NASA Rover Opportunity: On the 2,690th Martian Day

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity used its navigation camera to take this picture showing a light-toned rock, nicknamed Tisdale 2, on its 2,690th Martian day, or sol, of the rover's work on Mars (Aug. 18, 2011). The rock is about 12 inches (30 centimeters) tall.

In subsequent sols, the rover used tools on its robotic arm to examine Tisdale 2. That rock and others on the ground beyond it were apparently ejected by the impact that excavated a 66-foot-wide (20-meter-wide) crater, called Odyssey, which is nearby to the left of this scene.

Odyssey and these rocks are on a low ridge called Cape York, which is a segment of the western rim of Endeavour crater. Part of Opportunity's array of photovoltaic cells is visible in the foreground.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Paragon Software Selected For ISS Disaster Recovery Solutions

Paragon Software Group reached a milestone in the company's brief history as it soared into the heavens on the final flight of America's Space Shuttle Atlantis.

Selected by NASA's Prime Bioastronautics contractor, Wyle, Paragon's backup and disaster recovery software, Hard Disk Manager (HDM) 11 Professional now orbits the Earth on the International Space Station. HDM 11 serves as the primary backup and recovery software for the latest generation Ultrasound system also launched on Atlantis.

The International Space Station's primary goal is to provide a platform for scientific research. Human subject research is managed by Wyle as part of the Bioastronautics Contract.

Certification of the next generation ultrasound required being able to successfully restore the new ultrasound system to its launch configuration.

Lockheed Martin, one of the subcontractors operating with Wyle, the prime contractor on the Bioastronautics Contract, needed a recovery solution that could meet its stringent specifications. As is often the case with space-related operations, a customized software solution was needed.

"At Paragon, we provide our clients with superior customer service regardless of where they are, now that extends to outer space," said Tom Fedro, president of Paragon Software Group.

"It was important to Wyle and Lockheed Martin to ensure that the astronauts operating on the Space Station could quickly and easily restore their systems back to an operable state - with the customized version of Hard Disk Manager, they can recover in a matter of minutes without any additional tools."

Paragon developed a custom-restore script that automated the system restore process via a USB-bootable flash drive with the click of a button.

Bioastronautics personnel evaluated several back-up and recovery tools. Of the tools available Paragon's HDM 11 came closest to meeting the project's needs. The Paragon team stepped in to close the gap, providing a customized solution which minimized user interaction.

HDM 11 Server provides a complete data backup and disaster recovery solution. A virtual add-on component is available for virtual environments.

Both versions offer the ability to perform bare-metal restores, file-level recovery, includes advanced data wiping algorithms, and automatic partition alignment. Additionally, HDM 11 Server enables data back up or migration of an active server with locked volumes, files or folders.

Paragon Software is also used by European Aerospace Contractors such as EADS, Thales, Astrium, etc.

NASA Swift: Gamma-Ray Bursts More Active Than Thought

From time to time, a huge explosion followed by a bright flash of light can be observed in space.

It's a colossal gamma-ray burst (GRB), emitting for a few seconds as much radiation as a million galaxies.

A new discovery made by NASA's Swift satellite showed that the extremely energetic flares that follow a gamma-ray burst (GRB) are not just space "hiccups", but in fact, they represent a continuation of the burst itself.

They are truly impressive space phenomena, as even the smallest GRB can emit the same amount of energy our Sun will emit over its expected 10 billion-year lifetime, in just one second.

The most luminous events known in the universe since the Big Bang are flashes of gamma rays, coming from seemingly random places in the sky and at random times, that last from milliseconds to many minutes and are often followed by "afterglow" emission at longer wavelengths (X-ray, UV, optical, IR and radio).

What causes such a tremendous discharge of energy? The core of a massive star collapsing to form a black hole or neutron star. The initial pulse of gamma-rays is usually followed by what was thought to be a short-lived X-ray flare.

Hans Krimm of Universities Space Research Association, Columbia, Md. and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and eight colleagues, have been able to prove that these X-ray flares are actually a continuation of the initial pulse, which proves that the GRB central engines are active much longer than previously thought.

This was done after analyzing such an event, named GRB 060714, for its detection date of July 14, 2006 and the results showed that the prompt gamma-ray emission and the subsequent X-ray flares appear to form a continuously connected and evolving succession of events.

"This pattern points to a continuous injection of energy from the central engine, perhaps fueled by sporadic infall of material onto a black hole. 

The black hole just keeps gobbling up gas and the engine keeps spewing out energy," says Krimm.

NASA Chandra Image: Spiral Galaxy NGC 3393

Evidence for a pair of supermassive black holes in a spiral galaxy has been found in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

This main image is a composite of X-rays from Chandra (blue) and optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (gold) of the spiral galaxy NGC 3393.

Meanwhile, the inset box shows the central region of NGC 3993 as observed just by Chandra.

The diffuse blue emission in the large image is from hot gas near the center of NGC 3393 and shows low energy X-rays.

The inset shows only high energy X-rays, including emission from iron.

This type of emission is a characteristic feature of growing black holes that are heavily obscured by dust and gas.

Two separate peaks of X-ray emission (roughly at 11 o'clock and 4 o'clock) can clearly be seen in the inset box. These two sources are black holes that are actively growing, generating X-ray emission as gas falls towards the black holes and becomes hotter.

The obscured regions around both black holes block the copious amounts of optical and ultraviolet light produced by infalling material.

At a distance of 160 million light years, NGC 3393 contains the nearest known pair of supermassive black holes. It is also the first time a pair of black holes has been found in a spiral galaxy like our Milky Way.

Separated by only 490 light years, the black holes in NGC 3393 are likely the remnant of a merger of two galaxies of unequal mass a billion or more years ago.

Dubbed "minor mergers" by scientists, such collisions of one larger and another smaller galaxy may, in fact, be the most common way for black hole pairs to form.

Until the latest Chandra observations of NGC 3393, however, it has has been difficult to find good candidates for minor mergers because the merged galaxy is expected to look like an ordinary spiral galaxy.

If this was a minor merger, the black hole in the smaller galaxy should have had a smaller mass than the other black hole before their host galaxies started to collide.

Good estimates of the masses of both black holes are not yet available to test this idea, although the observations do show that both black holes are more massive than about a million Suns.

Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/G. Fabbiano et al; Optical: NASA/STScI

Artist's concept of the Aquarius/SAC-D spacecraft, a collaboration between NASA and Argentina's space agency, with participation from Brazil, Canada, France and Italy. 

Aquarius, the NASA-built primary instrument on the spacecraft, will take NASA's first space-based measurements of ocean surface salinity, a key missing variable in satellite observations of Earth that links ocean circulation, the global balance of freshwater and climate.

Image credit: NASA

NASA's Aquarius instrument has successfully completed its commissioning phase and is now "tasting" the saltiness of Earth's ocean surface, making measurements from its perch in near-polar orbit.

"This marks the end of the long odyssey to design, build and launch this mission, and the start of a new journey of scientific exploration," said Aquarius Principal Investigator Gary Lagerloef of Earth and Space Research, Seattle.

"Scientists from around the world are ready and waiting to study this important new satellite measurement for ocean and climate research."


Aquarius will make NASA's first space observations of the salinity, or concentration of salt, at the ocean surface, a key variable in satellite studies of Earth.

Variations in salinity influence the ocean's deep circulation, outline the path freshwater takes around our planet and help drive Earth's climate.

The Aquarius science team will spend the coming months analyzing and calibrating the measurements and releasing preliminary data.

With the Aquarius instrument commissioning now complete, the SAC-D Instruments Flight Operations Teams, together with the SAC-D Mission Flight Operations Team in Argentina, are now engaged in commissioning the other seven SAC-D instruments.

Once all the observatory instruments are commissioned, a maneuver will be conducted to place Aquarius/SAC-D in its final orbit, 408 miles (657 kilometers) above Earth.

The Galactic evolution of phosphorus

As a galaxy evolves, its chemical composition changes and the abundance ratios of different elements are powerful probes of the underlying evolutionary processes.

Phosphorous is an element whose evolution has remained quite elusive until now, because it is difficult to detect in cool stars.

The infrared weak P I lines of the multiplet 1, at 1050-1082 nm, are the most reliable indicators of the presence of phosphorus.

The availability of CRIRES at VLT has permitted access to this wavelength range in stellar spectra.We attempt to measure the phosphorus abundance of twenty cool stars in the Galactic disk.

The spectra are analysed with one-dimensional model-atmospheres computed in Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium (LTE).

The line formation computations are performed assuming LTE. The ratio of phosphorus to iron behaves similarly to sulphur, increasing towards lower metallicity stars. Its ratio with respect to sulphur is roughly constant and slightly larger than solar, [P/S]=0.10+- 0.10.

We succeed in taking an important step towards the understanding of the chemical evolution of phosphorus in the Galaxy. However, the observed rise in the P/Fe abundance ratio is steeper than predicted by Galactic chemical evolution model model developed by Kobayashi and collaborators.

Phosphorus appears to evolve differently from the light odd-Z elements sodium and aluminium. The constant value of [P/S] with metallicity implies that P production is insensitive to the neutron excess, thus processes other than neutron captures operate.

We suggest that proton captures on 30Si and alpha captures on $27Al are possibilities to investigate. We see no clear distinction between our results for stars with planets and stars without any detected planet.

The Galactic evolution of phosphorus

NASA Space Weather: Hurricane Katia From Space

Katia was a tropical storm gathering energy over the Atlantic Ocean when one of the Expedition 28 crew took this photo on Aug. 31, 2011, from aboard the International Space Station.

The picture, taken with a 12-mm focal length, was captured at 14:09:01 GMT. 

Later in the day Katia was upgraded to hurricane status. 

Two Russian spacecraft -- a Progress and a Soyuz --can be seen parked at the orbital outpost on the left side of the frame.


Image Credit: NASA

TRMM captured a rainfall image of Tropical Storm Katia on August, 31, 2011 2:29 p.m. EDT. Yellow and green indicate rainfall between 20 and 40 millimeters (.78 to 1.57 inches) per hour. 

Dark red areas are considered heavy rainfall, as much as 50 mm (2 inches) of rain per hour. Credit: SSAI/NASA, Hal Pierce

This infrared image of Tropical Storm Katia's cold clouds shows large areas of strong convection (purple) surrounding center. It was taken by the AIRS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite on Sept. 1 at 12:47 a.m. EDT. Credit: NASA/JPL, Ed Olsen