Nasa

With the final flight of the stalwart space shuttle Atlantis just a few days away, America is beginning an exciting new chapter in human space exploration. This chapter centers on full utilization of the International Space Station, development of multiple, made-in-America capabilities for astronauts and cargo to reach low-Earth orbit, and pursuit of two critical building blocks for our nation's exploration future: a deep space crew vehicle and an evolvable, heavy-lift rocket. Today, we embark on a new knowledge and innovation-driven approach to space science and exploration that will lead us into the new frontiers of deep space.

If you're easily startled by big, low-flying airplanes, you'll need to get a good grip on the steering wheel Monday. NASA will be starting a monthlong campaign of air pollution sampling, using a four-engine turboprop P-3B Orion to skim 1,000 feet over Central Maryland's interstate highways to gather air samples. A thousand feet is about the height of the TV towers on Television Hill in Baltimore, or twice the height of the Washington Monument in the nation's capital. Public safety officials have been told to expect anxious phone calls next week as the flights get under way. The aircraft will fly a circuit from Beltsville and Annapolis to Cecil County and back, sometimes flying low along Interstate 95, the Baltimore-Washington Parkway and the Baltimore Beltway.

Only three months after NASA's Messenger spacecraft became the first to orbit the planet Mercury, scientists are already tossing out some long-held ideas about the place, and wondering at some surprising and unexpected discoveries. "In many cases, a lot of our original ideas about Mercury were just plain wrong," said Larry Nittler, a Messenger scientist from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Among the surprises from the Maryland-run mission: • Mercury has unexpectedly high abundances of potassium and thorium — elements that scientists thought would have evaporated as the planet formed so close to the young sun. Now they'll need a new theory of how (and where)

William S. Aiken Jr., former NASA director of aeronautics who earlier in his career had worked on the X-1, the first supersonic aircraft, died May 27 of a blood disorder at St. Agnes Hospital. The Charlestown retirement community resident was 90. The son of a gas company executive and a homemaker, Mr. Aiken was born and raised in Elizabeth, N.J. He was a 1938 graduate of Thomas Jefferson High School and earned a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., in 1942.

One mission would parachute a floating science lab into a lake on Saturn's largest moon, Titan. The other would send a spacecraft to hop on and off a comet as it races toward the sun. Both outer-space adventures would be led by Maryland scientists — two women who attended Brown University together, and once shared a room at a scientific conference. And both ventures would be managed by Maryland institutions. But only one (or neither) will win the $425 million in NASA funding needed to get off the ground.

The NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt will get a $128 million slice of a new mission to grab a sample from an asteroid and return it to Earth in 2023. NASA selected the $800 million OSIRIS-Rex mission for funding Wednesday, passing over competing proposals to send spacecraft to Venus and the moon. The work will be led by Michael J. Drake at the University of Arizona, Tucson, and managed by Goddard. Engineers at the space center will also build one of its instruments.

Maryland institutions are involved in two of the three teams competing for $425 million in NASA funding to launch a new planetary mission in 2016. NASA said Thursday that the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California were selected from among 28 competitors for the Discovery Program funding. Each will get $3 million for preliminary design work. After a review next year, one will be selected for funding and development.

Morgan State University and the Johns Hopkins University are part of a group that has received a $95.8 million grant from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to conduct Earth-based research on the atmosphere, oceans and planet surface. Morgan's $28.5 million piece of the funding represents the largest grant in the university's history, and officials described it as a leap forward in national renown. "My hope is that people who have not been paying attention to Morgan will wake up and realize that Baltimore has an institution that is really capable of being exceptional," said Morgan President David Wilson.

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