Jeff Williams: Record Breaker

On June 19, engineers on the ground remotely operated the International Space Station’s robotic arm to remove the Roll-Out Solar Array (ROSA) from the trunk of SpaceX’s Dragon cargo vehicle. Here, you see the experimental solar array unfurl as the station orbits Earth.

Solar panels are an efficient way to power satellites, but they are delicate and large, and must be unfolded when a satellite arrives in orbit. The Roll-Out Solar Array (ROSA) is a new type of solar panel that rolls open in space like a party favor and is more compact than current rigid panel designs.

ROSA is 20% lighter and 4x smaller in volume than rigid panel arrays!

This experiment remained attached to the robotic arm over seven days to test the effectiveness of the advanced, flexible solar array that rolls out like a tape measure. During that time, they also measured power produced by the array and monitored how the technology handled retraction.

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Seeing El Niño…From Space

First, What is El Niño?

This irregularly occurring weather phenomenon is created through an abnormality in wind and ocean circulation. When it originates in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. El Niño has wide-reaching effects. In a global context, it affects rainfall, ocean productivity, atmospheric gases and winds across continents. At a local level, it influences water supplies, fishing industries and food sources.

What About This Year’s El Niño

This winter, weather patterns may be fairly different than what is typical — all because of unusually warm ocean water in the east equatorial Pacific, aka El Niño. California is expected to get more rain while Australia is expected to get less. Since this El Niño began last summer, the Pacific Ocean has already experienced an increase in tropical storms and a decrease in phytoplankton.

How Do We See El Niño?

Here are some of El Niño’s key impacts and how we study them from space:

Rainfall: 

El Niño often spurs a change in rainfall patterns that can lead to major flooding, landslides and droughts across the globe.

How We Study It: Our Global Precipitation Measurement mission (GPM), tracks precipitation worldwide and creates global precipitation maps updated every half-hour using data from a host of satellites. Scientists can then use the data to study changes in rain and snow patterns. This gives us a better understanding of Earth’s climate and weather systems.

Hurricanes:

El Niño also influences the formation of tropical storms. El Niño events are associated with fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic, but more hurricanes and typhoons in the Pacific.

How We Study It: We have a suite of instruments in space that can study various aspects of storms, such as rainfall activity, cloud heights, surface wind speed and ocean heat.

Ocean Ecology:

While El Niño affects land, it also impacts the marine food web, which can be seen in the color of the ocean. The hue of the water is influenced by the presence of tiny plants, sediments and colored dissolved organic material. During El Niño conditions, upwelling is suppressed and the deep, nutrient-rich waters aren’t able to reach the surface, causing less phytoplankton productivity. With less food, the fish population declines, severely affecting fishing industries.

How We Study It: Our satellites measure the color of the ocean to derive surface chlorophyll, a pigment in phytoplankton, and observe lower total chlorophyll amounts during El Niño events in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

Ozone:

El Niño also influences ozone — a compound that plays an important role in the Earth system and human health. When El Niño occurs, there is a substantial change in the major east-west tropical circulation, causing a significant redistribution of atmospheric gases like ozone.

How We Study It: Our Aura satellite is used to measure ozone concentrations in the upper layer of the atmosphere. With more than a decade of Aura data, researchers are able to separate the response of ozone concentrations to an El Niño from its response to change sin human activity, such as manmade fires.

Fires:

El Niño conditions shift patters of rainfall and fire across the tropics. During El Niño years, the number and intensity of fires increases, especially under drought conditions in regions accustomed to wet weather. These fires not only damage lands, but also emit greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.

How We Study It: Our MODIS instruments on Aqua and Terra satellites provide a global picture of fire activity. MODIS was specifically designed to observe fires, allowing scientists to discern flaming from smoldering burns.

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Going for GOLD

On Jan. 25, we’re going for GOLD!

We’re launching an instrument called Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk, GOLD for short. It’s a new mission that will study a complicated — and not yet fully understood — region of near-Earth space, called the ionosphere.

Space is not completely empty: It’s teeming with fast-moving energized particles and electric and magnetic fields that guide their motion. At the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space, these particles and fields — the ionosphere — co-exist with the upper reaches of the neutral atmosphere.

That makes this a complicated place. Big events in the lower atmosphere, like hurricanes or tsunamis, can create waves that travel all the way up to that interface to space, changing the wind patterns and causing disruptions.

It’s also affected by space weather. The Sun is a dynamic star, and it releases spurts of energized particles and blasts of solar material carrying electric and magnetic fields that travel out through the solar system. Depending on their direction, these bursts have the potential to disrupt space near Earth.

This combination of factors makes it hard to predict changes in the ionosphere — and that can have a big impact. Communications signals, like radio waves and signals that make our GPS systems work, travel through this region, and sudden changes can distort them or even cut them off completely.

Low-Earth orbiting satellites — including the International Space Station — also fly through the ionosphere, so understanding how it fluctuates is important for protecting these satellites and astronauts.  

GOLD is a spectrograph, an instrument that breaks light down into its component wavelengths, measuring their intensities. Breaking light up like this helps scientists see the behavior of individual chemical elements — for instance, separating the amount of oxygen versus nitrogen. GOLD sees in far ultraviolet light, a type of light that’s invisible to our eyes.

GOLD is a hosted payload. The instrument is hitching a ride aboard SES-14, a commercial communications satellite built by Airbus for SES Government Solutions, which owns and operates the satellite.

Also launching this year is the Ionospheric Connection Explorer, or ICON, which will also study the ionosphere and neutral upper atmosphere. But while GOLD will fly in geostationary orbit some 22,000 miles above the Western Hemisphere, ICON will fly just 350 miles above Earth, able to gather close up images of this region.

Together, these missions give us an unprecedented look at the ionosphere and upper atmosphere, helping us understand the very nature of how our planet interacts with space.

To learn more about this region of space and the GOLD mission, visit: nasa.gov/gold.

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7 Things You Need to Know About Small Satellites

1. Small satellites is the umbrella term for describing any satellite that is the size of an economy-sized washing machine all the way down to a CubeSat, which you can hold in your hand.

2. CubeSats come in multiple sizes defined by the U, which stands for unit. Making it the Unit unit. 1U CubeSats are cubes 4 inches (10 cm) on a side, weighing as little as 4 pounds. A 3U CubeSat is three 1Us hooked together, resembling a flying loaf of bread. A 6U CubeSat is two 3Us joined at the hip, like a flying cereal box. These are the three most common configurations.

Photo courtesy of the University of Michigan 

3. CubeSats were developed by researchers at California Polytechnic State University and Stanford University who wanted a standardized format to make launching them into space easier and to be small enough for students to get involved in designing, building and launching a satellite.

4. Small satellites often hitch a ride to space with another mission. If there’s room on the rocket of a larger mission, they’re in. CubeSats in particular deploy from a p-pod – poly-picosatellite orbital deployer – tucked on the underside of the upper stage of the rocket near the engine bell.

5. Small sats test technology at lower costs. Their small size and the relatively short amount of time it takes to design and build a small satellite means that if we want to test a new sensor component or a new way of making an observation from space, we can do so without being in the hole if it doesn’t work out. There’s no environment on Earth than can adequately recreate space, so sometimes the only way to know if new ideas work is to send them up and see.

6. Small sats force us to think of new ways to approach old problems. With a satellite the size of a loaf of bread, a cereal box, or a microwave oven, we don’t have a lot of room for the science instrument or power to run it. That means thinking outside the box. In addition to new and creative designs that include tape measures, customized camera lenses, and other off-the-shelf parts, we have to think of new ways of gathering all the data we need. One thing we’re trying out is flying small sat constellations – a bunch of the same kind of satellite flying in formation. Individually, each small sat sees a small slice of Earth below. Put them together and we start to see the big picture.

7. Small sats won’t replace big satellites. Size does matter when it comes to power, data storage, and how precise your satellite instrument is. Small satellites come with trade-offs that often mean coarser image resolution and shorter life-spans than their bigger sister satellites. However, small sat data can complement data collected by big satellites by covering more ground, by passing over more frequently, by flying in more dangerous orbits that big satellites avoid, and by continuing data records if there’s a malfunction or a wait between major satellite missions. Together they give us a more complete view of our changing planet.

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What are three things you would want everyone to know about your work?

5 Examples of How Our Satellite Data is Helping the Planet

We could talk all day about how our satellite data is crucial for Earth science…tracking ocean currents, monitoring natural disasters, soil mapping – the list goes on and on.

But did you know there is another way this data can improve life here on Earth?

Our satellite data can be used to build businesses and commercial products – but finding and using this data has been a daunting task for many potential users because it’s been stored across dozens of websites.

Until now.

Our Technology Transfer program has just released their solution to make finding data easier, called The NASA Remote Sensing Toolkit (RST).

RST offers an all-in-one approach to finding and using our Earth Science data, the tools needed to analyze it, and software to build your own tools.  

Before, we had our petabytes on petabytes of information spread out across dozens of websites – not to mention the various software tools needed to interpret the data. 

Now, RST helps users find everything they need while having only one browser open.

Feeling inspired to innovate with our data? Here are just a few examples of how other companies have taken satellite data and turned it into products, known as NASA spinoffs, that are helping our planet today.

1. Bringing Landscape into Focus

We have a number of imaging systems for locating fires, but none were capable of identifying small fires or indicating the flames’ intensity. Thanks to a series of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts between our Ames Research Center and Xiomas Technologies LLC, the Wide Area Imager aerial scanner does just that. While we and the U.S. Forest Service use it for fire detection, the tool is also being used by municipalities for detailed aerial surveillance projects.

2. Monitoring the Nation’s Forests with the Help of Our Satellites

Have you ever thought about the long-term effects of natural disasters, such as hurricanes, on forest life? How about the big-time damage caused by little pests, like webworms? 

Our Stennis Space Center did, along with multiple forest services and environmental threat assessment centers. They partnered to create an early warning system to identify, characterize, and track disturbances from potential forest threats using our satellite data. The result was ForWarn, which is now being used by federal and state forest and natural resource managers.

3. Informing Forecasts of Crop Growth

Want to hear a corny story?

Every year Stennis teams up with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to host a program called Ag 20/20 to utilize remote sensing technology for operational use in agricultural crop management practices at the level of individual farms. During Ag 20/20 in 2000, an engineering contractor developed models for using our satellite data to predict corn crop yield. The model was eventually sold to Genscape Inc., which has commercialized it as LandViewer. Sold under a subscription model, LandViewer software provides predictions of corn production to ethanol plants and grain traders.

4. Water Mapping Technology Rebuilds Lives in Arid Regions

No joking around here. Lives depend on the ability to find precious water in areas with little of it.  

Using our Landsat satellite and other topographical data, Radar Technologies International developed an algorithm-based software program that can locate underground water sources. Working with international organizations and governments, the firm is helping to provide water for refugees and other people in drought-stricken regions such as Kenya, Sudan, and Afghanistan.

5. Satellite Maps Deliver More Realistic Gaming

Are you more of the creative type? This last entry used satellite data to help people really get into their gameplay.

When Electronic Arts (EA) decided to make SSX, a snowboarding video game, it faced challenges in creating realistic-looking mountains. The solution was our ASTER Global Digital Elevation Map, made available by our Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which EA used to create 28 real-life mountains from 9 different ranges for its award-winning game.

You can browse our Remote Sensing Toolkit at technology.nasa.gov.

Want to know more about future tutorial webinars on RST?

Follow our Technology Transfer Program on twitter @NASAsolutions for the latest updates.

Want to learn more about the products made by NASA technologies? Head over to spinoff.nasa.gov.

Sign up to receive updates about upcoming tutorials HERE.

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Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Learn more about the speed and final mission for Cassini, citizen science on Jupiter and more!

1. Cassini's Two Speeds

Our Cassini spacecraft is blazingly fast. How fast? Well, that's all relative. Learn about the need for speed in space navigation.

2. Daphnis, the Wavemaker

The wavemaker moon, Daphnis, is featured in this view, taken as our Cassini spacecraft made one of its ring-grazing passes over the outer edges of Saturn's rings on earlier this month. This is the closest view of the small moon obtained to date.

3. Cassini's Grand Finale

The European Space Agency’s tracking antennas at New Norcia, Western Australia, and Malargüe, Argentina, are helping with crucial observations during Cassini's last months in orbit, dubbed the 'Grand Finale.'

4. Citizen Science—in Space

This image of a crescent Jupiter and the iconic Great Red Spot was created by a citizen scientist Roman Tkachenko using data from Juno spacecraft's onboard camera. The images also bear witness a series of storms shaped like white ovals, known informally as the "string of pearls." 

5. 360 video: Rover Ride-Along in the Mars Yard

Get a robot's-eye-view of the "Mars Yard," a terrain simulation area at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where rover hardware and software are tested before being sent to the Red Planet. Ride alongside, atop and below the Scarecrow test mobility double for the Curiosity and Mars 2020 rovers.

Watch the video: www.youtube.com/watch Learn more about Scarecrow: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/news/2014/scarecrow-rover-goes-off-roading-in-dumont-dunes

Discover the full list of 10 things to know about our solar system this week HERE.

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Black Hole Sculpts an Hourglass Galaxy

When it comes to galaxies, our home, the Milky Way, is rather neat and orderly. Other galaxies can be much more chaotic. For example, the Markarian 573 galaxy has a black hole at its center which is spewing beams of light in opposite directions, giving its inner regions more of an hourglass shape. 

Our scientists have long been fascinated by this unusual structure, seen above in optical light from the Hubble Space Telescope. Now their search has taken them deeper than ever — all the way into the super-sized black hole at the center of one galaxy.

So, what do we think is going on? When the black hole gobbles up matter, it releases a form of high-energy light called radiation (particularly in the form of X-rays), causing abnormal patterns in the flow of gas. 

Let’s take a closer look.

Meet Markarian 573, the galaxy at the center of this image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, located about 240 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Cetus. It’s the galaxy’s odd structure and the unusual motions of its components that inspire our scientists to study it.

As is the case with other so-called active galaxies, the ginormous black hole at the center of Markarian 573 likes to eat stuff. A thick ring of dust and gas accumulates around it, forming a doughnut. This ring only permits light to escape the black hole in two cone-shaped regions within the flat plane of the galaxy — and that’s what creates the hourglass, as shown in the illustration above.

Zooming out, we can see the two cones of emission (shown in gold in the animation above) spill into the galaxy's spiral arms (blue). As the galaxy rotates, gas clouds in the arms sweep through this radiation, which makes them light up so our scientists can track their movements from Earth.

What happens next depends on how close the gas is to the black hole. Gas that’s about 2,500 light-years from the black hole picks up speed and streams outward (shown as darker red and blue arrows). Gas that’s farther from the black hole also becomes ionized, but is not driven away and continues its motion around the galaxy as before.

Here is an actual snapshot of the inner region of Markarian 573, combining X-ray data (blue) from our Chandra X-ray Observatory and radio observations (purple) from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico with a visible light image (gold) from our Hubble Space Telescope. Given its strange appearance, we’re left to wonder: what other funky shapes might far-off galaxies take?

For more information about the bizarre structure of Markarian 573, visit http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/12657  

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How do you guys help with climate change?

Is your only job helping astronauts and satellites or does NASA do other thing too?