Scientists Expose 'Buried' Fault That Caused Deadly 2003 Quake

Using satellite radar data, NASA-funded scientists have observed, for the first time, the healing of subtle, natural surface scars from an earthquake that occurred on a "buried" fault several miles below the surface-a fault whose fractures are not easily observed at Earth's surface.

Reporting in the March 5 issue of Nature, geophysicist Eric Fielding of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., describes how so-called "buried" faults are not so hidden after all. Using the magnitude 6.6 earthquake that devastated Bam, Iran, in 2003 as a case study, Fielding and his university colleagues analyzed radar images from the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite to study the land surface above a fault that is buried about 1 kilometer (half a mile) under Earth's surface. They discovered a shallow, narrow surface depression that formed and evolved after the quake, which killed more than 30,000 people.

The results have implications for assessing the risk of future earthquakes associated with known buried faults, which can be found around the world but are often missed by geologists or assumed not to be active. Buried faults are thought to be responsible for the major 1992 Landers and 1999 Hector Mine earthquakes in Southern California.

Previous seismic and satellite studies showed that the fault under Bam had slipped by about 2 to 3 meters (6.6 to 9.8 feet) at the time of the earthquake. But when scientists from Iran went out in the field after the earthquake, the cracks they found at the surface only showed 25 centimeters (9.8 inches) of slip or less. If indeed there had been 2 to 3 meters of slip at depth, the surface must have somehow absorbed that slip.

Fielding and colleagues suspected the fault zone below could reveal itself in a slight deformation of Earth's surface because the pressure and stress during an earthquake causes rocks in the fault zone to expand and become more porous. After the quake, the ground will "heal" over a period of years, settling and forming a depression.

To investigate the extent and rate of surface deformation after the 2003 earthquake, the researchers turned to the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar instrument on Envisat. Researchers use images from that instrument to precisely measure elevation by bouncing a beam of microwave radiation off Earth's surface and observing the reflection back to the satellite. Fielding and colleagues then compared images from the 3.5 years following the Bam quake to see how the surface elevation changed, using a technique known as interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or InSAR.

"The advantage of InSAR is that you get a map of the pattern," said Fielding, "whereas a single surveying station on the ground would just reveal that something funny was going on at one place."

Indeed, InSAR revealed a shallow, ditch-like depression on the surface -- measuring between 200 to 400 meters (219 to 437 yards) wide and about 3 centimeters (1.2 inches) deep -- directly above the ruptured fault. "Using InSAR, we know that the deformation and the earthquake are associated," he said. “The depression deepened for at least 3.5 years after the earthquake.”

The team also modeled the sinking throughout the fault zone, using a model that is normally used to study crustal compaction and expansion around volcanoes. By analyzing an array of points along the fault to estimate how compaction produced the features at the surface, the researchers concluded that the 2 to 3 meters of slip at depth was absorbed by a "damage zone," close to Earth's surface. This means that the earthquake slip was spread over a wide volume of rock in the surface layers instead of a single fault.

"There's a big, crushed-up mass of the rock that absorbs this slip that occurred at depth, and it is only visible at the surface as a subtle deformation after the earthquake," Fielding said.

The study is helping the researchers anticipate the future behavior of the fault. Initially, they were concerned that if stress at depth was not relieved at the surface, then a subsequent earthquake could result. Because the rupture's stress was absorbed in the damage zone, the researchers believe the fault that shook Bam in 2003 is no longer a risk.

"There's always the chance that a nearby, related fault could rupture, as eastern Iran is full of faults that are active at some scale," Fielding said. "But this one beneath Bam is the type that ruptures every 2,000 years or longer, and the stress on it seems to have been relieved."

Other researchers on the study include Paul Lundgren of JPL; Roland Bürgmann of the University of California, Berkeley; and Gareth Funning of the University of California, Riverside.

NASA is studying designs for a future Earth observation mission called Deformation, Ecosystem Structure and Dynamics of Ice. A key objective of the mission would be to enable InSAR measurements of deformation on fault zones around the world to better understand the processes that cause earthquakes.

JPL is managed for NASA by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

For a summary of the report, go to http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v458/n7234/abs/nature07817.html .

Flight Team to Check Status of Backup System

Mars Odyssey Mission Status Report

The team operating NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter plans a procedure next week to address a long-known, potential vulnerability of accumulated memory corruption.

The procedure requires rebooting the spacecraft's computer. This is not a risk-free event, but the Odyssey team and NASA have carefully weighed the risks of performing a cold reboot compared with the risk of doing nothing, and determined that the proper course of action is to proceed with the reboot.

The chief concern about the potential memory vulnerability stems from the length of time that the spacecraft has been exposed to the accumulated effects of the space radiation environment since the last reboot, which occurred on Oct. 31, 2003.

As an additional benefit, the cold-reboot procedure will demonstrate whether Odyssey's onboard backup systems will be available should they ever be required.

"We have lost no functionality, but there would be advantages to knowing whether the B side is available," said Odyssey Mission Manager Gaylon McSmith of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We have developed a careful plan for attempting to determine that."

In all the years since its April 7, 2001, launch, Odyssey has not needed to use its set of spare components. The spares are called the spacecraft's "B side," which includes an identical set of a computer processor, navigation sensors, relay radio and other subsystems. To use any of them, Odyssey would have to shift to all of them at once from its primary set of components, called the "A side."

On March 21, 2007, the B-side spare of an electronic component for managing the distribution of power, called the high-efficiency power supply, became inoperable. If it is permanently disabled, then none of the B side is available for use. Engineers have investigated the inoperability of the B-side high-efficiency power supply. They concluded that the component can probably be made to work properly again by rebooting the orbiter's computer, although the memory-vulnerability issue that is the current concern is not directly related to the March 2007 event that affected the power supply.

Odyssey is in the third two-year extension of its mission at Mars. Some A-side components, such as the UHF radio used for communications with spacecraft on the surface of Mars, have worked as long as they were designed to last.

In addition to its own major scientific discoveries and continuing studies of the planet, the Odyssey mission has played important roles in supporting the missions of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity and the Phoenix Mars Lander.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages Mars Odyssey for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the prime contractor for the project and built the spacecraft. Additional information about Odyssey is at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/odyssey.

FTC - Bureau of Competition

FTC, The Bureau of Competition is the partition of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charged with abolition and deterrence of "anticompetitive" commerce practice. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) accomplish this by means of enforcement of antitrust law, assess of proposed merger, and examination into other non-merger big business practices that may damage competition. Such non-merger practice comprises horizontal fetters, involving agreement between straight competitor, and vertical fetters, involving agreement among business at diverse levels in the identical industry.

The FTC share enforcement of antitrust law with the section of honesty. Though, while the FTC is in charge for social enforcement of antitrust laws, the antitrust separation of the Department of Justice has the authority to bring together civil and criminal action in antitrust matter.

Kepler Declared Ready for Launch

The Kepler spacecraft and its Delta II rocket have been cleared to launch into space late Friday night following a thorough review by launch managers Monday.

Liftoff is scheduled for 10:49 p.m. EST. The Launch Services Program was joined by officials and engineers from the United Launch Alliance, the Kepler program and others to examine all aspects of the observatory and the launcher.


"Kepler is a critical component in NASA's broader efforts to ultimately find and study planets where Earth-like conditions may be present," said Jon Morse, the Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The planetary census Kepler takes will be very important for understanding the frequency of Earth-size planets in our galaxy and planning future missions that directly detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars."--> Press Conference/Science Briefing

NASA officials and members of the Kepler launch team will discuss Kepler's mission and launch readiness during a press conference beginning at 1 p.m. Thursday. Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, heads the panel that also includes Launch Director Omar Baez. A science briefing by the researchers who will analyze the Kepler's findings will follow the press conference. Both events will be televised on NASA TV.

› Watch Pre-launch Press Conference on NASA TV (Thursday @ 1 p.m. EST)

› Multimedia for Feb. 19 Press conference
› Launch Processing Images

The Kepler spacecraft will watch a patch of space for 3.5 years or more for signs of Earth-sized planets moving around stars similar to the sun. The patch that Kepler will watch contains about 100,000 stars like the sun. Using special detectors similar to those used in digital cameras, Kepler will look for slight dimming in the stars as planets pass between the star and Kepler. The Kepler's place in space will allow it to watch the same stars constantly throughout its mission, something observatories like Hubble cannot do.

Public Invited to Submit Questions for NASA's Space Shuttle Launch

Space enthusiasts from across the United States and around the world are invited to submit questions about space shuttle Discovery's upcoming launch, its STS-119 mission to the International Space Station, and NASA space exploration. Questions may be answered on NASA Television during the countdown to launch.

Questions can be submitted online at:

http://webcast.ksc.nasa.gov

The STS-119 mission will deliver a new crew member to the space station. The crew also will deliver and install a fourth and final set of large solar arrays that will provide electricity to support six-person station crews beginning in May. Currently, three crew members live aboard the station for several months at a time.

Discovery and its seven astronauts are tentatively targeted to launch March 12 at 8:54 p.m. EDT from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA commentary will begin about five hours before liftoff.

For more information about the STS-119 crew and mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

Trio of Galaxies Mix It Up

Though they are the largest and most widely scattered objects in the universe, galaxies do go bump in the night. The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed many pairs of galaxies colliding. Like snowflakes, no two examples look exactly alike. This is one of the most arresting galaxy smash-up images to date.

At first glance, it looks as if a smaller galaxy has been caught in a tug-of-war between a Sumo-wrestler pair of elliptical galaxies. The hapless, mangled galaxy may have once looked more like our Milky Way, a pinwheel-shaped galaxy. But now that it's caught in a cosmic Cuisinart, its dust lanes are being stretched and warped by the tug of gravity. Unlike the elliptical galaxies, the spiral is rich in dust and gas for the formation of new stars. It is the fate of the spiral galaxy to be pulled like taffy and then swallowed by the pair of elliptical galaxies. This will trigger a firestorm of new stellar creation.

If there are astronomers on any planets in this galaxy group, they will have a ringside seat to seeing a flurry of starbirth unfolding over many millions of years to come. Eventually the ellipticals should merge too, creating one single super-galaxy many times larger than our Milky Way. This trio is part of a tight cluster of 16 galaxies, many of them being dwarf galaxies. The galaxy cluster is called the Hickson Compact Group 90 and lies about 100 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Piscis Austrinus, the Southern Fish.

Hubble imaged these galaxies with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in May 2006.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) and is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Md. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., Washington, D.C.

STScI is an International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA 2009) program partner.

Earth-Observing Landsat 5 Turns 25

132,969 ... 132,970 ... 132,971. Like a trusty watch counting up the minutes, the Landsat 5 satellite keeps on ticking, orbit after orbit around Earth. Well beyond its design lifetime of 15,000 orbits, the satellite's trajectory could go askew or its instruments could malfunction at any moment.

But not today.

Still observing the Earth after 25 years -- 22 beyond its three-year primary mission lifetime -- Landsat 5 collects valuable scientific data daily. Some attribute the satellite's longevity to over-engineering. Others say it's a long run of good luck. Whatever the reason, no one who attended the satellite's March 1984 launch could have expected it would still be working today.

A Digital Family Photo Album

Landsat 5 is one of seven satellites in the Landsat Program, designed, built and launched by NASA, and operated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Only Landsat 5 and 7 are still operational. With the launch failure of the privately built Landsat 6 in 1993 and the launch of Landsat 7 in 1999, scientists would have had a 12-year gap in observations if Landsat 5 had only lasted for its primary mission lifetime.

"Such a gap would have been a scientific disaster," said Darrel Williams, Landsat project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Continuity is important because it's only through consistent observation that scientists can clearly identify human impacts on Earth and natural changes.

"The images derived from Landsat are like a family photo album," he added. "Just as we change over time, so, too, does Earth's surface."

Since 1972, a Landsat satellite has collected hundreds of thousands of digital images for the planet's photo album. The "sun-synchronous" orbit guarantees that each Landsat spacecraft will observe the same location on Earth at the same time of day every 16 days, making it easy to observe changes. Landsat 5 alone has gathered more than 700,000 images.

The Just-Right-Satellite

Those images are much more than pretty pictures. They provide robust scientific information about a changing planet.

The Thematic Mapper (TM) instrument on Landsat 5 was built in the late 1970s with a resolution fine enough to resolve blocks of land about 100 feet wide per pixel -- at a time when most people didn't know what a pixel was. It was a second-generation imaging instrument in the Landsat program, flying alongside and eventually surpassing the older Multispectral Scanner System (MSS), which had a resolution of about 250 feet.

TM cannot resolve individual houses or trees, but it can see areas where houses have been constructed or forests have been cleared. If the resolution were any finer, Landsat might not have been able to capture large-scale land changes. The satellite's resolution has been called "just-right" by Earth systems scientists.

"The data provided by the Landsat series of satellites over the past 35 years are among the most valuable scientific assets available to the Earth science research community," Williams noted. "These data provide the most consistent, reliable documentation of global land-cover change ever assembled."

Landsat 5 has charted urban growth in Las Vegas, monitored fire scars in Yellowstone National Park, and tracked the retreat of a Greenland glacier. Data from the satellite turns up frequently in scientific literature, and should continue to do so, particularly now that the images are available free of charge or copyright.

Beyond observations of change, the individual, static images have also proven useful in unforeseen ways. Cell phone companies -- most of which did not even exist when the satellite was launched -- now use Landsat images to scout the best locations for cell towers. Pilots in training see Landsat images when they enter a flight simulator. The Landsat catalog provides the backbone of Google Earth. The list goes on.

"Landsat is no longer an experiment," Williams said. "It is a fundamental part of the country's infrastructure."

The Mother of Invention

The circumstances that have kept Landsat 5 orbiting long enough to celebrate its 25th anniversary are part engineering ingenuity and part luck.

Engineers originally designed Landsat 5 to be retrievable by the space shuttle, so they added an auxiliary fuel tank to allow the satellite to meet the shuttle half-way during a rendezvous. When the idea of shuttle retrieval was scrapped, Landsat 5 found itself with a bounty of extra fuel, which it has used to maintain its orbiting altitude of 705 kilometers (438 miles).

The quarter-century in space, however, has been rough on the satellite and its instruments. "If you created a cartoon of Landsat 5, it would look like a mummy wrapped in bandages," Williams said, "with only a small hole for the instrument's 'eye' to look down at Earth."

All of those "bandages" have been applied remotely through quick thinking and innovation by engineers who have worked around and adapted to at least 22 mission anomalies. For instance, Landsat 5 has no on-board data recorder to capture acquired data for later downlink; everything must be relayed to ground antennas in real time.

"We've lost batteries, star trackers, Earth sensors, skew wheels -- all of which have been overcome through engineering and operational workarounds," said Steven Covington, a flight systems manager for Landsat 5 and 7 and an employee of the Aerospace Corporation at NASA Goddard.

"The notion that certain component failures will mean the demise of a mission is wrong," Covington said. "From an engineering standpoint, necessity has been the mother of invention."

The Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 satellites have proven to be resilient. Refined projections of fuel usage computed by USGS suggest that Landsat 5 and Landsat 7 could have sufficient fuel to operate at least through 2012, exceeding previous expectations. The next NASA land surface imaging mission is called the Landsat Data Continuity Mission and is scheduled for launch in December 2012.

Newfound Moon May Be Source of Outer Saturn Ring

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found within Saturn's G ring an embedded moonlet that appears as a faint, moving pinprick of light. Scientists believe it is a main source of the G ring and its single ring arc.

Cassini imaging scientists analyzing images acquired over the course of about 600 days found the tiny moonlet, half a kilometer (about a third of a mile) across, embedded within a partial ring, or ring arc, previously found by Cassini in Saturn's tenuous G ring.

The finding is being announced today in an International Astronomical Union circular. Images can be found at http://www.nasa.gov/cassini, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://ciclops.org .

"Before Cassini, the G ring was the only dusty ring that was not clearly associated with a known moon, which made it odd," said Matthew Hedman, a Cassini imaging team associate at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "The discovery of this moonlet, together with other Cassini data, should help us make sense of this previously mysterious ring."

Saturn's rings were named in the order they were discovered. Working outward they are: D, C, B, A, F, G and E. The G ring is one of the outer diffuse rings. Within the faint G ring there is a relatively bright and narrow, 250-kilometer-wide (150-miles) arc of ring material, which extends 150,000 kilometers (90,000 miles), or one-sixth of the way around the ring's circumference. The moonlet moves within this ring arc. Previous Cassini plasma and dust measurements indicated that this partial ring may be produced from relatively large, icy particles embedded within the arc, such as this moonlet.

Scientists imaged the moonlet on Aug. 15, 2008, and then they confirmed its presence by finding it in two earlier images. They have since seen the moonlet on multiple occasions, most recently on Feb. 20, 2009. The moonlet is too small to be resolved by Cassini's cameras, so its size cannot be measured directly. However, Cassini scientists estimated the moonlet's size by comparing its brightness to another small Saturnian moon, Pallene.

Hedman and his collaborators also have found that the moonlet's orbit is being disturbed by the larger, nearby moon Mimas, which is responsible for keeping the ring arc together.

This brings the number of Saturnian ring arcs with embedded moonlets found by Cassini to three. The new moonlet may not be alone in the G ring arc. Previous measurements with other Cassini instruments implied the existence of a population of particles, possibly ranging in size from 1 to 100 meters (about three to several hundred feet) across. "Meteoroid impacts into, and collisions among, these bodies and the moonlet could liberate dust to form the arc," said Hedman.

Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team member and professor at Queen Mary, University of London, said, "The moon's discovery and the disturbance of its trajectory by the neighboring moon Mimas highlight the close association between moons and rings that we see throughout the Saturn system. Hopefully, we will learn in the future more about how such arcs form and interact with their parent bodies."

Early next year, Cassini's camera will take a closer look at the arc and the moonlet. The Cassini Equinox mission, an extension of the original four-year mission, is expected to continue until fall of 2010.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

Space Shuttle Program Completes New Plan for Next Launch

NASA's Space Shuttle Program has established a plan that could support shuttle Discovery's launch to the International Space Station, tentatively targeted for March 12. An exact target launch date will be determined as work progresses with the shuttle's three gaseous hydrogen flow control valves.

At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, technicians have started removing Discovery's three valves, two of which will undergo detailed inspection. Approximately 4,000 images of each valve will be reviewed for evidence of cracks. Valves that have flown fewer times will be installed in Discovery. Engineering teams also will complete analysis and testing to understand the consequences if a valve piece were to break off and strike pressurization lines between the shuttle and external fuel tank. Hardware modifications may be made to the pressurization lines to add extra protection in the unlikely event debris is released.

NASA and contractor teams have been working to identify what caused damage to a flow control valve on shuttle Endeavour during its November 2008 flight. Part of the main propulsion system, the valves channel gaseous hydrogen from the main engines to the external tank. After a thorough review of shuttle Discovery's readiness for flight on Feb. 20, NASA managers decided more understanding of the valve work was required before launching Discovery.

The Space Shuttle Program will hold a meeting March 4 to review new data and assess ongoing work. Managers then will determine whether to move forward with a flight readiness review March 6.

If Discovery’s tentative launch date holds, there will be no effect on the next two shuttle launches: STS-125 to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and STS-127 to the International Space Station.

Dawn Finishes Mars Phase

Mission Status Report: NASA's Dawn Mission

With Mars disappearing in its metaphorical rearview mirror, NASA's Dawn spacecraft's next stop is the asteroid belt and the giant asteroid Vesta. Dawn got as close as 549 kilometers (341 miles) to the Red Planet during its Tuesday, Feb. 17, flyby.

Dawn's navigators placed the spacecraft on a close approach trajectory with Mars so the planet's gravitational influence would provide a kick to the spacecraft's velocity. If Dawn had to perform these orbital adjustments on its own, with no Mars gravitational deflection, the spacecraft would have had to fire up its engines and change velocity by more than 9,330 kilometers per hour (5,800 miles per hour).

The achieved goal of the flyby was to obtain this orbital pick-me-up, making possible its voyage to asteroid Vesta and, later, the dwarf planet Ceres. But Dawn's science teams used this massive target of opportunity to also perform calibrations of some of the scientific instruments. Calibration images were taken by Dawn's framing camera, and the Gamma Ray and Neutron Detector also observed Mars for calibration. These data will be compared to similar observations taken by spacecraft orbiting Mars.

Further observations were planned during the flyby, but fault detection software canceled the data collection and put the spacecraft into safe mode, a limited-activity precautionary status. The cause was determined to be an inappropriate software response to an expected temporary loss of valid data from the spacecraft's star tracker in the vicinity of Mars, and engineers were able to restore the spacecraft to normal operations within 48 hours.

While the spacecraft will never be back in the vicinity of Mars again, the Dawn team is using the event to fine-tune its software.

The spacecraft has already traveled about 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) beyond Mars. It has 30 months and 1.8 billion kilometers (1.1 billion miles) to go before its rendezvous with Vesta in 2011.

Dawn's 4.8-billion-kilometer (3-billion-mile) odyssey includes orbiting Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres in 2015. These two giants of the asteroid belt have been witness to much of our solar system's history. By using Dawn's instruments to study both objects for several months, scientists can more accurately compare and contrast the two. Dawn's science instrument suite will measure geology, elemental and mineral composition, shape, surface topography, geomorphology and tectonic history, and will also seek water-bearing minerals. In addition, the Dawn spacecraft's orbital characteristics around Vesta and Ceres will be used to measure the celestial bodies' masses and gravity fields.

The Dawn mission to Vesta and Ceres is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The University of California, Los Angeles, is home of the mission's principal investigator, Christopher Russell, and is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Other scientific partners include Planetary Science Institute, Tucson, Ariz.; Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany; DLR Institute for Planetary Research, Berlin; Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, Rome; and the Italian Space Agency. Orbital Sciences Corporation of Dulles, Va., designed and built the Dawn spacecraft.

To learn more about Dawn and its mission to the asteroid belt, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/dawn .

Geriatric Pulsar Still Kicking

The oldest isolated pulsar ever detected in X-rays has been found with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. This very old and exotic object turns out to be surprisingly active.

The pulsar, PSR J0108-1431 (J0108 for short) is about 200 million years old. Among isolated pulsars -- ones that have not been spun-up in a binary system -- it is over 10 times older than the previous record holder with an X-ray detection. At a distance of 770 light years, it is one of the nearest pulsars known.

Pulsars are born when stars that are much more massive than the Sun collapse in supernova explosions, leaving behind a small, incredibly weighty core, known as a neutron star. At birth, these neutron stars, which contain the densest material known in the Universe, are spinning rapidly, up to a hundred revolutions per second. As the rotating beams of their radiation are seen as pulses by distant observers, similar to a lighthouse beam, astronomers call them "pulsars".

Astronomers observe a gradual slowing of the rotation of the pulsars as they radiate energy away. Radio observations of J0108 show it to be one of the oldest and faintest pulsars known, spinning only slightly faster than one revolution per second.

The surprise came when a team of astronomers led by George Pavlov of Penn State University observed J0108 in X-rays with Chandra. They found that it glows much brighter in X-rays than was expected for a pulsar of such advanced years.

Some of the energy that J0108 is losing as it spins more slowly is converted into X-ray radiation. The efficiency of this process for J0108 is found to be higher than for any other known pulsar.

"This pulsar is pumping out high-energy radiation much more efficiently than its younger cousins," said Pavlov. "So, although it's clearly fading as it ages, it is still more than holding its own with the younger generations."

It's likely that two forms of X-ray emission are produced in J0108: emission from particles spiraling around magnetic fields, and emission from heated areas around the neutron star's magnetic poles. Measuring the temperature and size of these heated regions can provide valuable insight into the extraordinary properties of the neutron star surface and the process by which charged particles are accelerated by the pulsar.

The younger, bright pulsars commonly detected by radio and X-ray telescopes are not representative of the full population of objects, so observing objects like J0108 helps astronomers see a more complete range of behavior. At its advanced age, J0108 is close to the so- called “pulsar death line,” where its pulsed radiation is expected to switch off and it will become much harder, if not impossible, to observe.

"We can now explore the properties of this pulsar in a regime where no other pulsar has been detected outside the radio range," said co- author Oleg Kargaltsev of the University of Florida. "To understand the properties of ‘dying pulsars,’ it is important to study their radiation in X-rays. Our finding that a very old pulsar can be such an efficient X-ray emitter gives us hope to discover new nearby pulsars of this class via their X-ray emission."

The Chandra observations were reported by Pavlov and colleagues in the January 20, 2009, issue of The Astrophysical Journal. However, the extreme nature of J0108 was not fully apparent until a new distance to it was reported on February 6 in the PhD thesis of Adam Deller from Swinburne University in Australia. The new distance is both larger and more accurate than the distance used in the Chandra paper, showing that J0108 was brighter in X-rays than previously thought.

"Suddenly this pulsar became the record holder for its ability to make X-rays," said Pavlov, "and our result became even more interesting without us doing much extra work." The position of the pulsar seen by Chandra in X-rays in early 2007 is slightly different from the radio position observed in early 2001. This implies that the pulsar is moving at a velocity of about 440,000 miles per hour, close to a typical value for pulsars.

Currently the pulsar is moving south from the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, but because it is moving more slowly than the escape velocity of the Galaxy, it will eventually curve back towards the plane of the Galaxy in the opposite direction.

The detection of this motion has allowed Roberto Mignani of University College London, in collaboration with Pavlov and Kargaltsev, to possibly detect J0108 in optical light, using estimates of where it should be found in an image taken in 2000. Such a multi-wavelength study of old pulsars is critical for understanding the long-term evolution of neutron stars, such as how they cool with time, and how their powerful magnetic fields evolve.

The team of astronomers that worked with Pavlov also included Gordon Garmire and Jared Wong at Penn State. 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.

Additional information and images about this discovery is available on the Web at:

http://chandra.harvard.edu

http://chandra.nasa.gov

Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is a self-governing organization of the United States Administration, recognized in 1914 through the Federal Trade Commission Act. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) main mission is the advertising of "consumer protection" as well as the removal and deterrence of what regulator perceive to be destructively "anti-competitive" industry practices, such like coercive monopoly.

The Federal Trade Commission Act (FTC) was one of President Wilson's chief acts against trust. Trusts plus trust-busting were important political concerns through the Progressive Era. Since its beginning, the FTC has forced the necessities of the Clayton Act, a key antitrust edict, as well as the provision of the FTC Act, 15 U.S.C. § 41 et seq. Over time, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been delegate the enforcement of other business regulation statute and has promulgated a quantity of rules (codified in name 16 of the system of Federal policies).

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman with Commissioners

The Federal Trade Commission is chief by five Commissioners who are chosen by the President as well as confirmed through the United States Senate. Under the FTC Act, no other than three Commissioners might be from the similar political party. A Commissioner's tenure of office is seven years, and the terms are stagger so that in a certain year no more than lone Commissioner's term expire (even though in certain years no Commissioner's tenure expires and in time where Commissioners decide to step down, additional than one fresh Commissioner may be selected).

The present Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioners are:

* William Kovacic – Chairman of Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
* Jon Leibowitz – Commissioner of Federal Trade Commission (FTC)
* Pamela Jones Harbour - Commissioner of Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

* J. Thomas Rosch - Commissioner of Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

Federal Trade Commission (FTC & Waveshield) Bureau

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Bureau of Consumer Protection’s authorization is to defend customers against unjust or illusory acts or practice in trade. With the written consent of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Bureau attorneys put into effect federal laws associated to consumer affairs as well as regulations promulgate by the FTC & Waveshield. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) functions comprise investigations, enforcement events, and consumer and commerce education. Areas of main concern for this Federal Trade Commission (FTC & Waveshield) bureau are: promotion and advertising, monetary products and practices, telemarketing deception, solitude and identity protection and so on. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) bureau also is accountable for the United States.

Under the FTC Act, the Federal Trade Commission has the power, in most cases, to carry its measures in federal court throughout its own attorneys. In some consumer defense matters, the FTC & Waveshield appears with, or wires, the U.S. Department of Justice.

Kepler Set for March 5 Launch on Planet Finding Mission

The Kepler spacecraft has been lifted into place and attached to the Delta II rocket that will launch it into space. The work is on schedule to launch the observatory on March 5 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Florida's Atlantic coast.

It is the first mission with the ability to find planets like Earth -- rocky planets that orbit sun-like stars in a warm zone where liquid water could be maintained on the surface. Liquid water is believed to be essential for the formation of life.

"Kepler is a critical component in NASA's broader efforts to ultimately find and study planets where Earth-like conditions may be present," said Jon Morse, the Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "The planetary census Kepler takes will be very important for understanding the frequency of Earth-size planets in our galaxy and planning future missions that directly detect and characterize such worlds around nearby stars."

› Multimedia for Feb. 19 Press conference
› Launch Processing Images

The Kepler spacecraft will watch a patch of space for 3.5 years or more for signs of Earth-sized planets moving around stars similar to the sun. The patch that Kepler will watch contains about 100,000 stars like the sun. Using special detectors similar to those used in digital cameras, Kepler will look for slight dimming in the stars as planets pass between the star and Kepler. The Kepler's place in space will allow it to watch the same stars constantly throughout its mission, something observatories like Hubble cannot do.