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Happy New Year!

Wishing all a joyful new year, members of the Cassini-Huygens team offer us their views of Saturn and the Cassini spacecraft. Cassini-Huygens, a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, which is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, for NASA. The Cassini orbiter (pictured at the top right of this image) and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL

Astronauts' marathon mission to repair Hubble Telescope

Astronauts resort to brute force on their mammoth spacewalk as they continue repairing the Hubble telescope..

Astronauts Start Hubble Repairs

A pair of spacewalking astronauts stepped outside Thursday to begin demanding repair work on the Hubble Space Telescope, a job made all the more dangerous because of the high, debris-ridden orbit. (May 14)

Cardiac Patients Take NASA Super Plastic to Heart

WASHINGTON -- A NASA technology that was developed for an aerospace high-speed research program is now part of an implantable device for heart failure patients.

NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., created an advanced aerospace resin, named Langley Research Center's Soluble Imide, or LaRC-SI. It is highly flexible, resistant to chemicals, and withstands extreme hot and cold temperatures. The "super plastic" was determined to be biologically inert, making it suitable for medical use, including implantable devices.

"One of the advantages of this material is that it lends itself to a variety of diverse applications, from mechanical parts and composites to electrical insulation and adhesive bonding," said Rob Bryant, a NASA Langley senior researcher and inventor of the material.

In July 2004, NASA licensed the patented insulation technology to Medtronic Inc., a Minneapolis-based medical technology company. Medtronic Inc. incorporated the material into its Attain Ability left-heart lead, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved.

The use of this NASA-developed material in a medical implant is the latest in a long line of medical applications that have benefited from NASA technology.

"Langley Research Center's Soluble Imide is an excellent example of how taxpayer investment in NASA materials research has resulted in a direct benefit beyond the aerospace sector by extending the quality of life through medical technology," Bryant said.

Heart failure occurs when the heart muscle is unable to pump effectively to meet the body's need for blood and oxygen. It is a chronic and progressive condition that affects more than five million Americans and more than 22 million individuals worldwide. Cardiac resynchronization therapy, or CRT, is designed to coordinate the contraction of the heart's two lower chambers and improve the heart's efficiency to increase blood flow to the body.

CRT devices, which are stopwatch-sized, are implanted into the chest and connected to the heart by leads, such as the Attain Ability left-heart lead. A lead is a special wire that delivers energy from a CRT to the heart muscle. Electrical impulses generated by CRTs resynchronize heartbeats and improve blood flow.

The NASA insulation material makes possible the compact and flexible design of Medtronic's CRT lead, one of the thinnest left-heart leads available. Placing a lead in the heart is widely recognized by physicians as the most challenging aspect of implanting CRT devices. The narrow design allows physicians to choose between different sites on the heart to deliver optimal therapy. The lead is delivered by an inner catheter, a feature that helps physicians place the lead directly in difficult-to-reach areas of the heart. Clinical studies in the U.S. and Canada showed physicians were successful in placing the Attain Ability lead 96.4 percent of the time.

The Langley Research Center's Soluble Imide was featured in Spinoff 2008 -- NASA's annual premier publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. For more than 40 years, the NASA Innovative Partnerships Program has facilitated the transfer of NASA technology to the private sector, benefiting global competition and the economy. Since 1976, Spinoff has featured 40 to 50 of these commercial products annually.

In 1995, R&D Magazine selected the resin for an R&D 100 award as one of the top 100 technical innovations of the year.

NASA Television is airing a Video File demonstrating the technology. For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more information about Langley Research Center's Soluble Imide, visit:

http://technologygateway.nasa.gov/Advanced_Materials.html

and

http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/Spinoff2008/hm_4.html

NASA Television to Provide HD Coverage of Space Shuttle Launch

NASA Television to Provide HD Coverage of Space Shuttle Launch

WASHINGTON -- NASA Television will provide live high definition coverage of Monday's scheduled launch of space shuttle Atlantis on its STS-125 mission to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.

The NASA Television HD feed (Channel 105) will be available beginning Friday at 12 p.m., EDT, with live images from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Launch coverage begins Monday, May 11, at 8:30 a.m. Liftoff is slated for 2:01 p.m.

NASA TV Downlink Parameters are:
Uplink provider = Americom
Satellite = AMC 6
Transponder = 17C
72 Degrees West
Transmission Format: DVB-S
Downlink Frequency: 4040 MHz
Polarity: Vertical
FEC= 3/4
Data Rate= 36.860 MHz
Symbol Rate = 26.665 Ms/s

For NASA TV HD Programming:
HD Program = 105
Video PID = 82
AC-3 Audio PID = 238
MPEG-1 Layer II Audio PID =83

For NASA TV streaming video, downlink and scheduling information, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

For more information about the space shuttle's STS-125 mission, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/shuttle

For more information about the Hubble Space Telescope, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/hubble

NASA's Spitzer Telescope Warms Up to New Career

WASHINGTON -- The primary mission of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is about to end after more than five and a half years of probing the cosmos with its keen infrared eye. Within about a week of May 12, the telescope is expected to run out of the liquid helium needed to chill some of its instruments to operating temperatures.

The end of the coolant will begin a new era for Spitzer. The telescope will start its "warm" mission with two channels of one instrument still working at full capacity. Some of the science explored by a warm Spitzer will be the same, and some will be entirely new.

"We like to think of Spitzer as being reborn," said Robert Wilson, Spitzer project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Spitzer led an amazing life, performing above and beyond its call of duty. Its primary mission might be over, but it will tackle new scientific pursuits, and more breakthroughs are sure to come."

Spitzer is the last of NASA's Great Observatories, a suite of telescopes designed to see the visible and invisible colors of the universe. The suite also includes NASA's Hubble and Chandra space telescopes. Spitzer has explored, with unprecedented sensitivity, the infrared side of the cosmos, where dark, dusty and distant objects hide.

For a telescope to detect infrared light -- essentially heat -- from cool cosmic objects, it must have very little heat of its own. During the past five years, liquid helium has run through Spitzer's "veins," keeping its three instruments chilled to -456 degrees Fahrenheit (-271 Celsius), or less than 3 degrees above absolute zero, the coldest temperature theoretically attainable. The cryogen was projected to last as little as two and a half years, but Spitzer's efficient design and careful operations enabled it to last more than five and a half years.

Spitzer's new "warm" temperature is still quite chilly at -404 degrees Fahrenheit (-242 Celsius), much colder than a winter day in Antarctica when temperatures sometimes reach -75 degrees Fahrenheit (-59 Celsius). This temperature rise means two of Spitzer's instruments -- its longer wavelength multiband imaging photometer and its infrared spectrograph -- will no longer be cold enough to detect cool objects in space.

However, the telescope's two shortest-wavelength detectors in its infrared array camera will continue to function perfectly. They will still pick up the glow from a range of objects: asteroids in our solar system, dusty stars, planet-forming disks, gas-giant planets and distant galaxies. In addition, Spitzer still will be able to see through the dust that permeates our galaxy and blocks visible-light views.

"We will do exciting and important science with these two infrared channels," said Spitzer Project Scientist Michael Werner of JPL. Werner has been working on Spitzer for more than 30 years. "Our new science program takes advantage of what these channels do best. We're focusing on aspects of the cosmos that we still have much to learn about."

Since its launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Aug. 25, 2003, Spitzer has made countless breakthroughs in astronomy. Observations of comets both near and far have established that the stuff of comets and planets is similar throughout the galaxy. Breathtaking photos of dusty stellar nests have led to new insights into how stars are born. And Spitzer's eye on the very distant universe, billions of light-years away, has revealed hundreds of massive black holes lurking in the dark.

Perhaps the most revolutionary and surprising Spitzer finds involve planets around other stars, called exoplanets. Exoplanets are, in almost all cases, too close to their parent stars to be seen from our Earthly point of view. Nevertheless, planet hunters continue to uncover them by looking for changes in the parent stars. Before Spitzer, everything we knew about exoplanets came from indirect observations such as these.

In 2005, Spitzer detected the first actual photons from an exoplanet. In a clever technique, now referred to as the secondary-eclipse method, Spitzer was able to collect the light of a hot, gaseous exoplanet and learn about its temperature. Further detailed spectroscopic studies later revealed more about the atmospheres, or "weather," on similar planets. More recently, Spitzer witnessed changes in the weather on a wildly eccentric gas exoplanet -- a storm of colossal proportions brewing up in a matter of hours before quickly settling down.

"Nobody had any idea Spitzer would be able to directly study exoplanets when we designed it," Werner said. "When astronomers planned the first observations, we had no idea if they would work. To our amazement and delight, they did."

These are a few of Spitzer's achievements during the past five and a half years. Data from the telescope are cited in more than 1,500 scientific papers. And scientists and engineers expect the rewards to keep on coming during Spitzer's golden years.

Some of Spitzer's new pursuits include refining estimates of Hubble's constant, or the rate at which our universe is stretching apart; searching for galaxies at the edge of the universe; assessing how often potentially hazardous asteroids might impact Earth by measuring the sizes of asteroids; and characterizing the atmospheres of gas-giant planets expected to be discovered soon by NASA's Kepler mission. As was true during the cold Spitzer mission, these and the other programs are selected through a competition in which scientists from around the world are invited to participate.

JPL manages the Spitzer mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, and Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. in Boulder, Colo. support mission and science operations. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., built Spitzer's infrared array camera; the instrument's principal investigator is Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. built Spitzer's infrared spectrograph; its principal investigator is Jim Houck of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. and the University of Arizona in Tucson, built the multiband imaging photometer for Spitzer; its principal investigator is George Rieke of the University of Arizona.

For more information about Spitzer, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

and

http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/spitzer