New York City at Night

New York City at Night
One of the Expedition 35 crew members aboard the Earth-orbiting International Space Station exposed this 400 millimeter night image of the greater New York City metropolitan area on March 23, 2013.

For orientation purposes, note that Manhattan runs horizontal through the frame from left to the midpoint. Central Park is just a little to the left of frame center.

Image Credit: NASA

Only 6 Hours To International Space Station

The Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft carrying three new Expedition 35 crew members docked with the International Space Station’s Poisk module at 10:28 p.m. EDT Thursday, completing its accelerated journey to the orbiting complex in less than six hours.

Soyuz Commander Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, who launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:43 p.m. (2:43 a.m. Friday, Baikonur time) are the first station crew members to take this expedited route to the orbiting laboratory. The Soyuz reached the station after only four orbits instead of the usual two-day launch-to-docking mission profile for a Russian spacecraft. While this is the first crewed spacecraft to employ this technique, Russian space officials successfully tested it with the last three Progress cargo vehicles.

After the hatches opened at 12:35 a.m. Friday, Cassidy, Vinogradov and Misurkin joined Commander Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency and Flight Engineers Tom Marshburn of NASA and Roman Romanenko of Roscosmos who have been residing at the orbital laboratory since Dec. 21, 2012. All six crew members crew then participated in a welcome ceremony with family members and mission officials gathered at the Russian Mission Control Center in Star City near Moscow.

The Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Photo credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi

The Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft approaches the International Space Station. Photo credit: NASA TV
Expedition 35 will operate with its full six-person crew complement until May when Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko return to Earth aboard their Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft. Their departure will mark the beginning of Expedition 36 under the command of Vinogradov, who along with crewmates Cassidy and Misurkin will maintain the station as a three-person crew until the launch of three additional flight engineers in late May. Cassidy, Vinogradov and Misurkin are scheduled to return to Earth in September.

During the approximate six-month timeframe of Expeditions 35 and 36, 137 investigations will be performed on the U.S. operating segment of the station, and 44 on the Russian segment. More than 430 investigators from around the world are involved in the research. The investigations cover human research, biological and physical sciences, technology development, Earth observation, and education.

Cassidy, a commander in the U.S. Navy, is making his second spaceflight. His first visit to the station was as an STS-127 mission specialist aboard space shuttle Endeavour in July 2009. During that mission Cassidy performed three spacewalks, spending more than 18 hours outside the orbiting complex.

This is the third space mission for Vinogradov, a former design engineer. Previously, Vinogradov was a crew member aboard space station Mir for 197 days in 1997-98 and spent 182 days aboard the International Space Station in 2006 as an Expedition 13 flight engineer.

A retired lieutenant colonel in the Russian Air Force, Misurkin is making his first spaceflight. He was selected as a cosmonaut candidate in 2006 and qualified as a test-cosmonaut in 2009.

CANADA'S FIRST COMMANDER OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION

Ottawa, Ontario – Prime Minister Stephen Harper today participated in a live video conference with Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield who recently became the first Canadian to command the International Space Station. Prime Minister Harper also moderated a Q&A session with students between the ages of 8 and 12 from the Ottawa area and from the Children’s Wish Foundation of Canada. The event took place at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa.

“Canadians are tremendously proud of Chris Hadfield and all of his impressive achievements,” said Prime Minister Harper.  “He epitomizes how the citizens of our great country continue to push the frontiers of exploration and knowledge.  His teaching and sharing via social media are inspiring young people, like those joining me today, to dream big and achieve those dreams.”

As head of the International Space Station, Commander Hadfield is responsible for maintaining the health and safety of the crew, and for keeping the space station productive and functioning properly.  Some of these duties include engineering, vehicle safety and the supervision of over 100 science experiments; many with the potential to enhance the quality of our lives here on Earth and further enhance the strength and expertise of the Canadian scientific community.

Commander Hadfield is no stranger to the vast expanse of space. He is the only Canadian to have boarded Mir, the Russian Space Station; the first Canadian to operate the Canadarm in orbit; the first Canadian to perform a spacewalk—when he attached Canadarm2 to the ISS; and now, the first Canadian to Command the International Space Station.

Chris Hadfield became the first Canadian Commander of the ISS on March 13, 2013, taking the helm from U.S. Commander Kevin Ford (NASA). This is Commander Hadfield’s third mission to space.  He launched to the Station on December 19, 2012, and is scheduled to stay aboard until May 13, 2013, when he is due to return to Earth in a Russian Soyuz capsule.

NASA and JPL Contribute to European Jupiter Mission

NASA has selected key contributions to a 2022 European Space Agency (ESA) mission that will study Jupiter and three of its largest moons in unprecedented detail. The moons are thought to harbor vast water oceans beneath their icy surfaces.

NASA's contribution will consist of one U.S.-led science instrument and hardware for two European instruments to fly on ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) mission. Jeffrey Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will be the U.S. lead for the Radar for Icy Moon Exploration experiment. The radar experiment's principal investigator is Lorenzo Bruzzone of Universita degli Studi di Trento in Italy.

Under the lead of Bruzzone and the Italian Space Agency, JPL will provide the transmitter and receiver hardware for a radar sounder designed to penetrate the icy crust of Jupiter's moons Europa, Ganymede and Callisto to a depth of about 5 miles (9 kilometers). This will allow scientists to see for the first time the underground structure of these tectonically complex and unique icy worlds.

JUICE will carry 11 experiments developed by scientific teams from 15 European countries, the United

NASA Satellites Find Freshwater Losses in Middle East

PASADENA, Calif. - A new study using data from a pair of gravity-measuring NASA satellites finds that large parts of the arid Middle East region lost freshwater reserves rapidly during the past decade.

Scientists at the University of California, Irvine; NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., found during a seven-year period beginning in 2003 that parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of total stored freshwater. That is almost the amount of water in the Dead Sea. The researchers attribute about 60 percent of the loss to pumping of groundwater from underground reservoirs.

The findings, to be published Friday, Feb. 15, in the journal Water Resources Research, are the result of one of the first comprehensive hydrological assessments of the entire Tigris-Euphrates-Western Iran region. Because obtaining ground-based data in the area is difficult, satellite data, such as those from NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, are essential. GRACE is providing a global picture of water storage trends and is invaluable when hydrologic observations are not routinely collected or shared beyond political boundaries.

"GRACE data show an alarming rate of decrease in total water storage in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins, which currently have the second fastest rate of groundwater storage loss on Earth, after India," said Jay Famiglietti, principle investigator of the study and a hydrologist and professor at UC Irvine. "The rate was especially striking after the 2007 drought. Meanwhile, demand for freshwater continues to rise, and the region does not coordinate its water management because of different interpretations of international laws."

Famiglietti said GRACE is like having a giant scale in the sky. Within a given region, rising or falling water reserves alter Earth's mass, influencing how strong the local gravitational attraction is. By periodically measuring gravity regionally, GRACE tells us how much each region's water storage changes over time.

"GRACE really is the only way we can estimate groundwater storage changes from space right now," Famiglietti said.

The team calculated about one-fifth of the observed water losses resulted from soil drying up and snowpack shrinking, partly in response to the 2007 drought. Loss of surface water from lakes and reservoirs accounted for about another fifth of the losses. The majority of the water lost -- approximately 73 million acre feet (90 cubic kilometers) -- was due to reductions in groundwater.

"That's enough water to meet the needs of tens of millions to more than a hundred million people in the region each year, depending on regional water use standards and availability," said Famiglietti.

Famiglietti said when a drought reduces an available surface water supply, irrigators and other water users turn to groundwater supplies. For example, the Iraqi government drilled about 1,000 wells in response to the 2007 drought, a number that does not include the numerous private wells landowners also very likely drilled.

"Water management is a complex issue in the Middle East -- an area that already is dealing with limited water resources and competing stakeholders," said Kate Voss, lead author of the study and a water policy fellow with the University of California's Center for Hydrological Modeling in Irvine, which Famiglietti directs.

"The Middle East just does not have that much water to begin with, and it's a part of the world that will be experiencing less rainfall with climate change," said Famiglietti. "Those dry areas are getting dryer. The Middle East and the world's other arid regions need to manage available water resources as best they can."

Study co-author Matt Rodell of Goddard added it is important to remember groundwater is being extracted unsustainably in parts of the United States, as well.

"Groundwater is like your savings account," Rodell said. "It's okay to draw it down when you need it, but if it's not replenished, eventually it will be gone."

GRACE is a joint mission with the German Aerospace Center and the German Research Center for Geosciences, in partnership with the University of Texas at Austin. For more about GRACE, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/grace and http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace . The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA

NASA to Launch Ocean Wind Monitor to Space Station

PASADENA, Calif. - In a clever reuse of hardware originally built to test parts of NASA's QuikScat satellite, the agency will launch the ISS-RapidScat instrument to the International Space Station in 2014 to measure ocean surface wind speed and direction.

The ISS-RapidScat instrument will help improve weather forecasts, including hurricane monitoring, and understanding of how ocean-atmosphere interactions influence Earth's climate.

"The ability for NASA to quickly reuse this hardware and launch it to the space station is a great example of a low-cost approach that will have high benefits to science and life here on Earth," said Mike Suffredini, NASA's International Space Station program manager.

ISS-RapidScat will help fill the data gap created when QuikScat, which was designed to last two years but operated for 10, stopped collecting ocean wind data in late 2009. A scatterometer is a microwave radar sensor used to measure the reflection or scattering effect produced while scanning the surface of Earth from an aircraft or a satellite.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have studied next-generation replacements for QuikScat, but a successor will not be available soon. To meet this challenge cost-effectively, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the agency's station program proposed adapting leftover QuikScat hardware in combination with new hardware for use on the space station.

"ISS-RapidScat represents a low-cost approach to acquiring valuable wind vector data for improving global monitoring of hurricanes and other high-intensity storms," said Howard Eisen, ISS-RapidScat project manager at JPL. "By leveraging the capabilities of the International Space Station and recycling leftover hardware, we will acquire good science data at a fraction of the investment needed to launch a new satellite."

ISS-RapidScat will have measurement accuracy similar to QuikScat's and will survey all regions of Earth accessible from the space station's orbit. The instrument will be launched to the space station aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft. It will be installed on the end of the station's Columbus laboratory as an autonomous payload requiring no interaction by station crew members. It is expected to operate aboard the station for two years.

ISS-RapidScat will take advantage of the space station's unique characteristics to advance understanding of Earth's winds. Current scatterometer orbits pass the same point on Earth at approximately the same time every day. Since the space station's orbit intersects the orbits of each of these satellites about once every hour, ISS-RapidScat can serve as a calibration standard and help scientists stitch together the data from multiple sources into a long-term record.

ISS-RapidScat also will collect measurements of Earth's global wind field at all times of day for all locations. Variations in winds caused by the sun can play a significant role in the formation of tropical clouds and tropical systems that play a dominant role in Earth's water and energy cycles. ISS-RapidScat observations will help scientists understand these phenomena better and improve weather and climate models.

The ISS-RapidScat project is a joint partnership of JPL and NASA's International Space Station Program Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, with support from the Earth Science Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

NASA Officially Joins ESA's 'Dark Universe' Mission

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA has joined the European Space Agency's (ESA's) Euclid mission, a space telescope designed to investigate the cosmological mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

Euclid will launch in 2020 and spend six years mapping the locations and measuring the shapes of as many as 2 billion galaxies spread over more than one-third of the sky. It will study the evolution of our universe, and the dark matter and dark energy that influence its evolution in ways that still are poorly understood.

The telescope will launch to an orbit around the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2. The Lagrange point is a location where the gravitational pull of two large masses, the sun and Earth in this case, precisely equals the force required for a small object, such as the Euclid spacecraft, to maintain a relatively stationary position behind Earth as seen from the sun.

"NASA is very proud to contribute to ESA's mission to understand one of the greatest science mysteries of our time," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington.

NASA and ESA recently signed an agreement outlining NASA's role in the project. NASA will contribute 16 state-of-the-art infrared detectors and four spare detectors for one of two science instruments planned for Euclid.

"ESA's Euclid mission is designed to probe one of the most fundamental questions in modern cosmology, and we welcome NASA's contribution to this important endeavor, the most recent in a long history of cooperation in space science between our two agencies," said Alvaro Gimenez, ESA's Director of Science and Robotic Exploration.

In addition, NASA has nominated three U.S. science teams totaling 40 new members for the Euclid Consortium. This is in addition to 14 U.S. scientists already supporting the mission. The Euclid Consortium is an international body of 1,000 members who will oversee development of the instruments, manage science operations and analyze data.

Euclid will map

At Least One in Six Stars Has an Earth-sized Planet

The quest for a twin Earth is heating up. Using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, astronomers are beginning to find Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars. A new analysis of Kepler data shows that about 17 percent of stars have an Earth-sized planet in an orbit closer than Mercury. Since the Milky Way has about 100 billion stars, there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized worlds out there.

Francois Fressin, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, presented the analysis today in a press conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, Calif. A paper detailing the research has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

Kepler detects planetary candidates using the transit method, watching for a planet to cross its star and create a mini-eclipse that dims the star slightly. The first 16 months of the survey identified about 2,400 candidates. Astronomers then asked, how many of those signals are real, and how many planets did Kepler miss?

By simulating the Kepler survey, Fressin and his colleagues were able to correct both the impurity and the incompleteness of this list of candidates to recover the true occurrence of planets orbiting other stars, down to the size of Earth.

“There is a list of astrophysical configurations that can mimic planet signals, but altogether, they can only account for one-tenth of the huge number of Kepler candidates. All the other signals are bona-fide planets,” said Fressin.

Most sun-like stars have planets

Altogether, the researchers found that 50 percent of stars have a planet of Earth-size or larger in a close orbit. By adding larger planets, which have been detected in wider orbits up to the orbital distance of the Earth, this number reaches 70 percent.

Extrapolating from Kepler’s currently ongoing observations and results from other detection techniques, it looks like practically all Sun-like stars have planets.

The team then grouped planets into five different sizes. They found that 17 percent of stars have a planet 0.8 – 1.25 times the size of Earth in an orbit of 85 days or less. About one-fourth of stars have a super-Earth (1.25 – 2 times the size of Earth) in an orbit of 150 days or less. (Larger planets can be detected at greater distances more easily.) The same fraction of stars has a mini-Neptune (2 – 4 times Earth) in orbits up to 250 days long.

Larger planets are much less common. Only about 3 percent of stars have a large Neptune (4 – 6 times Earth), and only 5 percent of stars have a gas giant (6 – 22 times Earth) in an orbit of 400 days or less.

Smaller planets are not picky

The researchers also asked whether certain sizes of planets are more or less common around certain types of stars. They found that for every planet size except gas giants, the type of star does not matter. Neptunes are found just as frequently around red dwarfs as they are around sun-like stars. The same is true for smaller worlds. This contradicts previous findings.

“Earths and super-Earths aren’t picky. We’re finding them in all kinds of neighborhoods,” said co-author Guillermo Torres of the CfA.

Planets closer to their stars are easier to find because they transit more frequently. As more data are gathered, planets in larger orbits will come to light. In particular, Kepler’s extended mission should allow it to spot Earth-sized planets at greater distances, including Earth-like orbits in the habitable zone.

NASA Kicks Off 2013 First Robotics Season with Live Broadcast Jan. 5

 WASHINGTON -- NASA Television will broadcast the annual FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Kickoff event on Saturday, Jan. 5, starting at 10:30 a.m. EST from Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester. The event also will be streamed live on NASA's website.

As in past years, NASA plays a significant role by providing public access to robotics programs to encourage young people to investigate careers in the sciences and engineering. Through the NASA Robotics Alliance Project, the agency provides grants for almost 250 teams and sponsors four regional student competitions, including a FIRST regional competition in Washington that will be held March 28-30.

Each year, FIRST presents a new robotics competition scenario where each team receives an identical kit of parts and has six weeks to design and build a robot based on the team's interpretation of the game scenario. Other than dimension and weight restrictions, the look and function of the robots is up to each individual team. This year more than 2,500 teams from 49 states, and 12 countries will participate.

Engineer Dean Kamen founded FIRST in 1989 to help convince American youth that engineering and technology are exciting and 'cool' fields. NASA participation in the FIRST program is provided through the NASA Headquarters Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For NASA TV streaming video, schedule and downlink information, visit: 

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For a complete a list of the regional events, corporate sponsors and other details, visit: 

http://www.usfirst.org/

For more information on the NASA's Robotics Alliance Project visit: 

http://robotics.nasa.gov

NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn Arrives At The International Space Station

Expedition 34 Docking Confirmed at Station

NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield and Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko docked with the International Space Station's Rassvet module this morning at 9:09 a.m EST.

The station population will double with the hatch opening and welcome ceremony beginning at 11:15 a.m.