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Sunset at the Pad - An Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket is seen on launch Pad-0A at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Monday, Jan. 6, 2014, in advance of a planned Wednesday, Jan. 8th, 1:32 p.m. EST launch, Wallops Island, Va. The Antares will launch a Cygnus spacecraft on a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. The Orbital-1 mission is Orbital Sciences' first contracted cargo delivery flight to the space station for NASA. Among the cargo aboard Cygnus set to launch to the space station are science experiments, crew provisions, spare parts and other hardware. Photo Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls #antares #rocket #rocketlaunch #nasa #iss #orb1 #launch #wallops #orbitalsciences #cygnus #spacestation; -
Polar Vortex Enters Northern U.S. - The polar vortex is a whirling and persistent large area of low pressure, found typically over both North and South poles. The northern polar vortex was pushing southward over western Wisconsin and eastern Minnesota on Monday, Jan. 6, 2014, and was bringing frigid temperatures to half of the continental United States. It is expected to move northward back over Canada toward the end of the week. This image was captured by NOAA's GOES-East satellite on Jan. 6, 2014, at 11:01 a.m. EST (1601 UTC). A frontal system that brought rain to the coast is draped from north to south along the U.S. East Coast. Behind the front lies the clearer skies bitter cold air associated with the polar vortex. The image also revealed snow on the ground in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and Missouri, stretching into the Great Plains. Clouds over Texas are associated with a low pressure system centered over western Oklahoma that is part of the cold front connected to the movement of the polar vortex. The GOES image was created at NASA's GOES Project, located at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Both the northern and southern polar vortexes are located in the middle and upper troposphere (lowest level of the atmosphere) and the stratosphere (next level up in the atmosphere). The polar vortex is a winter phenomenon. It develops and strengthens in its respective hemispheres’ winters as the sun sets over the polar region and temperatures cool. They weaken in the summer. In the Northern Hemisphere, they circulate in a counterclockwise direction, so the vortex sitting over western Wisconsin is sweeping in cold Arctic air around it. Image credit: NASA's GOES Project #winter #storm #winterstorm #snow #snowstorm #weather #us #unitedstates #wx #nasa #space #goes #satellite; -
NASA's Fermi Makes First Gamma-ray Study of a Gravitational Lens - An international team of astronomers, using NASA's Fermi observatory, has made the first-ever gamma-ray measurements of a gravitational lens, a kind of natural telescope formed when a rare cosmic alignment allows the gravity of a massive object to bend and amplify light from a more distant source. This accomplishment opens new avenues for research, including a novel way to probe emission regions near supermassive black holes. It may even be possible to find other gravitational lenses with data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Fermi detected a series of bright gamma-ray flares from a source known as B0218+357, located 4.35 billion light-years from Earth in the direction of a constellation called Triangulum. These powerful flares, in a known gravitational lens system, provided the key to making the lens measurement. Astronomers classify B0218+357 as a blazar -- a type of active galaxy noted for its intense emissions and unpredictable behavior. At the blazar's heart is a supersized black hole with a mass millions to billions of times that of the sun. As matter spirals toward the black hole, some of it blasts outward as jets of particles traveling near the speed of light in opposite directions. This Hubble image of gravitational lens B0218+357 reveals two bright sources separated by about a third of an arcsecond, each an image of the background blazar. Spiral arms belonging to the lensing galaxy also can be seen. B0218+357 boasts the smallest separation of lensed images currently known. Image Credit: NASA/ESA and the Hubble Legacy Archive #nasa #space #astronomy #fermi #blazar #hubble #hst #aas223 #gammaray #telescope #blackhole #science; -
An Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket is seen as it is rolled out to launch Pad-0A at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Sunday, January 5, 2014 in advance of a planned Wednesday, Jan. 8th, 1:32 p.m. EST launch, Wallops Island, VA. The Antares will launch a Cygnus spacecraft on a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. The Orbital-1 mission is Orbital Sciences' first contracted cargo delivery flight to the space station for NASA. Among the cargo aboard Cygnus set to launch to the space station are science experiments, crew provisions, spare parts and other hardware. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls) #antares #rocket #rocketlaunch #nasa #iss #orb1 #launch #wallops #orbitalsciences; -
Alternative Fuel Studies Take Flight: Following a series of ground tests completed in 2010 and 2012, NASA began a series of flight tests in 2013 to study emissions from new blends of aviation gas that includes biofuel from renewable sources. NASA researchers are investigating the effect that a 50-50 blend of alternate biofuel has on jet engine performance, emissions and aircraft-generated contrails at altitude. The research involved flying NASA's DC-8 as high as 40,000 feet while an instrumented NASA Falcon HU-25 aircraft trailed behind at distances ranging from 300 feet to more than 10 miles. Preliminary results indicate that the bio fuel blends tested may substantially reduce the emission of black carbon, sulfates and organics. Future research will further study the impact that using bio fuel blends has on the formation of aircraft contrails. A second phase of ACCESS flights is planned for 2014. Seen here is the puffy white exhaust contrails stream from the engines of NASA's DC-8 flying laboratory during tests of alternative jet engine fuel emissions. Image Credit: NASA / Eddie Winstead #flynasa #nasaaero #aeronautics #airplane #aircraft #ecofuel #biofuel #altfuel #greenenergy #research #nasa;
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Japanese Astronaut Koichi Wakata shared this image from the International Space Station on Twitter this Saturday morning saying "the sun does not set on low earth orbit for another few days as the ISS is tracking parallel to the terminator." The expansive International Space Station is a working laboratory orbiting 260 miles above the Earth, traveling at 17,500 mph, and is home to an international crew. It is the most complex scientific and technological endeavor ever undertaken. As a research outpost, the station is a test bed for future technologies and a research laboratory for new, advanced industrial materials, communications technology, medical research and much more. Image credit: NASA/JAXA/Koichi Wakata #spacestation #iss #exp38 #station #space #nasa #jaxa #astronaut #astropics #astropix #orbit #orbitingearth #lowearthorbit #leo; -
Mars Exploration Rover Spirit's Selfie: The twin Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity were launched toward Mars in June and July of 2003. They arrived months later in spectacular fashion, bouncing down safely on the surface after a harrowing six-minute descent through the thin atmosphere. Spirit arrived on January 3, 2004, 10 years ago. Spirit operated for more than six years after landing for what was planned as a three-month mission. This bird's-eye view combines a self-portrait of the spacecraft deck and a panoramic mosaic of the Martian surface as viewed by Spirit. The rover's solar panels are still gleaming in the sunlight, having acquired only a thin veneer of dust two years after the rover landed and commenced exploring the red planet. Spirit captured this 360-degree panorama on the summit of "Husband Hill" inside Mars' Gusev Crater. During the period from Spirit's Martian days, or sols, 583 to 586 (Aug. 24 to 27, 2005), the rover's panoramic camera acquired the hundreds of individual frames for this largest panorama ever photographed by Spirit. This image is an approximately true-color rendering using the camera's 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 480-nanometer filters for the Martian surface, and the 600-nanometer, 530-nanometer, and 480-nanometer filters for the rover deck. This polar projection is a compromise between a cylindrical projection, which provides the best view of the terrain, and a vertical projection, which provides the best view of the deck but distorts the terrain far from the rover. The view is presented with geometric seam correction. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell #rover #marsrover #spirit #marsrovers #mars #planets #redplanet #nasa #space #solarsystem; -
On January 2, 2014, NASA’s Aqua satellite passed over the United States mutiple times showing winter weather, allowing the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on board to capture this true-color image of a massive winter storm moving up the eastern seaboard. According to the National Weather Service the winter storm that impacted the Midwest and Northeast over the past couple of days is moving into the Atlantic Friday. Very cold temperatures and dangerous wind chills are moving in behind the system. The next storm is forming, and will bring blizzard conditions to the northern Plains Friday Night into Saturday. Extreme wind chills to -55 F are possible in the northern Plains this weekend. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Aqua/MODIS #winter #storm #winterstorm #snow #snowstorm #weather #us #unitedstates #wx; -
Early Wednesday morning (Jan. 1, 2014), while New Year's 2014 celebrations were still underway in the United States, the Catalina Sky Survey near Tucson, Ariz., collected a single track of observations with an immediate follow-up on what was possibly a very small asteroid -- 7 to 10 feet (2 to 3 meters) in size -- on a potential impact trajectory with Earth. Designated 2014 AA, which would make it the first asteroid discovery of 2014, the track of observations on the object allowed only an uncertain orbit to be calculated. However, if this was a very small asteroid on an Earth-impacting trajectory, it most likely entered Earth's atmosphere sometime between 11 a.m. PST (2 p.m. EST) Wednesday and 6 a.m. PST (9 a.m. EST) Thursday. Using the only available observations, three independent projections of the possible orbit by the independent orbit analyst Bill Gray, of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., and Steve Chesley, of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., are in agreement that 2014 AA would hit Earth's atmosphere. According to Chesley, the potential impact locations are widely distributed because of the orbit uncertainty, falling along an arc extending from Central America to East Africa. The most likely impact location of the object was just off the coast of West Africa at about 6 p.m. PST (9 p.m. EST) Jan. 1. It is unlikely asteroid 2014 AA would have survived atmospheric entry intact, as it was comparable in size to asteroid 2008 TC3, which was about 7 to 10 feet (2 to 3 meters) in size. 2008 TC3 completely broke up over northern Sudan in October 2008. Asteroid 2008 TC3 is the only other example of an object discovered just prior to hitting Earth. So far, there have been a few weak signals collected from infrasound stations in that region of the world that are being analyzed to see if they could be correlated to the atmospheric entry of 2014 AA. Image Credit: CSS/LPL/UA #asteroid #neo #nasa #space #2014; -
Fourteen mountain peaks on Earth stand taller than 8,000 meters (26,247 feet). Pictured here is the tallest of these “eight-thousanders” -- Mount Everest, the standard to which all other mountains are compared. The Nepalese name for the mountain is Sagarmatha: “mother of the universe.” When climbers reach the top of Mount Everest, they are perched on softer sedimentary rock formed by the skeletons of creatures that lived in a warm ocean off the northern coast of India tens of millions of years ago. Meanwhile, glaciers have chiseled Mount Everest’s summit into a huge, triangular pyramid, defined by three faces and three ridges that extend to the northeast, southeast, and northwest. The southeastern ridge is the most widely used climbing route. It is the one that Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay followed in May 1953 when they became the first climbers to reach the summit and return safely. Despite its reputation as an extremely dangerous mountain, commercial guiding has done much to tame Everest in the last few decades. As of March 2012, there had been 5,656 successful ascents of Everest, while 223 people had died—a fatality rate of 4 percent. Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data from the NASA EO-1 team, archived on the USGS Earth Explorer. Caption: Adam Voiland #everest #mteverest #mountain #earth #nasa #eo1 #earthobs #earthobservations #satellitepics #space #remotesensing;
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The sun ushered out 2013 and welcomed 2014 with two mid-level flares on Dec. 31, 2013 and Jan. 1, 2014. 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 disrupts the radio signals for as long as the flare is ongoing, anywhere from minutes to hours. Pictured here are several wavelengths of light combined in this New Year's Day solar flare image, categorized as an M9.9 and peaking at 1:52 p.m. EST on Jan. 1, 2014. Each wavelength represents material at a different temperatures, helping scientists understand how it is moved and heated through these events. The first flare was categorized as an M6.4 and it peaked at 4:58 p.m EST on Dec. 31. The second was categorized as an M9.9 and peaked at 1:52 p.m. EST on Jan. 1. Both flares emerged from the same active region on the sun, AR1936. Imagery of the flares was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which keeps a constant watch on the sun, collecting new data every 12 seconds. Image Credit: NASA/SDO #sdo #sun #solarflare #spaceweather #nasa #solar #flare #star #solarsystem; -
Happy New Year! This image shows the Earth today, January 1, 2014, a few hours into the new year, as seen by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) satellite. 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 the 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 #nasa #earth #space #goes #irl #today #happynewyear #planets #solarsystem #newyear #2014 #nye #home; -
Quiet Corona and Upper Transition Region of the Sun: This image, taken on Dec. 31, 2013 by the AIA instrument on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) at 171 Angstrom, shows the current conditions of the quiet corona and upper transition region of the Sun on the last day of 2013. SDO was launched in 2010, and is currently studying solar activity and how it causes space weather. Space weather affects our lives on Earth, and even satellites and astronauts out in space! SDO is helping us understand where the sun's energy comes from, what happens inside of the sun, and how energy is stored and released in the sun's atmosphere. By better understanding the sun and how it works, we will be able to better predict space weather events. Credit: NASA/Solar Dynamics Observatory #sun #solarsystem #sdo #star #plasma#nasa #space #sunshine; -
New York City at Night! An astronaut aboard the International Space Station exposed this 400 millimeter night image of the greater New York City metropolitan area on March 23, 2013. For orientation purposes, note that Manhattan runs horizontal through the frame from left to the midpoint. Central Park is just a little to the left of frame center. NASA astronauts will help ring in 2014 by sending greetings from space and from Earth to the crowd gathered in New York's Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Astronaut Mike Massimino will participate in the New Year’s Eve Countdown event on Tuesday evening, Dec. 31. He also will introduce a video greeting from Expedition 36 flight engineer Karen Nyberg, who returned from the International Space Station in November, and from three of the astronauts currently on board the space station: NASA's Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins, and Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The New Year’s countdown will be shown from 6 p.m. to 12:15 a.m. EST on the Toshiba Vision screen atop One Times Square, right below the New Year countdown ball. Prominently positioned below the world-famous Times Square New Year's Eve Ball, the dual LED screens will allow revelers in Times Square to see this special greeting from space. Image Credit: NASA #nasa #space #spacestation #iss #newyear #timessquare #newyork #nycity #astronauts #earth #toshiba #newyearseve #party #celebrate #jaxa #nye; -
The vortex at Saturn's north pole -- seen here in the infrared -- takes on the menacing look of something from the imagination of Edgar Allen Poe. But really, of course, it's just another example of the amazing, mesmerizing meteorology on Saturn. The eye of the immense cyclone is about 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) wide, 20 times larger than most on Earth. For another view of the vortex, see Vortex in Psychedelic Color. This view is centered on clouds at 89 degrees north latitude, 109 degrees west longitude. North is up and rotated 33 degrees to the left. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 14, 2013 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 750 nanometers. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 476,000 miles (766,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 45 degrees. Image scale is 3 miles (5 kilometers) per pixel. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute #saturn #cassini #space #nasa #solarsystem #planets #planet #nofilter;
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