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Solar Dynamics Observatory Welcomes the New Year There were no fireworks on the sun to welcome in the New Year and only a few C-class flares during the last day of 2014. Instead, the sun starts 2015 with an enormous coronal hole near the south pole. This image, captured on Jan. 1, 2015 by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, shows the coronal hole as a dark region in the south. Coronal holes are regions of the corona where the magnetic field reaches out into space rather than looping back down onto the surface. Particles moving along those magnetic fields can leave the sun rather than being trapped near the surface. Those trapped particles can heat up and glow, giving us the lovely AIA images. In the parts of the corona where the particles leave the sun, the glow is much dimmer and the coronal hole looks dark. Coronal holes were first seen in images taken by astronauts on board NASA’s Skylab space station in 1973 and 1974. They can be seen for a long time, although the exact shape changes all the time. The polar coronal hole can remain visible for five years or longer. Each time a coronal hole rotates by the Earth we can measure the particles flowing out of the hole as a high-speed stream, another source of space weather. Charged particles in the Earth’s radiation belts are accelerated when the high-speed stream runs into the Earth’s magnetosphere. The acceleration of particles in the magnetosphere is studied by NASA’s Van Allen Probes mission. As Solar Cycle 24 fades, the number of flares each day will get smaller, but the coronal holes provide another source of space weather that needs to be understood and predicted. Image Credit: NASA/SDO Caption: Dean Pesnell; -
Polar Scars In addition to being evidence of past impacts, craters can serve another valuable scientific purpose. By counting the number of craters in an area, scientists can estimate the age of the terrain. Older surfaces, such as on Mimas (246 miles, or 396 kilometers across), will have more craters per unit area than younger surfaces. The view was acquired by the Cassini spacecraft at a distance of approximately 30,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) from Mimas. Image scale is 981 feet (299 meters) per pixel. This view looks toward the trailing hemisphere of Mimas. North on Mimas is up and rotated 4 degrees to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 5, 2012. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers) from Mimas. Image scale is 982 feet (299 meters) per pixel. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute; -
Ceres, Target of NASA's Dawn Mission Discovered on Jan. 1, 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi of Italy, Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt - the strip of solar system real estate between Mars and Jupiter. On March 6, 2015, NASA's Dawn spacecraft will arrive at Ceres, marking the first time that a spacecraft has ever orbited two solar system targets. Dawn previously explored the protoplanet Vesta for 14 months, from 2011 to 2012, capturing detailed images and data about that body. Dawn has entered its approach phase toward Ceres, and the next couple of months promise continually improving views prior to arrival. By the end of January, the spacecraft's images and other data will be the best ever taken of the dwarf planet. This image of Ceres was taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope between December 2003 and January 2004. Hubble images of Vesta and Ceres helped astronomers plan for the Dawn spacecraft’s tour. Astronomers enhanced the sharpness in the image to bring out features on Ceres' surface, including brighter and darker regions that could be asteroid impact features. The observations were made in visible and ultraviolet light. The colors represent the differences between relatively red and blue regions. These differences may simply be due to variation on the surface among different types of material. Ceres' round shape suggests that its interior is layered like those of terrestrial planets such as Earth. Ceres may have a rocky inner core, an icy mantle, and a thin, dusty outer crust inferred from its density and rotation rate of 9 hours. Ceres is approximately 590 miles (950 kilometers) across. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/J. Parker (SWRI), P. Thomas (Cornell U.), L. McFadden (U-Md., College Park), and M. Mutchler and Z. Levay (STScI); -
Recently, astronaut Terry Virts looked out the window aboard the International Space Station and saw the moon. He shared this video on Vine of moonset behind Earth’s atmosphere saying it "appears to land on a soft pillow of clouds." For him and the rest of the station crew, this extraordinary event is a daily occurrence. The space station and its crew orbit Earth from an altitude of about 250 miles, traveling at a speed of approximately 17,500 miles per hour. Since the station orbits Earth every ninety minutes, the crew experiences sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset about sixteen times a day. Credit: NASA/Terry Virts; -
Happy New Year! NOAA's GOES-East satellite captured this stunning view of the Americas on New Years Day, Jan. 1, 2015 at 14:45 UTC/9:45 a.m. EST. The data from GOES-East was made into an image by the NASA/NOAA GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. 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 #nasa @noaa #goes #earth #earthrightnow #happynewyear;
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Astronaut Terry Virts' (@Astro_Terry) photography from the International Space Station (@iss) is featured by @Instagram. Check it out: http://instagram.com/p/xSINEpBQYl/; -
Waiting for the ball to drop this New Year's eve? Enjoy this cluster of sparkle from the Hubble Space Telescope: This image captures the stunning NGC 6535, a globular cluster 22,000 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens (The Serpent) that measures one light-year across. Globular clusters are tightly bound groups of stars which orbit galaxies. The large mass in the rich stellar centre of the globular cluster pulls the stars inward to form a ball of stars. The word globulus, from which these clusters take their name, is Latin for small sphere. Globular clusters are generally very ancient objects formed around the same time as their host galaxy. To date, no new star formation has been observed within a globular cluster, which explains the abundance of aging yellow stars in this image, most of them containing very few heavy elements. NGC 6535 was first discovered in 1852 by English astronomer John Russell Hind. The cluster would have appeared to Hind as a small, faint smudge through his telescope. Now, over 160 years later, instruments like the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) on the NASA/ European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope allow us to marvel at the cluster and its contents in greater detail. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Gilles Chapdelaine; -
"This is what space science is all about," said NASA photographer Chris Gunn, who captured a photo from outside the enormous mouth of NASA's giant thermal vacuum chamber called Chamber A at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Previously used for manned spaceflight missions, this historic chamber is now filled with engineers and technicians preparing for one of NASA's biggest missions, the James Webb Space Telescope. Once fully assembled and launched into space, this telescope will allow us to explore ever further into the cosmos, seeing things that even the mighty Hubble Space Telescope can’t. Before this telescope is launched one million miles into space to its destination, it must undergo a series of detailed tests to ensure it's ready for the harsh environment of space. This spring, a model of the telescope called "Pathfinder" will begin cryogenic optical testing inside this chamber. The James Webb Space Telescope is the scientific successor to NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. It will be the most powerful space telescope ever built. Webb is an international project led by NASA with its partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency. Seen here are engineers and technicians inside Chamber A preparing a lift system that will be used to hold JWST during testing. Image Credit: NASA/Chris Gunn; -
View of the Alps From Space Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Samantha Cristoforetti of the European Space Agency (ESA) took this photograph of the Alps from the International Space Station, and posted it to social media on Tuesday, Dec. 23, 2014. She wrote, "I'm biased, but aren't the Alps from space spectacular? What a foggy day on the Po plane, though! #Italy" Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Samantha Cristoforetti; -
Earth From Space: 15 Years of Amazing Things The view of Earth from orbit is never the same – from minute to minute, day to day, year to year. In December of 1999 NASA launched a satellite that opened up a new era in our ability to see, measure and understand Earth. The satellite called Terra rocketed to space on Dec. 18, 1999. (And while it was designed for a five-year mission life – Terra is still up there, collecting invaluable data on Earth’s land, atmosphere and oceans.) In 2002 and 2004, satellites named Aqua and Aura followed. These are often called the three flagship satellites of NASA’s Earth Observing System -- which began in earnest with Terra and now comprises a fleet of 18 Earth-observing satellites that have revolutionized our ability to observe our home planet from space. NASA and other space agencies had launched satellites to study Earth before. But the past 15 years have produced a more comprehensive look at Earth from space than any other period in history. At a time when our planet is undergoing critically important changes, this global view offers not only stunning imagery but also vitally important information about how Earth is changing. In 2002, NASA scientists and visualizers stitched together strips of brand new data, in natural color, collected over four months from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS, instrument aboard Terra. Seen here is the western hemisphere of that Blue Marble image. Image Credit: NASA's Earth Observatory;
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Astronaut Terry Virts on the International Space Station shared this image on Twitter saying you can see a view of the Earth looking "across the Sahara to the Med." Astronauts have used hand-held cameras to photograph the Earth for more than 50 years. Beginning with the Mercury missions in the early 1960s, astronauts have taken more than 700,000 photographs of the Earth. Today, the International Space Station continues the NASA tradition of Earth observation from human-tended spacecraft. Image credit: NASA #iss @iss; -
Astronaut Terry Virts on the International Space Station shared this beautiful sunrise image on Twitter saying "Sunrise on Christmas morning - better than any present I could ask for!!!!" The space station orbits the Earth about every 90 minutes. It circles around the Earth 16 times per day, so astronauts can see 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets each day. During the daylight periods, temperatures reach 200 ºC, while temperatures during the night periods drop to -200 ºC. Image credit: NASA; -
Severe weather in the form of tornadoes is not something people expect on Christmas week but a storm system on Dec. 23 brought tornadoes to Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana. As the storm moved, NASA's RapidScat captured data on winds while NOAA's GOES satellite tracked the movement of the system. NASA's RapidScat instrument flies aboard the International Space Station and captured a look at some of the high winds from the storms that brought severe weather to the U.S. Gulf Coast on Dec. 23. In addition, this animation of images from NOAA's GOES-East satellite showed the movement of those storms and other weather systems from Canada to South America from Dec. 21 to 24. An animation of visible and infrared satellite data from NOAA's GOES-East satellite that showed the development and movement of the weather system that spawned tornadoes affecting the Gulf Coast of the U.S. on Dec. 23 and early Dec. 24. To create the images and the video, 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 (MODIS) instrument that flies aboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites. Together, those data created the entire picture of the storm systems and show their movement. Coupled with local weather observations, soundings, and computer models, data from satellites like NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite or GOES-East (also known as GOES-13) gives forecasters information about developing weather situations. In real-time, the NOAA's GOES-East satellite data in animated form showed forecasters how the area of severe weather was developing and moving. Image credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project; -
This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the galaxy IC 335 in front of a backdrop of distant galaxies. IC 335 is part of a galaxy group containing three other galaxies, and located in the Fornax Galaxy Cluster 60 million light-years away. As seen in this image, the disk of IC 335 appears edge-on from the vantage point of Earth. This makes it harder for astronomers to classify it, as most of the characteristics of a galaxy’s morphology — the arms of a spiral or the bar across the center — are only visible on its face. Still, the 45 000 light-year-long galaxy could be classified as an S0 type. These lenticular galaxies are an intermediate state in galaxy morphological classification schemes between true spiral and elliptical galaxies. They have a thin stellar disk and a bulge, like spiral galaxies, but in contrast to typical spiral galaxies they have used up most of the interstellar medium. Only a few new stars can be created out of the material that is left and the star formation rate is very low. Hence, the population of stars in S0 galaxies consists mainly of aging stars, very similar to the star population in elliptical galaxies. As S0 galaxies have only ill-defined spiral arms they are easily mistaken for elliptical galaxies if they are seen inclined face-on or edge-on as IC 335 here. And indeed, despite the morphological differences between S0 and elliptical class galaxies, they share some common characteristics, like typical sizes and spectral features. Both classes are also deemed "early-type" galaxies, because they are evolving passively. However, while elliptical galaxies may be passively evolving when we observe them, they have usually had violent interactions with other galaxies in their past. In contrast, S0 galaxies are either aging and fading spiral galaxies, which never had any interactions with other galaxies, or they are the aging result of a single merger between two spiral galaxies in the past. The exact nature of these galaxies is still a matter of debate. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA; -
This holiday season, look up and see the International Space Station pass over you. As the third brightest object in the sky the space station is easy to see if you know when to look up. NASA’s Spot The Station service gives you a list of upcoming sighting opportunities for thousands of locations worldwide, and will let you sign up to receive notices of opportunities in your email inbox or cell phone. The space station looks like a fast-moving plane in the sky, but it is dozens of times higher than any airplane and traveling thousands of miles an hour faster. It is bright enough that it can even be seen from the middle of a city! Sign up for alerts at http://spotthestation.nasa.gov #SpotTheStation @ISS;
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