Feb 16 2010
From The Space Library
RELEASE: 10-172
NASA'S NEBULA CLOUD COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY TO PLAY KEY ROLE IN NEW OPEN SOURCE INITIATIVE
WASHINGTON -- The core technology developed for NASA's Nebula cloud computing platform has been selected as a contributor for OpenStack, a newly-launched open source cloud computing initiative. It will pull together more than 25 companies to play a key role in driving cloud computing standards for interoperability and portability. Cloud computing is a way to deliver computing resources, such as software, storage and virtual computing power, as services over the Internet. NASA launched the Nebula cloud computing platform to provide agency researchers with a range of services powerful enough to manage NASA's large-scale scientific data sets. Nebula offers unparalleled compute capability, storage and bandwidth to users at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We hope that OpenStack will form the foundation of a new open source cloud ecosystem, said NASA chief technology officer for Information Technology Chris C. Kemp. With Nebula technology at the core of OpenStack, NASA will be uniquely positioned to drive standards that will ensure products and services powered by OpenStack will meet federal interoperability, portability, and security requirements. OpenStack is the first large-scale open source cloud project of its kind and is expected to gather significant momentum in the cloud and open source communities. "Nebula technology was selected for inclusion in the OpenStack project because of its massively scalable architecture and the high quality of its code said Jim Curry, director of OpenStack. The announcement coincides with O'Reilly Media's Open Source Developers Conference, which is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week. "Participating in OpenStack will allow NASA to tap into a well-established community of open source developers and enable us to benefit from crowd-sourced development efforts. said Raymond O'Brien, Nebula's program manager. Nebula is an agency-wide program and was one of three flagship initiatives highlighted in NASA's Open Government Plan.
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RELEASE: 10-038
NASA'S WISE MISSION RELEASES MEDLEY OF FIRST IMAGES
WASHINGTON -- A diverse cast of cosmic characters is showcased in the first survey images NASA released Wednesday from its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Since WISE began its scan of the entire sky in infrared light on Jan. 14, the space telescope has beamed back more than a quarter of a million raw, infrared images. Four new, processed pictures illustrate a sampling of the mission's targets -- a wispy comet, a bursting star-forming cloud, the grand Andromeda galaxy and a faraway cluster of hundreds of galaxies. The images are online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/images20100216.html "WISE has worked superbly, said Ed Weiler, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These first images are proving the spacecraft's secondary mission of helping to track asteroids, comets and other stellar objects will be just as critically important as its primary mission of surveying the entire sky in infrared. One image shows the beauty of a comet called Siding Spring. As the comet parades toward the sun, it sheds dust that glows in infrared light visible to WISE. The comet's tail, which stretches about 10 million miles, looks like a streak of red paint. A bright star appears below it in blue. "We've got a candy store of images coming down from space, said Edward (Ned) Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator for WISE. "Everyone has their favorite flavors, and we've got them all. During its survey, the mission is expected to find perhaps dozens of comets, including some that ride along in orbits that take them somewhat close to Earth's path around the sun. WISE will help unravel clues locked inside comets about how our solar system came to be. Another image shows a bright and choppy star-forming region called NGC 3603, lying 20,000 light-years away in the Carina spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. This star-forming factory is churning out batches of new stars, some of which are monstrously massive and hotter than the sun. The hot stars warm the surrounding dust clouds, causing them to glow at infrared wavelengths. WISE will see hundreds of similar star-making regions in our galaxy, helping astronomers piece together a picture of how stars are born. The observations also provide an important link to understanding violent episodes of star formation in distant galaxies. Because NGC 3603 is much closer, astronomers use it as a lab to probe the same type of action that is taking place billions of light-years away. Traveling farther out from our Milky Way, the third new image shows our nearest large neighbor, the Andromeda spiral galaxy. Andromeda is a bit bigger than our Milky Way and about 2.5 million light-years away. The new picture highlights WISE's wide field of view -- it covers an area larger than 100 full moons and even shows other smaller galaxies near Andromeda, all belonging to our local group of more than about 50 galaxies. WISE will capture the entire local group. The fourth WISE picture is even farther out, in a region of hundreds of galaxies all bound together into one family. Called the Fornax cluster, these galaxies are 60 million light-years from Earth. The mission's infrared views reveal both stagnant and active galaxies, providing a census of data on an entire galactic community. "All these pictures tell a story about our dusty origins and destiny, said Peter Eisenhardt, the WISE project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. WISE sees dusty comets and rocky asteroids tracing the formation and evolution of our solar system. We can map thousands of forming and dying solar systems across our entire galaxy. We can see patterns of star formation across other galaxies, and waves of star-bursting galaxies in clusters millions of light years away. Other mission targets include comets, asteroids and cool stars called brown dwarfs. WISE discovered its first near-Earth asteroid on Jan. 12 and first comet on Jan. 22. The mission will scan the sky one-and-a-half times by October. At that point, the frozen coolant needed to chill its instruments will be depleted. JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program, which NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument, and Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
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RELEASE: 10-005
NASA'S WISE EYE SPIES FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE STARRY SKY; INFRARED ALL-SKY SURVEYING TELESCOPE SENDS BACK FIRST IMAGES FROM SPACE
WASHINGTON -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has captured its first look at the starry sky that it will soon begin surveying in infrared light. Launched on Dec. 14, WISE will scan the entire sky for millions of hidden objects, including asteroids, failed stars and powerful galaxies. WISE data will serve as navigation charts for other missions such as NASA's Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, pointing them to the most interesting targets WISE finds. A new WISE infrared image was taken shortly after the space telescope's cover was removed, exposing the instrument's detectors to starlight for the first time. The picture shows 3,000 stars in the Carina constellation. It can be viewed online at: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/multimedia/wise20100106.html The image covers a patch of sky about three times larger than the full moon. The patch was selected because it does not contain any unusually bright objects, which could damage instrument detectors if observed for too long. The picture was taken while the spacecraft was staring at a fixed patch of sky and is being used to calibrate the spacecraft's pointing system. When the WISE survey begins, the spacecraft will scan the sky continuously as it circles the globe, while an internal scan mirror counteracts its motion. This allows WISE to take freeze-frame snapshots every 11 seconds, resulting in millions of images of the entire sky. "Right now, we are busy matching the rate of the scan mirror to the rate of the spacecraft, so we will capture sharp pictures as our telescope sweeps across the sky, said William Irace, the mission's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. To sense the infrared glow of stars and galaxies, the WISE spacecraft cannot give off any detectable infrared light of its own. This is accomplished by chilling the telescope and detectors to ultra-cold temperatures. The coldest of WISE's detectors will operate at less than 8 Kelvin, or minus 445 Fahrenheit. The first sky survey will be complete in six months, followed by a second scan of one-half of the sky lasting three months. The WISE mission ends when the frozen hydrogen that keeps the instrument cold evaporates away, an event expected to occur in October 2010. Preliminary survey images are expected to be released six months later, in April 2011, with the final atlas and catalog coming after another 11 months in March 2012. Selected images will be released to the public beginning in February 2010. JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The mission was competitively selected under NASA's Explorers Program, managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, and the spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. More information about the WISE mission is available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/wise
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