Oct 3 2012
From The Space Library
RELEASE: 12-341 NASA'S CURIOSITY ROVER CHECKS-IN ON MARS USING FOURSQUARE
WASHINGTON -- NASA's Curiosity Mars rover checked in on Mars Wednesday using the mobile application Foursquare. This marks the first check-in on another planet. Users on Foursquare can keep up with Curiosity as the rover checks in at key locations and posts photos and tips, all while exploring the Red Planet. "NASA is using Foursquare as a tool to share the rover's new locations while exploring Mars," said David Weaver, associate administrator for communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "This will help to involve the public with the mission and give them a sense of the rover's travels through Gale Crater." After landing in Gale Crater last month, Curiosity began a planned 23-month mission that includes some of Mars' most intriguing scientific destinations. Curiosity is roving toward Mount Sharp, a mountain about 3 miles (5 kilometers) tall. The rover is conducting experiments along the way, seeking clues in the rocks and soil that would indicate whether Mars ever was capable of supporting microbial life. It is taking and sharing pictures of the trip. Back here on Earth, Foursquare users will be able to earn a Curiosity-themed badge on the social media platform for check-ins at locations that generate an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Available late this year, this new badge will encourage Foursquare users to explore science centers, laboratories and museums that pique scientific curiosity. NASA has been on Foursquare since 2010 through a strategic partnership with the platform. This partnership, launched with astronaut Doug Wheelock's first-ever check-in from the International Space Station, has allowed users to connect with NASA and enabled them to explore the universe and re-discover Earth. The partnership launched the NASA Explorer badge for Foursquare users, encouraging them to explore NASA-related locations across the country. It also included the launch of a NASA Foursquare page, where the agency provides official tips and information about the nation's space program. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) manages the Mars Science Laboratory mission and its Curiosity rover for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif.
RELEASE: 12-343 NASA'S INFRARED OBSERVATORY MEASURES EXPANSION OF UNIVERSE
Updated Oct. 5, 2012 to include a similar result from another study WASHINGTON -- Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have announced one of the most precise measurements yet of the Hubble constant, or the rate at which our universe is stretching apart. The Hubble constant is named after the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who astonished the world in the 1920s by confirming our universe has been expanding since it exploded into being 13.7 billion years ago. In the late 1990s, astronomers discovered the expansion is accelerating, or speeding up over time. Determining the expansion rate is critical for understanding the age and size of the universe. Unlike NASA's Hubble Space Telescope that views the cosmos in visible and short-wavelength infrared light, Spitzer took advantage of long-wavelength infrared light for its latest Hubble constant measurement of 74.3 kilometers per second per megaparsec. A megaparsec is roughly three million light-years. This finding agrees with an independent supernovae study conducted last year by researchers primarily based at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and improves by a factor of 3 on a seminal 2001 Hubble telescope study using a similar technique as the current study. "Spitzer is yet again doing science beyond what it was designed to do," said project scientist Michael Werner at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Werner has worked on the mission since its early concept phase more than 30 years ago. "First, Spitzer surprised us with its pioneering ability to study exoplanet atmospheres," said Werner, "and now, in the mission's later years, it has become a valuable cosmology tool." In addition, the findings were combined with published data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe to obtain an independent measurement of dark energy, one of the greatest mysteries of our cosmos. Dark energy is thought to be winning a battle against gravity, pulling the fabric of the universe apart. Research based on this acceleration garnered researchers the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. "This is a huge puzzle," said study lead author Wendy Freedman of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena. "It's exciting that we were able to use Spitzer to tackle fundamental problems in cosmology: the precise rate at which the universe is expanding at the current time, as well as measuring the amount of dark energy in the universe from another angle." Freedman led the ground-breaking Hubble Space Telescope study that earlier had measured the Hubble constant. Glenn Wahlgren, Spitzer program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said infrared vision, which sees through dust to provide better views of variable stars called cepheids, enabled Spitzer to improve on past measurements of the Hubble constant using Cepheids. "These pulsating stars are vital rungs in what astronomers call the cosmic distance ladder: a set of objects with known distances that, when combined with the speeds at which the objects are moving away from us, reveal the expansion rate of the universe," said Wahlgren. Cepheids are crucial to the calculations because their distances from Earth can be measured readily. In 1908, Henrietta Leavitt discovered these stars pulse at a rate directly related to their intrinsic brightness. To visualize why this is important, imagine someone walking away from you while carrying a candle. The farther the candle traveled, the more it would dim. Its apparent brightness would reveal the distance. The same principle applies to cepheids, standard candles in our cosmos. By measuring how bright they appear on the sky, and comparing this to their known brightness as if they were close up, astronomers can calculate their distance from Earth. Spitzer observed 10 cepheids in our own Milky Way galaxy and 80 in a nearby neighboring galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Without the cosmic dust blocking their view at the infrared wavelengths seen by Spitzer, the research team was able to obtain more precise measurements of the stars' apparent brightness, and thus their distances. These data opened the way for a new and improved estimate of our universe's expansion rate. "Just over a decade ago, using the words 'precision' and 'cosmology' in the same sentence was not possible, and the size and age of the universe was not known to better than a factor of two," said Freedman. "Now we are talking about accuracies of a few percent. It is quite extraordinary." The study appears in the Astrophysical Journal. Freedman's co-authors are Barry Madore, Victoria Scowcroft, Chris Burns, Andy Monson, S. Eric Person and Mark Seibert of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution and Jane Rigby of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
RELEASE: 12-346 NASA TOURNAMENT LAB TO LAUNCH BIG DATA CHALLENGE SERIES FOR U.S. GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
WASHINGTON -- NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy announced Wednesday the launch of the Big Data Challenge, a series of competitions hosted through the NASA Tournament Lab (NTL). The Big Data Challenge series will apply the process of open innovation to conceptualizing new and novel approaches to using "big data" information sets from various U.S. government agencies. This data comes from the fields of health, energy and Earth science. Competitors will be tasked with imagining analytical techniques and software tools that use big data from discrete government information domains. They will need to describe how the data may be shared as universal, cross-agency solutions that transcend the limitations of individual agencies. "The ability to create new applications and algorithms using diverse data sets is a key element for the NTL," said Jason Crusan, director of the Advanced Exploration Systems Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "NASA is excited to see the results that open innovation can provide to these big data applications." "Big Data is characterized not only by the enormous volume or the velocity of its generation but also by the heterogeneity, diversity and complexity of the data," said Suzi Iacono, co-chair of the interagency Big Data Senior Steering Group, a part of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development Program. "There are enormous opportunities to extract knowledge from these large-scale diverse data sets, and to provide powerful new approaches to drive discovery and decision-making, and to make increasingly accurate predictions. We're excited to see what this competition will yield." The competition will be run by the NTL, a collaboration between NASA, Harvard University and TopCoder, a competitive community of digital creators. The TopCoder Open Innovation platform and process allows U.S. government agencies to conduct high risk/high reward challenges in an open and transparent environment with predictable cost, measurable outcomes-based results and the potential to move quickly into unanticipated directions and new areas of software technology. Registration is open through Oct. 13 for the Ideation Challenge phase, the first of four idea generation competitions in the series.
RELEASE: 12-347 SPACEX DRAGON TO CARRY 23 STUDENT EXPERIMENTS TO SPACE STATION
WASHINGTON -- Twenty-three microgravity experiments designed by participants of the Student Spaceflight Experiment Program (SSEP) will become part of space history Oct. 7. They will be launched to the International Space Station aboard the SpaceX Dragon, the first commercially developed and built American spacecraft to fly a resupply cargo resupply mission to the station. Twelve of the SSEP experiments are getting a second flight opportunity. They were delivered to the space station on a SpaceX demonstration mission in May, but were not completed. The other 11 experiments are new. Each experiment will study the effects of microgravity on physical, chemical and biological systems. The students have been immersed in every facet of research, from defining investigations to designing experiments, writing proposals, and submitting to a formal NASA review for selection of flight experiments. The 23 experiments represent more than 7,000 students and almost 2,000 proposals. "SSEP offers a unique flight opportunity that allows students to experience both the excitement and the challenges inherent in conducting research in a microgravity environment," said Roosevelt Johnson, deputy associate administrator for education at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "It really is STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] in action, using the International Space Station -- which has America's only orbiting National Laboratory -- to host these students' science experiments." SSEP began in June 2010 as a cooperative venture by the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education (NCESSE) and NanoRacks LLC, a national STEM education initiative. The organizations work together to give hundreds of students across a community the opportunity to design and propose real experiments to fly in low Earth orbit. Teams submit formal flight experiment proposals, and a formal proposal review process selects the flight experiment for the community. A suite of programs leverages the flight experiment design competition to engage the entire community, including a mission patch art and design competition. SSEP payloads were flown in 2011 aboard space shuttles Endeavour and Atlantis on their respective STS-134 and STS-135 missions. The third round of experiments in May was the first to be conducted in orbit by space station astronauts. Next week's Dragon launch is the fourth flight opportunity. A fifth suite of experiments is scheduled for spring 2013. More than 100 SSEP students, teachers, and family members will travel to Florida to attend the SpaceX launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. SSEP is one of many programs that use NASA's science and exploration missions to encourage students to pursue a STEM-centric school curriculum. NASA's Office of Education is committed to inspiring and developing the next generation of scientists and engineers through experiential, hands-on learning.
MEDIA ADVISORY: M12-198 GOOGLE+ HANGOUT OCT. 5 WITH NASA ADMINISTRATOR AND SPACEX CEO
WASHINGTON -- NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will discuss the first contracted cargo resupply flight to the International Space Station during a Google+ Hangout from 1-1:30 p.m. EDT Friday, Oct. 5. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and its Dragon cargo spacecraft are scheduled to lift off at 8:35 p.m., Sunday, Oct. 7 from at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Bolden and Musk will talk about the flight, which will be the first of 12 contracted for NASA by SpaceX to resupply the space station. The SpaceX flights under the Commercial Resupply Services contract will restore an American capability to deliver and return significant amounts of cargo, including science experiments, to the orbiting laboratory -- a feat not achievable since the retirement of the space shuttle. The Dragon will be filled with about 1,000 pounds of supplies. This includes critical materials to support the 166 investigations planned for the station's Expedition 33 crew, including 63 new investigations. The Dragon will return about 734 pounds of scientific materials, including results from human research, biotechnology, materials and educational experiments, as well as about 504 pounds of space station hardware.
