October 6, 2009
Categories: Uncategorized . Tags: Carl Sagan, Cornell, Mars, Mars Exploration Rovers, NASA, Steve Squyres . Author: beyond the cradle . Comments: 1 Comment
Mapping Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity to improve understanding of the Earth’s water cycle – By Mark Drinkwater, Head, Mission Science Division (European Space Agency)
The European Space Agency’s Earth Explorer series of research-driven satellite missions continues with the upcoming 2nd November launch of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. Known as ESA’s Water Mission, SMOS is the first satellite dedicated to providing global measurements of soil moisture and ocean salinity. The mission’s new technologies will extend key European capabilities in Earth Observation and help advance research towards improving our understanding of the global water cycle. Read More…
HAT-p-7b and the Grail quest – With Jon Jenkins
I went to bed the evening of May 13th exhausted from the long, intense campaign of commissioning the Kepler spacecraft. The long march started about a week after launch when we began to receive data from the photometer and needed to process it to verify that it was behaving as we expected and to prepare all the data products needed for nominal science operations. These included taking very special data sets to characterize the 2D bias frame of the CCDs (the image you get with no light falling on the detectors), the noise characteristics, the sky to pixel mapping, the science data compression tables, and the detailed shape of the stellar images (the Point Spread Functions) across the focal plane. We had been calculating the PSFs and getting our first science target tables together while the Combined Differential Photometric Precision (CDPP) data set was being collected during the last ten days of Commissioning. This was the first science-like data to be collected. So we had a target table in place with 52,496 targets and were compressing the 30-minute samples for each pixel of interest and storing these on board the Solid State Recorder. (During nominal science operations we collect pixel data for ~145,000 stars.) On Monday May 11 we turned the spacecraft to point the High Gain Antenna to Earth and downlinked the CDPP data set, all ten days of it, to the Deep Space Network, who transferred it through our Ground System* to the Science Operations Center at NASA Ames Research Center where we process the pixels, extract the photometric light curves and search for transiting planets. Nominal science operations commenced on May 12 and we could turn our attention to processing the CDPP data.
HAT-p-7b confirmation and many great things to come – With Natalie Batalha
August 5, 2009
Exactly five months after the launch of the Kepler spacecraft, NASA will hold a press conference to present early science results. Early science results. I linger over those words with great pleasure. It isn’t sufficient to simply write about the science or even comment on the mood of the science team at Ames during the days when they examined that first data transmittal. I must rewind a bit, for there is a story here to be told.
Farewell Ulysses!
6842 days (18 years, 8 months, 24 days) after launch, the amazing Ulysses mission will finally come to end today. Follow, live, the final day of operations. Starting at 15:20 UTC. Farewell Ulysses!
“The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.”
Free hearts, free foreheads you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.”
Excert from Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Rocky! CoRoT-Exo-7b update with Malcolm Fridlund…via Facebook
10:15pmRui
found us a new home already? 
10:16pmMalcolm
Not unless you like 2000K in the shadow
but it is indeed rocky 
10:17pmMalcolm
and more rocky than Mars
JPL Open House
Go visit Sarah!
The JPL Open House is a huge annual event. Scientists and engineers will be staffing the information displays, ready to show demos and answer questions about the spacecraft and instruments that they design, build, and operate, and the data that they analyze. Info, including hours and directions as well as links to videos from last year, can be found here.
Now, we know that not everyone can hop over to Pasadena for a weekend.
There will be an online live video chat at various times both days: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2009-073
The chats will also be archived, so you can email in a question ahead of time and watch the video later for an answer. You can also follow along on http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23jplopen.
There are pictures from this week’s set-up on various JPL Twitter feeds, including the full-scale model of the next Mars rover, MSL, and ATHLETE, a 6-legged robot which is being developed for the moon. I saw a demo of it last fall, it was really awesome.
I’ll be at the Cassini exhibit, next to the giant inflatable Saturn, on Sunday morning!
Kepler Mission – Mr. Ian Bradley you have an answer
A question made by Ian Bradley arrived my e-mail via Stuart Atkinson, since there might be other Kepler fans with the same doubt I decided to bring it here:
Regarding the Kepler 1st light image…
The imaged area is well away from the ecliptic to allow 24/7 viewing of the image area without Sun being a problem. On a quick glance at the high res 23Mb image from the Kepler website, there are several diagonal tracks [not the vertical or horizontal blooming from bright stars]. One is particularly bright (see below for position). Are these earth orbit satellites (given that Kepler is in an Earth trailing heliocentric orbit, this seems unlikely) or are they other solar system bodies e.g. minor planets, asteroids, Keuper Belt objects etc, etc. I guess it could be crap from the spacecraft itself…
Clearly they cannot be in the ecliptic! Few surveys have been done at large angles away from the ecliptic, so have we got a way to discover other members of the Solar System?
Bright diagonal object position – treat ccd array as 5 rows x 5 columns, each row, column element consists of 2 ccds of either horizontal or vertical alignment! Object is in 2nd row, 2nd column in the top ccd of the pair towards the bottom left of image.
Jon Jenkins, Kepler Co-Investigator, was, once more, kind enough to provide us an answer:
Ian is most likely seeing cosmic ray tracks which are the result of energetic particles whizzing through the CCD and depositing energy along the way. (I couldn’t tell from Ian’s email which direction he was counting CCD modules, although I found a bright cosmic ray track 2nd row, 2nd col from the top left, near the middle and low on the upper CCD in this pair.) We estimated a hit rate of 5 per square cm per second pre launch from counts reported by analysis of the LASCO CCDs aboard SOHO, which agrees well with the rates we’ve estimated from the dark frames we took prior to Dust Cover Ejection. The physics of our CCDs indicates that most cosmic rays deposit about 2500 electrons but some can deposit a whopping amount of charge. We identify and remove the “brightest” cosmic ray events from the data in ground-based processing. Most cosmic rays deposit too little energy for us to detect them in or near the cores of our relatively bright target stars. The Field Of View (FOV) is tipped up 60 degrees above the ecliptic plane, so the chances of seeing solar system bodies is rather small, and Kuiper belt objects, for example, would not be bright enough to be seen as a bright streak in our images, and travel fast enough that to see them eclipsing stars in the FOV would require much shorter exposures than Kepler is capable of. The first light image pair consisted of one 6-sec integration (not including the 0.51 sec readout time) and one 65 sec integration (10 co-adds of individual 6-sec integrations with 0.51 sec readout times). During nominal science operations the CCD images are co-added for 30 minutes (a sum of 270 individual 6 sec exposures).
Cheers,
Jon
Homo Viator Manifest – Part I
What do we whitdraw from this fabled lands, from this enticing unknown islands at large?
We aim at a near return of Man, in full strength, to the Spirit of Adventure, towards a new quest, which was first dreamed, then imagined and finally sedimented in our species’ core, offering consistence, permitting no retreat, towards the next step, that must and will be, the embarking of members of the Human family, fellow creatures with the Beyond as flag, onboard a New Era of Discoveries.
Full document here (PDF file):
