NASA's wish to follow the water on Mars just got a helping hand.

Scientists have released a new global map showing water ice that is as little as 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) below the Red Planet's surface.

With data in hand, the research team located at least one promising landing spot for future astronaut missions: a big zone in the northern hemisphere's Arcadia Planitia. This area has a lot of water ice close to the surface and is in the ideal location for a human Mars mission, because it is in a temperate, midlatitude region with plenty of sunlight, the research team wrote in a new study describing the findings.

Related: Where's All the Water on Mars? Scientists (and Future Astronauts) Need to Know

"You wouldn't need a backhoe to dig up this ice. You could use a shovel," lead author Sylvain Piqueux, who studies planetary surfaces at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement. "We're continuing to collect data on buried ice on Mars, zeroing in on the best places for astronauts to land."

Further study of the "treasure map" could unlock more landing locations, too, according to NASA. Water is a precious resource for future astronaut missions to Mars, where the space agency wants to land in the 2030s. The hope is that, instead of hauling all of the water astronauts will need from Earth to the Red Planet, astronauts could get their drinking water and the components of water (oxygen and hydrogen) for rocket fuel from Mars itself.

The new map is based on data from two long-running spacecraft: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey. Each spacecraft used heat-sensitive instruments to find the ice, because buried ice changes the temperature of the surface. To be sure that it was ice they were seeing, the scientists cross-referenced their work with other data like ice seen in radar instruments and Mars Odyssey's gamma-ray spectrometer, which is optimized for spotting water ice deposits.

The surface of Mars is a desert; water is scarce. That's because liquid water evaporates quickly in the thin atmosphere of the Red Planet. There have been reports of briny water flowing on crater walls, but some scientists say those streams are more likely dry dust flows. Notably, there is plenty of water ice locked up in the Martian polar caps. But this wouldn't be a viable solution for a lengthy mission because it would get too cold and dark at the poles for a good part of the year.

Water did flow on Mars' surface in the ancient past, but that was because the atmosphere was much thicker back then. The leading theory is that the sun's particles gradually eroded the Martian atmosphere over the eons, until the atmosphere was so thin that it could not support running water anymore.

A paper based on the research was published Tuesday (Dec. 10)in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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NASA's 'Treasure Map' of Water Ice on Mars Shows Where Humans Should Land - Space.com

NASAs X-Plane Program has been around for 70 years. Over the course of those decades, the agency has developed a series of airplanes and rockets to test out various technologies and design advances. Now NASA has cleared the newest one, the X-59, for final assembly.

The X-59 is a supersonic aircraft design. Its full name is the X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology (QueSST) aircraft.Rather than pushing for greater speeds or higher altitudes like some previous X-Planes, the X-59 is designed to break the sound barrier without the sonic boom. The X-59 will produce no more than a loud thump, if anything at all, when it passes the sound barrier.

Preliminary design for the X-59 began in February 2016. NASA wanted to develop a supersonic aircraft that eliminated the sonic boom. Supersonic aircraft have been around for a while, and have served as commercial airline aircraft. The Concorde was in service until 2003, but the tell-tale sonic boom that the Concorde created is problematic: the Concorde was only allowed on ocean-crossing flights as the noise was too much for populated areas.

But the speed of supersonic aircraft is hard to resist. Designers believed that the shape of an aircraft could be modified to eliminate the sonic boom, and bring supersonic aircraft back into service. One early test aircraft, the Northrop F5-E, had a specially-shaped nose that designers hoped would reduce or eliminate the sonic boom.

This modification, which made the front of the F-5E somewhat resemble a pelicans beak, was carefully shaped to change the pattern of shock waves it would generate while flying faster than the speed of sound, said Lawrence R. Benson, the author of Quieting the Boom, a book about supersonic aircraft design.

The sonic boom that jets emit has nothing to do with the engine. The boom comes from shock waves that coalesce together in the wake of an aircraft when it breaches the sound barrier. And though it sounds to an individual observer like the boom is a single event, thats not the case. The boom is continuous as long as the aircraft travels faster than the speed of sound.

The X-59 achieves its reduced noise level with the help of what are called canards. Canards are small fore-wings that sit ahead of the primary wings. They shape the shock waves and prevent them from coalescing behind the aircraft. Along with the long narrow air-frame of the X-59, the canards should reduce the noise from the aircraft to the equivalent of a car door closing.

One of the design concessions of the X-59 is that the cockpit has limited forward visibility. To get around this, the aircraft will have be equipped with the eXternal Visibility System (XVS.) The XVS is a system of sensors, computing, and display technologies that will overlay important flight information on cockpit displays, including visual aids for airport approaches, takeoffs, and landings. The result is a kind of virtual reality or augmented reality of the aircrafts forward line of sight.

Now NASA has announced that the X-59 has passed the critical Key Decision Point-D (KPD-D), a kind of final review before assembly. Once the aircraft is ready for test flights, NASA officials will meet again in late 2020 to approve the airplanes first flight in 2021.

With the completion of KDP-D weve shown the project is on schedule, its well planned and on track. We have everything in place to continue thishistoric research missionfor the nations air-traveling public, said Bob Pearce, NASAs associate administrator for Aeronautics, in a press release.

Once its flying, it will be tested rigorously with the help of civilian observers on the ground. Itll be flown above selected communities in the US who will report their observations of the aircrafts sound. This is to gauge the publics perception of the aircraft, and to assist in developing new flight guidelines for future supersonic aircraft.

NASA has employed a unique method of visualizing the sound waves generated by supersonic aircraft. Its called Schlieren Photography and it was first developed in 1864 to photograph the flow of fluids. NASA made great strides using it to image aircraft shock waves, and its been a key part of the development of the X-59.

The X-59 is being built by Lockheed-Martin at their Skunk Works facility in California. The aircraft is expected to cost about $250 million. By later 2020, final assembly should be complete.

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NASA Will Be Building a Quiet, Supersonic Aircraft: the X-59 - Universe Today

NASAs Mars 2020 rover takes its first steps in a clean room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, auto-navigating obstacles, turning in place and demonstrating its hazard-avoidance ability. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

With launch just seven months away, NASAs Mars 2020 rover passed its first driving test on 17 December, demonstrating the six-wheel nuclear-powered spacecraft can auto-navigate around obstacles, climb over relatively large obstructions and manoeuvre as required.

Mars 2020 has earned its drivers license, said Rich Rieber, the lead mobility systems engineer for the Mars 2020 project at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The test unambiguously proved that the rover can operate under its own weight and demonstrated many of the autonomous-navigation functions for the first time. This is a major milestone for Mars 2020.

The new rover is scheduled for launch atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Florida on 17 July. If all goes well, the spacecraft will be lowered from a rocket-powered sky crane to the floor of Jezero Crater on 18 February 2021. Once on the surface, Mars 2020 will search for evidence of past microbial life, study the planets climate and geology and collect rock and soil samples for possible return to Earth on a future mission.

To accomplish its science objects, Mars 2020 is expected to rove an average of 200 metres (650 feet) per day. Thats just a little less than the current record for a single days travel, 214 metres (702 feet) set by the Opportunity rover.

Similar in appearance to NASAs Curiosity rover, Mars 2020 features higher-resolution wide-field navigation cameras, an additional computer to process images and build maps, a more sophisticated auto-navigation system and redesigned, much tough wheels better able to resist damage from sharp rocks.

During its driving test at JPL, the rover spent more than 10 hours steering, turning and driving forward and backward in 1-metre (3-foot) increments over small ramps. Scientists also tested a ground-penetrating radar instrument.

A rover needs to rove, and Mars 2020 did that, said John McNamee, Mars 2020 project manager. We cant wait to put some red Martian dirt under its wheels.

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NASA's Mars 2020 rover passes first driving test on road to red planet - Astronomy Now Online

Nasa's X-59 space plane, capable of flying faster than the speed of sound without the loud boom that comes with supersonic flight, is finally nearing completion.

The plane will be the first large scale, piloted X-plane that Nasa has launched in more than 30 years when it is finally put together.

It could also herald a new era in fast space travel, as it attempts to overcome the problems that have blighted previous attempts like Concorde. Normally, supersonic planes create a loud boom when they reach the speed of sound and have as a result been banned from flying over populated areas but the creators of the X-59 claim it will be almost silent.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

And the space agency has announced that it is cleared for final assembly and "integration of its systems" after being looked over by senior managers.

The plane which has the full nameX-59 QuietSuperSonicTechnology (QueSST) is being put together by Lockheed Martin, which will now work to complete it ahead of testing.

The eye of Hurricane Dorian as captured by Nasa astronaut Nick Hague from onboard the International Space Station (ISS) on 3 September

Nasa/EPA

The River Nile and its delta captured at night from the ISS on 2 September

Nasa

The galaxy Messier 81, located in the northern constellation of Ursa Major, as seen by Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope

Nasa/JPL-Caltech

The flight path Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft is seen in this long exposure photograph as it launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 25 September

Nasa/Bill Ingalls

Danielson Crater, an impact crater in the Arabia region of Mars, as captured by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft

Nasa/JPL-Caltech

A team rehearses landing and crew extraction from Boeing's CST-100 Starliner, which will be used to carry humans to the International Space Station at the White Sands Missile Range outside Las Cruces, New Mexico

Nasa/Bill Ingalls

Bound for the International Space Station, the Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 25 September

Nasa/Bill Ingalls

Hurricane Dorian as seen from the ISS on 2 September

Nasa

A string of tropical cyclones streams across Earth's northern hemisphere in this picture taken from the ISS on 4 September

Nasa

The city of New York as seen from the ISS on 11 September

Nasa

The eye of Hurricane Dorian as captured by Nasa astronaut Nick Hague from onboard the International Space Station (ISS) on 3 September

Nasa/EPA

The River Nile and its delta captured at night from the ISS on 2 September

Nasa

The galaxy Messier 81, located in the northern constellation of Ursa Major, as seen by Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope

Nasa/JPL-Caltech

The flight path Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft is seen in this long exposure photograph as it launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 25 September

Nasa/Bill Ingalls

Danielson Crater, an impact crater in the Arabia region of Mars, as captured by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft

Nasa/JPL-Caltech

A team rehearses landing and crew extraction from Boeing's CST-100 Starliner, which will be used to carry humans to the International Space Station at the White Sands Missile Range outside Las Cruces, New Mexico

Nasa/Bill Ingalls

Bound for the International Space Station, the Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 25 September

Nasa/Bill Ingalls

Hurricane Dorian as seen from the ISS on 2 September

Nasa

A string of tropical cyclones streams across Earth's northern hemisphere in this picture taken from the ISS on 4 September

Nasa

The city of New York as seen from the ISS on 11 September

Nasa

It should be approved for its first flight in 2020, and the actual launch will come a year after that.

With the completion ofKDP-Dweve shown the project is on schedule, its well planned and on track. We have everything in place to continue this historic research mission for the nationsair-travelingpublic, said BobPearce, NASAs associate administrator for aeronautics, in a statement.

Nasa says that the new plane will make a boom that will onlybe audible as a "gentle thump", or might be entirely silent. It is able to do because of its precise shape, which looks something like an even more sharp version of the Concorde.

It will fly nearly as fast as its lookalike, with a cruising speed of1.42.

That will be put to the test when the plane is ready to fly. The trials will see it sent over "select US communities" in test flights that wil allow Nasa to measure itusing sensors and people on the ground who will "gauge public perception" of the sound of the plane.

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Nasa building supersonic plane that goes as fast as Concorde without the sound - The Independent

Nasa has released never-before-seen images of2I/Borisov, only the second known object to have visited our solar system from elsewhere.

The image shows the comet in front of a distant spiral galaxy, which can be made out to the side. But the focus of the imags is the bright blue centre of the image, which was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as it tracked the comet through space.

The picture shows the comet on its way through our solar system as it makes its way back into the interstellar space where it once flew.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

2I/Borisov was first spotted in August by a Crimean amateur astronomer who would give it its name, and caused a flurry of excitement across the world. Scientists quickly determined that it was the second interstellar object known to have visited our solar system, after the famous 'Oumuamua, and the first comet.

Since then, scientists have been taking images of the comet as it moves nearer to the Earth and can be seen in better detail. The first observations from Hubble came in October, and the new images come from November and December, offering a better look at the size and other details of the visitor.

Mystic Mountain, a pillar of gas and dust standing at three-light-years tall, bursting with jets of gas flom fledgling stars buried within, was captured by Nasa's Hubble Space Telelscope in February 2010

Nasa/ESA/STScI

The first ever selfie taken on an alien planet, captured by Nasa's Curiosity Rover in the early days of its mission to explore Mars in 2012

Nasa/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Death of a star: This image from Nasa's Chandra X-ray telescope shows the supernova of Tycho, a star in our Milky Way galaxy

Nasa

Arrokoth, the most distant object ever explored, pictured here on 1 January 2019 by a camera on Nasa's New Horizons spaceraft at a distance of 4.1 billion miles from Earth

Getty

An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory in January 2012. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust

Nasa

The first ever image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon telescope, as part of a global collaboration involving Nasa, and released on 10 April 2019. The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth

Getty

Pluto, as pictured by Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft as it flew over the dwarf planet for the first time ever in July 2015

Nasa/APL/SwRI

A coronal mass ejection as seen by the Chandra Observatory in 2019. This is the first time that Chandra has detected this phenomenon from a star other than the Sun

Nasa

Dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks running downhill on the surface Mars were believed to be evidence of contemporary flowing water. It has since been suggested that they may instead be formed by flowing sand

Nasa/JPL/University of Arizona

Morning Aurora: Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station in October 2015

Nasa/Scott Kelly

Mystic Mountain, a pillar of gas and dust standing at three-light-years tall, bursting with jets of gas flom fledgling stars buried within, was captured by Nasa's Hubble Space Telelscope in February 2010

Nasa/ESA/STScI

The first ever selfie taken on an alien planet, captured by Nasa's Curiosity Rover in the early days of its mission to explore Mars in 2012

Nasa/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Death of a star: This image from Nasa's Chandra X-ray telescope shows the supernova of Tycho, a star in our Milky Way galaxy

Nasa

Arrokoth, the most distant object ever explored, pictured here on 1 January 2019 by a camera on Nasa's New Horizons spaceraft at a distance of 4.1 billion miles from Earth

Getty

An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy seen in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory in January 2012. Regions of space such as this are where new stars are born from a mixture of elements and cosmic dust

Nasa

The first ever image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon telescope, as part of a global collaboration involving Nasa, and released on 10 April 2019. The image reveals the black hole at the centre of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides about 54 million light-years from Earth

Getty

Pluto, as pictured by Nasa's New Horizons spacecraft as it flew over the dwarf planet for the first time ever in July 2015

Nasa/APL/SwRI

A coronal mass ejection as seen by the Chandra Observatory in 2019. This is the first time that Chandra has detected this phenomenon from a star other than the Sun

Nasa

Dark, narrow, 100 meter-long streaks running downhill on the surface Mars were believed to be evidence of contemporary flowing water. It has since been suggested that they may instead be formed by flowing sand

Nasa/JPL/University of Arizona

Morning Aurora: Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly captured this photograph of the green lights of the aurora from the International Space Station in October 2015

Nasa/Scott Kelly

When this image was taken, the object was 326 million kilometres from Earth. Scientists can now use it and other observations to learn more about the comet.

"Hubble gives us the best measure of the size of comet Borisov's nucleus, which is the really important part of the comet," said David Jewitt, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California Los Angeles, whose team has captured the best and sharpest images of this first interstellar comet.

"Surprisingly, our Hubble images show that its nucleus is more than 15 times smaller than earlier investigations suggested it might be. The radius is smaller than half a kilometre. This is important because knowing the size helps us to determine the total number, and mass, of such objects in the Solar System, and in the Milky Way. Borisov is the first known interstellar comet, and we would like to know how many others there are."

Scientists now expect to see other interstellar objects, and compare those with the two mysterious objects they have already been able to see.

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Nasa releases never-before-seen image of mysterious object that arrived from another solar system - The Independent

The annotated area of Mars in this illustration holds near-surface water ice that would be easily accessible for astronauts to dig up. The water ice was identified as part of a map using data from NASA orbiters. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA has big plans for returning astronauts to the Moon in 2024, a stepping stone on the path to sending humans to Mars. But where should the first people on the Red Planet land?

A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters will help by providing a map of water ice believed to be as little as an inch (2.5 centimeters) below the surface.

Water ice will be a key consideration for any potential landing site. With little room to spare aboard a spacecraft, any human missions to Mars will have to harvest whats already available for drinking water and making rocket fuel.

NASA calls this concept in situ resource utilization, and its an important factor in selecting human landing sites on Mars. Satellites orbiting Mars are essential in helping scientists determine the best places for building the first Martian research station. The authors of the new paper make use of data from two of those spacecraft, NASAs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Odyssey orbiter, to locate water ice that could potentially be within reach of astronauts on the Red Planet.

You wouldnt need a backhoe to dig up this ice. You could use a shovel, said the papers lead author, Sylvain Piqueux of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Were continuing to collect data on buried ice on Mars, zeroing in on the best places for astronauts to land.

Liquid water cant last in the thin air of Mars; with so little air pressure, it evaporates from a solid to a gas when exposed to the atmosphere.

Martian water ice is locked away underground throughout the planets mid-latitudes. These regions near the poles have been studied by NASAs Phoenix lander, which scraped up ice, and MRO, which has taken many images from space of meteor impacts that have excavated this ice. To find ice that astronauts could easily dig up, the studys authors relied on two heat-sensitive instruments: MROs Mars Climate Sounder and the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera on Mars Odyssey.

This rainbow-colored map shows underground water ice on Mars. Cool colors are closer to the surface than warm colors; black zones indicate areas where a spacecraft would sink into fine dust; the outlined box represents the ideal region to send astronauts for them to dig up water ice. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Why use heat-sensitive instruments when looking for ice? Buried water ice changes the temperature of the Martian surface. The studys authors cross-referenced temperatures suggestive of ice with other data, such as reservoirs of ice detected by radar or seen after meteor impacts. Data from Odysseys Gamma Ray Spectrometer, which is tailor-made for mapping water ice deposits, were also useful.

As expected, all these data suggest a trove of water ice throughout the Martian poles and mid-latitudes. But the map reveals particularly shallow deposits that future mission planners may want to study further.

While there are lots of places on Mars scientists would like to visit, few would make practical landing sites for astronauts. Most scientists have homed in on the northern and southern mid-latitudes, which have more plentiful sunlight and warmer temperatures than the poles. But theres a heavy preference for landing in the northern hemisphere, which is generally lower in elevation and provides more atmosphere to slow a landing spacecraft.

A large portion of a region called Arcadia Planitia is the most tempting target in the northern hemisphere. The map shows lots of blue and purple in this region, representing water ice less than one foot (30 centimeters) below the surface; warm colors are over two feet (60 centimeters) deep. Sprawling black zones on the map represent areas where a landing spacecraft would sink into fine dust.

Piqueux is planning a comprehensive campaign to continue studying buried ice across different seasons, watching how the abundance of this resource changes over time.

The more we look for near-surface ice, the more we find, said MRO Deputy Project Scientist Leslie Tamppari of JPL. Observing Mars with multiple spacecraft over the course of years continues to provide us with new ways of discovering this ice.

###

Reference: Widespread Shallow Water Ice on Mars at High and Mid Latitudes by Sylvain Piqueux, Jennifer Buz, Christopher S. Edwards, Joshua L. Bandfield, Armin Kleinbhl, David M. Kass and Paul O. Hayne, 10 December 2019, Geophysical Research Letters.DOI: 10.1029/2019GL083947

JPL manages the MRO and Mars Odyssey missions for NASAs Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built both orbiters. JPL built and operates the Mars Climate Sounder instrument. THEMIS was built and is operated by Arizona State University in Tempe. The Gamma Ray Spectrometer was built and is operated by the University of Arizona in Tucson.

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Theres Buried Treasure on Mars Heres NASAs Treasure Map - SciTechDaily

NEW ORLEANS As NASA marked the completion of the core stage of the first Space Launch System rocket, the agency and the rockets prime contractor are in the midst of negotiations for a long-term production contract for additional vehicles.

NASA announced in October that it was starting negotiations with Boeing for a production contract that would cover up to 10 core stages for the SLS, starting with the third SLS rocket. Boeing is already under contract for the first two SLS vehicles and NASA has authorized initial funding for the third SLS in order for it to be ready in time for a human lunar landing mission in 2024.

NASA expects that, with a long-term contract in place, it will be able to bring down the costs of individual SLS vehicles. If you buy one SLS rocket, the price is really high. If you buy two, the price goes down significantly, and if you buy the three it keeps going down, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at a Dec. 9 event at the Michoud Assembly Facility here.

Bridenstine said at the event that the agency was seeking such economies of scale in any contract for future SLS vehicles, depending on how many the agency needed for its future exploration plans. We need to look at the price based on a negotiation between NASA and our prime contractor, he said, a reference to Boeing. That negotiation, and how many we buy, ultimately will determine what that final cost will be per rocket.

Bridenstine didnt state a price target for the SLS under any new contract, although at a NASA town hall meeting Dec. 3 he estimated the per-vehicle cost to eventually reach $800900 million. In an interview with CNN Dec. 9, he estimated a single SLS today costs $1.6 billion, but could get down $800 million under a long-term production contract.

Those contract negotiations are going well, according to a Boeing official. I personally dont think were that far apart, Jim Chilton, senior vice president for space and launch at Boeing Defense, Space and Security, said in a Dec. 9 interview. Its actually going pretty fast. The scope of that long-term contract, he said, would likely cover 10 vehicles, although initial funding would be for just the third and fourth SLS vehicles.

Another factor will be how quickly those vehicles will be produced. Some in Congress have sought to increase the SLS production rate to two vehicles a year as soon as 2024. That would enable another SLS to be available to support human lunar missions: Boeing, for example, has proposed developing a lunar lander that would be launched as a single vehicle on an SLS, rather than in modules launches on commercial rockets. Congress has also required that NASA use an SLS to launch its Europa Clipper mission.

Chilton said that, while Michoud was not designed for high production rates, he didnt see many problems in going to two SLS vehicles a year. Despite the long delays in the production of the first SLS core stage, he said the company could produce future SLS core stages at a rate of one every eight months. So were not that far off it, he said of a two-per-year production rate.

While Chilton said he thought that Boeing could produce two SLS vehicles a year by 2024, Bridenstine was not nearly as optimistic. Nobody has presented me a plan that says that thats happening, but certainly I would fully support it if they could make it happen, he told reporters at the event. Im not counting on that for 2024, quite frankly.

For 2024 we need to be focused on getting that Artemis 3 SLS complete, and using other rockets to do payload deliveries and that kind of thing apart from the SLS itself, Bridenstine added. NASAs current architecture calls on using commercial rockets for delivery of lunar Gateway elements and modules for the lunar lander, with SLS reserved for the launch of the crewed Orion spacecraft.

Another issue will be the transition from the original Block 1 version of the SLS, which uses the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage as its upper stage, to the Block 1B with the more powerful Exploration Upper Stage. NASAs current plans call for using the Block 1 SLS for the first three missions, then moving to the Block 1B, although some have called for a faster transition.

Starting in 2024, the Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) will power NASA missions that carry crew and heavy cargo deeper into space, Boeing said in a Dec. 9 statement about development of the stage. NASA expects to fly the EUS on the Artemis 3 mission to deliver combined payloads, such as large elements of the Gateway lunar orbiter or an integrated Human Lander System, along with Orion. A NASA statement in October said use of the EUS would begin with the Artemis 4 mission.

Chilton said that work on EUS, which was paused for a time, is proceeding, with the stage now between its preliminary and critical design reviews. The EUS, like the core stage, will be produced at Michoud. Our target is 24, he said of having the EUS ready. The Artemis 3, 4 time frame.

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NASA and Boeing look ahead to long-term SLS production - SpaceNews

When NASA astronauts visit Mars, they'll probably need to harvest the planet's water ice for drinking water and fuel.

It makes sense, then, for the space agency to target a landing spot near easily accessible ice - and they now have a "treasure map" detailing where that ice exists to make the process that much easier.

"You wouldn't need a backhoe to dig up this ice," NASA research Sylvain Piqueux said in a news release. "You could use a shovel."

We've known that water ice exists on Mars since 2008, and according to this new research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on Tuesday, NASA is continually discovering more and more of it.

"The more we look for near-surface ice, the more we find," NASA researcher Leslie Tamppari said in the news release. "Observing Mars with multiple spacecraft over the course of years continues to provide us with new ways of discovering this ice."

Some of the ice detailed in NASA's treasure map is as little as 2.5 centimeters (an inch) beneath the Red Planet's surface, so the agency already has several options for landing locations.

However, given that it likely won't be sending any humans to Mars before the 2030s, it has plenty of time to home in on the single most ideal landing spot, helping ensure the success of that first groundbreaking mission.

This article was originally published by Futurism. Read the original article.

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NASA Identifies Regions of Mars With Water Ice Just Below The Surface - ScienceAlert

Venus hides a wealth of information that could help us better understand Earth and exoplanets. NASAs JPL is designing mission concepts to survive the planets extreme temperatures and atmospheric pressure. This image is a composite of data from NASAs Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Sue Smrekar really wants to go back to Venus. In her office at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the planetary scientist displays a 30-year-old image of Venus surface taken by the Magellan spacecraft, a reminder of how much time has passed since an American mission orbited the planet. The image reveals a hellish landscape: a young surface with more volcanoes than any other body in the solar system, gigantic rifts, towering mountain belts and temperatures hot enough to melt lead.

Now superheated by greenhouse gases, Venus climate was once more similar to Earths, with a shallow oceans worth of water. It may even have subduction zones like Earth, areas where the planets crust sinks back into rock closer to the core of the planet.

Venus is like the control case for Earth, said Smrekar. We believe they started out with the same composition, the same water and carbon dioxide. And theyve gone down two completely different paths. So why? What are the key forces responsible for the differences?

By studying this mysterious planet, scientists could learn a great deal more about exoplanets, as well as the past, present, and possible future of our own. This video unveils this world and calls on current and future scientists to explore its many features.

Smrekar works with the Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG), a coalition of scientists and engineers investigating ways to revisit the planet that Magellan mapped so many decades ago. Though their approaches vary, the group agrees that Venus could tell us something vitally important about our planet: what happened to the superheated climate of our planetary twin, and what does it mean for life on Earth?

Venus isnt the closest planet to the Sun, but it is the hottest in our solar system. Between the intense heat (900 degrees Fahrenheit heat, or 480 degrees Celsius), the corrosive sulfuric clouds and a crushing atmosphere that is 90 times denser than Earths, landing a spacecraft there is incredibly challenging. Of the nine Soviet probes that achieved the feat, none lasted longer than 127 minutes.

From the relative safety of space, an orbiter could use radar and near-infrared spectroscopy to peer beneath the cloud layers, measure landscape changes over time, and determine whether or not the ground moves. It could look for indicators of past water as well as volcanic activity and other forces that may have shaped the planet.

Sue Smrekar, seen here at the 2018 media briefing before the landing of NASAs Mars InSight, is a planetary scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She believes exploring Venus will reveal important details about how rocky planets form and whether other planets are capable of supporting life. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Smrekar, who is working on an orbiter proposal called VERITAS, doesnt think that Venus has plate tectonics the way Earth does. But she sees possible hints of subduction what happens when two plates converge and one slides beneath the other. More data would help.

We know very little about the composition of the surface of Venus, she said. We think that there are continents, like on Earth, which could have formed via past subduction. But we dont have the information to really say that.

The answers wouldnt only deepen our understanding of why Venus and Earth are now so different; they could narrow down the conditions scientists would need in order to find an Earth-like planet elsewhere.

Orbiters arent the only means of studying Venus from above. JPL engineers Attila Komjathy and Siddharth Krishnamoorthy imagine an armada of hot air balloons that ride the gale-force winds in the upper levels of the Venusian atmosphere, where the temperatures are close to Earths.

There is no commissioned mission for a balloon at Venus yet, but balloons are a great way to explore Venus because the atmosphere is so thick and the surface is so harsh, said Krishnamoorthy. The balloon is like the sweet spot, where youre close enough to get a lot of important stuff out but youre also in a much more benign environment where your sensors can actually last long enough to give you something meaningful.

A team of JPL engineers tests whether a large balloon can measure earthquakes from the air. The team proposes to measure venusqakes from the temperate upper atmosphere of Venus, using an armada of balloons. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The team would equip the balloons with seismometers sensitive enough to detect quakes on the planet below. On Earth, when the ground shakes, that motion ripples into the atmosphere as waves of infrasound (the opposite of ultrasound). Krishnamoorthy and Komjathy have demonstrated the technique is feasible using silver hot-air balloons, which measured weak signals above areas on Earth with tremors. And thats not even with the benefit of Venuss dense atmosphere, where the experiment would likely return even stronger results.

If the ground moves a little bit, it shakes the air a lot more on Venus than it does on Earth, Krishnamoorthy explained.

To get that seismic data, though, a balloon mission would need to contend with Venus hurricane-force winds. The ideal balloon, as determined by Venus Exploration Analysis Group, could control its movements in at least one direction. Krishnamoorthy and Komjathys team hasnt gotten that far, but they have proposed a middle ground: having the balloons essentially ride the wind around the planet at a steady speed, sending their results back to an orbiter. Its a start.

Among the many challenges facing a Venus lander are those Sun-blocking clouds: Without sunlight, solar-power would be severely limited. But the planet is too hot for other power sources to survive. Temperature-wise, its like being in your kitchen oven set to self-cleaning mode, said JPL engineer Jeff Hall, who has worked on balloon and lander prototypes for Venus. There really is nowhere else like that surface environment in the solar system.

By default, a landing missions lifespan will be cut short by the spacecrafts electronics starting to fail after a few hours. Hall says the amount of power required to run a refrigerator capable of protecting a spacecraft would require more batteries than a lander could carry.

There is no hope of refrigerating a lander to keep it cool, he added. All you can do is slow down the rate at which is destroys itself.

NASA is interested in developing hot technology that can survive days, or even weeks, in extreme environments. Although Halls Venus lander concept didnt make it to the next stage of the approval process, it did lead to his current Venus-related work: a heat-resistant drilling and sampling system that could take Venusian soil samples for analysis. Hall works with Honeybee Robotics to develop the next-generation electric motors that power drills in extreme conditions, while JPL engineer Joe Melko designs the pneumatic sampling system.

Together, they work with the prototypes in JPLs steel-walled Large Venus Test Chamber, which mimics the conditions of the planet right down to an atmosphere thats a suffocating 100% carbon dioxide. With each successful test, the teams bring humanity one step closer to pushing the boundaries of exploration on this most inhospitable planet.

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NASA's Return to Venus and What It Means for Earth [Video] - SciTechDaily

WASHINGTON A House committee is finalizing its version of a NASA authorization bill that will cover many of the same topics as a Senate bill, but do so in different ways.

In a speech Dec. 11 at a space law conference here, Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.), chair of the House Science Committees space subcommittee, said her committee was making progress on a new NASA authorization bill that would address issues such as ensuring continued progress on major agency programs, like its effort to return humans to the moon.

Were getting close on a bill, she said. Stay tuned. We should have more on that soon.

The last NASA authorization bill passed by Congress was the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2017, signed into law in March 2017. It was intended to provide continuity for agency programs as the Trump administration took office.

The Senate Commerce Committee approved a new NASA authorization bill, introduced by bipartisan committee leadership, Nov. 13. That bill extends operations of the ISS through 2030 and calls for a stepping-stone approach to human exploration, although one that doesnt explicitly endorse the administrations goal of returning humans to the moon by 2024.

Horn said she expected the House bill to address some of the same issues, but not necessarily the same way. I think the broad topics, and many of the things the Senate has been concerned with, were concerned with, she said. We may be tackling some of them in slightly different ways, but we are eager to work with the Senate once we get ours done.

A top priority for the bill, she said, will be to address the challenges and opportunities of NASAs human spaceflight programs. An issue she emphasized in her speech and subsequent question-and-answer session was avoiding the stops and starts in agency programs during changes in presidential administrations and Congresses.

Our intention with this is that we do a better job to put some guardrails in place that will help to hopefully reduce some of those fits and starts, and decisions and changes, that take place between different priorities in administrations and Congresses, she said.

Horn said she is seeking to develop a strong bipartisan bill that can come out of the House, including working closely with the subcommittees ranking member, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas). Its incredibly important to me, and I think its incredibly important to this country, that we do this right, she said.

Work on a new NASA authorization bill has taken priority over commercial space legislation. The Senate Commerce Committee approved a new version of the Space Frontier Act in April, after the full Senate passed a similar bill last December. That earlier Senate bill, though, died in the House when it failed to garner the two-thirds majority needed for passage there under suspension of the rules.

Cruz criticized the lack of House action on the new Space Frontier Act, or similar legislation, in October. Many of the individuals who are gathered in this room today are the ones who are feeling the greatest impact moving forward due to the Houses failure not only to enact the Space Frontier Act, but also its current disinterest in taking any meaningful steps to address this issue, he said in an Oct. 31 speech at a forum organized by the Air Line Pilots Association and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation on airspace issues for commercial launches.

Horn said action on commercial space legislation would come after completion of the NASA authorization bill. Were definitely looking at some of those important questions and how we address those, she said.

One challenge, she said, is jurisdictional issues among House committees. While the Senate Commerce Committees jurisdiction includes both aviation and space, the House Transportation Committee handles aviation issues while the House Science Committee handles space. In recent years the House Transportation Committee has taken an increased interest in commercial space transportation, including how it interacts with the national airspace system.

In panels later in the day at the conference, held under the Chatham House Rule, other speakers noted that commercial space issues in general in Congress have taken a back seat this year to the new emphasis on human space exploration. The Artemis program has taken up all the attention when it comes to policymaking, said one.

See the article here:

House preparing to introduce new NASA authorization bill - SpaceNews

In this image captured by Juno, six cyclones remain stable at Jupiter's south pole. A small cyclone, seen at the bottom right in yellow, has recently joined the party.

An artist's impression of a collision between a young Jupiter and a massive, still-forming protoplanet in the early solar system.

These dramatic swirls on Jupiter are atmospheric features. Clouds swirl around a circular feature in a jet stream region.

Is that a dolphin on Jupiter? No, but it definitely looks like one. It's actually a cloud that looks like it's swimming through cloud bands along the South Temperate Belt.

This composite image, derived from data collected by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument aboard NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter, shows the central cyclone at the planet's north pole and the eight cyclones that encircle it.

This striking image of Jupiter was captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft as it performed its eighth flyby of the gas giant.

Algorithmic-based scaling and coloring reveal a vivid look at the Great Red Spot in July 2017.

Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a storm with a 10,000-mile-wide cluster of clouds in July 2017.

Color enhancements offer a detailed look into the Great Red Spot.

NASA configured this comparison of its own image of Earth with an image of Jupiter taken by astronomer Christopher Go.

This artist's concept shows the pole-to-pole orbits of the NASA's Juno spacecraft at Jupiter.

This image shows Jupiter's south pole, as seen by NASA's Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometers). The oval features are cyclones, up to 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) in diameter. Multiple images taken with the JunoCam instrument on three orbits were combined to show all areas in daylight, enhanced color and stereographic projection.

An even closer view of Jupiter's clouds obtained by NASA's Juno spacecraft.

Jupiter's north polar region comes into view as NASA's Juno spacecraft approaches the giant planet. This view of Jupiter was taken when Juno was 437,000 miles (703,000 kilometers) away during its first of 36 orbital flybys of the planet.

This infrared image gives an unprecedented view of the southern aurora of Jupiter, as captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft on August 27, 2016. Juno's unique polar orbit provides the first opportunity to observe this region of the gas-giant planet in detail.

NASA's Juno spacecraft has sent back its first photo of Jupiter, left, since entering into orbit around the planet. The photo is made from some of the first images taken by JunoCam and shows three of the massive planet's four largest moons: from left, Io, Europa and Ganymede.

An illustration depicts NASA's Juno spacecraft entering Jupiter's orbit. Juno will study Jupiter from a polar orbit, coming about 3,000 miles (5,000 kilometers) from the cloud tops of the gas giant.

This was the final view of Jupiter taken by Juno before the on-board instruments were powered down to prepare for orbit. The image was taken June 29, 2016, while the spacecraft was 3.3 million miles (5.3 million kilometers) from Jupiter.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured images of Jupiter's auroras on the poles of the gas giant. The observations were supported by measurements taken by Juno.

This artist rendering shows Juno orbiting Jupiter.

Jupiter and the gaseous planet's four largest moons -- Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto -- are seen in a photo taken by Juno on June 21, 2016. The spacecraft was 6.8 million miles (10.9 million kilometers) from the planet.

Juno made a flyby of Earth in October 2014. This trio of images was taken by the spacecraft's JunoCam.

Three Lego figurines are flying aboard the Juno spacecraft. They represent the Roman god Jupiter; his wife, Juno; and Galileo Galilei, the scientist who discovered Jupiter's four largest moons on January 7, 1610.

Jupiter was 445 million miles (716 million kilometers) from Earth when Juno was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on August 5, 2011. But the probe traveled a total distance of 1,740 million miles (2,800 million kilometers) to reach Jupiter, making a flyby of Earth to help pick up speed.

Technicians use a crane to lower Juno onto a stand where the spacecraft was loaded with fuel for its mission.

Technicians test the three massive solar arrays that power the Juno spacecraft. In this photo taken February 2, 2011, each solar array is unfurled at a Lockheed Martin Space Systems facility in Denver.

Read more here:

Cyclone size of Texas discovered on Jupiter by NASA's Juno mission - CNN International

Sue Smrekar really wants to go back to Venus. In her office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the planetary scientist displays a 30-year-old image of Venus' surface taken by the Magellan spacecraft, a reminder of how much time has passed since an American mission orbited the planet. The image reveals a hellish landscape: a young surface with more volcanoes than any other body in the solar system, gigantic rifts, towering mountain belts and temperatures hot enough to melt lead.

Now superheated by greenhouse gases, Venus' climate was once more similar to Earth's, with a shallow ocean's worth of water. It may even have subduction zones like Earth, areas where the planet's crust sinks back into rock closer to the core of the planet.

"Venus is like the control case for Earth," said Smrekar. "We believe they started out with the same composition, the same water and carbon dioxide. And they've gone down two completely different paths. So why? What are the key forces responsible for the differences?"

By studying this mysterious planet, scientists could learn a great deal more about exoplanets, as well as the past, present, and possible future of our own. This video unveils this world and calls on current and future scientists to explore its many features.

Smrekar works with the Venus Exploration Analysis Group (VEXAG), a coalition of scientists and engineers investigating ways to revisit the planet that Magellan mapped so many decades ago. Though their approaches vary, the group agrees that Venus could tell us something vitally important about our planet: what happened to the superheated climate of our planetary twin, and what does it mean for life on Earth?

Orbiters

Venus isn't the closest planet to the Sun, but it is the hottest in our solar system. Between the intense heat (900 degrees Fahrenheit heat, or 480 degrees Celsius), the corrosive sulfuric clouds and a crushing atmosphere that is 90 times denser than Earth's, landing a spacecraft there is incredibly challenging. Of the nine Soviet probes that achieved the feat, none lasted longer than 127 minutes.

From the relative safety of space, an orbiter could use radar and near-infrared spectroscopy to peer beneath the cloud layers, measure landscape changes over time, and determine whether or not the ground moves. It could look for indicators of past water as well as volcanic activity and other forces that may have shaped the planet.

Smrekar, who is working on an orbiter proposal called VERITAS, doesn't think that Venus has plate tectonics the way Earth does. But she sees possible hints of subduction - what happens when two plates converge and one slides beneath the other. More data would help.

"We know very little about the composition of the surface of Venus," she said. "We think that there are continents, like on Earth, which could have formed via past subduction. But we don't have the information to really say that."

The answers wouldn't only deepen our understanding of why Venus and Earth are now so different; they could narrow down the conditions scientists would need in order to find an Earth-like planet elsewhere.

Hot Air Balloons

Orbiters aren't the only means of studying Venus from above. JPL engineers Attila Komjathy and Siddharth Krishnamoorthy imagine an armada of hot air balloons that ride the gale-force winds in the upper levels of the Venusian atmosphere, where the temperatures are close to Earth's.

"There is no commissioned mission for a balloon at Venus yet, but balloons are a great way to explore Venus because the atmosphere is so thick and the surface is so harsh," said Krishnamoorthy. "The balloon is like the sweet spot, where you're close enough to get a lot of important stuff out but you're also in a much more benign environment where your sensors can actually last long enough to give you something meaningful."

The team would equip the balloons with seismometers sensitive enough to detect quakes on the planet below. On Earth, when the ground shakes, that motion ripples into the atmosphere as waves of infrasound (the opposite of ultrasound). Krishnamoorthy and Komjathy have demonstrated the technique is feasible using silver hot-air balloons, which measured weak signals above areas on Earth with tremors. And that's not even with the benefit of Venus's dense atmosphere, where the experiment would likely return even stronger results.

"If the ground moves a little bit, it shakes the air a lot more on Venus than it does on Earth," Krishnamoorthy explained.

To get that seismic data, though, a balloon mission would need to contend with Venus' hurricane-force winds. The ideal balloon, as determined by Venus Exploration Analysis Group, could control its movements in at least one direction. Krishnamoorthy and Komjathy's team hasn't gotten that far, but they have proposed a middle ground: having the balloons essentially ride the wind around the planet at a steady speed, sending their results back to an orbiter. It's a start.

Landing Probes

Among the many challenges facing a Venus lander are those Sun-blocking clouds: Without sunlight, solar-power would be severely limited. But the planet is too hot for other power sources to survive. "Temperature-wise, it's like being in your kitchen oven set to self-cleaning mode," said JPL engineer Jeff Hall, who has worked on balloon and lander prototypes for Venus. "There really is nowhere else like that surface environment in the solar system."

By default, a landing mission's lifespan will be cut short by the spacecraft's electronics starting to fail after a few hours. Hall says the amount of power required to run a refrigerator capable of protecting a spacecraft would require more batteries than a lander could carry.

"There is no hope of refrigerating a lander to keep it cool," he added. "All you can do is slow down the rate at which is destroys itself."

NASA is interested in developing "hot technology" that can survive days, or even weeks, in extreme environments. Although Hall's Venus lander concept didn't make it to the next stage of the approval process, it did lead to his current Venus-related work: a heat-resistant drilling and sampling system that could take Venusian soil samples for analysis. Hall works with Honeybee Robotics to develop the next-generation electric motors that power drills in extreme conditions, while JPL engineer Joe Melko designs the pneumatic sampling system.

Together, they work with the prototypes in JPL's steel-walled Large Venus Test Chamber, which mimics the conditions of the planet right down to an atmosphere that's a suffocating 100% carbon dioxide. With each successful test, the teams bring humanity one step closer to pushing the boundaries of exploration on this most inhospitable planet.

For more information about Venus, visit:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/venus

News Media Contact

Arielle SamuelsonJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.818-354-0307arielle.a.samuelson@jpl.nasa.gov

2019-246

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The Return to Venus and What It Means for Earth - Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Just before sunrise on Dec. 14, 2009, a Delta-II rocket lifted off from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base and brought NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) to low-Earth orbit. Its mission: to study galaxies, stars, asteroids and comets by imaging the entire sky in infrared light.

WISE was placed in hibernation in February 2011 after completing its primary astrophysics mission, but in late 2013, the spacecraft was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a second mission dedicated to identifying and characterizing the population of near-Earth objects while also providing information about the size and composition of more distant asteroids and comets.

Over the last decade, data from WISE and NEOWISE have been cited in more than 3,000 peer-reviewed publications and been used to study distant galaxies, cool stars, exploding white dwarfs, outgassing comets, near-Earth asteroids and everything in between.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the spacecraft's launch, the mission team has gathered their top 10 images and graphics based on WISE and NEOWISE data.

The Sky as Seen by WISE

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

The fundamental objective of the WISE mission was to map the entire sky in infrared light with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of times greater sensitivity than previous surveys. WISE completed this objective in 2010. This image shows the entire sky as seen by WISE with its four infrared detectors (3.4- and 4.6-micron light is colored blue; 12-micron light is green; and 22-micron light is red), with the plane of our Milky Way galaxy running across the center.

Read more about this image here: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/pia15481.html

Earth's Trojan Asteroid

Image credit: Paul Wiegert, University of Western Ontario - based on WISE/NEOWISE data

Trojan asteroids share an orbit with a planet, orbiting the Sun ahead of or behind the planet. While Trojan asteroids associated with Jupiter, Neptune and Mars are known, NEOWISE discovered the first (and so far only) Trojan asteroid in Earth's orbit, known as 2010 TK7. In this artist's conception, the asteroid is shown in gray and its orbit, which oscillates above and below Earth's every four centuries, is shown in green. Earth's orbit around the Sun is indicated by blue dots.

Read more about this image here: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/13115-4x3.html

Heart and Soul

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Located about 6,000 light-years from Earth, the Heart (right) and Soul (left) nebulas compose a vast star-forming complex that makes up part of the Perseus spiral arm of our Milky Way. The Perseus arm lies farther from the center of the Milky Way than the Sun. The nebulas are marked by giant bubbles that were blown into surrounding dust by radiation and winds from stars less than a few million years old - youngsters in comparison to the Sun, which is nearly 5 billion years old.

Read more about this image here: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/wiseimage20100524.html

The Great Galaxy in Andromeda

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

At 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda galaxy is the closest spiral galaxy to our Milky Way; in fact, it will collide with ours billions of years from now. This WISE mosaic covers an area equivalent to more than 100 full Moons, or five degrees across on the sky. Blue highlights mature stars, while yellow and red show dust heated by massive newborn stars.

Read more about this image here: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/pia12832-c.html

The Large Magellanic Cloud

Image credit: Thomas Jarrett - based on WISE/NEOWISE data

Larger view

Although the Andromeda galaxy is bigger, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, is closer: "only" 160,000 light-years from Earth. This makes it appear larger than Andromeda on the sky, and it is easy to spot in the all-sky image at about 4 o'clock, halfway out from the galactic center. The central blue bar is light from older stars. An oddly square outline encompasses the orange clouds outside this bar, which are regions of dust and gas illuminated by younger stars.

Millions of Giant Black Holes

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA Larger view

Peering more than 10 billion light-years into the distance, WISE has found tens of millions of actively feeding supermassive lack holes across the full sky. The orange circles highlight those that the telescope identified in a small patch of sky; the two zoomed-in images came from the Hubble Space Telescope. WISE easily sees these monsters because their powerful, accreting black holes warm the dust, causing it to glow in infrared light. The blue circles indicate black holes that were detected using visible-light imagers. In most, that light is blocked by dust.

Read more about this image here: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/pia15481.html

The New Solar Neighborhood

Image credit: PSU/Cushing - based on WISE/NEOWISE data

WISE discoveries have redefined the solar neighborhood. The third- and fourth-closest systems to the Sun are brown dwarfs about 7 light-years away. Brown dwarfs form like stars but can't sustain the fusion that powers more massive stars. So they cool off with time and can be seen only in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. The WISE 0855-0714 system shown here is the coldest known - colder than ice. Very cold brown dwarfs appear only in the second-shortest wavelength band of WISE, as shown at bottom mapped to green.

Klotho and Lina

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA Larger view

Those aren't Klingon vessels. Appearing as strings of orange dots, the brightest sets of dots belong to asteroids Klotho and Lina. Both orbit out in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, while smaller, more distant asteroids can also be seen passing through the image.

Comet 65P/Gunn

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

What looks like a narwhal is actually comet 65P/Gunn, which orbits the Sun every 6.8 years. A comet is a ball of dust and ice left over from the formation of the solar system. As it approaches the Sun and heats up, its surface releases gas and dust, which are then blown back by the solar wind into a long, spectacular tail. The "sword" ahead of the comet's nucleus is made of dust particles shed by 65P/Gunn on previous orbits around the Sun.

Read more about this image here: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/gallery/13115-4x3.html

The Most Luminous Galaxy

Image credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF/S. Dagnello - based on WISE/NEOWISE data

The most luminous galaxy confirmed - discovered by WISE and known by its catalog number, WISE J224607.55-052634.9 - radiates with 350 trillion times the luminosity of the Sun. As illustrated in this artist's conception based on subsequent observations using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile, trails of dust are being pulled from three smaller galaxies into this blazing powerhouse. It appears to be cannibalizing its smaller neighbors, which is likely contributing to its superlative brightness. WISE discovered this galaxy as part of a rare population of objects that appear only in its longest wavelength bands.

Read more about this image here: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA22358

For more information about NEOWISE, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/neowise

http://neowise.ipac.caltech.edu/

For more information about WISE, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/wise

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise/

News Media Contact

DC AgleJet PropulsionLaboratory, Pasadena, Calif.818-393-9011agle@jpl.nasa.gov

Alana JohnsonNASA Headquarters, Washington202-672-4780alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov

2019-247

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News | Celebrating 10 Years of the WISE Spacecraft - Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Scientists have found another reason to look forward to NASA's next Mars rover mission. A spacecraft orbiting Mars recently spotted clear signs that the landing site for NASAs Mars 2020 rover Jezero Crater is home to hydrated silica, a mineral thats particularly good at preserving signs of life. That could make the landing site a good place to preserve fossils on Mars.

The rover mission will help researchers figure out how the minerals formed and start probing them for signs of life. And a team of scientists is already proposing several ideas for how the minerals came to be in Jezero Crater. The researchers describe their findings in a study published in November in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Silica is a crystalline structure made of silicon and oxygen that can be found in quartz, glass and sand. Hydrated silica holds water within its crystal structure. On Earth, hydrated silica can form in a variety of environments, like in volcanic glass and on the ocean floor.

Read More: Scientists Gear Up to Look For Fossils on Mars

Hydrated silica is one of the hardest known materials other than diamond and resists weathering from wind and water. That means its very good at preserving softer materials that find their way inside.

The oldest evidence definitive evidence of microfossils that we have on Earth are usually found in silica, said Jesse Tarnas, a planetary scientist at Brown University and one of the authors of the paper.

The researchers found evidence for hydrated silica in Jezero Crater when data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft matched up with similar measurements taken of hydrated silica in the lab. Once the rover lands in 2021, scientists will be able to study the minerals up close and figure out how they formed and whether they might contain signs of past life.

Read More: Ancient Rivers Raged on Mars, Upsetting Geologic Timeline

Jezero Crater was once home to rivers that carved a delta into the planets surface. Its possible that the hydrated silica formed in these deltas, Tarnas said. Other possibilities are that it formed in volcanoes or rocks upriver, and that wind or water carried it into the delta. Some of these scenarios are more promising for preserving signs of life than others.

The Mars 2020 rover is scheduled to launch in July 2020 and land on Mars in February 2021. Once its there, the rover's instruments can carefully analyze the chemistry of the hydrated silica and surrounding rocks. These observations will let scientists figure out how the hydrated silica formed and if they contain complex organic molecules.

If the rovers on-site analysis looks promising, it can pack samples that a future Mars mission could try to bring back. Scientists would likely need to study the samples in person, Tarnas said, to confirm or deny whether they contain signs of life.

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Fossils on Mars? If They Exist, NASA's Mars 2020 Rover has a Shot at Finding Them - Discover Magazine

TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, has imaged an outburst from the comet 46P/Wirtanen. It caught the outburst in what NASA is calling the clearest images yet of a comet outburst from start to finish. A comet outburst is a significant but temporary increase in the comets activity, outside of the normal sunlight-driven vaporization of ices that creates a comets coma and tail.

Astronomers arent certain what causes them, but a new study based on this observation is shedding some light on them.

TESS is not meant to study comets. Its job is to spot dips in starlight when an exoplanet passes, or transits, in front of a star. But because it has such a wide field of view, and because it watches one section of sky for over 27 days, it also captures other transient phenomena like this comet outburst.

The study outlining this comet outburst was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on November 22nd. The study is titled First Results fromTESSObservations of Comet 46P/Wirtanen. Tony Farnham, a research scientist at the University of Marylands Department of Astronomy is the lead author.

TESS spends nearly a month at a time imaging one portion of the sky. With no day or night breaks and no atmospheric interference, we have a very uniform, long-duration set of observations, Farnham said in a press release.

As comets orbit the Sun, they can pass through TESS field of view. Wirtanen was a high priority for us because of its close approach in late 2018, so we decided to use its appearance in the TESS images as a test case to see what we could get out of it. We did so and were very surprised!, said Farnham.

Comets are small bodies in the Solar System with significant ice content. They normally follow long elliptical orbits that take them close to the Sun. As they approach the Sun, the comet warms and some of the ice out-gasses, dragging dust along with it. This creates a coma and a tail that stretches away from the Sun.

A comet outburst is a distinct phenomenon separate from the normal out-gassing that creates the tail and coma. While out-gassing is an ongoing gradual process, an outburst is a more immediate effect. Theyre related to the conditions on the comets surface.

Astronomers know of a number of potential triggers for comet outbursts. Comets can contain pockets of volatile ices. If a heat wave penetrates into one of those pockets, the rapid heating could vaporize those ices, causing an outburst of gas and dust. There are also mechanical events where a cliff or other feature on the comets surface collapses, subjecting freshly-exposed ice to the heat from the Sun, causing an outburst. Both could work together, and there could be other causes.

To understand these outbursts, its especially important to capture images of a comet in the days leading up to the outburst itself. Those observations can help astronomers understand the thermal and physical characteristics of the comet.

Thanks to TESS, thats what happened in the case of 46P/Wirtanen.

even if we somehow had the opportunity to schedule these observations, we couldnt have done any better in terms of timing.

The outburst began on September 26th 2018, almost three months before the comets closest approach to the Sun. The initial brightening occurred in two phases: first there was a bright flash that lasted about an hour, and then there was a second 8-hour long phase of gradual brightening. The team behind this study thinks that the second phase was dust and gas from the initial phase spreading out and reflecting more sunlight. After the brightness peaked, the outburst faded over a period of about two weeks.

Thanks to TESSs observational capabilities, astronomers had access to composite images of the outburst at 30 minute intervals.

With 20 days worth of very frequent images, we were able to assess changes in brightness very easily. Thats what TESS was designed for, to perform its primary job as an exoplanet surveyor, Farnham said. We cant predict when comet outbursts will happen. But even if we somehow had the opportunity to schedule these observations, we couldnt have done any better in terms of timing. The outburst happened mere days after the observations started.

Those detailed observations allowed the team to estimate the amount of material ejected during the outburst. They think that Wirtanen lost about 1 million kg (2.2 million lbs) of material, and that the outburst created a crater about 20 meters (65 ft.) across. That estimate will likely become more accurate when they analyze the size of the dust particles in the tail.

This is not the first time that 46P/Wirtanen has been observed during an outburst. Its happened at least three other times since its discovery in 1948: in October 1991, September 2002, and May 2008. Since none of those outbursts were correlated with the comets orbital position, scientists think that the outbursts are not related to a persistently volatile region of the comet.

This makes Wirtanen different than outbursts seen on some other comets. Comet 29P/SchwassmannWachmann1 (SW1) seems to experience outbursts frequently. Half of those outbursts are periodic, which suggests that it has volatile ice hot-spots that outburst according to diurnal heating.

We think comets lose most of their mass through their dust trails. When the Earth runs into a comets dust trail, we getmeteor showers.

The team of astronomers also detected the comets trail for the first time. The trail is separate from the tail. While the tail is shaped by the solar wind and always points away from the Sun, the trail is always behind the comet, tracing its orbital path. The trail is also made of larger debris than the tail. The trail is where a comet loses most of its mass, and is responsible for the meteor showers seen from Earth.

The trail more closely follows the orbit of the comet, while the tail is offset from it, as it gets pushed around by the suns radiation pressure. Whats significant about the trail is that it contains the largest material, saidMichael Kelley, an associate research scientist in the UMD Department of Astronomy and a co-author of the research paper. Tail dust is very fine, a lot like smoke. But trail dust is much largermore like sand and pebbles. We think comets lose most of their mass through their dust trails. When the Earth runs into a comets dust trail, we getmeteor showers.

We also dont know what causes natural outbursts and thats ultimately what we want to find.

While this study is fascinating, its really just a beginning. Further analysis of this comet, and of other ones in TESSs field of view, should shed more light on comets, and on their outbursts. Observing more comets will also help to determine whether multi-stage brightening is rare or commonplace in comet outbursts.

We also dont know what causes natural outbursts and thats ultimately what we want to find, Farnham said. There are at least four other comets in the same area of the sky where TESS made these observations, with a total of about 50 comets expected in the first two years worth of TESS data. Theres a lot that can come of these data.

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NASA's TESS Watched an Outburst from Comet 46P/Wirtanen - Universe Today

12/11/2019

The NOAA/NASA-co-chaired international Solar Cycle Prediction Panel has released its latest forecast for to forecast Solar Cycle 25. The panels consensus calls for a peak in July 2025 (8 months), with a smoothed sunspot number of 115. The panel agreed that Cycle 25 will be of average intensity and similar to Cycle 24. The panel additionally concurred that the solar minimum between Cycles 24 and 25 will occur in April 2020 (6 months). If the solar minimum prediction is correct, this would make Solar Cycle 24 the seventh longest on record at 11.4 years. In its preliminary forecast released last April, the scientists on the panel forecast that Solar Cycle 25 would likely be weak, much like the current Cycle 24.

Solar Cycle 25 may have a slow start, but is anticipated to peak with solar maximum occurring between 2023 and 2026, and a sunspot range of 95 to 130. This is well below the average number of sunspots, the panel said last spring, adding with high confidence that Cycle 25 should break the trend of weakening solar activity seen over the past four cycles. The panel said the expectation that Cycle 25 would be comparable in size to Cycle 24 suggests that the steady decline in solar cycle amplitude seen from Cycle 21 through Cycle 24 has ended and that there is no indication of an approaching Maunder-type minimum. Cycle 24 peaked in April 2014 with an average sunspot number of 82.

The Solar Cycle Prediction Panel forecasts the number of sunspots expected for solar maximum, along with the timing of the peak and minimum solar activity levels for the cycle. It is comprised of scientists representing NOAA, NASA, the International Space Environment Services, and other US and international scientists.

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NOAA/NASA Panel Concurs that Solar Cycle 25 will Peak in July 2025 - ARRL

Next year, NASA plans to scoop up a small batch of dirt from an asteroid named Bennu, located millions of miles from Earth and now the agency knows which part of the space rock its going to steal from. Today, the space agency announced that one of its spacecraft will attempt to grab some particles from a 20-meter-wide crater, called Nightingale, on the asteroid.

Engineers picked the Nightingale site from four final candidate spots on Bennu, arguing it could be the best place to find organic material and water on the asteroid that may hail from the earliest days of the Solar System. This one really came out on top, because of the scientific value, Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of the asteroid sampling mission, said during a press conference announcing the selection. However, targeting the crater is not without risk. The area is surrounded by a large wall of rocks, which could make it difficult to grab a sample. But ultimately, Lauretta said the area could have what theyre looking for.

Scientists are hoping to get a sample that will provide the best snapshot of what the early Solar System was like billions of years ago when it first formed. Asteroids are thought to be rocky remnants of the early Solar System, having stayed relatively the same over time and still containing materials that were present during the birth of the planets. Studying an asteroids offerings in a lab here on Earth could help us unlock some of the secrets of how our cosmic neighborhood came to be.

The robot tasked with grabbing and delivering these asteroid particles to our planet is the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The vehicle has been circling around Bennu for the last year, after spending two years traveling through space to reach the asteroid. During this hang out time, the spacecraft has been using various instruments to map Bennus surface and get a detailed understanding of what the rocks terrain is like. That way, the engineering team behind OSIRIS-REx could pick the best site for the vehicle to sample.

Well, it turns out that Bennu is not a particularly amenable space rock. Almost immediately after OSIRIS-REx got to Bennu, NASA engineers realized that the asteroid was incredibly rugged and rocky. Its quite different than what they thought it would be; based on their observations of the object from Earth, scientists thought that Bennu would house patches of smooth, sandy grains with very few boulders. Turns out there are hundreds of large boulders lurking on the asteroid, and smooth areas are almost nowhere to be seen.

That has made it extra tough to figure out the best place to grab a sample. To scoop up material from Bennu, OSIRIS-REx is equipped with a thin robotic arm that is meant to extend from the spacecraft and gently tap the asteroid, sending particles shooting up into the vehicles sample chamber. If OSIRIS-REx targets a particularly rugged patch, it could throw the sampler off or even cause the instrument to get clogged with large pieces of debris.

The OSIRIS-REx team only gets one shot at sampling Bennu, so selecting this site was an incredibly important part of the mission. After mapping the surface, engineers scoured the images and used algorithms and software to find flat parts of Bennu. NASA even put out a call to the public to help find possible targets. After identifying 50 potential sites, the OSIRIS-REx team eventually whittled it down to four, finally landing on the Nightingale crater.

Nightingale is filled with lots of fine grain material, but it also has a few larger boulders, making it one of the riskier spots to target. But scientists think the risk is worth it. For one, the crater is located pretty far north on the asteroid, where temperatures are cooler than other areas. Thats extra enticing because the cold temperatures may have kept the material in the crater well preserved from the early days of the Solar System; the particles may not have changed dynamically over time from heating. Additionally, the OSIRIS-REx team thinks that the crater is relatively new, so the material within the region has actually been inside Bennu for a long time until being unearthed recently. That also means the material may have stayed relatively unchanged, since it hasnt been exposed to the harsh radiation-filled space environment for very long.

Because Nightingale is a bit perilous, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has to be extra precise when it descends to the asteroids surface. The boulders surrounding the site could cause the spacecraft to tilt and then accidentally run into a rock as it tries to leave the asteroid. One of the rocks has even been nicknamed Mount Doom, since its extra tall and peak-shaped. Its a substantial building-sized obstruction, and were trying to get into a crater thats on the order of a few parking lot spaces wide, said Lauretta. So we are doing a really tight job parking that, and were aware that we have hazards around us. So precision navigation to that sample material is our biggest challenge. To be extra careful, the team has added some additional safety measures, programming the spacecraft to detect if its coming down on too rocky a surface. If so, itll fire its thrusters and fly away.

However, doing that will come with a cost. Firing thrusters on Nightingale may mess up the position of the material in the crater. If that does happen, the team will target a backup site called Osprey, which isnt as scientifically exciting but a bit more smooth.

Currently, NASA is hoping to grab a sample from Nightingale in the summer of 2020, with the goal of collecting at least 60 grams of material. Once a sample is obtained, OSIRIS-REx will head back home in 2021 and attempt to land in the Utah desert in 2023. If the sample does contain water and organic material like the team hopes, it could reinforce the idea that asteroids like Bennu may have brought this material to Earth when it was freshly formed. And that could be a substantial piece of evidence for how life came to be on our planet.

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NASA picks the asteroid crater its spacecraft will steal rocks from next summer - The Verge

Boeings first space-ready Starliner capsule stands atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket at Cape Canaverals Complex 41 launch pad. Credit: United Launch Alliance

NASA officials cleared Boeings Starliner spacecraft for flight Thursday after a thorough and comprehensive review of the crew capsules readiness, setting the stage for final pre-launch preparations at Cape Canaveral ahead of liftoff Dec. 20 on an unpiloted demonstration mission to the International Space Station.

The Starliners Orbital Flight Test will blast off on top of a 172-foot-tall (52.4-meter) United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The test flight is a prerequisite for the first Starliner launch with astronauts on-board, a milestone mission scheduled some time in 2020.

Together, NASA and Boeing are ready to demonstrate the capabilities of the CST-100 Starliner spacecraft ton top of a human-rated Atlas 5 rocket, said James Morhard, NASAs deputy administrator. This is the first flight test to the International Space Station of this new crew-capable system.

During a full day of briefings and discussion Thursday at NASAs Kennedy Space Center, representatives from NASA, Boeing and United Launch Alliance reviewed the status of flight hardware, software and the space stations readiness to receive the Starliner spacecraft.

We are go for launch for the Orbital Flight Test next Friday, Dec. 20, said Phil McAlister, director of NASAs commercial spaceflight development programs. Theres still some standard open work to complete, and a couple of technical issues we have to close out, so we could move off the 20th. But right now, the 20th is looking good.

John Mulholland, vice president and general manager of Boeings commercial crew program, said engineers continue to assess several unresolved issues, including a NASA verification of data showing the Starliner for the Orbital Flight Test matches Boeings design.

Part of our requirements was to provide that dataset to the International Space Station program, Mulholland said. They are almost complete with that review, but they are conducting a thorough review of that to make sure that theyre satisfied with the thoroughness of our build.

Mulholland said final analysis and qualification of the Starliners mission data load, which will be loaded into the capsules computer Tuesday, is also ongoing.

The launch time Dec. 20 is set for 6:36 a.m. EST (1136 GMT), roughly the moment Earths rotation brings Cape Canaverals Complex 41 launch pad under the space stations orbital plane.

The Atlas 5s Russian-made RD-180 main engine and two Aerojet Rocketdyne solid rocket boosters will power the launcher off the pad. A dual-engine Centaur upper stage will power the Starliner into space and deploy the capsule on a preliminary suborbital trajectory. The capsules own thrusters will fire about a half-hour after liftoff to reach a stable orbit and begin its pursuit of the station.

While officially getting the authority to proceed with the launch, its important to remember that the launch of the Starliner is just the beginning, Mulholland said Thursday. The spacecraft will spend about eight days in orbit, and weve got a highly skilled team who will be executing the mission.

Boeing, ULA and NASA have backup launch opportunities reserved with the U.S. Air Forces Eastern Range at Cape Canaveral for Dec. 21 and Dec. 23.

Assuming the launch occurs Dec. 20, docking of the Starliner spacecraft with the International Space Stations Harmony module is scheduled for Dec. 21 at 8:08 a.m. EST (1308 GMT).

The space station crew will open hatches and enter the Starliner spacecraft, retrieving cargo and performing inspections during the ships week-long stay.

At the conclusion of the eight-day test flight, the Starliner is scheduled to undock from the space station Dec. 28 around 2:16 a.m. EST (0716 GMT). After backing away to a safe distance, the 16.5-foot-tall (5-meter) capsule will fire its service module engines at 5:02 a.m. EST (1002 GMT) for a deorbit burn.

After slowing its speed enough to fall back into the atmosphere, the Starliner will jettison its disposable service module. The crew module will orient itself to fly belly first, exposing its heat shield to temperatures up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,650 degrees Celsius).

While the service module burns up in the atmosphere, the spacecrafts crew module will unfurl three main parachutes to slow down for landing. The capsule will inflate airbags to cushion its touchdown at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico on Dec. 28 at 5:48 a.m. EST (1048 GMT).

Recovery teams will be on standby at White Sands, the missions preferred landing site, to safe and retrieve the spaceship. They will transport the capsule back to Florida for refurbishment and reuse on a future crewed Starliner flight.

Mainly, the focus of this flight is to prove out the spacecrafts ability to get to the International Space Station and dock safely, transfer the cargo, and then safely return back to White Sands, Mulholland said.

The Flight Readiness Review held Thursday was a major milestone in the Starliners first launch campaign.

The Boeing team, in particular, went above and beyond in the last few months to complete the necessary testing and prepare the necessary certification products required for this review, McAlister said. Everyone is eager to see this mission fly, but the NASA team did a thorough and comprehensive job verifying all the safety products.

If someone saw something that gave them pause or required additional work, they spoke up, we talked about it, and in some cases, we developed additional data to help close the open item, McAlister said. The team worked quickly but they didnt hurry, and I think that speaks to the competence and professionalism of the team.

NASA is paying Boeing more than $4.8 billion for the Starliner program through a series of agreements and contracts since 2010. While the decade-long development of the Starliner spacecraft is nearing the finish line, the unpiloted test flight later this month is a precursor to future flights with astronauts.

Boeing astronaut Chris Ferguson, a former space shuttle commander, will fly on the Starliners first crewed test flight next year. NASA astronauts Mike Fincke and Nicole Mann will join Ferguson on the mission to the space station, where they could stay for up to six months.

The Starliners demonstration flight this month will also test the capsules life support systems before astronauts fly next year. An instrumented test dummy named Rosie the Astronaut will ride in one of the capsules seats to collect data on the environments astronauts will see on future missions.

This uncrewed test flight is not just another contract milestone, McAlister said Thursday. Its just a phenomenal opportunity for us to learn the true performance of the spacecraft. Computer models are great, but they only go so far. Seeing how the spacecraft actually performs in the operational environment of space is a huge confidence-building measure, and its going to provide us with the critical data we need for the final certification.

McAlister cautioned that the Starliners first trip to space will be risky.

While weve done everything we think is necessary prior to flight, there will undoubtedly be some unexpected results, he said. This is a test, and testing inevitably identifies some items that were unanticipated, and some of those items may even be unwelcome, but we are going to work through all those challenges that may arise in order to get our crew members to space, and our spacecraft will be better because of it.

NASAs other commercial crew partner, SpaceX, conducted the first unpiloted test flight of its Crew Dragon spacecraft to the station in March. Kathy Lueders, manager of NASAs commercial crew program, said Thursday that SpaceX could launch its first Crew Dragon flight with astronauts in the first quarter of 2020.

After the Starliner and Crew Dragon complete their first crewed missions, NASA plans to certify both vehicles for regular crew rotation flights to the space station. Each capsule will carry at least four astronauts for NASA and international partners to and from the station, ending U.S. reliance on Russian Soyuz crew ferry ships.

A fifth seat on Starliner missions could be sold commercially for space tourists or private astronauts.

We have not had this capability in the United States since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, and we are looking forward to ending that gap, McAlister said.

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NASA gives go-ahead for Starliner test flight to space station - Spaceflight Now

We understand how the star at the center of our solar system nourishes life on Earth. But it also burns, fizzes and spews in ways that are bewildering.

It is a long-standing mystery why the sun's crown, or corona, sizzles at millions of degrees, while the surface beneath is comparatively cool, simmering at only a few thousand. And, curiously, the "solar wind" of particles and magnetic fields blowing off the sun, which fills the entire solar system, accelerates as it increases in distance from it. To investigate, NASA sent a spacecraft straight to the source: the sun itself.

This week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, solar researchers presented new findings from the Parker Solar Probe, elaborating upon the initial data release last week.

Scientists are hopeful a better understanding of the sun will improve predictions of solar storms, rowdy ejections of fiery plasma from the sun, which can knock out electrical grids, take out satellites and harm the health of astronauts.

Now that the Parker Solar Probe has made three close passes to the sun, flying closer than any former spacecraft, astronomers are getting an unprecedented view.

"Because we've flown through with in situ measurements, we can really understand some of the detail that we've only had hints at before," said NASA astrophysicist Nicholeen Viall on Wednesday. "This matters because it's telling us about fundamental physical processes as this material is created and sent out into the solar system."

Researchers have likened studying the solar wind to studying the source of a waterfall. If you can only observe from the base of the fall, the stream will be mixed and you'll end up understanding very little. This is the view of the solar wind from Earth. With the Parker Solar Probe, scientists are able to effectively crawl up the waterfall.

"We can see that there is underlying structure, there's intermittency, the wind is emerging in a bursty fashion from the sun," said Stuart Bale, UC Berkeley physics professor and lead researcher for some of the probe's instruments, in a statement.

New Data, New Records

At AGU, researchers presented new images and findings hinting at the mechanics behind the sun's spew of solar wind. Researchers characterized particles and magnetic fields in solar storms or "coronal mass ejections." For the first time, they've observed these CMEs sweeping up and freshly energizing particles that the sun had spit out.

Researchers also elaborated on the Parker Solar Probe's discovery of what scientists are calling "switchbacks," when the solar magnetic field doubles back on itself. Researchers think these may help heat and accelerate the solar wind.

The Parker Solar Probe now holds the record for the spacecraft to pass closest to the sun, cruising about 15 million miles from the solar surface on three different passes. In 2025 it is expected to pass within 4 million miles; eventually, it will spiral into the sun and burn up. The probe is also the fastest spacecraft in history, cruising our inner solar system at about 430,000 miles per hour.

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New Science From NASA's Mission to Touch the Sun - KQED

In August 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe toward the sun to analyze and measure the G-type yellow dwarf star that makes life on Earth possible. Now, after the spacecraft completed 3 of 24 planned close orbits around the sun, researchers have released four papers published in the journal Nature detailing the probe's first findings.

The $1.5 billion probe has flown closer to the sun than any spacecraft in history, passing through the suns upper atmosphere, or corona, for the first time. The probe is loaded up with several suites of instruments that collect data about solar wind, plasma flows, the suns magnetic field and more, reports Alexandra Witze at Nature News & Comment.

Scientists at University of California, Berkeley led by plasma physicist Stuart Bale control the probes devices, fittingly dubbed FIELDS, that study the suns magnetic and electric fields. A second toolkit called SWEAPor Solar Wind Electrons Alphas and Protons, operated by the University of Michigan and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatorymeasures the particles of solar winds. The probes imaging instrument WISPR is led by the Naval Research Lab. Another group of devicescalled the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun suite, led by Princeton Universitymeasures the suns outflow of energetic particles, like electrons and ions. Together, data from all of these instruments are revolutionizing what we know about the star.

Solar winds constantly wash over Earth, but studying the phenomenon from an earthly vantage point is like trying to understand the origin of a waterfall by standing halfway down the cliff, explains Bale. Expanding on the waterfall analogy, Bale tells Witze, [i]f you want to know the source, you have to get up there and get closeris it coming from one hole in the ground? From a bunch of seams in the rocks? Is there a sprinkler system up there?

The so-called fast solar wind, which flows at 500 to 1,000 kilometers per second, emanates from large holes in the corona near the suns north and south poles, reports Hannah Devlin at The Guardian. However, the origin of the slow solar wind, which is denser and travels at about half that speed, is not understood, explains atmospheric physicist Tim Horbury of Imperial College London, who is part of FIELDS research team.

During each swoop toward the sun, the probe passes about 15 million miles above a coronal hole for up to a week at a time to measure the solar wind and magnetic fields, according to a Berkeley press release.

Parker Solar Probe is also investigating a mystery that has long baffled solar physicists: the extreme heat of the outer atmosphere. The corona is a million degrees, but the suns surface is only thousands, Horbury tells Devlin. Its as if the Earths surface temperature were the same, but its atmosphere was many thousands of degrees. How can that work? Youd expect to get colder as you moved away.

Data from the spacecraft shows that the movement of plasma in the corona is extraordinarily complex. The measurements revealed that quick reversals in magnetic fields and fast-moving jets of plasma cause turbulence in the solar wind. The researchers dubbed one particularly dramatic type of magnetic field reversal a switchback.

As the solar wind flows away from the sun, the magnetic field lines would almost completely reverse for a few seconds or even a few minutes, causing abrupt changes in velocity. When the magnetic field snaps back to its previous orientation, it produces a spike in energy. While the researchers do not yet know what causes these magnetic reversals, the spacecraft's close observations will help them narrow down the possibilities.

These switchbacks are probably associated with some kind of plasma jets," Bale says in the Berkeley release. My own feeling is that these switchbacks, or jets, are central to the solar wind heating problem.

The Parker probe was able to measure solar wind while it was still rotating with the sun, finding that the speed and strength of the rotation was ten times more powerful than current solar models predict.

Because the sun rotates, solar wind travels on a curved path. But after the energy is flung into space, its path eventually straightens out. Finding out the exact point at which that energy starts traveling in a straight line will tell researchers about the lifecycles of stars and the workings of protoplanetary disks, which will improve our understanding of how planets form.

The probe also observed the suns dust-free zone. Our solar system is full of dust particles remaining from the planet-forming process that occurred over billions of years. Researchers long ago predicted that the heat of the sun could vaporize this dust into gas creating an area with much less dust. The probe has finally found supporting evidence of this phenomenon and researchers suspect it will likely encounter less and less dust as it swings closer to the sun.

Scientists also used the probes data to measure the outflow of electrons and ions that sometimes produce solar flares or coronal mass ejections (CMEs). So far, the Parker probe has recorded several new types of particles and ejection events that researchers are unable to observe from Earth, explains Princetons David McComas who leads the Integrated Science Investigation of the Sun suite of instruments.

Its amazingeven at solar minimum conditions, the sun produces many more tiny energetic particle events than we ever thought, says McComas in a NASA press release. These measurements will help us unravel the sources, acceleration, and transport of solar energetic particles and ultimately better protect satellites and astronauts in the future.

As Mike Wall at Space.com reports, this new data is really just a taste of what the probe will likely discover if its 4.5-inch-thick, carbon-composite shield can survive the remaining 21 dips closer and closer to the sun over the next five years. Eventually, the craft will fly as close as 3.83 million miles above the sun.

We knew we were going into a region we've never been before. It is a voyage of discovery, Nicola Fox, director of the NASAs Heliophysics Division, tells Nell Greenfieldboyce at NPR. It's going to the last sort of major region of our solar system to ever be visited by a spacecraft. And as we continue to get closer and closer, then I'm sure that we are going to continue to see more and more surprises."

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NASA's Sun-Orbiting Probe Reveals New Secrets of Our Host Star - Smithsonian.com