LARGEST CARBONITE-RICH DEPOSIT ON MARS

FROM:  NASA
This view combines information from two instruments on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to map color-coded composition over the shape of the ground in a small portion of the Nili Fossae plains region of Mars' northern hemisphere.

This site is part of the largest known carbonate-rich deposit on Mars. In the color coding used for this map, green indicates a carbonate-rich composition, brown indicates olivine-rich sands, and purple indicates basaltic composition.

Carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on early Mars reacted with surface rocks to form carbonate, thinning the atmosphere by sequestering the carbon in the rocks.

An analysis of the amount of carbon contained in Nili Fossae plains estimated the total at no more than twice the amount of carbon in the modern atmosphere of Mars, which is mostly carbon dioxide. That is much more than in all other known carbonate on Mars, but far short of enough to explain how Mars could have had a thick enough atmosphere to keep surface water from freezing during a period when rivers were cutting extensive valley networks on the Red Planet. Other possible explanations for the change from an era with rivers to dry modern Mars are being investigated.

This image covers an area approximately 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) wide.  A scale bar indicates 500 meters (1,640 feet).  The full extent of the carbonate-containing deposit in the region is at least as large as Delaware and perhaps as large as Arizona.

The color coding is from data acquired by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), in observation FRT0000C968 made on Sept. 19, 2008.  The base map showing land shapes is from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. It is one product from HiRISE observation ESP_010351_2020, made July 20, 2013. Other products from that observation are online at http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_032728_2020.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been using CRISM, HiRISE and four other instruments to investigate Mars since 2006. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland, led the work to build the CRISM instrument and operates CRISM in coordination with an international team of researchers from universities, government and the private sector. HiRISE is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson, and was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colorado.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the orbiter and collaborates with JPL to operate it.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JHUAPL/Univ. of Arizona

MRO TAKES CLOSEUP IN AUREUM CHAOS, MARS

FROM:  NASA 

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter acquired this closeup image of a light-toned deposit in Aureum Chaos, a 368 kilometer (229 mile) wide area in the eastern part of Valles Marineris, on Jan. 15, 2015, at 2:51 p.m. local Mars time.

The objective of this observation is to examine a light-toned deposit in a region of what is called “chaotic terrain.” There are indications of layers in the image. Some shapes suggest erosion by a fluid moving north and south. The top of the light-toned deposit appears rough, in contrast to the smoothness of its surroundings.  Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.  Caption: HIRISE Science Team.

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THE MYSTERIOUS LIGHTS OF PLANET CERES

FROM:  NASA 

A cluster of mysterious bright spots on dwarf planet Ceres can be seen in this image, taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft from an altitude of 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers). The image, with a resolution of 1,400 feet (410 meters) per pixel, was taken on June 9, 2015.  Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA.

NASA Video: Mission to Europa Gets Green Light on This Week @NASA – June 19, 2015

A SPACECRAFT RETURNS

FROM:  NASA 

The Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 43 commander Terry Virts of NASA, cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), and Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti from the European Space Agency (ESA) near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan on Thursday, June 11, 2015.  Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls.

NASA VIDEO: Fly Over Dwarf Planet Ceres

NASA's VACUUM CHAMBER 5

FROM:  NASA 

When you need to test hardware designed to operate in the vast reaches of space, you start in a vacuum chamber.  NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland has many of them, but Vacuum Chamber 5 (VF-5) is special.  Supporting the testing of electric propulsion and power systems, VF-5 has the highest pumping speed of any electric propulsion test facility in the world, which is important in maintaining a continuous space-like environment.

The cryogenic panels at the top and back of the chamber house a helium-cooled panel that reaches near absolute zero temperatures (about -440 degrees Fahrenheit). The extreme cold of this panel freezes any air left in the chamber and quickly freezes the thruster exhaust, allowing the chamber to maintain a high vacuum environment. The outer chevrons are cooled with liquid nitrogen to shield the cryogenic panels from the room temperature surfaces of the tank.

Most electric propulsion devices, such as Hall Thrusters, use xenon as a propellant, which is very expensive. By capturing the used xenon as ice during testing, researchers are able to recover the propellant to reuse, saving NASA and test customers considerable costs.

The oil diffusion pumps along the bottom of the tank capped by circular covers use a low vapor pressure silicon oil to concentrate small amounts of gas to the point where it can be mechanically pumped from the chamber.

VF-5 will continue to provide a testing environment for Glenn’s advanced Solar Electric Propulsion technology needed for future astronaut expeditions into deep space, including to Mars.

Image Credit: NASA

NASA VIDEO: CURIOSITY ROVER REPORT (May 8, 2015): ROVER ROAD TRIP

NSF FUNDS SPACETEC'S PREPARATION OF NEXT GEN SPACECRAFT TECHNICIANS

FROM:  U.S. NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Who will do the technical jobs needed to fuel a commercial spacecraft industry?
With NSF funding, SpaceTEC is preparing the next generation of spacecraft technicians

For more than 100 years, humans have been buying airline tickets to the next best destination. Soon, that destination could be space, and space technology companies are working hard to have the first commercial spacecraft in the air.

To be space ready, they need aerospace technicians with the right credentials, and one center is situated to provide them.

SpaceTEC National Resource Center for Aerospace Technical Education is at the front end of preparing a technician workforce for this new commercial space travel.

SpaceTEC, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) since 2002 through the Advanced Technological Education program, provides resources and nationally recognized certifications for aerospace technology. It offers assessment tools and performance-based certifications to its 18 college partners, according to SpaceTEC managing director Steven Kane.

"The commercial space companies now are like the aviation industry was back in the 1920's, opening doors for entrepreneurs like Bill Boeing to take an aircraft, stretch it, put some seats in it and start carrying people," Kane said.

SpaceTEC saw a drop in enrollment when NASA's Space Shuttle program ended in 2011, but the industry underwent some retuning, according to Kane.

"Companies are starting to recognize that the curriculum that was created through SpaceTEC fits their needs for those technicians to start doing that work again," Kane said. SpaceTEC has certified about 425 technicians for this industry, according to Kane.

Educating a qualified workforce is part of keeping the U.S. globally competitive in this industry, according to NSF's lead program director Celeste Carter of the Advanced Technological Education program.

Creating SpaceTEC

SpaceTEC began as a way to create a national certification program that all companies would recognize. Earlier, companies conducted their own training and certification process. This meant that a technician starting a contract at a new company would have to go through training again and start at zero, no matter his or her experience.

Brian Madgett, a SpaceTEC certified examiner, has worked in the aerospace industry for over 30 years and knows how essential certifications are, he said.

"It was difficult to get into the industry because there were no standardized certifications for this type of work," Madgett said.

After being certified, Madgett said, the technical certification gave him an edge over other applicants. "Employers need to see the proof of your training and experience," Madgett said.

Partnering with educators and employers

The center works with colleges, companies, government agencies and the military to ensure that the curriculum SpaceTEC created is accepted at the educator and employer levels, according to Kane.

Educators and industry representatives have a seat at the table, Kane said, when the decisions are about the curriculum.

Some colleges like Eastern Shore Community College look to SpaceTEC to guide their program and curriculum, according to Assistant Professor of Electronics and Computer Technology John Floyd.

"As a national resource center, with decades of experience relating to the shuttle program and other high profile Aerospace ventures, the partnership gives us access to information and standards that we do not have locally," Floyd said.

Eastern Shore Community College partnered with SpaceTEC in 2011 to prepare students for the aerospace industry and for job opportunities at the close-by NASA Wallops Flight Facility, Floyd said.

Government agencies like NASA make the SpaceTEC certificate a requirement in their employee contracts.

"The industry collaborations are essential to ensure that educators are producing the graduates that industry values," Carter said.

Mechanical Engineering Technician Kevin McLain took the SpaceTEC exam at Thomas Nelson Community College as a requirement for his NASA contract.

"I think they made it a requirement to ensure that I had sufficient knowledge of the aerospace industry and could prove to them that [I'm] serious about [my] career field," McLain said.

SpaceTEC expands to other industries

Before SpaceTEC experienced a resurgence in certifications, the center saw an opportunity to apply the same skill sets required in their certification program in other industries, such as the automobile, airline and energy industries.

So NSF granted SpaceTEC a supplement in 2009 to create CertTEC, which offers performance-based, national certifications for technical training beyond aerospace technology. It includes certifications for Basic Electricity & Electronics, Aviation Structures, Aviation Mechanical Assembly and Basic Composites. CertTEC has certified almost 1200 technicians, according to Kane.

Like SpaceTEC, this program helps students enter and move up in their industry, according to CertTEC examiner and Senior Instructor Kenny Payton of the Francis Tuttle Technology Center.

"Being in the aviation field for over 40 years, the training and testing baseline insures the employee has the skills that the employer is seeking," Payton said, "making for an easier transition into productive employment."

A new project for veterans

SpaceTEC's newest project is VetTEC, a one-stop shop to help veterans apply the skills they learned in the military to industry jobs.

"When they come out of the military, there's nothing really that provides industry a guide to what this person knows," Kane said.

The military use skill codes, according to Kane, but they don't translate well to job postings' qualifications. VetTEC would be a tool that would let veterans input their skill code, find the certifications that fit their skills and see the jobs available for that skill set.

The project is a work in progress, but could give veterans a way into the commercial space industry, among others.

Beyond national certification, an ongoing dialogue with industry is key to SpaceTEC's success.

"The benefit of a national certification is that no matter what college teaches the information, everybody has to meet this national standard," Kane said. "In order to ensure that there's a home for these certified technicians that are created, the industry has to be involved."

-- Kierstyn Schneck
-- Maria C. Zacharias,
Investigators
Steven Kane
Albert Koller
Tad Montgomery
Patricia Taylor
Michael Reynolds
William Fletcher
Related Institutions/Organizations
Eastern Florida State College
Locations
Cocoa , Florida

ORION SPACECRAFT SUIT BEING TESTED AT JOHNSON SPACE CENTER

FROM:  NASA

Engineers and technicians at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston are testing the spacesuit astronauts will wear in the agency’s Orion spacecraft on trips to deep space. On March 17, members of the Johnson team participated in a Vacuum Pressure Integrated Suit Test to verify enhancements to the suit will meet test and design standards for the Orion spacecraft.  During this test, the suit is connected to life support systems and then air is removed from Johnson’s 11-foot thermal vacuum chamber to evaluate the performance of the suits in conditions similar to a spacecraft. The suit, known as the Modified Advanced Crew Escape Suit, is a closed-loop version of the launch and entry suits worn by space shuttle astronauts. The suit will contain all the necessary functions to support life and is being designed to enable spacewalks and sustain the crew in the unlikely event the spacecraft loses pressure. This is the first in a series of four tests with people in the suits to evaluate the performance of the spacesuit systems in an environment similar to a spacecraft.  Image Credit: NASA/ Bill Stafford

SCIENTISTS LOOKING FOR PLANETS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Techniques to prove or disprove existence of other planets
Astronomers developed technology while studying Gilese 581

Astronomers long have sought to find planets that can sustain life as humans know it. Four years ago, they thought they had one, possibly even two, pointing to signs that suggested that at least one rocky planet located in the "habitable zone" was revolving around Gliese 581, a faint dwarf star located 20 light-years from Earth.

Recently, however, National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientists, while developing technology they believe will better detect exoplanets, as they are known, determined that the suspected planets, known as Gliese 581g and 581d, did not exist.

Some of the signals, initially thought to be coming from two planets orbiting the star at a distance where liquid water could exist, actually were coming from the star itself, not from the "Goldilocks" planets, so-named because conditions on them are just right for supporting life.

The definition of the habitable zone of a star is whether liquid water can survive on its surface, given that life exists virtually wherever there is liquid water on Earth. Too far from a star, and a world is too cold, freezing all its water; too close to a star, and a world is too hot, boiling off all of its water.

Astronomers have found more than 1,000 planets orbiting stars, many discovered indirectly by the gravitational tug and pull that its mass exerts on the star during its orbit; most were found in close-in orbits to their stars, and unlikely to support life. But many scientists believe that there are a large number of planets, probably rocky like Earth, capable of doing so.

In recent years, scientists detected as many as six planets around Gliese 581, although one was later rescinded by the team that first announced it, but only two were thought to be in the habitable zone.

To be sure, it was disappointing to disprove the habitable zone planets in the Gliese 581 system; nevertheless, their research opens the way to valuable new methods for identifying such planets in the future.

"Bittersweet describes it pretty well," says Suvrath Mahadevan, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University, describing how he felt about their findings. Still, "these discoveries occur in incremental steps," he adds. "With more powerful instruments and surveys coming on line, we will be finding low mass planets at the right distance to stars in the habitable zone. This is where the field is going."

But Doppler shifts of a star's "absorption lines," which are dark bands where atoms or molecules absorb light, also can result from magnetic events like sunspots within the star itself and can emit signals of planets that do not exist.

"It's possible for things like magnetic activity on the star itself to create Doppler shifts that can be mistaken as planets," Robertson says. "This is a problem we are very concerned about. As we push toward detection of smaller and smaller signals, like those produced by Earth, it becomes more likely that the star will be creating signals that either can hide planets we are looking for, or create false positive planet signals."

The less massive the planet, the smaller is this stellar motion, and the more difficult are the measurements. Thus, observing planets as small as Earth must be conducted with spectrographs and spectral calibration of extreme precision.

This is what the two researchers are working on: a new near-infrared spectrograph called the "Habitable Zone Planet Finder," or HPF. Also, in collaboration with colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, they are developing a frequency stabilized laser comb calibration system that will enable scientists to detect terrestrial-mass exoplanets by improving the ability to precisely measure velocities.

These will be deployed in 2016 on the 10 meter Hobby-Eberly Telescope, located at the University of Texas at Austin.

The researchers, concerned about the impact of stellar activity on finding planets, consider Gliese 581 "a great test case," Robertson says. "It has this network of low mass planets, including the possibility of planets in the habitable zone, and I was curious as to whether a really good stellar activity analysis might shed some light one way or the other on planet detections around that star."

NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences supports their work.

The researchers analyzed Doppler shifts in existing spectroscopic observations of the star Gliese 581 obtained with two spectrographs, the ESO HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher), at the European Southern Observatory in La Silla, Chile and the Keck HIRES (High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer) at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

They focused on absorption lines that were most sensitive to magnetic activity, including looking specifically at one particular line, the "hydrogen alpha absorption line," which exists in all stars and is known to be sensitive to stellar magnetic activity, that is, its strength increases or decreases as a star's magnetic activity changes.

They boosted the signals of the three innermost planets around the star, but the ones attributable to the two likely candidate planets disappeared, becoming indistinguishable from measurement noise. They concluded that the star itself produced the earlier signals through its activity and rotation, and they did not result from the presence of these two suspected planets. But they confirmed the existence of the three additional planets, although none is located in the habitable zone.

"It was disappointing to find out that these potentially exciting planets were not real," Robertson says. Still, "with so much dispute about the system, we were very satisfied to have a definite answer. There is not a lot of confusion left about the origin of these signals, which is a silver lining. The improved signal strength of the real planets is the positive from this work, and will motivate studies in the future, including our own."

Mahadevan agrees. "We are all curious about how many worlds are out there that can support life, and where the closest ones are," he says, adding: "We realize that the results of our work here will be at first disappointing, because we disproved two planets initially thought to be in the habitable zone. But the techniques we have developed will help us find new candidates for planets in the habitable zone, and we likely will use it more to prove, rather than disprove, that these planets exist."

-- Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
Investigators
Jason Wright
Michael Endl
James Kasting
Lawrence Ramsey
Suvrath Mahadevan
Related Institutions/Organizations
Pennsylvania State Univ University Park

NASA | MEARSURING MARS' ANCIENT OCEAN

NASA VIDEO: DAWN NEARS CERES

ASTROTERRY TWEETS PHOTOGRAPH FROM ISS

FROM:  NASA 

On Sunday, March 1, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry Virts and Commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore ventured outside the International Space Station for their third spacewalk in eight days. Virts and Wilmore completed installing 400 feet of cable and several antennas associated with the Common Communications for Visiting Vehicles system known as C2V2. Boeing’s Crew Transportation System (CST)-100 and the SpaceX Crew Dragon will use the system in the coming years to rendezvous with the orbital laboratory and deliver crews to the space station. Virts (@AstroTerry) tweeted this photograph and wrote, "Out on the P3 truss. #AstroButch handing me his cable to install on the new antenna. #spacewalk" Image Credit: NASA.

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S STATEMENT ON PASSING OF LEONARD NIMOY

FROM:  THE WHITE HOUSE
February 27, 2015
Statement by the President on the Passing of Leonard Nimoy

Long before being nerdy was cool, there was Leonard Nimoy.  Leonard was a lifelong lover of the arts and humanities, a supporter of the sciences, generous with his talent and his time.  And of course, Leonard was Spock.  Cool, logical, big-eared and level-headed, the center of Star Trek’s optimistic, inclusive vision of humanity’s future.

I loved Spock.

In 2007, I had the chance to meet Leonard in person.  It was only logical to greet him with the Vulcan salute, the universal sign for “Live long and prosper.”  And after 83 years on this planet – and on his visits to many others – it’s clear Leonard Nimoy did just that.  Michelle and I join his family, friends, and countless fans who miss him so dearly today.

NASA VIDEO: U.S. COMMERCIAL CARGO SHIP LEAVES ISS, SPACE EXPLORATION, SCIENCE, RESERCH

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NASA VIDEO: LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE OF SPACE EXPLORATION