โพสต์เมื่อ 10 ม.ค. 2558 | 09:16 น.
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New woven composite materials are an advanced space technology that mark a major milestone toward development of the space systems that will enable extending human and robotic presence throughout the solar system. Today, our Administrator Charles Bolden and Space Technology Mission Directorate Associate Administrator Michael Gazarik toured the Bally Ribbon Mills facility in Bally, Pa. to get a first-hand look at the manufacturer's high-performance multidimensional (3D) woven materials. The company is weaving the multifunctional thermal protection system padding used to insulate and protect our Orion spacecraft. Orion, which recently completed its first flight test, will carry astronauts to Mars and return them safely to Earth with the help of this technology. The next test of this thermal protection technology will be on Orion on Exploration Mission-1 in 2017. Video and Image credit: Bally Ribbon Mills/ NASA JPL #nasa #321techoff #journeytomars #orion #nasatech #technology; -
Coloring the Sea Around the Pribilof Islands The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this view of a phytoplankton bloom near Alaska’s Pribilof Islands on Sept. 22, 2014. The Pribilofs are surrounded by nutrient-rich waters in the Bering Sea. The milky green and light blue shading of the water indicates the presence of vast populations of microscopic phytoplankton—mostly coccolithophores, which have calcite scales that appear white in satellite images. Such phytoplankton form the foundation of a tremendously productive habitat for fish and birds. Blooms in the Bering Sea increase significantly in springtime, after winter ice cover retreats and nutrients and freshened water are abundant near the ocean surface. Phytoplankton populations plummet in summertime as the water warms, surface nutrients are depleted by blooms, and the plant-like organisms are depleted by grazing fish, zooplankton, and other marine life. By autumn, storms can stir nutrients back to the surface and cooler waters make better bloom conditions. Image Credit: NASA/Landsat 8; -
Astronomers are enlisting the help of machines to sort through thousands of stars in our galaxy and learn their sizes, compositions and other basic traits. The research is part of the growing field of machine learning, in which computers learn from large data sets, finding patterns that humans might not otherwise see. Machine learning is in everything from media-streaming services that predict what you want to watch, to the post office, where computers automatically read handwritten addresses and direct mail to the correct zip codes. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech #nasa #aas225 #space #galaxy #spitzer #machinelearning #astronomy #science; -
Will the Real Monster Black Hole Please Stand Up? A new high-energy X-ray image from NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has pinpointed the true monster of a galactic mashup. The image shows two colliding galaxies, collectively called Arp 299, located 134 million light-years away. Each of the galaxies has a supermassive black hole at its heart. NuSTAR has revealed that the black hole located at the right of the pair is actively gorging on gas, while its partner is either dormant or hidden under gas and dust. The findings are helping researchers understand how the merging of galaxies can trigger black holes to start feeding, an important step in the evolution of galaxies. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC #nasa #aas225 #space #nustar #blackhole #astronomy #galaxy #science; -
Satellite Picture Shows Snow-covered U.S. Deep Freeze NOAA's GOES-East satellite provided a look at the frigid eastern two-thirds of the U.S. on Jan. 7, 2015, that shows a blanket of northern snow, lake-effect snow from the Great Lakes and clouds behind the Arctic cold front. A visible picture captured at 11 a.m. EST showed the effects of the latest Arctic outbreak. The cold front that brought the Arctic air moved as far south as Florida, and stretched back over the Gulf of Mexico and just west of Texas. The image shows clouds behind the frontal boundary stretching from the Carolinas west over the Heartland. Farther north, a wide band of fallen snow covers the ground from New England west to Montana, with rivers appearing like veins. The GOES-East satellite image also shows wind-whipped lake-effect snows off the Great Lakes, blowing to the southeast. Meanwhile, Florida, the nation's warm spot appeared almost cloud-free. Image Credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project;
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Eta Carinae, the most luminous and massive stellar system within 10,000 light-years of Earth, is known for its surprising behavior, erupting twice in the 19th century for reasons scientists still don't understand. A long-term study led by @nasagoddard astronomers used NASA satellites, ground-based telescopes and theoretical modeling to produce the most comprehensive picture of Eta Carinae to date. New findings include Hubble Space Telescope images that show decade-old shells of ionized gas racing away from the largest star at a million miles an hour, and new 3-D models that reveal never-before-seen features of the stars' interactions. Eta Carinae's great eruption in the 1840s created the billowing Homunculus Nebula, imaged here by Hubble. Now about a light-year long, the expanding cloud contains enough material to make at least 10 copies of our sun. Astronomers cannot yet explain what caused this eruption. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team #nasa #space #hst #hubble #hubble25 #aas225 #astronomy #astrophysics #science; -
Record-Breaking Outburst from Milky Way's Black Hole: Astronomers have observed the largest X-ray flare ever detected from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. This event, detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, raises questions about the behavior of this giant black hole and its surrounding environment. The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, called Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, is estimated to contain about 4.5 million times the mass of our sun. Image Credit: NASA/CXC/Stanford/I. Zhuravleva et al. #nasa #space #blackhole #chandra #milkyway #astronomy #xray #aas225 #science; -
Iconic Hubble Space Telescope 'Pillars of Creation' image, taken in near-infrared light, transforms the pillars into eerie, wispy silhouettes, which are seen against a background of myriad stars. The near-infrared light can penetrate much of the gas and dust, revealing stars behind the nebula as well as hidden away inside the pillars. Some of the gas and dust clouds are so dense that even the near-infrared light cannot penetrate them. New stars embedded in the tops of the pillars, however, are apparent as bright sources that are unseen in the visible image. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) #nasa #hubble #hubble25 #hst #space #astronomy #aas225 #telescope #science; -
Hubble’s High-Definition Panoramic View of the Andromeda Galaxy: This sweeping bird's-eye view of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is the sharpest image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbor. This ambitious photographic cartography of the Andromeda galaxy represents a new benchmark for precision studies of large spiral galaxies that dominate the universe's population of over 100 billion galaxies. Never before have astronomers been able to see individual stars inside an external spiral galaxy over such a large contiguous area. Most of the stars in the universe live inside such majestic star cities, and this is the first data that reveal populations of stars in context to their home galaxy. Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and L.C. Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler #nasa #hubble #hst #space #hubble25 #aas225 #galaxy #telescope #science; -
Twas the night before launch, and the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft were prepared to liftoff to the International Space Station to deliver cargo that will be sent aloft on the resupply flight. Launch of the Falcon 9 rocket on the SpaceX CRS-5 mission is scheduled for 6:20 a.m. EST Tuesday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida. The flight will deliver supplies, experiments and CATS, a laser instrument to measure clouds and the location and distribution of pollution, dust, smoke, and other particulates in the atmosphere. Clouds across the launch area are expected to thin out, and forecasters with the U.S. Air Force’s 45th Weather Squadron are predicting a 70 percent chance of favorable conditions at launch time. Image Credit: SpaceX #nasa #spacex #iss #isscargo #space #spacestation #launch #science #exp42;
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Hubble Goes High-Definition to Revisit Iconic Image: Although NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has taken many breathtaking images of the universe, one snapshot stands out from the rest: the iconic view of the so-called "Pillars of Creation." The jaw-dropping photo, taken in 1995, revealed never-before-seen details of three giant columns of cold gas bathed in the scorching ultraviolet light from a cluster of young, massive stars in a small region of the Eagle Nebula, or M16. The dust and gas in the pillars is seared by the intense radiation from young stars and eroded by strong winds from massive nearby stars. With these new images comes better contrast and a clearer view for astronomers to study how the structure of the pillars is changing over time. Credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team #nasa #hst #hubble #hubble25 #aas225 #astronomy #space #telescope #science; -
Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore on the International Space Station shared this beautiful image of #sunrise earlier today. 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; -
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);
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