SPACE: WHERE ARE WE GOING?

FROM: NASA
WASHINGTON -- NASA soon will open a new chapter of discovery using
enhanced Landsat Earth-observing data in a state-of-the-art,
high-performance computing and data access facility called NASA Earth
Exchange (NEX). This new facility is a virtual laboratory that will
allow scientists to tackle global Earth science challenges with
global high-resolution satellite observations.

After extensive development and testing, NASA is making the NEX
facility available to the research community for further research and
development. With NASA's state-of-the-art supercomputing capacity,
researchers can use NEX to explore and analyze large Earth science
data sets in hours rather than months. Scientists can produce
complex, interdisciplinary studies of world phenomena and share their
findings instantly on the NEX platform.

"Because of the large volume of high-resolution Landsat data,
scientists who wanted to study the planet as a whole prior to NEX
needed to invest tremendous amounts of time and effort to develop
high-end computational methods rather than focus on important
scientific problems," said Tsengdar Lee, high-end computing program
manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "NEX greatly simplifies
researchers' access to and analysis of high-resolution data like
Landsat."

This new facility boasts a large collection of global data sets and
analysis tools from NASA and other agencies, including surface
weather records, topography, soils, land cover and global climate
simulations. Using NEX, scientists now can fit Landsat scenes
together like a giant jigsaw puzzle to create snapshots of global
vegetation patterns containing more than a half-trillion pixels in
less than 10 hours. These global vegetation products, referred to as
the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, complement the more
standard products from the Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer on NASA's Aqua satellite but with 10 times higher
resolution.

"The science community is under increasing pressure not only to study
recent and projected changes in climate that likely impact our global
environment and natural resources, but also to design solutions to
mitigate, or cope, with the likely impacts," said Rama Nemani, a
senior Earth scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett
Field, Calif. "We want to change the research paradigm by bringing
large data holdings and supercomputing capabilities together, so
researchers have everything they need in one place."

Developed by a team at Ames, NEX combines Earth-system modeling,
remote-sensing data from NASA and other agencies, and a scientific
social networking platform to deliver a complete research
environment. Users can explore and analyze large Earth science data
sets, run and share modeling algorithms, collaborate on new or
existing projects and exchange workflows and results within and among
other science communities.

Scientists believe costs and time associated with research development
may be reduced significantly by allowing NEX members to collaborate
instantly in this type of large-scale supercomputing work
environment. For example, NEX may relieve researchers from
redundantly retrieving and integrating data sets and building
modeling analysis codes.

NEX uses Landsat data, which constitute a large collection of images
collected over 40 years by a series of satellite sensors. The
enhanced collection of Landsat data gives scientists the opportunity
to study and understand changes on a planetary scale, looking at
one-quarter acre at a time.

NASA, in cooperation with the Interior Department and its science
agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, launched the first Landsat
satellite in 1972. The resulting 40-year archive of Earth
observations from the Landsat fleet supports the improvement of human
and environmental health, biodiversity, energy and water management,
urban planning, disaster recovery and crop monitoring. The Landsat
program is jointly managed by NASA and the Interior Department.

Friday, August 3, 2012

50e succès d'affillée pour Ariane 5

Thursday, August 2, 2012

U.S. Department of Defense Armed with Science Update

STAR FLASH

What caused this outburst of V838 Mon? For reasons unknown, star V838 Mon's outer surface suddenly greatly expanded with the result that it became the brightest star in the entire Milky Way Galaxy in January 2002. Then, just as suddenly, it faded. A stellar flash like this had never been seen before -- supernovas and novas expel matter out into space. Although the V838 Mon flash appears to expel material into space, what is seen in the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope is actually an outwardly moving light echo of the bright flash. In a light echo, light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant rings in the complex array of ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of the unicorn (Monoceros), while the light echo above spans about six light years in diameter. Image Credit: NASA, ESA

THE SPIDERWEB GALAXY

Looking like a spider's web swirled into a spiral, Galaxy IC 342 presents its delicate pattern of dust in this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Seen in infrared light, faint starlight gives way to the glowing bright patterns of dust found throughout the galaxy's disk. At a distance of about 10 million light-years, IC 342 is relatively close by galactic standards, however our vantage point places it directly behind the disk of our own Milky Way. The intervening dust makes it difficult to see in visible light, but infrared light penetrates this veil easily. IC 342 belongs to the same group as its even more obscured galactic neighbor, Maffei 2. IC 342 is nearly face-on to our view, giving a clear, top-down view of the structure of its disk. It has a low surface brightness compared to other spirals, indicating a lower density of stars (seen here as a blue haze). Its dust structures show up much more vividly (red). Blue dots are stars closer to us, in our own Milky Way. New stars are forming in the disk at a healthy rate. The very center glows especially brightly in the infrared, highlighting an enormous burst of star formation occurring in this tiny region. To either side of the center, a small bar of dust and gas is helping to fuel this central star formation. Data from Spitzer's infrared array camera are shown in blue (3.6 microns), green (4.5 microns) and red (5.8 and 8.0 microns). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

JUMPING TO WARP SPEED

This cockpit view of a hypothetical spacecraft traveling at eight-tenths the speed of light shows the visual distortions that would be experienced at such high speeds. The star field is actually being wrapped toward the front of the craft in addition to being significantly blue-shifted. NASA Glenn leads the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project, NASA's primary effort to produce near-term, credible, and measurable progress toward the technology breakthroughs needed to revolutionize space travel and enable interstellar voyages. NASA Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center, Cleveland, Ohio.

OBSERVATION FROM THE SPACE STATION