Mercury can support ice in permanently shadowed pockets near its poles, despite its close proximity to the Sun. This collection of MESSENGER images shows areas of Mercury’s north polar region that are in shadow. (Courtesy NASA/JHUAPL/Carnegie Institution/NAIC, Arecibo Observatory)

The NASA MESSENGER mission has found evidence for a significant amount of ice on Mercury, according to three papers published today in Science Express. Although Mercury is the closest planet to our Sun, MESSENGER data suggests that permanently shadowed pockets and craters near Mercury’s poles are cold enough to support water in the form of ice and other frozen volatiles.

LASP developed and built the Mercury Atmospheric and Surface Composition Spectrometer (MASCS) instrument onboard MESSENGER. MASCS detects minerals on Mercury’s surface and determines the abundance and components of its thin atmosphere. MESSENGER instruments that contributed to the recent polar ice discovery include the Neutron Spectrometer and the Mercury Laser Altimeter.

Since it entered Mercury’s orbit on March, 17, 2011, MESSENGER has collected multiple, independent lines of evidence for the existence of the planet’s icy, shadowy craters: It has used spectroscopy to measure hydrogen concentrations, which indicate the presence of water ice; measured the amount of light reflected by its polar deposits; and modeled the surface and near-surface temperatures of the polar regions. The resulting data suggest that ice is the primary component of Mercury’s north polar deposits, and that ice is exposed at the surface of some of the deposits and buried in others.

For more information on the MESSENGER mission, please visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/messenger/.

LASP Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies (CCLDAS) scientists and staff speak with the public about lunar science during International Observe the Moon Night on September 22, 2012, at the Twenty Ninth Street Mall in Boulder. A large lunar telescope is set up in the background at the right. (Courtesy LASP)

Members of the Boulder community joined LASP scientists, staff, and students under the glow of a First Quarter Moon on Saturday evening for the 2012 International Observe the Moon Night (InOMN) celebration. Sponsored by the LASP Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies (CCLDAS), the event was an opportunity for the community to view the Moon through a lunar telescope, learn about the latest in lunar science, and celebrate the wonder of our closest neighbor in the Solar System.

Passers-by on the Twenty Ninth Street Mall lingered at a LASP display table and chatted with CCLDAS experts about the importance of the Moon, officially ushering in autumn during Saturday’s Fall Equinox. Children and families built their own miniature lunar telescopes out of plastic lenses and cardboard tubes, and pointed them at the perfectly illuminated First Quarter Moon.

The star of the event, however, was a large lunar telescope, custom-built by LASP scientist Scott Robertson. Visitors lined up to view the Moon through the telescope and were rewarded with a strikingly detailed close-up of the lunar surface, its craters and valleys dramatically enhanced by sideways-cast shadows and a clear sky. As observers peered at the Moon through squinted eyes, they were encouraged to dedicate their “winks” to the memory of astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon.

The LASP event was one of hundreds of InOMN celebrations held worldwide. InOMN is an annual event organized by a team of scientists, educators, and Moon enthusiasts from government and non-profit organizations, and businesses across the world. For more information on InOMN, please visit http://observethemoonnight.org/.

You may read about CCLDAS Education and Public Outreach at http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/education/ccldas-epo/.

CCLDAS graduate student Anthony Shu "winks" at the Moon through a lunar telescope during the September 22, 2012 LASP International Observe the Moon Night celebration. (Courtesy LASP)

The LASP-led Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission has approval to proceed to the final phase before launch. (Courtesy NASA/GSFC)

NASA has authorized the next Mars mission, led by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder), to proceed to system delivery, spacecraft integration, testing, and launch, which is slated for November 2013. The $670 million Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission will be the first devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The goal of MAVEN is to determine the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time.

LASP Associate Director for Science and MAVEN Principal Investigator Bruce Jakosky said, “The spacecraft and instruments are all coming together at this point. Although we’re focused on getting everything ready for launch right now, we aren’t losing sight of our ultimate objective—getting to Mars and making the science measurements.”

The authorization to proceed—called Key Decision Point D, or KDP-D—was decided at a meeting at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 10; the meeting was chaired by the NASA Science Mission Directorate. KDP-D occurs after the project has completed a series of independent reviews that cover the technical health and programmatic health of the project, including schedule and cost. KDP-D represents the official transition from the Phase C development stage to Phase D in the mission life cycle. During Phase D, the spacecraft bus will be completed and subsystems will be installed, and the science instruments will be integrated into the spacecraft. Rigorous spacecraft and environmental testing early in 2013 will culminate in launch later that year.

“I’m incredibly proud of how this team continues to meet every major milestone on schedule on its journey to Mars,” said David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Being ready for the start of system-level integration and test is critically important to ultimately being ready for launch on Nov. 18, 2013.”

Jakosky, also a professor in CU-Boulder’s geological sciences department and director of the CU-Boulder Center for Astrobiology, cautioned that there is much more work to be done before launch. “This decision by NASA marks the start of integration of all of the instruments on the spacecraft. It’s cool to see the spacecraft coming together, but there is a lot of work still to go and a lot of challenges to solve between now and when the spacecraft is ready for launch.”

The MAVEN spacecraft will carry three instrument suites. The LASP-built Remote Sensing Package will determine global characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere. LASP is also contributing instrumentation to the Particles and Fields Package, which will characterize the solar wind and the ionosphere of the planet. The Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer, provided by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, will measure the composition and isotopes of neutrals and ions.

The MAVEN science team includes three LASP scientists heading instrument teams—Nick Schneider, Frank Eparvier, and Robert Ergun—as well as a large supporting team of scientists, engineers, and mission operations specialists.

MAVEN will also include participation by a number of CU-Boulder graduate and undergraduate students in the coming years. Currently there are more than 100 undergraduate and graduate students working on research projects at LASP, which provides hands-on training for future careers as engineers and scientists, said Jakosky.

“CU-Boulder’s participation in Mars exploration missions goes back decades, beginning with NASA’s Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 missions launched in 1969,” said Vice Chancellor for Research Stein Sture. “LASP is a proven training ground for students seeking hands-on experience in building, testing and flying space hardware and is the only institute in the world to have designed and built instruments that have been launched to every planet in the Solar System.”

In addition to leading the mission and providing instrumentation, LASP will provide science operations, build instruments, and lead Education and Public Outreach. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the project and is building two of the science instruments for the mission. Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colo., will build the spacecraft and perform mission operations. The University of California-Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory is building instruments for the mission. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., provides program management via the Mars Program Office, navigation support, the Deep Space Network, and the Electra telecommunications relay hardware and operations.

The next major review for the MAVEN team is the Mission Operations Review in November 2012. This review assesses the project’s operational readiness and its progress towards launch. The project will continue to work with partners to deliver all instruments in the next four months. MAVEN will launch during a 20-day period in November-December, 2013. It will go into orbit around Mars in September 2014, and, after a one-month checkout period, will make measurements from orbit for one Earth year.

More Information 

• MAVEN Mission Website: http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/maven/
• NASA MAVEN Mission Website: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/maven/main/index.html

News releases

• NASA release
• CU-Boulder release
• Lockheed Martin release

Contact

LASP/CU-Boulder:

• Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN PI: 303-492-8004 or Bruce.Jakosky@lasp.colorado.edu
• Marisa Lubeck, LASP press office: 303-735-7108 or Marisa.Lubeck@lasp.colorado.edu

CU-Boulder:

• Jim Scott, CU media relations: 303-492-3114 or Jim.Scott@colorado.edu

A new report, chaired by LASP Director Dan Baker, presents a 10-year program to advance research on the Sun, Sun-Earth connections, and space weather. This Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) image shows a series of active regions, lined up across the upper half of the Sun. (Courtesy NASA-SDO)

A new survey, led by LASP Director Daniel Baker, brings the next decade of solar and space physics closer to home. The National Research Council (NRC) 10-year plan recommends that heliophysics research focus on the near-Earth environment in order to better understand how the Sun and space weather impact phenomena on Earth. Baker chaired the committee of over 85 physicists and engineers that developed the report.

The last decadal solar and space physics survey emphasized the effects of solar activity on space weather. The 2013-2022 strategy is the second NRC decadal survey in heliophysics, and introduces new scientific goals that stress the need for space weather forecasting and research on the societal impacts of solar forces.

Baker said, “Hazardous space weather, such as extreme solar eruptions, threatens human society and the technology that supports us on Earth. This new decadal survey prioritizes the need for research on predicting and mitigating the effects of adverse space weather.”

The four overarching research goals that Baker and the committee propose include predicting variations in the space environment that are caused by solar activity; understanding how Earth’s atmospheric layers respond to forces generated by the Sun; investigating relationships among the Sun, Solar System, and interstellar matter; and delving into the core processes of the heliosphere.

Completed over 18 months, the decadal report will be used by agencies such as NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) to garner Congressional support for its proposed solar and space physics priorities.

The survey was sponsored by NASA and NSF, and can be accessed via the National Academies Press at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13060.

For more information on LASP solar and space physics, please visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/science/space-physics/.

LASP provides both scientific guidance and instrumentation for the NASA RBSP spacecraft, pictured here at dawn on August 10, 2012, at the NASA Kennedy Space Center in Florida. RBSP will shed light on the dynamics of Earth’s radiation belts and improve scientists’ ability to predict space weather. (Courtesy NASA KSC)

Launch update: After a few postponements, RBSP launched successfully at 4:05 a.m. EDT on Thursday, August 30.

On August 24, the NASA Radiation Belt and Storm Probes (RBSP) mission will launch into orbit to study the forbidding belts of radiation that encircle Earth, which are trapped here by our planet’s magnetic field. Dual spacecraft will carry pioneering LASP-built instrumentation to study radiation belt particles and fields.

LASP Director and an RBSP instrument lead Dan Baker said, “Researching radiation belt physics is a major aspect of LASP science. Adding our cutting-edge instrumentation capabilities has put us firmly on the ‘hardware map’ for energetic particle measurements and research. Radiation belt science is a strong focus for LASP’s future.”

LASP’s involvement in RBSP centers on providing the know-how to explore the central questions in radiation belt science: Are radiation belt particles transported to near-Earth space from other locations and then trapped here? Or are low-energy particles, already trapped by the Earth’s magnetic field, subsequently heated to high-energy levels?

Bob Ergun, LASP scientist and an RBSP instrument Co-Investigator, said, “This is an exciting mission because we are going to measure all the important aspects of the radiation belt environment: the particles, the waves that are acting on them—and the ways the near-Earth radiation environment changes in both space and time.”

The LASP-built Relativistic Electron Proton Telescope (REPT) will directly measure near-Earth space radiation particles to understand their intensity, acceleration, number, and direction. The instrument is part of the RBSP Energetic Particle, Composition, and Thermal Plasma Suite (ECT). A miniature version of REPT is slated to launch aboard a CU-student-built CubeSat this month.

Xinlin Li, LASP scientist and PI of the student CubeSat mission, said, “The addition of our simplified REPT instrument to LASP’s existing suite of hardware specialties offers an important avenue for LASP to advance the scientific understanding of the radiation belts.”

The RBSP Digital Fields Board will study the electric fields that energize the particles that make up the radiation belt; this instrumentation is part of the RBSP Electric Field and Waves Suite (EFW).

David Malaspina, LASP scientist and fields expert for the Digital Fields Board, said, “LASP is a world leader in designing and building signal processing boards like the Digital Fields Board, which serves as the ‘brains’ behind RBSP’s Electronic Fields and Waves instrument.”

The RBSP mission consists of twin spacecraft that will traverse through the intense heart of the radiation belts, taking identical measurements during each orbit. The particles that make up the radiation belts are capable of penetrating and damaging sensitive electronics on board “workhorse” spacecraft, such as those responsible for weather monitoring and prediction, navigation, and communications. The radiation belts also pose a biological hazard to astronauts passing through the belts during manned missions.

Scot Elkington, LASP scientist and particle theorist for ECT, said, “RBSP is specially built to withstand the very dangers it is studying. This mission will give us unprecedented data to further our understanding of the radiation belts, their potential effects on human technologies and space exploration, and our ability to predict harmful space weather events.”

More Information

• Launch of miniature REPT
• Quick Facts: RBSP
• JHU RBSP site
• LASP Space Physics group

Contact

• Bob Ergun, EFW Co-I: 303-492-1560 or Bob.Ergun@lasp.colorado.edu
• David Malaspina, EFW scientist: 303-492-9501 or David.Malaspina@lasp.colorado.edu
• Xinlin Li, CubeSat PI and ECT scientist: 303-492-3514 or Xinlin.Li@lasp.colorado.edu
• Scot Elkington, ECT scientist 303-735-0810 or Scot.Elkington@lasp.colorado.edu

LASP Director Daniel Baker will present the Bowie Van Allen lecture at this year’s AGU Fall Conference.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has invited LASP Director Daniel Baker to deliver a Bowie lecture at its 2012 Fall Meeting in San Francisco, California, this December. Designation as a Bowie lecturer is the highest honor in each of the AGU scientific sections. Baker will deliver the Van Allen lecture in the Space Physics and Aeronomy section of the Bowie series; his talk is titled, “Magnetospheric Exploration: Basic Research with a High Public Purpose.”

Stein Sture, Vice Chancellor for Research at CU-Boulder, said, “Dr. Baker’s AGU Bowie lecturer recognition reflects his outstanding scholarship and leadership in space science and the broader field of space weather and solar physics.”

The AGU Bowie lecture series began in 1989 in commemoration of the 50^th presentation of the William Bowie Medal, the highest AGU honor named for its first president. Every year, each AGU scientific section designates a Bowie lecturer to present at an AGU meeting. The Bowie lecture in the Space Physics and Aeronomy section is a tribute to renowned physicist James A. Van Allen.

LASP scientist Larry Esposito provides an impromptu Mars talk to overflow guests at the August 5, 2012 MSL Curiosity landing LASP Pajama Party. (Courtesy LASP)

An estimated 350 people gathered at LASP Sunday night for activities surrounding the landing of the NASA Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Curiosity rover on Mars. The late-night public event brought local citizens, LASP staff, and space industry experts together to witness and celebrate Curiosity’s dramatic landing on the surface of the Red Planet. A number of young space enthusiasts accompanied their pajama-clad parents to experience the historic event.

Televisions throughout the LASP LSTB building were tuned to live NASA-TV coverage as the 11:32 p.m. MST landing drew near. Crowds clustered in an auditorium and large conference room, spilling out into the main lobby and the Mission Operations hallway as Bill Possel, LASP Mission Operations & Data Systems Director, and Jeff Parker, professor at the CU Boulder Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research, narrated the anxious moments leading up to the landing. The audience exploded into ecstatic cheers as the rover gently touched down on the surface of Mars’ Gale Crater, breaking the tension of MSL’s “seven minutes of terror” plunge toward safety. Applause burst out again as Curiosity returned images of its own shadow, cast on the surface of Mars.

Prior to MSL’s landing, pajama party guests enjoyed a Curiosity-decorated cake and a game of “Pin the Lander on the Planet.” LASP scientists Bruce Jakosky and David Brain gave educational talks about Mars and the Curiosity mission, while Larry Esposito provided an impromptu presentation for overflow attendees. The event lasted well into the morning, wrapping up with an emotional press conference on NASA-TV.

With the one-ton Curiosity rover onboard, the NASA MSL landing was the most complicated Mars landing ever attempted. Curiosity will now begin a two-year investigation of Mars’ surface geology to determine if the Gale Crater region was ever hospitable to primitive life.

For more information on LASP E/PO events, please visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/about/events/special-events/.

Guests at the August 5, 2012 LASP Pajama Party clap anxiously as the MSL Curiosity rover approaches its landing on Mars. (Courtesy LASP)

CU-Boulder students Ian Dahlke (left) and David Gerhardt (right) celebrate a successful vibration test, one of many tests the student-built NSF CubeSat satellite underwent prior to shipment.

UPDATE: After some range issues and weather setbacks, CSSWE launched successfully on Thursday, September 13, at 3:39 p.m. MT. It was deployed three hours later, and made its first pass over the LASP ground station at approximately 4:14 a.m. MT on Friday, September 14, when the first beacons were received.

A CubeSat mission designed, built, and tested by University of Colorado Boulder students is scheduled to launch just after 1:00 am MT on August 2, 2012. The NSF-funded CubeSat mission is a collaborative effort between LASP and the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences (AES).

Beginning in 2008, more than sixty students from five majors have worked under the guidance and support of faculty and professional engineers, including Principal Investigator Xinlin Li of LASP/AES, Co-Principal Investigator Scott Palo of AES, and LASP engineer Rick Kohnert.

Li, who is a LASP scientist and AES faculty member, said, “Our students have worked incredibly hard to overcome the challenges of building a real flight-ready mission. Many alums will be glued to NASA TV, watching the launch of a satellite that represents many years of learning and effort.”

The mission, called the Colorado Student Space Weather Experiment (CSSWE), will fly the science payload named the Relativistic Electron and Proton Telescope Integrated Little Experiment, or REPTile. REPTile is a scaled-down version of the REPT instrument, which was built at LASP for NASA’s Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) mission, scheduled for launch later this month.

The goal of the three-month CSSWE mission is to study solar flares—violent processes in the solar atmosphere that are associated with large energy releases—and how particles released during these events affect the Earth’s radiation belt electrons. Students will monitor incoming CCSWE data from a ground station operated at LASP.

CubeSats are miniaturized satellites, sized to a ten-centimeter cube per unit. CSSWE is a three-unit CubeSat with a mass of approximately three kilograms. NSF’s CubeSat program supports satellite missions in geospace and atmospheric research with an eye toward training the next generation of space scientists and aerospace engineers. The mission will launch on an Atlas V rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, along with ten other CubeSats under the NASA Educational Launch of Nano-Satellites program.

Contact

• PI, Xinlin Li: 303-492-3514 or Xinlin.Li@lasp.colorado.edu
• Co-PI, Scott Palo: 303-492-4289 or  Scott.Palo@colorado.edu
• System Engineer, David Gerhardt (student): 757-646-3445 or dtgerhardt@gmail.com
• Program Manager, Lauren Blum (student): 917-767-6626 or lwblum@gmail.com
• Instrument Scientist, Quintin Schiller (student): 608-469-5388 or quintinschiller@gmail.com

More information

• CSSWE website
• CSSWE quickfacts
• AES
• NSF CubeSat program

CCLDAS Principal Investigator Mihály Horányi shows the LASP dust accelerator to a group of science communicators during the July 20-22, 2012 LASP New Media Professional Development Workshop. (Photo courtesy Kevin Baird)

A group of New Media communicators gathered at LASP this past weekend to discuss the most up-to-date issues surrounding lunar and small bodies science and exploration with experts in the field. Sponsored by the LASP Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies (CCLDAS), the weekend-long workshop offered professional development for bloggers, podcasters, and other science communicators.

Laptops and tablets in hand, the workshop attendees live-reported as scientists discussed wide-ranging aspects of their work in an informal give-and-take atmosphere. Topics included the dangers of near-Earth objects such as asteroids and the Osiris-REx asteroid sampling mission; the New Horizons mission to Pluto and the debate over scientific definition of a planet; the hazards and significance of lunar dust; and the Deep Space 1 comet and asteroid fly-bys. The result was a trending topic on Twitter—hashtag #LASPnewmedia—and material for blog posts, photo essays, a space science video game, and other communiqués.

Over the course of the weekend, workshop attendees toured LASP facilities and visited the CCLDAS dust accelerator, a massive, tubular apparatus that shoots dust particles at up to 100 kilometers/second to study the effects of high-velocity dust impacts on the Moon. During the CCLDAS tour, Principal Investigator (PI) Mihály Horányi passed around a small sample of real Moon dust, brought back to Earth from the Apollo 17 mission. Consequently, the most-photographed star of the weekend weighed 0.3 grams and fit into a tiny glass jar.

The workshop’s speakers were Horányi; Daniel Britt, co-investigator for Mars Pathfinder and Deep Space 1; Richard Dissly of Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation; Ed Beshore, Deputy PI for Osiris-REx; Hal Levison of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI); and Alan Stern, New Horizons PI and Associate Vice President of SwRI.

Speaker presentations, participant lists, and other details from the workshop will be forthcoming at http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/education/journalist-workshops/2012-mediajournalist-workshop. For more information on LASP New Media professional development workshops, please visit http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/education/journalist-workshops.

You may read the post-workshop summary report at http://lasp.colorado.edu/home/ccldas/files/2012/07/CCLDASWorkshopSUMMARY_2012.pdf.

Contributions to the rising global surface temperature can be broken down based on observations: El Niño Southern Oscillation (purple), volcanic eruptions (blue), anthropogenic effects (red), and solar irradiance (green). Continuation of the solar irradiance data will help ensure the robustness of this long-term data record; this, in turn, will improve our understanding of climate change. (Courtesy Kopp and Lean)

An instrument to monitor solar energy, built by the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado Boulder, will be launched into orbit in 2013 to help determine the effects of solar radiation on Earth’s climate. This Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM) will mitigate a potential and likely upcoming gap in an otherwise continuous 34-year climate data record following the loss of the NASA Glory mission in 2011.

The NOAA Total Solar Irradiance Calibration Transfer Experiment (TCTE) will fly the LASP TIM, and the TCTE will catch a ride to space on board the STPSat-3 spacecraft, built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation for the U.S. Air Force. A space-flight veteran, TIM measures the Sun’s net energy output, which scientists call total solar irradiance.

Greg Kopp, LASP scientist and TIM Principal Investigator, said, “To understand the causes of climate change, we need to monitor fluctuations in incident sunlight, which is the dominant energy driving Earth’s climate. This timely collaboration among NASA, NOAA, the U.S. Air Force, Ball, and LASP should help us maintain continuity and accuracy in this critical long-term data record by providing overlap between a currently on-orbit but aging TIM and a future version of the instrument.”

Information collected by TIM will add to the solar climate data record that has been compiled by NASA and NOAA since 1978, filling a likely gap between NASA’s 2003 Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) mission and NOAA’s 2016 Joint Polar Satellite System. LASP has refined TIM for improved accuracy since its first launch on SORCE. A follow-on TIM on NASA’s Glory mission was lost due to a launch vehicle failure in 2011. The TCTE instrument, largely built alongside the original SORCE/TIM, provides a means of quickly readying a replacement instrument for a flight on the Air Force’s existing STPSat­‑3 mission for a mid-2013 launch.

More information

• LASP TIM instrument
• January 2011 Press Release: “Improved measurements of sun to advance understanding of climate change” 
• Glory mission TIM instrument
• SORCE
• LASP Interactive Solar Irradiance Data Center (LISIRD)

Contacts

CU-Boulder/LASP

• Greg Kopp, TIM PI: 303-735-0934 or Greg.Kopp@lasp.colorado.edu
• Marisa Lubeck, LASP press office: 303-735-7108 or marisa.lubeck@lasp.colorado.edu

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation

• Roz Brown, Media Relations Manager: 303-533-6059 or rbrown@ball.com