Top Stories

Thursday, March 21, 2013

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 .

-end-

To remove yourself from this mailing, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=dkIRJcNVJnL4KeP1H&s=hrJWLYMBLdLIJXPHIrH&m=gpKTL1PAKaJMK9J

To remove yourself from all mailings from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=6nKDJROtHgKQIUOAF&s=hrJWLYMBLdLIJXPHIrH&m=gpKTL1PAKaJMK9J

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

NASA Voyager Status Update on Voyager 1 Location

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

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

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

-end-

To remove yourself from this mailing, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=dkLRIbMULlJVL4NYE&s=hrLWJYNBLdKIKXNHKrG&m=gpLTIWPqE8KOK8K

To remove yourself from all mailings from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=6nJDIQOsFeIHIKMxD&s=hrLWJYNBLdKIKXNHKrG&m=gpLTIWPqE8KOK8K

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Sees GRAIL's Explosive Farewell

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

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

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

-end-

To remove yourself from this mailing, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=6dJDLQOrEeJPKUNAG&s=jtI0L4MJIfIML3MPJtH&m=mlL5KgPUJnJ1JmK

To remove yourself from all mailings from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=9gLJIZPDLhIVI4MNF&s=jtI0L4MJIfIML3MPJtH&m=mlL5KgPUJnJ1JmK

Herschel Discovers Some of the Youngest Stars Ever Seen

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: 2013-102 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 .

-end-

To remove yourself from this mailing, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=8pLHLWPyHgLRIUMFE&s=mwL6LdNVIiKSIcO1KwE&m=ihIXK4NEKeKQLcK

To remove yourself from all mailings from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=bsJNI5MKJjKXJ4PSH&s=mwL6LdNVIiKSIcO1KwE&m=ihIXK4NEKeKQLcK

Monday, March 18, 2013

Curiosity Mars Rover Sees Trend in Water Presence

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

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

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

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 .

-end-

To remove yourself from this mailing, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=cjIPK7MOKhKRI8O1E&s=ffLSISPtEbIEJRNzEpG&m=irJXI1MEIiJLL6J

To remove yourself from all mailings from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=7eLFISOuEcKIKLPyB&s=ffLSISPtEbIEJRNzEpG&m=irJXI1MEIiJLL6J

Friday, March 15, 2013

Panorama From NASA Mars Rover Shows Mount Sharp

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91009 PHONE 818-354-5011
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

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

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 .

-end-

To remove yourself from this mailing, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=ctIPK6MRKhKUI9OVE&s=fpJSISOtHbKEJRPzEpF&m=ihIWK4NEJgJVIeL

To remove yourself from all mailings from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=fwKVKfN3IkI0KjN8G&s=fpJSISOtHbKEJRPzEpF&m=ihIWK4NEJgJVIeL

NASA TV News Conference to Discuss Planck Cosmology Findings

Thursday, March 14, 2013

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

-end-

To remove yourself from this mailing, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=6nJDINOtFeIJINMuD&s=jtK0J4OJIfJMK3NPLtG&m=ktL0L7MLJlJVKfI

To remove yourself from all mailings from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, please go to http://www.kintera.org/TR.asp?a=9gKJJWPFIhLPKXPHF&s=jtK0J4OJIfJMK3NPLtG&m=ktL0L7MLJlJVKfI