NASA-International Space Station

The Flight Readiness Review for the launch of the Delta IV rocket with GOES-P was held on Feb. 25. The last assessment, the Launch Readiness Review, will be held on March 1.

At Launch Complex 37, closeouts of the Delta IV and GOES-P are commencement. A launch countdown mission dress preparation was successfully completed Friday.

On launch day, the mobile service tower will be retracted away from the Delta IV at 7:30 a.m. The fatal countdown will begin when the countdown clock emerges from a planned built-in hold at 1 p.m.

Space Shuttle Program conducted the last test firing of a reusable solid rocket motor Feb. 25 in Promontory, Utah.

The flight sustains motor, or FSM-17, burned for about 123 seconds -- the same time each reusable solid rocket motor burns during a definite space shuttle launch. Preliminary indications show all test objectives were met. After final test data are analyzed, results for each objective will be published in a NASA report.

ATK Launch Systems, a unit of Alliant Techsystems Inc., in Promontory, north of Salt Lake City, manufactures and tests the solid rocket motors.

The test -- the 52nd conducted for NASA by ATK – marks the closure of a test agenda that has spanned more than three decades. The first test was in July 1977. The ATK-built motors have effectively launched the space shuttle into orbit 129 times.

During space shuttle flights, solid rocket motors provide 80 percent of the thrust during the first two minutes of flight. Each motor, the primary constituent of the shuttle's twin solid rocket boosters, generates an average thrust of 2.6 million pounds and is just over 126 feet long and 12 feet in diameter."Today's test was an enormous deal more than the successful termination to a series of highly successful NASA/ATK-sponsored static tests that began more than three decades ago," said David Beaman, Reusable Solid Rocket Booster project manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The project, part of the Space Shuttle Propulsion Office, is responsible for motor design, development, manufacturing, assembly, and testing and flight performance.

During space shuttle flights, solid rocket motors provide 80 percent of the thrust during the first two minutes of flight. Each motor, the primary constituent of the shuttle's twin solid rocket boosters, generates an average thrust of 2.6 million pounds and is just over 126 feet long and 12 feet in diameter."These tests have built a base of engineering knowledge that continued engineering development of the reusable solid rocket motor system and the continued safe and successful launch of space shuttles," Beaman said. "They have provided an engineering model and lessons learned for additional applications in future launch systems."

The final test was conducted to ensure the safe journey of the four remaining space shuttle missions. A total of 43 design objectives were deliberate through 258 instrument channels during the two-minute static firing. The flight motor tested represents motors that will be used for all residual space shuttle launches.

The space shuttle's reusable solid rocket motor is the major solid rocket motor ever flown, the only one rated for human flight and the first designed for reuse. Each shuttle launch requires the boost of two reusable solid rocket motors to lift the 4.5-million-pound shuttle vehicle.

During space shuttle flights, solid rocket motors provide 80 percent of the thrust during the first two minutes of flight. Each motor, the primary constituent of the shuttle's twin solid rocket boosters, generates an average thrust of 2.6 million pounds and is just over 126 feet long and 12 feet in diameter.

NASA's Mars Odyssey began a second campaign Monday to check on whether the Phoenix Mars Lander has revitalized itself after the northern Martian winter. The orbiter established no signal from the lander during the first 10 overflights of this campaign.

Odyssey will pay attention for Phoenix during 50 additional overflights, through Feb. 26, during the current campaign.

Phoenix landed on Mars on May 25, 2008, and operated profitably in the Martian arctic for about two months longer than its planned three-month mission. Operations ended when declining sunlight left the solar-powered craft with insufficient energy to keep working. The season at the Phoenix landing site is now mid-springtime, with the sun above the horizon for roughly 22 hours each Martian day. That is analogous to the illumination that Phoenix experienced a few weeks after finishing its three-month primary mission.

Phoenix was not designed to withstand the tremendously low temperatures and the ice load of the Martian arctic winter. In the tremendously unlikely event that the lander has survived the winter and has achieved a stable energy state, it would operate in a mode where it occasionally awakens and transmits a signal to any orbiter in view.

A third movement to check on whether Phoenix has revived itself is scheduled for April 5-9, when the sun will be continuously above the Martian horizon at the Phoenix site.

Mars Odyssey is managed for NASA's Science Mission Directorate by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the prime contractor for the project and made the spacecraft. The successful Phoenix mission was led by Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, with project management at JPL and development partnership at Lockheed Martin. International contributions came from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark; the Max Planck Institute in Germany; the Finnish Meteorological Institute; and Imperial College, London.

Climatologists have long recognized that human-produced greenhouse gases have been the dominant drivers of Earth's observed warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution. But other factors also affect our planet's temperature. Of these, the ocean plays a central role. Its effects helped nudge global temperatures slightly higher in 2009, and, according to NASA scientists, could well contribute to making 2010 the warmest year on record.

Covering 71 percent of our planet's surface, the ocean acts as a global thermostat, storing energy from the sun, keeping Earth's temperature changes reasonable and keeping climate change gradual. In fact, the ocean can store as much heat in its top three meters (10 feet) as the entire atmosphere does.

"The vast amount of heat stored in the ocean regulates Earth's temperature, much as a flywheel regulates the speed of an engine," said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The ocean has a long history of capturing and giving up heat generated by both human activities and accepted cycles; it is the thermal memory of the climate system."

Heat and moisture from the ocean are constantly exchanged with Earth's atmosphere in a process that drives our weather and climate. Scientists at NASA and elsewhere use a variety of direct and satellite-based measurements to study the interactions between the ocean and atmosphere.

"These interactions result in large-scale global climate effects, the largest of which is the El Niño-Southern Oscillation," explained Josh Willis, a JPL oceanographer and climate scientist. This climate pattern appears in the tropical Pacific Ocean roughly every four to 12 years and has a powerful impact on the ocean and the atmosphere. It can disrupt global weather and influence hurricanes, droughts and floods. It can also raise or lower global temperatures by up to 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

The oscillation pattern is made up of linked atmospheric and oceanic components. The atmospheric component is called the Southern Oscillation, a pattern of reversing surface air pressure that see-saws between the eastern and western tropical Pacific. The ocean's response to this atmospheric shift is known as either "El Niño" or "La Niña" (Spanish for "the little boy" and "the little girl," respectively).

Where the wind blows

During El Niño, the normally strong easterly trade winds in the tropical eastern Pacific weaken, allowing warm water to shift toward the Americas and occupy the entire tropical Pacific. Heavy rains tied to this warm water move into the central and eastern Pacific. El Niño can cause drought in Indonesia and Australia and disrupt the path of the atmospheric jet streams over North and South America, changing winter climate.

Large El Niños, such as the most powerful El Niño of the past century in 1997 to 1998, tend to force Earth's average temperatures temporarily higher for up to a year or more. Large areas of the Pacific can be one to two degrees Celsius (around two to four degrees Fahrenheit) above normal, and the average temperature of the ocean surface tends to increase. The current El Niño began last October and is expected to continue into mid-2010. Scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York estimate that if this pattern persists, 2010 may well go down as the warmest year on record.

El Niño's cold counterpart is La Niña. During La Niña, trade winds are stronger than normal, and cold water that usually sits along the coast of South America gets pushed to the mid-equatorial region of the Pacific. La Niñas are typically associated with less moisture in the air and less rain along the coasts of the Americas, and they tend to cause average global surface temperatures to drop. The last La Niña from 2007 to 2009 helped make 2008 the coolest year of the last decade. The end of that La Niña last year and subsequent transition into an El Niño helped contribute to last year's return to near-record global temperatures.

All the ocean's a stage

Both El Niño and La Niña play out on a larger stage that operates on decade-long timescales. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO for short, describes a long-term pattern of change in the Pacific Ocean that alternates between cool and warm periods about every five to 20 years. The PDO can intensify the impacts of La Niña or diminish the impacts of El Niño. In its "cool, negative phase," warm water, which causes higher-than-normal sea-surface heights (because warmer water expands and takes up more space), forms a horseshoe pattern that connects the north, west and south Pacific with cool water in the middle. In its "warm, positive phase," these warm and cool regions are reversed, and warm water forms in the middle of the horseshoe.

Such phase shifts of the PDO result in widespread changes in Pacific Ocean temperatures and have significant global climate implications. During the 1950s and 1960s, the PDO was strongly negative, or cool, and global temperatures seemed to level off. During most of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, the Pacific was locked in a strong positive, or warm, PDO phase and there were many El Niños. We are currently in the early stages of a cool PDO phase that began around 2006. Cool, negative phases tend to dampen the effects of El Niños.

Willis said the PDO, El Niño and La Niña can strongly affect global warming due to increased greenhouse gases. "These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities, or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it," he explained.

Wild ride

"These natural signals -- El Niños, La Niñas and PDOs -- can modulate the global record for a decade or two, giving us a wild ride with major climate and societal impacts," said Patzert. "They can have a powerful short-term influence on global temperatures in any particular year or decade. This can make it appear as if global warming has leveled off or become global cooling. But when you look at the long-term trend over the past 130 years, our world is definitely getting warmer. And that's the human-produced greenhouse gas signal."

Patzert said the recent climate record is like making a drive from the coast to the mountains. "As you rise slowly to higher and higher elevations, occasionally you hit a major speed bump, such as the 1997 to 1998 El Niño, and temperatures spike; or you hit potholes, such as cooler phases of the PDO, and temperatures dip," he said. "In the end, though, we still tend toward the top of the mountain, and the trend upwards is clear. We are driving ourselves into a warmer world."

Will 2010 be the warmest year on record? How do the recent U.S. "Snowmageddon" winter storms and proof low temperatures in Europe fit into the bigger picture of long-term global warming? NASA has launched a fresh Web page to help people better understand the causes and effects of Earth's changing climate.

The new "A Warming World" page hosts a succession of new articles, videos, data visualizations, space-based descriptions and interactive visuals that offer unique NASA perspectives on this topic of global importance.

The page includes characteristic articles that explore the recent Arctic winter weather that has gripped the United States, Europe and Asia, and how El Nino and other longer-term ocean-atmosphere phenomena can affect global temperatures this year and in the future. A new video, "Piecing Together the Temperature Puzzle," illustrates how NASA satellites monitor climate change and help scientists better understand how our complex planet works.

The new Web page is available on NASA's Global Climate Change Web site at: http://climate.nasa.gov/warmingworld .

Newly released images from last November's swoop over Saturn's icy moon Enceladus by NASA's Cassini spacecraft reveal a forest of new jets spraying from prominent fractures crossing the south polar region and yield the most detailed temperature map to date of one fracture.

The new images from the imaging science subsystem and the composite infrared spectrometer teams also include the best 3-D image ever obtained of a "tiger stripe," a fissure that sprays icy particles, water vapor and organic compounds. There are also views of regions not well-mapped previously on Enceladus, including a southern area with crudely circular tectonic patterns.

The images and additional information are online at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

"Enceladus continues to astound," said Bob Pappalardo, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "With each Cassini flyby, we learn more about its extreme activity and what makes this strange moon tick."

For Cassini's visible-light cameras, the Nov. 21, 2009 flyby provided the last look at Enceladus' south polar surface before that region of the moon goes into 15 years of darkness, and includes the most detailed look yet at the jets.

Scientists planned to use this flyby to look for new or smaller jets not visible in previous images. In one mosaic, scientists count more than 30 individual geysers, including more than 20 that had not been seen before. At least one jet spouting prominently in previous images now appears less powerful.

"This last flyby confirms what we suspected," said Carolyn Porco, imaging team lead based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "The vigor of individual jets can vary with time, and many jets, large and small, erupt all along the tiger stripes."

A new map that combines heat data with visible-light images shows a 40-kilometer (25-mile) segment of the longest tiger stripe, known as Baghdad Sulcus. The map illustrates the correlation, at the highest resolution yet seen, between the geologically youthful surface fractures and the anomalously warm temperatures that have been recorded in the south polar region. The broad swaths of heat previously detected by the infrared spectrometer appear to be confined to a narrow, intense region no more than a kilometer (half a mile) wide along the fracture.

In these measurements, peak temperatures along Baghdad Sulcus exceed 180 Kelvin (minus 135 degrees Fahrenheit), and may be higher than 200 Kelvin (minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit). These warm temperatures probably result from heating of the fracture flanks by the warm, upwelling water vapor that propels the ice-particle jets seen by Cassini's cameras. Cassini scientists will be testing this idea by investigating how well the hot spots correspond with the jet sources.

"The fractures are chilly by Earth standards, but they're a cozy oasis compared to the numbing 50 Kelvin (-370 Fahrenheit) of their surroundings," said John Spencer, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "The huge amount of heat pouring out of the tiger stripe fractures may be enough to melt the ice underground. Results like this make Enceladus one of the most exciting places we've found in the solar system."

Some of Cassini's scientists infer that the warmer the temperatures are at the surface, the greater the likelihood that jets erupt from liquid. "And if true, this makes Enceladus' organic-rich, liquid sub-surface environment the most accessible extraterrestrial watery zone known in the solar system," Porco said.

The Nov. 21 flyby was the eighth targeted encounter with Enceladus. It took the spacecraft to within about 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) of the moon's surface, at around 82 degrees south latitude.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, 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 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.

Shuttle Launch Integration Manager Mike Moses said that space shuttle Endeavour's hall capped off a flawless mission. "The crew did an exceptional job," Moses said, referring to the complex task of installing Tranquility and its seven-windowed cupola to the International Space Station. "The landing today went as smooth as you can hope for -- by the numbers."

Moses wrapped up his remarks about the STS-130 mission by saying, "It was an exceptional mission -- I can't be happier with the success we had and look forward to repeating that on our next mission."

Shuttle Launch Director Mike Leinbach was extremely pleased with Endeavour's condition."One of the most magical things we get to do here at Kennedy Space Center is walk approximately the orbiter after a mission from space. She looks really, really good," Leinbach said.

Leinbach also congratulated Norm Knight and his team in the Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for a job well done.

Like the battered white whale Moby Dick pointed Captain Ahab, Saturn's moon Prometheus surges toward the viewer in a 3-D image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

The picture exposes the irregular shape and circular surface scars on Prometheus, pointing to a violent history. These craters are almost certainly the remnants from impacts long ago.

Prometheus is one of Saturn's inmost moons. It orbits the gas-giant at a distance of about 140,000 kilometers (86,000 miles) and is 86 kilometers (53 miles) across at its widest point. The porous, icy world was originally discovered in images taken by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft back in 1980.

Cassini's narrow-angle camera captured two black-and-white images of the moon on Dec. 26, 2009, and the imaging team combined the images to make this new stereo view. It looks dissimilar from the "egg-cellent" raw image of Prometheus obtained on Jan. 27 because that view shows one of the short ends of the strangely shaped moon. In this 3-D image, the sun illuminate Prometheus at a different angle, making the moon's elongated body visible.

The Cassini Equinox Mission is a joint United States and European endeavor. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 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 intended, developed and assembled at JPL. For more information about the Cassini Equinox Mission visit: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Just three days shy of one year before its planned flyby of comet Tempel 1, NASA's Stardust spacecraft has successfully performed a maneuver to adjust the time of its encounter by eight hours and 20 minutes. The delay maximizes the probability of the spacecraft capturing high-resolution images of the desired surface features of the 2.99-kilometer-wide (1.86 mile) potato-shaped mass of ice and dust.

With the spacecraft on the opposite side of the solar system and beyond the orbit of Mars, the trajectory correction maneuver began at 5:21 p.m. EST (2:21 p.m. PST) on Feb. 17. Stardust's rockets fired for 22 minutes and 53 seconds, changing the spacecraft's speed by 24 meters per second (54 miles per hour).

Stardust's maneuver placed the spacecraft on a course to fly by the comet just before 8:42 p.m. PST (11:42 p.m. EST) on Feb. 14, 2011 – Valentine's Day. Time of closest approach to Tempel 1 is important because the comet rotates, allowing different regions of the comet to be illuminated by the sun's rays at different times. Mission scientists want to maximize the probability that areas of interest previously imaged by NASA's Deep Impact mission in 2005 will also be bathed in the sun's rays and visible to Stardust's camera when it passes by.

"We could not have asked for a better result from a burn with even a brand-new spacecraft," said Tim Larson, project manager for the Stardust-NExT at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This bird has already logged one comet flyby, one Earth return of the first samples ever collected from deep space, over 4,000 days of flight and approximately 5.4 billion kilometers (3.4 billion miles) since launch."

Launched on Feb. 7, 1999, Stardust became the first spacecraft in history to collect samples from a comet and return them to Earth for study. While its sample return capsule parachuted to Earth in January 2006, mission controllers were placing the still viable spacecraft on a trajectory that would allow NASA the opportunity to re-use the already-proven flight system if a target of opportunity presented itself. In January 2007, NASA re-christened the mission "Stardust-NExT" (New Exploration of Tempel), and the Stardust team began a four-and-a-half year journey to comet Tempel 1. This will be humanity's second exploration of the comet – and the first time a comet has been "re-visited."

"Stardust-NExT will provide scientists the first opportunity to see the surface changes on a comet between successive visits into the inner solar system," said Joe Veverka, principal investigator of Stardust-NExT from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "We have theories galore on how each close pass to the sun causes changes to a comet. Stardust-NExT should give some teeth to some of these theories, and take a bite out of others."

Along with the high-resolution images of the comet's surface, Stardust-NExT will also measure the composition, size distribution, and flux of dust emitted into the coma, and provide important new information on how Jupiter family comets evolve and how they formed 4.6 billion years ago.

Stardust-NExT is a low-cost mission that will expand the investigation of comet Tempel 1 initiated by NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages Stardust-NExT for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. Joe Veverka of Cornell University is the mission's principal investigator. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver Colo., built the spacecraft and manages day-to-day mission operations.

In 2007, the Arctic lost an enormous amount of thick, multiyear sea ice, contributing to that year's record-low extent of Arctic sea ice. A new NASA-led study has create that the record loss that year was due in part to the absence of "ice arches," as expected-forming, curved ice structures that span the openings between two land points. These arches block sea ice from being pushed by winds or currents through narrow passages and out of the Arctic basin.

Beginning each fall, sea ice spreads across the surface of the Arctic Ocean until it becomes restricted by surrounding continents. Only a few passages -- including the Fram Strait and Nares Strait -- allow sea ice to escape.

"There are a couple of ways to lose Arctic ice: when it flows out and when it melts," said lead study investigator Ron Kwok of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "We are trying to enumerate how much we're losing by outflow versus melt."

Kwok and colleagues found that ice arches were absent in 2007 from the Nares Strait, a relatively narrow 30- to 40-kilometer-wide (19- to 25-mile-wide) passage west of Greenland. Without the arches, ice exited freely from the Arctic. The Fram Strait, east of Greenland, is about 400 kilometers (249 miles) wide and is the channel through which most sea ice usually exits the Arctic.

Despite Nares' narrow width, the team reports that in 2007, ice loss through Nares equaled more than 10 percent of the quantity emptied on average each year through the wider Fram Strait.

"Until recently, we didn't think the small straits were important for ice loss," Kwok said. The findings were available this month in Geophysical Research Letters.

"One of our most significant goals is developing predictive models of Arctic sea ice cover," said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Such models are significant not only to understanding changes in the Arctic, but also changes in global and North American climate. Figuring out how ice is lost through the Fram and Nares straits is critical to increasing those models."

To find out more about the ice motion in Nares Strait, the scientists examined a 13-year record of high-resolution radar descriptions from the Canadian RADARSAT and European Envisat satellites. They found that 2007 was a unique year – the only one on record when arches failed to form, allowing ice to flow unobstructed through winter and spring.

The arches usually form at southern and northern points within Nares Strait when big blocks of sea ice try to flow during the strait's restricted confines, become stuck and are compressed by other ice. This grinds the flow of sea ice to a halt.

"We don't completely understand the circumstances conducive to the formation of these arches," Kwok said. "We do know that they are temperature-dependent because they only form in winter. So there's anxiety that if climate warms, the arches could stop forming."

To quantify the impact of ice arches on Arctic Ocean ice cover, the team tracked ice motion evident in the 13-year span of satellite radar images. They calculated the area of ice passing during an imaginary line, or "gate," at the entrance to Nares Strait. Then they incorporated ice thickness data from NASA's ICESat to estimate the volume lost through Nares.

They found that in 2007, Nares Strait drained the Arctic Ocean of 88,060 square kilometers (34,000 square miles) of sea ice, or a volume of 60 cubic miles. The quantity was more than twice the average amount lost through Nares each year between 1997 and 2009.

The ice lost through Nares Strait was some of the thickest and oldest in the Arctic Ocean.

"If indeed these arches are less likely to form in the future, we have to explanation for the annual ice loss through this narrow passage. Potentially, this could lead to an even more rapid decline in the summer ice extent of the Arctic Ocean," Kwok said.

Imagine discovering a living dinosaur in your backyard. Astronomers have found the astronomical corresponding of prehistoric life in our intergalactic backyard: a group of small, early galaxies that has waited 10 billion years to come together. These "late bloomers" are on their way to building a large elliptical galaxy.

Such encounters between dwarf galaxies are usually seen billions of light-years away and therefore occurred billions of years ago. But these galaxies, members of Hickson Compact Group 31, are comparatively nearby, only 166 million light-years away.

New images of this foursome by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offer a window into the determining years of the universe, when the buildup of large galaxies from smaller construction blocks was common. The analysis was bolstered by infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and ultraviolet observations from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and Swift satellite. Those data helped the astronomers measure the total amount of star formation in the system.

A dramatic 3D Mars view based on land modeling from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter data shows "highs and lows" of Mojave Crater.

The vertical dimension is overstated three-fold compared with horizontal dimensions in the synthesized imagery of a portion of the crater's wall. The resulting images look like the view from a low-altitude aircraft. They reflect one use of digital modeling resulting from two observations by the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera.

This enhanced view shows material that has ponded and is backed up behind enormous blocks of bedrock in the crater's terrace walls. Hundreds of Martian collision craters have similar ponding with pitted surfaces. Scientists believe these "pitted ponds" are formed when material melted by the crater-causing impacts is captured behind the wall terraces.

Mojave Crater, one of the freshest large craters on Mars, is about 60 kilometers (37 miles) in diameter. In a sense, it is like the Rosetta Stone of Martian craters, because it is so fresh. Other craters of this size usually have already been affected by erosion, sediment and other geologic process. Fresh craters like Mohave reveal information about the collision process, including ejecta, melting and deposits.

A varied cast of cosmic characters is showcased in the first survey images NASA released Wednesday from its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.

Since WISE began its scan of the complete sky in infrared light on Jan. 14, the space telescope has beamed back more than a quarter of a million raw, infrared images. Four new, processed pictures demonstrate a sampling of the mission's targets a wispy comet, a bursting star-forming cloud, the grand Andromeda galaxy and a faraway cluster of hundreds of galaxies. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/images20100216.html (see images) .

"WISE has worked excellently," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These first images are proving the spacecraft's minor mission of helping to track asteroids, comets and other stellar objects will be just as significantly important as its primary mission of surveying the entire sky in infrared."

One image shows the attractiveness of a comet called Siding Spring. As the comet parades toward the sun, it sheds dust that glows in infrared light visible to WISE. The comet's tail, which stretches about 10 million miles, looks like a streak of red paint. A bright star appears below it in blue.

"We've got a candy store of descriptions coming down from space," said Edward (Ned) Wright of UCLA, the principal researcher for WISE. "Everyone has their favorite flavors, and we've got them all."

During its survey, the mission is predictable to find perhaps dozens of comets, including some that ride along in orbits that take them somewhat close to Earth's path around the sun. WISE will help unravel clues locked inside comets about how our solar system came to be.

Another image shows a bright and choppy star-forming region called NGC 3603, lying 20,000 light-years away in the Carina spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. This star-forming factory is churning out batches of new stars, some of which are monstrously massive and hotter than the sun. The hot stars warm the surrounding dust clouds, causing them to glow at infrared wavelengths.

WISE will see hundreds of similar star-making regions in our galaxy, helping astronomers piece mutually a picture of how stars are born. The observations also offer an important link to understanding violent episodes of star formation in distant galaxies. Because NGC 3603 is much closer, astronomers use it as a lab to probe the same type of action that is taking place billions of light-years away.

Traveling farther out from our Milky Way, the third new image shows our adjacent large neighbor, the Andromeda spiral galaxy. Andromeda is a bit bigger than our Milky Way and about 2.5 million light-years away. The new picture highlights WISE's wide field of view -- it covers an area larger than 100 full moons and even shows other smaller galaxies near Andromeda, all belonging to our "local group" of more than about 50 galaxies. WISE will capture the entire local group.

The fourth WISE image is even farther out, in a region of hundreds of galaxies all bound together into one family. Called the Fornax cluster, these galaxies are 60 million light-years from Earth. The mission's infrared views reveal both sluggish and active galaxies, providing a census of data on an entire galactic community.

"All these pictures tell a story about our dusty origins and destiny," said Peter Eisenhardt, the WISE project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "WISE sees dusty comets and rocky asteroids tracing the configuration and evolution of our solar system. We can map thousands of forming and dying solar systems across our entire galaxy. We can see patterns of star configuration across other galaxies, and waves of star-bursting galaxies in clusters millions of light years away."

Other mission targets include comets, asteroids and cool stars called brown dwarfs. WISE discovered its first near-Earth asteroid on Jan. 12, and first comet on Jan. 22. The mission will scan the sky one-and-a-half times by October. At that point, the frozen coolant needed to chill its instruments will be depleted.

JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program, which NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. For more information about WISE, visit http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu/ and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise.

The most important asteroid in the sky is currently yours for the perusing with binoculars -- and perhaps even the naked eye.

Tonight, Wednesday, Feb. 17, Vesta, the second most massive object in the asteroid belt, reaches what astronomers like to call "opposition." An asteroid (or planet or comet) is said to be "in opposition" when it is conflicting to the sun as seen from Earth. In other words, if you were to stand outside with the sun directly above you at high noon, Vesta would be straight below your feet some 211,980,000 kilometers (131,700,000 miles) away. With Vesta at opposition, the asteroid is at its adjoining point to Earth in its orbit.

Wednesday night, the asteroid is predictable to shine at magnitude 6.1. That brightness should make it visible to concerned parties brandishing telescopes or binoculars, and even those blessed with excellent vision and little or no light pollution or clouds in their vicinity. Vesta will be visible in the eastern sky in the constellation Leo.

What makes this space rock so famous these days? Along with its relative proximity at this point, a full half of the asteroid is being bathed by sunlight when seen from Earth, making it emerge brighter. Another attribute working in the observer's favor is that Vesta has a exclusive surface material that is not as dark as most main belt asteroids - allowing more of the sun's rays to reflect off its surface.

If spotting Vesta in the night sky has whetted your appetite for mega-rocks, all we can say is, stay tuned. NASA's Dawn spacecraft, currently motoring its way through the asteroid belt, will begin its exploration of Vesta in the summer of 2011.

Blazing through its closest pass of the Saturnian moon Mimas on Feb. 13, Cassini sent back prominent close-ups of the moon likened to the Death Star from "Star Wars" and the massive crater scarring its surface. The flyby also yielded solid data on the moon's thermal signature and surface composition.

Some of the raw, unprocessed pictures sent back from the flyby show the bright, steep slopes of the giant Herschel Crater, which measures about 140 kilometers (88 miles) wide. The icy slopes appear to be pitched around 24 degrees, which would possibly earn them a black- or double-black-diamond rating on Earth. Olympic downhill skiers could probably tear down these runs with ease, but it's clear Mimas is no place for bunny-slope beginners.

The images, which have the highest resolution so far, also explain jumbled terrain inside the crater and many craters within the crater. These features hint at a long history, which scientists will be working meticulously to analyze.

"This flyby has been like looking at a cell or an onion skin under the microscope for the first time," said Bonnie Buratti, one of the leads for the Satellite Orbiter Science Team. "We'd seen the large crater from afar because the early 1980s, but now its small bumps and blemishes are all obviously visible."

This encounter took the spacecraft as close as about 9,500 kilometers (5,900 miles) above Mimas. Cassini had to contrive through a dusty region to get in position, but survived the trip untouched, as expected.

The moon averages 396 kilometers (246 miles) in diameter. The walls of Herschel Crater are about 5 kilometers (3 miles) high, and parts of the floor are approximately 10 kilometers (6 miles) deep.

Unprocessed images of the flyby are available at http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/photos/raw/. More information about the Cassini mission is at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Twenty years ago on February 14, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft had sailed beyond the farthest planet in our solar system and turned its camera inward to snap a series of final descriptions that would be its parting valentine to the string of planets it called home.

Mercury was too close to the sun to see, Mars showed only a thin crescent of sunlight, and Pluto was too dim, but Voyager was able to capture cameos of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth and Venus from its unique vantage point. These images, later agreed in a large-scale mosaic, make up the only family portrait of our planets arrayed about the sun.

The Apollo missions in the 1960s and 70s had already altered our perspective of Earth by returning descriptions of our home planet from the moon, but Voyager was providing a completely new perspective, said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"It captured the Earth as a speck of light in the immensity of the solar system, which is our local neighborhood in the Milky Way galaxy, in a universe replete with galaxies," Stone said.

In the years since the twin Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977, they had previously sent back breathtaking, groundbreaking pictures of the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. It took Voyager 1 more than 12 years to reach the place where it took the group portrait, 6 billion kilometers (almost 4 billion miles) away from the sun. The imaging team started snapping images of the outer planets first since they were worried that pointing the camera near the sun would blind it and prevent more picture-taking.

Candy Hansen, a planetary scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who worked with the Voyager imaging team at the time, remembers combing through the pictures and finally finding the image of Earth. She had seen so many pictures over the years that she could distinguish dust on the lens from the black dots imprinted on the lens for geometric correction.

There was our planet, a bright speck sitting in a kind of spotlight of sunlight spotted by the camera. Hansen still gets chills thinking about it.

"I was struck by how special Earth was, as I saw it shining in a ray of sunlight," she said. "It also made me think about how susceptible our tiny planet is."

This was the image that inspired Carl Sagan, the the Voyager imaging team member who had optional taking this portrait, to call our home planet "a pale blue dot."

As he wrote in a book by that name, "That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every person being who ever was, lived out their lives. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world."

After these images were taken, mission managers started powering down the cameras. The spacecraft weren't going to fly near anything else, and other instrument that were still collecting data needed power for the long journey to interstellar space that was ahead.

The Voyagers are still transmitting data daily back to Earth. Voyager 1 is now nearly 17 billion kilometers (more than 10 billion miles) away from the sun. The spacecraft have continued on to the next leg of their interstellar mission, closing in on the boundary of the bubble fashioned by the sun that envelops all the planets. Scientists eagerly await the time when the Voyagers will leave that bubble and enter interstellar space.

"We were marveling at the vastness of space when this portrait was taken, but 20 years later, we're still inside the bubble," Stone said. "Voyager 1 may leave the solar bubble in five more years, but the family portrait gives you a sense of the scale of our neighborhood and that there is a great deal beyond it yet to be discovered."

The Voyagers were built by JPL, which continues to operate both spacecraft. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has exposed 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 merely 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 of our solar system, but after a long history of getting knocked around by the gravitational forces of Jupiter, it settled into an orbit much quicker to the sun. Right now, the comet is heading away from the sun and is about 175 million kilometers (109 million miles) from Earth.

"Comets are ancient reservoirs of water. They are one of the few places in addition Earth in the inner solar system where water is known to exist," said Amy Mainzer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Mainzer is the principal investigator of NEOWISE, a project to find and catalog new asteroids and comets spotted by WISE (the acronym combines WISE with NEO, the shorthand for near-Earth object).

"With WISE, we have a powerful tool to find new comets and learn more about the population as a whole. Water is necessary for life as we know it, and comets can tell us more about how much there is in our solar system."

The WISE telescope, which launched into a polar orbit around Earth on Dec. 14, 2009, is expected to discover anywhere from a few to dozens of new comets, in addition to hundreds of thousands of asteroids. Comets are harder to find than asteroids because they are much more rare in the inner solar system. Whereas asteroids tour around in the "main belt" between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, large numbers of comets orbit farther away, in the icy outer reaches of our solar system.

Both asteroids and comets can fall into orbits that bring them close to Earth's path around the sun. Most of these "near-Earth objects" are asteroids but some are comets. WISE is expected to find new near-Earth comets, and this will give us a better idea of how threatening they might be to Earth.

"It is very unlikely that a comet will hit Earth," said James Bauer, a scientist at JPL working on the WISE project, "But, in the rare chance that one did, it could be dangerous. The new discoveries from WISE will give us more precise statistics about the probability of such an event, and how powerful an impact it might yield."

The space telescope spotted the comet during its routine scan of the sky on January 22. Sophisticated software plucked the comet out from the stream of images pouring down from space by looking for objects that move quickly relative to background stars. The comet discovery was followed up by a combination of professional and amateur astronomers using telescopes across the United States.

A teacher also teamed up with an observer to measure comet WISE using a home-built telescope next to a cornfield in Illinois. Their research is part of the International Astronomical Search Collaboration, an education program that helps teachers and students observe comets and asteroids (more information is online at http://iasc.hsutx.edu/).

All the data are catalogued at the Minor Planet Center, in Cambridge, Mass., the worldwide clearinghouse for all observations and orbits of minor planets and comets.

Comet WISE takes 4.7 years to circle the sun, with its farthest point being about 4 astronomical units away, and its closest point being 1.6 astronomical units (near the orbit of Mars). An astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the sun. Heat from the sun causes gas and dust to blow off the comet, resulting in a dusty coma, or shell, and a tail.

Though this particular body is actively shedding dust, WISE is also expected to find dark, dead comets. Once a comet has taken many trips around the sun, its icy components erode away, leaving only a dark, rocky core. Not much is known about these objects because they are hard to see in visible light. WISE's infrared sight should be able to pick up the feeble glow of some of these dark comets, answering questions about precisely how and where they form.

"Dead comets can be darker than coal," said Mainzer. "But in infrared light, they will pop into view. One question we want to answer with WISE is how many dead comets make up the near-Earth object population."

The mission will spend the next eight months mapping the sky one-and-a-half times. A first batch of data will be available to the public in the spring of 2011, and the final catalog a year later. Selected images and findings will be released throughout the mission.

JPL manages the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory, Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. The ground-based observations are partly supported by the National Science Foundation. The Minor Planet Center is funded by NASA. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu.

Near the center of a Martian crater about the size of Connecticut, hundreds of exposed rock layers form a mound as tall as the Rockies and expose a record of major environmental changes on Mars billions of years ago.

The history told by this tall parfait of layers inside Gale Crater matches what has been proposed in current years as the dominant planet-wide pattern for early Mars, according to a new report by geologists using instruments on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"Looking at the layers from the bottom to the top, from the oldest to the youngest, you see a sequence of varying rocks that resulted from changes in environmental conditions through time," said Ralph Milliken of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "This thick sequence of rocks appears to be showing different steps in the drying-out of Mars."

Using geological layers to comprehend stages in the evolution of a planet's climate has a precedent on Earth. A change about 1.8 billion years ago in the types of rock layers formed on Earth became a key to understanding a dramatic change in Earth's ancient atmosphere.

Milliken and two co-authors report in Geophysical Research Letters those clay minerals, which form under very wet conditions, are concentrated in layers near the bottom of the Gale stack. Above that, sulfate minerals are intermixed with the clays. Sulfates form in wet circumstances and can be deposited when the water in which they are dissolved evaporates. Higher still are sulfate-containing layers without detectable clays. And at the top is a thick formation of regularly spaced layers bearing no detectable water-related minerals.

Rock exposures with compositions like various layers of the Gale stack have been mapped elsewhere on Mars, and researchers, including Jean-Pierre Bibring of the University of Paris, have planned a Martian planetary chronology of clay-producing conditions followed by sulfate-producing conditions followed by dry conditions. However, Gale is the first location where a particular series of layers has been found to contain these clues in a clearly defined sequence from older rocks to younger rocks.

"If you could stand there, you would see this beautiful formation of Martian sediments laid down in the past, a stratigraphic section that's more than twice the height of the Grand Canyon, though not as steep," said Bradley Thomson of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md. He and John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena are Milliken's co-authors.

NASA selected Gale Crater in 2008 as one of four finalist sites for the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, which has a planned launch in 2011. The finalist sites all have exposures of water-related minerals, and each has attributes that distinguish it from the others. This new report is an example of how observations made for evaluating the landing-site candidates are providing valuable science results even before the rover mission launches.

Three instruments on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have provided key data about the layered mound in Gale Crater. Images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera reveal details used to map hundreds of layers. Using stereo pairs of the images, the U.S. Geological Survey has generated three-dimensional models used to discern elevation differences as small as a meter (about a yard). Observations by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars yielded information about minerals on the surface. The Context Camera provided broader-scale images showing how the layers fit geologically into their surroundings.

Thomson said, "This work demonstrates the synergy of the instruments on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. We wouldn't have as complete a picture if we were missing any of the components."

The mission has been studying Mars since 2006. It has returned more data from the planet than all other Mars missions combined. More information about this mission is at http://www.nasa.gov/mro.

Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, provided and operates the Context Camera. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory provided and operates the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer. The University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Tucson, operates the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo.

JPL, a division of Caltech, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Atlas V rocket that will take it into space are being prepared for another launch attempt Thursday morning after an earlier try was scrubbed as of high winds. The launch window for Thursday runs from 10:23 a.m. to 11:23 a.m. The weather forecast improves to a 60 percent possibility of acceptable conditions.

The SDO spacecraft is headed to an orbit about 22,300 miles above Earth. From that height, the spacecraft will point its instruments at the sun and relay the readings directly to a ground station in New Mexico. The research is predictable to reveal the sun's inner workings by continuously taking high declaration images of the sun, collecting readings from inside the sun and measuring its magnetic field activity. This data is predictable to give researchers the insight they need to eventually forecast solar storms and other activity on the sun that can influence spacecraft in orbit, astronauts on the International Space Station and electronic and other systems on Earth.

Artwork inspired by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is making a manifestation at this year's Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia. No, it's not battling other telescopes for the "gold," but its comments are now on display as part of the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad Festival.

The Spitzer art project, called "We are Stardust," was created by George Legrady, a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The two-screen mechanism maps the sequence of 36,034 observations made by the space telescope from 2003 to 2008. Spitzer sees infrared light from the cosmos, capturing images of all from comets in our solar system to galaxies billions of light-years away.

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 the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

NASA administrators and international scientists are arriving in Alice Springs to assist launch balloons the size of football fields into the stratosphere.

The giant plastic balloons, which can drift at altitudes of up to 40 kilometers, hold germanium detectors, rare telescopes that collect data on x-rays and gamma rays. The telescopes weigh two to three tonnes and cost between $5 million and $10 million.

Over the next week, expert staff and instruments will travel to Alice Springs to begin preparation for the launches, which will happen next month from Runway 17 at the Alice Springs Airport.

On Saturday, February 6, 2010, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched its Open Government Webpage at: http://www.nasa.gov/open In line with the Directive, the NASA Open Government Webpage serves as a portal to agency activities related to the Open Government Directive. The portal provides an interface for users to get the latest news as it relates to open government at NASA; find ways to connect and collaborate with the agency; understand the Open Government Directive; and share ideas about how to be more transparent, participatory and collaborative. NASA's annual FOIA reports are also available on the portal in an open format. Users may access agency datasets, tools and geospatial data hosted on data.gov via this Open Government Webpage.

As part of the Open Government Directive, each agency will release an Open Government Plan. The Plan is intended to outline concrete steps NASA can take to be more collaborative, transparent and participatory. NASA is seeking input on the creation of this Plan from its employees and the public at large. The mechanism for collecting and sorting these inputs is a website where users may submit, vote, and comment on ideas. This website is publicly available at: http://opennasa.ideascale.com/

An e-mail address is also available for suggestions, along with a mailing address and phone number, posted on the Open Government Webpage. The new email address is:
opengov@nasa.govTo ensure NASA captures and responds to ideas submitted, the agency has enlisted a team of moderators to participate in the process and facilitate dialog about this exciting opportunity, using the above tools. NASA's encourages its employees, the space community at large, and the general public to contribute their ideas on how NASA can be more transparent, participatory, and collaborative.

NASA today released the most detailed set of images ever taken of the distant dwarf planet Pluto. The images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope show an icy and dark molasses-colored, mottled world that is undergoing seasonal changes in its surface color and brightness. Pluto has become significantly redder, while its illuminated northern hemisphere is getting brighter. These changes are most likely consequences of surface ices sublimating on the sunlit pole and then refreezing on the other pole as the dwarf planet heads into the next phase of its 248-year-long seasonal cycle. The dramatic change in color apparently took place in a two-year period, from 2000 to 2002.

The Hubble images will remain our sharpest view of Pluto until NASA's New Horizons probe is within six months of its Pluto flyby. The Hubble pictures are proving invaluable for picking out the planet's most interesting-looking hemisphere for the New Horizons spacecraft to swoop over when it flies by Pluto in 2015.

Though Pluto is arguably one of the public's favorite planetary objects, it is also the hardest of which to get a detailed portrait because the world is small and very far away. Hubble resolves surface variations a few hundred miles across, which are too coarse for understanding surface geology. But in terms of surface color and brightness Hubble reveals a complex-looking and variegated world with white, dark-orange and charcoal-black terrain. The overall color is believed to be a result of ultraviolet radiation from the distant sun breaking up methane that is present on Pluto's surface, leaving behind a dark and red carbon-rich residue.

When Hubble pictures taken in 1994 are compared with a new set of images taken in 2002 to 2003, astronomers see evidence that the northern polar region has gotten brighter, while the southern hemisphere has gotten darker. These changes hint at very complex processes affecting the visible surface, and the new data will be used in continued research.

The images are allowing planetary astronomers to better interpret more than three decades of Pluto observations from other telescopes, says principal investigator Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. "The Hubble observations are the key to tying together these other diverse constraints on Pluto and showing how it all makes sense by providing a context based on weather and seasonal changes, which opens other new lines of investigation.

"The Hubble pictures underscore that Pluto is not simply a ball of ice and rock but a dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes. These are driven by seasonal changes that are as much propelled by the planet's 248-year elliptical orbit as its axial tilt, unlike Earth where the tilt alone drives seasons. The seasons are very asymmetric because of Pluto's elliptical orbit. Spring transitions to polar summer quickly in the northern hemisphere because Pluto is moving faster along its orbit when it is closer to the sun.

Ground-based observations, taken in 1988 and 2002, show that the mass of the atmosphere doubled over that time. This may be due to warming and sublimating nitrogen ice. The new Hubble images from 2002 to 2003 are giving astronomers essential clues about how the seasons on Pluto work and about the fate of its atmosphere.

The images, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys, are invaluable to planning the details of the New Horizons flyby in 2015. New Horizons will pass by Pluto so quickly that only one hemisphere will be photographed in the highest possible detail. Particularly noticeable in the Hubble image is a bright spot that has been independently noted to be unusually rich in carbon monoxide frost. It is a prime target for New Horizons. "Everybody is puzzled by this feature," says Buie. New Horizons will get an excellent look at the boundary between this bright feature and a nearby region covered in pitch-black surface material.

"The Hubble images will also help New Horizons scientists better calculate the exposure time for each Pluto snapshot, which is important for taking the most detailed pictures possible," says Buie. With no chance for re-exposures, accurate models for the surface of Pluto are essential in preventing pictures that are either under- or overexposed.

The Hubble images are a few pixels wide. But through a technique called dithering, multiple, slightly offset pictures can be combined through computer-image processing to synthesize a higher-resolution view than could be seen in a single exposure. "This has taken four years and 20 computers operating continuously and simultaneously to accomplish," says Buie, who developed special algorithms to sharpen the Hubble data.

The Hubble research results appear in the March 2010 issue of the Astronomical Journal. Buie's science team members are William Grundy of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., and Eliot Young, Leslie Young, and Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Buie plans to use Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3 to make further Pluto observations prior to the arrival of New Horizons.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. in Washington, D.C.

NASA will extend the international Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn and its moons to 2017. The agency's fiscal year 2011 budget provides a $60 million per year extension for continued study of the ringed planet.

"This is a mission that never stops providing us surprising scientific results and showing us eye popping new vistas," said Jim Green, director of NASA's planetary science division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The historic traveler's stunning discoveries and images have revolutionized our knowledge of Saturn and its moons."

Cassini launched in October 1997 with the European Space Agency's Huygens probe. The spacecraft arrived at Saturn in 2004. The probe was equipped with six instruments to study Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Cassini's 12 instruments have returned a daily stream of data from Saturn's system for nearly six years. The project was scheduled to end in 2008, but the mission received a 27-month extension to Sept. 2010.

"The extension presents a unique opportunity to follow seasonal changes of an outer planet system all the way from its winter to its summer," said Bob Pappalardo, Cassini project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Some of Cassini's most exciting discoveries still lie ahead."

This second extension, called the Cassini Solstice Mission, enables scientists to study seasonal and other long-term weather changes on the planet and its moons. Cassini arrived just after Saturn's northern winter solstice, and this extension continues until a few months past northern summer solstice in May 2017. The northern summer solstice marks the beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere and winter in the southern hemisphere.

A complete seasonal period on Saturn has never been studied at this level of detail. The Solstice mission schedule calls for an additional 155 orbits around the planet, 54 flybys of Titan and 11 flybys of the icy moon Enceladus.
The mission extension also will allow scientists to continue observations of Saturn's rings and the magnetic bubble around the planet known as the magnetosphere. The spacecraft will make repeated dives between Saturn and its rings to obtain in depth knowledge of the gas giant. During these dives, the spacecraft will study the internal structure of Saturn, its magnetic fluctuations and ring mass.

The mission will be evaluated periodically to ensure the spacecraft has the ability to achieve new science objectives for the entire extension.

"The spacecraft is doing remarkably well, even as we endure the expected effects of age after logging 2.6 billion miles on its odometer," said Bob Mitchell, Cassini program manager at JPL. "This extension is important because there is so much still to be learned at Saturn. The planet is full of secrets, and it doesn't give them up easily."

Cassini's travel scrapbook includes more than 210,000 images; information gathered during more than 125 revolutions around Saturn; 67 flybys of Titan and eight close flybys of Enceladus. Cassini has revealed unexpected details in the planet's signature rings, and observations of Titan have given scientists a glimpse of what Earth might have been like before life evolved.

Scientists hope to learn answers to many questions that have developed during the course of the mission, including why Saturn seems to have an inconsistent rotation rate and how a probable subsurface ocean feeds the Enceladus' jets.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

This complex color infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy reveals a new population of massive stars and new details in complex structures in the hot ionized gas swirling around the central 300 light-years. This extensive panorama is the sharpest infrared picture ever made of the Galactic core and offers a laboratory for how massive stars form and influence their environment in the often violent nuclear regions of other galaxies.

This view combines the sharp imaging of the Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) with color imagery from a preceding Spitzer Space Telescope survey done with its Infrared Astronomy Camera (IRAC). The Galactic core is covered in visible light by intervening dust clouds, but infrared light penetrates the dust.

NICMOS shows a large number of these enormous stars distributed throughout the region. A new finding is that astronomers now see that the massive stars are not restricted to one of the three known clusters of massive stars in the Galactic Center, known as the Central cluster, the Arches cluster, and the Quintuplet cluster. These three clusters are simply seen as tight concentrations of bright, massive stars in the NICMOS image. The dispersed stars may have formed in isolation, or they may have originated in clusters that have been disrupted by strong gravitational tidal forces. The winds and radiation from these stars form the compound structures seen in the core, and in some cases, they may be triggering new generations of stars.

The NICMOS mosaic required 144 Hubble orbits to make 2,304 science exposures from Feb. 22 and June 5, 2008.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that propose a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought that the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

The object, “P/2010 A2”, was circling about 144 million kilometres from Earth in the major asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter when it was covered last week by the Hubble Space Telescope. “The truth is we’re still struggling to understand what this means,” said David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles. – (Reuters).

JPL's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) captured this false-color complex image of the city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and the surrounding region on Jan. 27, 2010. Port-au-Prince is visible near the center of the picture. The large dark line running east-west near the city is the major airport. UAVSAR left NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., Jan. 25, 2010, aboard a customized NASA Gulfstream III aircraft on a three-week campaign that will also take it to Central America.

Shortly before 5 p.m. local time on Jan. 12, 2010, a scale 7.0 earthquake struck southern Haiti. The earthquake's epicenter was about 25 kilometers (15 miles) west-southwest of Port-au-Prince, close to the west (left) edge of this picture. The large linear east-west valley in the mountains south of the city is the location of the major active fault zone responsible for the earthquake: the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault. The fault extend from the western tip of Haiti past Port-au-Prince into the Dominican Republic to the east of this image. Historical records show that the southern part of Haiti was struck by a series of hefty earthquakes in the 1700s, and geologists believe those were also caused by ruptures on this fault zone.

Satellite interferometric synthetic aperture radar measurements show that the Jan. 12 tremor ruptured a segment of the fault extending from the epicenter westward over a length of about 40 kilometers (25 miles), parting the section of the fault in this image unruptured. The earthquake has amplified the stress on this eastern section of the fault south of Port-au-Prince and the section west of the rupture. This has significantly increased the risk of a prospect earthquake, according to a recent report by the U.S. Geological Survey.

The colors in the image replicate the three different UAVSAR radar polarizations: HH (horizontal transmit, horizontal receive) is colored red; VV (vertical transmit, vertical receive) is colored blue; and HV (horizontal transmit, vertical receive) is colored green. Like a pair of Polaroid sunglasses, these images are receptive to different parts of the radar signal that is reflected back from Earth's surface. The HV division is sensitive to volume scattering that typically occurs over vegetation-this gives hills a greenish color. VV polarization is sensitive to surface scattering such as that returned from bare surfaces or water-this gives water a bluish tint. Finally, HH polarization is sensitive to corner-like objects-this gives some urban areas and vegetated regions a reddish tint. The picture is roughly 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) wide in the northwest-southeast direction. North is up and radar illumination is from the southeast.

This image will be mutual with other images of the same area to be acquired later this month and in the future in order to measure the motion of Earth's surface during the time between images using a technique called interferometry.The interferometric competence will allow scientists to study the pressures building up and being released on the fault at depth.

UAVSAR is a reconfigurable polarimetric L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) specifically designed to acquire airborne repeat track SAR data for differential interferometric measurements. For more information about radar polarimetry, see http://www.ccrs.nrcan.gc.ca/resource/tutor/polarim/index_e.php . The radar will eventually be flown aboard an uninhabited, remotely-piloted aircraft such as the Northrop Grumman Global Hawk. The radar was built at JPL with funding by NASA's Earth Science Technology Office. UAVSAR is managed and operated by JPL under contract with NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C.

An international team of astronomers using several telescopes has revealed what appears to be the coolest star-like body known, a brown dwarf called SDSS1416+13B. The faint ball of gas is roughly 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius). NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope helped nail down the warmth of the object by observing at a meticulous range of light called mid-infrared.

Too small to be stars, brown dwarfs have masses inferior than stars but larger than gas-giant planets like Jupiter. Due to their low temperature, these objects are very weak in visible light, and are detected by their glow at infrared wavelengths. They were initially dubbed "brown dwarfs" long before any were actually exposed, to describe bodies that are cooler, fainter and redder than "red dwarf" stars, with the color brown representing the mix of red and black.