WISE see An blast Of Infrared Light

This oddly colorful nebula is the supernova remnant IC 443 as seen by NASA's Wide-field Infrared review Explorer, or WISE. Also known as the Jellyfish nebula, IC 443 is mainly interesting because it provides a look into how stellar explosions relate with their environment. IC 443 can be found near the star Eta Geminorum, which lies near Castor, one of the twins in the group Gemini. Just like human beings, stars have a life cycle they are born, mature and finally die. The way in which stars die depends on their mass. Stars with mass alike to the sun characteristically become planetary nebulae at the end of their lives, whereas stars with many times the sun's collection explode as supernovae.

IC 443 is the remains of a star that go supernova somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. The explosion from the supernova sent out shock waves that travel through space, sweeping up and heating the nearby gas and dust in the interstellar medium, and creating the supernova remnant seen in this image. What is unusual about the IC 443 is that its shell-like form has two halve that have dissimilar radii, structures and emissions. The better northeastern shell, seen here as the violet colored semi circle on the top left of the supernova remainder, is composed of sheet like filaments that are emit light from iron, neon, silicon and oxygen gas atoms, in addition to dust particle, all heated by the blast from the supernova.

The smaller southern shell, seen here in a bright cyan color on the base half of the image, is constructed of denser clumps and knots chiefly emitting light from hydrogen gas and heated dust. These clumps are division of a molecular cloud, which can be seen in this image as the greenish cloud hurtful across IC 443 from the northwest to southeast. The color differences seen in this image represent dissimilar wavelengths of infrared emission. The differences in color are also the result of difference in the energies of the shock influence hitting the interstellar medium. The northeastern shell was most likely shaped by a fast shock wave, whereas the southern shell was perhaps created by a slow shock wave.

Technology Readiness Levels Demystified

In the research and development world, ideas are like schoolchildren. All new technologies must pass through a number of grades before they are declared ready for graduation. At NASA, as in the rest of the research community, these grades are called technology readiness levels, or TRLs. Each TRL represents the evolution of an idea from a thought, perhaps written on a cocktail napkin or the back of an envelope, to the full deployment of a product in the marketplace. "NASA acknowledges the system as a useful, commonly understood method for explaining to collaborators and stakeholders just how mature a particular technology is," said Tony Strazisar, senior technologist for NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate in Washington.

A NASA researcher, Stan Sadin, conceived the first scale in 1974. It had seven levels which were not formally defined until 1989. In the 1990s NASA adopted a scale with nine levels which gained widespread acceptance across industry and remains in use today. Industry and other government organizations, such as the U.S. Air Force, have tailored definitions for certain TRLs to suit their own needs, but their overall scales match NASA's traditional scale very closely, Strazisar said. Today's scale runs from TRL 1 through TRL 9. The lowest level, TRL 1, indicates that information already learned from basic scientific research is taking its first step from an idea to a practical application of a lesson learned. For example, after learning that hydrogen and oxygen can be combined to generate electricity, some would suggest an idea for building a machine to do just that.

A technology that has achieved TRL 9 is one that has been incorporated fully into a larger system. It has been proven to work smoothly and is considered operational. An example of an operational TRL 9 technology are the fuel cells which combine hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity for NASA's space shuttle. In this example, if an engineer were to suggest a major improvement to the fuel cell technology, the new idea would be considered to be at TRL 1. It would make its way through the development process, while the original fuel cell design remained at TRL 9. The distance between TRL 1 and TRL 9 often amounts to years of paper studies, prototype modeling, component building and testing, integration of tested components into other systems, and more tests in the laboratory and the real world. 

Research Suggests Water Content Of Moon Interior Underestimated

NASA-funded scientists estimate from recent research that the volume of water molecules locked inside minerals in the moon's interior could exceed the amount of water in the Great Lakes here on Earth. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, along with other scientists across the nation, determined that the water was likely present very early in the moon's formation history as hot magma started to cool and crystallize. This finding means water is native to the moon.

"For over 40 years we thought the moon was dry," said Francis McCubbin of Carnegie and lead author of the report published in Monday's Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "In our study we looked at hydroxyl, a compound with an oxygen atom bound with hydrogen, and apatite, a water-bearing mineral in the assemblage of minerals we examined in two Apollo samples and a lunar meteorite."

McCubbin's team utilized tests which detect elements in the parts per billion range. Combining their measurements with models that characterize how the material crystallized as the moon cooled during formation, they found that the minimum water content ranged from 64 parts per billion to 5 parts per million. The result is at least two orders of magnitude greater than previous results from lunar samples that estimated water content of the moon to be less than 1 parts per billion.