From a distance, Saturn's rings look flawlessly smooth, as if they've been in their current state indefinitely. But as the Voyager and Cassini probes have witnessed, the rings are incredibly dynamic. Small moons shepherd the ice and dust that comprise the rings, providing them with structure. At the same time, the passing of the moons creates gravitational distortions in the rings: spokes, ripples, and gaps within the ring material. As the ring material gets pushed together or pulled apart, smaller bodies can form within the ring, or be pulled apart into tiny ring particles.

While watching one of Saturn's moons, Prometheus, shepherd the edges of the F ring, researchers were surprised to find what they've termed "minijets," trails of ring particles that can be over 100 kilometers long. Although they don't have the ability to image the objects causing these jets, researchers think that they're simply large snowballs that have been aggregated under the influence of gravity, and were gradually pushed out of the plane of the ring, pulling some of the ring material with them as they left.

These aren't violent events—the objects that create the minijets are probably only moving at about four miles an hour (that's two meters a second). So, NASA's title for the article describing these results as "blazing a trail" is a bit of an overstatement. But it does have a very good video describing the discovery of these events.

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Visiting (and eventually mining) asteroids is viewed by space development advocates as an imperative stepping stone to making our way out into the solar system. One group of President Obama's advisors, the Augustine Commission, counseled that a manned asteroid mission might bring the highest payoff per dollar spent in terms of science and essential skills for space exploration. A study was also commissioned to check the feasibility of bringing a small asteroid—on the order of 10,000kg—back to the International Space Station. It reported no showstoppers.

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SpaceX has filed a notice of intent with the FAA, indicating it wants to conduct an Environmental Impact Study for the construction of a new spaceport in Cameron County, Texas, on the Gulf and very near the northern border of Mexico. The site could make Texas a powerhouse in commercial space.

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Jeff Bezos reported on his Bezos Expeditions website that one of his teams has located the engines from Apollo 11 at a depth of 14,000 feet, where they fell into the Atlantic on July 16, 1969.

The F-1 engines are some of the largest rocket engines ever built. Weighing 18,500 pounds, they're 19 feet tall. There's no doubt they're valuable should they be recovered intact; they're a priceless piece of the spacecraft that first took humankind to the Moon.

According to the NASA website, the Saturn S-1C first stage fell about 38 miles before hitting water roughly 55 miles downrange from Cape Kennedy. The majority of the stage is composed of aluminum and Inconel, and would not have corroded appreciably in saltwater. Likewise, the F-1 engines are composed of Inconel, aluminum, stainless steel and copper. All of those materials are relatively immune to seawater and might very well survive many years of immersion. 

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On March 9, NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station quietly began learning the space exploration equivalent of how to remove and replace a gas cap. It's the first in a series of small demonstrations that are intended to have big future consequences, an attempt to learn how to refuel a spacecraft in space instead of on the ground. The experiments have been hotly anticipated in the space community.

The Robotic Refueling Mission demonstrations were developed by the SSCO team headed up by Frank Cepollina at the NASA Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office (SSCO), formed in 2009 at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The team is known for its previous experience planning and executing five highly successful servicing missions for the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Last week, we reported on NASA’s ATREX mission, which will launch five rockets in about five minutes to study the high-altitude jet stream along the East Coast. These suborbital sounding rockets will release chemical tracers to track the high-speed winds nearly 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. In addition, a couple of the rockets will measure conditions such as temperature and pressure near the edge of space.

NASA since announced the launch for tonight between midnight and 1:30 am EDT (March 15).

The late-night launch time might seem strange, but according to NASA this window was chosen to give clear skies and a dark moon for the best viewing conditions. The tracer clouds should be visible for up to 20 minutes following the launches, and may be seen along the East Coast from northern parts of South Carolina through New Jersey, and possibly as far as New Hampshire and Vermont.

Those of us outside this visible range can watch the launch on a live webcast that starts tonight (March 14) at 10 pm (EDT). Mission status updates will also be posted on Twitter at @NASA_Wallops.

UPDATE: NASA scrubbed tonight's launch due to issues with the radio on one of the rocket's instrument payloads. The next launch window is the night of March 16.

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It's possible that no NASA Administrator has enjoyed appearing in front of Congress since the 1960's. Charlie Bolden's testimony in front of both the Senate and House oversight committees for his agency last Wednesday was likely to continue that trend.

Although there was some argument over the 20 percent cuts to the Mars exploration program and NASA's commitments to the ESA, the key issue in both the Senate and House hearings was a philosophical difference over how to get humans into orbit. The legislators favored NASA's Space Launch System, known among its detractors as the "Senate Launch System," over CCDev, the Commercial Crew Development program. The two shouldn't conflict, given that they are meant for completely different purposes, but in these highly-politicized times, they do.

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