tiny nano satellites will be sent by NASA on space research missions soon

The US space agency has said that it has already got as many as a dozen very small research satellites into space.

NASA is going to be leading in sending very small satellites into space.

These macro satellites will be sent along with other bigger satellites in the future launches in the days ahead.

They claim that these satellites are so small that many of them may well actually fit in the palm of your hand.

Reports claim that these cube-shaped nano-satellites, called CubeSats, which measure about four inches on each side and weigh less than three pounds, are small but pack an out-sized research punch. The satellites will enable unique technology demonstrations, education research and science missions.

NASA officials while talking about these very small satellites claim that these will also help in studying topics ranging from how the solar system formed and demonstrating a new radiation-tolerant computer system, NASA said. The 14 CubeSats selected are from 12 US states and will fly as auxiliary payloads aboard rockets planned to launch in 2016, 2017 and 2018. They come from universities across the US, non-profit organisations and NASA field centres, NASA said. The US space agency plans to launch 50 small satellites from all 50 states in the next five years.

-nvonews

Rover photographs perfectly round ball on Mars surface

NASA's Curiosity Rover has sent back a photo from Mars of a perfectly round object that looks like a ball.

But sad news for conspiracy theorists: No one has been playing golf on the Red Planet.

Instead, experts told Discovery.com they believe the ball is an example of a geological process called concretion — when a mass of minerals embeds in a "host" sedimentary rock.

NASA said the sphere, which was photographed Sept. 11, is likely one centimetre wide.

It's not the first time a rover has photographed a similar phenomenon on Mars. In 2004, the rover Opportunity relayed images of a small grouping of concretions that looked similar to blueberries. The existence of the spheres suggests that area of Mars had groundwater at one point, the scientists said in a paper in Nature in June 2004.

NASA Curiosity Rover Drills its First Hole at Mount Sharp

NASA's Curiosity rover has reached the ultimate destination in its science mission on Mars and has officially broken the ground at Mount Sharp.

According to Space.com, Curiosity drilled about 2.6 into the base of the mountain in the middle of the Gale Crater, the rover's landing spot. The one-ton rover collected pieces of powdered rock for future analysis.

Curiosity has been on a track to reach Mount Sharp, which stands about 3.4 miles high, since landing on the Red Planet in Aug. 2012.

"This drilling target is at the lowest part of the base layer of the mountain, and from here we plan to examine the higher, younger layers exposed in the nearby hills," Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity deputy project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a press release. "This first look at rocks we believe to underlie Mount Sharp is exciting because it will begin to form a picture of the environment at the time the mountain formed, and what led to its growth."

Curiosity took its time to get from Yellow Knife Bay to Mount Sharp, about a five-mile trek. In 15 months, Curiosity plodded along while making various stops to collect samples and examine them. Thanks to the rover, NASA mission managers have enjoyed a wealth of information that have changed the way many people look at Mars.

"We're putting on the brakes to study this amazing mountain," Jennifer Trosper, Curiosity deputy project manager at JPL, said in the release. "Curiosity flew hundreds of millions of miles to do this."

Curiosity will now take its time with analyzing the sample because the results could determine whether or not it is safe for filtration and delivery to the rover's internal lab.

NASA, ISRO in talks to set up Joint Mars Working Group

America’s premier space agency NASA and its Indian counterpart ISRO are talking about setting up a Joint Mars Working Group, a top US space official has said ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the US.

“NASA is in discussions with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) regarding potential scientific collaboration with their Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), due to enter Mars orbit about two days after MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) orbiter, which will arrive at Mars later this month,” said James Green Director, Planetary Science Division, Science Mission Directorate, NASA.

Testifying before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Space Committee on Science, Space and Technology, he said while primarily a technology-demonstration mission, MOM includes five science instruments to study the martian atmosphere, mineralogy and surface features.

“With multiple data sets being collected, NASA and ISRO scientists will have a wealth of information to help solve mysteries regarding the Mars atmosphere,” he said.

“In addition, NASA and ISRO are talking about setting up a Joint Mars Working Group, under the auspices of the State Department’s US-India Civil Space Joint Working Group, that would coordinate our two agencies’ plans for studying one of the Earth’s nearest neighbors,” Green said.

Both the missions of NASA and ISRO will arrive at the Red Planet just in time to join the fleet of Mars-based spacecraft that could witness the effects of comet Siding Spring, Green told lawmakers.

MAVEN, he said, will explore the Mars’ upper atmosphere, ionosphere and interactions with the sun and solar wind.

Scientists will use MAVEN data to determine the role that loss of volatiles from the Mars atmosphere to space has played through time, giving insight into the history of Mars’ atmosphere and climate, liquid water, and planetary habitability, he added.

James F. Bell, president of The Planetary Society & Professor at Arizona State University, described NASA as the most active, most capable, and most successful of all of the world’s space agencies.

When NASA doesn’t prioritize planetary science, no other agencies are presently capable of filling the gap, he added.

The emergence of the Chinese and Indian space programs and the continued successes of the European and Japanese programs illustrate that robotic exploration of space is an international priority — a way to gain scientific knowledge, global prestige and advance technological capability, he said.

“In the coming decade, China is preparing a series of robotic lunar missions, Russia is preparing lunar, Venus and Mars missions, India has plans to go to the Moon and Mars, Japan is planning a second asteroid sample-return mission, and the Europeans are headed to Mercury, Mars, the asteroids and Jupiter,” Bell said.

NASA map Earths forests in 3D

The United States’ space agency, NASA, is developing the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) Lidar device to map forests on Earth in 3D and increase understanding of their role in the carbon cycle.

The instrument will be the first to systematically probe the depths of the forests from space. "GEDI Lidar will have a tremendous impact on our ability to monitor forest degradation, adding to the critical data needed to mitigate the effects of climate change," said Patrick O'Shea, chief research officer at the University of Maryland. It is a laser-based system that can measure the distance from the space-based instrument to Earth's surface with enough accuracy to detect subtle variations, including the tops of trees, the ground, and the vertical distribution of above ground bio-mass in forests, Wired.com reported.

The instrument will be built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, a NASA release said. "GEDI will be a tremendous new resource for studying Earth's vegetation," said Piers Sellers, deputy director of Goddard's Sciences and Exploration Directorate. In particular, the GEDI data will provide global-scale insights into how much carbon is being stored in the forest bio-mass. NASA said GEDI is scheduled to be ready in 2018.

NASA Satellite Help Farmers Fighting Draught

NASA scientists, including one of Indian-origin, have developed a new satellite than can predict the severity of droughts worldwide and help farmers maximise crop yield.

Currently, there is no ground-or satellite-based global network monitoring soil moisture at a local level.

Farmers, scientists and resource managers can place sensors in the ground, but these only provide spot measurements and are rare across some critical agricultural areas in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite mission, scheduled to launch later, will collect the kind of local data agricultural and water managers worldwide need.

SMAP uses two microwave instruments to monitor the top 5 centimetres of soil on Earth’s surface.

Together, the instruments create soil moisture estimates with a resolution of about 9 kilometres mapping the entire globe every two or three days.

Although this resolution cannot show how soil moisture might vary within a single field, it will give the most detailed maps yet made.

“Agricultural drought occurs when the demand for water for crop production exceeds available water supplies from precipitation, surface water and sustainable withdrawals from groundwater,” said Forrest Melton, a research scientist in the Ecological Forecasting Lab at NASA Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California.

“Based on snowpack and precipitation data in California, by March we had a pretty good idea that by summer we’d be in a severe agricultural drought,” Melton added.

“But irrigation in parts of India, the Middle East and other regions relies heavily on the pumping of groundwater during some or all of the year,” Melton said.

Underground water resources are hard to estimate, so farmers who rely on groundwater have fewer indicators of approaching shortfalls than those whose irrigation comes partially from rain or snowmelt.

For these parts of the world where farmers have little data available to help them understand current conditions, SMAP’s measurements could fill a significant void.

Some farmers handle drought by changing irrigation patterns. Others delay planting or harvesting to give plants their best shot at success.

Currently, schedule modifications are based mostly on growers’ observations and experience. SMAP’s data will provide an objective assessment of soil moisture to help with their management strategy.

“If farmers of rain-fed crops know soil moisture, they can schedule their planting to maximise crop yield,” said Narendra Das, a water and carbon cycle scientist on SMAP’s science team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“SMAP can assist in predicting how dramatic drought will be, and then its data can help farmers plan their recovery from drought,” said Das.

Indian graduate student discovers and measures black hole

An Indian-origin graduate student has discovered and measured one of the most elusive and mysterious objects in the Universe — a middling-sized black hole.

University of Maryland astronomy graduate student Dheeraj Pasham and two colleagues made the measurements of the rare black hole which they found hiding in the well-known galaxy M82, some 12 million light years away from Earth. Their findings were published online on August 17 in the journal Nature.

The reason why this discovery and the measurement are considered so significant is that these intermediate-mass black holes are hard to measure even their existence is sometimes disputed. Little is known about how they form, a Maryland varsity statement said. Some astronomers question whether they behave like other black holes.

The universe has countless black holes and just our galaxy, the Milky Way, may have up to 100 million of them, it is thought. Nearly all black holes fall into one of two classes: big, and colossal. The 'big' ones have from about 10 times to 100 times the mass of our sun. They are the remnants of dying stars. The 'colossal' or supermassive black holes have more than a million times the mass of the sun. These giants inhabit the centres of most galaxies.

But scattered across the universe are a few apparent black holes of the more mysterious type.

Ranging from a hundred times to a few hundred thousand times the sun's mass, these intermediate-mass black holes are mysterious because they are difficult to pinpoint.

"Objects in this range are the least expected of all black holes," says Richard Mushotzky UMD astronomy professor and a co-author. "Astronomers have been asking — do these objects exist or do they not exist? What are their properties? Until now we have not had the data to answer these questions." While the intermediate-mass black hole that the team studied is not the first one measured, it is the first one so precisely measured, Mushotzky says, "establishing it as a compelling example of this class of black holes."

The regions around supermassive black holes shine brightly in X-rays. Some of this radiation comes from a surrounding disk, and most comes from the corona, pictured here in this artist's concept as the white light at the base of a jet. This is one of a few possible shapes predicted for coronas. Image Credit: Nasa/JPL-Caltech

A black hole is a region in space containing a mass so dense that not even light can escape its gravity. Black holes are invisible, but astronomers can find them by tracking their gravitational pull on other objects. Matter being pulled into a black hole gathers around it like storm debris circling a tornado's centre. As this cosmic stuff rubs together it produces friction and light, making black holes among the universe's brightest objects.

Pasham, who will begin a post-doctoral research position at Nasa Goddard in late August, has identified six potential intermediate-mass black holes that Nasa's to-be launched X-ray telescope NICER might explore.

Why Sun atmosphere is much hotter than its surface revealed

Researchers said that nanoflares - a constant peppering of impulsive bursts of heating, none of which can be individually detected - provide the mysterious extra heat. Scientists have discovered some of the strongest evidence to date to explain what makes the Sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than its surface.

The new observations come from just six minutes worth of data from one of NASA’s least expensive type of missions, a sounding rocket, researchers said.

The Sun’s visible surface, called the photosphere, is some 6,000 Kelvins, while the corona regularly reaches temperatures which are 300 times as hot.

Many theories have been offered for how the magnetic energy coursing through the corona is converted into the heat that raises the temperature.

The EUNIS rocket, short for Extreme Ultraviolet Normal Incidence Spectrograph, however, was equipped with a very sensitive version of an instrument called a spectrograph.

Spectrographs gather information about how much material is present at a given temperature, by recording different wavelengths of light.

EUNIS flew up nearly 321 km above the ground aboard a sounding rocket, a type of NASA mission that flies for only 15 minutes or so, and gathered about six minutes worth of observations from above the planet’s air.

During its flight, EUNIS scanned a pre-determined region on the Sun known to be magnetically complex, a so-called active region, which can often be the source of larger flares and coronal mass ejections.

As light from the region streamed into its spectrograph, the instrument separated the light into its various wavelengths. Instead of producing a typical image of the Sun, the wavelengths with larger amounts of light are each represented by a vertical line called an emission line. Each emission line, in turn, represents material at a unique temperature on the Sun. Further analysis can identify the density and movement of the material as well.

The EUNIS spectrograph was tuned into a range of wavelengths useful for spotting material at temperatures of 10 million Kelvin - temperatures that are a signature of nanoflares.

Scientists have hypothesised that a myriad of nanoflares could heat up solar material in the atmosphere to temperatures of up to 10 million Kelvins.

This material would cool very rapidly, producing ample solar material at the 1 to 3 million degrees regularly seen in the corona. However, the faint presence of that extremely hot material should remain.

Looking over their six minutes of data, the EUNIS team spotted a wavelength of light corresponding to that 10 million degree material.

NASA plans to launch a flying-saucer-shaped vehicle

NASA plans to launch a flying-saucer-shaped vehicle to test technology for landing heavy loads - and one day even people - on Mars. The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) will be taken into the stratosphere from the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai. How the vehicle is launched.

After several weather delays, NASA will try to launch a "flying saucer" into Earth's atmosphere Saturday to test technology that could be used to land on Mars.

The attempt off the coast of the Hawaiian island of Kauai will test the disc-shaped vehicle and a giant parachute. Those interested can watch live at 2:15 p.m. ET.

The test at the Kauai military range has been postponed several times since June 2 because of winds.

It may seem straight out of a B-movie, but the space agency says the launch has a serious purpose: to test technology that will help land spacecraft and someday humans on Mars.

NASA still relies on some of the basic designs developed more than 40 years ago to land the Viking spacecraft on Mars, principal investigator Ian Clark of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said earlier this month.

"We've been using the same parachutes for several decades now," he said. "If we want to eventually land a human on the surface of Mars, we realized we need to develop new technologies."

The low-density supersonic decelerator, as it's officially known, will ascend into the skies dangling from a gargantuan balloon filled with helium. At 34 million cubic feet, the balloon would fill the Rose Bowl, encasing the helium in a skin made of a high-tech film as thin as sandwich wrap.

After the balloon and its load soar to roughly 23 miles high, the balloon will break away from the vehicle and drop to Earth, the cue for a rocket attached to the saucer to fire. The rocket will propel the saucer to four times the speed of sound, duplicating the rapid clip of a spacecraft bound for Mars.

If all goes according to plan, the saucer's inflatable ring, made of the same material as bulletproof vests, will pop up, expanding to some 3 feet high in a fraction of a second. The ring is designed to brake the vehicle as it speeds through the atmosphere. Finally a parachute much bigger than anything of its kind will cushion the saucer as it drifts down to an ocean landing.

NASA's latest rover on Mars, the Mars Science Laboratory, weighed about a ton. The new technology being tested would allow the landing of a load twice as heavy, and the use of multiple parachutes could mean even spacecraft of 20 to 30 tons could make a soft landing, Clark said.

At the test location high above the Earth, the air will be as thin as the wispy atmosphere around Mars, but it will be a lot easier to recover the saucer if things go wrong. The balloon could fail or the vehicle itself may prove balky, Clark said.

"We want to test them here — where it's a lot cheaper — before we we send them to Mars," said project manager Mark Adler, also of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Contributing: Associated Press

Sun belches out radiation plume SEVEN times the size of Earth

By Ellie Zolfagharifard
    

• The huge curtain of solar radiation erupted on May 9 but didn't affect Earth
• It was the first ever coronal mass ejection (CME) observed by the Iris probe
• During a CME, changes in sun’s magnetic fields can cause a section of the solar surface to expand, ejecting billions of tonnes of particles into space
• CMEs can disrupt communication signals and cause surges in power grids

Nasa’s latest solar observatory has captured footage of the sun belching out a stream of charged particles at 1.5 million miles per hour.
The curtain of radiation, which erupted on May 9, was the first coronal mass ejection (CME) observed by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or Iris.

The footage reveals the CME in ‘extraordinary detail’ showing a field of view about five Earths wide and seven-and-a-half Earths tall.

HOW DO CORONAL MASS EJECTIONS IMPACT EARTH?

CMEs are a mass of charged particles and magnetic field energy that bursts from the sun like a volcanic eruption.
Material from a coronal mass ejection takes two to three days to reach Earth, but in this case, the coronal mass ejection didn't affect our planet.
Coronal mass ejections interact with Earth’s magnetic field to generate auroras and magnetic storms.
The CME's magnetic fields peel back the outermost layers of Earth's fields changing their very shape, distortions which can can degrade communication signals and cause unexpected surges in power grids.
They also can cause aurora. Storms are rare during solar minimum, but as the sun nears solar maximum, large storms occur several times per year.

Because the observatory has to position itself a day in advance, it was a stroke of luck that the eruption happened just as the probe was pointing the right way.
‘We focus in on active regions to try to see a flare or a CME,’ said Bart De Pontieu, the Iris science lead at Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in California.

And then we wait and hope that we'll catch something. This is the first clear CME for Iris so the team is very excited.’
During a CME, changes in the sun’s magnetic fields cause a large section of the surface of the sun to expand rapidly, ejecting billions of tonnes of particles out into space.

Material from a coronal mass ejection takes two to three days to reach Earth, peeling back the outermost layers of the planet’s magnetic field.

CME’s can degrade communication signals and cause unexpected surges in power grids. However, this CME is not thought to have made a significant impact on Earth.
CME’s often accompany a solar flare – a solar eruption that pushes out waves of light all across the spectrum.

Iris can observe both types of eruption. It was launched in June 2013 to study what's known as the interface region, which is a layer between the sun's surface the corona that has long baffled scientists.

HOW DO FLARES AFFECT US?

Solar flares can damage satellites and have an enormous financial cost.
Astronauts are not in immediate danger because of the relatively low orbit of this manned mission. They do have to be concerned about cumulative exposure during space walks.
The charged particles can also threaten airlines by disturbing the Earth’s magnetic field.
Very large flares can even create currents within electricity grids and knock out energy supplies.
A positive aspect, from an aesthetic point of view, is that the auroras are enhanced.
Geomagnetic storms are more disruptive now than in the past because of our greater dependence on technical systems that can be affected by electric currents.

By capturing light emitted by atoms of different temperatures, Iris can looks at different heights above the sun's surface to analyse this obscure layer. 
The line moving across the middle of the movie is the entrance slit for Iris’ spectrograph, an instrument that can split light into its many wavelengths – a technique that ultimately allows scientists to measure temperature, velocity and density of the solar material behind the slit.
While the strength of this CME is yet to be revealed, it follows on the heels of the most powerful type of solar flare that’s ever been recorded by the space agency.
The huge event on the sun occurred on 29 March 2014, but Nasa has only now analysed the data from their fleet of observatories.
This fleet consisted of four telescopes in space and one observatory on Earth.
The flare observed was an X-class flare, the biggest and highest-energy solar flares that have ever been observed.