The U.S. soybean crop is suffering nearly $2 billion in damage a year due to rising surface ozone concentrations harming plants and reducing the crop's yield potential, a NASA-led study has concluded.

The study, presented at the American Geophysical Union Joint Assembly meeting, May 24 in Toronto, is based on five years of soybean yields, surface ozone, and satellite measurements of tropospheric ozone levels in Indiana, Illinois and Iowa. It revealed summertime ozone concentrations consistently exceeded threshold levels at which crops are negatively affected. The states, three of the biggest soybean producers in the U.S., account for a large chunk of the country's $27 billion annual soybean crop. The study estimates damage to the soybean crop – by a yield reduction of approximately 10 percent – of at least several hundred million in some years in those states alone, and possibly more than $2 billion nationwide.

Ozone, depending on where it resides, can protect or harm life on Earth. In the stratosphere (6 to 25 miles, or 10 to 40 km above the surface), it shields Earth's surface from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. Closer to Earth in the troposphere (surface to 6 miles, or 10 km), ozone forms from reactions between sunlight and manmade emissions and is a harmful pollutant, causing damage to lung tissue and plants.

The severe heat that descends on the farm country of the Midwest each summer has combined with manmade emissions to create increasingly higher levels of surface ozone over the past several decades. As temperature and the likelihood of stagnant summertime air masses increase, chemical reactions involving nitrogen oxide, hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide in the air – often the emissions from fossil-fuel burning – create widespread smog and its most prevalent component, surface ozone.

At the ground level, too much ozone causes respiratory problems in humans. Research attributes as many as 4,000 deaths per year in the U.S. to elevated ozone levels in the summer. Ozone similarly affects plants. The compound enters plants through pore-like openings in their leaves and then reacts with surfaces inside the plant to cause oxidizing damage through tissue destruction. The result is depressed photosynthesis, stunted growth and, for sensitive crops such as soybeans, reduced yield.

Climate change scenarios present numerous global problems for agriculture in this century, with the probability of more severe and extended droughts. But there's also the strong likelihood that as cars, factories and power plants both here and abroad continue to change the fundamental chemistry of the air, the altered atmosphere will negatively impact the biological processes of important crops.

"In the 19th and early 20th century, background surface ozone concentrations were relatively low so that an increase of 25 percent, (5 to 10 parts per billion), didn't ffect living organisms," said Jack Fishman, a research scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center. "But now, we crossed the line where you can expect to see modest increases in surface ozone result in crop growth being stunted."

Since the early twentieth century, surface ozone levels in rural areas in the Midwest have doubled, Fishman said. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that surface ozone concentrations will rise another 25 percent by 2050. In the southern region of the three states studied, peak daytime concentrations often surpassed 60 parts per billion. And so the yields in the southern region definitively suffered. In the northern region of the area studied, averaged concentrations were nearly 20 percent lower, and the impact of ozone was less.

"Background conditions are rising. Precursor emissions are rising," said Elizabeth Ainsworth, a professor of crop biology at the University of Illinois. "This is likely to get worse in the future and impact a greater area of the Midwest."

The methodology used in this study provided a unique, broad-scale look at the impact of ozone on crops. The question of impact on yield has, until now, largely been addressed by closed, chamber studies and on a larger scale at open-air facilities like the one at the University of Illinois, called SoyFACE (Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment). This study proved that space-borne satellite measurements of tropospheric ozone – derived from NASA's Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) prior to 2005, and from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) since 2005– have provided useful indicators of surface ozone concentration over a far broader area than ground-based monitors. The study used both satellite and surface observations of ozone, historic yield data and a sophisticated statistical model that also included factors such as ozone, temperature and soil moisture. The multiple linear regression analyses isolate the impact of those factors in order to outline ozone effect on crop productivity. The results compared favorably to the SoyFACE experiments and other experiments where ozone was artificially increased under controlled conditions.

Soybean yields – like that of most major crops – have risen dramatically over the last half-century due to advances in crop science and fertilization. This study suggests surface ozone concentrations in these key soybean-growing states represent a threat to the crop's ability to, at the least, sustain such yield increases.

Jack Creilson, a former NASA Langley employee now at the Climate System Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, said the advantage of the satellite-derived method is that it can be used worldwide. Poorer countries have little monitoring capability and even in the U.S., croplands are so vast that a land-based network of ozone sensors would be extremely expensive to construct and maintain.

"You have these farming locations that have no way of measuring surface ozone," Creilson said. "What we had to do was come up with a way of showing them there's a benefit of having the information."

The first benefit of having the information, Ainsworth said, is simply pointing out the problem. Soybeans – along with wheat and rice – are among the more sensitive crops to ozone. Observing ozone levels and extrapolating their yield impact could eventually play in role in the development of new, more tolerant cultivars, Ainsworth said.

Ainsworth pointed out that while the problem will likely get worse, its effects are being felt today.

"Yields across the country are lower than they otherwise would be," she said. "We are losing a very significant chunk of the potential yield."

Related Links:

> OMI: Ozone Monitoring Instrument
> TOMS: Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer
> SoyFACE: Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment

NASA researchers are using satellite data to deliver a kind of space-based humanitarian assistance. They are cultivating the most accurate estimates of soil moisture – the main determinant of crop yield changes – and improving global forecasts of how well food will grow at a time when the world is confronting shortages.

During a presentation this week at the the Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union in Toronto, NASA scientist John Bolten described a new modeling product that uses data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) sensor on NASA's Aqua satellite to improve the accuracy of West African soil moisture. The group produced assessments of current soil moisture conditions, or "nowcasts," and improved estimates by 5 percent over previous methods. Though seemingly small and incremental, the increase can make a big difference in the precision of crop forecasts, Bolten said.

The modeling innovation comes at a time when crop analysts at agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are working to meet the food shortage problem head on. They combine soil moisture estimates with weather trends to produce up-to-date forecasts of crop harvests. Those estimates help regional and national officials prepare for and prevent food crises.

“The USDA's estimates of global crop yields are an objective, timely benchmark of food availability and help drive international commodity markets,” said Bolten, a physical scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “But crop estimates are only as good as the observations available to drive the models."

Crop analysts must estimate root-zone soil moisture, the amount of water beneath the surface available for plants to absorb. But estimating the amount of water in soil has posed challenges. Ground-level sensors for rainfall and temperature -- the two key elements for estimating soil moisture – are often sparsely located in the developing nations that need them the most. Hard-to-reach terrain like mountains or desert, lack of local cooperation as well as high maintenance costs, can lead to sensors more than 500 miles apart.

Under a new NASA-USDA collaboration known as the Global Agriculture Monitoring Project, Bolten and colleagues from the USDA's Agricultural Research Service are using AMSR-E to fill the data gaps with daily soil moisture “snapshots.” Since its launch in 2002, the instrument has “seen” through clouds, and light vegetation like crops and grasses to detect the amount of soil moisture beneath Earth's surface.

AMSR-E uses varying frequencies to detect the amount of emitted electromagnetic radiation from the Earth's surface. Within the microwave spectrum, this radiation is closely related to the amount of water that is in the soil, allowing researchers to remotely sense the amount of water in the soil across any geographic landscape.

Following a test of their system over the United States, Bolten's team tracked West African rainfall, temperature, and model assessments of soil moisture with and without the AMSR-E satellite sensor observations. They used West Africa as a model because the landscape provides varying cover, from desert and semi-arid landscape in the north to grasslands, lush forests, and crop land to the south. Rainfall in the region is highly variable yet sparsely monitored by ground-based sensors. They also targeted West Africa to demonstrate the possibility for improving the assessment of drought-caused food shortages on the region's dense population.

“Many developing countries are relying on limited and highly variable water resources," said Bolten. "And typically those same regions don't have adequate ground station data or crop-estimating agencies capable of making reliable production forecasts.”

By definition, the severity of agricultural drought is determined by root-zone soil water content. So Bolten's satellite-driven boost to root-zone soil moisture prediction also directly improves drought monitoring. And Bolten says results from AMSR-E are just a precursor to dramatic new improvements in data and prediction accuracy researchers expect from the Soil Moisture Active and Passive satellite, slated to launch in 2013.

Food reserves are at their lowest level in 30 years, according to the United Nations World Food Program, putting the world's 1 billion poorest people most at risk. Prices for wheat, rice, and corn have more than doubled in the last 24 months, hitting countries like Haiti, Bangladesh, and Burkina Faso the hardest. And the U.S. is not unaffected -- drought in 2008 led to an estimated $1.1 billion in crop losses in Texas alone.

“This advance is making it possible for us to do our job in a more precise way,” said Curt Reynolds, a crop analyst for the USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service in Washington. “We plan to make NASA's soil moisture information available to commodity markets, traders, agricultural producers, and policymakers through our Crop Explorer Web site.”

Related Links:

> See USDA Crop Explorer on the Web
> See USDA World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates reports on the Web
> NASA Data Show Some African Drought Linked to Warmer Indian Ocean
> NASA Researchers Find Satellite Data Can Warn of Famine

Space shuttle Atlantis and its crew will stay in space another day after bad weather prevented them from landing Saturday at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA Flight Director Norm Knight and the entry team will evaluate weather conditions at Kennedy before permitting the shuttle to land. If the weather is not acceptable for a return to Kennedy, the team will look to land at the secondary landing site, Edwards Air Force Base in California. White Sands Space Harbor is not expected to be activated tomorrow. For recorded updated information about landing, call 321-867-2525.

If the landing is diverted to Edwards, reporters should call the public affairs office at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards at 661-276-3449. Dryden has limited facilities available for use by previously accredited journalists.

The landing times below are approximate and subject to change. All times are Eastern.

Sunday Landing Opportunities
10:11 a.m. Orbit 196 landing at Kennedy (deorbit burn at 8:58 a.m.)
11:40 a.m. Orbit 197 landing at Edwards (deorbit burn at 10:25 a.m.)
11:49 a.m. Orbit 197 landing at Kennedy (deorbit burn at 10:31 a.m.)
1:19 p.m. Orbit 198 landing at Edwards (deorbit burn at 12:08 p.m.)

The NASA News Twitter feed is updated throughout the shuttle mission and landing. To access the NASA News feed and other agency Twitter feeds, visit:

For NASA TV downlink information, schedules and links to streaming video, visit:

For the latest information about the STS-125 mission and accomplishments, visit:

For information about the Hubble Space Telescope, visit:

Space shuttle Atlantis and its crew landed at 8:39 a.m. PDT Sunday at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., completing the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Atlantis' astronauts conducted five successful spacewalks during their STS-125 flight to enhance and extend the life of the orbiting observatory.

"This mission highlights what the challenges of spaceflight can bring out in human beings," said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This mission required the absolute best from the shuttle team, the Hubble science and repair teams, and the crew. The results are a tribute to the entire team and the years of preparation."

Atlantis' nearly 13-day mission of almost 5.3 million miles rejuvenated Hubble with state-of-the-art science instruments designed to improve the telescope's discovery capabilities by as much as 70 times, while extending its lifetime through at least 2014.

"This is not the end of the story but the beginning of another chapter of discovery by Hubble," said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for Science at NASA Headquarters. "Hubble will be more powerful than ever, continue to surprise, enlighten, and inspire us all and pave the way for the next generation of observatories."

Scott Altman commanded the shuttle flight and was joined by Pilot Gregory C. Johnson and Mission Specialists Megan McArthur, John Grunsfeld, Mike Massimino, Andrew Feustel and Michael Good. McArthur served as the flight engineer and lead for robotic arm operations, while the remaining mission specialists paired up for challenging spacewalks on Hubble.

Weather concerns prevented the crew from returning to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the primary end-of-mission landing site. In seven to 10 days, Atlantis will be transported approximately 2,500 miles from California to Florida on the back of a modified 747 jumbo jet. Once at Kennedy, the shuttle will be separated from the aircraft to begin processing for its next flight, targeted for November 2009.

The STS-125 mission was the 126th shuttle flight, the 30th for Atlantis and the second of five planned for 2009. Hubble was delivered to space on April 24, 1990, on the STS-31 mission. Atlantis' landing at Edwards was the 53rd shuttle landing to occur at the desert air base.

Hubble has enabled a number of ground-breaking discoveries during its time in orbit. They include determining the age of the universe to be 13.7 billion years; finding that virtually all major galaxies have black holes at their center; discovering that the process of planetary formation is relatively common; detecting the first-ever organic molecule in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star; and providing evidence the expansion of the universe is accelerating because of an unknown force that makes up approximately 72 percent of the matter-energy content in the universe.

With Atlantis and its crew safely home, the focus will shift to the launch of STS-127, targeted for June 13. Endeavour's 16-day flight will deliver a new station crew member and complete construction of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo laboratory. Astronauts will attach a platform to the outside of the Japanese module that will serve as a type of "back porch" for experiments that require direct exposure to space.

For information about NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, visit:

For more about the STS-125 mission and the upcoming STS-127 flight, visit:

NASA's return to the moon will get a boost in June with the launch of two satellites that will return a wealth of data about Earth's nearest neighbor. On Thursday, the agency outlined the upcoming missions of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, and the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS. The spacecraft will launch together June 17 aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

Using a suite of seven instruments, LRO will help identify safe landing sites for future human explorers, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment and test new technology. LCROSS will seek a definitive answer about the presence of water ice at the lunar poles. LCROSS will use the spent second stage Atlas Centaur rocket in an unprecedented way that will culminate with two spectacular impacts on the moon's surface.

"These two missions will provide exciting new information about the moon, our nearest neighbor," said Doug Cooke, associate administrator of NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington. "Imaging will show dramatic landscapes and areas of interest down to one-meter resolution. The data also will provide information about potential new uses of the moon. These teams have done a tremendous job designing and building these two spacecraft."

LRO's instruments will help scientists compile high resolution, three-dimensional maps of the lunar surface and also survey it in the far ultraviolet spectrum. The satellite's instruments will help explain how the lunar radiation environment may affect humans and measure radiation absorption with a plastic that is like human tissue.

LRO's instruments also will allow scientists to explore the moon's deepest craters, look beneath its surface for clues to the location of water ice, and identify and explore both permanently lit and permanently shadowed regions. High resolution imagery from its camera will help identify landing sites and characterize the moon's topography and composition. A miniaturized radar will image the poles and test the system's communications capabilities.

"LRO is an amazingly sophisticated spacecraft," said Craig Tooley, LRO project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Its suite of instruments will work in concert to send us data in areas where we've been hungry for information for years."

While most Centaurs complete their work after boosting payloads out of Earth's orbit, the LCROSS Centaur will journey with the spacecraft for four months and be guided to an impact in a permanently shadowed crater at one of the moon's poles. The resulting debris plume is expected to rise more than six miles. It presents a dynamic observation target for LCROSS as well as a network of ground-based telescopes, LRO, and possibly the Hubble Space Telescope. Observers will search for evidence of water ice by examining the plume in direct sunlight. LCROSS also will increase knowledge of the mineralogical makeup of some of the remote polar craters that sunlight never reaches. The satellite represents a new generation of fast development, cost capped missions that use flight proven hardware and off the shelf software to achieve focused mission goals.

"We look forward to engaging a wide cross section of the public in LCROSS' spectacular arrival at the moon and search for water ice," said LCROSS Project Manager Dan Andrews of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. "It's possible we'll learn the answer to what is increasingly one of planetary science's most intriguing questions."

LRO and LCROSS are the first missions launched by the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate. Their data will be used to advance goals of future human exploration of the solar system. LRO will spend at least one year in low polar orbit around the moon, collecting detailed information for exploration purposes before being transferred to NASA's Science Mission Directorate to continue collecting additional scientific data.

Goddard manages the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Ames manages the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite. LRO is a NASA mission with international participation from the Institute for Space Research in Moscow. Russia provides the neutron detector aboard the spacecraft. Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, Calif., built the LCROSS spacecraft.

For more information about LRO, visit:


For more information about LCROSS, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/lcross

Unfurling in majestic patriotic colors, a successful cluster test of the Ares I rocket's three, 1-ton main parachutes (Windows, streaming) was conducted May 20 by NASA and industry engineers at the U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground located near Yuma, Ariz. The main parachute is designed to slow the rapid descent of the spent first-stage motor and permit its recovery for use on future flights.

The Ares I, the first launch vehicle being designed for NASA's Constellation Program, will launch explorers to the International Space Station, the moon and beyond in coming decades. The main parachutes -- the largest rocket parachute ever manufactured -- measure 150 feet in diameter and weigh 2,000 pounds each. They serve as the central element of the rocket's deceleration system, which includes a pilot parachute, a drogue parachute and the main parachutes. Deployed in a cluster, the main parachutes open at the same time, providing the drag necessary to slow the descent of the huge solid rocket motor for a soft landing in the ocean.

"The successful main chute cluster test today confirms the development and design changes we have implemented for the Ares I first stage recovery system," said Ron King, Ares I first stage deceleration subsystem manager for the Ares Projects at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "Thanks to our great collaborative team the test went as anticipated and all of our design objectives were met."

Engineers from the Marshall Center managed the team that conducted this first cluster test with the newly designed parachutes. This was the eighth in an ongoing series of flight tests supporting development of the Ares I parachute recovery system. Researchers dropped the 41,500-pound load from a U.S. Air Force C-17 aircraft flying at an altitude of 10,000 feet. The parachutes and all test hardware functioned properly and landed safely.

As the test series progresses, engineers perform three classifications of testing: development, design load and overload. Each level of testing is designed to fully test the performance of the new parachute design with different size payloads and under varying conditions. The next test in the cycle -- scheduled for fall 2009 -- will involve the first design limit load test of a single main parachute.

The recovery system currently under development uses parachutes similar to those used for the four-segment space shuttle boosters, but they have been redesigned to accommodate new requirements of the Ares I first stage. The Ares I will have a five-segment solid rocket booster that will fly faster and fall from a higher altitude than the shuttle boosters.

Situated in the southwestern Arizona, the Army proving ground -- the site of more than 36,000 annual parachute drops -- is in the heart of the great Sonoran Desert. Located near the Arizona-California state lines and adjacent to the Colorado River, it’s approximately 24 miles north of the city of Yuma.

ATK Space Systems near Promontory, Utah, is the prime contractor for the first stage booster. ATK's subcontractor, United Space Alliance of Houston, is responsible for design, development and testing of the parachutes at its facilities at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla.

NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston manages the Constellation Program, which includes the Ares I rocket, the Ares V heavy-lift launch vehicle, the Orion crew spacecraft, and the Altair lunar lander. The Marshall Center manages the Ares Projects. The U.S. Army's Yuma Proving Ground provides the test range, support facilities and equipment to NASA for parachute testing.

When video from the test becomes available, it will air on NASA Television's Video File. For NASA TV downlink, schedule and streaming video information, visit:

For additional images, video and information about NASA's Constellation Program, visit:

A NASA-funded study indicates that an intense asteroid bombardment nearly 4 billion years ago may not have sterilized the early Earth as completely as previously thought. The asteroids, some the size of Kansas, possibly even provided a boost for early life.

The study focused on a particularly cataclysmic occurrence known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, or LHB. This event occurred approximately 3.9 billion years ago and lasted 20 to 200 million years. In a letter published in the May 21 issue of Nature magazine titled "Microbial Habitability of the Hadean Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment," Oleg Abramov and Stephen J. Mojzsis, astrobiologists at the University of Colorado's Department of Geological Sciences, report on the results of a computer modeling project designed to study the heating of Earth by the bombardment.

Results from their project show that while the Late Heavy Bombardment might have generated enough heat to sterilize Earth's surface, microbial life in subsurface and underwater environments almost certainly would have survived.

"Exactly when life originated on Earth is a hotly debated topic," said Michael H. New, the astrobiology discipline scientist and manager of the Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These findings are significant because they indicate that if life had begun before the LHB or some time prior to 4 billion years ago, it could have survived in limited refuges and then expanded to fill our world."

"Our new results point to the possibility life could have emerged about the same time that evidence for our planet's oceans first appears," said Mojzsis, principal investigator of the project.

A growing scientific consensus is that during our solar system's formation, planetary bodies were pummeled by debris throughout the Late Heavy Bombardment. A visual record of the event is preserved in the form of the scarred face of our moon. On Earth, all traces of the bombardment appear to have been erased by rock recycling forces like weathering, volcanoes or other conditions that cause the crust to move or change.

Surface habitats for microbial life on early Earth would have been destroyed repeatedly by the bombardment. However, at the same time, impacts could have created subsurface habitats for life, such as extensive networks of cracks or even hydrothermal vents. Any existing microbial life on Earth could have found refuge in these habitats. If life had not yet emerged on Earth by the time of the bombardment, these new subsurface environments could have been the place where terrestrial life emerged.

"Even under the most extreme conditions we imposed on our model, the bombardment could not have sterilized Earth completely," said Abramov, lead author of the paper. "Our results are in line with the scientific consensus that hyperthermophilic, or 'heat-loving,' microbes could have been the earliest life forms on Earth, or survivors from an even more ancient biosphere. The results also support the potential for the persistence of microbial biospheres on other planetary bodies whose surfaces were reworked by the bombardment, including Mars."

NASA's Astrobiology Program's Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Program and the NASA Astrobiology Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., through its support of NASA's Postdoctoral Program, provided funding for this research. The Astrobiology Program supports research into the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life on Earth and the potential for life elsewhere.

For more information about NASA's astrobiology activities, visit: http://astrobiology.nasa.gov.

NASA's rover project team is using the Spirit rover and other spacecraft at Mars to begin developing the best maneuvers for extracting Spirit from the soft Martian ground where it has become embedded.

A diagnostic test on May 16 provided favorable indications about Spirit's left middle wheel. The possibility of the wheel being jammed was one factor in the rover team's May 7 decision to temporarily suspend driving Spirit after that wheel stalled and other wheels had dug themselves about hub-deep into the soil. The test over the weekend showed electrical resistance in the left middle wheel is within the expected range for a motor that has not failed.

"This is not a full exoneration of the wheel, but it is encouraging," said John Callas of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., project manager for Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity. "We're taking incremental steps. Next, we'll command that wheel to rotate a degree or two. The other wheels will be kept motionless, so this is not expected to alter the position of the vehicle."

Another reason to suspend driving is the possibility that the wheels' digging into the soil may have lowered the body of the rover enough for its belly pan to be in contact with a small mound of rocks. The rover team is using Opportunity to test a procedure for possible use by Spirit: looking underneath the rover with the microscopic imager camera that is mounted on the end of the rover's arm. This might be a way to see whether Spirit is, in fact, touching the rocks beneath it.

NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter is also aiding in the Spirit recovery plan. As a result of winds blowing dust off Spirit's solar panel four times in the past month, Spirit now has enough power to add an extra communication session each day. The Odyssey project has made the orbiter available for receiving extra transmissions from Spirit. The transmissions include imaging data from Spirit's examinations of soil properties and ground geometry.

Rover team members are using that data and other information to construct a simulation of Spirit's situation in a rover testing facility at JPL. The team is testing different materials to use as soil that will mimic the physical properties of the Martian soil where Spirit is embedded. Later, the team will test maneuvers to get the rover free. Weeks of testing are anticipated before any attempt to move Spirit.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Earth scientists are reaping huge benefits from research performed on NASA's advanced supercomputers. New cube-based simulations are helping to improve estimates of ocean circulation and climate.

Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Mass., are using a new gridding method that projects the faces of a cube onto the surface of a sphere. They found that this method covers the sphere more uniformly than a latitude-longitude grid, and that it produces more accurate results near Earth's poles.

"The NASA Advanced Supercomputers (NAS) facilities at Ames Research Center have been critical to our cube-based approach. We were able to scale the cube at higher resolutions to improve model accuracy," said Chris Hil a MIT science researcher. "Without the NAS resources, both hardware and people, we would not have been able to perform these calculations in a timely manner."

Scientists believe the ocean and its interactions with the atmosphere are key to studying climate change. To better understand these interactions, they identified three important areas in climate research. They look at the 'states' of the ocean and sea-ice, which includes their temperature, salinity, current speeds, and sea-surface elevation, and study their changes at and below the surface. They also look at the 'state' of the atmosphere, which includes its temperature, humidity, and wind patterns, and study how it was affected by the changes in the ocean. These interactions between the atmosphere and ocean directly affect the weather, according to Hill. Finally, the scientists study the biological activity in the ocean and its responses to the changing 'state' of the ocean.

"The day-to-day weather comes from the atmosphere state, but it is strongly modulated by the ocean state. Other less apparent processes, such as the carbon dioxide extracted from the atmosphere by the ocean, depend on the oceans' physical and biological state," said Hill.

Following work begun by Carl Wunsch and colleagues at MIT, and as part of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment, a NASA-sponsored project called Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II (ECCO2), is modeling the global ocean currents and their fluctuations, the changes in temperature and salinity, and the growth and melting of sea-ice in the polar regions.

The project's goal is to produce quantitative images of the state of the ocean globally, including its evolution. These images use data from all available NASA satellites and from on-site instruments, and are the result of combining and assimilating these data into global full-ocean-depth and sea-ice configurations built by the MIT general circulation model (MITgcm). These data combinations, called data syntheses, help quantify the role of the ocean in the global carbon cycle, explain the recent evolution of the polar oceans, and monitor time-evolving balances within and between different components of the Earth system.

The first Earth-orbiting satellite designed for remote sensing of Earth's ocean was the Seasat mission, which was launched in 1978. Since then, NASA has developed a series of ocean observing satellites that monitor sea surface elevation and temperature, surface wind stress, and the ocean's gravitational field. Part of this series is NASA’s Earth Observing System, which is the data system used by ECCO2 today.

According to Dimitris Menemenlis, a JPL Earth scientist and ECCO2 researcher, the available oceanographic data will be enhanced by two forthcoming satellites: the Aquarius and the Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) missions. Both satellites will provide different information that will be assimilated into a single coherent picture of the ocean state. Aquarius is due to launch in 2010 and will provide global maps of sea surface salinity. The SWOT mission is still in development and aims to observe sea surface elevation with unprecedented resolution and spatial coverage.

In the past, the standard model gridding methods, using longitude and latitude, had difficulty assimilating data at the poles. To solve this problem, researchers started looking at the world in a new way, using a new cube-based method. But advanced computers and algorithms were needed to enable modeling at higher resolutions, said Hill.

"Currently, NAS is home to two of the fastest supercomputers in the world, Pleiades and Columbia," said William Thigpen, NAS manager at Ames Research Center. "NAS provides data analysis, visualization tools and support that enable the exploration of huge data-sets that provide insights not previously possible."

Initially, the cube-based computation was simulated on the NAS SGI Altix system, Columbia, but was later moved to the NAS Pleiades cluster facility to take advantage of the increased size and performance of the new supercomputer's architecture. Over time and with improvements, supercomputing evolved into 'green technology.' Using a total of 2.09 megawatts, or 233 megaflops per watt, Pleiades ranked number 22 on the November 2008 Green500 list. This ranking makes Pleiades the second-most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputer in the world.

According to Menemenlis, these improvements have increased the accuracy of ocean data syntheses to such an extent that they are starting to resolve ocean eddies and other narrow currents, which transport heat, carbon, and other properties within the ocean. The importance of this endeavor is recognized by numerous national and international organizations, such as the World Meteorological Organization's World Climate Research Programme and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

After more than five-and-a-half years of probing the cool cosmos, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has run out of the coolant that kept its infrared instruments chilled. The telescope will warm up slightly, yet two of its infrared detector arrays will still operate successfully. The new, warm mission will continue to unveil the far, cold and dusty universe.

Spitzer entered standby mode at 3:11 p.m. Pacific Time (6:11 p.m. Eastern Time or 22:11 Universal Time), May 15, as result of running out of its liquid helium coolant. Scientists and engineers will spend the next few weeks recalibrating the instrument at the warmer temperature, and preparing it to begin science operations.

Additional information, including the following items, is at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer-warm.html .

--A full news release about Spitzer's warm mission and past accomplishments
--A mock interview titled "If Spitzer Could Talk: An Interview with NASA's Coolest Space Mission"
--A video about the Spitzer mission
--An article about the late astronomer Lyman Spitzer, the mission's namesake

Detailed information about the Spitzer mission at http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

Who's Who of the Spitzer mission:

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., in Boulder, Colo., support mission and science operations. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., built Spitzer's infrared array camera; the instrument's principal investigator was Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. built Spitzer's infrared spectrograph; its principal investigator was Jim Houck of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. and the University of Arizona in Tucson, built the multiband imaging photometer for Spitzer; its principal investigator was George Rieke of the University of Arizona.

NASA′s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft has spotted the first major activity of the new solar cycle. On May 5 STEREO-B observed a Type II radio burst and a bright, fast coronal mass ejection (CME) emanating from the far side of the sun. The activity originated in a solar active region that rotated into view from Earth on May 8.

The active region appears well above the sun′s equator, at about 30 degrees latitude, which indicates it is part of the new solar cycle. Activity from the previous solar cycle would appear nearer to the sun′s equator. These regions also have a distinct magnetic organization characteristic of new cycle regions.

″This is a really exciting opportunity to observe the first major outbreak of solar activity in Solar Cycle 24,″ says Joseph Gurman, the newly named project scientist for STEREO at Goddard Space Flight Center. Gurman officially takes the helm from current project scientist Michael Kaiser on June 1.

The last years of Solar Cycle 23 marked the longest and deepest solar minimum in 100 years. Its unusually small number of active regions and sunspots have led some impatient space-weather watchers to wonder if we were entering another ″Maunder minimum.″ That period, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, saw few, if any, sunspot regions, and coincided with the deepest part of the ″Little Ice Age″ of global cooling.

The twin STEREO spacecraft each carry two instruments and two instrument suites, including the Sun Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation (SECCHI). SECCHI consists of an extreme ultraviolet imager (EUVI), two visible-light coronagraphs (COR-1 and COR-2), and a heliospheric imager (HI). The radio bursts were observed by the SWAVES instrument, also included in the STEREO payload. The solar activity on May 5 was detected with the EUVI instrument aboard STEREO-B, the spacecraft that trails behind Earth in its orbit around the sun.

STEREO, the third mission in NASA′s Solar Terrestrial Probes series, launched on October 26, 2006. STEREO′s mission, now in the extended phase, is to provide the first-ever stereoscopic measurements to study the sun.

For more information about NASA’s STEREO mission, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/stereo

For more information about the solar cycle, visit:
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/sunspotcycle.shtml

For more SOHO solar images, visit:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/

James Webb garnered tremendous praise for his management acumen as NASA’s administrator during the race to space and the moon. But along with setting a course for a clearly left-brained organization focused on engineering and inventing technology, Webb also gave NASA room for the right-brain to breathe a bit.

In 1962, Webb sent a two-paragraph memo that suggested involving artists to help tell the agency’s story of adventure.

That was all James Dean needed to start a program that would produce a bold catalog of almost 3,000 pieces of artwork during the course of NASA’s first 50 years.

Some of the pieces are utterly realistic scenes, such as the painting by Norman Rockwell that depicts Gemini astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young suiting up before launch. There’s a Mars landscape made inside the prototype wheel of one of the Mars rovers. Others are more abstract, including a black star made from the shredded rubber of a space shuttle tire to commemorate Columbia’s STS-107 mission.

"You could take seven or eight artists out, looking at the same launch, and each one would have a totally different point of view," Dean said. "Some would see it in an abstract, almost spiritual way, some would be totally realistic in their view and some would go so far beyond the physical launch."

Photographs show us how human eyes see a space launch, but it takes an artist to show us the different ways the mind sees, feels and reacts to such an event, Dean said in giving Webb credit for recognizing a need for different eyes to chronicle the agency’s exploits.

"That’s the beauty of art," said Bert Ulrich, curator of NASA’s art program. "That it reaches people in different ways. The idea is that art is another way to inspire people."

An artist also could bring something that engineers and managers loathe to admit to: emotion.

"Artists are really emotional types who can project themselves into it and really get a lot out of the experience," Dean said.

The first team of artists set off in time to see the last launch of the Mercury Program -- Gordon Cooper’s Faith 7 flight May 15, 1963. Most of the group stayed on land and watched from Cape Canaveral while another artist went out on the Navy ship that would recover Cooper and his spacecraft.

After the launch, the artists were free to create whatever work inspired them. Their pieces formed the core of NASA’s first exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

For their efforts, each artist received an $800 honorarium. Travel costs had to come out of that total, as well.

"It wasn’t a lot of money, even in the early 1960s," Dean said.

There was enormous public interest though, so the agency never had trouble finding artists willing to take on the task.

"Artists share something with scientists and astronauts in that they are adventurers," Ulrich said. "Artists try to interpret the unknown and they do that with their imaginations."

The artists soon traveled to all of NASA’s facilities, recording events far from the launch site in mediums ranging from pencils and pens to watercolors and ink. Later, as the Space Shuttle Program was in full force, NASA enlisted musicians, poets and others for more variety. Patti LaBelle even recorded a space-themed song.

Norman Rockwell, Robert T. McCall, Andy Warhol and Annie Leibovitz are some of the well-known names to take part in the program, but, reaching out to the National Gallery’s expertise, the agency made sure to include up-and-coming artists, again, to encourage variety.

The biggest event for the program was the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969, Dean said. The first time humans would walk on the moon would be one of the most historic moments in history, so the roster of artists grew and their locations varied.

Some went to Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, one went out on the aircraft carrier that picked up Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins from the Pacific Ocean and others went to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to see the Saturn V rocket lift off. Dean accompanied the group to Kennedy.

"It was like the eighth wonder of the world to see that Saturn V illuminated in the night and to hear the alligators and the night birds and the insects," Dean said. "It was an incredible contrast."

The mission’s success and significance was not lost on the National Gallery either. The director called Dean soon after the moon landing and slated an exhibition of the work in November 1969, which was a much tighter timetable than artists are accustomed to.

"I called them up and said, 'We really have to get moving,' " Dean said. "We got some of the most beautiful artwork you’ve ever seen."

About 2,100 pieces from the art program now belong to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where some are on display. NASA’s collection numbers about 800, and many of those go on public viewing, while others can be seen at NASA field centers.

Don’t ask Dean or Ulrich to pick a favorite, it’s like asking a parent to name a favorite child.

"I think I could tell a story about every one (of the pieces)," Dean said.

Rockwell, for example, desperately wanted a spacesuit so he could get all the details in his painting of Grissom and Young suiting up for the Gemini 3 mission. But NASA officials refused on the grounds that there was a lot of secret technology in the suits and they couldn’t release one. Dean worked as the go-between, and it was not looking good.

"I had (Mercury astronaut) Deke Slayton mad at me on one side and Norman Rockwell aggravated at me on the other," Dean said.

The compromise was that a technician accompanied the suit up to Rockwell’s studio and sat with it every day as Rockwell worked. The technician’s reward was to be included in the piece as one of the people helping the astronauts.

Another artist was determined to sculpt a Saturn lifting off. The rocket was not a problem, but capturing the chaos of the smoke and flame reaching skyward was not easy in a sculpture. The solution: molten aluminum poured over a pile of potatoes. The aluminum cooked the potatoes and the artist scooped them out, leaving the outside aluminum in the rough shape of the pyramid of rocket exhaust.

Successful space artists were not always Earth-bound. Apollo astronaut and moonwalker Alan Bean has sketched and painted space scenes from firsthand knowledge of seeing the moon up close and orbiting above Earth. After retiring from NASA, Bean continues painting and incorporating his experiences into the works.

"Artists never quit," Dean said. "Even if they don’t sell a thing, they can’t stop."

The Herschel and Planck spacecraft successfully blasted into space at 6:12 a.m. Pacific Time (9:12 a.m. Eastern Time) on May 14 from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana.

The European Space Agency missions, with significant participation from NASA, hitched a ride together on an Ariane 5 rocket, but now have different journeys before them. Herschel will explore, with unprecedented clarity, the earliest stages of star and galaxy birth in the universe; it will help answer the question of how our sun and Milky Way galaxy came to be. Planck will look back to almost the beginning of time itself, gathering new details to help explain how our universe came to be.

"These two missions have spent a lot of time together," said Ulf Israelsson, NASA project manager for both Herschel and Planck at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "But now they are going their separate ways, each ready to do what it does best."

JPL contributed key technology to both missions. NASA team members will play an important role in data analysis and science operations.

Herschel separated from its Ariane 5 rocket 26 minutes after launch, followed by Planck about two minutes later. The spacecraft are traveling on separate trajectories to a point in the Earth-sun system called the second Lagrangian point, four times farther away than the moon's orbit, or an average distance of 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth. They will spend the rest of their missions independently orbiting this point -- located on the other side of Earth from the sun -- as they make their way around the sun every year. See animations at http://www.esa.int/esa-mmg/mmg.pl?b=b&type=VA&mission=Herschel&single=y&start=10 and http://www.esa.int/esa-mmg/mmg.pl?b=b&type=VA&mission=Planck&single=y&start=10 .

Herschel will start preparing for science operations while en route toward its operational orbit, which will be reached in about two months. Four months later, the science mission will begin and is expected to last more than three-and-a-half years. Planck will reach a similar orbit in roughly two months, with science observations beginning one month later. The mission's science operations are scheduled to last a minimum of 15 months, with the possibility of an extension.

Both observatories are designed to see light that our human eyes cannot. Herschel will detect light that has gone largely unexplored until now, with wavelengths in the infrared and submillimeter range. It will make the most detailed measurements yet of the cold and dark wombs where the embryos of stars and galaxies have just begun to grow.

Herschel will also be able to detect key elements and molecules involved in a star's life, tracing their evolution from atoms to potentially life-forming materials. One of these molecules is water; astronomers say Herschel will provide a greatly improved measurement of how much water there is in space.

"Using Herschel is like opening a dirty window and getting a clear view of stars and galaxies," said Paul Goldsmith, the NASA Herschel project scientist at JPL.

Planck will see longer wavelength light, from the submillimeter to microwave range. It will work like the ultimate time capsule, to see light that has traveled billions of years from the newborn universe to reach us. This light, called the cosmic microwave background, contains information about the Big Bang that created space and time itself.

"Our previous images of the baby universe were like fuzzy snapshots -- now we'll have the cleanest, deepest and sharpest images ever made of the early universe," said Charles Lawrence, the NASA Planck project scientist at JPL.

In order to do their jobs, the instruments on both spacecrafts will be icy cold. Liquid helium will cool the coldest of Herschel's detectors to just 0.3 Kelvin (minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit), or 0.3 degrees above the coldest temperature theoretically attainable in the universe. Planck's coldest detectors, which are chilled by cutting-edge coolers developed in part by JPL, will reach a frosty 0.1 Kelvin.

Herschel is a European Space Agency mission, with science instruments provided by a consortium of European-led institutes, and with important participation by NASA. NASA's Herschel Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for two of Herschel's three science instruments. The NASA Herschel Science Center, part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, supports the United States astronomical community. Caltech manages JPL for NASA. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/herschel and http://www.herschel.caltech.edu/ and http://www.esa.int/herschel .

Planck is a European Space Agency mission, with significant participation from NASA. NASA's Planck Project Office is based at JPL. JPL contributed mission-enabling technology for both of Planck's science instruments. European, U.S. and NASA Planck scientists will work together to analyze the Planck data. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/planck and http://www.esa.int/planck .

NASA's Space Place is a website that helps kids learn about Earth and space science and technology. The latest interview on the website's animated "Television show," called Space Place Live! features a scientist from the weather satellite that NASA is launching in 2009, called "GOES-O."

In the latest episode of the Space Place Live, animated young hosts Kate and Kyo interview a cartoon version of the GOES satellite Deputy Project Manager, Andre Dress. Andre works at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. He talked with Kate and Kyo about the new GOES-O weather satellite as it is being prepared for launch. There have been 13 GOES satellites launched already. Before they launch, they are named with a letter, once they're in orbit, the name changes to a number, so GOES-O would become GOES-14.

"GOES means Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite," Dress said during his interview. That means the satellite stays in a fixed position above the Earth as it rotates in orbit so it can keep an eye on the weather in a fixed area over the U.S. NASA manages the development and launch of the satellites for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also called NOAA. Once in orbit and after check out, NOAA takes over the satellite's daily operations.

During the ten minute cartoon interview, Andre explains what the GOES satellite will do, where it is located in orbit, and how the satellite is launched. He also explains why it's so important that scientists rehearse what they're going to say during and after the launch. Because Andre Dress will be in that group of engineers that will be practicing, it will really be a "Dress Rehearsal."

The actual launch will happen during the summertime in 2009.

The Space Place is produced by the jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. New episodes of "Space Place Live" with hosts Kate and Kyo are always being made. The website is geared toward elementary school students and teachers. It is updated daily, with events, games, projects, animations, cool subjects, amazing facts and section for friends to share news from their communities, so kids should bookmark it on their computer and check it daily. It's both fun and a great learning experience.

Another website, scijinks.gov, is for middle-school-age students. It includes games and fun facts about weather and Earth science and technology, with GOES and POES emphasis paid for by NOAA.

Related Links:

> GOES episode > GOES-O

Two missions to study our cosmic roots, Herschel and Planck, are stacked atop the same Ariane 5 rocket, waiting to blast into space. Their launch is scheduled for 6:12 a.m. Pacific Time on May 14, from Kourou, French Guiana. The missions are led by the European Space Agency, with significant participation from NASA. For regular Web updates, and to view the launch online, visit www.esa.int/herschelplanck .

While Herschel and Planck have spent their youths together, they will soon be on their own. Shortly after launch, the two spacecraft will separate from their rocket and take independent paths to the second Lagrange point of our Earth-sun system. Once there, they will still be neighbors, following similar orbits around the sun, but their eyes will be set on different aspects of the cosmos. This chart helps explain the missions' roles.

As astronaut Mike Massimino zoomed to rendezvous with the Hubble Space Telescope Tuesday, he managed to reach out to thousands of people who are following his Twitter feed. He sent an email to Johnson Space Center, which then posted this message to his Twitter:

"From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!"

Massimino began 'tweeting' in early April about his training for the STS-125 shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. By Wednesday morning, more than 247,000 people were following his Twitter feed.

Massimino and his six crew mates launched Monday on an 11-day mission that includes five spacewalks. Massimino has said he will do his best to post updates to Twitter, if at all possible, during the challenging mission.

Aboard the shuttle, astronauts have one or two opportunities each day to send an email, but do not have access to the Internet.

Another astronaut, Mark Polansky, commander for the next shuttle flight, also is 'tweeting.' He's posting updates as he and his crew finish preparing for their STS-127 mission to the International Space Station in June.

NASA also provides updates on the shuttle missions and its other endeavors.
Check out NASA's Twitter feed.

The five wheels that still rotate on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit have been slipping severely in soft soil during recent attempts to drive, sinking the wheels about halfway into the ground.

The rover team of engineers and scientists has suspended driving Spirit temporarily while studying the ground around the rover and planning simulation tests of driving options with a test rover at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

"Spirit is in a very difficult situation," JPL's John Callas, project manager for Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, said Monday. "We are proceeding methodically and cautiously. It may be weeks before we try moving Spirit again. Meanwhile, we are using Spirit's scientific instruments to learn more about the physical properties of the soil that is giving us trouble."

Both Spirit and Opportunity have operated more than five years longer than their originally planned missions of three months on Mars and have driven much farther than designed. The rover team has so far developed ways to cope with various symptoms of aging on both rovers.

Spirit has been driving counterclockwise from north to south around a low plateau called "Home Plate" for two months. The rover progressed 122 meters (400 feet) on that route before reaching its current position.

In the past week, the digging-in of Spirit's wheels has raised concerns that the rover's belly pan could now be low enough to contact rocks underneath the chassis, which would make getting out of the situation more difficult. The right-front wheel on Spirit stopped working three years ago. Driving with just five powered wheels while dragging or pushing an immobile wheel adds to the challenge of the situation.

Favorably, three times in the past month, wind has removed some of the dust accumulated on Spirit's solar panels. This increases the rover's capability for generating electricity. "The improved power situation buys us time," Callas said. "We will use that time to plan the next steps carefully. We know that dust storms could return at any time, although the skies are currently clear."

Behavioral problems that Spirit exhibited in early April -- episodes of amnesia, computer resets and failure to wake for communications sessions -- have not recurred in the past three weeks, though investigations have yet to diagnose the root causes.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Although engineers, scientists and manufacturers are still in the process of building all of the instruments that will fly aboard NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, they had to figure out long ago, how it was going to "unfold" in space. That's because the Webb Telescope is so big that it has to be folded up for launch. Now, animators have made that "unfolding" come to life in two new videos.

A brand new animation of how NASA's massive next-generation space telescope will open up in space once it achieves orbit, was created by the Image center at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, Redondo Beach, Calif. The Webb Telescope is roughly 65 feet (21 meters) from end to end and about 3 stories high.

"Animation helps designers and their colleagues to fully visualize and explain the complex motions required to deploy this observatory," said Mike Herriage, Webb Telescope Deputy Program Manager at Northrop Grumman. "And while it’s a visual tool, producing accurate animation is a technical challenge as well."

The James Webb Space Telescope is a large, infrared space telescope. It will find the first galaxies that formed in the early Universe, connecting the Big Bang to our own Milky Way Galaxy. It will peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming planetary systems, connecting the Milky Way to our own Solar System.

The Webb Telescope is extremely large and cannot fit in a rocket unless it is folded. It has a sunshield the size of a tennis court and an 18-segment mirror that looks like a honeycomb. Because of its large size, the telescope needs to be folded up to fit in the rocket. The sunshield will be compactly folded, much like a parachute, around the front and back of the telescope. The mirror segments are mounted on the "spine" or backplane of the telescope and the segments on the left and right sides of the honeycomb shape are folded in the rocket.

Once the Webb telescope is on its way to its final orbit, approximately 1 million miles from the Earth, engineers at Northrop Grumman will issue commands to the Webb Telescope to unfold it. "Think of the sunshield as five candy wrappers the size of a tennis court," said Mark Clampin, Webb Telescope Observatory Project Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

The animation shows the first part of the telescope to unfold is the solar panel, followed by the communications antenna. Next, the five layers of sunshield will drop into place from the front and back, spread out into a kite shape. The "secondary mirror support structure," an arm-like feature holding the secondary mirror assembly will then drop down from its folded center perch, and finally, the side mirror segments will be moved forward to form the complete "honeycomb."

"There are videos showing a simple deployment and a version that includes detailed views of key points in the sequence," Clampin said. "There are 2 and 4 megabyte versions of each video and they are high definition."

James Webb Space Telescope is a joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.

Related Links:

> Deployment videos
> James Webb Space Telescope

Electrons – the particles that carry electricity – can both protect and disrupt your satellite TV or GPS navigator with a "song" they make while being flung toward Earth in a giant magnetic slingshot.

Scientists using NASA's fleet of THEMIS spacecraft have discovered how radio waves produced by electrons injected into Earth’s near-space environment both generate and remove high-speed "killer" electrons.

Killer electrons are born within Earth's natural radiation belts, called the Van Allen belts after their discoverer, James Van Allen. If the Van Allen radiation belts were visible from space, they would resemble a pair of donuts around Earth, one inside the other, with our planet in the hole of the innermost. Killer electrons are mostly found in the outer belt, which over the equator begins approximately 8,000 miles above Earth and tapers off about 28,000 miles high. Although the outer belt is strongest around 16,000 to 20,000 miles up, it is highly variable, especially during solar storms, and an intense population of killer electrons can occur anywhere in the outer belt zone.

The high-speed electrons pose a threat to satellites in or near the outer belt -- those in medium-level and higher (geosynchronous) orbits -- like the Global Positioning System and most communications satellites. They are known as "killer" electrons because they can penetrate a spacecraft's sensitive electronics and cause short circuits.

"This discovery is important to understand the physical processes that shape the radiation belts, so that one day we will be able to predict the moment-by-moment evolution of the radiation belts and be in a position to safeguard satellites in these regions, or astronauts passing through them on the way to the moon or other destinations in the solar system," said Dr. Jacob Bortnik of the University of California, Los Angeles, lead author of a paper on this research appearing May 8 in Science.

Electrons are subatomic particles that carry negative electric charge, and we harness their flow every day as electricity. Electrons are also present in space in a gas of electrically charged particles called plasma, which is constantly blown from the surface of the sun as the solar wind. The solar wind can become particularly dense and gusty during solar storms, which are produced by explosive events on the sun like coronal mass ejections, billion-ton eruptions of solar plasma moving at millions of miles per hour.

When this plasma interacts with Earth's magnetic field, some of it is shot toward Earth. As the solar wind plasma flows over Earth's magnetic field, it stretches the night-side magnetic field into a long "tail" which, when pulled too far, snaps back toward Earth. The magnetic field over Earth's night side acts like a slingshot, propelling blobs of plasma toward Earth. When this happens, electrons in the plasma blobs release extra energy gained from the slingshot by "singing" – they generate a discrete type of organized radio wave called "chorus," which sounds like birds singing when played through an audio converter.

Scientists previously discovered that electrons in the outer radiation belt can extract energy from these chorus waves to reach near-light speed and become killer electrons. The new research, confirmed by the team's THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms) observations, is that the chorus waves can be refracted into the inner portion of the radiation belts by dense plasma near Earth and bounce around from hemisphere to hemisphere within the radiation belts. When this happens, the chorus waves become disorganized and evolve into another type of radio wave called "hiss," according to the team.

Hiss waves, named for the sound they make when played through a speaker, are of interest to space weather forecasters because earlier research showed they can clear killer electrons from lower altitudes of the outer radiation belt. Hiss deflects the speedy particles into Earth's upper atmosphere, where they lose energy and are absorbed when they hit atoms and molecules there. Despite its important role, it was not clear how hiss was generated.

"It is not immediately obvious that these two waves are related, but we had a fortuitous observation where the THEMIS spacecraft were lined up just right to make the connection," said Bortnik. "First we observed chorus on the THEMIS "E" spacecraft, then a few seconds later, we observed hiss on the THEMIS "D" spacecraft, about 20,000 kilometers (almost 12,500 miles) away, with the same modulation pattern as the chorus."

"Last year, we published a Nature paper that put forward a theory that seemed to explain just about everything we knew about hiss," adds Bortnik. "We showed theoretically how chorus could propagate from a distant region, and essentially evolve into hiss. We reproduced statistical information about hiss, and a few case-examples published in the literature seemed to agree with what we were predicting. The only problem was that it seemed really difficult to verify the theory directly -- to have a satellite in the (distant) chorus source region, to have another satellite in the hiss region, to have both satellites recording in high-resolution simultaneously, for the waves to be active and present at the same time, and for the satellites to be in the right relative configuration to each other to make the measurement possible. That's where THEMIS came in. It has the right set of instruments, and the right configuration at certain parts of its orbit."

According to the team, it's possible other mechanisms could contribute to the generation of hiss as well. "Lightning could certainly contribute, and so could 'in situ' growth – the high-speed particles in the belts could generate hiss with their own motion. However, it's just a question of which mechanism is dominant, and each might dominate at different times and locations. More research is needed to determine this," said Bortnik.

The research was funded by NASA Heliophysics theory grant NNX08135G. The team includes Jacob Bortnik, Wen Li, Richard Thorne, and Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California in Los Angeles, Chris Cully of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, John Bonnell of the University of California in Berkeley, and Olivier Le Contel and Alain Roux of the Centre d'Etude des Environnements Terrestre et Planétaires.

NASA released an interactive, 3-D photographic collection of internal and external views of the International Space Station and a model of the next Mars rover on Thursday, May 7.

NASA and Microsoft's Virtual Earth team developed the online experience with hundreds of photographs and Microsoft's photo imaging technology called Photosynth. Using a click-and-drag interface, viewers can zoom in to see details of the space station's modules and solar arrays or zoom out for a more global view of the complex.

"Photosynth brings the public closer to our spaceflight equipment and hardware," said Bill Gerstenmaier, associate administrator for Space Operations at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The space station pictures are not simulations or graphic representations but actual images taken recently by astronauts while in orbit. Although you're not flying 220 miles above the Earth at 17,500 miles an hour, it allows you to navigate and view amazing details of the real station as though you were there."

The software uses photographs from standard digital cameras to construct a 3-D view that can be navigated and explored online.

"This stunning collection of photographs using Microsoft's Photosynth interactive 3-D imaging technology provides people around the world with an exciting new way to explore the space station and learn about NASA's upcoming Mars Science Laboratory mission," said S. Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "This collaboration with Microsoft offers the public the opportunity to participate in future exploration using this innovative technology."

The Mars rover imagery gives viewers an opportunity to preview the hardware of NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, currently being assembled for launch to the Red Planet in 2011.

"We are making this enhanced viewing experience available from the Mars Science Laboratory project because we're eager for the public to share in the excitement that's building for this mission," said Fuk Li,, manager of NASA's Mars Exploration Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

NASA's Photosynth collection can be viewed at http://www.nasa.gov/photosynth .

The NASA images also can be viewed on Microsoft's Virtual Earth Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/virtualearth .

While roaming through different components of the station, the public also can join in a scavenger hunt. NASA has a list of items that can be found in the Photosynth collection. These items include a station crew patch, a spacesuit and a bell that is traditionally used to announce the arrival of a visiting spacecraft. Clues to help in the hunt will be posted on NASA's Facebook page and @NASA on Twitter. To access these sites, visit http://www.nasa.gov/collaborate .

NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus, took the internal images of the space station during the 129 days she lived aboard the complex. She photographed the station's exterior while aboard the space shuttle Discovery, which flew her back to Earth in March. The rover images were taken of a full-scale model in a Mars-simulation testing area at JPL. Photosynth has multiple potential benefits for NASA. Engineers can use it to examine hardware, and astronauts can use it for space station familiarization training.

Photosynth software allows the combination of up to thousands of regular digital photos of a scene to present a detailed 3-D model of a subject, giving viewers the sensation of smoothly gliding around the scene from every angle. A collection can be constructed using photos from a single source or multiple sources. The NASA Photosynth collection also includes shuttle Endeavour preparing for its STS-118 mission in August 2008.

For more information about the space station, visit http://www.nasa.gov/station . For more information about the Mars Science Laboratory, visit http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl . JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington.