Shuttle Getting an Upgraded Fuel Tank

Discovery rolls back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for an upgrade. Image credit: NASA. Click to enlarge.
The Space Shuttle Discovery is back in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Fla. The Shuttle will get a new, modified external fuel tank to ensure a safe Return to Flight mission (STS-114).

Discovery, carried by a Crawler Transporter, entered the VAB at 4:30 p.m. EDT. The 10-hour, 4.2 mile trip from Launch Pad 39B was briefly interrupted due to an over heated bearing on the Transporter. Today’s rollback was the 15th in Space Shuttle Program history.

“Rolling back Discovery was the right thing to do and demonstrates our commitment to a safe Return to Flight,” said Shuttle Program Manager Bill Parsons. “We will continue to focus on the processing milestones and complete the additional analysis we determined was required, so that we continue to move toward a launch during the July window.”

Technicians will de-mate Discovery from its External Tank (ET-120) and Solid Rocket Boosters on May 31. Discovery will be attached to ET-121 on June 7. ET-121 was originally scheduled to fly with the Shuttle Atlantis on the second Return to Flight mission (STS-121).

In the VAB, a new heater will be added to ET-121 on the feedline bellows. It is the part of the pipeline that carries liquid oxygen to the Shuttle’s main engines, to minimize potential ice and frost buildup. The tank also has several safety improvements, including an improved bipod fitting that connects it to the Orbiter.

In addition, NASA’s second redesigned tank has been outfitted with temperature sensors and accelerometers, used to measure vibration. These sensors will gather information about the tank’s performance during flight.

After the heater is added to ET-121 and the Shuttle is attached to its new propulsion elements, Discovery will roll back out to Launch Pad 39B in mid-June. Discovery’s payload, the Italian-built Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Raffaello, will be installed in the payload bay, while the Shuttle is on the pad.

Launch of Discovery for STS-114 is targeted for July 13. The launch window extends to July 31. During its 12-day mission, Discovery’s seven-person crew will test new hardware and techniques to improve Shuttle safety and deliver supplies to the International Space Station.

Video from the rollback will feed on NASA TV, available on the Web and via satellite in the continental U.S. on AMC-6, Transponder 9C, C-Band, at 72 degrees west longitude. The frequency is 3880.0 MHz. Polarization is vertical, and audio is monaural at 6.80 MHz. It’s available in Alaska and Hawaii on AMC-7, Transponder 18C, C-Band, at 137 degrees west longitude. The frequency is 4060.0 MHz. Polarization is vertical, and audio is monaural at 6.80 MHz. For NASA TV information and schedules on the Internet, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

Photos of the rollback are available on the Web at: http://mediaarchive.ksc.nasa.gov/index.cfm

For the latest information about NASA’s Return to Flight efforts, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight

Original Source: NASA News Release

Dark Spots on the Moon Show a Turbulent Solar System

The Moon and its dark spots. Image credit: NASA. Click to enlarge.
People of every culture have been fascinated by the dark “spots” on the Moon, which seem to compose the figure of a rabbit, frogs or the face of a clown. With the Apollo missions, scientists found that these features are actually huge impact basins that were flooded with now-solidified lava. One surprise was that these basins formed relatively late in the history of the early solar system – approximately 700 million years after the formation of the Earth and Moon. Many scientists now believe that these lunar impact basins bear witness to a huge spike in the bombardment rate of the planets – called the late heavy bombardment (LHB). The cause of such an intense bombardment, however, is considered by many to be one of the best-preserved mysteries of solar system history.

In a series of three papers published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, an international team of planetary scientists, Rodney Gomes (National Observatory of Brazil), Harold Levison (Southwest Research Institute, United States), Alessandro Morbidelli (Observatoire de la C?te d’Azur, France) and Kleomenis Tsiganis (OCA and University of Thessaloniki, Greece) – brought together by a visitor program hosted at the Observatoire de la C?te d’Azur in Nice – proposed a model that not only naturally solves the mystery of the origin of the LHB, but also explains many of the observed characteristics of the outer planetary system.

This new model envisions that the four giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, formed in a very compact orbital configuration, which was surrounded by a disk of small objects made of ice and rock (known as “planetesimals”). Numerical simulations by the Nice team shows that some of these planetesimals slowly leaked out of the disk due to the gravitational effects of the planets. The planets scattered these smaller objects throughout the solar system, sometimes outward and sometimes inward.

“As Isaac Newton taught us, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” says Tsiganis. “If a planet throws a planetesimal out of the solar system, the planet moves toward the Sun, just a tiny bit, in compensation. If, on the other hand, the planet scatters the planetesimal inward, the planet jumps slightly farther from the Sun.”

Numerical simulations show that, on average, Jupiter moved inward while the other giant planets moved outward.

Initially, this was a very slow process, taking millions of years for the planets to move a small amount. Then, according to this new model, after 700 million years, the situation suddenly changed. At that time, Saturn migrated through the point where its orbital period was exactly twice that of Jupiter’s. This special orbital configuration caused Jupiter’s and Saturn’s orbits to suddenly become more elliptical.

“This caused the orbits of Uranus and Neptune to go nuts,” says Gomes. “Their orbits became very eccentric and they started to gravitationally scatter off each other – and Saturn too.”

The Nice team argues that this evolution of Uranus’ and Neptune’s orbits caused the LHB on the Moon. Their computer simulations show that these planets very quickly penetrated the planetesimal disk, scattering objects throughout the planetary system. Many of these objects entered the inner solar system where they peppered the Earth and Moon with impacts. In addition, the whole process destabilized the orbits of asteroids, which then would have also contributed to the LHB. Finally, the gravitational effects of the planetesimal disk caused Uranus and Neptune to evolve onto their current orbits.

“It’s very convincing,” says Levison. “We have made several dozen simulations of this process, and statistically the planets ended up on orbits very similar to the ones that we see, with the correct separations, eccentricities and inclinations. So, in addition to the LHB, we can also explain the orbits of the giant planets. No other model has ever accomplished either thing before.”

However, there was one more hurdle to overcome. The solar system currently contains a population of asteroids that follow essentially the same orbit as Jupiter, but lead or trail that planet by an angular distance of roughly 60 degrees. Computer simulations show that these bodies, known as the “Trojan asteroids,” would have been lost as the giant planets’ orbits changed.

“We sat around for months worrying about this problem, which seemed to invalidate our model,” says Morbidelli, “until we realized that if a bird can escape from an open cage, another one can come and nest in it.”

The Nice team found that some of the very objects that were driving the planetary evolution, and which caused the LHB, would also have been captured into Trojan asteroid orbits. In the simulations, the trapped Trojans turned out to reproduce the orbital distribution of the observed Trojans, which was unexplained up to now. The total predicted mass of the trapped objects was also consistent with the observed population.

Taken in total, the Nice team’s new model naturally explains the orbits of the giant planets, the Trojan asteroids and the LHB to unprecedented accuracy. “Our model explains so many things that we believe it must be basically correct,” says Mordibelli. “The structure of the outer solar system shows that the planets probably went through a shake up well after the planet formation process ended.”

Original Source: SWRI News Release

Mysterious Spot on Titan Puzzles Astronomers

Titan and its strange spot viewed in different wavelengths. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Click to enlarge.
Saturn’s moon Titan shows an unusual bright spot that has scientists mystified. The spot, approximately the size and shape of West Virginia, is just southeast of the bright region called Xanadu and is visible to multiple instruments on the Cassini spacecraft.

The 483-kilometer-wide (300-mile) region may be a “hot” spot — an area possibly warmed by a recent asteroid impact or by a mixture of water ice and ammonia from a warm interior, oozing out of an ice volcano onto colder surrounding terrain. Other possibilities for the unusual bright spot include landscape features holding clouds in place or unusual materials on the surface.

“At first glance, I thought the feature looked strange, almost out of place,” said Dr. Robert H. Brown, team leader of the Cassini visual and infrared mapping spectrometer and professor at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson. “After thinking a bit, I speculated that it was a hot spot. In retrospect, that might not be the best hypothesis. But the spot is no less intriguing.”

The Cassini spacecraft flew by Titan on March 31 and April 16. Its visual and infrared mapping spectrometer, using the longest, reddest wavelengths that the spectrometer sees, observed the spot, the brightest area ever observed on Titan.

Cassini’s imaging cameras saw a bright, 550-kilometer-wide (345-mile) semi-circle at visible wavelengths at this same location on Cassini’s December 2004 and February 2005 Titan flybys. “It seems clear that both instruments are detecting the same basic feature on or controlled by Titan’s surface,” said Dr. Alfred S. McEwen, Cassini imaging team scientist, also of the University of Arizona. “This bright patch may be due to an impact event, landslide, cryovolcanism or atmospheric processes. Its distinct color and brightness suggest that it may have formed relatively recently.”

Other bright spots have been seen on Titan, but all have been transient features that move or disappear within hours, and have different spectral (color) properties than this feature. This spot is persistent in both its color and location. “It’s possible that the visual and infrared spectrometer is seeing a cloud that is topographically controlled by something on the surface, and that this weird, semi-circular feature is causing this cloud,” said Dr. Elizabeth Turtle, Cassini imaging team associate, also from the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

“If the spot is a cloud, then its longevity and stability imply that it is controlled by the surface. Such a cloud might result from airflow across low mountains or outgassing caused by geologic activity,” said Jason Barnes, a postdoctoral researcher working with the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at the University of Arizona.

The spot could be reflected light from a patch of terrain made up of some exotic surface material. “Titan’s surface seems to be mostly dirty ice. The bright spot might be a region with different surface composition, or maybe a thin surface deposit of non-icy material,” Barnes added.

Scientists have also considered that the spot might be mountains. If so, they’d have to be much higher than the 100-meter-high (300-foot) hills Cassini’s radar altimeter has seen so far. Scientists doubt that Titan’s crust could support such high mountains.

The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team will be able to test the hot spot hypothesis on the July 2, 2006, Titan flyby, when they take nighttime images of the same area. If the spot glows at night, researchers will know it’s hot.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. For additional images visit the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer page at http://wwwvims.lpl.arizona.edu and the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. 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 and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team is based at the University of Arizona. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Co.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Podcast: Amateurs Help Find a Planet

Professional astronomers have got some powerful equipment at their disposal: Hubble, Keck, and Spitzer, just to name a few. But many discoveries rely on the work of amateurs, using equipment you could buy at your local telescope shop. And recently, amateurs helped discover a planet orbiting another star 15 thousand light-years away. Grant Christie is an amateur astronomer from Auckland New Zealand, and is part of the team that made the discovery.
Continue reading “Podcast: Amateurs Help Find a Planet”

Audio: Amateurs Help Find a Planet

Artist illustration of an extrasolar planet. Image credit: CfA. Click to enlarge.
Listen to the interview: Microlens Planet Discovery (6.2 mb)

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Fraser Cain: Can you give me some background on the planet that you helped to discover?

Grant Christie: There’s still a bit of analysis to do on it to figure out exactly all its parameters, but it’s in the order of about 15,000 light-years away. That’s still being worked on, the distance. It’s quite a massive planet, probably in the order of about 2-3x the mass of Jupiter, and it’s orbiting at about 3 astronomical units away from its parent star. It’s not exactly like a familiar object, but if you could see it up close, it would probably look a bit like Jupiter. It would be about 3 times heavier, but not that much bigger because it would be more compressed by its gravity.

Fraser: The planets that have been discovered to date are within a few hundred light years of Earth. How were you able to find one 15,000 light-years away, expecially using backyard equipment?

Christie: With this discovery, we’re just part of a cog in a wheel, we’re part of a team, but it was using a method known as gravitational microlensing. That sounds like a bit of a mouthful, but essentially it uses a star as a lens to magnify a more distant star. This works if the two stars are exactly lined up as we see them from Earth. So we have a situation where we have a distant star somewhere in the halo – or the bulge – of the galaxy maybe 20,000 light-years from Earth. By chance, another star has come almost exactly in line between us and it. That intervening star’s gravity works like a lens and it amplifies the light of the more distant star. We can’t see them as two stars, they’re so close together, and no telescope on Earth can. But what we see is the magnification, or the amplification of the light from the distant star as it goes through that lens. All of that’s fine, some 600 of these microlensing events are detected each year currently. They in themselves aren’t that unusual, but it turns out that if you have a planet orbiting the lensing star – the one that’s intervened between us and the more distant one – then that planet hugely changes the characteristics of the lens. It changes the light amplification greatly. What we’re doing is simply measuring the brightness changes of the lens as these two stars come into alignment and then move out of alignment. It turns out that the one we were observing, the light was magnified by something like 50x over and above what was there before the lensing started. That brings faint stars that we normally couldn’t see with a small telescope up within our range. In the current case, the amplification brought it up to magnitude 18 in the visual wavelengths. That’s very close to our limit, but we were still able to do it.

Fraser: Was your team expecting to find evidence of a planet before you began any observations, or was that just a happy outcome?

Christie: It is largely a happy outcome. There’s a team based in Chile, a Polish team from Warsaw University let by Professor Udalski, and their job, their main function is to find microlensing events. They monitor millions of stars every night looking for stars that just seem to rise in brightness in a way that you’d expect from a lens. There are obviously lots of variable stars as well, which they have already tabulated, so they know about those. They’re detecting microlensing events. They’re detecting about 600 a year. They started observing this event in about March 17th, or thereabouts, and they noticed this star just starting to brighten – it had never brightened before – and they followed it. Each night as they took an observation, it appeared to brighten more and more, and as this process goes on they noticed that it was following a particular brightening curve that you’d expect from a microlensing event, so they were confident that it was a microlens. And then as we got closer into April, it started to show signs that it was departing from a pure simple lens you’d get from a single star all by itself; that’s a mathematically defined shape and if the photometry’s good, you can usually tell whether you’ve got a single lens or not. Around April 18th they started to notice a significant departure from that simple lens model, these are the guys running the OGLE team. They put out an alert that went to MicroFUN, who is a group we’re associated with. They run out of Ohio State University, led by Professor Andrew Gould there. We then received notification saying, it looks like there might be an anomoly with this microlensing event; try and observe it as much as possible. That’s really where we started our observations. By that stage it was faint, but it was still within reach of our telescopes. We were surprised that it actually was observable. I would have thought that it was too faint. Now I know that we can do work at a fainter limit than I’d previously thought. It was known by about April 20th that this microlensing event had a strong anomaly in it, which is the term they use, and we followed it for the following few days – probably about 3-4 days. It went through some very strong anomalies that really were a sign that was a planet present causing those anomolies. Most of these events you observe – I’ve done quite a few, probably 20 at least myself – turn out to be a simple lens, and there’s nothing surprising in them at all. The excitement of doing this sort of work is that you simply don’t know, nobody knows what you’re going to find. You start following one of these microlensing events as it reaches its maximum, and it’s at the maximum point, or close to it when the maximum sensitivity to a planet is going to be. We’re just not that interested in looking at them until you get very close to that maximum. And that’s when the networks really come are really start to saturate the light curve by covering them.

Fraser: So the stars have to be lined up quite nicely for the effect of the planet to show up.

Christie: Yes, they need to be nearly perfect. That creates a very high amplification. Some of the ones we’ve looked at have had amplifications where the light is magnified 800x. They’re not common, but when you get a very high amplification lens like that, when the alignment is nearly perfect, that’s when you’re most likely to find a planet if there’s one present.

Fraser: How sensitive can this technique be?

Christie: Some of the experts have said that had this planet not been bigger than Jupiter, it was the size of the Earth, these observations still would have detected it. I know there’s some debate about that amongst the academics in the teams, but broadly speaking, that’s probably an indication that this method can be very sensitive. And this event actually didn’t come up to be that bright. We’ve observed ones which have come up so bright you could see them in a little 6″ telescope.

Fraser: That’s amazing, though. I know people have been discussing different techniques that they might be able to see Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars, but to know that we might have a technique available right now is pretty impressive. I wanted to talk to you a bit about how amateurs can get involved in the discoveries in astronomy. Where are some avenues that people can get involved?

Christie: There are lots of ways you can get involved in observational astronomy, but in talking about photometry, which is a measurement of star brightness, you basically just need a telescope with as much aperture as you can afford. A decent sort of mounting and a CCD imaging camera. For below $10,000 you can set up a system that’s very capable, and can actually be really useful. There are lots of other things you can do in observational astronomy that don’t require that, but to do this sort of work, that’s what you’d need. We do work other than this microlensing work, we also measure the light changes of objects called cataclysmic variable stars. These are interesting objects that do a lot of flickering, and all sorts of things, and we’re part of a worldwide network that follows that kind of object. Generally, the common denomenator is the measurement of brightness over time of some star or object. That’s called photometry, and that’s primarily what we do.

Fraser: Congratulations on your team’s discovery of this new planet, and good luck with your work in the future.

Christie: You’re very welcome. I’d like to pay tribute to my co-worker here in New Zealand, Jennie McCormick, who uses the smallest telescope of all, and has done way over a thousand hours on this kind of work and deserves the recognition from her efforts put in.

Saturn Reflects X-Rays from the Sun

Saturn viewed by Chandra in the X-Ray spectrum during a solar flare. Image credit: Chandra. Click to enlarge.
When it comes to mysterious X-rays from Saturn, the ringed planet may act as a mirror, reflecting explosive activity from the sun, according to scientists using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The findings stem from the first observation of an X-ray flare reflected from Saturn’s low-latitudes, the region that correlates to Earth’s equator and tropics.

Dr. Anil Bhardwaj, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), Huntsville, Ala., led the study team. The study revealed Saturn acts as a diffuse mirror for solar X-rays.

Counting photons, particles that carry electromagnetic energy including X-rays, was critical to this discovery. Previous studies revealed Jupiter, with a diameter 11 times that of Earth, behaves in a similar fashion. Saturn is about 9.5 times larger than Earth. It is twice as far from Earth as Jupiter.

“The bigger the planet and nearer to the sun, the more solar photons it will intercept; resulting in more reflected X-rays.” Bhardwaj said. “These results imply we could use giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn as remote-sensing tools. By reflecting solar activity back to us, they could help us monitor X-ray flaring on portions of the sun facing away from Earth’s space satellites.”

Massive solar explosions called flares often accompany coronal mass ejections, which emit solar material and a magnetic field. When directed toward Earth, these ejections can wreak havoc on communications’ systems from cell phones to satellites.

Even as the research appeared to solve one mystery, the source of Saturn’s X-rays, it fueled long standing questions about magnetic fields. Of the three magnetic planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Earth emit two general types of X rays, auroral emissions from polar regions and disk emissions from low latitudes. No research has observed unambiguous signatures of auroral X-ray emissions on Saturn.

“We were surprised to find no clear evidence of auroral X-ray emissions during our observations,” Bhardwaj said. “It is interesting to note that even as research solves some mysteries, it confirms there is much more we have to learn.”

The research appeared in the May 10, 2005 issue of Astrophysical J. Letters. the research team also included Ron Elsner of MSFC; Hunter Waite of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Randy Gladstone of the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas; Thomas Cravens of the University of Kansas, Lawrence; and Peter Ford from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

Bhardwaj is working at MSFC as a National Research Council scholar. MSFC manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Northrop Grumman of Redondo Beach, Calif., was the prime development contractor for the observatory. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Mass.

Original Source: NASA News Release

Opportunity Still Working Itself Free from the Sand

Opportunity’s self-portrait, showing its wheel in the sand. Image credit: NASA/JPL. Click to enlarge.
NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity is trying to escape from a sand trap, while its twin, Spirit, has been busy finding new clues to a wet and violent early Martian history.

“Spirit has finally found the kind of geology you can really sink your teeth into,” said Dr. Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. He is principal investigator for the Mars rovers’ science instruments. According to Squyres, multiple layers of rock in the hills Spirit is exploring suggest successive deposits of water-altered explosive debris.

Spirit, inside Mars’ Gusev Crater, had to share the spotlight with the drama provided by Opportunity on the martian Meridiani plains. The rover has been hindered by soft sand for nearly three weeks. Traction is difficult in the ripple-shaped dune of windblown dust and sand that Opportunity drove into on April 26. Since it began trying to get out, the rover has advanced only 11 inches. Without the slippage caused by the rover’s wheels spinning in the soft sand, Opportunity could have driven 157 feet.

“If Opportunity gets free, its next task will be examining the site to give the rover team a better understanding of how this ripple differs from dozens Opportunity easily crossed,” said Jim Erickson. He is project manager for the Mars Exploration Rover project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

The rovers have worked under harsh martian conditions longer than expected. They have been studying geology on opposite sides of Mars for more than a year since successfully completing their three-month primary missions. Shortly after landing in January 2004, Opportunity found layered bedrock bearing geological evidence of a shallow ancient sea. More than one year later, Spirit found extensive layered bedrock after driving more than two miles and climbing into the “Columbia Hills.”

Squyres said, “In the last few weeks, we have gone from a state of confusion about the geology of the “Columbia Hills” to having real stratigraphic sequence and a powerful working hypothesis for the history of these layers.”

For several months, Spirit climbed a flank of “Husband Hill,” the tallest in the range. The slope closely matched the angle of underlying rock layers, which made the layering difficult to detect. Spirit reached an intermediate destination, dubbed “Larry’s Lookout,” then continued uphill and looked back. “That was the critical moment, when it all began falling into place,” Squyres said. “Looking back downhill, you can see the layering, and it suddenly starts to makes sense.”

Spirit has been examining rocks in a series of outcrops called “Methuselah,” “Jibsheet” and “Larry’s Lookout.” Some of the rocks contain the mineral ilmenite, not found previously by Spirit. “Ilmenite is a titanium-iron oxide formed during crystallization of magma,” said Dr. Dick Morris, a rover science-team member at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Houston. “Its occurrence is evidence for diversity in the volcanic rocks in the Gusev region.”

Rocks from different layers share compositional traits, high in titanium and low in chromium, which suggests a shared origin. However, the degree to which minerals in rocks have been chemically altered by exposure to water or other processes varies greatly from outcrop to outcrop. The textures also vary. At Methuselah, rocks have thin laminations revealed by Spirit’s microscopic imager. At Jibsheet, they are built of bulbous grains packed together. At Larry’s Lookout, the rocks are massive, with little fine-scale structure.

“Our best hypothesis is we’re looking at a stack of ash or debris that was explosively erupted from volcanoes and settled down in different ways,” Squyres said. “We can’t fully rule out the possibility the debris was generated in impact explosions instead of volcanic ones. But we can say, once upon a time, Gusev was a pretty violent place. Big, explosive events were happening, and there was a lot of water around.”

Rover-team scientists described the robot explorers’ activities today at the spring meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans. For images and information about the rovers and their discoveries, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/mer_main.html.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

A Bend in the Rings

Saturn’s atmosphere makes the rings look like they’re bending just as they pass behind the planet. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI. Click to enlarge.
Saturn’s rings appear strangely warped in this view of the rings seen through the upper Saturn atmosphere.

The atmosphere acts like a lens in refracting (bending) the light reflected from the rings. As the rings pass behind the overexposed limb (edge) of Saturn as seen from Cassini, the ring structure appears to curve downward due to the bending of the light as it passes through the upper atmosphere.

This image was obtained using a near-infrared filter. The filter samples a wavelength where methane gas does not absorb light, thus making the far-off rings visible through the upper atmosphere.

By comparing this image to similar ones taken using filters where methane gas does absorb, scientists can estimate the vertical profile of haze and the abundance of methane in Saturn’s high atmosphere.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 14, 2005, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths of infrared light centered at 938 nanometers and at a distance of approximately 197,000 kilometers (123,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 820 meters (2,680 feet) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. 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 and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage http://ciclops.org .

Original Source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release

Voyager 1 Enters the Heliosheath

Artist illustration of the position of the twin Voyager spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL. Click to enlarge.
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered the solar system’s final frontier. It is entering a vast, turbulent expanse where the Sun’s influence ends and the solar wind crashes into the thin gas between stars.

“Voyager 1 has entered the final lap on its race to the edge of interstellar space,” said Dr. Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which built and operates Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2.

In November 2003, the Voyager team announced it was seeing events unlike any in the mission’s then 26-year history. The team believed the unusual events indicated Voyager 1 was approaching a strange region of space, likely the beginning of this new frontier called the termination shock region. There was considerable controversy over whether Voyager 1 had indeed encountered the termination shock or was just getting close.

The termination shock is where the solar wind, a thin stream of electrically charged gas blowing continuously outward from the Sun, is slowed by pressure from gas between the stars. At the termination shock, the solar wind slows abruptly from a speed that ranges from 700,000 to 1.5 million miles per hour and becomes denser and hotter. The consensus of the team is that Voyager 1, at approximately 8.7 billion miles from the Sun, has at last entered the heliosheath, the region beyond the termination shock.

Predicting the location of the termination shock was hard, because the precise conditions in interstellar space are unknown. Also, changes in the speed and pressure of the solar wind cause the termination shock to expand, contract and ripple.

The most persuasive evidence that Voyager 1 crossed the termination shock is its measurement of a sudden increase in the strength of the magnetic field carried by the solar wind, combined with an inferred decrease in its speed. This happens whenever the solar wind slows down.

In December 2004, the Voyager 1 dual magnetometers observed the magnetic field strength suddenly increasing by a factor of approximately 2-1/2, as expected when the solar wind slows down. The magnetic field has remained at these high levels since December. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., built the magnetometers.

Voyager 1 also observed an increase in the number of high-speed electrically charged electrons and ions and a burst of plasma wave noise before the shock. This would be expected if Voyager 1 passed the termination shock. The shock naturally accelerates electrically charged particles that bounce back and forth between the fast and slow winds on opposite sides of the shock, and these particles can generate plasma waves.

“Voyager’s observations over the past few years show the termination shock is far more complicated than anyone thought,” said Dr. Eric Christian, Discipline Scientist for the Sun-Solar System Connection research program at NASA Headquarters, Washington.

The result is being presented today at a press conference in the Morial Convention Center, New Orleans, during the 2005 Joint Assembly meeting of Earth and space science organizations.

For their original missions to Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 and sister spacecraft Voyager 2 were destined for regions of space far from the Sun where solar panels would not be feasible, so each was equipped with three radioisotope thermoelectric generators to produce electrical power for the spacecraft systems and instruments. Still operating in remote, cold and dark conditions 27 years later, the Voyagers owe their longevity to these Department of Energy-provided generators, which produce electricity from the heat generated by the natural decay of plutonium dioxide.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Powerful Flare Shook Up Our Understanding of the Sun

Artist illustration of magnetic lines stretching and twisting around sunspots. Image credit: NASA. Click to enlarge.
The most intense burst of solar radiation in five decades accompanied a large solar flare on January 20. It shook space weather theory and highlighted the need for new forecasting techniques, according to several presentations at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting this week in New Orleans.

The solar flare, which occurred at 2 a.m. EST, tripped radiation monitors all over the planet and scrambled detectors on spacecraft. The shower of energetic protons came minutes after the first sign of the flare. This flare was an extreme example of the type of radiation storm that arrives too quickly to warn interplanetary astronauts.

“This flare produced the largest solar radiation signal on the ground in nearly 50 years,” said Dr. Richard Mewaldt of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. He is a co-investigator on NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft. “But we were really surprised when we saw how fast the particles reached their peak intensity and arrived at Earth.”

Normally it takes two or more hours for a dangerous proton shower to reach maximum intensity at Earth after a solar flare. The particles from the January 20 flare peaked about 15 minutes after the first sign.

“That’s important because it’s too fast to respond with much warning to astronauts or spacecraft that might be outside Earth’s protective magnetosphere,” Mewaldt said. “In addition to monitoring the sun, we need to develop the ability to predict flares in advance if we are going to send humans to explore our solar system.”

The event shakes the theory about the origin of proton storms at Earth. “Since about 1990, we’ve believed proton storms at Earth are caused by shock waves in the inner solar system as coronal mass ejections plow through interplanetary space,” said Professor Robert Lin of the University of California at Berkeley. He is principal investigator for the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI). “But the protons from this event may have come from the sun itself, which is very confusing.”

The origin of the protons is imprinted in their energy spectrum, as measured by ACE and other spacecraft, which matches the energy spectrum of gamma-rays thrown off by the flare, as measured by RHESSI. “This is surprising because in the past we believed the protons making gamma-rays at the flare were produced locally and the ones at the Earth were produced instead by shock acceleration in interplanetary space,” Lin said. “The similarity of the spectra suggests they are the same.”

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs), associated giant clouds of plasma in space, are the largest explosions in the solar system. They are caused by the buildup and sudden release of magnetic stress in the solar atmosphere above the giant magnetic poles we see as sunspots. The Transitional Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) and the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft are devoted to observing the sun and identifying the root causes of flares and CMEs, with an eye toward forecasting them.

“We do not know how to predict the flow of energy into and through these large flares”, said Dr. Richard Nightingale of the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alta, Calif. “Instruments like TRACE give us new clues with each event we observe.”

TRACE has identified a possible source of the magnetic stress that causes solar flares. The sunspots that give off the very largest (X-class) flares appear to rotate in the days around the flare. “This rotation stretches and twists the magnetic field lines over the sunspots”, Nightingale said. “We have seen it before virtually every X-flare that TRACE has observed since it was launched and more than half of all flares in that time.”

However, rotating sunspots are not the whole story. The unique flare came at the end of a string of five other very large flares from the same sunspot group, and no one knows why this one produced more sudden high energy particles than the first four.

“It means we really don’t understand how the sun works,” Lin said. “We need to continue to operate and exploit our fleet of solar-observing spacecraft to identify how it works.”

Original Source: NASA News Release