NASA Administrator Lori Garver Visits Israel for Global Space Conference

NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver returned Feb. 1 from a four-day tour to Israel where she delegated NASA at an international space conference, met with students and rewarded tribute to the memory of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon.

Garver’s visit was tinted by her contribution in the Sixth Annual Ilan Ramon International Space Conference, a two-day forum for Israel’s space community to confer technologies, programs and strategies with representatives from around the world.

The convention included meetings with European Space Agency Director General Jean-Jacques Dordain, Israeli Minister of Science and Technology Daniel Hershkowitz, Menachem Greenblum, director general of Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology, and Israel Space Agency Director General Zvi Kaplan.

NASA's Kepler Spacecraft Discovers Astonishing New Planetary Structure

Scientists using NASA's Kepler, a space telescope, lately exposed six planets made of a mix of rock and gases orbiting a single sun-like star, known as Kepler-11, which is situated approximately 2,000 light years from Earth.

"The Kepler-11 planetary system is astounding," said Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist and a Kepler knowledge team member at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

In other words, Kepler-11 has the fullest, most compact environmental system yet discovered beyond our own.

According to Lissauer, Kepler-11 is an amazing planetary system whose architecture and dynamics provide clues about its formation. The planets Kepler-11d, Kepler-11e and Kepler-11f have a significant amount of light gas, which Lissauer says indicates that at least these three planets created early in the history of the planetary system, within a few million years.

NASA Satellite Tracks Ominous Australian Cyclone

Fresh on the heels of a series of crippling floods that began in December 2010, and a tiny tropical cyclone, Anthony, this past weekend, the northeastern Australian state of Queensland is now stimulating for what could become one of the largest tropical cyclones the state has ever seen. The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite, built and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The AIRS data create an exact 3-D map of atmospheric temperature, water vapor and clouds, data that are functional to forecasters. The image shows the temperature of Yasi's cloud tops or the surface of Earth in cloud-free regions.

The coldest cloud-top temperatures appear in purple, in lieu of soaring cold clouds and heavy precipitation. The infrared signal of AIRS does not pierce through clouds. Where there are no clouds, AIRS reads the infrared signal from the surface of the sea waters, enlightening warmer temperatures in orange and red.

Charles Bolden Speaks to Richmond Middle School Students

NASA Admin Charles Bolden visited the MathScience Innovation Center in Richmond, Va., to meet seventh and eighth-grade students from the city's Albert Hill Middle School. Bolden discussed his armed and space career and the significance of science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, education for tomorrow's careers. In his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, President Obama emphasized the significance of STEM education for the U.S. to fight globally and create jobs.

U.S. Senator Mark Warner and U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott joined Bolden and science center executives for the event.

STEM education is the basis of NASA's learning initiatives, such as the Summer of Innovation (SoI) project. Begun in 2010, the project engages middle school students in STEM studies and hands-on, or participatory, exploration during the summer hiatus, when many lose academic skills acquired during the school year.

SoI also supports a continuum of synchronized services to engage students in meaningful ways through summer and extensive learning during the school year. NASA will proclaim this year's summer of novelty plans in the spring.

Mars Investigation Rover Mission Standing Report

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

For the fourth time since chance 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 an astrophysical conjunction, the sun can disturb radio transmissions between Earth and Mars. To evade the chance of a command being corrupted by the sun and harming a spacecraft, NASA momentarily refrains from sending commands from Earth to Mars spacecraft in orbit and on the surface. This year, the commanding cessation will be Jan. 27 to Feb. 11 for Opportunity, with similar periods for the Mars inspection Orbiter and Mars Odyssey orbiter.

Russian Made Cargo Vessel Blasts Off Towards Station

The ISS Progress 41 cargo craft launched at 8:31 p.m. EST Thursday (7:31 a.m. Baikonur time Friday) from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. The Russian resupply craft will dock to the station’s Pirs docking compartment Saturday at 9:39 p.m. The Progress is carrying 1,918 pounds of propellant, 110 pounds of oxygen, 926 pounds of water and 3,080 pounds of spare parts and supplies to the station.

Nine minutes after launch, the Progress alienated from the third stage of its Soyuz rocket, placing the unpiloted cargo craft into its preliminary orbit. The crew opened the hatch to the HTV2 at 3:47 p.m. Thursday as the global Space Station orbited 220 miles west of Chile.

In the coming days, a pallet loaded with spare station parts will be extracted from a slot in the cargo ship and attached to an experiment platform outside the Japanese Kibo module. Other cargo will be transferred internally to the station.

NASA's Hubble Discovers Most far-away Galaxy Candidate Ever Seen in Universe

Astronomers have pushed NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to its limits by finding what is expected to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe. The object's light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach Hubble, roughly 150 million years longer than the preceding record holder. The age of the universe is about 13.7 billion years.

The tiny, soft object is a compacted galaxy of blue stars that existed 480 million years after the big bang. More than 100 such mini-galaxies would be needed to make up our Milky Way.

The new research offers amazing evidence that the rate of star birth in the early universe grew radically, increasing by about a factor of 10 from 480 million years to 650 million years after the big bang.