NASA has a job opening. Wanted: People of all ages to sort, stack, and catalogue terabytes of simulated data from a satellite that launches in 2015. Agile thumbs required.

Sorting terabytes of data? It’s more fun than it sounds.

In fact it’s a game: Satellite Insight. The Space Place Team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory created the entertaining app for iPhones to get the word out about GOES-R, an advanced Earth science satellite built by NOAA and NASA.

Described by the Los Angeles Times as possibly “the nerdiest game ever,” Satellite Insight may be downloaded for free from Apple’s app store. Be careful, though, once you start playing it’s hard to stop. Some reviewers have likened it to Tetris, one of the most popular video games of all time.

GOES, short for “Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite,” is the workhorse spacecraft for weather forecasters. NOAA operates two (at a time) in geosynchronous orbit, one above the west coast of N. America and one above the east coast. They monitor clouds, wind, rain, hurricanes, tornadoes and even solar flares.  The GOES program has been in action since 1975.

GOES-R is the next-generation satellite with advanced technologies far beyond those of the older GOES satellites. It has sensors for lightning detection, wildfire mapping, storm tracking, search and rescue, solar imaging, and more. Many of the sensors are trailblazers. For example, the Advanced Baseline Imager has 60 times the capability of the current imager—16 channels instead of 5. It has twice the spatial resolution and five times the temporal refresh rate, including the 30-second imaging of weather systems over a region of 1000 km x 1000 km. Also, the Geostationary Lightning Mapper can count and pinpoint lightning bolts over the Americas 24/7. It’s the first such detector to fly on a geosynchronous satellite, and it could lead to transformative advances in severe storm warning capability.

All in all, GOES-R represents a “huge technological leap from the current GOES.” We know this because Satellite Insight tells us so. The app has an informative “Learn More” feature where players can find out about the satellite and the data they have been sorting.

Which brings us back to sorting data. It’s a bit like eating Cheerios; just don’t tell the kids it’s nutritious, and they love it. Helping GOES-R gather and stash data from all those advanced sensors is just as satisfying, too—a dose of Earth science wrapped in thumb-flying fun.

More information about Satellite Insight may be found on the web at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/satellite-insight/id463588902?mt=8. The game also available in web form (flying thumbs optional) at spaceplace.nasa.gov/satellite-insight.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption:

New iPhone game is first NOAA app and only the second NASA game app. Just as with the real GOES-R, the challenge with Satellite Insight is to keep up with the massive influx of weather and other environmental data.

Dawn is the first space mission with an itinerary that includes orbiting two separate solar system destinations. It is also the only spacecraft ever to orbit an object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The spacecraft accomplishes this feat using ion propulsion, a technology first proven in space on the highly successful Deep Space 1 mission, part of NASA’s New Millennium program.

Launched in September 2007, Dawn arrived at protoplanet Vesta in July 2011. It will orbit and study Vesta until July 2012, when it will leave orbit for dwarf planet Ceres, also in the asteroid belt.

Dawn can maneuver to the orbit best suited for conducting each of its scientific observations. After months mapping this alien world from higher altitudes, Dawn spiraled closer to Vesta to attain a low altitude orbit, the better to study Vesta’s composition and map its complicated gravity field.

Changing and refining Dawn’s orbit of this massive, irregular, heterogeneous body is one of the most complicated parts of the mission. In addition, to meet all the scientific objectives, the orientation of this orbit needs to change.

These differing orientations are a crucial element of the strategy for gathering the most scientifically valuable data on Vesta. It generally requires a great deal of maneuvering to change the plane of a spacecraft’s orbit. The ion propulsion system allows the probe to fly from one orbit to another without the penalty of carrying a massive supply of propellant. Indeed, one of the reasons that traveling from Earth to Vesta (and later Ceres) requires ion propulsion is the challenge of tilting the orbit around the sun.

Although the ion propulsion system accomplishes the majority of the orbit change, Dawn’s navigators are enlisting Vesta itself. Some of the ion thrusting was designed in part to put the spacecraft in certain locations from which Vesta would twist its orbit toward the target angle for the low-altitude orbit. As Dawn rotates and the world underneath it revolves, the spacecraft feels a changing pull. There is always a tug downward, but because of Vesta’s heterogeneous interior structure, sometimes there is also a slight force to one side or another. With their knowledge of the gravity field, the mission team plotted a course that took advantage of these variations to get a free ride.

The flight plan is a complex affair of carefully timed thrusting and coasting. Very far from home, the spacecraft is making excellent progress in its expedition at a fascinating world that, until a few months ago, had never seen a probe from Earth.

Keep up with Dawn’s progress by following the Chief Engineer’s (yours truly’s) journal at http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/journal.asp. And check out the illustrated story in verse of “Professor Starr’s Dream Trip: Or, how a little technology goes a long way,” at http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/story-prof-starr.

This article was provided courtesy of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

This full view of the giant asteroid Vesta was taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, as part of a rotation characterization sequence on July 24, 2011, at a distance of 5,200 kilometers (3,200 miles).  Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Now they’re thinking again. New observations by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that 55 Cancri e may be wetter and weirder than anyone imagined.

Spitzer recently measured the extraordinarily small amount of light 55 Cancri e blocks when it crosses in front of its star. These transits occur every 18 hours, giving researchers repeated opportunities to gather the data they need to estimate the width, volume and density of the planet.

According to the new observations, 55 Cancri e has a mass 7.8 times and a radius just over twice that of Earth. Those properties place 55 Cancri e in the “super-Earth” class of exoplanets, a few dozen of which have been found. Only a handful of known super-Earths, however, cross the face of their stars as viewed from our vantage point in the cosmos, so 55 Cancri e is better understood than most.

When 55 Cancri e was discovered in 2004, initial estimates of its size and mass were consistent with a dense planet of solid rock. Spitzer data suggest otherwise: About a fifth of the planet’s mass must be made of light elements and compounds—including water. Given the intense heat and high pressure these materials likely experience, researchers think the compounds likely exist in a “supercritical” fluid state.

A supercritical fluid is a high-pressure, high-temperature state of matter best described as a liquid-like gas, and a marvelous solvent. Water becomes supercritical in some steam turbines—and it tends to dissolve the tips of the turbine blades. Supercritical carbon dioxide is used to remove caffeine from coffee beans, and sometimes to dry-clean clothes. Liquid-fueled rocket propellant is also supercritical when it emerges from the tail of a spaceship.

On 55 Cancri e, this stuff may be literally oozing—or is it steaming? —out of the rocks.

With supercritical solvents rising from the planet’s surface, a star of terrifying proportions filling much of the daytime sky, and whole years rushing past in a matter of hours, 55 Cancri e teaches a valuable lesson: Just because a planet is similar in size to Earth does not mean the planet is like Earth.

It’s something to re-think about.

Get a kid thinking about extrasolar planets by pointing him or her to “Lucy’s Planet Hunt,” a story in rhyme about a girl who wanted nothing more than to look for Earth-like planets when she grew up. Go to http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/story-lucy.

The original research reported in this story has been accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The lead author is Brice-Olivier Demory, a post-doctoral associate in Professor Sara Seager’s group at MIT.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption:

Artist’s rendering compares the size Earth with the rocky “super-Earth” 55 Cancri e. Its year is only about 18 hours long!

Urban astronomers are always wishing for darker skies. But that complaint is due to light from Earth. What about the light coming from the night sky itself? When you think about it, why is the sky dark at all?

Of course, space appears dark at night because that is when our side of Earth faces away from the Sun. But what about all those other suns? Our own Milky Way galaxy contains over 200 billion stars, and the entire universe probably contains over 100 billion galaxies. You might suppose that that many stars would light up the night like daytime!

Until the 20th century, astronomers didn’t think it was even possible to count all the stars in the universe. They thought the universe was infinite and unchanging.

Besides being very hard to imagine, the trouble with an infinite universe is that no matter where you look in the night sky, you should see a star. Stars should overlap each other in the sky like tree trunks in the middle of a very thick forest. But, if this were the case, the sky would be blazing with light. This problem greatly troubled astronomers and became known as “Olbers’ Paradox” after the 19^th century astronomer Heinrich Olbers who wrote about it, although he was not the first to raise this astronomical mystery.

To try to explain the paradox, some 19th century scientists thought that dust clouds between the stars must be absorbing a lot of the starlight so it wouldn’t shine through to us. But later scientists realized that the dust itself would absorb so much energy from the starlight that eventually it would glow as hot and bright as the stars themselves.

Astronomers now realize that the universe is not infinite. A finite universe—that is, a universe of limited size—even one with trillions of stars, just wouldn’t have enough stars to light up all of space.

Although the idea of a finite universe explains why Earth’s sky is dark at night, other factors work to make it even darker.

The universe is expanding. As a result, the light that leaves a distant galaxy today will have much farther to travel to our eyes than the light that left it a million years ago or even one year ago. That means the amount of light energy reaching us from distant stars dwindles all the time. And the farther away the star, the less bright it will look to us.

Also, because space is expanding, the wavelengths of the light passing through it are expanding. Thus, the farther the light has traveled, the more red-shifted (and lower in energy) it becomes, perhaps red-shifting right out of the visible range. So, even darker skies prevail.

The universe, both finite in size and finite in age, is full of wonderful sights. See some bright, beautiful images of faraway galaxies against the blackness of space at the Space Place image galleries. Visit http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/search/?q=gallery.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

This Hubble Space Telescope image of Galaxy NGC 4414 was used to help calculate the expansion rate of the universe. The galaxy is about 60 million light-years away. Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

News flash: You may be closer to interstellar space than you previously thought.

A team of researchers led by Tom Krimigis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory announced the finding in the June 2011 issue of Nature.  The complicated title of their article, “Zero outward flow velocity for plasma in a heliosheath transition layer,” belies a simple conclusion: The solar system appears to be a billion or more kilometers smaller than earlier estimates.

The recalculation is prompted by data from NASA’s Voyager 1 probe, now 18 billion kilometers from Earth. Voyagers 1 and 2 were designed and built and are managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Aging but active, the spacecraft have been traveling toward the stars since 1977 on a heroic mission to leave the solar system and find out what lies beyond.

To accomplish their task, the Voyagers must penetrate the outer walls of the heliosphere, a great bubble of plasma and magnetism blown in space by the solar wind. The heliosphere is so big, it contains all the planets, comets, and asteroids that orbit the sun. Indeed many astronomers hold that the heliosphere defines the boundaries of the solar system.  Inside it is “home.”  Outside lies the Milky Way.  For 30+ years, the spacecraft have been hurtling toward the transition zone. Voyager 1 is closing in.

Much of Voyager 1’s long journey has been uneventful.  Last year, however, things began to change. In June 2010, Voyager 1 beamed back a startling number: zero. That’s the outward velocity of the solar wind where the probe is now.

“This is the first sign that the frontier is upon us,” says Krimigis.

Previously, researchers thought the crossing was still years and billions of kilometers away, but a new analysis gave them second thoughts.  Krimigis and colleagues combined Voyager data with previously unpublished measurements from the Cassini spacecraft. Cassini, on a mission to study Saturn, is nowhere near the edge of the solar system, but one of its instruments can detect atoms streaming into our solar system from the outside. Comparing data from the two locations, the team concluded that the edge of the heliosphere lies somewhere between16 to 23 billion kilometers from the sun, with a best estimate of approximately 18 billion kilometers.

Because Voyager 1 is already nearly 18 billion kilometers out, it could cross into interstellar space at any time—maybe even as you are reading this article.

“How close are we?” wonders Ed Stone, Caltech professor and principal investigator of the Voyager project since the beginning.  “We don’t know, but Voyager 1 speeds outward a billion miles every three years, so we may not have long to wait.”

Stay tuned for the crossing.

For more about the missions of Voyager 1 and 2, see http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/. Another Voyager project scientist, Merav Opher, is the guest on the newest Space Place Live cartoon interview show for kids at http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/space-place-live.

Caption:

This artist’s concept shows NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft exploring a turbulent region of space known as the heliosheath, the outer shell of the bubble of charged particles around our sun. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

So far this spring, more than 1,400 tornadoes have struck the U.S.  Some of them have cut jaw-dropping trails of destruction across the countryside and, tragically, across inhabited communities, too.  Hundreds of lives have been lost in the onslaught.

Throughout the season, the National Weather Service has routinely issued tornado alerts. In the case of the Alabama tornadoes of April 27^th, forecasters warned of severe weather five full days before the twisters struck.  Because they couldn’t say precisely where the twisters would strike, however, many of their warnings went unheeded.

“If people get a hurricane warning, they often evacuate the area,” notes NOAA’s Steve Goodman. “But we react differently to tornado warnings.”

Perhaps it’s because tornadoes are smaller than hurricanes, and the odds of a direct hit seem so remote.  Recent pictures from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Joplin, Missouri, however, show the perils of playing those odds.  Goodman believes that more precise warnings could save lives.

To fine-tune tornado warnings, NOAA will soon launch the first in a series of next-generation weather satellites – GOES-R (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites-R series). The spacecraft is brimming with advanced sensors for measuring key ingredients of severe weather including winds, cloud growth, and lightning.

“GOES-R will be the first geostationary spacecraft to carry a lightning sensor,” says Goodman, the GOES-R Program Senior Scientist. “Studies show that sudden changes in the total lightning activity correlate with storm intensity—and with tornadoes.”

The lightning mapper will detect and map not only cloud-to-ground lightning, but also bolts within and between clouds. The kind of cloud-to-ground lightning we see from our front yards accounts for only 15-20 percent of total lightning. To get a clear idea of a storm’s intensity, meteorologists need to know about all the lightning—a view GOES-R can provide.

All by itself, the lightning mapper will provide 7 minutes more lead time in tornado warnings, according to Goodman. GOES-R’s state-of-the-art instruments will also improve long-range forecasts.

“The satellite’s Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), for instance, will provide a much clearer picture of clouds,” says NOAA research meteorologist Tim Schmit.  Compared to lesser instruments already in orbit, ABI can better detect super-cold “overshooting tops,” evidence of enormous energy and upward velocity that correlate with subsequent severe weather.

“Accurate advanced notice of high-risk tornadic conditions can cue officials to close schools and businesses even before tornadoes are actually detected,” says Schmit.

Forecasters doubt tornadoes can ever be predicted with 100% accuracy. The twisters are just too capricious.  GOES-R, however, is a step in the right direction.

Find out more about GOES-R’s unprecedented capabilities at http://www.goes-r.gov. Young people can learn more about tornadoes and all kinds of other weather at http://scijinks.gov.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption:

This GOES image shows the storms that spurred the intense April 27 tornado outbreak in the southern U.S. Animation showing the development of weather can be seen at

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=50347.

Strange but true: When it comes to finding new extra-solar planets, or exoplanets, stars can be an incredible nuisance.

It’s a matter of luminosity. Stars are bright, but their planets are not. Indeed, when an astronomer peers across light years to find a distant Earth-like world, what he often finds instead is an annoying glare.  The light of the star itself makes the star’s dim planetary system nearly impossible to see.

Talk about frustration! How would you like to be an astronomer who’s constantly vexed by stars?

Fortunately, there may be a solution. It comes from NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, an ultraviolet space telescope orbiting Earth since 2003.  In a new study, researchers say the Galaxy Evolution Explorer is able to pinpoint dim stars that might not badly outshine their own planets.

“We’ve discovered a new technique of using ultraviolet light to search for young, low-mass stars near the Earth,” said David Rodriguez, a graduate student of astronomy at UCLA, and the study’s lead author. “These M-class stars, also known as red dwarfs, make excellent targets for future direct imaging of exoplanets.”

Young red dwarfs produce a telltale glow in the ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum that Galaxy Evolution Explorer can sense.  Because dwarf stars are so numerous—as a class, they account for more than two-thirds of the stars in the galaxy—astronomers could reap a rich bounty of targets.

In many ways, these stars represent a best-case scenario for planet hunting. They are close and in clear lines-of-sight, which generally makes viewing easier. Their low mass means they are dimmer than heavier stars, so their light is less likely to mask the feeble light of a planet. And because they are young, their planets are freshly formed, and thus warmer and brighter than older planetary bodies.

Astronomers know of more than five hundred distant planets, but very few have actually been seen.  Many exoplanets are detected indirectly by means of their “wobbles”—the gravitational tugs they exert on their central stars.  Some are found when they transit the parent star, momentarily dimming the glare, but not dimming it enough to reveal the planet itself.

The new Galaxy Evolution Explorer technique might eventually lead to planets that can be seen directly. That would be good because, as Rodriguez points out, “seeing is believing.”

And it just might make astronomers feel a little better about the stars.

The Galaxy Evolution Explorer Web site at http://www.galex.caltech.edu describes many of the other discoveries and accomplishments of this mission. And for kids, how do astronomers know how far away a star or galaxy is? Play “How Old do I Look” on The Space Place at http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/whats-older and find out!

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption:

Exoplanets are easier to see directly when their star is a dim, red dwarf.

Safari, anyone? Citizen scientists are invited to join a hunt through the galaxy. As a volunteer for Zooniverse’s Milky Way Project, you’ll track down exotic creatures like mysterious gas bubbles, twisted green knots of dust and gas, and the notorious “red fuzzies.”

“The project began about four months ago,” says astrophysicist Robert Simpson of Oxford University. “Already, more than 18,000 people are scouting the Milky Way for these quarry.”

The volunteers have been scrutinizing infrared images of the Milky Way’s inner regions gathered by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Spitzer’s high resolution in infrared helps it pierce the cloaking haze of interstellar gas and dust, revealing strange and beautiful structures invisible to conventional telescopes.  The Milky Way Project is helping astronomers catalogue these intriguing features, map our galaxy, and plan future research.

“Participants use drawing tools to flag the objects,” explains Simpson. “So far they’ve made over a million drawings and classified over 300,000 images.”

Scientists are especially interested in bubble-like objects believed to represent areas of active star formation.  “Every bubble signifies hundreds to thousands of young, hot stars. Our volunteers have circled almost 300,000 bubble candidates, and counting,” he says.

Humans are better at this than computers. Computer searches turn up only the objects precisely defined in a program, missing the ones that don’t fit a specified mold. A computer would, for example, overlook partial bubbles and those that are skewed into unusual shapes.

“People are more flexible. They tend to pick out patterns computers don’t pick up and find things that just look interesting. They’re less precise, but very complementary to computer searches, making it less likely we’ll miss structures that deserve a closer look. And just the sheer numbers of eyes on the prize mean more comprehensive coverage.”

Along the way the project scientists distill the volunteers’ data to eliminate repetitive finds (such as different people spotting the same bubbles) and other distortions.

The project’s main site (http://www.milkywayproject.org ) includes links to a blog and a site called Milky Way Talk. Here “hunters” can post comments, chat about images they’ve found, tag the ones they consider especially intriguing, vote for their favorite images (see the winners at http://talk.milkywayproject.org/collections/CMWS00002u ), and more.

Zooniverse invites public participation in science missions both to garner interest in science and to help scientists achieve their goals. More than 400,000 volunteers are involved in their projects at the moment. If you want to help with the Milky Way Project, visit the site, take the tutorial, and … happy hunting!

You can get a preview some of the bubbles at Spitzer’s own web site, http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/. Kids will enjoy looking for bubbles in space pictures while playing the Spitzer concentration game at http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/spitzer-concentration/.

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Volunteers study infrared images of our galaxy from the Spitzer Space Telescope, identifying interesting features using the special tools of the Milky Way Project, part of the Citizen Science Alliance Zooniverse web site.

Caption:

Volunteers study infrared images of our galaxy from the Spitzer Space Telescope, identifying interesting features using the special tools of the Milky Way Project, part of the Citizen Science Alliance Zooniverse web site.

News flash:  The Census Bureau has found a way to save time and money.  Just count the biggest people.  For every NBA star like Shaquille O’Neal or Yao Ming, there are about a million ordinary citizens far below the rim.  So count the Shaqs, multiply by a million, and the census is done.

Could the Bureau really get away with a scheme like that?  Not likely. Yet this is just what astronomers have been doing for decades.

Astronomers are census-takers, too.  They often have to estimate the number and type of stars in a distant galaxy. The problem is, when you look into the distant reaches of the cosmos, the only stars you can see are the biggest and brightest. There’s no alternative.  To figure out the total population, you count the supermassive Shaqs and multiply by some correction factor to estimate the number of little guys.

The correction factor astronomers use comes from a function called the “IMF”—short for “initial mass function.” The initial mass function tells us the relative number of stars of different masses. For example, for every 20-solar-mass giant born in an interstellar cloud, there ought to be about 100 ordinary sun-like stars.  This kind of ratio allows astronomers to conduct a census of all stars even when they can see only the behemoths.

Now for the real news flash: The initial mass function astronomers have been using for years might be wrong.

NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, an ultraviolet space telescope dedicated to the study of galaxies, has found proof that small stars are more numerous than previously believed.

“Some of the standard assumptions that we’ve had—that the brightest stars tell you about the whole population—don’t seem to work, at least not in a constant way,” says Gerhardt R. Meurer who led the study as a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.  (Meurer is now at the University of Western Australia.)

Meurer says that the discrepancy could be as high as a factor of four.  In other words, the total mass of small stars in some galaxies could be four times greater than astronomers thought. Take that, Shaq!

The study relied on data from Galaxy Evolution Explorer to sense UV radiation from the smaller stars in distant galaxies, and data from telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory to sense the “H-alpha” (red light) signature of larger stars.  Results apply mainly to galaxies where stars are newly forming, cautions Meurer.

“I think this is one of the more important results to come out of the Galaxy Evolution Explorer mission,” he says. Indeed, astronomers might never count stars the same way again.

Find out about some of the other important discoveries of the Galaxy Evolution Explorer at http://www.galex.caltech.edu/. For an easy-to-understand answer for kids to “How many solar systems are in our galaxy?” go to The Space Place at:  http://tiny.cc/I2KMa

This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Caption:

Astronomers have recently found that some galaxies have as many as 2000 small stars for every 1 massive star. They used to think all galaxies had only about 500 small stars for every 1 massive star.