The Cassini space probe ended its mission in 2017 with a dramatic plunge into Saturn, yet it continues to fuel discoveries.

In a new analysis of data from one of the probe’s instruments, an international team of researchers has identified new organic compounds within jets of icy water erupting from Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. The material likely originated in Enceladus’ ocean, and adds to mounting evidence that the moon could be habitable.

“We found a rich organic inventory in Enceladus’ plume,” said Fabian Klenner, a 91Ě˝»¨ postdoctoral researcher of Earth and space sciences and a member of the research team. “Having clear evidence of a variety of organic compounds from inside an extraterrestrial water world is incredible and further strengthens Enceladus’ potential for habitability. It appears that Enceladus has all the ingredients for life as we know it.”

in Nature Astronomy.

Launched in 1997, Cassini performed a while in orbit around Saturn, resolving two longstanding mysteries surrounding the system: the origin of Saturn’s enormous but faint E ring and the cause of Enceladus’ unusual brightness. Enceladus, it turns out, is covered in a 16-19 miles thick shell of highly reflective ice which hides a global saltwater ocean. The probe observed fissures in the ice of the moon’s South Polar Terrain ejecting massive quantities of icy water into space. Some of the material forms Saturn’s E ring.

Data from Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer, or CDA, previously helped researchers identify organic compounds and other key building blocks for life within Saturn’s E ring. Cassini also found material in the E ring that suggests hydrothermal activity deep within Enceladus.

“We suspect that so-called hydrothermal fields exist there — these are vents at the bottom of the ocean from which hot water rises. There is evidence that life on Earth originated in such fields,” said lead author , a research group leader at Freie Universität Berlin.

The new results come from data collected in a close flyby of Enceladus’ icy plume, offering scientists a look at material that had been inside the moon just minutes before.

“The high-speed flyby of Enceladus enabled us to identify new compounds that were not found in the E ring data, most notably esters, alkenes and ether compounds,” said Klenner, who helped validate the new CDA results. “Notably, esters and ethers can be part of lipids, and lipids are key to life as we know it.”

The success of Cassini has helped stoke considerable investment in future missions to the outer solar system. NASA’s is currently en route to Jupiter to study its moon Europa, which is also a promising candidate in the search for extraterrestrial life.

In the meantime, there’s plenty more Cassini data up for grabs.

“It’s phenomenal to continue learning from the Cassini mission,” said Klenner, who will start a new position as an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside in December. “Much of the CDA data still isn’t analyzed and I’m so excited about what it may reveal next.”

Co-authors include , , , and at Freie Universität Berlin; at the University of Colorado, Boulder; and at the Institute of Science Tokyo; and and at the University of Stuttgart.Ěý

This research was funded by the European Research Council, the German Aerospace Center, the state of Berlin and NASA.

For more information, contact Klenner at fklenner@uw.edu.Ěý

This story was adapted by the University of Stuttgart.

A team of researchers led by , professor of civil and environmental engineering, developed and continues to improve a technology-based irrigation advisory system to give farmers real-time information right on their cell phones.

The system is called Provision of Advisory for Necessary Irrigation, or PANI for short. The work extends to India the earlier development of a similar irrigation advisory system in Pakistan.

It’s an application that uses NASA observations of Earth, such as precipitation data from the satellite mission, to help farmers know better, based on resources in their own area, when and how much to water their crops.

The system uses low-cost environmental monitoring ground sensors to help provide advisories on a hyperlocal scale, and for a variety of crops. Hossain’s team tested the system with 150 farmers in northern India in 2018 and 2019 and found it did indeed help improve their productivity and water usage.

Now, as part of commemorating the 50^th anniversary of Earth Day, NASA’s program has featured Hossain and the PANI system . Hossain is the first of four researchers NASA selected to profile.

Hossain also worked with NASA-contracted staff to create videos about the PANI system and lesson plans geared for students in , , and , and in which he discusses his work.

Separately, NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System also is adding Hossain to its list of .

“Knowing when and how much to water crops can empower India’s struggling farmers and help conserve critical freshwater resources,” NASA wrote, adding that research from the 91Ě˝»¨ is “critical.”

The PANI project is a collaboration involving the 91Ě˝»¨and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kritsnam Technologies and GeoKno, all of India. It is built on a that is now serving 100,000 farmers and has recently expanded to Bangladesh.

For more information, contact Hossain at fhossain@uw.edu.

• Learn more about the project in a NASA video:

91Ě˝»¨scientists are prepping a  experiment at Cape Canaveral, Florida, awaiting a shuttle launch that will take the chips into space. At an altitude of 250 miles, astronauts will help study how reduced gravity in space affects kidney physiology.

Credit card-sized chip devices will contain microchambers that are lined with human-derived kidney cells. The cells simulate part of a kidney, and act like part of a kidney when fluid medications or toxins are injected into the device.

New tools, like the kidney chips, could help find ways to prevent or treat kidney problems in that occur often in astronauts, as well as in people who will never venture into space. Kidney disease occurs in about 10 percent of adults; treatment can diminish quality of life.ĚýCells age more rapidly in space and can give researchers results that would take much longer on Earth, and without having to test on real people.

A Dragon C19/Falcon 9 supply shuttle will deliver the chips to the International Space Station, where they will be exposed to microgravity for about two weeks.

The chief scientists are Ed Kelly, associate professor of pharmaceutics, ; Jonathan Himmelfarb, kidney disease specialist at 91Ě˝»¨Medicine and professor of medicine, Division of Nephrology, 91Ě˝»¨School of Medicine; and Cathy Yeung, research assistant professor of pharmacy.

The unmanned SpaceX mission CRS17, contracted with , is slated to launch at the end of April, pending favorable conditions.

Read more about the project and where to watch the launch live 

is associate director and the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor in the . The founding director of the school’s doctoral program, she also holds adjunct appointments in both political science and law. She has master’s degrees from Yale Law School and Columbia University and a doctorate from Harvard University, and joined the 91Ě˝»¨ in 2004.

Have you always been interested in space?

I have! Although I have to say, funnily enough, when I arrived at Harvard and said that’s what I am interested in doing, I remember some faculty said, “You know, seems like too much of a niche thing for one dissertation — what’s the big picture?” Though they didn’t really advise against it.

So did you put the interest aside for a while?

I did not. I did a chapter from my dissertation and then sort of went from there. And I’ve been following civil, commercial and military space affairs ever since.

And little did I imagine, coming here 10 years ago, that the Pacific Northwest was going to become the amazing regional space player that it is becoming. There are people here very committed not just to space travel but also to advancing the technology, and it’s unique to have them all concentrated in this area. It is becoming a sort of “space valley” — the Silicon Valley for space — and I feel utterly lucky!

You co-chair the , which recently met in Washington, D.C. What is that group and its mission?

This is a standing group with stakeholders from the United States and Japan, which brings different angles to the space policy table in both countries. As you know, Japan is a security ally of the United States. In 2013 the two counties launched a government-to-government dialogue with the idea of figuring out how as the geopolitics of the region changed, they could cooperate better in terms of space technology, which would also of course affect their security.

But space has become very democratized, in the sense that it’s beyond governments. It’s not just a question of private companies — it’s also now down to the billionaires who are helping us change some of the technologies and trajectories. The other important change is that it’s not just Western countries — the United States and Europe — that are dominant.

It used to be just us and the Russians.

Exactly — but that world is gone. I’d say the world’s most important, rising and ambitious space players are now in Asia — China and Japan, of course, and also India. And all of them have civilian, commercial and military ambitions in space.

It’s not just about the space technology anymore, it’s about the geopolitical context in which these newer powers are developing them. The Forum reflects these realities.

You have written of the dangers of a “counterspace race.” What is that?

This is the race we are in, very different from your grandfather’s space race. Counterspace means that you have the ability to protect your friends and deter your rivals in operations out there. Because of the way space assets are linked to civilian, commercial and military life on the planet, that can also mean enabling or crippling systems down here. All this affects the balance of power among countries at a fundamental level.

The U.S. is the world’s most “dependent” space power in the sense that our civilian, commercial and military life rely on those assets more heavily than other countries — GPS, for example, and communications, navigation or weather satellites. And for the military, of course, reconnaissance is important, too, as well as aiding fighters carrying out operations on the ground. So this dependency is a vulnerability, the Achilles heel of the U.S., and everyone knows it.

If you look at the National Defense Authorization Act, it has become very strident about the fact that this counterspace threat is very serious, very deadly. So, institutionally the Pentagon is responding to this. And the U.S. is moving forward with like-minded allies to devise ways to safeguard freedom of space navigation, which is critical.

You write in about topics including the dangers of human-caused debris in Earth orbit. It needs cleaning up, but that process also has a darker side. Would you explain?

The dark side is that the technologies that might be used to get rid of orbital debris — to, say, sort of drag it down, zap it and bump it out of orbit — are the same technologies that can knock out your functioning assets.

So of course for a dependent space power like the United States, that’s a huge concern. The U.S. is responding by elevating the institutional focus on debris threats within the Department of Defense.

I think they’ve been thinking about it for some time, but now it’s politically clear they have a mandate to go after this, to ensure that the heavens are safe and sustainable — those are the watchwords for the global community, too.

The threat is very real, you write.

I want to be very clear when I make this statement: I do see considerable threats in space. And these will have consequences for humanity’s ventures in outer space. This is where the counterspace race comes in, with fairly irresponsible behavior by the world’s leading space players.

For example, certain countries have used direct ascent missiles and have created orbital debris. Everybody cites the example of test in 2007 (said to be the largest recorded creation of space debris in history) — but China is not the only one doing things.

Russia has demonstrated what we call co-orbital satellite operations, going around other satellites with the potential to take them down. India is also interested in going after military space. Japan pioneered the technology back in the late 1990s. And the United States has both offensive and defensive counterspace abilities.

What is — or could be — the UW’s Jackson School of International Studies’ role in such discussions?

One of the most exciting things happening here at the Jackson School is the , which was formed through a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The idea is to bridge the gap between what academics know and what policymakers might want to know. It’s hard for academics to convert what they do into “policyspeak,” and one of the goals of the institute is to give our faculty the chance to communicate some of their ideas to the real world.

What comes first, as you begin this work?

Right now, for the first year we are focusing on space, cyberspace and also the Arctic — each a sort of new frontier in terms of U.S. foreign policy, but also the global community. We just had a where we connected with policymakers in the D.C. area, and we will return east to communicate the messages to more policymakers later in the year.

You have said we are at “a very pivotal crossroads” as far as space affairs are concerned. Would you say more?

I seriously believe that we can put Seattle and the Pacific Northwest on the map with respect to elevating peaceful solutions to issues in outer space, particularly with respect to getting rid of debris. And one of my missions is to make that possible.

So I am spending some time not just with the private sector stakeholders here in the community, but also working very closely with the Museum of Flight people, to expand the educational mission.

We have to raise public awareness about the issue, because I think that most people say of orbital debris, “What is that?”

We also have to realize that the technology and the policy go together. And what we are going to create here is a community of stakeholders who meet on a regular basis to discuss these issues and to figure out how we can connect to these larger global security issues.

Certainly, I feel the U.S. does need to protect its interests because it has the most to lose out there. But you cannot leave diplomacy out of the question, because in the end you have to bring every stakeholder to the table. We can’t do that with just one space power acting alone.

This gathering of stakeholders sounds a bit like the recent climate talks in Paris.

I’m glad you brought that up, because how long did that take? It took over 50 years to come to fruition and a lot begins with raising consciousness about a global problem.

So I feel we’re at the beginning. We are just starting the conversation, and the way to position what we are doing in Seattle and the Jackson School is to help advance that conversation for the future.

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For more information, contact Pekkanen at 206-543-6148 or smp1@uw.edu. To learn more about the Jackson School and its work, contact Monique Thormann, director of communications, at 206-685-0578 or thormm@uw.edu.

Observations of nitrogen in Earth’s atmosphere by a NASA spacecraft 17 million miles away are giving astronomers fresh clues to how that gas might reveal itself on faraway planets, thus aiding in the search for life.

Finding and measuring nitrogen in the atmosphere of an exoplanet — one outside our solar system — can be crucial to determining if that world might be habitable. That’s because nitrogen can provide clues to surface pressure. If nitrogen is found to be abundant in a planet’s atmosphere, that world almost certainly has the right pressure to keep liquid water stable on its surface. Liquid water is one of the prerequisites for life.

Should life truly exist on an exoplanet, detecting nitrogen as well as oxygen could help astronomers verify the oxygen’s biological origin by ruling out certain ways oxygen can be produced abiotically, or through means other than life.

The trouble is, is hard to spot from afar. It’s often called an “invisible gas” because it has few light-altering features in visible or infrared light that would make it easy to detect. The best way to detect nitrogen in a distant atmosphere is to measure nitrogen molecules colliding with each other. The resulting, instantaneously brief “collisional pairs” create a unique and discernable spectroscopic signature.

A published Aug. 28 in The Astrophysical Journal by 91Ě˝»¨ astronomy doctoral student and lead author , together with astronomy professor and co-authors, shows that a future large telescope could detect this unusual signature in the atmospheres of terrestrial, or rocky planets, given the right instrumentation.

The researchers used three-dimensional planet-modeling data from the UW-based — of which Meadows is principal investigator — to simulate how the signature of nitrogen molecule collisions might appear in the Earth’s atmosphere, and compared this simulated data to real observations of the Earth by NASA’s unmanned spacecraft, launched in 2005.

The craft undertook a revised mission, called , which included observation and characterization of the Earth as if it were an exoplanet. By comparing the real data from the EPOXI mission and the simulated data from Virtual Planetary Laboratory models, the authors were able to confirm the signatures of nitrogen collisions in our own atmosphere, and that they would be visible to a distant observer.

“One of the main messages of the Virtual Planetary Laboratory is that you always need validation of an idea — a proof of concept — before you can extrapolate your knowledge to studying a potentially Earth-like exoplanet,” Schwieterman said. “That’s why studying the Earth as an exoplanet is so important — we were able to validate that nitrogen produces an impact on the spectrum of our own planet as seen by a distant spacecraft. This tells us it’s something worth looking for elsewhere.”

This confirmation in hand, the researchers used a suite of Virtual Planetary Laboratory models that simulated the appearance of planets beyond the solar system bearing varying amounts of nitrogen in their atmospheres.

The detection of nitrogen will help astronomers characterize the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets and determine the likelihood of oxygen production by nonliving processes, the researchers write.

“One of the interesting results from our study is that, basically, if there’s enough nitrogen to detect at all, you’ve confirmed that the surface pressure is sufficient for liquid water, for a very wide range of surface temperatures,” Schwieterman said.

Schwieterman and Meadows’ 91Ě˝»¨co-author is , who recently completed his doctorate at the 91Ě˝»¨in astronomy. Other co-authors are of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California, who earned his doctorate at the UW; and Shawn Domagal-Goldman of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, who completed a postdoctoral appointment at the UW.

The research was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

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For more information, contact Schwieterman at eschwiet@uw.edu, or 321-505-1605.

Cooperative agreement number NNA13AA93A.

This coming fall, the drops and flakes will be tracked as never before. Researchers are preparing for , a ground-based effort to calibrate and validate precipitation measurements made by the Global Precipitation Measurement () constellation of satellites. An international collaboration including the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and NASA recently launched the core GPM satellite, equipped with new instruments that can measure a range of precipitation intensities, from light snowfall to heavy tropical rain.

“It’s exciting to have all these things come together, measuring storm systems in all these different ways,” said , a 91Ě˝»¨research scientist in atmospheric sciences.

, professor of atmospheric sciences, is the other 91Ě˝»¨lead on the project to validate the new satellites’ data.

The Olympic Peninsula is an ideal location to conduct a precipitation field campaign. It is situated within an active storm track and offers a unique venue to monitor storm systems and their evolution as they cross from the ocean to the coastal lowlands, and over complex terrain.

The high-tech storm watch will track weather from the air and on the ground. The most intense phase of the project is scheduled to start after the first week of November and continue for six weeks. Other sensors will stay on the ground throughout the winter until the spring thaw.

The ground campaign will include several dual-polarization weather radars to complement the one on Washington’s coast, as well as other special ground instruments measuring the type and amount of precipitation. Research aircraft carrying instruments similar to those on the GPM core satellite will fly over the ocean and over the weather radars and other ground sensors.

Instruments will measure the exact amount of precipitation in different places, determine the height where snow turns to rain in a storm system, and even measure the size of the drops – whether the precipitation falls as many small drops, or fewer big drops.

“The size of the drops tells us something about the processes that are creating the rain, and is an important quantity used in the precipitation algorithms for the satellite,” McMurdie said.

As part of the current gear-up phase, the team is asking the community for help. Residents from around the state, but especially from the Olympic Peninsula and Chehalis River basin to the south, are being sought to monitor precipitation. The citizen-science is helping with the recruitment. The network, which has operated in Washington since 2008, has more than 400 active volunteers, with 58 of those on the Olympic Peninsula.

The national volunteer rain-monitoring effort began in Colorado after a in 1997 was poorly forecasted by weather models and came as a surprise, killing five people and causing millions of dollars in damage.

Volunteers buy a $30 rain gauge, install it on their property, and then check it and report by computer each morning. Data from volunteers inside the study area will be entered into the NASA project database.

The data also will be used by 91Ě˝»¨doctoral student , who is installing rain gauges throughout the Chehalis River basin to understand how satellite precipitation estimates match up with actual river flows. The project is starting now and next year Gergel expects to deploy 30 to 50 rain gauges. The NASA-funded study, led by , research associate professor in civil and environmental engineering, will help to predict flooding in that region by building better models that use satellite data to forecast extreme precipitation events.

Other 91Ě˝»¨researchers who are involved with the NASA rain-monitoring campaign include in atmospheric sciences and in civil and environmental engineering, and 91Ě˝»¨graduate students in those two departments.

More on the NASA GPM satellites, which launched in February 2014:

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For more information, contact McMurdie at 206-685-9405 or mcmurdie@atmos.washington.edu. For information about the volunteer rain-gauge program contact Karin Bumbaco at 206-543-3145 or kbumbaco@uw.edu.

91Ě˝»¨ researchers and scientists at a Redmond-based space-propulsion company are building components of a fusion-powered rocket aimed to clear many of the hurdles that block deep space travel, including long times in transit, exorbitant costs and health risks.

“Using existing rocket fuels, it’s nearly impossible for humans to explore much beyond Earth,” said lead researcher , a 91Ě˝»¨research associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics. “We are hoping to give us a much more powerful source of energy in space that could eventually lead to making interplanetary travel commonplace.”

The project is funded through NASA’s . Last month at a , Slough and his team from , of which he is president, presented their mission analysis for a trip to Mars, along with detailed computer modeling and initial experimental results. Theirs was one of a handful of projects awarded a second round of last fall after already receiving phase-one money in a field of 15 projects chosen from more than 700 proposals.

NASA estimates a round-trip human expedition to Mars would take more than four years using current technology. The sheer amount of chemical rocket fuel needed in space would be extremely expensive – the launch costs alone would be more than $12 billion.

Slough and his team have published calculating the potential for 30- and 90-day expeditions to Mars using a rocket powered by fusion, which would make the trip more practical and less costly.

But is this really feasible?

Slough and his colleagues at MSNW think so. They have demonstrated successful lab tests of all portions of the process. Now, the key will be combining each isolated test into a final experiment that produces fusion using this technology, Slough said.

The research team has developed a type of plasma that is encased in its own magnetic field. Nuclear fusion occurs when this plasma is compressed to high pressure with a magnetic field. The team has successfully tested this technique in the lab.

Only a small amount of fusion is needed to power a rocket – a small grain of sand of this material has the same energy content as 1 gallon of rocket fuel.

To power a rocket, the team has devised a system in which a powerful magnetic field causes large metal rings to implode around this plasma, compressing it to a fusion state. The converging rings merge to form a shell that ignites the fusion, but only for a few microseconds. Even though the compression time is very short, enough energy is released from the fusion reactions to quickly heat and ionize the shell. This super-heated, ionized metal is ejected out of the rocket nozzle at a high velocity. This process is repeated every minute or so, propelling the spacecraft.

In the video below, the plasma (purple) is injected while lithium metal rings (green) rapidly collapse around the plasma, creating fusion.

The UW-MSNW team has successfully demonstrated the metal-crushing process in the in Redmond. The video below, taken from a 3-D computer simulation, shows three lithium rings as they collapse around plasma material.

The team had a sample of the collapsed, fist-sized aluminum ring resulting from one of those tests on hand for people to see and touch at the recent NASA symposium.

“I think everybody was pleased to see confirmation of the principal mechanism that we’re using to compress the plasma,” Slough said. “We hope we can interest the world with the fact that fusion isn’t always 40 years away and doesn’t always cost $2 billion.”

Now, the team is working to bring it all together by using the technology to compress the plasma and create nuclear fusion. Slough hopes to have everything ready for a first test at the end of the summer.

The Plasma Dynamics Lab – where Slough and colleagues, including 91Ě˝»¨graduate students, build and conduct experiments – is filled wall-to-wall with blue capacitors that hold energy, each functioning like a high-voltage battery. The capacitors are hooked up to a giant magnet that houses the chamber where the fusion reaction will take place. With the flip of a switch, the capacitors are simultaneously triggered to deliver 1 million amps of electricity for a fraction of a second to the magnet, which quickly compresses the metal ring.

The mechanical process and equipment used are reasonably straightforward, which Slough said supports their design working in space.

“Anything you put in space has to function in a fairly simple manner,” he said. “You can extrapolate this technology to something usable in space.”

In actual space travel, scientists would use lithium metal as the crushing rings to power the rocket. Lithium is very reactive, and for lab-testing purposes, aluminum works just as well, Slough said.

Nuclear fusion may draw concern because of its application in nuclear bombs, but its use in this scenario is very different, Slough said. The fusion energy for powering a rocket would be reduced by a factor of 1 billion from a hydrogen bomb, too little to create a significant explosion. Also, Slough’s concept uses a strong magnetic field to contain the fusion fuel and guide it safely away from the spacecraft and any passengers within.

Research partners are Anthony Pancotti, David Kirtley and George Votroubek, all of MSNW; Christopher Pihl, research engineer in aeronautics and astronautics at UW; and Michael Pfaff, a 91Ě˝»¨doctoral student in aeronautics and astronautics.

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For more information, contact Slough at 425-319-5024 or sloughj@uw.edu.

More videos are available on the fusion-driven rocket’s .