NASA Tech Briefs Insider Blog

NASA Spacecraft Zaps Venus with a Laser

On June 5, NASA’s MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft flew past Venus just 338 km above the planet’s surface and shot a laser into the clouds. Although MESSENGER is on a mission to Mercury, the spacecraft must pass by Venus for a gravity assist en route. In passing, researchers hope to learn a few things about the planet with sulfuric acid clouds, a choking carbon dioxide atmosphere, and a surface hot enough to melt lead.

“We are treating the Venus flyby as a full dress rehearsal for the first flyby of Mercury in January 2008,” said Sean Solomon, the mission’s principal investigator at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “All of the spacecraft’s science instruments will be turned on during the flyby.”

The experiment aims to measure the location of Venus’ cloud decks. The Mercury Laser Altimeter (MLA) was designed to map the rocky topography of Mercury, but MLA turns out to have some nice properties for the study of Venus. In addition to the laser, MESSENGER will scrutinize Venus using high-resolution cameras, a suite of spectrometers ranging in wavelength from infrared to gamma rays, an energetic particle counter, and a magnetometer.

For more information about the MESSENGER mission, including a photo gallery and movies, click here.

Naval Academy Develops Satellite for NASA Instruments

A partnership between NASA and the U.S. Naval Academy is offering students the chance to build a satellite called “MidSTAR-2″ through a U.S. Department of Defense program that will carry four experiments into space in 2011 to look at different parts of Earth’s atmosphere, gamma rays, and solar winds. Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland are taking advantage of the opportunity to carry promising technologies into orbit for evaluation.

The NASA experiments that will fly on MidSTAR-2 are part of the Internal Research and Development Program at NASA Goddard. The program lets NASA send instruments into space without waiting for another mission. “This is a program where everyone wins,” said Dan Powell, MidSTAR program manager at NASA Goddard. “Students get an opportunity to build and integrate a satellite bus and our scientists’ instruments get a free ride.”

One of the instruments taking that ride is the Remote Sensing of the Thermospheric Temperature instrument that will be used to take the temperature of Earth’s thermosphere to determine how much it can slow low-altitude spacecraft. The thermosphere is Earth’s outermost layer of atmosphere, located about 50 to 340 miles above the surface. Because of the thin air, scientists can’t measure temperature directly, so they measure density of the air by seeing how much drag it puts on satellites.

For information about the MidSTAR program, click here.

NASA Wireless Sensor System Finds New Uses as Commercial Product

Beneath the waves near Key Largo, FL, an underwater lab called Aquarius provides a safe harbor for scientists to live and work for weeks at a time. For NASA, Aquarius provides an environment that is analogous to the International Space Station (ISS) and the space shuttle. To maintain Aquarius, NASA recruited Invocon of Conroe, TX, to develop wireless sensor technology that monitors and measures environmental and structural parameters inside the lab.

The project included the design, fabrication, and demonstration of a battery- powered, miniature wireless temperature sensor. NASA and Invocon agreed to take Invocon’s existing wireless network communication system and combine it with various microelectro- mechanical system (MEMS) sensors. The innovation consisted of a PC interface unit, a graphical user interface, and multiple wireless sensors that are each equivalent in size to a stack of five quarters.

Upon completion of the miniature wireless sensor, NASA’s Johnson Space Center applied it to the space shuttle to acquire temperature data from several fundamental locations in and around the shuttle crew compartment and avionics equipment. The sensor system has flown and operated successfully on more than 20 space shuttle missions. Further use of the technology is being investigated for monitoring carbon dioxide concentrations onboard the ISS.

Invocon’s wireless sensor system has been turned into a commercial product called MicroWIS-CO2, a wireless, remote, low-power, carbon dioxide data acquisition system for near-static sensing and recording applications.

Read the full story here.

NASA Spacecraft Aids in Forecast of Solar Radiation Storms

NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) now enables scientists to forecast solar radiation storms, giving future astronauts time to seek shelter and ground controllers time to safeguard satellites. The new method offers as much as one-hour advance notice when a storm is approaching.

Solar radiation storms are swarms of electrons, protons, and heavy ions accelerated to high speed by explosions on the sun. On Earth, humans are protected from these particles by Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. “Solar radiation storms are notoriously difficult to predict. They often take us by surprise, but now we’ve found a way to anticipate these events,” said Arik Posner, a physicist in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

The key to the breakthrough was the Comprehensive Suprathermal and Energetic Particle Analyzer (COSTEP) instrument on board the observatory. COSTEP counts particles coming from the sun and measures their energies. Posner looked at hundreds of radiation storms recorded by COSTEP between 1996 and 2002, and was able to construct an empirical, predictive matrix that involved plugging an electron data into the matrix, and an ion forecast emerging.

For more information, click here.

NASA/Industry Partnership Results in New Decision-Making Software

As part of NASA’s Partnership Seed Fund program, Goddard Space Flight Center is integrating the ILIADS software, a geospatial information system (GIS) it developed for lunar applications, with Questus(TM), a management and planning software tool developed by United Space Alliance (USA) for space shuttle operations. The integration will result in a new decision-making application that NASA can use to plan and carry out future robotic and crewed missions to the Moon.

Using internal research and development funding, Goddard technologists modified commercial off-the-shelf GIS software typically used in terrestrial applications to design ILIADS (Integrated Lunar Information Architecture for Decision Support). It gives users access to 3D lunar crater scenes, topographic contour maps, surface distance and elevation measurements, in situ resource and hazard maps, and historical mission data and other useful datasets.

The ILIADS-Questus software will let mission planners directly apply scientific data gathered from remote-sensing satellites and other sources to select potential landing and habitat sites. Ultimately, the tool will support human exploratory sorties on the lunar surface later in the next decade. USA can commercialize the new product, particularly in its work developing NASA’s next-generation trans- portation system, the Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). Goddard and USA expect to complete the integration of ILIADS and Questus in time for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a Goddard-led mission that will spend a year mapping the Moon after its launch in 2008.

Read the full story here.