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Space News Update — July 8, 2016 —

Contents

In the News

Story 1: Juno Team Begins Powering up Science Instruments

Story 2: Newly-Discovered Planet Has 3 Suns

Story 3: Hitomi Observes the Perseus Galaxy Cluster

Departments

The Night Sky

ISS Sighting Opportunities

Space Calendar

NASA-TV Highlights

Food for Thought

Space Image of the Week

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1. Juno Team Begins Powering up Science Instruments

The engineers and scientists working on NASA’s Juno mission have been busying themselves, getting their newly arrived Jupiter orbiter ready for operations around the largest planetary inhabitant in the solar system. Juno successfully entered Jupiter's orbit during a 35-minute engine burn on Monday, July 4. Confirmation that the burn had completed was received on Earth at 8:53 pm. PDT (11:53 p.m. EDT) that evening.

As planned, the spacecraft returned to high-rate communications on July 5 and powered up five of its science instruments on July 6. Per the mission plan, the remaining science instruments will be powered up before the end of the month. Juno’s science instruments had been turned off in the days leading up to

Jupiter orbit insertion.

The Juno team has scheduled a short trajectory correction maneuver on July 13 to refine the orbit around Jupiter.

"Prior to launch five years ago we planned a date and time for the Jupiter orbit insertion burn and the team nailed it,” said Rick Nybakken, project manager for Juno from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We are in our planned 53.4 day orbit. Now we are focusing on preparing for our fourth and final main engine burn, which will put us in our 14-day science orbit on October 19.”

The next time Juno’s orbit carries it close by the planet will be on Aug. 27. The flyby is expected to provide some preliminary science data. “We had to turn all our beautiful instruments off to help ensure a successful Jupiter orbit insertion on July 4,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “But next time around we will have our eyes and ears open. You can expect us to release some information about our findings around September 1.”

The Juno spacecraft launched on Aug. 5, 2011, from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

JPL manages the Juno mission for the principal investigator, Scott Bolton, of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Juno is part of NASA's New Frontiers Program, which is managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, built the spacecraft. Caltech in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

More information on the Juno mission is available at http://www.nasa.gov/juno

The public can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at http://www.facebook.com/NASAJuno and http://www.twitter.com/NASAJuno

Source: NASA Return to Contents

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2. Newly-Discovered Planet Has 3 Suns

If you thought Luke Skywalker's home planet, Tatooine, was a strange world with its two suns in the sky, imagine this: a planet with either constant daylight or triple sunrises and sunsets each day depending on the seasons (which last longer than human lifetimes).

Such a world has been discovered by a team of astronomers led by the University of Arizona using direct imaging. The planet, HD 131399Ab, is unlike any other known world – one with, by far, the widest known orbit within a multi-star system. The discovery will be published in an early online edition of the journal Science on July 7.

Located about 340 light years from Earth in the constellation Centaurus, HD 131399Ab is believed to be about 16 million years old, making it one of the youngest exoplanets discovered to date. With a temperature of 850 kelvins (about 1,070 F or 580 C) and weighing in at an estimated four Jupiter masses, it is also one of the coldest and least massive directly-imaged exoplanets.

"HD 131399Ab is one of the few exoplanets that have been directly imaged, and it's the first one in such an interesting dynamical configuration," said Daniel Apai, an assistant professor of Astronomy and Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona. He is the principal investigator of one of NASA’s teams in the Nexus for Exoplanet System Science (NExSS), which is an interdisciplinary network dedicated to the search for life on planets outside our solar system.

"For about half of the planet’s orbit, which lasts 550 Earth-years, three stars are visible in the sky, the fainter two always much closer together, and changing in apparent separation from the brightest star throughout the year," said Kevin Wagner, a doctoral student in Apai's research group and the paper's first author, who discovered HD 131399Ab. "For much of the planet’s year the stars appear close together, giving it a familiar night-side and day-side with a unique triple-sunset and sunrise each day. As the planet orbits and the stars

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grow farther apart each day, they reach a point where the setting of one coincides with the rising of the other – at which point the planet is in near-constant daytime for about one-quarter of its orbit, or roughly 140 Earth-years."

The planet marks the first discovery of an exoplanet made with SPHERE, which stands for the Spectro-Polarimetric High-Contrast Exoplanet Research Instrument. It is installed on the Very Large Telescope operated by the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, and dedicated to finding planets around other stars. SPHERE is sensitive to infrared light, making it capable of detecting the heat signatures of young planets, along with sophisticated features correcting for atmospheric disturbances and blocking out the otherwise blinding light of their host stars.

Although repeated and long-term observations will be needed to precisely determine the planet's trajectory among its host stars, observations and simulations seem to suggest the following scenario: At the center of the system lies a star estimated to be 80 percent more massive than the sun and dubbed HD 131399A, which itself is orbited by the two remaining stars, B and C, at about 300 AU (one AU, or astronomical unit, equals the average distance between Earth and the sun). All the while, B and C twirl around each other like a spinning dumbbell, separated by a distance roughly equal to that between our sun and Saturn.

In this scenario, planet HD 131399Ab travels around the central star, A, in an orbit about twice as large as Pluto’s if compared to our solar system, and brings the planet to about one-third of the separation of the stars themselves. The authors point out that a range of orbital scenarios is possible, and the verdict on long-term stability of the system will have to wait for planned follow-up observations that will better constrain the planet's orbit.

"If the planet was further away from the most massive star in the system, it would be kicked out of the system," Apai explained. "Our computer simulations showed that this type of orbit can be stable, but if you change things around just a little bit, it can become unstable very quickly."

Planets in multi-star systems are of special interest to astronomers and planetary scientists because they provide an example of how planet formation functions in these extreme scenarios. While multi-star systems seem exotic to us in our orbit around our solitary star – multi-star systems are in fact just as common as single stars.

"It is not clear how this planet ended up on its wide orbit in this extreme system, and we can't say yet what this means for our broader understanding of the types of planetary systems out there, but it shows there is more variety out there than many would have deemed possible," Wagner said. "What we do know is that planets in multi-star systems are much less explored, and potentially just as numerous as planets in single-star systems."

“This is the kind of discovery that helps us place our own solar system in the context of the diversity of worlds beyond it, by finding systems that are much different from our own,” says Mary Voytek, senior scientist for astrobiology and program manager of the NExSS network at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “By combining these results with research on the formation of habitable worlds, we will have a better understanding of the systems in which habitable worlds might form. NExSS will ensure such connections are made, within and beyond our NExSS teams.”

NExSS is a NASA-led research coordination network dedicated to the study of planetary habitability by bringing together researchers from different fields. NExSS aims to build an international community of interdisciplinary researchers, including those supported by other agencies, dedicated to exoplanet research through NASA investments. This network will explore the diversity of exoplanets and to learn how their history, geology and climate interact to create the conditions for life. NExSS investigators also strive to put planets into an architectural context – as solar systems built over the eons through dynamical processes and sculpted by

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stars. Based on our understanding of our own solar system and habitable planet Earth, researchers in the network aim to identify where habitable niches are most likely to occur, which planets are most likely to be habitable. NExSS will accelerate the discovery and characterization of other potentially life-bearing worlds in the galaxy.

The co-authors on the paper are Markus Kasper and Melissa McClure of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany; Kaitlin Kratter at the UA's Steward Observatory; Massimo Roberto at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore; and Jean-Luc Beuzit with the University of Grenoble Alpes and the National Center of Scientific Research, both in Grenoble, France.

Related Links

• NASA's exoplanets website • Feature: "NASA's NExSS Coalition to Lead Search for Life on Distant Worlds" • NExSS website • "Many Worlds" blog

Source: NASA Return to Contents

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3. Hitomi Observes the Perseus Galaxy Cluster

In its brief time gathering data this year, the Hitomi X-ray Observatory discovered something quite serene: the calm core in a massive cluster of galaxies.

Scientists from the international Hitomi mission report July 6 in the journal Nature that a "remarkably quiescent atmosphere" exists at the heart of the Perseus cluster, located in the constellation Perseus. The new information, obtained with an innovative Soft X-ray Spectrometer (SXS), gives astronomers fresh insight into the dynamics of the hot, flowing gas that pervades galaxy clusters and other important astrophysical phenomena.

Yale played a prominent role in the project. Andrew Szymkowiak, a Yale senior research scientist in astronomy and physics, was a key member of the SXS development team over the past 30 years. Meg Urry, Yale's Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy; Paolo Coppi, professor of astronomy and physics; and Szymkowiak are co-authors of the new study. The principal investigator is Tadayuki Takahashi of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the University of Tokyo.

"This cluster contains an active galaxy in its core, and there is clear evidence in previously obtained x-ray images that outflows from this 'central engine' have injected shocks and bubbles into the cluster core," Szymkowiak said. "The surprising result from the spectra obtained with the SXS is that the bulk of the x-ray gas only shows evidence for very small amounts of turbulence from these outflow events."

Measuring the amount of turbulence is important, the researchers said, because the size of galaxy clusters is a useful tool for measuring the parameters of cosmology and the growth of structure in the universe.

The Hitomi mission launched in February, led by JAXA and featuring participation from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and research institutions around the world. The project previously had gone by the name ASTRO-H.

Hitomi was intended to spend several years studying the formation of galaxy clusters and the warping of space and time around black holes. The spacecraft featured a number of cutting-edge technologies, including the SXS, built to generate the most accurate X-ray measurements to date of objects in deep regions of space.

Unfortunately, the mission went awry just weeks after the launch, when JAXA lost control of the spacecraft. Several additional scientific papers are expected to emerge from the initial Hitomi data.

Source: Spaceref.com Return to Contents

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The Night Sky Friday, July 8

• The waxing crescent Moon shines in the west at dusk. Jupiter is the bright "star" some 3° or 4° upper left of it (for North America). When night arrives, look for Sigma Leonis, magnitude 4.0, glimmering 0.9° to Jupiter's upper left (not shown on the twilight chart here).

Saturday, July 9

• Jupiter now shines to the Moon's lower right during and after dusk. The Moon is 1.3 light-seconds away; Jupiter this week is 49 light-minutes away, 2,200 times farther.

Sunday, July 10

• After nightfall, Altair shines in the east-southeast. It's the second-brightest star on the eastern side of the sky, after Vega very high to its upper left.

Look above Altair by a finger-width at arm's length for little orange Tarazed. A bit more than a fist-width to Altair's lower left is Delphinus, the Dolphin, leaping leftward below the Milky Way.

Monday, July 11

• First-quarter Moon (exact at 8:52 p.m. EDT). As twilight fades, watch for 1st-magnitude Spica emerging into view about 6° to the Moon's lower left (as seen during the twilight times for North America).

Tuesday, July 12

• As soon as it's dark, look just ½° north (upper right) of Jupiter for 4th-magnitude Sigma Leonis, Leo's hind foot. Tonight they're the closest they will appear.

Source: Sky & Telescope Return to Contents

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ISS Sighting Opportunities

For Denver:

Date Visible Max Height Appears Disappears Sat Jul 9, 4:51 AM 4 min 79° 13° above SW 44° above ENE Sun Jul 10, 4:00 AM 3 min 37° 30° above S 19° above ENE Mon Jul 11, 3:09 AM 1 min 17° 17° above ESE 11° above E Mon Jul 11, 4:42 AM 4 min 43° 14° above WSW 28° above NNE Sighting information for other cities can be found at NASA’s Satellite Sighting Information

NASA-TV Highlights (all times Eastern Daylight Time)

Friday, July 8

1 p.m., 6 p.m. Replay of the Russian State Commission Meeting and Final ISS Expedition 48-49 Pre-Launch Crew News Conference in Baikonur, Kazakhstan (Ivanishin, Rubins, Onishi) (NTV-1 (Public), NTV-3 (Media))

2 p.m., 7 p.m., 10 p.m. NASA Television Video File News Feed of ISS Expedition 48-49/Soyuz MS-01 Pre-Launch, Launch Video B-Roll and Related Interviews (NTV-1 (Public), NTV-3 (Media))

11:30 p.m., ISS Expedition 48-49/Soyuz MS-01 Docking Coverage (Ivanishin, Rubins, Onishi; docking scheduled at 12:13 a.m. ET July 9) – JSC via Moscow, Russia (all channels)

11:30 p.m., Friday, July 8 - ISS Expedition 48-49/Soyuz MS-01 Docking Coverage (Ivanishin, Rubins, Onishi; docking scheduled at 12:12 a.m. ET July 9) (NTV-1 (Public), NTV-3 (Media))

Saturday, July 9

2 a.m., ISS Expedition 48-49 (Ivanishin, Rubins, Onishi) Soyuz MS-01 Hatch Opening and Other Activities hatch opening scheduled at approximately 2:50 a.m. ET) (NTV-1 (Public), NTV-3 (Media))

4:30 a.m., 9 a.m., 7 p.m., NASA Television Video-File News Feed of ISS Expedition 48-49 Soyuz MS-01 Docking, Hatch Opening and Other Activities (NTV-1 (Public), NTV-3 (Media))

7 a.m., 11 a.m., 3 p.m., 11 p.m., Replay of Space Station Live (7/8/16) (NTV-1 (Public), NTV-3 (Media))

8 a.m., Saturday, July 9 - NASA Television Video File News Feed of ISS Expedition 48-49/Soyuz MS-01 Pre-Launch, Launch Video B-Roll and Related Interviews (NTV-1 (Public), NTV-3 (Media))

2 p.m., 8 p.m., Replay of the Post Juno Orbital Insertion NASA Science Briefing (NTV-1 (Public), NTV-3 (Media))

3:30 p.m., 9:30 p.m., Video B-Roll Feed of ISS Expedition 49-50 Crew Training (NTV-1 (Public), NTV-3 (Media))

4 p.m., 10 p.m., Replay of the ISS Expedition 49-50 Crew News Conference (Kimbrough, Borisenko, Ryzhikov) (NTV-1 (Public), NTV-3 (Media))

6 p.m., NASA Television Video File News Feed of ISS Expedition 48-49/Soyuz MS-01 Pre-Launch, Launch Video B-Roll and Related Interviews (NTV-1 (Public), NTV-3 (Media))

Watch NASA TV on the Net by going to the NASA website. Return to Contents

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Space Calendar • Jul 08 - Dwarf Planet 134340 Pluto At Opposition (32.115 AU) • Jul 08 - Comet 96P/Machholz At Opposition (3.982 AU) • Jul 08 - Comet 171P/Spahr At Opposition (4.082 AU) • Jul 08 - [Jul 08] Amor Asteroid 2016 NN15 Near-Earth Flyby (0.011 AU) • Jul 08 - Asteroid 10001 Palermo Closest Approach To Earth (1.473 AU) • Jul 08 - Asteroid 23638 Nagano Closest Approach To Earth (1.490 AU) • Jul 08 - Apollo Asteroid 11885 Summanus Closest Approach To Earth (1.558 AU) • Jul 08 - 5th Anniversary (2011), STS-135 Launch (Space Shuttle Atlantis, International Space Station,

Final Space Shuttle Launch) • Jul 08 - 45th Anniversary (1971), Solrad 10 Launch • Jul 08-10 - 2016 Alberta Star-B-Q, Caroline, Alberta, Canada • Jul 09 - Moon Occults Jupiter • Jul 09 - Comet 73P-AF/Schwassmann-Wachmann Perihelion (1.027 AU) • Jul 09 - Asteroid 4923 Clarke Closest Approach To Earth (0.719 AU) • Jul 09 - Apollo Asteroid 101955 Bennu Closest Approach To Earth (1.375 AU) • Jul 09 - Asteroid 5725 Nordlingen Closest Approach To Earth (1.885 AU) • Jul 09 - Asteroid 51825 Davidbrown Closest Approach To Earth (2.099 AU) • Jul 09 - John Wheeler's 105th Birthday (1911) • Jul 10 - [Jul 08] Apollo Asteroid 2016 ND1 Near-Earth Flyby (0.027 AU) • Jul 10 - Neptune Trojan 2011 HM102 At Opposition (27.077 AU) • Jul 10 - Nikola Tesla's 160th Birthday (1856) • Jul 11 - Comet C/2015 J2 (PANSTARRS) Closest Approach To Earth (4.046 AU) • Jul 11 - Apollo Asteroid 2010 WT8 Near-Earth Flyby (0.093 AU) • Jul 11 - Asteroid 4768 Hartley Closest Approach To Earth (1.783 AU) • Jul 11 - Asteroid 300221 Brucebills Closest Approach To Earth (2.330 AU) • Jul 12 - Comet 337P/WISE Perihelion (1.651 AU) • Jul 12 - Comet 240P/NEAT At Opposition (3.521 AU) • Jul 12 - Asteroid 1381 Danubia Closest Approach To Earth (1.452 AU) • Jul 12 - Asteroid 7028 Tachikawa Closest Approach To Earth (1.703 AU) • Jul 12 - Asteroid 2198 Ceplecha Closest Approach To Earth (1.753 AU) • Jul 12 - Asteroid 1584 Fuji Closest Approach To Earth (1.778 AU) • Jul 12 - Asteroid 3174 Alcock Closest Approach To Earth (2.572 AU)

Nikola Tesla, circa 1896

Source: JPL Space Calendar Return to Contents

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Food for Thought

How a NASA Engineer Created the Modern Airplane Wing

Once dubbed “the man who could see air,” NASA engineer Richard T. Whitcomb used a combination of visualization and intuition to revolutionize modern aviation — by turning the shape of the airplane wing on its head.

For decades, Whitcomb had been working on getting aircraft to move faster and more efficiently. By the time he was 34, he had already won the most prestigious honor in aviation, the National Aeronautic Association’s 1954 Collier Trophy, for his critical work to overcome the aviation challenge of the day — the sound barrier.

Sixteen years later, he was working on improving flight efficiency at speeds just below that barrier.

“Most people have to see through testing how air moves on a model,” Roy Harris, former aeronautics director at NASA’s Langley Research Center, told the Washington Post in Whitcomb’s 2009 obituary. “But he had this uncanny ability to accurately sense how air molecules reacted over a surface before he even built the models.”

Conquering Drag

The problem facing aviation engineers was that, as an airplane approached the speed of sound, the air molecules around the wings created drag, forcing the plane to work harder to maintain its speed.

“As an object moves through air, it collides with the air molecules, creating a disturbance,” forming what are essentially sound waves, explains Robert Gregg, chief aerodynamicist for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. “As the object moves faster, approaching the speed of sound, these disturbances that travel at the speed of sound cannot work their way forward and instead coalesce to form a shock wave.”

That was the sound barrier, which aeronautical engineers figured out how to breach in 1947. However, flying near the speed of sound — around 660 mph at cruising altitudes, depending on air pressure and humidity — remained highly inefficient because of the drag caused by these standing shock waves.

Whitcomb set out to conquer the drag. And his bosses at NASA were eager to help him lend his particular brand of genius to the problem. “Though he had a conservative, shy personality, he was a radical in the laboratory,” NASA historian James Hansen wrote of Whitcomb in his history of Langley. “In some respects, management did not know exactly how to deal with him. The best idea any of his supervisors came up with was to leave him alone” and take care of any administrative details slowing him down.

Winging It

Obsessed with the aerodynamics of flight since his childhood, Whitcomb was famous for his single-track focus. He never married, and he often worked two shifts per day, sleeping on a cot at the high-speed wind tunnel

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facility. His nephew, David Whitcomb, told the New York Times that NASA accountants scolded his uncle more than once for letting his paychecks expire while he used them as bookmarks.

Unlike many engineers, Whitcomb skipped the calculations and went straight to a physical model.

He started with a conventional wing design and, relying on intuition, used auto body putty to add bulk to some areas while filing away others, testing and retesting his models in Langley’s high-speed wind tunnel. He came up with something he called the “supercritical” airfoil. The end result almost looked upside-down compared with standard wings of the day, because it was nearly flat on top and rounded on the bottom. It was also thicker than the norm, especially on its blunt leading edge.

Around the speed of sound, the flatter top minimized the effect of the standing shock wave that formed on the wing, while a downward-curving underside compensated with additional lift. The added thickness also provided a sturdier attachment to the fuselage, allowing for less reinforcing structure and, hence, a lighter wing.

Early testing showed the supercritical wing increased a plane’s efficiency by as much as 15 percent. And it turned out that the wings were more efficient at subsonic speeds as well.

Today, Whitcomb’s supercritical wing design is the industry standard, used in commercial, business and military aircraft all over the world. Its increased efficiency has saved the airline industry billions of dollars in fuel every year, which also means significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

To learn more about this NASA spinoff, read the original article from Spinoff 2015.

For more information on how NASA is bringing its technology down to Earth, visit http://technology.nasa.gov.

Source: NASA Return to Contents

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Space Image of the Week

The Swirling Core of the Crab Nebula

Explanation: At the core of the Crab Nebula lies a city-sized, magnetized neutron star spinning 30 times a second. Known as the Crab Pulsar, it's actually the rightmost of two bright stars, just below a central swirl in this stunning Hubble snapshot of the nebula's core. Some three light-years across, the spectacular picture frames the glowing gas, cavities and swirling filaments bathed in an eerie blue light. The blue glow is visible radiation given off by electrons spiraling in a strong magnetic field at nearly the speed of light. Like a cosmic dynamo the pulsar powers the emission from the nebula, driving a shock wave through surrounding material and accelerating the spiraling electrons. With more mass than the Sun and the density of an atomic nucleus, the spinning pulsar is the collapsed core of a massive star that exploded. The Crab Nebula is the expanding remnant of the star's outer layers. The supernova explosion was witnessed on planet Earth in the year 1054. Image Credit: NASA, ESA - Acknowledgment: J. Hester (ASU), M. Weisskopf (NASA / GSFC)

Source: Astronomy Picture of the Day Return to Contents