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Kepler Mission Rockets to Space in Search of Other Earths
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/06mar_keplerlaunch.htm
 
Pretty Sky Alert
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/26feb_prettysky.htm
 
 
 
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     Start Time :  3/13     Latitude : 34.1199989318
     End Time   :  3/16     Longitude: -117.30999755
     UTC-0.00694444444444444 Not Daylight Savings.
 
  *** Warning: Your longitude may not match your time zone. ***
 According to our calculations, your time zone should be around
-8 but you have registered -0.00694444444444444.
If either your longitude or time zone are
 in error, your viewing times will also be in error!
  >>          HST             approx. vis. mag. 1.5
 Date                       Dur.   Lit Dur. Max.
mm/dd  Rise            Set  mm:ss  mm:ss    Elev.
---------------------------------------------------
 3/14  01:57:04am WSW  E    13:00  11:44    36 S
 3/14  03:38:38am W    ESE  12:50  06:05    31 S
 3/15  01:55:21am WSW  ESE  12:59  11:58    37 S
 3/15  03:37:00am W    ESE  12:44  06:14    27 SSW
 3/16  01:53:39am W    ESE  12:59  12:13    36 S
 3/16  03:35:23am W    SE   12:24  06:24    23 SSW
 
 
  >>          UARS            approx. vis. mag. 10
 Date                       Dur.   Lit Dur. Max.
mm/dd  Rise            Set  mm:ss  mm:ss    Elev.
---------------------------------------------------
 3/14  02:33:42am SW   NNE  10:13  09:58    36 NW
 
 
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STATUS REPORT: 2009-047                                                                       March 12, 2009

Cassini-Huygens Mission Status Report      

Cassini Swaps Thrusters

PASADENA, Calif. – Early this morning the Cassini spacecraft relayed information that it had successfully swapped to a backup set of propulsion thrusters late Wednesday. 

The swap was performed because of degradation in the performance of the primary thrusters, which had been in use since Cassini's launch in 1997. This is only the second time in Cassini's 11 years of flight that the engineering teams have gone to a backup system. 

The thrusters are used for making small corrections to the spacecraft's course, for some attitude control functions, and for making angular momentum adjustments in the reaction wheels, which also are used for attitude control. The redundant set is an identical set of eight thrusters. Almost all Cassini engineering subsystems have redundant backup capability. 

Cassini has successfully completed its original four-year planned tour of Saturn and is now in extended mission operations. 

More information on the mission is available at: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini .

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

-end-

NEWS RELEASE: 2009-043                                                                      March 6, 2009

NASA's Kepler Mission Rockets to Space in Search of Other Earths

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA's Kepler mission successfully launched into space from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II at 10:49 p.m. EST (7:49 p.m. PST), Friday, March 6. Kepler is designed to find the first Earth-size planets orbiting stars at distances where water could pool on the planet's surface. Liquid water is believed to be essential for the formation of life.

"It was a stunning launch," said Kepler Project Manager James Fanson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Our team is thrilled to be a part of something so meaningful to the human race -- Kepler will help us understand if our Earth is unique or if others like it are out there."

Engineers acquired a signal from Kepler at 12:11 a.m. Saturday EST (9:11 p.m. Friday PST), after it separated from its spent third-stage rocket and entered its final sun-centered orbit, trailing about 1,529 kilometers (950 miles) behind Earth. The spacecraft is generating its own power from its solar panels.

"Kepler now has the perfect place to watch more than 100,000 stars for signs of planets," said William Borucki, the mission's science principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. Borucki has worked on the mission for 17 years. "Everyone is very excited as our dream becomes a reality. We are on the verge of learning if other Earths are ubiquitous in the galaxy."

Engineers have begun to check Kepler to ensure it is working properly, a process called "commissioning" that will take about 60 days. In about a month or less, NASA will send up commands for Kepler to eject its dust cover and make its first measurements. After another month of calibrating Kepler's single instrument, a wide-field charge-couple device camera, the telescope will begin to search for planets.

The first planets to roll out on the Kepler "assembly line" are expected to be the portly "hot Jupiters" -- gas giants that circle close and fast around their stars. NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes will be able to follow up with these planets and learn more about their atmospheres. Neptune-size planets will most likely be found next, followed by rocky ones as small as Earth. The true Earth analogs -- Earth-sized planets orbiting stars like our sun at distances where surface water, and possibly life, could exist -- would take at least three years to discover and confirm. Ground-based telescopes also will contribute to the mission by verifying some of the finds.

In the end, Kepler will give us our first look at the frequency of Earth-size planets in our Milky Way galaxy, as well as the frequency of Earth-size planets that could theoretically be habitable.

"Even if we find no planets like Earth, that by itself would be profound. It would indicate that we are probably alone in the galaxy," said Borucki.

As the mission progresses, Kepler will drift farther and farther behind Earth in its orbit around the sun. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which was launched into the same orbit more than five years ago, is now more than about 100 million kilometers (62 million miles) behind Earth.

Kepler is a NASA Discovery mission. Ames is the home organization of the science principal investigator and is responsible for the ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. JPL manages the Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., is responsible for developing the Kepler flight system and supporting mission operations. NASA's Launch Services Program at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla., managed the launch service including payload integration and certifying the Delta II launch vehicle for NASA's use.

For more information about the Kepler mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/kepler .

-end-

Feature                                                               March 5, 2009
 
Five Things About the Kepler Mission


Some quick facts about the Kepler mission, scheduled to launch March 6, 2009:

Kepler is the world's first mission with the ability to find true Earth analogs -- planets that orbit stars like our sun in the “habitable zone.” The habitable zone is the region around a star where the temperature is just right for water -- an essential ingredient for life as we know it -- to pool on a planet's surface.
By the end of Kepler's three-and-one-half-year mission, it will give us a good idea of how common or rare other Earths are in our Milky Way galaxy. This will be an important step in answering the age-old question: Are we alone?
Kepler detects planets by looking for periodic dips in the brightness of stars. Some planets pass in front of their stars as seen from our point of view on Earth; when they do, they cause their stars to dim slightly, an event Kepler can see.
Kepler has the largest camera ever launched into space, a 95-megapixel array of charge-coupled devices, or CCDs, like those in everyday digital cameras.
Kepler's telescope is so powerful that, from its view up in space, it could detect one person in a small town turning off a porch light at night.
 

Newfound Moon May Be Source of Outer Saturn Ring

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found within Saturn's G ring an embedded moonlet that appears as a faint, moving pinprick of light. Scientists believe it is a main source of the G ring and its single ring arc.

Cassini imaging scientists analyzing images acquired over the course of about 600 days found the tiny moonlet, half a kilometer (about a third of a mile) across, embedded within a partial ring, or ring arc, previously found by Cassini in Saturn's tenuous G ring. 

The finding is being announced today in an International Astronomical Union circular. Images can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org .

"Before Cassini, the G ring was the only dusty ring that was not clearly associated with a known moon, which made it odd," said Matthew Hedman, a Cassini imaging team associate at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "The discovery of this moonlet, together with other Cassini data, should help us make sense of this previously mysterious ring."

Saturn's rings were named in the order they were discovered. Working outward they are: D, C, B, A, F, G and E. The G ring is one of the outer diffuse rings. Within the faint G ring there is a relatively bright and narrow, 250-kilometer-wide (150-miles) arc of ring material, which extends 150,000 kilometers (90,000 miles), or one-sixth of the way around the ring's circumference. The moonlet moves within this ring arc. Previous Cassini plasma and dust measurements indicated that this partial ring may be produced from relatively large, icy particles embedded within the arc, such as this moonlet.

Scientists imaged the moonlet on Aug. 15, 2008, and then they confirmed its presence by finding it in two earlier images. They have since seen the moonlet on multiple occasions, most recently on Feb. 20, 2009. The moonlet is too small to be resolved by Cassini's cameras, so its size cannot be measured directly. However, Cassini scientists estimated the moonlet's size by comparing its brightness to another small Saturnian moon, Pallene.  

Hedman and his collaborators also have found that the moonlet's orbit is being disturbed by the larger, nearby moon Mimas, which is responsible for keeping the ring arc together. 

This brings the number of Saturnian ring arcs with embedded moonlets found by Cassini to three. The new moonlet may not be alone in the G ring arc. Previous measurements with other Cassini instruments implied the existence of a population of particles, possibly ranging in size from 1 to 100 meters (about three to several hundred feet) across. "Meteoroid impacts into, and collisions among, these bodies and the moonlet could liberate dust to form the arc," said Hedman.

Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member and professor at Queen Mary, University of London, said, "The moon's discovery and the disturbance of its trajectory by the neighboring moon Mimas highlight the close association between moons and rings that we see throughout the Saturn system. Hopefully, we will learn in the future more about how such arcs form and interact with their parent bodies."

Early next year, Cassini's camera will take a closer look at the arc and the moonlet. The Cassini Equinox mission, an extension of the original four-year mission, is expected to continue until fall of 2010.   

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

-end-

Stellar Nursery in the Rosette Nebula
Mon, 03 May 2010 23:00:00 -0500

This image from the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory shows the cloud associated with the Rosette Nebula, a stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years from Earth in the Monoceros, or Unicorn, constellation. Herschel collects the infrared light given out by dust. The bright smudges are dusty cocoons containing massive embryonic stars, which will grow up to 10 times the mass of our sun. The small spots near the center of the image are lower mass stellar embryos. The Rosette Nebula itself, and its massive cluster of stars, is located to the right of the picture. This image is a three-color composite showing infrared wavelengths of 70 microns (blue), 160 microns (green), and 250 microns (red). It was made with observations from Herschel's Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer and the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver instruments. Herschel is an ESA cornerstone mission, with science instruments provided by consortia of European institutes and with participation by NASA. For more information on this image, visit ESA's Herschel Program site. Image Credit: ESA/PACS & SPIRE Consortium/HOBYS Key Programme Consortia