The SESDA II Cassini team played a vital role in the production of remarkable new surface thermal maps of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. A recent spacecraft flyby of the southern pole yielded highly detailed images of the moon’s surface that reveal amazing features such as jets spewing icy crystals and organic particles from frigid valleys, and a mysterious fracture with glowing hot spots. Thermal maps of the fracture were produced with the Cassini/Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) and were highlighted in a mission news release.

SESDA II personnel were instrumental in generating the thermal maps by designing and testing the commands to record the observations, and by producing the calibrated spectra used to derive the temperature measurements.

SESDA II staff has set up a web-cam in the NASA/GSFC Building 29 clean room so that anybody can watch work being done on components of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in real-time. A NASA web page is updated regularly with information and descriptions of the work that’s underway while the camera itself updates with a new picture every 60 seconds. The page is proving to be wildly popular, having been featured on the front page of the nasa.gov website among other places, and received more than a million views in the month of March!

SESDA II scientists and media staff at the STEREO Science Center received a rare added bonus while processing video images of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) obtained with one of the twin STEREO coronagraphs. The coronagraph’s occulting disk blocked out sufficient background light from the Sun’s gleaming outer atmosphere that Jupiter and four of its faint Galilean moons (first discovered by Galileo in 1610) could be discerned in the far distance. If you have the bandwidth, go to http://cor1.gsfc.nasa.gov/movies for a spectacular movie of Jupiter and its moons orbiting the Sun.

SESDA II staff members planned and implemented the NASA booth at the Fall American Geophysical meeting in San Francisco. More than 10,000 people viewed booth exhibits and events, including the ‘Dynamic Planet’; an 81” video board showing continuous clips of NASA Science research and results; plus talks by prominent scientists. The SESDA team was led by Jennifer Brennan and Winnie Humberson.

SESDA II staff member, Maurice Henderson, attended and supported the Science on a Sphere exhibit at the 15th Conference of the Parties Climate Change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December. Several climate scientists presented data using the Sphere. The figure shows Dr. Alexander MacDonald, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Deputy Assistant Administrator for Labs and Cooperative Institutes, presenting data which was simulcast to other Spheres around the world. Mr. Henderson is the principle developer of the exhibit.

Dr. Tony Phillips, well-known for penning Spaceweather.com and currently a consultant working with SESDA II staff, has developed a novel freeware application for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch that uses real-time observations from the twin STEREO spacecraft to give a 3-D view of the state of the Sun. Views from both the STEREO Ahead and Behind spacecraft are blended together onto a spherical representation of the Sun.

Users can rotate the Sun to see active regions and sunspots both on the Earth-facing side, and on the far side to see what active regions might be coming around in the next few days. If you worry about when that next big Solar flare is going to affect your GPS system or satellite TV, then this is the app for you. The app is now available for download at appshopper.com/education/3d-sun.