Waching daily Sep 1 2018

"New Horizons Detects Next Flyby Target"

New Horizons spots its next flyby target …

Administrator Bridenstine visits our west coast facilities …

and using data from space to fight a life-threatening disease … a few of the stories to tell you

about – This Week at NASA!

Our New Horizons spacecraft has made its first detection of the Kuiper Belt object it is

scheduled to flyby on New Year's Day, 2019.

The small, dim object – nicknamed Ultima Thule – was detected by the spacecraft's

telescopic Long Range Reconnaissance Imager from a distance of more than 100 million miles.

The flyby will be the first-ever close-up exploration of a small Kuiper Belt object

and the farthest exploration of any planetary body in history, shattering the record New

Horizons itself set at Pluto in July 2015 – by about 1 billion miles.

The Kuiper Belt is a ring of icy objects around the Sun – that extends just beyond the orbit

of Neptune and includes Pluto.

On Aug. 27, our administrator, Jim Bridenstine kicked off a series of visits to our west

coast centers and facilities with a stop at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,

California.

While there, he visited labs and test beds related to the InSight Mars lander, the Mars

2020 rover, and the Mars Helicopter.

The next day, at our Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, Bridenstine

heard about a number of aeronautical research projects and visited Mojave Air and Space

Port.

The administrator's final stop was Ames Research Center, in northern California.

While there, he talked to the Ames workforce and saw innovative thermal protection materials

being develop to support the agency's space exploration missions.

He also spoke to the NASA Advisory Council about our plans to return humans to the lunar

surface.

"This time when we go to the moon, we're going sustainably.

In other words, we're not going to do flags and footprints again.

This time when we go, we're going to go to stay."

For the first time ever, measurements from our Earth-observing research satellites are

being used to help combat a potential outbreak of the life-threatening disease, cholera.

A humanitarian effort in Yemen is targeting areas identified by a NASA-supported project

that precisely forecasts high-risk regions for the disease, based on environmental conditions

observed from space.

The forecasts are made using data from our Global Precipitation Measurement mission,

and our Terra and Aqua satellites, as well as measurements of phytoplankton concentrations

in nearby coastal ocean areas.

Our ICESat-2 mission will use the most advanced laser instrument of its kind to measure – in

unprecedented detail – changes in the heights of Earth's polar ice.

The mission's Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System, or ATLAS will fire 10,000

times each second – sending hundreds of trillions of photons to the ground in six

beams of green light.

ATLAS measures the height of objects by timing how long it takes individual light photons

to travel from the spacecraft to Earth and back.

ICESat-2 is scheduled to launch Sept. 15 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

That's what's up this week @NASA …

For more on these and other stories follow us on the web at nasa.gov/twan

Credits: "New Horizons Detects Next Flyby Target" This Week at NASA. NASA Headquarters