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Tag: NASA

  • Cassini to Take Another Photo of Earth From Saturn

    Cassini to Take Another Photo of Earth From Saturn

    One of the most famous images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft is of Saturn as it eclipses the Sun. With the gas giant bathed in shadow, a tiny speck called Earth can be seen in the photo.

    This week, NASA announced that Cassini will be recreating that famous photo. On July 19, the probe will take the picture as part of a mosaic being composed using Cassini pictures. Though the Earth will appear as only a pale blue dot roughly the size of one pixel, NASA is encouraging people in North America and parts of the Atlantic Ocean (which will be in sunlight at the time) to wave to the sky at around 2:30 pm to acknowledge the occasion.

    “While Earth will be only about a pixel in size from Cassini’s vantage point 898 million [1.44 billion kilometers] away, the team is looking forward to giving the world a chance to see what their home looks like from Saturn,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “We hope you’ll join us in waving at Saturn from Earth, so we can commemorate this special opportunity.

    In addition to providing a new photo of the Earth from Saturn, Cassini will be studying the planet’s ring during the 15 minutes it will spend in its shadow. The probe will be taking both visible- and infrared-light images of Saturn’s rings to gather data for researchers.

    “Looking back towards the sun through the rings highlights the tiniest of ring particles, whose width is comparable to the thickness of hair and which are difficult to see from ground-based telescopes,” said Matt Hedman, a Cassini science team member at Cornell University. “We’re particularly interested in seeing the structures within Saturn’s dusty E ring, which is sculpted by the activity of the geysers on the moon Enceladus, Saturn’s magnetic field and even solar radiation pressure.”

  • Billion-Pixel Panorama of Mars Released by NASA

    Billion-Pixel Panorama of Mars Released by NASA

    During its 10 months on the red planet, Mars rover Curiosity has taken hundreds of high-quality photographs of the Martian landscape. Now, NASA has released a photo of Mars sporting over 1 billion pixels.

    The panorama is pieced together from almost 900 different photographs taken by cameras on Curiosity. The complete image is 1.3 billion pixels in size and can be viewed in multiple ways on NASA’s Mars Exploration Program website.

    The photos show a patch of Mars named “Rocknest,” where Curiosity took its first scoop of Martian soil in October 2012. The mountain seen in the distance is Mount Sharp, the current long-term destination for the rover.

    “It gives a sense of place and really shows off the cameras’ capabilities,” said Bob Deen, a researcher with the Multi-Mission Image Processing Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “You can see the context and also zoom in to see very fine details.”

    The photos that comprise the panorama were primarily taken using Curiosity’s Mast Camera, with further images coming from the Mastcam’s wide-angle camera. The photos were taken over the course of several Martian days, explaining the inconsistent illumination and shadows seen in different parts of the image.

    Curiosity is currently preparing to shift into a distance-driving mode, and will soon be heading five miles to an area at the base of Mount Sharp.

  • NASA Issues ‘Grand Challenge’ to Combat Killer Asteroids

    NASA Issues ‘Grand Challenge’ to Combat Killer Asteroids

    NASA and astronomers around the world have been tracking asteroids for decades now. Though asteroids seem to be constantly be giving the Earth a close miss, no ‘doomsday’ asteroids have yet been found. That doesn’t mean they aren’t out there, though, hurdling toward Earth with the potential to end life as we know it.

    With that in mind, NASA this week issued a “Grand Challenge” to find all asteroids that could potentially threaten human existence and develop the means to deal with them. The challenge was issued at an asteroid initiative industry and partner day at NASA Headquarters.

    “NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth’s orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth,” said Lori Garver deputy administrator at NASA. “This Grand Challenge is focused on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats. We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem.”

    As part of the challenge, NASA is now soliciting ideas on how to accomplish the goal from private industry and other potential partners. The ultimate goal would be to locate, redirect, and explore an asteroid. The agency is also asking for plans to deal with potential asteroid threats.

    NASA’s Grand Challenges are what they call “ambitious” projects with a large scale that will need significant science and technology breakthroughs to accomplish. The Obama administration has also promoted NASA’s challenges as a part of its Strategy for American Innovation.

    “I applaud NASA for issuing this Grand Challenge because finding asteroid threats, and having a plan for dealing with them, needs to be an all-hands-on-deck effort,” said Tom Kalil, deputy director for technology and innovation at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “The efforts of private-sector partners and our citizen scientists will augment the work NASA already is doing to improve near-Earth object detection capabilities.”

  • Amazon Fires Have Destroyed Almost 3 Percent Of The Rainforest

    Amazon Fires Have Destroyed Almost 3 Percent Of The Rainforest

    Amazon fires are a major threat to the world’s largest rainforest, but we’re only just beginning to understand how fire spreads there.

    NASA recently released a study that looked at understory fires burning in the Amazon rainforest between 1999 and 2010. Through satellite imagery, they found that 2.8 percent of the rainforest has been affected by these devastating undestory fires.

    So, what makes these understory fires so bad? The understory of the rainforest is not easily visible from the air so satellite views used to be able to see only so much. These fires also burn incredibly slowly so it’s hard to track their progress and just how much they burn.

    That being said, NASA says that the trees in the rainforest have not yet adapted to fire. That means the trees affected by fire can not shrug off the damage caused and end up dying. The researchers estimate that as many as 50 percent of all trees affected by understory fires end up dying.

    Thankfully, deforestation and understory fires are not related whatsoever. NASA originally thought that might be the case, but they found that forests next to those that had been cleared had the lowest rates of fire. Both are still detrimental to the rainforest, but it would have been even more disastrous if deforestation and fires had been related.

    The researchers believe they may be able to predict areas of the forest that are more likely to catch fire in the future. They will now focus their efforts on this to help prevent more destruction.

  • Mars Rover Curiosity Prepares For Long Drive

    Mars Rover Curiosity Prepares For Long Drive

    NASA today revealed that Mars rover Curiosity will soon wrap up its exploration of the Glenelg area and shift into a distance-driving mode. The rover is headed for an area at the base of Mount Sharp, about 5 miles from its current location.

    “We’re hitting full stride,” said Jim Erickson, Project Manager for the Mars Science Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We needed a more deliberate pace for all the first-time activities by Curiosity since landing, but we won’t have many more of those.”

    Some of those first-time activities include scooping Martian soil, analyzing its chemical makeup, and drilling a rock to obtain rock powder. A second rock drilling (seen above) took place just last Month.

    Most of the drilling has occurred near Glenelg, where varied terrain interesting to researchers converges. No more scooping or drilling is now planned for the area.

    Curiosity has already driven over one third of a mile during its time on Mars. To reach Mount Sharp will take “many months” of driving, as researchers are bound to find interesting things to look at along the way.

    “We don’t know when we’ll get to Mount Sharp,” said Erickson. “This truly is a mission of exploration, so just because our end goal is Mount Sharp doesn’t mean we’re not going to investigate interesting features along the way.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

  • NASA Is Funding A 3D Food Printer, May Be Used In Future Space Missions

    NASA Is Funding A 3D Food Printer, May Be Used In Future Space Missions

    Making food with 3D printers is not a new concept, but it is still largely in the realm of science fiction. NASA wants to make science fiction into reality sooner than later, however, and it’s throwing plenty of money towards those at the cutting edge of the technology.

    Quartz reports that NASA has awarded Systems & Materials Research Corporation a $125,000 grant to continue work on what company head, Anjan Contractor, calls a universal food synthesizer. As currently envisioned, the technology would use cartridges of powders and oils to create complex foods one layer at a time.

    NASA is understandably interested in the technology as it would provide plenty of inexpensive food to space travelers. The current goal is to have the food cartridges last up to 30 years. It would ensure that any long distance space travel plans to Mars and beyond wouldn’t suffer from food spoilage.

    Of course, space travel isn’t the only thing that this particular 3D printer would make easier. Feeding the world’s population would be a cinch if everybody owned a 3D printer and a number of inexpensive food cartridges that only doled out what a person needs so no food is wasted. It seems impossible with our current food production methods, but Contractor’s plans could very well end world hunger.

    The first step in space travel and ending world hunger may just lie in the humble pizza. America’s favorite food seems to be perfectly suited to the 3D printing process as one layer of food is added at a time. In the case of pizza, the dough would be extruded onto a heated plate that bakes the dough as its being printed. Afterwards, a tomato powder would be added while being mixed with water and oil to create the sauce. Finally, a “protein layer” made up of plants or animals would be added to the top.

    A 3D pizza printer may sound like some kind of revolutionary new concept, but NASA has been playing around with 3D printers for quite some time. The agency is even looking into whether or not it could deploy 3D printers to the surface of the moon to build 3D printed structures out of lunar soil.

    As for 3D food printers, NASA may also want to look into Burritob0t or Google’s 3D pasta printer. There’s probably nothing quite like space travel accompanied by a steady diet of starches.

  • Here’s Video of the Biggest and Brightest Explosion on the Moon That NASA’s Ever Seen

    Here’s Video of the Biggest and Brightest Explosion on the Moon That NASA’s Ever Seen

    Two months ago, NASA observed the largest explosion on the Moon that they’ve ever seen. And today, they’re talking about it and have released a cool video that shows the event as it took place.

    The explosion was caused by a meteorite, 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide, weighing in at about 40 kilograms. When it hit the moon, it was travelling at 56,000 miles per hour. According to NASA, it exploded with the force of 5 tons of TNT.

    “On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”

    The impact was so bright, in fact, that anyone looking would have seen it without the help of a telescope.

    “It jumped right out at me, it was so bright,” says Marshall Space Flight Center analyst Ron Suggs, who was the first to see the impact.

    This type of lunar strike is common, but NASA has yet to see one this large in the nearly 8 years its been monitoring the moon for such impacts. Here’s why:

    Unlike Earth, which has an atmosphere to protect it, the Moon is airless and exposed. “Lunar meteors” crash into the ground with fair frequency. Since the monitoring program began in 2005, NASA’s lunar impact team has detected more than 300 strikes, most orders of magnitude fainter than the March 17th event. Statistically speaking, more than half of all lunar meteors come from known meteoroid streams such as the Perseids and Leonids. The rest are sporadic meteors–random bits of comet and asteroid debris of unknown parentage.

    Oh, by the way, the “explosion” is special thanks to the lack of oxygen in the Moon’s atmosphere.

    “The Moon has no oxygen atmosphere, so how can something explode? Lunar meteors don’t require oxygen or combustion to make themselves visible. They hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that even a pebble can make a crater several feet wide. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site,” says NASA.

    [NASA via Wired]

  • Monster Saturn Hurricane Imaged by Cassini

    Monster Saturn Hurricane Imaged by Cassini

    NASA has revealed new pictures and of a massive hurricane on Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft.

    The images depict a hurricane in Saturn’s north pole region. The eye of the storm is around 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) in diameter. The clouds on the hurricane’s outer edge are travelling at 150 meters per second (330 miles per hour).

    “We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology. “But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”

    NASA has stated that the storm on Saturn is “locked onto” the planet’s north pole. Cassini was unable to image Saturn’s northern hemisphere using visible light until 2009, when the planet’s equinox passed. Researchers hope that studying the hurricane on Saturn can provide data on how hurricanes on Earth develop and sustain themselves.

    “Such a stunning and mesmerizing view of the hurricane-like storm at the north pole is only possible because Cassini is on a sportier course, with orbits tilted to loop the spacecraft above and below Saturn’s equatorial plane,” said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “You cannot see the polar regions very well from an equatorial orbit. Observing the planet from different vantage points reveals more about the cloud layers that cover the entirety of the planet.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI)

  • Mars Rover Opportunity Found in Standby Mode After Solar Conjunction

    Mars Rover Opportunity Found in Standby Mode After Solar Conjunction

    The rovers on Mars this month were under a command moratorium as Mars passed behind the sun, an event known as solar conjunction. Now that the solar conjunction has ended, researchers have found something amiss with Mars rover Opportunity.

    Mission controllers this week found Opportunity in a standby mode. NASA has stated that it appears the rover “sensed something amiss” during a camera check on April 22 and entered standby. Team members have prepared commands for Opportunity to bring it back to full operative status.

    “Our current suspicion is that Opportunity rebooted its flight software, possibly while the cameras on the mast were imaging the sun,” said John Callas, Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We found the rover in a standby state called automode, in which it maintains power balance and communication schedules, but waits for instructions from the ground. We crafted our solar conjunction plan to be resilient to this kind of rover reset, if it were to occur.”

    Opportunity was one of two rovers that landed on Mars in 2004 as part of the Mars Exploration Rover Project. The other rover, Spirit, became stuck in soft soil in 2009, and ceased communications in 2010.

    The newest rover on Mars, Curiosity, is reported to be fully operational following the solar conjunction. Researchers are planning on sending it commands starting tomorrow.

    (Image courtesy ASA/JPL-Caltech)

  • Meteors Spotted Hitting Saturn’s Rings

    Meteors Spotted Hitting Saturn’s Rings

    Watching stellar impacts as they occur is a rare treat for astronomers. The famous Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter (which left water in the planet’s atmosphere), which happened only 20 years ago, was the first directly-seen extraterrestrial collision in the solar system.

    This week, NASA revealed that Saturn has now been added to the short list of places in the Solar System where astronomers have been able to observe collisions occurring as they happen (Earth, the moon, and Jupiter are the others).

    NASA’s Cassini probe has captured images of meteoroids hitting the debris that makes up Saturn’s rings. Researchers believe that studying the impact rate on Saturn can help them determine more precisely how the planets in the Solar System formed.

    “These new results imply the current-day impact rates for small particles at Saturn are about the same as those at Earth – two very different neighborhoods in our solar system – and this is exciting to see,” said Linda Spilker, a Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “It took Saturn’s rings acting like a giant meteoroid detector – 100 times the surface area of the Earth – and Cassini’s long-term tour of the Saturn system to address this question.”

    Cassini scientists studied data for years to find evidence of the tracks the small meteorites left behind. The research has been published in the latest issue of the journal Science.

    “We knew these little impacts were constantly occurring, but we didn’t know how big or how frequent they might be, and we didn’t necessarily expect them to take the form of spectacular shearing clouds,” said Matt Tiscareno, lead author of the paper and a Cassini participating scientist at Cornell University. “The sunlight shining edge-on to the rings at the Saturnian equinox acted like an anti-cloaking device, so these usually invisible features became plain to see.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Cornell)

  • Voyager 1 Module Added to NASA’s Solar System Viewer

    Voyager 1 Module Added to NASA’s Solar System Viewer

    There’s been some confusion in recent months over whether Voyager 1 has actually exited the Solar System. NASA scientists have reported multiple times that they’ve seen indications that the probe may be outside the heliosphere, only to roll back the fanfare with a deeper analysis of the data.

    Now, NASA is letting everyone in on the agonizing wait with a new feature incorporated into its Eyes on the Solar System software. Eyes on the Solar System is an interactive, 3-D web app that uses up-to-date NASA mission data to depict the Solar System.

    The new module allows users to watch the Voyager 1 probe as it hurtles toward interstellar space. Astronomers believe that Voyager 1 entered a “magnetic highway” at the edge of the Solar System late last year. The ‘Highway” is a region where charged particles can pass both in and out of the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles that surrounds the sun.

    The app will speed up Voyager 1’s journey to one day per second. Navigation data from the project is used to show the probe roll and maneuver through the Solar System.

    NASA researchers are tracking the particles coming from inside the heliosphere and outside of it. They believe that a sustained increase in detected outside charged particles indicates the “magnetic highway” Voyager 1 currently occupies. Scientists are waiting for a magnetic field shift before confirming the probe has left the Solar System.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  • NASA Drew a Penis on Mars or We’re All Just Really Immature

    NASA Drew a Penis on Mars or We’re All Just Really Immature

    Either NASA’s Opportunity Mars rover left a deliberate, and truly amazing mark on the red planet – or we’re all just programmed by the internet to see the wiener in everything.

    As you may have expected, the clever minds on reddit first spotted this image. It was subsequently noticed by the likes of Gizmodo and The Huffington Post. Fierce debate ensued. Is it real? If so, did they mean to do it?

    We probably know the answer to the first question. You can find the image on NASA’s website, so it’s not likely photoshopped or anything.

    But just because it’s real, that doesn’t make it intentional.

    I’d like to hope that whoever was controlling the rover had a few too many beers and decided to substitute the forehead of their passed-out buddy for Mars’ vast, blank canvas.

  • Water on Jupiter Linked to Shoemaker-Levy Impact

    Water on Jupiter Linked to Shoemaker-Levy Impact

    It appears that the mystery of how water got into the atmosphere of Jupiter has finally been solved.

    The European Space Agency (ESA) today announced that the water in the Jovian planet’s upper atmosphere has been linked to the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts. The comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke up and collided with Jupiter in July of 1994. The week-long event, which was the first directly-seen extraterrestrial collision in the Solar System, was observed by astronomers around the world.

    Though astronomers suspected the Shoemaker-Levy impacts were the source of the water, the ESA’s Herschel space observatory has now been able to map the vertical and horizontal distribution of the water in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The observatory’s infrared imaging was able to discern that there is two to three times more water in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere than in the northern hemisphere. Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, and Herschel has found “most” of the water is concentrated around the impact sites. The findings have been published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

    “Only Herschel was able to provide the sensitive spectral imaging needed to find the missing link between Jupiter’s water and the 1994 impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9,” said Thibault Cavalié, lead author of the paper and an astrophysicist at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux. “The asymmetry between the two hemispheres suggests that water was delivered during a single event and rules out icy rings or moons as candidate sources.

    “According to our models, as much as 95% of the water in the stratosphere is due to the comet impact.”

    (Image courtesy ESA/Herschel/T. Cavalié et al./NASA/ESA/Reta Beebe)

  • NASA Video Shows Sun’s Rise in Activity

    NASA Video Shows Sun’s Rise in Activity

    The sun. We see it nearly every day, and yet most of us spend a considerable amount of time trying to keep it out of our eyes or off our skin.

    NASA, on the other hand, has been staring straight into the sun for years now. The agency launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in 2010 to capture images of the sun, which it does every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. Scientists are using the SDO to learn more about the sun and to improve predictions for solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which can affect satellites orbiting Earth.

    In the three years since its launch, the SDO has observed the sun as it ramps up to “solar maximum,” which is the peak of the star’s 11-year solar activity cycle. To demonstrate this increase in the sun’s activity, NASA this week released a video that puts together many of the images taken by the SDO. The time-lapsed video shows two images of the sun per day for three years. It also has some nice background music (“A Lady’s Errand of Love” by Martin Lass).

  • Learn How NASA Uses Google Earth For Space Missions

    Learn How NASA Uses Google Earth For Space Missions

    Google has shown that it has an interest in space what with its founders funding space missions, and the company sending Bugdroid to space. Beyond that, though, the folks at Google create tools that are invaluable to mission strategists at NASA.

    In the latest Google Tech Talk, Matt Deans of NASA’s Intelligent Robotics Group, discusses how the U.S. space agency uses a variety of Web tools and Google Earth to create the Exploration Ground Data System, or xGDS. Here’s more:

    Did you know that NASA uses Google Earth for mission planning and real-time mission operations? Are you curious about the software NASA is developing to carry out future human and robot missions? Would you like to know how modern Web frameworks can be used for data-driven field science?

    The Exploration Ground Data System (xGDS) is a suite of reusable software tools for human and robotic missions. xGDS supports mission planning, ingesting and managing geo-referenced and time-series data, and visualization/analysis. xGDS is highly modular, Web-based and makes extensive use of Apache, Django, the Google Earth plug-in, JQuery, and
    MySQL.

    In this talk, I will discuss the use cases that xGDS was designed to support and describe how it is implemented. I will show how the Intelligent Robotics Group has used xGDS for exploration missions involving astronauts (Arizona), planetary rovers (Canada and Hawaii), and personal submarines (British Columbia and Florida). And, I’ll briefly talk about how xGDS can be used for other applications, such as crisis and disaster response.

  • Showcase Your Knowledge With Mozilla’s Open Badges

    Showcase Your Knowledge With Mozilla’s Open Badges

    For the past few years, Mozilla has been working on a project called Open Badges. You can think of the project like merit badges for the Internet. It allows people to prove that they have accomplished something, or are knowledgeable in a topic, in a visual format. Now after a year of extensive beta testing, the finished product is finally ready.

    Mozilla announced today that Open Badges 1.0 is ready for public use. The first release of Open Badges will be focused on three areas:

  • earn badges for skills you learn online and offline
  • give recognition for things you teach
  • show your badges in the places that matter.

    • Right from the start, Open Badges users will be able to prove their worth with badges from over 600 organizations. Mozilla itself offer a wide range of badges, including badges for Web development. Other organizations offering badges include the Girl Scouts and NASA.

    For a more in-depth breakdown of what Open Badges offer, the Mozilla blog explains:

    Knits skills together. Through the Open Badges shared standard, badges for the same skill-set can connect and build on one another — whether they’re issued by the same organization or many different ones. Individuals can earn badges that recognize learning and skills from multiple sources both online and offline — from learning HTML with Mozilla, to volunteering and leadership skills with Girl Scouts, to learning introductory robotics and engineering with NASA.

    Full of information. With Open Badges, every badge has important data built in that links back to who issued it, how it was earned, and even the projects a user completed to earn it. Employers and others can dig into this rich data and see the full story of each user’s skills and achievements.

    Can go anywhere on the web. The Open Badges backpack gives users an easy way to collect their badges, sort them by category, and display them across social networking profiles, job sites, websites and more.

    Recognizes learning that matters. Open Badges’ free software allows any organization that meets the standard to begin issuing — and verifying — badges. Currently 600 organizations have issued 62,000 badges to 23,000 learners. A growing list of who is issuing badges is available here.

    Free, open to anyone, and part of Mozilla’s non-profit mission. Open Badges is designed, built and backed by a broad community of contributors. The open source model means improvements made by one partner can benefit everyone, from bug fixes to new features.

    If you want to start working with Open Badges, you should start with the developer community. After that, check out the source code and contribute to its development. Open Badges has an opportunity to change how we learn and earn accomplishments on the Web, but it won’t be able to do anything if it doesn’t have the support of the open source community.

  • Mars Flooding Evidence Further Points To Planet’s Wet Past

    Mars Flooding Evidence Further Points To Planet’s Wet Past

    Mars flooding seems about as likely as finding extraterrestrial life on the planet, but new evidence suggests the red planet really was subject to intense flooding during its lifetime.

    NASA announced today the results of a study conducted by its Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite. The study sought to recreate “ancient water channels below the Martian surface” in full 3D. Mapping out these channels helped scientists realize that Mars was home to massive floods in the last 500 million years.

    The floods that created these channels are comparable to the floods that created the Channeled Scablands in Washington State during ancient times.

    “Our findings show the scale of erosion that created the channels previously was underestimated and the channel depth was at least twice that of previous approximations,” said Gareth Morgan, a geologist at the National Air and Space Museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies in Washington and lead author on the paper. “This work demonstrates the importance of orbital sounding radar in understanding how water has shaped the surface of Mars.”

    NASA found the flood channels in the Elysium Planitia, an area along the Martian equator. The existence of the flood channels were covered up when much of the area was subjected to intense and frequent volcanic activity. NASA says that there are other water channels on Mars’ surface that were covered up in a similar fashion.

    [Image: JPL/NASA]

  • Mars Rover Curiosity Swaps Computers

    Mars Rover Curiosity Swaps Computers

    NASA announced today that Mars rover Curiosity has switched onboard computers as a result of a “memory issue” experienced on its active computer. The issue has brought research by the rover to a halt.

    The swap to the rover’s redundant computer took place yesterday and placed the rover into a “safe mode.” Over then next several days the rover team will be bringing the rover into operational status.

    “We switched computers to get to a standard state from which to begin restoring routine operations,” said Richard Cook, project manager for the Mars Science Laboratory Project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

    These computer issues are surfacing just as Curiosity is in the midst of a historical sample analysis. Earlier this week the rover had begun analyzing two small samples of rock powder taken from the inside of a Martian rock using the rover’s hammering drill.

    The computer issue was revealed on Wednesday, February 27 when the rover failed to send recorded data back to Earth, instead sending only status information. It was found that Curiosity had not entered its latest planned “sleep mode.” The “memory issue” on Curiosity’s first computer is thought to be related to a corrupted flash memory.

    The rover will now operate on its “B-side” computer, which was tested during its flight to Mars. The “A-side” computer was used from the rover’s landing on the red planet until this week.

    “While we are resuming operations on the B-side, we are also working to determine the best way to restore the A-side as a viable backup,” said Magdy Bareh, leader of the mission’s anomaly resolution team at JPL.

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  • SpaceX Problem Alters Dragon Capsule Schedule

    SpaceX Problem Alters Dragon Capsule Schedule

    The second SpaceX mission to resupply the International Space Station (ISS) began early this morning as a Falcon 9 rocket lifted the Dragon capsule into orbit.

    Though the launch was successful, a problem with three of the capsule’s four thruster pods delayed the opening of its solar arrays. SpaceX engineers had to wait until the capsule was over its Australia-based ground station to “command inhibit override” and reactivate enough of the thruster pods to deploy the arrays. While only one of the thruster pods was reactivated, it was enough to successfully deploy the arrays.

    SpaceX spent hours trying to reactivate the two thruster pods that were still malfunctioning. At around 3 pm EST Space X founder Elon Musk tweeted that the thruster pods were back online and that the capsule is no longer drifting:

    The problems caused the capsule to miss one of its scheduled burns that would take it toward its scheduled docking with the ISS. As a result, the docking could be delayed.

    SpaceX and NASA have scheduled a teleconference for 3 pm EST. More details about the Dragon capsule and its docking schedule should be revealed during the call.

    The Dragon capsule is carrying 1,200 pounds of cargo and science equipment that will be delivered to the ISS’s crew of six international astronauts. The capsule is scheduled to return with refuse and used equipment on March 25. SpaceX successfully completed its first resupply mission to the ISS back in October 2012 when it delivered 882 pounds of supplies to the satellite.

    The launch of the capsule can be seen in the video below, which NASA released earlier today:

  • Radiation Belt Around Earth Discovered by NASA

    Radiation Belt Around Earth Discovered by NASA

    NASA this week revealed that its Van Allen Probes have discovered a third radiation belt around the Earth. Before now, the Earth’s Van Allen belts were thought to be two belts of radiation surrounding the planet.

    The newly discovered belt of radiation was observed for four weeks before a shockwave from the sun blew it apart. The new belt could improve researchers’ understanding of how the belts react to space weather, and in particular solar winds. The research was published this week in the journal Science.

    “Even 55 years after their discovery, the Earth’s radiation belts still are capable of surprising us and still have mysteries to discover and explain,” said Nicky Fox, Van Allen Probes deputy project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “We thought we knew the radiation belts, but we don’t. The advances in technology and detection made by NASA in this mission already have had an almost immediate impact on basic science.”

    The new belt was detected by the Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope (REPT) on-board the Van Allen Probes. The probes discovered that a region thought to be one belt had actually become two distinct belts with space in between.

    “This is the first time we have had such high-resolution instruments look at time, space and energy together in the outer belt,” said Daniel Baker, lead author of the study and REPT instrument lead at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado. “Previous observations of the outer radiation belt only resolved it as a single blurry element. When we turned REPT on just two days after launch, a powerful electron acceleration event was already in progress, and we clearly saw the new belt and new slot between it and the outer belt.”

    The Van Allen Probes were launched back in August with the mission of studying the Van Allen belts and how space weather can affect them. By December of last year data from the probes was already revealing to scientists just how much influence the sun has over the Earth’s magnetosphere.

    “The fantastic new capabilities and advances in technology in the Van Allen Probes have allowed scientists to see in unprecedented detail how the radiation belts are populated with charged particles and will provide insight on what causes them to change, and how these processes affect the upper reaches of Earth’s atmosphere,” said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science.

  • NASA Measures Fast-Spinning, Supermassive Black Hole

    NASA Measures Fast-Spinning, Supermassive Black Hole

    NASA today revealed that it has teamed up with the European Space Agency (ESA) to, for the first time, measure the spin rate of a supermassive black hole.

    Using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the ESA’s XMM-Newton, astronomers were able to observe the black hole that lies at the center of the galaxy NGC 1365. The object was found to be spinning nearly as fast as physics will allow, providing researchers with new information about how black holes behave.

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

    The measurements, to be published in the journal Nature, also provide clear evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The data shows that X-rays around the black hole are being warped by the object’s high gravity.

    “We can trace matter as it swirls into a black hole using X-rays emitted from regions very close to the black hole,” said Fiona Harrison, coauthor of a new study, NuSTAR principal investigator 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.”

    Both the NuSTAR and XMM-Newton telescopes were needed to penetrate the gas clouds that obscure NGC 1365’s center. NuSTAR detects high-energy X-ray radiation, while the XMM-Newton detects lower-energy X-rays. By simultaneously observing the X-rays emitted by iron in the black hole’s accretion disc, the telescopes were able to determine that the X-ray distortion was coming from the black hole instead of gas clouds. This means that astronomers can now use iron signature distortions to measure black hole spin rates.

    “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. “The high-energy X-rays provided an essential missing puzzle piece for solving this problem.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)