Feb 15 2011
From The Space Library
RELEASE: 11-043 NASA AWARD RECOGNIZES AIR FORCE REMOTE-SENSING PROGRAM
WASHINGTON -- NASA and the U.S. Department of the Interior presented the 2010 William T. Pecora group award to the U.S. Air Force Eagle Vision program Tuesday at a Pentagon ceremony. Eagle Vision was recognized for contributions in the United States and abroad to homeland security, humanitarian aid and natural disaster recovery efforts. The program consists of five ground stations capable of retrieving real-time satellite imagery from numerous commercial Earth-observing satellites to deliver time-critical precision images to support U.S. global crisis response. The ground stations are deployable worldwide. The award was presented to James G. Clark, Air Force director of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Innovations and deputy chief of staff for ISR. NASA Chief Scientist Waleed Abdalati and Anne Castle, Interior's assistant secretary for water and science, made the presentation. "Eagle Vision is an excellent demonstration of how Earth observations from space support not only our soldiers and allies, but make a big contribution to our country's humanitarian efforts at home and abroad," Abdalati said. "One of NASA's primary missions, according to our founding charter, is expanding human knowledge of the Earth. Eagle Vision is an excellent example of the great achievements that can be realized in Earth science through inter-agency collaboration." The program was created in 1995 in response to the post-Desert Storm need for timely, unclassified imagery the U.S. military could share with our allies. Since then the program has aided natural disaster relief and humanitarian efforts, including fighting wildfires in California and relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina. Outside the United States, the Eagle Vision team provided support to 19 different disaster events in six different countries during 2009. Two Eagle Vision units provided Haiti earthquake first responders with images within 24 hours of the quake. Units also were deployed to Africa between 2004 and 2007 to collect commercial satellite imagery of Chad, Mauritania, Uganda, and Niger to build a broad-area geospatial library for humanitarian support. NASA and the Department of the Interior present individual and group Pecora Awards to honor outstanding contributions in the field of remote sensing and its application to understanding Earth. The award was established in 1974 to honor the memory of William T. Pecora, former director of the U.S. Geological Survey and under secretary of the Department of the Interior.
RELEASE: 11-046 NASA RELEASES IMAGES OF MAN-MADE CRATER ON COMET PASADENA, Calif. --
NASA's Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus. The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST at a distance of approximately 111 miles. Stardust took 72 high-resolution images of the comet. It also accumulated 468 kilobytes of data about the dust in its coma, the cloud that is a comet's atmosphere. The craft is on its second mission of exploration called Stardust-NExT, having completed its prime mission collecting cometary particles and returning them to Earth in 2006. The Stardust-NExT mission met its goals which included observing surface features that changed in areas previously seen during the 2005 Deep Impact mission; imaging new terrain; and viewing the crater generated when the 2005 mission propelled an impactor at the comet. "This mission is 100 percent successful," said Joe Veverka, Stardust-NExT principal investigator of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. "We saw a lot of new things that we didn't expect, and we'll be working hard to figure out what Tempel 1 is trying to tell us." Several of the images provide tantalizing clues to the result of the Deep Impact mission's collision with Tempel 1. "We see a crater with a small mound in the center, and it appears that some of the ejecta went up and came right back down," said Pete Schultz of Brown University, Providence, R.I. "This tells us this cometary nucleus is fragile and weak based on how subdued the crater is we see today." Engineering telemetry downlinked after closest approach indicates the spacecraft flew through waves of disintegrating cometary particles including a dozen impacts that penetrated more than one layer of its protective shielding. "The data indicate Stardust went through something similar to a B-17 bomber flying through flak in World War II," said Don Brownlee, Stardust-NExT co-investigator from the University of Washington in Seattle. "Instead of having a little stream of uniform particles coming out, they apparently came out in chunks and crumbled." While the Valentine's Day night encounter of Tempel 1 is complete, the spacecraft will continue to look at its latest cometary obsession from afar. "This spacecraft has logged over 3.5 billion miles since launch, and while its last close encounter is complete, its mission of discovery is not," said Tim Larson, Stardust-NExT project manager at JPL. "We'll continue imaging the comet as long as the science team can gain useful information, and then Stardust will get its well-deserved rest." Stardust-NExT is a low-cost mission that is expanding the investigation of comet Tempel 1 initiated by the Deep Impact spacecraft. The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft and manages day-to-day mission operations.
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