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Space News Update — August 23, 2013 —

Contents

In the News

Story 1:

NASA Spacecraft Reactivated to Hunt for Asteroids

Story 2:

Fermi Space Telescope Celebrates Five Years in Space

Story 3:

13 Year Hubble Time-Lapse Movie Shows a Jet of Superheated Gas

Departments

The Night Sky

ISS Sighting Opportunities

Space Calendar

NASA-TV Highlights

Food for Thought

Space Image of the Week

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1. NASA Spacecraft Reactivated to Hunt for Asteroids

A NASA spacecraft that discovered and characterized tens of thousands of asteroids throughout the solar

system before being placed in hibernation will return to service for three more years starting in September,

assisting the agency in its effort to identify the population of potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, as well as

those suitable for asteroid exploration missions.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) will be revived next month with the goal of discovering and

characterizing near-Earth objects (NEOs), space rocks that can be found orbiting within 28 million miles (45

million kilometers) from Earth's path around the sun. NASA anticipates WISE will use its 16-inch (40-

centimeter) telescope and infrared cameras to discover about 150 previously unknown NEOs and characterize

the size, albedo and thermal properties of about 2,000 others -- including some which could be candidates for

the agency's recently announced asteroid initiative.

"The WISE mission achieved its mission's goals and as NEOWISE extended the science even further in its

survey of asteroids. NASA is now extending that record of success, which will enhance our ability to find

potentially hazardous asteroids, and support the new asteroid initiative," said John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate

administrator for science in Washington. "Reactivating WISE is an excellent example of how we are leveraging

existing capabilities across the agency to achieve our goal."

NASA's asteroid initiative will be the first mission to identify, capture and relocate an asteroid. It represents an

unprecedented technological feat that will lead to new scientific discoveries and technological capabilities that

will help protect our home planet. The asteroid initiative brings together the best of NASA's science, technology

and human exploration efforts to achieve President Obama's goal of sending humans to an asteroid by 2025.

Launched in December 2009 to look for the glow of celestial heat sources from asteroids, stars and galaxies,

WISE made about 7,500 images every day during its primary mission, from January 2010 to February 2011. As

part of a project called NEOWISE, the spacecraft made the most accurate survey to date of NEOs. NASA

turned most of WISE's electronics off when it completed its primary mission.

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"The data collected by NEOWISE two years ago have proven to be a gold mine for the discovery and

characterization of the NEO population," said Lindley Johnson, NASA's NEOWISE program executive in

Washington. "It is important that we accumulate as much of this type of data as possible while the WISE

spacecraft remains a viable asset."

Because asteroids reflect but do not emit visible light, infrared sensors are a powerful tool for discovering,

cataloging and understanding the asteroid population. Depending on an object's reflectivity, or albedo, a small,

light-colored space rock can look the same as a big, dark one. As a result, data collected with optical telescopes

using visible light can be deceiving.

During 2010, NEOWISE observed about 158,000 rocky bodies out of approximately 600,000 known objects.

Discoveries included 21 comets, more than 34,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, and 135

near-Earth objects.

The WISE prime mission was to scan the entire celestial sky in infrared light. It captured more than 2.7 million

images in multiple infrared wavelengths and cataloged more than 560 million objects in space, ranging from

galaxies faraway to asteroids and comets much closer to Earth.

"The team is ready and after a quick checkout, we're going to hit the ground running," said Amy Mainzer,

NEOWISE principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "NEOWISE not only

gives us a better understanding of the asteroids and comets we study directly, but it will help us refine our

concepts and mission operation plans for future, space-based near-Earth object cataloging missions."

JPL manages WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington. The

mission is part of NASA's Explorers Program, which NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.,

manages. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace &

Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colo., built the spacecraft. Science operations and data processing take place at

the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech

manages JPL for NASA.

More information about NEOWISE is available online at: http://www.nasa.gov/wise and

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/wise/.

For more information on the asteroid initiative, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/asteroidinitiative.

Source: NASA Return to Contents

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2. Fermi Space Telescope Celebrates Five Years in Space

During its five-year primary mission, NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has given astronomers an

increasingly detailed portrait of the universe's most extraordinary phenomena, from giant black holes in the

hearts of distant galaxies to thunderstorms on Earth.

But its job is not done yet. On Aug. 11, Fermi entered an extended phase of its mission -- a deeper study of the

high-energy cosmos. This is a significant step toward the science team's planned goal of a decade of

observations, ending in 2018.

"As Fermi opens its second act, both the spacecraft and its instruments remain in top-notch condition and the

mission is delivering outstanding science," said Paul Hertz, director of NASA's astrophysics division in

Washington.

Fermi has revolutionized our view of the universe in gamma rays, the most energetic form of light. The

observatory's findings include new insights into many high-energy processes, from rapidly rotating neutron

stars, also known as pulsars, within our own galaxy, to jets powered by supermassive black holes in far-away

young galaxies.

The Large Area Telescope (LAT), the mission's main instrument, scans the entire sky every three hours. The

state-of-the-art detector has sharper vision, a wider field of view, and covers a broader energy range than any

similar instrument previously flown.

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"As the LAT builds up an increasingly detailed picture of the gamma-ray sky, it simultaneously reveals how

dynamic the universe is at these energies," said Peter Michelson, the instrument's principal investigator and a

professor of physics at Stanford University in California.

Fermi's secondary instrument, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM), sees all of the sky at any instant, except

the portion blocked by Earth. This all-sky coverage lets Fermi detect more gamma-ray bursts, and over a

broader energy range, than any other mission. These explosions, the most powerful in the universe, are thought

to accompany the birth of new stellar-mass black holes.

"More than 1,200 gamma-ray bursts, plus 500 flares from our sun and a few hundred flares from highly

magnetized neutron stars in our galaxy have been seen by the GBM," said principal investigator Bill Paciesas, a

senior scientist at the Universities Space Research Association's Science and Technology Institute in Huntsville,

Ala.

The instrument also has detected nearly 800 gamma-ray flashes from thunderstorms. These fleeting outbursts

last only a few thousandths of a second, but their emission ranks among the highest-energy light naturally

occurring on Earth.

One of Fermi's most striking results so far was the discovery of giant bubbles extending more than 25,000 light-

years above and below the plane of our galaxy. Scientists think these structures may have formed as a result of

past outbursts from the black hole -- with a mass of 4 million suns -- residing in the heart of our galaxy.

To build on the mission's success, the team is considering a new observing strategy that would task the LAT to

make deeper exposures of the central region of the Milky Way, a realm packed with pulsars and other high-

energy sources. This area also is expected to be one of the best places to search for gamma-ray signals from

dark matter, an elusive substance that neither emits nor absorbs visible light. According to some theories, dark

matter consists of exotic particles that produce a flash of gamma rays when they interact.

"Over the next few years, major new astronomical facilities exploring other wavelengths will complement

Fermi and give us our best look yet into the most powerful events in the universe," said Julie McEnery, the

mission's project scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is an astrophysics and particle physics partnership. Goddard

manages the mission. The telescope was developed in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy's

Office of Science, with contributions from academic institutions and partners in the United States, France,

Germany, Italy, Japan, and Sweden.

For images and video related to this release, visit: http://go.nasa.gov/1f2vYAm

For more information about Fermi, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/fermi

Source: Spaceref.com s Return to Contents

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3. 13 Year Hubble Time-Lapse Movie Shows a Jet of Superheated Gas

Astronomers have assembled, from more than 13 years of observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope,

a series of time-lapse movies showing a jet of superheated gas -- 5,000 light-years long -- as it is ejected from a

supermassive black hole.

The movies promise to give astronomers a better understanding of how black holes shape galaxy evolution.

"Central, supermassive black holes are a key component in all big galaxies," said Eileen T. Meyer of the Space

Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. "Most of these black holes are believed to have gone through an

active phase, and black-hole powered jets from this active phase play a key role in the evolution of galaxies. By

studying the details of this process in the nearest galaxy with an optical jet, we can hope to learn more about

galaxy formation and black hole physics in general."

The research team spent eight months analyzing 400 observations from Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera

2 and Advanced Camera for Surveys. The observations, taken from 1995 to 2008, are of a black hole sitting in

the center of a giant galaxy dubbed M87.

"We analyzed several years' worth of Hubble data of a relatively nearby spiraling jet of plasma emitted from a

black hole, which allowed us to see lots of details," Meyer said. "The only reason you see the distant jet in

motion is because it is traveling very fast."

Meyer found evidence that suggests the jet's spiral motion is created by a helix-shaped magnetic field

surrounding the black hole. In the outer part of the M87 jet, for example, one bright gas clump, called knot B,

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appears to zigzag, as if it were moving along a spiral path. Several other gas clumps along the jet also appear to

loop around an invisible structure.

M87 resides at the center of the neighboring Virgo cluster of roughly 2,000 galaxies, located 50 million light

years away. The galaxy's monster black hole is several billion times more massive than our sun.

The Hubble data also provided information on why the M87 jet is composed of a long string of gas blobs, which

appear to brighten and dim over time.

"The jet structure is very clumpy. Is this a ballistic effect, like cannonballs fired sequentially from a cannon?"

Meyer asked, "or, are there some particularly interesting physics going on, such as a shock that is magnetically

driven?"

Meyer's team found evidence for both scenarios. "We found things that move quickly," Meyer said. "We found

things that move slowly. And, we found things that are stationary. This study shows us that the clumps are very

dynamic sources."

It is too soon to tell whether all black-hole-powered jets behave like the one in M87, which is why Meyer plans

to use Hubble to study three more jets. "It's always dangerous to have exactly one example because it could be a

strange outlier," Meyer said. "The M87 black hole is justification for looking at more jets."

The team's results appeared Aug. 22 in the online issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

For images and more information about M87's jet, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/hubble and

http://hubblesite.org/news/2013/32.

Source: Spaceref.com Return to Contents

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The Night Sky

Friday, August 16

By about 10 p.m. (depending on where you live), W-

shaped Cassiopeia is now as high in the northeast as the

Big Dipper is in the northwest. Cassiopeia will grow

ever more ascendant over the Dipper for the next several

months as the seasons turn.

Saturday, August 17

The waxing gibbous Moon shines in the south after

nightfall. Below it is the Sagittarius Teapot, as shown at

right.

Look high to the Moon's upper left for bright Altair.

Just above Altair is 3rd-magnitude Tarazed, an orange-

red giant star (can you see its tint?) 20 times farther

away.

Sunday, August 18

The two brightest stars of summer are Vega, passing

overhead soon after dark, and Arcturus shining in the

west. Vega is a white-hot type-A star 25 light-years

away. Arcturus is an orange-yellow-hot type-K giant 37

light-years distant. Both are much brighter than the Sun.

Their color difference is pretty clear to the unaided eye.

Monday, August 19

Look east in early dawn for the next few mornings and

spot bright Jupiter. Look lower left of Jupiter for faint

Mars. Mars forms the bottom end of a curving line with similarly bright Pollux and Castor (to its upper left).

Watch this line straighten out day by day as Mars speeds eastward. It becomes exactly straight on Sunday

morning the 25th.

Sky & Telescope Return to Contents

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ISS Sighting Opportunities

For Denver:

LOCAL DURATION MAX ELEV APPROACH DEPARTURE

DATE/TIME (MIN) (DEG) (DEG-DIR) (DEG-DIR)

Fri Aug 23, 9:21 PM 2 43 24-W 39-SSW

Sat Aug 24, 8:32 PM 4 81 35-WNW 17-SE

Sun Aug 25, 9:19 PM 3 15 10-W 13-SSW

Mon Aug 26, 8:32 PM 4 26 22-WSW 11-SSE

Sighting information for other cities can be found at NASA’s Satellite Sighting Information

NASA-TV Highlights (all times Eastern Daylight Time)

August 23, Friday

6 - 10:45 a.m. - Live Interviews on Artic Sea Ice - GSFC (Media Channel)

6 a.m. - Replay of LADEE Prelaunch Briefing - HQ (Public and Education Channels)

10 a.m. - Replay of LADEE Prelaunch Briefing - HQ (Public and Education Channels)

1-2 p.m. - Live Interviews on Arctic Sea Ice - GSFC (Media Channel)

Watch NASA TV on the Net by going to the NASA website.

Return to Contents

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Space Calendar

Aug 23 - Comet 79P/du Toit-Hartley Perihelion (1.124 AU)

Aug 23 - Comet P/2013 J2 (McNaught) Perihelion (2.148 AU)

Aug 23 - Asteroid 137126 (1999 CF9) Near-Earth Flyby (0.063 AU)

Aug 23 - Asteroid 2653 Principia Closest Approach To Earth (1.631 AU)

Aug 23 - Asteroid 2309 Mr. Spock Closest Approach To Earth (2.031 AU)

Aug 23 - Asteroid 2421 Nininger Closest Approach To Earth (2.108 AU)

Aug 24 - Asteroid 52760 (1998 ML14) Near-Earth Flyby (0.056 AU)

Aug 24 - Asteroid 2875 Lagerkvist Closest Approach To Earth (2.075 AU)

Aug 25 - Northern Iota Aquarids Meteor Shower Peak

Aug 25 - Comet P/2005 RV25 (LONEOS-Christensen) At Opposition (3.406 AU)

Aug 25 - Asteroid 224 Oceana Occults HIP 17588 (6.4 Magnitude Star)

Aug 25 - [Aug 20] Asteroid 2013 QR1 Near-Earth Flyby (0.021 AU)

Aug 25 - Asteroid 232691 (2004 AR1) Near-Earth Flyby (0.054 AU)

Aug 25 - Kuiper Belt Object 225088 (2007 OR10) At Opposition (85.875 AU)

Aug 25 - 10th Anniversary (2003), Spitzer Space Telescope Launch

Aug 26 - Comet C/2013 E2 (Iwamoto) Closest Approach To Earth (1.899 AU)

Aug 26 - Comet P/1997 T3 (Lagerkvist-Carsenty) Closest Approach To Earth (4.164 AU)

Aug 26 - Asteroid 8992 Magnanimity Closest Approach To Earth (0.892 AU)

Source: JPL Space Calendar

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Food for Thought

New Imagery of Asteroid Mission

NASA released Aug. 22 new photos and video animations depicting the agency's planned mission to find,

capture, redirect, and study a near-Earth asteroid. The images depict crew operations including the Orion

spacecraft's trip to and rendezvous with the relocated asteroid, as well as astronauts maneuvering through a

spacewalk to collect samples from the asteroid. The photos and video can be found at

http://www.nasa.gov/content/new-imagery-of-asteroid-mission/index.html.

Part of President Obama's FY 2014 budget request for NASA, the asteroid initiative capitalizes on activities

across the agency's human exploration, space technology and science efforts. NASA is enhancing its ongoing

efforts to identify and characterize near-Earth objects for scientific investigation, and to find potentially

hazardous asteroids and targets appropriate for capture.

The agency is creating an asteroid mission baseline concept to develop further in 2014 to help engineers

establish more details about the mission. Meanwhile, engineers and scientists across the agency continue to

evaluate several alternatives, as well as ideas from the public, for consideration throughout mission planning.

The asteroid initiative will incorporate advanced solar electric propulsion technology as a power source for

spacecraft, offering greater flexibility to the spacecraft and mission planners. The mission also leverages the

agency's progress on the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft and other cutting-edge technology

developments.

Source: NASA Return to Contents

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Space Image of the Week

NASA's Spitzer Telescope Celebrates 10 Years in Space

Explanation: Ten years after a Delta II rocket launched NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, lighting up the night

sky over Cape Canaveral, Fla., the fourth of the agency's four Great Observatories continues to illuminate the

dark side of the cosmos with its infrared eyes.

The telescope studied comets and asteroids, counted stars, scrutinized planets and galaxies, and discovered

soccer-ball-shaped carbon spheres in space called buckyballs. Moving into its second decade of scientific

scouting from an Earth-trailing orbit, Spitzer continues to explore the cosmos near and far. One additional task

is helping NASA observe potential candidates for a developing mission to capture, redirect and explore a near-

Earth asteroid.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Source: NASA Return to Contents