May 2 2016

From The Space Library

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Revision as of 18:50, 12 May 2016

RELEASE 16-049 NASA Welcomes New Director for its Jet Propulsion Laboratory

The following is a statement from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on the selection of Michael Watkins as the new director of the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

“President Thomas Rosenbaum and his leadership team at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have made an outstanding choice in naming Dr. Michael M. Watkins as the new director of JPL. I, for one, cannot wait to work with him to advance our Journey to Mars, along with our understanding of our own planet, our universe, and humanity’s place in it.

“Dr. Watkins is no stranger to the NASA family. In more than two decades at JPL, Dr. Watkins played a major role in the Mars Curiosity Rover, Cassini, Mars Odyssey, GRACE, GRAIL, and the GRACE Follow-on missions -- to name just a few. I am confident that he will do an excellent job as he begins a new chapter in the incredible legacy that Caltech and NASA have written together through JPL for generations.

“Dr. Watkins will have some very big shoes to fill in succeeding retiring JPL Director Charles Elachi. When American astronauts reach Mars in the 2030s it will be in large part because of the work that Dr. Elachi and his JPL team have done in tandem with NASA colleagues, collaborators and contractors throughout the nation, and indeed our world.”

CONTRACT RELEASE C16-012 NASA Awards Contract for Aeronautics, Exploration Modeling, Simulation

NASA has selected Science and Technology Corporation of Hampton, Virginia, to provide support services at the agency’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California under the Aeronautics and Exploration Mission Modeling and Simulation (AEMMS) contract.

AEMMS is a single-award, hybrid, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract with definite core and indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity core line items, and a maximum total value of approximately $39.3 million. The period of performance consists of a two-year base and three one-year options.

Science and Technology Corporation will provide research and development support services for the Systems Analysis Office; Army Aviation Development Directorate; Applied Modeling and Simulation Branch, and Fundamental Modeling and Simulation Branches of the NASA Advanced Super-computing Division; and NASA Aeromechanics Office.

Contract objectives include: modeling, simulation, analysis of systems relevant to the NASA aeronautics, exploration, space operations and science missions; development and application of technologies for the design and analysis of aerospace vehicles and systems; large-scale numerical simulations in support of NASA and Army mission-critical engineering applications; and, fundamental advances in numerical methodologies, algorithms, physical models, and application code development.

MEDIA ADVISORY M16-049 NASA Astronauts to Call Chicago Area Students from International Space Station

Students from 11 schools in South Holland, Illinois, will have the opportunity to speak with two NASA astronauts currently living and working aboard the International Space Station at 11:55 a.m. EDT Thursday, May 5. The 20-minute, Earth-to-space call will air live on NASA Television and the agency’s website.

The event, hosted by South Suburban College, will begin when Rep. Robin Kelly of Illinois opens the downlink with Expedition 47 Commander Tim Kopra and Flight Engineer Jeff Williams. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois will close the call.

Media interested in covering the event should contact Lisa Miller at lmiller@ssc.edu. South Suburban College is located at 15800 State Street.

Participating schools include: Arbor Park, Coolidge and Gwendolyn Brooks Middle Schools; Kankakee Montessori, Junior and High Schools; King and Kennedy Upper Grade Centers; Roosevelt Junior High School; St. George School District 258; and STEM Academy.

Williams launched to the space station March 18 and will live aboard until September. Kopra launched Dec. 15 and will return home in June.

This in-flight education downlink is an integral component of the NASA Office of Education’s efforts to improve science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) teaching and learning in the United States. Linking students directly to astronauts aboard the space station through the agency Office of Education’s STEM on Station activity provides authentic, live experiences in space exploration, space study and the scientific components of space travel, while introducing the possibilities of life in space.

Promising Worlds Found Around Nearby Ultra-cool Dwarf Star

Astronomers using the TRAPPIST telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory have discovered three planets with sizes and temperatures similar to those of Venus and Earth, orbiting an ultra-cool dwarf star just 40 light-years from Earth.

Michaël Gillon of the University of Liège in Belgium, leading a team of astronomers including Susan M. Lederer of NASA Johnson Space Center, have used the TRAPPIST telescope to observe the star 2MASS J23062928-0502285, now also known as TRAPPIST-1. They found that this dim and cool star faded slightly at regular intervals, indicating that several objects were passing between the star and the Earth. Detailed analysis showed that three planets are present around the star.

TRAPPIST-1 is an ultra-cool dwarf star — it is much cooler and redder than the Sun and barely larger than Jupiter. Despite being so close to the Earth, this star is too dim and too red to be seen with the naked eye or even visually with a large amateur telescope. It lies in the constellation of Aquarius (The Water Carrier).

Follow-up observations with larger telescopes, including the HAWK-I instrument on ESO’s 8-metre Very Large Telescope in Chile, have shown that the planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1 have sizes very similar to that of Earth. Two of the planets have orbital periods of about 1.5 days and 2.4 days respectively, and the third planet has a less well-determined orbital period in the range 4.5 to 73 days.

"With such short orbital periods, the planets are between 20 and 100 times closer to their star than the Earth to the Sun. The structure of this planetary system is much more similar in scale to the system of Jupiter’s moons than to that of the Solar System," explains Michaël Gillon.

Although they orbit very close to their host dwarf star, the inner two planets only receive four times and twice, respectively, the amount of radiation received by the Earth, because their star is much fainter than the Sun. That puts them closer to the star than the so-called habitable zone for this system, defined as having surface temperatures where liquid water can exist, although it is still possible that they possess potentially habitable regions on their surfaces. The third, outer, planet’s orbit is not yet well known, but it probably receives less radiation than the Earth does, but maybe still enough to lie within the habitable zone. The new results will be published in the journal Nature on 2 May 2016.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and K2, the Kepler spacecraft's second mission, will be observing TRAPPIST-1 and its planets later this year.

Fortuitously, two of these planets are transiting the star on May 4, an event that happens only once every two years as seen from Earth. Astronomers hope to make measurements of the atmospheres of both of these planets and look for evidence of water vapor. The Hubble Space Telescope can characterize the atmospheres of the planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system by observing them as they pass in front of, or transit, their parent star. Hubble astronomers will use spectroscopy to measure starlight as it filters through a planet’s atmosphere.

K2 will observe TRAPPIST-1 as part of their Campaign 12, which is scheduled to take place from Dec. 15 to March 4, 2017. The data are expected to be available at the public archive the end of May 2017.

K2 will observe tens of transits of the two close-in Earth-sized exoplanets during the approximately 80-day campaign. The continuous and multiple observations will allow for measurements of predicted transit timing variations – the gravitational interaction between planets that cause transits to occur slightly earlier or slightly later than predicted. This will provide estimates of the masses of these exoplanets. Using K2’s mass measurements and TRAPPIST's ground-based size measurements, astronomers can calculate or constrain the density of the exoplanets to determine if they could be rocky worlds.

K2’s observations will also help scientists determine the orbital period of the third planet, and help find any additional small transiting objects in the system.

The TRAPPIST-1 system is an ideal target for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s infrared sensitivity will be able to detect carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor, and other molecules common in the atmospheres of the rocky planets in our own solar system.

"Thanks to several giant telescopes currently under construction, including ESO’s E-ELT and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope due to launch for 2018, we will soon be able to study the atmospheric composition of these planets and to explore them first for water, then for traces of biological activity. That's a giant step in the search for life in the Universe," says Julien de Wit, a co-author from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA.

The TRAPPIST survey is a prototype for a more ambitious project called SPECULOOS that will be installed at ESO’s Paranal Observatory.