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Friday, December 19, 2014

Fwd: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Friday – December 19, 2014



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Begin forwarded message:

From: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Date: December 19, 2014 at 11:11:53 AM CST
To: "Moon, Larry J. (JSC-EA411)" <larry.j.moon@nasa.gov>
Subject: FW: NASA and Human Spaceflight News - Friday – December 19, 2014

 
Happy Friday everyone.   Be safe and have a great weekend.
 
NASA and Human Spaceflight News
Friday – December 19, 2014
NASA News will be on hiatus until Jan. 5, 2015. For news, visit:
Space Today
 
Space Politics
 
Space Daily:
 
Spaceflight Now
 
FAA News Updates:
 
The Telegraph:
 
ZEENEWS:
Space Coalition
 
 
NASA Administrator Interviewed
 
In an over 11-minute interview on PBS – Travis Smiley, NASA administrator Charles Bolden said, "I think if you measure the state of an agency based on what people say about it, we're for the third year in a row, the best place to work in government for large federal agencies." He added that Americans and people across the world "still look to us for leadership in space." Bolden also said, "I go out and tell Americans they should be proud about the space program and sticking their chest out and saying how proud they are, because we're leading an international effort with the International Space Station." When asked about the US-Russia tensions and the ISS, Bolden said, "I am a big fan of the international space station as a candidate for the Nobel peace prize, because when you look at the way that astronauts work on the international space station day in and out, while we have a difficult time politically and diplomatically maybe down here on Earth."
        Later on the program, Bolden said, "I think space shuttle's legacy will be the fact that it opened up space to everyone." When asked about recent accidents involving spacecraft, Bolden said, "Those are tragic things that happen in our line of work. but they are things that those of us who live in this business that's a part of the risk that you take. It's a risk worth taking because of what it's going do to advanced society." On a mission to Mars, Bolden said, "If there's an issue that the Congress and everyone is in agreement with, we're going to get humans to Mars. There's is no difference of opinion."
Bolden Speaks At Georgia Middle School
WJCL-TV Savannah, Ga., reported NASA administrator Charles Bolden spoke with students at Hubert Middle School in Savannah, Georgia. He said he talked about "Who we are at NASA and what we do, and about the excitement of being in the aerospace business today, I let them know about our journey to Mars and how they need to be successful, because it's them who are going to be making the trip for the mission we're planning right now." A text version of the segment is on the station's website.
HEADLINES AND LEADS
SpaceX delays space station delivery until Jan.
Marcia Dunn – AP
The space station astronauts will have to wait until next month for their Christmas delivery.
 
SpaceX launch postponed again; it's too sunny up there
Scott Powers - Orlando (FL) Sentinel
 
Concerns over the International Space Station's angles and exposure to sunlight during late December and early January have led SpaceX to again postpone the launch of their Dragon capsule to resupply the station. Next target date is Jan. 6, 2015.
 
SpaceX Delays Launch Of Next Space Station Cargo Mission to January
Jeff Foust – Space News
 
SpaceX has postponed the scheduled Dec. 19 launch of an international space station cargo mission until early January, as a technical issue with the Falcon 9 rocket creates a domino effect of other delays.
 
Congress keeps NASA education programs aloft
Jeffrey Mervis - Science Magazine
 
Since 2011, 55 science teachers from across the United States have flown on a Boeing 747, modified to hold a 2.5-meter telescope, that serves as NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). They have used that experience working alongside scientists—enhanced by additional training before and after their flights—to inform and excite students about the world around them.
2 astronauts will expand envelope with 1-year spaceflight
Marcia Dunn – AP
The two men assigned to a one-year spaceflight said Thursday that their upcoming mission will allow the world to push deeper into space.
America's First One-Year Space Voyage Has Astronaut Excited
Miriam Kramer - Space.com
A NASA astronaut is getting ready to be the first American to spend a continuous year in space, and he is excited.
Space station team eager to begin record yearlong flight
William Harwood – CBS News
 
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are gearing up for launch March 27 to kick off a record one-year stay aboard the International Space Station, an orbital marathon both men say is crucial for planning future flights beyond Earth orbit and, eventually, to Mars.
NASA's Orion Spacecraft Back in Florida After Test Flight
Marcia Dunn – AP
NASA's experimental Orion spacecraft left Florida by rocket and returned by truck.
NASA's Orion capsule back at Kennedy Space Center
James Dean – Florida Today
 
NASA's first space-flown Orion capsule today arrived back at Kennedy Space Center, where it was assembled.
Wallops launch pad where Antares rocket exploded should be repaired by next year
By The Associated Press
Despite a massive explosion in October, authorities say a state-owned launch pad at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility should be repaired and ready for testing late next year.
Orbital Sciences Orders Russian RD-181 Engines for Antares Rocket
Peter B. de Selding – Space News
Satellite and rocket builder Orbital Sciences Corp. on Dec. 16 confirmed that it has contracted with Russia's Energomash to provide RD-181 engines to power the first stage of Orbital's Antares rocket, replacing the AJ-26 engine, also from Russia, that Orbital suspects was the origin of Antares' Oct. 28 failure.
NASA's Incredible, Futuristic, And Totally Real Plan To Establish A Human Colony On Venus
Jessica Orwig – Business Insider
 
NASA has plans to live on Venus. Seriously.
Kepler Spacecraft Finds New 'Super-Earth' 180 Light-Years Away
Dennis Overbye – New York Times
A year and a half after a pointing failure threatened to derail its epochal search for worlds beyond our solar system, NASA's Kepler spacecraft has bagged another planet, astronomers announced on Thursday.
NASA Satellite Sees Holiday Lights Shine Bright from Space
CBS
NASA scientists have used satellite images to discover an increase of brighter nighttime lights in major cities during Christmas and New Year's in the U.S.
Martian Rover Makes Curious Methane Discovery
The Curiosity space rover has found methane on Mars. But where did the methane come from? And where is it going?
Andrew Soergel - US News & World Report
 
A burst of methane gas and a dash of carbon compounds in Martian rock samples are leading some scientists to believe Mars may have once – or may still – hold the ingredients necessary for life.
The Keeper Of The Maps Of Mars
Lost on the Red Planet? Ask Dr. Fred Calef III
Shannon Stirone - Popular Science
Dr. Fred Calef's official title is Geospatial Information Scientist for the Curiosity Rover, but at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory they call him the Keeper of the Maps. Dr. Calef's job isn't just to make maps of Mars, but to bring together all of the data that can range from types of rocks, slope angles and elevation changes, into one intelligible record for the team at the Mars Science Laboratory.
Satellite maps global carbon-dioxide levels
NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 overcomes design flaw discovered after launch.
Richard Monastersky - Nature
       
NASA's carbon-monitoring satellite has passed its post-launch checks and is beaming high-quality data back to Earth. But getting to this point required some last-minute adjustments: after the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) launched in July, the agency had to overcome a key design problem with the spacecraft that had gone unnoticed in a decade of planning.
 
California drought weakens, forecasters have 'cautious optimism' for future
Joseph Serna – Los Angeles Times
For the first time in five months, a majority of California is no longer considered to be in an exceptional drought, the most severe level possible under federal
JWST facing increased schedule risk with significant work remaining
Tomasz Nowakowski – Spaceflight Insider
 
With just under 4 years until its planned launch in October 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project reports it remains on schedule and budget. However, technical challenges with JWST elements and major subsystems, have diminished the project's overall schedule reserve and increased risk, says a new report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
 
Science Graphic of the Week: Scientists Map Seaside Terrain at Titan's North Pole
Adam Mann – Wired
Saturn's moon Titan is a wet world, the only other place in the solar system that we know has flowing liquid on its surface. The colorful geomorphic map (above left) combines radar and topographic data of Titan's north pole to show different features around a large sea called Ligeia Mare. The map, presented Dec. 15 here at the American Geophysical Union meeting, defines four different major regions according to colors: orange, dark green, and yellow for plains, pale green for small depressions, blue for seas, and pink for ridge and valley networks. Radar imagery of the same area is seen on the right.
COMPLETE STORIES
SpaceX delays space station delivery until Jan.
Marcia Dunn – AP
The space station astronauts will have to wait until next month for their Christmas delivery.
 
On Thursday, the SpaceX company announced it was delaying this week's planned launch of an unmanned supply capsule until January.
 
SpaceX spokesman John Taylor said a test firing of the rocket engines earlier this week did not go precisely as planned at the Cape Canaveral launch pad. The company wants to conduct a second test on the Falcon rocket before committing to a launch, he said.
 
Combined with the Christmas and New Year's holidays, as well as the sun's angles on the space station, the earliest the California-based company can launch is Jan. 6. The liftoff should have occurred Friday, already a few days late.
 
NASA says the delay will not affect the space station or its six occupants: two Americans, one Italian and three Russians.
 
The space agency is paying SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. to launch supplies and experiments to the orbiting lab. Orbital's shipments are on hold, however, because of October's launch explosion. The Antares rocket blew up seconds after liftoff from Wallops Island, Virginia.
 
Orbital Sciences said it will be 2016 before it can launch again with an improved Antares rocket from Wallops Island. The Virginia-based company is shifting much of its intended station shipment to an Atlas rocket that would fly from Cape Canaveral sometime later next year. A second Atlas might also be needed to pick up the slack.
 
SpaceX launch postponed again; it's too sunny up there
Scott Powers - Orlando (FL) Sentinel
 
Concerns over the International Space Station's angles and exposure to sunlight during late December and early January have led SpaceX to again postpone the launch of their Dragon capsule to resupply the station. Next target date is Jan. 6, 2015.
The Dragon was supposed to go up Friday afternoon atop SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.
It's the third time the launch date has been reset.
And this would be the first commercial resupply of the space station since a competing company's resupply capsule was lost in an explosion Oct. 28, when the Orbital Sciences had its Antares rocket explode on launch at NASA's Wallops Island, Va., launch complex.
The last successful commercial resupply mission of the space station occurred with SpaceX's previous launch, in September, though some supplies were carried to the station on a Russian Soyuz in November.
Here's the explanation NASA provided Thursdaymorning when it announced SpaceX was postponing:
"This will provide SpaceX engineers time to investigate further some of the issues that arose from the static fire test of the Falcon 9 rocket on Dec. 16 and will avoid beta angle constraints for berthing the Dragon cargo ship to the station that exist through the end of the year.
"Beta angles are the angles between the space station orbital plane and the sun, resulting in the station being in almost constant sunlight for a 10 day period. During this time, there are thermal and operational constraints that prohibit Dragon from berthing to the station. This high beta period runs from Dec. 28 through Jan. 7.
"The new launch date also will allow the teams to enjoy the holidays."
SpaceX Delays Launch Of Next Space Station Cargo Mission to January
Jeff Foust – Space News
 
SpaceX has postponed the scheduled Dec. 19 launch of an international space station cargo mission until early January, as a technical issue with the Falcon 9 rocket creates a domino effect of other delays.
 
In a statement issued Dec. 18, SpaceX said that a recent static fire test of the Falcon 9, where the vehicle's nine first stage engines are briefly fired on the launch pad, encountered problems that led the company to repeat that test and thus delay the launch.
 
"While the recent static fire test accomplished nearly all of our goals, the test did not run the full duration," the company said in its statement. "The data suggests we could push forward without a second attempt, but out of an abundance of caution, we are opting to execute a second static fire test prior to launch."
 
The delay created by the rescheduled static fire test created further delays "due to the holidays and other restrictions," SpaceX said in the statement. Company spokesman John Taylor declined to elaborate on what the additional restrictions are.
 
One issue that both SpaceX and NASA acknowledged contributed to the delay is the space station's high "beta angle," a measure of how much of each orbit the ISS is in sunlight. The ISS will be in nearly constant sunlight from Dec. 28 to Jan. 7, NASA said in a statement. "During this time, there are thermal and operational constraints that prohibit Dragon from berthing to the station," the agency said.
 
SpaceX and NASA have rescheduled the launch for Jan. 6 at 6:18 am EST, with a backup launch date of Jan. 7. A launch on Jan. 6 would allow the Dragon to arrive at the ISS on the morning of Jan. 8.
 
The launch is the fifth of twelve Dragon missions to the ISS SpaceX is under contract to perform as part of its Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract with NASA. Dragon is scheduled to deliver 2,395 kilograms of cargo to the ISS, including supplies, hardware, and experiments. It will return about four weeks later with 1,662 kilograms of equipment from the station.
 
SpaceX also plans to use this launch to test the ability to recover the Falcon 9's first stage. On several recent launches, SpaceX has attempted to "land" the first stage on the ocean. The stages touched down on the ocean surface, but toppled over and broke apart immediately afterwards.
 
For this launch, SpaceX has developed what it calls an "autonomous spaceport drone ship," about 90 meters long and 50 meters wide, that will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean downrange of the Cape Canaveral, Florida, launch site. The company will attempt to land the stage on the ship, using four fins deployed during reentry to improve landing precision.
 
In a Dec. 16 statement describing their stage recovery plans, the company cautioned that it was an experiment. "Though the probability of success on this test is low, we expect to gather critical data to support future landing testing," the company said.
 
With this launch rescheduled for January, SpaceX will finish 2014 with six Falcon 9 launches, less than the ten that company officials projected early in the year. SpaceX has not announced a launch schedule for 2015, but now has two launches planned for January: in addition to the rescheduled CRS mission, a Falcon 9 is scheduled to launch the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Jan. 23 from Cape Canaveral.
 
Congress keeps NASA education programs aloft
Jeffrey Mervis - Science Magazine
 
Since 2011, 55 science teachers from across the United States have flown on a Boeing 747, modified to hold a 2.5-meter telescope, that serves as NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA). They have used that experience working alongside scientists—enhanced by additional training before and after their flights—to inform and excite students about the world around them.
 
Next week is the deadline for teachers to apply to be part of the next cohort of airborne astronomy ambassadors. But the fate of that NASA-funded education program and many others was very much up in the air until this week, when Congress passed a $1 trillion spending bill to fund the federal government through 30 September 2015. The legislation, signed into law on Tuesday, restores funding for what NASA calls education and public outreach (E/PO) programs operated by SOFIA and dozens of other scientific missions. Many educators are relieved, but are also watching closely as the agency reshuffles some of its E/PO programs.
 
"We had a bumpy ride in 2014," admits Edna DeVore, an astronomy educator who manages the program for SOFIA, which is based in southern California. DeVore actually works in northern California as deputy CEO for the SETI Institute, which also conducts E/PO for two other NASA science missions: Kepler, a space telescope that is searching for exoplanets, and Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, which is orbiting Mars to study its atmosphere.
 
A change in plans
NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD) has traditionally funded education activities directly in conjunction with every scientific payload. (There's also an Office of Education at NASA headquarters that runs agency-wide programs such as scholarships and research opportunities for students and efforts to attract more minority students into space science.) The idea is to yoke those most knowledgeable about the science with those skilled in public dissemination.
 
In April 2013, however, NASA announced it wanted to sever those ties as part of the Obama administration's proposed reorganization of all federal science education activities. The $42 million allocated for E/PO within the science directorate would have disappeared in fiscal year 2014. Congress rejected the idea (as well as much of the White House's overall reorganization plan) and eventually restored the NASA funding. But the money was slow to trickle out to the individual projects, and some suffered actual cuts.
 
"We kept going, but the process of selecting the 2014 cohort was delayed by 5 to 6 months," DeVore says about the teachers who were trained to fly aboard SOFIA. The E/PO component for Kepler received only 20% of its previous year's allocation, she adds, leading to reductions in both programming and staff.
 
This year the administration again lowballed funding for the activity, asking for only $15 million in its 2015 request for NASA. The final bill signed into law this week again restores the budget to pre-2014 levels. But even that amount is "well below" the 1% that NASA's $5.1 billion science directorate is authorized to spend on education activities, notes a report from Senate appropriators this summer that accompanied a 2015 NASA spending bill that was folded into the final accord.
 
"I'm very encouraged that Congress elected to put the funding back into SMD for E/PO," DeVore says. "The real strength of having education specialists embedded is that they can suggest to the scientists and engineers the best way to translate for the public what they are doing."
 
Getting the public to understand those activities is essential to the country's well-being, believes Leland Melvin, a former astronaut who stepped down earlier this year as head of NASA's education office. "If we want to sustain our society, we need to make sure that we get kids excited about exploring the universe," says Melvin, now a consultant and motivational speaker based in Lynchburg, Virginia. "And the best way to do that is through education and public outreach to share what NASA missions are discovering about our world."
 
NASA shuffles the education deck
Kathryn Flanagan, deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, says that the U.S. space science education community breathed a "huge sigh of relief" when Congress reasserted the mission directorate's key role in education. (The institute manages the Hubble Space Telescope and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, and its education activities have their own website.) But more challenges await.
 
Last month, NASA announced it would soon be requesting "team-based proposals for SMD science education" as part of a reshuffling of how the directorate will manage those programs. The preliminary notice says that NASA "intends to select one or more" teams to be the primary contractors. The competition gives organizations like STScI the chance to run education programs for several different NASA science missions while retaining the ties between educators and scientists.
 
"It's an interesting proposition," says Flanagan, an x-ray astronomer with extensive experience as an educator. "It's an opportunity to break the mission stovepiping of science content." NASA's four great space observatories—Hubble, the Chandra x-ray telescope, the Spitzer infrared telescope, and the now-defunct Compton gamma ray telescope—have some common themes, she believes, and educators would love to use content from each of them to enhance their activities. NASA would also benefit, she says, from the infrastructure and networks that already exist at organizations now performing E/PO duties for the directorate.
 
DeVore is hoping that NASA will choose several institutions "and then ask them to work together" in applying what they have learned. In her case, that means drawing upon more than 2 decades of work in the field.
 
She began doing NASA E/PO in the early 1990s for SOFIA's predecessor, the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, now grounded. "I'm an educator," DeVore says. "So I'm always looking for opportunities to take what NASA has learned and share it with teachers, students, and the public." For example, what Kepler scientists are learning about potentially habitable planets, she says, can be easily turned it into a lesson that's aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards, a state-led, voluntary effort to improve science instruction in elementary and secondary schools across the country.
 
In the meantime, teachers interested in riding aboard SOFIA have until Monday to submit an application. Those selected will need to complete an online graduate astronomy course before participating in two overnight flights. The program pays for all of their training, as well as the salary of a substitute back home while they're away. The cost to the government is only $7000 per participant, DeVore notes—a very down-to-earth price for a chance to do science in the skies.
2 astronauts will expand envelope with 1-year spaceflight
Marcia Dunn – AP
The two men assigned to a one-year spaceflight said Thursday that their upcoming mission will allow the world to push deeper into space.
 
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will rocket into orbit from Kazakhstan in March and move into the International Space Station for an entire year. For NASA, it will represent a space endurance record; for Russia, it will fall two months shy of its world record.
 
At a news conference Thursday at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, Kelly and Kornienko said they anticipate many scientific gains from their mission. Researchers need to know more about the prolonged effects of space on humans, before astronauts embark on Mars expeditions lasting three years, round trip, they said.
 
"What makes this exciting for me, this one-year flight, is about the science and everything we're going to learn from expanding the envelope on the space station," Kelly said. "If we're ever going to go to Mars someday, the International Space Station is really a great platform to learn much more about having people live and work in space for longer durations. It's close to the Earth, and it's a great orbiting facility."
 
Kelly and Kornienko have been training for this mission since their selection two years ago. Both already have spent a half-year aboard the orbiting lab, on separate flights, and have been advised by previous yearlong space fliers to "pace yourself."
 
The 50-year-old Kelly, a former Navy fighter pilot, said his goals are the same as they are every time he flies in space: "No one gets hurt, we don't break anything and we leave as friends."
 
Kelly noted that his first spaceflight, back in 1999, lasted eight days. At the time, it "seemed like that was a long time." His second flight, also on a space shuttle, lasted 13 days, and his space station visit in 2010 lasted 159 days.
 
"They're getting longer," he told reporters. "I think if I fly again," it just goes on forever "and I never come home."
 
Kornienko, 54, a former Soviet paratrooper, said the support of his family has helped him deal with the preparations and the flight itself.
 
He had exciting personal news for those tuning in: "You can congratulate me. I am becoming grandpa."
America's First One-Year Space Voyage Has Astronaut Excited
Miriam Kramer - Space.com
A NASA astronaut is getting ready to be the first American to spend a continuous year in space, and he is excited.
NASA's Scott Kelly will perform experiments to help the space agency learn more about how space changes the human body after he launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for his yearlong stay aboard the International Space Station on March 27, 2015. The long-duration mission could also be one of the first steps toward flying people to Mars in the future.
"What makes this exciting for me, this one-year flight is about the science and everything we're going to learn from expanding the envelope on the space station greater than what we've currently done," Kelly told members of the press during news conference hosted at UNESCO headquarters in Paris today (Dec. 18). "If we're ever going to go to Mars someday, the International Space Station is really a great platform to learn much more about having people live and work in space for longer durations." [Most Extreme Human Spaceflight Records]
Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will join Kelly on the space station for the one-year mission. The two crewmembers consider themselves good friends now, and they expect to remain close throughout the mission, Kelly said.
Spaceflight isn't about national borders and separate countries, Kornienko said. The two veteran spaceflyers don't plan to let politics interfere with their time aboard the orbiting outpost.
"There are no borders in space," Kornienko said during the news conference. "It's a great example of how [countries] can work together, especially for politics on the ground."
This won't be Kelly's first spaceflight. Kelly and Kornienko have each flown to the space station for six-month missions before, and Kelly flew two short shuttle missions. Kornienko has spent a total of 176 days in space, and Kelly has spent 180 days in orbit.
While Kelly's flight will be the longest amount of time an American has spent in space, a few cosmonauts spent one year or more living on the space station Mir in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
NASA scientists have said that they hope to gather more data about how the human body changes during long spaceflights. This new information could help NASA officials understand more about the potential challenges astronauts could face during trips to and from Mars.
Astronauts will need to spend more than a year in space to get to Mars, work on the Red Planet and then return back to Earth. Therefore, NASA officials hope to use the International Space Station as a test bed for understanding how long spaceflights affect humans psychologically and physically.
Kelly said of the space station, "It's close to the Earth, and it's a great orbiting facility. This one-year flight is one of many stepping stones toward leaving low-Earth orbit again."
The astronaut will take part in a variety of experiments that will track the way his eyes, bones and other parts of his body change over the course of the year. Kelly's twin brother, astronaut Mark Kelly, will participate in some science experiments on the ground to assess Scott's physiological changes in space when compared to Mark's on Earth.
Kelly will monitor about 19 collaborative space station experiments on the human body for NASA. Officials from Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, have chosen 14 investigations. The cosmonaut and astronaut will join forces to participate in some of the chosen experiments, while the others are specific to NASA or Roscosmos, Kelly said.
"My excitement is for the science and what we're going to learn on this nearly one-year flight," Kelly said.
Space station team eager to begin record yearlong flight
William Harwood – CBS News
 
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are gearing up for launch March 27 to kick off a record one-year stay aboard the International Space Station, an orbital marathon both men say is crucial for planning future flights beyond Earth orbit and, eventually, to Mars.
While four cosmonauts logged flights longer than one year between 1987 and 1999, the upcoming flight will be a first for the international lab complex and the first to focus on the long-term biological effects of the space environment using state-of-the-art medical and scientific research equipment and procedures.
"If we're ever going to go beyond low-Earth orbit for longer periods of time, spaceflight presents a lot of challenges to the human body with regard to bone loss, muscle loss, vision issues that we've recently realized people are having, the effect on your immune system, the effect of radiation on our bodies," Kelly said Thursday during a news conference in Paris. "Understanding those effects are very important.
"If a mission to Mars is going to take a three-year round trip, we need to know better how our body and our physiology performs over durations longer than what we've previously on the space station investigated, which is six months. Perhaps there's a cliff out there with regards to some of these issues that we experience and perhaps there aren't. But we won't know unless we investigate it."
A veteran of three previous space flights, including a shuttle mission to the Hubble Space Telescope and a 159-day stay aboard the station in 2010-11, Kelly is the twin brother of Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut who flew four shuttle missions and who is married to former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
Kornienko also is a station veteran, logging 176 days aboard the outpost in 2010.
"The last long-time space mission was on the Mir (space) station and it brought major data for investigations and research about how humans will feel during long-term flights into space," he said. "I hope that our mission will be an opportunity for others who will follow in our footsteps and take space exploration further."
Kornienko said his wife cried before his last launch and cried again when he was named to the one-year crew. Asked how his daughter took the news, he smiled and said "she's 32, and you can congratulate me, I've become a grandpa!"
During their year aboard the station, major changes are planned including the installation of new docking adapters on two U.S. ports to accommodate commercial crew ferry craft being built by Boeing and SpaceX, work that will require the robotic relocation of a storage module. At least a half-dozen U.S. spacewalks are planned, including at least three by Kelly, and an unrelated Russian excursion that will include Kornienko.
The work will begin in late January and early February when two current crew members, Expedition 42 commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore and Terry Virts, carry out three spacewalks to pre-install wiring needed by the docking adaptors and new communications equipment that will be used by Boeing and SpaceX crews approaching and departing the space station.
"I'll be doing ... some of the spacewalks, some of the robotics and a lot of the internal reconfiguration," Kelly said. "Actually, we're starting to refer to it as the 'reassembly of the space station' because it does involve a lot of EVAs (spacewalks) and internal work on (the) wiring of the space station and moving (components) around. It's a lot of work, and I'll be involved in all of it. I really look forward to that, too."
But the primary focus is on research, serving as both operator and subject in a variety of experiments. In a Time Magazine cover story this week, Mark and Scott discussed the value of research comparing changes experienced by one twin in orbit with the baseline provided by the other twin on Earth.
"This one-year flight is one of many stepping stones towards leaving low-Earth orbit again," Kelly said at the news conference. "It's a focused effort to reach across international and technological boundaries to enhance our integrated science on board the space station."
While station fliers routinely operate a battery of experiments, for Kelly's flight "NASA has selected 19 collaborative investigations to evaluate the effects of longer duration spaceflight on humans," he said. "Roscosmos and the Russian space agency selected 14 investigations. And some of those are joint investigations that Misha (Kornienko) and I will be participating in together."
"As far as the U.S. science is concerned, our 19 investigations are broken down into seven different categories, from functional to behavioral health, visual impairment, metabolic, physical performance, microbial and human factors investigations. ... My excitement is for the science and what we're going to learn on this nearly one-year flight."
But it won't be easy. Even thought the space station is relatively roomy with a habitable volume roughly equivalent to a 747 jumbo jet, staying cooped up for a year will be a challenge. While Kelly said he's not particularly worried about any psychological effects, he said the idea of spending a year in space was not initially appealing.
"At first, I'll be honest with you, I wasn't that interested because six months is a long time in space, and a year is obviously twice as long," he said. "But after thinking about it for a while, I did want to fly in space again."
In the end, he decided that spending a year aloft would not be all that different from a typical six-month station stay, adding "I'm the type of person who likes challenges."
The International Space Station is normally staffed by overlapping three-person crews launched aboard Russian Soyuz ferry craft. Each crew typically stays aloft for five to six months.
The lab's current crew is made up of Wilmore, Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova, launched Sept. 25 aboard the Soyuz TA-14M spacecraft, along with Virts, Anton Shkaplerov and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, launched Nov. 23 aboard the TMA-15M ferry ship.
Wilmore, Samokutyaev and Serova are scheduled to return to Earth March 11, leaving the station in the hands of Virts, Cristoforetti and Shkaplerov. On March 27, Kelly, Kornienko and Soyuz TMA-16M commander Gennady Padalka will blast off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, docking with the station's upper Poisk module that same day.
Virts, Cristoforetti and Shkaplerov will return to Earth May 10. That will clear the way for the launch of Soyuz TMA-17M on May 26 carrying spacecraft commander Oleg Kononenko, Japan's Kimiya Yui and NASA's Kjell Lindgren, who will dock at the forward Rassvet module.
Because Soyuz spacecraft are only certified for six months in orbit, the ferry craft that carries Kelly, Kornienko and Padalka to the outpost must be replaced midway through the year-long mission. A fresh Soyuz, TMA-18M, will take off Sept. 1 carrying spacecraft commander Sergei Volkov, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen and singer Sarah Brightman, the first paying "space tourist" to visit the station since 2009. The arrival of Volkov and company will temporarily boost the lab's crew to nine.
Brightman and Mogensen will remain aboard the station for just 10 days, returning to Earth with Padalka on Sept. 11 aboard the Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft that carried Kelly and his crewmates into orbit. Volkov will remain behind, taking Padalka's place aboard the station and serving as spacecraft commander for the eventual return of Kelly and Kornienko aboard the TMA-18M ferry craft.
Kononenko, Lindgren and Yui are scheduled to depart the station on Nov. 5, leaving the lab in the hands of Kelly, Kornienko and Volkov. Then, on Nov. 20, three fresh crew members -- Yuri Malenchenko, NASA astronaut Tim Kopra and ESA's Timothy Peake-- will take off aboard the Soyuz TMA-19M ferry ship to boost the station's crew back to six.
Finally, on March 3, 2016, Kelly, Kornienko and Volkov will return to Earth, closing out the year-long mission. Assuming the launch and landing dates hold up, mission duration will be 341 days.
"For me personally, this flight is not any different from any of my three previous flights," Kelly said. "My goals have always been no one gets hurt, we don't break anything and we leave as friends. That was the case, I felt, on my first flight, which was only eight days. Seemed like that was a long time. ... Then my next flight was 13 days, then 159, and they're getting longer. I think if I fly again it just goes asymptotic and I never come home!"
The Paris news conference touched on a wide variety of issues, including increased tensions between the United States and Russia in the wake of Russian actions in Crimea and Ukraine and subsequent U.S. sanctions. But Kelly and Kornienko insisted that political discord on Earth had no bearing on space station operations.
"We rely on each other implicitly for our lives," Kelly said. "Any political issues that exist between our countries is something we don't even discuss. We're great friends, we're colleagues, we're professionals, and that's the way it has to be."
Said Kornienko: "I absolutely agree with Scott. There are no borders in space between us. It's a great example of how we can work together."
NASA's Orion Spacecraft Back in Florida After Test Flight
Marcia Dunn – AP
NASA's experimental Orion spacecraft left Florida by rocket and returned by truck.
The capsule arrived back at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday. It rocketed into orbit Dec. 5, traveling 3,600 miles into space on an unmanned test flight that proved to be a great success. NASA plans to use future models to help get astronauts to Mars in coming decades.
Orion parachuted into the Pacific. After coming ashore at San Diego, the spacecraft was hauled by truck across the country.
Engineers will now begin the lengthy process of inspecting the vessel and reviewing all the data collected by sensors. The capsule was struck by micrometeoroids, but that was anticipated.
It will be 2018 before another Orion flies. This one will be reused in a launch abort test.
NASA's Orion capsule back at Kennedy Space Center
James Dean – Florida Today
 
NASA's first space-flown Orion capsule today arrived back at Kennedy Space Center, where it was assembled.
 
The spacecraft completed a 2,700-mile cross-country drive from San Diego that followed its Dec. 5 splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, at the end of a successful first test flight launched hours earlier from Cape Canaveral.
 
Orion is the spacecraft NASA is designing to carry astronauts beyond low Earth orbit again, to the area around the moon and possibly one day Mars.
 
The unmanned Exploration Flight Test-1 mission launched by a Delta IV Heavy rocket sent Orion to a peak altitude of 3,600 miles during a two-orbit, four-and-a-half-hour mission. Orion survived a 20,000-mph reentry through the atmosphere and deployed parachutes in preparation for the splashdown 600 miles southwest of San Diego.
 
"Orion's flight test was a critical step on our journey to send astronauts to explore deep space destinations," said Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a statement. "We stressed Orion to help us evaluate its performance and validate our computer models and ground-based evaluations, and the information we gathered will help us improve Orion's design going forward."
 
NASA has invited media to see Orion Friday morning in its open shipping container, and we'll follow up then with more details on the spacecraft's return and what's next for the program.
Wallops launch pad where Antares rocket exploded should be repaired by next year
By The Associated Press
Despite a massive explosion in October, authorities say a state-owned launch pad at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility should be repaired and ready for testing late next year.
Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket exploded seconds after liftoff from Wallops Island on the Eastern Shore of Virginia on Oct. 28. The rocket was carrying a cargo ship that was bound for the International Space Station.
The Virginia Commercial Spaceflight Authority on Wednesday provided news media outlets a tour of the damage from the explosion. Two lightning towers at the launch pad were knocked down by the blast while the two others suffered damage and will need to be replaced. A water tower next to the launch pad was slightly charred and had exterior lighting damaged, but otherwise withstood the blast. A large crater was created in the sand next to the launch pad from the blast where the rocket came down.
Two nearby buildings scheduled to be removed prior to the explosion were also damaged, but the vast majority of the complex was unscathed.
"This pad has come through in very good shape. It's still some significant repairs, but it's a $120 million pad and the repairs are less than $20 million," said Dale Nash, executive director of the Virginia Commercial Spaceflight Authority.
ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDIATION
NASA says no environmental hazards were discovered in the air following the explosion. The space agency says the water-retention basins at the launch pad have been pumped dry and will be cleaned to prevent future contamination. The impact crater was pumped dry five times to remove what NASA describes as significant levels for perchlorate. Additional pumping will continue, and water samples will be taken each time. The pumped water is being kept in large, enclosed storage tanks and will be taken to an off-site treatment facility. Soil near the crater is also being excavated to remove any residual chemicals, which will also be taken to an off-site disposal facility.
FUTURE LAUNCHES
Orbital Sciences plans to launch its next Antares rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station in 2016. The Virginia Commercial Spaceflight Authority says the launch pad should be able to conduct what's known as a hot-fire test at the launch pad by the end of 2015 in anticipation of the launch.
REPAIR COSTS
The Virginia Commercial Spaceflight Authority has said repairs to the launch pad should not exceed $20 million. Congress has agreed to pick up the tab for those costs. U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., toured the launch pad on Wednesday and said it is of national interest to see the facility repaired as quickly as possible.
"This infrastructure survived remarkably well, given the magnitude of the challenge," Kaine said. "But there's obviously a cost to repair. The missions that are flown here are very necessary. The mission that is being done serving the space station and other missions here definitely have a public component."
Orbital Sciences Orders Russian RD-181 Engines for Antares Rocket
Peter B. de Selding – Space News
Satellite and rocket builder Orbital Sciences Corp. on Dec. 16 confirmed that it has contracted with Russia's Energomash to provide RD-181 engines to power the first stage of Orbital's Antares rocket, replacing the AJ-26 engine, also from Russia, that Orbital suspects was the origin of Antares' Oct. 28 failure.
Dulles, Virginia-based Orbital had withheld public announcement of the engine until Dec. 16 despite widespread reports in Russia of the selection, saying it did not want to show its hand in advance of one or more U.S. rocket-selection competitions.
Orbital announced its choice via Twitter and through an article in Aviation Week and Space Technology.
Khimki, Russia-based Energomash also supplies the RD-180 engine to United Launch Alliance of Denver for U.S. government launches of ULA's Atlas V rocket. The ULA contract with Energomash is handled through RD Amross of Cocoa Beach, Florida, whose contract terms are now under review in the U.S. Congress.
Orbital apparently will contract directly with Energomash. Russia's Izvestia press agency on Dec. 17 quoted an official from the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, as saying the Energomash-Orbital deal is valued at about $1 billion and includes a firm order for 20 engines, plus two options for 20 engines each. [Antares Rocket Explosion in Pictures]
Orbital spokesman Barron Beneski said in a Dec. 17 statement:
"Our order with Energomash can take us through 2020, with firm orders that will allow us to fulfill our CRS commitments for NASA and several more options that can be exercised along the way as needed. Naturally, we are not discussing price."
Beneski said the $1 billion contract value being quoted in Moscow is incorrect.
"If all the options under the contract were exercised, the total value would be significantly less than $1 billion," Beneski added in an email to SpaceNews. "I can't be more precise than that."
Despite the widely assumed choice of a Russian engine and the announcements in Russia, Orbital's choice maintained an element of surprise because of the political context. U.S.-Russian relations have soured since early this year and Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea and continued implication in eastern Ukraine.
The United States and the European Union have slapped multiple sanctions on Russian businesses without touching the ULA-RD Amross-Energomash contract directly. But the U.S. Congress has moved to limit long-term reliance on Russian engines.
Orbital is planning to merge with the aerospace and defense division of ATK or Arlington, Virginia. The merger was delayed as ATK evaluated the consequences to Orbital of the Oct. 28 Antares failure, and is now subject to shareholder votes by both companies scheduled for Jan. 27.
ATK officials said they conducted their own due-diligence review of Orbital's Antares post-failure business prospects, including an assessment of political risk – presumably associated with the Russian engine selection – and concluded that the merger should continue.
In its Twitter statement, Orbital said it would take delivery of the first RD-181 engines in 2015, with a launch scheduled for 2016.
The Izvestia report cited the Roscosmos official as saying the Orbital-Energomash contract excludes launches of defense payloads. Orbital has said that beyond its initial contract with NASA to supply Antares launches of cargo to the international space station, it is looking for commercial and other U.S. government business.
NASA's Incredible, Futuristic, And Totally Real Plan To Establish A Human Colony On Venus
Jessica Orwig – Business Insider
 
NASA has plans to live on Venus. Seriously.
In fact, up in the clouds above its scorching surface, Venus is "probably the most Earth-like environment that's out there," Chris Jones of NASA told Evan Ackerman at IEEE Spectrum.
Forget Mars and its frigid temperatures and thin atmosphere when we can live like gods, afloat in the clouds of Venus.
Jones is part of the Space Mission Analysis Branch of NASA's Systems Analysis and Concepts Directorate at Langley Research Center in Virginia. The research group recently unveiled a detailed plan to eventually set up permanent residence on Venus. The mission is called the High Altitude Venus Operational Concept, or HAVOC. (We reached out to NASA for comment but have not heard back.)
Right now, HAVOC is just an idea, but if fully implemented, it would lead to floating cities on Venus that look like this:
Humans would inhabit the small compartment attached to the belly of the airship.
Venus' cloudy skies are relatively pleasant — especially when compared to the planet's surface, perhaps one of the most inhospitable places you could imagine. Temperatures are hot enough to melt lead, there are more active volcanoes than on any other planet in our solar system, and atmospheric pressures are 90 times denser than Earth's at sea level.
The few landers humankind has set down on the surface of Venus did not last very long before melting and crumbling under the extreme environment. Here's an image of the surface taken by the Soviets' Vanera 13 lander in 1981. It survived 127 minutes.
If humankind were ever to live on Venus, it would almost certainly have to be in the clouds, high above the surface.
At about 30 miles up, the temperature is roughly 160 degrees Fahrenheit, a fraction of the surface temperature, and the atmospheric pressure is comparable to Earth's at sea level — an ideal place to set up a city of helium-filled, solar-powered airships. And Jones and his colleagues have worked out a five-phase plan to make it happen:
  1. HAVOC would begin by dispatching a robot into the Venutial atmosphere to study the environment and make sure there are no surprises.
  2. After that, NASA would send a manned mission to orbit the planet for one month.
  3. If all went well, the crew would then enter the planet's atmosphere and float among the clouds for another month.
  4. Later missions would send a crew to stay in the planet's atmosphere for a year. And if that was successful, then...
  5. We could begin to establish permanent floating cities on Venus.
Pretty cool!
Of course the plan is far simpler than the execution. But the HAVOC team have the details mapped out down to the minute. The key to the mission is successfully deploying the floating airship. To do this, the team would first encase the airship inside a protective shell that would enter the atmosphere at 16,000 miles per hour.
Seven minutes later, when the thick atmosphere has reduced the speed to 1,000 miles per hour, the shell will deploy a parachute, slowing its speed even further. After that, the shell drops away, plummeting to the surface — and the airship emerges from within it.
It's at this point that "things get crazy," Ackerman writes. It's time to unfurl the airship, which has been flattened inside of the case.
If all goes according to plan, the airship will fully inflate at about 30 miles above the surface, and remain there soaking up the sun with the 10,700 square feet of solar panels on its roof. The crew will enter Venus' atmosphere in a separate vehicle that would rendez-vous with the inflated airship.
There's no reason that humans should not also try to visit Mars, but between the two neighboring planets, Venus is an obvious first choice to visit, another member of the HAVOC team, Dale Arney, told IEEE Spectrum. But there are still technologies we need to get ready — like long-duration habitats and carbon dioxide processing — before we'll be able to visit any planet in our solar system.
Venus is usually much closer to Earth than Mars, meaning astronauts could complete a round-trip mission in about 440 days, which includes a month-long stay in the planet's atmosphere. A similar trip to Mars would take at least 500 days, and possibly many more.
"If you did Venus first, you could get a leg up on advancing those technologies and those capabilities ahead of doing a human-scale Mars mission. It's a chance to do a practice run, if you will, of going to Mars," Arney told Ackerman.
Living on Earth's sister planet has other benefits compared to Mars, too:
  • Venus is more similar in mass to Earth, which means the human body could adjust to the gravity on Venus more readily than on Mars.
  • Venus is closer to the sun than Mars, which means it receives 240% more sunlight, which is a lot of energy to feed those solar-powered airships.
  • Although the thick atmosphere on Venus would make it highly unlikely that humans could ever inhabit the surface, it could protect humans from dangerous solar and cosmic radiation. If we were ever to colonize Mars, meanwhile, we would either have to live underground or make sure our homes could block the dangerous levels of radiation that the thin atmosphere lets in.
    •
The most exciting prospect of HAVOC right now is that the technology and materials NASA would need to implement the mission are already available, or nearly so. And the team has already begun tests to proove their concept is not as far-fetched as it first sounds. For example, they have tested Teflon coatings that could be used to protect the solar cells and other parts of the airship from the droplets of sulfuric acid that occupy Venus's atmosphere.
"Given that Venus's upper atmosphere is a fairly hospitable destination, we think it can play a role in humanity's future in space," Arney told Ackerman.
Kepler Spacecraft Finds New 'Super-Earth' 180 Light-Years Away
Dennis Overbye – New York Times
A year and a half after a pointing failure threatened to derail its epochal search for worlds beyond our solar system, NASA's Kepler spacecraft has bagged another planet, astronomers announced on Thursday.
The new planet is 20,000 miles in diameter, about two and a half times the size of Earth, and 12 times as massive, putting it into a category of planets called super-Earths that do not exist in our solar system. It is unlivable, circling a star slightly smaller than the Sun about 180 light-years from here in the constellation Pisces at the roasting distance of only 8.4 million miles, less than a tenth of the distance between us and our star.
Kepler was designed to stare at a patch of stars for four years and watch for blinks caused by planets passing in front of them. Early in 2013, however, one of the reaction wheels that keep the telescope pointed broke down. Engineers figured out a way to compensate using the pressure of sunlight on Kepler's solar panels to stabilize the spacecraft for smaller periods of time.
During a nine-day test run in February with the telescope, a team led by Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected a planet passing in front of a star known as HIP 116454. Follow-up observations with ground-based telescopes and the Canadian MOST satellite confirmed the presence of a planet, which astronomers said was probably a water world or a "mini-Neptune," with a small core and a billowing gaseous atmosphere.
NASA Satellite Sees Holiday Lights Shine Bright from Space
CBS
NASA scientists have used satellite images to discover an increase of brighter nighttime lights in major cities during Christmas and New Year's in the U.S.
Data from the NOAA/NASA satellite showed how patterns in nighttime light change during major holidays around the world.
Nighttime lights shine 20 to 50 percent brighter during Christmas and New Year's when compared to light output during the rest of the year.
The lights started getting brighter on Black Friday and continued to New Year's Day in the U.S., according to data from the NOAA/NASA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite.
In some Middle Eastern cities, nighttime lights shine more than 50 percent brighter during Ramadan, compared to the rest of the year.
The NASA team also examined lighting patterns across 30 major towns in Puerto Rico, known for its vibrant nocturnal celebrations and for having one of the longest Christmas holiday periods.
The new analysis of holiday lights uses an advanced algorithm, developed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, that filters out moonlight, clouds and airborne particles in order to isolate city lights.
The data from this algorithm provided high-quality satellite information on light output across the world, allowing scientists to track when – and how brightly – people illuminate the night.
Martian Rover Makes Curious Methane Discovery
The Curiosity space rover has found methane on Mars. But where did the methane come from? And where is it going?
Andrew Soergel - US News & World Report
 
A burst of methane gas and a dash of carbon compounds in Martian rock samples are leading some scientists to believe Mars may have once – or may still – hold the ingredients necessary for life.
 
NASA announced in September 2013 that its Curiosity rover had found no signs of methane gas on the red planet, according to The New York Times. But scientists this week reported the Martian rover had found a spurt of methane gas detectable for at least two months.
 
Methane is a relatively simple organic compound that has a short shelf life, according to the Times. Scientists believe the Martian atmosphere would naturally break up a compound like methane within a few hundred years, so methane found today was likely produced in the not-so-distant past.
 
"Right now, it's too much of a single-point measurement for us really to jump to any conclusions," said Paul Mahaffy, chief of NASA's Atmospheric Experiments Laboratory, according to Space.com. "Maybe there are microbes on Mars cranking out methane, but we sure can't say that with any certainty. It's just speculation at this point."
 
The existence of Martian methanogens – microbes that release methane as waste – is one possible explanation for the methane discovery, according to the Times. Another possibility is serpentinization, a geologic process involving both heat and water.
 
Scientists announced Tuesday that Curiosity had drilled into Martian rock and found an ancient entrapment of water. Scientists are still unraveling the mystery of how Mars lost its surface water, but Tuesday's announcement reaffirms that water likely existed on the planet's surface at one point.
 
Recordable Martian methane levels have jumped up and down over the last decade, adding complexity to the mystery of what's creating the gas and why it's disappearing relatively quickly. Scientists reported seeing "plumes" of methane in the Martian atmosphere in 2003, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
 
Those plumes appeared to have vanished two years later, according to the Times.
Since Curiosity's arrival on the red planet in 2012, its methane readings have jumped on four separate occasions to almost 10 times the faint wisps of methane it had detected previously. Those readings then dropped back to normal soon afterward, according to the NASA and CNN.
 
"This temporary increase in methane – sharply up and then back down – tells us there must be some relatively localized source," said Sushil Atreya, a member of the Curiosity rover team, according to NASA. "There are many possible sources, biological or non-biological, such as interaction of water and rock."
 
NASA scientists on Tuesday also announced the discovery of organic material found in Martian rock samples. Though the carbon-based organics could have been carried to Mars by a meteorite, the discovery gives credence to the theory that Mars at one point possessed the ingredients necessary for life, according to the Times.
 
"The first confirmation of organic carbon in a rock on Mars holds much promise," said Roger Summons, a Curiosity participating scientist from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to NASA. "Organics are important because they can tell us about the chemical pathways by which they were formed and preserved."
The Keeper Of The Maps Of Mars
Lost on the Red Planet? Ask Dr. Fred Calef III
Shannon Stirone - Popular Science
Dr. Fred Calef's official title is Geospatial Information Scientist for the Curiosity Rover, but at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory they call him the Keeper of the Maps. Dr. Calef's job isn't just to make maps of Mars, but to bring together all of the data that can range from types of rocks, slope angles and elevation changes, into one intelligible record for the team at the Mars Science Laboratory.
Before Mars, Calef worked for a transportation agency in Massachusetts and for small local governments mapping watersheds, then got a Ph.D. in geology. Now, after years of working on the Curiosity mission, Calef is gearing up for the launch of Insight in 2016, NASA's next mission to Mars. He has already begun doing landing-site analysis for Insight.
Dr. Calef took some time out of his 831st Martian sol to talk to us about his job and where he plans to set up camp on Mars.
Popular Science: How did you get the name "the Keeper of the Maps"?
Dr. Calef: That name was given to me by the principal scientist on the Curiosity mission, Dr. John Grotzinger, and I use the title any chance that I get.
 
How does one become the keeper of the maps?
Right place, right time, right skillset. I have my PhD in geology, and one of the tools I learned was mapmaking, specifically digital mapmaking. Eventually I applied at JPL to do landing site analysis for the Curiosity rover. A few months before the mission was scheduled to land, I was asked to join the team as the 'Keeper of the Maps'.
 
We can figure out: Where do we want to go to do the science?
How do you create a map of another planet?
We start out just the same way you would make a map on Earth; we start by making a base map, specifically with photos from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The MRO has a camera on it called HIRISE, the High-Resolution Science Experiment. HIRISE takes pictures at roughly 25 centimeters square, about the size of a dinner plate. So if you put a dinner plate on Mars, it could take a picture of it, or at least it would show up as a bright dot. When we take pictures of the ground we can take them at different angles, and when we do we can create an elevation model. With that information we can see the shape of craters and rocky areas and figure out where it's safe to land, where it's safe to drive the rover and, just as important, where do we want to go to do the science?
 
How about images from Curiosity?
Every time the rover drives we take images all around us, 360 degrees, and then we take those images and match it up to the HIRISE base map and that helps identify where the rover is located. From there we can see the rocks that are in front of us and can decide to take a color picture of them, shoot them with the CHEMCAM laser to see what those rocks are made of, or take out the rover arm to investigate further.
 
How do you come up with the names for the locations on Mars. Have you named any?
It's mostly formal, but we have a little bit of leeway to pick from interesting rock formations on Earth. MSL (Mars Science Laboratory) science team members who've mapped the geology in a specific landing site area could pick a name related to their favorite rock formation; for example, one region is named Kimberly after Kimberly, Australia. One of my rocks I've given a name is Coeymans, which is a limestone formation near Albany, New York. It's a place I visited a lot with my family and while I was getting my PhD. It's also really interesting geologically.
 
Would you say that know more about the terrain of Mars than Earth?
The joke I tell my friends whenever I get lost trying to get somewhere to meet them is: "Ask me where to go on Mars, fine; ask me on Earth, good luck!" It's probably the case in some areas that, yeah, I know Mars a lot better than I do Earth, for better or for worse. That's what GPS is made for.
 
What is it like to know more about another planet than your own?
It's strange because when I'm here at JPL, I'm living in this Mars world. The viewpoint of the rover is like you're standing on the surface and so I'm used to seeing that everyday, and I forget that other people don't know what that's like. It becomes casual, but I know it's not.
 
If we ever start a colony on Mars, where is the sweet spot to live in your opinion?
Oh boy, that's tough. This is where the engineer kicks in. I'd have to ask: what resources do we have there? What's interesting? I do like Gale Crater, it has some benefits. It has some atmosphere over it, which means you don't get as much radiation. It doesn't have any water-ice though which is a bummer, but assuming you can solve that problem there are a lot of interesting things, geologically speaking. Gale Crater is probably my favorite because I already live there so to speak. That's my pick.
 
Gale Crater is probably my favorite.
Has mapping Mars helped us learn more about Earth?
Earth is about 4 billion years old and Mars is about 4 billion years old. On Earth we can only see back about 3 billion years, and then when we talk about anything older than that, we're taking about microscopic zircon crystals which you can barely hold with a pair of tweezers, so we don't really know what the old Earth looked like. However, on Mars, a big part of its early development is preserved. If you want to know what ancient Earth looked like, look at Mars, because it's probably pretty similar. When you combine what Mars was in the past with what Earth became you kind of get the full picture of planet development. So studying Mars can really provide insight into how Earth came to be the way it is.
 
What most surprised you about the surface of Mars?
I think that there was a lot more water than we thought. We saw outcrops from orbit and thought, oh that was probably a lava flow and now when the rover gets close up, we see that it was probably laid down by water. It's making us go back and look at everything else on Mars and ask: do we really understand how those rocks got there? It's been a huge shift in how we think about Mars. We used to look at images and say maybe there was a little water here, a little water there, but now it's maybe there was just water everywhere; definitely a lot more than we thought.
 
With the help of orbiters like the MRO and rovers like Curiosity, you have plotted a large portion of Mars already. How much more do you have left before you consider the planet completely mapped?
We have imaging of the entire planet, some better, some worse, but in terms of maps and rock formations, I don't know if we'll ever have it mapped completely with enough detail. We've got a long way to go, and plenty more to explore, which is a good thing.
 
Satellite maps global carbon-dioxide levels
NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 overcomes design flaw discovered after launch.
Richard Monastersky - Nature
       
NASA's carbon-monitoring satellite has passed its post-launch checks and is beaming high-quality data back to Earth. But getting to this point required some last-minute adjustments: after the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) launched in July, the agency had to overcome a key design problem with the spacecraft that had gone unnoticed in a decade of planning.
 
News of the satellite's status came on 18 December briefing at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, California, where OCO-2 scientists released the first images from the probe. "The results and the promise of this mission are quite amazing," said Annmarie Eldering, deputy project scientist for OCO-2 at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
 
The data from OCO-2 — which maps the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as it circles the globe — is a long time coming. Scientists and engineers on the project have ridden an emotional roller coaster: in 2009, a rocket failure doomed the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, their first attempt at a carbon-mapping probe.
 
Its replacement, OCO-2, launched successfully. But after JPL turned on the main instrument — a trio of spectrometers that measures sunlight light reflecting off Earth's surface — the team discovered a problem in OCO-2's data. They eventually determined that it was caused by a design flaw that reduced the amount of light entering the instrument during one mode of operation.
 
The problem dated to 2004 and had never been caught in testing, says JPL's David Crisp, the science team leader of the OCO-2 mission and the principal investigator of OCO. "It was a stupid mistake. Embarrassing to the instrument designer and to me," he says.
 
The team quickly developed a fix that involved tilting the spacecraft by 30 degrees to reorient light entering the instrument. Within 3 weeks they had tested and validated the solution, Crisp says, and OCO-2 is now operating as planned.
Spying on CO2
OCO-2 aims to measure atmospheric CO2 levels with enough precision to help pin down how human activities and natural systems are emitting and absorbing the greenhouse gas. It does so at far greater resolution than similar probes, such as Japan's Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT), which launched in 2009.
The OCO-2 team is still evaluating its initial data and plans to release its first batch of CO2 measurements in March. But this week, the researchers distributed images showing the first few months of measurements.
The first global image of OCO-2 data reveals peak carbon dioxide values over northern Australia, southern Africa and eastern Brazil. The OCO-2 team suggests that the high concentrations over Africa come from burning of savannas and forests. Elevated concentrations of carbon dioxide over North America, Europe and China may be associated with human activities, such as burning of fossil fuels in power plants.
These and other human sources are pouring 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, which has driven concentrations of the greenhouse gas higher than they have been in millions of years. Only half of that emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere; the rest is absorbed by the oceans and vegetation on land. Researchers are keen to determine where the carbon dioxide is going and whether natural systems are losing their capacity to absorb some of that pollution.
There are high hopes that information gleaned from the new mission can help answer some of those questions. For carbon dioxide measurements, "OCO-2 is the sharpest eyes in the sky," says Inez Fung, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Berkeley
California drought weakens, forecasters have 'cautious optimism' for future
Joseph Serna – Los Angeles Times
For the first time in five months, a majority of California is no longer considered to be in an exceptional drought, the most severe level possible under federal
About 32% of California, however – most of it in the Central Valley – remains under the exceptional drought category. Last week the total was at more than 55%.
"The wet weather finally allowed ample runoff (while producing stream and river flooding) that raised major reservoir levels…in most of northern and central California," the report said.
 
"'Cautious optimism, but still a long way to go' would be the very short summary for this week's California drought picture," the report said.
The good news is tempered by the fact that the entire state remains in some degree of drought and more than three-quarters of it, about 78%, is in "extreme" drought, the second-highest category available, the report said.
California must receive three seasons of above-average rainfall to get back to a "manageable situation," said Jay Famiglietti, senior water cycle scientist of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.
"We need 11 trillion just to get back to our normal, dry conditions," he told The Times on Tuesday.
But with the rainy winter season just beginning, the storms have given California a "foothold for drought recovery" and left open the chance to gradually chip away at three years worth of drought, the report stated.
The third storm of the week is predicted to settle over Southern California on Friday.
JWST facing increased schedule risk with significant work remaining
Tomasz Nowakowski – Spaceflight Insider
 
With just under 4 years until its planned launch in October 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) project reports it remains on schedule and budget. However, technical challenges with JWST elements and major subsystems, have diminished the project's overall schedule reserve and increased risk, says a new report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
 
"During the past year, delays have occurred on every element and major subsystem schedule—especially with the cryocooler—leaving all at risk of negatively impacting the overall project schedule reserve if further delays occur," GAO notices. JWST is one of NASA's most complex and expensive projects, at an anticipated cost of $8.8 billion. With significant integration and testing planned until the launch date, the JWST project will need to address many challenges before NASA can conduct the science the telescope is intended to produce.
 
The report indicates that the project has begun integrating and testing only two of the five elements and major subsystems. As such, maintaining as much schedule reserve as possible to navigate through almost 4 more years of integration and testing that remains, where prior work has shown problems are commonly found and schedules tend to slip, is critical. While the project has been able to reorganize work when necessary to mitigate schedule slips, this flexibility will diminish going forward. JWST is also facing limited short-term cost reserves to mitigate additional project schedule threats.
"The JWST project and prime contractor's cost risk analyses used to validate the JWST budget are outdated and do not account for many new risks identified since 2011. GAO best practices for cost estimating call for regularly updating cost risk analyses to validate that reserves are sufficient to account for new risks," the report reads. NASA officials said they conduct sufficient analysis to monitor the health of the budget.
GAO points out that these efforts do not incorporate potential impacts of risks identified since 2011 into estimates. "While the project has subsequently agreed to conduct a cost risk analysis of the contract, it is important that they follow best practices, for example, by regularly updating that analysis. Doing so would provide the project with reliable information to gauge whether the contractor is at risk of future cost overruns."
The project continues to face major technical challenges building the cryocooler that have significantly delayed delivery of key components, have made it the driver of the project's overall schedule or the project's critical path, and required the use of a disproportionate amount of project cost reserves. Since the 2011 replan, the cryocooler development has experienced over 150 percent cost growth. Consequently, it was one of the largest users of project cost reserves in fiscal year 2014 and is contributing to the project's limited cost reserve status for fiscal year 2015.
All three cryocooler components (the cold head assembly, the compressor assembly, and the electronics assembly) fell significantly behind the delivery dates established during the cryocooler's April 2013 schedule replan.
GAO has made a number of prior recommendations to NASA, including in December 2012 that the project perform an updated joint cost and schedule risk analysis to improve cost estimates. NASA initially concurred with this recommendation, but it later indicated that the tracking of information it already had in place was sufficient and ultimately decided not to conduct another joint cost and schedule risk analysis.
GAO is the audit, evaluation, and investigative arm of Congress. It exists to support Congress in meeting its constitutional responsibilities and to help improve the performance and accountability of the federal government.
JWST will be a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror, the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.
JWST is an international collaboration between NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA ), and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA ). The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is managing the development effort. The main industrial partner is Northrop Grumman; the Space Telescope Science Institute will operate JWST after launch.
Science Graphic of the Week: Scientists Map Seaside Terrain at Titan's North Pole
Adam Mann – Wired
Saturn's moon Titan is a wet world, the only other place in the solar system that we know has flowing liquid on its surface. The colorful geomorphic map (above left) combines radar and topographic data of Titan's north pole to show different features around a large sea called Ligeia Mare. The map, presented Dec. 15 here at the American Geophysical Union meeting, defines four different major regions according to colors: orange, dark green, and yellow for plains, pale green for small depressions, blue for seas, and pink for ridge and valley networks. Radar imagery of the same area is seen on the right.
Titan is a cold place, with surface temperatures averaging -300 degrees Fahrenheit. Its lakes and rivers and seas carry not water, which would be frozen hard as a rock on the surface, but liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. Most of this liquid pools at the moon's north pole, where enormous seas known as mare dominate the landscape. In contrast, the south pole is a relatively dry place, with a few small lakes and many giant basins, likely the remnants of ancient Titanean seas. Scientists think that long term cycles analogous to Earth's Milankovitch cycles—where changes in our planet's axial tilt have caused glaciers to advance and retreat—move large amounts of liquid from pole to pole roughly every 50,000 years.
Geologists like to know the features on a planet's surface because it tells them something about its history and composition. Both poles show highland regions cut through with river channels that drain into wide basins. If you were standing at Titan's poles, the view might look something like the U.S. Southwest, with rivers winding around steep-sided mesas and vast plains. At the north pole, there is evidence that catastrophic floods occurred when lakes broke their shorelines and spilled out into the plains. In the drier south pole, mountain ranges are more prevalent as well as long valley networks.
The data for this map comes from NASA's Cassini mission, which has been flying around the ringed giant and its moons since 2004. During close flybys, Cassini shoots Titan with radar and analyzes the returning beams to figure out surface features. But radar data can't tell researchers what the different terrains of Titan are made of. Water ice is likely to be the bulk of the material, which gets broken down into smaller particles that are the equivalent of earthly gravel and sand. But because scientists don't know exactly how such materials erode and evaporate, much of Titan's geologic history remains a mystery. Perhaps one day NASA will send a mission to the icy moon that can sample its surface and help identify its exact composition.
 
 
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