NASA CONTRACT INTEGRATES MISSION OPERATIONS, TRAINING FACILITIES

NASA has awarded a $667.3 million contract to Lockheed Martin Corp. of Gaithersburg, Md., to provide integrated support for the hardware, software, data and displays used to train for and execute human spaceflight missions.

The new Facilities Development and Operations Contract, or FDOC, combines work previously performed under two separate contracts, and the synergy is expected to augment the efficiency and effectiveness of the human spaceflight operations team. The FDOC replaces the Mission Support Operations Contract and incorporates portions of the work performed under the Space Program Operations Contract.

"This award offers the opportunity to effectively transition experienced mission operations capabilities from the Space Shuttle Program to the Constellation Program," said Associate Administrator for Space Operations Bill Gerstenmaier. "Specifically, this contract will make possible the efficient transformation of shuttle operations personnel, knowledge and facilities to enable success in future human spaceflight programs."

The contract provides consolidated systems services development and operations support within NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston and backup control centers for the space shuttle, International Space Station and Constellation programs. The FDOC team will ensure the availability, integrity and reliability of space station avionics software, space shuttle and space station integrated planning systems, shuttle and station simulators for crews and flight controllers, and space shuttle flight software production. In addition, it will support development of a Constellation training facility, simulators and mission control systems. The majority of the work for the contract will take place at or near NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The contract base period begins Jan. 1, 2009, and continues through Sept. 30, 2012. The contract includes two one-year extension options valued at $154.2 million and $155.5 million respectively. Exercising both options would extend the contract through Sept. 30, 2014, and increase the total contract value to $977 million.

For more information about NASA and its programs, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

NASA Showcases Science at 2008 Supercomputing Conference

NASA will highlight some of its most inspiring science and engineering achievements at the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC08), at the Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas, Nov. 15–21, 2008.

At NASA’s SC08 research exhibit, scientists and engineers will be on hand to explain more than 40 projects supporting some of NASA’s most critical mission work — all made possible by the agency’s powerful high-end computing (HEC) resources. Featured are presentations about how NASA is advancing the ability to predict tropical storms to help reduce loss of lives and property, and working to design the thermal protection system for America’s next-generation spacecraft, the Orion crew exploration vehicle (CEV). The exhibit also highlights innovative computational methods to reduce the sound from jet engines — a source of noise pollution for the public and potentially hazardous operating conditions for pilots.

“NASA’s high-performance computers are critical for the accurate simulations needed to support safe engineering designs for the Ares launch vehicles, and the CEV and launch abort system,” said Rupak Biswas, acting chief of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. “With a new generation of supercomputers now in place, NASA is planning even more significant extensions to its high-end computing resources in the coming years to meet the continuing surge in computational requirements,” Biswas said.

The computational infrastructure at Ames was recently expanded to include Pleiades, a 47,104 processor core SGI® Altix® ICE system to augment the Columbia supercomputer in supporting NASA’s four key mission areas. In addition, the NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., has nearly tripled the performance of its Discover cluster to 67 trillion calculations per second (teraflops) with the addition of an IBM® iDataPlex® system containing 4,096 processor cores. The expanded Discover will enable high-resolution modeling of climate, weather, solar activity, and astrophysical phenomena.

“Discover can now provide NASA researchers with even more critical computing power needed for current and future NASA Earth and space science studies,” said Phil Webster, NCCS project manager and chief of the Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

Conference participants will also see captivating images and videos generated using NASA computer data models and simulation results, shown on the nine-screen “mini-hyperwall,” a traveling version of the recently installed hyperwall-2 visualization system.

NASA’s exhibit (booth #1343) represents work supporting all four of the agency’s mission directorates — aeronautics, exploration systems, science, and space operations. This work is conducted by researchers at six NASA field centers: Ames Research Center; Goddard Space Flight Center; Glenn Research Center, Cleveland; Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va.; Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Ala.; and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.—in addition to various NASA research partners. The conference is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and by the Association for Computing Machinery.

For more information about the NASA’s SC08 exhibit, please visit:

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC08/SC08.html

For more information about the SC08 conference, please visit:

http://sc08.supercomputing.org/

For information about NASA’s High-End Computing Program, please visit:

http://www.hec.nasa.gov/

New NASA Technique Measures Up, When it Comes to Sea Level Changing Glaciers

A NASA-led research team has used satellite data to make the most precise measurements to date of changes in the mass of mountain glaciers in the Gulf of Alaska, a region expected to be a significant contributor to global sea level rise over the next 50-100 years.

Geophysicist Scott Luthcke of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues knew from well-documented research that changes in the cryosphere -- glaciers, ice caps, and other parts of the globe covered year-round by ice -- are a key source of most global sea level rise. Melting ice will also bring changes to freshwater resources and wildlife habitat. Knowing that such ice-covered areas are difficult to observe consistently, the team worked to develop a satellite-based method that could accurately quantify glacial mass changes across seasons and years, and even discern whether individual glacier regions are growing or shrinking.

The study’s authors found that the annual ice mass lost from glaciers in the Gulf of Alaska has been 84 gigatons annually, about five times the average annual flow of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon and equal to the entire amount of water in the Chesapeake Bay.

“The Gulf of Alaska region is 20 times smaller than the ice-covered area of Greenland, yet it contributes nearly half as much freshwater melt as Greenland and accounts for about 15 percent of present-day global sea level rise stemming from melting ice,” said Luthcke, lead author of the study which will appear this week in the Journal of Glaciology. “Considering that the Gulf of Alaska makes such a disproportionate contribution, it is vital that we know more about the nature of glacial change there.”

Luthcke and colleagues found a way to remotely measure the “mass balance” of a glacier; that is, the net annual difference between ice accumulation and ice loss. Past measurements of glacial mass balance in remote mountain ranges have been sparse or imprecise. Ground-based sensors can provide long-term data, but such data points are scattered due to the inaccessibility of many remote mountain ranges. Altimeters aboard aircraft can measure changes in the height of glaciers, but the sampling is sporadic because flights are relatively infrequent.

Glaciers in the coastal environments on the edge of the Arctic or Antarctic shed and gain mass rapidly, a high mass turnover that is particularly sensitive to climate change. Warming seas can accelerate the motion of tidewater glaciers, and melt water on glacial surfaces can flow to the floors of glaciers and serve as a lubricant as the ice slides toward the sea. The subsequent addition of freshwater to the ocean contributes to one of two sources of global sea level rise; “eustatic” rise resulting from melted ice in the form of freshwater, with the other source set off by “thermal expansion,” sea level rise that occurs due to warming ocean temperatures.

The Goddard-led research team developed a new data analysis technique for NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission. GRACE is made up of twin satellites that orbit Earth about 137 miles apart and 300 miles above Earth's surface. The positions of the two satellites change in response to variations in Earth's gravity field, which is stronger or weaker depending on the land or ice mass that they are flying over. Microwave ranging systems measure the distance between the two satellites down to the width of a human hair, so by measuring the change in the distance between the satellites over time, researchers can essentially "weigh" the changes in Gulf of Alaska glaciers.

Using data collected by the GRACE satellites from 2003-2007, as well as unique processing and analysis techniques, Luthcke and colleagues were able to measure the mass of the glaciers every 10 days across an area spanning 18,919 square miles, about the equivalent of Vermont and New Hampshire combined.

The team found the largest ice mass losses occurring in the Yakutat, Glacier Bay, and St. Elias regions. Those observations are consistent with recent studies from aircraft-based altimeters and other satellites.

“The consistent and direct measurement of ice-mass change made possible by the GRACE data and the analysis techniques applied in this study provide unprecedented observations that further our knowledge of the region’s complex ice evolution,” said Luthcke.

The most rapid glacial melt, according to Luthcke and colleagues, came in response to the summer heat wave of 2004, when the region's glaciers shed 374 gigatons of ice, or about 98 cubic miles of ice. In comparison, the record for Greenland ice melt was 500 gigatons, or about 131 cubic miles, during the summer of 2007.

"With such rapid change taking place in such a critical area, we need to be able to more reliably observe how these glaciers are responding," said Luthcke. "The direct measurement of ice-mass variation is important for improving our modeling capability and for ultimately predicting future changes."

Related link:

> The Workings of GRACE

DIGITAL LEARNING NETWORK HOSTS WORLDWIDE VIRTUAL PARTY FOR NASA

Schools all over the world will wish NASA a happy birthday as part of an all-day virtual birthday party through NASA's Digital Learning Network on Thursday, Nov. 13.

The virtual party begins at 9 a.m. EST with live videoconferences occurring every hour on the hour until 6 p.m. Schools from Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, Mexico City, India, Slovenia and New Zealand will participate in the live digital connection.

During each webcast, international schools will connect with a U.S. school and one of NASA's 10 field centers. Each Digital Learning Network site will host a 45-minute videoconference featuring a unique program in NASA's 50 years of discovery and exploration in science, aeronautics and space.

Webcast topics for NASA's 50th birthday party include (all times EST):

- Space shuttle, hosted at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9 a.m.

- Project Mercury, hosted at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., at 10 a.m.

- The Viking Project, hosted at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., at 11 a.m.

- Hubble Space Telescope, hosted at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., at noon.

- Project Gemini, hosted at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston at 1 p.m.

- Stennis Space Center history, hosted at NASA's Stennis Space Center in Mississippi at 2 p.m.

- X-43, hosted at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., at 3 p.m.

- Icing Tunnel, hosted at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland at 4 p.m.

- Arc Jet Facility, hosted at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., at 5 p.m.

- Phoenix Mars Lander, hosted at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., at 6 p.m.

The birthday party is being held through a partnership among NASA, Discovery Education of Silver Spring, Md., the U.S. Distance Learning Association of Boston and Polycom of Pleasanton, Calif.

NASA's Digital Learning Network began in the spring of 2004 with three hub sites at Langley, Glenn and Johnson and now extends to all 10 field centers. Through interactive videoconferencing, the network allows the next generation of explorers to connect with scientists, engineers and researchers without leaving the classroom. The distance-learning events are designed to educate through demonstrations and live interactions with NASA experts.

To view the live webcasts on Nov. 13, visit:

http://dln.nasa.gov/dln/content/webcast

For more information about NASA's education programs, visit:

www.nasa.gov/education

First Rocket Parts Of NASA's New Launch System Arrive In Florida

The first major flight hardware of the Ares I-X rocket has arrived in Florida to begin preparation for the inaugural test flight of the agency's next-generation launch system. The test flight is targeted for July 12, 2009.

The Ares I-X upper stage simulator traveled to Port Canaveral aboard the Delta Mariner, a ship that also transports the Delta IV rocket for United Launch Alliance. The journey began Oct. 22 on the Ohio River as the barge traveled toward the Mississippi River for its voyage to Port Canaveral. By Nov. 6, the flight hardware will have been moved off the barge into high bay 4 of the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

The upper stage simulator consists of 11 individual components that were designed and manufactured during a two-year period at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. The components represent the size, outer shape and weight of the second stage of the Ares I rocket, and will be integrated together in the Vehicle Assembly Building. The upper stage simulator eventually will be stacked atop the solid rocket booster segments of the Ares I-X rocket.

The Ares I-X test flight will provide NASA an early opportunity to test and prove hardware, facilities and ground operations associated with the Ares I crew launch vehicle. It also will allow NASA to gather critical data during ascent of the integrated Orion crew exploration vehicle and the Ares I rocket. The data will ensure the entire vehicle system is safe and fully operational before astronauts begin traveling to orbit.

On Nov. 6, video B-roll of the arrival activities will be available on NASA Television's Video File feed. For NASA TV streaming video, schedules and downlink information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more information about the Ares I-X and NASA's next-generation spacecraft, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ares

'Ghost of Mirach' Materializes in Space Telescope Image

NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer has lifted the veil off a ghost known to haunt the local universe, providing new insight into the formation and evolution of galaxies.

The eerie creature, called NGC 404, is a type of galaxy known as "lenticular." Lenticular galaxies are disk-shaped, with little ongoing star formation and no spiral arms. NGC 404 is the nearest example of a lenticular galaxy, and therefore of great interest. But it lies hidden in the glare from a red giant star called Mirach. For this reason, NGC 404 became known to astronomers as the "Ghost of Mirach."

When the Galaxy Evolution Explorer spied the galaxy in ultraviolet light, a spooky ring materialized.

"We thought this celestial ghost was essentially dead, but we've been able to show that it has an extended ring of new stars. The galaxy has a hybrid character in which the well-known, very old stellar population tells only part of the story," said David Thilker of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "It's like the living dead."

Thilker and members of the Galaxy Evolution Explorer team spotted the Ghost of Mirach in images taken during the space telescope's all-sky survey. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer is a relatively low-cost NASA mission, launched in 2003, with an ambitious charge to survey the entire visible sky in ultraviolet light, a job never before accomplished. Because Earth's atmosphere absorbs ultraviolet photons -- a good thing for us living creatures who are susceptible to the damaging light -- ultraviolet telescopes must operate from space.

The first images of the Ghost of Mirach taken by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer hinted at a surrounding ultraviolet-bright extended structure. Subsequent, longer exposure observations indeed show that the lenticular galaxy is surrounded by a clumpy, never-before-seen ring of stars.

What is this mysterious ultraviolet ring doing around an otherwise nondescript lenticular galaxy? As it turns out, previous imaging with the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico had discovered a gaseous ring of hydrogen that matches the ultraviolet ring observed by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer. The authors of this Very Large Array study attributed the gas ring to a violent collision between NGC 404 and a small neighboring galaxy 900 million years ago.

The ultraviolet observations demonstrate that, when the hydrogen from the collision settled into the plane of the lenticular galaxy, stars began to form in a ghostly ring. Young, relatively hot stars forming in stellar clusters sprinkled throughout NGC 404's ring give off the ultraviolet light that the Galaxy Evolution Explorer was able to see.

"Before the Galaxy Evolution Explorer image, NGC 404 was thought to contain only very old and evolved red stars distributed in a smooth elliptical shape, suggesting a galaxy well into its old age and no longer evolving significantly," said Mark Seibert of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena, Calif. "Now we see it has come back to life, to grow once again."

"The Ghost of Mirach has been lucky enough to get a new lease on life through the rejuvenating, chance merger with its dwarf companion," added Thilker.

The findings indicate that the evolution of lenticular galaxies might not yet be complete. They may, in fact, continue to form stars in a slow, piecemeal fashion as they suck the raw, gaseous material for stars from small, neighboring galaxies. It seems the Ghost of Mirach might act more like a vampire than a ghost.

Caltech leads the Galaxy Evolution Explorer mission and is responsible for science operations and data analysis. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the mission and built the science instrument. The mission was developed under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Researchers sponsored by Yonsei University in South Korea and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France collaborated on this mission.

Graphics and additional information about the Galaxy Evolution Explorer is online at http://www.nasa.gov/galex/ and http://www.galex.caltech.edu .

NASA Hearing Daily From Weak Phoenix Mars Lander

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander has communicated with controllers daily since Oct. 30 through relays to Mars orbiters. Information received over the weekend indicates Phoenix is running out of power each afternoon or evening but reawakening after its solar arrays catch morning sunlight.

The fraction of each day with sun above the horizon is declining at the Martian arctic landing site. Dust raised by a storm last week continues to block some of the sunshine.

"This is exactly the scenario we expected for the mission's final phase, though the dust storm brought it a couple weeks sooner than we had hoped," said Phoenix Project Manager Barry Goldstein of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "We will be trying to gain some additional science during however many days we have left. Any day could be our last."

Mission engineers at JPL and at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, are attempting this week to upload commands to be stored in the lander's flash memory for science activities to be conducted when the lander wakes up each day.

"Weather observations are our top priority now," said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith. "If there's enough energy, we will try to get readings from the conductivity probe that has been inserted into the soil, and possibly some images to assess frost buildup."

Phoenix landed on Mars May 25. It accomplished its main science goals during the three months originally planned as its prime mission, then continued operating, now in its sixth month.

The Phoenix mission is led by Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson, with project management at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and development partnership at Lockheed Martin, Denver. International contributions come from the Canadian Space Agency; the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland; the universities of Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark; the Max Planck Institute in Germany; the Finnish Meteorological Institute; and Imperial College, London. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.