NASA Mourns the Passing of Astronaut John Young

NASA logo.

Jan. 6, 2018

Astronaut John Young, who walked on the Moon during Apollo 16 and commanded the first space shuttle mission, died Friday, Jan. 5, 2018, at the age of 87 from complications of pneumonia. Young began his impressive career at NASA in 1962, when he was selected from among hundreds of young pilots to join NASA's second astronaut class, known as the "New Nine."

John Young's official astronaut portrait. Image Credit: NASA

“Today, NASA and the world have lost a pioneer," acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a statement. "Astronaut John Young's storied career spanned three generations of spaceflight; we will stand on his shoulders as we look toward the next human frontier.

“John was one of that group of early space pioneers whose bravery and commitment sparked our nation's first great achievements in space. But, not content with that, his hands-on contributions continued long after the last of his six spaceflights -- a world record at the time of his retirement from the cockpit."

After hearing President Kennedy's bold proposal in 1961 to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth, Young said knew what he had to do.

Young in Gemini 3. Image Credit: NASA

"I thought returning safely to Earth sounded like a good idea," said Young, who stood on the Moon, drove 16 miles in a lunar rover and spent three nights on the lunar surface. He is the only person to go into space as part of the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs and was the first to fly into space six times -- or seven times, when counting his liftoff from the Moon during Apollo 16.

Young was born in San Francisco, California. His family moved to Georgia and then Florida, where he lived for most of his childhood along with his younger brother.

As a boy, Young's favorite pastimes were building model airplanes -- the first hint of his passion for aeronautics -- and reading.

"My grandpa taught me how to read," said Young. "I read the encyclopedia when I was five."

Image above: Gemini X astronauts John Young, left, and Mike Collins stand on the deck of USS Guadalcanal following splashdown and recovery on July 21, 1966. Image Credit: NASA.

His father, a civil engineer, was Young's role model. Young graduated from Orlando High School and then earned a degree in aeronautical engineering from Georgia Tech, where he graduated with highest honors in 1952.

Following graduation, he joined the Navy and, after a year's service aboard a destroyer, was sent to flight training.

Image Gallery: John Young: https://www.nasa.gov/content/image-gallery-john-young

He flew fighter planes for four years, then completed test pilot training and served three years at the Navy's Air Test Center, where he heeded the president's call to go to the Moon.

Image above: John Young on the Moon, with the Lunar Module and Lunar Rover in the background. Image Credit: NASA.

In March 1965, Young made his first flight as an astronaut, joining Gus Grissom on Gemini 3, the first manned flight of that program. As Young prepared, a sense of obligation overruled excitement or any other emotion.

"We were just thinking about doing the job right," Young said.

Young commanded the Gemini 10 mission in July 1966. He and pilot Mike Collins rendezvoused with two Agena target vehicles, and Collins did a spacewalk to retrieve a micrometeorite detector from one of them.

In May 1969, he served as command module pilot on Apollo 10 and flew all the way to the Moon with crewmates Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan. The crew scouted landing sites from lunar orbit and rendezvoused the lunar module and command module in a full dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 landing two months later.

STS-1 crew Young, left, and Crippen. Image Credit: NASA

Young made a return trip to the Moon as commander of Apollo 16 in April 1972. With Ken Mattingly orbiting above in the command module, Young and lunar module pilot Charlie Duke landed in the Descartes highlands. "The moon is a very nice place," Young said. "When we landed, we were 20 minutes behind. Because time on the Moon was so precious, what I remember most is trying to catch up."

NASA Johnson Space Center Bio: John Young: https://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/young.html

Young and Duke set up scientific equipment and explored lunar highlands in the rover. The mission returned more than 200 pounds of Moon rocks gathered from three geological outings.

Young's career was full of firsts, none more notable than in April 1981, when he commanded Space Shuttle Columbia on its -- and the Shuttle program's -- maiden flight, STS-1. It was the first time a piloted spacecraft was tested in space without previous unpiloted orbital flights. Young and pilot Robert Crippen accomplished more than 130 flight test objectives during their almost 55-hour mission.

In late 1983 Young commanded STS-9, the first Spacelab mission. During the 10-day flight, the six crewmembers worked around the clock in 12-hour shifts, involved in more than 70 experiments in a range of scientific disciplines. The mission returned more scientific and technical data than all the Apollo and Skylab missions combined.

In addition to his six spaceflights, Young was a member of five backup crews. He's logged thousands of hours of training and flight time, including a total of 835 hours in space.

NASA Remembers Moonwalker, Shuttle Commander John Young

In early 1973, he became chief of the Space Shuttle Branch of the Astronaut Office at Johnson Space Center. The following year, Young, who retired from the Navy as a captain in 1976 after 25 years of military service, was named chief of the Astronaut Office, a post he held until May 1987.

Throughout this time, Young remained an active astronaut, eligible to command space shuttle missions.

Young's numerous awards and special honors included the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, three NASA Distinguished Service Medals, the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal, two Navy Distinguished Service Medals, three Navy Distinguished Flying Crosses, the Georgia Tech Distinguished Young Alumni Award, the Exceptional Engineering Achievement Award and the American Astronautical Society Space Flight Award.

Those are among more than 80 major honors and awards, including four honorary doctorate degrees, Young has received. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1988.

"I've been very lucky, I think," Young said at his retirement from NASA in 2004. As to which moment was most memorable, he says simply, "I liked them all."

Images (mentioned), Video (NASA), Text, Credits: NASA/Brian Dunbar.

R.I.P., Orbiter.ch

NASA Sees First Direct Proof of Ozone Hole Recovery

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center logo.

January 5, 2018

Animation above: Using measurements from NASA's Aura satellite, scientists studied chlorine within the Antarctic ozone hole over the last several years, watching as the amount slowly decreased. Animation Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Katy Mersmann.

For the first time, scientists have shown through direct observations of the ozone hole by a satellite instrument, built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, that levels of ozone-destroying chlorine are declining, resulting in less ozone depletion.

Measurements show that the decline in chlorine, resulting from an international ban on chlorine-containing human-produce chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), has resulted in about 20 percent less ozone depletion during the Antarctic winter than there was in 2005 -- the first year that measurements of chlorine and ozone during the Antarctic winter were made by NASA's Aura satellite.

NASA Sees Definitive Evidence of the Montreal Protocol's Success

"We see very clearly that chlorine from CFCs is going down in the ozone hole, and that less ozone depletion is occurring because of it," said lead author Susan Strahan, an atmospheric scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

CFCs are long-lived chemical compounds that eventually rise into the stratosphere, where they are broken apart by the Sun's ultraviolet radiation, releasing chlorine atoms that go on to destroy ozone molecules. Stratospheric ozone protects life on the planet by absorbing potentially harmful ultraviolet radiation that can cause skin cancer and cataracts, suppress immune systems and damage plant life.

Two years after the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985, nations of the world signed the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, which regulated ozone-depleting compounds. Later amendments to the Montreal Protocol completely phased out production of CFCs.

Past studies have used statistical analyses of changes in the ozone hole's size to argue that ozone depletion is decreasing. This study is the first to use measurements of the chemical composition inside the ozone hole to confirm that not only is ozone depletion decreasing, but that the decrease is caused by the decline in CFCs.

The study was published Jan. 4 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The Antarctic ozone hole forms during September in the Southern Hemisphere's winter as the returning Sun's rays catalyze ozone destruction cycles involving chlorine and bromine that come primarily from CFCs.To determine how ozone and other chemicals have changed year to year, scientists used data from JPL's Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) aboard the Aura satellite, which has been making measurements continuously around the globe since mid-2004. While many satellite instruments require sunlight to measure atmospheric trace gases, MLS measures microwave emissions and, as a result, can measure trace gases over Antarctica during the key time of year: the dark southern winter, when the stratospheric weather is quiet and temperatures are low and stable.

The change in ozone levels above Antarctica from the beginning to the end of southern winter -- early July to mid-September -- was computed daily from MLS measurements every year from 2005 to 2016. "During this period, Antarctic temperatures are always very low, so the rate of ozone destruction depends mostly on how much chlorine there is," Strahan said. "This is when we want to measure ozone loss."

They found that ozone loss is decreasing, but they needed to know whether a decrease in CFCs was responsible. When ozone destruction is ongoing, chlorine is found in many molecular forms, most of which are not measured. But after chlorine has destroyed nearly all the available ozone, it reacts instead with methane to form hydrochloric acid, a gas measured by MLS. "By around mid-October, all the chlorine compounds are conveniently converted into one gas, so by measuring hydrochloric acid we have a good measurement of the total chlorine," Strahan said.

Image above: A view of Earth's atmosphere from space.Image Credit: NASA.

Nitrous oxide is a long-lived gas that behaves just like CFCs in much of the stratosphere. The CFCs are declining at the surface but nitrous oxide is not. If CFCs in the stratosphere are decreasing, then over time, less chlorine should be measured for a given value of nitrous oxide. By comparing MLS measurements of hydrochloric acid and nitrous oxide each year, they determined that the total chlorine levels were declining on average by about 0.8 percent annually.

The 20 percent decrease in ozone depletion during the winter months from 2005 to 2016 as determined from MLS ozone measurements was expected. "This is very close to what our model predicts we should see for this amount of chlorine decline," Strahan said. "This gives us confidence that the decrease in ozone depletion through mid-September shown by MLS data is due to declining levels of chlorine coming from CFCs. But we're not yet seeing a clear decrease in the size of the ozone hole because that's controlled mainly by temperature after mid-September, which varies a lot from year to year."

Looking forward, the Antarctic ozone hole should continue to recover gradually as CFCs leave the atmosphere, but complete recovery will take decades. "CFCs have lifetimes from 50 to 100 years, so they linger in the atmosphere for a very long time," said Anne Douglass, a fellow atmospheric scientist at Goddard and the study's co-author. "As far as the ozone hole being gone, we're looking at 2060 or 2080. And even then there might still be a small hole."

To read the study, visit: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL074830/abstract

For more on MLS, visit: https://mls.jpl.nasa.gov/index-eos-mls.php

Animation (mentioned), Image (mentioned), Video (GFSC), Text, Credits: NASA's Earth Science News Team, Written by Samson Reiny/JPL/Alan Buis.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

The mystery of the star of "Tabby" is solved

NASA - Kepler Space Telescope patch.

Jan. 5, 2018

Scientists have dismissed after months of work the thesis of an extraterrestrial structure to explain the light variations around "Tabby".

This image of KIC 8462852 is an artist illustration published by NASA. Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

A fault?

The American astronomer Jason Wright, from Pennsylvania State University, caused a sensation in October 2015 by suggesting that this strange phenomenon could perhaps be explained by the presence of a sphere of Dyson, a megastructure built by an extraterrestrial civilization to capture the energy of the star. It took several months of observations for a team of more than 200 astrophysicists to reject this hypothesis. They now evoke clouds of dust.

Astronomer Jason Wright. Image Credit: Wikipedia

"Dust is the most likely cause of these variations in brightness of the star," says Tabetha Boyajian, assistant professor at Louisiana State University and principal author of this work published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-637X/816/1/17

"The new data collected during the observations reveals different colors of light blocked at different intensities. This means that what passes between the star and us is not opaque, thereby removing an extraterrestrial megastructure or a planetary body, "said Ms. Boyajian, whose name inspired the nickname of the star, namely" Tabby 'but known scientifically as KIC 8462852.

About 50% larger than the Sun

This star, described by scientists as "the most mysterious of the universe", is located more than 1000 light-years from Earth. About 50% bigger than our Sun, it is also 1000 degrees warmer.

Even though scientists have dismissed the hypothesis of a giant extraterrestrial structure, "the last observations could also be the signature of other natural phenomena," points out Wright, who participated in this study. "There are mathematical models simulating circumstellar materials like exocometes, orbiting a star, which seems to correspond to the data we have collected," he says.

Kickstarter campaign

Tabby was discovered with the Kepler space telescope, developed by NASA and dedicated to the detection of exoplanets when they pass their star and momentarily reduce their brightness.

More than 1,700 people donated a total of $ 100,000 to the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform to further explore this star. Astronomers at the observatory in Las Cumbres, California, have studied it closely between March 2016 and December 2017.

Related articles:

An alien star in distant space seems to be acting very strangely
http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2015/10/an-alien-star-in-distant-space-seems-to.html

Star Strange Likely Swarmed by Comets
http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2015/11/strange-star-likely-swarmed-by-comets.html

The Scientific Quest to Explain Kepler's Most Enigmatic Find
http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2017/10/the-scientific-quest-to-explain-keplers.html

Mysterious Dimming of Tabby 's Star May Be Caused by Dust
http://orbiterchspacenews.blogspot.ch/2017/10/mysterious-dimming-of-tabbys-star-may.html

Related links:

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope: http://kepler.nasa.gov/

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope: https://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

Planet Hunters: http://www.planethunters.org/

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: AFP / Orbiter.ch Aerospace / Roland Berga.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

High Above Jupiter’s Clouds

NASA - JUNO Mission logo.

Jan. 5, 2018

NASA’s Juno spacecraft was a little more than one Earth diameter from Jupiter when it captured this mind-bending, color-enhanced view of the planet’s tumultuous atmosphere.

Jupiter completely fills the image, with only a hint of the terminator (where daylight fades to night) in the upper right corner, and no visible limb (the curved edge of the planet).

Juno took this image of colorful, turbulent clouds in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere on Dec. 16, 2017 at 9:43 a.m. PST (12:43 p.m. EST) from 8,292 miles (13,345 kilometers) above the tops of Jupiter’s clouds, at a latitude of 48.9 degrees.

The spatial scale in this image is 5.8 miles/pixel (9.3 kilometers/pixel).

Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager.

JunoCam's raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at:

http://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam     

More information about Juno is at:

https://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu

Image, Text, Credits: NASA/Tony Greicius/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

James Webb Telescope to Investigate Mysterious Brown Dwarfs

NASA / ESA / CSA-ASC . James Webb Space Telescope patch.

Jan. 4, 2018

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Astronomers are hopeful that the powerful infrared capability of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will resolve a puzzle as fundamental as stargazing itself — what IS that dim light in the sky? Brown dwarfs muddy a clear distinction between stars and planets, throwing established understanding of those bodies, and theories of their formation, into question.

Image above: Stellar cluster NGC 1333 is home to a large number of brown dwarfs. Astronomers will use Webb’s powerful infrared instruments to learn more about these dim cousins to the cluster’s bright newborn stars. Image Credits: NASA/CXC/JPL.

Several research teams will use Webb to explore the mysterious nature of brown dwarfs, looking for insight into both star formation and exoplanet atmospheres, and the hazy territory in-between where the brown dwarf itself exists. Previous work with Hubble, Spitzer, and ALMA have shown that brown dwarfs can be up to 70 times more massive than gas giants like Jupiter, yet they do not have enough mass for their cores to burn nuclear fuel and radiate starlight. Though brown dwarfs were theorized in the 1960s and confirmed in 1995, there is not an accepted explanation of how they form: like a star, by the contraction of gas, or like a planet, by the accretion of material in a protoplanetary disk? Some have a companion relationship with a star, while others drift alone in space.

At the Université de Montréal, Étienne Artigau leads a team that will use Webb to study a specific brown dwarf, labeled SIMP0136. It is a low-mass, young, isolated brown dwarf — one of the closest to our Sun — all of which make it fascinating for study, as it has many features of a planet without being too close to the blinding light of a star. SIMP0136 was the object of a past scientific breakthrough by Artigau and his team, when they found evidence suggesting it has a cloudy atmosphere. He and his colleagues will use Webb’s spectroscopic instruments to learn more about the chemical elements and compounds in those clouds.

“Very accurate spectroscopic measurements are challenging to obtain from the ground in the infrared due to variable absorption in our own atmosphere, hence the need for space-based infrared observation. Also, Webb allows us to probe features, such as water absorption, that are inaccessible from the ground at this level of precision,” Artigau explains.

Image above: Artist’s conception of a brown dwarf, featuring the cloudy atmosphere of a planet and the residual light of an almost-star. Image Credits: NASA/ESA/JPL.

These observations could lay groundwork for future exoplanet exploration with Webb, including which worlds could support life. Webb’s infrared instruments will be capable of detecting the types of molecules in the atmospheres of exoplanets by seeing which elements are absorbing light as the planet passes in front of its star, a scientific technique known as transit spectroscopy.

“The brown dwarf SIMP0136 has the same temperature as various planets that will be observed in transit spectroscopy with Webb, and clouds are known to affect this type of measurement; our observations will help us better understand cloud decks in brown dwarfs and planet atmospheres in general,” Artigau says.

The search for low-mass, isolated brown dwarfs was one of the early science goals put forward for the Webb telescope in the 1990s, says astronomer Aleks Scholz of the University of St. Andrews. Brown dwarfs have a lower mass than stars and do not “shine” but merely emit the dim afterglow of their birth, and so they are best seen in infrared light, which is why Webb will be such a valuable tool in this research.

Scholz, who also leads the Substellar Objects in Nearby Young Clusters (SONYC) project, will use Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) to study NGC 1333 in the constellation of Perseus. NGC 1333 is a stellar nursery that has also been found to harbor an unusually high number of brown dwarfs, some of them at the very low end of the mass range for such objects – in other words, not much heavier than Jupiter.

"In more than a decade of searching, our team has found it is very difficult to locate brown dwarfs that are less than five Jupiter-masses - the mass where star and planet formation overlap. That is a job for the Webb telescope,” Scholz says. “It has been a long wait for Webb, but we are very excited to get an opportunity to break new ground and potentially discover an entirely new type of planets, unbound, roaming the Galaxy like stars."

Both of the projects led by Scholz and Artigau are making use of Guaranteed Time Observations (GTOs), observing time on the telescope that is granted to astronomers who have worked for years to prepare Webb’s scientific operations.

The James Webb Space Telescope, the scientific complement to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, will be the premier space observatory of the next decade. Webb is an international project led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).

For more information about the Webb telescope, visit http://www.nasa.gov/webb or http://www.webbtelescope.org/

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Lynn Jenner/Space Telescope Science Institute, By Leah Ramsay.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Robot Arm Finishes Swapping Experiments Outside Dragon

ISS - Expedition 54 Mission patch.

Jan. 4, 2018

Robotics controllers have completed the science cargo transfers from the rear of the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship, also known as its trunk. Dragon is due to depart the International Space Station Jan. 13 and return to Earth.

Over the holidays, the ground robotics teams remotely operated the Canadarm2 to remove a pair of new external experiments from Dragon and install them on the station. The teams also finished installing an older experiment back inside the cargo craft’s trunk in time for its departure.

Dragon delivered the Total and Spectral Solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1) and the Space Debris Sensor (SDS) when it arrived on Dec. 17, 2017. TSIS-1 was attached to an External Logistics Carrier on the port solar alpha rotary joint. It will study the sun’s natural influence on the Earth’s ozone layer, atmospheric circulation, clouds, and ecosystems. The SDS was installed outside the Columbus lab module where it will directly measure the orbital debris environment around the space station for two to three years.

Image above: The SpaceX Dragon is pictured with the Canadarm2 robotic arm in the foreground and the Earth’s limb in the background as the International Space Station soars into an orbital sunrise during Expedition 54. Image Credit: NASA.

The successful RapidScat experiment was installed back in Dragon’s trunk after being delivered in September 23, 2014, on the SpaceX CRS-4 mission. RapidScat observed wind patterns on the ocean’s surface providing agencies better data for weather forecasting before ending its mission in August of 2016.

RapidScat will be destroyed inside Dragon’s trunk when it separates from the Dragon resupply ship to burn up over the Pacific Ocean. Dragon itself will safely parachute to a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the southern coast of California.

Related links:

Total and Spectral Solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS-1): http://www.nasa.gov/tsis-1

Space Debris Sensor (SDS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/2145.html

Orbital debris: https://www.orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/

RapidScat: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/1067.html

Expedition 54: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition54/index.html

International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Image (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Geocolor Image From NOAA's GOES-16 Satellite of Powerful East Coast Storm

NOAA / NASA - GOES-R Mission patch.

Jan. 4, 2018

This Geocolor image from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) GOES-16 satellite captures the deepening storm off the East coast of the United States on Jan. 4, 2018, at 16:22 UTC.  The powerful nor'easter is battering coastal areas with heavy snow and strong winds, from Florida to Maine. Notice the long line of clouds stretching over a thousand miles south of the storm, which is drawing moisture all the way from deep in the Caribbean.

Geocolor is a multispectral product composed of True Color (using a simulated green component) during the daytime, and an Infrared product that uses bands 7 and 13 at night. During the day, the imagery looks approximately as it would appear when viewed with human eyes from space.

The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) – R Series is a collaborative development and acquisition effort between NOAA and NASA. The GOES-16 (GOES-East) satellite, the first of the series, provides continuous imagery and atmospheric measurements of Earth’s western hemisphere and space weather monitoring.

Related links:

GOES (Geostationary Environmental Operational Satellites): http://www.nasa.gov/goes/

GOES-R: http://www.nasa.gov/content/goes-r/

Image, Text, Credits: NOAA/NASA/Sarah Loff.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Spend Next New Year’s Eve with New Horizons

NASA - New Horizons Mission logo.

Jan. 4, 2018

The New Year’s celebration to usher in 2019 will include an event like no other – more than four billion miles from Earth.

Image above: Artist’s impression of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft encountering 2014 MU69, a Kuiper Belt object that orbits one billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto, on Jan. 1, 2019. Image Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Steve Gribben.

In just under a year – shortly after midnight Eastern Time on Jan. 1, 2019 – NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will buzz by the most primitive and most distant object ever explored. New Horizons’ encounter with Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, which orbits a billion miles beyond Pluto, will offer the first close-up look at such a pristine building block of the solar system – and will be performed in a region of deep space that was practically unknown just a generation ago. 

“The Voyagers and Pioneers flew through the Kuiper Belt at a time when we didn’t know this region existed,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division at Headquarters in Washington. “New Horizons is on the hunt to understand these objects, and we invite everyone to ring in the next year with the excitement of exploring the unknown.”

“We invite everyone to ring in the next year with the excitement of exploring the unknown." – Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division.

“Our flyby of MU69 on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day 2019 will be an exciting sequel to the historic exploration New Horizons performed at Pluto in 2015,” added Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “Nothing even like MU69 has ever been explored before.”

As with the hundreds of thousands of other small worlds in this zone of icy bodies, MU69 is shrouded in mystery. In fact, the all we know about it has come from the Hubble Space Telescope (used to discover the object in 2014) and a comprehensive observation campaign last summer, in which the New Horizons team gathered data on MU69 as it passed in front of three stars. Those observations indicated that MU69 could be two objects, perhaps accompanied by a moon.

“That tells us this object is going to have a lot of surprises in store for New Horizons,” said Marc Buie, the New Horizons science team member from SwRI who led the observation campaign. “We’re going to see something that dates back to the formation of the solar system.”

New Horizons will fly about three times closer to MU69 than it did to Pluto in July 2015, allowing the spacecraft’s cameras to provide a more detailed look at the object’s surface. Project Scientist Hal Weaver, of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, pointed out that New Horizons’ vantage point from about 2,175 miles (3,500 kilometers) from MU69 will allow it spot details about the size of a basketball court.

Image above: Timeline of New Horizons operations leading up to and just after the New Year’s 2019 encounter with Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69. Image Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.

“Combining images with the measurements we make of the composition of and environment around MU69, should teach us a great deal about objects like MU69 that built dwarf planets like Pluto,” Weaver said.

The MU69 flyby is the centerpiece of the current New Horizons extended mission that also includes observations of more than two-dozen other Kuiper Belt objects, as well as measurements of the plasma, gas and dust environment of the Kuiper Belt. “This post-Pluto mission is a complete and comprehensive exploration of the Kuiper Belt,” said Alice Bowman, New Horizons mission operations manager, also from APL. “The spacecraft is collecting data out there throughout each year while the mission team works together to plan and shape the MU69 flyby.”

New Horizons is currently in hibernation until June 4. After that wake-up and a check of the spacecraft’s systems and science instruments, the MU69 encounter begins in mid- August, with the first attempts at long-distance observations of MU69 that the team will use to navigate the spacecraft along the flyby path.

Image above: New Horizons team members discuss the Kuiper Belt Extended Mission during a media briefing at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting on Dec. 12 in New Orleans. Image Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI.

Learn More

The New Horizons team made dozens of discoveries in the Pluto system and looks forward to solving even more scientific mysteries at MU69. Watch the “Pluto and Charon in the Rear View, MU69 Dead Ahead off the Starboard Bow” session from the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting on Dec. 11, 2017. Watch here:

The New Horizons team briefed the media at the 2017 AGU Fall Meeting, covering key elements of the Kuiper Belt extended mission. Watch here:

New Horizons: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Tricia Talbert.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Crew Begins 2018 Studying How Living in Space Affects Humans

ISS - Expedition 54 Mission patch.

January 3, 2018

The Expedition 54 crew is starting the New Year studying how humans adapt to living in space for months and years at a time. NASA and its international partners are also learning how to support crews on longer missions with less help from the ground.

The astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station orbit Earth 16 times a day affecting their circadian rhythms, or biological clocks. Japanese astronaut Norishige Kanai is helping doctors understand how being away from the normal 24-hour sunrise-sunset cycle impacts the human body. He strapped on sensors today that will measure his body composition and temperature for 36 hours.

Image above: The well-lit coasts of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut are pictured in the wee hours of New Year’s Day. Image Credit: NASA.

NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei is helping engineers design closed-loop systems keeping crews self-sufficient on longer missions beyond low-Earth orbit. He swapped experimental containers in the Biolab Incubator containing bacteria cultures that could be used for carbon dioxide removal and oxygen production.

Crews also need to be prepared for bone injuries or dental work that may be necessary during a space mission. The Synthetic Bone experiment, that Flight Engineer Joe Acaba worked on today with Kanai, is testing how a synthetic material integrates with bone cells to address bone fractures and bone loss in space and on Earth.

Related links:

Biolab Incubator: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/68.html

Synthetic Bone: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/explorer/Investigation.html?#id=7374

Expedition 54: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition54/index.html

International Space Station (ISS): https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Image (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Mark Garcia.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch

NASA-led Study Solves a Methane Puzzle

JPL - Jet Propulsion Laboratory logo.

January 3, 2018

NASA-led Study Solves a Methane Puzzle

A new NASA-led study has solved a puzzle involving the recent rise in atmospheric methane, a potent greenhouse gas, with a new calculation of emissions from global fires. The new study resolves what looked like irreconcilable differences in explanations for the increase.

Methane emissions have been rising sharply since 2006. Different research teams have produced viable estimates for two known sources of the increase: emissions from the oil and gas industry, and microbial production in wet tropical environments like marshes and rice paddies. But when these estimates were added to estimates of other sources, the sum was considerably more than the observed increase. In fact, each new estimate was large enough to explain the whole increase by itself.

Scientist John Worden of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and colleagues focused on fires because they're also changing globally. The area burned each year decreased about 12 percent between the early 2000s and the more recent period of 2007 to 2014, according to a new study using observations by NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer satellite instrument. The logical assumption would be that methane emissions from fires have decreased by about the same percentage. Using satellite measurements of methane and carbon monoxide, Worden's team found the real decrease in methane emissions was almost twice as much as that assumption would suggest.

When the research team subtracted this large decrease from the sum of all emissions, the methane budget balanced correctly, with room for both fossil fuel and wetland increases. The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Fast Facts:

- Atmospheric methane concentrations are given by their weight in teragrams.

- One teragram equals 110,000 tons -- the weight of about 17,000 elephants.

- Methane emissions are increasing by about 25 teragrams a year, with total emissions currently around 550 teragrams a year.

Most methane molecules in the atmosphere don't have identifying features that reveal their origin. Tracking down their sources is a detective job involving multiple lines of evidence: measurements of other gases, chemical analyses, isotopic signatures, observations of land use, and more. "A fun thing about this study was combining all this different evidence to piece this puzzle together," Worden said.

Carbon isotopes in the methane molecules are one clue. Of the three methane sources examined in the new study, emissions from fires contain the largest percentage of heavy carbon isotopes, microbial emissions have the smallest, and fossil fuel emissions are in between. Another clue is ethane, which (like methane) is a component of natural gas. An increase in atmospheric ethane indicates increasing fossil fuel sources. Fires emit carbon monoxide as well as methane, and measurements of that gas are a final clue.

Artist's view of Terra satellite. Image Credit: NASA

Worden's team used carbon monoxide and methane data from the Measurements of Pollutants in the Troposphere instrument on NASA's Terra satellite and the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer instrument on NASA's Aura to quantify fire emissions of methane. The results show these emissions have been decreasing much more rapidly than expected.

Combining isotopic evidence from ground surface measurements with the newly calculated fire emissions, the team showed that about 17 teragrams per year of the increase is due to fossil fuels, another 12 is from wetlands or rice farming, while fires are decreasing by about 4 teragrams per year. The three numbers combine to 25 teragrams a year -- the same as the observed increase.

Worden's coauthors are at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado; and the Netherlands Institute for Space Research and University of Utrecht, both in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

NASA's Terra satellite: https://terra.nasa.gov/

NASA's Aura satellite: https://aura.gsfc.nasa.gov/

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/

Anomation (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/JPL/Alan Buis/Earth Science News Team, Written by Carol Rasmussen.

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From the Earth, Moon and Beyond

NASA - OSIRIS-REx Mission patch.

Jan. 2, 2018

The purpose of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft—Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security–Regolith Explorer—is to map and return samples from asteroid Bennu, a carbon-rich hunk of rock that might contain organic materials or molecular precursors to life. It is also an asteroid that could someday make a close pass or even a collision with Earth, though not for several centuries. The OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft is expected to reach its asteroid destination, Bennu, in August 2018.

OSIRIS-REx is a mission to figure out where we came from, as asteroids are remnants from the formation of our solar system. But while the spacecraft might tell us some things about where we have been and where we are headed, it also can remind us of where we are right now.

This composite image of the Earth and Moon is made from data captured by OSIRIS-REx's MapCam instrument on October 2, 2017, when the spacecraft was approximately 3 million miles (5 million kilometers) from Earth, about 13 times the distance between the Earth and Moon. (Click here to see the geometry of the shot.) Three images (different color wavelengths) were combined and color-corrected to make the composite, and the Moon was “stretched” (brightened) to make it more easily visible.

OSIRIS-REx (Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer): http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/osiris-rex/index.html

Image, Text,  Credits: NASA/Yvette Smith/OSIRIS-REx team and the University of Arizona.

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