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NASA's SDO Sees a Summer Solar Flare The sun emitted a significant solar flare, peaking at 7:42 a.m. EDT on June 10, 2014. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory – which typically observes the entire sun 24 hours a day -- captured images of the flare. It is seen bursting off the left limb of the sun in this image captured by SDO and is shown in a blend of two wavelengths of light: 171 and 131 angstroms, colorized in gold and red, respectively. 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 X2.2 flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, etc. Image Credit: NASA/SDO/Goddard/Wiessinger #nasa #sun #solarflare #sdo #solar #flare; -
Prometheus is caught in the act of creating gores and streamers in the F ring. Scientists believe that Prometheus and its partner-moon Pandora are responsible for much of the structure in the F ring. The orbit of Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers across) regularly brings it into the F ring. When this happens, it creates gores, or channels, in the ring where it entered. Prometheus then draws ring material with it as it exits the ring, leaving streamers in its wake. This process creates the pattern of structures seen in this image. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 8.6 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Feb. 11, 2014. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.3 million miles (2.1 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 147 degrees. Image scale is 8 miles (13 kilometers) per pixel. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute #nasa #space #solarsystem #saturn #cassini; -
As seen on #Cosmos: NASA's Voyager 1 & 2 The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft are exploring where nothing from Earth has flown before. Continuing on their more-than-35-year journey since their 1977 launches, they each are much farther away from Earth and the sun than Pluto. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between stars, filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago. Scientists hope to learn more about this region when Voyager 2, in the “heliosheath" -- the outermost later of the heliosphere where the solar wind is slowed by the pressure of interstellar medium -- also reaches interstellar space. Both spacecraft are still sending scientific information about their surroundings through the Deep Space Network. The primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. After making a string of discoveries there -- such as active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io and intricacies of Saturn's rings -- the mission was extended. Voyager 2 went on to explore Uranus and Neptune, and is still the only spacecraft to have visited those outer planets. The adventurers' current mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), will explore the outermost edge of the Sun's domain. And beyond. This artist's concept shows the general locations of NASA's two Voyager spacecraft. Voyager 1 (top) has sailed beyond our solar bubble into interstellar space, the space between stars. Its environment still feels the solar influence. Voyager 2 (bottom) is still exploring the outer layer of the solar bubble. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech #nasa #space #voyager @nasajpl; -
As seen on #Cosmos: The Pale Blue Dot "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there -- on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." -Carl Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot," 1994 This image of Earth, captured by NASA's Voyager 1 at a distance of more than 4 billion miles, inspired Carl's famous quote. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech #nasa #space #voyager @nasajpl #earth; -
As seen on #Cosmos: Dark Matter & Dark Energy Everyday matter that we see around us, for example in tables and chairs, people and even stars, makes up only a few percent of everything in our cosmos. If you could fill a bucket with the mass and energy contents of our universe, this everyday matter would fill only a small fraction. A larger amount, about 24 percent, would consist of dark matter, an invisible substance that does not reflect or emit any light, but exerts a gravitational tug on other matter. The majority of our universal bucket, about 73 percent, is thought to be filled with dark energy, something even more mysterious than dark matter. Whereas dark matter pulls through its gravity, dark energy is thought to be a repulsive force pushing matter apart. Scientists think dark energy may be responsible for stretching our universe apart at ever-increasing speeds, an observation that earned the Nobel Prize in 2011. This image shows the distribution of dark matter, galaxies, and hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CFHT, CXO, M.J. Jee (University of California, Davis), and A. Mahdavi (San Francisco State University) #space #nasa #hubble #universe #darkenergy;
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As seen on #Cosmos: The Gravitational Lens Imagine a bright object such as a star, a galaxy, or a quasar, that is very far away from Earth (say...10 billion light years). For our discussion, let us imagine we have a quasar. If there is nothing between it and us, we see one image of the quasar. Yet, if a massive galaxy (or cluster of galaxies) is blocking the direct view to the quasar, the light will be bent by the gravitational field around the galaxy. This is called "gravitational lensing," since the gravity of the intervening galaxy acts like a lens to redirect the light rays. But rather than creating a single image of the quasar, the gravitational lens creates multiple images. We follow the light rays from the Earth to the apparent locations of the quasar. If the galaxy were perfectly symmetric with respect to the line between the quasar and the Earth, then we would see a ring of quasars! The Hubble Space Telescope has peered nearly 5 billion light-years away to resolve intricate details in the galaxy cluster Abell 370, seen here. Abell 370 is one of the very first galaxy clusters where astronomers observed the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, where the warping of space by the cluster's gravitational field distorts the light from galaxies lying far behind it. This is manifested as arcs and streaks in the picture, which are the stretched images of background galaxies. Image credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble SM4 ERO Team, and ST-ECF #space #nasa #universe #hubble; -
Astronaut Reid Wiseman, aboard the International Space Station, shared this image on Friday, June 6 wishing everyone a great weekend. He shared that this image shows "Trinidad and Tobago in the evening sun." The crew of the ISS is preparing to take out the trash when a resupply craft undocks Monday morning. The crew is also counting down to a Russian spacewalk on June 19. In the meantime, science, maintenance and exercise are filling the rest of the crew’s time. The ISS Progress 53 (53P) cargo craft has been filled with trash and discarded gear. Flight Engineers Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev closed the hatches Friday morning and monitored for leak checks in the afternoon. It will undock from the aft end of the Zvezda service module Monday at 9:30 a.m. EDT and reenter the Earth’s atmosphere a few hours later for a fiery destruction over the Pacific Ocean. Image credit: NASA #nasa #space #exp40 #iss #spacestation #astro_reid #earth; -
Grand Swirls: This new Hubble image shows NGC 1566, a beautiful galaxy located approximately 40 million light-years away in the constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish). NGC 1566 is an intermediate spiral galaxy, meaning that while it does not have a well-defined bar-shaped region of stars at its center — like barred spirals — it is not quite an unbarred spiral either. The centers of such galaxies are very active and luminous, emitting strong bursts of radiation and potentially harboring supermassive black holes that are many millions of times the mass of the sun. Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA #nasa #hst #galaxy #hubble #astronomy #space #esa #science; -
Giant Landform on Mars: Sandy landforms formed by the wind, or aeolian bedforms, are classified by the wavelength--or length--between crests. On Mars, we can observe four classes of bedforms (in order of increasing wavelengths): ripples, transverse aeolian ridges (known as TARs), dunes, and what are called “draa.” All of these are visible in this Juventae Chasma image. Here, this giant draa possesses steep faces or slip faces several hundreds of meters tall and has lower-order superposed bedforms, such as ripples and dunes. A bedform this size likely formed over thousands of Mars years, probably longer. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona #hirise #nasa #mars #marscuriosity #msl #planets #science; -
With the #BelmontStakes this Saturday and the #NBAFinals heating up, let's Throwback Thursday to one of the tallest and one of the shortest professional athletes finding a middle ground on the topic of space technology. They mention scratch-resistant lenses, a popular NASA spinoff. It's a technology, originally developed to meet NASA mission needs, that has been transferred to the public and now provides benefits for the nation and world as a commercial product or service. Video credit: NASA #tbt #321TechOff #BelmontStakes #NBAFinals #throwbackthursday #vintage #history #nasahistory @kaj33;
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NASA Technology: As we prepare for the Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) experimental flight test in Hawaii, now set to launch no earlier than June 7, the agency continues work on other entry, descent and landing technologies. As seen in this image, technicians prepare the Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD) for structural loads testing beginning in mid-2013 at our Armstrong's Flight Loads Laboratory. The donut-shaped, inflatable test article is designed to more effectively slow down a spacecraft upon atmospheric re-entry to Earth or other planets. Image credit: NASA #321techoff #nasaarmstrong #nasatech #nasa #technology #ldsd #hiad; -
High Vortex: Titan's polar vortex stands illuminated where all else is in shadow. Scientists deduce that the vortex must extend higher into Titan's atmosphere than the surrounding clouds because it is still lit in images like this. Although the south polar region is now in winter, the Sun can still reach high features like the vortex. Titan (3,200 miles, or 5,150 kilometers across) is Saturn's largest moon. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Titan. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Feb. 3 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 742 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 134,000 miles (215,000 kilometers) from Titan. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute #cassini #nasa #space #moon #saturn #titan #science; -
New Suspect Identified in Supernova Explosion: Supernovas are often thought of as tremendous explosions that mark the ends of massive stars' lives, but not all supernovas occur in this fashion. A common supernova class, Type Ia, involves the detonation of white dwarfs -- small, dense stars that are already dead. New results from our Spitzer Space Telescope have revealed a rare example of Type Ia explosion, in which a dead star "fed" off an aging star like a cosmic zombie, triggering a blast. The results help researchers piece together how these powerful and diverse events occur. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Goddard #nasa #spitzer #supernova #astronomy #stars #telescope #science; -
The most colorful view of universe captured: Astronomers using our Hubble Space Telescope have assembled a comprehensive picture of the evolving universe – among the most colorful deep space images ever captured by the 24-year-old telescope. This image -- made from 841 orbits of telescope viewing time -- contains approximately 10,000 galaxies, extending back in time to within a few hundred million years of the big bang. This is a composite image showing the visible and near infrared light spectrum collected from Hubble's ACS and WFC3 instruments over a nine-year period. Image Credit: NASA/ESA #nasa #hst #hubble #space #astronomy #galaxy #universe #stars #telescope #science; -
We captured an image of a galaxy sparkling in X-rays: Nearly a million seconds of observing time with our Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way glittering with hundreds of X-ray points of light. The galaxy is officially named Messier 51 (M51) or NGC 5194, but often goes by its nickname of the “Whirlpool Galaxy.” Like the Milky Way, the Whirlpool is a spiral galaxy with spectacular arms of stars and dust. M51 is located 30 million light years from Earth, and its face-on orientation to Earth gives us a perspective that we can never get of our own spiral galactic home. Much of the diffuse, or fuzzy, X-ray emission in M51 comes from gas that has been superheated by supernova explosions of massive stars. Image Credit: NASA #nasa #chandra #galaxy #xray #milkyway #space #astronomy #science;
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