NASA Mars InSight Mission Overview | JPL
NASA's next mission to Mars launches in May 2018. InSight is more than a Mars mission. Its team members hope to unlock the mysteries of the formation and evolution of rocky planets, including Earth.

For more about the mission, visit: https://mars.nasa.gov/insight

Credit: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Duration: 2 minutes, 31 seconds
Release Date: March 29, 2018

+NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
+DLR, German Aerospace Center
+Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR)
+NASA Solar System Exploration

#NASA #Mars #Astronomy #Space #Science #Insight #Robotics #Technology #RedPlanet #STEM #Education #UnitedStates #JPL #Pasadena #California #DLR #Germany #Deutschland #JourneyToMars #HD #Video

Skywatching: What's Up for May 2018 | NASA/JPL
Viewers on the West Coast may be able to see NASA's Mars InSight lander launch with its destination planet in sight. The Eta Aquarid meteor shower will be washed out by the Moon this month, but some meteors might be visible. May is also the best Jupiter-observing season, especially for mid-evening viewing.

For more info about InSight, visit:
https://mars.nasa.gov/insight

Credit: NASA/JPL
Duration: 2 minutes, 57 seconds
Release Date: May 1, 2018

+DLR, German Aerospace Center
+NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
+Jane Houston Jones
+American Astronomical Society
+National Science Teachers Association

#NASA #Astronomy #Space #Science #Skywatching #Mars #Insight #Spacecraft #Moon #Saturn #Jupiter #MeteorShower #Stars #MilkyWay #Planets #SolarSystem #Galaxies #Constellations #JourneyToMars #JPL #Pasadena #California #UnitedStates #STEM #Education #HD #Video

NASA's GRACE Twins Mission: Media Briefing | JPL
NASA discusses the upcoming launch of a mission that will study our planet's changing climate and Earth system processes, and have far-reaching benefits to society, such as improving water resource management.

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission will measure and monitor monthly changes in how mass is redistributed within and among Earth's atmosphere, oceans, land and ice sheets, as well as within Earth itself. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

GRACE-FO is scheduled to launch May 19, 2018 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California as a "rideshare" on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying five Iridium communications satellites. GRACE-FO is a partnership between NASA and GFZ.

For more information about the mission, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/gracefo and https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov/

The briefing participants are:
David Jarrett, GRACE-FO program executive in the Earth Science Division at NASA Headquarters, Washington
Michael Watkins, GRACE-FO science lead and director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
Frank Webb, GRACE-FO project scientist at JPL
Phil Morton, NASA GRACE-FO project manager at JPL
Frank Flechtner, GRACE-FO project manager for the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), in Potsdam, Germany

Original air date: Monday, April 30, 2018

Credit: NASA/JPL
Duration: 55 minutes
Release Date: April 30, 2018

+NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
+DLR, German Aerospace Center
+NASA Earth Observatory
+SpaceX

#NASA #Earth #Science #Space #Satellite #Water #Climate #Weather #GRACEFO #JPL #California #UnitedStates #DLR #Germany #Deutschland #STEM #Education #HD #Video

Bringing Mars Back to Earth | NASA JPL
April 26, 2018: NASA and the European Space Agency are now working together to explore options for a pair of missions that could take the next steps to bring samples back from Mars.

Credit: NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Duration: 2 minutes, 22 seconds
Release Date: April 26, 2018

+NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
+NASA
+European Space Agency, ESA

#NASA #Space #Astronomy #Science #Mars #SampleReturn #JPL #UnitedStates #ESA #Europe #JourneyToMars #Robotics #Technology #Spacecraft #Engineering #Exploration #Future #SolarSystem #STEM #Education #HD #Video

Twin Spacecraft to Weigh in on Earth's Changing Water
Mission Overview
Targeted to launch May 19, 2018, GRACE Follow-On is continuing the original GRACE mission’s legacy of tracking water movement everywhere on Earth. Monitoring changes in ice sheets and glaciers, in underground water, and in sea level provides a unique view of Earth’s climate and benefits its people.

GRACE-FO Mission Website: https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov

A pair of new spacecraft that will observe our planet’s ever-changing water cycle, ice sheets, and crust is in final preparations for a California launch no earlier than Saturday, May 19. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission, a partnership between NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), will take over where the first GRACE mission left off when it completed its 15-year mission in 2017.

GRACE-FO will continue monitoring monthly changes in the distribution of mass within and among Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land and ice sheets, as well as within the solid Earth itself. These data will provide unique insights into Earth’s changing climate, Earth system processes and even the impacts of some human activities, and will have far-reaching benefits to society, such as improving water resource management.

“Water is critical to every aspect of life on Earth – for health, for agriculture, for maintaining our way of living,” said Michael Watkins, GRACE-FO science lead and director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “You can’t manage it well until you can measure it. GRACE-FO provides a unique way to measure water in many of its phases, allowing us to manage water resources more effectively.”

Like GRACE, GRACE-FO will use an innovative technique to observe something that can’t be seen directly from space. It uses the weight of water to measure its movement – even water hidden far below Earth’s surface. GRACE-FO will do this by very precisely measuring the changes in the shape of Earth’s gravity field caused by the movement of massive amounts of water, ice, and solid Earth.

“When water is underground, it’s impossible to directly observe from space. There’s no picture you can take or radar you can bounce off the surface to measure changes in that deep water,” said Watkins. “But it has mass, and GRACE-FO is almost the only way we have of observing it on large scales. Similarly, tracking changes in the total mass of the polar ice sheets is also very difficult, but GRACE-FO essentially puts a ‘scale’ under them to track their changes over time.”

A Legacy of Discoveries
GRACE-FO will extend the GRACE data record an additional five years and expand its legacy of scientific achievements. GRACE chronicled the ongoing loss of mass from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets and mountain glaciers. That wealth of data shed light on the key processes, short-term variability, and long-term trends that impact sea level rise, helping to improve sea level projections. The estimates of total water storage on land derived from GRACE data, from groundwater changes in deep aquifers to changes in soil moisture and surface water, are giving water managers new tools to measure the impact of droughts and monitor and forecast floods.

GRACE data also have been used to infer changes in deep ocean currents, a driving force in Earth’s climate. Its atmospheric temperature profile data, derived from measurements of how signals from the constellation of GPS satellites were bent as they traveled through the atmosphere and received by antennas on the GRACE satellites, have contributed to U.S. and European weather forecast products. GRACE data have even been used to measure changes within the solid Earth itself, including the response of Earth’s crust to the retreat of glaciers since the last Ice Age, and the impact of large earthquakes.

According to Frank Webb, GRACE-FO project scientist at JPL, the new mission will provide invaluable observations of long-term climate-related mass changes.

“The only way to know for sure whether observed multi-year trends represent long-term changes in mass balance is to extend the length of the observations,” Webb said.

An Orbiting Cat and Mouse
Like its predecessors, the two identical GRACE-FO satellites will function as a single instrument. The satellites orbit Earth about 137 miles (220 kilometers) apart, at an initial altitude of about 305 miles (490 kilometers). Each satellite continually sends microwave signals to the other to accurately measure changes in the distance between them. As they fly over a massive Earth feature, such as a mountain range or underground aquifer, the gravitational pull of that feature tugs on the satellites, changing the distance separating them. By tracking changes in their separation distance with incredible accuracy - to less than the thickness of a human hair - the satellites are able to map these regional gravity changes.

A global positioning system receiver is used to track each spacecraft’s position relative to Earth’s surface, and onboard accelerometers record non-gravitational forces on the spacecraft, such as atmospheric drag and solar radiation. These data are combined to produce monthly maps of the regional changes in global gravity and corresponding near-surface mass variations, which primarily reflect changes in the distribution of water mass in Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land and ice sheets.

In addition, GRACE-FO will test an experimental Laser Ranging Interferometer, an instrument that could increase the precision of measurements between the two spacecraft, by a factor of 10 or more, for future missions similar to GRACE. The interferometer, developed by a German/American instrument team, will be the first in-space demonstration of laser interferometry between satellites.

“The Laser Ranging Interferometer is an excellent example of a great partnership,” said Frank Flechtner, GFZ’s GRACE-FO project manager. “I’m looking forward to analysing these innovative inter-satellite ranging data and their impact on gravity field modelling.”

GRACE-FO will be launched into orbit with five Iridium NEXT communications satellites on a commercially procured SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. This unique “rideshare” launch will first deploy GRACE-FO, then the Falcon 9 second stage will continue to a higher orbit to deploy the Iridium satellites.

GRACE-FO continues a successful partnership between NASA and Germany’s GFZ, with participation by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). JPL manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.


For more look at:
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/grace-fo



#NASA #GraceFo #Satellites #Launch #SpaceX #Space #DLR #JPL #GFZ #ESA #Earth #Water #GroundWater #Ice #Health, #Agriculture #Climate #Gravity #Experiments

Martian Dunes Facing Southeast | NASA MRO
The slipfaces primarily face southeast, but there also other orientations.
How is the sublimation process affected by this?

Location:
318 km above the surface.
Scene is less than 1 km top to bottom and north is to the left.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Release Date: March 29, 2018

+NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
+NASA Solar System Exploration
+The University of Arizona
+Ball Aerospace

#NASA #Mars #Space #Astronomy #Science #Geology #Dunes #Landscape #Terrain #Geoscience #RedPlanet #MRO #Reconnaissance #Orbiter #Spacecraft #HiRISE #Camera #JPL #STEM #Education

Mars: Russell Crater Dunes & Gullies | NASA MRO
Monitoring Changes among Russell Crater Dunes and Gullies—This area is a favorite to look for changes over time. These gullies have been formed by the defrosting of carbon dioxide ice.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) image
(254 km above the surface, less than 5 km across)

The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Release Date: May 2, 2018

+NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
+NASA Solar System Exploration
+The University of Arizona
+Ball Aerospace

#NASA #Mars #Space #Astronomy #Science #Geology #Russell #Crater #Gullies #Dunes #Landscape #Terrain #Geoscience #RedPlanet #MRO #Reconnaissance #Orbiter #Spacecraft #HiRISE #Camera #JPL #STEM #Education

Tracking Water from Space: NASA's GRACE-FO Mission
GRACE-Follow On (GRACE-FO) is a satellite mission scheduled for launch in May 2018. GRACE-FO will continue the work of the GRACE satellite mission tracking Earth's water movement around the globe. These discoveries provide a unique view of Earth's climate and have far-reaching benefits to society and the world's population.

For more information about this mission, visit:
www.nasa.gov/missions/grace-fo and https://gracefo.jpl.nasa.gov/

Credit: NASA/JPL
Duration: 2 minutes, 14 seconds
Release Date: April 30, 2018

+NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
+NASA Earth Observatory

#NASA #Earth #Science #Space #Satellite #Water #ClimateChange #Climate #GRACEFO #JPL #California #UnitedStates #STEM #Education #HD #Video

Mars: Russell Crater Dunes & Gullies | NASA MRO
Monitoring Changes among Russell Crater Dunes and Gullies—This area is a favorite to look for changes over time. These gullies have been formed by the defrosting of carbon dioxide ice.

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) image
(254 km above the surface, less than 5 km across)

The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
Release Date: May 2, 2018

+NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
+NASA Solar System Exploration
+The University of Arizona
+Ball Aerospace

#NASA #Mars #Space #Astronomy #Science #Geology #Russell #Crater #Gullies #Dunes #Landscape #Terrain #Geoscience #RedPlanet #MRO #Reconnaissance #Orbiter #Spacecraft #HiRISE #Camera #JPL #STEM #Education