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Airborne Astronomy is one of the main interests of the astronomers here at NASA Ames. In addition to having hosted the airborne infrared (IR) telescope called the KAO, we hope that the new airborne IR observatory SOFIA will be flying out of Ames soon.

We have an Astrobiology Institute Team lead by David Des Marais, that performs research efforts that integrate a variety of disciplines around three scientific themes that address the context for life, the origin and early evolution of life, and the future of life both on Earth and in the environment of space. Click here to hear Dr. Des Marais speaking about astrobiology.

We are home to the Mars General Circulation Modeling Group that does research to better understand the nature of the general circulation of the atmosphere of Mars, how that circulation is driven and how it affects martian long term climate.

The Astrochemistry Lab is a laboratory group that studies the formation, distribution, and fate of organic molecules in space, from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) to amino acids.

The Microbial Ecology/Biogeochemistry Research Lab (http://exobiology.arc.nasa.gov/ssx/microecobiogeo/) is involved in a number of projects involving photosynthetic microbial mats. Also, check out PI Brad Bebout also has an education page at: http://microbes.arc.nasa.gov/ for more general information about mats, and curriculum written for a Middle School level.

Our local comet observer Diane Wooden is "very interested in dust that is the building blocks of the planets" and she did observations from Hawaii during the deep impact mission. She says "Comets are the deep-freezers of what was happening in our solar nebula at the time that Jupiter and Saturn were forming."

We are very proud of Tony Colaprete who is principle investigator on the LCROSS mission that was selected as the Secondary Payload for the LRO mission. LCROSS will deliver a 2000 kg impactor that will create nearly a 1000 metric ton plume of lunar ejecta- more than 200 times the energy of Lunar prospector- which will be visible from a number of Lunar-orbital and Earth-based assets. This will reveal new information about the composition of ice in the permanently shadowed region of the south pole that will be the target.

You can read more about the LCROSS mission at ABC news, Popular Mechanics, Space.com, Astronomy Today, and astrobio.net just to name a few.

Jeff Moore has recently been appointed Imaging Node Leader for NASA's New Horizons Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission. We have other outer Solar System scientists who are participating in that mission, including Dale Cruikshank who is also a participating scientist on the Cassini Mission (VIMS team), and he was also part of the Galileo Mission as well. He is also a co-I on a recently selected Mars Scout Mission.

Members of our division are Co-Investigators on a number of missions such as The Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) (David Des Marais, Natalie Cabrol, Jeff Moore) the CRISM and HiRISE instruments on MRO (Robert Haberle, Virginia Gulick, Janice L Bishop) and even ESA missions such as Mars Express (Aaron Zent).

Dr. Sandford was a Co-Investigator on the Stardust Mission which brought back dust from comet Wild2. See the photos that Dr. Sandford took while they were finding the sample return capsule from the Stardust Mission, transporting it back to JSC, and opening it up in the clean room

People in the Space Science and Astrobiology Division are using space based telescopes like Hubble and Spitzer. Indeed division scientists have been leads or co-investigators on dozens of observing programs, more successful Spitzer proposals than any other group. In cycle two we had an unprecedented 75% win rate!

Among our scientists using Hubble are Jeff Cuzzi and Jack Lissauer. Dr. Lissauer is now perhaps best known for his recent paper with former SS&A division post-doctoral fellow Eugenio Rivera (now at UC Santa Cruz) on the discovery of the most earth like planet outside of our Solar System.

Speaking of planet finding, the Kepler Mission to fly a big space telescope especially designed to detect planets is being run out of NASA Ames and a number of our scientists are involved, including former astronaut, Janice Voss.

Scott Sanford got quite well known for the emails that he wrote during the sleep-deprived period of the sample return from the Stardust Mission.

Members of the division are performing important field work all over the world, especially in places that mimic the Mars environment in one way or another. For example,

Chris Mckay and post-doctoral fellow Darlene Lim have been studying carbonate formations in Pavilion Lake,

They require that we include this link to our privacy policy and that I tell you that the curator and NASA official for this page is Mark Fonda who can be reached at mfonda (at) mail.arc.nasa.gov This page was last Updated on April 9th, 2007.