Aug 14 2015

From The Space Library

Release M15-125 Foul Weather Forecast Delays Launch of Japanese Cargo Ship to Space Station

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has pushed the launch of its H-II Transport Vehicle (HTV)-5 to the International Space Station to 8:35 a.m. EDT on Monday, Aug. 17. NASA Television will carry live coverage of the event beginning at 7:45 a.m.

JAXA is delaying the launch from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan due to an unfavorable weather forecast for the original launch date of Sunday, Aug. 16.

Loaded with more than 4.5 tons of supplies, including water, spare parts and experiment hardware for the six-person space station crew, the unpiloted cargo craft, named Kounotori, Japanese for “white stork,” will travel four days to reach the station.

Rendezvous and grapple of the HTV-5 now is scheduled for approximately 7:55 a.m. on Aug. 21. NASA TV coverage will begin at 6:15 a.m. Installation coverage now will begin at 10:15 a.m., with installation occurring at approximately 10:45 a.m.

NASA Scientists Help Understand Newly Discovered Planet

One of the best ways to learn how our solar system evolved is to look at younger star systems in the early stages of development. Recently, a team of astronomers including NASA scientists discovered a Jupiter-like planet within a young system that could serve as a decoder ring for understanding how planets formed around our sun.

The new planet, called 51 Eridani (Eri) b, is the first exoplanet discovered by the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), a new instrument operated by an international collaboration, and installed on the 8-meter Gemini South Telescope in Chile. The GPI was designed specifically for discovering and analyzing faint, young planets orbiting bright stars via “direct imaging,” in which astronomers use adaptive optics to sharpen the image of a target star, then block out its starlight. Any remaining incoming light is then analyzed, and the brightest spots indicate a possible planet.

“This is exactly the kind of planet we envisioned discovering when we designed GPI”, says James Graham, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and project scientist for GPI.

Other methods of planet detection are indirect, such as the transit method used by NASA's Kepler mission, in which it discovers planets by measuring the loss of starlight when a planet passes in front of its star.

As Bruce Macintosh, a professor of physics at Stanford University and member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology figuratively described, to detect planets, Kepler sees their shadow while GPI sees their glow.

As far as the cosmic clock is concerned, 51 Eridani is young – only 20 million years old – and this made the direct detection of the planet possible. When planets coalesce, material falling into the planet releases energy and heats it up. Over the next hundred millions years, they radiate that energy away, mostly as infrared light.

“Many of the exoplanets astronomers have imaged before have atmospheres that look like very cool stars" said Macintosh, who led the construction of GPI and now leads the planet-hunting survey. "This one looks like a planet.”

GPI observations revealed that 51 Eri b is roughly twice the mass of Jupiter. Other directly-imaged planets are five times the mass of Jupiter or more. In addition to being the lowest-mass exoplanet ever imaged, it's also the coldest – 800 degrees Fahrenheit, whereas others are around 1,200 F – and it features the strongest atmospheric methane signal ever detected on an alien planet.

Previous Jupiter-like exoplanets have shown only faint traces of methane, far different from the distinctive signatures of methane seen in the atmospheres of the gas giants in our solar system. All of these characteristics, researchers say, point to a planet that is very much what models suggest Jupiter was like in its infancy.

In the atmospheres of the cold giant planets of our solar system, carbon is found as methane, unlike most exoplanets where carbon has mostly been found in the form of carbon monoxide. “Since the atmosphere of 51 Eri b is also methane rich, it signifies that this planet is well on its way to becoming a cousin of our own familiar Jupiter,” said Mark Marley, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, co-lead for theory and a team member responsible for helping to interpret GPI observations.

In addition to expanding the universe of known planets, GPI will provide key clues as to how solar systems form. Astronomers believe that the gas giants in our solar system formed by building up a large, core over a few million years and then pulling in a huge amount of hydrogen and other gasses to form an atmosphere. But the Jupiter-like exoplanets that have been discovered are much hotter than models have predicted, hinting that they could have formed much faster as material collapsed quickly to make a very hot planet. This is an important difference. Using GPI to study more young solar systems such as 51 Eridani will help astronomers understand the formation of our neighbor planets, and how common that planet-forming mechanism is throughout the universe.

"The newly discovered 51 Eri b is the first planet that's cold enough and close enough to the star that it could have indeed formed right where it is the 'old-fashioned way,” Macintosh said. "This planet really could have formed the same way Jupiter did - the whole solar system could be a lot like ours."

The results are published in the current issue of Science Express and in the August 20 issue of Science.

GPI was constructed by a consortium of American and Canadian institutions, funded by the Gemini Observatory, which is an international partnership comprising the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and Chile. The Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey (GPIES) campaign is partially funded by National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the University of California and the Laboratory Directed Research and Development funding at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Release 15-170 NASA Awards Grants for Technologies That Could Transform Space Exploration

NASA has selected eight university-led proposals to study innovative, early stage technologies that will address high-priority needs of America's space program.

The selected proposals for unique, disruptive or transformational space technologies will investigate challenges in the areas of solar cell operations at high temperatures, atmospheric entry model development, synthetic biology applications for space exploration and dynamic tensegrity-based space structures. Tensegrity is a property of structures that employs continuous tension and discontinuous compression to produce exceptionally strong structures for their mass.

"These early career researchers will provide fuel for NASA's innovation engine," said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. "Technology drives exploration, and investments in these technologies and technologists is essential to ensure NASA and the nation have the capabilities necessary to meet the challenges we will face as we journey to Mars. The faculty selected and their colleagues help assure a robust university research community dedicated to advanced space technology development."

The awards are approximately $200,000 per year, up to a possible three years of research, for outstanding early-career faculty who research space technologies that are high priorities for NASA missions.

The selected NASA Early Career Faculty proposals are:

• Robust Planning for Dynamic Tensegrity Structures -- Kostas Bekris of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey
• Synthetic Biology for Recycling Human Waste into Food, Nutraceuticals, and Materials: Closing the Loop for Long-Term Space Travel -- Mark Blenner of Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina
• Lightweight and Flexible Metal Halide Perovskite Thin Films for High Temperature Solar Cells -- Joshua Choi of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville
• Dynamics and Control of Tensegrity Space Manipulators -- James Forbes of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Advanced Physical Models and Numerical Algorithms to Enable High-Fidelity Aerothermodynamic Simulations of Planetary Entry Vehicles on Emerging Distributed Heterogeneous Computing Architectures -- Matthias Ihme of Stanford University in Stanford, California
• Reduced Order Modeling for Non-equilibrium Radiation Hydrodynamics of Base Flow and Wakes: Enabling Manned Missions to Mars -- Marco Panesi of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Engineering Cyanobacteria for the Production of Lightweight Materials -- Fuzhong Zhang of Washington University in St. Louis
• High Temperature InGaN-based Solar Cells -- Yuji Zhao, Arizona State University, Tempe.

These proposals have the potential to yield significant rewards for space exploration by:

• allowing solar cells to function at reasonable levels of efficiency in high-temperature environments;
• improving the process of identifying the most effective thermal protection systems for entering various atmospheres;
• providing the means to produce food, medical supplies and building materials on site at distant destinations using synthetic, biology-based approaches; and
• enabling more capable and affordable space missions through the development of tensegrity technologies that permit large, reconfigurable structures such as antennas, solar arrays and observatories, as well as lightweight landers.

NASA's Early Career Faculty efforts are an element of the agency's Space Technology Research Grants Program. This program is designed to accelerate the development of technologies originating from academia that support the future science and exploration needs of NASA, other government agencies and the commercial space sector.