NASA got something in return. A group of students who, before March, had never designed a virtual sphere, much less a virtual telescope, now have hands-on experience with the engineering tools of the future: modeling and simulation technology - ModSim for short.

The contest is part of a push by NASA and the National Institute of Aerospace to get that technology into the hands of the next generation of astronauts and engineers earlier.

"If you're going to have an appreciable or measurable impact on changing the work force, you have to get down in the K-12 (level)," said Thom Pinelli, deputy manager of the MODSIM Initiative at NASA's Langley Research Center. "We can't just sit around and wait for the system to change itself, because the system isn't going to change itself."

Engineering and design have been moving toward modeling technology for years: it allows engineers to design and then tweak designs without building expensive prototypes, or, in some cases, putting human testers in danger.

But even in Hampton Roads, where modeling and simulation are a fast-growing part of the economy, their use in the classroom hasn't followed, NASA and NIA officials say.

"You'll find little pockets of it," often in technology academies, or career and technical schools, said Mark Clemente, a Virginia Beach teacher. "But it's not widespread." Students learn how to use the software, but it's not integrated into the rest of the curriculum.

"This stuff could be as common as pencil and paper was when I was in school," said Sharon Bowers, who also teaches in Virginia Beach.

Bowers and Clemente are on leave and working out of NIA headquarters in Hampton on ways to bring ModSim into the classroom.

Along with the Hubble engineering contest, the institute is working with a group of teachers at Ocean Lakes High School in Virginia Beach who receive training from NASA and NIA on ways to incorporate modeling and simulation into core classes at the school: algebra, biology, chemistry and pre-calculus.

"The idea is to try to expose students to not necessarily a specific modeling and simulation program, but more how you think about things as you go to try to model them," Clemente said.

The institute has gotten interest about similar programs from schools in Portsmouth and Franklin, he said.

During the Hubble challenge, the students spent the first month doing traditional research. It was during the second half that they started to tackle the design and animation - "the real part of the challenge," said Grassfield freshman Ben Belfore.

They spent a day just making simple geometric objects, such as spheres and squares. There was "a pretty steep learning curve" at first, said one of their mentors, physics teacher Ken Dugan. The students had to make their presentation in a "virtual world," so along with the animation, they had to create all the objects to fill that world, such as the whiteboards.

The experience started out feeling like a video game, said freshman A.J. Glass.

"I didn't see it necessarily as a learning environment," he said. "But when I did start using it, it got cooler to make things and put things in the world. It became more of a growing habit to get on there."

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NOAA Selects Contractor to Develop GOES-R Ground System

The Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced today that Harris Corporation – Government Communications Systems Division of Melbourne, Fla. has been selected to develop the GOES-R ground system, which will capture, process and distribute information from NOAA’s next generation geostationary satellite series to users around the world.

The GOES-R series of spacecraft, set to begin launching in 2015, is expected to double the clarity of today’s satellite imagery and provide at least 20 times more atmospheric observations from space. The ground system is composed of computers which control the satellite and process the satellite’s data into products scientists can use.

“NOAA’s satellites are a crucial tool for weather forecasters and scientists. They help predict the path of dangerous storms and give us a greater understanding of our changing climate,” Undersecretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco, Ph.D. said.  “This award will generate nearly 300 jobs for the aerospace industry and will ensure NOAA remains on the cutting edge of satellite technology.”

The contract, which has an estimated value of $736 million, requires Harris Corporation to design, develop, test and implement the GOES-R ground system. The award was the result of a full and open competitive procurement process following federal acquisition regulations.  

Forecasters from NOAA’s National Weather Service, one of the primary users of GOES-R data, will see detailed images of potentially deadly hurricanes every 30 seconds, instead of every 7.5 minutes, which the current system provides.

Experts with the GOES-R program, and NOAA’s national data centers, will use the Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System (CLASS) to preserve the satellite data for future climate science research.  

The GOES-R ground system will be developed and operated at the NOAA Satellite Operations Facility in Suitland, Md. and at the Wallops Command and Data Acquisition Station in Wallops Island, Va.  The system will be designed to ensure continuity of operations during severe weather and other threat scenarios. 

Earlier this month, NOAA and NASA announced that Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co., was chosen to build the GOES-R satellites through a separate contract.

NOAA funds, manages and will operate the GOES-R program. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center oversees the acquisition of the GOES-R spacecraft and instruments for NOAA.  

NOAA understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and conserves and manages our coastal and marine resources.

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Now, new research coming out of the United Kingdom (U.K.) suggests that the amount of salt in seawater is varying in direct response to man-made climate change³. Working with colleagues to sift through data collected over the past 50 years, Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office in Exeter, England, studied whether or not human-induced climate change could be responsible for rises in salinity that have been recorded in the subtropical regions of the Atlantic Ocean, areas at latitudes immediately north and south of Earth’s tropics.

By comparing the data to climate models that correct for naturally occurring salinity variations in the ocean, Stott has found that man-made global warming -- over and above any possible natural sources of global warming, such as carbon dioxide given off by volcanoes or increases in the heat output of the sun⁴ -- may be responsible for making parts of the North Atlantic Ocean more salty.

Salinity levels are important for two reasons. First, along with temperature, they directly affect seawater density (salty water is denser than freshwater) and therefore the circulation of ocean currents from the tropics to the poles. These currents control how heat is carried within the oceans and ultimately regulate the world’s climate. Second, sea surface salinity is intimately linked to Earth’s overall water cycle and to how much freshwater leaves and enters the oceans through evaporation and precipitation. Measuring salinity is one way to probe the water cycle in greater detail.

In the last half-century or so, the subtropical Atlantic has been getting gradually saltier -- a less than 1 percent increase in real terms, but an effect that is nevertheless significant. "It might sound like quite a small change," says Stott, "but the overall salinity of our oceans is naturally relatively steady, so it's actually a lot of freshwater being factored out of the ocean.”

Stott’s analysis suggests that global warming is changing precipitation patterns over our planet. Higher temperatures increase evaporation in subtropical zones; the moisture is then carried by the atmosphere towards higher latitudes (towards the poles), and by trade winds across Central America to the Pacific, where it provides more precipitation. This process concentrates the salt in the water left behind in the North Atlantic, causing salinity to increase.

Water bearer
These are just the sort of effects that Gary Lagerloef and Amit Sen hope to uncover over the next few years. Lagerloef and Sen are, respectively, principal investigator and project manager of Aquarius, part of a brand new satellite mission due to be launched into orbit in May 2010. Aquarius is the first NASA instrument designed to track sea salinity from space and will be the primary payload on the SAC-D spacecraft, which has been built by the Argentinian Space Agency or Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE). The three-year mission is named after the “cup-bearer to the gods” in Greek mythology.

Sea saltiness has been measured for centuries. Most of the data we have today consist of direct measurements taken at sea (traditionally by ships and, nowadays, more often by automated buoys and profiling floats). But there are vast areas of the ocean surface -- a quarter in total -- where salinity has never been measured. By covering the entire globe once every seven days, Aquarius will fill in the blanks and provide an unprecedented global picture of salinity.

Scientists measure salt levels using a practical salinity scale. One practical salinity unit or psu almost exactly represents the number of grams of salt in a kilogram of seawater. Salinities in the open ocean, free of ice or land mass, generally lie between 32 and 37 psu (the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans have maximum surface salinities around 35 and 37 respectively). "With our instruments we will be able to measure salinity to an accuracy of 0.2 psu," explains Sen, who works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "If you take half a gallon of water and put a pinch of salt in it, that’s about 0.2 psu. We will be able to detect that from space, while flying about 650 kilometers [about 404 miles] above Earth."

This is no mean feat and is possible because of some impressive radiometer technology that will fly on board the spacecraft. A radiometer is essentially a sensitive radio receiver, which, in this instance, detects microwave radiation given off by the sea surface. The radiated power of the microwaves that are emitted enables scientists to calculate the saltiness of the water at the surface.

What's special about the three radiometers designed for Aquarius is their calibration stability -- over a seven-day period, their temperature cannot stray more than 0.1 kelvin (0.18 degrees Fahrenheit). This calls for very precise thermal control and is the reason Aquarius will be able to measure salinity with unprecedented precision.

Boom boom
"We measure salinity in the top one to three centimeters of water because that is the crucial layer that connects the atmosphere and the oceans," explains Simon Collins, instrument manager for Aquarius who is also based at JPL. "As such, one of the largest errors in our measurement comes from ripples in the surface of the sea." To correct for this, Aquarius also carries with it a scatterometer -- a state-of-the-art radar instrument that senses roughness in the sea surface by booming microwave pulses down to the ocean and detecting the scattered pulses bounced back to the satellite.

While Aquarius has not yet set off, it has been a long journey for the project’s scientists and engineers, who are now ready to ship their instrument from JPL to Argentina. There it will be installed on the SAC-D spacecraft, before being transported to Brazil for functional and environmental testing and returned to the United States in April 2010, ready for its trip to space.

"People don’t realize that there is so much water and so little land," Sen remarks. Aquarius, flying high above us, will shed light on El Niño and La Niña, phases of the world’s most powerful climate phenomena, reveal insights into how monsoons develop and, most importantly of all, how a pinch of salt can change our lives.

To learn more about Earth’s changing climate, visit NASA’s Global Climate Change Web site at http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov.

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Supporters say the resolution - which is expected to be up for a final vote this week - could help avert the type of schedule pressure that led to the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia accidents.

It also could stave off an estimated 3,500 job cuts at Kennedy Space Center in 2011 while minimizing a five-year gap between the last shuttle mission and the first piloted flights of next-generation spacecraft.

But, ultimately, the budget resolution is just a recommendation and not an actual funding decision.

"This budget is a significant step towards maintaining safety, minimizing the spaceflight gap, and preserving the highly skilled workforce at Kennedy Space Center and throughout Florida," U.S. Rep. Suzanne Kosmas, D-New Smyrna Beach, said in a statement.

"Kennedy Space Center is an economic engine for our community and I will not stand idly by while these jobs are at risk."

The Bush administration in 2004 directed NASA to complete the International Space Station and retire the shuttle fleet by Sept. 30, 2010. The agency also was told to develop a new piloted spaceship by 2014 and return American astronauts to the moon by 2020.

NASA's new Apollo-style Orion spacecraft will not be ready to fly before March 2015. The U.S. plans to rely on Russia to fly American astronauts to and from the station in the interim. Legislators with ties to KSC - including U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Orlando, and U.S. Rep. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge - have been lobbying to eliminate the September 2010 deadline. It was set by the White House Office of Management and Budget after Bush outlined a new national space policy in the wake of the Columbia accident.

Nine more shuttle flights are on NASA's schedule: eight to complete the station and a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission scheduled to launch May 11.

NASA's historical annual shuttle flight rate is about four or five missions a year. But the agency's post-Columbia flight rate has been about three per year. Some question whether NASA can safely fly the nine remaining missions by the end of September 2010.

Accident investigators cited schedule pressure as a contributing cause in both the Challenger and Columbia catastrophes.