NASA-International Space Station

The Hubble Space Telescope's dramatic glimpse of the Carina Nebula, a gigantic cloud of soil and gas bustling with star-making activity, is a glorious feast for the eyes. Energetic young stars are sculpting a desire landscape of bubbles, valleys, mountains, and pillars. Now this celestial fantasyland has been brought into view for people who cannot explore the figure by sight.

Max Mutchler, a study and instrument scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and Noreen Grice, president of You Can Do Astronomy LLC and author of a number of tactile astronomy books, have created a touchable image of the Carina Nebula that is engaging for everyone, regardless of their visual ability.

The 17-by-11-inch color image is embossed with lines, slashes, and other markings that exchange letters to objects in the giant cloud, allowing visually impaired people to feel what they cannot see and form a picture of the nebula in their minds. The image's design is also useful and intriguing for sighted people who have different learning styles.

"The Hubble image of the Carina Nebula is so beautiful, and it illustrates the whole life cycle of stars," says Mutchler, who, along with Grice, unveiled the tactile Carina image in January 2010, at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. "I thought that people who are visually impaired should be able to look at it and learn from it, too."

Located 7,500 light-years from Earth, the nebula is a 3-million-year-old gigantic cloud where thousands of stars are cycling all the way through the stages of stellar life and death. The nebula is 300 light-years wide, but Hubble captured a 50-light-year-wide view of its middle region.

A Hubble education and public outreach grant allowed Mutchler to produce the extraordinary image. The grant is part of his Hubble archival research project to create entire mosaics of a huge collection of individual Carina Nebula images taken by Hubble (http://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/carina/). Mutchler made 300 copies of the tactile image and will distribute them to organizations that serve the visually impaired, together with state schools and libraries for the blind and the National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore, Md.

When Mutchler determined to make a tactile Carina Nebula image last year, he immediately called his friend Grice, who is a pioneer in designing tactile astronomy images for the blind.

But Grice says the nebula image is so visually rich, it posed a test to design a textured image that conveys its beauty and complexity.

"When I first looked at the image, I didn't recognize what to focus on," she recalls. "In order to convert the image into a tactile image, I had to make convinced that I understood the individual features that make up the image. There was so much to see."

She tired a couple of hours on the telephone with Mutchler, who gave her a guided tour of the nebula. Then she parsed astronomy books, looking for new views of the nebula. One feature, in particular, gave her a few trouble. It was the Keyhole Nebula. Grice couldn't see how the shape in the figure resembled a keyhole. Finally, she came across a 1950s image of Carina, and unexpectedly, she got it. The name referred to the form of an old-fashioned "skeleton" key. Some visually impaired children who have touched the picture say the feature actually resembles a foot, Grice says.


Choosing which features to show on the textured picture also posed a challenge. Grice says she relied on a lesson she educated from her first NASA tactile astronomy book of Hubble images called "Touch the Universe": less is more.

"Convey just sufficient to get the idea," she says. "Then provide some Braille content that explains the science and describes the scene. A picture that is jammed with various tactile details is very overwhelming for the mind's eye."

Grice used the Keyhole Nebula as the focal point and added extra important features suggested by Mutchler to tell the story of stellar life and death, such as pillars of gas and dust that harbor infant stars, a cluster of young stars called Trumpler 14, and a massive, unstable star, Eta Carinae, that is near the end of its life.

The pair then developed a tactile code identifying the raised features and wrote a short guided tour that provides more in order on the highlighted on the features. The guide and an audio visit of the nebula are on a special Web page called "The Tactile Carina Nebula" (http://amazing-space.stsci.edu/tactile-carina/), on Amazing Space, the Space Telescope Science Institute's education Web site.


A stable of experienced tactile astronomy evaluators, including Vivian Hoette, the education outreach coordinator of the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wis., and Ben Wentworth, a retired teacher from the Colorado School for the Blind in Colorado Springs, Colo., helped test several prototypes of the image. One such evaluation place was the Youth Slam, held in the summer of 2009 in College Park, Md. The National Federation of the Blind coordinated the occurrence to promote careers in math, engineering, and science.

One of the biggest surprises from their trying was the image size. Grice and Mutchler originally thought that a large (almost 6-foot-wide) or medium-sized (3-foot-wide) tactile image would be appropriate for students. The children who sampled the image, however, chosen the much smaller 11-by-17-inch image.

"Many students felt lost with the larger prototype versions because definite objects were separated by empty spaces," Grice says. "However, the lesser version allowed hands to easily track from one object to another."

Adds Hoette, individual of the evaluators: "The smaller size gives them enough details so they can get the big image, and then they can read the science behind it in Braille text, or they can listen to the audio visit on 'The Tactile Carina' Web page while they are touching the image."

The Grice-Mutchler partnership has worked so well that the duo hopes to generate more tactile Hubble images. "It would be huge to build up a catalogue of these images for the visually impaired," Mutchler says.

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

The Herschel Space Observatory has exposed the chemical fingerprints of potentially life-enabling organic molecules in the Orion nebula, a nearby stellar nursery in our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel is led by the European Space Agency with important participation from NASA.

The new data, obtained with the telescope's heterodyne gadget for the far infrared -- one of Herschel's three innovative instruments demonstrates the gold mine of information that Herschel will offer on how organic molecules form in space.

The Orion nebula is known to be one of the most prolific chemical factories in space, although the full extent of its chemistry and the pathways for molecule formation are not well understood. By sifting through the pattern of spikes in the new data, called a spectrum, astronomers have recognized a few common molecules that are precursors to life-enabling molecules, including water, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, methanol, dimethyl ether, hydrogen cyanide, sulfur oxide and sulfur dioxide.

Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by a consortia of European institutes and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

NASA's newest Mars orbiter, finishing its fourth year at the Red Planet next week, has just approved a data-volume milestone unimaginable a generation ago and still difficult to fathom: 100 terabits.

That 100 trillion bits of information is more data than in 35 hours of uncompressed high-definition video. It's also more than three times the quantity of data from all other deep-space missions combined -- not just the ones to Mars, but every mission that has flown past the orbit of Earth's moon.

"What is most extraordinary about all these data is not the sheer quantity, but the quality of what they tell us about our neighbor planet," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Rich Zurek, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "The data from the orbiter's six instruments have given us a much deeper sympathetic of the diversity of environments on Mars today and how they have changed over time."

The spacecraft entered orbit around Mars on March 10, 2006, following an Aug. 12, 2005, launch from Florida. It completed its primary science phase in 2008 and continues investigations of Mars' surface, subsurface and atmosphere.

The orbiter sports a dish antenna 3 meters (10 feet) in diameter and uses it to pour data Earthward at up to 6 megabits per second. Its science instruments are three cameras, a spectrometer for identifying minerals, ground-penetrating radar and an atmosphere sounder.

The ability to return enormous volumes of data enables these instruments to view Mars at unprecedented spatial resolutions. Half the planet has been covered at 6 meters (20 feet) per pixel, and nearly 1 percent of the planet has been observed at about 30 centimeters (1 foot) per pixel, sharp enough to discern objects the size of a desk. The radar, provided by Italy, has looked beneath the surface in 6,500 observing strips, sampling about half the planet.

Among the mission's major findings is that the action of water on and near the surface of Mars occurred for hundreds of millions of years. This action was at least regional and possibly global in extent, though possibly intermittent. The spacecraft has also observed that signatures of a variety of watery environments, some acidic, some alkaline, increase the possibility that there are places on Mars that could reveal evidence of past life, if it ever existed.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the spacecraft development and integration contractor for the project and built the spacecraft.

The Shallow Radar instrument was provided by the Italian Space Agency, and its operations are led by the InfoCom Department, University of Rome "La Sapienza." Thales Alenia Space Italia, in Rome, is the Italian Space Agency's prime contractor for the radar instrument. Astro Aerospace of Carpinteria, Calif., a business unit of Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman Corp., developed the instrument's antenna as a subcontractor to Thales Alenia Space Italia.

NASA's Aquarius instrument, and the Argentinian spacecraft that will carry it into space, the Satelite de Aplicaciones Cientificas (SAC-D), successfully rode out one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history Feb. 27 with no problems. The instrument and spacecraft are at the satellite systems contractor's satellite integration facility in Bariloche, Argentina. The city of Bariloche, located approximately 588 kilometers, or 365 miles, from the epicenter of the magnitude 8.8 earthquake, experienced light shaking, as indicated by the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale, which evaluates the effects of earthquakes as experienced by people in the region. No damage was reported to the facility or spacecraft. A separate magnitude 6.3 earthquake in Salta, Argentina, later that day that was triggered by the Chile earthquake was too far away (1,900 kilometers or 1,200 miles) to be felt in Bariloche.

The JPL-built Aquarius instrument is at the Bariloche facility to be integrated with the SAC-D satellite.

Aquarius/SAC-D is an international mission between NASA and Argentina's space agency, Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales. The primary instrument on the mission, Aquarius is designed to provide monthly global maps of how salt concentration varies on the ocean surface -- a key indicator of ocean circulation and its role in climate change. Seven Argentine space agency-sponsored instruments will provide environmental data for a wide range of applications, including natural hazards, land processes, epidemiological studies and air quality issues.

The minimum three-year mission is scheduled to launch late this year from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

On Tuesday, March 2, 2010, NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its closest encounter yet with Saturn’s second largest moon. This is the mission’s second targeted flyby of the moon in the mission, so it is sometimes referred to as R-2.