NASA Aids in Characterizing Super-Earth Atmosphere

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

NEWS RELEASE: 2010-404 Dec. 1, 2010

NASA AIDS IN CHARACTERIZING SUPER-EARTH ATMOSPHERE

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-404&cid=release_2010-404

PASADENA, Calif. -- A team of astronomers, including two NASA Sagan Fellows, has made
the first characterizations of a super-Earth's atmosphere, by using a ground-based
telescope. A super-Earth is a planet up to three times the size of Earth and weighing up to
10 times as much. The findings, reported in the Dec. 2 issue of the journal Nature, are a
significant milestone toward eventually being able to probe the atmospheres of Earth-like
planets for signs of life.

The team determined the planet, GJ 1214b, is either blanketed with a thin layer of water
steam or surrounded by a thick layer of high clouds. If the former, the planet itself would
have an icy composition. If the latter, the planet would be rocky or similar to the
composition of Neptune, though much smaller.

"This is the first super-Earth known to have an atmosphere," said Jacob Bean, a NASA
Sagan Fellow and astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in
Cambridge, Mass. "But even with these new measurements, we can't say yet what that
atmosphere is made of. This world is being very shy and veiling its true nature from us."

GJ 1214b, first discovered in December 2009, is 2.7 times the size of Earth and 6.5 times
as massive. Previous observations of the planet's size and mass demonstrated it has a low
density for its size, leading astronomers to conclude the planet is some kind of solid body
with an atmosphere.

The planet orbits close to its dim star, at a distance of 0.014 astronomical units. An
astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the sun, approximately 93 million
miles. GJ 1214b circles too close to its star to be habitable by any life forms.

Bean and his team observed infrared light as the planet crossed in front of its star. During
such transits, the star's light filters through the atmosphere. Gases absorb the starlight at
particular wavelengths, leaving behind chemical fingerprints detectable from Earth. This
same type of technique has been used to study the atmospheres of distant "hot Jupiters,"
or Jupiter-like planets orbiting close to their stars, and found gases like hydrogen,
methane and sodium vapor.

In the case of the super-Earth, no chemical fingerprints were detected; however, this
doesn't mean there are no chemicals present. Instead, this information ruled out some
possibilities for GJ 1214b's atmosphere, and narrowed the scope to either an atmosphere
of water steam or high clouds. Astronomers believe it's more likely the atmosphere is too
thin around the planet to let enough light filter through and reveal chemical fingerprints.

"A steamy atmosphere would have to be very dense – about one-fifth water vapor by
volume -- compared to our Earth, with an atmosphere that's four-fifths nitrogen and one-
fifth oxygen with only a touch of water vapor," Bean said. "During the next year, we
should have some solid answers about what this planet is truly like."

The team, which included Bean's co-authors -- Eliza Miller-Ricci Kempton, a NASA Sagan
Fellow at the University of California in Santa Cruz, and Derek Homeier of the Institute for
Astrophysics in Gottingen, Germany -- examined GJ 1214b using the ground-based Very
Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile.

"This is an important step forward, narrowing our understanding of the atmosphere of
this planet," said NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program Scientist Douglas Hudgins at NASA
Headquarters in Washington. "Bizarre worlds like this make exoplanet science one of the
most compelling areas in astrophysics today."

The Sagan Fellowship Program is administered by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at
the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Its purpose is to advance the scientific
and technical goals of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program. The program is managed
for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Caltech manages JPL for
NASA.

More information about NASA's planet-finding missions is online
at; http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov . More information about NASA's Sagan Fellowship
Program is at http://nexsci.caltech.edu/sagan .

-end-

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

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

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Cassini Finds Warm Cracks on Enceladus

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 818-354-0474
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
jccook@jpl.nasa.gov

Nancy Neal Jones/Elizabeth Zubritsky 301-286-0039/301-614-5438
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
nancy.n.jones@nasa.gov/elizabeth.a.zubritsky@nasa.gov

Image advisory: 2010-402 November 30, 2010

Cassini Finds Warm Cracks on Enceladus

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-402&cid=release_2010-402

PASADENA, Calif. – New images and data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft give scientists a
unique Saturn-lit view of active fissures through the south polar region of Saturn's moon
Enceladus. They reveal a more complicated web of warm fractures than previously thought.

The new images are available at: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Scientists working jointly with Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer and its high-
resolution imaging camera have constructed the highest-resolution heat intensity maps yet of
the hottest part of a region of long fissures spraying water vapor and icy particles from
Enceladus. These fissures have been nicknamed "tiger stripes." Additional high-resolution
spectrometer maps of one end of the tiger stripes Alexandria Sulcus and Cairo Sulcus reveal
never-before-seen warm fractures that branch off like split ends from the main tiger stripe
trenches. They also show an intriguing warm spot isolated from other active surface fissures.

"The ends of the tiger stripes may be the places where the activity is just getting started, or is
winding down, so the complex patterns of heat we see there may give us clues to the life cycle
of tiger stripes," said John Spencer, a Cassini team scientist based at Southwest Research
Institute in Boulder, Colo.

The images and maps come from the Aug. 13, 2010, Enceladus flyby, Cassini's last remote
sensing flyby of the moon until 2015. The geometry of the many flybys between now and
2015 will not allow Cassini to do thermal scans like these, because the spacecraft will be too
close to scan the surface and will not view the south pole. This Enceladus flyby, the 11th of
Cassini's tour, also gave Cassini its last look at any part of the active south polar region in
sunlight.

The highest-resolution spectrometer scan examined the hottest part of the entire tiger stripe
system, part of the fracture called Damascus Sulcus. Scientists used the scan to measure
fracture temperatures up to190 Kelvin (minus 120 degrees Fahrenheit). This temperature
appears slightly higher than previously measured temperatures at Damascus, which were
around 170 Kelvin (minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit).

Spencer said he isn't sure if this tiger stripe is just more active than it was the last time
Cassini's spectrometer scanned it, in 2008, or if the hottest part of the tiger stripe is so narrow
that previous scans averaged its temperature out over a larger area. In any case, the new scan
had such good resolution, showing details as small as 800 meters (2,600 feet), that scientists
could see for the first time warm material flanking the central trench of Damascus, cooling off
quickly away from the trench. The Damascus thermal scan also shows large variations in heat
output within a few kilometers along the length of the fracture. This unprecedented resolution
will help scientists understand how the tiger stripes deliver heat to the surface of Enceladus.

Cassini acquired the thermal map of Damascus simultaneously with a visible-light image
where the tiger stripe is lit by sunlight reflecting off Saturn. The visible-light and thermal data
were merged to help scientists understand the relationships between physical heat processes
and surface geology.

"Our high-resolution images show that this section of Damascus Sulcus is among the most
structurally complex and tectonically dynamic of the tiger stripes," said imaging science team
associate Paul Helfenstein of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Some details in the appearance
of the landforms, such as a peculiar pattern of curving striations along the flanks of Damascus,
had not previously been noticed in ordinary sunlit images.

The day after the Enceladus flyby, Cassini swooped by the icy moon Tethys, collecting
images that helped fill in gaps in the Tethys global map. Cassini's new views of the heavily
cratered moon will help scientists understand how tectonic forces, impact cratering, and
perhaps even ancient resurfacing events have shaped the moon's appearance.

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 in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission
Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed,
developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science
Institute in Boulder, Colo. The composite infrared spectrometer team is based at NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., where the instrument was built.

More details are also available at the imaging team's website http://ciclops.org and the
composite infrared spectrometer team's website http://cirs.gsfc.nasa.gov .

Additional contact: Joe Mason, Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
720-974-5859 or jmason@ciclops.org .

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Mars Rover Construction Webcam Tops Million Viewers

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

Guy Webster 818-354-6278 / Veronica McGregor 818-354-9452
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov / veronica.c.mcgregor@jpl.nasa.gov

News release: 2010-401 Nov. 30, 2010

Mars Rover Construction Webcam Tops Million Viewers

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-401&cid=release_2010-401

PASADENA, Calif. -- More than one million people have watched assembly and testing of
NASA's next Mars rover via a live webcam since it went online in October.

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, also known as the Curiosity rover, is being tested and
assembled in a clean room at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The
webcam, affectionately dubbed "Curiosity Cam," shows engineers and technicians clad in head-
to-toe white smocks working on the rover.

Metrics from the webcam's hosting platform, Ustream, showed more than one million unique
viewers spent more than 400,000 hours watching Curiosity Cam between Oct. 21 and Nov. 23.
There have been more than 2.3 million viewer sessions.

The camera is mounted in the viewing gallery of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at JPL. While
the gallery is a regular stop on JPL's public tour, Curiosity Cam allows visitors from around the
world to see NASA engineers at work without traveling to Pasadena.

Viewers from Chile, Japan, Turkey, Spain, Mexico and the United Kingdom have sent good
wishes and asked questions in the chat box that accompanies the Curiosity Cam webstream. At
scheduled times, viewers can interact with each other and JPL staff. The chat schedule is
updated weekdays at http://www.ustream.tv/nasajpl .

Months of assembly and testing remain before the car-sized rover is ready for launch from Cape
Canaveral, Fla. The rover and spacecraft components will ship to NASA's Kennedy Space Center
in Florida next spring. The launch will occur between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18, 2011. Curiosity will
arrive on Mars in August 2012.

The rover is one of the most technologically challenging interplanetary missions ever designed.
Curiosity is engineered to drive longer distances over rougher terrain than previous Mars rovers.
It will carry a science payload 10 times the mass of instruments on NASA's Spirit and
Opportunity rovers. Curiosity will investigate whether the landing region had environments
favorable for supporting microbial life. It will also look for environments that have been
favorable for preserving evidence about whether life existed.

Continuous live video of rover construction is available at:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasajpl ,
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/building_curiosity.html and
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/whereistherovernow/ .

For information and news about Curiosity, visit http://www.nasa.gov/msl .

Social media audiences can learn more about the mission on Twitter at and Facebook at
http://www.twitter.com/MarsCuriosity and http://www.facebook.com/MarsCuriosity .

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Spain Supplies Weather Station for Next Mars Rover

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

NEWS FEATURE: 2010-400 Nov. 30, 2010

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

Spain Supplies Weather Station for Next Mars Rover

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-400&cid=release_2010-400

The first instrument from Spain for a mission to Mars will provide daily weather reports from the
Red Planet. Expect extremes.

Major goals for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory include assessing the modern environment in its
landing area, as well as clues to environments billions of years ago. The environment station from
Spain will fill a central role in studying modern conditions by measuring daily and seasonal changes.

The Rover Environmental Monitoring Station, or REMS, is one of 10 instruments in the mission's
science payload. REMS uses sensors on the mast, on the deck and inside the body of the mission's
car-size rover, Curiosity. Spain's Ministry of Science and Innovation and Spain's Center for
Industrial Technology Development supplied the instrument. Components were installed on
Curiosity in September and are being tested at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

While most of Curiosity's electronics are sheltered for some protection from the Martian
environment, the team that developed and built the environmental station needed to fashion
external sensors that could tolerate the temperature extremes that some of them would be
monitoring.

"That was our biggest engineering challenge," said REMS Principal Investigator Javier Gómez-
Elvira, an aeronautical engineer with the Centro de Astrobiología, Madrid, Spain. "The sensors will
get very cold and go through great changes in temperature every day." The Center for
Astrobiology is affiliated with the Spanish National Research Council and the National Institute for
Aerospace Technology.

The air temperature around the rover mast will likely drop to about minus 130 degrees Celsius
(about minus 202 degrees Fahrenheit) some winter nights and climb to about minus 50 C (about
minus 60 F) by 12 hours later. On warmer days, afternoon air temperatures could reach a balmy 10
to 30 C (50 to 86 F), depending on which landing site is selected.

Other challenges have included accounting for how the rover itself perturbs air movement, and
keeping the entire weather station's mass to just 1.3 kilograms (2.9 pounds).

The instrument will record wind speed, wind direction, air pressure, relative humidity, air
temperature and ground temperature, plus one variable that has not been measured by any previous
weather station on the surface of Mars: ultraviolet radiation. Operational plans call for taking
measurements for five minutes every hour of the 23-month-long mission. Twenty-three months is
equal to approximately one Martian year.

Monitoring ground temperature and ultraviolet radiation along with other weather data will
contribute to understanding the Martian climate and will aid the mission's assessment of whether the
current environment around the rover has conditions favorable for microbial life.

"It is important to know the temperature and humidity right at ground level," said Gómez-Elvira.
Humidity at the landing sites will be extremely low, but knowing daily humidity cycles at ground
level could help researchers understand the interaction of water vapor between the soil and the
atmosphere. If the environment supports, or ever supported, any underground microbes, that
interaction could be key.

Ultraviolet radiation can also affect habitability. For example, germ-killing ultraviolet lamps are
commonly used to help maintain sterile conditions for medical and research equipment. The
ultraviolet sensor Curiosity's deck measures six different wavelength bands in the ultraviolet portion
of the spectrum, including wavelengths also monitored from above by NASA's Mars
Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The weather station will help extend years of synergy between missions that study Mars from orbit
and missions on the surface.

"We will gain information about whether local conditions are favorable for habitability, and we will
also contribute to understanding the global atmosphere of Mars," said Gómez-Elvira. "The
circulation models of the Mars atmosphere are based mainly on observations by orbiters. Our
measurements will provide a way to verify and improve the models."

For example, significant fractions of the Martian atmosphere freeze onto the ground as a south polar
carbon-dioxide ice cap during southern winter and as a north polar carbon-dioxide ice cap in
northern winter, returning to the atmosphere in each hemisphere's spring. At Curiosity's landing site
far from either pole, REMS will check whether seasonal patterns of changing air pressure fit the
existing models for effects of the coming and going of polar carbon-dioxide ice.

The sensor for air pressure, developed for REMS by the Finnish Meteorological Institute, uses a
dust-shielded opening on Curiosity's deck. The most conspicuous components of the weather station
are two fingers extending horizontally from partway up the rover's remote-sensing mast. Each of
these two REMS mini-booms holds three electronic sensors for detecting air movement in three
dimensions. Placement of the booms at an angle of 120 degrees from each other enables calculating
the velocity of wind without worrying about the main mast blocking the wind. One mini-boom also
holds the humidity sensor; the other a set of directional infrared sensors for measuring ground
temperature.

To develop REMS and prepare for analyzing the data it will provide, Spain has assembled a team of
about 40 researchers -- engineers and scientists. The team plans to post daily Mars weather reports
online.

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Thin Air: Cassini Finds Ethereal Atmosphere at Rhea

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

Feature: 2010-399 Nov. 29, 2010

Thin Air: Cassini Finds Ethereal Atmosphere at Rhea

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-399&cid=release_2010-399

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has detected a very tenuous atmosphere known as an
exosphere, infused with oxygen and carbon dioxide around Saturn's icy moon
Rhea. This is the first time a spacecraft has directly captured molecules of an
oxygen atmosphere – albeit a very thin one -- at a world other than Earth.

The oxygen appears to arise when Saturn's magnetic field rotates over Rhea.
Energetic particles trapped in the planet's magnetic field pepper the moon's water-
ice surface. They cause chemical reactions that decompose the surface and release
oxygen. The source of the carbon dioxide is less certain.

Oxygen at Rhea's surface is estimated to be about 5 trillion times less dense than
what we have at Earth. But the new results show that surface decomposition could
contribute abundant molecules of oxygen, leading to surface densities roughly 100
times greater than the exospheres of either Earth's moon or Mercury. The
formation of oxygen and carbon dioxide could possibly drive complex chemistry
on the surfaces of many icy bodies in the universe.

"The new results suggest that active, complex chemistry involving oxygen may be
quite common throughout the solar system and even our universe," said lead
author Ben Teolis, a Cassini team scientist based at Southwest Research Institute in
San Antonio. "Such chemistry could be a prerequisite for life. All evidence from
Cassini indicates that Rhea is too cold and devoid of the liquid water necessary for
life as we know it."

Releasing oxygen through surface irradiation could help generate conditions
favorable for life at an icy body other than Rhea that has liquid water under the
surface, Teolis said. If the oxygen and carbon dioxide from the surface could
somehow get transported down to a sub-surface ocean, that would provide a much
more hospitable environment for more complex compounds and life to form.
Scientists are keen to investigate whether life on icy moons with an ocean is
possible, though they have not yet detected it.

The tenuous atmosphere with oxygen and carbon dioxide makes Rhea, Saturn's
second largest moon, unique in the Saturnian system. Titan has a thick nitrogen-
methane atmosphere, but very little carbon dioxide and oxygen.

"Rhea is turning out to be much more interesting than we had imagined," said
Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif. "The Cassini finding highlights the rich diversity of Saturn's moons
and gives us clues on how they formed and evolved."

Scientists had suspected Rhea could have a thin atmosphere with oxygen and
carbon dioxide, based on remote observations of Jupiter's icy moons by NASA's
Galileo spacecraft and Hubble Space Telescope. Other Cassini observations
detected oxygen escaping from icy Saturn ring particles after ultraviolet
bombardment. But Cassini was able to detect oxygen and carbon dioxide in the
exosphere directly because of how close it flew to Rhea – 101 kilometers, or 63
miles – and its special suite of instruments.

In the new study, scientists combined data from Cassini's ion and neutral mass
spectrometer and the Cassini plasma spectrometer during flybys on Nov. 26, 2005,
Aug. 30, 2007, and March 2, 2010. The ion and neutral mass spectrometer "tasted"
peak densities of oxygen of around 50 billion molecules per cubic meter (1 billion
molecules per cubic foot). It detected peak densities of carbon dioxide of around
20 billion molecules per cubic meter (about 600 million molecules per cubic foot).

The plasma spectrometer saw clear signatures of flowing streams of positive and
negative ions, with masses that corresponded to ions of oxygen and carbon
dioxide.

"How exactly the carbon dioxide is released is still a puzzle," said co-author Geraint
Jones, a Cassini team scientist based at University College London in the U.K. "But
with Cassini's diverse suite of instruments observing Rhea from afar, as well as
sniffing the gas surrounding it, we hope to solve the puzzle."

The carbon dioxide may be the result of "dry ice" trapped from the primordial
solar nebula, as is the case with comets, or it may be due to similar irradiation
processes operating on the organic molecules trapped in the water ice of Rhea.
The carbon dioxide could also come from carbon-rich materials deposited by tiny
meteors that bombarded Rhea's surface.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space
Agency, and the Italian Space Agency. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena,
Calif., a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the
mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini
orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The ion and neutral mass
spectrometer team and the Cassini plasma spectrometer team are based at
Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio.

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

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Stripes Are Back in Season on Jupiter

MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
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RELEASE: 2010-397 Nov. 24, 2010

Stripes Are Back in Season on Jupiter

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-397&cid=release_2010-397

PASADENA, Calif. – New NASA images support findings that one of Jupiter's stripes
that "disappeared" last spring is now showing signs of a comeback. These new
observations will help scientists better understand the interaction between Jupiter's winds
and cloud chemistry.

Earlier this year, amateur astronomers noticed that a longstanding dark-brown stripe,
known as the South Equatorial Belt, just south of Jupiter's equator, had turned white. In
early November, amateur astronomer Christopher Go of Cebu City, Philippines, saw an
unusually bright spot in the white area that was once the dark stripe. This phenomenon
piqued the interest of scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.,
and elsewhere.

After follow-up observations in Hawaii with NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility, the
W.M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory telescope, scientists now believe
the vanished dark stripe is making a comeback.

First-glimpse images of the re-appearing stripe are online at:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/jupiter20101124-i.html .

"The reason Jupiter seemed to 'lose' this band – camouflaging itself among the
surrounding white bands – is that the usual downwelling winds that are dry and keep the
region clear of clouds died down," said Glenn Orton, a research scientist at JPL. "One of
the things we were looking for in the infrared was evidence that the darker material
emerging to the west of the bright spot was actually the start of clearing in the cloud
deck, and that is precisely what we saw."

This white cloud deck is made up of white ammonia ice. When the white clouds float at a
higher altitude, they obscure the missing brown material, which floats at a lower altitude.
Every few decades or so, the South Equatorial Belt turns completely white for perhaps
one to three years, an event that has puzzled scientists for decades. This extreme change
in appearance has only been seen with the South Equatorial Belt, making it unique to
Jupiter and the entire solar system.

The white band wasn't the only change on the big, gaseous planet. At the same time,
Jupiter's Great Red Spot became a darker red color. Orton said the color of the spot – a
giant storm on Jupiter that is three times the size of Earth and a century or more old – will
likely brighten a bit again as the South Equatorial Belt makes its comeback.

The South Equatorial Belt underwent a slight brightening, known as a "fade," just as
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft was flying by on its way to Pluto in 2007. Then there
was a rapid "revival" of its usual dark color three to four months later. The last full fade
and revival was a double-header event, starting with a fade in 1989, revival in 1990, then
another fade and revival in 1993. Similar fades and revivals have been captured visually
and photographically back to the early 20th century, and they are likely to be a long-term
phenomenon in Jupiter's atmosphere.

Scientists are particularly interested in observing this latest event because it's the first
time they've been able to use modern instruments to determine the details of the chemical
and dynamical changes of this phenomenon. Observing this event carefully may help to
refine the scientific questions to be posed by NASA's Juno spacecraft, due to arrive at
Jupiter in 2016, and a larger, proposed mission to orbit Jupiter and explore its satellite
Europa after 2020.

The event also signifies another close collaboration between professional and amateur
astronomers. The amateurs, located worldwide, are often well equipped with
instrumentation and are able to track the rapid developments of planets in the solar
system. These amateurs are collaborating with professionals to pursue further studies of
the changes that are of great value to scientists and researchers everywhere.

"I was fortunate to catch the outburst," said Christopher Go, referring to the first signs
that the band was coming back. "I had a meeting that evening and it went late. I caught
the outburst just in time as it was rising. Had I imaged earlier, I would not have caught
it," he said. Go, who also conducts in the physics department at the University of San
Carlos, Cebu City, Philippines, witnessed the disappearance of the stripe earlier this year,
and in 2007 he was the first to catch the stripe's return. "I was able to catch it early this
time around because I knew exactly what to look for."

NASA's Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena manages time allocation on the Keck telescope for NASA. Caltech manages
JPL for NASA.

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

-end-

Priscilla Vega/Jia-Rui Cook 818-354-1357/354-0850
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
priscilla.r.vega@jpl.nasa.gov / Jia-Rui.C.Cook@jpl.nasa.gov

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Astronomers Probe 'Sandbar' Between Islands of Galaxies

Feature Nov. 24, 2010

Astronomers Probe 'Sandbar' Between Islands of Galaxies

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-396&cid=release_2010-396

Astronomers have caught sight of an unusual galaxy that has illuminated new details about a
celestial "sandbar" connecting two massive islands of galaxies. The research was conducted in part
with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

These "sandbars," or filaments, are known to span vast distances between galaxy clusters and form a
lattice-like structure known as the cosmic web. Though immense, these filaments are difficult to see
and study in detail. Two years ago, Spitzer's infrared eyes revealed that one such intergalactic
filament containing star-forming galaxies ran between the galaxy clusters called Abell 1763 and
Abell 1770.

Now these observations have been bolstered by the discovery, inside this same filament, of a galaxy
that has a rare boomerang shape and unusual light emissions. Hot gas is sweeping the wandering
galaxy into this shape as it passes through the filament, presenting a new way to gauge the filament's
particle density. Researchers hope that other such galaxies with oddly curved profiles could serve as
signposts for the faint threads, which in turn signify regions ripe for forming stars.

"These filaments are integral to the evolution of galaxy clusters -- among the biggest gravitationally
bound objects in the universe -- as well as the creation of new generations of stars," said Louise
Edwards, a postdoctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and lead
author of a study detailing the findings in the Dec. 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Her
collaborators are Dario Fadda, also at Caltech, and Dave Frayer from the National Science
Foundation's National Radio Astronomy Observatory, based in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Blowing in the cosmic breeze

Astronomers spotted the bent galaxy about 11 million light-years away from the center of the galaxy
cluster Abell 1763 during follow-up observations with the WIYN Observatory near Tucson, Ariz.,
and radio-wave observations by the Very Large Array near Socorro, N.M. The WIYN Observatory
is named after the consortium that owns and operates it, which includes the University of
Wisconsin, Indiana University, Yale University, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatories.

The galaxy has an unusual ratio of radio to infrared light, as measured by the Very Large Array and
Spitzer, making it stand out like a beacon. This is due in part to the galaxy having twin jets of
material spewing in opposite directions from a supermassive black hole at its center. These jets have
puffed out into giant lobes of material that emit a tremendous amount of radio waves.

Edwards and her colleagues noticed that these lobes appear to be bent back and away from the
galaxy's trajectory through the filament. This bow shape, the astronomers reasoned, is due to
particles in the filament pushing on the gas and dust in the lobes.

By measuring the angle of the arced lobes, Edwards' team calculated the pressure exerted by the
filaments' particles and then determined the density of the medium. The method is somewhat like
looking at streamers on a kite soaring overhead to judge the wind strength and the thickness of the
air.

According to the data, the density inside this filament is indeed about 100 times the average density
of the universe. This value agrees with that obtained in a previous X-ray study of filaments and also
nicely matches predictions of supercomputer simulations.

Interconnected superclusters

Galaxies tend to bunch together as great islands in the void of space, called galaxy clusters. These
galaxy groupings themselves often keep company with other clusters in "superclusters" that loom as
gargantuan, gravitationally associated walls of galaxies. These structures evolved from denser
patches of material as the universe rapidly expanded after the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago.

The clumps and threads of this primordial matter eventually cooled, and some of it has condensed
into the galaxies we see today. The leftover gas is strewn in filaments between galaxy clusters.

Much of it is still quite hot -- about one million degrees Celsius (1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit) --
and blazes in high-energy X-rays that permeate galaxy clusters. Filaments are therefore best
detected in X-ray light, and one direct density reading of the strands has previously been obtained
in this band of frequencies.

But the X-ray-emitting gas in filaments is much more diffuse and weak than in clusters, just as
submerged sandbars are extremely hard to spot at sea compared to islands poking above the water.

Therefore, obtaining quality observations of filaments is time-consuming with current space
observatories.

The technique by Edwards and her colleagues, which uses radio frequencies that can reach a host of
ground-based telescopes, points to an easier way to probe the interiors of galaxy-cluster filaments.
Instead of laboring to find subtle X-rays clues, astronomers could trust these arced "lighthouse" galaxies to indicate just where cosmic filaments lie.

Knowing how much material these filaments contain and how they interact with galaxy clusters will
be very important for understanding the overall evolution of the universe, Edwards said.

The Spitzer observations were made before it ran out of its liquid coolant in May 2009 and began its
warm mission.

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

Written by Adam Hadhazy

Media Contact:

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

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Tuning an 'Ear' to the Music of Gravitational Waves

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

Feature: 2010-394 Nov. 23, 2010

Tuning an 'Ear' to the Music of Gravitational Waves

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-394&cid=release_2010-394

A team of scientists and engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has brought the
world one step closer to "hearing" gravitational waves -- ripples in space and time
predicted by Albert Einstein in the early 20th century.

The research, performed in a lab at JPL in Pasadena, Calif., tested a system of lasers that
would fly aboard the proposed space mission called Laser Interferometer Space Antenna,
or LISA. The mission's goal is to detect the subtle, whisper-like signals of gravitational
waves, which have yet to be directly observed. This is no easy task, and many challenges
lie ahead.

The new JPL tests hit one significant milestone, demonstrating for the first time that
noise, or random fluctuations, in LISA's laser beams can be hushed enough to hear the
sweet sounds of the elusive waves.

"In order to detect gravitational waves, we have to make extremely precise
measurements," said Bill Klipstein, a physicist at JPL. "Our lasers are much noisier than
what we want to measure, so we have to remove that noise carefully to get a clear signal;
it's a little like listening for a feather to drop in the middle of a heavy rainstorm."
Klipstein is a co-author of a paper about the lab tests that appeared in a recent issue of
Physical Review Letters.

The JPL team is one of many groups working on LISA, a joint European Space Agency
and NASA mission proposal, which, if selected, would launch in 2020 or later. In August
of this year, LISA was given a high recommendation by the 2010 U.S. National Research
Council decadal report on astronomy and astrophysics.

One of LISA's primary goals is to detect gravitational waves directly. Studies of these
cosmic waves began in earnest decades ago when, in 1974, researchers discovered a pair
of orbiting dead stars -- a type called pulsars -- that were spiraling closer and closer
together due to an unexplainable loss of energy. That energy was later shown to be in the
form of gravitational waves. This was the first indirect proof of the waves, and ultimately
earned the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics.

LISA is expected to not only "hear" the waves, but also learn more about their sources --
massive objects such as black holes and dead stars, which sing the waves like melodies
out to the universe as the objects accelerate through space and time. The mission would
be able to detect gravitational waves from massive objects in our Milky Way galaxy as
well as distant galaxies, allowing scientists to tune into an entirely new language of our
universe.

The proposed mission would amount to a giant triangle of three distinct spacecraft, each
connected by laser beams. These spacecraft would fly in formation around the sun, about
20 degrees behind Earth. Each one would hold a cube made of platinum and gold that
floats freely in space. As gravitational waves pass by the spacecraft, they would cause the
distance between the cubes, or test masses, to change by almost imperceptible amounts --
but enough for LISA's extremely sensitive instruments to be able to detect corresponding
changes in the connecting laser beams.

"The gravitational waves will cause the 'corks' to bob around, but just by a tiny bit," said
Glenn de Vine, a research scientist and co-author of the recent study at JPL. "My friend
once said it's sort of like rubber duckies bouncing around in a bathtub."

The JPL team has spent the last six years working on aspects of this LISA technology,
including instruments called phase meters, which are sophisticated laser beam detectors.
The latest research accomplishes one of their main goals -- to reduce the laser noise
detected by the phase meters by one billion times, or enough to detect the signal of
gravitational waves.

The job is like trying to find a proton in a haystack. Gravitational waves would change
the distance between two spacecraft -- which are flying at 5 million kilometers (3.1
million miles) apart -- by about a picometer, which is about 100 million times smaller than
the width of a human hair. In other words, the spacecraft are 5,000,000,000 meters apart,
and LISA would detect changes in that distance on the order of .000000000005 meters!

At the heart of the LISA laser technology is a process known as interferometry, which
ultimately reveals if the distances traveled by the laser beams of light, and thus the
distance between the three spacecraft, have changed due to gravitational waves. The
process is like combining ocean waves -- sometimes they pile up and grow bigger, and
sometimes they cancel each other out or diminish in size.

"We can't use a tape measure to get the distances between these spacecraft," said de Vine,
"So we use lasers. The wavelengths of the lasers are like our tick marks on a tape
measure."

On LISA, the laser light is detected by the phase meters and then sent to the ground,
where it is "interfered" via data processing (the process is called time-delay interferometry
for this reason -- there's a delay before the interferometry technique is applied). If the
interference pattern between the laser beams is the same, then that means the spacecraft
haven't moved relative to each other. If the interference pattern changes, then they did. If
all other reasons for spacecraft movement have been eliminated, then gravitational waves
are the culprit.

That's the basic idea. In reality, there are a host of other factors that make this process
more complex. For one thing, the spacecraft don't stay put. They naturally move around
for reasons that have nothing to do with gravitational waves. Another challenge is the
laser beam noise. How do you know if the spacecraft moved because of gravitational
waves, or if noise in the laser is just making it seem as if the spacecraft moved?

This is the question the JPL team recently took to their laboratory, which mimics the
LISA system. They introduced random, artificial noise into their lasers and then, through
a complicated set of data processing actions, subtracted most of it back out. Their recent
success demonstrated that they could see changes in the distances between mock
spacecraft on the order of a picometer.

In essence, they hushed the roar of the laser beams, so that LISA, if selected for
construction, will be able to hear the universe softly hum a tune of gravitational waves.

Other authors of the paper from JPL are Brent Ware; Kirk McKenzie; Robert E. Spero
and Daniel A. Shaddock, who has a joint post with JPL and the Australian National
University in Canberra.

LISA is a proposed joint NASA and European Space Agency mission. The NASA
portion of the mission is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt,
Md. Some of the key instrumentation studies for the mission are being performed at JPL.
The U.S. mission scientist is Tom Prince at the California Institute of Technology in
Pasadena. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.

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NASA Study Finds Earth's Lakes are Warming

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

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

Steve Cole 202-358-0918
NASA Headquarters, Washington
Stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov

NEWS RELEASE: 2010-393 Nov. 23, 2010

NASA Study Finds Earth's Lakes are Warming

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-393&cid=release_2010-393

PASADENA, Calif. – In the first comprehensive global survey of temperature trends in major lakes,
NASA researchers determined Earth's largest lakes have warmed during the past 25 years in response
to climate change.

Researchers Philipp Schneider and Simon Hook of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
Calif., used satellite data to measure the surface temperatures of 167 large lakes worldwide.

They reported an average warming rate of 0.45 degrees Celsius (0.81 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade,
with some lakes warming as much as 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade. The
warming trend was global, and the greatest increases were in the mid- to high-latitudes of the
Northern Hemisphere.

"Our analysis provides a new, independent data source for assessing the impact of climate change
over land around the world," said Schneider, lead author of the study published this week in the
journal Geophysical Research Letters. "The results have implications for lake ecosystems, which can
be adversely affected by even small water temperature changes."

Small changes in water temperature can result in algal blooms that can make a lake toxic to fish or
result in the introduction of non-native species that change the lake's natural ecosystem.

Scientists have long used air temperature measurements taken near Earth's surface to compute
warming trends. More recently, scientists have supplemented these measurements with thermal
infrared satellite data that can be used to provide a comprehensive, accurate view of how surface
temperatures are changing worldwide.

The NASA researchers used thermal infrared imagery from National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration and European Space Agency satellites. They focused on summer temperatures (July to
September in the Northern Hemisphere and January to March in the Southern Hemisphere) because of
the difficulty in collecting data in seasons when lakes are ice-covered and/or often hidden by clouds.
Only nighttime data were used in the study.

The bodies studied were selected from a global database of lakes and wetlands based on size
(typically at least 500 square kilometers – 193 square miles – or larger) or other unique characteristics
of scientific merit. The selected lakes also had to have large surface areas located away from
shorelines, so land influences did not interfere with the measurements. Satellite lake data were
collected from the point farthest from any shoreline.

The largest and most consistent area of warming was northern Europe. The warming trend was
slightly weaker in southeastern Europe, around the Black and Caspian seas and Kazakhstan. The
trends increased slightly farther east in Siberia, Mongolia and northern China.

In North America, trends were slightly higher in the southwest United States than in the Great Lakes
region. Warming was weaker in the tropics and in the mid-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere. The
results were consistent with the expected changes associated with global warming.

The satellite temperature trends largely agreed with trends measured by nine buoys in the Great
Lakes, Earth's largest group of freshwater lakes in terms of total surface area and volume.

The lake temperature trends were also in agreement with independent surface air temperature data
from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. In certain regions, such as the Great
Lakes and northern Europe, water bodies appear to be warming more quickly than surrounding air
temperature.

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

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

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NASA Mars Rover Images Honor Apollo 12

Feature Nov. 18, 2010

NASA Mars Rover Images Honor Apollo 12

The full version of this story with accompanying images is at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-388&cid=release_2010-388

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has visited and
photographed two craters informally named for the spacecraft that carried men to the moon
41 years ago this week.

Opportunity drove past "Yankee Clipper" crater on Nov. 4 and reached "Intrepid crater" on
Nov. 9. For NASA's Apollo 12, the second mission to put humans onto the moon, the
command and service module was called Yankee Clipper, piloted by Dick Gordon, and the
lunar module was named Intrepid, piloted by Alan Bean and commanded by the late Pete
Conrad. The Intrepid landed on the moon with Bean and Conrad on Nov. 19, 1969, while
Yankee Clipper orbited overhead. Their landing came a mere four months after Apollo 11's
first lunar landing.

This week, Bean wrote to the Mars Exploration Rover team: "I just talked with Dick Gordon
about the wonderful honor you have bestowed upon our Apollo 12 spacecraft. Forty-one
years ago today, we were approaching the moon in Yankee Clipper with Intrepid in tow. We
were excited to have the opportunity to perform some important exploration of a place in the
universe other than planet Earth where humans had not gone before. We were anxious to give
it our best effort. You and your team have that same opportunity. Give it your best effort."

Rover science team member James Rice, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, Md., suggested using the Apollo 12 names. He was applying the rover team's
convention of using names of historic ships of exploration for the informal names of craters
that Opportunity sees in the Meridian Planum region of Mars.

"The Apollo missions were so inspiring when I was young, I remember all the dates. When
we were approaching these craters, I realized we were getting close to the Nov. 19
anniversary for Apollo 12," Rice said. He sent Bean and Gordon photographs that
Opportunity took of the two craters.

The images are available online at http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA13593 and
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA13596. Intrepid crater is about 20 meters (66
feet) in diameter. Yankee Clipper crater is about half that width.

After a two-day stop to photograph the rocks exposed at Intrepid, Opportunity continued on
a long-term trek toward Endeavour crater, a highly eroded crater about 1,000 times wider
than Intrepid. Endeavour's name comes from the ship of James Cook's first Pacific voyage.

During a drive of 116.9 meters (383.5 feet) on Nov. 14, Opportunity's "odometer" passed 25
kilometers (15.53 miles). That is more than 40 times the driving-distance goal set for
Opportunity to accomplish during its original three-month prime mission in 2004.

Mars Exploration Project Manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
Pasadena, Calif., said, "Importantly, it's not how far the rovers have gone but how much
exploration and science discovery they have accomplished on behalf of all humankind."

At the beginning of Opportunity's mission, the rover landed inside "Eagle crater," about the
same size as Intrepid crater. The team's name for that landing-site crater paid tribute to the
lunar module of Apollo 11, the first human landing on the moon. Opportunity spent two
months inside Eagle crater, where it found multiple lines of evidence for a wet environment
in the area's ancient past.

The rover team is checking regularly for Opportunity's twin, Spirit, in case the increasing
daily solar energy available at Spirit's location enables the rover to reawaken and resume
communication. No signal from Spirit has been received since March 22. Spring began last
week in the southern hemisphere of Mars.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars
Exploration Rovers for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. For more
information about the rovers, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/rovers .

-end-

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

Nancy Neal Jones 301-286-0039
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
nancy.n.jones@nasa.gov

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

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