The NASA Lunar Science Institute is pleased to announce the 5th annual NASA Lunar Science Forum, to be held July 17-19, 2012. This year’s forum will feature sessions on in-depth scientific results from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), Acceleration Reconnection Turbulence and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun (ARTEMIS), Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) and the Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) satellites, a dedicated side-conference for graduate students and young lunar professionals, as well as the annual Shoemaker Award ceremony and associated keynote lecture. This year’s Shoemaker Award winner is Dr. S. Ross Taylor in recognition of his significant scientific accomplishments and contributions to the lunar field. As in past years, science sessions are structured to report on both recent results and future opportunities for lunar science, exploration, education and outreach.

The conference will review the state of knowledge, and opportunities for science:
Of the Moon: Investigating the composition, structure and history of the Moon as each relates to the evolution of the Earth, Moon and Solar System.
On the Moon: Investigating the effects of lunar material and the environment on terrestrial life and robotic equipment.
From the Moon: Exploring science that is uniquely enabled by being on or near the Moon, including celestial and Earth observations.

Presentations on elements of education and public outreach are included to better understand how lunar exploration can be used to stimulate public interest in space exploration and improve science literacy.

Abstract Deadlines
Abstracts will be accepted through May 1, 2012 at http://www.acteva.com/go/lunarscience2012

Attending Registration Deadlines
Free advanced registration must be completed by July 1st: http://www.acteva.com/go/lunarscience2012
Non-U.S. citizens must register by June 4th for access to a government facility: http://www.acteva.com/go/lunarscience2012

Meeting Format
The conference consists of invited and contributed oral and poster presentations, together with breakout sessions to plan for the future of lunar science.

The session summaries, along with the abstracts, list of organizers, and participants, will be included in a final report to be posted on the NASA Lunar Science Institute website.

Oral Presentations
Speakers should bring their presentations on a memory stick and include any media, embedded videos or movie clips. The schedule is tight, so please submit your presentation to the system operator in the assigned plenary or breakout room at least 30 minutes before your presentation.

Poster Presentations
The space available for poster displays is 48” x 48”. The poster area will be open during all normal meeting hours, so authors may install their poster anytime after 5PM on July 16th. Posters should be removed by 2PM on Thursday. Authors are required to be at their posters during at least one poster session (sign up sheets will be provided at check-in). Poster authors are also encouraged to bring several press-ready copies of their abstract for the media.

Student and Young Professionals Events
NLSI is very supportive of developing the Next Generation of Lunar Scientists. Please see the following activities listed below, that are occurring before the Forum.

Join the 3rd annual Lunar Graduate Conference on Sunday, July 15th. More information on this event will be posted soon.
Join the Next Generation Lunar Scientists and Engineers Workshop on Monday, July 16th. More information on this event will be posted soon.

We look forward to another exciting meeting focusing on science of, on and from the Moon!

Contact

For further information regarding local logistics, contact:
Shirley Berthold
NASA Ames Research Center
Phone: 650-604-1654
E-mail: Shirley.Berthold@nasa.gov

Posted by: Soderman/NLSI Staff
Source: NLSI

NASA’s first mission to sample an asteroid is moving ahead into development and testing in preparation for its launch in 2016.

The Origins-Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) passed a confirmation review Wednesday called Key Decision Point (KDP)-C. NASA officials reviewed a series of detailed project assessments and authorized the spacecraft’s continuation into the development phase.

OSIRIS-REx will rendezvous with the asteroid Bennu in 2018 and return a sample of it to Earth in 2023.

“Successfully passing KDP-C is a major milestone for the project,” said Mike Donnelly, OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “This means NASA believes we have an executable plan to return a sample from Bennu. It now falls on the project and its development team members to execute that plan.”

Bennu could hold clues to the origin of the solar system. OSIRIS-REx will map the asteroid’s global properties, measure non-gravitational forces and provide observations that can be compared with data obtained by telescope observations from Earth. OSIRIS-REx will collect a minimum of 2 ounces (60 grams) of surface material.

“The entire OSIRIS-REx team has worked very hard to get to this point,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “We have a long way to go before we arrive at Bennu , but I have every confidence when we do, we will have built a supremely capable system to return a sample of this primitive asteroid.”

The mission will be a vital part of NASA’s plans to find, study, capture and relocate an asteroid for exploration by astronauts. NASA recently announced an asteroid initiative proposing a strategy to leverage human and robotic activities for the first human mission to an asteroid while also accelerating efforts to improve detection and characterization of asteroids.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. will provide overall mission management, systems engineering and safety and mission assurance. The University of Arizona in Tucson is the principal investigator institution. Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver will build the spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA’s New Frontiers Program. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages New Frontiers for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information on OSIRIS-REx, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/osiris-rex/index.html

and

http://osiris-rex.lpl.arizona.edu/

Posted by: Soderman/NLSI Staff
Source: NASA

Led by postdoc Andrew Poppe at the University of California at Berkeley, NLSI’s DREAM scientists have used recent data from NASA’s twin probe ARTEMIS (Acceleration, Reconnection, Turbulence, and Electrodynamics of the Moon’s Interaction with the Sun) mission to investigate the thin neutral atmosphere surrounding the Moon by looking at the trajectories of ions originating from the lunar atmosphere. These ions were detected by ARTEMIS while the Moon crossed Earth’s geomagnetic tail, where the Moon is protected from the energetic blast of solar wind particles.

By modeling the expected distribution and intensity of ions originating from the Moon’s thin atmosphere and comparing the model to the ARTEMIS data, the DREAM members calculated new upper limits to the density of several species thought to be in the lunar atmosphere.

Additionally, the model also suggests that while the Moon is in the magnetotail, the lunar atmosphere shifts away from the lunar sub-solar point towards the dawn terminator. The DREAM scientists believe the reason for this is that while the solar wind will tend to generate an exosphere centered on the sub-solar point as it bombards the Moon, the shielding nature of Earth’s magnetic tail causes a secondary source of the lunar atmosphere, micrometeoroid bombardment, to become dominant.

Measurements from both space and Earth have shown that micrometeoroids preferentially impact the Earth-Moon system from the dawn-ward direction and thus, may generate an atmosphere at the Moon that is centered around dawn.

The paper is currently in press in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Planets:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgre.20090/abstract

Posted by: Soderman/NLSI Staff
Source: NLSI DREAM Team

Seen in this video is the Larrivée Parlor guitar that has found it’s home on the ISS for the last decade. Chris has used this Parlor, the first guitar in space, to write and record the first musical recordings in space.

Posted by: Soderman/NLSI Staff
Source: CSA/Chris Hadfield

Engineers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., and amateur radio operators around the world collaborated to reconstruct an image of Earth sent from three smartphones in orbit. The joint effort was part of NASA’s nanosatellite mission, called PhoneSat, which launched on Sunday, April 21, 2013 aboard the Antares rocket from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia.

The ultimate goal of the PhoneSat mission was to determine whether a consumer-grade smartphone can be used as the main flight avionics for a satellite in space, but the three miniature satellites also used their smartphone cameras to take pictures of Earth and transmitted these “image-data packets” to multiple ground stations. Every packet held a small piece of “the big picture.” As the data became available, the PhoneSat Team and multiple amateur ham radio operators, who call themselves “hams,” pieced together a high-resolution photograph from the tiny data packets.

“During the short time the spacecraft were in orbit, we were able to demonstrate the smartphones’ ability to act as satellites in the space environment,” said Bruce Yost, the program manager for NASA’s Small Satellite Technology Program. “The PhoneSat project also provided an opportunity for NASA to collaborate with its space enthusiasts. Amateur radio operators from every continent but Antarctica contributed in capturing the data packets we needed to piece together the smartphones’ image of Earth from space.”

As part of their preparation for space, the smartphones were outfitted with a low-powered transmitter operating in the amateur radio band. They sent the image information to awaiting hams who worked with the Ames engineers to stitch together multiple, tiny images to restore the complete Earth view.

Piecing together the photo was a very successful collaboration between NASA’s PhoneSat team and volunteer amateur ham radio operators around the world. NASA researchers and hams working together was an excellent example of Citizen Science, or crowd-sourced science, which is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur or nonprofessional scientists. On the second day of the mission, the Ames team had received over 200 packets from amateur radio operators.

“Three days into the mission we already had received more than 300 data packets,” said Alberto Guillen Salas, an engineer at Ames and a member of the PhoneSat team. “About 200 of the data packets were contributed by the global community and the remaining packets were received from members of our team with the help of the Ames Amateur Radio Club station, NA6MF.”

The mission successfully ended Saturday, April 27, 2013, after predicted atmospheric drag caused the PhoneSats to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up. But with the next PhoneSat launch there will likely be another 2013 opportunity for amateur radio operators to help NASA piece together PhoneSat pictures.

“The NASA PhoneSat Team would like to acknowledge how grateful we are to the amateur radio community for contributing to the success of this mission,” said Oriol Tintore, an engineer and a member of the PhoneSat Team at Ames who participated in the picture data processing.

The PhoneSat project is a technology demonstration mission funded by NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters and the Engineering Directorate at NASA Ames Research Center. The project started in summer 2009 as a student-led collaborative project between Ames and the International Space University, Strasbourg.

These results will encourage further research into applying low-cost terrestrial technologies to space applications and also may open space to a whole new generation of commercial, academic and citizen-space users, according to Yost. For more information about the PhoneSat mission and the participation of the radio amateur:

http://www.phonesat.org

For more about information about NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program and the PhoneSat mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/smallsats

NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate is innovating, developing, testing and flying hardware for use in future science and exploration missions. NASA’s technology investments provide cutting-edge solutions for our nation’s future. For more information about NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/spacetech

Posted by: Soderman/NLSI Staff
Source: NASA/PhoneSat Team

By looking through images that have never before been seen, our new Space Warps project asks you to help discover these incredibly elusive objects. To take part visit www.spacewarps.org.

Computer algorithms have already scanned the images, but there are likely to be many more space warps that the algorithms have missed and we think that it’s only with human help that we’ll find them all. We’re really excited about this project and think you’ll be able to make some amazing discoveries through it.

Gravitational lenses help us to answer all kinds of questions, including how many very low mass stars – that aren’t bright enough to detect directly – are lurking in distant galaxies. Read more on the Space Warps blog.

The project is also found on Twitter (@SpaceWarps), on Facebook and you can discuss any interesting objects you find on Space Warps Talk.

Happy hunting,

The Space Warps team.

Posted by: Soderman/NLSI Staff
Source: www.spacewarps.org

NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) Observatory recently completed the Thermal-Vacuum (TVAC) phase of environmental testing at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. During the TVAC environmental testing phase, LADEE underwent a variety of rigorous tests that simulate the full range of extreme temperatures and vacuum the spacecraft will experience during the course of its mission. The successful completion of this phase of testing means NASA engineers are confident that LADEE will be able to operate in the harsh conditions of space.

Previous mechanical tests – including acoustic, vibration and shock – confirmed the LADEE Observatory is able to withstand the loud, shaking launch conditions the spacecraft must endure to reach orbit.

Now that the TVAC tests are complete, engineers will test LADEE’s radio communication system to ensure it is compatible with NASA’s Near-Earth and Deep Space Communication Networks. To perform these communications tests, equipment will be brought to NASA Ames and connected to the spacecraft to exercise the communications modes that will be used during the mission. It is important to test the LADEE communications system with both communication networks prior to launch, so that the Mission Operations Team at NASA Ames can prepare for the initial contact with the spacecraft.

After LADEE separates from the upper stage of the Minotaur V launch vehicle, the spacecraft will power on. At that time, the Mission Operations Team at NASA Ames will use the Near-Earth Space network to make initial contact with LADEE. After initial contact, the team will establish positive control of the spacecraft so that they can maneuver LADEE into a phasing orbit that will take it to the moon.

LADEE will loop around Earth to gradually raise its orbit and position so that it can fire its engines and enter lunar orbit. During the trajectory maneuvers on its way to the moon, LADEE will transmit to NASA’s Deep Space Network ground stations located around the globe. LADEE also will use this network to send science data back to Earth during the mission’s science phase.

Once the communications compatibility tests are complete, the LADEE observatory will undergo its final Comprehensive Performance Test to confirm nothing significant has changed during the Mechanical, TVAC, and Communications testing.

Posted by: Soderman/NLSI Staff
Source: NASA/Butler Hine

More recently, the role of the changing dusty plasma environments of comets as natural space laboratories for the study of dust-plasma interactions, and their physical and dynamical consequences, has been recognized. The forthcoming Rosetta-Philae rendezvous and lander mission will provide a unique opportunity to revisit the entire range of earlier observations of dusty plasma phenomena in a single comet, as it moves around the Sun. Rosetta will rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in May 2014, at about 4 AU from the Sun, deploy its Philae surface lander in November 2014, and escort the comet around the Sun until at least December 2015.

In a topical review motivated by the Rosetta mission, NLSI Scientist Mihaly Horanyi and prof. Mendis discuss the varying modes of interaction of the comet as it approaches the Sun, and the different dusty plasma phenomena that are expected in each case, drawing on the earlier observations, including their interpretations and prevailing open questions. The team’s paper appeared in the Reviews of Geophysics.

Many of the dusty plasma issues discussed for the Moon will be of interest for comets and asteroids. Comets provide excellent laboratories to study dusty plasma phenomena in space. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that these laboratories are not static. As a comet approaches the Sun from a large distance, its particles and fields environment changes dramatically. This leads to a wide range of dust-plasma interactions with both physical and dynamical consequences for the dust, as well as the dusty plasma ensemble as a whole via possible collective effects.

Dusty plasma phenomena have been observed at a wide range of cometary activities, beginning with an inactive distant comet where the solar wind flows unimpeded on to the surface, to comets closer to perihelion, when the solar wind interacts with an extended, dense commentary atmosphere. However, all of the existing observations pertain to different comets at different heliocentric distances. Also, the methods have ranged from ground-based and Earth orbiting observations, to in-situ measurements from fast fly-by spacecraft.

Due to Rosetta’s impressively complete set of instruments to observe the nucleus, the evolving fields and particles, and dust environment of the comet, researchers will gain unprecedented insight into a range of interconnected dusty plasma phenomena, observed so far only in fragments, at different comets at different heliocentric distances.

Initially, the scientists expect to learn about surface interactions, the charging, mobilization, and transport of dust on the nucleus. These processes have relevance to all airless bodies in the solar system, including Mercury, the Moon, asteroids, and the martian moons Phobos and Deimos, for example. Rosetta will follow the emergence of the cometary atmosphere and ionosphere, the dramatically changing interaction of the comet with the solar wind plasma flow, and its effects on the size and spatial distributions of dust.

The multi-spacecraft observations of comet 76P/ Halley during its last apparition in 1986 greatly enhanced our knowledge about comets, and gave rise to the recognition of the important role dusty plasma processes can play at comets. The Rosetta/Philae rendezvous mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko will likely bring closure to many open questions about comets, and the physics of dusty plasmas in cometary environments, while possibly observing a range of as of yet unseen and unpredicted phenomena.

Rosetta’s Philae lander on comet nucleus. Credit: ESA

The Rosetta Lander
The 100-kilogram Rosetta lander is provided by a European consortium under the leadership of the German Aerospace Research Institute (DLR). Other members of the consortium are ESA and institutes from Austria, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy and the UK.

The box-shaped lander is carried on the side of the orbiter until it arrives at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Once the orbiter is aligned correctly, the lander is commanded to self-eject from the main spacecraft and unfold its three legs, ready for a gentle touchdown at the end of the ballistic descent.

On landing, the legs damp out most of the kinetic energy to reduce the chance of bouncing, and they can rotate, lift or tilt to return the lander to an upright position.

Immediately after touchdown, a harpoon is fired to anchor the lander to the ground and prevent it escaping from the comet’s extremely weak gravity. The minimum mission target is one week, but surface operations may continue for many months.

For more information, visit http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/The_Rosetta_lander

Posted by: Soderman/NLSI Staff
Source: NLSI Team

Earth’s atmosphere is critically important to all of us. In addition to providing us with air to breathe, it protects us from temperature extremes, harmful space radiation, and vast numbers of incoming meteoroids. The atmosphere is a very complex system that we are only beginning to understand. Gaining a better understanding of the atmosphere, how it protects us, and how we can protect it is in all of our interests.

On Feb. 5, 1974, Mariner 10 took this first close-up photo of Venus. Made using an ultraviolet filter in its imaging system, the photo has been color-enhanced to bring out Venus’s cloudy atmosphere as the human eye would see it. Venus is perpetually blanketed by a thick veil of clouds high in carbon dioxide and its surface temperature approaches 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Launched on Nov. 3, 1973 atop an Atlas-Centaur rocket, Mariner 10 flew by Venus in 1974. Image Credit: NASA

In order to understand Earth’s atmosphere and how it works, it is essential to study atmospheres under a wide range of conditions beyond Earth. Examining atmospheres on other planets allows this. For example, by studying the atmosphere of Venus, we learned about the role of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and saw how it drives the temperature on Venus as high as 860 degrees Fahrenheit (460 degrees Celsius).

The moon has a type of atmosphere scientists call a surface boundary exosphere. This very thin atmosphere may actually be the most common type of atmosphere in our solar system. Yet despite occurring so frequently, surface boundary exospheres largely remain a mystery. The moon, Mercury, larger asteroids, many moons orbiting the solar system’s giant planets and even some of the distant Kuiper Belt Objects beyond Neptune, all have surface boundary exospheres.

To fully understand atmospheres and how they work, we also need to understand the most common type. Fortunately, the moon is in our own celestial “backyard,” and NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer’s (LADEE) observations of the lunar atmosphere and surface conditions will provide us with insights we can apply to many worlds and to Earth’s atmosphere.

Posted by: Soderman/NLSI Staff
Source: Brian Day/NLSI Staff

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn’s rings.

These observations make Saturn’s rings the only location besides Earth, the moon, and Jupiter where scientists and amateur astronomers have been able to observe impacts as they occur. Studying the impact rate of meteoroids from outside the Saturn system helps scientists understand how different planet systems in the solar system formed.

Our solar system is full of small, speeding objects. Planetary bodies frequently are pummeled by them. The meteoroids at Saturn range from about one-half inch to several yards (1 centimeter to several meters) in size. It took scientists years to distinguish tracks left by nine meteoroids in 2005, 2009 and 2012.

Details of the observations appear in a paper in the Thursday edition of Science.

Results from Cassini already have shown Saturn’s rings act as very effective detectors of many kinds of surrounding phenomena, including the interior structure of the planet and the orbits of its moons. For example, a subtle but extensive corrugation that ripples 12,000 miles (19,000 kilometers) across the innermost rings tells of a very large meteoroid impact in 1983.

“These new results imply the current-day impact rates for small particles at Saturn are about the same as those at Earth– two very different neighborhoods in our solar system, and this is exciting to see,” said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. “It took Saturn’s rings acting like a giant meteoroid detector — 100 times the surface area of the Earth — and Cassini’s long-term tour of the Saturn system to address this question.”

The Saturnian equinox in summer 2009 was an especially good time to see the debris left by meteoroid impacts. The very shallow sun angle on the rings caused the clouds of debris to look bright against the darkened rings in pictures from Cassini’s imaging science subsystem.

“We knew these little impacts were constantly occurring, but we didn’t know how big or how frequent they might be, and we didn’t necessarily expect them to take the form of spectacular shearing clouds,” said Matt Tiscareno, lead author of the paper and a Cassini participating scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “The sunlight shining edge-on to the rings at the Saturnian equinox acted like an anti-cloaking device, so these usually invisible features became plain to see.”

Tiscareno and his colleagues now think meteoroids of this size probably break up on a first encounter with the rings, creating smaller, slower pieces that then enter into orbit around Saturn. The impact into the rings of these secondary meteoroid bits kicks up the clouds. The tiny particles forming these clouds have a range of orbital speeds around Saturn. The clouds they form soon are pulled into diagonal, extended bright streaks.

“Saturn’s rings are unusually bright and clean, leading some to suggest that the rings are actually much younger than Saturn,” said Jeff Cuzzi, a co-author of the paper and a Cassini interdisciplinary scientist specializing in planetary rings and dust at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. “To assess this dramatic claim, we must know more about the rate at which outside material is bombarding the rings. This latest analysis helps fill in that story with detection of impactors of a size that we weren’t previously able to detect directly.”

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras. The imaging team consists of scientists from the United States, England, France and Germany. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For images of the impacts and information about Cassini, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/cassini

Posted by: Soderman/NLSI Staff
Source: NASA