ORION SPACECRAFT TO GO ON TOUR

The above picture and following excerpt is from the NASA website:

NASA'S ORION SPACECRAFT TO LAND IN OKLAHOMA, TEXAS AND ALABAMA

W”ASHINGTON -- A test version of NASA's Orion spacecraft soon will make
a cross-country journey, giving residents in three states the chance
to see a full scale test version of the vehicle that will take humans
into deep space.

The crew module will make stops during a trip from the White Sands
Missile Range in New Mexico to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The planned stops include Jan. 23-25 at Science Museum Oklahoma in
Oklahoma City; Jan. 27-29 at Victory Park and the American Airlines
Center in Dallas; and, Jan. 31-Feb. 2 at the U.S. Space and Rocket
Center in Huntsville, Ala. Engineers, program officials, astronauts
and NASA spokespeople will be available to speak with the media and
the public.

The full-scale test vehicle was used by ground crews in advance of the
launch abort system flight test that took place in New Mexico in
2010.

Media interested in seeing the spacecraft or scheduling interviews
should contact Dan Huot at daniel.g.huot@nasa.gov or by calling the
newsroom at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston at 281-483-5111.

Orion will serve as the vehicle that takes astronauts beyond low-Earth
orbit. The first orbital flight test is scheduled for 2014.”

FERMI SPACE TELESCOPE LOOKS AT UNEXPLORED ELECTROMAGNETIC RANGE

The following excerpt is from the NASA website:

“WASHINGTON -- After more than three years in space, NASA's Fermi
Gamma-ray Space Telescope is extending its view of the high-energy
sky into a largely unexplored electromagnetic range. Today, the Fermi
team announced its first census of energy sources in this new realm.

Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) scans the entire sky every three
hours, continually deepening its portrait of the sky in gamma rays,
the most energetic form of light. While the energy of visible light
falls between about 2 and 3 electron volts, the LAT detects gamma
rays with energies ranging from 20 million to more than 300 billion
electron volts (GeV).

At higher energies, gamma rays are rare. Above 10 GeV, even Fermi's
LAT detects only one gamma ray every four months.

"Before Fermi, we knew of only four discrete sources above 10 GeV, all
of them pulsars," said David Thompson, an astrophysicist at NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "With the LAT, we've
found hundreds, and we're showing for the first time just how diverse
the sky is at these high energies."

Any object producing gamma rays at these energies is undergoing
extraordinary astrophysical processes. More than half of the 496
sources in the new census are active galaxies, where matter falling
into a supermassive black hole powers jets that spray out particles
at nearly the speed of light.

Only about 10 percent of the known sources lie within our own galaxy.
They include rapidly rotating neutron stars called pulsars, the
expanding debris from supernova explosions, and in a few cases,
binary systems containing massive stars.

More than a third of the sources are completely unknown, having no
identified counterpart detected in other parts of the spectrum. With
the new catalog, astronomers will be able to compare the behavior of
different sources across a wider span of gamma-ray energies for the
first time.

Just as bright infrared sources may fade to invisibility in the
ultraviolet, some of the gamma-ray sources above 1 GeV vanish
completely when viewed at higher, or "harder," energies.

One example is the well-known radio galaxy NGC 1275, which is a
bright, isolated source below 10 GeV. At higher energies it fades
appreciably and another nearby source begins to appear. Above 100
GeV, NGC 1275 becomes undetectable by Fermi, while the new source,
the radio galaxy IC 310, shines brightly.

The Fermi hard-source list is the product of an international team led
by Pascal Fortin at the Ecole Polytechnique's Laboratoire
Leprince-Ringuet in Palaiseau, France, and David Paneque at the Max
Planck Institute for Physics in Munich.

The catalog serves as an important roadmap for ground-based facilities
called Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes, which have amassed about 130
gamma-ray sources with energies above 100 GeV. They include the Major
Atmospheric Gamma Imaging Cherenkov telescope (MAGIC) on La Palma in
the Canary Islands, the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope
Array System (VERITAS) in Arizona, and the High Energy Stereoscopic
System (H.E.S.S.) in Namibia.

"Our catalog will have a significant impact on ground-based
facilities' work by pointing them to the most likely places to find
gamma-ray sources emitting above 100 GeV," Paneque said.

Compared to Fermi's LAT, these ground-based observatories have much
smaller fields of view. They also make fewer observations because
they cannot operate during daytime, bad weather or a full moon.

"As Fermi's exposure constantly improves our view of hard sources,
ground-based telescopes are becoming more sensitive to lower-energy
gamma rays, allowing us to bridge these two energy regimes," Fortin
added.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle
physics partnership. Fermi is managed by Goddard. It was developed in
collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy, with important
contributions from academic institutions and partners in France,
Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden and the United States.”

TEST FLIGHT OF NEW NASA ROCKET LAUNCHED JANUARY 11, 2012

   
                                                The following excerpt is from the NASA website:

“A NASA Terrier-Improved Malemute suborbital sounding rocket was successfully launched this morning, Jan. 11, 2012, at 8:25 from the Wallops Flight Facility. This was a test flight of the vehicle being developed to support NASA suborbital science missions. Image Credit: NASA”

HUBBLE TELESCOPE MAKES DISTANT SUPERNOVA DISCOVERY

                                                         Picture Courtesy NASA Website

“WASHINGTON -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has looked deep into the
distant universe and detected the feeble glow of a star that exploded
more than 9 billion years ago. The sighting is the first finding of
an ambitious survey that will help astronomers place better
constraints on the nature of dark energy, the mysterious repulsive
force that is causing the universe to fly apart ever faster.

"For decades, astronomers have harnessed the power of Hubble to
unravel the mysteries of the universe," said John Grunsfeld,
associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in
Washington. "This new observation builds upon the revolutionary
research using Hubble that won astronomers the 2011 Nobel Prize in
Physics, while bringing us a step closer to understanding the nature
of dark energy which drives the cosmic acceleration." As an
astronaut, Grunsfeld visited Hubble three times, performing a total
of eight spacewalks to service and upgrade the observatory.

The stellar explosion, nicknamed SN Primo, belongs to a special class
called Type Ia supernovae, which are bright beacons used as distance
markers for studying the expansion rate of the universe. Type Ia
supernovae likely arise when white dwarf stars, the burned-out cores
of normal stars, siphon too much material from their companion stars
and explode.

SN Primo is the farthest Type Ia supernova with its distance confirmed
through spectroscopic observations. In these types of observations, a
spectrum splits the light from a supernova into its constituent
colors. By analyzing those colors, astronomers can confirm its
distance by measuring how much the supernova's light has been
stretched, or red-shifted, into near-infrared wavelengths because of
the expansion of the universe.

The supernova was discovered as part of a three-year Hubble program to
survey faraway Type Ia supernovae, opening a new distance realm for
searching for this special class of stellar explosion. The remote
supernovae will help astronomers determine whether the exploding
stars remain dependable cosmic yardsticks across vast distances of
space in an epoch when the cosmos was only one-third its current age
of 13.7 billion years.

Called the CANDELS+CLASH Supernova Project, the census uses the
sharpness and versatility of Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to
assist astronomers in the search for supernovae in near-infrared
light and verify their distance with spectroscopy. CANDELS is the
Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey and
CLASH is the Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey.

"In our search for supernovae, we had gone as far as we could go in
optical light," said Adam Riess, the project's lead investigator, at
the Space Telescope Science Institute and The Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore, Md. "But it's only the beginning of what we
can do in infrared light. This discovery demonstrates that we can use
the Wide Field Camera 3 to search for supernovae in the distant
universe."

The new results were presented on Jan. 11 at the American Astronomical
Society meeting in Austin, Texas.

The supernova team's search technique involved taking multiple
near-infrared images over several months, looking for a supernova's
faint glow. After the team spotted the stellar blast in October 2010,
they used WFC3's spectrometer to verify SN Primo's distance and to
decode its light, finding the unique signature of a Type Ia
supernova. The team then re-imaged SN Primo periodically for eight
months, measuring the slow dimming of its light.

By taking the census, the astronomers hope to determine the frequency
of Type Ia supernovae during the early universe and glean insights
into the mechanisms that detonated them.

"If we look into the early universe and measure a drop in the number
of supernovae, then it could be that it takes a long time to make a
Type Ia supernova," said team member Steve Rodney of The Johns
Hopkins University. "Like corn kernels in a pan waiting for the oil
to heat up, the stars haven't had enough time at that epoch to evolve
to the point of explosion. However, if supernovae form very quickly,
like microwave popcorn, then they will be immediately visible, and
we'll find many of them, even when the universe was very young. Each
supernova is unique, so it's possible that there are multiple ways to
make a supernova."

If astronomers discover that Type Ia supernovae begin to depart from
how they expect them to look, they might be able to gauge those
changes and make the measurements of dark energy more precise. Riess
and two other astronomers shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for
discovering dark energy 13 years ago, using Type Ia supernova to plot
the universe's expansion rate.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation
between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science
Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is
operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in
Astronomy, Inc., in Washington, D.C.”

NASA SAYS MINERAL VEIN FOUND ON MARS WAS DEPOSITED BY WATER

"Mars Rover Finds Mineral Vein Deposited by Water WASHINGTON -- NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has found bright veins of a mineral, apparently gypsum, deposited by water. Analysis of the vein will help improve understanding of the history of wet environments on Mars.

"This tells a slam-dunk story that water flowed through underground fractures in the rock," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, principal investigator for Opportunity. "This stuff is a fairly pure chemical deposit that formed in place right where we see it. That can't be said for other gypsum seen on Mars or for other water-related minerals Opportunity has found. It's not uncommon on Earth, but on Mars, it's the kind of thing that makes geologists jump out of their chairs."

The latest findings by Opportunity were presented Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union's conference in San Francisco.

The vein examined most closely by Opportunity is about the width of a human thumb (0.4 to 0.8 inch), 16 to 20 inches long, and protrudes slightly higher than the bedrock on either side of it. Observations by the durable rover reveal this vein and others like it within an apron surrounding a segment of the rim of Endeavour Crater. None like it were seen in the 20 miles (33 kilometers) of crater-pocked plains that Opportunity explored for 90 months before it reached Endeavour, nor in the higher ground of the rim.

Last month, researchers used the Microscopic Imager and Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer on the rover's arm and multiple filters of the Panoramic Camera on the rover's mast to examine the vein, which is informally named "Homestake." The spectrometer identified plentiful calcium and sulfur, in a ratio pointing to relatively pure calcium sulfate.

Calcium sulfate can exist in many forms, varying by how much water is bound into the minerals' crystalline structure. The multi-filter data from the camera suggest gypsum, a hydrated calcium sulfate. On Earth, gypsum is used for making drywall and plaster of Paris.

Observations from orbit have detected gypsum on Mars previously. A dune field of windblown gypsum on far northern Mars resembles the glistening gypsum dunes in White Sands National Monument in New Mexico.

"It is a mystery where the gypsum sand on northern Mars comes from," said Opportunity science-team member Benton Clark of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. "At Homestake, we see the mineral right where it formed. It will be important to see if there are deposits like this in other areas of Mars."

The Homestake deposit, whether gypsum or another form of calcium sulfate, likely formed from water dissolving calcium out of volcanic rocks. The minerals combined with sulfur either leached from the rocks or introduced as volcanic gas, and was deposited as calcium sulfate into an underground fracture that later became exposed at the surface.

Throughout Opportunity's long traverse across Mars' Meridiani plain, the rover has driven over bedrock composed of magnesium, iron and calcium sulfate minerals that also indicate a wet environment billions of years ago. The highly concentrated calcium sulfate at Homestake could have been produced in conditions more neutral than the harshly acidic conditions indicated by the other sulfate deposits observed by Opportunity.

"It could have formed in a different type of water environment, one more hospitable for a larger variety of living organisms," Clark said.

Homestake and similar-looking veins appear in a zone where the sulfate-rich sedimentary bedrock of the plains meets older, volcanic bedrock exposed at the rim of Endeavour. That location may offer a clue about their origin.

"We want to understand why these veins are in the apron but not out on the plains," said the mission's deputy principal investigator, Ray Arvidson, of Washington University in St. Louis. "The answer may be that rising groundwater coming from the ancient crust moved through material adjacent to Cape York and deposited gypsum, because this material would be relatively insoluble compared with either magnesium or iron sulfates."

Opportunity and its rover twin, Spirit, completed their three-month prime missions on Mars in April 2004. Both rovers continued for years of extended missions and made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life. Spirit stopped communicating in 2010. Opportunity continues exploring, currently heading to a sun-facing slope on the northern end of the Endeavour rim fragment called "Cape York" to keep its solar panels at a favorable angle during the mission's fifth Martian winter.

NASA launched the next-generation Mars rover, the car-sized Curiosity, on Nov. 26. It is slated for arrival at the planet's Gale Crater in August 2012.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Exploration Rover Project for the NASA Science Mission Directorate in Washington".

NASA LAUNCH CHALLENGE WILL HAVE 57 TEAM PARTICIPANTS IN APRIL 2012

The following excerpt is from the NASA website:

“HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- More than 500 students from middle schools, high
schools, colleges and universities in 29 states will show their
rocketeering prowess in the 2011-12 NASA Student Launch Projects
flight challenge. The teams will build and test large-scale rockets
of their own design in April 2012.

NASA created the twin Student Launch Projects to spark students'
imaginations, challenge their problem-solving skills and give them
real-world experience. The project aims to complement the science,
mathematics and engineering lessons they study in the classroom.

"Just as NASA partners with innovative companies such as ATK to pursue
the nation's space exploration mission, these young rocketeers pool
their talent and ingenuity to solve complex engineering problems and
fly sophisticated machines,” said Tammy Rowan, manager of Marshall's
Academic Affairs Office.

A record 57 teams of engineering, math and science students will take
part in the annual challenge, organized by NASA's Marshall Space
Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Fifteen middle and high school
teams will tackle the non-competitive Student Launch Initiative,
while 42 college and university teams will compete in the University
Student Launch Initiative. The latter features a $5,000 first-place
award provided by ATK Aerospace Systems of Salt Lake City, Utah.

"This competition is extremely important to ATK to mentor and train
our future workforce," said Charlie Precourt, ATK general manager and
vice president of Space Launch Systems. Precourt is a former space
shuttle astronaut who piloted STS-71 in 1995 and commanded STS-84 in
1997 and STS-91 in 1998. "ATK is proud to enter our fifth year as a
partner with NASA on this initiative to engage the next generation.
The competition grows in impact each year."

Each Student Launch Projects team will build a powerful rocket,
complete with a working science or engineering payload, which the
team must design, install and activate during the rocket launch. The
flight goal is to come as close as possible to an altitude of 1 mile,
requiring a precise balance of aerodynamics, mass and propulsive
power.

As in classroom studies, participants must "show their work," writing
detailed preliminary and post-launch reports and maintaining a public
website for their rocket-building adventure. Each team also must
develop educational engagement projects for schools and youth
organizations in its community, inspiring the imaginations and career
passions of future explorers.

In April, the teams will converge at Marshall, where NASA engineers
will put the students' creations through the same kind of rigorous
reviews and safety inspections applied to the nation's space launch
vehicles. On April 21, 2012, students will firing their rockets
toward the elusive 1-mile goal, operating onboard payloads and
waiting for chutes to open, signaling a safe return to Earth.

The student teams will vie for a variety of awards for engineering
skill and ingenuity, team spirit and vehicle design. These include
two new prizes: a pair of TDS2000 Series oscilloscopes, which are
sophisticated tools for studying the change in flow of electrical
voltage or current. Donated by Tektronix Inc. of Beaverton, Ore., the
oscilloscopes will be presented to the two school teams that earn the
"Best Payload" and "Best Science Mission Directorate Challenge
Payload" honors.

This year's participants hail from Alabama, Arkansas, California,
Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas,
Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Mississippi,
North Carolina, North Dakota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York,
Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington and
Wisconsin.”

CASSINI LOOKS AT SOUTH POLE OF SATURN MOON

The following excerpt is from the NASA website:

“This view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks toward the south polar region of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, and shows a depression within the moon's orange and blue haze layers near the south pole. The moon's high altitude haze layer appears blue here; whereas, the main atmospheric haze is orange. The difference in color could be due to particle size of the haze. The blue haze likely consists of smaller particles than the orange haze. The depressed or attenuated layer appears in the transition area between the orange and blue hazes about a third of the way in from the left edge of the narrow-angle image. The moon's south pole is in the upper right of this image. This view suggests Titan's north polar vortex, or hood, is beginning to flip from north to south. The southern pole of Titan is going into darkness as the sun advances towards the north with each passing day. The upper layer of Titan's hazes is still illuminated by sunlight. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained on Sept. 11, 2011 at a distance of approximately 83,000 miles (134,000 kilometers) from Titan. Image scale is 2,581 feet (787 meters) per pixel. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
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ESA Portal - Austria - Livestream: Pressekonferenz des ESA-Generaldirektors am Montag, 09.01.2012

ESA Portal - Austria - Livestream: Pressekonferenz des ESA-Generaldirektors am Montag, 09.01.2012

GRAIL TWIN SPACESHIPS NOW ORBIT THE MOON

The following excerpt is from the NASA website:

 PASADENA, CALIF--The second of NASA's two Gravity/Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) has successfully completed its planned main engine burn and is now in lunar orbit.  Working together, GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B will study the moon as never before.

 

NASA NEW TOOLS TO HELP DEVELOP BETTER ROTORCRAFT

The following excerpt is from the NASA website:

Helicopters and rotorcraft provide many useful civil and military functions without the need for airports and runways. However, accurately predicting vehicle performance and noise production is very challenging and requires a more accurate technical approach to understand the interaction between rotor blades and the rotor blade vortices. Scientists supporting NASA's Subsonic Rotary Wing Project are developing state-of-the-art simulation tools to more accurately predict these flowfields. Use of these tools provide new insight into the rotor wakes, and will help improve rotorcraft performance. This snapshot of a V-22 rotorcraft in hover shows a cross-section of the blade vortices and turbulent flow, where magenta is high vorticity (spin) and blue is low. The Pleiades supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility has allowed scientists to greatly improve the prediction accuracy of rotor blade aerodynamics. These tools will allow engineers to develop faster and quieter rotorcraft with larger lifting capability.

TWIN SPACECRAFT ON FINAL APPROACH TO NEW YEARS DAY LUNAR RENDEZVOUS

The following excerpt is from the NASA website:

“PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's twin spacecraft to study the moon from
crust to core are nearing their New Year's Eve and New Year's Day
main-engine burns to place the duo in lunar orbit.

Named Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL), the spacecraft
are scheduled to be placed in orbit beginning at 1:21 p.m. PST (4:21
p.m. EST) for GRAIL-A on Dec. 31, and 2:05 p.m. PST (5:05 p.m. EST)
on Jan. 1 for GRAIL-B.

"Our team may not get to partake in a traditional New Year's
celebration, but I expect seeing our two spacecraft safely in lunar
orbit should give us all the excitement and feeling of euphoria
anyone in this line of work would ever need," said David Lehman,
project manager for GRAIL at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
in Pasadena, Calif.

The distance from Earth to the moon is approximately 250,000 miles
(402,336 kilometers). NASA's Apollo crews took about three days to
travel to the moon. Launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station
Sept. 10, 2011, the GRAIL spacecraft are taking about 30 times that
long and covering more than 2.5 million miles (4 million kilometers)
to get there.

This low-energy, long-duration trajectory has given mission planners
and controllers more time to assess the spacecraft's health. The path
also allowed a vital component of the spacecraft's single science
instrument, the Ultra Stable Oscillator, to be continuously powered
for several months. This will allow it to reach a stable operating
temperature long before it begins making science measurements in
lunar orbit.

"This mission will rewrite the textbooks on the evolution of the
moon," said Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. "Our two
spacecraft are operating so well during their journey that we have
performed a full test of our science instrument and confirmed the
performance required to meet our science objectives."

As of Dec. 28, GRAIL-A is 65,860 miles (106,000 kilometers) from the
moon and closing at a speed of 745 mph (1,200 kph). GRAIL-B is 79,540
miles (128,000 kilometers) from the moon and closing at a speed of
763 mph (1,228 kph).

During their final approaches to the moon, both orbiters move toward
it from the south, flying nearly over the lunar south pole. The lunar
orbit insertion burn for GRAIL-A will take approximately 40 minutes
and change the spacecraft's velocity by about 427 mph (688 kph).
GRAIL-B's insertion burn 25 hours later will last about 39 minutes
and is expected to change the probe's velocity by 430 mph (691 kph).

The insertion maneuvers will place each orbiter into a near-polar,
elliptical orbit with a period of 11.5 hours. Over the following
weeks, the GRAIL team will execute a series of burns with each
spacecraft to reduce their orbital period from 11.5 hours down to
just under two hours. At the start of the science phase in March
2012, the two GRAILs will be in a near-polar, near-circular orbit
with an altitude of about 34 miles (55 kilometers).

When science collection begins, the spacecraft will transmit radio
signals precisely defining the distance between them as they orbit
the moon. As they fly over areas of greater and lesser gravity,
caused both by visible features such as mountains and craters and by
masses hidden beneath the lunar surface. they will move slightly
toward and away from each other. An instrument aboard each spacecraft
will measure the changes in their relative velocity very precisely,
and scientists will translate this information into a high-resolution
map of the Moon's gravitational field. The data will allow mission
scientists to understand what goes on below the surface. This
information will increase our knowledge of how Earth and its rocky
neighbors in the inner solar system developed into the diverse worlds
we see today.

JPL manages the GRAIL mission. MIT is home to the mission's principal
investigator, Maria Zuber. The GRAIL mission is part of the Discovery
Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville,
Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft.”

EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY TO LAUNCH NEW SPACESHIP MODEL

The following excerpt is from the European Space Agency Website:

"Europe's ambition for a spacecraft to return autonomously from low orbit is a cornerstone for a wide range of space applications, including space transportation, exploration and robotic servicing of space infrastructure.

Part of this goal will be achieved with IXV Intermediate Experimental Vehicle planned for launch in 2014.  Launced into a suborbital trajectory on ESA's Vega rocket from Europe's Spaceport in French Guiana, IXV will return to Earth as if from a low-orbit mission, to test and qualify new European critical reentry technologies such as advanced ceramic and ablative thermal protection."

CRYOGENIC TESTING COMPLETE ON MIRRORS FOR HUBBLE TELESCOPE REPLACEMENT

The following excerpt is from the NASA website:

Dec. 21, 2011
GREENBELT, Md. -- Cryogenic testing is complete for the final six
primary mirror segments and a secondary mirror that will fly on
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The milestone represents the
successful culmination of a process that took years and broke new
ground in manufacturing and testing large mirrors.

"The mirror completion means we can build a large, deployable
telescope for space," said Scott Willoughby, vice president and Webb
program manager at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. "We have
proven real hardware will perform to the requirements of the
mission."

The Webb telescope has 21 mirrors, with 18 mirror segments working
together as a large 21.3-foot (6.5-meter) primary mirror. Each
individual mirror segment now has been successfully tested to operate
at 40 Kelvin (-387 Fahrenheit or -233 Celsius).

"Mirrors need to be cold so their own heat does not drown out the very
faint infrared images," said Lee Feinberg, NASA Optical Telescope
Element manager for the Webb telescope at the agency's Goddard Space
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "With the completion of all mirror
cryogenic testing, the toughest challenge since the beginning of the
program is now completely behind us."

Completed at the X-ray and Cryogenic Facility (XRCF) at NASA's
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., a ten-week test
series chilled the primary mirror segments to -379 degrees
Fahrenheit. During two test cycles, telescope engineers took
extremely detailed measurements of how each individual mirror's shape
changed as it cooled. Testing verified each mirror changed shape with
temperature as expected and each one will be the correct shape upon
reaching the extremely cold operating temperature after reaching deep
space.

"Achieving the best performance requires conditioning and testing the
mirrors in the XRCF at temperatures just as cold as will be
encountered in space," said Helen Cole, project manager for Webb
Telescope mirror activities at the XRCF. "This testing ensures the
mirrors will focus crisply in space, which will allow us to see new
wonders in our universe."

Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. successfully
completed comparable testing on the secondary mirror. However,
because the secondary mirror is convex (i.e., it has a domed surface
that bulges outward instead of a concave one that dishes inward like
a bowl), it does not converge light to a focus. Testing the mirror
presented a unique challenge involving a special process and more
complex optical measurements.

The Webb telescope is the world's next-generation space observatory
and successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. It will be most powerful
space telescope ever built, provide images of the first galaxies ever
formed, and explore planets around distant stars. It is a joint
project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space
Agency.”

NEW MAGNETIC BACTERIA COULD LEAD TO BIOTECH AND NANOTECH APPLICATIONS

The following excerpt is from the National Science Foundation website:

“Nevada, the "Silver State," is well-known for mining precious metals.
But scientists Dennis Bazylinski and colleagues at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) do a different type of mining.
They sluice through every water body they can find, looking for new forms of microbial magnetism.
In a basin named Badwater on the edge of Death Valley National Park, Bazylinski and researcher Christopher Lefèvre hit pay dirt.

Lefèvre is with the French National Center of Scientific Research and University of Aix-Marseille II.
In this week's issue of the journal Science, Bazylinski, Lefèvre and others report that they identified, isolated and grew a new type of magnetic bacteria that could lead to novel biotech and nanotech uses.
Magnetotactic bacteria are simple, single-celled organisms that are found in almost all bodies of water.
As their name suggests, they orient and navigate along magnetic fields like miniature swimming compass needles.

This is due to the nano-sized crystals of the minerals magnetite or greigite they produce.
The presence of these magnetic crystals makes the bacteria and their internal crystals--called magnetosomes--useful in drug delivery and medical imaging.

The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy and the French Foundation for Medical Research.

"The finding is significant in showing that this bacterium has specific genes to synthesize magnetite and greigite, and that the proportion of these magnetosomes varies with the chemistry of the environment," said Enriqueta Barrera, program director in NSF's Division of Earth Sciences.

While many magnetite-producing bacteria can be grown and easily studied, Bazylinski and his team were the first to cultivate a greigite-producing species. Greigite is an iron sulfide mineral, the equivalent of the iron oxide magnetite.
"Because greigite-producing bacteria have never been isolated, the crystals haven't been tested for the types of biomedical and other applications that currently use magnetite," said Bazylinski.
"Greigite is an iron sulfide that may be superior to magnetite in some applications due to its slightly different physical and magnetic properties. Now we have the opportunity to find out."
Researchers found the greigite-producing bacterium, called BW-1, in water samples collected more than 280 feet below sea level in Badwater Basin. Lefèvre and Bazylinski later isolated and grew it leading to the discovery that  BW-1 produces both greigite and magnetite
.
A detailed look at its DNA revealed that BW-1 has two sets of magnetosome genes, unlike other such bacteria, which produce only one mineral and have only one set of magnetosome genes.
This suggests that the production of magnetite and greigite in BW-1 is likely controlled by separate sets of genes. That could be important in the mass production of either mineral for specific applications.
According to Bazylinski, the greigite-producing bacteria represent a new, previously unrecognized group of sulfate-reducing bacteria that "breathe" the compound sulfate rather than oxygen as most living organisms do.
"With how much is known about sulfate-reducing bacteria, it's surprising that no one has described this group," he said.

Working with Bazylinski and Lefèvre on the project are David Pignol of the French National Center of Scientific Research and University of Aix-Marseille II; Nicolas Menguy of Pierre and Marie Curie University, France; Fernanda Abreu and Ulysses Lins of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Mihaly Pósfai of the University of Pannonia, Hungary; Tanya Prozorov of Ames Laboratory, Iowa; and Richard Frankel of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.”

PULSAR FOUND IN REMAINS OF A SUPERNOVA

The following is an excerpt from the NASA website:

“With the holiday season in full swing, a new image from an assembly of telescopes has revealed an unusual cosmic ornament. Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton have been combined to discover a young pulsar in the remains of a supernova located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, or SMC. This would be the first definite time a pulsar, a spinning, ultra-dense star, has been found in a supernova remnant in the SMC, a small satellite galaxy to the Milky Way.

In this composite image, X-rays from Chandra and XMM-Newton have been colored blue and optical data from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile are colored red and green. The pulsar, known as SXP 1062, is the bright white source located on the right-hand side of the image in the middle of the diffuse blue emission inside a red shell. The diffuse X-rays and optical shell are both evidence for a supernova remnant surrounding the pulsar. The optical data also displays spectacular formations of gas and dust in a star-forming region on the left side of the image. A comparison of the Chandra image with optical images shows that the pulsar has a hot, massive companion.

Astronomers are interested in SXP 1062 because the Chandra and XMM-Newton data show that it is rotating unusually slowly -- about once every 18 minutes. (In contrast, some pulsars are found to revolve multiple times per second, including most newly born pulsars.) This relatively leisurely pace of SXP 1062 makes it one of the slowest rotating X-ray pulsars in the SMC.

Two different teams of scientists have estimated that the supernova remnant around SXP 1062 is between 10,000 and 40,000 years old, as it appears in the image. This means that the pulsar is very young, from an astronomical perspective, since it was presumably formed in the same explosion that produced the supernova remnant. Therefore, assuming that it was born with rapid spin, it is a mystery why SXP 1062 has been able to slow down by so much, so quickly. Work has already begun on theoretical models to understand the evolution of this unusual object.”