NASA's IceCube No Longer On Ice -

This file photo shows examples of three-unit (3U) CubeSats. 

At about a foot in length and four inches wide, these are similar in design to IceCube and the five selected heliophysics CubeSats. 

Image courtesy NASA.

NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD) has chosen a team at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to build its first Earth science-related CubeSat mission.

The tiny payload, known as IceCube or Earth-1, will demonstrate and validate a new 874-gigahertz submillimeter-wave receiver that could help advance scientists' understanding of ice clouds and their role in climate change.

SMD also selected five heliophysics-related missions, two involving Goddard scientists who will serve as co-investigators responsible primarily for data analysis and instrument design.

All will fly on a three-unit or 3U CubeSat, which is comprised of individual units each about four inches on a side. Each satellite will weigh about three pounds.

For the IceCube team, led by Principal Investigator Dong Wu, the news was sweet.

"Needless to say, we were thrilled when we got the news that the directorate had chosen it as its first Earth-1 CubeSat," said Jeff Piepmeier, associate head of Goddard's Microwave Instruments and Technology Branch. "I really think it's an important opportunity."

Qualifying COTS Receiver As the sole Earth science CubeSat mission selected by SMD, IceCube will demonstrate and space-qualify a commercially available 874-gigahertz submillimeter-wave receiver developed by Virginia Diodes Inc. (VDI), of Charlottesville, Virginia, under a NASA Small Business Innovative Research contract.

Ultimately, the team wants to infuse this receiver into an ice-cloud imaging radiometer for NASA's proposed Aerosol-Cloud-Ecosystems (ACE) mission.

IceCube will lead to the development of an instrument capable of providing an accurate daily assessment of the global distribution of atmospheric ice.

Knowing this distribution will help scientists describe the linkage between the hydrologic and energy cycles in the climate system.

Ice clouds ultimately are a product of precipitating cloud systems and dramatically affect Earth's emission of infrared energy into space and its reflection and absorption of the sun's energy.

To this day, the amount of atmospheric ice on a global scale remains highly uncertain.

The key is obtaining measurements over a broader frequency band, from the infrared to submillimeter wavelengths, IceCube team members said.

Submillimeter wavelength coverage fills the data gap in the middle and upper troposphere where ice clouds are often too opaque for infrared and visible sensors to penetrate. Microwave wavelengths are not sensitive to ice.

Although NASA has flown submillimeter receivers in airborne missions, a capability that was non-existent just a decade ago before VDI began advancing its 874-gigahertz receiver, it has not flown them in space.

"What we want to do is modify this receiver to fly in space and raise its technology-readiness level for deployment on a satellite," said Goddard scientist Paul Racette, a member of Goddard's IceCube team. Although the technology itself has proven its mettle in aircraft, challenges remain.

"The receiver technology is very challenging," Racette added.

"The team must make sure the receiver is sensitive enough to detect and measure ice clouds using little power from a very small platform. This project will help us develop the processes required to space-qualify commercial-off-the-shelf components," he said.

IceCube will be managed and co-funded by NASA's Earth Science Technology Office (ESTO), which has an existing stable of CubeSat projects under development and already in-orbit.

IceCube will be the eighth Earth science technology validation effort to use the CubeSat platform.

IceCube World's largest particle detector detects first high-energy neutrinos from the cosmos

This is the highest energy neutrino ever observed, with an estimated energy of 1.14 PeV. 

It was detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole on Jan. 3, 2012. IceCube physicists named it Ernie.

Twenty-eight events with energies around and above 30 TeV were observed in an all-sky search, conducted between May 2010 and May 2012, for high-energy neutrino events with vertices contained in the IceCube neutrino detector. Credit: Credit: IceCube Collaboration

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a particle detector buried in the Antarctic ice, is a demonstration of the power of the human passion for discovery, where scientific ingenuity meets technological innovation.

Today, nearly 25 years after the pioneering idea of detecting neutrinos in ice, the IceCube Collaboration announces the observation of 28 very high-energy particle events that constitute the first solid evidence for astrophysical neutrinos from cosmic accelerators.

Francis Halzen

"This is the first indication of very high-energy neutrinos coming from outside our solar system, with energies more than one million times those observed in 1987 in connection with a supernova seen in the Large Magellanic Cloud," says Francis Halzen, principal investigator of IceCube and the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

"It is gratifying to finally see what we have been looking for. This is the dawn of a new age of astronomy."

Details of the research appear in a manuscript published in the Nov. 22, 2013 issue of the journal Science.

Because they rarely interact with matter, the nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos can carry information about the workings of the highest-energy and most distant phenomena in the universe.

Gregory Breit

Billions of neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of the Earth every second, but the vast majority originate either in the sun or in the Earth's atmosphere.

Far rarer are neutrinos from the outer reaches of our galaxy or beyond, which have long been theorized to provide insights into the powerful cosmic objects where high-energy cosmic rays may originate: supernovas, black holes, pulsars, active galactic nuclei and other extreme extragalactic phenomena.

IceCube, run by the international IceCube Collaboration and headquartered at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at UW–Madison, was designed to accomplish two major scientific goals: measure the flux, or rate, of high-energy neutrinos, and try to identify some of their sources.

This is an artistic rendering of IceCube DOMs below the Antarctic ice. Inside IceCube, a total of 5,160 sensitive detectors hang from 86 steel cables. 

Credit: Jamie Yang, The IceCube Collaboration.

The analysis presented in the Science paper reveals the first high-energy neutrino flux ever observed, a highly statistically significant signal (more than 4 sigma) that meets expectations for neutrinos originating in cosmic accelerators.

"From hints in earlier IceCube analyses, we have used improved analysis methods and more data to make a significant step forward in our search for the elusive astrophysical signal," says collaboration spokesperson Olga Botner, of Uppsala University.

"We are now working hard on improving the significance of our observation, and on understanding what this signal means and where it comes from."

More information: Evidence for High-Energy Extraterrestrial Neutrinos at the IceCube Detector; The IceCube Collaboration; Science (2013); DOI: 10.1126/science.1242856

IceCube Detector under Antarctic ice may have seen first cosmic neutrinos

IceCube, the giant experiment buried beneath the South Pole's ice has recorded the first neutrinos ever detected originating outside our solar system, researchers say.

Neutrinos are produced in our atmosphere but the IceCube experiment -- a cubic kilometer of sensitive detectors sunk into the Antarctic ice -- has seen the first "cosmic neutrinos," they said.

IceCube consists of 86 strings, each with 60 sensitive light detectors strung along it like "fairy lights," sunk deep into the ice.

Rare collisions of neutrinos with the nuclei of atoms in the ice produce a brief flash that the detectors can catch.

With more than 5,000 detectors catching the flashes the direction of the neutrinos' arrival on Earth can be determined, the researchers said.

Neutrinos can be produced in the Earth's atmosphere -- IceCube picks up about 100,000 of that variety a year -- but previous attempts to isolate neutrinos created in far-flung cosmic processes had all failed.

However, in April the IceCube research team reported detecting two neutrinos -- nicknamed Bert and Ernie -- with energy levels high enough to suggest a cosmic rather than atmospheric origin.

The team has now reported 26 more events of similar energy that they expect will also be confirmed as cosmic in origin.

Francis Halzen

Detection is just a first step and "of course, there's much more to do," IceCube principle investigator Francis Halzen told reporters.

"It's after you find them that the work starts; these events are very difficult to analyze."

The study results were presented Wednesday at the IceCube Particle Astrophysics Symposium in Madison, Wis.