Spacecraft Monitoring Martian Dust Storm

This nearly global mosaic of observations made by the Mars Color Imager on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 18, 2012, shows a dust storm in Mars' southern hemisphere. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS › Full image and caption

Mars Status Report

PASADENA, Calif. -- A Martian dust storm that NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been tracking since last week has also produced atmospheric changes detectable by rovers on Mars.

Using the orbiter's Mars Color Imager, Bruce Cantor of Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, began observing the storm on Nov. 10, and subsequently reported it to the team operating NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. The storm came no closer than about 837 miles (1,347 kilometers) from Opportunity, resulting in only a slight drop in atmospheric clarity over that rover, which does not have a weather station.

Halfway around the planet from Opportunity, the NASA Mars rover Curiosity's weather station has detected atmospheric changes related to the storm. Sensors on the Rover Environmental Monitoring Station (REMS), which was provided for Curiosity by Spain, have measured decreased air pressure and a slight rise in overnight low temperature.

"This is now a regional dust storm. It has covered a fairly extensive region with its dust haze, and it is in a part of the planet where some regional storms in the past have grown into global dust hazes," said Rich Zurek, chief Mars scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "For the first time since the Viking missions of the 1970s, we are studying a regional dust storm both from orbit and with a weather station on the surface."

Curiosity's equatorial location and the sensors on REMS, together with the daily global coverage provided by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, provide new advantages compared with what Viking offered with its combination of orbiters and landers. The latest weekly Mars weather report from the orbiter's Mars Color Imager is athttp://www.msss.com/msss_images/2012/11/21/ .

Each Martian year lasts about two Earth years. Regional dust storms expanded and affected vast areas of Mars in 2001 and 2007, but not between those years nor since 2007.

"One thing we want to learn is why do some Martian dust storms get to this size and stop growing, while others this size keep growing and go global," Zurek said.

From decades of observing Mars, scientists know there is a seasonal pattern to the largest Martian dust-storm events. The dust-storm season began just a few weeks ago, with the start of southern-hemisphere spring.

Starting on Nov. 16, the Mars Climate Sounder instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter detected a warming of the atmosphere at about 16 miles (25 kilometers) above the storm. Since then, the atmosphere in the region has warmed by about 45 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius). This is due to the dust absorbing sunlight at that height, so it indicates the dust is being lofted well above the surface and the winds are starting to create a dust haze over a broad region.

Warmer temperatures are seen not only in the dustier atmosphere in the south, but also in a hot spot near northern polar latitudes due to changes in the atmospheric circulation. Similar changes affect the pressure measured by Curiosity even though the dust haze is still far away.

Besides the research value in better understanding storm behavior, monitoring the storm is also important for Mars rover operations. If the storm were to go global, the Opportunity rover would be affected most. More dust in the air or falling onto its solar panels would reduce the solar-powered rover's energy supply for daily operations. Curiosity is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator, rather than solar cells. The main effects of increased dust in the air at its site would be haze in images and increased air temperature.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project and both of the Mars rover projects for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

For more information about the missions of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, visit http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/ .

click me!

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Phasellus ut nisl gravida mi vulputate ullamcorper. Mauris mattis ante ut ante. Quisque gravida commodo pede. Aliquam tellus nunc, commodo sed, tincidunt id, luctus eu, odio. Donec arcu diam, molestie bibendum, sagittis et, vulputate sed, eros.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Phasellus ut nisl gravida mi vulputate ullamcorper. Mauris mattis ante ut ante. Quisque gravida commodo pede. Aliquam tellus nunc, commodo sed, tincidunt id, luctus eu, odio. Donec arcu diam, molestie bibendum, sagittis et, vulputate sed, eros. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Phasellus ut nisl gravida mi vulputate ullamcorper. Mauris mattis ante ut ante. Quisque gravida commodo pede. Aliquam tellus nunc, commodo sed, tincidunt id, luctus eu, odio. Donec arcu diam, molestie bibendum, sagittis et, vulputate sed, eros.

Thanksgiving Aboard Space Station

ext Size

Grow Text SizeShrink Text Size

Thanksgiving Aboard Space Station

11.21.12

 

From aboard the International Space Station, Expedition 34 Commander Kevin Ford recorded a special Thanksgiving message and discussed how he and his crewmates, Flight Engineers Evgeny Tarelkin and Oleg Novitskiy, are celebrating the holiday.

In addition to the space-food versions of traditional holiday favorites such as irradiated smoked turkey and thermo-stabilized yams, the station crew’s out-of-this-world Thanksgiving menu will include NASA's own cornbread dressing, as well as Russian mashed potatoes with onions, corn and a cranberry-apple dessert.


› Expedition 34 Thanksgiving Message

In a recent interview, Vickie Kloeris, NASA food scientist and manager of the space station food system, described the holiday fare available to the station crew and the work that goes into ensuring that astronauts have access to a delicious variety of healthy food during their long-duration spaceflights.

› ISS Update: Packing and Preparing Space Food (Part 1)
› ISS Update: Packing and Preparing Space Food (Part 2)

‘Tis the season to send a holiday greeting! You can select a postcard to send to the station crew or send season’s tweetings via Twitter!

› Send greetings to the crew

Expedition 34 began when Expedition 33 Commander Suni Williams and Flight Engineers Aki Hoshide and Yuri Malenchenko departed station Nov. 18 aboard their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft after 125 days aboard the orbiting complex.

Before departing, Williams recorded a video tour of the International Space Station.

› Harmony, Tranquility and Unity Nodes
› Kibo, Columbus and Destiny Labs
› Cupola, Tranquility and Leonardo
› Russian Segment of Station

Ford and his crewmates will tend to the station as a three-man crew until the arrival of three additional flight engineers just in time for the Christmas holidays. NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Chris Hadfield, and Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Roman Romanenko are scheduled to launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome Dec. 19 and dock to the station two days later for a five-month stay. Hadfield will become the first Canadian to command the station when Ford, Novitskiy and Tarelkin depart in March, marking the start of Expedition 35.

› Read more about Expedition 34

Call for Feedback as We Prepare the Next NASA.gov

Call for Feedback as We Prepare the Next NASA.gov

We are starting on the next version of what NASA.gov looks like and want to know what you think.

Do you like something you've seen? Is something missing? How do you interact with NASA online? Where else do you get your NASA news from? We have set up an online forum at Ideascale to take your feedback. You can offer ideas of your own or comment and vote on others' suggestions. We will take all the data and do some prototyping, then see what you think.

Curiosity Rover Preparing for Thanksgiving Activities

Curiosity Rover Preparing for Thanksgiving Activities

11.20.12

 

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity drove 83 feet eastward during the 102nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission (Nov. 18, 2012), and used its left navigation camera to record this view ahead at the end of the drive. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Full image and caption       › Latest images       › Curiosity gallery       › Curiosity videos       › Related video 

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity drove 6.2 feet (1.9 meters) during the 100th Martian day, or sol, of the mission (Nov. 16, 2012). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Full image and caption

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity drove 6.2 feet (1.9 meters) during the 100th Martian day, or sol, of the mission (Nov. 16, 2012). The rover used its Navigation Camera after the drive to record the images combined into this stereo, panoramic view. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Full image and caption

Mission Status Report

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars rover Curiosity completed a touch-and-go inspection of one rock on Sunday, Nov. 18, then pivoted and, on the same day, drove toward a Thanksgiving overlook location.

Last week, Curiosity drove for the first time after spending several weeks in soil-scooping activities at one location. On Friday, Nov. 16, the rover drove 6.2 feet (1.9 meters) to get within arm's reach of a rock called "Rocknest 3." On Sunday, it touched that rock with the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) on its arm, and took two 10-minute APXS readings of data about the chemical elements in the rock. Then Curiosity stowed its arm and drove 83 feet (25.3 meters) eastward toward a target called "Point Lake."

"We have done touches before, and we've done goes before, but this is our first 'touch-and-go' on the same day," said Curiosity Mission Manager Michael Watkins of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "It is a good sign that the rover team is getting comfortable with more complex operational planning, which will serve us well in the weeks ahead."

During a Thanksgiving break, the team will use Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam) from Point Lake to examine possible routes and targets to the east. A priority is to choose a rock for the first use of the rover's hammering drill, which will collect samples of powder from rock interiors.

Although Curiosity has departed the Rocknest patch of windblown sand and dust where it scooped up soil samples in recent weeks, the sample-handling mechanism on the rover's arm is still holding some soil from the fifth and final scoop collected at Rocknest. The rover is carrying this sample so it can be available for analysis by instruments within the rover if scientists choose that option in coming days.

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL designed and built the rover.

More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl andhttp://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ . You can follow the mission on Facebook at:http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at:http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

 

 

Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
guy.webster@jpl.nasa.gov

Astronomers Directly Image Massive Star's 'Super-Jupiter'

Astronomers Directly Image Massive Star's 'Super-Jupiter'

11.19.12

 

Astronomers using infrared data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii have discovered a "super-Jupiter" around the bright star Kappa Andromedae, which now holds the record for the most massive star known to host a directly imaged planet or lightweight brown dwarf companion.

Designated Kappa Andromedae b (Kappa And b, for short), the new object has a mass about 12.8 times greater than Jupiter's. This places it teetering on the dividing line that separates the most massive planets from the lowest-mass brown dwarfs. That ambiguity is one of the object's charms, say researchers, who call it a super-Jupiter to embrace both possibilities.

The "super-Jupiter" Kappa Andromedae b, shown here in an artist's rendering, circles its star at nearly twice the distance that Neptune orbits the sun. With a mass about 13 times Jupiter's, the object glows with a reddish color. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger
› Larger image

"According to conventional models of planetary formation, Kappa And b falls just shy of being able to generate energy by fusion, at which point it would be considered a brown dwarf rather than a planet," said Michael McElwain, a member of the discovery team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "But this isn't definitive, and other considerations could nudge the object across the line into brown dwarf territory."

Massive planets slowly radiate the heat leftover from their own formation. For example, the planet Jupiter emits about twice the energy it receives from the sun. But if the object is massive enough, it's able to produce energy internally by fusing a heavy form of hydrogen called deuterium. (Stars like the sun, on the other hand, produce energy through a similar process that fuses the lighter and much more common form of hydrogen.) The theoretical mass where deuterium fusion can occur -- about 13 Jupiters -- marks the lowest possible mass for a brown dwarf.

"Kappa And b, the previously imaged planets around HR 8799 and Beta Pictoris, and the most massive planets discovered by non-imaging techniques likely all represent a class of object that formed in much the same way as lower-mass exoplanets," said lead researcher Joseph Carson, an astronomer at the College of Charleston, S.C., and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. 

The discovery of Kappa And b also allows astronomers to explore another theoretical limit. Astronomers have argued that large stars likely produce large planets, but experts predict that this stellar scaling can only extend so far, perhaps to stars with just a few times the sun's mass. The more massive a young star is, the brighter and hotter it becomes, resulting in powerful radiation that could disrupt the formation of planets within a circumstellar disk of gas and dust.

"This object demonstrates that stars as large as Kappa And, with 2.5 times the sun's mass, remain fully capable of producing planets," Carson adds.

This false-color near-infrared image has been processed to remove most of the scattered light from the star Kappa Andromedae (masked out at center). The "super-Jupiter" companion, Kappa Andromedae b (upper left), lies at a projected distance of about 55 times the average distance between Earth and the sun and about 1.8 times farther than Neptune, whose orbit is shown for comparison (dashed circle). The white region marking the companion indicates a signal present in all near-infrared wavelengths, while colored blobs represent residual noise. The Subaru Telescope in Hawaii captured the image in July. Credit: NOAJ/Subaru/J. Carson, College of Charleston
› Larger image (labeled)
› Larger image (unlabeled)

The research is part of the Strategic Explorations of Exoplanets and Disks with Subaru (SEEDS), a five-year effort to directly image extrasolar planets and protoplanetary disks around several hundred nearby stars using the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Direct imaging of exoplanets is rare because the dim objects are usually lost in the star's brilliant glare. The SEEDS project images at near-infrared wavelengths using the telescope's adaptive optics system, which compensates for the smearing effects of Earth's atmosphere, in concert with its High Contrast Instrument for the Subaru Next Generation Adaptive Optics and Infrared Camera and Spectrograph. 

Young star systems are attractive targets for direct exoplanet imaging because young planets have not been around long enough to lose much of the heat from their formation, which enhances their brightness in the infrared. The team focused on the star Kappa And because of its relative youth -- estimated at the tender age of 30 million years, or just 0.7 percent the age of our solar system, based on its likely membership in a stellar group known as the Columba Association. The B9-type star is located 170 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Andromeda and is visible to the unaided eye. 

This chart locates the star Kappa Andromedae, which is visible to the unaided eye from suburban skies. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/DSS
› Larger image (labeled)
› Larger image (unlabeled)

Kappa And b orbits its star at a projected distance of 55 times Earth's average distance from the sun and about 1.8 times as far as Neptune; the actual distance depends on how the system is oriented to our line of sight, which is not precisely known. The object has a temperature of about 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit (1,400 Celsius) and would appear bright red if seen up close by the human eye. 

Carson's team detected the object in independent observations at four different infrared wavelengths in January and July of this year. Comparing the two images taken half a year apart showed that Kappa And b exhibits the same motion across the sky as its host star, which proves that the two objects are gravitationally bound and traveling together through space. Comparing the brightness of the super-Jupiter between different wavelengths revealed infrared colors similar to those observed in the handful of other gas giant planets successfully imaged around stars. 

A paper describing the results has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and will appear in a future issue. 

The SEEDS research team is continuing to study Kappa And b to better understand the chemistry of its atmosphere, constrain its orbit, and search for possible secondary planets. 

Coincidentally, the stellar association that hosts Kappa And also includes another famous high-mass star, HR 8799, which is one of the first where astronomers directly imaged an extrasolar planet. The system hosts several gas giant planets with masses and infrared colors similar to Kappa And b.

Related Links

› Paper (preprint): "Direct Imaging Discovery of a 'Super-Jupiter' Around the late B-Type Star Kappa And."
› Related multimedia from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio
› Subaru Telescope press release: "Direct Imaging of a Super-Jupiter Around a Massive Star" (11.19.12)
› "Spiral Arms Point to Possible Planets in a Star's Dusty Disk" (10.19.11)

 

 

Francis Reddy
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.