The moon’s surface is more complex than previously thought and was bombarded by two distinct populations of asteroids or comets in its youth, according to three new papers in the Sept. 17 issue of Science that describe data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Two of the papers describe data from LRO’s Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment instrument that reveal the complex geologic processes that forged the lunar surface. The data showed previously unseen compositional differences in the crustal highlands, and confirmed the presence of anomalously silica-rich material in five distinct regions.

All minerals and rocks absorb and emit energy with unique signatures that reveal their identity and formation mechanisms. For the first time, the Diviner instrument is providing scientists with global, high-resolution infrared maps of the moon, enabling them to make a definitive identification of silicate minerals commonly found within its crust. “Diviner is literally viewing the moon in a whole new light,” said Benjamin Greenhagen of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., lead author of one of the Diviner papers.

Lunar geology can be roughly broken down into two categories – the anorthositic highlands, rich in calcium and aluminium, and the basaltic “maria,” giant impact basins filled with solidified lava flows that are abundant in iron and magnesium. Both of these crustal rocks are considered the direct result of crystallization from lunar mantle material, the partially molten layer beneath the crust.

Diviner’s observations have confirmed that most lunar terrains have signatures consistent with compositions in these two broad categories. But they have also revealed lunar soil compositions with more sodium than that of typical anorthosite crust. The widespread nature of these soils reveals that there may have been variations in the chemistry and cooling rate of the magma ocean that formed the early lunar crust, or they could be the result of secondary processing of the early lunar crust.

Most impressively, in several locations around the moon, Diviner has detected highly silicic minerals such as quartz, potassium-rich and sodium-rich feldspar — minerals that are only associated with highly evolved lithologies, or rocks that have undergone extensive magmatic processing. Detection of silicic minerals at these locations is significant, as they occur in areas previously shown to exhibit anomalously high abundances of the element thorium, another proxy for highly evolved lithologies.

“The silicic features we’ve found on the moon are fundamentally different from the more typical basaltic mare and anorthositic highlands,” said Timothy Glotch of Stony Brook University, N.Y., lead author of the second Diviner paper. “The fact that we see this composition in multiple geologic settings suggests that there may have been multiple processes producing these rocks.”

One thing not apparent in the data is evidence for pristine lunar mantle material, which previous studies have suggested may be exposed at some places on the lunar surface. Even in the South Pole Aitken basin, also known as SPA, the largest, oldest, and deepest impact crater on the moon — deep enough to have penetrated through the crust and into the mantle — there is no evidence of mantle material.

The implications of this are as yet unknown. Perhaps there are no such exposures of mantle material, or maybe they occur in areas too small for Diviner to detect. But it’s likely that if the impact that formed this crater did excavate any mantle material, it has since been mixed with crustal material from later impacts inside and outside the basin.

“The new Diviner data will help in selecting the appropriate landing sites for potential future robotic missions to return samples from SPA,” Greenhagen said. “We want to use these samples to date the SPA-forming impact and potentially study the lunar mantle, so it’s important to use Diviner data to identify areas with minimal mixing.”

In the other paper, lead author James Head of Brown University in Providence, R.I., describes an analysis of a detailed global topographic map of the moon created using LRO’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter. This new dataset shows that the older highland impactor population can be clearly distinguished from the younger population in the lunar maria. The highlands have a greater density of large craters, implying that the earlier population of impactors had a proportionally greater number of large fragments than the population characterizing later lunar history, Head said.

Head said details about impactor populations on the moon have implications for the earliest history of all the planets in the inner solar system, including Earth. “Like the Rosetta stone, the lunar record can be used to translate the ‘hieroglyphics’ of the poorly preserved impact record on Earth,” he said.

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., built and manages the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA mission with international participation from the Institute for Space Research in Moscow. JPL designed, built and operates the Diviner instrument. The University of California, Los Angeles is the home institution of Diviner’s principal investigator, David Paige. LOLA was built by Goddard.

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It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of Clarence A. “Sy” Syvertson, a former Director of the NASA Ames Research Center from 1977 to 1984. He died the evening of Sept. 13, 2010 at the age of 84.

Sy was an exemplary scientist and a dynamic and innovative leader who began his career at Ames in 1948 and matched his theoretical insights on hypersonic airflows with brilliant experimental work. He led the 3.5-foot hypersonic wind tunnel branch and developed advanced vehicles like the XB-70 Valkyrie and the M2 lifting bodies. His fundamental work on reentry vehicles contributed to the design of the space shuttle. He served as Director of Astronautics and during the tenure of former Ames Center Director Hans Mark from 1969 to 1977 as Center Deputy Director.

Under his leadership, NASA Ames continued to blossom as a world-class research organization. Ames people did groundbreaking research on vertical-lift aircraft, built the world’s largest wind tunnel, flew the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, consolidated its collaboration with NASA Dryden, and prepared the Galileo Probe for its journey to Jupiter. He was elected to the NASA Ames Hall of Fame, was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the AIAA, and won many awards for his service to NASA and to space exploration. Most recently, Sy visited Ames for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Historic Aerospace Site dedication held on August 25, 2009.

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The moon is the Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor and a geologic wonderland. There are mountains that are many miles high, lava flows several hundred miles long and enormous lava tubes and craters of every size. It is the brightest object in the night sky and has profoundly influenced the course of human civilization.

For early humans, the moon provided lighting for hunting and defined when crops should be planted and harvested. Markings of lunar phases appear in cave paintings in France and defined the arrangement of Stonehenge.

The 2010 International “Observe the Moon Night” is happening on Saturday, Sept. 18. On Thursday, Sept. 16, at 3:00 p.m. EDT, Dr. Rob Suggs of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., will answer your questions about the moon and National Observe the Moon Night. Joining the chat is easy. Simply return to this page a few minutes before the chat time on Thursday. The chat module will appear at the bottom of this page. After you log in, wait for the chat module to be activated at 3:00, then ask your questions!

About Chat Expert Dr. Rob Suggs

Dr. Rob Suggs is the Space Environments Team Lead in the Engineering Directorate of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. For the past 4 years he has managed the NASA Lunar Impact Monitoring Project which has recorded over 200 meteoroid impacts on the Moon using telescopes at 2 observatories. He has a Ph.D. in Astronomy from New Mexico State University (NMSU) and was part of the NMSU team which attempted to record the LCROSS spacecraft impact on the Moon last October.

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NASA’s Desert RATS, or Research and Technology Studies, team made its 13th trip to the desert for another round of analog testing. The Desert RATS tests offer a chance for a NASA-led team of engineers, astronauts and scientists to conduct technology development research in the Arizona desert. The location offers a good stand-in for destinations for future planetary exploration missions. This year’s tests take place Aug. 31-Sept. 15. This image is a night-time shot of the rover and habitat unit.

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NASA is enabling biomedical research with National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that take advantage of the unique microgravity environment aboard the International Space Station to explore fundamental questions about important health issues.

The NIH Biomedical Research on the International Space Station (BioMed-ISS) awards are the next step in a new partnership to apply the national laboratory to research that complements NASA’s own space studies. The NIH studies include research on how bones and the immune system weaken in space.

“This marks the beginning of a new era in microgravity-based research with the International Space Station turning the corner from construction to use as a new national laboratory,” said Mark Uhran, assistant associate administrator for space station, NASA Headquarters in Washington.

In 2005 Congress recognized the immense promise the station holds for U.S.-led science and technology efforts. It opened the U.S. portion of the facility to federal agencies, university and private sector researchers by designating the station as a national laboratory. In addition to NIH, NASA has similar research agreements with the Departments of Defense, Agriculture and Energy and the National Science Foundation.

Scientists will conduct their experiments under a two-stage mechanism. The first is a ground-based preparatory phase to allow investigators to meet select milestones and technical requirements. The second is an experimental phase on the space station that will include preparing the experiments for launch, working with astronauts to conduct them on orbit and performing subsequent data analyses on Earth.

“BioMed-ISS offers a novel opportunity for gaining scientific insights that would not otherwise be possible through ground-based means,” said Stephen I. Katz, M.D., Ph.D., director of the NIH’s National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases and NIH liaison to NASA. “The beauty of this initiative is that it offers an unprecedented opportunity for benefitting human health on earth, while leveraging the American public’s investment in the ISS.”

NIH is hosting three rounds of competition for the initiative. The first round of grants for the ground-based phase, totaling an estimated $1,323,000, has been awarded as follows:

Paola Divieti, M.D., Ph.D., Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, Boston: Weight-bearing activities contribute to the development and maintenance of bone mass, while weightlessness and immobility, as experienced by the astronauts and bedridden and immobilized patients, can result in bone loss and a weakened skeleton. Osteocytes, the most common type of bone cell, are believed to have gravity-sensing abilities. These cells play a key role in bone remodeling, a process that is vital to skeletal health. In studying osteocytes in a gravity-free environment, Divieti aims to uncover new therapeutic targets for osteoporosis and related bone diseases.

Millie Hughes-Fulford, Ph.D., Northern California Institute for Research and Education, San Francisco: The immune system, which protects the body against foreign substances, is suppressed in space. A reduction in the immune response also occurs in the elderly, who, like the astronauts, are at increased risk for infection. As a former astronaut, Hughes-Fulford, a former payload specialist on the STS-40 Spacelab Life Sciences shuttle mission in 1991, aims to apply lessons learned from studies of immune cells in microgravity to a new model for investigating the loss of immune response in older women and men.

Declan McCole, Ph.D., University of California, San Diego: The movement of toxins from intestines to other organs in the body is a major source of illness in the United States. A major factor in disease stems from the ability of toxins to compromise the natural barrier function of cells in the gastrointestinal tract. Using microgravity based three-dimensional cell culture models, McCole plans to generate insights regarding the barrier properties of the intestines, and explore how the absence of gravity affects a toxin’s ability to diminish this barrier.

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Just as sunspot 1105 was turning away from Earth on Sept. 8, the active region erupted, producing a solar flare and a fantastic prominence. The eruption also hurled a bright coronal mass ejection into space. The eruption was not directed toward any planets.

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The Fourmile Canyon Fire continues to burn west of Boulder, Colorado on September 7 casting a long line of smoke to the east that was visible from NASA’s Aqua satellite in its orbit around the Earth.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image of the fire at 2:40 p.m. local time (20:40 UTC) on September 7, 2010. The red outline corresponds with the unusually high surface temperatures associated with an active fire. The thick smoke plume flows eastward. Over the plains northeast of Denver, the smoke plume casts a shadow to the north.

By early morning on September 8, thousands of people had abandoned their homes while the battle against the blaze continued.

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Their emergencies happened hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from one another, but the captain whose vessel had become disabled near Kamalino, Hawaii, the pilot who crashed onto the Knik Glacier near Anchorage, Alaska, and the hiker who suffered a compound fracture while hiking near Merritt, Washington, all share a common experience: They were plucked to safety in the weeks leading up to the Labor Day weekend due to NASA technology.

With these rescues, the total number of people saved so far this year because of technologies NASA created for the international Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking (SARSAT) program is 186. “We had 195 saves last year in the U.S.,” said LT Shawn Maddock, the SARSAT Operations Support Officer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that manages the SARSAT program in the U.S. “We’re on pace to exceed that number this year.”

“That’s the beauty of this program,” said NASA Search and Rescue Mission Manager Dave Affens. In the 30 years since the system began operations, it has saved more than 28,000 lives worldwide and 6,420 in the U.S. “Our motto here is ‘taking the search out of search and rescue,’ so we want to reduce that part to a minimum,” he added.

Although Affens takes personal pleasure knowing that his work contributed to thousands of lives saved, perhaps the one rescue that he believes most clearly demonstrates the value of space-based search and rescue system is the one involving 16-year-old Abby Sunderland, who was saved in June after floating helplessly in the Indian Ocean about 2,000 miles from Madagascar after a violent storm had damaged her 40-foot vessel, Wild Eyes. “Without NASA technology, she may have lost her life. This case was more interesting than most because we contributed to every aspect of it,” Affens said.

In the ultimate display of NASA spin-off technology, Abby’s life was changed with a small yellow device the size of a BlackBerry™. Fortunately, she was carrying a MicroPLB Type GXL handheld device — developed under a NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program award to Microwave Monolithics Inc. (MMInc.) in Simi Valley, California. The company had given Abby the device before she tried to break the record of sailing non-stop around the world, previously held by her older brother.

NASA had provided Microwave Monolithics with the specifications to design the beacon, which relayed her distress signal to a SARSAT satellite, 22,500 miles away in space. When Abby activated the beacon, the satellite, equipped with NASA-developed repeater technology, then relayed the signal to the U.S. via the international satellite-aided search and rescue network now comprised of 40 participating nations. Eight minutes later, the U.S. Coast Guard’s Pacific Area Command in Alameda, California, contacted her parents using information she provided when she registered her beacon with NOAA. And less than an hour later, two NOAA weather satellites, launched by NASA, used NASA technology to pinpoint her location.

“We developed the concept of detecting distress signals by the satellite, relaying it to ground stations where the locations were calculated. We then launched the distress-detection device on a NOAA weather satellite, tested the concept, and approved the system for operational use,” Affens explained.

Ultimately, a French fishing vessel, which was 400 miles from Abby’s location when the distress signal was detected, was directed to her location to perform the rescue.

Affens and his team are now developing new technology to further take the “search out of search and rescue” with new technology that is sure to increase the number of rescues and lives saved in which SARSAT has assisted, he said.

Engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, along with NOAA, the Coast Guard, and the Air Force, are developing a new search and rescue system that will detect and locate distress signals from beacons in less than five minutes. The current system, which places repeaters on weather satellites, can actually take up to an hour or more to locate the distress signal depending on the position of the satellite.

The Distress Alerting Satellite System, or DASS, will be more efficient because the repeater technology will be placed on the Air Force’s Global Positioning System (GPS), instead of NOAA weather satellites. Using the constellation of 24 GPS spacecraft operating in mid-Earth orbit, “we would be able to identify distress signals faster and with a greater level of precision,” Affens said.

The new GPS-based system is now being tested. Currently 10 of the 20 GPS satellites are flying the proof-of-concept DASS equipment and an additional 12 are planned. Goddard is testing the technology before transitioning to a final system after 2015, which will be deployed on the Air Force’s Block III GPS satellites. “The bottom-line here is that within one minute, we’ll know where the distress signals come from,” said Mickey Fitzmaurice, a space systems engineer for NOAA’s SARSAT program. “It is the future.”

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For the first time in nearly 50 years of American human spaceflight, Kennedy Space Center could be at the forefront of designing, developing, demonstrating and flying human-rated vehicles.

“We’re looking to create a robust commercial space program with multiple customers, multiple providers and multiple systems that take Americans to the International Space Station and other low Earth orbit destinations,” said Ed Mango, director of the Space Transportation Planning Office.

In May, the office sent out a Commercial Crew Initiative Request for Information (RFI). Mango, along with the office’s Exploration Systems Mission Directorate (ESMD) Planning Lead Phil McAlister, Deputy Program Planning Manager Brent Jett and Insight Manager Scott Thurston, recently participated in a forum at NASA Headquarters to talk about common themes captured from dozens of industry responses. ESMD Deputy Administrator Dr. Laurie Leshin, Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Program Manager Alan Lindenmoyer and the Space Transportation Office’s Deputy Director Maria Collura also were on hand to offer insight.

“We have about 50 team members from shuttle, space station, Constellation, the Launch Services Program, the astronaut office, other NASA centers and contractors all coming together and melding our ideas of what commercial crew should be,” Mango said. “And we’re melding . . . it’s like making gumbo and we just started making the roux.”

If the Commercial Crew Program is approved by Congress and the White House, it would have several billion dollars within a five- year period to develop humanrating requirements, partner with commercial entities and complete design and development. The program also would include demonstration flights.

“We believe that we could fund up to four providers with that $5.8 billion,” McAlister said. “We definitely want competition. That is a key aspect to our strategy. We need multiple providers that are coming forward with innovative solutions.”

In addition to competition, will be collaboration. Thurston described more in depth about how NASA will take on a more “insight” role than its traditional “oversight” role and it’s a change that the team doesn’t take lightly.

“NASA has to re-examine what has been our traditional identity,” said Leshin, “and think about our role in a new way as catalysts of a much broader and more inclusive activity.”

Another aspect of collaboration would come from industries that are interested in performing science and research in low Earth orbit, whether on board the International Space Station or other future orbiting complexes.

Mango said because this would be the first Kennedy-led human spaceflight program, it could have quite an effect on the local economy.

“There is a door that is beginning to open to allow the Central Florida area to grow with dozens of companies, probably more engineering and technology firms, much like around other NASA centers,” Mango said.

Currently, the office is working closely with the 21st Century Space Launch Complex Planning Office at Kennedy to determine what facilities and capabilities commercial providers are looking for. For example, Mango said they are looking at ways to improve Launch Complex 39 so it can be used for multiple launch vehicles.

“We’re encouraging you all (industry) to go talk to the NASA centers, please provide them input, let them know of your needs, let them know the timing of your needs, and start negotiating pricing,” Collura said.

Jett described some requirements NASA will be looking for commercial companies to meet, including health, medical and safety. Some of those, Mango said, include life support requirements for the astronauts to be able to breathe and redundancies for emergency situa-tions, such as a backup flight control system.

The office is looking to NASA’s Launch Services Program and the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Office for guidance on how to move forward with commercial partnerships.

“We’ve learned so much over the last four years since we awarded our first COTS agreement,” Lindenmoyer said. “We let the creativity, innovation, ingenuity and flexibility happen . . . and yet, we still have to maintain our standards of safety and reliability.”

NASA also is embedding workers in the Federal Aviation Administration, FAA, and vice versa so the two agencies can understand day-to-day operations and iron out future roles and responsibilities.

“We’re working with the FAA to figure out how to take 50 years of how we’ve done business, which involves a lot of requirement iterations, and merge it into the FAA’s more regulatory-type environment,” Mango said. “So in a generation or two, the FAA should be licensing spacecraft like they do aircraft today.”

So, what’s the ultimate goal for commercial crew?

“In the future, NASA will buy tickets to low Earth orbit that way we can focus more on exploration,” Mango said. “I believe there are companies in this country that can definitely do commercial crew . . . and do it well.”

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The universe is still an arcane place that scientists know very little about, but a new NASA Solar Terrestrial Probe mission is going to shed light on one especially mysterious event called magnetic reconnection. It occurs when magnetic lines of force cross, cancel, and reconnect releasing magnetic energy in the form of heat and charged-particle kinetic energy.

On the sun, magnetic reconnection causes solar flares more powerful than several atomic bombs combined. In Earth’s atmosphere, magnetic reconnection dispenses magnetic storms and auroras, and in laboratories on Earth it can cause big problems in fusion reactors.

Although the study of magnetic reconnection dates back to the 1950s and despite numerous scientific papers addressing this perplexing issue, scientists still cannot agree on one accepted model.

In 2014, NASA is scheduled to launch a satellite that will greatly increase our understanding of this phenomenon when it launches the Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) mission, a suite of four identical spacecraft that will study magnetic reconnection in the best possible laboratory – the Earth’s magnetosphere. The spacecraft will obtain measurements necessary to test prevailing theories as to how reconnection is enabled and how it progresses.

Recently, NASA and members of an independent review board painstakingly reviewed every aspect of the MMS mission, and successfully completed the mission’s critical design review. This technical review is held to ensure that a mission can proceed into fabrication, demonstration and test and can meet stated performance requirements, including cost, schedule, risk and other system constraints.

According to MMS deputy project scientist Mark Adrian of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., “This is the last hurdle before the spacecraft and instrument teams begin to build actual flight hardware.”

MMS was approved for implementation in June 2009 following a successful Preliminary Design Review in May 2009.

Dr. James L. Burch of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas, will lead the MMS science team. According to Burch, “Magnetic reconnection is a fundamental physical process that occurs throughout the universe,” says Burch. “MMS will enable us to study this dynamic process in the near-Earth space environment, where it transfers energy from the solar wind to the magnetosphere and drives disturbances known as space weather.”

Goddard is the lead Center for the mission. Engineers there will perform the required environmental testing, build the spacecraft and integrate all four sets of instruments into the MMS satellites, support launch vehicle integration and operations, and develop the Mission Operations Center which to monitor and control the spacecraft.

MMS will carry identical suites of plasma analyzers, energetic particle detectors, magnetometers, and electric field instruments as well as a device to prevent spacecraft charging from interfering with the highly sensitive measurements required in and around the diffusion regions.

Scientists and engineers at Goddard have designed and will build one of the instruments – the Fast Plasma Instrument, which will measure the ion and electron distributions and the electric and magnetic fields with unprecedentedly high millisecond time resolution and accuracy.

Currently, MMS is scheduled to launch in August 2014 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, FL aboard an Atlas V rocket.

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