NASA Awards Ground Systems And Operations Support Contract

 NASA has selected Honeywell Technology Solutions Inc. in Columbia, Md., to provide Ground Systems and Mission Operations support.

The total maximum ordering value of the cost-plus-award fee, indefinite-delivery/indefinite- quantity contract is $450 million. The effective ordering period is from Nov. 1 through Oct. 31, 2016. The work will be performed at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

Under this contract, Honeywell Technology Solutions Inc. will support a wide range of mission operations in all phases of the mission life cycle, including concept studies, formulation development, implementation, operations, sustaining engineering and decommissioning. The contractor also will support operations studies, systems engineering, design, implementation, integration and testing of ground systems and operations products, mission operations and sustaining engineering.

This contract will support NASA's Earth Science Mission Operations and Space Science Mission Operations including: Aqua, Aura, Terra, Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and Earth Observing-1, Advanced Composition Explorer, Geotail, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, Solar Dynamics Observatory, Solar and Heliospheric Observatory and Wind.

NASA Latest Updates: There is water on moon

               This figure shows that NASA has announced that there is water on moon after it intentionally collided its LCROSS spacecraft with the lunar surface and examined the debris of this collision. Earlier Chandrayan had found evidence of this fact.

NASA Has announced that there is water on the moon. The evidence of this water was discovered after the NASA spacecraft LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observatory and Sensing Satellite) discovered water ice beds at the lunar south pole, when it impacted the moon. Cabeus - the lunar south pole crater was intentionally impacted by LCROSS on Friday, October 9.

The LCROSS spacecraft, which was built at a cost of $79 million, crashed the lunar surface so that scientists could probe the debris for the presence of water. The project scientist Anthony Colaprete, who is also the principal investigator for NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffet Field, said "Indeed yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit, we found a significant amount."

MAVEN News

  

 

      

         MAVEN: Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution

 

 

 About Mars Climate History:

• The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission, scheduled for NASA launch in late 2013, will be the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere.
• The goal of MAVEN is to determine the role that loss of atmospheric gas to space played in changing the Martian climate through time. Where did the atmosphere – and the water – go?
• MAVEN will determine how much of the Martian atmosphere has been lost over time by measuring the current rate of escape to space and gathering enough information about the relevant processes to allow extrapolation backward in time. 

     The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission reached a major milestone last week when it successfully completed its Mission Critical Design Review (CDR).

Maven PerteAtmosphereMars Nasa

      MAVEN, scheduled for launch in late 2013, will be the first mission devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere. The goal of MAVEN is to determine the history of the loss of atmospheric gases to space through time, providing answers about Mars climate evolution. It will accomplish this by measuring the current rate of escape to space and gathering enough information about the relevant processes to allow extrapolation backward in time.

     "Understanding how and why the atmosphere changed through time is an important scientific objective for Mars," said Bruce Jakosky, MAVEN Principal Investigator from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado (CU/LASP) at Boulder. "MAVEN will make the right measurements to allow us to answer this question. We’re in the middle of the hard work right now—building the instruments and spacecraft—and we’re incredibly excited about the science results we’re going to get from the mission."