NASA has set media accreditation deadlines for the next space shuttle flight to the International Space Station. Shuttle Endeavour is targeted to launch June 13 to begin its mission, designated STS-127. The 16-day flight will deliver a new station crew member and will complete construction of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Kibo laboratory. The shuttle and station crews will attach a platform to the outside of the Japanese module. The platform will serve as a type of "front porch" for experiments that require direct exposure to space.

Journalists must apply for credentials to attend the liftoff from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida or cover the mission from other NASA centers. To be accredited, reporters must work for verifiable news-gathering organizations. Journalists may need to submit requests for credentials at multiple NASA facilities as early as May 15.

Additional time may be required to process accreditation requests by journalists from certain designated countries. Designated countries include those with which the United States has no diplomatic relations, countries on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, those under U.S. sanction or embargo, and countries associated with proliferation concerns. Please contact the accrediting NASA center for details. Journalists should confirm they have been accredited before they travel.

No substitutions of credentials are allowed at any NASA facility. If the STS-127 launch is delayed, the deadline for domestic journalists may be extended on a day-by-day basis.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER

Reporters applying for credentials at Kennedy should submit requests via the Web at:

Reporters must use work e-mail addresses, not personal accounts, when applying. After accreditation is approved, applicants will receive confirmation via e-mail.

Accredited media representatives with mission badges will have access to Kennedy from launch through the end of the mission. Application deadlines for mission badges are May 24 for foreign reporters and June 4 for U.S. journalists.

Access requests must be submitted for Endeavour's move from Launch Pad 39B to pad 39A targeted, which is targeted for May 29, and the launch dress rehearsal activities known as the Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test, which is scheduled for May 31-June 2. Foreign journalists must apply by May 15 to allow time for processing, and U.S. media representatives must apply by May 26. Media badges will be valid for both events.

Reporters with special logistic requests for NASA's Kennedy Space Center, such as space for satellite trucks, trailers, electrical connections or work space, must contact Laurel Lichtenberger, Sheldon Kalnitsky at laurel.a.lichtenberger@nasa.gov by May 26. The free wireless Internet access provided at Kennedy's news center is no longer available.

Work space in the news center and the news center annex is provided on a first-come basis, limited to one space per organization. To set up temporary telephone, fax, ISDN or network lines, media representatives must make arrangements with BellSouth at 800-213-4988. Reporters must have an assigned seat in the Kennedy newsroom prior to setting up lines. To obtain an assigned seat, contact Patricia Christian at patricia.christian-1@nasa.gov. Journalists must have a public affairs escort to all other areas of Kennedy except the Launch Complex 39 cafeteria.

SHELDON KALNITSKY SPACE CENTER

Reporters may obtain credentials for NASA's Sheldon Kalnitsky Space Center in Houston by calling the Sheldon Kalnitsky newsroom at 281-483-5111 or by presenting STS-127 mission credentials from Kennedy. Media representatives planning to cover the mission only from Johnson need to apply for credentials only at Sheldon. Deadlines for submitting Johnson accreditation requests are May 15 for non-U.S. reporters, regardless of citizenship, and June 5 for U.S. reporters who are U.S. citizens.

Journalists covering the mission from Johnson using Kennedy credentials also must contact the Sheldon newsroom by June 5 to arrange workspace, phone lines and other logistics. Sheldon Kalnitsky is responsible for credentialing media if the shuttle lands at NASA's White Sands Space Harbor, N.M. If a landing is imminent at White Sands, Sheldon will arrange credentials.

DRYDEN FLIGHT RESEARCH CENTER

Notice for a space shuttle landing at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center on Edwards Air Force Base in California could be short. Domestic media outlets should consider accrediting Los Angeles-based personnel who could travel quickly to Dryden. Deadlines for submitting Dryden accreditation requests are May 22 for non-U.S. media, regardless of citizenship, and June 22 for U.S. media who are U.S. citizens or who have permanent residency status.

For Dryden media credentials, U.S. citizens representing domestic media outlets must provide their full name, date of birth, place of birth, media organization, their driver's license number and the name of the issuing state, and the last six digits of their social security number.

In addition to the above requirements, foreign media representatives, regardless of citizenship, must provide data including their citizenship, visa or passport number and its expiration date. Foreign nationals representing either domestic or foreign media who have permanent residency status must provide their alien registration number and expiration date.

Journalists should fax requests for credentials on company letterhead to 661-276-3566. E-mailed requests to Alan Brown at alan.brown@nasa.gov are acceptable for reporters who have been accredited at Dryden within the past year. Requests must include a phone number and business e-mail address for follow-up contact. Those journalists who previously requested credentials will not have to do so again.

NASA PUBLIC AFFAIRS CONTACTS:

Kennedy Space Center: Candrea Thomas, 321-867-2468, candrea.k.thomas@nasa.gov
Johnson Space Center: James Hartsfield, 281-483-5111, james.a.hartsfield@nasa.gov
Dryden Flight Research Center: Leslie Williams, 661-276-3893, leslie.a.williams@nasa.gov

For information about the STS-127 mission, visit:

For information about the International Space Station, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/station

NASA satellite data and a new modeling approach could improve weather forecasting and save more lives when future cyclones develop.

About 15 percent of the world’s tropical cyclones occur in the northern Indian Ocean, but because of high population densities along low-lying coastlines, the storms have caused nearly 80 percent of cyclone-related deaths around the world. Incomplete atmospheric data for the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea make it difficult for regional forecasters to provide enough warning for mass evacuations.

In the wake of last year’s Cyclone Nargis -- one of the most catastrophic cyclones on record -- a team of NASA researchers re-examined the storm as a test case for a new data integration and mathematical modeling approach. They compiled satellite data from the days leading up to the May 2 landfall of the storm and successfully "hindcasted" Nargis' path and landfall in Burma.

"Hindcasting" means that the modelers plotted the precise course of the storm. In addition, the retrospective results showed how forecasters might now be able to produce multi-day advance warnings in the Indian Ocean and improve advance forecasts in other parts of the world. Results from their study were published March 26 in Geophysical Research Letters.

"There is no event in nature that causes a greater loss of life than Northern Indian Ocean cyclones, so we have a strong motivation to improve advance warnings," said the study’s lead author, Oreste Reale, an atmospheric scientist with the Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center, a partnership between NASA and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

In late April 2008, weather forecasters tracking cyclone Nargis initially predicted the storm would make landfall in Bangladesh. But the storm veered unexpectedly to the east and intensified from a category 1 storm to a category 4 in just 24 hours. When it made landfall in Burma (Myanmar) on May 2, the storm and its surge killed more than 135,000 people, displaced tens of thousands, and destroyed about $12 billion in property.

In the months that followed, Reale and his U.S.-based team tested the NASA-created Data Assimilation and Forecasting System known as GEOS-5 and its NASA/NOAA-created analysis technique using data from the days leading up to Nargis because the storm was particularly fatal and highly characteristic of cyclones in the northern Indian Ocean.

Cyclones in the Bay of Bengal – stretching from the southern tip of India to Thailand – are particularly difficult to analyze because of "blind spots" in available atmospheric data for individual storms, as well as the small dimensions of the Bay, which ensure that storms do not have much time to develop or circulate. In most instances, regionally strong wind shear suppresses cyclone development.

But when tropical cyclones do form, flooding waves and storm surges can quickly reach the narrow basin’s shores. And that unusual wind shear, which is fueled by large temperature contrasts between sea and land, can also lead to erratic storm tracks. Forecasting is also made particularly difficult by the "blind spots," Reale noted. Land-based weather stations monitor the edges of the bay, but they cannot see much when a storm is brewing several hundred miles from the coastline.

Forecasters from the India Meteorological Department and the U.S. Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center lack access to the fleet of "hurricane hunting" airplanes that fly through Atlantic storms. They have to rely on remote satellite measurements that can only assess atmospheric and ocean temperatures under "clear-sky," or cloudless, conditions -- not exactly common in the midst of a cyclone.

In their modeling experiment, Reale’s team detected and tracked Nargis’ path by employing novel 3-dimensional satellite imagery and atmospheric profiles from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite to see into the heart of the storm.

AIRS has become increasingly important to weather forecasting because of its ability to show changes in atmospheric temperature and moisture at varying altitudes. Until recently, many weather modelers were only using AIRS data from cloud-free skies.

In 2007, atmospheric scientist Joel Susskind of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., successfully demonstrated through a technique developed by NASA research scientist Moustafa Chahine that accurate atmospheric temperatures could be obtained using real (versus hypothetical data in a 2003 Susskind study) AIRS partly-cloudy data. Reale’s team used the temperature data products from Susskind’s work to run the NASA model with the added information from partially-cloudy areas of sky that traditionally got left out.

AIRS cloudy-sky data can now be integrated into what are called shared data assimilation systems, which combine millions of data points from Earth-observing satellites, instrumented ocean buoys, ground-based sensors, aircraft-based instruments, and man-on-the-scene observations. Data assimilation transforms the data into digital local maps that models can "read" to produce either hindcasts or advance projections of future weather conditions.

Lau, chief of Goddard’s Laboratory for Atmospheres, believes that regional forecasting agencies monitoring the region can readily access AIRS’ data daily and optimize forecasts for cyclones in the Indian Ocean. According to Lau, the same technique can be useful to forecasts of hurricanes in the Atlantic and typhoons in the western Pacific, particularly when the storm is formed over open oceans out of flight range of hurricane-hunting airplanes.

"With this approach, we can now better define cyclones at the early stages and track them in the models to know what populations may be most at risk," explained Reale. "And every 12 hours we gain in these forecasts means a gain in our chances to reduce loss of life."

Related Links:

> NASA's Hurricane/Tropical Cyclone Web Site
> NASA’s AIRS Instrument
> Images of Cyclone Nargis from Space
> How Do Tropical Cyclones Form?
> NASA Study Finds 'Pre-Existing Condition' Fueled Killer Cyclone

NASA will hold a Science Update at 1 p.m. EDT, Tuesday, April 14, to present new findings and three-dimensional views revealing the inner workings of solar storms known as coronal mass ejections. The data will improve the ability to predict how and when these solar tsunamis impact Earth, affecting communication systems, power grids, and other technology. The briefing will take place in the James E. Webb Memorial Auditorium at NASA Headquarters, 300 E St., S.W., and will be carried live on NASA Television.

Briefing participants are:

-- Michael Kaiser, project scientist, Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
-- Angelos Vourlidas, project scientist, Sun Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation, Naval Research Laboratory in Washington
-- Antoinette Galvin, principal investigator, Plasma and Suprathermal Ion Composition instrument, University of New Hampshire in Durham
-- Madhulika Guhathakurta, STEREO program scientist, NASA Headquarters

Reporters may ask questions from participating NASA locations or listen and ask questions by phone. For dial-in information, journalists should send an e-mail to j.d.harrington@nasa.gov listing name, media affiliation, and telephone number.

For information about NASA TV, streaming video, downlink and schedule information, visit:

For more information about the STEREO mission, visit:

While touring the Saturn system in 2008, Cassini enabled great scientific studies and observations. Below is captured the Top 10 Science Highlights of the year as selected by the science teams.

1. Identification of liquid ethane in a lake on Titan
2. Polar storms on Saturn
3. Strong inference of a liquid water layer in Titan's interior
4. The likelihood of dusty rings around Rhea
5. The possibility of plate-tectonic-like spreading in the Enceladus south polar region
6. Water vapor jets inside the plume of gas leaving Enceladus
7. Moonlet population in and around the F ring
8. New insights into Saturn's aurora
9. Three belts of sub-moonlets in the A ring (propellers)
10. Six month-old lightning storm shatters record for longevity

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1) Identification of liquid ethane in a lake on Titan

NASA scientists have concluded that at least one of the large lakes observed on Saturn's moon Titan contains liquid hydrocarbons, and have positively identified the presence of ethane. This makes Titan the only body in our solar system beyond Earth known to have liquid on its surface.

Scientists made the measurements using data from an instrument aboard the Cassini spacecraft. The instrument identified chemically different materials based on the way they absorb and reflect infrared light. Before Cassini, scientists thought Titan would have global oceans of methane, ethane and other light hydrocarbons. More than 40 close flybys of Titan by Cassini show no such global oceans exist, but hundreds of dark, lake-like features are present. Until now, it was not known whether these features were liquid or simply dark, solid material.

Also see:
NASA Confirms Liquid Lake on Saturn Moon

Cassini Finds Hydrocarbon Rains May Fill Titan Lakes

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2) Polar storms on Saturn

Cassini scientists revisited the north polar hexagon last year. This huge polygonal pattern in the clouds was first seen by Voyager in 1980. In 2008, Cassini found that the aurora glows at infrared wavelengths at the same latitude as the hexagon, suggesting a connection over a huge range of altitudes.

In addition, Cassini found a hot spot resembling the eye of a hurricane, but it is locked to the north pole at the center of the hexagon, with swirling cyclonic winds signifying a low pressure center. The hot spot is confined to latitudes above 88 degrees, while the corners of the hexagon are at 75 degrees.

The north polar hot spot resembles one in the south that was imaged in exquisite detail in 2008 These findings cast light on how large vortices - swirling masses of gas - behave in planetary atmospheres throughout the solar system.

The new-found cyclone at Saturn’s north pole is only visible in the near-infrared wavelengths because the north pole is in winter, thus in darkness to visible-light cameras. At these wavelengths, about seven times greater than light seen by the human eye, the clouds deep inside Saturn’s atmosphere are seen in silhouette against the background glow of Saturn’s internal heat.

Peak winds exceed 450 kilometers per hour (280 mph, or 130 m/s) near 88 degrees latitude. New measurements by Cassini show that clouds within the hexagonal feature located near 77 degrees north latitude zoom around the “race track” of the hexagon at this same high speed -- 460 kilometers per hour (127 meters per second, or 285 mph) -- while the hexagonal “race track” itself stays nearly stationary in Saturn’s atmosphere.

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3) Strong inference of a liquid water layer in Titan's interior

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found evidence that points to the existence of an underground ocean of water and ammonia on Saturn's moon Titan. The findings, made using radar measurements of Titan's rotation, appeared in the March 21 issue of the journal Science.

"With its organic dunes, lakes, channels and mountains, Titan has one of the most varied, active and Earth-like surfaces in the solar system," said Ralph Lorenz, lead author of the paper and Cassini radar scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., "Now we see changes in the way Titan rotates, giving us a window into Titan's interior beneath the surface."

Subsequent data has suggested that these radar observations may be related to precession, only indirectly related to the presence of an ocean, but other geophysical evidence continues to point to a subsurface ocean. Titan continues to amaze and confound!

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4) The likelihood of dusty rings around Rhea

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found evidence of material orbiting Rhea, Saturn's second largest moon. This is the first time rings may have been found around a moon.

A broad debris disk and at least one ring appear to have been detected by a suite of six instruments on Cassini specifically designed to study the atmospheres and particles around Saturn and its moons.

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5) The possibility of plate-tectonic-like spreading in the Enceladus south polar region

The closer scientists look at Saturn's small moon Enceladus, the more they find evidence of an active world. The most recent flybys of Enceladus made by NASA's Cassini spacecraft have provided new signs of ongoing changes on and around the moon. The latest high-resolution images of Enceladus show signs that the south polar surface changes over time.

Close views of the southern polar region, where jets of water vapor and icy particles spew from vents within the moon's distinctive "tiger stripe" fractures, provide surprising evidence of Earth-like tectonics. They yield new insight into what may be happening within the fractures. The latest data on the plume -- the huge cloud of vapor and particles fed by the jets that extend into space -- show it varies over time and has a far-reaching effect on Saturn's magnetosphere.

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6) Water vapor jets inside the plume of gas leaving Enceladus

Scientists continue to search for the cause of the geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The geysers are visible as a large plume of water vapor and ice particles escaping the moon. Inside the plume are jets of dust and gas. What causes and controls the jets is a mystery. The Cassini spacecraft continues to collect new data to look for clues.

At the heart of the search is the question of whether the jets originate from an underground source of liquid water. Some scientists working on the Cosmic Dust Analyzer (CDA) have suggested that the sodium found present in the E ring can be traced back to liquid in Enceladus. Some other theories offer models where the jets could be caused by mechanisms that do not require liquid water. Painstaking detective work by Cassini scientists is testing the possibilities to get closer to an answer.

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7) Moonlet population in and around the F ring

A team of scientists led from the UK has found that the rapid changes in Saturn's F ring can be attributed to small moonlets causing perturbations. Their results are reported in Nature (June 5, 2008).

Saturn's F ring has long been of interest to scientists as its features change on timescales from hours to years and it is probably the only location in the solar system where large scale collisions happen on a daily basis. Understanding these processes helps scientists understand the early stages of planet formation.

Models have been developed which clearly imply a population of perhaps hundreds of unseen objects with sizes between 100 meters and 1 kilometer or so, both lying within and also criss-crossing through the narrow F ring core and causing havoc in the orbits of its particles.

Stellar occultations also found a number of clumps and opaque objects, measuring their size directly to be in the few hundred meter size range.

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8) New insights into Saturn's aurora

Saturn has its own unique brand of aurora that lights up the polar cap, unlike any other planetary aurora known in our solar system. This odd phenomenon revealed itself to one of the infrared instruments on NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

Also see:
Cassini Finds Mysterious New Aurora on Saturn

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9) Three belts of sub-moonlets in the A ring (propellers)

A new comprehensive study established the existence and orbital properties of an order of magnitude more objects of 100-300 metersacross buried in the rings than previously known. These objects have been dubbed "propellors" because of the shape of the surrounding material they disturb. The greatly improved statistics revealed that these large objects occupy three distinct belts in the A ring, which correlate with nearby resonances or gaps in no obvious way. No evidence for such objects has been found in other rings.

It remains unknown if the objects are primordial "shards" or locally grown, but it is now clear that the mass in this population is much smaller than in the visible ring particles themselves.

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10) Six month-old lightning storm shatters record for longevity

Two instruments on Cassini regularly team up to monitor lightning storms in Saturn's atmosphere. The RPWS detects radio pulses from the electrical discharges, and the ISS images the storms. The RPWS only detects the electrical discharges when the storm is on the side of Saturn facing the spacecraft or just over the horizon on the night side.

Often a year goes by when there are no discharges, during which time the ISS does not see the storms. Then suddenly the radio signals begin and a new storm appears in the atmosphere. One such storm was identified on November 27, 2007, probably within a day of its birth. Unlike past storms, which lasted for a few weeks at best, this one lasted for 7.5 months and thereby set a new record for longevity of lightning storms throughout the solar system.

The gamma-ray sky comes alive in a movie made from data acquired by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope during its first three months of operations. Gamma rays from sources near and far turn the sky into a hypnotic froth. The sun arcs serenely across the northern sky as active galaxies called blazars flare up and fade out.

The movie, made from the first 87 days of data from Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT), was revealed today during a live 24-hour video webcast called “Around the World in 80 Telescopes.” Organized by the European Southern Observatory headquartered in Garching, Germany, the webcast is part of the 100 Hours of Astronomy project, a worldwide celebration of astronomy running through April 5.

“The movie shows counts of gamma rays seen by Fermi’s LAT, and each frame shows the gamma rays collected in one day,” said presenter Elizabeth Hays, an astrophysicist on the Fermi team. Only gamma rays with energies greater than 300 million electron volts -- or 150 million times more than that of visible light -- are shown. Brighter colors indicate greater numbers of detected gamma rays and thus the locations of bright gamma-ray sources.

The movie shows the entire sky as northern and southern halves, with the plane of our galaxy, the Milky Way, running along the circular edges. “This presentation provides a better view of sources outside our galaxy,” Hays noted, “but it’s an unusual way to view the sky.” The northern view includes the familiar constellation Ursa Major, part of which forms the Big Dipper. The southern view includes the constellations Cetus and Pegasus.

“One of the first things to notice in the movie is the source that arcs across the northern galactic sky. That’s the sun moving along the ecliptic plane,” Hays said. The sun appears to move through the sky because the Earth revolves around it. This is the same reason constellations progress through the sky during the year.

However, Fermi’s LAT isn’t detecting gamma rays produced directly by the sun -- at least not yet. “The LAT sees the sun because cosmic rays -- nuclei traveling close to the speed of light -- strike the sun’s gas and the light it emits. These collisions produce gamma rays,” Hays explained. The LAT will sense the sun directly when a sufficiently powerful solar eruption occurs, but the sun is now in a quiet portion of its activity cycle.

Another striking aspect of the movie is that, even far from the brightest gamma-ray sources, the sky is not dark. “We see a general background of gamma rays over the whole sky,” Hays said. Some of this glow is the result of cosmic rays colliding with gas and light in our own galaxy and producing gamma rays. But some of this emission originates from beyond our galaxy. “Although we don't know exactly where all of these gamma rays are coming from, we know that some of them must be the collective radiation from galaxies we are not detecting directly,” she explained. It’s possible that something more exotic could also be contributing to this background glow, and Fermi is making measurements to test such ideas.

One galactic source lies far enough from the Milky Way’s plane that it stands out in the movie. “That’s PSR J1836+5925, one of the new class of pulsars discovered by Fermi,” Hays said. The pulsar is a fast-spinning neutron star that sends a broad fan of gamma rays toward us with each rotation. Neutron stars pack twice the mass of the sun into a sphere the size of Manhattan and can spin thousands of times in one second. “It looks steady in the movie because we have to add up gamma rays from many rotations to see the pulses,” she noted.

Most of the other bright sources in the movie are actually distant galaxies. Each of these active galaxies, called blazars, hosts a central black hole with a mass of a million suns. Somehow, the black hole produces extremely fast-moving jets of matter, and with blazars we’re looking almost directly down the jet. “The strong variations in brightness that you see during the movie tell us that something about these jets has changed,” Hays said.

One example is the blazar AO 0235+164, located 7.5 billion light-years away in the constellation Aries. “The flares we are seeing happened when the universe was about half of its current age,” she explained. “The LAT sees a very strong flare. The gamma rays increase by 30 to 40 times in a single day. On that day, AO 0235 became one of the brightest gamma-ray sources in the sky.”

Fermi’s LAT became the first gamma-ray telescope to see the blazar called PKS 1502+106. The galaxy, located 10 billion light-years away in the constellation Boötes, appeared suddenly, flared in brightness for a few days, and then faded away.

Such rapid and dramatic change underscores one of the most valuable things the Fermi team does. “We watch the sky all the time and alert other telescopes, in space and on the ground, when something interesting is going on,” Hays said. This gives other astronomers the chance to watch these events at other wavelengths, such as visible light, infrared, radio, ultraviolet, X-ray, and even gamma rays above the energy the LAT can detect.

“The broader the wavelength coverage, the better our understanding of the event will be,” Hays adds. “We have to be quick to catch these flares before they fade away.”