Two Asteroids to Pass by Earth Wednesday

PASADENA, Calif. – Two asteroids, several meters in diameter and in unrelated orbits, will pass within the moon's distance of Earth on Wednesday, Sept. 8.

Both asteroids should be observable near closest approach to Earth with moderate-sized amateur telescopes. Neither of these objects has a chance of hitting Earth. A 10-meter-sized near-Earth asteroid from the undiscovered population of about 50 million would be expected to pass almost daily within a lunar distance, and one might strike Earth's atmosphere about every 10 years on average...

NASA's Magnetospheric Mission Passes Major Milestone

The universe is still an arcane place that scientists know very little about, but a new NASA Solar Terrestrial Probe mission is going to shed light on one especially mysterious event called magnetic reconnection. It occurs when magnetic lines of force cross, cancel, and reconnect releasing magnetic energy in the form of heat and charged-particle kinetic energy...

NASA Chat: Cheating the Weather to Improve On-Time Arrivals

We've all heard this announcement on an airplane before: "Uh, folks, we've got some weather around the airport right now. So I expect we'll be circling probably for the next half hour or so." Heather Arneson, a NASA Aeronautics Scholarship recipient and doctoral student at the University of Illinois, spent her summer at NASA working on ways to better control flows of aircraft into airspace impacted by weather...

NASA Tops Off Earl Research with Historic Global Hawk Flight

NASA completed a historic day for its hurricane research on Thursday as it put the Global Hawk over Earl, marking the first time the unmanned drone flew over a fully formed hurricane...

Missing Piece Inspires New Look at Mars Puzzle

September 03, 2010

PASADENA, Calif. -- Experiments prompted by a 2008 surprise from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander suggest that soil examined by NASA's Viking Mars landers in 1976 may have contained carbon-based chemical building blocks of life...

Russian Firestorm: Finding a Fire Cloud from Space

Thick, choking smoke hung over Russia on August 1, 2010, adding to the misery of a stifling summer heat wave. Thousands of people were fleeing nearly 700 fires burning in the drought-dried forests and peat bogs of western Russia, while those not directly threatened were struggling to see through and breathe the smoky air.

Spitzer Finds a Flavorful Mix of Asteroids

New research from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveals that asteroids somewhat near Earth, termed near-Earth objects, are a mixed bunch, with a surprisingly wide array of compositions. Like a piñata filled with everything from chocolates to fruity candies, these asteroids come in assorted colors and compositions. Some are dark and dull; others are shiny and bright. The Spitzer observations of 100 known near-Earth asteroids demonstrate that the objects’ diversity is greater than previously thought...

NASA Selects Science Investigations for Solar Probe Plus

WASHINGTON -- NASA has begun development of a mission to visit and study the sun closer than ever before. The unprecedented project, named Solar Probe Plus, is slated to launch no later than 2018.
The small car-sized spacecraft will plunge directly into the sun's atmosphere approximately four million miles from our star's surface. It will explore a region no other spacecraft ever has encountered. NASA has selected five science investigations that will unlock the sun's biggest mysteries...

NASA's Successful Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Mission Comes to

One of NASA's orbiting sentinels is expected to return to Earth in a few days. The agency's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation (ICESat) satellite completed a very productive scientific mission earlier this year. NASA lowered the satellite's orbit last month and then decommissioned the spacecraft in preparation for re-entry. It is estimated that the satellite will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and largely burn up on or about August 29.

ICESat was launched in January 2003, as a three-year mission with a goal of returning science data for five years. It was the first mission of its kind –specifically designed to study Earth's polar regions with a space-based laser altimeter called the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System, or GLAS...

Hurricane Katrina: A NASA Satellite Video Retrospective

In early August 2005, Katrina was just a name. By September, it had become synonymous with the costliest and one of the deadliest tropical cyclones in U.S. history.

Five years later, NASA is revisiting Hurricane Katrina with a short video that shows the storm as captured by NASA satellites. NASA provides space-based satellite observations, field research missions, and computer climate modeling to further scientists' understanding of these storms. NASA also provides measurements and modeling of global sea surface temperatures, precipitation, winds and ocean heat content -- all ingredients that contribute to the formation of tropical cyclones (the general name for typhoons, tropical storms and hurricanes)...

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer Makes Last Stop on Earth

A new experiment designed to reveal the origin and structure of the universe has reached its last stop on Earth before it’s set to ride into orbit aboard space shuttle Endeavour early next year.

The long-awaited Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS) arrived Aug. 26 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, secured in the belly of a U.S. Air Force C-5M cargo plane that arrived at the launch center with a late-morning touchdown on the shuttle's runway...

Tracing the Big Picture of Mars' Atmosphere

August 26, 2010

One of the instruments on a 2016 mission to orbit Mars will provide daily maps of global, pole-to-pole, vertical distributions of the temperature, dust, water vapor and ice clouds in the Martian atmosphere.

The joint European-American mission, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, will seek faint gaseous clues about possible life on Mars. This instrument, called the ExoMars Climate Sounder, will supply crucial context with its daily profiling of the atmosphere's changing structure...

Kepler Discovers Multiple Planets Transiting a Single Star

August 26, 2010:  NASA's Kepler spacecraft has discovered the first confirmed planetary system with more than one planet crossing in front of, or transiting, the same star.

The transit signatures of two distinct Saturn-sized planets were seen in the data for a sun-like star designated "Kepler-9." The planets were named Kepler-9b and 9c. The discovery incorporates seven months of observations of more than 156,000 stars as part of an ongoing search for Earth-sized planets outside our solar system. The findings will be published in Thursday's issue of the journal Science...

The Mutating Mars Hoax

August 25, 2010:  It spreads, it mutates, it refuses to die.

For the seventh year in a row, the Mars Hoax is infecting email boxes around the world. Passed from one reader to another, the message states that on August 27th Mars will approach Earth and swell to the size of a full Moon. "NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN," the email declares--always in caps.

News flash: It's not true.

(Read the rest of                                                                                  http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/25aug_marshoax/)

Pulverized Planet Dust May Lie Around Double Stars

PASADENA, Calif. -- Tight double-star systems might not be the best places for life to spring up, according to a new study using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The infrared observatory spotted a surprisingly large amount of dust around three mature, close-orbiting star pairs. Where did the dust come from? Astronomers say it might be the aftermath of tremendous planetary collisions.

( Read the rest oF                                                                          http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/news/spitzer20100823.html)