Jan 7 2013

From The Space Library

RELEASE: 13-002 - NASA'S GREEN AVIATION RESEARCH THROTTLES UP INTO SECOND GEAR --WASHINGTON -- NASA has selected eight large-scale integrated technology demonstrations to advance aircraft concepts and technologies that will reduce the impact of aviation on the environment over the next 30 years, research efforts that promise future travelers will fly in quieter, greener and more fuel-efficient airliners. The demonstrations, which are part of by NASA's Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) Project, will focus on five areas -- aircraft drag reduction through innovative flow control concepts, weight reduction from advanced composite materials, fuel and noise reduction from advanced engines, emissions reductions from improved engine combustors, and fuel consumption and community noise reduction through innovative airframe and engine integration designs. The selected demonstrations are: -- Active Flow Control Enhanced Vertical Tail Flight Experiment: Tests of technology that can manipulate, on demand, the air that flows over a full-scale commercial aircraft tail. -- Damage Arresting Composite Demonstration: Assessment of a low-weight, damage-tolerant, stitched composite structural concept, resulting in a 25 percent reduction in weight over state-of-the-art aircraft composite applications. -- Adaptive Compliant Trailing Edge Flight Experiment: Demonstration of a non-rigid wing flap to establish its airworthiness in the flight environment. -- Highly Loaded Front Block Compressor Demonstration: Tests to show Ultra High Bypass (UHB) or advanced turbofan efficiency improvements of a two-stage, transonic high-pressure engine compressor. -- 2nd Generation UHB Ratio Propulsor Integration: Continued development of a geared turbofan engine to help reduce fuel consumption and noise. -- Low Nitrogen Oxide Fuel Flexible Engine Combustor Integration: Demonstration of a full ring-shaped engine combustor that produces very low emissions. -- Flap and Landing Gear Noise Reduction Flight Experiment: Analysis, wind tunnel and flight tests to design quieter flaps and landing gear without performance or weight penalties. -- UHB Engine Integration for a Hybrid Wing Body: Verification of power plant and airframe integration concepts that will allow fuel consumption reductions in excess of 50 percent while reducing noise on the ground. With these demonstrations we will take what we've learned and move from the laboratory to more flight and ground technology tests, said Fay Collier, ERA project manager based at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. "We have made a lot of progress in our research toward very quiet aircraft with low carbon footprints. But the real challenge is to integrate ideas and pieces together to make an even larger improvement. Our next steps will help us work towards that goal." The Environmentally Responsible Aviation Project was created in 2009 and is part of NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate's Integrated Systems Research Program. During its first phase, engineers assessed dozens of broad areas of environmentally friendly aircraft technologies and then matured the most promising ones to the point that they can be tested together in a real world environment in the second phase. Those experiments included nonstick coatings for low-drag wing designs, laboratory testing of a new composite manufacturing technique, advanced engine testing, and test flights of a remotely piloted hybrid wing body prototype. Key to ERA research is industry partnerships. Each of the demonstrations, which are scheduled to begin this year and continue through 2015, is expected to include selected industry partners, many of which will contribute their own funding. "ERA's research portfolio provides a healthy balance of industry and government partnerships working collaboratively to mature key technologies addressing ERA's aggressive fuel burn, noise and emission reductions goals for tomorrow's transport aircraft," said Ed Waggoner, director of the Integrated Systems Research Program. ERA is one of many NASA aeronautics research efforts to develop technologies to make aircraft safer, faster, and more efficient and to help transform the national air transportation system. That research is being conducted at NASA Langley, NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., and NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

RELEASE: 13-003 - NEW CHANDRA MOVIE FEATURES NEUTRON STAR ACTION --WASHINGTON -- Unlike with some blockbuster films, the sequel to a movie from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is better than the first. This latest movie features a deeper look at a fast moving jet of particles produced by a rapidly rotating neutron star, and may provide new insight into the nature of some of the densest matter in the universe. The hero of this Chandra movie is the Vela pulsar, a neutron star that was formed when a massive star collapsed. The Vela pulsar is about 1,000 light-years from Earth, about 12 miles in diameter, and makes a complete rotation in 89 milliseconds, faster than a helicopter rotor. As the pulsar whips around, it spews out a jet of charged particles that race along the pulsar's rotation axis at about 70 percent of the speed of light. The new Chandra data, which were obtained from June to September 2010, suggest the pulsar may be slowly wobbling, or precessing, as it spins. The period of the precession, which is analogous to the slow wobble of a spinning top, is estimated to be about 120 days. We think the Vela pulsar is like a rotating garden sprinkler -- except with the water blasting out at over half the speed of light, said Martin Durant of the University of Toronto in Canada, who is the first author of the paper describing these results. One possible cause of precession for a spinning neutron star is it has become slightly distorted and is no longer a perfect sphere. This distortion might be caused by the combined action of the fast rotation and "glitches," sudden increases of the pulsar's rotational speed due to the interaction of the superfluid core of the neutron star with its crust. The deviation from a perfect sphere may only be equivalent to about one part in 100 million, said co-author Oleg Kargaltsev of The George Washington University in Washington, who presented these results Monday at the 221st American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, Calif. "Neutron stars are so dense that even a tiny distortion like this would have a big effect." If the evidence for precession of the Vela pulsar is confirmed, it would be the first time a neutron star has been found to be this way. The shape and the motion of the Vela jet look strikingly like a rotating helix, a shape that is naturally explained by precession. Another possibility is the strong magnetic fields around the pulsar are influencing the shape of the jet. For example, if the jet develops a small bend caused, by precession, the magnetic field's lines on the inside of the bend will become more closely spaced. This pushes particles toward the outside of the bend, increasing the effect. It's like having an unsecured fire hose and a flow of water at high pressure, said co-author George Pavlov, principal investigator of the Chandra proposal at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. "All you need is a small bend in the hose and violent motion can result." This is the second Chandra movie of the Vela pulsar. The original was released in 2003 by Pavlov and co-authors. The first Vela movie contained shorter, unevenly spaced observations so that the changes in the jet were less pronounced and the researchers did not argue that precession was occurring. However, based on the same data, Avinash Deshpande of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India, and the late Venkatraman Radhakrishnan, argued in a 2007 paper the Vela pulsar might be precessing. Astronomers have returned to observing Vela because it offers an excellent chance to study how a pulsar and its jet work. The 0.7 light-year-long jet in Vela is similar to those produced by accreting supermassive black holes in other galaxies, but on a much smaller scale. Because Vela's jet changes dramatically over a period of months and is relatively close, it can be studied in great detail unlike jets from black holes that change over much longer timescales. If precession is confirmed and the Vela pulsar is indeed a distorted neutron star, it should be a persistent source of gravitational waves, and would be a prime target for the next generation of gravitational wave detectors designed to test Einstein's theory of general relativity. A paper describing these results will be published in Thursday's The Astrophysical Journal. Other co-authors of the paper were Julia Kropotina and Kseniya Levenfish from St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University in St. Petersburg, Russia. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

RELEASE: 13-007 - NASA'S NUSTAR CATCHES BLACK HOLES IN GALAXY WEB --WASHINGTON -- NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, set its X-ray eyes on a spiral galaxy and caught the brilliant glow of two black holes lurking inside. The new image is being released Monday along with NuSTAR's view of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, Calif. These new images showcase why NuSTAR is giving us an unprecedented look at the cosmos, said Lou Kaluzienski, NuSTAR Program Scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington. "With NuSTAR's greater sensitivity and imaging capability, we're getting a wealth of new information on a wide array of cosmic phenomena in the high-energy X-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum." Launched last June, NuSTAR is the first orbiting telescope with the ability to focus high-energy X-ray light. It can view objects in considerably greater detail than previous missions operating at similar wavelengths. Since launch, the NuSTAR team has been fine-tuning the telescope, which includes a mast the length of a school bus connecting the mirrors and detectors. The mission has looked at a range of extreme, high-energy objects already, including black holes near and far, and the incredibly dense cores of dead stars. In addition, NuSTAR has begun black-hole searches in the inner region of the Milky Way galaxy and in distant galaxies in the universe. Among the telescope's targets is the spiral galaxy IC342, also known as Caldwell 5, featured in one of the two new images. This galaxy lies 7 million light-years away in the constellation Camelopardalis (the Giraffe). Previous X-ray observations of the galaxy from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory revealed the presence of two blinding black holes, called ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs). How ULXs can shine so brilliantly is an ongoing mystery in astronomy. While these black holes are not as powerful as the supermassive black hole at the hearts of galaxies, they are more than 10 times brighter than the stellar-mass black holes peppered among the stars in our own galaxy. Astronomers think ULXs could be less common intermediate-mass black holes, with a few thousand times the mass of our sun, or smaller stellar-mass black holes in an unusually bright state. A third possibility is that these black holes don't fit neatly into either category. High-energy X-rays hold a key to unlocking the mystery surrounding these objects, said Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Whether they are massive black holes, or there is new physics in how they feed, the answer is going to be fascinating." In the image, the two bright spots that appear entangled in the arms of the IC342 galaxy are the black holes. High-energy X-ray light has been translated into the color magenta, while the galaxy itself is shown in visible light. Before NuSTAR, high-energy X-ray pictures of this galaxy and the two black holes would be so fuzzy that everything would appear as one pixel, said Harrison. The second image features the well-known, historical supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, located 11,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia. The color blue indicates the highest energy X-ray light seen by NuSTAR, while red and green signify the lower end of NuSTAR's energy range. The blue region is where the shock wave from the supernova blast is slamming into material surrounding it, accelerating particles to nearly the speed of light. As the particles speed up, they give off a type of light known as synchrotron radiation. NuSTAR will be able to determine for the first time how energetic the particles are, and address the mystery of what causes them to reach such great speeds. Cas A is the poster child for studying how massive stars explode and also provides us a clue to the origin of the high-energy particles, or cosmic rays, that we see here on Earth, said Brian Grefenstette of Caltech, a lead researcher on the observations. "With NuSTAR, we can study where, as well as how, particles are accelerated to such ultra-relativistic energies in the remnant left behind by the supernova explosion."

RELEASE: 13-008 - NASA'S KEPLER MISSION DISCOVERS 461 NEW PLANET CANDIDATES --WASHINGTON -- NASA's Kepler mission Monday announced the discovery of 461 new planet candidates. Four of the potential new planets are less than twice the size of Earth and orbit in their sun's "habitable zone," the region in the planetary system where liquid water might exist on the surface of a planet. One of the four newly identified super Earth-size planet candidates, KOI-172.02, orbits in the habitable zone of a star similar to our sun. The possible planet is approximately 1.5 times the radius of Earth and orbits its host star every 242 days. Additional follow-up analysis will be required to confirm the candidate as a planet. Based on observations conducted from May 2009 to March 2011, the findings show a steady increase in the number of smaller-size planet candidates and the number of stars with more than one candidate. There is no better way to kickoff the start of the Kepler extended mission than to discover more possible outposts on the frontier of potentially life bearing worlds, said Christopher Burke, Kepler scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who is leading the analysis. Since the last Kepler catalog was released in February 2012, the number of candidates discovered in the Kepler data has increased by 20 percent and now totals 2,740 potential planets orbiting 2,036 stars. The most dramatic increases are seen in the number of Earth-size and super Earth-size candidates discovered, which grew by 43 and 21 percent respectively. The new data increases the number of stars discovered to have more than one planet candidate from 365 to 467. Today, 43 percent of Kepler's planet candidates are observed to have neighbor planets. The large number of multi-candidate systems being found by Kepler implies that a substantial fraction of exoplanets reside in flat multi-planet systems, said Jack Lissauer, planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "This is consistent with what we know about our own planetary neighborhood." The Kepler space telescope identifies planet candidates by repeatedly measuring the change in brightness of more than 150,000 stars in search of planets that pass in front, or "transit," their host star. At least three transits are required to verify a signal as a potential planet. Scientists analyzed more than 13,000 transit-like signals to eliminate known spacecraft instrumentation and astrophysical false positives, phenomena that masquerade as planetary candidates, to identify the potential new planets. Candidates require additional follow-up observations and analyses to be confirmed as planets. At the beginning of 2012, 33 candidates in the Kepler data had been confirmed as planets. Today, there are 105. The analysis of increasingly longer time periods of Kepler data uncovers smaller planets in longer period orbits-- orbital periods similar to Earth's, said Steve Howell, Kepler mission project scientist at Ames. "It is no longer a question of will we find a true Earth analogue, but a question of when." The complete list of Kepler planet candidates is available in an interactive table at the NASA Exoplanet Archive. The archive is funded by NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program to collect and make public data to support the search for and characterization of exoplanets and their host stars. Ames manages Kepler's ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with JPL at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes the Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery Mission and is funded by NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington. JPL manages NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program. The NASA Exoplanet Archive is hosted at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology.

RELEASE: 13-009 - NASA KEPLER SCIENTIST HONORED BY NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES --WASHINGTON -- William Borucki, science principal investigator for NASA's Kepler mission at the agency's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California, is the recipient of the 2013 Henry Draper Medal awarded by the National Academy of Sciences. Borucki is honored for his founding concept and visionary leadership during the development of Kepler, which uses transit photometry to determine the frequency and kinds of planets around other stars. This is a commendable recognition for Bill Borucki and the Kepler mission, said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "It is well deserved and a tribute both to Bill's dedication and persistence and the fantastic and exciting results from Kepler." Kepler is the first NASA mission capable of finding Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist on the surface of an orbiting planet. Kepler is detecting planets and possible candidates with a wide range of sizes and orbital distances to help scientists better understand our place in the galaxy. It has been a privilege to participate in the initial steps in the search for life in our galaxy. I would like to thank all who have worked with me to make this possible, said Borucki. Borucki earned a Master of Science degree in physics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1962 and joined Ames as a space scientist that same year. The results of Borucki's early work developing spectroscopic instrumentation to determine the plasma properties of hypervelocity shock waves was used in the design of the heat shields for the Apollo mission. In June, Borucki celebrated 50 years of service at NASA. The Henry Draper Medal is awarded every four years for an outstanding, recently published contribution to astrophysical research and carries with it an award of $15,000. The award will be presented at a ceremony April 28, during the National Academy of Sciences' 150th annual meeting in Washington. Ames manages Kepler's ground system development, mission operations and science data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., managed Kepler mission development. Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo., developed the Kepler flight system and supports mission operations with JPL at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore archives, hosts and distributes the Kepler science data. Kepler is NASA's 10th Discovery Mission and is funded by NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters.

RELEASE: 13-004 - GALAXY'S GAMMA-RAY FLARES ERUPTED FAR FROM ITS BLACK HOLE --WASHINGTON -- In 2011, a months-long blast of energy launched by an enormous black hole almost 11 billion years ago swept past Earth. Using a combination of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the world's largest radio telescope, astronomers have zeroed in on the source of this ancient outburst. Theorists expect gamma-ray outbursts occur only in close proximity to a galaxy's central black hole, the powerhouse ultimately responsible for the activity. A few rare observations suggested this is not the case. The 2011 flares from a galaxy known as 4C +71.07 now give astronomers the clearest and most distant evidence that the theory still needs some work. The gamma-ray emission originated about 70 light-years away from the galaxy's central black hole. The 4C +71.07 galaxy was discovered as a source of strong radio emission in the 1960s. NASA's Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, which operated in the 1990s, detected high-energy flares, but the galaxy was quiet during Fermi's first two and a half years in orbit. In early November 2011, at the height of the outburst, the galaxy was more than 10,000 times brighter than the combined luminosity of all of the stars in our Milky Way galaxy. This renewed activity came after a long slumber, and that's important because it allows us to explicitly link the gamma-ray flares to the rising emission observed by radio telescopes, said David Thompson, a Fermi deputy project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Located in the constellation Ursa Major, 4C +71.07 is so far away that its light takes 10.6 billion years to reach Earth. Astronomers are seeing this galaxy as it existed when the universe was less than one-fourth of its present age. At the galaxy's core lies a supersized black hole weighing 2.6 billion times the sun's mass. Some of the matter falling toward the black hole becomes accelerated outward at almost the speed of light, creating dual particle jets blasting in opposite directions. One jet happens to point almost directly toward Earth. This characteristic makes 4C +71.07 a blazar, a classification that includes some of the brightest gamma-ray sources in the sky. Boston University astronomers Alan Marscher and Svetlana Jorstad routinely monitor 4C +71.07 along with dozens of other blazars using several facilities, including the VLBA. The instrument's 10 radio telescopes span North America, from Hawaii to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and possess the resolving power of a single radio dish more than 5,300 miles across when their signals are combined. As a result, The VLBA resolves detail about a million times smaller than Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) and 1,000 times smaller than NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. In autumn 2011, the VLBA images revealed a bright knot that appeared to move outward at a speed 20 times faster than light. Although this apparent speed was an illusion caused by actual motion almost directly toward us at 99.87 percent the speed of light, this knot was the key to determining the location where the gamma-rays were produced in the black hole's jet, said Marscher, who presented the findings Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach, Calif. The knot passed through a bright stationary feature of the jet, which the astronomers refer to as its radio "core," on April 9, 2011. This occurred within days of Fermi's detection of renewed gamma-ray flaring in the blazar. Marscher and Jorstad noted that the blazar brightened at visible wavelengths in step with the higher-energy emission. During the most intense period of flaring, from October 2011 to January 2012, the scientists found the polarization direction of the blazar's visible light rotated in the same manner as radio emissions from the knot. They concluded the knot was responsible for the visible and the gamma-ray light, which varied in sync. This association allowed the researchers to pinpoint the location of the gamma-ray outburst to about 70 light-years from the black hole. The astronomers think that the gamma rays were produced when electrons moving near the speed of light within the jet collided with visible and infrared light originating outside of the jet. Such a collision can kick the light up to much higher energies, a process known as inverse-Compton scattering. The source of the lower-energy light is unclear at the moment. The researchers speculate the source may be an outer, slow-moving sheath that surrounds the jet. Nicholas MacDonald, a graduate student at Boston University, is investigating how the gamma-ray brightness should change in this scenario to compare with observations. The VLBA is the only instrument that can bring us images from so near the edge of a young supermassive black hole, and Fermi's LAT is the only instrument that can see the highest-energy light from the galaxy's jet, said Jorstad. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership. Fermi is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. It was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with contributions from academic institutions and partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States. The VLBA is operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.