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Scientists used Earth-based radar to produce these sharp views of the asteroid designated “2014 HQ124" on June 8, 2014. 2014 HQ124 is what scientists call a "contact binary": an asteroid that consists of two lobes that are in contact and that could have once been separate objects. About one in six asteroids in the near-Earth population has this type of elongated, "peanut" shape. The asteroid is about 1,300 feet (400 meters) long and about half as wide. The radar images reveal a wealth of interesting features, including a large depression or concavity on the larger lobe as well as two blocky, sharp-edged features at the bottom on the radar echo. Scientists suspect that some of the bright features that persist from frame to frame could be surface boulders. The 21 radar images were taken over a span of four hours. During that interval, the asteroid rotated a few degrees per frame, suggesting its rotation period is slightly less than 24 hours. At its closest approach to Earth on June 8, the asteroid came within 776,000 miles (1.25 million kilometers), or slightly more than three times the distance to the moon. Scientists began radar observations of 2014 HQ124 shortly after the closest approach, when the asteroid was between about 864,000 miles (1.39 million kilometers) and 902,000 miles (1.45 million kilometers) from Earth. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Arecibo Observatory/USRA/NSF #dsn #nasa #space #asteroid #asteroidwatch #radar #neo #nearearthobject; -
Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo seen from International Space Station: Astronaut Reid Wiseman on the space station captures an image of Rio de Janiero and Sao Paulo as the station orbits the Earth. Sao Paulo is the farthest cluster of lights on the right side and Rio de Janeiro is closer to the middle of the picture. There are three World Cup 2014 stadium cities in one picture: Arena de Sao Paulo, Estadio Mineirao (Belo Horizonte), and Estadio Do Maracana (Rio de Janeiro). As fans around the world tune in to World Cup 2014, a few fans out of this world will be watching, too. United States astronauts Reid Wiseman and Steve Swanson and German astronaut Alexander Gerst will be cheering on their teams from some 230 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station. Image credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman #ISS #exp40 #worldcup #worldcup2014 #brazil #space #nasa #earth; -
An adult osprey returns home to its nest built on a platform in a parking lot at our Kennedy Space Center, carrying a fish in its talons. In the background is the 12,300-square-foot NASA logo painted on the side of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB). The VAB is adjacent to the Turn Basin in Launch Complex 39, making it an ideal osprey nesting place. The Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge overlaps with Kennedy Space Center property and provides a habitat for many types of wildlife, including the osprey, and 330 species of birds. Photo credit: NASA/Daniel Casper #nasa #usfws #osprey #wildlife #nature #earth #motherearth #nasakennedy #kennedyspacecenter; -
As fans around the world tune in to World Cup 2014, a few fans out of this world will be watching, too. United States astronauts Reid Wiseman and Steve Swanson and German astronaut Alexander Gerst will be cheering on their teams from some 230 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station. The crew sent down a special message to wish good luck to all the players and teams as they compete in World Cup 2014 in Brazil from June 12 until the final match July 13. The astronauts have trained for years to work together as a unified crew, but the U.S. astronauts and their German crewmate are feeling a little friendly competition: their home countries will play against each other for a chance to advance out of Group G of the World Cup matches. USA and Germany face off on June 26 at Arena Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil. Reid Wiseman, of NASA, and Alexander Gerst, of the European Space Agency, arrived at the space station on May 28 as part of the Expedition 40/41 crew and are scheduled to spend the next several months living and working in space until they return to Earth in November 2014. Steven Swanson arrived as part of the Expedition 39/40 crew on March 25 and is expected to return home in September 2014. Video credit: NASA #worldcup #iss #nasa #space #dlr #exp40; -
This isn't a science fiction movie — it's the view in the International Space Station, photographed by an Expedition 40 crew member, showing how it looks inside the space station while the crew is asleep. The dots near the hatch point to a Soyuz spacecraft docked to the station in case the crew was to encounter an emergency. This view is looking into the Destiny Laboratory from Node 1 (Unity) with Node 2 (Harmony) in the background. Destiny is the primary research laboratory for U.S. payloads, supporting a wide range of experiments and studies. Image Credit: NASA #nasa #iss #exp40 #space #sleeping #spacestation;
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NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has imaged the planet Mercury passing in front of the sun, visible as a faint darkening that moves across the face of the sun. This is the first transit of the sun by a planet observed from any planet other than Earth, and also the first imaging of Mercury from Mars. Mercury fills only about one-sixth of one pixel as seen from such great distance, so the darkening does not have a distinct shape, but its position follows Mercury's expected path based on orbital calculations. The observations were made on June 3, 2014, from Curiosity's position inside Gale Crater on Mars. In addition to showing the Mercury transit, the same Mastcam frames show two sunspots approximately the size of Earth. The sunspots move only at the pace of the sun's rotation, much slower than the movement of Mercury. Many viewers on Earth observed a Venus transit in June 2012, the last visible from Earth this century. The next Mercury transit visible from Earth will be May 9, 2016. Mercury and Venus transits are visible more often from Mars than from Earth, and Mars also offers a vantage point for seeing Earth transits. The next of each type visible from Mars will be Mercury in April 2015, Venus in August 2030 and Earth in November 2084. This animated blink comparison shows five versions of observations that NASA's Curiosity made about one hour apart while Mercury was passing in front of the sun on June 3, 2014. Two sunspots, each about the diameter of Earth, also appear, moving much less than Mercury during the hour. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Texas A&M #nasa #mars #curiosity #marscuriosity #solarsystem #space #mercury #sun #solar; -
Orion Comes Together The Orion crew module for Exploration Flight Test-1 is shown in the Final Assembly and System Testing (FAST) Cell, positioned over the service module just prior to mating the two sections together. The FAST cell is where the integrated crew and service modules are put through their final system tests prior to rolling out of the Operations and Checkout Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Technicians are in position to assist with the final alignment steps once the crew module is nearly in contact with the service module. In December, Orion will launch 3,600 miles into space in a four-hour flight to test the systems that will be critical for survival in future human missions to deep space. Image Credit: NASA #nasa #space #orion #nasaorion #spacecapsule #capsule #spacecraft; -
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;
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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; -
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;
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