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Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission Marks Ten Years of Discovery On Nov. 20, 2004, NASA's Swift spacecraft lifted off aboard a Boeing Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., beginning its mission to study gamma-ray bursts and identify their origins. Gamma-ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the cosmos. Most are thought to be triggered when the core of a massive star runs out of nuclear fuel, collapses under its own weight, and forms a black hole. The black hole then drives jets of particles that drill all the way through the collapsing star and erupt into space at nearly the speed of light. Seen here, astronomers at NASA and Pennsylvania State University used Swift to create the most detailed ultraviolet light surveys ever of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, the two closest major galaxies. Nearly a million ultraviolet sources appear in this mosaic of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which was assembled from 2,200 images taken by Swift's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) and released on June 3, 2013. The 160-megapixel image required a cumulative exposure of 5.4 days. The image includes light from 1,600 to 3,300 angstroms -- UV wavelengths largely blocked by Earth's atmosphere -- and has an angular resolution of 2.5 arcseconds at full size. The Large Magellanic Cloud is about 14,000 light-years across. Viewing in the ultraviolet allows astronomers to suppress the light of normal stars like the sun, which are not very bright at such higher energies, and provides a clearer picture of the hottest stars and star-formation regions. No telescope other than UVOT can produce such high-resolution wide-field multicolor surveys in the ultraviolet. Image Credit: NASA/Swift/S. Immler (Goddard) and M. Siegel (Penn State); -
Five hundred million years after the sun was born, Jupiter’s massive gravity disrupts countless asteroids and comets. These hammer down on the inner planets. Did this impact deliver water and organics? The key ingredients to life? The Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security -- Regolith Explorer spacecraft (OSIRIS-REx) will travel to a near-Earth asteroid, called Bennu, and bring a sample back to Earth for study. The mission will help scientists investigate how planets formed and how life began, as well as improve our understanding of asteroids that could impact Earth. OSIRIS-REx is scheduled for launch in late 2016. As planned, the spacecraft will reach its asteroid target in 2018 and return a sample to Earth in 2023.; -
Supernova Remnant: A long observation with Chandra of the supernova remnant MSH 11-62 reveals an irregular shell of hot gas, shown in red, surrounding an extended nebula of high energy X-rays, shown in blue. Even though scientists have yet to detect any pulsations from the central object within MSH 11-62, the structure around it has many of the same characteristics as other pulsar wind nebulas. The reverse shock and other, secondary shocks within MSH 11-62 appear to have begun to crush the pulsar wind nebula, possibly contributing to its elongated shape. (Note: the orientation of this image has been rotated by 24 degrees so that north is pointed to the upper left.) Image credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Slane et al. #nasa #chandra #xray#astronomy #space #nebula #science #supernova; -
As icy cold Canadian air settled over the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. bringing snow and bitter cold, NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured this infrared view of what looks like a frozen blanket over the region. NOAA's GOES-East satellite provides visible and infrared images over the eastern U.S. and the Atlantic Ocean from its fixed orbit in space. In an infrared image taken on Nov. 18 at 12:30 UTC (7:30 a.m. EST), the cold air over the eastern and central U.S. appears to look like a blanket of white, but it's not all snow. Infrared data shows temperature, so although the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. appears to appear is if snow covers the ground, the blanket is in fact cold clouds. However, snow does lie under that blanket in the Upper Midwest, Ohio Valley, and Canada, where it will continue in those areas through Thursday, Nov. 20. To create the image, NASA/NOAA's GOES Project takes the cloud data from NOAA's GOES-East satellite and overlays it on a true-color image of land and ocean created by data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites. Together, those data created the entire picture of the storm and show its movement. After the storm system passes, the snow on the ground becomes visible. GOES satellites provide the kind of continuous monitoring necessary for intensive data analysis. Geostationary describes an orbit in which a satellite is always in the same position with respect to the rotating Earth. This allows GOES to hover continuously over one position on Earth's surface, appearing stationary. As a result, GOES provide a constant vigil for the atmospheric "triggers" for severe weather conditions such as tornadoes, flash floods, hail storms and hurricanes. Image credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project, Dennis Chesters; -
Temperatures are dropping, the leaves are falling, and the countdown is on to the busiest time of year for air travel around the nation. Even if you won’t be taking to the sky anytime soon, it’s a good bet something you're using today– your cell phone, flat-screen TV – or the holiday gifts you're buying online arrived as part of the billions of tons of cargo shipped on airplanes every year in the U.S. The holidays reinforce how much we rely on aviation. And thanks to advancements in aeronautics developed by NASA, today’s aviation industry is better equipped than ever to safely and efficiently transport all those passengers and packages to their destinations. Streamlined aircraft bodies, quieter jet engines, techniques for preventing icing, drag-reducing winglets, lightweight composite structures, and so much more are an everyday part of flying thanks to NASA research that traces its origins back to the earliest days of aviation. It’s the same story for the U.S. air traffic control system. Computer software tools produced by NASA to help reduce congestion from gate to gate, on the airport tarmac and along the highways in the sky, are in place at Federal Aviation Administration facilities all over the country. Image credit: NASA #flyNASA #NASAaero #aviation #avchat #flying #airplanes #airtraffic #flights #airport #nasa;
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Astronauts aboard the International Space Station took this photograph of Florida in October 2014. The peninsula is highly recognizable even at night, especially when looking roughly north, as our map-trained brains expect. Illuminated areas give a strong sense of the size of cities. The brightest continuous patch of lights is the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area, the largest urban area in the southeastern U.S. and home to 5.6 million people. The next largest area is the Tampa Bay region (2.8 million people) on the Gulf Coast of the peninsula. Orlando, located in the middle, has a somewhat smaller footprint (2.3 million). A nearly straight line of cities runs nearly 560 kilometers (350 miles) along the Atlantic coast from Jacksonville, Florida, to Wilmington, North Carolina. South of Orlando, the center and southern portions of the peninsula are as dark as the Atlantic Ocean, vividly illustrating the almost population-free Everglades wetland. The lights of Cocoa Beach trace the curved lines of Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center, an area well known to astronauts. Dim lights of the Florida Keys extend the arc of the Atlantic coast to the corner of the image. The small cluster of lights far offshore is Freeport on Grand Bahama Island (image right). The faint blue areas throughout the image are clouds lit by moonlight. Image credit: NASA; -
Work on NASA's InSight Lander Starts New Phase Technicians in a Lockheed Martin clean room near Denver prepare NASA's InSight Mars lander for propulsion proof and leak testing on Oct. 31, 2014. Following the test, the lander was moved to another clean room for the start of the mission's assembly, test and launch operations (ATLO) phase. The assembly portion of ATLO will last about six months. The InSight mission (for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is scheduled to launch in March 2016 and land on Mars six months later. It will investigate processes that formed and shaped Mars and will help scientists better understand the evolution of our inner solar system's rocky planets, including Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin; -
SLS Engine Section Barrel Hot off the Vertical Weld Center at Michoud The barrel for the engine section of NASA's new rocket, the Space Launch System, is taken off the Vertical Weld Center at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. The barrel is flight hardware to be used on the first uncrewed test flight of the 70-metric-ton configuration of the rocket. The engine section, made up of the barrel and a ring -- also welded at Michoud -- will hold four RS-25 engines that will power the core stage of the SLS. The core stage, towering more than 200 feet tall with a diameter of 27.5 feet, will store cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen that will feed the vehicle’s RS-25 engines. The Vertical Weld Center is part of a family of state-of-the-art tools at Michoud that is being used to build the core stage. Along with the engine section, it will weld barrel panels together to produce whole barrels for the SLS two pressurized tanks, the intertank and the forward skirt. It stands about three stories tall and weighs 150 tons. Image credit: NASA/Michoud; -
Efforts to conserve parks and protected areas around the world are being aided by Earth observations from space-based sensors operated by NASA and other organizations. “Sanctuary,” a new book released this week at the World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia, highlights how the view from space is being used today to protect some of the world’s most interesting, changing, and threatened places. In the book’s foreword, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden writes, ““As a former astronaut who has looked upon our beautiful planet from space, I hope that we can advance the use of space-based remote sensing and other geospatial tools to study, understand, and improve the management of the world’s parks and protected areas as well as the precious biodiversity that thrives within their borders.” NASA’s basic research and applied conservation programs have advanced our understanding of global change impacts within and around protected areas. Ongoing projects include assessing coral reef health, investigating the vulnerability of U.S. National Parks to climate change, and establishing marine biodiversity observation networks. Seen here is development and agricultural clearing (pink areas) shown encroaching the Sundarbans mangroves along the Bay of Bengal in this Landsat 8 image taken in March 2014. Credit: NASA/USGS; -
Hubble Reveals a Super-Rich Galactic Neighborhood This new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the super-rich galaxy cluster Abell 1413. Located between the constellations of Leo (The Lion) and Coma Berenices, the cluster is over 2 billion light-years from Earth. This image is dominated by a large and highly elliptical galaxy called MCG+04-28-097, with a halo of stars extending for more than 6.5 million light-years. The galaxies at the center of Abell 1413 are found to be very highly elliptical whereas those at the periphery are more spherical. Abell 1413 is part of the Abell catalog, a collection of over 4,000 rich clusters of galaxies fairly close to Earth — at least from a cosmological perspective — their light took less than 3 billion years to reach us. The clusters are called rich due to the huge number of galaxies they play host to. Abell 1413 is observed to contain more than 300 galaxies held together by the immense gravity of the cluster. The strong interactions between these galaxies cause the material in the cluster to be heated to extremely high temperatures of almost 100 million degrees. Because of this, the cluster emits very strong X-ray radiation. Visible distortions in the image can be seen in the form of arcs, caused by gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when the intense gravity of the cluster bends space-time around it, causing a range of bizarre and beautiful optical phenomena for galaxies located in the background. This image was created from optical and near-infrared exposures taken with the Wide Field Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). Credit: ESA/NASA, Acknowledgement: Nick Rose;
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Sunrise on Saturn A new day dawns on Saturn as the part of the planet seen here emerges once more into the Sun's light. With an estimated rotation period of 10 hours and 40 minutes, Saturn's days and nights are much shorter than those on Earth. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 25 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 23, 2014 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 939 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 127 degrees. Image scale is 67 miles (108 kilometers) per pixel. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute; -
IceBridge researchers continued their Antarctic work with a run of four flights in a row that targeted different science sites in western Antarctica. On Nov. 5, the IceBridge team carried out a survey of the Ferrigno and Alison ice streams and the Abbot Ice Shelf and ice along the Eights Coast. Weather forecasts showed clear conditions in West Antarctica, which typically only last for a few days. Less certain was how cloud cover would look in the Bellingshausen Sea, home of one of the mission’s highest priority flights. That uncertainty is what led mission planners to the decision they made. The Nov. 5 survey was a new design that incorporated elements of two previously flown missions. The Ferrigno and Alison ice stream portion of the flight followed coast-parallel lines last surveyed in 2012. After completing those back and forth lines, the team headed on to the Abbott Ice Shelf, measuring a region last surveyed during IceBridge’s first campaign in 2009. NASA’s Operation IceBridge images Earth's polar ice in unprecedented detail to better understand processes that connect the polar regions with the global climate system. IceBridge utilizes a highly specialized fleet of research aircraft and the most sophisticated suite of innovative science instruments ever assembled to characterize annual changes in thickness of sea ice, glaciers, and ice sheets. In addition, IceBridge collects critical data used to predict the response of earth’s polar ice to climate change and resulting sea-level rise. IceBridge also helps bridge the gap in polar observations between NASA's ICESat satellite missions. Seen here is a view of Mount Murphy in Antarctica's Marie Byrd Land seen on the Nov. 7, 2014, IceBridge survey flight. Credit: NASA / Michael Studinger; -
Efforts to conserve parks and protected areas around the world are being aided by Earth observations from space-based sensors operated by NASA and other organizations. “Sanctuary,” a new book released this week at the World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia, highlights how the view from space is being used today to protect some of the world’s most interesting, changing, and threatened places. In the book’s foreword, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden writes, ““As a former astronaut who has looked upon our beautiful planet from space, I hope that we can advance the use of space-based remote sensing and other geospatial tools to study, understand, and improve the management of the world’s parks and protected areas as well as the precious biodiversity that thrives within their borders.” NASA’s basic research and applied conservation programs have advanced our understanding of global change impacts within and around protected areas. Ongoing projects include assessing coral reef health, investigating the vulnerability of U.S. National Parks to climate change, and establishing marine biodiversity observation networks. Pictured here is a July 2014 Landsat 8 image of the isolated island of protected forest around New Zealand’s Mt. Taranaki in Egmont National Park surrounded by once-forested pasturelands. Credit: NASA/USGS; -
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.;
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