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Landing at 10:30PM Pacific...yes, this is early so all the aviation, space, astronomy and science pingers can "get 'er done".

Chinese hackers gained control over NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in November, which could have allowed them delete sensitive files, add user accounts to mission-critical systems, upload hacking tools, and more -- all at a central repository of U.S. space technology, according to a report released Wednesday afternoon by the Office of the Inspector General. That report revealed scant details of an ongoing investigation into the incident against the Pasadena, Calif., lab, noting only that cyberattacks against the JPL involved Chinese-based Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Paul K. Martin, NASA’s inspector general, put his conclusions bluntly. “The attackers had full functional...

As NASA's two Voyager spacecraft hurtle towards the edge of our solar system, a new project manager will shepherd the spacecraft into this unexplored territory: Suzanne Dodd, whose first job at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., involved sequencing science and engineering commands for Voyager 1 and 2 in 1984. "I'm thrilled to re-join a pioneering mission that set up adventures for so many other spacecraft to follow," Dodd said. "There will be more firsts to come as we gather unique data once the spacecraft reach interstellar space. There isn't a single mission currently on the books that will...

NASA's plucky Voyager 2 spacecraft has hit a long-haul operations milestone - operating continuously for 12,000 days. For nearly 33 years, the venerable spacecraft has been returning data about the giant outer planets, and the characteristics and interaction of solar wind between and beyond the planets. Among its many findings, Voyager 2 discovered Neptune's Great Dark Spot and its 450-meter-per-second (1,000-mph) winds. The two Voyager spacecraft have been the longest continuously operating spacecraft in deep space. Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977, when Jimmy Carter was president. Voyager 1 launched about two weeks later on Sept. 5. The two...

What do NASA techies do with their spare time? They make rock-n-roll videos. Not the big-hair, booty-shaking, smoke-and-fire kind. They help make rock videos that would make their daytime colleagues proud or jealous, or both. The rock band OK Go prides itself on creative visual expressions of their music, and they wanted an extra dose of gee-whiz fun for their new song "This Too Shall Pass." In the winter of 2010, the group enlisted the help of Syyn Labs -- a self-described "group of creative engineers who twist together art and technology." The Syyn Labs fraternity included (or ensnared) four...

One flip of a bit in the memory of an onboard computer appears to have caused the change in the science data pattern returning from Voyager 2, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Monday, May 17. A value in a single memory location was changed from a 0 to a 1. On May 12, engineers received a full memory readout from the flight data system computer, which formats the data to send back to Earth. They isolated the one bit in the memory that had changed, and they recreated the effect on a computer at JPL. They found the...

FORT WORTH,- Officials with a Texas school district said a group of high school cheerleaders was disciplined for giving urine-tainted drinks to teammates. Administrators said at least two girls at Fort Worth's Saginaw High School received in-school suspensions and an unspecified number of their fellow cheerleaders received lesser punishments for serving sodas contaminated with a cheerleader's urine to their teammates during a basketball game late last year, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported Thursday. District officials said Principal Ric Canterbury began an investigation after hearing rumors about the incident. They said the girls involved in the prank will be barred from...

Pictures of widespread devastation leave no doubt: Last month's 8.8 magnitude earthquake in coastal Chile was extremely strong. Indeed, say NASA scientists, it might have shifted the axis of Earth itself. "According to our calculations, the quake moved Earth's figure axis by about 3 inches (8 cm)," says geophysicist Richard Gross of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. If the Earth tilted over 3 inches, you probably think you would have noticed. But that's not how the "figure axis" works. "The figure axis defines not how Earth is tilted, but rather how it is balanced," says Gross. Consider the...

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded Dulles, Va.-based Orbital Sciences Corp. a $75 million contract to develop the final design for a radically new space architecture in which traditional, large spacecraft are replaced by clusters of wirelessly connected orbiting modules. Dubbed System F6, short for Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying spacecraft, Orbital’s design was selected among four competing study contracts issued in 2008 and 2009, according to a Dec. 18 company news release. The new contract is valued at $74.6 million over a one-year period. Gregg Burgess, Orbital’s vice president for national security systems in the company’s Advanced...

Russia has reneged on an agreement to deliver a total of 10 kilograms of plutonium-238 to the United States in 2010 and 2011 and is insisting on a new deal for the costly material vital to NASA’s deep space exploration plans. The move follows the U.S. Congress’ denial of President Barack Obama’s request for $30 million in 2010 to permit the Department of Energy to begin the painstaking process of restarting domestic production of plutonium-238. Bringing U.S. nuclear laboratories back on line to produce the isotope is expected to cost at least $150 million and take six years to seven...

NASA scientists are sick of being asked if the world is going to end in 2012 – so much in fact, they've published an article on their website explaining just why it's a load of rubbish. The release of Roland Emmerich's blockbuster film 2012, in which John Cusack's character Jackson Curtis has to deal with the end of the world, has only made matters worse. There are several theories as to how the world is supposed to end, most of which focus on a particular date - December 21. The best-known is that relating to the Mayan 'long-count' calendar, which...

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...