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Wednesday, February 27, 2013

NASA's Aquarius Sees Salty Shifts

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

Written by Maria-José Viñas

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

News feature: 2013-074 Feb. 27, 2013

NASA's Aquarius Sees Salty Shifts

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-074&cid=release_2013-074

The colorful images chronicle the seasonal stirrings of our salty world: Pulses of freshwater
gush from the Amazon River's mouth; an invisible seam divides the salty Arabian Sea from
the fresher waters of the Bay of Bengal; a large patch of freshwater appears in the eastern
tropical Pacific in the winter. These and other changes in ocean salinity patterns are
revealed by the first full year of surface salinity data captured by NASA's Aquarius
instrument.

"With a bit more than a year of data, we are seeing some surprising patterns, especially in
the tropics," said Aquarius Principal Investigator Gary Lagerloef, of Earth & Space
Research in Seattle. "We see features evolve rapidly over time."

Launched June 10, 2011, aboard the Argentine spacecraft Aquarius/Satélite de
Aplicaciones Científicas (SAC)-D, Aquarius is NASA's first satellite instrument specifically
built to study the salt content of ocean surface waters. Salinity variations, one of the main
drivers of ocean circulation, are closely connected with the cycling of freshwater around
the planet and provide scientists with valuable information on how the changing global
climate is altering global rainfall patterns.

The salinity sensor detects the microwave emissivity of the top approximately 1 inch (1 to 2
centimeters) of ocean water – a physical property that varies depending on temperature
and saltiness. The instrument collects data in 240-mile-wide (386 kilometers) swaths in an
orbit designed to obtain a complete survey of global salinity of ice-free oceans every seven
days.

The Changing Ocean

The animated version of Aquarius' first year of data unveils a world of varying salinity
patterns. The Arabian Sea, nestled up against the dry Middle East, appears much saltier
than the neighboring Bay of Bengal, which gets showered by intense monsoon rains and
receives freshwater discharges from the Ganges and other large rivers. Another mighty
river, the Amazon, releases a large freshwater plume that heads east toward Africa or
bends up north to the Caribbean, depending on the prevailing seasonal currents. Pools of
freshwater carried by ocean currents from the central Pacific Ocean's regions of heavy
rainfall pile up next to Panama's coast, while the Mediterranean Sea sticks out in the
Aquarius maps as a very salty sea.

One of the features that stand out most clearly is a large patch of highly saline water
across the North Atlantic. This area, the saltiest anywhere in the open ocean, is analogous
to deserts on land, where little rainfall and a lot of evaporation occur. A NASA-funded
expedition, the Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS), traveled
to the North Atlantic's saltiest spot last fall to analyze the causes behind this high salt
concentration and to validate Aquarius measurements.

"My conclusion after five weeks out at sea and analyzing five weekly maps of salinity from
Aquarius while we were there was that indeed, the patterns of salinity variation seen from
Aquarius and by the ship were similar," said Eric Lindstrom, NASA's physical
oceanography program scientist, NASA Headquarters, Washington, and a participant of
the SPURS research cruise.

Future Goals

"The Aquarius prime mission is scheduled to run for three years but there is no reason to
think that the instrument could not be able to provide valuable data for much longer than
that," said Gene Carl Feldman, Aquarius project manager at NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "The instrument has been performing flawlessly and our
colleagues in Argentina are doing a fantastic job running the spacecraft, providing us a
nice, stable ride."

In future years, one of the main goals of the Aquarius team is to figure out ways to fine-
tune the readings and retrieve data closer to the coasts and the poles. Land and ice emit
very bright microwave emissions that swamp the signal read by the satellite. At the poles,
there's the added complication that cold polar waters require very large changes in their
salt concentration to modify their microwave signal.

Still, the Aquarius team was surprised by how close to the coast the instrument is already
able to collect salinity measurements.

"The fact that we're getting areas, particularly around islands in the Pacific, that are not
obviously badly contaminated is pretty remarkable. It says that our ability to screen out
land contamination seems to be working quite well," Feldman said.

Another factor that affects salinity readings is intense rainfall. Heavy rain can affect salinity
readings by attenuating the microwave signal Aquarius reads off the ocean surface as it
travels through the soaked atmosphere. Rainfall can also create roughness and shallow
pools of freshwater on the ocean surface. In the future, the Aquarius team wants to use
another instrument aboard Aquarius/SAC-D, the Argentine-built Microwave Radiometer, to
gauge the presence of intense rain simultaneously to salinity readings, so that scientists
can flag data collected during heavy rainfall.

An ultimate goal is combining the Aquarius measurements with those of its European
counterpart, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite (SMOS) to produce more
accurate and finer maps of ocean salinity. In addition, the Aquarius team, in collaboration
with researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is about to release its first global
soil moisture dataset, which will complement SMOS' soil moisture measurements.

"The first year of the Aquarius mission has mostly been about understanding how the
instruments and algorithms are performing," Feldman said. "Now that we have overcome
the major hurdles, we can really begin to focus on understanding what the data are telling
us about how the ocean works, how it affects weather and climate, and what new insights
we can gain by having these remarkable salinity measurements."

Aquarius was built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.; and NASA
Goddard. JPL managed Aquarius through its commissioning phase and is archiving
mission data. Goddard now manages Aquarius mission operations and processes science
data. Argentina's space agency, Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE),
provided the SAC-D spacecraft, optical camera, thermal camera with Canada, microwave
radiometer, sensors from various Argentine institutions and the mission operations center.
France and Italy also contributed instruments. For more information about NASA's
Aquarius mission, visit: www.nasa.gov/aquarius .

For a narrated global tour of Aquarius ocean surface salinity measurements,
see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xQP_B18vMw . A visualization showing
changes in global ocean surface salinity as measured by Aquarius from Dec. 2011
through Dec. 2012 can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVnZnZUUYc -

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NASA's NuSTAR Helps Solve Riddle of Black Hole Spin

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

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

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

News release: 2013-075 Feb. 27, 2013

NASA's NuSTAR Helps Solve Riddle of Black Hole Spin

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-075&cid=release_2013-075

PASADENA, Calif. -- Two X-ray space observatories, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun.

The supermassive black hole lies at the dust- and gas-filled heart of a galaxy called NGC 1365, and it is spinning almost as fast as Einstein's theory of gravity will allow. The findings, which appear in a new study in the journal Nature, resolve a long-standing debate about similar measurements in other black holes and will lead to a better understanding of how black holes and galaxies evolve.

"This is hugely important to the field of black hole science," said Lou Kaluzienski, a NuSTAR program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The observations also are a powerful test of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which says gravity can bend space-time, the fabric that shapes our universe, and the light that travels through it.

"We can trace matter as it swirls into a black hole using X-rays emitted from regions very close to the black hole," said the coauthor of a new study, NuSTAR principal investigator Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "The radiation we see is warped and distorted by the motions of particles and the black hole's incredibly strong gravity."

NuSTAR, an Explorer-class mission launched in June 2012, is designed to detect the highest-energy X-ray light in great detail. It complements telescopes that observe lower-energy X-ray light, such as XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Scientists use these and other telescopes to estimate the rates at which black holes spin.

Until now, these measurements were not certain because clouds of gas could have been obscuring the black holes and confusing the results. With help from XMM-Newton, NuSTAR was able to see a broader range of X-ray energies and penetrate deeper into the region around the black hole. The new data demonstrate that X-rays are not being warped by the clouds, but by the tremendous gravity of the black hole. This proves that spin rates of supermassive black holes can be determined conclusively.

"If I could have added one instrument to XMM-Newton, it would have been a telescope like NuSTAR," said Norbert Schartel, XMM-Newton Project Scientist at the European Space Astronomy Center in Madrid. "The high-energy X-rays provided an essential missing puzzle piece for solving this problem."

Measuring the spin of a supermassive black hole is fundamental to understanding its past history and that of its host galaxy.

"These monsters, with masses from millions to billions of times that of the sun, are formed as small seeds in the early universe and grow by swallowing stars and gas in their host galaxies, merging with other giant black holes when galaxies collide, or both," said the study's lead author, Guido Risaliti of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics.

Supermassive black holes are surrounded by pancake-like accretion disks, formed as their gravity pulls matter inward. Einstein's theory predicts the faster a black hole spins, the closer the accretion disk lies to the black hole. The closer the accretion disk is, the more gravity from the black hole will warp X-ray light streaming off the disk.

Astronomers look for these warping effects by analyzing X-ray light emitted by iron circulating in the accretion disk. In the new study, they used both XMM-Newton and NuSTAR to simultaneously observe the black hole in NGC 1365. While XMM-Newton revealed that light from the iron was being warped, NuSTAR proved that this distortion was coming from the gravity of the black hole and not gas clouds in the vicinity. NuSTAR's higher-energy X-ray data showed that the iron was so close to the black hole that its gravity must be causing the warping effects.

With the possibility of obscuring clouds ruled out, scientists can now use the distortions in the iron signature to measure the black hole's spin rate. The findings apply to several other black holes as well, removing the uncertainty in the previously measured spin rates.

For more information on NASA's NuSTAR mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/nustar .

For more information on ESA's XMM-Newton mission, visit: http://go.nasa.gov/YUYpI6 .

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

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Tuesday, February 26, 2013

NASA Announces New CubeSat Space Mission Candidates

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

Jane Platt 818-354-0880
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
Jane.platt@jpl.nasa.gov

Joshua Buck 202-357-1100
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Jbuck@nasa.gov

News release: 2013-073 Feb. 26, 2013

NASA Announces New CubeSat Space Mission Candidates

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-073&cid=release_2013-073

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA has selected 24 small satellites, including three from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., to fly as auxiliary payloads aboard rockets planned to launch in 2014, 2015 and 2016. The proposed CubeSats come from universities across the country, a Florida high school, several non-profit organizations and NASA field centers.

CubeSats belong to a class of research spacecraft called nanosatellites. The cube-shaped satellites measure about 4 inches (10 centimeters) on each side, have a volume of about 1 quart (1 liter), and weigh less than 3 pounds (1.1 kilograms).

The selections are from the fourth round of the CubeSat Launch Initiative. After launch, the satellites will conduct technology demonstrations, educational research or science missions. The selected CubeSats will be eligible for flight after final negotiations and an opportunity for flight becomes available.

The following organizations submitted winning satellite proposals:

-- The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, Calif.
-- The Discovery Museum and Planetarium, Bridgeport, Conn.
-- Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott, Ariz.
-- Morehead State University, Morehead, Ky., in partnership with the University of California at Berkeley
-- Montana State University, Bozeman (two CubeSats) in partnership with The University of New Hampshire, Durham
-- Merritt Island High School, Fla., in partnership with California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
-- NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
-- NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. (three CubeSats)
-- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. (three CubeSats)
-- NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
-- Pennsylvania State University, in partnership with the Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, Calif.; and The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, Calif.
-- Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Mo.
-- Tyvak Nano-Satellites Systems, Irvine, Calif., in partnership with the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
-- University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
-- University of Colorado, Boulder
-- University of Florida, Gainesville, in partnership with Stanford University
-- University of Maryland, Baltimore County
-- University of Texas, Austin
-- Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., in partnership with the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, Silver Spring, Md.

The three CubeSats from JPL, which is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, are:

--The Integrated Solar Array and Reflectarray Antenna (ISARA), a technology demonstration of a practical, low-cost Ka-band high-gain antenna on a 3U CubeSat that will increase downlink data rates from a baseline of 9.6 kilobits per second to more than 100 megabits per second with minimal impact on spacecraft mass, volume, cost and power requirements.

--The CubeSat VHF transmitter to study Ionospheric dispersion of Radio Pulses (CHIRP), a 6U CubeSat designed to provide measurements of very high frequency (VHF) radio pulses propagated through the ionosphere that will be essential to the development of SWORD, a future explorer class charged-particle astronomical observatory.

--The Interplanetary NanoSpacecraft Pathfinder In Relevant Environment (INSPIRE) project, which will open deep-space heliophysics and planetary science to the CubeSat community by demonstrating functionality, communication, navigation and payload-hosting in interplanetary space on dual 3U CubeSats.

In the three previous rounds of the CubeSat initiative, NASA has selected 63 missions for flight. The agency's Launch Services Program Educational Launch of Nanosatellite (ELaNa) Program has launched 12 CubeSat missions. This year, 22 CubeSat missions are scheduled for flight.

For additional information on NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative program, visit:
http://go.nasa.gov/nXOuPI .

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

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Upcoming Educator Workshop: Our Solar System and the Periodic Table of Elements

Educator Workshop Feb. 26, 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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Monday, February 25, 2013

NASA Hosts Media Teleconference About Black Hole Studies

Thursday, February 21, 2013

NASA and JPL Contribute to European Jupiter Mission

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

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

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

News release: 2013-069 Feb. 21, 2013

NASA and JPL Contribute to European Jupiter Mission

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-069&cid=release_2013-069

NASA has selected key contributions to a 2022 European Space Agency (ESA) mission that will study Jupiter and three of its largest moons in unprecedented detail. The moons are thought to harbor vast water oceans beneath their icy surfaces.

NASA's contribution will consist of one U.S.-led science instrument and hardware for two European instruments to fly on ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission. Jeffrey Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will be the U.S. lead for the Radar for Icy Moon Exploration experiment. The radar experiment's principal investigator is Lorenzo Bruzzone of Universita degli Studi di Trento in Italy.

Under the lead of Bruzzone and the Italian Space Agency, JPL will provide the transmitter and receiver hardware for a radar sounder designed to penetrate the icy crust of Jupiter's moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto to a depth of about 5 miles (9 kilometers). This will allow scientists to see for the first time the underground structure of these tectonically complex and unique icy worlds.

JUICE will carry 11 experiments developed by scientific teams from 15 European countries, the United States and Japan.

The spacecraft will orbit Jupiter for three years and travel past Callisto and Europa multiple times, then orbit Ganymede, a moon larger than the planet Mercury. JUICE will conduct the first thorough exploration of Jupiter since NASA's Galileo mission from 1989-2003.

By studying the Jupiter system, JUICE will look to learn more about the formation and evolution of potentially habitable worlds in our solar system and beyond.

"NASA is thrilled to collaborate with ESA on this exciting mission to explore Jupiter and its icy moons," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science in Washington. "Working together with ESA and our other international partners is key to enabling future scientific progress in our quest to understand the cosmos."

The solar-powered spacecraft will carry cameras and spectrometers, a laser altimeter and an ice-penetrating radar instrument. The mission also will carry a magnetometer, plasma and particle monitors, and radio science hardware. The spacecraft is scheduled to arrive at the Jupiter system in 2030.

"The selection of JUICE's instruments is a key milestone in ESA's flagship mission to the outer solar system, which represents an unprecedented opportunity to showcase leading European technological and scientific expertise," said Alvaro Gimenez Canete, ESA's director of science and robotic exploration.

NASA invited researchers in 2012 to submit proposals for NASA-provided instruments for the mission. Nine were reviewed, with one selected to fly. NASA agreed to provide critical hardware for two of the 10 selected European-led instruments. NASA's total contribution to the JUICE mission is $100 million for design, development and operation of the instruments through 2033.

In addition to the radar team and instrument, the NASA contributions are:

-- Ultraviolet Spectrometer: The principal investigator is Randy Gladstone of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. This spectrometer will acquire images to explore the surfaces and atmospheres of Jupiter's icy moons and how they interact with the Jupiter environment. The instrument also will determine how Jupiter's upper atmosphere interacts with its lower atmosphere below, and the ionosphere and magnetosphere above. The instrument will provide images of the aurora on Jupiter and Ganymede.

-- Particle Environment Package: The principal investigator is Stas Barabash of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics. The U.S. lead is Pontus Brandt of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md. Under the lead of Barabash and the Swedish National Space Board, APL will provide instruments to this suite to measure the neutral material and plasma that are accelerated and heated to extreme levels in Jupiter's fierce and complex magnetic environment.

NASA's Science Mission Directorate conducts a wide variety of research and scientific exploration programs for Earth studies, space weather, the solar system and the universe. The New Frontiers Program Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., will manage the NASA contributions. JUICE is the first large-class mission in ESA's Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 Program.

For more information on NASA planetary programs, visit: http://www.nasa.gov .

For more information about the JUICE mission, visit: http://sci.esa.int/juice .

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Wednesday, February 20, 2013

CANCELED - Feb. 23 Informal Educator Workshop in Pomona

Informal Educator Workshop - CANCELED Feb. 20, 2013

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

Please note the Feb. 23 "Jewel of the Solar System" workshop at the NASA/JPL Educator Resource Center in Pomona, Calif., has been canceled and will be rescheduled for a later date. We apologize for the inconvenience. Informal and formal educator resources relating to Saturn can still be obtained from the Educator Resource Center in Pomona, Calif. To learn more and plan your visit, see: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/index.cfm?page=115.

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NASA Rover Confirms First Drilled Mars Rock Sample

NASA Hosts Teleconference Today About Curiosity Rover

NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Tiny Planet System

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

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

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

News release: 2013-066 Feb. 20, 2013

NASA's Kepler Mission Discovers Tiny Planet System

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-066&cid=release_2013-066

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Kepler mission scientists have discovered a new planetary system that is home to the smallest planet yet found around a star similar to our sun.

The planets are located in a system called Kepler-37, about 210 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. The smallest planet, Kepler-37b, is slightly larger than our moon, measuring about one-third the size of Earth. It is smaller than Mercury, which made its detection a challenge.

The moon-size planet and its two companion planets were found by scientists with NASA's Kepler mission, which is designed to find Earth-sized planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water might exist on the surface of an orbiting planet. However, while the star in Kepler-37 may be similar to our sun, the system appears quite unlike the solar system in which we live.

Astronomers think Kepler-37b does not have an atmosphere and cannot support life as we know it. The tiny planet almost certainly is rocky in composition. Kepler-37c, the closer neighboring planet, is slightly smaller than Venus, measuring almost three-quarters the size of Earth. Kepler-37d, the farther planet, is twice the size of Earth.

The first exoplanets found to orbit a normal star were giants. As technologies have advanced, smaller and smaller planets have been found, and Kepler has shown that even Earth-size exoplanets are common.

"Even Kepler can only detect such a tiny world around the brightest stars it observes," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "The fact we've discovered tiny Kepler-37b suggests such little planets are common, and more planetary wonders await as we continue to gather and analyze additional data."

Kepler-37's host star belongs to the same class as our sun, although it is slightly cooler and smaller. All three planets orbit the star at less than the distance Mercury is to the sun, suggesting they are very hot, inhospitable worlds. Kepler-37b orbits every 13 days at less than one-third Mercury's distance from the sun. The estimated surface temperature of this smoldering planet, at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit (700 degrees Kelvin), would be hot enough to melt the zinc in a penny. Kepler-37c and Kepler-37d, orbit every 21 days and 40 days, respectively.

"We uncovered a planet smaller than any in our solar system orbiting one of the few stars that is both bright and quiet, where signal detection was possible," said Thomas Barclay, Kepler scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Sonoma, Calif., and lead author of the new study published in the journal Nature. "This discovery shows close-in planets can be smaller, as well as much larger, than planets orbiting our sun."

The research team used data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, which simultaneously and continuously measures the brightness of more than 150,000 stars every 30 minutes. When a planet candidate transits, or passes, in front of the star from the spacecraft's vantage point, a percentage of light from the star is blocked. This causes a dip in the brightness of the starlight that reveals the transiting planet's size relative to its star.

The size of the star must be known in order to measure the planet's size accurately. To learn more about the properties of the star Kepler-37, scientists examined sound waves generated by the boiling motion beneath the surface of the star. They probed the interior structure of Kepler-37's star just as geologists use seismic waves generated by earthquakes to probe the interior structure of Earth. The science is called asteroseismology.

The sound waves travel into the star and bring information back up to the surface. The waves cause oscillations that Kepler observes as a rapid flickering of the star's brightness. Like bells in a steeple, small stars ring at high tones while larger stars boom in lower tones. The barely discernible, high-frequency oscillations in the brightness of small stars are the most difficult to measure. This is why most objects previously subjected to asteroseismic analysis are larger than the sun.

With the very high precision of the Kepler instrument, astronomers have reached a new milestone. The star Kepler-37, with a radius just three-quarters of the sun, now is the smallest bell in the asteroseismology steeple. The radius of the star is known to three percent accuracy, which translates to exceptional accuracy in the planet's size.

Ames is responsible for Kepler's ground system development, mission operations, and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission development.

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

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

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

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