National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland/Wallops Island, Virginia

January 26, 2001

The Goddard News is published weekly by the Office of Public Affairs, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771

Table of Contents        

All Hands Meeting

All Goddard employees are invited to attend the Director's State of the Center Address. Mr. Diaz's address to the Center will be held on Thursday, February 1 from 9 to 11 a.m. in the Building 8 auditorium. Mr. Diaz will discuss the following:

- Our achievements and accomplishments for 2000

- Opportunities and outlook for a new year and a new Administration

- Looking ahead - a strategic view for 2001 and beyond

Wallops employees will view the presentation on Goddard TV Channel 6, questions may be called in on ext. 66-5592. IV&V employees will view the presentation and ask questions in the VITS conference room 225B.

All Goddard employees are encouraged to attend. A sign language interpreter will be available, and refreshments provided.

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STS-51L would have been NASA's 25th Shuttle launch. All Goddard employees are invited to attend this brief ceremony. For more information, please contact the Visitor Center on x6-8981.

The NASA History Division has updated its World Wide Web site on STS-51L, Challenger, because of this anniversary. Links on this page include a series of significant NASA sites containing information about the mission and the accident. In addition, links to numerous other sites on the web relating to the Challenger accident are available also can be found. The URL is: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/sts51l.html 

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David Lavanchy of World Health Organization, is today's Scientific Colloquium speaker. His topic is "Epidemics: Properties, Surveillance and Early Warnings." This presentation will discuss the importance of geographic information systems and related mapping technologies which represent very powerful resource tools within the context of public health programming.

The colloquium is at 3:30 p.m. in the Building 3 auditorium. For information about the scientific colloquia go to: http://scicolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov/ 

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The first large-scale pictures of the hidden machinations of the Earth's magnetic force-field are now available, including confirmation of a suspected but previously invisible "tail" of electrified gas.

The tail, which streams from Earth towards the Sun, was spotted by NASA's Imager for Magnetopause to Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) spacecraft and is featured on the cover of the Jan. 26 issue of the journal Science. The new imaging technology offers unprecedented views of the transparent, electrified gas trapped within Earth's magnetic field, providing the first visual, global perspective on magnetic storms.

The region laced by Earth's magnetic field, called the magnetosphere, dominates the behavior of electrically charged particles in space near Earth and shields the planet from the solar wind. Explosive events on the Sun can charge the magnetosphere with energy, generating magnetic storms that occasionally affect satellites, communications and power systems.

It's difficult for any one spacecraft, or even a small fleet, to obtain a coherent, large-scale view of activity in this vast region because the magnetosphere extends beyond the Moon on the night side of the Earth. "Imagine trying to track and understand the formation of hurricanes without the view from weather satellites," said Dr. Thomas Moore, IMAGE Project Scientist at Goddard. "Like the first meteorologists with a small number of measuring stations, we had an incomplete and at times misleading view of the magnetosphere and magnetic storms before IMAGE, because we couldn't see the big picture."

"IMAGE is providing for the first time global views of the Earth's charged-particle populations at multiple wavelengths and energies on time scales of a few minutes, which is sufficient to track the dynamics of the magnetosphere," said Dr. James Burch, IMAGE Principal Investigator and lead author of the Science paper at Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, TX.

The Earth's magnetosphere traps electrified gas, called plasma. The new IMAGE pictures show a tail-like structure in the Earth's own plasma cloud that forms as some of the gas streams toward the Sun. The structure was predicted 30 years ago, but previous spacecraft were unable to confirm its existence.

The tail structure is believed to be a return flow of plasma that occurs when the solar wind (a plasma flow ejected continuously from the solar surface) buffets the magnetosphere and distorts its shape. For example, at first a falling raindrop is roughly spherical. As it falls and gains speed, air resistance causes the droplet to change shape as water is dragged from the bottom (head) to the top (tail). Surface tension prevents most of the water from simply dispersing from the tail, so it is forced to flow within the raindrop and return to the head.

The solar wind distorts the Earth's magnetosphere in a similar way, compressing it on the Earth's day side, like the head of a raindrop. The region is stretched on the night side, like the raindrop tail, forming a teardrop shape.

Plasma near the boundaries of the magnetosphere is dragged with the solar wind, but then is turned around and forced back towards the Sun, moving around the Earth in tail-like flows. Although the plasma tails were expected, IMAGE discovered areas in Earth's plasma cloud that are nearly empty of plasma. The IMAGE team calls these unexpected structures "troughs" and is trying to discover how they form.

IMAGE, launched March 25, 2000, also revealed some surprising activity during magnetic storms, which occur when the solar wind pummels the Earth's magnetosphere, stretching it out on night side. The night-side region of the magnetosphere suddenly snaps back and shoots plasma violently toward Earth. The plasma becomes heated to several hundred million degrees and whirls around Earth in multi-million-amp currents. IMAGE discovered the hot storm-plasma occasionally is most dense on the Earth's day side, which is unexpected. Researchers are currently studying this.

Images and more information are available at:

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Weather prediction is hard enough. But what are the possibilities for predicting events related to weather?

With new tools being developed at Goddard and NASA's ever increasing suite of Earth observations, scientists just might be on the road to estimating future weather-related incidents.

A recent real world example suggests just how valuable this kind of information could be. Following the devastating season of wildfires in the western United States, many questions remain. Could officials have predicted the conditions for the severity of last summer's fire season, and therefore planned differently?

At Goddard, experts are developing a system that someday soon might be useful in making those predictions. Oceanographer Dr. David Adamec and a team of earth scientists and others are using satellite measurements and conventional temperature readings of the oceans to drive an advanced computer simulation depicting seasonal to annual changes in the land and atmosphere.

The goal of the research is to use the model to forecast real world, short-term climate trends. "We've essentially constructed a climate in cyberspace," said Adamec. "With the kind of dedicated digital horsepower at our disposal, this model goes far beyond anything available to the desktop world."

Adamec says the simulation churns its digital winds and pelts the electronic ground with simulated rain inside the heart of a Cray T3E supercomputer. Although some years old now, NASA's T3E is still one of the fastest systems in the world.

"The sheer speed at which we are able to run the model on the Cray T3E allows for advances in climate research," says Adamec.

Performing billions of calculations per second, the system simulates the complex processes that produce short-term climate changes. The resulting images and data provide clues as to possible scenarios for seasonal and short-term climate trends. "It's a pro-active approach toward short-term global climatological research," he said.

Adamec's team focuses on the model's interconnectedness of the atmosphere, ocean and land. By combining climatological interactions in an environment that can be fully controlled, the researchers can examine the Earth's climate and seasonal behavior in detail.

One of the most powerful aspects of the work is the ability to change conditions to suit experimental needs. This ability has allowed them to use the conditions leading to last summer's fires as a test case for their model. Using actual ocean data during the conflagrations, Adamec's team looked to see if their computer model arrived at the same conclusion as the events in the real world.

Often, summer rains begin from evaporating soil moisture. Since a layer of moist air tends to remain closer to the ground than a layer of dryer air, it is more easily heated during the day due to its proximity to the warm ground. Eventually, that heated, moist air rises and produces rain clouds.

But with last year's La Niña spring, part of that cycle was interrupted. The soil did not contain much moisture going into the summer due to a dry spring. When soil moisture is limited, the mechanism for summertime precipitation is deficient, and the result is a season of drought that sets prime conditions for fires.

What did NASA's supercomputer predict? Using data prior to the fire season, the model essentially concluded that dry conditions would persist through the season.

While in this instance the model was right on, Adamec says it is still a long way from completion. "The model still cannot reliably predict complex climate changes into the future to the degree that state or federal governmental agencies and communities can set their calendars and budgets," he said. "But with recent, stunning advances in computer technology, as well as continuing developments in using satellites to acquire new data, we are definitely making progress toward that end."

Adamec's team hopes their work will lead to not only highly precise methods for climate prediction, but also tools for understanding how it works at the most sophisticated levels.

Research into the forces that drive short and long-term changes to the land and atmosphere are part of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise, a research program designed to study the Earth's land, oceans, air, ice and life as a total system.

Information and images to support this story are available at:

Additional information on NASA's high-performance scientific computing facility can be found at:

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Students from across Kentucky will get a new tool with which to explore space with the relocation of a NASA satellite-tracking antenna to Morehead State University.

Moorhead President Ronald Eagan said, "Transfer of the satellite tracking station from NASA will revolutionize the science curriculum at Moorhead State University. We also are very excited about this project’s potential impact on high-tech economic development related to satellite telecommunications. The long-term impact that this project will have on a region desperate for high-tech training opportunities is immeasurable."

Steve Curia, manager of the Ground Network Project Office for Goddard, said, "NASA is extremely pleased to see new life breathed into the antenna system. It has served NASA well for more than 30 years and now it will be used to train a new generation of space scientists and engineers."

The antenna system stands approximately nine stories tall and the tracking dish is 60-feet (18 meters) in diameter. In recent years, its primary mission was to provide tracking and control for the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE) satellite. NASA decommissioned the antenna system after the IUE mission ended in 1997.

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Shuttle managers have announced Feb. 7 as the target launch date for Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-98. The date accommodates scheduled launch activities on Florida's Eastern Test Range and better supports a desire to rendezvous with the orbiting International Space Station on flight day 3.

Atlantis with a five member crew is scheduled to liftoff at 6:11 p.m. EST on a mission to deliver the U.S. laboratory module to the International Space Station. The Shuttle will spend six days docked to the station while the laboratory is attached and three spacewalks will be conducted to complete its assembly. Landing is planned for February 18 at 1:39 p.m. EST.

Managers also announced a target launch date of no earlier than June 8 for Atlantis' next flight on mission STS-104.

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Written requests for vehicle passes to view Space Shuttle launches within the restricted perimeter of Kennedy Space Center (KSC) are once again being accepted. These passes grant visitors permission to drive through several designated guard stations to a public viewing site on the causeway between KSC and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station without the requirement of an escort.

Anyone is welcome to make a request, including members of the general public worldwide, educators, and representatives from groups or organizations wishing to attend the launch together.

Only requests for passes for the following Space Shuttle missions currently targeted for launch in the year 2001 are being accepted. Specific Space Shuttle mission launch assessment dates can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/schedule/schedule.htm .

Since the number of vehicle passes is limited, requests will be accepted on a first come first served basis. All requests should be submitted in writing to:

Car Pass Request

PA-PASS

Kennedy Space Center, FL 32899

Letter and postcard requests are allowed. No e-mail or telephone requests will be accepted.

The request must be for one mission only. The mission must be specified in the request letter. The request must also specify which of the following category of vehicle pass is required: car, motor home, bus, or disabled.

Only those selected will be notified by mail. The passes will then be mailed to the recipient's address approximately three weeks prior to the launch. Only one request per person will be honored. Only one pass will be issued per request.

Because of the limited number of passes available, only one (1) request per household or address will be honored each calendar year. This policy will apply to all future Space Shuttle missions. Requests for passes for missions launching after the year 2001 will not be honored at this time.

For more information, visit the following Web site:

Efforts by its Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization really paid off recently when NASA was named one of America's top 50 organizations for providing multicultural business opportunities. NASA received the honor after the first Internet-based election involving more than 50 thousand of America's leading women- and minority-owned businesses.

"As a premier high-technology federal agency, we're happy to know that we're on the right track," said Ralph C. Thomas III, NASA's Associate Administrator for Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization. "We consider this award to be an endorsement from the small- and multicultural-business community of the innovative programs and initiatives we implement to attract those firms that have provided us with high-quality goods and services at the lowest practicable cost."

Div2000.com, a business portal providing the link among multicultural businesses, Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies and universities, conducted the election.

Fiscal year 2000 was a banner year for NASA as the agency awarded more than $2 billion in contracts to minority- and women-owned firms. The figure represents 18.3 percent of NASA's total contract dollars and is NASA's highest accomplishment ever with such firms. It compares with just 7.2 percent or $865 million in FY 92.

The "top 50" list also included such companies as IBM, Boeing, Microsoft, 3Com, Wal-Mart and Cisco Systems.

In the Safety Corner

Time is critical during an emergency. By properly activating the GSFC emergency response system, you can ensure that these resources are quickly and efficiently dispatched.

On the GSFC ROLM phone system, you must dial 112 to activate the GSFC emergency response system. On non-ROLM phones (i.e., construction sites, analog lines, off-site phones, and cellular phones) the GSFC emergency number is (301) 286-8080. The appropriate emergency number should be prominently displayed on or near your phone. These numbers may be used at any time on any day.

When you call to notify the Emergency Console of an emergency, be prepared to give your name and the phone number of the phone from which you are calling as well as the nature and location of the emergency.

Dialing 911 directly from GSFC does not speed up the process. This bypasses the emergency services available on Center, and actually slows the response time down because the EMTs on Center are not notified that their services are needed.

So remember, for all emergencies, dial 112.

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Aurora/2001: Dance of the Auroras, Fire in the Sky, a visionary international performance event that relates the story of the auroras with a strong emphasis on real time interactive visual elements, will be performed February 3 at the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

Aurora/2001 will relate the story of auroras. Performers will use a wireless mouse to manipulate the projected surroundings, interacting with constantly changing constructions, animations, solar images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and other missions, and films and footage of Earth's elusive auroras provided by NASA's Polar spacecraft and ground-based cameras.

The project is the brainchild of choreographer and video artist Maida Withers, an international artist and master of dance experimentation. Artists and scientists from five continents have contributed their unique accomplishments to create this combination of live performance and interactive virtual space.

Nicola Fox, International Solar Terrestrial Physics science and operations coordinator at Goddard, and Pal Brekke, ESA SOHO deputy project scientist at Goddard, will provide opening remarks at the Feb. 3 event to be held in the Air and Space Museum's Einstein Planetarium in Washington, D.C. The 6 p.m. EST presentation is free to the public, but seating is limited.

Additional productions of Aurora/2001 are scheduled for Feb. 15 and 16 at the Lisner Auditorium in Washington, D.C., beginning at 8 p.m. EST. Tickets for this event are available at all Ticketmaster locations, or at the Lisner box office, Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. through 5 p.m. EST.

Withers conducted five years of intense research, traveling the globe to observe the aurora phenomenon, consulting with numerous scientists from NASA, the European Space Agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and others in an attempt to comprehend the challenging mysteries of auroras.

For more details about Aurora/2001, contact Susan Hendrix at 301-286-7745, or visit the Aurora/2001 web site at: http://www.danceaurora.org 

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On Feb. 12, NASA makes history when mission controllers attempt to bring a spacecraft down to the surface of an asteroid for the first time.

Controllers will send commands to the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft to initiate a four-hour series of engine burns designed to set the spacecraft down gently on the asteroid Eros at about 3:01 p.m. EST.

The target site is on a saddle-shaped area known as Himeros on the Manhattan-sized asteroid. The goal is to obtain high-resolution imagery as NEAR Shoemaker, which has completed its one-year orbital mission of Eros, slowly drops to the surface.

A media briefing to discuss the mission's science results and the details of the descent to the surface of Eros is set for 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Jan. 31, in the James E. Webb Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, 300 E St. SW, Washington, DC. The briefing will be carried live on NASA Television.

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The Office of Inspector General (OIG) announced this month it will conduct a new review of Public Law 106-554 concerning the collection of personal information on NASA's publicly accessible Web sites. Public Law 106-554, enacted December 16, 2000, requires the Inspector General to report to Congress any NASA activity relating to:

(1) the collection or review of singular data, or the creation of aggregate lists that include personally identifiable information, about individuals who access any Internet site of the department or agency; and

(2) entering into agreements with third parties, including other government agencies, to collect, review, or obtain aggregate lists or singular data containing personally identifiable information relating to any individual's access or viewing habits for governmental and non-governmental Internet sites.

The report to Congress is due not later than 60 days after the date of enactment of the legislation, or February 16, 2001. The OIG has initiated the review assignment to obtain information to satisfy the reporting requirement. Specifically, they will test a sample of NASA's publicly accessible Web sites for use of persistent "cookies," and for compliance with Office of Management and Budget Web site privacy policies as prescribed in its Memorandum M-00-13 issued June 22, 2000. Additionally, they will solicit input from the Chief Information Officer and the Office of General Counsel as necessary.

If you have any questions or need additional information, please contact Mr. Gregory B. Melson, Program Director for Information Assurance Audits, at (202) 358-2588 or Mr. Ernest L. Willard, Audit Program Manager, at (650) 604-2676.

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Goddard in the News

Goddard scientists David Adamec and Rosanna Nieto Ferra conducted 28 live interviews with week with television stations around the country concerning "The World in a Supercomputer: First Pictures from NASA's 'Virtual Climate.'" Nationally, CNBC, CNN, Discovery Canada and the National Geographic interviewed Dr. Adamec. Other stations included those from Washington, D.C, Kansas City, St. Louis, Boise, Green Bay, Austin, Denver, New Orleans, Sacramento, Detroit, Philadelphia and Knoxville. Nieto Ferra conducted two interviews with the Spanish Weather Channel (including one in her native Portuguese) and with CBS Telenoticias/Telemundo

El Nino & La Nina: Information about the effect pattern of El Nino and La Nina that was released at the recent meeting of the American Meteorological Society appeared in various news outlets, including USA Today.com and SpaceFlight Now.com.

Antarctic Ice Crack: NASA and university scientists report in the latest issue of the Journal of Glaciology that warmer temperatures in a few months time can splinter an ice shelf and prime it for a major collapse. This report was featured on ABCNews.com and co-author Christine Hulbe, is mentioned for her findings of the amount of water in a surface crack.

Outreach: A lunar sample from Goddard was displayed at area schools in the Coatsville, Penn., region in an effort to promote science in the community. The story made the cover of the local Daily News newspaper. Over 500 people attended a special lunar sample event that took place.

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You are invited to make a difference! Kids can be engineers and technicians too - if they are encouraged. Join us for Engineers Week, February 19-23, 2001. We would like to double our participation for this year. Review the NEW Engineers Week web site http://education.gsfc.nasa.gov/eweek/engineers/ for registration, resources and assistance.

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Goddard Education Programs has received a request for Judges at the Howard County Public School Systems Mathematics, Science, and Technology Fair, Long Reach High School, Columbia, Maryland on Saturday, March 3, 2001. The judge(s) will assist in the school's program of reviewing/evaluating project display contents, creativity and quality; research reports; and student interviews representing a variety of topics. If you are interested in volunteering or for more information, please contact Ms. Clarissa Evans or Terri Showers at 410-313-6615 at the Science Office of Howard County Public Schools.

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***UPCOMING EVENTS AT GODDARD***

Scientific Colloquium

Who: Bruno Coppi of Yale University

What: Will speak on "Theoretical and Experimental results in Fusion Research: Related Issues in Astrophysics"

When/Where: Friday, Feb 2, bldg. 3 auditorium at 3:30

For more info: http://lheawww.gsfc.nasa.gov/users/djt/colloq/

Who: Avi Silberschatz, Vice President for Information Science Research, Lucent Technologies Bell Labs

What: Will speak on the topic entitled, "Next Generation Information Systems"

When/Where: Wednesday, Jan 31, bldg.3 auditorium at 3:30 p.m.

For more info: http://ISandTColloq.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Who: Dr. Francisco Valero of Scripps Institution of Oceanography

What: Will discuss, "Triana: The First Deep Space Climate Observatory"

When/Where: Tuesday, Feb 6, bldg. 33, Room H114 at 3:30 p.m.

For more info: http://code916.gsfc.nasa.gov./Personnel/people/Newman,_Paul_A./lab_seminar_spr2001.html#Feb.%2006

Upcoming Launches

If you would like to submit articles, make comments or ask questions concerning Goddard News for this week please address your email comment to:  Trusilla.Y.Steele.1@gsfc.nasa.gov