Scientists to develop lunar landing pad test site on Hawaii Island
Scientists are developing a lunar landing pad test site on Hawaii Island.
The Pacific International Space Center for Exploration Systems (PISCES) signed an agreement with NASA’s Kennedy Space Center to work on the project.
The goal is to build a launch and landing pad using indigenous Hawaiian basalt, or crushed rock material, mined from a quarry near Hilo.
Scientists say it’s nearly identical to the dirt found on the moon and Mars.
Landing pads offer a flat, stable surface to prevent damages that occur when spacecrafts take off or land.
PISCES will build a simulated lunar surface and launch pad using a telerobotically operated rover.
NASA could then remotely teleoperate the leveling blade and potentially the rover from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Crews will start building the lunar landing pad later this fall, weather permitting.
The following are links to some research project and group homepages located on the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies websites:
ACCMIP – Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Model Intercomparison Project
ACCMIP aims to better evaluate the role of atmospheric chemistry, both gases and aerosols, in driving climate change. In particular, the intercomparison is designed to facilitate analyses of the driving forces of climate change in simulations being performed in the Climate Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) in support of the IPCC AR5. ACCMIP consists of a set of experiments designed to provide insight into the CMIP5 simulations of historical and future climate change, along with additional simulations to better understand the role of particular processes and to constrain uncertainties.
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Astrobiology
The GISS Astrobiology group is an interdisciplinary team of scientists interested in understanding our solar system through time — from the early configuration of the planets nearly 4 billion years ago to their modern state. Our focus is on characterizing the habitability of rocky planets, extending that understanding to the climates of extrasolar planets, but also includes understanding environments as diverse as Titan and Archean Earth.
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Climate Impacts
The Climate Impacts group at NASA GISS seeks to improve understanding of how climate affects human society through assessment of the effect of current climate variability and of potential climate change impacts caused by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols. Impacts research includes development of a framework to analyze complex interactions among biophysical and socio-economic processes.
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EdGCM – Education Global Climate Model
The Education GCM project at the Columbia University Center for Climate Systems Research couples the GISS Model II with a user-friendly interface that runs on desktop Macintosh and Windows PCs. EdGCM allows students to experience the full scientific process, from designing experiments to setting up and running climate simulations, processing output, displaying results, and creating scientific reports.
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Ent Dynamic Global Terrestrial Ecosystem Model
The Ent model is a dynamic global terrestrial ecosystem model (DGTEM) being developed specifically for coupling with atmospheric general circulation models (GCMs). Ent will be capable of predicting the fast time scale fluxes of water, carbon, nitrogen and energy between the land-surface and the atmosphere and the resulting diurnal surface fluxes, seasonal and inter-annual vegetation growth, and decadal to century scale alterations in vegetation structure and soil carbon and nitrogen.
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GACP – Global Aerosol Climatology Project
GACP was established in 1998 to extract an improved multi-decadal aerosol record from existing satellite measurements. The main objective was to develop advanced global aerosol climatologies for the full period of satellite data, supplement them by improved modeling results, and make these aerosol datasets broadly available and suitable for use in studies of the direct and indirect effects of aerosols on climate.
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GISTEMP – Goddard Institute Surface Temperature Analysis
Surface air temperature change is a primary measure of global climate change. The GISTEMP project started in the late 1970s to provide an estimate of the changing global surface air temperature which could be compared with the estimates obtained from climate models simulating the effect of changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, volcanic aerosols, and solar irradiance. The continuing analysis updates global temperature change from the late 1800s to the present.
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Global Climate Modeling
The climate modeling program at GISS is primarily aimed at the development of 3D general circulation models (GCMs) and coupled atmosphere-ocean models for simulating Earth’s climate system, although some research may include the use of regional climate models, 2D energy balance models, and 1D radiative-convective models. Primary emphasis is placed on investigation of climate sensitivity, including the climate system’s response to forcings such as solar variability, anthropogenic and natural emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, etc.
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Glory Mission Science
NASA’s Glory satellite was to increase our understanding of the Earth’s Enegy Balance. Glory was to be placed in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and was designed to achieve two major goals: (1) Collect data on the properties of aerosols, including black carbon, in the Earth’s atmosphere and climate system and thereby provide a greater understanding of the seasonal variability of aerosol properties; and (2) Collect data on solar irradiance for the long-term effects on the Earth climate record.
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ISCCP – International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project
ISCCP was established as part of the World Climate Research Programme to collect and analyze satellite radiance measurements to infer the global distribution of clouds, their properties, and their diurnal, seasonal, and interannual variations. The resulting datasets and analysis products are used to improve understanding and modeling of the role of clouds in climate, with the primary focus being the elucidation of the effects of clouds on the radiation balance. The Global Processing Center for ISCCP is located at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
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RSP Airborne Science
GISS operates the two most accurate polarimeters in the world on a range of aircraft, at altitudes from 200 m to 20 km. These instruments, called Research Scanning Polarimeters (RSP), retrieve aerosol and cloud properties. Aerosol data obtained include the size distribution and complex refractive index of particles, their optical depth, and an estimate of layer height. Cloud retrievals consist of layer average particle size, cloud optical thickness and cloud top height, as well as droplet size distribution at cloud top for water clouds and aspect ratio and level of distortion of crystals in ice clouds.
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SWING2 – Stable Water Isotope Intercomparison Group, Phase 2
The Stable Water Isotope iNtercomparison Group (SWING) 2 project is the second phase of an international intercomparison of current state-of-the-art water isotope general circulation models and related observational isotope data. It brings together scientists with a common wide range of interest in both modelling and measuring stable water isotopes (H218O, HDO) and their application to Earth System problems.
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WGDMA – Working Group on Data Management and Analysis
The GEWEX global data analysis seeks to obtain observations of the global energy and water cycle with sufficient detail and accuracy to diagnose the causes of recent climate variations in terms of energy and water exchanges among climate components. To enable better analyses and more closely coordinate the production of data products, WGDMA was organized to systematially assess current products, refine and improve analyses with attention to making the long-term record more homogeneous and the products physically consistent, and conduct a complete re-processing of all GEWEX data products.
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NBC 101 celebrating 9 years of community service 