What's Next For NASA?

The end of the space shuttle program does not mean the end of NASA, or even of NASA sending humans into space. NASA has a robust program of exploration, technology development and scientific research that will last for years to come. Here is what's next for NASA:

Exploration
NASA is designing and building the capabilities to send humans to explore the solar system, working toward a goal of landing humans on Mars. We will build the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, based on the design for the Orion capsule, with a capacity to take four astronauts on 21-day missions.

NASA is also moving forward with the development of the Space Launch System -- an advanced heavy-lift launch vehicle that will provide an entirely new national capability for human exploration beyond Earth's orbit. The SLS rocket will use a liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propulsion system, which will include shuttle engines for the core stage and the J-2X engine for the upper stage.

We are developing the technologies we will need for human exploration of the solar system, including solar electric propulsion, refueling depots in orbit, radiation protection and high-reliability life support systems.

International Space Station
The International Space Station is the centerpiece of our human spaceflight activities in low Earth orbit. The ISS is fully staffed with a crew of six, and American astronauts will continue to live and work there in space 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Part of the U.S. portion of the station has been designated as a national laboratory, and NASA is committed to using this unique resource for scientific research.

The ISS is a test bed for exploration technologies such as autonomous refueling of spacecraft, advanced life support systems and human/robotic interfaces. Commercial companies are well on their way to providing cargo and crew flights to the ISS, allowing NASA to focus its attention on the next steps into our solar system.

Aeronautics
NASA is researching ways to design and build aircraft that are safer, more fuel-efficient, quieter, and environmentally responsible. We are also working to create traffic management systems that are safer, more efficient and more flexible. We are developing technologies that improve routing during flights and enable aircraft to climb to and descend from their cruising altitude without interruption.

We believe it is possible to build an aircraft that uses less fuel, gives off fewer emissions, and is quieter, and we are working on the technologies to create that aircraft. NASA is also part of the government team that is working to develop the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, to be in place by the year 2025. We will continue to validate new, complex aircraft and air traffic control systems to ensure that they meet extremely high safety levels.

Science
NASA is conducting an unprecedented array of missions that will seek new knowledge and understanding of Earth, the solar system and the universe. NASA has observatories in Earth orbit and deep space, spacecraft visiting the moon and other planetary bodies, and robotic landers, rovers, and sample return missions. NASA's science vision encompasses questions as practical as hurricane formation, as enticing as the prospect of lunar resources, and as profound as the origin of the Universe.

NASA's Goddard, Glenn Centers Look to Lift Space Astronomy out of the Fog

A fogbank is the least useful location for a telescope, yet today's space observatories effectively operate inside one. That's because Venus, Earth and Mars orbit within a vast dust cloud produced by comets and occasional collisions among asteroids. After the sun, this so-called zodiacal cloud is the solar system's most luminous feature, and its light has interfered with infrared, optical and ultraviolet observations made by every astronomical space mission to date.

"To put it simply, it has never been night for space astronomers," said Matthew Greenhouse, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Light from zodiacal dust can be a thousand times brighter than the sources astronomers actually target, limiting sensitivity in much the same way that bright moonlight hampers ground-based observatories. The dust and its unwanted illumination are greatest in the plane of Earth's orbit, the same plane in which every space telescope operates.

Placing future astronomy missions on more tilted orbits would let spacecraft spend significant amounts of time above and below the thickest dust and thereby reduce its impact on observations. So Greenhouse teamed with Scott Benson at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, to investigate how these "dark sky" or extra-zodiacal orbits might improve mission science and to develop a means of cost-effectively reaching them.

"Just by placing a space telescope on these inclined orbits, we can improve its sensitivity by a factor of two in the near-ultraviolet and by 13 times in the infrared," Greenhouse explained. "That's a breakthrough in science capability with absolutely no increase in the size of the telescope's mirror."

Greenhouse, Benson and the COllaborative Modeling and Parametric Assessment of Space Systems (COMPASS) study team at NASA Glenn designed a mission that utilizes new developments in solar arrays, electric propulsion and lower-cost expendable launch vehicles. Their proof-of-concept mission is the Extra-Zodiacal Explorer (EZE), a 1,500-pound EX-class observatory that could accommodate a telescope in the size range of the recently completed WISE mission — all within the cost and schedule constraints of NASA’s Explorer Program.

Launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, EZE would use a powerful new solar-electric drive as an upper stage to direct the spacecraft on a gravity-assist maneuver past Earth or Mars. This flyby would redirect the mission into an orbit inclined by as much as 30 degrees to Earth's.

The result, the scientists say, will be the highest-performance observatory ever achieved in the decades-long history of NASA's Explorer program.

"We see EZE as a game-changer, the first step on a new path for NASA Explorers that will yield major science goals despite limited resources," said Benson, who previously managed the new electric propulsion technology project.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope discovers Black Hole surrounded by Star Cluster

Astronomers know how massive stars collapse to form black holes but it is not clear how supermassive black holes, which can weigh billions of times the mass of our sun, form in the cores of galaxies. One idea is that supermassive black holes may build up through the merger of smaller black holes.

Sean Farrell of the Sydney Institute for Astronomy in Australia discovered a middleweight black hole in 2009 using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope. Known as HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), the black hole has an estimated weight of about 20,000 solar masses. It lies towards the edge of the galaxy ESO 243-49, 290 million light-years from Earth.

Farrell then observed HLX-1 simultaneously with NASA’s Swift observatory in X-ray and Hubble in near infrared, optical and ultraviolet wavelengths. The intensity and the color of the light may indicate the presence of a young, massive cluster of blue stars, perhaps 250-light-years across, encircling the black hole. Hubble can’t resolve the stars individually because the suspected cluster is too far away. The brightness and color is consistent with other clusters of stars seen in other galaxies, but some of the light may be coming from the gaseous disk around the black hole.

“Before this latest discovery, we suspected that intermediate-mass black holes could exist, but now we understand where they may have come from,” Farrell said. “The fact that there seems to be a very young cluster of stars indicates that the intermediate-mass black hole may have originated as the central black hole in a very-low-mass dwarf galaxy. The dwarf galaxy might then have been swallowed by the more massive galaxy, just as happens in our Milky Way.”

From the signature of the X-rays, Farrell’s team knew there would be some blue light emitted from the high temperature of the hot gas in the disk swirling around the black hole. They couldn’t account for the red light coming from the disk. It would have to be produced by a much cooler gas, and they concluded this would most likely come from stars.

3 smallest planets outside solar system found

Washington: A team of astronomers has discovered the three smallest confirmed planets ever detected outside our solar system.

The three planets, discovered by scientists led by Philip Muirhead from the University of California, all orbit a single star, are smaller than Earth and appear to be rocky with a solid surface.

Until now, astronomers have found at most only four other rocky planets, also called terrestrial planets, around other stars.

The trio of new planets is too close to the central star to be in its habitable zone, the ring-shaped region around a star where the temperature is mild enough for liquid water, and possibly life, to exist.

However, the planets are the first rocky ones to be found orbiting a type of dim, small star called a red dwarf, the most common kind in the Milky Way. Their existence suggests that the galaxy could be teeming with similarly rocky planets and that there’s a good chance that many are in the habitable zone.

The red dwarf, called KOI-961, was first flagged as a potential planetary system by the Kepler mission, a space telescope that looks for planets around sunlike stars by scanning the sky for stars that periodically dip in brightness—the result of one or more planets passing in front of them.

Although Kepler reported 900 potential planetary systems in February, only about 85 of those were red-dwarf systems. The fact that a relatively small sample of red dwarfs produced three terrestrial planets means that either the Caltech-led team was really lucky or, more likely, that these planets are commonly found around red dwarfs.

This report comes just a few weeks after the Kepler team announced it had detected two rocky planets around a sunlike star—Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f—the first Earth-sized planets ever found and the smallest known at the time.

In January 2011, the Kepler team reported the discovery of the first unequivocally rocky planet around another star, Kepler-10b. Another planet—Corot-7b, which was found in 2009—could also be a rocky planet.

With the exception of Kepler-20e, which is about the size of Venus, the other previously discovered planets are all bigger than Earth. All three of the ones found by the Caltech-led team are smaller—the outermost one is about half the size of Earth and the other two are three-fourths the size of Earth.

In fact, the entire KOI-961 planetary system is remarkably tiny. KOI-961 has a diameter one-sixth that of the sun’s, making it just 70 percent bigger than Jupiter.

Each of the three planets needs less than two days to zip around their star, and all three are about one hundred times closer to that star than Earth is to the sun.

Since they’re so close to their star, they’re hot—the outermost planet is estimated to be about 200 degrees Celsius while the innermost planet is a scorching 500 degrees Celsius.

“The really amazing thing about this system is that the closest size comparison is to Jupiter and its moons,” John Johnson, one of the paper’s co-authors, said.

“This is causing me to have to fully recalibrate my notion of planetary and stellar systems,” he said.

Kepler’s initial measurements, which are automated to help it sift through roughly 150,000 stars, underestimated the size of KOI-961 and any planets it might have had.

No one realized this until amateur astronomer and paper coauthor Kevin Apps alerted Muirhead and his team to the idea that KOI-961 bore a remarkable resemblance to another red dwarf called Barnard''s Star, a nearby star that’s one of the most well-studied.

When the astronomers used telescopes at the Palomar and Keck Observatories to take a closer look at both stars, they found that the two are practically twins.

The characteristics of Barnard’s Star allowed the team to infer the properties of KOI-961, which is needed to deduce the nature of the planetary system from the star’s light curve, a plot of how the star dims over time due to transiting planets. In particular, the depth of the light curve, that is, how much the curve dips reveals the planets’ sizes.

Because the planets are so small, the only way they could have enough gravity to hold themselves together is if they are balls of rock, like Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.

“Just three years ago, just talking about a rocky planet would have been pure speculation,” Johnson said.

“But these are unambiguously rocky,” he said.

Still, before they could make any conclusions, the researchers had to confirm that the dips in light detected by Kepler really were due to planets—and not something else, such as a pair of background stars in orbit around each other.

Spectacular Photo Captures Astronaut's Last Day in Space

he scene could be straight out of a science fiction film: A solitary astronaut gazes longingly at his home planet below from a spaceship observation deck — a tiny bubble of light in the vast ocean of space. But this isn't a sci-fi scene at all; it's a real-life photo from a NASA astronaut.

In the photo, American astronaut Ron Garan is looking down at Earth from the International Space Station. The photo was taken by a crewmate from a different part of the space station and shows Garan awash in bright light as he snaps his own photos from the orbiting lab's seven-window observation room, called the Cupola. Bright stars shine in the background, with Earth's atmosphere aglow and city lights visible on the Earth.

"How I spent my last day in space," Garan wrote in a Twitter post recently when he uploaded the image. "That's me in the cupola off the coast of Australia taking my last of >25K pics." [Amazing Space Photos by Astronaut Ron Garan]

Garan, who spent more than five months living and working on the space station, was a prolific space photographer and posted many stunning views of space, Earth and auroras during his stay.

Garan returned to Earth on Sept. 16 aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule, but during his spaceflight (as well as before and after it) he chronicled his work on Twitter under the moniker @Astro_Ron, He also runs a separate website called Fragile Oasis, which is dedicated to raising awareness about Earth and its environment.

Garan spent 164 days in space as part of the space station's Expedition 27 and Expedition 28 crews. He launched into orbit aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule on April 4.

Like all astronauts, Garan has said the views of Earth from space are awe-inspiring.

" I think it's very difficult not to be moved when you look at our planet from space. You see how beautiful it is, how fragile it is. You really get this feeling of, we've been given an incredible gift," Garan told SPACE.com after returning to Earth. "We are very, very fortunate."