NASA Spacecraft Images New Zealand Quake Region

A day after a powerful magnitude 6.3 earthquake rocked Christchurch, a city of 377,000 on New Zealand’s South Island, on Feb. 22, 2011, the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA’s Terra spacecraft imaged the Christchurch region. The imaging was done at the request of the International Charter, Space and Major Disasters, which provides emergency satellite data to federal agencies in disaster-stricken regions.Two images are presented here. The first...

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NASA's NEOWISE Completes Scan for Asteroids and Comets

NASA's NEOWISE mission has completed its survey of small bodies, asteroids and comets, in our solar system. The mission's discoveries of previously unknown objects include 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs). The NEOs are asteroids and comets with orbits that come within 45 million kilometers (28 million miles) of Earth's path around the sun.NEOWISE is an enhancement of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE,...

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Advanced NASA Instrument Gets Close-up on Mars Rocks

NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, will carry a next generation, onboard "chemical element reader" to measure the chemical ingredients in Martian rocks and soil. The instrument is one of 10 that will help the rover in its upcoming mission to determine the past and present habitability of a specific area on the Red Planet. Launch is scheduled between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18, 2011, with landing in August 2012.The Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) instrument, designed by physics professor...

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NASA Releases Images of Man-Made Crater on Comet

NASA's Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus.The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST (11:40 p.m. EST) at a distance of approximately 178 kilometers (111 miles). Stardust took 72 high-resolution images of the comet. It also accumulated 468 kilobytes of data about the dust in its coma, the cloud that is a comet's...

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NASA Helps Create a More Silent Night

The holidays are here and the nation's airports are busier than ever –thousands of airplanes taking off and landing. Passengers and people living around airports are reminded that the airplane is not the quietest mode of transportation; certainly not as quiet as a sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer.Fear not, because even while travelers are heading home, NASA continues working with others in industry and academia on technologies that will create a more silent night (and day) around airports.One...

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Engineers Assemble Giant 3-D Space Puzzle

Piece by piece a team of NASA researchers put together a huge composite and metal structure that looked a lot like high-tech tinkertoys on steroids.The structural mechanics and concepts branch engineers are going back to the past to try to explore the future. Most of them were involved with large space structure research done at NASA's Langley Research Center from the 70s to the early 90s. Now they're dusting off some of the hardware to see if the concepts would work in the 21st century"Back almost...

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NASA's Kepler Spacecraft Discovers Extraordinary New Planetary System

Scientists using NASA's Kepler, a space telescope, recently discovered six planets made of a mix of rock and gases orbiting a single sun-like star, known as Kepler-11, which is located approximately 2,000 light years from Earth."The Kepler-11 planetary system is amazing," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist and a Kepler science team member at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. "It’s amazingly compact, it’s amazingly flat, there’s an amazingly large number of big planets orbiting...

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Five Things About NASA's Valentine's Day Comet

Here are five facts you should know about NASA's Stardust-NExT spacecraft as it prepares for a Valentine's "date" with comet Tempel 1. Feel free to sing along!1. "The Way You Look Tonight" – The spacecraft is on a course to fly by comet Tempel 1 on Feb. 14 at about 8:37 p.m. PST (11:37 p.m. EST) -- Valentine's Day. Time of closest approach to Tempel 1 is significant because of the comet's rotation. We won't know until images are returned which face the comet has shown to the camera.2. "It's All...

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Taurus XL Ready to Launch Glory Spacecraft

The Glory spacecraft and its Taurus XL launch vehicle are coming together at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California as NASA gets ready to launch its first Launch Services Program mission of 2011.Researchers are looking for more puzzle pieces to fill out the picture of Earth's climate and Glory was designed to give them the pieces relating to the role tiny particles known as aerosols play in the planet's weather. The spacecraft, about the size of a refrigerator, is also equipped with an instrument...

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NASA’s “COSmIC” Simulator Helps Fingerprint Unknown Matter in Space

Who are we? Where do we come from? These are questions that scientists hope to find clues to by better understanding the composition and evolution of the universe.NASA flies sophisticated space missions that can probe vast regions of space to detect spectral signatures, or fingerprints, of unknown materials.Through the years, scientists have found that these materials are much more complicated than originally anticipated. Because conditions in space are vastly different from conditions on Earth,...

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NASA Finds Earth-size Planet Candidates in the Habitable Zone

Is our Milky Way galaxy home to other planets the size of Earth? Are Earth-sized planets common or rare? NASA scientists seeking answers to those questions recently revealed their discovery."We went from zero to 68 Earth-sized planet candidates and zero to 54 candidates in the habitable zone - a region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Some candidates could even have moons with liquid water," said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and the...

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LRO Could Have Given Apollo 14 Crew Another Majestic View

Although the Apollo 14 mission to the moon was filled with incredible sights and was completely successful -- it met all its science goals -- the crew experienced a bit of a disappointment at missing the spectacular view from the rim of a 1,000-foot-wide crater. They might have gazed into its depths if they had the high-resolution maps now available from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) spacecraft.Pressure was on the Apollo 14 mission, launched January 31, 1971, from the start. The Apollo...

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Northern Mars Landscape Actively Changing

Sand dunes in a vast area of northern Mars long thought to be frozen in time are changing with both sudden and gradual motions, according to research using images from a NASA orbiter.These dune fields cover an area the size of Texas in a band around the planet at the edge of Mars' north polar cap. The new findings suggest they are among the most active landscapes on Mars. However, few changes in these dark-toned dunes had been detected before a campaign of repeated imaging by the High Resolution...

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Developers Support JPL-Led Software Architecture

The Object Oriented Data Technology (OODT) architecture, originally developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., was recently selected to become a fully-fledged Top Level Project at the Apache Software Foundation, Forest Hill, Md. This important recognition means that OODT will be one of the few projects to receive project management and resource support from the open-source software foundation.The Object Oriented Data Technology architecture makes use of metadata to seek out...

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NASA To Announce New Planetary Discoveries

WASHINGTON -- NASA will host a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Feb. 2, to announce the Kepler mission's latest findings about planets outside our solar system. The briefing will be held in the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St S.W. in Washington and carried live on NASA Television and the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv.Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water...

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An Astronomer 's Field of Dreams

An innovative new radio telescope array under construction in central New Mexico will eventually harness the power of more than 13,000 antennas and provide a fresh eye to the sky. The antennas, which resemble droopy ceiling fans, form the Long Wavelength Array, designed to survey the sky from horizon to horizon over a wide range of frequencies.The University of New Mexico leads the project, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provides the advanced digital electronic systems,...

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