NASA Work Helps Better Predict World's Smoggiest Days

PASADENA, Calif. – A research team led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), both in Pasadena, Calif., has fully characterized a key chemical reaction that affects the formation of pollutants in smoggy air in the world's urban areas. When applied to Los Angeles, the laboratory results suggest that, on the most polluted days and in the most polluted parts of L.A., current models are underestimating ozone levels by 5 to 10 percent.The results—published...

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Explore Energy with NASA during Earth Science Week

We all know how it feels to be low on energy after a long day. Or how it feels to be full of energy after a good night’s rest or a good meal. Energy is just as important to Earth’s everyday life as it is to ours.“Exploring Energy” is the theme of this year’s Earth Science Week, Oct. 10-16. The American Geological Institute hosts Earth Science Week annually in cooperation with various sponsors to engage people in Earth science and encourage stewardship of Earth.NASA develops, deploys and manages...

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Wind Shear Accident Was Catalyst for Technology

On that day 25 years ago the public affairs specialist was a young U.S. Air Force airman heading home on leave to North Carolina, flying out of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport."I was looking out my window, sitting at the end of the runway aboard the second airplane lined up to take off," said Creech. "I had a window seat and was looking out the window when I noticed some really, really black thunder clouds at our end of the runway. Then I saw orange, extremely bright orange, light. My brain...

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Chandra: What Lies Beneath? Magnetar Enigma Deepens

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Observations with NASA’s Chandra, Swift and Rossi X-ray observatories, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and ESA’s XMM-Newton have revealed that a slowly rotating neutron star with an ordinary surface magnetic field is giving off bursts of X-rays and gamma rays. This discovery may indicate the presence of an internal magnetic field much more intense than the surface magnetic field, with implications for how the most powerful magnets in the cosmos evolve.The neutron star, SGR 0418+5729,...

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NASA Simulates the Sun's Power on Earth to Test Hardware Intended for Space

In the hostile environment of space, satellites could get burned by the ultra-hot sun in front of them and chilled by the frigid cold conditions of space behind them.Researchers at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., are using their Solar Thermal Test Facility to simulate some of the harshest conditions space has to offer to learn what these extreme temperatures can do to flight hardware close to the sun. They're currently testing Strofio, a unique NASA instrument that will...

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NASA TV Program Wins Emmy

When Tom Shortridge was growing up in small Laurel, Del., with a population of 3,600, he knew he wanted to work in television. He graduated from a technical high school with a concentration in media broadcasting. There Shortridge helped produce daily school newscasts and a weekly news show that aired on local cable. He went on to major in communications in college with a minor in film and videoBut the 25-year-old never guessed some day he would be part of a team that would win a regional Emmy award...

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NASA Invites Students to Study the Sun During Solar Week

Want to build a pinhole camera to look at an eclipse? Or learn more about how gigantic telescopes examine the sun? The place to go on the Web is solarweek.org from October 18-22. Twice a year, Solar Week provides a weeklong series of web-based educational activities for classrooms about our magnetic variable star, the sun, and its interactions with Earth and the solar system.Each day of Solar Week offers a different set of lessons and games for students ranging from the upper elementary to high...

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The Moon Puts on Camo

A new geologic map of the moon's Schrödinger basin paints an instant, camouflage-colored portrait of what a mash-up the moon's surface is after eons of violent events. The geologic record at Schrödinger is still relatively fresh because the basin is only about 3.8 billion years old; this makes it the moon's second-youngest large basin (it's roughly 320 kilometers, or 200 miles, in diameter).Schrödinger is located near the moon's south pole, a region where pockets of permanent ice are thought to...

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NASA Mission to Asteroid Gets Help From Hubble

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of the large asteroid Vesta that will help refine plans for the Dawn spacecraft's rendezvous with Vesta in July 2011.Scientists have constructed a video from the images that will help improve pointing instructions for Dawn as it is placed in a polar orbit around Vesta. Analyses of Hubble images revealed a pole orientation, or tilt, of approximately four degrees more to the asteroid's east than scientists previously thought.This...

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Cassini Catches Saturn Moons in Paintball Fight

PASADENA, Calif. – Scientists using data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have learned that distinctive, colorful bands and splotches embellish the surfaces of Saturn's inner, mid-size moons. The reddish and bluish hues on the icy surfaces of Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione and Rhea appear to be the aftermath of bombardments large and small.A paper based on the findings was recently published online in the journal Icarus. In it, scientists describe prominent global patterns that trace the trade routes...

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Cluster Helps Disentangle Turbulence in the Solar Wind

From Earth, the Sun looks like a calm, placid body that does little more than shine brightly while marching across the sky. Images from a bit closer, of course, show it’s an unruly ball of hot gas that can expel long plumes out into space – but even this isn’t the whole story. Surrounding the Sun is a roiling wind of electrons and protons that shows constant turbulence at every size scale: long streaming jets, smaller whirling eddies, and even microscopic movements as charged particles circle in...

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NASA Loosens GRIP On Atlantic Hurricane Season

NASA wrapped up one of its largest hurricane research efforts ever last week after nearly two months of flights that broke new ground in the study of tropical cyclones and delivered data that scientists will now be able to analyze for years to come.While the 2010 hurricane season has been a rather quiet one for coastal dwellers, the churning meteorology of the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea seemed to cooperate well with the science goals of Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) experiment....

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'A-Train' Satellites Search for 770 Million Tons of Dust in the Air

Using data from several research satellites, scientists will spend the next three years trying to understand the climate impacts of about 770 million tons of dust carried into the atmosphere every year from the Sahara Desert.Terra satellite's MODIS image of dust off the west coast of AfricaClick to enlarge"The people who build climate models make some assumptions about dust and its impact on the climate," said Dr. Sundar Christopher, a professor of atmospheric science at The University of Alabama...

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NASA Assets Provide Orbital View to Study Phoenix Heat Waves

Where you live may say a lot about your socioeconomic status. It also may suggest how vulnerable you are to long periods of excessively hot weather.Researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Arizona State University and the University of California at Riverside are studying the relationship between temperature variations and socioeconomic variables across metropolitan Phoenix. They have found that the urban poor are the most vulnerable to extreme heat.Those in higher incomes tend to live in areas...

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WISE Spies a Comet with its Powerful Infrared Eye

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has discovered its first comet, one of many the mission is expected to find among millions of other objects during its ongoing survey of the whole sky in infrared light.Officially named "P/2010 B2 (WISE)," but known simply as WISE, the comet is a dusty mass of ice more than 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) in diameter. It probably formed around the same time as our solar system, about 4.5 billion years ago. Comet WISE started out in the cold, dark reaches...

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IBEX Finds Surprising Changes at Solar Boundary

When NASA launched the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) on October 19, 2008, space physicists held their collective breath for never-before-seen views of a collision zone far beyond the planets, roughly 10 billion miles away. That’s where the solar wind, an outward rush of charged particles and magnetic fields continuously spewed by the Sun, runs into the flow of particles and fields that permeates interstellar space in our neighborhood of the Milky Way galaxy.No spacecraft had ever imaged...

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NASA Study Sees Earth's Water Cycle Pulse Quickening

Freshwater is flowing into Earth's ocean in greater amounts every year, thanks to more frequent and extreme storms related to global warming, according to a first-of-its-kind study by a team of NASA and university researchers.The team, led by Tajdarul Syed of the Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, India, and formerly with the University of California, Irvine, used NASA and other world-scale satellite observations to track total water volume flowing from the continents into the ocean each month. They...

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NASA Ames Scientists Train the Next Generation of Earth Explorers

South of the San Francisco Bay is a 100-year tidal floodplain near NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. Because of the potential for flooding, Ames purchased a segment of the mud flats for flood storm management, and has used the area for field experiments to teach and train gifted science students about the practical benefits of studying the tidal salt marsh and its wildlife.For the last eight years, NASA Ames Earth Science Division has been participating in a student internship program...

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