Sabancaya Volcano, Peru

The 5,967-meter- (19,577-foot-) high Sabancaya stratovolcano (Nevado Sabancaya in the local language) is located in southern Perú, approximately 70 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of the city of Arequipa. The name Sabancaya means “tongue of fire” in the Quechua Indian language.

Sabancaya is part of a volcanic complex that includes two other nearby (and older) volcanoes, neither of which has been active historically. In this detailed astronaut photograph, Nevado Ampato is visible to the south (image left), and the lower flanks of Nevado Hualca Hualca are visible to the north (image top right). The snowy peaks of the three volcanoes provide a stark contrast to the surrounding desert of the Puna Plateau.

Sabancaya’s first historical record of an eruption dates to 1750. The most recent eruptive activity at the volcano occurred in July 2003, and it deposited ash on the volcano’s summit and northeastern flank. Volcanism at Sabancaya is fueled by magma generated at the subduction zone between the Nazca and South American tectonic plates.

Magma can erupt to the surface and form lava flows through the volcano’s summit (frequently forming a crater), but it can also erupt from lava domes and flank vents along the volcano’s sides. Lava has issued from all of these points at Sabancaya, forming numerous gray to dark brown scalloped lobes that extend in all directions except southwards (image center).

NASA Satellites' View of Gulf Oil Spill Over Time

Two NASA satellites are capturing images of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which began April 20, 2010 with the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. This short video reveals a space-based view of the burning oil rig and, later, the resulting spread of the oil spill. This version updates a previous version of the video through July 14th. The timelapse uses imagery from the MODIS instrument, on board NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites. The oil slick appears grayish-beige in the image and changes due to changing weather, currents, and use of oil dispersing chemicals. The oil slick only appears clearly in MODIS imagery when the sun is a a particular angle in relation to the satellite's position as it orbits over the Gulf. In areas where sunlight reflects off the ocean's surface toward the satellite, oil-slicked water usually looks brighter than cleaner ocean water in the region. (no narration, music only)

The images in this video were selected to show the spill most clearly. The full image archive is available at http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov. For more information and imagery about the oil spill, visit NASA's Oil Spill website. Imagery and information about the oil spill is also available on NASA's Earth Observatory Natural Hazards website.

Commercial Facility Activated on U.S. National Laboratory Onboard International Space Station

his July, U.S. Astronaut Shannon Walker activated a fully commercial research facility designed to make access to the International Space Station easy and cost-effective for scientists and educators.

Developed by NanoRacks LLC, of Laguna woods, Calif., the research platforms are designed for use within the pressurized space station environment. Each platform provides room for up to 16 customer payloads to plug effortlessly into a standard USB connector, which provides both power and data connectivity. Its plug and play system uses a simple, standardized interface that reduces payload integration cost and schedule for nano-scale research on the orbiting laboratory.

NanoRacks is working with NASA under a Space Act Agreement awarded from a competitive announcement of opportunity for the use of the National Laboratory on the International Space Station. The funding to build and certify the rack inserts has come exclusively from NanoRacks and their customers.

"As the International Space Station National Lab activities are ramping up to enable full use of the station, partnerships such as this one are an important component of an integrated strategy to enable full utilization," said Jason Crusan, NASA's chief technologist for Space Operations. "Lowering the burden to conduct research while demonstrating that hardware can go from concept to on-orbit capability in less than 10 months is also a significant milestone."

Crew Performs Dry Run for Monday Spacewalk

Cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Mikhail Kornienko will exit the International Space Station Monday night for a six-hour spacewalk. The pair will exit the Pirs docking compartment and work outside the Zarya and Zvezda modules. This will be the first Expedition 24 spacewalk.

› View Spacewalk Briefing Graphics from July 21

They will outfit the Rassvet module’s Kurs automated rendezvous system, install cables and remove and replace a video camera. Kurs is a Russian radio telemetry system that allows automated dockings of unmanned spacecraft such as the Progress resupply vehicle. The new video camera will document the rendezvous and docking of future Automated Transfer Vehicles to the aft end of the Zvezda service module.

On Friday, Yurchikhin and Kornienko put on their Orlan spacesuits and performed a dry run of the spacewalk activities. From inside the Pirs docking compartment they checked out the Orlan systems, practiced translation movements and tested their mobility.

NASA astronauts Tracy Caldwell Dyson, Doug Wheelock and Shannon Walker continued their science and maintenance activities throughout the station. The three flight engineers also participated in a review and conducted a conference to discuss future shuttle and station spacewalks.

Walker also completed work on the station’s Oxygen Generation System. The American life support system is now running again providing breathable oxygen for the station’s environment.

Friday morning, the sun’s glint over the Gulf of Mexico allowed the crew to photograph the oil spill’s progress. Pictures were taken using 400mm and 800mm lenses as the station orbited 220 miles above the gulf and Mississippi delta region.

The next spacewalk will take place Aug. 5 with Flight Engineers Caldwell Dyson and Wheelock. The astronauts will exit the Quest airlock and install a Portable Data Grapple Fixture on the Zarya module extending the reach of Canadarm2, the station’s robotic arm, and increasing a spacewalker’s capabilites. They also will jettison old multi-layer insulation removed for the PDGF install and mate power connectors to Zarya.

Researchers can learn more about opportunities to develop and fly science experiments on the International Space Station (ISS) at the NASA ISS Research Academy Aug. 3-5 in League City, Texas.

Nasa Discoveries Spark Hopes Of Alien Life

Nasa's planet-hunting deep space observatory has found hundreds of new potential planets, sparking hopes of finding other worlds similar to Earth.
The objects were found in Nasa's Kepler Mission, a space observatory designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

Its massive telescope monitors the brightness of over 145,000 stars in a fixed field of view in three constellations in the Milky Way.

A 95-megapixel camera records and analyses the passage of planets around those stars by measuring the changes in light radiation.

The findings show 140 of the new discoveries could be similar in size to Earth.

"From the orbital size and the temperature of the star, the planet's characteristic temperature can be calculated," Nasa explains on the mission's website.

"From this the question of whether or not the planet is habitable (not necessarily inhabited) can be answered."

Scientists say the results contradict older theories that had suggested small and Earth-like planets would be less frequent.

An astronomer on the Kepler mission, Dimitar Sasselov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, revealed the findings in a conference in Oxford earlier this month.

He said the next step would be to determine whether the suspected planets would indeed be habitable.

"The figures suggest our galaxy, the Milky Way, will contain 100 million habitable planets," he said.

"With our own little telescope just in the next two years we will able to identify at least 60 of them.

"There is a lot more work we need to do with this, but the statistical result is loud and clear, and it is that planets like our own Earth are out there."

Clean Technology in 'Hot Water'

What if work performed in space could improve the treatment of household and nuclear waste on Earth? That's what investigators are hoping to do with the results of a fluid physics study in progress on the International Space Station.

The experiment, called DECLIC-HTI, is studying supercritical water that could lead to spin-offs in the field of clean technologies for treating waste here on Earth.

A supercritical fluid is any substance at a temperature and pressure above its critical point -- the point at which the fluid is one homogeneous phase and exhibits properties of both liquids and gases. In this form, the substance can flow through solids like a gas and dissolve materials like a liquid. Water and carbon dioxide are the most commonly used supercritical fluids. Using extremely high temperatures, supercritical water can completely break down waste into benign forms.

DECLIC, or DEvice for the study of Critical LIquids and Crystallization, is a miniaturized, automatic thermo-optical laboratory that studies transparent fluids by finely tuning the temperature of a sample and sending images and video to the ground. The HTI, or high temperature insert, can measure fluid temperatures up to 400 degrees Celsius.

For the experiment, astronauts plug an insert, containing the water sample cell, into the DECLIC payload. The sample is precisely heated and observed in real time by investigators on the ground.

"These phenomena will be of interest to understand the behavior of supercritical fluids in space, but also to improve industrial processes on the ground," said Gabriel Pont, DECLIC mission manager with the CNES, or Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, in Toulouse, France.

"A typical example is burning completely organic or industrial waste in supercritical water at a much lower temperature than in conventional systems, thus saving energy and being cleaner. Microgravity will provide the ideal environment to understand how to do that."

The supercritical water temperature is very sensitive to gravity and has never been measured in microgravity conditions. "We expect HTI to give us the best measurement of this temperature ever found," added Pont.

The experiment began in October 2009 when the High Temperature Insert commissioning was performed. Since then, four experimental sequences have been performed, leading to more than 80 running days. "We are very excited about what we've seen thus far, and cannot wait to see the potential benefits of our work on Earth," added Pont.

NASA Moves Forward on Commercial Partnership for Rocket Engine Testing

Engineers at NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center recently installed an Aerojet AJ26 rocket engine for qualification testing as part of a partnership that highlights the space agency's commitment to work with commercial companies to provide space transportation.

Stennis has partnered with Orbital Sciences Corporation to test the AJ26 engines that will power the first stage of the company's Taurus® II space launch vehicle. Orbital is working in partnership with NASA under the agency's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) joint research and development project. The company is under contract with NASA through the Commercial Resupply Services program to provide eight cargo missions to the International Space Station through 2015.

Stennis operators have been modifying their E-1 test facility since April 2009 to test the AJ26 engines for Orbital. Work has included construction of a 27-foot-deep flame deflector trench.
The latest step in the project involved delivery and installation of an AJ26 engine for testing. In upcoming days, operators will perform a series of "chilldown" test, which involves running sub-cooled rocket propellants through the engine, just as will occur during an actual "hotfire" ignition test.

The chilldown tests are used to verify proper temperature conditioning of the engine systems and elapse time required to properly chill the engine, and to measure the quantity of liquid oxygen required to perform the operation.

Once the installed engine passes the chilldown and other qualification tests, it will be removed from the Stennis E-1 test facility. The first actual flight engine then will be delivered and installed for hotfire testing.