New Horizons Successful Completes the Historic First Flyby of Pluto and Its Moons

On July 14, 2015, after a 9.5 year trek across the solar system, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew by the dwarf planet Pluto and its system of moons, taking imagery, spectra and in-situ particle data. Data from New Horizons will address numerous outstanding questions on the geology and composition of Pluto and Charon, plus measurements of Pluto's atmosphere, and provide revised understanding of the formation and evolution of Pluto and Charon and its smaller moons. This data set is an invaluable glimpse into the outer Third Zone of the solar system. Data from the intense July 14th fly-by sequence will be downlinked to Earth over a period of 16 months, the duration set by the large data set (over 60 GBits) and the limited transmitted bandwidth rates (approx. 1-2 kbps) and sharing the three 70 m DSN assets with our missions. The small fraction (approx. 1%) of data downlinked during the early phase of the flyby has already revealed Pluto and Charon to be very different worlds, with increasing and dynamic complexity

Pluto Revealed: First Results from the Historic 1st Fly-By Space Mission.

On July 14, 2015, after a 9.5 year trek across the solar system, NASAs New Horizons spacecraft successfully flew by the dwarf planet Pluto and its system of moons, taking imagery, spectra and in-situ particle data. In this internet-information age, this historic first fly-by was shared across planet Earth, everyone witnessing first-hand the transformation of distant point of lights into real worlds. The New Horizons dataset has become an invaluable first glimpse into the outer Third Zone of the Solar System. Pluto has revealed itself to be a complex, beautiful place, with a variety of geophysical and surface-atmosphere interactions. Charon has been unmasked; its surface features implying a complicated, enigmatic history. The smaller moons, origins still unknown, are uniquely different in their own right. This presentation summarizes NASAs New Horizons mission and its early science results, and touches on the future of further exploring the outer Third Zone

Configurable Aperture Space Telescope

In December 2014, we were awarded Center Innovation Fund to evaluate an optical and mechanical concept for a novel implementation of a segmented telescope based on modular, interconnected small sats (satlets). The concept is called CAST, a Configurable Aperture Space Telescope. With a current TRL is 2 we will aim to reach TLR 3 in Sept 2015 by demonstrating a 2x2 mirror system to validate our optical model and error budget, provide straw man mechanical architecture and structural damping analyses, and derive future satlet-based observatory performance requirements. CAST provides an alternative access to visible and/or UV wavelength space telescope with 1-meter or larger aperture for NASA SMD Astrophysics and Planetary Science community after the retirement of HS

The Curiosity Effect

This conference aims to improve how we learn through integrative project and discovery-based methods. My talk highlights areas in my experience as a scientist, and most recently working for our national space agency, NASA, where we work in teams with a "discovery-based" mindset. When you demonstrate broad curiosity, you become open to different viewpoints and ways to approach and manage situations. Sometimes working only from "what you have been trained to do" or "what you know" is not enough, especially when the rules may be changing. Increasing our openness in our learning, and sharing what we know, can lead to a more diverse and innovative community, solving problems in new ways, overcoming resistance to new ideas, and hopefully creating a dynamic and faring-forward society. Let us not kill curiosity, at any age, in any situation. Let us remind ourselves, at any time, in any circumstance, to continue to learn, to mentor, to stimulate, to engage and reconnect with that "open sense of possibility.

Star & Planet Formation Studies and Opportunities with SOFIA

Star formation, the most fundamental process in the universe, is linked to planet formation and thus to the origin and evolution of life. We have a general outline of how planets and stars form, yet unraveling the details of the physics and chemistry continues to challenge us. The infrared and submillimeter part of the spectrum hold the most promise for studying the beginnings of star formation. The observational landscape recently shaped by Spitzer, Herschel and ALMA, continues to challenge our current theories. SOFIA, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, equipped with state-of-the-art infrared instrumentation to a vantage point at 45,000 feet (13.7 kilometers) flight altitude that is above 99.9 percent of the Earth's water vapor, enables observations in the infrared through terahertz frequencies not possible from the ground. SOFIA is a community observatory, about to start its sixth annual observing cycle. My talk will focus on recent results in advancing star and planet formation processes using SOFIAs imaging and polarimetric capabilities, and the upcoming science enabled by the 3rd generation instrument High-Resolution Mid-Infrared Spectrometer (HIRMES) to be commissioned in 2019. I will show how mid-infrared imaging is used to test massive star formation theories, how far-infrared polarimetry on sub-parsec scales is directly testing the role of magnetic fields in molecular clouds, and how velocity-resolved high-resolution spectroscopy will push forward our understanding of proto-planetary disk science. I will also summarize upcoming opportunities with the SOFIA observatory. For the latest news about your flying observatory, see https://sofia.usra.edu/

Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) Instrument Calibration Summary

This document describes the calibration of the LCROSS instruments. It will be released to the public via the Planetary Data System. We need a quick review, if possible, because the data has been delivered to the PDS, and this document is needed to interpret the LCROSS impact data fully. [My mistake [shirley) in not realizing this needed to be treated as a normal publication.] The LCROSS instruments are commercially available units except for one designed and built at Ames. The commercially available instruments don't seem to me to present ITAR issues (Sony video camera, thermal camera from England, and so on.) Also, the internal design details of the instruments are not included in this report, only the process of calibrating them against standard targets. Only very high-level descriptions of the spacecraft are included, comparable to the level of detail included in the public web pages on nasa.gov

Detection of Ocean Glint and Ozone Absorption Using LCROSS Earth Observations

The Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) observed the distant Earth on three occasions in 2009. These data span a range of phase angles, including a rare crescent phase view. For each epoch, the satellite acquired near-infrared and mid-infrared full-disk images, and partial-disk spectra at 0.26-0.65 microns (R~500) and 1.17-2.48 microns (R~50). Spectra show strong absorption features due to water vapor and ozone, which is a biosignature gas. We perform a significant recalibration of the UV-visible spectra and provide the first comparison of high-resolution visible Earth spectra to the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Laboratory three-dimensional spectral Earth model. We find good agreement with the observations, reproducing the absolute brightness and dynamic range at all wavelengths for all observation epochs, thus validating the model to within the ~10% data calibration uncertainty. Data-model comparisons reveal a strong ocean glint signature in the crescent phase dataset, which is well matched by our model predictions throughout the observed wavelength range. This provides the first observational test of a technique that could be used to determine exoplanet habitability from disk-integrated observations at visible and near-infrared wavelengths, where the glint signal is strongest. We examine the detection of the ozone 255 nm Hartley and 400-700 nm Chappuis bands. While the Hartley band is the strongest ozone feature in Earth's spectrum, false positives for its detection could exist. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings for future exoplanet characterization missions.Comment: Accepted to The Astrophysical Journal; recalibration data for LCROSS VSP can be found at: https://sites.google.com/site/tdrobinsonscience/science/moo

LCROSS: Volatiles and Exosphere Associated with a Permanently Shadowed Region in Cabeus

We discuss the volatile species in the LCROSS data set in addition to water that were observed by the LCROSS Shepherding Spacecraft before its own demise in the four minutes following the first impact by the Centaur. The stochastic nature of the temporal variations observed by the nadir-viewing near-infrared spectrometer combined with the diversity of the volatile species suggests that these species were in situ in the permanently shadowed crater and were released by a combination of the centaur impact and the resulting warming of the regolith by the impact and ejecta debris blanket. Adding to this intrigue are the pre-impact observations by the UVVisual spectrometer that reveal that the field-of-view into the permanently shadowed crater contains UV emission lines, The UV lines are clearly revealed once the descent of the shepherding spacecraft narrows the field-of-view of the UV-Vis spectrometer so as to exclude any surrounding bright terrain. Our suggestion is that this emission comes from tenuous gases, i.e., there appears to be a potential association between the cold, permanently shadowed region and an exosphere