Jet Propulsion Laboratory
A detailed picture of the seeds of structures in the universe has been unveiled by an international team co-led by Sarah Church of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, joint
The following highlights summarize research papers that have been published or accepted for publication (paper in press) in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).
"It is really surprising how closely Titan's surface resembles Earth's," says Rosaly Lopes, a planetary geologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, who is presenting the results on Friday, 7 August. "In fact, Titan looks more like the Earth than any other body in the Solar System, despite the huge differences in temperature and other environmental conditions."
PASADENA, Calif. -- Stromatolites are dome- or column-like sedimentary rock structures that are formed in shallow water, layer by layer, over long periods of geologic time.
RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- An international team of researchers led by a UC Riverside astronomer has completed the largest ever survey designed to find very distant clusters of galaxies.
Recent images of Titan from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft affirm the presence of lakes of liquid hydrocarbons by capturing changes in the lakes brought on by rainfall.
ESOC radio engineer Boris Smeds has become a modest celebrity for his single-handed discovery of a fatal design flaw in Huygens' radio relay link; one magazine credibly dubbed him a "hero." But developing the mission recovery plan required a team effort involving hundreds. Media interest in the little-known story of how the Huygens mission was recovered from near-certain disaster started to grow last fall as the joint NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission neared its 14 January 2005 rendezvous with Titan.
The Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain has been gathering light from the depths of the universe for 55 years. It finally sent some back early last week as a team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Chicago created an artificial star by propagating a 4-watt laser beam out from the Hale Telescope and up into the night sky. The laser was propagated as the first step in a program to expand the fraction of sky available to the technique known as adaptive optics.
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has set its infrared sight on a major galactic collision and witnessed not death, but a teeming nest of life. The colliding galaxies, called the Antennae galaxies, are in the process of merging together. As they churn into each other, they throw off massive streamers of stars and dark clouds of dust. Spitzer's heat-seeking eyes peered through that dust and found a hidden population of newborn stars.
NASA has selected nine studies to investigate new ideas for future mission concepts within its Astronomical Search for Origins Program. Some of the new mission ideas will survey one billion stars within our own galaxy; measure the distribution of galaxies in the distant universe; study dust and gas between galaxies; study organic compounds in space and investigate their role in planetary system formation; and create an optical-ultraviolet telescope to replace NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
The world gets to see the rusty, dusty martian terrain as if humans themselves were riding atop the rovers. Who's responsible for our front-row seats on Mars? The masterminds working tirelessly behind the scenes in the Multimission Image Processing Lab (MIPL) at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Like professional basketball stars, MIPL (pronounced 'mipple') team members at Jet Propulsion Laboratory perform amazing technical feats and shoot images from Mars into the Internet in record, near real-time before their shot clocks expire many times a day.
There's nothing worse than a satellite that can't make decisions. Rather than organizing data, it simply spews out everything it collects, swamping scientists with huge amounts of information. It's like getting a newspaper with no headlines or section pages in which all the stories are strung together end-to-end.
Researchers at the University of Arizona (UA), Arizona State University (ASU) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are working to solve this problem by developing machine-learning and pattern-recognition software. This smart software can be used on all kinds of spacecraft, including orbiters, landers and rovers.
Seven years of waiting comes to an end on 1 July when the Cassini spacecraft swoops closer to Saturn than any spacecraft previously. Researchers at Imperial College London will be anxiously awaiting the first signals that all has gone to plan during a 90-minute engine burning procedure known as Saturn Orbit Insertion, or SOI, and that their mission to definitively map the magnetic fields around Saturn has successfully begun. Never has a spacecraft been put in orbit around Saturn and not since Pioneer 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1981 has one passed so close.
A traveling robotic geologist from NASA has landed on Mars and returned stunning images of the area around the landing site in Gusev Crater. Mars Exploration Rover Spirit successfully sent a radio signal after the spacecraft had bounced and rolled for several minutes following its initial impact at 11:35 p.m. EST (8:35 p.m. Pacific Standard Time).
A California physicist will announce plans for the first known attempt to push a spacecraft into the Earth's orbit with energy beamed up from the ground. The satellite will be called the Cosmos Sail, the first solar-sail craft to orbit Earth. The physics team developed the sail with researchers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Made from lightweight layers of aluminized mylar, the sail will allow a craft to be propelled from low orbit to high orbit and ultimately into interplanetary space, driven by microwave energy, similar to the way wind pushes a sailboat across the sea.
