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Throwback Thursday: How Satellite Laser Ranging Got its Start Fifty years ago, NASA announced the first successful tracking of a satellite using a laser, a technique now standard for precisely determining satellite orbits. The landmark experiments were conducted at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and the results publicized on Nov. 13, 1964. Before the end of the decade, the technique had gone international, with five stations in the U.S. and France equipped for laser ranging. These days, more than 40 stations are in operation, located on every continent except Antarctica. The appeal of these measurements is their precision. In 1964, microwave radars for tracking satellites had a range accuracy up to about 250 feet (75 meters). NASA’s initial announcement about satellite laser ranging reported a range accuracy up to about 10 feet (3 meters) – about 25 times better. In this image, physicist Henry Plotkin examines the retroreflector array for Beacon Explorer A before integration onto the 1964 satellite. Image Credit: Courtesy of Henry Plotkin #TBT #Throwbackthursday #lasers; -
The giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way may be producing mysterious particles called neutrinos. If confirmed, this would be the first time that scientists have traced neutrinos back to a black hole. The evidence for this came from three NASA satellites that observe in X-ray light: the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Swift gamma-ray mission, and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR). Neutrinos are tiny particles that carry no charge and interact very weakly with electrons and protons. Unlike light or charged particles, neutrinos can emerge from deep within their cosmic sources and travel across the universe without being absorbed by intervening matter or, in the case of charged particles, deflected by magnetic fields. The Earth is constantly bombarded with neutrinos from the sun. However, neutrinos from beyond the solar system can be millions or billions of times more energetic. Scientists have long been searching for the origin of ultra-high energy and very high-energy neutrinos. Image Credit: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Wisconsin/Y.Bai. et al.; -
A filament, which at one point had an eerie similarity to a snake, broke away from the Sun and out into space on Nov. 1, 2014. This video covers just over three hours of activity. This kind of eruptive event is called a Hyder flare. These are filaments (elongated clouds of gases above the Sun's surface) that erupt and cause a brightening at the Sun's surface, although no active regions are in that area. It did thrust out a cloud of particles but not towards Earth. The images were taken in a wavelength of extreme UV light. Credit: NASA/SDO; -
“We congratulate ESA on their successful landing on a comet today," says John Grunsfeld, astronaut and associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, about the successful comet landing by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission. "This achievement represents a breakthrough moment in the exploration of our solar system and a milestone for international cooperation. We are proud to be a part of this historic day and look forward to receiving valuable data from the three NASA instruments on board Rosetta that will map the comet’s nucleus and examine it for signs of water." "The data collected by Rosetta will provide the scientific community, and the world, with a treasure-trove of data. Small bodies in our solar system like comets and asteroids help us understand how the solar system formed and provide opportunities to advance exploration. We look forward to building on Rosetta's success exploring our solar system through our studies of near earth asteroids and NASA's upcoming asteroid sample return mission OSIRIS-REx. It’s a great day for space exploration." This is the first time in history that a spacecraft has attempted a soft landing on a comet. Rosetta is an international mission led by the European Space Agency (ESA), with instruments provided by its member states, and additional support and instruments provided by NASA. Comets are considered primitive building blocks of the solar system that are literally frozen in time. They may have played a part in "seeding" Earth with water and, possibly, the basic ingredients for life. Image credit: ESA/Rosetta/Philae/ROLIS/DLR #CometLanding #Rosetta #Philae #nasa #space; -
At 8:54 p.m. EST Tuesday, the Orion spacecraft began its 22 mile trek from the Launch Abort System Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. A little after 10 p.m., the spacecraft will stop in front of Kennedy’s Vehicle Assembly Building. Orion is expected to reach Space Launch Complex 37 at approximately 2 a.m., Wednesday, and be hoisted on top of the United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket later in the morning. Orion is in the final stages of preparation for its uncrewed flight test, targeted for Dec. 4, that will take it 3,600 miles above Earth on a 4.5 hour flight that will test many of the systems critical for future human missions into deep space. After two orbits and nearly 60,000 miles, Orion will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at almost 20,000 mph before its parachute system deploys to slow the spacecraft for a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. On future missions, the Orion spacecraft will send astronauts farther into the solar system than ever before, including to an asteroid and on the journey to Mars. Pictured here is the Orion spacecraft in front of the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Image credit: NASA;
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The ruddy color of Jupiter's Great Red Spot is likely a product of simple chemicals being broken apart by sunlight in the planet's upper atmosphere, according to a new analysis of data from NASA's Cassini mission. The results contradict the other leading theory for the origin of the spot's striking color -- that the reddish chemicals come from beneath Jupiter's clouds. Researchers arrived at their conclusions using a combination of data from Cassini's December 2000 Jupiter flyby and laboratory experiments. In the lab, the researchers blasted ammonia and acetylene gases -- chemicals known to exist on Jupiter -- with ultraviolet light, to simulate the sun's effects on these materials at the extreme heights of clouds in the Great Red Spot. This produced a reddish material, which the team compared to the Great Red Spot as observed by Cassini's Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS). They found that the light-scattering properties of their red concoction nicely matched a model of the Great Red Spot in which the red-colored material is confined to the uppermost reaches of the giant cyclone-like feature. A coloring agent confined to the top of the clouds would be inconsistent with the competing theory, which posits that the spot's red color is due to upwelling chemicals formed deep beneath the visible cloud layers, he said. If red material were being transported from below, it should be present at other altitudes as well, which would make the red spot redder still. The Great Red Spot is a long-lived feature in Jupiter's atmosphere that is as wide as two earths. Jupiter possesses three main cloud layers, which occupy specific altitudes in its skies; from highest to lowest they are: ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide and water clouds. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ Space Science Institute; -
Hubble Catches Jets, Bubbles, Bursts of Light in Taurus The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a striking view of a multiple star system called XZ Tauri, its neighbor HL Tauri, and several nearby young stellar objects. XZ Tauri is blowing a hot bubble of gas into the surrounding space, which is filled with bright and beautiful clumps that are emitting strong winds and jets. These objects illuminate the region, creating a truly dramatic scene. This dark and ominous landscape is located some 450 light-years away in the constellation of Taurus (The Bull). It lies in the northeastern part of a large, dark cloud known as LDN 1551. Just to the left of center in this image, embedded within a rust-colored cloud, lies XZ Tauri. While it appears to be a single star, this bright spot actually consists of several stars. It has long been known to be a binary, but one of these two stars is thought also to be a binary, making a total of three stars within a single system. Above and to the right of XZ Tauri, an equally epic scene is unfolding. Wisps of deep red seem to be streaking away from the blue-tinged clumps on the right. This bright blue patch contains a star known as HL Tauri, which is associated with Herbig-Haro object HH 150. Herbig-Haro objects are streaks of hot gas blasted into space by newborn and newly forming stars and LDN 1551 is particularly rich in these dramatic objects. In the bottom right of this Hubble image is another Herbig-Haro object known as HH 30 (opo9905), associated with the variable star V1213 Tauri. The star itself is hidden within a flat, bright disk of dust that is split in half by a dark lane. This dust blocks direct light from V1213 Tauri, but the star is visible via its reflected light and the prominent, knotty jets it is blasting out into space. Image credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA; acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt; -
Welcome home! Expedition 41 Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency (ESA), left, Commander Max Suraev of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), center, and NASA Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman, sit in chairs outside the Soyuz TMA-13M capsule just minutes after they landed in a remote area near the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 10, 2014. Suraev, Wiseman and Gerst returned to Earth after more than five months onboard the International Space Station where they served as members of the Expedition 40 and 41 crews. Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls; -
Three of the crew members aboard the International Space Station are scheduled to depart the orbiting laboratory today, Sunday, Nov. 9 after almost six months aboard. NASA Television will provide complete coverage at www.nasa.gov/nasatv Expedition 41 Commander Max Suraev of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), NASA Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman and Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency (ESA) will undock their Soyuz spacecraft from the station at 7:30 p.m. EST for a landing in Kazakhstan at 10:58 p.m. (9:58 a.m. Nov. 10 Kazakh time). Their return will wrap up 165 days in space since launching from Kazakhstan on May 29 and a mission that covered almost 70 million miles in orbit. With their landing, Suraev will have spent 334 days in space on two flights, and Wiseman and Gerst will have logged 165 days in space on their first flights. At the time of undocking, Expedition 42 will formally begin aboard the station under the command of NASA astronaut Barry Wilmore. Along with his crewmates Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova of Roscosmos, Wilmore will operate the station as a three-person crew for two weeks until the arrival of three new crew members. NASA astronaut Terry Virts, Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov and ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti are scheduled to launch from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, Nov. 23, (U.S. time). Image credit: NASA; -
Hubble View of Bubbly Nebula This image from Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 showcases NGC 1501, a complex planetary nebula located in the large but faint constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe). Discovered by William Herschel in 1787, NGC 1501 is a planetary nebula that is just under 5,000 light-years away from us. Astronomers have modeled the three-dimensional structure of the nebula, finding it to be a cloud shaped as an irregular ellipsoid filled with bumpy and bubbly regions. It has a bright central star that can be seen easily in this image, shining brightly from within the nebula’s cloud. This bright pearl embedded within its glowing shell inspired the nebula’s popular nickname: the Oyster Nebula. While NGC 1501's central star blasted off its outer shell long ago, it still remains very hot and luminous, although it is quite tricky for observers to spot through modest telescopes. This star has actually been the subject of many studies by astronomers due to one very unusual feature: it seems to be pulsating, varying quite significantly in brightness over a typical timescale of just half an hour. While variable stars are not unusual, it is uncommon to find one at the heart of a planetary nebula. It is important to note that the colors in this image are arbitrary. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA; acknowledgement: Marc Canale;
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Mimicking the Moon When Galileo first observed Venus displaying a crescent phase, he excitedly wrote to Kepler (in anagram) of Venus mimicking the moon-goddess. He would have been delirious with joy to see Saturn and Titan, seen in this image, doing the same thing. More than just pretty pictures, high-phase observations - taken looking generally toward the Sun, as in this image - are very powerful scientifically since the way atmospheres and rings transmit sunlight is often diagnostic of compositions and physical states. In this example, Titan's crescent nearly encircles its disk due to the small haze particles high in its atmosphere scattering the incoming light of the distant Sun. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 3 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in violet light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 11, 2013. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.1 million miles (1.7 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 154 degrees. Image scale is 64 miles (103 kilometers) per pixel. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute; -
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have completed the largest and most sensitive visible-light imaging survey of dusty debris disks around other stars. These dusty disks, likely created by collisions between leftover objects from planet formation, were imaged around stars as young as 10 million years old and as mature as more than 1 billion years old. Once thought to be simply pancake-like structures, the unexpected diversity and complexity and varying distribution of dust among these debris systems strongly suggest the disks are gravitationally-affected by unseen exoplanets orbiting the star. Alternatively, these effects could result from the stars passing through interstellar space. This is an image from the Hubble Space Telescope visible-light survey of the architecture of debris systems around young stars. Hubble's sharp view uncovers an unexpected diversity and complexity in the structures. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/G. Schneider/U. Arizona; -
NASA Astronaut Reid Wiseman shared this image of Yosemite via his twitter account this morning. Wiseman later tweeted: "We cranked up our #Soyuz this morning and test fired all the thrusters. Everything worked flawlessly - ready for a Sunday departure." The homebound Expedition 40/41 trio, consisting of Soyuz Commander Max Suraev and Flight Engineers Alexander Gerst and Wiseman, is counting down to its Nov. 9 departure inside the Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft. They are packing gear to be returned home while they continue science and maintenance on the U.S. side of the International Space Station. Back on Earth, the new Expedition 42/43 crew is getting ready for its launch to the space station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Nov. 23. Soyuz Commander Anton Shkaplerov will be joined by NASA astronaut Terry Virts and European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti aboard a Soyuz TMA-15M spacecraft to begin a 5-1/2 month mission aboard the orbital laboratory. Image Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman #iss #soyuz #yosemite #earth #space #nasa @iss; -
Throwback Thursday: Driving the Lunar Rover Astronaut Eugene A. Cernan, Apollo 17 mission commander, makes a short checkout of the Lunar Roving Vehicle during the early part of the first Apollo 17 extravehicular activity at the Taurus-Littrow landing site. This view of the "stripped down" Rover is prior to load up. This photograph was taken by Geologist-Astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, Lunar Module pilot. The mountain in the right background is the East end of South Massif. Image credit: NASA #TBT #NASA #History #Apollo17 #Moon #1972 #space #Throwbackthursday; -
An active region on the sun emitted a mid-level solar flare, peaking at 4:47 a.m. EST on Nov. 5, 2014. This is the second mid-level flare from the same active region, labeled AR 12205, which rotated over the left limb of the sun on Nov. 3. The image was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in extreme ultraviolet light that was colorized in red and gold. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth's atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however -- when intense enough -- they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel. This flare is classified as an M7.9-class flare. M-class flares are a tenth the size of the most intense flares, the X-class flares. The number provides more information about its strength. An M2 is twice as intense as an M1, an M3 is three times as intense, etc. Image Credit: NASA/SDO #SDO #SolarFlare #Sun #Solar #nasa #space;
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