Stephen Warren has made eight previous trips to Antarctica, including hunkering down for a winter at South Pole, to study its climate. But on his ninth visit to the frozen continent later this year, the professor from the University of Washington in Seattle will use Antarctic ice to learn more about Earth's climate hundreds of millions of years ago.

18 June 2009 Paul D. Tompkins -- This morning when I woke up, I told myself, well another two days of preparation, and we'll have our shot on Friday. I woke to the news of the continuing problems with the STS-127 hydrogen leak, and all indications from KSC were that we'd have to slip to June 19 given the late hour of the discovery. Then, I started reading e-mail - a firestorm of activity! "We're GO for June 18!" Whoa! The day sent me from zero to 100 in a few seconds, and it didn't let up all day. We held our last Flight Readiness Status meeting today. With only a few items remaining until the evening, and now completed, I can honestly now say we are ready to go. As good as we'll ever be!

In anticipation of the upcoming equinox at Saturn, the imaging science team on NASA's Cassini spacecraft is releasing today a series of images and movies capturing scenes possible only once every 15 years.

Source: LRO Blog. Click on image to enlarge.

Boulder, Colorado -- Scientists from the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, have discovered that a solar jet stream deep inside the Sun is migrating slower than usual through the star's interior, giving rise to the current lack of sunspots and low solar activity, according to work being presented this week at the meeting of the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society (AAS/SPD).

Images from the moon will be sent to Earth with higher power and increased efficiency due to communications hardware provided by NASA's Glenn Research Center. The hardware, called the traveling wave tube amplifier, was built by L-3 Communications Electron Technologies, Torrance, Calif., under Glenn's supervision. Incorporated in NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, it is a critical part of the primary communication system that will send data from the spacecraft to Earth as it circles the moon.