GREENBELT, Md. - NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, located in Greenbelt, Maryland, has the lead on many exciting space missions launching in the next year.
These missions include a final repair trip to upgrade the famous Hubble Space Telescope and spacecraft to study powerful gamma-rays, the moon, the Sun, and Earth's weather and pollution. "This is one of the busiest periods in the history of Goddard," said Rick Obenschain, acting director of Goddard.
The mission that kicked off the series of launches was CINDI.
GLAST is a powerful new tool to explore the most extreme environments in the universe, where nature harnesses energies far beyond anything possible on Earth. GLAST is also the first imaging gamma-ray observatory to survey the entire sky every day and with high sensitivity. It will detect thousands of gamma-ray sources, most of which will be super-massive black holes in the cores of distant galaxies. And it will give scientists a unique opportunity to learn about the ever-changing universe at extreme energies. For more information about GLAST, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/glast
IBEX will make the first global observations of the region beyond the termination shock, an invisible shock formed as the solar wind piles up against the gas in interstellar space. The termination shock marks the beginning of our solar system's final frontier, a vast expanse of turbulent gas and twisting magnetic fields. This region is critical because it blocks the vast majority of the deadly cosmic rays that would otherwise permeate the space around Earth and other planets. By making the first images of the interstellar boundaries neighboring our solar system, IBEX will provide a first step toward exploring the galactic frontier. For more information about IBEX, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ibex/index.html
With more than 17 years of historic and trailblazing science already accomplished, Hubble will again be reborn with Servicing Mission Four, during which astronauts will conduct five spacewalks; install two new cutting-edge science instruments -- the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph -- to enhance Hubble's capabilities by large factors; refurbish a number of Hubble's subsystems including the Fine Guidance Sensor to maintain a robust ability to point the telescope; and install gyros, batteries and thermal blankets to ensure Hubble functions efficiently for a minimum of five years after servicing. Astronauts will also attempt the first ever on-orbit repair of two existing instruments: the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph and the Advanced Cameras for Surveys. For more information about Hubble, visit http://www.nasa.gov/hubble
Have you always wanted to see a rocket launch but don't have the time to take a trip to Florida's Space Coast? Then take the short three-hour drive to Virginia's Eastern Shore where three space missions are planned from Goddard's Wallops Flight Facility: TacSat-3, the Hypersonic Boundary Layer Transition (HyBoLT), and the Max Launch Abort System.
LRO will carry a suite of six instruments and will scan for resources and create accurate temperature maps necessary for designing structures that can endure the extreme temperature swings caused by the lunar day/night cycle. The moon offers radio-quiet sites that do not look through a thick ionosphere, allowing the use of low-frequency radio astronomy to access a new window into the early universe. It also allows the closest location where we can begin to learn how to extract, process, and use extra-terrestrial materials, significant to sustain a human presence in space. For more information about LRO, visit: http://lunar.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Slated for a December launch, SDO will look inside the Sun where solar activity begins, and also provide a better understanding of the flows of plasma inside the Sun, which is a key to predicting solar storms and activity cycles. SDO's "X-ray vision" could revolutionize the forecasting of solar storms. SDO will also measure the Sun's ever-changing extreme ultraviolet brightness, as well as help solve the mystery of what magnetic structures in the Sun may lead to violent space weather activity like flares and Coronal Mass Ejections. It will provide images of the Sun in eight soft X-ray wavelengths every 10 seconds, instead of once every 45 seconds as satellites do now. For more information about SDO, visit http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov
The Earth's energy balance, and its effect on climate, requires measuring black carbon soot and other aerosols, as well as the total solar irradiance. Glory is designed to collect data on the composition, properties and distribution of natural and man-made aerosols in Earth's atmosphere and climate system. Glory's data will help NASA scientists understand the climate-relevant chemical, microphysical, and optical properties, and spatial and temporal distributions of human-caused and naturally occurring aerosols. In addition, Glory will continue the measurement of the total solar irradiance to determine the Sun's direct and indirect effect on Earth's climate.
These data are essential to predicting future climate change and to making sound, scientifically based economic and policy decisions related to environmental change. For more information about Glory: http://glory.gsfc.nasa.gov/
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