Jun 8 2006
From The Space Library
The House Committee on Science held a hearing to address the results of the statutorily mandated Nunn-McCurdy review of the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). NOAA, NASA, and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) jointly managed NPOESS, which would provide data and imagery to help weather forecasters, climatologists, and the military map and monitor changes in weather, climate, the oceans, and the environment. The Nunn-McCurdy amendment to the Defense Authorization Act of 1983 (10 U.S.C. 2433) provided that Congress must review any DOD-funded program that was more than 25 percent over budget, to determine whether and in what manner it should continue. In January 2006, the Secretary of the Air Force had notified Congress that the NPOESS program would exceed the 25 percent Nunn-McCurdy threshold. The three NPOESS managing agencies had reviewed the program and determined that it should continue. However, NPOESS must reduce the number of its satellites from six to four and eliminate five sensors, including three for climate research. The agencies would postpone the first NPOESS satellite launch until 2013 and discontinue work on the key weather sensor known as Conically Scanning Microwave Image/Sounder (CMIS). The United States would temporarily rely on Europe for the data that CMIS would have collected, including ocean wind speeds. NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin testified regarding NASA’s compliance with the mandates of the Nunn-McCurdy recertified NPOESS program, emphasizing that NASA would continue to provide cost-effective technologies for two key components of this program—the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP) and the continuity of long-term climate measurements.
U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Science, The Future of NPOESS: Results of the Nunn-McCurdy Review of NOAA’s Weather Satellite Program, 109th Cong., 2nd sess., 8 June 2006, 3-6, 22-25, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/pagedetails.action?browsePath=109%2FHOUSE%2FCommittee+on+Science&granuleId=CHRG-109hhrg27970&packageId=CHRG-109hhrg27970&fromBrowse=true (accessed 20 December 2010); NOAA, Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR), “STAR Acronyms,” http://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/star/acronyms.php (accessed 5 October 2010).
A team of international astronomers, led by Aki Roberge of NASA’s GSFC, reported in Nature that, using NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) telescope, they had discovered that the disc surrounding the Beta Pictoris star, initially discovered in 1984, is extremely rich in carbon. Beta Pictoris is approximately 60 light-years away from Earth and relatively young—8 to 20 million years old. The HST’s earlier observations had indicated that a Jupiter-like planet might have already formed in the star’s disc and that rocky terrestrial planets might be forming. Roberge’s team reported that the disc contained nine times as much carbon as oxygen, which is twice the ratio found in the Sun or in Beta Pictoris itself. The scientists proposed one possible explanation for the high carbon content: that the disc is in a transient, carbon-rich phase. In its earliest period of development, Earth’s solar system could have gone through a phase similar to that of the disc surrounding Beta Pictoris. Alternatively, if researchers were to discover in the future that the asteroids and comets orbiting Beta Pictoris contained large amounts of carbon-rich material, such as graphite and methane, such a finding could indicate the formation of carbon planets very different from Earth.
Maggie McKee, “Star’s Dusty Disc Could Create Exotic Worlds,” New Scientist, 8 June 2006; NASA, “NASA’s Fuse Finds Infant Solar System Awash in Carbon,” news release 06-236, 7 June 2006, http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/jun/HQ_06236_FUSE_0607_final.html (accessed 23 August 2010); see also Aki Roberge et al., “Stabilization of the Disk Around ß Pictoris By Extremely Carbon-Rich Gas,” Nature 441 (8 June 2006): 724-26.
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