrites was augmented by recent close-in observations of Vesta's surface by NASA's Dawn spacecraft. In addition, the team used the latest dynamical models of early main belt evolution to discover the likely source of these high velocity impactors. The team determined that the population of projectiles that hit Vesta had orbits that also enabled some objects to strike the moon at high speeds.

"It appears that the asteroidal meteorites show signs of the asteroid belt losing a lot of mass four billion years ago, with the escaped mass beating up on both the surviving main belt asteroids and the moon at high speeds" says lead author Simone Marchi, who has a joint appointment between two of NASA's Lunar Science Institutes, one at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and another at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston. "Our research not only supports the current theory, but it takes it to the next level of understanding."

The NLSI is headquartered at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

To learn more about NLSI, visit: http://lunarscience.nasa.gov .

For more information about the Dawn mission, visit: www.nasa.gov/dawn .

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JPL Scientists Reflect on World Water Day

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

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

News feature: 2013-113 March 22, 2013

JPL Scientists Reflect on World Water Day

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-113&cid=release_2013-113

"We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one."
-- Jacques Cousteau

Water. Beautiful. Ever-changing. Life-giving. It envelops us, creates us, nurtures us, defines us, and yet can destroy us in an instant. This chemical compound -- two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen -- that we take for granted as plentiful, is actually remarkably scarce in its freshwater form. Less than three percent of Earth's water is freshwater, and more than two-thirds of that is locked up in glaciers and icecaps and therefore unavailable for drinking or agriculture. Within our solar system, water is even more scarce. And while NASA continues its quest to "follow the water" on Mars, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Earth scientists and many of its Earth missions are busy studying our Water World and the complex interactions between Earth's water and its atmosphere, land and living organisms that make up our dynamic Earth system.

Each year on March 22, the member states of the United Nations observe World Water Day to focus attention on the importance of freshwater and to advocate for the sustainable management of Earth's precious freshwater resources. In December 2010, the United Nations General Assembly declared 2013 as the United Nations International Year of Water Cooperation. The objective of the year is to raise awareness of the potential for, and value of increased cooperation in relation to water.

We asked several JPL scientists to reflect on World Water Day and the importance of studying Earth's water.

"When it comes to humans and climate change, it is all about the water. It's too dry where you want it wet, too wet where you want it dry, salty where you want it fresh, liquid where you want it solid, and ultimately....you can't grow food without water."
-- Erika Podest, JPL research scientist

"We are now able to see from space all parts of the water cycle on land -- rain and snow, evapotranspiration, soil moisture and deep groundwater, and NASA has another satellite mission on its way to detect river runoff: Surface Water and Ocean Topography, or SWOT. We're combining all these 'eyes on Earth' to make better predictions of water resources, droughts and floods."
-- Josh Fisher, JPL research scientist

"Probing aquifers with NASA airborne radar can help scientists better understand Earth's fossil aquifer systems. The approximate number, occurrence and distribution of those systems remain largely unknown. Much of the evidence for climate change in Earth's deserts lies beneath the surface and is reflected in its groundwater. By mapping desert aquifers with this technology, we can detect layers deposited by ancient geological processes and trace back paleoclimatic conditions that existed thousands of years ago, when many of today's deserts were wet.

"Most recent observations, scientific interest and data analyses of global warming have concentrated on Earth's polar regions and forests, which provide direct measurable evidence of large-scale environmental changes. Arid and semi-arid environments, which represent a substantial portion of Earth's surface, have remained poorly studied. Yet water scarcity and salt content, changes in rainfall, flash floods, high rates of aquifer exploitation and growth of desert regions are all signs that suggest climate change and human activities are also affecting these arid and semi-arid zones."
-- Essam Heggy, JPL research scientist

"Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink."
-- "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

"Since 2002, NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites have been monitoring large-scale groundwater depletion all over the globe. In northwest India, the Middle East, and also close to home in California's Central Valley aquifer, a significant fraction of the water needed to farm comes from groundwater. With GRACE, we have a tool that allows us to very accurately detect where and how much water is pumped from deep below -- unfortunately, often at unsustainable rates. For example, during the 2006 to 2010 California drought, the equivalent volume of an entire Lake Mead was extracted from the Central Valley Aquifer!"
-- Felix Landerer, JPL research scientist

"In Colombia, the country where I was born, it rained constantly for more than a year. At the same time, the United States, where I now live, was experiencing extreme droughts. The movement of water is global, giving to some what it takes from others. As Earth's climate changes, changes in precipitation and water storage will change the way we live. We need to understand how, and how we can adapt."
-- Ernesto Rodriguez, QuikScat project scientist; ISS-RapidScat principal investigator; mission design lead, Surface Water and Ocean Topography Mission

"More than 90 percent of the water vapor traveling from the tropical oceans to Earth's mid-latitudes is contained in narrow channels in the lower atmosphere called 'atmospheric rivers,' where the amount of water transported is comparable to the largest rivers on Earth. In our studies of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, we found that snowfall produced by atmospheric rivers accounts for, on average, nearly 50 percent of the total water storage in the seasonal snowpack. However, we also found the amount of snow deposited during atmospheric river events is sensitive to air temperature changes on the order of a few degrees -- that is, similar to future projections of regional climate warming. This is one example of how vulnerable our natural water system could be, and of the importance of water cooperation."
-- Bin Guan, JPL research scientist

"Water sustains all."
-- Thales of Miletus, 600 B.C.

"Water, water everywhere, but ... almost none of it is for drinking. Why? On Earth, more than 97 percent of our precious water is in the ocean and is salty. Even though we can't drink our oceans, they have provided the unique crucible where life developed and thrived, and our oceans are the great buffer that provides our 'near-perfect' climate. But in the past century, the oceans are warming, rising and becoming more acidic. Without consideration for the consequences, humankind is upsetting the climate that has sustained our civilizations for millennia. We are behaving thoughtlessly, foolishly and dangerously. If we abuse the oceans, we put all life on Earth in peril. On this World Water Day, it's imperative that each of us pledges to handle the oceans with care."
-- Bill Patzert, JPL climatologist

"As exemplified by NASA and JPL's remarkable achievements in the search for water on Mars, we are using this world-class science and engineering expertise to measure Earth's freshwater reservoirs and fluxes. During this decade, we will see come to fruition the capabilities to monitor nearly every component of Earth's freshwater -- from the snow and ice at the poles and in our mountains to the groundwater deep beneath our feet, and all that lies between, such as water vapor, clouds and precipitation in the atmosphere and stream flow and soil moisture on the ground. As the demand for this precious resource increase with population growth and societal and ecosystem vulnerabilities change and/or grow in conjunction with climate change, these capabilities will become vital to maintaining our thriving society."
-- Duane Waliser, JPL chief Earth scientist

"When the well is dry, we know the worth of water."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"On a warming planet, the shifting water resources will cast a significant impact on our society. The steady source of freshwater from the mountaintops that has fostered human civilization for thousands of years has begun changing rapidly. We do not even have an adequate inventory of Earth's lakes. Only 15 percent of the lakes are measurable from space. Millions of small lakes have not yet been mapped and monitored. In addition, existing stream gauges cover only very large river basins, yet we do not have adequate knowledge of the river flow (or its discharge) in most of the river basins that sustain human needs.

"The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite mission planned for launch in 2020 -- jointly developed and managed by NASA, the French Space Agency (CNES) and the Canadian Space Agency -- will make measurements of the inventory of lakes and the discharge of rivers that are key to understanding the global water cycle on land; studying the dynamics of floodplains and wetlands, which have important impact on flood control and the balance of ecosystems; and providing a global assessment of water resources, including transboundary rivers, lake and reservoir storage and river dynamics."
-- Lee-Lueng Fu, JPL senior research scientist/Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission project scientist

Several of the new NASA JPL Earth satellite missions launching in 2014 and early 2015 will "follow the water" on Earth, among them:
- ISS-RapidScat, which will measure ocean surface wind speed and direction and help improve weather forecasts, including hurricane monitoring.
- Jason-3, which will extend the timeline of ocean surface topography measurements begun by the Topex/Poseidon, Jason-1 and Jason-2 satellites, making highly detailed measurements of sea level on Earth to gain insight into ocean circulation and climate change.
- Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), which will measure how much water is in the top layer of Earth's soil. Among the mission's many benefits, it will help us better understand and manage water resources; better understand Earth's terrestrial water, carbon and energy cycles; and improve flood predictions and drought monitoring.

Related links:

World Water Day: http://www.worldwaterday.org
GRACE: http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/science/
SWOT: http://swot.jpl.nasa.gov/
SMAP: http://smap.jpl.nasa.gov/
ISS-RapidScat: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/ISSRapidScat.html
Jason-3: http://sealevel.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/jason3/
JPL Western Water Resource Solutions website: http://water.jpl.nasa.gov/
JPL Earth science: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/earth/
NASA Global Climate Change: http://climate.nasa.gov/
NASA Earth science: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/index.html

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



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Supercomputer Helps Planck Mission Expose Ancient Light

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

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

News feature: 2013-110 March 21, 2013

Supercomputer Helps Planck Mission Expose Ancient Light

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-110&cid=release_2013-110

Like archeologists carefully digging for fossils, scientists with the Planck mission are sifting through cosmic clutter to find the most ancient light in the universe.

The Planck space telescope has created the most precise sky map ever made of the oldest light known, harking back to the dawn of time. This light, called the cosmic microwave background, has traveled 13.8 billion years to reach us. It is so faint that Planck observes every point on the sky an average of 1,000 times to pick up its glow.

The task is even more complex than excavating fossils because just about everything in our universe lies between us and the ancient light. Complicating matters further is "noise" from the Planck detectors that must be taken into account.

That's where a supercomputer helps out. Supercomputers are the fastest computers in the world, performing massive amounts of calculations in a short amount of time.

"So far, Planck has made about a trillion observations of a billion points on the sky," said Julian Borrill of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, Calif. "Understanding this sheer volume of data requires a state-of-the-art supercomputer."

Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant contributions from NASA. Under a unique agreement between NASA and the Department of Energy, Planck scientists have been guaranteed access to the supercomputers at the Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The bulk of the computations for this data release were performed on the Cray XE6 system, called the Hopper. This computer makes more than a quintillion calculations per second, placing it among the fastest in the world.

One of the most complex aspects of analyzing the Plank data involves the noise from its detectors. To detect the incredibly faint cosmic microwave background, these detectors are made of extremely sensitive materials. When the detectors pick up light from one part of the sky, they don't reset afterwards to a neutral state, but instead, they sort of buzz for a bit like the ringing of a bell. This buzzing affects observations made at the next part of the sky.

This noise must be understood, and corrected for, at each of the billion points observed repeatedly by Plank as it continuously sweeps across the sky. The supercomputer accomplishes this by running simulations of how Planck would observe the entire sky under different conditions, allowing the team to identify and isolate the noise.

Another challenge is carefully teasing apart the signal of the relic radiation from the material lying in the foreground. It's a big mess, as some astronomers might say, but one that a supercomputer can handle.

"It's like more than just bugs on a windshield that we want to remove to see the light, but a storm of bugs all around us in every direction," said Charles Lawrence, the U.S. project scientist for the Planck mission. "Without the exemplary interagency cooperation between NASA and the Department of Energy, Planck would not be doing the science it's doing today."

The computations needed for Planck's current data release required more than 10 million processor-hours on the Hopper computer. Fortunately, the Planck analysis codes run on tens of thousands of processors in the supercomputer at once, so this only took a few weeks.

Read about the newest results from Planck at http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-109 .

More information about the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is online at: http:///www.nersc.gov/ .

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

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Planck Mission Brings Universe Into Sharp Focus

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

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

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

News release: 2013-109                                                                           March 21, 2013

Planck Mission Brings Universe Into Sharp Focus

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-109&cid=release_2013-109

PASADENA, Calif. -- The Planck space mission has released the most accurate and detailed map ever made of the oldest light in the universe, revealing new information about its age, contents and origins.

Planck is a European Space Agency mission. NASA contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck's science instruments, and U.S., European and Canadian scientists work together to analyze the Planck data.

The map results suggest the universe is expanding more slowly than scientists thought, and is 13.8 billion years old, 100 million years older than previous estimates. The data also show there is less dark energy and more matter, both normal and dark matter, in the universe than previously known. Dark matter is an invisible substance that can only be seen through the effects of its gravity, while dark energy is pushing our universe apart. The nature of both remains mysterious.

"Astronomers worldwide have been on the edge of their seats waiting for this map," said Joan Centrella, Planck program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These measurements are profoundly important to many areas of science, as well as future space missions. We are so pleased to have worked with the European Space Agency on such a historic endeavor."

The map, based on the mission's first 15.5 months of all-sky observations, reveals tiny temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, ancient light that has traveled for billions of years from the very early universe to reach us. The patterns of light represent the seeds of galaxies and clusters of galaxies we see around us today.

"As that ancient light travels to us, matter acts like an obstacle course getting in its way and changing the patterns slightly," said Charles Lawrence, the U.S. project scientist for Planck at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The Planck map reveals not only the very young universe, but also matter, including dark matter, everywhere in the universe."

The age, contents and other fundamental traits of our universe are described in a simple model developed by scientists, called the standard model of cosmology. These new data have allowed scientists to test and improve the accuracy of this model with the greatest precision yet. At the same time, some curious features are observed that don't quite fit with the simple picture. For example, the model assumes the sky is the same everywhere, but the light patterns are asymmetrical on two halves of the sky, and there is a spot extending over a patch of sky that is larger than expected.

"On one hand, we have a simple model that fits our observations extremely well, but on the other hand, we see some strange features which force us to rethink some of our basic assumptions," said Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency's Planck project scientist based in the Netherlands. "This is the beginning of a new journey, and we expect our continued analysis of Planck data will help shed light on this conundrum."

The findings also test theories describing inflation, a dramatic expansion of the universe that occurred immediately after its birth. In far less time than it takes to blink an eye, the universe blew up by 100 trillion trillion times in size. The new map, by showing that matter seems to be distributed randomly, suggests that random processes were at play in the very early universe on minute "quantum" scales. This allows scientists to rule out many complex inflation theories in favor of simple ones.

"Patterns over huge patches of sky tell us about what was happening on the tiniest of scales in the moments just after our universe was born," Lawrence said.

Planck launched in 2009 and has been scanning the skies ever since, mapping the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the theorized big bang that created our universe. This relic radiation provides scientists with a snapshot of the universe 370,000 years after the big bang. Light existed before this time, but it was locked in a hot plasma similar to a candle flame, which later cooled and set the light free.

The cosmic microwave background is remarkably uniform over the entire sky, but tiny variations reveal the imprints of sound waves triggered by quantum fluctuations in the universe just moments after it was born. These imprints, appearing as splotches in the Planck map, are the seeds from which matter grew, forming stars and galaxies. Prior balloon-based and space missions learned a great deal by studying these patterns, including NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), which earned the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Planck is the successor to these satellites, covering a wider range of light frequencies with improved sensitivity and resolution. Its measurements reveal light patterns as small as one-twelfth of a degree on the sky.

"Planck is like the Ferrari of cosmic microwave background missions," said Krzysztof Gorski, a U.S Planck scientist at JPL. "You fine tune the technology to get more precise results. For a car, that can mean an increase in speed and winning races. For Planck, it results in giving astronomers a treasure trove of spectacular data, and bringing forth a deeper understanding of the properties and history of the universe."

The newly estimated expansion rate of the universe, known as Hubble's constant, is 67.15 plus or minus 1.2 kilometers/second/megaparsec. A megaparsec is roughly 3 million light-years. This is less than prior estimates derived from space telescopes, such as NASA's Spitzer and Hubble, using a different technique. The new estimate of dark matter content in the universe is 26.8 percent, up from 24 percent, while dark energy falls to 68.3 percent, down from 71.4 percent. Normal matter now is 4.9 percent, up from 4.6 percent.

Complete results from Planck, which still is scanning the skies, will be released in 2014.

NASA's Planck Project Office is based at JPL.

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

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NASA Voyager Status Update on Voyager 1 Location

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News release: 2013-107 March 20, 2013

NASA Voyager Status Update on Voyager 1 Location

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-107&cid=release_2013-107

"The Voyager team is aware of reports today that NASA's Voyager 1 has left the solar system," said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. "It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space. In December 2012, the Voyager science team reported that Voyager 1 is within a new region called 'the magnetic highway' where energetic particles changed dramatically. A change in the direction of the magnetic field is the last critical indicator of reaching interstellar space and that change of direction has not yet been observed."

To learn more about the current status of the Voyager mission: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-381

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NASA to Hold News Teleconference to Discuss Planck Cosmology Findings (Update)

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News advisory: 2013-105 March 19, 2013

NASA to Hold News Teleconference to Discuss Planck Cosmology Findings (Update)

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-105&cid=release_2013-105

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA will host a news teleconference at 8 a.m. PDT (11 a.m. EDT), Thursday, March 21, to discuss the first cosmology results from Planck, a European Space Agency mission with significant NASA participation.

Planck launched into space in 2009 and has been scanning the skies ever since, mapping cosmic microwave background, or the afterglow, of the theoretical big bang that created the universe more than 13 billion years ago. NASA contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck's science instruments, and U.S., European and Canadian scientists work together to analyze the Planck data.

The teleconference participants are:

-- Paul Hertz, director of astrophysics, NASA Headquarters, Washington
-- Charles Lawrence, U.S. Planck project scientist, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
-- Martin White, U.S. Planck scientist, University of California, Berkeley, Calif.; and Faculty Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
-- Krzysztof Gorski, U.S. Planck scientist, JPL
-- Marc Kamionkowski, professor of physics and astronomy, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.

This event previously was scheduled as a televised news conference.

Questions may be submitted via Twitter using the hashtag #AskNASA .

Visuals will be posted at the start of the teleconference on NASA's Planck website: http://www.nasa.gov/planck .

Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live on NASA's website at:
http://www.nasa.gov/newsaudio . The event will also be streamed live on Ustream at:
http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2 .

For additional information about Planck, visit:
http://www.esa.int/planck .

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Educator Workshop: How to Think Like a NASA Scientist

Educator Workshop March 19, 2013

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

How to Think Like a NASA Scientist: Analyzing Data, Drawing Conclusions

Date: Saturday, April 13, 2013, 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Target audience: Middle and high school science and mathematics educators (but all are welcome)

Location: Theodore von Kármán Auditorium, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Overview: Learn to think like a NASA scientist - and get your students thinking like one, too! This one-day workshop will show you how to teach students to read scientific graphs and draw conclusions based on real NASA data. Experts will discuss current Earth science missions and show how the scientists, themselves, draw conclusions from these data. Participants will also receive science and math application problems to take back and use in the classroom tomorrow.

A registration fee of $25 covers continental breakfast, lunch and snacks. The deadline to register is April 5, 2013.

For more information and to register, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=373

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Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Sees GRAIL's Explosive Farewell

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News feature: 2013-103 March 19, 2013

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Sees GRAIL's Explosive Farewell

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-103&cid=release_2013-103

Many spacecraft just fade away, drifting silently through space after their mission is over, but not GRAIL. NASA's twin GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) spacecraft went out in a blaze of glory on Dec. 17, 2012, when they were intentionally crashed into a mountain near the moon's north pole.

The successful mission to study the moon's interior took the plunge to get one last bit of science: with the spacecraft kicking up a cloud of dust and gas with each impact, researchers hoped to discover more about the moon's composition. However, with the moon about 380,000 kilometers (over 236,000 miles) away from Earth, the impact plumes would be difficult to observe from here. Fortunately, GRAIL had company. NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) is orbiting the moon as well, busily making high-resolution maps of the lunar surface. With just three weeks notice, the LRO team scrambled to get their orbiter in the right place at the right time to witness GRAIL's fiery finale.

"We were informed by the GRAIL team about three weeks prior to the impact exactly where the impact site would be," said LRO Project Scientist John Keller of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The GRAIL team's focus was on obtaining the highest-resolution gravity measurements possible from the last few orbits of the GRAIL spacecraft, which led to uncertainty in the ultimate impact site until relatively late."

LRO was only about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the lunar surface at the time of the impact, and variations in gravity from massive features like lunar mountains tugged on the spacecraft, altering its orbit.

The site was in shadow at the time of the impact, so the LRO team had to wait until the plumes rose high enough to be in sunlight before making the observation. The Lyman Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP), an ultraviolet imaging spectrograph on board the spacecraft, saw mercury and enhancements of atomic hydrogen in the plume.

"The mercury observation is consistent with what the LRO team saw from the LCROSS impact in October 2009," said Keller. "LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) saw significant amounts of mercury, but the LCROSS site was at the bottom of the moon's Cabeus crater, which hasn't seen sunlight for more than a billion years and is therefore extremely cold."

LRO's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera was able to make an image of the craters from the GRAIL impacts despite their relatively small size.

The two spacecraft were relatively small -- cubes about the size of a washing machine with a mass of about 200 kilograms (440 pounds) each at the time of impact. The spacecraft were traveling about 3,800 mph (6,100 kilometers per hour) when they hit the surface.

"Both craters are relatively small, perhaps 4 to 6 meters (about 13 to 20 feet) in diameter and both have faint, dark, ejecta patterns, which is unusual," said Mark Robinson, LROC principal investigator at Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Sciences, Tempe, Ariz. "Fresh impact craters on the moon are typically bright, but these may be dark due to spacecraft material being mixed with the ejecta."

"Both impact sites lie on the southern slope of an unnamed massif [mountain] that lies south of the crater Mouchez and northeast of the crater Philolaus," said Robinson. "The massif stands as much as 2,500 meters [about 8,202 feet] above the surrounding plains. The impact sites are at an elevation of about 700 meters [around 2,296 feet] and 1,000 meters [3,281 feet], respectively, about 500 to 800 meters [approximately 1,640 to 2,625 feet] below the summit. The two impact craters are about 2,200 meters [roughly 7,218 feet] apart. GRAIL B [renamed Flow] impacted about 30 seconds after GRAIL A [Ebb] at a site to the west and north of GRAIL A."

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter complemented the GRAIL mission in other ways as well. LRO's Diviner lunar radiometer observed the impact site and confirmed that the amount of heating of the surface there by the relatively small GRAIL spacecraft was within expectations. LRO's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) instrument bounced laser pulses off the surface to build up a precise map of the lunar terrain, including the three-dimensional structure of features like mountains and craters.

"Combining the LRO LOLA topography map with GRAIL's gravity map yields some very interesting results," said Keller. "You expect that areas with mountains will have a little stronger gravity, while features like craters will have a little less. However, when you subtract out the topography, you get another map that reveals gravity differences that are not tied to the surface. It gives insight into structures deeper in the moon's interior."

JPL manages the GRAIL mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. GRAIL 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.

For the mission's press kit and other information about GRAIL, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/grail . You can follow JPL News on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/nasajpl and on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/nasajpl .

The research was funded by the LRO mission, currently under NASA's Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. LRO is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Images are posted at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/grail-results.html


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Herschel Discovers Some of the Youngest Stars Ever Seen

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News release: 2013-102 March 19, 2013

Herschel Discovers Some of the Youngest Stars Ever Seen

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-102&cid=release_2013-102

PASADENA, Calif. – Astronomers have found some of the youngest stars ever seen, thanks to the Herschel space observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA contributions.

Observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile, a collaboration involving the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, the Onsala Space Observatory in Sweden, and the European Southern Observatory in Germany, contributed to the findings.

Dense envelopes of gas and dust surround the fledging stars known as protostars, making their detection difficult. The 15 newly observed protostars turned up by surprise in a survey of the biggest site of star formation near our solar system, located in the constellation Orion. The discovery gives scientists a peek into one of the earliest and least understood phases of star formation.

"Herschel has revealed the largest ensemble of such young stars in a single star-forming region," said Amelia Stutz, lead author of a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal and a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "With these results, we are getting closer to witnessing the moment when a star begins to form."

Stars spring to life from the gravitational collapse of massive clouds of gas and dust. This changeover from stray, cool gas to the ball of super-hot plasma we call a star is relatively quick by cosmic standards, lasting only a few hundred thousand years. Finding protostars in their earliest, most short-lived and dimmest stages poses a challenge.

Astronomers long had investigated the stellar nursery in the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex, a vast collection of star-forming clouds, but had not seen the newly identified protostars until Herschel observed the region.

"Previous studies have missed the densest, youngest and potentially most extreme and cold protostars in Orion," Stutz said. "These sources may be able to help us better understand how the process of star formation proceeds at the very earliest stages, when most of the stellar mass is built up and physical conditions are hardest to observe."

Herschel spied the protostars in far-infrared, or long-wavelength, light, which can shine through the dense clouds around burgeoning stars that block out higher-energy, shorter wavelengths, including the light our eyes see.

The Herschel Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) instrument collected infrared light at 70 and 160 micrometers in wavelength, comparable to the width of a human hair. Researchers compared these observations to previous scans of the star-forming regions in Orion taken by Spitzer. Extremely young protostars identified in the Herschel views but too cold to be picked up in most of the Spitzer data were further verified with radio wave observations from the APEX ground telescope.

"Our observations provide a first glimpse at protostars that have just begun to 'glow' at far-infrared wavelengths," said paper coauthor Elise Furlan, a postdoctoral research associate at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Ariz.

Of the 15 newly discovered protostars, 11 possess very red colors, meaning their light output trends toward the low-energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum. This output indicates the stars are still embedded deeply in a gaseous envelope, meaning they are very young. An additional seven protostars previously seen by Spitzer share this characteristic. Together, these 18 budding stars comprise only five percent of the protostars and candidate protostars observed in Orion. That figure implies the very youngest stars spend perhaps 25,000 years in this phase of their development, a mere blink of an eye considering a star like our sun lives for about 10 billion years.

Researchers hope to document chronologically each stage of a star's development rather like a family album, from before birth to early infancy, when planets also take shape.

"With these recent findings, we add an important missing photo to the family album of stellar development," said Glenn Wahlgren, Herschel Program Scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Herschel has allowed us to study stars in their infancy."

Herschel is a European Space Agency mission, with science instruments provided by a consortia of European institutes with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.

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

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Curiosity Mars Rover Sees Trend in Water Presence

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News release: 2013-099 March 18, 2013

Curiosity Mars Rover Sees Trend in Water Presence

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-099&cid=release_2013-099

THE WOODLANDS, Texas – NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has seen evidence of water-bearing minerals in rocks near where it had already found clay minerals inside a drilled rock.

Last week, the rover's science team announced that analysis of powder from a drilled mudstone rock on Mars indicates past environmental conditions that were favorable for microbial life. Additional findings presented today (March 18) at a news briefing at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, suggest those conditions extended beyond the site of the drilling.

Using infrared-imaging capability of a camera on the rover and an instrument that shoots neutrons into the ground to probe for hydrogen, researchers have found more hydration of minerals near the clay-bearing rock than at locations Curiosity visited earlier.

The rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam) can also serve as a mineral-detecting and hydration-detecting tool, reported Jim Bell of Arizona State University, Tempe. "Some iron-bearing rocks and minerals can be detected and mapped using the Mastcam's near-infrared filters."

Ratios of brightness in different Mastcam near-infrared wavelengths can indicate the presence of some hydrated minerals. The technique was used to check rocks in the "Yellowknife Bay" area where Curiosity's drill last month collected the first powder from the interior of a rock on Mars. Some rocks in Yellowknife Bay are crisscrossed with bright veins.

"With Mastcam, we see elevated hydration signals in the narrow veins that cut many of the rocks in this area," said Melissa Rice of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. "These bright veins contain hydrated minerals that are different from the clay minerals in the surrounding rock matrix."

The Russian-made Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons (DAN) instrument on Curiosity detects hydrogen beneath the rover. At the rover's very dry study area on Mars, the detected hydrogen is mainly in water molecules bound into minerals. "We definitely see signal variation along the traverse from the landing point to Yellowknife Bay," said DAN Deputy Principal Investigator Maxim Litvak of the Space Research Institute, Moscow. "More water is detected at Yellowknife Bay than earlier on the route. Even within Yellowknife Bay, we see significant variation."

Findings presented today from the Canadian-made Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer (APXS) on Curiosity's arm indicate that the wet environmental processes that produced clay at Yellowknife Bay did so without much change in the overall mix of chemical elements present. The elemental composition of the outcrop Curiosity drilled into matches the composition of basalt. For example, it has basalt-like proportions of silicon, aluminum, magnesium and iron. Basalt is the most common rock type on Mars. It is igneous, but it is also thought to be the parent material for sedimentary rocks Curiosity has examined.

"The elemental composition of rocks in Yellowknife Bay wasn't changed much by mineral alteration," said Curiosity science team member Mariek Schmidt of Brock University, Saint Catharines, Ontario, Canada.

A dust coating on rocks had made the composition detected by APXS not quite a match for basalt until Curiosity used a brush to sweep the dust away. After that, APXS saw less sulfur.

"By removing the dust, we've got a better reading that pushes the classification toward basaltic composition," Schmidt said. The sedimentary rocks at Yellowknife Bay likely formed when original basaltic rocks were broken into fragments, transported, re-deposited as sedimentary particles, and mineralogically altered by exposure to water.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project is using Curiosity to investigate whether an area within Mars' Gale Crater has ever offered an environment favorable for microbial life. Curiosity, carrying 10 science instruments, landed seven months ago to begin its two-year prime mission. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more about the mission, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl , http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl and http://www.nasa.gov/msl .

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

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Panorama From NASA Mars Rover Shows Mount Sharp

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Image advisory: 2013-097 March 15, 2013

Panorama From NASA Mars Rover Shows Mount Sharp

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-097&cid=release_2013-097

PASADENA, Calif. -- Rising above the present location of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, higher than any mountain in the 48 contiguous states of the United States, Mount Sharp is featured in new imagery from the rover.

A pair of mosaics assembled from dozens of telephoto images shows Mount Sharp in dramatic detail. The component images were taken by the 100-millimeter-focal-length telephoto lens camera mounted on the right side of Curiosity's remote sensing mast, during the 45th Martian day of the rover's mission on Mars (Sept. 20, 2012).

This layered mound, also called Aeolis Mons, in the center of Gale Crater rises more than 3 miles (5 kilometers) above the crater floor location of Curiosity. Lower slopes of Mount Sharp remain a destination for the mission, though the rover will first spend many more weeks around a location called "Yellowknife Bay," where it has found evidence of a past environment favorable for microbial life.

A version of the mosaic that has been white-balanced to show the terrain as if under Earthlike lighting, which makes the sky look overly blue, is at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16768 . White-balanced versions help scientists recognize rock materials based on their terrestrial experience. The Martian sky would look like more of a butterscotch color to the human eye. A version of the mosaic with raw color, as a typical smart-phone camera would show the scene, is at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA16769 .

In both versions, the sky has been filled out by extrapolating color and brightness information from the portions of the sky that were captured in images of the terrain.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory project is using Curiosity and the rover's 10 science instruments to investigate environmental history within Gale Crater, a location where the project has found that conditions were long ago favorable for microbial life.

Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, built and operates the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory mission for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington, and built the rover.

For more information about the mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/msl 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 TV News Conference to Discuss Planck Cosmology Findings

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News release: 2013-096 March 15, 2013

NASA TV News Conference to Discuss Planck Cosmology Findings

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-096&cid=release_2013-096

PASADENA, Calif.-- NASA will host a news conference at 8 a.m. PDT (11 a.m. EDT) Thursday, March 21, to discuss the first cosmology results from Planck, a European Space Agency mission with significant NASA participation.

The briefing will be held at NASA Headquarters in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency's website.

Planck launched into space in 2009 and has been scanning the skies ever since, mapping cosmic microwave background, or the afterglow, of the big bang that created our universe more than 13 billion years ago.

The briefing participants are:

-- Paul Hertz, director of astrophysics, NASA, Washington
-- Charles Lawrence, U.S. Planck project scientist, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif.
-- Martin White, U.S. Planck scientist, University of California, Berkeley, Calif.
-- Krzysztof Gorski, U.S. Planck scientist, JPL
-- Marc Kamionkowski, professor of physics and astronomy, John Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.

Questions may be submitted via Twitter to #AskNASA.

For NASA TV streaming video, scheduling and downlink information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv. The event will also be streamed live on Ustream at: http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl2 .

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


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This Weekend! NASA/JPL Educator Workshop: Our Solar System and the Periodic Table of Elements

Educator Workshop March 14, 2013

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


Our Solar System and the Periodic Table of Elements

Date: Saturday, March 16, 2013, 10 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Target audience: Review of 5th grade standards, all formal and informal educators K-12 are welcome

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

Overview: This California standard-based workshop will teach you basic principles of what the table represents by using the solar system as an exciting basis for understanding. Learn the difference between an atom and a molecule, "tour" the solar system and identify predominant elements that compose each planet. This lesson can be used as a way for students to review for the fifth grade state science test and is easily understood by most third graders.

The workshop will be held at the JPL Educator Resource Center in Pomona, Calif. To sign up, please call the Resource Center at 909-397-4420.

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

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'Hot Spots' Ride a Merry-Go-Round on Jupiter

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
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Jia-Rui C. 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

News feature: 2013-095 March 14, 2013

'Hot Spots' Ride a Merry-Go-Round on Jupiter

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-095&cid=release_2013-095

In the swirling canopy of Jupiter's atmosphere, cloudless patches are so exceptional that the big ones get the special name "hot spots." Exactly how these clearings form and why they're only found near the planet's equator have long been mysteries. Now, using images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists have found new evidence that hot spots in Jupiter's atmosphere are created by a Rossby wave, a pattern also seen in Earth's atmosphere and oceans. The team found the wave responsible for the hot spots glides up and down through layers of the atmosphere like a carousel horse on a merry-go-round.

"This is the first time anybody has closely tracked the shape of multiple hot spots over a period of time, which is the best way to appreciate the dynamic nature of these features," said the study's lead author, David Choi, a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The paper is published online in the April issue of the journal Icarus.

Choi and his colleagues made time-lapse movies from hundreds of observations taken by Cassini during its flyby of Jupiter in late 2000, when the spacecraft made its closest approach to the planet. The movies zoom in on a line of hot spots between one of Jupiter's dark belts and bright white zones, roughly 7 degrees north of the equator. Covering about two months (in Earth time), the study examines the daily and weekly changes in the sizes and shapes of the hot spots, each of which covers more area than North America, on average.

Much of what scientists know about hot spots came from NASA's Galileo mission, which released an atmospheric probe that descended into a hot spot in 1995. This was the first, and so far only, in-situ investigation of Jupiter's atmosphere.

"Galileo's probe data and a handful of orbiter images hinted at the complex winds swirling around and through these hot spots, and raised questions about whether they fundamentally were waves, cyclones or something in between," said Ashwin Vasavada, a paper co-author who is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and who was a member of the Cassini imaging team during the Jupiter flyby. "Cassini's fantastic movies now show the entire life cycle and evolution of hot spots in great detail."

Because hot spots are breaks in the clouds, they provide windows into a normally unseen layer of Jupiter's atmosphere, possibly all the way down to the level where water clouds can form. In pictures, hot spots appear shadowy, but because the deeper layers are warmer, hot spots are very bright at the infrared wavelengths where heat is sensed; in fact, this is how they got their name.

One hypothesis is that hot spots occur when big drafts of air sink in the atmosphere and get heated or dried out in the process. But the surprising regularity of hot spots has led some researchers to suspect there is an atmospheric wave involved. Typically, eight to 10 hot spots line up, roughly evenly spaced, with dense white plumes of cloud in between. This pattern could be explained by a wave that pushes cold air down, breaking up any clouds, and then carries warm air up, causing the heavy cloud cover seen in the plumes. Computer modeling has strengthened this line of reasoning.

From the Cassini movies, the researchers mapped the winds in and around each hot spot and plume, and examined interactions with vortices that pass by, in addition to wind gyres, or spiraling vortices, that merge with the hot spots. To separate these motions from the jet stream in which the hot spots reside, the scientists also tracked the movements of small "scooter" clouds, similar to cirrus clouds on Earth. This provided what may be the first direct measurement of the true wind speed of the jet stream, which was clocked at about 300 to 450 mph (500 to 720 kilometers per hour) -- much faster than anyone previously thought. The hot spots amble at the more leisurely pace of about 225 mph (362 kilometers per hour).

By teasing out these individual movements, the researchers saw that the motions of the hot spots fit the pattern of a Rossby wave in the atmosphere. On Earth, Rossby waves play a major role in weather. For example, when a blast of frigid Arctic air suddenly dips down and freezes Florida's crops, a Rossby wave is interacting with the polar jet stream and sending it off its typical course. The wave travels around our planet but periodically wanders north and south as it goes.

The wave responsible for the hot spots also circles the planet west to east, but instead of wandering north and south, it glides up and down in the atmosphere. The researchers estimate this wave may rise and fall 15 to 30 miles (24 to 50 kilometers) in altitude.

The new findings should help researchers understand how well the observations returned by the Galileo probe extend to the rest of Jupiter's atmosphere. "And that is another step in answering more of the questions that still surround hot spots on Jupiter," said Choi.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency. The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

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Mars Curiosity Lands South by Southwest Interactive Award

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91009 PHONE 818-354-5011
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Jane Platt 818-354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jane.platt@jpl.nasa.gov

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

News release: 2013-094 March 13, 2013

Mars Curiosity Lands South by Southwest Interactive Award

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-094&cid=release_2013-094

PASADENA, Calif. – The down-to-Earth persona of NASA's Mars Curiosity rover, expressed on Twitter, Facebook, live streaming on Ustream, viral videos and the first Foursquare check-in from another planet, has captured the 2013 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Award for best social media campaign.

The award, presented last night at the SXSW Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, honors the Mars Curiosity social media campaign for turning NASA's newest Mars rover into an Internet celebrity.

As an example, via the @MarsCuriosity Twitter account, more than 1.3 million people currently follow the ongoing musings of the car-sized rover. Since the account began in 2008, the rover has shared thoughts about preparations leading up to its November 2011 launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla.; the long, dark journey to the Red Planet; the dramatic, white-knuckler events of landing night in August 2012; and numerous post-landing mechanical maneuvers and science discoveries on Mars. Curiosity's Facebook audience now numbers more than 500,000 people who have "liked" the rover's page.

As the rover was built, tested, launched and landed, the public was with the mission every step of the way. Each step, including much of the rover's construction, was streamed live to the NASAJPL Ustream channel, allowing online audiences to view the activities and ask questions through live chats. The channel has received more than 9 million views. Dozens of explanatory videos, including "Seven Minutes of Terror," a dramatic explanation of the complicated landing process, were posted to YouTube.

NASA Tweetup and NASA Social events added a "you are there" element to the campaign. Social media followers were randomly selected to go behind the scenes for launch and landing. They met with scientists and engineers, took pictures, asked questions and shared the experience via their own social media accounts, making them citizen journalists and ambassadors for the mission.

On landing night, Aug. 5, 2012 Pacific time (Aug. 6 Eastern time), millions around the world watched a live feed from JPL's mission control as the rover touched down on the Red Planet.

Accepting the award at SXSW were three people from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.: Veronica McGregor, news and social media manager; and social media specialists Courtney O'Connor and Stephanie L. Smith.

The social media efforts are part of an overall strategy to deliver news and information on two dozen space missions managed by JPL. They supplement other communication techniques and products, such as news releases, news conferences and press kits, used by NASA and JPL to share the excitement of space exploration and discovery with people everywhere.

"Our goal is to communicate the news of our missions to the widest possible audiences via multiple methods," said McGregor. "With social media platforms, we can deliver information nearly every day and respond to questions quickly. The real joy is seeing comments from people who say this is the first time they've followed a NASA mission so closely, and how it has increased their interest in and excitement about space exploration."

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project has been using Curiosity to investigate whether an area within Mars' Gale Crater ever has offered an environment favorable for microbial life. In fact, just hours before the social media award was announced in Texas, scientists announced at a news conference held at NASA Headquarters in Washington that an analysis of a rock sample collected by Curiosity shows ancient Mars could have supported living microbes.

The SXSW Interactive Awards competition "uncovers the best new digital work, from mobile and tablet apps to websites and installations, while celebrating those who are building tomorrow's interactive trends." The competition, initially known as the SXSW Web Awards, was founded in 1997.

The Curiosity Mars rover, carrying 10 science instruments, landed seven months ago to begin its two-year prime mission. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more about the mission, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl , http://www.nasa.gov/msl . You can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosityand http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

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NASA Mars Rover Mission Picked for Smithsonian Honor

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
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NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
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D.C. Agle / Guy Webster 818-393-9011 / 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle@jpl.nasa.gov / guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

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

News release: 2013-093 March 13, 2013

NASA Mars Rover Mission Picked for Smithsonian Honor

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-093&cid=release_2013-093

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project, managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has been selected to receive the top group honor from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum -- the Trophy for Current Achievement. The award will be presented on April 24 at a black-tie dinner in Washington, D.C.

The Mars Science Laboratory Project built and operates the rover Curiosity, which has been investigating past and current environments in Mars' Gale Crater since its dramatic sky-crane landing seven months ago.

The trophies for current and lifetime achievement are the National Air and Space Museum's most prestigious awards. They recognize outstanding achievements in the fields of aerospace science and technology and their history.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project is using the Curiosity rover with its 10 science instruments to investigate whether an area within Mars' Gale Crater ever has offered an environment favorable for microbial life. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more about the mission, visit: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/msl , http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl and http://www.nasa.gov/msl .

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

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NASA Rover Finds Conditions Once Suited for Ancient Life on Mars

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

News release: 2013-092                                                          March 12, 2013

NASA Rover Finds Conditions Once Suited for Ancient Life on Mars

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-092&cid=release_2013-092

PASADENA, Calif. -- An analysis of a rock sample collected by NASA's Curiosity rover shows ancient Mars could have supported living microbes.

Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon -- some of the key chemical ingredients for life -- in the powder Curiosity drilled out of a sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet last month.

"A fundamental question for this mission is whether Mars could have supported a habitable environment," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "From what we know now, the answer is yes."

Clues to this habitable environment come from data returned by the rover's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) and Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instruments. The data indicate the Yellowknife Bay area the rover is exploring was the end of an ancient river system or an intermittently wet lake bed that could have provided chemical energy and other favorable conditions for microbes. The rock is made up of a fine-grained mudstone containing clay minerals, sulfate minerals and other chemicals. This ancient wet environment, unlike some others on Mars, was not harshly oxidizing, acidic or extremely salty.

The patch of bedrock where Curiosity drilled for its first sample lies in an ancient network of stream channels descending from the rim of Gale Crater. The bedrock also is fine-grained mudstone and shows evidence of multiple periods of wet conditions, including nodules and veins.

Curiosity's drill collected the sample at a site just a few hundred yards away from where the rover earlier found an ancient streambed in September 2012.

"Clay minerals make up at least 20 percent of the composition of this sample," said David Blake, principal investigator for the CheMin instrument at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

These clay minerals are a product of the reaction of relatively fresh water with igneous minerals, such as olivine, also present in the sediment. The reaction could have taken place within the sedimentary deposit, during transport of the sediment, or in the source region of the sediment. The presence of calcium sulfate along with the clay suggests the soil is neutral or mildly alkaline.

Scientists were surprised to find a mixture of oxidized, less-oxidized, and even non-oxidized chemicals, providing an energy gradient of the sort many microbes on Earth exploit to live. This partial oxidation was first hinted at when the drill cuttings were revealed to be gray rather than red.

"The range of chemical ingredients we have identified in the sample is impressive, and it suggests pairings such as sulfates and sulfides that indicate a possible chemical energy source for micro-organisms," said Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator of the SAM suite of instruments at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

An additional drilled sample will be used to help confirm these results for several of the trace gases analyzed by the SAM instrument.

"We have characterized a very ancient, but strangely new 'gray Mars' where conditions once were favorable for life," said John Grotzinger, Mars Science Laboratory project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "Curiosity is on a mission of discovery and exploration, and as a team we feel there are many more exciting discoveries ahead of us in the months and years to come."

Scientists plan to work with Curiosity in the "Yellowknife Bay" area for many more weeks before beginning a long drive to Gale Crater's central mound, Mount Sharp. Investigating the stack of layers exposed on Mount Sharp, where clay minerals and sulfate minerals have been identified from orbit, may add information about the duration and diversity of habitable conditions.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Project has been using Curiosity to investigate whether an area within Mars' Gale Crater ever has offered an environment favorable for microbial life. Curiosity, carrying 10 science instruments, landed seven months ago to begin its two-year prime mission. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

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

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