First Solar Sail organize in Low-Earth Orbit

NASA is now one step nearer to sailing among the stars! In a famous milestone on Jan. 21, 2011, NASA engineers established that the NanoSail-D nanosatellite deployed its 100-square-foot polymer sail in low-Earth orbit and is working as planned. The deployment was complete with beacon packets data received from NanoSail-D and extra ground-based satellite tracking assets.


NASA hopes to one day use thin membranes to de-orbit satellites and space trash. While NanoSail-D's relatively low altitude means drag from Earth's atmosphere may lead any force from the sun, the nanosatellite remains a small first step towards finally deploying solar sails at higher altitudes.

Mars Sliding last Sun After drifter Anniversary

The team operating NASA's Mars rover Opportunity will temporarily suspend commanding for 16 days after the rover's seventh anniversary next week, but the rover will stay busy.



For the fourth time since Opportunity landed on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004, Universal Time (Jan. 24, Pacific Time), the planets' orbits will put Mars almost directly behind the sun from Earth's perspective.

During the days surrounding such an alignment, called a solar conjunction, the sun can disrupt radio transmissions between Earth and Mars. To avoid the chance of a command being corrupted by the sun and harming a spacecraft, NASA temporarily refrains from sending commands from Earth to Mars spacecraft in orbit and on the surface. This year, the commanding moratorium will be Jan. 27 to Feb. 11 for Opportunity, with similar periods for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey orbiter.

Downlinks from Mars spacecraft will continue during the conjunction period, though at a much reduced rate. Mars-to-Earth communication does not present risk to spacecraft safety, even if transmissions are corrupted by the sun.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will scale back its observations of Mars during the conjunction period due to reduced capability to download data to Earth and a limit on how much can be stored onboard.

NASA & OPTIMUS PRIME team up to Educate Youth

NASA has opened online voting for the agency's OPTIMUS PRIME Spin-off Award student video challenge. The public is invited to vote for its favorite videos, made by students in grades three through eight, developed to help educate America's youth about the profit of NASA's technologies.

NASA is using the union between Hasbro's TRANSFORMERS property and commercialized agency " Spinoffs" to help students know how technology developed for space and aeronautics "transforms" into what is old on Earth.

More than 190 children from 31 states have submitted creative videos describing their favorite agency technology from NASA's 2009 Spinoff publication. The students also documented why their video should be selected to win the NASA OPTIMUS PRIME trophy.

The top five submissions from each of two groups (third through fifth and sixth through eighth grades) will proceed for final judging. The voting course is open until Feb. 6.

A panel of NASA judges will select the winners in each of the two grade categories. The winning students, associated Spinoff companies and NASA innovators will be announced in February.

In addition to the trophy, the winners will travel to Colorado Springs, Colo., for an award service during the 27th National Space Symposium on April 12.

NASA intends to make this an annual competition. Students can begin thinking about next year's competition by deciding which Spinoffs they like best from NASA's recently-published Spin-off 2010.

Andromeda is So Hot 'n' Cold

This mosaic of the Andromeda spiral galaxy highlights explosive stars in its interior, and cooler, dusty stars forming in its many rings. The image is a combination of observations from the Herschel Space Observatory taken in infrared light (seen in orange hues), and the XMM-Newton telescope captured in X-rays (seen in blues). NASA plays a role in both of these European Space Agency-led missions.



Herschel provides a detailed look at the cool clouds of star birth that line the galaxy's five concentric rings. Massive young stars are heating blankets of dust that surround them, causing them to glow in the longer-wavelength infrared light, known as far-infrared, that Herschel sees.

In contrast, XMM-Newton is capturing what happens at the end of the lives of massive stars. It shows the high-energy X-rays that come from, among other objects, supernova explosions and massive dead stars rotating around companions. These X-ray sources are clustered in the center of the galaxy, where the most massive stars tend to form.

Andromeda is our Milky Way galaxy's nearest large neighbor. It is located about 2.5 million light-years away and holds up to an estimated trillion stars. Our Milky Way is thought to contain about 200 billion to 400 billion stars.