The 2009 Leonid Meteor Shower

This year's Leonid meteor shower peaks on Tuesday, Nov. 17th. If forecasters are correct, the shower should produce a mild but pretty sprinkling of meteors over North America followed by a more intense outburst over Asia. The phase of the Moon will be new, setting the stage for what could be one of the best Leonid showers in years.

"We're predicting 20 to 30 meteors per hour over the Americas, and as many as 200 to 300 per hour over Asia," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office. "Our forecast is in good accord with independent theoretical work by other astronomers."¹

Leonids are bits of debris from Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Every 33 years the comet visits the inner solar system and leaves a stream of dusty debris in its wake. Many of these streams have drifted across the November portion of Earth's orbit. Whenever we hit one, meteors come flying out of the constellation Leo.

"We can predict when Earth will cross a debris stream with pretty good accuracy," says Cooke. "The intensity of the display is less certain, though, because we don't know how much debris is in each stream." Caveat observer!

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The first stream crossing on Nov. 17th comes around 0900 UT (4 a.m. EST, 1 a.m. PST). The debris is a diffuse mix of particles from several old streams that should produce a gentle display of two to three dozen meteors per hour over North America. Dark skies are recommended for full effect.

"A remarkable feature of this year's shower is that Leonids will appear to be shooting almost directly out of the planet Mars," notes Cooke.

It's just a coincidence. This year, Mars happens to be passing by the Leonid radiant at the time of the shower. The Red Planet is almost twice as bright as a first magnitude star, so it makes an eye-catching companion for the Leonids: sky map.

Above: This side of Earth will be facing the Leonid debris stream at the time of the Nov. 17th outburst. Observers in India, China and Indonesia are favored with dark, pre-dawn skies. Image credit: Danielle Moser of the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office.

The next stream crossing straddles the hour 2100-2200 UT, shortly before dawn in Indonesia and China. At that time, Earth will pass through a pair of streams laid down by Comet Tempel-Tuttle in 1466 and 1533 AD. The double crossing could yield as many as 300 Leonids per hour.

"Even if rates are only half that number, it would still be one of the best showers of the year," says Cooke.

The Leonids are famous for storming, most recently in 1999-2002 when deep crossings of Tempel-Tuttle's debris streams produced outbursts of more than 1000 meteors per hour. The Leonids of 2009 won't be like that, but it only takes one bright Leonid streaking past Mars to make the night worthwhile.

NASA Briefs Preliminary Plume Findings from Moon Mission

NASA will hold a news conference Friday to talk about early science results from its successful moon impacting mission, the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS. The satellite gained worldwide attention when it plunged into a crater near the moon's south pole on Oct. 9.

The briefing from NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., will begin at 9 a.m. PST, on Nov. 13. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and the agency's Web site. For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

The panelists are:

- Doug Cooke, associate administrator, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington
- Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist for Exploration Systems at NASA Headquarters
- Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator from Ames
- Greg Delory, senior fellow, Space Sciences Laboratory and Center for Integrative Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley

To attend or participate by telephone reporters should contact Jonas Dino (jonas.dino@nasa.gov) at 650-604-5612 or Rachel Prucey (rachel.l.prucey@nasa.gov) at 650-604-0643.

For information about the LCROSS mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/lcross

Swift XMM-Newton Satellites Tune Into a Middleweight Black Hole

While astronomers have studied lightweight and heavyweight black holes for decades, the evidence for black holes with intermediate masses has been much harder to come by. Now, astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., find that an X-ray source in galaxy NGC 5408 represents one of the best cases for a middleweight black hole to date.

"Intermediate-mass black holes contain between 100 and 10,000 times the sun's mass," explained Tod Strohmayer, an astrophysicist at Goddard. "We observe the heavyweight black holes in the centers of galaxies and the lightweight ones orbiting stars in our own galaxy. But finding the 'tweeners' remains a challenge."

Several nearby galaxies contain brilliant objects known as ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs). They appear to emit more energy than any known process powered by stars but less energy than the centers of active galaxies, which are known to contain million-solar-mass black holes.

"ULXs are good candidates for intermediate-mass black holes, and the one in galaxy NGC 5408 is especially interesting," said Richard Mushotzky, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, College Park. The galaxy lies 15.8 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus.

Using the European Space Agency's orbiting XMM-Newton observatory, Strohmayer and Mushotzky studied the source -- known as NGC 5408 X-1 -- in 2006 and 2008.

XMM-Newton detected what the astronomers call "quasi-periodic oscillations," a nearly regular "flickering" caused by the pile-up of hot gas deep within the accretion disk that forms around a massive object. The rate of this flickering was about 100 times slower than that seen from stellar-mass black holes. Yet, in X-rays, NGC 5408 X-1 outshines these systems by about the same factor.

Based on the timing of the oscillations and other characteristics of the emission, Strohmayer and Mushotzky conclude that NGC 5408 X-1 contains between 1,000 and 9,000 solar masses. This study appears in the October 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

"For this mass range, a black hole's event horizon -- the part beyond which we cannot see -- is between 3,800 and 34,000 miles across, or less than half of Earth's diameter to about four times its size," said Strohmayer.

If NGC 5408 X-1 is indeed actively gobbling gas to fuel its prodigious X-ray emission, the material likely flows to the black hole from an orbiting star. This is typical for stellar-mass black holes in our galaxy.

Strohmayer next enlisted the help of NASA's Swift satellite to search for subtle variations of X-rays that would signal the orbit of NGC 5408 X-1's donor star. "Swift uniquely provides both the X-ray imaging sensitivity and the scheduling flexibility to enable a search like this," he added. Beginning in April 2008, Swift began turning its X-Ray Telescope toward NGC 5408 X-1 a couple of times a week as part of an on-going campaign.

Swift detects a slight rise and fall of X-rays every 115.5 days. "If this is indeed the orbital period of a stellar companion," Strohmayer said, "then it's likely a giant or supergiant star between three and five times the sun's mass." This study has been accepted for publication in a future issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

The Swift observations cover only about four orbital cycles, so continued observation is needed to confirm the orbital nature of the X-ray modulation.

"Astronomers have been studying NGC 5408 X-1 for a long time because it is one of the best candidates for an intermediate-mass black hole," adds Philip Kaaret at the University of Iowa, who has studied the object at radio wavelengths but is unaffiliated with either study. "These new results probe what is happening close to the black hole and add strong evidence that it is unusually massive."

Related Links:

> NASA's Swift mission

NASA and Spaceward Foundation Award Prize Money for Successful Wireless Power Demonstration

NASA has awarded $900,000 in prize money to a Seattle company that successfully demonstrated new wireless energy beaming technology which could one day be used to help power a "space elevator."

LaserMotive of Seattle was awarded the money after its performance in the Power Beaming Challenge competition, which was a demonstration of wireless power transmission that enabled a robotic device to climb a vertical cable. The competition was held Nov. 4-6 at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif. The Spaceward Foundation of Mountain View, Calif., manages the competition for NASA's Centennial Challenges program.

To win a prize, teams had to develop a power transmission system and robotic climber that could reach a height of 3,280 feet. Teams that reached the top share in a total purse of $2 million, based on their vertical speed and payload mass.

LaserMotive's average speed on their best of several successful climbs was 8.7 mph over a four minute period. By exceeding the average speed of 4.5 mph and being the only team to reach the top of the cable, LaserMotive claimed the entire $900,000 prize for that level. Teams had to exceed an average speed of approximately 11 mph to qualify for a share of the remaining prize purse of $1.1 million. That amount will remain available for the next Power Beaming competition.

NASA is interested in power-beaming technology for a variety of purposes including remotely powering rovers and instruments on the moon. On Earth, the technology might supply communities with power following natural disasters. There also are potential applications for power beaming for airships, satellites and space transportation, including the space elevator concept.

LaserMotive was competing with two other teams, the Kansas City Space Pirates and the USST team from South Bend, Ind. Although they did not post prize-winning performances, the other teams kept the contest outcome in doubt up until the final moments.

"I have watched these teams steadily improve their designs since we began the challenge in 2005 and the sophistication of the systems that they demonstrated this week is impressive by any standard." said Ben Shelef of the Spaceward Foundation.

A vertical "racetrack" was created for the competition by suspending a cable from a helicopter flying 4,300 feet overhead. This arrangement, along with the high-power laser systems, provided a unique and unprecedented testing environment.

"The kilometer-high vertical cable system established for this competition was something that had never been done before and is a remarkable accomplishment in itself. The Spaceward Foundation and their partners, along with our hosts at NASA Dryden, deserve a lot of credit for their creativity and determination." said Andrew Petro, Centennial Challenge program manager.

The Power Beaming Challenge is one of six Centennial Challenges managed by NASA's Innovative Partnership Program. NASA's Centennial Challenges program's goals are to drive progress in aerospace technology that is of value to NASA's missions; encourage participation of independent teams, individual inventors, student groups and private companies of all sizes in aerospace research and development; and find innovative solutions to technical challenges through competition and cooperation.

Official results, as well as video and photography, are available at:

http://www.SpaceElevatorGames.org

For more information on Centennial Challenges, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ipp/innovation_incubator/cc_home.html

For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

NASA's GOES Project Offers Real-Time Hurricane Alley Movies

People love to get the big picture of hurricane alleys, and thanks to the GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., they can now get real-time satellite animations of the eastern Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

NASA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) Project is offering real-time HDTV movies of the east- and west-coast "hurricane alley" regions. There are two types of movies for both the Eastern Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. There are "Coastal" and "Global" movies. The two coastal movies (one for each ocean) show four satellite image frames per hour over the previous two days. The two global movies show two frames per hour over the most recent three days. All four movies are automatically updated every hour.

"The color frames are composed by overlaying the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) GOES cloud images on a true-color background previously derived from NASA's Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) imager," said GOES Project Scientist Dennis Chesters on the NASA GOES Project at Goddard. MODIS is an instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites to provide color imagery of the Earth's surface. "The GOES infrared images show the convective storms 24 hours a day. During daylight, the GOES visible images reveal the low clouds that provide detail and a sense of the low-level winds," Chesters said.

Hurricanes develop far from land in wide areas of the sub-tropical Atlantic and Pacific oceans, where only satellites can provide up-to-date weather data. NASA's GOES Project has created a method to animate satellite imagery on a true-color map over that large area to watch the early development of hurricanes.

"These new live animations provide panoramic views of each hurricane alley in HDTV wide-screen format," Chesters said. Viewers can see tropical cyclones in the Pacific developing off of the western Mexican or Central American coasts, potentially threatening Mexico or Hawaii. The Atlantic panorama revels the potential hurricanes that threaten the Caribbean islands and the USA's eastern and gulf coasts, and also shows the constant flow of convective storms across the eastern United States.

All of the animations can be found at the NASA GOES Project Web page: http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/. There are four links, each labeled "Hurricane Alley HDTV," next to the GOES-EAST and the GOES-WEST images of the USA and the globe. Each link delivers a hurricane alley movie from the area suggested by the image next to the link.

For example, to see what's happening in the always stormy Atlantic, click the link next to the GOES-EAST global image: http://goes.gsfc.nasa.gov/goescolor/goeseast/overview2/movie/alley_east_globe.mp4

Stretch your browser window wide to see the entire panorama.

The "global view" of the Atlantic Ocean is most interesting because it displays several weather regimes simultaneously. It shows the easterly winds in Hurricane Alley, daily thunderstorms over the Antilles, storms across the southeast U.S., the prevailing westerly winds and Atlantic storms at mid-latitudes.

There is a little date/time stamp in the lower left corner of each frame so viewers know which day they're viewing. The date/time is odometer-style: YYMMDDhhmm, an abbreviation for YEAR-MONTH-DAY-hour-minute, and is in Universal Time.

The movies are 1280x720p MPEG4 (H.264) in an Apple Quicktime file, and are about 20 Megabytes each.

Hurricane Alley animations can be found at the NASA GOES Project Web page.

Poisk Poised for Live NASA TV Space Station Docking

NASA Television will air the docking of the newest Russian module to the International Space Station starting at 9 a.m. CST Nov. 12.

The Mini Research Module-2, known as "Poisk," which means "explore" in Russian, will deliver 1,800 pounds of cargo to the station. Poisk is scheduled to automatically dock to the station's Zvezda Service Module at 9:44 a.m.

The 8-ton module is scheduled to launch at 8:22 a.m. Nov. 10 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The combination docking port and airlock will ride atop a Soyuz booster rocket. The Soyuz launch will not be broadcast on NASA TV.

The module will be used as an additional docking port for Russian vehicles, as an airlock for Russian-based spacewalks and as a platform for external science experiments. Its first use will be as a docking port during the relocation of a Soyuz crew vehicle in January.

A companion module, the Mini Research Module-1, will be carried to orbit on space shuttle Atlantis' STS-132 mission, targeted to launch in May 2010. That module will be robotically attached to the station's Zarya module.

For more information about the space station, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/station

For more information about how to access NASA Television, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

NASA Hubble image showcases star birth in M83, the Southern Pinwheel

NASA, ESA, R. O'Connell (University of Virginia), B. Whitmore (Space Telescope Science Institute), M. Dopita (Australian National University), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee

The spectacular new camera installed on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope during Servicing Mission 4 in May has delivered the most detailed view of star birth in the graceful, curving arms of the nearby spiral galaxy M83.

Nicknamed the Southern Pinwheel, M83 is undergoing more rapid star formation than our own Milky Way galaxy, especially in its nucleus. The sharp "eye" of the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) has captured hundreds of young star clusters, ancient swarms of globular star clusters, and hundreds of thousands of individual stars, mostly blue supergiants and red supergiants.

The image at right is Hubble's close-up view of the myriad stars near the galaxy's core, the bright whitish region at far right. An image of the entire galaxy, taken by the European Southern Observatory's Wide Field Imager on the ESO/MPG 2.2-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile, is shown at left. The white box outlines Hubble's view.

WFC3's broad wavelength range, from ultraviolet to near-infrared, reveals stars at different stages of evolution, allowing astronomers to dissect the galaxy's star-formation history.

The image reveals in unprecedented detail the current rapid rate of star birth in this famous "grand design" spiral galaxy. The newest generations of stars are forming largely in clusters on the edges of the dark dust lanes, the backbone of the spiral arms. These fledgling stars, only a few million years old, are bursting out of their dusty cocoons and producing bubbles of reddish glowing hydrogen gas.

The excavated regions give a colorful "Swiss cheese" appearance to the spiral arm. Gradually, the young stars' fierce winds (streams of charged particles) blow away the gas, revealing bright blue star clusters. These stars are about 1 million to 10 million years old. The older populations of stars are not as blue.

A bar of stars, gas, and dust slicing across the core of the galaxy may be instigating most of the star birth in the galaxy's core. The bar funnels material to the galaxy's center, where the most active star formation is taking place. The brightest star clusters reside along an arc near the core.

The remains of about 60 supernova blasts, the deaths of massive stars, can be seen in the image, five times more than known previously in this region. WFC3 identified the remnants of exploded stars. By studying these remnants, astronomers can better understand the nature of the progenitor stars, which are responsible for the creation and dispersal of most of the galaxy's heavy elements.

M83, located in the Southern Hemisphere, is often compared to M51, dubbed the Whirlpool galaxy, in the Northern Hemisphere. Located 15 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra, M83 is two times closer to Earth than M51.

Credit for ground-based image: European Southern Observatory

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. Goddard manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. in Washington, and is an International Year of Astronomy 2009 program partner.

Images and more information about M83 are available at:

› HubbleSite
› Space Telescope Science Institute
› NASA Hubble page

› Series of STSI images zooming in on M83

NASA Spitzer Observes a Chaotic Planetary System

Before our planets found their way to the stable orbits they circle in today, they wiggled and jostled about like unsettled children. Now, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found a young star with evidence for the same kind of orbital hyperactivity. Young planets circling the star are thought to be disturbing smaller comet-like bodies, causing them to collide and kick up a huge halo of dust.

The star, called HR 8799, was in the news last November 2008, for being one of the first of two stars with imaged planets. Ground-based telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory, both in Hawaii, took images of three planets orbiting in the far reaches of the system, all three being roughly 10 times the mass of Jupiter. Another imaged planet was also announced at the same time around the star Fomalhaut, as seen by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Both HR 8799 and Fomalhaut are younger and more massive than our sun.

Astronomers had previously used both Spitzer and Hubble to image a rotating disk of planetary debris around Fomalhaut, which is 25 light-years from Earth. HR 8799 is about five times farther away, so scientists weren't sure if Spitzer would be able to capture a picture of its disk. To their amazement and delight, Spitzer succeeded. The picture can be seen online at http://spitzer.caltech.edu/images/2781 .

The Spitzer team, led by Kate Su of the University of Arizona, Tucson, says the giant cloud of fine dust around the disk is very unusual. They say this dust must be coming from collisions among small bodies similar to the comets or icy bodies that make up today's Kuiper Belt objects in our solar system. The gravity of the three large planets is throwing the smaller bodies off course, causing them to migrate around and collide with each other. Astronomers think the three planets might have yet to reach their final stable orbits, so more violence could be in store.

"The system is very chaotic and collisions are spraying up a huge cloud of fine dust," said Su. "What's exciting is that we have a direct link between a planetary disk and imaged planets. We've been studying disks for a long time, but this star and Fomalhaut are the only two examples of systems where we can study the relationships between the locations of planets and the disks."

When our solar system was young, it went through similar planet migrations. Jupiter and Saturn moved around quite a bit, throwing comets around, sometimes into Earth. Some say the most extreme part of this phase, called the late heavy bombardment, explains how our planet got water. Wet, snowball-like comets are thought to have crashed into Earth, delivering life's favorite liquid.

The Spitzer results were published in the Nov. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal. The observations were made before Spitzer began its "warm" mission and used up its liquid coolant.

NASA West Point Welcomes Home One of Their Heroes

On the morning of Oct. 2, as he had done so many times before, Bill McArthur arrived early for his mechanical engineering class at the U. S. Military Academy at West Point. But this time he wasn’t a student, he was the teacher and he wasn’t wearing the black and gray uniform of a cadet, he was wearing the iconic blue flight suit of an astronaut. Almost four decades after graduating from West Point he had been invited to return to his alma mater as part of the Army’s annual homecoming celebration and NASA’s Hometown Heroes campaign.

McArthur graduated from West Point in 1973 and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. He returned to teach at the distinguished military academy in 1983 and in 1987 the Army re-assigned him to work for NASA as a Space Shuttle vehicle integration test engineer at Johnson Space Center. In 1990, he was selected as an astronaut and flew on three shuttle missions followed by a six-month stay onboard the International Space Station (ISS). He now serves as the manager of the Orbiter Project Office for the Space Shuttle Program at JSC.

McArthur’s return to West Point was one of three Hometown Heroes events occurring the weekend of Oct. 3. Throughout the 2009 fall football season, astronauts have been returning to their alma maters to help celebrate two major NASA milestones - the 10th anniversary of the space station in orbit and the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Recognition during the football game along with media, community and educational outreach events are all part of the campaign.


McArthur began his West Point visit the morning of Oct. 2 by sharing the story of his life onboard the space station with Army cadets during three separate mechanical engineering classes. Next was a lunch presentation to a packed conference room of cadets and faculty members before heading off base to spend the afternoon at nearby Highland Falls Middle School (HFMS). About 400 students, teachers and parents listened intently as McArthur stressed the power of how a good education can help dreams, like his to become an astronaut and eventually live in space, come true.

“Col. Bill McArthur's presentation at our school was for most, if not all, a once in a lifetime opportunity,” said Ellen Connors, principal of HFMS. “To be witness to a first-hand account of the space program's history is a memory that all will hold in their hearts and minds forever. I assure you that you've made 400 new friends and fans!”


“When she got home Friday, my daughter took one of her old school pictures out of a frame and replaced it with her autographed picture of Col. McArthur,” added Mary Jane Pitt, parent of an HFMS sixth grader. “It's now hanging proudly in her room.”

After signing autographs for more than an hour, McArthur ended his visit by presenting the HFMS staff with a photo of the Highland Falls, NY area taken from the space station.

On Oct. 3, game day at West Point, McArthur spent the morning talking to parents and faculty during a pre-game breakfast and at the Army cadet review that followed. Next was an autograph session just outside Michie Stadium, home of the Army Black Knights football team. Just before kickoff, McArthur joined the more than 24,000 fans in the stadium as the Black Nights hosted the Tulane Green Wave.

At halftime, McArthur was interviewed by the Army radio broadcast team and between the third and fourth quarter was recognized on the field where he received a standing ovation from the fans. “I feel totally recharged,” McArthur said, standing on the sidelines afterwards with a huge smile on his face.

"What strikes me most about Bill MacArthur is that he always has time for everyone,” said Joe Tombrello, deputy director of Public Affairs and Communications for the U.S. Military Academy. “Whether teaching a class to cadets, discussing old times with a classmate, accepting a handshake from a well-wisher, or simply signing an autograph for a 5th grader whose dad is stationed in Korea, Bill made everyone feel as though they were the most important thing in his life at the time.”

And as the sun set on an empty Michie Stadium, McArthur was easy to spot in his blue flight suit just outside the gate talking with cadets and their families and sharing the excitement of both his life as an astronaut and the future of NASA’s space exploration opportunities.

NASA and X Prize Announce Winners of Lunar Lander Challenge

NASA will award $1.65 million in prize money Thursday to a pair of innovative aerospace companies that successfully simulated landing a spacecraft on the moon and lifting off again.

NASA’s Centennial Challenges program will give a $1 million first prize to Masten Space Systems of Mojave, Calif., and a $500,000 second prize to Armadillo Aerospace of Rockwall, Tex., for their Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge flights. The competition was managed by the X PRIZE Foundation. The Northrop Grumman Corporation is a commercial sponsor that provided operating funds for the contest to the X PRIZE Foundation.

An awards ceremony for the winning teams will be held at noon on Nov. 5 in room 2325 of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington. Journalists should contact Sonja Alexander at 202-358-1761 for more information about the ceremony.

The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge involves building and flying a rocket-powered vehicle that simulates the flight of a vehicle on the moon. The lander must take off vertically then travel horizontally, flying a mission profile designed to demonstrate both power and control before landing accurately at another spot. The same vehicle then must take off again, travel horizontally back to its original takeoff point and land successfully, all within a two-hour-and-15-minute time period.

The challenge requires exacting control and navigation, as well as precise control of engine thrust, all done automatically. The rocket's engine must be started twice in a short time with no ground servicing other than refueling. This represents the technical challenges involved in operating a reusable vehicle that could land on the moon.

The prize purse is divided into first and second prizes for Level 1 and Level 2. Level 1 requires a flight duration of at least 90 seconds on each flight and Level 2 requires a duration of at least 180 seconds. One of the landings for a Level 2 attempt must be made on a simulated lunar terrain with rocks and craters.

Masten Space Systems met the Level 2 requirements by achieving accurate landings and captured the first place prize during flights of their "Xoie" (pronounced "Zoey") vehicle Oct. 30 at the Mojave Air and Space Port. Masten also claimed a $150,000 prize as part of the Level 1 competition.

Armadillo Aerospace was the first team to qualify for the Level 2 prize with successful flights of its Scorpius rocket Sept. 12 in Caddo Mills, Tex. Armadillo placed second in the Level 2 competition, earning a $500,000 prize.

The average landing accuracy determined which teams would receive first and second place prizes. The Masten team achieved an average accuracy of 7.5 inches while Armadillo Aerospace's average accuracy was 34 inches.

The events of the past two months have brought the four-year Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge to a conclusion. All $2 million in prize money has been awarded.

"The Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge has had its intended impact, with impressive performances by multiple teams representing a new generation of aerospace entrepreneurs" said Andrew Petro, NASA's Centennial Challenge program manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "These companies have demonstrated reusable vehicles with rapid turnaround and a surprising degree of precision in flight, and they have done all this at a much lower cost than many thought possible."

Four teams had been in pursuit of the 2009 Lunar Lander Challenge prizes during the competition that opened in July. The BonNova team dropped out of the competition last week. Unreasonable Rocket, a father-and-son team from Solana Beach, Calif., conducted flight attempts during the final days of the competition but did not complete any qualifying flights.

In the Level 1 competition, Armadillo Aerospace previously claimed the first place prize of $350,000 in 2008. Masten Space Systems qualified for the remaining second place prize on Oct. 7, 2009, with an average landing accuracy of 6.3 inches. Because there were no other qualifying Level 1 flights this year, the Masten team will receive the second place prize of $150,000.

NASA's Centennial Challenges program's goals are to drive progress in aerospace technology that is of value to NASA's missions; encourage participation of independent teams, individual inventors, student groups and private companies of all sizes in aerospace research and development; and find innovative solutions to technical challenges through competition and cooperation.

The Northop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge is one of six Centennial Challenges managed by NASA's Innovative Partnership Program. The competition was managed for NASA at no cost to the taxpayer by the X PRIZE Foundation under a Space Act Agreement. NASA provided all of the prize funds.

For more information on Centennial Challenges, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ipp/innovation_incubator/cc_home.html

For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

New Celestial Map Gives Directions for GPS

Many of us have been rescued from unfamiliar territory by directions from a Global Positioning System (GPS) navigator. GPS satellites send signals to a receiver in your GPS navigator, which calculates your position based on the location of the satellites and your distance from them. The distance is determined by how long it took the signals from various satellites to reach your receiver.

The system works well, and millions rely on it every day, but what tells the GPS satellites where they are in the first place?

"For GPS to work, the orbital position, or ephemeris, of the satellites has to be known very precisely," said Dr. Chopo Ma of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "In order to know where the satellites are, you have to know the orientation of the Earth very precisely."

This is not as obvious as simply looking at the Earth – space is not conveniently marked with lines to determine our planet's position. Even worse, "everything is always moving," says Ma. Earth wobbles as it rotates due to the gravitational pull (tides) from the moon and the sun. Even apparently minor things like shifts in air and ocean currents and motions in Earth's molten core all influence our planet's orientation.

Just as you can use landmarks to find your place in a strange city, astronomers use landmarks in space to position the Earth. Stars seem the obvious candidate, and they were used throughout history to navigate on Earth. "However, for the extremely precise measurements needed for things like GPS, stars won't work, because they are moving too," says Ma.

What is needed are objects so remote that their motion is not detectable. Only a couple classes of objects fit the bill, because they also need to be bright enough to be seen over incredible distances. Things like quasars, which are typically brighter than a billion suns, can be used. Many scientists believe these objects are powered by giant black holes feeding on nearby gas. Gas trapped in the black hole's powerful gravity is compressed and heated to millions of degrees, giving off intense light and/or radio energy.

Most quasars lurk in the outer reaches of the cosmos, over a billion light years away, and are therefore distant enough to appear stationary to us. For comparison, a light year, the distance light travels in a year, is almost six trillion miles. Our entire galaxy, consisting of hundreds of billions of stars, is about 100,000 light years across.

A collection of remote quasars, whose positions in the sky are precisely known, forms a map of celestial landmarks in which to orient the Earth. The first such map, called the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF), was completed in 1995. It was made over four years using painstaking analysis of observations on the positions of about 600 objects.

Ma led a three-year effort to update and improve the precision of the ICRF map by scientists affiliated with the International Very Long Baseline Interferometry Service for Geodesy and Astrometry (IVS) and the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Called ICRF2, it uses observations of approximately 3,000 quasars. It was officially recognized as the fundamental reference system for astronomy by the IAU in August, 2009.

Making such a map is not easy. Despite the brilliance of quasars, their extreme distance makes them too faint to be located accurately with a conventional telescope that uses optical light (the light that we can see). Instead, a special network of radio telescopes is used, called a Very Long Baseline Interferometer (VLBI).

The larger the telescope, the better its ability to see fine detail, called spatial resolution. A VLBI network coordinates its observations to get the resolving power of a telescope as large as the network. VLBI networks have spanned continents and even entire hemispheres of the globe, giving the resolving power of a telescope thousands of miles in diameter. For ICRF2, the analysis of the VLBI observations reduced uncertainties in position to angles as small as 40 microarcseconds, about the thickness of a 0.7 millimeter mechanical pencil lead in Los Angeles when viewed from Washington. This minimum uncertainty is about five times better than the ICRF, according to Ma.

These networks are arranged on a yearly basis as individual radio telescope stations commit time to make coordinated observations. Managing all these coordinated observations is a major effort by the IVS, according to Ma.

Additionally, the exquisite precision of VLBI networks makes them sensitive to many kinds of disturbances, called noise. Differences in atmospheric pressure and humidity caused by weather systems, flexing of the Earth's crust due to tides, and shifting of antenna locations from plate tectonics and earthquakes all affect VLBI measurements. "A significant challenge was modeling all these disturbances in computers to take them into account and reduce the noise, or uncertainty, in our position observations," said Ma.

Another major source of noise is related to changes in the structure of the quasars themselves, which can be seen because of the extraordinary resolution of the VLBI networks, according to Ma.

The ICRF maps are not only useful for navigation on Earth; they also help us find our way in space -- the ICRF grid and some of the objects themselves are used to assist spacecraft navigation for interplanetary missions, according to Ma.

Despite its usefulness for things like GPS, the primary application for the ICRF maps is astronomy. Researchers use the ICRF maps as driving directions for telescopes. Objects are referenced with coordinates derived from the ICRF so that astronomers know where to find them in the sky.

Also, the optical light visible to our eyes is only a small part of the electromagnetic radiation produced by celestial objects, which ranges from less-energetic, low-frequency radiation, like radio and microwaves, through optical light to highly energetic, high-frequency radiation like X-rays and gamma-rays.

Astronomers use special detectors to make images of objects producing radiation our eyes can't see. Even so, since things in space can have extremely different temperatures, objects that generate radiation in one frequency band, say optical, do not necessarily produce radiation in another, perhaps radio. The main scientific use of the ICRF maps is a precise grid for combining observations of objects taken using different frequencies and accurately locating them relative to each other in the sky.

Astronomers also use the frame as a backdrop to record the motion of celestial objects closer to us. Tracing how stars and other objects move provides clues to their origin and evolution.

The next update to the ICRF may be done in space. The European Space Agency plans to launch a satellite called Gaia in 2012 that will observe about a half-million quasars. Gaia uses an optical telescope, but because it is above the atmosphere, the satellite will be able to clearly see these faint objects and precisely locate them in the sky. The mission will use quasars that are optically bright, many of which are too dim in radio to be useful for the VLBI networks. The project expects to have enough observations by 2018 to 2020 to produce the next-generation ICRF.

ICRF2 involved researchers from Australia, Austria, China, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States; and was funded by organizations from these countries, including NASA. The analysis efforts are coordinated by the IVS. The IAU officially adopts the ICRF maps and recommends their occasional updates.

Robot Armada Might Scale New Worlds

An armada of robots may one day fly above the mountain tops of Saturn's moon Titan, cross its vast dunes and sail in its liquid lakes.

Wolfgang Fink, visiting associate in physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena says we are on the brink of a great paradigm shift in planetary exploration, and the next round of robotic explorers will be nothing like what we see today.

"The way we explore tomorrow will be unlike any cup of tea we've ever tasted," said Fink, who was recently appointed as the Edward and Maria Keonjian Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. "We are departing from traditional approaches of a single robotic spacecraft with no redundancy that is Earth-commanded to one that allows for having multiple, expendable low-cost robots that can command themselves or other robots at various locations at the same time."

Fink and his team members at Caltech, the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Arizona are developing autonomous software and have built a robotic test bed that can mimic a field geologist or astronaut, capable of working independently and as part of a larger team. This software will allow a robot to think on its own, identify problems and possible hazards, determine areas of interest and prioritize targets for a close-up look.

The way things work now, engineers command a rover or spacecraft to carry out certain tasks and then wait for them to be executed. They have little or no flexibility in changing their game plan as events unfold; for example, to image a landslide or cryovolcanic eruption as it happens, or investigate a methane outgassing event.

"In the future, multiple robots will be in the driver's seat," Fink said. These robots would share information in almost real time. This type of exploration may one day be used on a mission to Titan, Mars and other planetary bodies. Current proposals for Titan would use an orbiter, an air balloon and rovers or lake landers.

In this mission scenario, an orbiter would circle Titan with a global view of the moon, with an air balloon or airship floating overhead to provide a birds-eye view of mountain ranges, lakes and canyons. On the ground, a rover or lake lander would explore the moon's nooks and crannies. The orbiter would "speak" directly to the air balloon and command it to fly over a certain region for a closer look. This aerial balloon would be in contact with several small rovers on the ground and command them to move to areas identified from overhead.

"This type of exploration is referred to as tier-scalable reconnaissance," said Fink. "It's sort of like commanding a small army of robots operating in space, in the air and on the ground simultaneously."

A rover might report that it's seeing smooth rocks in the local vicinity, while the airship or orbiter could confirm that indeed the rover is in a dry riverbed - unlike current missions, which focus only on a global view from far above but can't provide information on a local scale to tell the rover that indeed it is sitting in the middle of dry riverbed.

A current example of this type of exploration can best be seen at Mars with the communications relay between the rovers and orbiting spacecraft like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. However, that information is just relayed and not shared amongst the spacecraft or used to directly control them.

"We are basically heading toward making robots that command other robots," said Fink, who is director of Caltech's Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory, where this work has taken place.

"One day an entire fleet of robots will be autonomously commanded at once. This armada of robots will be our eyes, ears, arms and legs in space, in the air, and on the ground, capable of responding to their environment without us, to explore and embrace the unknown," he added.

Papers describing this new exploration are published in the journal "Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine" and in the Proceedings of the SPIE.

For more information on this work, visit http://autonomy.caltech.edu . More information on JPL missions is at http:/www.jpl.nasa.gov/ .

Tattooed Mars

Close

This high-resolution picture from the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows twisting dark trails criss-crossing light-colored terrain on the Martian surface. Newly formed trails like these had presented researchers with a tantalizing mystery but are now known to be the work of miniature wind vortices known to occur on the red planet, in other words Martian dust devils. Such spinning columns of rising air heated by the warm surface are also common in dry and desert areas on planet Earth. Typically lasting only a few minutes, dust devils become visible as they pick up loose red-colored dust leaving the darker and heavier sand beneath intact. Ironically, dust devils have been credited with unexpectedly cleaning the solar panels of the Mars rovers.

NASA App Now Available from App Store

The NASA App for the iPhone and iPod touch is now available free of charge on the Apple App Store. The NASA App delivers a wealth of NASA's mission information, videos, images and news updates to people's fingertips.

"Making NASA more accessible to the public is a high priority for the agency," said Gale Allen, director of Strategic Integration and Management for NASA's Exploration Systems Mission Directorate in Washington. "Tools like this allow us to provide users easy access to NASA information and progress at a fast pace."

The NASA App collects, customizes and delivers an extensive selection of dynamically updated information, images and videos from various online NASA sources. Users can access NASA countdown clocks, the NASA Image of the Day, Astronomy Image of the Day, online videos, NASA's many Twitter feeds and other information in a convenient mobile package. It delivers NASA content in a clear and intuitive way by making full use of the iPhone and iPod touch features, including the Multi-Touch user interface. The New Media Team at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., developed the application.

The NASA App also allows users to track the current positions of the International Space Station and other spacecraft currently orbiting Earth in three views: a map with borders and labels, visible satellite imagery, or satellite overlaid with country borders and labels.

"We're excited to deliver a wide range of up-to-the-minute NASA content to iPhone and iPod touch users," said Gary Martin, director of the New Ventures and Communications Directorate at Ames. "The NASA App provides an easy and interesting way for the public to experience space exploration."

For more information about NASA's iPhone application, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/iphone

Galaxy Cluster Smashes Distance Record

Chandra's 'Greatest Hits'

The most distant galaxy cluster yet has been discovered by combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical and infrared telescopes. The cluster is located about 10.2 billion light years away, and is observed as it was when the Universe was only about a quarter of its present age.

The galaxy cluster, known as JKCS041, beats the previous record holder by about a billion light years. Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the Universe. Finding such a large structure at this very early epoch can reveal important information about how the Universe evolved at this crucial stage.

JKCS041 is found at the cusp of when scientists think galaxy clusters can exist in the early Universe based on how long it should take for them to assemble. Therefore, studying its characteristics -- such as composition, mass, and temperature -- will reveal more about how the Universe took shape.

"This object is close to the distance limit expected for a galaxy cluster," said Stefano Andreon of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Milan, Italy. "We don't think gravity can work fast enough to make galaxy clusters much earlier."

Distant galaxy clusters are often detected first with optical and infrared observations that reveal their component galaxies dominated by old, red stars. JKCS041 was originally detected in 2006 in a survey from the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT). The distance to the cluster was then determined from optical and infrared observations from UKIRT, the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope in Hawaii and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Infrared observations are important because the optical light from the galaxies at large distances is shifted into infrared wavelengths because of the expansion of the universe.

The Chandra data were the final - but crucial - piece of evidence as they showed that JKCS041 was, indeed, a genuine galaxy cluster. The extended X-ray emission seen by Chandra shows that hot gas has been detected between the galaxies, as expected for a true galaxy cluster rather than one that has been caught in the act of forming.

Also, without the X-ray observations, the possibility remained that this object could have been a blend of different groups of galaxies along the line of sight, or a filament, a long stream of galaxies and gas, viewed front on. The mass and temperature of the hot gas detected estimated from the Chandra observations rule out both of those alternatives.

The extent and shape of the X-ray emission, along with the lack of a central radio source argue against the possibility that the X-ray emission is caused by scattering of cosmic microwave background light by particles emitting radio waves.

It is not yet possible, with the detection of just one extremely distant galaxy cluster, to test cosmological models, but searches are underway to find other galaxy clusters at extreme distances.

"This discovery is exciting because it is like finding a Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil that is much older than any other known," said co-author Ben Maughan, from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. "One fossil might just fit in with our understanding of dinosaurs, but if you found many more, you would have to start rethinking how dinosaurs evolved. The same is true for galaxy clusters and our understanding of cosmology."

The previous record holder for a galaxy cluster was 9.2 billion light years away, XMMXCS J2215.9-1738, discovered by ESA's XMM-Newton in 2006. This broke the previous distance record by only about 0.1 billion light years, while JKCS041 surpasses XMMXCS J2215.9 by about ten times that.

"What's exciting about this discovery is the astrophysics that can be done with detailed follow-up studies," said Andreon.

Among the questions scientists hope to address by further studying JKCS041 are: What is the build-up of elements (such as iron) like in such a young object? Are there signs that the cluster is still forming? Do the temperature and X-ray brightness of such a distant cluster relate to its mass in the same simple way as they do for nearby clusters?

The paper describing the results on JKCS041 from Andreon and his colleagues will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, DC. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

More information, including images and other multimedia, can be found at:

http://chandra.harvard.edu