Navy Adm. Mike Rogers, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, said Cybercom continues to expand its capabilities and outlined five priorities for the command.
Monday, August 18, 2014
Defense.gov Special Report: Travels With Work
Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work is traveling to the Asia-Pacific region to strengthen multilateral security cooperation, build more robust partnerships and discuss ongoing efforts and regional security matters.
Face of Defense: USS Roosevelt Conducts UAV Testing
The Navy's experimental unmanned X-47B air vehicle returned to carrier operations aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt and completed a series of tests, operating safely and seamlessly with manned aircraft.
Service Members Receiving RAND Military Workplace Survey
About 580,000 service members have begun receiving emails or letters inviting them to participate in the first RAND Military Workplace Study, Defense Department officials said.
Departure of U.S. Cargo Ship to Air on NASA Television
Departure of U.S. Cargo Ship to Air on NASA Television
After delivering almost three tons of supplies and scientific experiments to the crew of the International Space Station, Orbital Sciences Corporation's Cygnus cargo spacecraft, the SS Janice Voss, is scheduled to leave the station Friday, Aug. 15. NASA Television will provide live coverage of departure activities beginning at 6:15 a.m. EDT.
Ground controllers in the Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston will detach Cygnus from the Earth-facing port of the Harmony module and maneuver it into release position. With the assistance of NASA Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman, Expedition 40 Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency then will use the station's Canadarm2 robotic arm, operated from the station's cupola robotics workstation, to release Cygnus.
Once the spacecraft is a safe distance from the station, its engines will fire twice Sunday, Aug. 17, pushing it into Earth's atmosphere where it will burn up over the Pacific Ocean. Station crew members may have an opportunity to photograph Cygnus' fiery reentry back to Earth in order to gather engineering data that could be applied to the entry path of the European Space Agency's Automated Transfer Vehicle cargo ship in January 2015. The deorbit burn and reentry of Cygnus will not be broadcast on NASA TV.
Cygnus was launched on an Orbital Sciences Antares rocket from NASA's Wallop's Flight Facility in Virginia July 13 on the company's second commercial resupply mission to the station, arriving at the orbiting laboratory July 16.
For more information about the spacecraft's mission and the International Space Station, visit:
Sunday, August 17, 2014
New Airstrikes Against ISIL Forces Near Mosul Dam
New Airstrikes Against ISIL Forces Near Mosul Dam
U.S. military forces conducted additional airstrikes today in Iraq, using fighter and attack aircraft to attack ISIL terrorists near Mosul Dam.
The strikes destroyed three ISIL armed vehicles, an ISIL vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft artillery gun, an ISIL checkpoint and an IED emplacement.
These strikes are in addition to the 14 strikes in the same vicinity announced earlier today by U.S. Central Command and the nine airstrikes conducted yesterday.
All aircraft exited the strike area safely.
These strikes were conducted under authority to support Iraqi security forces and Kurdish defense forces as they work together to combat ISIL, as well as to protect critical infrastructure, U.S. personnel and facilities and support humanitarian efforts there.
WORK SIGNS GUESTBOOK
Los Angeles Philharmonic Concertmaster Martin Chalifour Returns to Rolling Hills United Methodist Church for Its Second Sundays At Two Season Opener
MartinChalifourMartin Chalifour began his tenure as Principal Concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1995. The recipient of various grants and awards in his native Canada, he graduated with honors from the Montreal Conservatory at the age of 18 and then moved to Philadelphia to pursue studies at the Curtis Institute of Music. In 1986 Martin Chalifour received a Certificate of Honor at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and was a laureate of the Montreal International Competition the following year. Since then he has concertized extensively, playing hundreds of concerto performances from a repertoire of more than 50 works with the world's leading orchestras and conductors. He is also a frequent guest at several summer music festivals, including the Sarasota Festival and the Mainly Mozart Festival. Martin Chalifour is a professor at the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music. He records for the Yarlung label; his latest album was released in September 2011, and features solo music composed by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Steven Stucky, as well as Mozart and Lutoslawski concertos with the Los Angeles Philharmonic recorded live at Walt Disney Concert Hall.
TimDurkovic2Los Angeles-based pianist Timothy Durkovic is an active soloist and chamber musician, collaborating regularly with some of world's finest instrumentalists and vocalists including Martin Chalifour, Helen Callus, Movses Pogossian, Timothy Landauer, Richard O'Neil, Jonathan Mack, among others. He is the Grand Prize Winner of the 1996 Los Angeles Liszt Competition as well as a winner of the Beverly Hills Auditions, the Carmel Music Society Competition, the 2001 San Diego Duo Piano Competition and the 2001 IBLA Grand Prize Duo Award (Sicily, Italy) with his duo partner Chie Nagatani, as well as the recipient of the prestigious Outstanding Master's Graduate Award from the USC Thornton School of Music. He has served on the faculties of the Orange County High School of the Arts, University of La Verne, USC Thornton School of Music and is currently the Director of Keyboard Studies at Long Beach City College. His playing has been described as having great "sensitivity to colors" (Salt Lake City Tribune) and "effortless, with the music always in the forefront, and an overall effect…of music making that is too rarely heard." (Frederick Swann). His CD recording "Gargoyles," available on iTunes, received rave reviews as being "an incisive and exciting performance" from Lowell Lieberman, the title track's composer himself. Born and raised in Guatemala, Mr. Durkovic studied at the National Conservatory of Guatemala, the Juilliard School, Salem College, and the USC Thornton School of Music.
The Venue
The acoustics of Rolling Hills United Methodist Church's sanctuary are among the finest in Southern California, and the venue's idyllic sylvan setting next to the South Coast Botanic Garden on the north-east corner of Crenshaw Blvd and Palos Verdes Drive North makes the concert experience especially pleasant.
Rolling Hills United Methodist Church's Second Sundays At Two presents free concerts without intermission, September through June, except December and May. Generous at-the-door contributions (100% are for the artists!) ensures the success of the series.
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NASA's NuSTAR Sees Rare Blurring of Black Hole Light
The regions around supermassive black holes shine brightly in X-rays. Some of this radiation comes from a surrounding disk, and most comes from the corona, pictured here in this artist's concept as the white light at the base of a jet. This is one of a few possible shapes predicted for coronas.
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech
This plot of data captured by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, shows X-ray light streaming from regions near a supermassive black hole known as Markarian 335.
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Institute for Astronomy, Cambridge
NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has captured an extreme and rare event in the regions immediately surrounding a supermassive black hole. A compact source of X-rays that sits near the black hole, called the corona, has moved closer to the black hole over a period of just days.
"The corona recently collapsed in toward the black hole, with the result that the black hole's intense gravity pulled all the light down onto its surrounding disk, where material is spiraling inward," said Michael Parker of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, United Kingdom, lead author of a new paper on the findings appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
As the corona shifted closer to the black hole, the gravity of the black hole exerted a stronger tug on the X-rays emitted by it. The result was an extreme blurring and stretching of the X-ray light. Such events had been observed previously, but never to this degree and in such detail.
Supermassive black holes are thought to reside in the centers of all galaxies. Some are more massive and rotate faster than others. The black hole in this new study, referred to as Markarian 335, or Mrk 335, is about 324 million light-years from Earth in the direction of the Pegasus constellation. It is one of the most extreme of the systems for which the mass and spin rate have ever been measured. The black hole squeezes about 10 million times the mass of our sun into a region only 30 times the diameter of the sun, and it spins so rapidly that space and time are dragged around with it.
Even though some light falls into a supermassive black hole never to be seen again, other high-energy light emanates from both the corona and the surrounding accretion disk of superheated material. Though astronomers are uncertain of the shape and temperature of coronas, they know that they contain particles that move close to the speed of light.
NASA's Swift satellite has monitored Mrk 335 for years, and recently noted a dramatic change in its X-ray brightness. In what is called a target-of-opportunity observation, NuSTAR was redirected to take a look at high-energy X-rays from this source in the range of 3 to 79 kiloelectron volts. This particular energy range offers astronomers a detailed look at what is happening near the event horizon, the region around a black hole from which light can no longer escape gravity's grasp.
Follow-up observations indicate that the corona still is in this close configuration, months after it moved. Researchers don't know whether and when the corona will shift back. What is more, the NuSTAR observations reveal that the grip of the black hole's gravity pulled the corona's light onto the inner portion of its superheated disk, better illuminating it. Almost as if somebody had shone a flashlight for the astronomers, the shifting corona lit up the precise region they wanted to study.
The new data could ultimately help determine more about the mysterious nature of black hole coronas. In addition, the observations have provided better measurements of Mrk 335's furious relativistic spin rate. Relativistic speeds are those approaching the speed of light, as described by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
"We still don't understand exactly how the corona is produced or why it changes its shape, but we see it lighting up material around the black hole, enabling us to study the regions so close in that effects described by Einstein's theory of general relativity become prominent," said NuSTAR Principal Investigator Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. "NuSTAR's unprecedented capability for observing this and similar events allows us to study the most extreme light-bending effects of general relativity."
NuSTAR is a Small Explorer mission led by Caltech and managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was built by Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Virginia. Its instrument was built by a consortium including Caltech, JPL, the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, New York, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, the Danish Technical University in Denmark, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, ATK Aerospace Systems in Goleta, California, and with support from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) Science Data Center.
NuSTAR's mission operations center is at UC Berkeley, with the ASI providing its equatorial ground station located in Malindi, Kenya. The mission's outreach program is based at Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California. NASA's Explorer Program is managed by Goddard. JPL is managed by Caltech for NASA.
For more information on NuSTAR, visit:
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Supernova SN 2014J Explodes
Supernova SN 2014J Explodes
New data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has provided stringent constraints on the environment around one of the closest supernovas discovered in decades. The Chandra results provide insight into possible cause of the explosion, as described in our press release.
On January 21, 2014, astronomers witnessed a supernova soon after it exploded in the Messier 82, or M82, galaxy. Telescopes across the globe and in space turned their attention to study this newly exploded star, including Chandra. Astronomers determined that this supernova, dubbed SN 2014J, belongs to a class of explosions called "Type Ia" supernovas. These supernovas are used as cosmic distance-markers and played a key role in the discovery of the Universe's accelerated expansion, which has been attributed to the effects of dark energy. Scientists think that all Type Ia supernovas involve the detonation of a white dwarf. One important question is whether the fuse on the explosion is lit when the white dwarf pulls too much material from a companion star like the Sun, or when two white dwarf stars merge.
This image contains Chandra data, where low, medium, and high-energy X-rays are red, green, and blue respectively. The boxes in the bottom of the image show close-up views of the region around the supernova in data taken prior to the explosion (left), as well as data gathered on February 3, 2014, after the supernova went off (right). The lack of the detection of X-rays detected by Chandra is an important clue for astronomers looking for the exact mechanism of how this star exploded.
The non-detection of X-rays reveals that the region around the site of the supernova explosion is relatively devoid of material. This finding is a critical clue to the origin of the explosion. Astronomers expect that if a white dwarf exploded because it had been steadily collecting matter from a companion star prior to exploding, the mass transfer process would not be 100% efficient, and the white dwarf would be immersed in a cloud of gas.
If a significant amount of material were surrounding the doomed star, the blast wave generated by the supernova would have struck it by the time of the Chandra observation, producing a bright X-ray source. Since they do not detect any X-rays, the researchers determined that the region around SN 2014J is exceptionally clean.
A viable candidate for the cause of SN 2014J must explain the relatively gas-free environment around the star prior to the explosion. One possibility is the merger of two white dwarf stars, in which case there might have been little mass transfer and pollution of the environment before the explosion. Another is that several smaller eruptions on the surface of the white dwarf cleared the region prior to the supernova. Further observations a few hundred days after the explosion could shed light on the amount of gas in a larger volume, and help decide between these and other scenarios.
A paper describing these results was published in the July 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal and is available online. The first author is Raffaella Margutti from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, MA, and the co-authors are Jerod Parrent (CfA), Atish Kamble (CfA), Alicia Soderberg (CfA), Ryan Foley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Dan Milisavljevic (CfA), Maria Drout (CfA), and Robert Kirshner (CfA).
On January 21, 2014, astronomers witnessed a supernova soon after it exploded in the Messier 82, or M82, galaxy. Telescopes across the globe and in space turned their attention to study this newly exploded star, including Chandra. Astronomers determined that this supernova, dubbed SN 2014J, belongs to a class of explosions called "Type Ia" supernovas. These supernovas are used as cosmic distance-markers and played a key role in the discovery of the Universe's accelerated expansion, which has been attributed to the effects of dark energy. Scientists think that all Type Ia supernovas involve the detonation of a white dwarf. One important question is whether the fuse on the explosion is lit when the white dwarf pulls too much material from a companion star like the Sun, or when two white dwarf stars merge.
This image contains Chandra data, where low, medium, and high-energy X-rays are red, green, and blue respectively. The boxes in the bottom of the image show close-up views of the region around the supernova in data taken prior to the explosion (left), as well as data gathered on February 3, 2014, after the supernova went off (right). The lack of the detection of X-rays detected by Chandra is an important clue for astronomers looking for the exact mechanism of how this star exploded.
The non-detection of X-rays reveals that the region around the site of the supernova explosion is relatively devoid of material. This finding is a critical clue to the origin of the explosion. Astronomers expect that if a white dwarf exploded because it had been steadily collecting matter from a companion star prior to exploding, the mass transfer process would not be 100% efficient, and the white dwarf would be immersed in a cloud of gas.
If a significant amount of material were surrounding the doomed star, the blast wave generated by the supernova would have struck it by the time of the Chandra observation, producing a bright X-ray source. Since they do not detect any X-rays, the researchers determined that the region around SN 2014J is exceptionally clean.
A viable candidate for the cause of SN 2014J must explain the relatively gas-free environment around the star prior to the explosion. One possibility is the merger of two white dwarf stars, in which case there might have been little mass transfer and pollution of the environment before the explosion. Another is that several smaller eruptions on the surface of the white dwarf cleared the region prior to the supernova. Further observations a few hundred days after the explosion could shed light on the amount of gas in a larger volume, and help decide between these and other scenarios.
A paper describing these results was published in the July 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal and is available online. The first author is Raffaella Margutti from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, MA, and the co-authors are Jerod Parrent (CfA), Atish Kamble (CfA), Alicia Soderberg (CfA), Ryan Foley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Dan Milisavljevic (CfA), Maria Drout (CfA), and Robert Kirshner (CfA).
Image Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/R.Margutti et al
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