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LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE - Plans to move forward with an estimated $3-billion project to send a spacecraft to one of Jupiter's moons is ensuring jobs as much as its ensuring discoveries. Officials at the La Canada Flintridge-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory say a 10-year project resulting in a mission to Europa will offer some stability in a fleeting job market. "Right now we have another exploration goal," JPL spokeswoman Veronica McGregor said. "We do need future missions for our staff to be able to move on, to do more work. So, obviously having a new mission on our plate is fantastic."...

NASA engineers are scratching their heads over some unexpected behavior from the long-lived Spirit rover, which began its sixth year exploring Mars this month. Spirit failed to report in to engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., last weekend, prompting a series of diagnostic tests this week to hunt the glitch's source. The aging Mars rover did not beam home a record of its weekend activities and, more puzzlingly, apparently failed to even record any of its actions on Sunday, mission managers said. ... By Monday, Spirit's mission controllers decided to tell the rover to find the...

(AFP) – Global warming is increasing the frequency of extremely high clouds in the Earth's tropics that cause severe storms and rainfall, according to a NASA study released Friday. The space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said a study by its scientists "found a strong correlation between the frequency of these clouds and seasonal variations in the average sea surface temperature of the tropical oceans." "For every degree Centigrade (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in average ocean surface temperature, the team observed a 45-percent increase in the frequency of the very high clouds," according to the study, recently published in Geophysical...

Water vapor is known to be Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution to global warming has been debated. Using recent NASA satellite data, researchers have estimated more precisely than ever the heat-trapping effect of water in the air, validating the role of the gas as a critical component of climate change. Andrew Dessler and colleagues from Texas A&M University in College Station confirmed that the heat-amplifying effect of water vapor is potent enough to double the climate warming caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. With new observations, the scientists confirmed experimentally...

Rep. Edward Markey, chair of the Global Warming Committee recently told students gathered at the U.S. Capitol that climate change caused Hurricane Katrina. “There now is no question that this harm is being caused by human activity,” said Markey. “It’s warming up the planet and melting the glaciers. There is an underwater heat wave going on that intensifies the storms and creates even greater havoc when those storms reach land. The planet is running a fever.” Markey was not aware the globe and its oceans were cooling. Global temperatures stopped warming in 1998 and since 2002 have been declining. NASA’s...

Two-Armed Spiral Milky Way Illustration Credit: R. Hurt (SSC), JPL-Caltech, NASA Survey Credit: GLIMPSE Explanation: Gazing out from within the Milky Way, our own galaxy's true structure is difficult to discern. But an ambitious survey effort with the Spitzer Space Telescope now offers convincing evidence that we live in a large galaxy distinguished by two main spiral arms (the Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus arms) emerging from the ends of a large central bar. In fact, from a vantage point that viewed our galaxy face-on, astronomers in distant galaxies would likely see the Milky Way as a two-armed barred spiral similar...

PASADENA, Calif. -- A NASA spacecraft today sent pictures showing itself in good condition after making the first successful landing in a polar region of Mars. The images from NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander also provided a glimpse of the flat valley floor expected to have water-rich permafrost within reach of the lander's robotic arm. The landing ends a 422-million-mile journey from Earth and begins a three-month mission that will use instruments to taste and sniff the northern polar site's soil and ice. "We see the lack of rocks that we expected, we see the polygons that we saw from space,...

This will be the official thread for the Phoenix Mars Lander..

05.25.08 Brent Shockley 4:53 pm Touchdown detected!! We're on the surface of Mars and there is celebration in Mission Control!! 4:50 pm Parachute deploy detected! Heat shield deploy detected! Radar ground lock detected! 4:48 pm Odyssey has maintained a signal from Phoenix through the period of peak heating when we might have experienced a loss of communications due to plasma blackout. 4:45 pm Phoenix has now entered the atmosphere. We expect possible plasma blackout in about a minute. Phoenix is less than three minutes to parachute deploy and less than seven minutes to touchdown. 4:39 pm We have now verified...

Mission controllers for NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander decided Saturday afternoon, May 24, to forgo the second-to-last opportunity for adjusting the spacecraft's flight path. Phoenix is so well on course for its Sunday-evening landing on an arctic Martian plain that the team decided it was not necessary to do a trajectory correction 21 hours before landing. However, the team left open the option of a correction maneuver eight hours before landing, if warranted by updated navigational information expected in the intervening hours. Sunday at 4:53 p.m. Pacific Time is the first possible time for confirmation that Phoenix has landed. The landing...

PASADENA, Calif. - After a nearly 10-month journey, a NASA spacecraft will land softly Sunday on the northern polar region of Mars, if all goes as planned. The Phoenix Mars Lander is set to touch down in a broad, shallow valley in the Martian arctic plains believed to hold a vast supply of underground ice. Phoenix's job during the 90-day mission is to excavate the soil and ice to study whether the site could have supported microbial life. The stakes are especially high: Fewer than half of the world's attempts to land on the Red Planet have succeeded. "I'm getting...

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's William Pickering, University of Iowa physicist James Van Allen and rocket scientist Wernher von Braun hold up a model of Explorer 1 at a news conference after hearing the satellite had reached orbit on Jan. 31, 1958. Click on the image to watch a newsreel report on the launch. Carl Raggio still remembers how tense he felt exactly 50 years ago, on the night America entered the Space Age.He and his fellow engineers were playing gin rummy at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. - but their minds weren't fully on the game. They were...

Foothill residents are reminded that the Southland still has a wild side. Experts say the big cats routinely venture into civilization, but most go unnoticed.An engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge was walking across a bridge to work about 8:45 a.m. Jan. 16 when he spotted something moving in the creek below. At first he thought it was a coyote, but as he got closer he could make out the low build, hulking forequarters and tawny fur. Mountain lion. The engineer, Matthew Dickie, moved to grab his camera, and the animal crouched and froze. Other people...

A federal judge blocked the government from conducting background checks of low-risk employees at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after an appeals court said the investigations threatened the constitutional rights of workers. U.S. District Judge Otis Wright issued the injunction Friday after the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed his earlier ruling and issued a sharp rebuke to the judge. The higher court said the 28 scientists and engineers who refused to submit to the background checks faced "a stark choice -- either violation of their constitutional rights or loss of their jobs." The workers sued the federal government, claiming...

Judges extend block on background checks By Elise Kleeman, Staff Writer LA CAÑADA FLINTRIDGE - A panel of three federal judges has extended its temporary injunction blocking NASA from requiring background checks of all JPL employees. Without an injunction, JPL employees who did not complete the necessary paperwork would have been "voluntarily terminated" Oct. 27.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An orbiting spacecraft has found evidence of what look like seven caves on the slopes of a Martian volcano, the space agency NASA said on Friday. The Mars Odyssey spacecraft has sent back images of very dark, nearly circular features that appear to be openings to underground spaces. "They are cooler than the surrounding surface in the day and warmer at night," said Glen Cushing of the U.S. Geological Survey's Astrogeology Team and Northern Arizona University. "Their thermal behavior is not as steady as large caves on Earth that often maintain a fairly constant temperature, but it...

At the 50th anniversary space conference here Thursday, a fight over the future role of NASA's space program inadvertently took off. If it were up to Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer known for building a suborbital rocket plane that won the Ansari X Prize, NASA wouldn't be developing a spacecraft to put another man on the moon by 2020. That government mission has already been accomplished, and a repeat performance is "silly," Rutan said during a panel held at California Institute of Technology, CalTech, which runs NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. "Taxpayer-funded NASA should only fund research and not development," Rutan...

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft has discovered entrances to seven possible caves on the slopes of a Martian volcano. The find is fueling interest in potential underground habitats and sparking searches for caverns elsewhere on the Red Planet. Very dark, nearly circular features ranging in diameter from about 100 to 250 meters (328 to 820 feet) puzzled researchers who found them in images taken by NASA's Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor orbiters. Using Mars Odyssey's infrared camera to check the daytime and nighttime temperatures of the circles, scientists concluded that they could be windows into underground spaces....

Homer J. Stewart, an early pioneer of rocket research who helped develop the first successful U.S. satellite, Explorer I, has died. He was 91. Stewart, an emeritus professor of aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology, died May 26 at his home in Altadena, the school said in a statement. Stewart came to Caltech in 1936, but in the late 1950s took a leave of absence to advise on the preparation of Explorer I. Following the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik I in October 1957, there was a frenzied effort by the United States to launch a satellite of...

The twin Mars rovers are getting wiser with age. Engineers have transmitted new flight software to the rovers' onboard computers - just in time for the third anniversary of their landings. The software is aimed at boosting their intelligence and independence so that they can roll around the Red Planet with less help from humans. "We're teaching an old dog new tricks," said John Callas, the mission project manager with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which is in charge of the rovers. Among the rovers' new skills is the ability to automatically recognize and transmit to Earth photographs that...

NASA Images Suggest Water Still Flows in Brief Spurts on Mars 12.06.06    More Images:     + Groundwater May Be Responsible     + New Craters     + Fresh Crater in Arabia Terra NASA photographs have revealed bright new deposits seen in two gullies on Mars that suggest water carried sediment through them sometime during the past seven years. " These observations give the strongest evidence to date that water still flows occasionally on the surface of Mars," said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's Mars Exploration Program, Washington. Image right: A new gully deposit in a crater in the Centauri Montes...

Ever since astronauts returned from another world, scientists have been mystified by some of the moon rocks they brought back. Now one of the mysteries has been solved. "We learned a great deal about the sun by going to the moon," said Don Burnett, Genesis principal investigator at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. "Now, with our Genesis data, we are turning the tables, using the solar wind to better understand lunar processes." Ansgar Grimberg from ETH Institute of Astronomy in Zurich and coworkers analyzed the composition of neon in a metallic glass exposed on NASA's Genesis mission. The team's...

Mars Patrol, Please Phone Home NASA Loses Contact With Mars Global Surveyor Orbiter By NED POTTER Nov. 13, 2006 — - Ten years ago -- 10 years last week, in fact -- a little ship named Mars Global Surveyor was launched from Florida, designed to spend two years in Martian orbit. It hasn't been heard from in a week now, and the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California are finally getting worried. Something on the ship apparently went awry when it sent a signal that it was having trouble orienting one of its solar panels to face...

Oct. 26, 2006: The Indonesian volcano Talang on the island of Sumatra had been dormant for centuries when, in April 2005, it suddenly rumbled to life. A plume of smoke rose 1000 meters high and nearby villages were covered in ash. Fearing a major eruption, local authorities began evacuating 40,000 people. UN officials, meanwhile, issued a call for help: Volcanologists should begin monitoring Talang at once. Little did they know, high above Earth, a small satellite was already watching the volcano. No one told it to. EO-1 (short for "Earth Observing 1") noticed the warning signs and started monitoring Talang...

Voyager 1, already the most distant human-made object in the cosmos, reached 100 astronomical units from the sun on Tuesday, August 15 at 5:13 p.m. Eastern time (2:13 p.m. Pacific time). That means the spacecraft, which launched nearly three decades ago, is 100 times more distant from the sun than Earth is. In more common terms, Voyager 1 is about 15 billion kilometers (9.3 billion miles) from the sun. Dr. Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist and the former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., says the Voyager team always predicted that the spacecraft would have enough power...

<p>Bangalore: ISRO and NASA signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Tuesday on the inclusion of two US scientific instruments on board India's mission to the Moon, Chandrayaan-I.</p> <p>ISRO Chairman G Madhavan Nair and NASA Administrator Michael Griffin signed the MoU at the ISRO Satellite Centre in Bangalore.</p>

NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto is proceeding toward launch on Jan. 19. The launch opportunity runs from 1:08 p.m. - 3:07 p.m. EST. A power outage this morning at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, where the spacecraft will be operated in flight, had led mission managers to postpone today's launch attempt at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. Power has since been restored to the Laboratory campus; the New Horizons Mission Operations Center has both primary and backup power and is ready to support tomorrow's launch.

DUGWAY PROVING GROUND, Utah - A space capsule ferrying the first comet dust samples to Earth parachuted onto a remote stretch of desert before dawn Sunday, drawing cheers from elated scientists. The touchdown capped a seven-year journey by NASA's Stardust spacecraft, which zipped past a comet in 2004 to capture minute dust particles and store them in the capsule. "It's an absolutely fantastic end to the mission," said Carlton Allen, a scientist with NASA's Johnson Space Center. A helicopter recovery team located the capsule Sunday and was transferring it to a clean room at the nearby Michael Army Air Field....

LOS ANGELES - Two new studies are challenging the notion that the desolate Martian plains once brimmed with salty pools of water that could have supported some form of life. Instead, the studies argue, the layered rock outcrops probed by NASA's robot rover Opportunity and interpreted as signs of ancient water could have been left by explosive volcanic ash or a meteorite impact eons ago. That would suggest a far more violent and dry history than proposed by the scientists operating Opportunity and its twin rover, Spirit, on the other side of the planet.The new scenarios, published in Thursday's journal...

LANCASTER - For Andrea Donnellan, the Earth moves. Well, the land beneath us moves for us all. It's actually in a continual state of flux. But Donnellan, a geophysicist and deputy manager of the Science Division at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, takes a special interest in the Earth's movements. Donnellan was the keynote speaker Friday at the Bohn-Meyer Math and Science Odyssey at Antelope Valley College. Roughly 150 eighth-grade students from 10 schools attended the day of workshops related to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Donnellan served up a slide presentation titled "Living on a Restless Planet," demonstrating how...

PASADENA, Calif. - A space probe hit its comet target late Sunday in a NASA-directed, Hollywood-style mission that scientists hope will reveal clues to how the solar system formed. It was the first time a spacecraft had ever touched the surface of a comet, igniting brief Independence Day weekend fireworks in space. The successful strike 83 million miles away from Earth occurred at 10:52 p.m. PDT, according to mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Scientists on the mission — called Deep Impact, like the movie — erupted in applause and exchanged hugs. "A lot of people said...

July 3, 2005 MEDIA RELATIONS OFFICE JET PROPULSION LABORATORY CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION PASADENA, CALIF. 91109 TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov DC Agle (818) 393-9011 Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. Dolores Beasley (202) 358-1753 NASA Headquarters, Washington Lee Tune (301) 405-4679 University of Maryland, College Park NEWS RELEASE: 2005-108 DEEP IMPACT STATUS REPORT One hundred and seventy-one days into its 172-day journey to comet Tempel 1, NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft successfully released its impactor at 11:07 p.m. Saturday, Pacific Daylight Time (2:07 a.m. Sunday, Eastern Daylight Time). At release, the impactor was about 880,000 kilometers (547,000 miles)...

Scientist Spots What May Be Missing Mars Polar Lander NASA Craft Vanished During a Landing Attempt on Red Planet Six Years Ago By ALICIA CHANG, AP A NASA image may show the craft's parachute. A white dot labeled MPL a few hundred yards away could be the lander. LOS ANGELES (May 6) - Nearly six years after NASA's Mars Polar Lander vanished during a landing attempt on the Red Planet, a scientist said he has spotted what appears to be wreckage of the spacecraft. The observation came during a re-examination of grainy, black-and-white images taken by the orbiting Mars Global...

This map illustrates the planned imaging coverage for the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer, onboard the European Space Agency's Huygens probe during the probe's descent toward Titan's surface on Jan. 14, 2005. The Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer is one of two NASA instruments on the probe. The colored lines delineate regions that will be imaged at different resolutions as the probe descends. On each map, the site where Huygens is predicted to land is marked with a yellow dot. This area is in a boundary between dark and bright regions. This map was made from the images taken by the Cassini spacecraft...

Approximate true color . . . 3D - Glyph

The highlights of the first year of the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn can be broken into two chapters: first, the arrival of the Cassini orbiter at Saturn in June, and second, the release of the Huygens probe on Dec. 24, 2004, on a path toward Titan. The Huygens probe, built and managed by the European Space Agency (ESA), is bolted to Cassini and fed electrical power through an umbilical cable. It has been riding along during the nearly seven-year journey to Saturn largely in a "sleep" mode, awakened every six months for three-hour instrument and engineering checkups. In three days,...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - A commuter van from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory tumbled more than 200 feet off a mountain road Wednesday, killing at least four people, authorities said. The van with 10 people aboard went off Angeles Crest Highway in the Angeles National Forest at about 6:30 a.m. and rolled down the mountainside, Los Angeles County Fire Department inspector John Mancha said. Five people were initially trapped and one person was flung from the vehicle, Mancha said. Later, at least two victims were airlifted to hospitals, Mancha said. Televised reports showed a badly battered white van lying in the...

LOS ANGELES - A van carrying workers to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory tumbled 200 feet off a mountain road Wednesday, killing at least four people and trapping five others, officials said. The van went off Angeles Crest Highway in the Angeles National Forest at about 6:30 a.m. and rolled down the embankment, Los Angeles County Fire Department inspector John Mancha said. Five people were trapped and one person was flung from the vehicle, Mancha said. Televised reports showed a badly battered white van lying in the middle of dense forest. Firefighters made their way down and were taking out victims...

In a splendid portrait created by light and gravity, Saturn's lonely moon Mimas is seen against the cool, blue-streaked backdrop of Saturn's northern hemisphere. Delicate shadows cast by the rings arc gracefully across the planet, fading into darkness on Saturn's night side. http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06142 http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA06142.jpg

And you think your operating system needs to be reliable. page 1 Introductions Mike Deliman was pretty busy last January when the Mars rover Spirit developed memory and communications problems shortly after landing on the Red Planet. He is a member of the team at Wind River Systems who created the operating system at the heart of the Mars rovers, and he was among those working nearly around the clock to discover and solve the problem that had mysteriously halted the mission on Mars. Deliman serves as chief engineer of operating systems at Wind River Systems. After leaving the...

Five years ago, after two NASA missions to Mars were doomed by elementary mistakes - a software glitch and a mix-up between English and metric units - the space agency devised more elaborate pre-launching review procedures to safeguard future missions. Now the agency is trying to figure out how an equally embarrassing error eluded the review process, apparently resulting in the crash of the Genesis space capsule in the Utah desert last month. In this case, four switches that were to deploy the capsule's parachutes were installed upside down, the parachutes never opened and the capsule plunged to the ground...

The Greatest Show Off Earth SEVEN YEARS AND 2.2 BILLION MILES IN THE MAKING Saturn's peaceful beauty invites the Cassini spacecraft for a closer look.... NASA TV/webcast coverage of Cassini's arrival at Saturn begins June 30, 6:30 pm Pacific time. Check this page frequently for mission updates. My up-close and personal relationship with Saturn is brand new. Sure, I'd seen the pictures and the "artist's conceptions" all my life. I'd read the stories, both science and fiction, and I believed. I had faith. I had faith that Saturn existed and that it had the rings that made it the single...

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- NASA's Mars rover Spirit has found concentrated salt below the surface of the Red Planet, offering more evidence of past water activity, mission scientists said Tuesday. The wheeled robot found the salt while analyzing the composition of a trench it had dug in a large crater. Scientists believe the salt may have been deposited after water drained through the soil, dissolving materials in rocks. Cornell University astronomer Steve Squyres, the mission's main scientist, said the findings offered "much more compelling evidence than we have found anywhere else" in the vast Gusev Crater region, which the rover...

Cassini CHAT online on IRC (freenode) The Cassini Chat has been activated and is now available without password to the public. Anyone interested in the discussion should log-in to the irc.freenode.net servers and point your chat-client to the #cassini room. There you will find some of the people involved with the project, many very knowledgable people involved in other space projects, as well as those interested in these endeavours ...(like you). We also moderate the Mars Rover chat as well which is located in the #maestro room. Maestro is the free 'public-outreach' software based on the actual program that JPL...

<p>June 3 (Bloomberg) -- The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, a European-U.S. project, is approaching Saturn after a journey of almost seven years and on July 1 is scheduled to become the first manmade object to orbit the ringed planet.</p> <p>The Cassini orbiter and Huygens probe were launched from Florida's Cape Canaveral on Oct. 15, 1997. The orbiter will study Saturn, its 31 moons, rings and magnetic environment. The probe will detach from Cassini in six months to descend to one of the moons. For scientists at London's Imperial College, the insertion of the craft into orbit represents ``the most critical moment of the mission,'' according to an e-mailed statement.</p>

'Columbia Hills' from OrbitThis view of the "Columbia Hills" in Gusev Crater was made by draping an image from the Mars Orbiter Camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter (image E0300012 from that camera) over a digital elevation model that was derived from two Mars Orbiter Camera images (E0300012 and R0200357). This unique view is helpful to the rover team members as they plan the journey of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit to the base of the Columbia Hills and beyond. Spirit successfully completed a three-month primary mission, and so far remains healthy in an extended mission of bonus exploration....

JPL Open House Jet Propulsion Laboratory News Release NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will hold an open house on Sat. and Sun., May 15 and 16, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., taking visitors on a virtual ride through the solar system with this year's theme, "The Spirit of Exploration." This fun-filled, family event has a little of everything for space enthusiasts and non-space buffs. You can explore the planets as you walk through a model of the solar system, build your own spacecraft, and have your picture taken in infrared light. Visitors will have the opportunity to...

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William Pickering, Key U.S. Figure in Space Race, Dead at 93 Mar 16, 2004 By Andrew Bridges/ The Associated Press PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - William H. Pickering, who as director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the dawn of the space age oversaw the launch of the first U.S. satellite, has died, lab officials said Tuesday. He was 93. Pickering, who twice appeared on the cover of Time magazine, died of pneumonia Monday at his home in suburban La Canada Flintridge, JPL said. "Dr. Pickering was one of the titans of our nation's space program," JPL director Charles Elachi said....

<p>LOS ANGELES (AP) — NASA plans to announce "significant findings" by its Mars rover Opportunity, which has been studying a martian crater for evidence the Red Planet was once a wetter place that could have been hospitable to life, officials said Monday. The findings were to be released Tuesday during a news conference at NASA headquarters in Washington. The space agency revealed no details in advance.</p>