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The United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with NASA’s Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft onboard launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 41 on Thursday, March 12, 2015. One hour, 47 minutes after launch, all four Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) observatories separated from the Centaur upper stage and are now flying on their own. MMS will study magnetic reconnection, a fundamental process that occurs throughout the universe when magnetic fields connect and disconnect explosively, releasing energy and accelerating particles up to nearly the speed of light. Unlike previous missions that have observed only evidence of magnetic reconnection events, MMS has sufficient resolution to observe and measure reconnection events as they occur. While MMS will fly through reconnection regions in less than a second, key sensors on each spacecraft are able to capture measurements 100 times faster than any previous mission. In addition, MMS consists of four identical observatories, which together will provide the first ever three-dimensional view of magnetic reconnection. The mission observes reconnection directly in Earth’s protective magnetic space environment known as the magnetosphere. By studying reconnection in this local, natural laboratory, MMS helps scientists understand reconnection elsewhere, such as in the atmosphere of the sun and other stars, in the vicinity of black holes and neutron stars and at the boundary between our solar system’s heliosphere and interstellar space. Image credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani; -
Ready for Liftoff! At Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 41, all remains on schedule for the liftoff of our Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) spacecraft atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 10:44 p.m. EDT. Weather forecast has improved and is now 80 percent favorable during the 30-minute launch window. NASA Television and blog coverage of launch will begin at 8 p.m. and continue through spacecraft separation, about an hour and 30 minutes after liftoff. Image Credit: NASA #nasa #space #mms #science #magrecon #earthrightnow #sun #launch #ula #atlasv 7F6FEC49-5125-4759-A07E-81BB373271C7; -
Space Station Crew Returns to Earth: The Soyuz TMA-14M spacecraft is seen as it lands with International Space Station Expedition 42 commander Barry Wilmore of NASA, Alexander Samokutyaev of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) and Elena Serova of Roscosmos near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan. The landing took place on the evening of Wednesday, March 11 in the U.S, and early in the morning on Thursday, March 12, in Kazakhstan. The three crew members returned to Earth after a 167-day mission on the orbital outpost that included hundreds of scientific experiments and several spacewalks to prepare the orbiting laboratory for future arrivals by U.S. commercial crew spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls #nasa #space #isscrew #iss #spacestation #astronauts #roscosmos #soyuz #astrobutch #exp42; -
Smoke & Fire! The largest, most powerful rocket booster ever built successfully fired up Wednesday for a major-milestone ground test in preparation for future missions to help propel our Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft to deep space destinations, including an asteroid and Mars. The booster fired for two minutes, the same amount of time it will fire when it lifts the SLS off the launch pad, and produced about 3.6 million pounds of thrust. The test was conducted at the Promontory, Utah test facility of commercial partner Orbital ATK, and is one of two tests planned to qualify the booster for flight. Once qualified, the flight booster hardware will be ready for shipment to Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the first SLS flight. Image Credit: NASA #slsfiredup #journeytomars #nasa #test #space #sls #rocket #fire #smoke #mars #orion #orbitalatk; -
Preparing to Test the Booster for NASA's New Rocket Engineers at Orbital ATK prepare to test the largest, most powerful booster ever built for NASA's new rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), which will fire up for a ground test at 11:30 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, March 11, at Orbital ATK Propulsion Systems’ test facilities in Promontory, Utah. The two-minute static test is a significant milestone for the SLS as part of NASA’s journey to Mars, and follows years of development. It is one of two ground tests to qualify the booster for flight. A second test is planned for early 2016. Once qualification is complete, the hardware will be ready to help send the rocket, along with NASA’s Orion spacecraft, on its first flight test. When completed, two five-segment, solid-rocket boosters and four RS-25 main engines will power the SLS as it begins its deep space missions. The boosters operate in parallel with the main engines for the first two minutes of flight, providing more than 75 percent of the thrust needed for the rocket to escape Earth’s gravitational pull. The first flight test of the SLS will feature a configuration for a 70-metric-ton (77-ton) lift capacity and carry an uncrewed Orion spacecraft beyond low-Earth orbit to test the performance of the integrated system. As the SLS is updated, it will provide an unprecedented lift capability of 130 metric tons (143 tons) to enable missions even farther into our solar system. Live coverage of the test on NASA TV begins on Wednesday at 11:00 a.m. EDT. Image Credit: Orbital ATK;
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Taking a Closer Look at Orion After Successful Flight Test Engineers across the country have been busy taking a closer look at NASA's Orion spacecraft and the data it produced during its successful flight test in December 2014. Inside the Launch Abort System Facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, Orion was lifted using a special crane for removal of its heat shield on Feb. 13, 2015. In the background, technicians move the heat shield on a work stand. The spacecraft’s heat shield protected Orion as it reentered Earth’s atmosphere at searing temperatures. Removing the back shell allows the team to get a closer look at Orion’s systems to see how they fared during the trip to space. The heat shield was removed in preparation for shipment to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where special equipment will be used to remove its ablative material. From there, the heat shield will be shipped to NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where it will be outfitted on a test article for water impact testing. Meanwhile, NASA and Lockheed Martin, the prime contractor for Orion, continue to take a look at the data the flight test produced to validate pre-flight models and improve the spacecraft’s design. Analysis of data obtained during its two-orbit, four-and-a-half hour mission Dec. 5 will provide engineers detailed information on how the spacecraft fared. Photo Credit: NASA/Jim Grossmann; -
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have spotted for the first time a distant supernova split into four images. The multiple images of the exploding star are caused by the powerful gravity of a foreground elliptical galaxy embedded in a massive cluster of galaxies. This unique observation will help astronomers refine their estimates of the mass of dark matter in the lensing galaxy and cluster. Dark matter is an invisible form of matter that makes up most of the mass of the universe. The gravity from both the elliptical galaxy and its galaxy cluster distorts and magnifies the light from the supernova behind it in an effect called gravitational lensing. First predicted by Albert Einstein, this effect is similar to a glass lens bending light to magnify and distort the image of an object behind it. The multiple images are arranged around the elliptical galaxy in a cross-shaped pattern, also known an Einstein Cross. The elliptical galaxy and its galaxy cluster, MACS J1149.6+2223, are 5 billion light-years away from Earth. The supernova behind it is 9.3 billion light-years away. The image shows the galaxy's location within a hefty cluster of galaxies called MACS J1149.6+2223. Arrows (inset) point to the multiple copies of Supernova Refsdal. The four images were spotted on Nov. 11, 2014. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI/UCLA; -
Free Fall in the Zero G Mechanical Engineering Technician Alex Camargo retrieves a drop vehicle after its 432-foot free fall in NASA Glenn’s Zero Gravity Research Facility. The drop vehicle, which weighs about 2000 lbs., contains hardware for the Saffire experiment, which is being developed to study how fires behave in spacecraft in microgravity. The Zero-G research team was verifying the ignition system design. Microgravity, a condition of relative near weightlessness, can only be achieved on Earth by putting an object in a state of free fall. In the Zero-G, low gravity is achieved for 5.18 seconds as the drop vehicle falls inside a 470 ft. long vacuum chamber. Image Credit: NASA Acknowledgment: Bridget R. Caswell and Mark Grills (Wyle Information Systems, LLC); -
Moon Set from Space: Astronaut Terry Virts posted this video and wrote, 'Full #moon setting over Hokkaido and Vladivostok.' Virts and #ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti were in the U.S. Quest airlock yesterday conducting airflow monitor tests, measurements and calibrations. The tests were part of the Airway Monitoring experiment that is looking for possible indicators of airway inflammation in astronauts during spaceflight. Credit: NASA #nasa #space #iss #spacestation #moon #exp42 #astronauts; -
Hubble Sees a Young Star Take Center Stage With its helical appearance resembling a snail’s shell, this reflection nebula seems to spiral out from a luminous central star in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. The star in the center, known as V1331 Cyg and located in the dark cloud LDN 981 — or, more commonly, Lynds 981 — had previously been defined as a T Tauri star. A T Tauri is a young star — or Young Stellar Object — that is starting to contract to become a main sequence star similar to the sun. What makes V1331Cyg special is the fact that we look almost exactly at one of its poles. Usually, the view of a young star is obscured by the dust from the circumstellar disc and the envelope that surround it. However, with V1331Cyg we are actually looking in the exact direction of a jet driven by the star that is clearing the dust and giving us this magnificent view. This view provides an almost undisturbed view of the star and its immediate surroundings allowing astronomers to study it in greater detail and look for features that might suggest the formation of a very low-mass object in the outer circumstellar disk. Image credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA. Acknowledgement: Karl Stapelfeldt (GSFC), B. Stecklum and A. Choudhary (Thüringer Landessternwarte Tautenburg, Germany);
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NASA's Dawn spacecraft has become the first mission to achieve orbit around a dwarf planet. The spacecraft was approximately 38,000 miles (61,000) kilometers from Ceres when it was captured by the dwarf planet’s gravity at about 4:39 a.m. PST (7:39 a.m. EST) Friday. Mission controllers at our Jet Propulsion Laboratory received a signal from the spacecraft at 5:36 a.m. PST (8:36 a.m. EST) that Dawn was healthy and thrusting with its ion engine, the indicator Dawn had entered orbit as planned. Ceres is seen here from Dawn on March 1, just a few days before the mission achieved orbit around the previously unexplored dwarf planet. The image was taken at a distance of about 30,000 miles (about 48,000 kilometers). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA; -
Three seconds. That’s all it took for the attitude control motor of NASA’s Orion Launch Abort System (LAS) to prove that its material can survive not only the intense temperatures, pressures, noise and vibrations experienced during a launch emergency but also 40 percent beyond. The LAS is being designed to bring a crew to safety should there be a problem in the launch pad or during ascent. Video of a March 4 test of Orion’s LAS attitude control motor . Image Credit: Orbital ATK #nasa #orbital #atk #lockheedmartine #orbitalatk #orion #journeytomars #test #launch; -
Astronaut Scott Kelly is seen inside a Soyuz simulator at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC), Wednesday, March 4, 2105 in Star City, Russia. Kelly, along with Expedition 43 Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), and Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka of Roscosmos were at GCTC for the second day of qualification exams in preparation for their launch to the International Space Station onboard a Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 3:42 p.m. EST on March 27. As the one-year crew, Kelly and Kornienko will return to Earth on Soyuz TMA-18M in March 2016. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls) #nasa #iss #yearinspace #iss1years #spacestation #science; -
Using our Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have found that the growth of galaxies, including Abell 2597 shown here, containing supermassive black holes can be slowed down by a phenomenon referred to as cosmic precipitation. Cosmic precipitation is not a weather event, as we commonly associate the word -- rain, sleet, or snow. Rather, it is a mechanism that allows hot gas to produce showers of cool gas clouds that fall into a galaxy. Researchers have analyzed X-rays from more than 200 galaxy clusters, and believe that this gaseous precipitation is key to understanding how giant black holes affect the growth of galaxies. Image Credit: NASA/CXC/DSS/Magellan #nasa #chandra #xray #telescope #galaxy #astronomy #space #blackhole #science; -
Hawaii from Space! From the International Space Station, European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti took this photograph of the island of Hawaii and posted it to social media on Feb. 28, 2015. Cristoforetti tweeted, "And suddenly as we flew over the Pacific... the island of #Hawaii with its volcanoes! #HelloEarth" Crew members on the space station photograph the Earth from their unique point of view located 200 miles above the surface as part of the Crew Earth Observations program. Photographs record how the planet is changing over time, from human-caused changes like urban growth and reservoir construction, to natural dynamic events such as hurricanes, floods and volcanic eruptions. Astronauts have used hand-held cameras to photograph the Earth for more than 40 years, beginning with the Mercury missions in the early 1960s. The ISS maintains an altitude between 220 - 286 miles (354 - 460 km) above the Earth, and an orbital inclination of 51.6˚, providing an excellent stage for observing most populated areas of the world. Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Samantha Cristoforetti #nasa #esa #space #iss #spacestation;
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