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Video archive
ISS spacewalk preview
This is a preview the planned July 23 EVA by members of the space station crew to jettison two objects from the outpost and perform maintenance.
Briefing | Animation
STS-118: The mission
Officials for Endeavour's trip to the space station present a detailed overview of the STS-118 flight and objectives.
Briefing | Questions
STS-118: Spacewalks
Four spacewalks are planned during Endeavour's STS-118 assembly mission to the space station. Lead spacewalk officer Paul Boehm previews the EVAs.
Full briefing
EVA 1 summary
EVA 2 summary
EVA 3 summary
EVA 4 summary
STS-118: Education
A discussion of NASA's educational initiatives and the flight of teacher Barbara Morgan, plus an interactive event with students were held in Houston.
Briefing | Student event
The Endeavour crew
The Endeavour astronauts, including teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan, meet the press in the traditional pre-flight news conference.
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Mars lander preview
A preview of NASA's Phoenix Mars lander mission and the science objectives to dig into the arctic plains of the Red Planet are presented here.
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Phoenix animation
Project officials narrate animation of Phoenix's launch from Earth, arrival at Mars, touchdown using landing rockets and the craft's robot arm and science gear in action.
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Dawn launch delay
Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters, explains why the agency decided to delay launch of the Dawn asteroid probe from July to September.
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Spitzer observatory searches for the origins of life
NASA/JPL NEWS RELEASE
Posted: July 20, 2007
Astronomers suspect the early Earth was a very harsh place. Temperatures were extreme, and the planet was constantly bombarded by cosmic debris. Many scientists believe that life's starting materials, or building blocks, must have been very resilient to have survived this tumultuous environment.
This false-color composite from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows the remnant of one such explosion. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
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Now, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has learned that organic molecules believed to be among life's building blocks, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, can also survive the harsh environment of an exploding supernova. Supernovae are the violent deaths of the most massive stars. In death, these volatile objects blast tons of energetic waves into the cosmos, destroying much of the dust surrounding them.
The fact that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons can survive a supernova indicates that they are incredibly tough - like cosmic cockroaches enduring a nuclear blast. Such durability might be further proof that these molecules are indeed among life's building blocks.
Achim Tappe of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass., used Spitzer's infrared spectrograph instrument to detect abundant amounts of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons along the ridge of supernova remnant N132D. The remnant is located 163,000 light-years away in a neighboring galaxy called, the Large Magellanic Cloud.
"The fact that we see polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons surviving this explosion illustrates their resilience," says Tappe.
These intriguing molecules are comprised of carbon and hydrogen atoms, and have been spotted inside comets, around star-forming regions and planet-forming disks. Since all life on Earth is carbon based, astronomers suspect that some of Earth's original carbon might have come from these molecules - possibly from comets that smacked into the young planet.
Astronomers say there is some evidence that a massive star exploded near our solar system as it was just beginning to form almost 5 billion years ago. If so, the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons that survived that blast might have helped seed life on our planet.
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