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Questions for Peter Schultz: What can we learn by landing on a comet?

By Guest PostNovember 22, 2014Sciencebiomanufacturing, carbiocial, churyumov gerasimenko, combat climate change, electricity production, european space agency, evolution, illegale rinderherden, john sheppard, kevin stacey, lucas vann, michael klingler, midus control, NASA, polareis, questions, solar system, spacecraft, stardust next

Brown geoscientist Peter Schultz, a veteran of three NASA missions to comets and asteroids, talks about the European Space Agency’s mission to land on a comet and what the scientific community hopes to learn about these orbiting bodies.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — On Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2014, the European Space Agency landed a spacecraft on the surface of a comet for the first time. Scientists hope data returned from the Rosetta spacecraft’s Philae Lander might not only offer a new perspective on the nature of comets, but also shed light the evolution of the solar system. (more…)

NASA Mission Provides Its First Look at Martian Upper Atmosphere

By Guest PostNovember 5, 2014Scienceanthropocene epoch, anthropocene reading, cfcs, cmes, coronal mass ejections, fevco, first look, jesse oak taylor, juan defuca platte, klimaabkuehlung, mars atmosphere, nasa mission, olympic mountains, ozone, pleistozaen, red planet, spacecraft, tobias menely, todd ehlers

NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft has provided scientists their first look at a storm of energetic solar particles at Mars, produced unprecedented ultraviolet images of the tenuous oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon coronas surrounding the Red Planet, and yielded a comprehensive map of highly variable ozone in the atmosphere underlying the coronas. (more…)

Metal Made Like Plastic May Have Big Impact

By Guest PostOctober 16, 2014Science3d metall drucker, 3d printing, atoms, brigham young university, bulk metallic glasses, clean, digital strategy, elektronenstrahl druck verfahren, ernst rauch, flexibility, german reinsurance company, giovanni d, jpl, metal, model, munich re, NASA, science meets risk, spacecraft, thomas niendorf, understanding climate change

Open a door and watch what happens — the hinge allows it to open and close, but doesn’t permanently bend. This simple concept of mechanical motion is vital for making all kinds of movable structures, including mirrors and antennas on spacecraft. Material scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are working on new, innovative methods of creating materials that can be used for motion-based mechanisms. (more…)

Bringing a Spacecraft Back from the Dead

By Guest PostMay 25, 2014Scienceaedes aegypti larvae, back, blood diseases, california, data, diana dou, earth, fight against zika, from, hoxa genes, ice, magnetic field, mars, mountain view, nasa spacecraft, openzika project, oswaldo cruz foundation, primary mosquito, puerto rico, solar wind, spacecraft, university of arizona, vincenzo calvanese

A UA engineering student is part of a team trying to awaken an abandoned NASA space probe and put it back to work in outer space.

More than 25 years ago, an abandoned NASA spacecraft fulfilled its mission, fell silent and has since been hurtling around the sun, somewhere between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Now, a University of Arizona engineering student is trying to wake it up. (more…)

Martian moon samples will have bits of Mars

By Guest PostNovember 13, 2013Scienceamounts of water, brown university geologists, james head, ken ramsley, large projectile impacts, mars, martian bits, martian material, martian moon phobos, martian moon samples, orbit, phobos, planetary geosciences group, regolith, russian mission, russian space agency, spacecraft

A Russian mission to the Martian moon Phobos, launching in 2020, would return samples from Phobos that contain bits and pieces of Mars itself. A new study calculates how much Martian material is on the surface of Phobos and how deep it is likely to go.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A planned mission to return a sample from the Martian moon Phobos will likely be a twofer, according to a study by Brown University geologists. (more…)

Spacecraft measures changes in direction of solar system’s interstellar winds

By Guest PostSeptember 8, 2013Sciencechanges in direction, dave mccomas, galactic cloud, helium atoms, ibex measurements, interstellar atoms flow, interstellar boundary explorer, interstellar winds, measure, NASA, neutral interstellar atoms, pickup ions, priscilla frisch, solar system, spacecraft, spacecraft data, sun, university of chicago

Data from NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer spacecraft reveal that neutral interstellar atoms are flowing into the solar system from a different direction than previously observed.

Interstellar atoms flow past the Earth as the solar system passes through the surrounding interstellar cloud at 23 kilometers per second (50,000 miles per hour). The latest IBEX measurements of the interstellar wind direction were found to differ from those made by the Ulysses spacecraft in the 1990s. That difference led the IBEX team to compare the IBEX measurements to data gathered by 11 spacecraft between 1972 and 2011. Statistical testing of the Earth-orbiting and interplanetary spacecraft data showed that, over the past 40 years, the longitude of the interstellar helium wind has changed by four to nine degrees. (more…)

Catching Black Holes on the Fly

By Guest PostSeptember 7, 2013Scienceblack hole, black hole hunter, david alexander, durham university, England, fiona harrison, gargantuan structures, Kenya, malindi, NASA, nuclear spectroscopic, nustar, sky, spacecraft, supermassive black holes, telescope array, universe, wise, xmm newton satellite

NASA’s black-hole-hunter spacecraft, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has “bagged” its first 10 supermassive black holes. The mission, which has a mast the length of a school bus, is the first telescope capable of focusing the highest-energy X-ray light into detailed pictures.

The new black-hole finds are the first of hundreds expected from the mission over the next two years. These gargantuan structures — black holes surrounded by thick disks of gas — lie at the hearts of distant galaxies between 0.3 and 11.4 billion light-years from Earth. (more…)

Littlest Continent Had Biggest Role in Sea Level Drop

By Guest PostAugust 22, 2013Environmentargo global array, atmospheric patterns, australia, climate experiment, earth, german aerospace center, grace, gravity recovery, john fasullo, la niña, littlest continent, NASA, ncar, poseidon, satellite altimeters, sea level drop, smallest continent, spacecraft, topex

A unique and complex set of circumstances came together over Australia from 2010 to 2011 to cause Earth’s smallest continent to be the biggest contributor to the observed drop in global sea level rise during that time, finds a new study co-authored and co-funded by NASA.

In 2011, scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Colorado at Boulder reported that between early 2010 and summer 2011, global sea level fell sharply, by about a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter. Using data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) spacecraft, they showed that the drop was caused by the very strong La Nina that began in late 2010. That La Nina changed rainfall patterns all over our planet, moving huge amounts of Earth’s water from the ocean to the continents. The phenomenon was short-lived, however. (more…)

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