May 9 2013

From The Space Library

RELEASE: 13-117 - NASA PARTNERS WITH OHIO NON-PROFIT ON UNMANNED AIR CHALLENGE --WASHINGTON -- NASA has selected Development Projects Inc. of Dayton, Ohio, to manage a new Centennial Challenge prize competition involving unmanned aircraft systems in 2014. NASA's Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Airspace Operations Challenge is focused on developing and demonstrating key technologies, particularly the ability to sense and avoid other air traffic. This will make it possible for these robotic aircraft to operate safely in the same airspace as piloted aircraft. NASA is providing a $500,000 prize purse. Development Projects Inc. leads a technically diverse expert team to conduct this new NASA aeronautics-related challenge competition, said Larry Cooper, program executive for NASA's Centennial Challenges Program in Washington. "We look forward to working with Development Projects to see this challenge provide advanced technologies and new entrants who will assist in the development of our nation's next generation airspace capabilities." Unmanned aircraft systems have the potential to carry out a wide range of public service tasks that are too expensive, monotonous or dangerous for piloted aircraft. Robotic aircraft can carry instruments into violent hurricanes and monitor remote stretches of infrastructure, such as power lines and pipelines. First responders can use UAS platforms to assess flood damage and wildfire intensity. The NASA Aeronautics Research Institute at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., is coordinating agency participation in the challenge on behalf of NASA's Space Technology and Aeronautics Research mission directorates. Development Projects Inc. was selected from proposals submitted in response to a NASA solicitation in fall 2012. The non-profit organization will finalize rules and begin detailed preparations for the challenge, eventually registering competitors. The first competition to demonstrate team entries is expected in May 2014. In the Centennial Challenges Program, NASA provides the prize purse, but the competitions are managed by non-profit organizations that cover the cost of operations through commercial or private sponsorships. NASA's Centennial Challenges seek unconventional solutions to problems of interest to NASA and the nation. Competitors have included private companies, student groups and independent inventors working outside the traditional aerospace industry. Unlike contracts or grants, prizes are awarded only after solutions are successfully demonstrated. There have been 23 Centennial Challenges competition events since 2005. NASA has awarded almost $6 million to 15 challenge-winning teams.

RELEASE: 13-133 - NASA'S HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE FINDS DEAD STARS 'POLLUTED' WITH PLANET DEBRIS --WASHINGTON -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found the building blocks for Earth-sized planets in an unlikely place-- the atmospheres of a pair of burned-out stars called white dwarfs. These dead stars are located 150 light-years from Earth in a relatively young star cluster, Hyades, in the constellation Taurus. The star cluster is only 625 million years old. The white dwarfs are being polluted by asteroid-like debris falling onto them. Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph observed silicon and only low levels of carbon in the white dwarfs' atmospheres. Silicon is a major ingredient of the rocky material that constitutes Earth and other solid planets in our solar system. Carbon, which helps determine properties and origin of planetary debris, generally is depleted or absent in rocky, Earth-like material. We have identified chemical evidence for the building blocks of rocky planets, said Jay Farihi of the University of Cambridge in England. He is lead author of a new study appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "When these stars were born, they built planets, and there's a good chance they currently retain some of them. The material we are seeing is evidence of this. The debris is at least as rocky as the most primitive terrestrial bodies in our solar system." This discovery suggests rocky planet assembly is common around stars, and it offers insight into what will happen in our own solar system when our sun burns out 5 billion years from now. Farihi's research suggests asteroids less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide probably were torn apart by the white dwarfs' strong gravitational forces. Asteroids are thought to consist of the same materials that form terrestrial planets, and seeing evidence of asteroids points to the possibility of Earth-sized planets in the same system. The pulverized material may have been pulled into a ring around the stars and eventually funneled onto the dead stars. The silicon may have come from asteroids that were shredded by the white dwarfs' gravity when they veered too close to the dead stars. It's difficult to imagine another mechanism than gravity that causes material to get close enough to rain down onto the star, Farihi said. By the same token, when our sun burns out, the balance of gravitational forces between the sun and Jupiter will change, disrupting the main asteroid belt. Asteroids that veer too close to the sun will be broken up, and the debris could be pulled into a ring around the dead sun. According to Farihi, using Hubble to analyze the atmospheres of white dwarfs is the best method for finding the signatures of solid planet chemistry and determining their composition. Normally, white dwarfs are like blank pieces of paper, containing only the light elements hydrogen and helium,Farihi said. "Heavy elements like silicon and carbon sink to the core. The one thing the white dwarf pollution technique gives us that we just won't get with any other planet-detection technique is the chemistry of solid planets." The two "polluted" Hyades white dwarfs are part of the team's search of planetary debris around more than 100 white dwarfs, led by Boris Gansicke of the University of Warwick in England. Team member Detlev Koester of the University of Kiel in Germany is using sophisticated computer models of white dwarf atmospheres to determine the abundances of various elements that can be traced to planets in the Hubble spectrograph data. Farihi's team plans to analyze more white dwarfs using the same technique to identify not only the rocks' composition, but also their parent bodies.

MEDIA ADVISORY: M13-074 - NASA ADMINISTRATOR TOURS ADVANCED AVIATION TECHNOLOGY AT LANGLEY, MEETS MEDIA FRIDAY --WASHINGTON -- NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will see technologies NASA is developing to make flying and the national air transportation system safer, cleaner and more efficient during a trip to NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., Friday, May 10. Bolden will visit Langley's Air Traffic Operations Laboratory and a cockpit simulator. He will join Langley Center Director Lesa Roe and others for a look at facilities researchers are using to transform the nation's air traffic management system, improve aircraft fuel efficiency and enhance aviation safety. Also included in Langley research are systems that would allow remotely piloted, unmanned aerial systems to be operated safely in the same airspace used by piloted aircraft.

RELEASE: 13-134 - NASA WINS PRESTIGIOUS AEROSPACE INDUSTRY AWARDS --WASHINGTON -- Two prominent aerospace industry organizations are recognizing the contributions of NASA, especially the achievements of the team that landed NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars in August, with coveted awards. The National Aeronautic Association (NAA) will present its Robert J. Collier Trophy to the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Team of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., at an event in Arlington, Va., Thursday night. At an event in Washington on Wednesday, the team received the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Foundation Award. AIAA also conferred its highest recognition, the title of honorary fellow, on William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for human exploration and operations and presented NASA's Associate Administrator for Science, astronaut John Grunsfeld, with its AIAA National Capitol Section Barry Goldwater Educator Award. AIAA recognized two other NASA employees as fellows: Ray G. Clinton of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and Laurence D. Leavitt of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. It's wonderful to see NASA's people and their accomplishments recognized by the aerospace community, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "In particular, the Curiosity landing was the hardest NASA mission ever attempted in the history of robotic planetary exploration. These prestigious awards are a testament to the dedication and hard work of the entire worldwide team." The NAA established the Collier Trophy in 1911 and presents it yearly to recognize the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America. The AIAA awards recognize the most influential and inspiring individuals in aerospace, whose outstanding contributions merit the highest accolades. Past honorees have included Orville Wright, Neil Armstrong, the team that designed the space shuttle and the astronauts who carried out the first Hubble Space Telescope repair mission in 1993. The NAA's Collier citation notes the MSL team's "extraordinary achievements of successfully landing Curiosity on Mars, advancing the nation's technological and engineering capabilities, and significantly improving humanity's understanding of ancient Martian habitable environments." More than 7,000 people in at least 33 U.S. states and 11 other countries have worked on the Mars Science Laboratory mission. Curiosity, the laboratory's centerpiece, carries 10 science instruments to investigate the environmental history inside Gale Crater on Mars. In March, rover scientists announced an analysis of a rock sample collected there shows Mars could have supported living microbes in an ancient freshwater environment. Curiosity's mission is expected to last at least two years. The prestigious Collier Trophy is a wonderful recognition for Curiosity, a phenomenal engineering and science achievement that has captured the hearts and minds of children and adults across America and around the globe, said Charles Elachi, director of JPL. "It's an honor to do missions like this one on behalf of NASA and the nation." Two other teams from JPL that manage NASA spacecraft, the Dawn mission to the asteroid belt and the Voyager mission to interstellar space, were finalists for the 2012 Collier Trophy. JPL designed, developed and assembled the rover and manages its mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

RELEASE: 13-135 - NASA COMMERCIAL PARTNER SIERRA NEVADA COMPLETES SAFETY REVIEW --WASHINGTON -- Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC) Space Systems of Louisville, Colo., has completed its first major, comprehensive safety review of its Dream Chaser Space System. This is the company's latest paid-for-performance milestone with NASA's Commercial Crew Program (CCP), which is working with commercial space partners to develop capabilities to launch U.S. astronauts from American soil in the next few years. The Integrated Systems Safety Analysis Review provided NASA with hazard reports and safety and reliability plans for the major components of the company's integrated crew transportation system, including the Dream Chaser spacecraft, United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, and flight and ground systems. Safety review milestones are critical to ensuring safety and reliability techniques and methods are incorporated into space systems design, said Ed Mango, NASA's CCP manager. "NASA's participation in these reviews provides our partners with critical design experiences from past human spaceflight activities." SNC is developing its Dream Chaser Space System under NASA's Commercial Crew Integrated Capability (CCiCap) initiative, which is intended to lead to the availability of commercial human spaceflight services for government and commercial customers. Dream Chaser is making substantial progress toward flight with the help of our NASA team, said Mark Sirangelo, head of SNC's Space Systems. "The ability to openly exchange information through the work on these CCiCap milestones is invaluable for many reasons, such as communicating Dream Chaser development plans and receiving timely feedback from NASA, all of which help to improve our design and maximize safety and reliability. As we begin our flight test program we have a better and stronger program due to our partnership with NASA." A Dream Chaser engineering test craft is being prepared for shipment to NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California this month for its first free-flight test later this year at the center. The test will provide data on the winged spacecraft's aerodynamic performance during approach and landing on a traditional runway.

RELEASE: 13-136 - NASA CURIOSITY ROVER TEAM SELECTS SECOND DRILLING TARGET ON MARS --PASADENA, Calif. -- The team operating NASA's Curiosity Mars rover on Mars has selected a second target rock for drilling and sampling. The rover will set course to the drilling location in coming days. This second drilling target, called "Cumberland," lies about nine feet (2.75 meters) west of the rock where Curiosity's drill first touched Martian stone in February. Curiosity took the first rock sample ever collected on Mars from that rock, called "John Klein." The rover found evidence of an ancient environment favorable for microbial life. Both rocks are flat, with pale veins and a bumpy surface. They are embedded in a layer of rock on the floor of a shallow depression called "Yellowknife Bay." This second drilling is intended to confirm results from the first drilling, which indicated the chemistry of the first powdered sample from John Klein was much less oxidizing than that of a soil sample the rover scooped up before it began drilling. We know there is some cross-contamination from the previous sample each time, said Dawn Sumner, a long-term planner for Curiosity's science team at the University of California at Davis. "For the Cumberland sample, we expect to have most of that cross-contamination come from a similar rock, rather than from very different soil." Although Cumberland and John Klein are very similar, Cumberland appears to have more of the erosion-resistant granules that cause the surface bumps. The bumps are concretions, or clumps of minerals, which formed when water soaked the rock long ago. Analysis of a sample containing more material from these concretions could provide information about the variability within the rock layer that includes both John Klein and Cumberland. Mission engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., recently finished upgrading Curiosity's operating software following a four-week break. The rover continued monitoring the Martian atmosphere during the break but the team did not send any new commands because Mars and the sun were positioned in such a way the sun could have blocked or corrupted commands sent from Earth. Curiosity is about nine months into a two-year prime mission since landing inside Gale Crater on Mars. After the second rock drilling in Yellowknife Bay and a few other investigations nearby, the rover will drive toward the base of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile (5-kilometer) tall layered mountain inside the crater. JPL manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project, of which Curiosity is the centerpiece, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

RELEASE: 13-137 - NASA STATEMENT ON NEW MANUFACTURING INNOVATION INSTITUTES --WASHINGTON -- The following is a statement from NASA Associate Administrator for Space Technology Michael Gazarik about Thursday's announcement from the Obama Administration that it is launching competitions to create three new manufacturing innovation institutes supported by five federal agencies -- NASA, the National Science Foundation and the departments of Defense, Energy, and Commerce. "The president's announcement today of three new Manufacturing Innovation Institutes continues the momentum needed to address a crucial competitiveness challenge – the need to close the gap between research and development activities and the deployment of technological innovations that benefits American manufacturers and American-made goods. Through NASA's ongoing participation in the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, we are assuring the aerospace community, and all American manufacturers, have access to the new knowledge and technology capabilities that are essential for turning research discoveries, inventions and new ideas into better or novel products. Advanced manufacturing, for and in space, holds great promise for NASA as we move forward with our exploration efforts. " The new technology economy of the 21st century is driven by innovation. This is why NASA has been fully engaged with our partners in the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute in Youngstown, Ohio. We look forward to working with the other stakeholders in these new institutes, recognizing they will provide the fuel for America's innovation engine. NASA is proud to help keep that engine running.