58 Days After the Pluto Flyby: New Horizons Has Resumed Sending Photos Back to Earth!

NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute

New Pluto Images from NASA’s New Horizons: It’s Complicated (Press Release)

New close-up images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveal a bewildering variety of surface features that have scientists reeling because of their range and complexity.

“Pluto is showing us a diversity of landforms and complexity of processes that rival anything we’ve seen in the solar system,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there.”

New Horizons began its yearlong download of new images and other data over the Labor Day weekend. Images downlinked in the past few days have more than doubled the amount of Pluto’s surface seen at resolutions as good as 400 meters (440 yards) per pixel. They reveal new features as diverse as possible dunes, nitrogen ice flows that apparently oozed out of mountainous regions onto plains, and even networks of valleys that may have been carved by material flowing over Pluto’s surface. They also show large regions that display chaotically jumbled mountains reminiscent of disrupted terrains on Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

“The surface of Pluto is every bit as complex as that of Mars,” said Jeff Moore, leader of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging (GGI) team at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “The randomly jumbled mountains might be huge blocks of hard water ice floating within a vast, denser, softer deposit of frozen nitrogen within the region informally named Sputnik Planum.”

New images also show the most heavily cratered -- and thus oldest -- terrain yet seen by New Horizons on Pluto next to the youngest, most crater-free icy plains. There might even be a field of dark wind-blown dunes, among other possibilities.

“Seeing dunes on Pluto -- if that is what they are -- would be completely wild, because Pluto’s atmosphere today is so thin,” said William B. McKinnon, a GGI deputy lead from Washington University, St. Louis. “Either Pluto had a thicker atmosphere in the past, or some process we haven’t figured out is at work. It’s a head-scratcher.”

Discoveries being made from the new imagery are not limited to Pluto’s surface. Better images of Pluto’s moons Charon, Nix, and Hydra will be released Friday at the raw images site for New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), revealing that each moon is unique and that big moon Charon’s geological past was a tortured one.

Images returned in the past days have also revealed that Pluto’s global atmospheric haze has many more layers than scientists realized, and that the haze actually creates a twilight effect that softly illuminates nightside terrain near sunset, making them visible to the cameras aboard New Horizons.

“This bonus twilight view is a wonderful gift that Pluto has handed to us,” said John Spencer, a GGI deputy lead from SwRI. “Now we can study geology in terrain that we never expected to see.”

The New Horizons spacecraft is now more than 3 billion miles (about 5 billion kilometers) from Earth, and more than 43 million miles (69 million kilometers) beyond Pluto. The spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally.

New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science mission, payload operations, and encounter science planning.

Source: NASA.Gov

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NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute

Dawn Update: The Bright Spots of Ceres...

NASA / JPL - Caltech / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA

Dawn Takes a Closer Look at Occator (Press Release)

This image, made using images taken by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, shows Occator crater on Ceres, home to a collection of intriguing bright spots.

The bright spots are much brighter than the rest of Ceres' surface, and tend to appear overexposed in most images. This view is a composite of two images of Occator: one using a short exposure that captures the detail in the bright spots, and one where the background surface is captured at normal exposure.

The images were obtained by Dawn during the mission's High Altitude Mapping Orbit (HAMO) phase, from which the spacecraft imaged the surface at a resolution of about 450 feet (140 meters) per pixel.

Source: NASA.Gov

Oh, China— Just Keep Droppin' the Ball...

Ten years ago this month, I posted this lengthy Blog entry highlighting my disappointment when I found out that I missed the opportunity to have my name on a DVD that was placed aboard NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. The disappointment was so great that not only did it bring back my obsession for space exploration in a big way (the last time I was a major space geek was back in 8th grade...21 years ago), but it motivated me to keep track of every future interplanetary missions that NASA and other government space agencies developed that would have the potential of allowing the public to place names on them. It was after losing my chance to fly past Pluto and into interstellar space aboard New Horizons that the Dawn asteroid mission started collecting monikers for its ion propulsion-powered orbiter (Dawn was briefly canceled by NASA due to technical reasons a few weeks later, in October of 2005—but was reinstated in March of 2006). In October of 2006, the Phoenix Mars mission started collecting names via the California-based space advocacy group, The Planetary Society, and a little over a month after that, Japan's space agency (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA) collected names to be place on its SELENE spacecraft (eventually renamed to Kaguya) that was destined for the Moon. These three robotic probes were launched in 2007 alone.


NASA / JHU APL / SwRI / Steve Gribben

Jump to 2015, and NASA and JAXA have given me the opportunity to have a virtual presence on more than a dozen missions. Not just Dawn, Phoenix and Kaguya (and Deep Impact, which NASA collected names for back in 2003...that intentionally got obliterated by a comet's nucleus in 2005), but the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Kepler space telescope, JAXA's Akatsuki Venus orbiter, IKAROS solar sail and asteroid-bound Hayabusa 2 spacecraft, the Curiosity Mars rover, the MAVEN Mars orbiter, the last three space shuttle missions (STS-133, STS-134 and STS-135) in 2011 and even Orion's first space voyage on Exploration Flight Test-1 last year. And next year, cross my fingers, my name plus hundreds of thousands of others will hopefully be soaring towards Mars and asteroid Bennu with NASA's InSight lander and the OSIRIS-REx sample return mission, respectively. Not bad... Not bad at all.


NASA

So what does this have to do with China, you ask? Well, not only is having my name aboard a spacecraft that will eventually leave our solar system on my wishlist (or to be blunt: bucket list), but I also think that it would be cool to have my name on the surface of the Moon (intact) as well. JAXA has been proposing a lunar lander (dubbed SELENE-2) that would be the follow-up to its successful Kaguya mission. However, this was back in 2008 (or 2009, I think) and SELENE-2 is nowhere near the assembly stage. It was originally scheduled to launch in 2013, then 2015, and then 2017, but now it's not slated to take flight till 2019 at the earliest. A U.S. lander that would touch down on the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin was proposed through a competition by NASA's New Frontiers program, but it eventually lost out to the OSIRIS-REx mission that will head to asteroid Bennu in late 2016.


JAXA

So again—what does this have to do with China, you ask? Well— China's lunar rover, Yutu, launched and landed on the Moon in December of 2014...as part of the Chang'e 3 mission. Reading about Yutu online was exciting; it would've been more exciting, personally, if I knew that my name briefly strolled around the lunar surface aboard this rover. So now Chang'e 4 is in the planning stages, with another lander and rover slated to head back to the Moon by 2020. And after that, the Chang'e 5 mission...which would collect samples from the Moon's surface and return them to China next decade.


NASA / JPL - Caltech / MSSS

Admittedly, there's still enough time before Chang'e 4 launches that China could decide to follow in the footsteps of NASA, JAXA and the European Space Agency (which collected names for the Huygens lander that touched down on Saturn's moon Titan in 2005, courtesy of NASA's Cassini orbiter) and allow the public to take part in this mission by collecting names via the World Wide Web. Unfortunately, this is China... A Communist superpower that enjoys grabbing territory in the Pacific Ocean at the expense of its Asian neighbors (including the Philippines; I'm Filipino), improving its technological infrastructure by conducting industrial espionage on the United States, and of course, continuing to have an abysmal human-rights record. (And let's not ignore the recent news about Chinese naval ships milling about off the coast of Alaska.) I'm gonna come out and admit that my opinion for China, despite these negative qualities, would improve if Beijing at least allowed folks (not just its Chinese populace) to submit their monikers to fly on its next mission to the Moon's surface. China is, after all, a fledgling space-faring nation...and has the political will to conduct missions that NASA wants to do but otherwise can't due to those stupid things called budget cuts, continuing resolutions and sequestration.


NASA

So the gist of this entry: If I can't have my name on a New Horizons-type spacecraft that will venture towards interstellar space anytime soon, then I can at least have my name resting on the lunar surface the same way the first Yutu rover and Apollo hardware from 40-plus years ago still sit peacefully on the Moon's landscape. If JAXA follows through with SELENE 2 and launches it in 2019 (but not before collecting names for it a la Kaguya, Akatsuki, IKAROS and Hayabusa 2), then all is good with Chang'e 4. If not, then I hope China will one day open a webpage that allows Chinese and non-Chinese folks alike to submit their names to be placed aboard Yutu's successor. The same way that NASA is currently collecting names to be placed aboard NASA's InSight lander. The deadline is this Tuesday, September 8, by the way.

That is all. Again, Happy Labor Day weekend to my fellow Yanks!

May The Force (Friday) Be With You!

So earlier today, I spent more than two hours driving around to different Toys"R"Us, Walmart and Target stores looking for Kylo Ren and Captain Phasma action figures to buy as a way of participating in the much-hyped "Force Friday." I worked a night shift yesterday, and by the time I drove to the Toys"R"Us store that was right next to the freeway I used to head home early this morning, it had already closed following midnight festivities that only lasted an hour (stores selling The Force Awakens stuff opened at 12:01 AM; I didn't arrive at the Toys"R"Us till a couple of minutes after 1 AM). So right when I was about to head home empty-handed this afternoon since most of the new Star Wars merchandise at the three stores mentioned above were gone (yes— I went home, got some sleep and ate breakfast before I headed back out), I decided to visit the Disney Store at my local mall to see if they had the figures I was searching for. As the photo above shows, it did! Presumably, since the Disney Store didn't open at midnight (I didn't stumble upon anything online showing that Disney's own retail outlet would take part in the 12:01 AM activities), I assumed that it would have Kylo Ren and Captain Phasma figures in stock. And yep, I was right. The fact that this um, playset also comes with First Order Flametrooper, Finn, Rey and BB-8 figurines is an added bonus! Thanks Disney! Here's hoping Star Wars: Episode VII itself will deliver the goods like you did.

Lastly— If you wanna know just how big of a geek I am, open my closet door at home. Or just check out the pic below. Yes, that's a Pacific Rim Jaeger to screen right of my General Grievious figure from Revenge of the Sith. Have a nice weekend. Oh, and Happy Labor Day to my fellow Yanks!

F-35 Update: Welcome to Your New Home, Lightning IIs!

USAF / Lockheed Martin

Hill AFB Receives First Two F-35A Lightning IIs (Press Release)

The first two Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning IIs assigned to the 388th Fighter Wing were officially delivered to the base today. The two F-35A Conventional Takeoff and Landing variants, known as AF-77 and AF-78, are the first of 72 F-35As scheduled for delivery to the base.

“The F-35A Lightning II represents the future of tactical aviation for the United States and our allies,” said Col. David Lyons, 388th FW Commander. “Alongside our 419th Fighter Wing counterparts, we’re excited to usher in a new era of combat capability for the Air Force.”

Today’s delivery marks the stand-up of the 10th F-35 base and Hill is the fifth Air Force base to receive the Lightning II. During the next several months, Hill will receive additional F-35As, pilots and maintenance personnel in order to meet requirements for the declaration of IOC in 2016.

“The F-35A Lightning II provides the USAF and international partners a decisive edge over its adversaries,” said Lorraine Martin, Lockheed Martin F-35 Program General Manager. "The exceptional capabilities of this 5th generation stealth fighter are now in the hands of the Hill team and we couldn’t be prouder of our warfighters at the 388th and 419th Fighter Wings.”

The F-35A Lightning II is a 5th generation fighter, combining advanced stealth with fighter speed and agility, fully fused sensor information, network-enabled operations and advanced sustainment. Three distinct variants of the F-35 will replace the A-10 and F-16 for the U.S. Air Force, the F/A-18 for the U.S. Navy, the F/A-18 and AV-8B Harrier for the U.S. Marine Corps, and a variety of fighters for at least nine other countries.

Source: F35.com

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USAF / Lockheed Martin

Photos of the Day: The Wilshire Grand Center Continues to Take Shape...

Just thought I'd end this month by sharing these cool progress photos of what will soon be the tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi River. The Wilshire Grand Center is scheduled to open in downtown Los Angeles two years from now...and based on these pics, the construction remains right on schedule (not to jinx it or anything) for its grand debut. Unlike the other buildings that dot L.A.'s skyline, I plan to visit this tower once it opens to the public in 2017. Of course, if I had enough money to spare on another trip to New York, I'd check out the 1 World Trade Center first! Oh well.


Image courtesy of Wilshire Grand Center - Facebook


Image courtesy of Wilshire Grand Center - Facebook


Image courtesy of Wilshire Grand Center - Facebook

Quotes of the Day...

“You can love someone so much...But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.”

-― John Green


“When you loved someone and had to let them go, there will always be that small part of yourself that whispers, 'What was it that you wanted and why didn't you fight for it?'”

-― Shannon L. Alder


“I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough. In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost.”

-― Nan Goldin


“No one compares to you, but there's no you, except in my dreams tonight.”

-― Lana Del Rey


“It hurts to breathe. It hurts to live. I hate her, yet I do not think I can exist without her.”

-― Charlotte Featherstone, Addicted


“I think about you. But I don't say it anymore.”

-― Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour

New Horizons Update... Next Stop (Hopefully): A Kuiper Belt Object Dubbed PT1!

NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute

NASA’s New Horizons Team Selects Potential Kuiper Belt Flyby Target (Press Release)

NASA has selected the potential next destination for the New Horizons mission to visit after its historic July 14 flyby of the Pluto system. The destination is a small Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) known as 2014 MU69 that orbits nearly a billion miles beyond Pluto.

This remote KBO was one of two identified as potential destinations and the one recommended to NASA by the New Horizons team. Although NASA has selected 2014 MU69 as the target, as part of its normal review process the agency will conduct a detailed assessment before officially approving the mission extension to conduct additional science.

“Even as the New Horizon’s spacecraft speeds away from Pluto out into the Kuiper Belt, and the data from the exciting encounter with this new world is being streamed back to Earth, we are looking outward to the next destination for this intrepid explorer,” said John Grunsfeld, astronaut and chief of the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. “While discussions whether to approve this extended mission will take place in the larger context of the planetary science portfolio, we expect it to be much less expensive than the prime mission while still providing new and exciting science.”

Like all NASA missions that have finished their main objective but seek to do more exploration, the New Horizons team must write a proposal to the agency to fund a KBO mission. That proposal – due in 2016 – will be evaluated by an independent team of experts before NASA can decide about the go-ahead.

Early target selection was important; the team needs to direct New Horizons toward the object this year in order to perform any extended mission with healthy fuel margins. New Horizons will perform a series of four maneuvers in late October and early November to set its course toward 2014 MU69 – nicknamed “PT1” (for “Potential Target 1”) – which it expects to reach on January 1, 2019. Any delays from those dates would cost precious fuel and add mission risk.

“2014 MU69 is a great choice because it is just the kind of ancient KBO, formed where it orbits now, that the Decadal Survey desired us to fly by,” said New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “Moreover, this KBO costs less fuel to reach [than other candidate targets], leaving more fuel for the flyby, for ancillary science, and greater fuel reserves to protect against the unforeseen.”

New Horizons was originally designed to fly beyond the Pluto system and explore additional Kuiper Belt objects. The spacecraft carries extra hydrazine fuel for a KBO flyby; its communications system is designed to work from far beyond Pluto; its power system is designed to operate for many more years; and its scientific instruments were designed to operate in light levels much lower than it will experience during the 2014 MU69 flyby.”

The 2003 National Academy of Sciences’ Planetary Decadal Survey (“New Frontiers in the Solar System”) strongly recommended that the first mission to the Kuiper Belt include flybys of Pluto and small KBOs, in order to sample the diversity of objects in that previously unexplored region of the solar system. The identification of PT1, which is in a completely different class of KBO than Pluto, potentially allows New Horizons to satisfy those goals.

But finding a suitable KBO flyby target was no easy task. Starting a search in 2011 using some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth, the New Horizons team found several dozen KBOs, but none were reachable within the fuel supply available aboard the spacecraft.

The powerful Hubble Space Telescope came to the rescue in summer 2014, discovering five objects, since narrowed to two, within New Horizons’ flight path. Scientists estimate that PT1 is just under 30 miles (about 45 kilometers) across; that’s more than 10 times larger and 1,000 times more massive than typical comets, like the one the Rosetta mission is now orbiting, but only about 0.5 to 1 percent of the size (and about 1/10,000th the mass) of Pluto. As such, PT1 is thought to be like the building blocks of Kuiper Belt planets such as Pluto.

Unlike asteroids, KBOs have been heated only slightly by the Sun, and are thought to represent a well preserved, deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago.

“There’s so much that we can learn from close-up spacecraft observations that we’ll never learn from Earth, as the Pluto flyby demonstrated so spectacularly,” said New Horizons science team member John Spencer, also of SwRI. “The detailed images and other data that New Horizons could obtain from a KBO flyby will revolutionize our understanding of the Kuiper Belt and KBOs.”

The New Horizons spacecraft – currently 3 billion miles [4.9 billion kilometers] from Earth – is just starting to transmit the bulk of the images and other data, stored on its digital recorders, from its historic July encounter with the Pluto system. The spacecraft is healthy and operating normally.

New Horizons is part of NASA’s New Frontiers Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft and manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science mission, payload operations, and encounter science planning.

Source: NASA.Gov

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NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

More Than 35 Trillion Miles and Counting...

Six Light-Years... That’s how far the Hello From Earth message has traveled since being transmitted from a giant NASA antenna in Australia to the exoplanet Gliese 581d (whose existence was in doubt until earlier this year) more than half a decade ago today. As of 7 PM California time tonight (12 PM Sydney time on Friday, August 28), the radio signal containing 25,878 goodwill text messages—including one by me—will have ventured across approximately 35.3 trillion miles (57 trillion kilometers) of deep space...which, as stated at the very start of this Blog entry, equals a distance of six light-years. The signal, despite traveling 186,000 miles per second (or 671 million miles per hour, or um, 1 billion kilometers per hour), will still take 14 years to reach the Gliese 581 star system. Woohoo.

OSIRIS-REx Update: Getting a New Set of Eyes...

University of Arizona / Symeon Platts

Cameras Delivered for NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Mission as Launch Prep Continues (Press Release - August 24)

The first U.S. mission to return samples of an asteroid to Earth is another step closer to its fall 2016 launch, with the delivery of three cameras that will image and map the giant space rock.

A camera suite that will allow NASA’s Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission to see a near-Earth asteroid, map it, and pick a safe and interesting place to touch the surface and collect a sample, has arrived at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver for installation to the spacecraft.

“This is another major step in preparing for our mission,” said Mike Donnelly, OSIRIS-REx project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “With the delivery of the camera suite to the spacecraft contractor, we will have our full complement of cameras and spectrometers.”

The OSIRIS-REx mission is scheduled to launch in September 2016 to study Bennu, a near-Earth asteroid that’s about one-third of a mile (approximately 500 meters) across. After rendezvousing with Bennu in 2018, the spacecraft will survey the asteroid, obtain a sample, and return it to Earth in 2023.

The three camera instrument suite, known as OCAMS (OSIRIS-REx Camera Suite), was designed and built by the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. The largest of the three cameras, PolyCam, is a small telescope that will acquire the first images of Bennu from a distance of 1.2 million miles (2 million kilometers) and provide high resolution imaging of the sample site. MapCam will search for satellites and dust plumes around Bennu, map the asteroid in color, and provide images to construct topographic maps. SamCam will document the sample acquisition event and the collected sample.

“PolyCam, MapCam and SamCam will be our mission’s eyes at Bennu,” said Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for OSIRIS-REx at the University of Arizona, Tucson. “OCAMS will provide the imagery we need to complete our mission while the spacecraft is at the asteroid.”

OSIRIS-REx is the first U.S. mission to sample an asteroid, and will return the largest sample from space since the Apollo lunar missions. Scientists expect that Bennu may hold clues to the origin of the solar system and the source of water and organic molecules that may have seeded life on Earth. OSIRIS-REx’s investigation will inform future efforts to develop a mission to mitigate an impact, should one be required.

"The most important goal of these cameras is to maximize our ability to successfully return a sample,” said OCAMS instrument scientist Bashar Rizk from the University of Arizona, Tucson. “Our mission requires a lot of activities during one trip – navigation, mapping, reconnaissance, sample site selection, and sampling. While we are there, we need the ability to continuously see what is happening around the asteroid in order to make real-time decisions."

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, provides overall mission management, systems engineering and safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. Dante Lauretta is the mission's principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver is building the spacecraft. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages New Frontiers for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

Source: NASA.Gov

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NASA / Goddard / Chris Meaney