Today’s Mission Management Team meeting has concluded. The team is unanimous to go forward with space shuttle Discovery’s launch tomorrow at 4:50 p.m. EST.

The prelaunch news conference is scheduled to begin at 11 a.m. on NASA Television. The participants will be Mike Moses, Mission Management Team chair, Mike Leinbach, shuttle launch director, Scott Higginbotham, STS-133 payload manager, and Kathy Winters, shuttle weather officer.

Watch the news conference live at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

At today's pre-launch news conference NASA's mission management team have given their unanimous approval for space shuttle Discovery's launch tomorrow at 4:50 p.m. EST.

"Everything is on track and going beautifully with the countdown," said Mike Moses, mission management team chair. "We're really looking forward to a very action-packed, successful mission and everything is on track."

Mike Leinbach, shuttle launch director, agreed that everything is going extremely well with the launch countdown. He also acknowledged the processing teams who worked on Discovery, its flight systems and ground elements. "As we're powering up (the systems) we're seeing no problems at all."

The rotating service structure will be rolled away from Discovery at around 8 p.m. revealing it for the last time on the launch pad. Loading of the external fuel tank will begin at around 7:25 a.m. tomorrow morning. "We're not tracking any issues and it looks like Discovery will fly this time," said Leinbach.

Kathy Winters, shuttle weather officer, reported that the weather remains exceptional with only a 20 percent chance that weather will be prohibitive at launch time. The only slight issue may be a localized off-shore shower in the late afternoon. The forecast during tanking also is looking very good.

At 7:15 a.m. EST NASA TV will begin coverage of the fueling of the external tank. Launch coverage for Discovery's final mission to the International Space Station will begin at 11:30 a.m.

The rotating service structure (RSS) on NASA Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Pad 39A moved away from space shuttle Discovery in preparation for tomorrow's launch attempt. The move began at 8:02 p.m. EST and was completed at 8:37 p.m. Moving the structure, which is used for weather protection and provides access to the shuttle at the pad, took about 30 minutes.‬

Teams are not working any issues that would delay liftoff at 4:50 p.m.

Fueling of Discovery's external fuel tank with more than 535,000 gallons of super cold liquid hydrogen and oxygen is expected to begin at approximately 7:25 a.m. NASA TV coverage begins at 7:15 a.m.

One year ago, on February 11, 2010, at 10:23 in the morning, SDO launched into space on an Atlas V-401 from Cape Canaveral. Credit: NASA On February 11, 2010, at 10:23 in the morning, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) launched into space on an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral. A year later, SDO has sent back millions of stunning images of the sun and a host of new data to help us understand the complex star at the heart of our solar system.

"One of the highlights of the last year is just that everything worked so smoothly," says astrophysicist Dean Pesnell, the project scientist for SDO at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We turned it on in March and it immediately started sending us data at 150 megabits per second. It worked from the very get go."

The first things scientists and the public saw from SDO was an array of wonderfully detailed pictures of the sun. One of the three instruments on board, called the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA), captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths -- each wavelength helps illuminate aspects of the sun at different temperatures. The images are all available in real time online for everyone to see.

"It's been great to watch how popular these images are," says Phil Chamberlin, another astrophysicist at Goddard and one of SDO's deputy project scientists. "The public has been extremely interested. And it's important that people see what the sun is doing and how it affects us."


Here is one of the first images taken by SDO and still a favorite: A solar eruptive prominence as seen in extreme UV light on March 30, 2010 with Earth superimposed for a sense of scale. Credit: NASA/SDO

These images have regularly caught solar flares, coronal mass ejections, filament eruptions and other space weather phenomena in the act. Such images are helping to flesh out such questions as why the sun's corona – its atmosphere – is thousands of times hotter than the surface of the sun. For example, given how quickly SDO takes its pictures, scientists were recently able to track plumes of plasma heating up as they moved from the sun's surface up into the corona.

Another fruitful area of research from SDO involves understanding the massive explosions on the sun's surface called solar flares. Scientists have been able to use the GOES spacecraft to look at X-rays emitted from solar flares for some 40 years. But observing them in X-rays means one can only see those parts of the flares that are about 10 million degrees Celsius. Other spacecraft have since shown the flares in other wavelengths, but SDO's ability to provide detailed images of the same event in so many wavelengths allows one to see different parts of the flare no matter what temperature. It now appears that flares may be more complex than previously known.

The other two instruments onboard SDO also have made a strong impact. The Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE) examines the extreme ultraviolet photons from the sun that are responsible for heating in Earth's upper atmosphere. The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) observes how the magnetic fields across the surface of the sun change, as well as seismic activity across the sun. "These are the doorway to the interior of the sun," says Pesnell. "This is how we understand what's going on inside it."

Artist's concept of the Solar Dynamics Observatory. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab One of SDO's greatest successes so far may be how well these three instruments coordinate with other spacecraft observing the sun. For example, the two STEREO spacecraft moved into position on opposite sides of the sun on February 6, 2011 and will continue towards the far side and all the way around again over the next eight years. For that entire time, STEREO and SDO together will offer scientists their first opportunity to watch the entire sun simultaneously. There are many clues that solar weather can be connected over distances up to a million miles, but this will be the first chance to see how flares on one side coordinate with flares on the other.

In addition, sun observers such as the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) can show the highest energy, highest temperature bursts on the sun. These can be overlaid on SDO's images to get a more comprehensive picture of each individual event. On January 28, 2011, for example, two bursts of plasma jumped out from each side of the sun simultaneously -- an example of unconfirmed theories that such things often happen 180 degrees apart. Luckily, RHESSI caught the same event in its images, offering an unprecedented chance to examine all parts of the bursts at all temperatures.

"It's not just SDO. It's RHESSI, STEREO, SDO's three instruments all together," says Chamberlin. "The whole is much greater than the sum of the individual parts. We've been talking about putting together this great Heliophysics observatory and this really is what we have."

 

 
A composite SDO image from Feb. 11, 2011, exactly one year after its launch. The image combines three wavelengths of extreme ultraviolet light. Credit: NASA/SDO

SDO is the first mission in a NASA science program called Living With a Star, the goal of which is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to address those aspects of the sun-Earth system that directly affect our lives and society. NASA Goddard built, operates, and manages the SDO spacecraft for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about SDO, visit: www.nasa.gov/sdo.

 

 

Here are five facts you should know about NASA's Stardust-NExT spacecraft as it prepares for a Valentine's "date" with comet Tempel 1. Feel free to sing along! 

1. "The Way You Look Tonight" – The spacecraft is on a course to fly by comet Tempel 1 on Feb. 14 at about 8:37 p.m. PST (11:37 p.m. EST) -- Valentine's Day. Time of closest approach to Tempel 1 is significant because of the comet's rotation. We won't know until images are returned which face the comet has shown to the camera. 

2. "It's All Coming Back To Me Now" – In 2004, Stardust became the first mission to collect particles directly from a comet, Wild 2, as well as samples of interstellar dust. The samples were returned in 2006 via a capsule that detached from the spacecraft and parachuted to the ground at a targeted area in Utah. Mission controllers then placed the still-viable Stardust spacecraft on a flight path that could reuse the flight system, if a target of opportunity presented itself. Tempel 1 became that target of opportunity. 

3. "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" – The Stardust-NExT mission will allow scientists for the first time to look for changes on a comet's surface that occurred after one orbit around the sun. Tempel 1 was observed in 2005 by NASA's Deep Impact mission, which put an impactor on a collision course with the comet. Stardust-NExT might get a glimpse of the crater left behind, but if not, the comet would provide scientists with previously unseen areas for study. In addition, the Stardust-NExT encounter might reveal changes to Tempel 1 between Deep Impact and Stardust-Next, since the comet has completed an orbit around the sun. 

4. "The Wind Beneath My Wings" – This Tempel 1 flyby will write the final chapter of the spacecraft's success story. The aging spacecraft approached 12 years of space travel on Feb. 7, logging almost 6 billion kilometers (3.5 billion miles) since launch. The spacecraft is nearly out of fuel. The Tempel 1 flyby and return of images are expected to consume the remaining fuel. 

5. "Love is Now the Stardust of Yesterday" – Although the spacecraft itself will no longer be active after the flyby, the data collected by the Stardust-NExT mission will provide comet scientists with years of data to study how comets formed and evolved.

Bonus points for naming all the artists who sing these catchy tunes.

 

Artist's concept of NASA's Stardust-NExT mission, which will fly by comet Tempel 1 on Feb. 14, 2011.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/LMSS

A bonus round is something one usually associates with the likes of a TV game show, not a pioneering deep space mission. "We are definitely in the bonus round," said Stardust-NExT Project Manager Tim Larson of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "This spacecraft has already flown by an asteroid and a comet, returned comet dust samples to Earth, and now has almost doubled its originally planned mission life. Now it is poised to perform one more comet flyby."

A Successful Prime Mission

NASA's Stardust spacecraft was launched on Feb. 7, 1999, on a mission that would explore a comet as no previous mission had. Before Stardust, seven spacecraft from NASA, Russia, Japan and the European Space Agency had visited comets – they had flight profiles that allowed them to perform brief encounters, collecting data and sometimes images of the nuclei during the flyby.

Like those comet hunters before it, Stardust was tasked to pass closely by a comet, collecting data and snapping images. It also had the ability to come home again, carrying with it an out-of -this-world gift for cometary scientists – particles of the comet itself. Along the way, the telephone booth-sized comet hunter racked up numerous milestones and more than a few "space firsts."

In the first round of its prime mission, Stardust performed observations of asteroid Annefrank, only the sixth asteroid in history to be imaged close up. After that, Stardust racked up more points of space exploration firsts. It became the first spacecraft to capture particles of interstellar dust for Earth return. It was first to fly past a comet and collect data and particles of comet dust (hurtling past it at almost four miles per second) for later analysis. Then, it was first to make the trip back to Earth after traveling beyond the orbit of Mars (a two-year trip of 1.2 billion kilometers, or 752 million miles). When Stardust dropped off its sample return capsule from comet Wild 2, the capsule became the fastest human-made object to enter Earth's atmosphere. The mission was also the first to provide a capsule containing cometary dust specimens, speciments that will have scientists uncovering secrets of comets for years to come.

With such a high tally of "firsts" on its scoreboard, you'd think Stardust could receive a few parting gifts and leave the game. And an important part of the original spacecraft is currently enjoying retirement – albeit a high-profile one: Stardust's 100-pound sample return capsule is on display in the main hall (Milestones of Flight) of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington. But the rest of NASA's most-seasoned comet hunter is still up there – and there is work still to be done.

"We placed Stardust in a parking orbit that would carry it back by Earth in a couple of years, and then asked the science community for proposals on what could be done with a spacecraft that had a lot of zeros on its odometer, but also had some fuel and good miles left in it," said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division.

Moving into the Bonus Round

In January 2007, from a stack of proposals with intriguing ideas, NASA chose Stardust-NExT (Stardust's Next Exploration of Tempel). It was a plan to revisit comet Tempel 1 at a tenth of the cost of a new, from-the-ground-up mission. Comet Tempel 1 was of particular interest to NASA. It had been the target of a previous NASA spacecraft visit in July 2005. That mission, Deep Impact, placed a copper-infused, 800-pound impactor on a collision course with the comet and observed the results from the cosmic fender-bender via the telescopic cameras onboard the larger part of Deep Impact, a "flyby" spacecraft observing from a safe distance.

"The plan for our encounter is to be more hospitable to comet Tempel 1 than our predecessor," said Joe Veverka, principal investigator of Stardust-NExT from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. "We will come within about 200 kilometers [124 miles] of Tempel 1 and view the changes that took place over the past five-and-a-half years."

That period of time is significant for Tempel 1 -- it is the period of time it takes the comet to orbit the sun once. Not much happens during a comet's transit through the chilly reaches of the outer solar system. But when it nears perihelion (the point in its orbit that an object, such as a planet or a comet, is closest to the sun), things begin to sizzle.

"Comets can be very spectacular when they come close to the sun, but we still don't understand them as well as we should," said Veverka. "They are also messengers from the past. They tell us how the solar system was formed long ago, and Stardust-NExT will help us understand how much they have changed since their formation."

So the spacecraft that had traveled farther afield than any of its predecessors was being sent out again in the name of scientific opportunity. In between spacecraft and comet lay four-and-a-half years, over a billion kilometers (646 million miles), and more than a few hurdles along the way.

Your Mileage May Vary

"One of the challenges with reusing a spacecraft designed for a different prime mission is you don't get to start out with a full tank of gas," said Larson. "Just about every deep-space exploration spacecraft has a fuel supply customized to get the job done, with some held in reserve for contingency maneuvers and other uncertainties. Fortunately, the Stardust mission navigation team did a great job, the spacecraft operated extremely well, and there was an adequate amount of contingency fuel aboard after its prime mission to make this new comet flyby possible – but just barely."

Just how much fuel is in Stardust's tanks for its final act?

"We estimate we have a little under three percent of the fuel the mission launched with," said Larson. "It is an estimate, because no one has invented an entirely reliable fuel gauge for spacecraft. There are some excellent techniques with which we have made these estimates, but they are still estimates."

One of the ways mission planners can approximate fuel usage is to look at the history of the vehicle's flight and how many times and for how long its rocket motors have fired. When that was done for Stardust, the team found their spacecraft's attitude and translational thrusters had fired almost half-a-million times each over the past 12 years.

"There is always a little plus and minus with each burn. When you add them all up, that is how you get the range of possible answers on how much fuel was used," said Larson.

Fuel is not the only question that needs to be addressed on the way to a second comet encounter. Added into the mix is the fact a comet near the sun can fire off jets of gas and dust that can cause a change in its orbit, sometimes in unexpected ways, potentially causing a precisely designed cometary approach to become less precise. Then there are the distances involved. Stardust will fly past comet Tempel 1 on almost the opposite side of the sun from Earth, making deep-space communication truly, well, deep space. Add into the mix the Stardust spacecraft itself. Launched when Bill Clinton was in the White House, Stardust has been cooked and frozen countless times during its trips from the inner to outer solar system. It has also weathered its fair share of radiation-packed solar storms. But while its fuel tank may be running near-empty, that doesn't mean Stardust doesn't have anything left in the tank.

"All this mission's challenges are just that – challenges," said Larson. "We believe our team and our spacecraft are up to meeting every one of them, and we're looking forward to seeing what Tempel 1 looks like these days."

The Final Payoff

Larson, Veverka and the world will get their chance beginning a few hours after the encounter on Monday, Feb. 14, at about 8:56 p.m. PST (11:56 p.m. EST), when the first of 72 bonus-round images of the nucleus of comet Tempel 1 are downlinked.

All images of the comet will be taken by the spacecraft's navigation camera – an amalgam of spare flight-ready hardware left over from previous NASA missions: Voyager (launched in 1977), Galileo (launched in 1989), and Cassini (launched in 1997). Each image will take about 15 minutes to transmit. The first five images to be received and processed on the ground are expected to include a close up of Tempel 1's nucleus. All data from the flyby (including the images and science data obtained by the spacecraft's two onboard dust experiments) are expected to take about 10 hours to reach the ground.

Stardust-NExT is a low-cost mission that will expand the investigation of comet Tempel 1 initiated by NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages Stardust-NExT for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. Joe Veverka of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., is the mission's principal investigator. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver Colo., built the spacecraft and manages day-to-day mission operations.

More information about Stardust-NExT is online at: http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov .