[Spacetalk] http://www.nasa.gov/index.html

Thu May 28 07:00:46 CDT 2015

Good morning all,
 This week is flying....I know for many of you, the school year is almost over.....it seems crazy how fast the time disappears...all the more reason for us to appreciate and enjoy the day we are in...the visit to Knight's Elementary was great...a full day for sure, I spoke with each grade individually from K thru 5th, then spent a little time in the classroom with the 5th graders who have been using the group email in their class...it is so much fun to be with the kids....I would like to thank Michele for all her coordination and also Mrs. Jacobs, whose second grade class, after the presentation went back to their classroom and wrote me thank you cards which were so cute....there is so much excitement as the New Horizons mission approached Pluto,  hope you can share it with the kids and maybe they will follow it through the summer when it reaches its historic arrival at Pluto on July 14th....3 billion miles away....wishing you all a wonderful day...we have to remember to always do our best, enjoy everything we do, live in the present, make each day special, let those we care about most know....smile & have fun, Gabe

NASA's New Horizons Detects Pluto Surface Features, Including Possible Polar Cap
Features from Deep Space

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NASA's New Horizons Sees More Detail as It Draws Closer to Pluto
What a difference 20 million miles makes! Images of Pluto from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft are growing in scale as the spacecraft approaches its mysterious target. The new images, taken May 8-12 using a powerful telescopic camera and downlinked last week, reveal more detail about Pluto's complex and high contrast surface.
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These images show Pluto in the latest series of New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) photos, taken May 8-12, 2015, compared to LORRI images taken one month earlier. In the month between these image sets, New Horizons' distance to Pluto decreased from 68 million miles (110 million kilometers) to 47 million miles (75 million kilometers), as the spacecraft speeds toward a close encounter with the Pluto system in mid-July. The April images are shown on the left, with the May images on the right. All have been rotated to align Pluto's rotational axis with the vertical direction (up-down), as depicted schematically in the center panel. Between April and May, Pluto appears to get larger as the spacecraft gets closer, with Pluto's apparent size increasing by approximately 50 percent. Pluto rotates around its axis every 6.4 Earth days, and these images show the variations in Pluto's surface features during its rotation. These images are displayed at four times the native LORRI image size, and have been processed using a method called deconvolution, which sharpens the original images to enhance features on Pluto. Deconvolution can occasionally add "false" details, so the finest details in these pictures will need to be confirmed by images taken from closer range in the next few weeks. All of the images are displayed using the same linear brightness scale.
The images were taken from just under 50 million miles (77 million kilometers) away, using the  Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on New Horizons. Because New Horizons was approximately 20 million miles closer to Pluto in mid-May than in mid-April, the new images contain about twice as many pixels on the object as images made in mid-April.
A technique called image deconvolution sharpens the raw, unprocessed pictures beamed back to Earth. In the April images, New Horizons scientists determined that Pluto has broad surface markings - some bright, some dark - including a bright area at one pole that may be a polar cap. The newer imagery released here shows finer details. Deconvolution can occasionally produce spurious details, so the finest details in these images will need confirmation from images to be made from closer range in coming weeks.
"As New Horizons closes in on Pluto, it's transforming from a point of light to a planetary object of intense interest," said NASA's Director of Planetary Science Jim Green. "We're in for an exciting ride for the next seven weeks."

"These new images show us that Pluto's differing faces are each distinct; likely hinting at what may be very complex surface geology or variations in surface composition from place to place," added New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. "These images also continue to support the hypothesis that Pluto has a polar cap whose extent varies with longitude; we'll be able to make a definitive determination of the polar bright region's iciness when we get compositional spectroscopy of that region in July."
The images New Horizons returns will dramatically improve in coming weeks as the spacecraft speeds closer to its July 14 encounter with the Pluto system, covering about 750,000 miles per day.
"By late June the image resolution will be four times better than the images made May 8-12, and by the time of closest approach, we expect to obtain images with more than 5,000 times the current resolution," said Hal Weaver, the mission's project scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
Following a January 2006 launch, New Horizons is currently about 2.95 billion miles from home; the spacecraft is healthy and all systems are operating normally.
APL designed, built, and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. SwRI leads the science team, payload operations and encounter science planning. New Horizons is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Last Updated: May 28, 2015
Editor: Tricia Talbert

NASA Begins Testing Mars Lander in Preparation for Next Mission to Red Planet
Testing is underway on NASA's next mission on the journey to Mars, a stationary lander scheduled to launch in March 2016.
The lander is called InSight, an abbreviation for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. It is about the size of a car and will be the first mission devoted to understanding the interior structure of the Red Planet. Examining the planet's deep interior could reveal clues about how all rocky planets, including Earth, formed and evolved.
[http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/thumbnails/image/15-106a.jpg]<http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/15-106a.jpg>
Engineers and technicians at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, run a test of deploying the solar arrays on NASA's InSight lander. Photo taken April 30, 2015.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin
The current testing will help ensure InSight can operate in and survive deep space travel and the harsh conditions of the Martian surface. The spacecraft will lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and land on Mars about six months later.
The technical capabilities and knowledge gained from Insight, and other Mars missions, are crucial to NASA's journey to Mars, which includes sending astronauts to the Red Planet in the 2030s.
"Today, our robotic scientific explorers are paving the way, making great progress on the journey to Mars," said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Together, humans and robotics will pioneer Mars and the solar system."
[http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/styles/side_image/public/thumbnails/image/15-106b.jpg]
The solar arrays on NASA's InSight lander are deployed in this April 30 test inside a clean room. This configuration is how the spacecraft will look on the surface of Mars.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin
During the environmental testing phase at Lockheed Martin's Space Systems facility near Denver, the lander will be exposed to extreme temperatures, vacuum conditions of nearly zero air pressure simulating interplanetary space, and a battery of other tests over the next seven months. The first will be a thermal vacuum test in the spacecraft's "cruise" configuration, which will be used during its seven-month journey to Mars. In the cruise configuration, the lander is stowed inside an aeroshell capsule and the spacecraft's cruise stage - for power, communications, course corrections and other functions on the way to Mars -- is fastened to the capsule.
"The assembly of InSight went very well and now it's time to see how it performs," said Stu Spath, InSight program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver. "The environmental testing regimen is designed to wring out any issues with the spacecraft so we can resolve them while it's here on Earth. This phase takes nearly as long as assembly, but we want to make sure we deliver a vehicle to NASA that will perform as expected in extreme environments."
Other tests include vibrations simulating launch and checking for electronic interference between different parts of the spacecraft.  The testing phase concludes with a second thermal vacuum test in which the spacecraft is exposed to the temperatures and atmospheric pressures it will experience as it operates on the Martian surface.
The mission's science team includes U.S. and international co-investigators from universities, industry and government agencies.
"It's great to see the spacecraft put together in its launch configuration," said InSight Project Manager Tom Hoffman at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California. "Many teams from across the globe have worked long hours to get their elements of the system delivered for these tests. There still remains much work to do before we are ready for launch, but it is fantastic to get to this critical milestone."

The InSight mission is led by JPL's Bruce Banerdt. The Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, France's space agency, and the German Aerospace Center are each contributing a science instrument to the two-year scientific mission. InSight's international science team includes researchers from Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company built the lander.
For addition information about the mission, visit:
http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov
More information about NASA's journey to Mars is available online at:
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/journeytomars

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